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Milton Friedman on Limited Government

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The best colonizers

"The authors also compare the experiences of separate Pacific islands with eight different colonizers: the United States, Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Japan, Germany, and France. Their verdict is that the islands that are best off, in terms of income growth, are the ones that were colonized by the United States—as in Guam and Puerto Rico. Next best is time spent as a Dutch, British, or French colony. At the bottom are the countries colonized by the Spanish and especially the Portuguese." (Which country is the best colonizer? - By Joel Waldfogel - Slate Magazine)

Milking the Public

"In the summer of 2003, shoppers in Southern California began getting a break on the price of milk.

A maverick dairyman named Hein Hettinga started bottling his own milk and selling it for as much as 20 cents a gallon less than the competition, exercising his right to work outside the rigid system that has controlled U.S. milk production for almost 70 years. Soon the effects were rippling through the state, helping to hold down retail prices at supermarkets and warehouse stores.

That was when a coalition of giant milk companies and dairies, along with their congressional allies, decided to crush Hettinga's initiative. For three years, the milk lobby spent millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions and made deals with lawmakers, including incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).

Last March, Congress passed a law reshaping the Western milk market and essentially ending Hettinga's experiment -- all without a single congressional hearing.

"They wanted to make sure there would be no more Heins," said Mary Keough Ledman, a dairy economist who observed the battle.

Hettinga, who ran a big business and was no political innocent, fought back with his own lobbyists and alliances with lawmakers. But he found he was no match for the dairy lobby.

"I had an awakening," the 64-year-old Dutch-born dairyman said. "It's not totally free enterprise in the United States..."

Hettinga vowed to keep supplying his customers in Arizona and California even though the new law required him to pay the Arizona pool what he said was a "crippling" sum of up to $400,000 a month.

"The irony is that Hein is paying his competitors," said Alfred W. Ricciardi, Hettinga's Phoenix lawyer.

Hettinga and his relatives gave nearly $20,000 to Kyl's Democratic challenger this year. Kyl won handily and got his own dairy industry support: A few weeks before Senate action on the milk bill, 11 officials of Shamrock contributed $14,800.

Hettinga also turned to the courts. In October, he filed a lawsuit charging that the milk bill was unconstitutional because it was aimed at penalizing a single individual.

"I still think this is a great country," Hettinga said. "In Mexico, they would have just shot me."

(Dairy Industry Crushed Innovator Who Bested Price-Control System - washingtonpost.com)

BCS Championship Game

"Do we know if Florida is the second-best team in the country? Of course not. Here's what we do know: Michigan is not the best. How do we know that? By the traditional criterion: They scored fewer points in a football game than Ohio State did. The only team that has the "right" to play in the BCS championship game is the best team, Ohio State. And the only teams that should be scratched without question are teams that have already been determined to be "not the best," like Michigan.

On Sunday, Michigan coach Lloyd Carr had the gall to declare, "I hope that, in the future, we can have a system where all of the answers are decided on the field" and, "We need to get away from anything that's not decided by the players themselves." I'm fairly certain that Carr's players were involved in Michigan's 42-39 defeat at the hands of Ohio State and that it was played on a field. (If not, sports journalists have a real scandal on their hands.)

"Divining the difference between 11-1 Michigan and 12-1 Florida is truly an impossible task," wrote ESPN.com's Pat Forde. Fair enough, but there's no need to divine the difference between Michigan and Florida. The gridiron has already divined the relevant question: the difference between Michigan and Ohio State."

(The BCS' dumb obsession with finding America's second-best college football team. - By Chris Suellentrop - Slate Magazine)

A-10 Warthog

"The A-10 was also the most storied aircraft of the first gulf war. It flew so many sorties the Air Force lost count. The glamorous F-117 Stealth fighter got the headlines, but Iraqi prisoners interrogated after the war said the aircraft they feared most were the A-10 and the ancient B-52 bomber.

To understand why the corporate Air Force so deeply loathes the A-10, one must go back to 1947, when the Air Force broke away from the Army and became an independent branch. "Strategic bombing," which calls for deep bombing raids against enemy factories and transportation systems, was the foundation of the new service branch. But that concept is fundamentally flawed for the simple reason that air power alone has never won a war.

Nevertheless, strategic bombing, now known as "interdiction bombing," remains the philosophical backbone of the Air Force. Anything involving air support of ground troops is a bitter reminder that the Air Force used to be part of the Army and subordinate to Army commanders. For the white-scarf crowd, nothing is more humiliating than being told that what it does best is support ground troops.

Until the A-10 was built in the 1970's, the Air Force used old, underpowered aircraft to provide close air support. It never had a plane specifically designed to fly low to the ground to support field troops. In fact, the A-10 never would have been built had not the Air Force believed the Army was trying to steal its close air support role - and thus millions of dollars from its budget - by building the Cheyenne helicopter. The Air Force had to build something cheaper than the Cheyenne. And because the Air Force detested the idea of a designated close air support aircraft, generals steered clear of the project, and designers, free from meddling senior officers, created the ultimate ground-support airplane.

It is cheap, slow, low-tech, does not have an afterburner, and is so ugly that the grandiose name "Thunderbolt" was forgotten in favor of "Warthog" or, simply, "the Hog." What the airplane does have is a deadly 30-millimeter cannon, two engines mounted high and widely separated to offer greater protection, a titanium "bathtub" to protect the pilot, a bullet- and fragmentation-resistant canopy, three back-up flight controls, a heavy duty frame and foam-filled fuel tanks - a set of features that makes it one of the safest yet most dangerous weapons on the battlefield."

(Robert Coram Op-Ed: The Hog That Saves the Grunts

Tom Peters: Cool Friends

tompeters!

John Boyd

"He was the first man to codify the arcane and hitherto unwritten rules of aerial warfare. He reduced it to a mathematical formula. Then, as a student at Georgia Tech, where he went to get his second degree, he discovered Energy-Maneuverability, which forever changed aviation. Those things alone would have made him worth writing about. But his greatest contributions came after he retired, when he went into seclusion for a year or 18 months and adopted this daunting course of self study. Out of that emerged a briefing called "Patterns of Conflict."

It made Boyd, in the eyes of many, the greatest military thinker since Sun Tzu. When I interviewed Vice President Dick Cheney, he told me that Boyd's ideas had a great impact on his thinking when he, as Secretary of Defense, was planning the First Gulf War. He summoned Boyd to secret meetings in the Pentagon. Because of Boyd, he overrode Schwarzkopf's strategy. It was Boyd's idea that led us to that swift, decisive victory in the First Gulf War."

(Robert Coram interview with Tom Peters about the book The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War)

Unlocking Cell Phones

"If you've had a T-Mobile phone for 90 days, or you've run out of time on a Cingular contract, you can get an unlocking code just by calling your carrier. Tell your carrier's customer service representative that you're traveling abroad and want to use a foreign carrier's SIM card. If they don't give you the code, stick by your guns and ask for a manager." (PC Magazine Special Report: How To Unlock Your Phone)