Pun Salad

Also of note:

• Yes. Next question? Note that David R. Henderson prefers his original headline on his article, and I agree: Should Billionaires Be Allowed to Exist?. An interesting point, aside from the mere fact that billionaires accumulate wealth by being pretty good at producing things that a lot of people want:

  First, consider the argument for respecting billionaires’ rights to their wealth. I could make my argument for rights in a vacuum, but Bernie Sanders has already provided a road map for that argument. After he became a millionaire, Senator Sanders quit attacking millionaires and raised the ante: he shifted to attacking billionaires. Something he said when he became a millionaire is quite relevant here. He had written a book that had sold well and here is how he explained and defended his newfound wealth. He stated, “I wrote a bestselling book. If you write a bestselling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”

  Notice something important that is implicit in his statement. Sanders thinks that he has a right to the $1.06 million that, according to this news story, he made on the book. His implicit moral claim is worth a lot. For many decades, Sanders described himself as a socialist. The term “socialist” can be used to mean many things, all the way from wanting an expanded welfare state to having an all-powerful government that claims ownership of everything and takes people’s wealth. Wherever Sanders is on that spectrum, his statement makes clear that he rejects one important tenet of extreme socialism, namely, that productive people should not be able to keep what they earn. So far, Bernie and I are on the same page.

  But that raises an issue. Does that same thinking apply to billionaires? Bernie made money by selling a book that many people wanted to buy. Billionaires make money by producing many things that people want to buy. Do they deserve to keep what they earned?

  If they don’t deserve to keep what they earned, there must be some numerical dividing line. Where is that line? In Sanders’s case, the dividing line now seems to be above a few million dollars. Although it’s possible that I’ve missed it, I don’t recall his castigating decamillionaires—people with a net worth of $10 million. So, we’ve narrowed it down a bit. The dividing line seems to be somewhere between $10 million and $1 billion. Let’s say it’s $100 million. Having a net worth of $100 million is fine, but if you’re a centi-millionaire who engages in a transaction that makes you an extra $10,000, that’s not fine. But why? Why is it bad to make that extra $10,000?

  Why it's almost as if the Sanderses of the world didn't think about this very hard.

• I love this Slashdot headline. Doesn't it capture the California ethos? Mark Zuckerberg Opened an Illegal School At His Palo Alto Compound. His Neighbor Revolted. It's a simple link to this WIRED story with the same headline.

  One can only imagine the Palo Alto SWAT team descending on the "illegal" school, with a megaphone: "THROW OUT ALL YOUR COLORED CHALK AND COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP."

  The Crescent Park neighborhood of Palo Alto, California, has some of the best real estate in the country, with a charming hodgepodge of homes ranging in style from Tudor revival to modern farmhouse and contemporary Mediterranean. It also has a gigantic compound that is home to Mark Zuckerberg, his wife Priscilla Chan, and their daughters Maxima, August, and Aurelia. Their land has expanded to include 11 previously separate properties, five of which are connected by at least one property line.

  The Zuckerberg compound’s expansion first became a concern for Crescent Park neighbours as early as 2016, due to fears that his purchases were driving up the market. Then, about five years later, neighbors noticed that a school appeared to be operating out of the Zuckerberg compound. This would be illegal under the area’s residential zoning code without a permit. They began a crusade to shut it down that did not end until summer 2025.

  I can imagine Zuck being somewhat amazed that it might be illegal to teach kids stuff on his own property.

• No Kings, either. Jeffrey A. Singer boldly advocates: No Swords, No Subsidies: Let the Market Set Drug Prices.

  On November 6, President Donald Trump announced that the government will refrain from tariffs on Eli Lilly’s and Novo Nordisk’s imported products and active pharmaceutical ingredients and that Medicare and Medicaid will subsidize the use of their drugs. In exchange, the pharmaceutical companies will significantly cut prices for their GLP‑1 weight-loss medications, Zepbound and Wegovy. Medicare and Medicaid will pay approximately $245 per month to the companies for the products, and Medicare Part D beneficiaries will have a $50 co-pay.

  Jeffrey goes on to note that simply making the GLP-1 drugs available OTC would save people a lot more money, and also relieve a hefty burden on taxpayers.

• This shouldn't be controversial, should it? J.D. Tuccille thinks Americans Shouldn't Be Governed by People Who Hate Half of Us.

  At September's televised memorial service for Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump commented on the conservative commentator's character, saying, "He did not hate his opponents; he wanted the best for them." He then added, "That's where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents. And I don't want the best for them."

  Like too much of the political class across the ideological spectrum, Trump is prone to despising those he disagrees with. It raises questions about why people should ever submit to the governance of those who hate them—and whether politicians realize they're a big part of what brought us to this unfortunate moment.

  "It's long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree," Trump had told the nation on the day of Kirk's assassination, at a perhaps more self-aware moment. "This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today."

  It's easy to play the "whataboutism" game here. Let's not.

Recently on the book blog:

This was kind of a frustrating read for me. It's a mixture of very good observations and very poor recommendations. The authors, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, note that various roadblocks stand in the way of their imagined utopia (visions of plentiful housing, lots of green energy, affordable health care, high-speed rail, etc.) And the good observation is that a lot of those roadblocks have been set up by the Blue Team: endless environmental reviews, restrictive zoning, onerous regulation, nuclear energy phobia, diversity mandates, etc.) Klein and Thompson also steadfastly oppose the "degrowthers" on the left; they are all for increasing the size of the economic pie, spurring innovation, invention, and research, so good for them.

Ah, but Klein and Thompson are huge fans of hands-on good government directing all this. Just not bad government. I am unconvinced they can tell one from another. "Hayek" does not appear in the book's index. Neither does "Solyndra". They don't talk about incentives much. They are frustrated by the escalating costs, endless delays, and shrinking scope of California's high-speed rail project, but they never seem to draw the obvious conclusion that maybe it wasn't a good idea in the first place. They are also True Believers in Climate Change Catastrophe, something that even Bill Gates has moved away from.

There's a certain amount of selective amnesia involved, too. Back in the day, Klein was an enthusiastic cheerleader for ObamaCare. Memorably claiming that Joe Lieberman, a conscientious objector in the original debate, was “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.” Never mind the present-day reality that ObamaCare failed its goal of "bending the cost curve"; we've has moved on to designing the next Big Plan That Will Solve Everything. (And if you don't go along, it's probably because you want to kill hundreds of thousands of people.)

All this is accompanied by a lot of sweet, gauzy rhetoric. Designed (successfully) to appeal to "progressive" readers who push policy books onto the best-seller lists, while only making minor quibbles about their bankrupting philosophies. So: read for the good stuff, ignore the road-to-serfdom cheerleading for big government.

If you're looking for a laff riot, maybe you should look elsewhere. I thought Woody Allen's previous book, his autobiography, was funnier. (Some Amazon reviewers were more amused than I, though, so…)

It's a novel, his first and (so far) only. Like his autobiography, there are no chapters. It's just one page after another. And it kind of reads like a novelization of a movie, one that could be funny. But, alas …

"Baum" of the title is the neurotic Asher Baum, a writer of plays, novels, and non-fiction, all relatively obscure and tepidly received by critics. He is on his third marriage. He (literally) talks to himself, not always in private. (Something that might work better in a movie.) He's haunted by worries about his wife's (imagined) infidelity, and he's continually tempted to engage in infidelities of his own.

The plot driver doesn't show up until about 70% of the way through the book. Up to then it's all character study. And those characters are ones that work words like "egregious" into their most emotional dialogue. (Which is actually kind of funny in itself.)