In Passing.

If you were a hedge fund manager, given what’s happened at Chrysler, would you ever again invest in a unionized company? Because I sure as hell wouldn’t.

Update. Professor Bainbridge says:

“You don’t need banks and bondholders to make cars,” said one administration official.

As Larry’s observation suggests, that official — who’s probably never run any business more complicated than a lemonade stand — will soon discover just how wrong s/he was. It’s called CAPITALism for a reason, after all.

In fact, we know from experience that over the last 2 decades, firms are more likely to use debt than equity when relying on external financing. If creditors get tired of getting screwed, the Chrysler debacle and the looming repeat at GM may mark a major shift in the ability of American business to finance operations and growth.

Indeed, this particular chicken may come home to roost almost immediately.

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I saw an ad for a hanging device for growing tomatoes. Among the selling points were that you could get thirty pounds of tomatoes from one plant and that it eliminated the back breaking work of growing them the normal way. Back breaking work? Growing a few tomatoes? All part of the wimpification of the country that someone can come up with something like that and most people will read it and think nothing of it.

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Norm recently had one of his polls, here is the result with what I chose in brackets.

The votes have all been counted and I can bring you the results: your choices for ‘a representative collection of the Arts of Humankind’, to be preserved in a sealed container for the benefit of future beings of intelligence who might happen upon it.

1. Poets: W.B. Yeats (15); Homer (11); T.S. Eliot (10). [Thomas Hardy]

2. Playwright: William Shakespeare (93). [Tom Stoppard]

3. Novelists: Jane Austen (24); Charles Dickens (22); Leo Tolstoy (14). [Penelope Fitzgerald]

4. Composers: J.S. Bach (40); Ludwig van Beethoven (38); Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (35) [Bach]

5. Jazz musicians: Miles Davis (25); Louis Armstrong (24). [Sidney Bechet]

6. Rock or pop stars: The Beatles (41); Bob Dylan (16). [Jane Siberry]

7. Country music stars: Johnny Cash (18); Hank Williams (17). [Hank Williams]

8. Movie directors: Alfred Hitchcock (21); John Ford (10). [Jean Renoir]

9. Painters: Rembrandt van Rijn (14); Vincent van Gogh (11); Pablo Picasso (10). [Cezanne]

10. Photographer: Henri Cartier-Bresson (12). [Richard Avedon]

11. Sculptor: Michelangelo Buonarroti (46). [Michelangelo]

12. Architects: Andrea Palladio (13); Christopher Wren (13); Frank Lloyd Wright (10). [Wren]

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Found this at Cafe Hayek:

I read Tocqueville’s Democracy in America well over a decade ago. I now want to read it again. This desire is prompted by this passage below, taken from today’s column by George Will. I’m chagrined to admit I do not recall, from my own long-ago reading of that great book, the Tocqueville quotation :

In “Democracy in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville anticipated people being governed by “an immense, tutelary power” determined to take “sole charge of assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate.” It would be a power “absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident and gentle,” aiming for our happiness but wanting “to be the only agent and the sole arbiter of that happiness.” It would, Tocqueville said, provide people security, anticipate their needs, direct their industries and divide their inheritances. It would envelop society in “a network of petty regulations — complicated, minute and uniform.” But softly: “It does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them” until people resemble “a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

So what today seems as modern as Matisse once seemed was foreseen 17 decades ago.

Isn’t that amazing? That a Frenchman some 170 years ago could foresee what too many Americans [and others] can’t see when it’s right before their eyes.

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