Milton Friedman on Greed

Liberals always intermix greed and self interest.

More Confusion Equals Safer Driving

When people are more confused or less safe, they are more cautious and alert. Driving is no exception.
Gordon Tullock famously remarked that the best way for government to reduce the number of traffic fatalities is for it to mandate that a sharp steel dagger be mounted on the steering column of each vehicle and pointed directly at each driver's heart. Forget about all other regulations and mandates; that dagger will ensure safe driving. European towns are experimenting with this. Although no daggers are involved, these towns are taking down street lights and traffic signals to decrease the high amount of pedestrian deaths.

In Haren, the Netherlands, for example, the number of accidents at one intersection dropped by 95 percent, from 200 a year to about 10 after seriously deregulating traffic laws.
Read the Washington Post story here.

Milton Friedman has a day now

Milton Friedman is such an inspiration that he deserves a day on my blog. Milton Mondays will be filled with videos and fun facts about this one economist who most defined conservatism in the 20th century. To start out here is a fun movie of the Milton Friedman choir singing about corporations.

The Ant and the Grasshopper

OLD VERSION:

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be responsible for yourself!

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MODERN VERSION:

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grass shopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.
CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast.
How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?
Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when they sing, "It's Not Easy Being Green."
Jesse Jackson stages a demonstration in front of the ant's house where the news stations film the group singing, "We shall overcome." Jesse then has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper's sake.
Nancy Pelosi & John Kerry exclaim in an interview with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.
Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity & Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer.The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the government. Hillary gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel
of federal judges that Bill Clinton appointed from a list of single-parent welfare recipients. The ant loses the case. The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while the government house he is in (which just happens to be the ant's old house), crumbles around him because he doesn't maintain it. The ant has disappeared in the snow. The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the once peaceful neighborhood.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Don't give your responsibility to the government!

Religious Cult of the Environment

In my studies of Art I find that the majority of graphic designers and artists are extremely liberal. I don't know what these people lean to the left accept that artists generally have this strange need to be different (you can see it by the way many of them dress) and someone told the lie that liberalism was progressive and unconventional. But, the left wants bigger government. It sure doesn't seem like more government is progressive. It sounds more like going backwards into a state of communism and serfdom.

It is amazing how religious these people are. In my Graphic design class we branded a logo for a Hybrid car. One girl was told by the teacher that she could not use plastic because it was damaging to the environment. Everyone was encouraged to use recycled paper and biodegradable materials. Spray mount was called "Satan's Can of Satan" because it was damaging to the environment and other things. No thought was given to logic and economics.

There is an inverse relationship to recycled paper and trees. The more paper we recycle, the less trees we grow. Loggers own the land they log and they have incentive to replenish their resources by planting more trees. When we recycle paper, they lose business and re-plant fewer trees. Environmentalists want more trees, but they accomplish the opposite by recycling which is the way they claim will save trees. They think that somehow recycling companies are more virtuous than other corporations when they are just as self interested.

My teacher was also praising a BYU student who spearheaded the alternative graduation last year because Dick Cheney was speaking. She got Ralph Nader to speak. I wanted to laugh. The first presidency and the presidency of BYU invited a Dick Cheney to speak to us and he gave an incredible uplifting speech. Liberals in general call Cheney a murderer but, Ralph Nader has arguably caused thousands of unnecessary deaths due to a spike in car accidents in the 80's because of his influence on policy. The softness of his heart by way of good intention went to his head, just like many environmentalists out there. If they truly cared about the environment they would research the results of their "well intentioned" actions. They strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.

We need more economy when discussing our sacred ecology.

Low Dollar, Big Hype

A low dollar simply looks bad. We are, after all, used to judging ourselves against others — comparing our salaries with the earnings of our peers, and our homes with those of our neighbors. We’re used to thinking it is a big advantage to stand at the top of a numerical list.

But when it comes to currencies, a higher value neither brings national success nor predicts future prosperity. The measure of a nation’s wealth is the goods and services it produces, not the relative standing of its currency. Take a look at 1985-88, when the dollar lost more ground than in the last few years. Those were good times, and the next decade was largely prosperous as well.

Marginalist Revolution