In This Week's Mail...

The aforementioned The Age of Roosevelt, by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., vol. 1 (1957) and 2 (1958). --Incredibly interesting so far! It seems FDR, when first elected, was under the spell of his Treasury Secretary, who believed that the government had a moral obligation to balance the budget, and that if it did, everything would be well again...

Charles Stross's The Hidden Family -- Development novel and historical/sci-fi classic all rolled into one... Hard to put down so far.

Staffan Burenstam Linder's 1961 An Essay on Trade and Transportation. Ohlin's student (of the infamous Heckscher-Ohlin Theorem, which posits that factor endowments determine trade flows) Linder's hypothesis, a famous conjecture in trade theory, is that nations trade based on their demand structures, since manufactures are specialized, subject to increasing returns, and require learning-by-doing...

Milton Friedman''s Money Mischief, and his short essay "Why Government is the Problem". --The first 15 pages of Money Mischief have been interesting so far. I'm embarrassed to say that I had never read Milton Friedman (I know, I know, I should start with his Monetary History, but that was $40+ on Amazon, and I've gotta pay rent...). Since Milton Friedman was Larry Summers idol, and Brad DeLong often blogs about him as having been a genius, I've tried to read him with an open mind.

Most of his arguments do not really ring true for me. He lists nine major areas where he thinks government has made a mess... One of them is airports. Airports? He says the "bottleneck" is in air control facilities. I would imagine this was a 60s, 70s, and 80s thing. Yes, I had a flight delayed for a day when I flew home for Christmas, but it was because my layover was in Chicago, which had a blizzard. I fly frequently, I definitely do not usually have delays. Never had my luggage lost. Most airports appear almost excessively nice to me... This is one of his nine key areas where government has failed? Really? Another is homelessness... I just can't get my head around why it's government which has caused homelessness and not capitalism. Yes, ok, rent control is bad, but, please, there are also housing projects, welfare, social security, and food stamps, all goverment programs and all of which, if ended, there would be much, much more homelessness.

Another one is the "Financial System". Please. Not a good time for that Milton. Government can only be seen to have "caused" the current crisis in that it failed to intervene in the free market.

The next example of government failure was "Highway Congestion". Here, I tend to agree with him that government action has been problematic. Rush hour traffic and gasoline should both almost certainly be taxed, with the proceeds to go to expanding the highway and mass transit. I think where i would differ from Friedman on this, though, is that I think government is the only solution to the traffic problem.

On rent control and local building code requirements, though, I agree that there's too much regulation at the local level. This regulation is often designed to protect established interests from new competition...

Another of his big areas where government has failed is in "lawlessness and crime". Why? He says, if we would just legalize drugs, it would go a long way to stop gang violence. Here, too, I'm somewhat in agreement. I would like to see some drugs legalized, but only so they could be taxed heavily and regulated.

Friedman also argues that government has caused a decline in family values... Please. I'd pick apart his argument, but he doesn't really make any argument. This section is just really vague, and he cites Charles Murray's book as evidence that "these social problems owe a great deal to mistaken and misdirected governmental policies."


So, this Friedman essay reads like utter garbage to me so far. His one saving grace may be that this was published in 1993. I just checked his birth date -- 1912, which makes him 81 at the time. Given his age, it's actually quite impressive! It's never fair to judge an author by anything he wrote after the age of 60... I'll have to get his earlier books...