Quotes of the day

Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.--H.L. Mencken

At work, you think of the children you've left at home. At home you think of the work you've left unfinished. . . . Your heart is rent.--Golda Meir

And because the charge of sexism is all of the above [insulting, manipulative, untrue, prissy, and sissy], it is, ultimately, undermining of the position of women.--Peggy Noonan, link same as above

The concept of the "teeth-to-tail ratio" needs to be revisited. For the past generation, military reformers looked at the support, headquarters and institutional base of the armed services, especially the Army, as overhead fat to be trimmed ruthlessly. But in an irregular warfare environment, the old tail – military police, engineers, civil affairs units, intelligence analysts, command-and-control nodes, military education and so on – are the new teeth.--THOMAS DONNELLY and FREDERICK W. KAGAN, italics mine

Important exceptions notwithstanding, the overall trend toward greater regulation of consumer choices is disturbing. Consumers make worse decisions when they are not responsible for their decisions, or when they can sue or otherwise get compensated when they make bad decisions. Consumers make mistakes, but they learn from them when they have to bear the consequences of their decisions. They are generally far more competent to make decisions in their own interests than are regulators or lawmakers as long as consumers are the ones who benefit from good choices and are hurt by bad choices. This is why I continue to be a minimalist on government regulation, and greatly prefer the controls over behavior that stem from consumer responsibility and the discipline of competition.--Gary Becker

Climate change will create problems but how clueless do you have to be not to understand that a large fraction of the world's people would love to live long enough to die from obesity and other diseases of wealth?--Alex Tabbarok