It's Tyler Cowen's second anniversary, which is probably why he didn't post that he gave a scintillating Bradley Lecture at AEI tonight, touching on everything from the economics of BBQ to the effect of the Internet on militant Islam. It was old hat for his regular blog-readers. Chris DeMuth was kind enough to invite me to join Tyler, his charming wife, and several scholars and employees for dinner, where the conversation continued for another hour. After over a year of corresponding with Tyler in the same city, it was great to finally meet him. Did I mention I was going to like working at AEI? And I discovered a sauvignon blanc that I like, not that you should trust my wine palate. And a local BBQ recommendation I'll have to try. Good times.

The good news: Tyler endorsed my decision to refinance instead of sell and rent. I'll sleep better.

It's regularly said that GM can't compete because of its health-care costs. Here's the WSJ version repeated by Postrel:

Wonder why GM invests just enough in new product to keep the game going, not enough to make its cars really sought after? Because the extra capital that would have to be invested goes instead to doling out gold-plated health care—no copays, no deductibles—to workers and to plumping up their pension fund, which two years ago required the largest corporate debt offering in history to top off.

This makes no sense to me. GM has to pay its health-care costs whether or not it invests in Zeta. If Zeta is a means to a profitable new line of cars, why wouldn't it be a good investment decision regardless of whether the company as a whole is profitable? If it's because the marginal health-care costs of Zeta workers makes the difference between profitability and the lack of profitability, why not build the Zeta cars in Mexico?

I see baseball teams use this reasoning all the time: "The Texas Rangers can't afford pitching because of Alex Rodriguez's salary." No, there's no salary cap, and you're paying ARod whether or not you pay for pitching: if it's profitable to pay for pitching, the Rangers should do it.