David Friedman is always worth reading.

What are the three errors, seen from the standpoint of measuring and taxing the real gains from buying and selling assets?

1. The failure to index capital gains, to measure them in real rather than in nominal terms. At a zero inflation rate this wouldn’t matter, but if inflation is substantial it taxes investors on imaginary profits, heavily discouraging any form of investment activity that will eventually show up on a schedule D.

2. The failure to retain the basis for capital gains when an asset is inherited. Under current law, when my imaginary investor dies in 1998 and his son inherits his $300 asset, the basis for the asset shifts up, so neither the real $100 gain nor the imaginary $100 gain ever pays capital gains tax.

3. The estate tax. Instead of paying capital gains tax on either the real or the imaginary capital gains, the son is taxed on the amount of the estate, some unknown fraction of which consists of actual capital gains. This is double taxation on part of the estate, single taxation on another part, and, given the exemptions in the estate tax law, zero taxation on a third part.

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Muslims hate Jews more than they love their children. That tells you everything you need to know.

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Everything bad is good for you.

Don’t like what scientists tell you? Wait a week or two, and they’ll reverse their opinions. (Unless grant money is involved, as with ‘climate change’. That’s cast in concrete, with enough rebar to built a new Bismarck.)

Freeberg is always worth reading.

It must be easier to be an atheist when you’re a vegetarian. Imagine how silly it would be, if we were surrounded by Tribbles who were made of marshmallow and chocolate with a yummy caramel center, to say “they’re just like that because they evolved that way.” To a meat-eater gnawing on chicken wings on a rainy Sunday morning, this is what atheists sound like. Cook the animal’s flesh over flame and it turns into a delicious snack, you’re saying that was not part of a design? It certainly isn’t survival-of-the-fittest to have yummy flesh on your bones that tastes good with a dry rub.

And you can’t say any fairer than that.

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After donating upwards of 700 toys a year in the past, it will have to discontinue the program in future since it can’t afford the third-party testing required under the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, sponsored by area members of Congress Bobby Rush and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.).

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Cancer patients are being “left in the dark” about life-extending drugs that are not available on the NHS, charities said last night.

So much for the supriority of government-provided health care.

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Army cadets have been banned from carrying rifles on a Remembrance Day parade amid fears the weapons might “upset” onlookers.

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Traditional school science is being dumbed down as teachers focus on social issues to make lessons more “relevant” to pupils’ lives, according to a leading headmistress.

And this is a problem in the U.S. as well. The problem lies, I suspect, in the fact that the teachers and administrators aren’t really convinced that science has any intrinsic value, and they are projecting those attitudes onto their students: After all, if I the teacher have doubts, then such doubts are natural, and so of course the students will have doubts as well.

Leaving aside the problems inherent in the increasingly common tendency for teachers and administrators to project their attitudes onto their students, I suggest that the problem is one of teachers and administrators losing their grasp on what education is all about. (I know: What a shocking notion.)

Most teachers would really rather be going on intellectual spelunking expeditions with college students than drilling pre-pubescent children, and so sort of reflexively try to intrude pedagogical methods suitable for semi-mature young people into what they’re doing with kiddies. This is always a mistake, and one that I am convinced is behind much of the deterioration of our ‘educational’ systems today.

Fortunately, we are increasingly gaining access to technology that can correct this problem. Prior to about age 12, most kids need facts and skills, not intellectual adventure (look at how schools a hundred years ago did things–and at what they, and their students, accomplished), and the best way to impart facts and skills is repetitive memorization, drilling, and testing–activities for which computers are ideal. When the time comes that automated processes are no longer appropriate, then the teachers can take over and play coach. Until we get such a system in place, our schools will continue to suck.

I am convinced that such a system will eventually arise, if for no other reason than that some desperate group of parents somewhere will try it because they’ve tried everything else, and it will be so successful that everyone else will either adopt it or lose the competition for educational excellence. But getting there will be painful, and a large part of that is the unfortunate fact that teachers as a profession are more ignorant about what they ought to be doing than almost every other field of endeavor.

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Is this a purely English obsession? Looking at much American television, the interest in class and status seems alive and well, despite a widespread belief that Americans don’t “do” class. There are the fascinated homages to opulent wealth and the people struggling to get into that world – 30 years ago, Dallas and Dynasty, these days the awesomely snobbish Gossip Girl and the milder Brothers and Sisters.

I think that the popularity of stories about social class stem from the fact that ‘celebrities’ we will have always with us, and there seems to be a natural homeopathic impulse in people to believe that acting the way rich & famous people act will somehow replicate the effects of being rich & famous, as if being rich & famous were some guarantee of quality. Needless to say, most ‘celebrities’ today fall down on the job (assuming that this is their job to do). As a result, people are attracted to stories set in environments where the equation of wealth and fame with Quality was not only embraced but positively cultivated–and that means looking into the past. (Or into fantasy–it’s no accident that most successful fantasies, like The Lord of the Rings, are set in societies that have nobles and peasants, with the nobles being central to the story.) The constant blathering in the press about sports figures being ‘role models’ merely underscores the accuracy of this analysis.

Exempli gratia: Lance Armstrong. Does he use drugs to win his races? Damn the man for being a negative role model. Does he win his ‘fight’ with cancer? Praise the man for being a positive role model. And all of this is completely divorced from the consideration of whether or not it makes any sense for someone in a normal life to take inspiration from a guy who rides a bicycle for a living. Think about that one for a minute.

Of course, I plan to buy the Downton Abbey series on DVD when it comes out, as it inevitably will. But at least I’ll understand what’s going on.

And, really, is The Sopranos all that different? Most of the trouble into which Mafia guys get is caused by their congenitally poor impulse control … and impulse control is the essence of ‘upper class’.

Which class people belong to, and to which they want to rise; these questions have been the raw stuff of drama for centuries, and are not going to disappear.

It’s as if we only notice the questions, however, when the presence of a butler and a duke alert us to them.

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It’s hip, and trendy. Christian? Not so much.

William Saletan, in Slate magazine, makes a good case.

But if health care did cost the party its majority, so what? The bill was more important than the election.

If your goal is ideological, then it doesn’t matter whether you survive the battle, so long as your ideological accomplishment remains in place.

The big picture isn’t about winning or keeping power. It’s about using it.

We still have Obamacare and a multi-trillion-dollar expansion of the Federal debt. And those aren’t likely to go away any time soon; trimmed, perhaps, but still there. Call it ‘Ratcheting Socialism’ if you will.

A party that loses a House seat can win it back two years later, as Republicans just proved. But a party that loses a legislative fight against a middle-class health care entitlement never restores the old order. Pretty soon, Republicans will be claiming the program as their own. Indeed, one of their favorite arguments against this year’s health care bill was that it would cut funding for Medicare. Now they’re pledging to rescind those cuts. In 30 years, they’ll be accusing Democrats of defunding Obamacare.

I wish I could say that he’s wrong. But, given the record of the Republican Party during my lifetime, I’m very much afraid that he’s right. The problem with being ‘a conservative’ is that what there is to be conserved keeps moving to the Left.

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When even Slate magazine notices, now that’s corruption.

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You, too, can do Footfall.

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Stick-limbed, balloon-bellied, ancient-eyed, the tiny, failing bodies of Biafra had become as heavy a presence on evening-news broadcasts as battlefield dispatches from Vietnam. The Americans who took to the streets to demand government action were often the same demonstrators who were protesting what their government was doing in Vietnam. Out of Vietnam and into Biafra—that was the message. Forsyth writes that the State Department was flooded with mail, as many as twenty-five thousand letters in one day. It got to where President Lyndon Johnson told his Undersecretary of State, “Just get those nigger babies off my TV set.”

Although sadly decayed, the New Yorker still has some of the best writing in the English language.

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[At work] There are always small-scale, short-term reasons not to upset the apple cart, which is why the proprietors of the apple carts tell you that

(a) you’re playing the game of Monopoly

(b) on a given turn in the game of Monopoly, you roll the dice, move your token, buy and sell properties…and nothing else.

The truth is, though, that you’re not playing Monopoly, either in your job or in your life.

You’re playing D&D.

The great thing about D&D is that it tells you that you’re playing D&D, and that you’ve got infinite choices.

The bad thing about Monopoly is that it tells you that you’re playing Monopoly, and you’ve got finite choices…when, in fact, you’re still actually playing D&D.

Playing D&D is more work than playing Monopoly.

…and it’s a lot more fun.

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Hey, if there aren’t any Jews or Americans handy, Muslims will happily blow up each other.

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Welcome to Londonistan. In the Good Old Days, he would have been taken out into the courtyard and shot. Those days, alas, are long gone.

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Hint: Don’t get on the fargin plane in the first place. That seems plain enough.

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Hah!

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A really beautiful model.

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When people tell me how mad they are at Wal-Mart for driving the mom-and-pop stores out of business, I ask them how Wal-Mart managed to do that. Did they go around torching their stores in the middle of the night, threatening the moms and the pops with baseball bats if they didn’t close their stores?

The consumers drove the mom and pops out of business. The consumers preferred Wal-Mart (and Target and K-Mart) to the mom-and-pops. To the extent Wal-Mart did the driving, it was by offering better products at better prices.

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On Wednesday, after workers represented by the International Association of Machinists voted down a contract offer for the second time, they learned that their employer was not bluffing about moving their jobs to Mississippi.

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George Will is always worth reading.

Unwilling to delay until tomorrow mistakes that could be made immediately, Democrats used 2010 to begin losing 2012.

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Dude, this is what minions and henchmen are for. Don’t you read? Or watch movies? What a maroon. If I had a billion, security would be one of the biggest line items on my budget.

The Other McCain has some advice for Republican candidates.

Note to future Republican candidates: Do you own damned laundry and wash your own damned dishes. If you have ever employed a domestic servant named “Maria,” please don’t run for office as a Republican.

Hypotheticals are always tricky. When you’re second-guessing Lee’s tactics at Gettysburg, your own plans are always executed flawlessly. So it is in election post-mortems. It is a lot easier to imagine the victories of Sue Lowden in Nevada and Mike Castle in Delaware than it actually would have been to achieve those objectives. And, hey, if you can’t win your own party’s primary, what does that say about your prowess as a candidate?

If the only way the GOP can win a Senate majority is by electing useless turds like Mike Castle, we’ll just have to learn to live without a Senate majority.

If all the GOP offers voters is Liberalism Lite, or if Democrats are allowed to represent their agenda as “centrist” or “moderate” — so that opposition is pre-emptively defined as “extremism” – Republicans will lose their political raison d’etre.

So the strategical upshot is that conservatives should work to defeat Democrat Blue Dogs by exposing the phoniness of their “centrism” and never – ever – support a RINO in a primary.

Preach it, brother.

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Key paragraphs:

But what made Choudhry’s crime all the more disturbing was her transformation in just six months from a moderate Muslim enjoying her English degree studies into an al-Qaeda operative, as a result of simply listening to the sermons of Anwar al-Awlaki online.

Police believe that Choudhry had no direct contact with Islamic extremists and became “self-radicalised” by the calls to arms of al-Awlaki, the Yemen-based leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He is behind numerous terrorist plots, including last week’s attempt to bring down aircraft using parcel bombs.

Moral: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A MODERATE MUSLIM. A ‘moderate Muslim’ is one who does not take the tenets of his religion seriously; and that can change at any moment without any warning. As the saying goes, ‘Past performance is no guarantee of future results.’

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Last year, we had a discussion about all of the various transit authorities that had been threatening various app makers for creating rather useful train schedule apps for mobile devices. Now you might think (if you thought) that transit groups would be thrilled with such apps, which would make taking the train easier and more convenient. And, really, when you realize that others would be building these apps that get more people to take the train, without you even having to pay them as developers, it sounds absolutely great for the folks who make the trains run. If they thought. But, apparently, thinking is not a pre-requisite for some of these jobs, and many of them couldn’t think beyond “those apps use our data” and freaked out. In some cases it was because the train operators wanted to license the data. In some cases it was because they were offering or building their own, competing, app.

It’s all about the power, Larry.

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Identity politics is alive and well among the Voices of the Crust.

How much Congress is straight, white, or male matters only to people who ought not to be allowed to vote in the first place.

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Democracy works every time it’s tried. That’s what drives the Crust insane.

Three Iowa Supreme Court Justices were tossed as a result of their votes mandating that same-sex couples be allowed to marry.  They are the first Justices who failed to be retained since 1962, when the current system was implemented.

Although I don’t understand the complaint of Drake University Law School Dean Allan Vestal that this was a “misuse” of the right of voters to vote on judicial retention.  Isn’t this exactly what the retention power is intended to do?

Heh. Would that the U.S. Supreme Court had the same system.

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The measure, known as Initiative 1098, went down in flames, with nearly two-thirds of voters against. The ballot measure would have taxed individuals earning more than $200,000 a year or households earning more than $400,000, but cut property taxes and taxes on small businesses. The money raised was to go to schools and health care.

Most people appreciate that when rich people call for higher taxes, there’s some motivation behind it other than increasing government revenue. After all, there’s nothing preventing a rich person who thinks his taxes are too low from just writing a check to the government. No, what they really want is to keep people who aren’t rich already from becoming rich, as they did. After all, of you tax Bill Gates Sr at 50%, or even 90%, he’s still rich; but somebody who’s doing well with his own small business can’t absorb that kind of hit.

The death tax (which Bill Gates Sr famously also supports) operates on the same principles; Really Rich People can afford accountants and tax lawyers that will avoid most of it; a well-to-do farmer or small business owner can’t afford that kind of expertise, so that even if they fight off the IRS vultures during their lifetimes they won’t be able to pass what they’ve earned on to their kids.

So when you hear rich people advocate tax hikes, or bad-mouth tax cuts, ask yourself why this guy isn’t just giving more money to the government voluntarily, rather than calling for increased burdens on everybody. (Yeah, I’m looking at you, Bill Clinton.)

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Why college isn’t for everyone. And he’s certainly right on the money about law school; I’ve often wished I could get a refund.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Arnold Kling points out an inconvenient truth.

The usual bleeding-heart cry is that it is absurd for a society to have people as rich as Bill Gates and still have poverty. But government is much, much, much richer than Bill Gates, and no bleeding heart complains about government’s indifference or misplaced priorities.

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A key shortcoming of statutes and regulations is that they impose one-size-fits-all rules on the behavior of individuals and businesses. Thus “helpful” statutes and regulations turn out to be unhelpful because they substitute rigid rules for the application of local knowledge and on-scene judgment to unique circumstances.

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Life imitates art.

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This happens in every close election. It happened in Washington State in the 2002 Gubernatorial Rossi-Gregoire race – Rossi won the first and second recounts, with King County Democrats finding more and more votes until Gregoire finally won – on the third recount. At which point, WA newspapers began calling on Rossi to accept the “results” and concede.

They tried to get car trunk ballots added to the tally in Ohio in 2004. They successfully got them added multiple times in the Minnesota 2008 Coleman-Franken race and a myriad of races in between.

Each time, the Democrats, their special interest groups, and their friends in the Press, from local newspapers up to the alphabet soup networks have shrieked that Republican objections to the counting of votes from “lost” ballot boxes miraculously found by Democratic activists in their closets and car trunks a week after the election which – “shockingly” – always overturn Republican leads, is because Republicans want to “suppress” the vote.

Jeff Jarvis sees the cracks beginning to form.

Old TV channels have become an unnecessary layer of curation. It’s the shows we want, not the networks. Networks are and always have been meaningless brands. They provided services: distribution, promotion, monetization. But as in the rest of media — as with news publishers, book publishers, radio stations, book stores — those functions can now be taken away from the middlemen and done more efficiently elsewhere.

The problem for Cablevision is that the unraveling has to start at home. It can’t unbundle Glee and the World Series from Fox until it unbundles its huge packages of utterly unwanted channels that cable companies force us to pay for though we never watch them. Physician, heal theyself.

Of course, this unbundling will be painful for cable companies. They gather huge revenue selling those bundles to trapped customers who have no choice but to pay for Fuse if they want Food. It won’t be an easy transition. But once choice arrives, we will demand our freedom from bundles.

And this unbundling will be quite painful — no, fatal — for many channels. No longer subsidized by being sold with Food, Fuse may die.

David Friedman understands the dialectic.

When I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, a very long time ago, it was common for undergraduate acquaintances to have, and talk about having, a shrink—a psychoanalyst. I never saw much evidence that psychoanalysis was improving their psyches to any significant degree, which led me to suspect that the real function of the shrink was to make the patient feel better, and perhaps more important, by paying attention to him or her. A friend who was getting his doctorate in psychology asked one of his professors what the evidence was that psychoanalysis worked, read the articles the professor suggested, and concluded that the evidence was that it didn’t; I take that as at least mild support for my interpretation of the role of the shrink.

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Supposedly every issue from May 1872 to March 2009.

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Students and professors at the University of Manitoba are rallying around a math professor who has been suspended for three months without pay after he took legal action to overturn the university’s decision to award a PhD to a student who hadn’t met all the requirements.

Gábor Lukács said the U of M is demeaning the reputation of other PhD students and the professors who teach them. “The shadow of suspicion that the present case casts on all other, hard-working students who did fulfil their requirements bothers me a lot,” Lukács said.

Lukács said the U of M awarded a PhD in mathematics in October to an individual who lacked the academic requirements, who failed a critical exam twice, and was then informed he didn’t have to take the exam.

Standards? In a modern university? What’s up with that?

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Formed in 1926, Pontiac made cars for the working class until a sales slump in the 1950s nearly killed it. GM revived the brand by connecting it to auto racing. From then on, each Pontiac sales boom was driven by speed.

The brand’s most storied muscle car, the GTO, came about when some GM engineers took a small car called the Tempest and put a powerful V8 engine under the hood. The letters stood for “Gran Turismo Omologato,” Italian for “ready to race.”

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Employees at a CBS affiliate in Anchorage left an accidental voicemail for an aide to GOP Senate candidate Joe Miller in which they discussed and laughed about the possibility of reporting on the appearance of sex offenders at a Miller rally. And they chatted about responding with a Twitter alert to “any sort of chaos whatsoever” including the candidate being “punched.”

The Crust takes care of its own.

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Slow news day.

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Most of Mexico’s violence and corruption has as much to do with our war on drugs than anything indigenous. It is thus preventable with a change of U.S. policy. This is not only in Mexico’s interest but ours as well: the drug-related violence has already begun to spill over into the United States.

Huh. So it’s our fault that people attempt to make money by breaking our laws. I agree that it’s preventable with a change in U.S. policy: If our policy were to execute anybody caught with illegal drugs–shoot them right there in the street–then the problem would be much reduced. But I somehow don’t think that’s what they had in mind.

McDonald’s Workers Are Told Whom to Vote For

Except, of course, that they weren’t. But, of course, one seldom expects truth from the New York Times, and one is rarely disappointed.

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Europe isn’t completely gone.

Forty-two years ago the British politician Enoch Powell made his famous “Rivers of Blood” speech, in which he stated that “The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.”

Our politicians today do the exact opposite. They actively promote a preventable evil.

Islam was not the religion of peace to Winston Churchill. He described it as the religion of blood and war.

Anyone with a knowledge of the foundations and history of Islamic expansion knows this to be the truth.

Mohammed was a warlord. And a very good warlord indeed. By the time of his death he had militarily defeated and converted most of the pagan and Christian tribes of the Arabian Peninsula.

After his death Islam rapidly expanded at the point of a sword, defeating ancient civilisations and overrunning continents as it did so.

And today it is within Europe, it is within the West, and it is calling for what it has always called for: total Islamic domination. And if we wish to resist, then they will use terror against us.