Escape From Pianosa

At improv rehearsal last night I had this conversation three separate times:

Other person: How was your weekend?

Me: Pretty good, went to the beach.

OP: Oh yeah? What beach.

Me: Rehoboth.

OP: Oh, isn’t that the GAY beach?

Me: Yeah, it’s really really gay. But it’s cool, they let straight people hang out there too. I have a straight visa because I’m a friend of the gay man.

I’m selling my rental property in East Baltimore–great time to sell, right?

So I was showing it last night to another investor and as we were walking to our cars we heard pop pop pop pop pop. Hey were those gunshots? Yeah, I think so. Funny because I hear that all the time in Baltimore, just random popping–I always thought they were fireworks. A woman unrolled a window above us and said “get used to it, mmm hmm.” We didn’t see anyone running, or police sirens or anything. Target practice?

Am I going to Europe? I’m not sure. Months ago I realized that I want to be a writer, or at least to give it a shot, having nothing else at the moment that strikes my interest. I realized that the reasons for my employment in real estate were wholely monetary–a means to an end, and that the ends were varied but included travel and writing and possibly a return to formal schooling, despite all its shortcomings. I also realized that the money would never come if that’s all I cared about (cliché, but true in my case).

So I decided to pursue my interests without regard to money–to play for the sake of music, without an eye towards success, as Rodrigo y Gabriela put it during their concert Saturday.

I applied for a job as a writer for a European guidebook, and much to my surprise, I got the job. I was supposed to leave next week, but there’s been some delays with the publisher, which should be resolved in the next few days. I suppose that if they aren’t resolved that I’ll be back to square one–not that this gig was ever anything more than a temporary endeavor.

Socialist medicine takes a beating by Don Boudreaux and commenters at Cafe Hayek.

Then Kurt Loder has a go at Michael Moore’s Sicko on MTV.com. This is my favorite part, and Loder really gets the economics right:

“When governments attempt to regulate the balance between a limited supply of health care and an unlimited demand for it they’re inevitably forced to ration treatment. This is certainly the situation in Britain. Writing in the Chicago Tribune this week, Helen Evans, a 20-year veteran of the country’s National Health Service and now the director of a London-based group called Nurses for Reform, said that nearly 1 million Britons are currently on waiting lists for medical care — and another 200,000 are waiting to get on waiting lists. Evans also says the NHS cancels about 100,000 operations each year because of shortages of various sorts. Last March, the BBC reported on the results of a Healthcare Commission poll of 128,000 NHS workers: two thirds of them said they “would not be happy” to be patients in their own hospitals.”

In summary, you get a massive tax increase for declining quality in health care and you may have to wait a year or two to get it. And you might die while you’re waiting. Why anyone, let alone everyone would want to be forced into such a system is beyond me.

You know, governments wouldn’t be able to segregate schools if governments didn’t have control over schools. Just sayin’.

Listening to Bryan Caplan talk about his new book The Myth of the Rational Voter, I realized that I’ve been too hard on politicians. Yes, they do awful and stupid things all the time but that’s what they have to do to stay employed.

As spineless as they may be, they move in the direction of the voters, and often the voters demand ridiculous policies. So just as I don’t fault a business for responding to the market and producing silly products, I shouldn’t fault politicians for responding to voters who demand (literally) poor policy.*

The funny thing is that voters demand bad economic policies and then punish politicians for poor economic results. For example, they demand higher tariffs but get angry when less trade leads to less growth and less wealth and less employment. Not that they connect the dots. Anyway, it’s a tough life being a politician.

*Caveat: people who demand bad products waste their own money. People who demand bad policies invariably waste my money, so I feel that I have the right to thumb my nose at their ‘inferior preferences.’

My observation today is that when you learn something new, it’s best to immerse yourself in a subject completely and learn all the “rules.” For me recently, I’ve been learning about economics but in the past this has applied to languages I’ve learned as well.

And everything you learn–every new system, whether it’s a science or a language, has a system and various subsystems. When you learn Spanish, you know that there are several ways to conjugate verbs. For instance, all verbs ending in -ar conjugate the same, as well as all verbs ending in -ir and -er. They all follow their own systems, but in this way we learn the simple rule for conjugating a verb, and then we can easily apply it to the thousands of verbs.

And it’s all very easy, except for when it’s not. Except for the two dozen or so “irregular verbs” that conjugate differently and the nasty but indispensable verbs like ser and estar and ir, without which we would not be able to go or to be.

Pardon the rambling but my original thought was that in economics, you learn lots of laws. Laws about how markets work and economic laws that govern human behavior. They may be harder to prove in laboratories but they govern all the same–things like supply and demand and the fact that when you place an artificial ceiling on price, then you will create a shortage. Yes, even in Iran, they have a gasoline shortage due to a short-sighted choice to ignore economic law.

And so all these laws and ideas about free markets–they really do exist and they really do work, except it’s not as simple as that. There’s a cultural component and “institutions matter.” So you cannot just throw up a society based on capitalism and say voilá and watch it grow. Because people have to believe in the system for it to work. You need more that courts to enforce laws, because courts will not be effective if nobody believes they will.

There is a cultural component underlying all social institutions and this is something I can see but that I understand very little about. In Spanish you can learn the exceptions to rules, but in economics I don’t think that anyone really understands all the answers yet. So I am a libertarian, but I will admit that there are gray areas and that pushing the magical “make everything libertarian” button might have some adverse consequences.

And if culture is so important, then that’s a bit sad too. Because it means bringing prosperity to impoverished places takes deep cultural change and not just checks from the west or military revolutions.

Here’s a funny CraigsList posting that mocks the way writers are paid. Looking at CraigsList every day for freelance writing stuff, there’s always dozens of posts that “don’t pay, but you get great exposure!” As if real magazines are impressed by your unpaid credentials.

Excerpt:

AWESOME OPPORTUNITY FOR ELECTRIC COMPANY!

Do you make electricity?? Are you just dying to share it with others??

We are looking to start up the electrical grid for our new community. If you’d like to contribute some kilowattage while getting to know a great group of people who value natural living, nudity and goats, please send a backhoe, poles and powerlines to Rural Route 67, Scrub Brush Springs. All submissions considered.

(No pay.)

Or wait, maybe they are…

MC Hammer Endorses Ron Paul.

OK, he hasn’t officially endorsed Ron Paul, but he is blogging about him. You could pretty much replace “Ron Paul” with any other presidential candidate and that would still be hilarious.

Aspiring satirists take note:

“Interestingly, 19% of Americans state that they rely on satire sites or shows like the Daily Show for their [political] information.”

More here.