The free market as creation myth

There has never been a greater lie than the purported desire for a free market. No businessman who 's worth his salt has ever actually believed in a free market or truly sought it out, (and logically so) because his ultimate goal is (and probably ought to be) to corner the market, i.e. to create for himself a monopoly. The free market, in the end, is nothing more than a creation myth preached by his intellectual stooges to bestow upon his practices the appearances of fair competition and ethical behavior for consumption by those he sees as cattle.

Greg Mankiw (circa 1998) on supply-siders a.k.a. "charlatans and cranks"

"CHARLATANS AND CRANKS
Fad diets are popular because they promise amazing results with minimal effort. Many people want to lose weight but are not eager to pay the price of eating fewer calories and exercising more regularly. These people are convinced all too easily by the reassuring words of some self-proclaimed expert selling a miraculous product. They want to believe that this new, easy-to-follow diet really will work.
Fad economics is also popular, for much the same reason. Anyone can adopt the title "economist" and claim discovery of some easy fix to the economy's troubles. These fads often tempt politicians, who are eager to find easy and novel solutions to hard and persistent problems. Some fads come from charlatans who use crazy theories to gain the limelight and promote their own interests. Others come from cranks who believe that their theories really are true.
An example of fad economics occurred in 1980, when a small group of economists advised presidential candidate Ronald Reagan that an across-the-board cut in income tax rates would raise tax revenue. They argued that if people could keep a higher fraction of their income, people would work harder to earn more income. Even though tax rates would be lower, income would rise by so much, they claimed, that tax revenue would rise. Almost all professional economists, including most of those who supported Reagan's proposal to cut taxes, viewed this outcome as far too optimistic. Lower tax rates might encourage people to work harder, and this extra effort would offset the direct effects of lower tax rates to some extent. But there was no credible evidence that work effort would rise by enough to cause tax revenues to rise in the face of lower tax rates. George Bush, also a presidential candidate in 1980, agreed with most of the professional economists: He called this idea "voodoo economics." Nonetheless, the argument was appealing to Reagan, and it shaped the 1980 presidential campaign and the economic policies of the 1980s.
People on fad diets put their health at risk but rarely achieve the permanent weight loss they desire. Similarly, when politicians rely on the advice of charlatans and cranks, they rarely get the desirable results they anticipate. After Reagan's election, Congress passed the cut in tax rates that Reagan advocated, but the tax cut did not cause tax revenue to rise. Instead, tax revenue fell, as most economists predicted it would, and the U.S. federal government began a long period of deficit spending, leading to the largest peacetime increase in the government debt in U.S. history.
Fads can make experts seem less united than they actually are. It would be wrong to conclude that professional nutritionists are in disarray simply because fad diets are so popular. In fact, nutritionists have agreed on the basics of weight loss--exercise and a balanced low-fat diet--for many years. Similarly, when the economics profession appears in disarray, you should ask whether the disagreement is real or manufactured. It may be that some snake-oil salesman is trying to sell a miracle cure for what ails the economy."

--N. Gregory Mankiw, Principles of Microeconomics (1998), pp. 29-30

Richard Haas: "This is not Bob Dole's Republican Party..."

“This a very different Republican Party. This is not that Republican Party that made fiscal management and stewardship its priority. This is not Bob Dole’s Republican Party. This is a Party that now has built an ideology or a theology about opposition to taxes. It ‘s just simply in a different place. And that ‘s the split, in some ways, between [Cantor and Boehner]: it ‘s between what ‘s the most important: [whether it is] shrinking the size of Government and preventing any new taxes or whether it is financial stewardship." -Richard Haas, President, CFR
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/43767473#43767473

We the folks, in order to form a more perfect union...

I have recently started noticing, I mean really noticing, the adoption of the word "folks" in modern American political discourse, where the word "people" was once employed. And, although I wholehearted support him, I am saddened to see Barak Obama also falling into the clutches of this practice. Here 's what Susan Jacoby, author of "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism" and "The Age of American Unreason" had to say on the subject in an interview with Bill Moyers:

BILL MOYERS: You have a powerful section in here on what's happened to our political language. How, for example, politicians so often talk these days not about people but ab-

SUSAN JACOBY: Folks.

BILL MOYERS: --folks-

SUSAN JACOBY: Folks.

BILL MOYERS: --about the folks. What's wrong that?

SUSAN JACOBY: What's wrong with it is folks used to be a colloquialism. It was the kind of thing that you'd talk about mostly in rural areas, mostly in the south and the Midwest. People talked about folks. It was not considered suitable for public speech. If you used it in the classroom your teacher would, you know, would get after you, because it wasn't considered appropriate language.

But think about this though. Think about our political language in the past and today. Just think about The Gettysburg Address. We highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this government, of the folks, by the folks, and for the folks, shall not perish from the earth. This is patronizing. It's talking down to people. I read all of FDR's fireside chats where he-- I could not find a single reference to folks. You know why? Because the addressing people as folks is talking down to them. It's not dignifying them. When you call people citizens you're calling them to rise-- calling on them to rise above the lowest common denominator. You really need to think about what's being said when people are called folks. It's encouraging you not to do too much. And, you know, when I--

BILL MOYERS: Not to expect anything special.

SUSAN JACOBY: Not to expect anything special. And people are terribly scared of saying, "We really need to expect more."

Transcript
Video

Also, Stephen Colbert has done a brilliant interview with Susan Jacoby. Not to be missed.

No cable TV in Greece

I know I 'm not the only one who has wondered why cable TV never happened in Greece. We talk about it here all the time. Well, it seems we 're not the only ones. Here 's an excerpt from an OECD Report from over a decade ago:

The policies of some OECD governments seem set to increase the ownership of cable infrastructure by monopoly PTOs [public telecommunication operators]. In Greece, although service is yet to commence, a recently passed law mandates that the development, installation, operation and management of any kind of infrastructure for cable television broadcasting is exclusively the right of the Hellenic Telecommunications Organization (OTE) in conjunction with the broadcasting monopoly (ERT). Because it takes several years to roll out an alternative network, the current policy in Greece will close-off the potential for competition at the local level for over a decade. This would substantially eliminate the benefits local service competition would bring to the development of information infrastructures in Greece.

The OECD Report on Regulatory Reform: vol. I Sectoral Studies (OECD, 1997), p. 53

Indeed, eleven years later the prospect of cable TV in Greece is nowhere on the visible horizon.