QUOTE OF THE DAY. Marginal Utility's Tom Bozzo weighs in on James Kunstler v. Thomas Friedman.

Inevitability and immutability arguments should be recognized as having little economic content. The factoid that the supposedly immutable often will give way to adverse price changes is part of the secret to the Big Bucks (or at least some fish-in-a-barrel shooting) for the econ profession.

Deeper into the post, he notes the folly of throwing more money into road construction in the hopes that somehow ethanol-based import-substitution activities will keep the car culture humming. The Illinois Tollway Authority has yet to get the message. It's spring, and the signs apologizing for the inconvenience and promising less future congestion are sprouting, this season along the eastbound Reagan Tollway through Warrenville and Naperville. Dream on. Commuters have to put up with the construction congestion, they have to put up with the inevitable congestion at the end of the widened section, if the widening is ever finished, the improved road will attract drivers who are currently using the Northwest Tollway but will find the widened Reagan preferable, and the congestion will be further exacerbated when the tollway discovers that the Northwest requires widening. As far as the ethanol is concerned, it might displace some Middle Eastern oil, but the ethanol program has turned Mexico from a net importer of corn (for tortillas) into a net exporter of corn (to the ethanol plants.) This week a few of us hosted the chairman of the economics department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who alerted us to the policy challenges that presents within his country and between our countries.