Elsewhere (86)

Janet Daley on Obama’s obstinate denial of reality:

His party’s view of the spending question is, indeed, ingeniously delusional. The Democrat leader in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has said, “It is almost a false argument to say we have a spending problem.” (I love that “almost”.) Her party whip, Steny Hoyer, asserted that the country does not have a spending problem at all – it simply has a “paying-for problem.” (Imagine your teenage child explaining that he needs an advance on his allowance, not because he has spent too much money but because, for some peculiar reason, he just can’t pay for everything he has bought.)

Mark Steyn on the same:

The annual “deficit” has been over a trillion for every year of Obama’s presidency. The cumulative deficits have, in fact (to use a quaint expression), increased the national debt by $6 trillion. Yet Obama claims Washington has “reduced the deficit” by $2.5 trillion and all we need to do is “finish the job.” Presumably this is a reference to allegedly agreed deficit reductions over the next decade, or quarter-century, or whatever. In other words, Obama has saved $2.5 trillion of Magical Fairyland money, which happily frees him up to talk about the really critical issues like high-speed rail and green-energy solutions. […] Maybe it’s just me, but the whole joint seems to be seizing up these days: The more “activist” Big Government gets, the more inactive the nation at large.

Via Simen, and somewhat related, Milton Friedman on the minimum wage. See also this:

Despite the wishful thinking of politicians like President Obama, the laws of supply and demand are not optional.

A random thought from Thomas Sowell:

In the modern welfare state, a vote becomes a license to take what others create – and these others include generations yet unborn.

And Brian Micklethwait is reading Madsen Pirie’s Think Tank: The Story of the Adam Smith Institute. He quotes the following, on the subject of state-run telephony in the late 1970s:

We needed a telephone and a photocopier. We were told by the Post Office, which ran the state monopoly telephone service, that there was a fourteen-month wait to have a line and phone installed. We somehow bargained them into doing it within six weeks by pointing out that our predecessors in the building had used a switchboard with four separate telephone numbers, one for each of the companies that had used the place, and all we wanted to do was to reactivate one line. Until the GPO engineers came, we had to conduct all the new Institute’s business from the public call box on the corner, and we ensured we kept a ready supply of coins for the purpose.

And,

One of our friends, telephoning family in South Africa, was surprised when a telephone engineer entered the conversation to say that because the call did not sound urgent, he was disconnecting it. The union had ‘blacked’ non-urgent calls to South Africa, and its members monitored private calls to enforce it.

As usual, feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments.