Maine Family Robinson's Maine Politics -- A Primer. The election's over, so it's time for me to pay attention to Maine politics, I guess. One quote from the guy who is truly not a Masshole:
All the candidates for governor said they were for education and jobs. The way they said "education and jobs" sounded like they were describing a Loch Ness monster or a Sasquatch or some other creature they'd heard of, but didn't have a current home address for. Since all the candidates vehemently pronounced their love for education and jobs, no matter what question was posed to them, I figured there must be a dastardly candidate that was for unemployment and ignorance, but I couldn't find one. My wife helpfully offered to write my name in.
Ilya asks whether there is anything the Feds cannot control via Commerce
Fun vid: Andrew Klavan: Is America Satanophobic?
Some sanity: Breaking: Japan refuses to extend Kyoto treaty at Cancun
Let no crisis go to waste: Gulf oil spill could usher in new safety agency. Related, in The Atlantic, Obama's BP Oil Spill Commission Gets It Wrong
Via Insty, Megan asks Should China Rethink High Speed Rail?
Prices are really useful. But in whole large sectors of the Chinese economy, particularly the banking sector, the government sets those prices. This means huge information loss, and the concomitant possibility that there is a vast misallocation of resources.
Don't those things happen in markets? Hell yes: witness the housing bubble. On the other hand, witness East Germany. To get a really catastrophic misallocation of resources, it seems to take a government; corporations can only screw things up on an artisinal scale. For that matter, it's worth noting that our government has spent the last seven decades trying to keep the price of housing low, and that much of that intervention, such as the creation of mortgage securitization, ultimately significantly contributed to the crisis.
