Jeff Jacoby's Thanksgiving day paean to capitalism and the free market it espouses ("Giving thanks for capitalism," Nov. 27) no doubt was intended to be a necessary reminder--by means of this utterly textbook explanation--of the impressive and ever benevolent power of Adam Smith's "invisible hand."
Unfortunately, the textbook of choice for the usual praise bestowed on this single, all-guiding principle has once more nimbly declined to address the equally significant market-constraining concept of governmental regulation.
To be sure, we receive rote instruction against extremes in this regard ("No turkey czar sat in a command post somewhere, consulting a master plan"), but not a word deigns acknowledge necessary protections against marketplace exploitation.
Or perhaps one word (surprisingly) does: "inspected." "The [turkey] had to be slaughtered and defeathered and inspected and transported and unloaded and wrapped and priced and displayed." My interpretation reads "inspected" as in government inspections. I can't be sure, but perhaps Jacoby's including the verb had in mind only the private employee tasked with inspecting each carcass for cleanliness and salability. After all, the "free" marketplace would punish the vendor of unclean turkeys and fowl, hence the motivation for private inspection (would claim our friends of Adam Smith).
But there are some things that consumers deserve protection from, without having to first suffer the ill consequences of an unlucky purchase from a less than scrupulous merchant, only subsequently becoming empowered (from their sickbed) to teach that merchant a lesson by voting with her or his pocketbook (never buy turkey there again).
The entire subject is an ages-old argument, I just didn't expect this permitted glimmer of insight from Jacoby's piece: Adam Smith's invisible hand needs to be seen now and again. Reasonable inspection, not complete invisibility, is what our textbooks (and our own experience) ought to teach us.
WILLIAM REILLY
Somerville
Gregor's entry on his long December 2nd ("black ice Tuesday traffic tangle morning"), mentions moi and at least a couple other just-met Sagittarian types in a healthy dose of beer- & chocolate-induced giggliness, installed in a John Harvard Brewhouse booth, after sundown, over in the wayback (where we like it).
It was fun finding out, piecemeal stabbing sentence at a time, that everyone present was born in late November or non-late December, and (it turned out) that included our waitstaff representative. (We thought for sure there must be a free congratulatory pitcher policy for such a thing, and tried our best to implement one (!). Alas, I think all's we got was a free, eminently shareable ice cream brownie vertical dessert of some dimension...)
Evan, seated next to me in the booth, was in Harvard's employ, a born in NYC South Carolinian astrologer and alternative health kinda mustachioed guy; his father professor expert in medieval philosophy. Evan could do a Texas drawl vs. a Carolina one, and things went uphill from there.
I had to depart before too terribly long, but knew that Gregor was in good hands for at least the next portion of his (still long to go) evening. (See other Trackback from his pal sooz as to where Gregor went next... :^).
Cheers, from William not-too-late December (18th) Reilly.
My posting to the cms-list back on November 7, in response to a big ol' long thread (some 23 entries!) on the topic.
My own inquiry (pasted below, and available online at:
http://archivist.incutio.com/viewlist/cms-list/2012
elicited exactly zero replies!
Wm.
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[cms-list] Re: Cutting and Pasting from Word?!
From: William Reilly
To: cms-list@cms-list.org
I'd be curious:
== Has anyone ever heard from any Microsoft employee / defender / apologist on
any public listserv (or other venue) speak up about the how and why their
rendition of HTML-izing has to be quite so bad as it is???
I mean, we know why, I suppose: round-tripping to MS-Word being the central
raison d'etre for working with HTML, according to Redmond, but still...
== Are the new "File | Save As..." options in Office 11/2003 making any of
this appreciably better?
William Reilly
Somerville, Massachusetts U.S.A.
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On Friday 07 November 2003 peeter talvistu, wrote:
> It is hard to make it work 100% well, though, because Word's html is
> so - and let me be blunt - idiotic (thousands of <b> and <strong> tags for
> marking one paragraph bold for example).
--
http://cms-list.org/
please trim your posts.