To the Editor:

Re “Two Candidates, Two Fortunes, Two Distinct Views of Wealth” (front page, Dec. 23):

There is a critical distinction between Mitt Romney’s and John Edwards’s wealth. Mr. Romney, as a businessman, made investments that created wealth. Mr. Edwards, as a trial lawyer, made his money through lawsuits that merely took from one pocket and gave to another, and probably destroyed wealth in the process. (Mr. Edwards’s multimillion-dollar medical malpractice verdicts almost certainly hurt the quality of health care in North Carolina.)

Little wonder that Mr. Romney understands that to improve the economy, one needs to expand the pie, while Mr. Edwards’s policy proposals focus entirely on the redistribution of the existing pie without thought for the future adverse consequences to the size of the pie.

Theodore H. Frank
Washington, Dec. 23, 2007
The writer is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.

More on the question of pie-sharing and pie-growing at SSRN.

More on John Edwards's trial-lawyer record: the Valerie Lakey trial; Edwards on the failure to warn; Edwards on stacking juries; and Edwards's cerebral palsy cases (also: April 11 and links therein).

Slim ends up in the Washingtonian before I do.

Far too often I have to walk out of a supermarket because I don't feel like waiting a half hour in line because they haven't adequately staffed their registers and have decided to impose the costs on their customers instead. (The Giant across from Ron Paul HQ is especially appalling in this regard. I'm ready to just simply never shop there again.) We're only a couple of years away from all local markets having something like this that will reduce labor and grocery and waiting costs. Which will almost make up for the ludicrous increase in food costs caused by the taxpayer boondoggle of ethanol support. If only the Dems demonized Big Corn the way they do Big Pharma, but that would entail actually doing good for someone other than trial lawyers.

Fanboys complaining about continuity problems in their favorite mass media entertainment have always been an issue. Over 2000 years ago, Horace wrote in the Ars poetica

...indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus

presumably complaining about Pylaemenes being killed in combat by Meneleaos but then showing up many books later to witness the death of his son. (From this passage, we get the phrase "Even Homer nods.") Christian scripture and religious writing are full of retcons reconciling the Gospels with contradictory passages in the Jewish bible, but perhaps the first secular retcon comes from Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism:

I know there are, to whose presumptuous Thoughts
Those Freer Beauties, ev'n in Them, seem Faults:
Some Figures monstrous and mis-shap'd appear,
Consider'd singly, or beheld too near,
Which, but proportion'd to their Light, or Place,
Due Distance reconciles to Form and Grace.
A prudent Chief not always must display
His Pow'rs in equal Ranks, and fair Array,
But with th' Occasion and the Place comply,
Conceal his Force, nay seem sometimes to Fly.
Those oft are Stratagems which Errors seem,
Nor is it Homer Nods, but We that Dream.

Carne asada fries and barbacoa in Los Angeles. (via Newmark)

As seen at Balducci's, via radosh.net.

My latest working paper is up on SSRN.