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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
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Monday, March 22, 2004 :::
A quick trip around the web:- Derek Lowe is discussing diminishing returns to investment in the pharma industry. I particularly liked this anecdote:
A special case, perhaps, is Alexander Fleming. One time in his later years, he was being given a tour of a more up-to-date research site, and someone exclaimed "Just think of what you might have discovered here!" Fleming looked around at the gleaming work surfaces and said "Well, not penicillin, anyway." He continues, though:I'm not arguing for poverty. I think that a certain minimum level of funding is necessary for good science - below that and you spend too much time in grunt work, the equivalent of digging ditches with kitchen spoons and mowing the lawn with scissors. But once past that, I don't think the correlation of budget and results is all that good. There's perhaps a broad trend, but nothing you'd want to stake your career on. Does this make anyone besides me think of education?
- At NRO, there's a story about the Iraq Oil-for-Food scandal.
- Also at NRO, Derbyshire offers an overview of Taiwanese politics. He got some disagreeing email, which he put on the Corner.
- Speaking of Derb, he recently did an email interview. If you disagree with his take on homosexuality (as I do) and don't find it amusing (as I do), you'll want to skip parts.
Q. How do you think Bush is doing as president?
A. All right. But I speak as a person who has very low expectations of politicians.
Q. How much worse do you think Kerry would do?
A. Very, very much. He'd be another Carter, spend four years apologizing to the world for our appalling inclination to defend our own interests & way of life. Unthinkable. Vote Bush! That's pretty close to my take, though I might be slightly more positive about Bush.
I am a bit puzzled by the claim that 31 is the "first prime number the decimal period of whose reciprocal is an odd number of digits in length." What about three?
- The Edge of England's Sword offers a slogan for Democrats for Bush: "I voted for John Kerry, before I voted against him."
- Glenn Reynolds has a good suggestion:
ANOTHER HATE CRIME HOAX, this time at Claremont. Meanwhile there's genuine crushing of dissent, with apparent support from the Administration, at U.C. Berkeley.
UPDATE: Here's another one. I think that these hoaxes should be treated as hate crimes themselves. The argument for special "hate crime" rules, after all, is that hate crimes promote fear and division. So do fake hate crimes.
- Finally, I'm not certain whether Pete DuPont's piece at OpinionJournal is available to everyone, or just to Journal subscribers.
President Bush's steel tariffs saved the jobs of 5000 U.S. steel workers, but caused higher steel prices that eliminated 23,000 jobs in steel-consuming industries. Should similar tariffs be imposed on other product imports?
Radiologists in India can analyze patient X-rays at one-fourth of the cost of radiologists in the United States, and they are using U.S. computers, data chips and software to do it. Should such "outsourcing" of medical technology be forbidden and some American X-ray health care costs increased by a factor of four? Well, we do keep hearing complaints about how little health care costs.The trouble with protectionism, aside from its costs to the consumer, is that other nations retaliate: If America forbids the import of their goods and services into America, they will not permit export of American products to their countries. That would be costly because one factory job in five in America depends on international trade.
U.S. exports supported 12 million American jobs in the 1990s while foreign-owned firms directly employed 6.4 million American workers--Honda's 13,000 jobs in Ohio and BMW's 4,300 in South Carolina, for example. Why would we want to adopt protectionist policies that put all these jobs and people and good products at risk? If Messrs. Kerry and Edwards become Smoot and Hawley, a spiraling economic and employment decline will be the result; America will go backwards.
The truth is that market economies are in constant flux. Job opportunities change with time and technology. In the '30s farmers' jobs were one quarter of the American economy; today they are one-fortieth. Productivity is up, food prices are down, and fewer people work on farms. Is this a bad thing?
Horse-drawn carriages were replaced by cars, typewriters by computers, and E-ZPass has no doubt replaced some toll-taking highway jobs, all good things although a lot of jobs disappeared as new ones were created. The gales of creative destruction that shape market economies created 18 million new jobs in America in the past 10 years. But the important thing to understand is how that total was reached: 339 million old jobs disappeared while an astounding 357 million new ones were created in their place.
Democratic capitalism--market economies and free trade--has been the world's most successful economic system. To suggest that it be replaced by government regulated protectionism is, well, just plain stupid.
::: posted by Steven at 11:59 PM
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