Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
When Joe Wurzelbacher had the misfortune of having Obama walk onto his front yard and solicit questions he discovered what the rest of us will all soon discover.
The all-caring nanny state destroys privacy. That’s the thing about nannies: they always know what the children are up to.
Robert Avrech went to a script conference the other day, and ran straight into the Inquisition.
I was not happy with the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement for many reasons.
One of my main objections was that the entire premise behind the complaint against the tobacco industry was that they used advertising to control the minds of their customers. It seems extremely obvious that the dangers of using tobacco were well established long before my birth in 1964, yet it was claimed that tens of millions of Americans were too stupid or weak minded to pay attention. Consenting adults in this country could be trusted to choose political leaders in elections, but they were helpless to resist when confronted with a picture of the Marlboro Man.
One of the most moronic claims by the anti-tobacco crowd was that the cartoon advertising mascot Joe Camel was enslaving the youth of America. It was said that children recognized Joe more readily than they did Mickey Mouse, even though the cigarette ads only ran for 9 years and giant amusement parks featuring the anthropomorphic camel were never constructed. It looked to me to be a blatant attempt to demonize an industry in order to force them to pony up some cash.
The title of this article is “10 Things the Food Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know”, and it shows that some people figure the same methods used against Big Tobacco will work just fine when applied to the food industry.
Click on that last link and all the same tricks are on display. Food companies target little kids to advertise unhealthy food. They sponsor studies that obscure the fact that unhealthy food is bad for you. The industry puts pressure on legislators to keep them from passing laws limiting consumer access to fattening and sweet foods. They bankroll front groups which fight anti-obesity laws. And so on.
This appears to me to be exactly the same tactics used against tobacco companies. They are evil, unconcerned with the health of their customers, and all too willing to employ Jedis working on Madison Avenue to use their powers on the minds of vulnerable little children. (“Broccoli is not what you want to eat! Ice Cream would be much nummier!”)
The author of the article claims that obesity is a major health concern, and I have no problem with that. But I do object to the idea that people in this country are so stupid that they just can’t figure out that eating unhealthy foods will make you unhealthy.
How long will it take before state legislatures combine resources to blackmail the food industry into making a huge payment? I figure about ten years on the outside.
I see the campaign against the tobacco industry, and now the food industry, as an attack on the free market system. Free markets means free choice, which means that individuals have to be allowed to make bad personal choices if that is what they want to do.
I mean, isn’t that the very basis of American society?
Probably most of you have seen these, but if not they may amuse you:
As we infantilize ourselves. (I view this somewhat ruefully because, unlike apparently most of the Chicagoboyz, I’m totally incompetent. Last New Year’s Day my brother walked into our kitchen, asked what was wrong with the sink I said we were going to phone a plumber after the holiday. He looked at it, climbed under the sink, screwed the head on the hose, and it has worked ever since.)
The friend who forwarded that (who I might say is skilled at both dressing for success and hacking down a tree, at editing a paper and remodeling a room) sent two sons to the first Gulf War and one of them forwarded this to her.
And this rant is cheerful (even if the Iowa Trades are not likely to make us feel the sentiment is as widespread as we’d like).
The headline reads “Armed killings cost nations billions of dollars”. survey from the United Nations Development Program and the
Okay, so there is an economic cost to violence. That is obvious just through the lifelong revenue lost when someone is murdered. But the first sentence of the news article wants to make a point.
“The United States leads the world in economic loss from deaths caused by armed crime, according to a global survey released Friday.”
The US leads the world when it comes to economic costs due to violence, but the author also points out that there are countries with higher levels of violence than the United States. No doubt the higher standard of living and GDP we enjoy here when compared to majority of the world has something to do with it, but the article makes no mention of that.
There is also no attempt made to define what is meant by the phrase “armed killings”. Do they mean any weapon, with rocks and sticks lumped in with machine guns and crossbows? Are improvised weapons included, such as normally innocent clotheslines used for hanging or water in bathtubs which is used to drown someone? How do they discount people who are killed by bare hands alone? Isn’t someone who is strangled or beaten to death just as dead, the economic costs just as high, as someone who is deliberately run over by a car?
And I wonder about suicides. Are they included as well? Suicide is illegal, so it would certainly fit the definition of “armed crime”. What about people who overdose instead of slitting their wrists or shoot themselves? Are prescription pills considered a weapon when deliberately used to end an innocent life?
All of these questions I am raising might seem frivolous, and they certainly are. But that is because I find the entire premise to be laughable. The people behind this study are obviously trying to advance an agenda of some kind, and the details they ignore say more about their motives than anything they claim to reveal. It is no surprise that the study was sponsored by the United Nations Development Program and the Small Arms Survey.
These are the same people that like to argue that the 2nd Amendment is actually a violation of human rights. (PDF file here.) Looks like they are up to the same old tricks, using smoke and mirrors to try and make their case.