The Angry Economist

Money spent trying to change the weather is wasted, and takes away money needed to adapt to the weather. We can stop emitting CO2, sure, and we can become damned poor and unable to help the people who are REALLY POOR. I'm not worried about us. I'm worried about the poor people in low-lying areas. Who's gonna take care of them if the rich countries have impoverished themselves and not succeeded at changing the weather.

Remember: Kyoto has cost the world half a trillion dollars already. How much of that money would we have been able to spend to buy up low-lying land in India, Bangladesh and other such countries? That's how the free market would deal with warming: people in rich countries buying out the property of people in poor countries, so they can afford to move elsewhere and rebuild. How many shanties in India could you buy with a half-trillion dollars? All of them, I'll venture.

Larry Lessig proposes to lessen the influence of money on legislators. Unfortunately for him, he is trying to hide a symptom without curing the disease. The disease is that governments regulate businesses. The symptom is that businesses then have a profit motive in regulating governments. If you want a government which is free of corruption, you have to eliminate the motive for corrupting them.

The solution is a "Freedom of Trade" amendment to the Constitution. Word it like "Congress shall pass no law respecting the freedom of trade. Congress may tax trade without respect to its nature only on a percentage of price."

Update: it seems that Larry agrees with me, so it will be interesting to see what goes up on Change Congress. The only realistic solution that I see to excess power at the federal level is for the states to demand their power back. In order for that to happen, first the people must be changed, otherwise the states won't know to demand their power.

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards. --Arthur Koestler

And the more obvious a discovery, the EVEN WAY MORE OBVIOUS it seems afterwards. --me

People who claim that no patent can be judged as obvious after it's been invented (such as Arthur Koestler) are missing something. There are two kinds of inventions: obvious ones, and original ones. The original ones come from asking an obvious question, and deriving a unique solution. One that has never been thought of. One whose details are not obvious given the question. This is a true invention -- something from nothing.

On the other hand, obvious inventions can come from asking an original question. An inventive question. And some answers are completely obvious once you ask the question. I claim that these are the kinds of discoveries that Arthur Koestler is referring to. You can even argue that the patent system should cover these kinds of inventions, because a public purpose is served by encouraging people to invent new questions by giving them a monopoly on the answer.

The trouble arises when people ask obvious questions, derive the obvious answer, and then think they can get a patent. And right now, they do. There are innumerable examples of obvious inventions deriving from obvious questions, and the public harm in allowing an unproductive monopoly on an idea should be obvious but the USPTO continues to grant these kinds of patents.

The solution is to look for obviousness in both the question and the answer, and only give patents for originality in either the question or the answer.

From the mouths of politicians comes wisdom. CNN reported today that Barack Obama said:

"The problem we have is not a lack of good ideas," Obama said in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Friday. "It's that Washington today is a place where good ideas go to die."

Washington has too much power now, but there are still many things that can be done at the state level. Do that, and keep those ideas secret from Washington, lest it kill the idea.

A California legislator wants the state's science cirriculum to teach climate change. Climate change is a documented fact. Within recorded human history we have gone through two 1500-year warming / cooling cycles. There's evidence on every continent of this. But human-caused global warming is bullshit. Basically, we're being asked to believe that the inevitable warming is *more* warm *now* than it *should* be. We have zero evidence of that. Nobody can say with any precision how quickly the earth warms when it warms. It was warmer during the Roman Warming than it is now. Fig trees grew in northern Italy where they don't grow now.

Yeah, teach climate change, but teaching global warming is as bad as teaching creationism. They're both faith-based education.

Health insurance companies do three things:

• they pay ordinary medical bills which most people could afford. This is extremely expensive "insurance" because nearly everybody ends up getting a payout.
• They mitigate against the risk of a catastrophic (unaffordable) health collapse, say a car accident, or a chronic disease.
• They act as a risk pool to ensure that people who lost the genetic lottery do not have to pay all their own health care.

A friend and I were talking about the war on drugs. He teaches at a local college, and he claimed to me that he'd seen way too many students proclaim that if something was legal, it couldn't be bad for you. This is exactly what you should expect when the government tries to protect you from everything. The self-reliant adult realizes that it cannot succeed at doing that, so there will always be things that are legal which are harmful. A victim of the nanny state doesn't understand that, and so seeks more and more regulation of their lives. They want the government to eliminate any and all danger from their lives, without any need on their part to detect and avoid danger.

They think they'll get a safer adult life. Instead, they'll get a crib.

I've blogged about workplace safety before, but I had no idea how right I was. We could fire everyone who works for OSHA and not affect workplace safety one whit.

Some people don't see the value in individuality. "Oh, the world would be better if we just did this once and shared it." To which I say "yeah, but only if they DO IT RIGHT." It's a utopian idea: "let's make everybody do the right thing, because mistakes are killing us."

No. The biggest problem to solve in human activity is the problem of error. We make mistakes, and we don't know they're mistakes. The problem is that the future is unknowable. When we take action to affect the future (but action can only affect the future, so action is always speculative) we don't know if that will be the right action.

Centralizing decisions doesn't solve that problem, but it increases the cost of the inevitable errors.

Here is a selection of my blog postings concerning mistakes: value-transactions, taxes-spent-badly, monopoly-and-market-power, feature-not-a-bug, centralization-vs-distribution, and buy-my-mistakes.