"a Weibo post showed a child defecating on board Shenzhen Airlines flight ZH9709 from Nanjing to Guangzhou.... after a passenger complained saying both bathrooms were vacant, the parents said the bathrooms were too small anyway so they used the back of the plane because it had more room."
What's that you say? Pictures or it didn't happen? OK.
I can't believe that the only valid complaint was that the bathroom was vacant. On Chinese airlines are you ALLOWED to poop in the aisle if the bathrooms are occupied?
In the process of designing our house in Santa Fe, we were concerned the guest bathroom was too small. Our architect assured us it would be functional and beautiful "like an airline bathroom". Robin went totally nuts. We somehow got the project done anyway and the bath in question is actually quite spacious. Even a Chinese kid would deign to poop there.
Perhaps the worst part of the airline poop saga? The plane had not yet taken off!
Man oh man. What is it with right-wingers and hypocritical racist derp? It's truly amazing. Fresh off of Bret Stephens' salvo in the WSJ comes copy-cat racist David Brooks in the NY Times:
"It’s not that Egypt doesn’t have a recipe for a democratic transition. It seems to lack even the basic mental ingredients." People, this is what used to be said about African-Americans in the US. About women in the US as well. They didn't have the "mental capacity" or "mental ingredients" to be allowed to participate in self-governance. It's pure bigoted, racist, right-wing derp. Rupert Murdoch and Carlos Slim better get their shops in order. Not only is this derpy and racist, but, as I noted in the Stephens case, highly hypocritical. We underwrote and supported 30 years of Mubarak destroying civil society and opposition politics. We underwrote and supported the Egyptian military for longer than that. Any problems Egypt is having with self-governance are partly our fault. And that part is not tiny.
The problem is not really the IRS. The problem is enormous power and discretion in the hands of ANYONE. There is no bigger inequality than that between ruler and ruled.
This morning, I read Mark Thoma's column about Tyler's column before I read Tyler's column and thought to myself, "an anti-government screed? Kill Government? Tyler? Did Tyler outsource his column to me and Mungowitz? Or has visiting North Korea allowed Tyrone to just take over?"
Then I read Tyler's actual column and it was vintage Tyler. We are both makers AND takers. Restrictive zoning favors the rich. There are things we could do over time to improve education but those things are difficult. The mortgage interest deduction is both popular and distortionary.The founding fathers worried about this problem.
But here's Thoma's reaction:
I just don't believe that no government at all will result in a better outcome for the vast majority of Americans. (A good analogy is monopoly power. I think the government should do more to reduce monopoly power, but it doesn't due to the influence of the wealthy and powerful who own these companies. But getting rid of anti-trust law altogether, i.e. getting government out of the way completely, won't improve the outcome -- monopoly problems would simply get worse). I want to improve government, not kill it.
Maybe Romney's glorious comeback has everyone on edge, but Mark is just way way way off base here. There is not a single phrase in Tyler's piece to suggest that Tyler favors "killing" government.
In fact, Tyler's libertarian bona fides are actually quite suspect to many because of his acceptance of relatively big government.
Liberalizing zoning laws is not killing government. Repealing the mortgage interest deduction is not killing government. Reforming teachers' unions is not killing government. Centralizing school spending decisions is not killing government. More school choice is not killing government.
I'd suggest that Mark consider responding to what people actually write, than to the boogieman that appears before his eyes when he sees the byline of someone he suspects might be a libertarian.
I'd also suggest that phrases like this, "the answer is a government that represents all of our interests," suggest that Mark's comparative advantage in blogging may lie outside the field of political economy.
