There's nothing wrong with predicting that something will be a political issue. But if you aren't just a horserace reporter, it's customary to say what you think the right stand is. Nobody says "gay marriage will be a political issue" and simply lets the reader guess their own views.

On reflection, I think I'm reacting to the economics (or lack of same), not the politics, of Glenn's posts on the subject. Often, his views on the international division of labor, a.k.a. outsourcing, sound a lot like some libertarians' views of drug use: "I'm against it as a practice, but I don't think the government should try to stop it." Can I prove that's what he thinks? Not at all. In fact, he may not even think that at all. But he leaves it for the reader to fill in the blanks. He's coy.

Open markets and open societies go together. Both depend on finding ways to trust and interact with strangers in mutually beneficial ways. That exchange disrupts not just settled economic relationships but settled social and ethnic definitions as well. I'm all in favor of low taxes, but they do not, by themselves, a free economy make--no matter what an erstwhile supply sider may think.

My thanks to Eugene Volokh for doing the research I should have done when Craig Roberts and Charles Schumer's piece first ran. (My one quibble: I don't think even an unreconstructed southerner would include American blacks among "international looking" people. But he might include most of the Volokh Conspiracy, including those born in the USA.) Anyone who has spent 15 minutes talking with Roberts, or who saw him on C-Span sitting with Schumer and declaring that "the United States will be a Third World country in 20 years," can tell he thinks society has gone to hell and dark-hued people have a lot to do with that decline. (Women, too. Or at least I always got that feeling when I talked to him.) He is not a man who hides his views. And unlike Pat Buchanan, he doesn't even have a sunny persona.

The interesting questions: What does Senator Schumer think? And why isn't he paying a political price for this alliance?

So I devoted my latest NYT column to Mann's work. Her argument is particularly interesting to me because I'm old enough to remember--and cite quotations from--the last time we had this kind of hysteria about tech jobs going abroad. Hardware went offshore in the late 1980s, and the result was a huge boom in computer use, business productivity, and overall employment in the United States.

As a side note, I look forward to the day when my pal Glenn Reynolds stops coyly feeding the anti-outsourcing frenzy by egging on demagogic politicians and actually defends the international division of labor. Sure, outsourcing is a political issue. So was Japanese auto competition. So are steel imports. But the fact that unemployed workers are understandably upset doesn't mean the policies they want--or the general anti-competitive attitudes they express--are in the public interest.

If you haven't read it yet, Dan Pink's cover story in Wired is not just a must read but a good read as well.

"He's really been a disaster, possibly the worst commissioner I've seen," said Dr. Sydney Wolfe, director of health research at consumer group Public Citizen in Washington. "He is more well-liked by the pharmaceutical industry than any other commissioner I can remember."

Note that Wolfe doesn't point to any bad policy outcomes. But McClellan doesn't share his reflexive hatred of the pharmaceutical industry, so he must be bad. The NYT account, which is far more positive than the Globe's assessment, likes McClellan because he's banned ephedra and hasn't made policy according to right-wing religious doctrine.

Both pieces are worth reading, especially during a political season where nobody is paying much attention to the vast power of the regulatory state. Unlike tax and spending policies, most regulations receive little public debate--and much of what does occur is on symbolism, not substance--and they tend to be permanent. The potential for damage and distortion is enormous. (For my general views on the problems of regulation, see The Future and Its Enemies.)

As a side note, stories about Mark McClellan or his brother Scott, the White House press secretary, often mention that their mother, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, is a Republican elected official, the comptroller of Texas. What they don't say is that she's not a go-along-to-get-along Republican, having seriously ticked off the establishment last summer by sending the budget back to the legislature for revision on the grounds that it wasn't really balanced. As best I can tell, on casual readings, she mostly lost her battles with the legislature, which took out its wrath on her agency.

Susan Foerster, chief of cancer prevention and nutrition for the state health department, said her staff is analyzing a variety of factors--such as car-dominated or unsafe neighborhoods and limited access to fresh fruits and vegetables--that could cause millions of people to gain weight in a relatively short time. Obesity "is way up over where it was even 15 years ago," Foerster said. "It's not a matter of simply pushing away from the table or getting up off the couch ï¿‘ the increase in rates over time has been a function of changed lifestyles and changed environment."

Ms. Foerster herself says people weren't this fat a mere 15 years ago. That would be the mid-1980s. I was alive in the mid-1980s; I even lived in California. Americans drove cars and lived in the suburbs. They didn't walk a lot. There was less access to fresh fruits and vegetables than there is today. Ms. Foerster, who was apparently born around 1990, seems to think the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s resembled the 1920s (or even earlier). Why did people gain so much weight over such a short time? It's a mystery that requires a lot more intelligent analysis than the California health department is offering. A 15-year-old trend won't have a 50-year-old cause.

A leading candidate is the changing nature of work, with more people sitting in chairs all day. When my father started work as an industrial engineer in the late 1950s, he was told that the typical factory worker walked six miles in the course of a day's work; walk that much and you're unlikely to get fat. Work today is more pleasant, and less taxing, but instead of getting paid to exercise, you have to use leisure time to burn calories.

Take health care, a fast-growing industry. While the doctors may be slim, in my admittedly unscientific experience, the typical support person--whether a nurse, a technician, or a paper processor--is seriously overweight. And it's not as though people who work in hospitals and doctor's offices don't know being obese is dangerous.

Because California's skewed income distribution, combined with progressive tax rates, means that the people at the very top of the income heap pay a very high percentage of the personal income tax collected in this state.

Their extraordinary, onetime income surge at the end of the last century provided most of the new tax revenue that legislators and former Gov. Gray Davis used to raise teacher salaries, increase welfare benefits and expand eligibility to state-provided health care. But the decline that followed also accounted for most of the revenue drop that contributed to the state's fiscal crisis. And as of the most recent tax year, they hadn't hit bottom yet.

The million-dollar earners peaked in 2000, when 44,000 of them -- about enough to fill your average baseball stadium -- reported incomes totaling $172 billion and paid more than $15 billion in taxes. The tax take from that relative handful of returns accounted for more than one-third of all income tax paid in the state.

The next year, the number of returns reporting incomes that high slumped to 29,000. Their combined income also declined, by nearly half, to $95 billion. And here was the killer: Their tax liability dropped from $15 billion to just under $8 billion....

The remaining 25,000 million-dollar earners took in a combined $75 billion, down from $95 billion the year before. And the tax take from that crowd declined again, to just over $6 billion. The super-rich, and the state's treasury, are basically back to where they were in 1998....

Since 2000, when the high-tech bubble was concentrating income at the higher end of the scale, the share of California income reported by those highest fliers -- the million-dollar earners -- has been cut in half, from 20 percent to just 10 percent. More broadly, all of those earning more than $100,000 in California saw their combined income drop from 54 percent of all the money earned in the state to 46 percent.

The middle-class, meanwhile, saw its share of the income expand. Those earning between $50,000 and $100,000 increased their share of the income from 23 percent to 27 percent. But people in that income category pay relatively little income tax in California. Combined, they pay a bit less today than they did in 2000.

In fact, those earning between $50,000 and $100,000, while they took in 27 percent of the income in 2002, paid 19 percent of the income tax. People earning more than $100,000, while earning 46 percent of the money in the state, paid 73 percent of the income tax.

The tax-collection data should provide an important reality check on Democrats who've been responding to Arnold's budget cuts with calls for higher taxes on the richest Californians. Soaking the rich is already the state's approach to taxation, and it's one reason the budget is such a mess.

Concludes Weintraub: "Raising tax rates on this small group of highly successful Californians will undoubtedly be part of the mix of deficit-closing policy proposals debated in the Capitol this year. But the tax return data suggest that a more fruitful and more stable approach to balancing the budget over the long term would be to somehow figure out how to make more Californians wealthy, and keep them that way.

Those who either attack or defend a minister in such a government as ours, where the utmost liberty is allowed, always carry matters to an extreme, and exaggerate his merit or demerit with regard to the public. His enemies are sure to charge him with the greatest enormities, both in domestic and foreign management; and there is no meanness or crime, of which, in their account, he is not capable. Unnecessary wars, scandalous treaties, profusion of public treasure, oppressive taxes, every kind of mal-administration is ascribed to him. To aggravate the charge, his pernicious conduct, it is said, will extend its baleful influence even to posterity, by undermining the best constitution in the world, and disordering that wise system of laws, institutions, and customs, by which our ancestors, during so many centuries, have been so happily governed. He is not only a wicked minister in himself, but has removed every security provided against wicked ministers for the future.

On the other hand, the partizans of the minister make his panegyric run as high as the accusation against him, and celebrate his wise, steady, and moderate conduct in every part of his administration. The honour and interest of the nation supported abroad, public credit maintained at home, persecution restrained, faction subdued; the merit of all these blessings is ascribed solely to the minister. At the same time, he crowns all his other merits by a religious care of the best constitution in the world, which he has preserved in all its parts, and has transmitted entire, to be the happiness and security of the latest posterity.

When this accusation and panegyric are received by the partizans of each party, no wonder they beget an extraordinary ferment on both sides, and fill the nation with violent animosities.

From David Hume's essay, "That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science"

One of the delights of my work is talking with people like Muller, who must be a great teacher. He's an exceptionally lucid writer, who makes complex ideas clear without losing their nuances. I haven't read all of his book The Mind and the Market, but reading the chapter on Hayek makes me want to read the rest.

The standard advice seems to be to move these files to the trash:
~/Library/Caches/MS Internet Cache
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.internetconfig.plist
~/Library/Preferences/Explorer/History.html
(The tilde stands for your home folder.)
and then try loading IE again.

For those looking for a comprehensive guide to Mac browsers, here's a note from reader Sandy Smith:

What version of Safari do you have? (Safari->About Safari) Have you upgraded to OS 10.3? If not, I highly recommend it, as it comes with a later version than the publicly downloadable one (it depends on some technologies included in the OS). I'm using v. 1.1.1 and Safari handled MSNBC much better than even Camino. I've also had better Java experiences with it--be sure you run Software Update to make sure you have the latest Java releases.

Anyway, there are a plethora of browser options available on the Mac:

Camino (I highly recommend downloading the latest nightly): Mozilla-based browser with OS X-native widgets. Handles bookmarklets--I use one to submit pages to the W3C's validator tool while I'm testing them. MSNBC is broken all over the place.

Mozilla: Open source version of Netscape, same engine that powers Camino. Comes with all the bells and whistles of the old Netscape Communicator suite, so they created...

Firebird: Browser-only version of Mozilla

Omniweb: Used to be the Web browser on NeXT computers, the OS that OS X is descended from and that Tim Berners-Lee used to create the first Web server and client. Now based on Apple's Safari engine. Version 5.0 is supposed to be a fairly big feature-focused release with more OSX-like elements than even Safari. OmniGroup have a good history at producing that sort of thing.

iCab: ick, but it's there. Completely home-grown engine.

I haven't ever used Internet Explorer for Mac regularly as my default browser--some things worked, but so many didn't. I'm familiar with it though, because we officially support it at work.

My default browser is Camino, because it's still the fastest renderer of the bunch, though Safari is now neck-and-neck as of v.1.1.1. The lead developer who did most of the initial work on Camino (then called Chimera) was Dave Hyatt, who then went to work for Apple on Safari:

PS - in Camden, SC we were allowed to talk (quietly) in the halls between classes and at lunch/recess. This was the mid-Seventies.

One thing everyone seems to agree on is that the MSNBC redesign is a disaster. What were they thinking????

I've updated the book tour page, with more appearances to come in the next week. Thanks to reader demand and an invitation from the University of Denver's real estate school, it looks like I'll be making a Denver appearance in early May. Details to come.

A side note: Neither browser handles MSNBC.com's accursed new design well. I used to love that site as a quick news source. Now it takes forever to load and blinks on and off repeatedly before it's done.

UPDATE: I quit Explorer, and now it's broken again. As soon as it launches, it quits. Aargh. So I'm back on Safari.

The "liberal" bias usually manifests itself as a certain comfy sort of groupthink. Most people in the newsroom are Democrats. They vary wildly from issue to issue, perhaps, but there are some tenets that bind the tribe, and a good number of them are based in certain attitudes about conservatives that were quite possibly formed at birth. Certainly in college. My favorite example: years ago I wrote a book review about a study of free speech on American campuses. It wasn’t one of those thinly-documented screeds; it was written by college educators horrified by PC speech codes, assaults on campus newspapers, and academic freedom. The copy editor had a question about one of the author’s names. I wandered over and read it to her. The author used all three names--first, middle, last.

"F*cking Republicans," she said.

I was a bit surprised, and asked her what she meant. She seemed startled and suddenly a bit abashed, and said that the three names were pretentious. Like Hillary Rodham Clinton?

The book in question is obviously The Shadow University by Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silverglate, who went on to found the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Pretentious is not a word anyone who knows them would use.

UPDATE: The piece is #4 as of Tuesday noon.

I agree, btw, that Bazaar had great photography--and graphic design--in the mid-'90s. But it took about 30 seconds to read. Aside from the photos, it had no content. (Thanks to Reason's Jeff Taylor, a veritable clipping service, for the tip.)

MR. BRODER: I saw the same kind of contrast when I was out there earlier this week. Gephardt gave a pep talk to about 175 union business agents and staff people who';d come in from around the country. I'd say it was about 98 percent male and the median size of these guys, about 6'3", 250 pounds. Then I went over to...

MR. RUSSERT: My kind of guy.

MR. BRODER: Then I went over to the Dean headquarters, they're young, they're female, they're gay, and they're small. And I thought to myself, I hope those Gephardt guys don't run into the Dean people. You know it would be a bad scene.

MR. TODD: You know, it'll be interesting at the caucuses, on caucus night, if there is some physical intimidation, or not, I mean...

MR. RUSSERT: Punch everybody out.

Mr. TODD: Yeah.

MR. BROWNSTEIN: I wanted to add a shirt size cross tab to our poll after experiencing the same thing. I think we'd find a pretty clear division.

MR. RUSSERT: Double XL.

This DMN article on employers' response was also a refreshing change from the horse-race treatment. Unlike most cities, Dallas takes restaurants and construction seriously as major local industries. Combine that business angle with the long-standing connnection between Texas and Mexico and you get a more nuanced picture of immigration policy than cable's 24/7 "news" shows offer. (Unlike Californian conservatives, Texans don't appear to long for the good old days of life without Mexican immigrants, perhaps because they realize those days didn't exist in Texas.)

Karlyn Bowman, an expert on polling at the American Enterprise Institute, sees a two-step process in voter decisionmaking. First, she says, people want a "threshold level of confidence in the individual, a feeling you could sit down in a living room and relate that person, feel comfortable with that person in their stewardship of policy." Then, she says, "the issues follow from that."

That's why seemingly qualified candidates run into trouble if they seem weird--watch out, Wesley Clark. It's also why the star candidates--Reagan, Clinton, Arnold--combine familiarity with charisma. We don't really know them, and if we did they'd lose some of their magic, but we like to think we know them. (That combination was, I think, much of Colin Powell's appeal as a fantasy candidate for Republicans.)

Many, though by no means all, of the book's problems stem from its lack of concern with "how life gets better," as opposed to the mere fact that life gets better. There are lots of statistics, but very little connection to specific human enterprise, experiments, or experience. The few anecdotes are memorable, because they're so rare. The Progress Paradox represents an old strain of progressive optimism, which imagines social and economic systems as far simpler than they are. It's reminiscent of the technocratic works that dominated "progressive" thinking through the 1960s. Easterbrook's approach to, say, universal health insurance amounts to the "if we can put a man on the moon" argument, with no acknowledgement whatsoever of all the feedback effects that people who think seriously about health policy--regardless of their prescriptions--routinely address. He essentially takes a Nike attitude: Just do it! The result is a glib work, but not a very good one.