Consider two propositions:

• The first is that markets are smart, to the extent that they cannot be tricked into anything unless one carefully hides most or all of the contrary evidence.
• The second is that, left unregulated, markets produce some best possible outcomes.

These aren't at all the same proposition. On the one hand, something can be hard to deceive, yet work at purposes contrary to those that one favors. On the other hand, a mechanism can be vulnerable to some sorts of disruption but, in the absence of that disruption, perform some task well. I'm not saying that the propositions are contrary; they could be simultaneously true; none-the-less, they're plainly not identical.

The run-up to the latest economic crisis seems to have been founded in no small part by a confusion of these two distinct propositions. The Bush Administration represented itself — and may well have considered itself — free market, in-so-far as it expected considerable resilience on the part of the market in the face of remarkable levels of state borrowing and considerable other interventions (compassionately conservative or kleptocratic). And Alan Greenspan, who surely considered himself a believer in laissez faire, is these days explaining his optimistic proclamations from before the crisis as stemming from a failure to reälize that investors would not recognize that a boom could not last forever, to which lack of recognition he also attributes the crisis, as if irrational exuberance were simply a Keynesian animal spirit, rather than a product of things such as lending regulations and Federal Reserve interest rate policy.

Meanwhile, many of the Keynesians, socialists, and pragmatic technocrats (long-standing or born-again) are arguing that the fact that the market could be fooled shows that markets aren't clever and that thus various sorts of interventions are needed, as if any defense of free markets must hang upon a belief that markets are simply too clever to be fooled. Left unaddressed is whether the confusion were endogenous or brought on by state intervention, whether those prior interventions that may have been the cause of the confusion produce actual benefits worth the costs of that confusion, and whether more intervention would produce a more clever system or a less clever system.

In fact, there are various long-established free-market schools of thought that attribute economic crises to a propensity of state intervention to fool economic participants. For example, it is difficult to distinguish to what extent interest rates reflect the supply and demand of private savings for future consumption, and to what extent they are an artefact of central bank intervention for other purposes. In the face of Federal Reserve manipulation of interest rates, the market will not be sufficiently smart to see what the price of loanable funds should be, and therefore will almost certainly build too much or too little for the future.

For some time now, I've been asserting that, when the same statistical protocol is used, the UK is actually ahead of the US (per capita) in all but a couple of forms of violent crime. I'm going to have to revise that assertion. The UK is ahead of the US in all forms of violent crime except criminal homicide.

Most places in the universe are not Bella Italia Fragrances. But there's a place in Hillcrest that in its own special way is not Bella Italia Fragrances.

Here are a couple of pictures of Bella Italia Fragrances, at 3852 4th Avenue, captured by Google for their street view: It sold soap, shave brushes, and so forth.

One day, walking along the 3800 block of 4th Avenue for the first time in many days, I found this carport. I was amazed. As you can infer by looking to the left and to the right, the carport was where Bella Italia Fragrances once was. But the carport also appeared to have been where it was for years.

Evidently, a shop had been implanted into the carport. The decorative bushes at the entrance, and the scrubby bush at the curb served to disguise what had been done. And evidently the implantation was highly reversible.

One of the oddities of Hillcrest manifests itself as this building front: It's right in the middle of the block on the east side of 5th Avenue, between Robinson Avenue and University Avenue. The doors have been closed and locked every time that I've passed.

Walk around to the east side of the block, on 6th Avenue, and you'll find a building and parking lot with signs for Pernicano's and Casa di Baffi. (The name of the latter means House of the Mustaches.) The building itself is labelled Pernicano's. It is always closed. The parking lot is always fenced-off and unavailable.

All told, this is a pretty big chunk of a city block. Hillcrest has various idling properties right now, but, actually, these particular properties have been idling since 1985!

I believe that the building on 5th Avenue was Casa di Baffi, but I wasn't in San Diego back in '84. In any case, the properties belong to George Pernicano. He operated two restaurants there from 1946 until 1985. Pernicano's was apparently quite a hot-spot, with movie stars and celebrity athletes visiting regularly. Then he shut the restaurants down, and refuses to do anything with the property.

Various explanations — some speculative, some perhaps informed — are offered for why Mr Pernicano keeps these properties idle.

Search the web, or ask some of the merchants in Hillcrest, and you'll read or hear a lot of complaining about Pernicano. Some of it is honest; some of it self-serving posturing. Many merchants would like active businesses on these lots; some parties, at least in good times, would like to have the properties for their own direct use; a lot of people would like local parking to be increased, as it is a real problem.

My own view starts with the point that the properties belong to Pernicano. People can make polite suggestions — and some indeed confine themselves to such — but Pernicano ought to reject sanctimonious demands out-of-hand. As to parking, if successful businesses were again operating out of the two buildings, increased demand for parking would consume that now unused lot. I don't see any other landlords preparing to tear down a building to make room for a parking lot. I think that the parking issue is a wash.

But I do think that Mr Pernicano needs to attend to some building maintenance very soon. Some of those roofing tiles on the 5th Avenue building are working loose. Results could be pretty dire if one fell and hit a pedestrian.

Some years ago, Go Daddy added a back-order service whereby a domain already registered by another party would be monitored and, should its registeration lapse, the domain would be registered in the name of the purchaser of the service.

Some time after that, Go Daddy added an auction service. And, when registration lapses for which Go Daddy is the registrar, then duiring the grace period (42 days in the case of Go Daddy) Go Daddy itself puts the domain up for auction; the auction ends well before the grace period, and the auction results are cancelled if the prior registrant renews before the end of the grace period.

A registrant seeking to have a domain appraised might simply let the registration lapse, watch the auction, and then register before the end of the grace period. A late registration requires a higher fee, but that difference could be viewed as the cost of appraisal.

Now. here's where it gets ugly. Go Daddy holds such auctions even if there is a prior back-order. They hold the auctions even if the domain had a different registrar when the back-order was placed, but then switched to Go Daddy. They hold the auctions even if the back-order was placed before they had an auction service. If the domain should be bid to anything above an opening bid of US$10, the purchaser of the back-order must either pay more or let the domain go to some other party.

A Go Daddy back-order on a domain is worse than useless to its buyer if the domain may be expected to be registered with Go Daddy at the time whenever registration lapses. If the domain is sufficiently attractive that a back-order would be useful without an auction, then there will be competitive bidding in an auction.

Now, I'm sure that Go Daddy sent a notice that the old back-orders were going to be subjected to the new protocol, and that refunds were offered. But few if any customers would have understood the implications of a change, otherwise there would have been a lawsuit that Go Daddy would have lost, as simple refunds wouldn't have covered the economic loss avoidably being placed on these customers.

I recently read someone defending socialism on the ground that socialism has the same root as does society. Well, I don't object to society. And I venture to guess that she doesn't object to fathers, yet I go further to guess that she does object to what's called patriarchy. One mustn't over-reach with etymology, with dear old dad, nor with society.

I've previous explained the economic calculation problem of socialism: Rational allocation of resources requires trade-off signals that reflect as much relevant information as practicable. Most of the relevant information is highly decentralized, and some of it (such as the expectations and preferences of participants) is intrinsically so. A market brings that information into play by way of prices (trade-off signals) developed by the give-and-take of would-be consumers and of would-be sellers. Socialists haven't developed an alternative; they correct the market only at the cost of over-all misallocations with their own costs in human welfare.

This point is as true in the delivery of health care as anywhere else. Almost everyone agrees that American health-care delivery is in appalling shape, but there are those who ignore that the problems have grown as state interventions have increased. Commentators frequently note that costs have exploded in the last fourteen years, but then most of these commentators are silent on the fact that the period followed upon the last round of reforms. Of course, the period before those reforms wasn't itself some sort of golden age; the reforms were effected because many things were seen to be worse than once they were, and getting worse still. But, again, due attention was not paid to the rôle of prior state intervention in effecting that worsening. This routine of blaming what remains of a market for the mounting problems of an increasingly state-controlled system began well before I was born.

Many people, even defenders of socialized medicine for the United States, admit that the socialized systems elsewhere have some dramatic flaws. The belief of the defenders is that the United States can develop a better system, perhaps in part by learning from the problems of other states. But the deep problem is, again, that of trade-off signals. And one of the seldom-recognized implications of that is that greater state control here has led and will lead to a worsening of systems elsewhere. A state-controlled system can somewhat compensate for its own inability to formulate rational trade-off signals by being guided (directly or indirectly) by prices generated elsewhere. (This solution is imperfect because the prices of one region cannot be expected to be ideal for another; and, if they were, using them fully would generate exactly the same out-comes as would be effected by a free market, rendering the socialism absurd.) Implicitly, production and distribution of health care in the industrialized nations with more socialized medicine has been significantly guided by the choices made in the United States. To the extent that our prices as well continue to become the guesses of bureaucrats rather that the outcomes of interaction between free consumers and free producers, socialized medicine everywhere will be shooting in an ever-growing darkness.

Even assuming that morality can somehow ignore such practical problems, the morality of the claims for socialized medicine strikes me as utterly bogus. Many people declare health care to be a fundamental right, but that's plainly incoherent as one could exercise any fundamental right without the presence and assistance of other people. There have been very few attempts to build ground-up cases for a moral entitlement to health care — identifying some actual fundamental right from which a right to health care is derived in a social context — and every one with which I'm familiar has been exploded on logical grounds. Mostly people just confuse the appealing proposition that it would be a very fine thing if no one was denied health care for simple lack of resources with there being a right to health care. There are a great many hypotheticals that would be very fine things. I know people such that it would be a very fine thing if they had the companionship of someone of the desired sex, and such that they would like that even more than access to medical care; I hardly think that we should force someone else to provide that companionship though.

Some very fine things become very vile things when delivered by virtue of confiscations, regardless of whether we imagine that the confiscation is effected by society, or recognize that it is by a state or by a gang or by a mob.

By way of an entry in Gaal's LJ, I was led to Eric, a story by Shaun Tan, as reproduced by the Guardian. On the strength of the story and of what I read in reviews, I ordered three of Tan's books:

• The Red Tree
• The Arrival
• Tales from Outer Suburbia

And, after reading The Arrival and Tales from Outer Suburbia (The Red Tree came last), I ordered

• The Haunted Playground
• The Lost Thing[1 (2023:02/20)]

The Red Tree (2001) doesn't tell a story. It is a sequence of metaphors for depression, concluding with the expression of a principle of hope. The focal character is a little red-headed girl, and the metaphors are written at a level that a depressive child should be able to understand. I don't believe the particular message of hope, and so I very much doubt that I would offer this book to a depressed child. But if one wants to offer the message that things will surely get better to a despondent child, then this book might be an appropriate device. Otherwise, adults can appreciate the quality of the pictures.

The Arrival (2006) is the most impressive of these five books, and one that I very strongly recommend for adults. It is the tale of a stranger come to a strange land — so strange to him that he cannot read the local script. To communicate that loss of communication, the story is told without words for the reader either; once past the title page, there are no words beyond the Roman numbering of chapters and whatever is said in that mysterious script. I'd far rather that you experienced the story as it was designed, so I will resist the temptation to reveal more to you. I will tell you that not only should this not be simply classified as a children's book, but that I think that a younger child should not go through this book for the first time without an adult beside him or her.

BTW, you can get this virtually wordless book as translated into Spanish if you wish. (And, apparently, there was some concern that El Llegado or somesuch would be too subtle a title.)

Tales from Outer Suburbia (2008) is a heavily illustrated anthology of short fiction — Eric is taken from it — such that the styles of the illustrations vary with the stories. The stories are not uniformly as marvelous as is The Arrival, but Outer Suburbia is still an outstanding book, which I again recommend. In my opinion, the best of the stories is the very last, night of the turtle rescue; it is very short but very powerful. Most of the stories are suitable for younger children, but it would concern me to have a younger child reading stick figures or wake on his or her own.

The Haunted Playground (1998) is essentially a ghost story for children reading at about third-grade level. I’d guess that it’s about 11000 words, with about ten pen-and-ink interior illustrations by Tan. (The cover is by David Pulmbo.)

The Lost Thing (2000), which arrived yester-day, seems to have slipped out-of-print since I ordered it.[1] In any case, is about the discovery of an enormous, lost creature by a boy, told from the perspective of that boy. Not only do most people not recognize the creature’s condition of being lost; they don’t even recognize the existence of the creature (in spite of its size) until someone directs their attention to it. When the boy does this with his parents, they can see it only long enough to insist that it be sent away. Although Tan has provided some interpretation of the story at his website, he actively resisted including any with the book itself.

While I cannot as strongly recommend The Lost Thing as I do The Arrival or Tales from Outer Suburbia, it can be appreciated both by adults and by children. And I don’t think that one need be right at the elbow of a younger child when he or she first reads it, as opposed to Arrival and to Outer Suburbia. The Lost Thing, BTW, is being made into a short, animated film.

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[1 (2023:02/20)] On 8 April 2010, a paperback edition of Lost Thing was released.

Joe Wilson has behaved like a d_mn'd fool, and there's not much reason to expect him to stop behaving like a d_mn'd fool, but he's being offered a Golden Opportunity:

A clever politician would agree that such an apology were required, and then proceed to deliver something that were indeed an expression of regret, and impossible to fault on technical grounds, but that wrapped an explanation of Wilson's ostensible concerns. The apology could be formally very polite and yet a strong declaration of belief in opposition to the President's programmes. Listeners at all inclined to sympathy for Mr Wilson or to anxieties about the President would have that sympathy or those anxieties greatly reïnforced.

Were I a Democrat then, while I'd generally bet on Wilson's continued foolishness, I wouldn't take this particular bet. The chance of losing is quite low, but the loss would be far too great.

In predicting response to the speech yester-day of President Obama, I certainly did not anticipate the outburst by Joe Wilson.

Pericles once noted that the choices of a leader should be informed by the fact that he would not always be the leader.

Our two major political parties need to remember, when in opposition, that their presumption is that they will not always be in opposition. Their behaviors when in opposition set precedents that will be followed by each other party when it is forced into opposition. The next time that we have a Republican President speaking before Congress, there will be less to prevent a Democrat from heckling him or her.