Kevin Raybauld asks (in the comments below):
I guess I am just not sure why information qualifies as a different category. Like I said, to me, it seems to fit the category of a natural resource, at least in behavior. How is information different than say, steel? In the 19th century, one could have argued that control and manipulation of steel was just as important to economic success as information is today.
Kevin, steel is information – the information on how to make steel, plus the natural resources (iron ore, coal) plus the labor needed. It’s all one unified process, distinguished only by the way we try and analyze it (candle flame: chemical process or physics problem?).
I argued below that Marx screwed up because he divided everything into two categories: labor and capital (land and frozen labor). I’ll argue there is a third category, information, and that the history of modernity is in part the trumph of the information-wranglers (think clerks, bankers, engineers and scientists) over the landowners and the laborers.
Of course the wranglers are themselves laborers…so the analysis gets kinda complex.
But to quote Dante (the clerk, not the poet) “I’m not even suppsed to be here today…”
Back to looking for projects…

In a world beset by terror and violence, it’s good to know that a simple pun can still make you queasy. A ‘tip’ of the hat to the Wall Street Journal‘s ‘Best Of The Web Today’

Military Operations
Turkish troops leading the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) for Afghanistan won friends among hundreds of Afghan families Tuesday after army doctors carried out a mass circumcision of boys who had missed the important Muslim ceremony for one reason or another,” Reuters reports from Kabul:
“It takes about five to eight minutes to do each person,” an army doctor told Reuters. “If you want, I would be happy to do you and your colleagues.”
The dispatch doesn’t say if the wire service took the doc up on his offer. Nor does it say if the doctors received payment for their work, though we suspect they only took tips.

I’m speechless. Laughing really hard, but speechless. This is almost a Feghoot (let’s see who remembers those)…
.

In Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal: George Bush Predicts P/E Ratios Will Rise. Megan McArdle Disagrees.
Two more fans of regression to the mean.

Kevin Raybould, over at Lean Left digs down to the roots of what the Democratic Party claims to stand for.
I think his analysis misses a few things…it’s no longer labor vs. capital, but labor vs. capital vs. information…and I’ll argue that this recent bubble is the fleecing of capital by the information workers. But deep down, I’ve always felt that the Democrats should be the party that could help my old administrative assistant…a 32-year old single mom, making about $26,000/year, with minimal benefits and no clear career track.
Who speaks for her??
Certainly not the current crop of Democrats…
A.L.

OK so I asked the one health-care blogger I know of, Alwin Hawkins of View From The Heart what he thought about my post, and he answered in the comments section below. It’s too good to risk folks missing it, so here it is:

OK, first question: do we have national health insurance? No, of course not. You answered that question yourself in your example; LA county hospitals are financed by a complex web of county, state, and federal grants to support the system – a system almost ready to collapse and due for major cutbacks.
(BTW, LA county health system is a great model for how such systems collapse. Currently there is a huge budget problem. The solution? Close the public health clinics, which provide primary care. Why? Because you have to provide emergency medical care; it’s a federal law. So you shut the inexpensive, cost-effective preventive services and keep the expensive emergency services going. It doesn’t have to make sense; it’s the law.)
As Ross pointed out, government health money only pays a fraction of the cost of services, and federal law prevents the hospitals/docs from getting the patient to pay the difference. That means that the private patients – both the insured and the un/underinsured – make up the difference. Whether it’s directly out of your own pocket or indirectly out of your employers pocket, individuals subsidize government mandated health care and federal/state reimbursements.
Government sponsored healthcare is one of those beasts that works only because the government sets the standards. Run out of money? Don’t pay and let the administrators decide which service gets cut, who doesn’t get paid, what capital expenditure gets deferred, what medications aren’t available. After all, sick people don’t bitch much- and if you cut off services, they don’t complain long, either.
To answer your final question, we do it better by requiring every government mandated program or law passed also have the money to provide those services. If we want universal health care, fine. But we have to also agree to pay for it, and to understand that it will be really, really expensive as the Boomers hit the Medicare barrier. We pay as we go, and we pay whatever it takes to provide the services so that employers aren’t left holding the bag.

Bob Morris, who writes the usually sensible ’Politics In The Zeroes’ blog, takes Ted Rall’s hook and gets reeled in (no permalinks, so just scroll down) with this:

Ted Rall on why it’s different this time
Wise words from Ted Rall, an investment banker turned cartoonist/political columnist.

The trouble is that the accounting scandal that brought down Enron, WorldCom and Xerox is something far more serious than a short-term cyclical correction. It threatens to undermine the foundation of market-based capitalism itself. Bush addressed investors twice in one week, but his assurances that help is on the way only drove jittery securities exchanges to record lows. “For lack of a better description, you have as much full-fledged panic as you are going to get,” commented Tony Cecin, director of institutional trading at U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray in Minneapolis. “The negative mentality is as pervasive as I have ever seen it, and I went through (the) `73 and `74 bear market.”
The panic is real and it is rational: Investors finally realize that they can’t trust earnings and other “audited” figures released by corporations. Absent that information they can’t evaluate stocks, which leads to only one logical conclusion: sell everything and stay out of the market.
“Independent accounting” was BS all along; even companies that didn’t bribe their auditing firms outright with lucrative consulting deals controlled them via the millions of dollars in fees paid out for their signing off on company financial statements. It’s hardly a unique moment in history to discover that some shepherds have been munching on lambchops from a flock they swore to protect.

Rall, sadly is no better on business history than military reportage. Off the top of my head, from the turn of the century to the 90’s:
Teapot Dome (and pretty much the whole Harding Administration)
Julian Oil, here in L.A.
Ivar Krueger, in Sweden
I.O.S. (Bernie Kornfeld)
Equity Funding
Cendant
People have always cheated; capitalism has survived, Rall’s apocalyptic fantasies notwithstanding.

Had lunch today with a political friend, and was chatting about healthcare; mentioned my distaste for ‘National Health’ type solutions, and was rewarded with a verbal smack to the head.
“What do you think we have now?” he asked, giving me the you-moron look.
He referred me to the LA County Budget (a pdf chart is here), and points out that in 2001-2, Los Angeles County spent 23% of its budget…or $3.85 Billion on healthcare. Public Protection, in contrast (Sheriff & Fire) were 20% of the budget, and Social Services (the County is the major provider of welfare) was 29%.
His point is well-taken. We already have publicly-financed healthcare. It’s just crappy, inefficient, and relatively ineffective because we persist in making believe that we don’t.
This is because the giant institutions…the giant hospitals, and the emergency rooms which increasingly serve as the primary-care physicians for a large portion of the population…soak up an increasing amount of the available dollars, and my guess is that they leave little for the kind of preventative, low-profile, relatively less expensive care which would potentially be less expensive and possibly provide better care.
Now this is a ‘newspaper’ set of interpretations; I’d be most interested in hearing from folks in the field.
But the one concrete point is that we have government financed health care for a large portion of the population, and folks like me who sit around and pontificate on how bad government-financed health care would be need to wake up and look at the real world.
So how do we do it better?

…that the character Jack Black played in ‘High Fidelity’ had a website??
Jaguaro.org lists 100 albums he is too cool to own…and sadly, you and I probably do.
Including the Kinks’ Arthur was the straw that put me over the edge.
[note: should have credited Matthew Yglesias.]

That last one seemed a little…I donno, serious, so I thought I’d balance things out with one of my favorite quotes from another of my teachers, Clint Smith, of Thunder Ranch:
“If you carry a gun, people will call you paranoid. That’s ridiculous. If I have a gun, what in the hell do I have to be paranoid about?”

First, a weak-ass apology; I’m diving into deep waters in raising these subjects, and I’m doing so knowing that I do not, at this moment, have the time to adequately address them. My outside life is pretty demanding right now; but I can’t give up completely. So I owe some of the folks I’m arguing with (in the best sense of arguing, I feel), and the folks just passing by and reading, an apology because I cannot spend enough time in front of the keyboard to hone the lengthy and deep arguments these issues require…if, in fact, I’m capable of making them. I’ll try and improve.
Plus I confused Derrida with De Man in a posting below.
Meanwhile, to paraphrase Truman Capote’s acid review of On The Road, instead of writing, I’ll type. (his review: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”)
I’m very fortunate to have a great visual and spatial memory, which reminds me that the little purple book I’m looking for was next to the big Caro books on the upper right shelf, which means it ought to be in…yes! this!!…box.
The Aquinas Lecture, 1961. Metaphysics and Historicity, by Emil Fackenheim

This effect of contemporary events is reinforced by an intellectual development which, in the West, began in the nineteenth century. For a century and a half, Western man has developed an ever increasing historical self-consciousness. And this has not been without grave spiritual effects. In earlier ages, most men could simply accept religious beliefs or moral principles, as unquestioningly true. In this historically self-conscious age, few men can ever forget that what seems unquestioningly true to one age or civilization differs from what seems unquestioningly true to others. And fron historical self-consciousness there is but one step—albeit a long and fateful one—to a wholesale historical skepticism: to the despairing view that history discloses a variety of conflicting Weltanschauungen, with no criterion for choice between them anywhere in sight [A.L.: except essentially artificial and arbitrary ones, per Derrida]. But when events move as they do today, this step is easily taken.
Just how commonly it is in fact taken may be illustrated by a review of three typically contemporary attitudes. The first is what may be called skeptical paralysis. Here historical self-consciousness has led to two results: to the insoght that wherever there has been great purpose, there has been great faith; and to the loss of the capacity for commitment to such a faith. Hence there is paralysis which recognizes itself as paralysis and preaches doom.
Then there is what may be called pragmatic make-believe. Here man, caught in skepticism, seeks escape from its paralyzing consequences. Unable to believe and yet seeking a purpose, he falls to pretending to believe, hoping that a pretended might do the work of an actual faith. But it cannot. For a pretended faith is no faith at all. Pragmatic make-believe collapses in self-contradiction.
When men truly suffer from this contradiction they may seek escape in the most ominous form of modern spiritual life: ideological fanaticism. Unlike pragmatic make-believe and like faith, ideology asserts itself absolutely. But unlike faith and like pragmatic make-believe, it is shot through with historical skepticism. For it knows itself to be not truth, but merely one specific product of history.
Hence, unlike faith, ideology must by its very nature become fanatical. When challenged by a conflicting faith, faith may withdraw on its certainty of being true. Because it knows itself to be but one product of history, ideology can achieve certainty only by making itself true; and this it can do only be re-creating all history in its own image. When challenged, therefore, ideology cannot withdraw on itself; it must seek to destroy the challenger. That is, in order to resolve its internal conflict between absolute assertion and historical skepticism, it must engage in a total war from which it hopes to emerge as the only ideology left on earth.