Wirkman Netizen is a mostly self-scripted, non-automated online journal, presented in addition to (if not instead of) the lengthy ruminations on the author's longer-running essay site, Instead of a Blog. The menu below also directs the reader to other sites and offerings by the very same writer.

Current site motto:

Insert ideas into head, observe at safe distance.

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Rainy daze | | |

It’s raining again. Pouring, as they say. I got soaked when I left home for work around noon, just walking to the car. Tomorrow I drive to Seattle in aid of a friend who’s heading for the hospital. I, chauffeur. Through a rainstorm, apparently.

I spent the morning finishing The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine. What a fascinating book. It was great to come across Richard Carlile, again, the author of Every Woman’s Book. But he was only one of many odd characters who somehow touched the bones of the deceased author of Common Sense.

Paul Collins, the book’s author, is very good. His research into the ways and byways of forgotten history amounts to pure delight. Unfortunately, though his prose is always steady, he has an organizational preference and comic sense that I’m not so smitten with. He often begins sections with his recounting of what’s happening today, as he lives and sees and researches. And these sections begin, almost everyone of them, in the thick of whatever thicket he’s writing about. It can be very confusing. I’m sure he does it for some situational drama and humor, but mostly I found these excursions unnecessarily confusing. But the confusion vanishes after a paragraph or two. Still, this style of presentation is not to my taste. Oh, well. A fine book, otherwise.

Talking on the phone with a friend, he mentioned a book that was just published, and he thought I might like it: The Android’s Dream. An sf book written for Philip K. Dick fans, Amazon lists a provocative grab-bag of characteristic key phrases: gecko man, sentient species, Evolved Lamb . . . Yes, I might like it.

Rainy weather is perfect book-reading weather. Stay in bed and read. This is the greatest of all indulgences, and it seems almost perverse, in its own way. But hey: if I didn’t read, I’d be of no use in my profession. So I read. It’s part of my job. And every editor is a reader. A writer (even so humble a one as yours truly) is also a reader.

Since the death of Milton Friedman, last week, I’ve been trying to remember whether it was from Friedman, or from some other libertarian, that I first heard of the penny circle game. What? Here’s how I remember it:

Gather in a circle, with one person playing the role of Government.
Government goes around the circle, divesting each player of one penny.
At the end of the round, Government takes half of the pennies for himself, and gives the other half to a select member.
Repeat, only giving different amounts in the share-out, and to a different player each time.

It’s an illusion that we all get better off. Do the math like an economist, and you quickly see how the con is made. But people do tend to get taken in. Indeed, it’s easy to get caught up in the game, and many players are likely to object to stopping the game, for fear of coming out behind somebody else . . . despite the fact that most who play come out further behind than they would have had they never started the play.

Government, without strict limits, is really just another example of the grifter’s art, a magic trick. The Penny Circle Game illustrates this better than more sophisticated argumentation can.

But did I learn this from the late Milton Friedman, or someone else? I didn’t see it mentioned in quick searches at the Free to Choose site.

T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | November 19, 2006 | permalink