But it creates jobs....

I got into an interesting conversation at the bar with an electrical contractor while I was celebrating my birthday last night.  (52nd birthday, BTW.) 

We were talking about building inspectors, corrupt building inspectors, and the people that most regulations are written to benefit.  (Hint:  It ain't you.)

The guy was obviously a skilled electrician.  Plenty smart.  But then he let loose with this statement:  At least all those rules and regulations create jobs and help the economy. 

I couldn't help myself.  Like I said, I was celebrating my birthday with plenty of Jim Beam and wasn't capable of self-censorship.  I remembered the Milton Friedman "spoons" story.

The story goes that Milton Friedman was once taken to see a massive government project somewhere in Asia. Thousands of workers using shovels were building a canal. Friedman was puzzled. Why weren’t there any excavators or any mechanized earth-moving equipment? A government official explained that using shovels created more jobs. Friedman’s response: “Then why not use spoons instead of shovels?”

So I said "If the goal is to create jobs and help the economy, why not use lanterns instead of electricity?"  I don't remember his response, if there was one. 

Here's something I found on the Forbes website while I was looking for the "spoons" story. 

Economies prosper when multitudes of ordinary people are motivated to make improvements. This is because information and insights needed to make an economy prosper are widely dispersed. There’s far more than could ever be centralized, validated and updated in a place like the federal government. The most reliable way to motivate people? Harness their self-interest: let them try making a profit by starting a business based on their information and insights. Government can best promote prosperity by, among other things, maintaining equal rights, low taxes, free trade, sound money, predictable laws and protection against force and fraud. Government should let consumers render their verdicts in open markets – no subsidies, special favors or bailouts.

Creating artificial hurdles, and then paying government bureaucrats to monitor the hurdles, does not help an economy.  It's all about production, baby !! 

I had to get that out of my system.  Have a good day, and be thankful for the electrical contractors who bring power to your laptop/phone/ipad/ipod/Blackberry reading device IN SPITE OF the electrical code, and not because of it. 

Happy Birthday, Milton Friedman !!!

From The Wall Street Journal:

It's a tragedy that Milton Friedman—born 100 years ago on July 31—did not live long enough to combat the big-government ideas that have formed the core of Obamanomics. It's perhaps more tragic that our current president, who attended the University of Chicago where Friedman taught for decades, never fell under the influence of the world's greatest champion of the free market. Imagine how much better things would have turned out, for Mr. Obama and the country.

Friedman was a constant presence on these pages until his death in 2006 at age 94. If he could, he would surely be skewering today's $5 trillion expansion of spending and debt to create growth—and exposing the confederacy of economic dunces urging more of it.

In the 1960s, Friedman famously explained that "there's no such thing as a free lunch." If the government spends a dollar, that dollar has to come from producers and workers in the private economy. There is no magical "multiplier effect" by taking from productive Peter and giving to unproductive Paul. As obvious as that insight seems, it keeps being put to the test. Obamanomics may be the most expensive failed experiment in free-lunch economics in American history.

Equally illogical is the superstition that government can create prosperity by having Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke print more dollars. In the very short term, Friedman proved, excess money fools people with an illusion of prosperity. But the market quickly catches on, and there is no boost in output, just higher prices.

Next to Ronald Reagan, in the second half of the 20th century there was no more influential voice for economic freedom world-wide than Milton Friedman. Small in stature but a giant intellect, he was the economist who saved capitalism by dismembering the ideas of central planning when most of academia was mesmerized by the creed of government as savior.

Some words to remember from the middle of the article, on school choice, and why raising taxes on anybody is a bad idea:

The issue he devoted most of his later years to was school choice for all parents, and his Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice is dedicated to that cause. He used to lament that "we allow the market, consumer choice and competition to work in nearly every industry except for the one that may matter most: education."


As for congressional Republicans who are at risk of getting suckered into a tax-hike budget deal, they may want to remember another Milton Friedman adage: "Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with."

Go here to read the whole thing.  Here are the closing paragraphs: 

In a recent tribute to Friedman in the Journal of Economic Literature, Harvard's Andrei Shleifer describes 1980-2005 as "The Age of Milton Friedman," an era that "witnessed remarkable progress of mankind. As the world embraced free-market policies, living standards rose sharply while life expectancy, educational attainment, and democracy improved and absolute poverty declined."

Here's an idiotic stencil from the "Occupy Wall Street Folks" who don't quite understand that increased trade and freedom are good things:

Well over 200 million were liberated from poverty thanks to the rediscovery of the free market. And now as the world teeters close to another recession, leaders need to urgently rediscover Friedman's ideas.

I remember asking Milton, a year or so before his death, during one of our semiannual dinners in downtown San Francisco: What can we do to make America more prosperous? "Three things," he replied instantly. "Promote free trade, school choice for all children, and cut government spending."

How much should we cut? "As much as possible."

One other thing...Friedman was much criticized for advising some of the regime of Pinochet in Chile.  Protesters met him at the airport, etc.  (No one said anything about him advising China's murderous commie regime, since the Communists were thought to have pure intentions.) 

I'm sending shipments to Chile and China in the next few weeks.  Since Friedman's consultations, these nations have gone from 3rd World Shitholes to prosperous places to live.  They can afford to purchase fruitstands made in the USA.  Chile now afford to purchase entire grocery stores worth of USA-manufactured displays. 

North Korea and Cuba are not yet customers.  Come back, Milton!  We need you !!!

Marvel Variants Turns 50 !!

My ex-boss, who runs the Bronze Age Marvel Variants website, has turned 50. 

We still work for the same company, but Mr. Variants recently hired an Operations Manager to handle his old responsibilities.  Then he promoted himself into the stratosphere so he could do things like go to Brazil and search for new business. 

Here's documentation of his efforts in Brazil. 

For those of you new to my site, Mr. Variants makes a lot of money seeking out rare Marvel comics and selling them for a small fortune.  Every time he does particularly well, I get a snarky email from him about the sale, about how he found the comic at a yard sale for 25 cents, about the overall profit margin, and about how many emails it took to separate some geek from his $459 in exchange for a 1978 Howard The Duck comic with a variant cover. 

Here's a paragraph from one of Mr. Variant's recent posts.  It's about an online comic book auction:

 I think the auction was kind of hit and miss in regards to pricing as some of the books, like the spidey (Spiderman) variants, went for bargain prices, while others did very well.  The auction was competing with the World Series and football.

Trust me, Mr. Variants.....The comic book auctions don't compete with the World Series or football.

Battlestar Galactica, Adventures of Jimmy Neutron - Boy Genius, Doctor Who, or SuperFriends might have been on TV at the same time as the auction though. 

Anyway, Mr. Variants turned 50 today, and we dedicated most of our morning meeting to that milestone.  So many of our employees wore all-black clothing to the party that the room looked like the crowd at an early 90's art gallery. 
Here he is wearing what looks like the Hogwarts sorting hat, holding all his loot.

We had a guest from China in this meeting, BTW.  I bet she thought we'd lost our minds. 

The sorting hat sent Mr. Variants to Slytherin. 

Please hit this link and use the comment fields of his site to wish Marvel Variants a happy 50th. 

Happy Birthday, Mark Twain !!!

Sam Clemens was born 176 years ago today. 
Be grateful. 

How to learn to appreciate Bob Dylan, in honor of his 70th birthday

First of all, Happy 70th Birthday, Bob Dylan ! 
The world is a better place with you in it. 

Second, there are billions of people out there who just can't "get" Dylan's music. 
I used to be one of them. 
I couldn't get past all the strange vocal mannerisms.  The swoops at the end of each line and his kazoo voice (which I think can produce the root and the 3rd of a chord simultaneously) were too off-putting for this boy who grew up singing in Southern Baptist choirs. 
But Dylan was always there in the background, lurking in the pages of my Rolling Stone subscription that my grandmother got me every year.  Every now and then Dylan's songs would get played on WHBQ in Memphis, or a little more often on Rock 103 out of Jackson.  Sometimes I changed the station, sometimes I didn't.  I figured Dylan was just a "you had to be there to appreciate it" 1960's thing. 

Dylan became a Christian in the late 70's, and his "Slow Train Coming" album could've been the gateway drug to a proper appreciation of The Great Bob and all his works.  I thought "Serve Somebody", "Slow Train", and "When You Gonna Wake Up" were pretty good songs, mostly because they fit well with the near-fanatical sense of evangelical purpose I felt at the time. 
But "When He Returns" was nothing to me but a series of croaks and groans.  Why on earth would anybody sing that way?  I mean, you could listen to him on "The Freewheeling Bob Dylan" and hear that the man really could hold a pitch for several seconds.  Why did he do that Minnesota Mud Throat thing, and why did so many people like it? 
I just didn't get it. 

And then it happened.  Trisha Yearwood covered Dylan's "To Make You Feel My Love" on the "Hope Floats" soundtrack.  It was a beautiful song, and I had no idea that Dylan wrote it. 



Later on in the same movie, Ol' Garth did the same song.



I liked the movie; I loved the soundtrack.
Years passed by. Dylan kept writing songs. I kept ignoring them.
Then an employee of mine asked me to sing "To Make You Feel My Love" at her wedding. When I was downloading the guitar tab, I saw that the song was written by...Bob Dylan.
I found his original version, and it clicked. I loved it.
I got it.



(Is there any other performer out there who can inspire "conversion stories"?)

In my opinion, the vocal swoops and falls are more than just a weird mannerism. Listen to any of the dozens and dozens of covers of Dylan songs on the internet, and you'll hear people taking his melodies in radically different directions. That's because different people hear different pitches inside those weird-assed roller coaster vocal things he does. Bob Dylan hits every note in the scale when travelling from the first to the last syllable of a word. If you want to sing a Dylan song, you can take your pick of pitches and melodies.

Somewhere in there, your version fits his.

Rolling Stone magazine has published a list of the 70 Greatest Bob Songs.
If you're not yet a Dylan fan, but feel like you're missing something, select one of those tunes. Pick one that has lots of YouTube pickers who cover it. Listen to his fans do the songs. Keep it in your head for a few days. Sing it to yourself.
Then listen to his original. It'll be like finding a King James Bible after making do with nothing but a copy of Good News For Modern Man.

If that doesn't work, at least you'll know that you have an open mind and that you gave it a shot.

Here's one for all my friends in Memphis and the Mississippi Delta. "High Water Everywhere (for Charley Patton)".



I get it now. I get it. Beautiful, beautiful stuff.
Hope you learn to like it.

He is a human. He was born on this planet. No defects were noted.

I was hoping for something that would answer the really big questions. 

Happy Birthday, blah blah blah

I just changed the "About Me" section to your right. I turn 47 on July 1.

My mother gave me a card that said "Happy Birthday to the one I count on to be as obnoxious as I am". We both laughed really hard at it, partly because it's true, and partly because she was so sincere about it.

If you come here regularly for the anti-government rants, that's me channeling my father.
If you're here for the attitude I bring to it, that's my mother.

I've had a fun year talking to you folks.