Notes and observations. Diversions and digressions. All done far too infrequently.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Sunday, July 27, 2008
"As You Like It " on the Boston Common
All the world’s a stage,One of Shakespeare's greatest passages. Delightful.
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many, parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the shining school-boy, with his stachel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel...
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
City payroll costs grow 25 percent, report says - The Boston Globe
There's never enough money for city government, which needs to go on a diet.
The city of Boston has hired more than a thousand new employees in the last four years, driving up personnel costs by 25 percent and drawing criticism from a fiscal watchdog group that warns that the city needs to keep a lid on hiring.
A report released yesterday by the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, a business-funded, nonprofit organization, says that the School Department has added 658 positions since 2004, the Police Department hired 266 employees, and the Fire Department hired 78. The total city workforce is now 17,075.
The additional employees, combined with increases in the cost of health insurance, pensions, raises, and other benefits, meant that the city's personnel spending grew to $1.6 billion, an increase of $312.5 million. Personnel costs now represent 69 percent of the city's total budget.
Boston officials defended the growing payroll as necessary to respond to vital city needs.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Jeff Jacoby hits his stride
Column after column could be filled with the ways the Massachusetts political class and its hangers-on play taxpayers for suckers - the gold-plated tax breaks for moviemakers, the insanely lucrative sick-time buybacks, the indefensible police details, the public-sector-only paid holidays, the "temporary" tax hikes that last forever, the state budgets that keep growing even as family budgets shrink.Are you angry yet?
It will never end - not until the suckers get riled up enough to fight back. Not until they start throwing incumbents out of office, instead of blindly reelecting them. Not until they stop letting themselves be treated as ATMs for politicians and doormats for public-employee unions. Not until they force their public "servants" to defer to them, instead of the other way around.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
It's always difficult to get statists to face the facts of government failure.
The current world food crisis is not the long predicted signal of Malthusian overpopulation. Instead, it is the result of political Malthusianism, that is, a series of government policy failures that are preventing farmers from growing the food demanded by the world's hungry billions.Get that? It's about government failure, not "market failure."
Monday, July 07, 2008
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Let us now praise Venus, again!
Thursday, July 03, 2008
On the limits of libertarianism
I've discovered just one problem with my elegant libertarian philosophy after spending two decades in public policy: It's terribly impractical for actually governing society. My whole quibble with libertarians can be boiled down to one banal question: What's the libertarian point of view on stoplights?Read the whole thing.
I like stoplights. More to the point, they're a simple and tangible example of how government can make us better off: They enable complete strangers to interact more safely and efficiently. Given a choice between the freedom to speed through an intersection at any time and the coercive red light, I'll tolerate the red light.
That's kind of silly, so consider a more significant example, like counterterrorism. In a world of libertarians, who finds Osama bin Laden?