David Friedman asks the following question:
“Assuming that airline passengers will soon be allowed to use their cellphones mid-flight, is it ethical not to wrench a phone from a loud talker’s hand and twist the earpiece off the phone, thus rendering our offensive communicator phoneless?”
It will be interesting to observe what etiquette and/or rules emerge voluntarily. Maybe we will soon see “talking” and “nontalking” sections on airplanes. Of course, if a cong gets personally offended (as is likely) airlines may be coerced into enforcing the cong’s rules.

Leave it to Venezuela. This (subscription required) makes the wishful thinking of New Mexico’s social and economic development schemes look small. Any bets as to the success of Venezuela’s new utopian cooperatives?
Here is a sample of what Hugo Chávez is trying to do:
“To accomplish that goal, the Chávez government is plowing billions of dollars into new programs, called “missions,” which act as social welfare agencies. Mostly financed by the PDVSA and run by a hodgepodge of bureaucratic offices, the missions are largely devoted to health-care education and jobs training. They exist as a sort of parallel government and are controlled by Mr. Chávez. The missions provide hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans with monthly stipends to learn everything from reading and writing to setting up cooperative farms. Mr. Chávez plans to combine the dozen or so existing missions into a megaproject dubbed “Mision Cristo,” or Christ’s Mission, which he proclaims will end poverty in Venezuela by 2021.”
This is bad news for Venezuela, bad news for Latin America and bad news for New Mexico.

Congratulations to the Rio Grande Foundation’s Micha Gisser. His excellent letter to the editor regarding health policy was published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal. Here is a portion:
“The economic problem lies in the fact that traditional medical insurance covers two dissimilar events, catastrophic and minor illnesses. Consumers’ demand for catastrophic medical incidents is inelastic: a consumer will not use more of the heart-surgeon’s services just because his out-of-pocket spending is zero. Consumers’ demand for care for minor illnesses is elastic: it is inversely related to price. At the true high price a consumer would consult the medical encyclopedia and use over-the-counter drugs. At a low price (zero if her insurance pays the entire cost) a person would consume much more freely, mainly by making appointments with her doctor for every sniffle and headache. The problem with the prevailing health insurance is that the third-party payment of health-care bills insulates the consumers from the real costs of medical care services for non-catastrophic incidents.”
For the entire letter, click here (subscription required).
Nice job, Micha!

A few years ago I conducted a national study of private prison costs. The results were published in two papers, one written for the Foundation and the other for the Maryland Public Policy Institute. The editor of an important book on the subject and a professor of my acquaintance at George Mason recently received a letter from an expert on the subject–a prisoner. Read it here.

Of the 12,167 certified “provisional” ballots cast for Bush or Kerry in New Mexico Bush received less than 40 percent. Does that seem suspicious?