Unqualified Offerings have yet another forceful word to say about the conduct of the War of the Year:

Here is the thing you must understand about David Brooks and Max Boot and William Kristol and the whole “national greatness” gang. The “brutal measures” are not regrettable means to a noble end. They are a noble end. The national greatness types have been bemoaning America’s supposed softness and urging it to toughen up since the mid-1990s. The war on terror has simply been their opportunity to sell a preexisting product. That product is, chiefly, your sons and daughters, brothers, sisters and schoolmates shooting foreigners. Some of the foreigners shot may indeed be our enemies. Others may be the sons and daughters, brothers, sisters or schoolmates or our enemies. Or at least standing somewhere in the vicinity of where our enemies are or have been or may think about being. No matter. The real enemy is “decadence,” which is their word for liberty.

Rasmusen on the value of liberty

What is wrong with government regulations? Well, first, of course, they are likely to be the result of special interests, and inefficient. But even good regulations have a cost that I don’t see mentioned: the cost of having to act carefully so as to avoid breaking the rules. In a society with numerous regulations, people spend a lot of time learning about the regulations.
. . . .
What I think the model might illustrate is that when lots of things are arbitrarily illegal, there are big transaction costs.

People are asking why the latest drug-war outrage has not resulted in tar and feathers, or at least some basic rock-throwing. Perhaps the potential ringleaders are worried about being prosecuted for terrorism?

Kevin Marks, whom I had not read before, cites Jerome K Jerome (author of Three Men in a Boat) on economics:

What a wonderful piece of Socialism modern civilisation has become! – not the Socialism of the so-called Socialists — a system modelled apparently upon the methods of the convict prison – a system under which each miserable sinner is to be compelled to labour, like a beast of burden, for no personal benefit to himself, but only for the good of the community – a world where there are to be no men, but only numbers – where there is to be no ambition and no hope and no fear, — but the Socialism of free men, working side by side in the common workshop, each one for the wage to which his skill and energy entitle him; the Socialism of responsible, thinking individuals, not of State-directed automata. . . .

Damn. I was doing so well.

Oy. 334 bogus ‘Microsoft security patch’ messages today from ‘particular’, all dated October 27-30. And how have you been?

Tim Lambert (Deltoid) is compiling a table of bloggers’ scores in a Political Compass quiz. I scored in the middle of the Right Libertarian quadrant, close to Will Wilkinson (The Fly Bottle). I suspect I’d be further left if some of the questions were worded differently.

Later: I wonder whether the creators of the Compass website are doing any factor analysis on the responses (analogous to that which produced the Animation of Congress) to check the validity of their scoring rules. (I also wish I had a clue about how factor analysis is done.)

Update!

2006: I didn’t record my exact score back then; so I did the quiz again just now and scored (+4.63, -5.85).