It looks obvious

This blog should be very interesting:

Creative Capitalism: A Conversation is a web experiment designed to produce a book - a collection of essays and commentary on capitalism, philanthropy and global development - to be edited by us and published by Simon and Schuster in the fall of 2008. The book takes as its starting point a speech Bill Gates delivered this January at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In it, he said that many of the world’s problems are too big for philanthropy–even on the scale of the Gates Foundation. And he said that the free-market capitalist system itself would have to solve them.

This is the public blog of a private website where a group of invited economists have spent the past couple of weeks criticizing and debating those claims. Over the next couple of months we’ll be posting much of that material here, in the hopes of eliciting public commentary. Some of the public commentary - the comments posted on this blog - will also be used in the book. (Comments to the effect of “capitalism is evil and Bill Gates is a fool” probably won’t be used. But we’re genuinely open to opinions of all stripes, and all of the contributors who do end up in the finished product will be paid on a per-word basis, which should work out to between one and two dollars per word.)

Oh, no! Obama might not be so bad as those who try to convince conservatives that McCain is “the lesser evil” :

Demonstrating that this is no mere spring fling, he has appointed 37-year-old Jason Furman to head his economic policy team. Furman is one of Wal-Mart’s most prominent defenders, anointing the company a “progressive success story.” On the campaign trail, Obama blasted Clinton for sitting on the Wal-Mart board and pledged, “I won’t shop there.” For Furman, however, it’s Wal-Mart’s critics who are the real threat: the “efforts to get Wal-Mart to raise its wages and benefits” are creating “collateral damage” that is “way too enormous and damaging to working people and the economy more broadly for me to sit by idly and sing ‘Kum-Ba-Ya’ in the interests of progressive harmony.”

Obama’s love of markets and his desire for “change” are not inherently incompatible. “The market has gotten out of balance,” he says, and it most certainly has. Many trace this profound imbalance back to the ideas of Milton Friedman, who launched a counterrevolution against the New Deal from his perch at the University of Chicago economics department. And here there are more problems, because Obama -who taught law at the University of Chicago for a decade - is thoroughly embedded in the mind-set known as the Chicago School.

The explanation can be also that this is part of the obvious break toward the center that the candidates have to do after the Primaries and before the general election, or that Obama was never that extreme left as his opponents try to portray him. Nevertheless, this is just confirming my arguments that He is less offensive than McCain.

Via LRC

I listen to NPR on the way to, and from, the train every day. It wakes me up early in the morning and keeps me awake when I’m coming back home tired from work. It is almost certain that one of the segment aired on NPR during the 15-20 minutes I’m in the car will upset me so much that I will be fully awake and upset. Here is an example how the public radio, who demand the right to funds its activity from my tax money misrepresent one of the pillars of my world view.

It is OK for a radio station to misrepresent issues. It is OK also to report unfairly and even to bend the truth. The only thing that I really object to is the fact that I am being coerced to pay for this. What ever the flag the people behind NPR carrying, it is not mine and the notion that the station, and its affiliates, are entitled to receive the tax payers money - simply because they need it - is immoral.