THE PACE WOULD PLEASE NEITHER YERKES NOR INSULL. The Chicago Transit Authority plans to extend the Dan Ryan, Midway, and North Shore Skokie lines. The editorial board at the Chicago Tribune approves.

Extending the Chicago Transit Authority's Red, Orange and Yellow Lines has been debated for decades, long enough for entire generations of commuters to have come and gone. But these extensions made good sense when they were proposed back in the 20th Century -- and they make good sense today.

Residents of the relatively poor neighborhoods of the Southeast Side and Southwest Side, who have never had rapid transit, tend to approve.

Residents of the Skokie-Old Orchard neighborhood, which was once home to the Mother of All Bullet Trains, aren't keen on the idea.

For the most part, the 1.6-mile leg from the Skokie Swift Terminal north to the Old Orchard shopping center area would pass through open space, industrial areas and run along the eastern frontage of the Edens Expressway. The route would end near Niles North High School.

A three-block cluster of homes near Golf Avenue is in the path of the proposed elevated line. With power lines towering nearby, many of these homes along Terminal and Laramie Avenues are near recently dormant freight tracks. "It's the route of least resistance," said Steve Marciani, planning supervisor for Skokie. "The power lines have always been there, and the railroad was there until a couple of years ago."

The railroad that recently left there was Union Pacific's former Chicago and North Western line that ran from Mayfair to a connection with the Freight Main near Deerpath with another line that connected to the Passenger Main in Wilmette.

The power lines once marked the tracks of another railroad.

Harmswoods Station at Golf Road, looking southeast.
George Krambles photograph from B-107 Route of the Electroliners.

The proposed extension of the Skokie Swift will deviate from the current right of way to run into Old Orchard shopping center.

Elevated tracks would be built to carry Yellow Line trains over the 1.6-mile extension from the current terminus at Dempster Street to a station at Old Orchard Road, between the Edens Expressway and Niles North High School, near Old Orchard.

The article suggests a single-track elevated structure, which immediately constrains future train frequencies, and the terminus at Old Orchard precludes easy extension to Northfield, Briergate, and Deerpath. I've read that Chicago and North Western purchased one track from the estate of the North Shore Line to preempt extension of Transit Authority service in competition with its bilevel streamliners. (There were detailed plans to run the Transit Authority to Clavey Road or possibly Mundelein, and some experimental cars were built with that possibility in mind.) Union Pacific might be pleased to be out from any plans to run commuter trains onto the Freight Main, which would be feasible if at some expense.

POOLING AND SEPARATING EQUILIBRIA. Maha likes the large numbers argument for government-mandated (and provided)? health insurance.

Insurance works by risk pooling — everybody throws money into a pot so that there’s money for people who are hit with unexpected expenses. In order for this to work, in any given year most of the people in the pool throw more money into the pot than take it out. Generally, the bigger the pool, the better it works. Insurance companies invest the premium money, and they make most of their profits from investments.

Thus, a single carrier is by definition able to pool risks more effectively than competing carriers (leaving aside for the moment the problem of valuing risk without a market test) and a single carrier enjoying the force of law has higher exit costs for people who know they are subsidizing others. Pooling equilibria are therefore fragile, as participation is not incentive-compatible for everybody, and that's why automobile insurance (required by most states) comes with experience rating and with choices.

I left that last sentence in as it is also instructive. Many advocates of the government insurance company suggest that, as there is no residual claimant, the operating costs of that insurer will be lower. Is that accurate? Perhaps such an insurer, if it did crowd out all private insurers, could act as a monopsonist with respect to risk managers. (Higher education acts as a monopsonist with respect to humanities Ph.Ds. Discuss.) On the other hand, an insurance company cannot do better with its investments, adjusted for risk, than an investment bank. If that is the case, is it the insurance premiums that provide the profits, or is it the investments of premiums?

In a column dealing primarily with the inefficiency effects of favorable tax treatment for health insurance as a fringe benefit, Martin Feldstein identifies the incentive for participants in a pool to self-select out.

The best solution to this problem of private overconsumption of health services would be to eliminate the tax rule that is causing the excessive insurance and the resulting rise in health spending. Alternatively, Congress could strengthen the incentives in the existing law for health savings accounts with high insurance copayments. Either way, the result would be more cost-conscious behavior that would lower health-care spending.

But unlike reductions in care achieved by government rationing, individuals with different preferences about health and about risk could buy the care that best suits their preferences. While we all want better health, the different choices that people make about such things as smoking, weight and exercise show that there are substantial differences in the priority that different people attach to health.

And perhaps, worst case scenario, in the priority that an insurer attaches to a policyholder receiving treatment?

A TOWN RUNS A PIER NEAR NANTUCKET.

Its price is so low boaters are ...

The captain of the boat met us at the town pier, loaded us onto a small skiff, and then took us to a mooring out in the harbor, where the boat was waiting.

He explained to us that he would prefer to keep his sailboat at the pier, which would make loading and unloading passengers much easier, but he could not get a space there. Every year, he told us, the town has a lottery to allocate the right to rent one of the scare docking slots. For quite a few years, the captain has been putting his name into the lottery, but he has never won. "There are just not enough spaces," he said.

Ever the economist, I replied, "It seems to me that the price isn't high enough."

"Well, actually," the captain said, "if you want to pay more, you can go down there." He pointed to the next dock over.

Apparently, next to the town pier is another pier that is privately owned and operated. The price for a docking space there is about five times as high as it is at the town pier. But there is never any significant shortage. Anyone can sign up for a slot, as long as you are willing and able to pay.

What a wonderful illustration of basic economic principles! In one way or another, scarce resources need to be allocated among competing uses. Free markets typically use the price system. Governments, often in the name of "fairness," seem to prefer other mechanisms, which don't always direct resources to their highest value use.

There will be a quiz later.

REALITY CHECK. The dean at Anonymous Community contemplates crowded commuter lots.

We've had some talk of congestion pricing -- require a paid permit for prime time, but allow free parking during off-peak periods (i.e. late afternoon). The problem there is that anything regressive enough to make a difference would crash into our 'accessibility' mission, and anything sufficiently painless as to be completely nondiscriminatory would also be ineffectual. There's also an issue of inflated expectations when students actually pay. Not being able to find a free space is annoying, but not being able to find a paid space feels like being ripped off.

In a few weeks, we're going to get an entering class of a magnitude we haven't seen before. I wish them well in their quest for parking spaces.

Evaluate the generalization to health. In your essay, consider the parallels between the joint costs of producing a parking space for mid-day that is also available at night and a new therapy, and the effects of the Baby Boomers exercising their prescription drug benefits. Bonus points: why is a policy of rationing-by-congestioning midday and rationing-by-inconvenience in late afternoon discriminatory, even though there is no parking charge for anyone.

BARACK MILHOUS OBAMA? Atlantic Blog raises the possibility.

Obama is trying out Richard Nixon's "silent majority" line. Of course, it is worth remembering that Nixon, unlike Obama, had a serious and vastly better point to make.

With video arguing that case.

ALLOCATING SCARCE RESOURCES. Betsy Newmark.

[T]he first lesson a student learns in introductory economics is the concept of scarcity.

Camille Paglia.

Obama's aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land. The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.

You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you're happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.

Profit-driven private investment implies rationing by price, and a different set of trade-offs. Public policy, however, trades off higher prices in order to allow additional choices, at least where goods such as oil or steel or aluminum or dry goods are concerned.

Christopher Beam.

In many countries, the government actually puts an explicit dollar amount on saving a life. Britain, with something called the "quolly," is the clearest example. The metric is the Quality-Adjusted Life Year, or QALY, basically a measurement of time adjusted to account for your health. Everyone gets a rating between 1 and 0: One means you're perfectly healthy. Zero means you're dead. Anything in between stacks the quality of your life against that of a healthy person. For example, if you have "some problems with performing usual activities, some pain or discomfort," you get a rating of 0.76. If you're depressed as well, your score drops lower. Someone in extreme pain or discomfort who can't wash themselves and is depressed might even get a negative rating. (For a better explanation, see here. For an even better one, here.)

Medical treatments are then assessed according to their cost per QALY. Say you have cancer and there is a $100,000 treatment that would extend your life by five years, but those years would be painful. You might get a score of 0.20, which would make those five years equal to 1 QALY. Under the British system, then, this treatment would not cost $20,000 per year—it would cost $100,000 per QALY. This system allows doctors to compare the efficiency of treatments for different diseases, whether it's HIV or depression or Alzheimer's, on the same scale. It also gives the government a metric by which to cap spending. Right now, the British health care system generally doesn't cover treatments that cost more than about 30,000 pounds per QALY. (That's about $50,000 at today's exchange rate. This is what people mean when they talk about rationing.)

Such a policy implicitly involves capital rationing. Consider a research project that could reduce that 100K (60,000 pounds) to 30,000 pounds for the same outlay as another research project that reduces 35,000 pounds to 25,000 pounds. Which one gets funded?

SOME PERSPECTIVE. Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times gags on the Woodstock retrospectives.

OK, 400,000 people gathered for a rock concert and didn't kill each other -- big flippin' deal. Ten years later, in 1979, 1.2 million people showed up in Grant Park for a mass with Pope John Paul II, and you never hear them claiming it was a rend in the time-space continuum. Even more people are flocking to the lakefront for the Air & Water Show this weekend, and we don't act like it's some giant epochal moment -- just another summer weekend in Chicago.

A summer weekend on which the limitations of one platform at Elburn present themselves. At the station is an extra train that will leave at 10.15. With centralized traffic control, radio requests to pass the work zones, and mostly wholesale freight railroading, the discipline of "display signals and run as first 504" and "second 504 leaves Elburn at 10.15 making scheduled stops to Villa Park" isn't required. But while Second 504 is awaiting time, that's 501, which will turn to become 506, waiting to get to the platform. Most of the traffic is headed to the air show or baseball. There won't be many passengers inconvenienced by the wait. Further back is a stack train waiting its turn at Rochelle.

Passenger loadings were heavy on all lines. I rode several trains to a number of hobby stores. There's a pretty dependable 20 minute connection from the Northwest to the West, but I had about seven minutes to make that connection.

On the matter of Woodstock, Rick Moran offers additional perspective.

Glorifyng the 60’s as a time that should be emulated is myth making. In 500 years, the only thing remembered about the 60’s will be the Apollo moon landings and perhaps the struggle to codify into law the civil rights of Americans who had been previously denied them. Woodstock will be a footnote - if that - and a curiosity for historians of the future who will wonder why everyone was making such a big deal out of it.

The Chicago air show, however, did not include a visit by the next-generation Rutan launch vehicle. Perhaps there will be improvements on it in the next 500 years.

A CLASS PROJECT WORTHY OF VINCE LOMBARDI. I give you the Cut Block Simulator.

Craig Rusch had plenty of down time on the sidelines during the fall of 2007. After a season-ending knee injury, it was watching and waiting with a little time to reflect and daydream.

He watched practices he couldn’t compete in, film he wasn’t in and drills – like a cut-blocking drill where coaches rolled a 60-pound ball at defensive lineman – he couldn’t participate in.

One day – he doesn’t remember which one – an idea came to him.

What if there was a better way to simulate a cut block?

It's Rube Goldbergian, but it works.

Once the sled was complete, it was time for the class presentation.

While the sled didn’t fit in the classroom, it was rolled into the engineering building for the presentations encore.

When the three students walked into the room to present, they were a bit surprised – it was packed. NIU coach Jerry Kill was there with defensive coordinator Tracy Claeys, defensive line coach Jeff Phelps, athletic director Jeff Compher, members of the engineering industry and a whole lot of family members.

Patent pending.

WAL-MART IS TO VLASIC AS CONCARE IS TO? Robert Reich:

Being the one public plan, it will have large economies of scale that will enable it to negotiate more favorable terms with pharmaceutical companies and other providers. ... But this won't lead to a government takeover of health care. The whole point of cost containment is to provide the public with health care on more favorable terms. If the public plan negotiates better terms—thereby demonstrating that drug companies and other providers can meet them—private plans can seek similar deals.

Where shall we begin? If Wal-Mart negotiates better terms, Dayton-Hudson can seek similar deals. Or has Wal-Mart solicited a discriminatory price cut that leads to a substantial lessening of competition or a tendency to create monopoly? Does the argument generalize? Or, will cost containment mean lower prices for current pharmaceuticals at the expense of future development?

BEER IS FOR SWILLING. Some Cubs fans have trouble holding their Old Style.

YOU HAVE TO MAKE THE CASE, COUNSELOR. Some time ago, I purchased Laura Ingraham's Shut Up & Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the UN Are Subverting America. The book dates to 2003, just before the liberation of Iraq started turning into real work, and before the 2004 hopes by the Republicans of a permanent majority. Thus, to a great extent, the work is overtaken by events. That's unfortunate, as the author would like to make the case for majority rule, individual rights, equality of opportunity, and limited government, four things that are contested territory at the moment. Such a case is serious work, but a recitation of anecdotes held together with guilt-by-association and run through the Regnery rhetoric machine doesn't make the case. Begin at the beginning.

Meet the elites.

Who are they? Essentially elites are defined not so much by class or wealth or position as they are by a general outlook. Their core belief -- embraced with a fervor that does not allow for rational debate -- is that they are superior to We the People.

(On the other hand, the author later expresses surprise that South Dakota's Tom Daschle becomes a leader for these elites. I'm too tired to work through the implications of that.)

Thus, Book Review N^o. 30 is of an unsatisfactory effort to support political positions that are intellectually defensible. There is material, particularly in the sections on immigration and business, where stronger are necessary and feasible. The book is neither likely to change many minds nor to provide readers the intellectual ammunition to do so.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

"DEATH PANEL" IS LOADED TERMINOLOGY. Perhaps so, but where scarce resources have to be allocated among competing uses, somebody has to make the tough decisions. Because there is no medical college at Northern Illinois University, some of the medical journals are not available through our library, which limits me to the abstracts. Consider first Jennifer Stanton, "The cost of living: kidney dialysis, rationing and health economics in Britain, 1965–1996," Social Science and Medicine 49, 9, (November 1999): 1169-1182.

Paradoxically, the most effective covert rationing was achieved under the British NHS which ostensibly provides free care for all, while the uncentralised market system in the US gave way, on this issue, to almost universal state-subsidised provision. Under the British system, the most cost-effective options for renal care tended to flourish, but some patients were turned away. Physicians have been held responsible for complying with covert rationing: this paper suggests that early gearing towards socially-useful survival filtered back to selection at primary level, possibly continuing long after specialists wished to expand. Public outcry, though muted, reached parliament and caused minor shifts in policy; the main aim of the voluntary pressure campaign, to release more organs for transplant through ‘opt-out’, remained unrealised in the UK. Yet dialysis was targetted for expansion in the 1980s just at the point when health economists were presenting evidence for its low cost-effectiveness compared with other expensive interventions. According to the main strand of argument in this paper, comparisons with other countries and between regions were most influential in breaking the hold of covert rationing: policy making by embarrassment.

Intriguing. Somebody had to do the "gearing towards socially-useful survival."

Also consider David Mechanic, "Dilemmas in rationing health care services: the case for implicit rationing," BMJ Education and Debate, 1995, 310 (24 June 1995): 1655-1659.

With tension between the demand for health services and the cost of providing them, rationing is increasingly evident in all medical systems. Until recently, rationing was primarily through the ability to pay or achieved implicitly by doctors working within fixed budgets. Such forms of rationing are commonly alleged to be inequitable and inefficient and explicit rationing is advocated as more appropriate. Utilisation management in the United States and quasimarkets separating purchasing from provision in the United Kingdom are seen as ways of using resources more efficiently and are increasingly explicit. There is also advocacy to ration explicitly at the point of service.

Ration explicitly at the point of service. Somebody has to say no. Put it to a committee and do it by secret ballot, so that no one wise expert is put on the spot.

WHY PUBLIC CHOICE THEORY MATTERS. Folkbum recommends a Matt Taibbi column expressing little surprise that health insurance reform morphs into corporate welfare.

Our government doesn’t exist to protect voters from interests, it exists to protect interests from voters. The situation we have here is an angry and desperate population that at long last has voted in a majority that it believes should be able to pass a health care bill. It expects something to be done. The task of the lawmakers on the Hill, at least as they see things, is to create the appearance of having done something.

Perhaps there is an alternate universe in which wise experts pass laws in the general interest to which wise citizens submit, recognizing that the limitations being imposed on their freedom of action are for their own good and for everybody else's.

It doesn't surprise me that in this universe, citizens, wise or otherwise, act in what they perceive to be their best interest, which includes but is not limited to influencing the actions wise experts, or whoever happens to be In Authority at the moment, might take. That, as I understand things, is at the basis of enumerating and limiting the powers of government: it being understood that interests will use the government to take advantage of voters, limitations imposed on the freedom of action of the legislators is for the good of the voters, and of the legislators.

REOPEN MILWAUKEE ELECTRIC'S COLD SPRING SHOPS. There are few manufacturers of passenger train equipment in the United States. Milwaukee's Super Steel has contracts with Japanese manufacturers Sumitomo and Nippon Sharyo, and those contracts apparently will not impair Super Steel being the possible final assembler of Wisconsin's Talgo trains. (Labor-protection legislation requires Passenger Rail authorities to purchase train equipment with some share of the value added in the United States. That usually means final assembly. It's a bit more work than opening an Athearn box.)

Now comes The Political Environment, reacting to Brookfield's request for a train stop on the Madison extension. "Next stop: light rail service to link these potential high-speed rail stations so travelers don't have to drive there." Fast-rewind to 1939, when The Milwaukee Electric Railway and Transit discontinued service west of Oconomowoc. Once upon a time, that service included coach-diner cars scratchbuilt at Cold Spring Shops, admittedly not exactly light rail vehicles.

ADVERSE SELECTION. Taunter Media (via Folkbum) analyzes the algebra of insurance company rescissions.

Half of the insured population uses virtually no health care at all. The 80th percentile uses only $3,000 (2002 dollars, adjust a bit up for today). You have to hit the 95th percentile to get anywhere interesting, and even there you have only $11,487 in costs. It’s the 99th percentile, the people with over $35,000 of medical costs, who represent fully 22% of the entire nation’s medical costs. These people have chronic, expensive conditions. They are, to use a technical term, sick.

In that breakdown is an argument for requiring everyone to purchase health insurance. Presumably the people who opt to do without health insurance estimate that they will not use any health services, and it's likely that a meaningful share of those people bet correctly. (On the other hand, pre-existing condition is not limited to people who change jobs: per corollary to the canonical business law question about the farmer who buys wind insurance as he sees a funnel cloud to his southwest ...) So far, I'm pleased to report that other participants in the Illinois plan are benefitting from my premium payments, as befits somebody whose only award in high school was for perfect attendance.

It should be fairly clear that the people who do not file insurance claims do not face rescission. The insurance companies will happily deposit their checks. Indeed, even for someone in the 95th percentile, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for the insurance company to take the nuclear option of blowing up the policy. $11,487 in claims is less than two years’ premium; less than one if the individual has family coverage in the $12,000 price range. But that top one percent, the folks responsible for more than $35,000 of costs – sometimes far, far more – well there, ladies and gentlemen, is where the money comes in. Once an insurance company knows that Sally has breast cancer, it has already seen the goat; it knows it wants nothing to do with Sally.

If the top 5% is the absolute largest population for whom rescission would make sense, the probability of having your policy cancelled given that you have filed a claim is fully 10% (0.5% rescission/5.0% of the population).

Conditional probability is nasty stuff. Insurance companies that offer a cash settlement in exchange for a patient waiving future claims make a similar calculation, which is why the best thing to do with such an offer, assuming the rescission option isn't in a desk drawer, is to decline it.

The substitution of a government insurance policy, or the enforcement of stricter conditions on rescissions, however, does not make the underlying problem of allocating scarce resources go away. There has to be a better way to debate the issue, however, than trotting out scary stories about rescissions on one side and death panels on the other, there being a significant overlap between being in the 99th percentile of incurring health expenses and being in the 99th percentile of your cohort predeceased you.

WHO COVERS THE DEVELOPMENT COSTS? Shark and Shepherd weighs in on the government-buying-power argument advocates of nationalized health care trot out.

What the public option does is simply refuse to pay the market price. Then, one of two things happen. As do service providers with Medicare and Medicaid, the drug company may sell at the lower price to the public plan and increase its price to private plans. But, as our commenter suggests, that might not work if people migrate to the public plan in response to that and other costs shifted from the public option to private plans. The drug company, if it can, might refuse to do business with the public plan. But if it is legally required to do so or, if the public option by undercutting private plans, has become the only game in town, then it may be forced to take the lower price or withdraw the product.

In many cases, it may do the former because the cost of a drug is generally in its development and not in its production. Development costs are sunk. The company may not recoup its costs or make a "sufficient" profit at $10/pill, but it will cut its losses by selling it for that.

That's partially correct.

It's a bit more complex than that, as the health ministries can make a payment that covers more than the incremental costs of the drugs, meaning Canada is picking up some of the research and development costs.

But without sufficient incentive to incur new research and development costs, patients might ultimately be able to buy only the cheaper red pill.

We have now changed the economic environment in which new medical technology is developed. We have reduced incentives for development, so we will get less development. This creates hidden victims. We can congratulate ourselves that the $40 pill now costs $10. But we don't know who has suffered and died because the next pill was never invented. The only thing that we can be sure of is that it has happened.

This is why the "cheaper drugs in Canada" story is a canard. The problem isn't that the drug companies don't recoup their minimal marginal costs of production due to Candadian price controls. It's that they wouldn't have the same incentives for development if the whole world was Canada. In that sense, Canada's drug consumers are free riders. They enjoy what they don't pay for.

A "public option" is not the answer to unaffordable drug prices because it can't change the difficulty in developing new drugs. If we want people to have drugs that they can't pay for (and, at least for some drugs, we do), then we should help them pay for them.

Here, too, I can quibble: a drug company could assume a larger standard volume, and quote Canada and everybody else a fully-allocated-cost price which would end the free riding. On the other hand, if the Canadian price makes some contribution to the development costs, Canadian patients and investors both gain by the contract. It's too late in the evening, and a thunderstorm is too close, to get into the intricacies of Ramsey pricing. Perhaps on another day.

CALM DOWN, ALREADY. The Democrats' discomfiture at the reception their incomplete insurance reform plan, or whatever it is, produces schadenfreude.

Conservatives, myself included, have been having a lot of fun with the Democrats' dismay at people speaking their minds at townhalls or taking to the streets to protest the growth of the federal government that we've been witnessing in recent years. While I condemn any of the extremes that a handful of individuals have gone to with lynching profiles, threats of violence, or shouting down congressmen and preventing them from answering questions, there still is a lot of irony in those people who praised community organizers a few months ago now getting their panties in a wad about senior citizens showing up to complain about the Democrats' health care plans.

As ever, it matters more whether logic and content will carry the day, or if it's going to be just another round of "You compared us to Nazis first."

In America, the darkness is descending and torches are being lit. Fear stalks the land - fear of the unknown, fear of our fellow citizens, fear of our political leaders, fear of the future. This fear is being stoked on both sides by people who are well aware of the consequences of what they are doing, but continue to fan the flames of dread because it gives them power and influence, or furthers their political designs. Reason has left the building. It has been replaced by a raw emotionalism that feeds upon itself, spiraling out of control, threatening violence and disorder while making any rational debate about health care reform impossible.

Many years ago, I took issue with one of the educational reformers of the time, who saw merit in deconstructing "coherent beliefs of any kind." My response: enjoy the incoherence. Happy now?

NEW DEALERS MUGGED BY REALITY. There's accumulating evidence that the technocratic policies begun during the Hoover administration and expanded by the Roosevelt administration deepened, or, at best, failed to ameliorate, the Great Depression. Amity Shlaes's The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, will provide background for that evidence, without providing the statistical or economic analysis itself. Thus for a short Book Review N^o. 29: more than a few of the technocrats visited the Soviet Union in the 1920s only to revise their impressions of that technocratic nightmare later; more than a few of the people demonized by the Administration (the enemies list, or "they bring a knife, we bring a gun" are for the future) come off as sympathetic characters, and Wendell Willkie emerges as sympathizer-turned-skeptic. The forgotten man of the title is the individual who must contribute to the efforts of the government to do well by somebody else. In Randian terms, one could substitute Blank-out. For all of that, the focus is on principal actors, and there is, in common with many of the Civil War histories, an appendix with what-happened-after-1940 stories for those actors.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

LOCAL COLOR. Representative Don Manzullo, a Republican from the Sixteenth District, held a town meeting in Sycamore.

Manzullo pointed out some of the major problems he sees in the [health care] bill. Those include new bureacracies created, more entitlement programs and the high use of taxes and penalties.

He cited a report that the unemployment rate would rise because small businesses would be put out of business. Faced with penalties, they would be forced to buy into it, he said.

Manzullo said he has spent 60 hours reading the bill and is halfway finished reading the 1,000-page-plus document.

His solution to health care reform is to continue improving what's already being done, such as health savings accounts and refundable tax credits for low-income people to purchase health insurance.

As far as I know, there were no Nazis, paid Republican agitators, or Democratic thugs present, although the news accounts suggest a frank and open exchange of views, with no outbreaks of verbal terrorism.

It's quite likely that anybody at this meeting wearing a DeKalb seed cap was doing so with no symbolism in mind. They're available around here if you know where to look.

TONIGHT'S PASSENGER RAILROAD DEVELOPMENTS. Trains for America found a WTTW Chicago Tonight report on recent developments in high-speed rail.

The opening footage of the story shows the 1937 Hiawatha (look closely at the Tip Top Tap car behind the One-Spot). The main body features interviews with assorted public officials and dissenters.

Closer to home, Genoa City Administrator Joe Misurelli is drawing Thunen rings.

On Misurelli’s map, the circles are drawn in a radius of 10 and 12 miles around one of the two proposed stops in Rockford – the route will include two Rockford stops no matter which route is chosen – and the other is around the proposed Genoa and Belvidere stations.

The circle around the Belvidere stop overlaps the Rockford stop by about half – meaning people in communities like Cherry Valley and Irene are within 10 miles of both stations.

But when the second circle is centered over Genoa, residents from Genoa, Kingston, Kirkland, Hampshire, Burlington, Sycamore, DeKalb and Cortland are all within 10 miles of an Amtrak station. None of those communities is within 10 miles of the Belvidere station.

When the center of the circle is moved from Belvidere to Genoa, the only community that loses its 10-mile link to Amtrak is Poplar Grove – a town with a population of less than 2,000. The Belvidere route means that DeKalb, a city of nearly 50,000 people, would be more than 25 miles from an Amtrak station while residents of Timberlane, population 735, will have a choice of three nearby stations.

Having the line come through Genoa would fully serve Rockford and Belvidere, Misurelli said, while also picking up Sycamore, DeKalb and Northern Illinois University.

One train a day, morning-eastward, evening-outward, is unlikely to be much help for Northern Illinois University traffic. The Genoa Chamber of Commerce has created a domain called Blackhawk Express Direct Route to make the case for the routing via Genoa, the line that hosted Amtrak's Black Hawk until 1982 and at one time featured the Land O'Corn and the Hawkeye to points further west.

As far as Northern Illinois University is concerned, the Direct Route is the Overland Route. That, however, is not a serious option for a train aimed at the North West Frontier.

The wrangling over routing is necessary, although it's likely to delay startups for either the Dubuque service or the Madison service.

GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS. No evidence of clouted admissions at Northern Illinois.

Northern Illinois University officials said Friday that they have found no evidence that former Gov. Rod Blagojevich or any of his friends used political clout to help gain admission for certain students.

NIU is one of three state universities – along with the University of Illinois system and Southern Illinois University – that was subpoenaed in June by the U.S. attorney’s office, which was seeking records to determine whether the former governor improperly exercised clout in admitting favored students.

A commenter to the article gripes, "Please, this is such a non-story. There are so many programs to get somebody undeserving into NIU if they needed help, there really was a problem." That's one possibility: another possibility is that state officials intuit on some level the deleterious effects of the mis-named Priorities, Quality, and Productivity initiative and its successors, which has affected all of the state's universities, but perhaps the politically favored ones in Urbana and Carbondale less so.

THE WORLD I HAD TO COME OF AGE IN. Helter Skelter. Woodstock. Such marvelous preparation for junior year of high school.

LEGO IMAGE OF THE DAY.

From 11-D.

BUILD THE STATIONS WHERE THE PASSENGERS ARE. Brookfield, an upscale suburb in automotive-addicted Waukesha County, wants an Amtrak stop.

The proposed station would be located in the Village Area along Brookfield Road near River Road. Construction costs, which would be covered by federal stimulus funds, would include a new station, a 300-plus-stall parking lot and train platforms, said Dan Ertl, the city's director of community development.

The old station, at the west end of the split-grade line out of Milwaukee, still stands.

In Madison, an organization called Dane Alliance for Rational Transportation suggests a station in the wye connecting the Watertown Sub with the Portage Sub to set passengers down closer to Capitol Hill and the University. The station is not as close to the capitol as the Alton gets in Springfield or to the University as the Illinois Central gets in Champaign, but it is a lot closer than the station at the airport. The proposal is for a station on a curve, which is less of a problem with a fixed-formation train, at a location where a signal to allow the train onto the Portage Sub might be restrictive, but it envisions a relatively short platform. There's more conversation about this proposal at Trains for America.

The recession has reduced ridership on the existing Hiawathas.

In recent years, Hiawatha ridership nearly doubled, from 397,518 in 2002 to 766,167 last year, with a 24% jump in 2008 alone. That 93% ridership boost wasn't enough to convince the Legislature to authorize an eighth daily round trip in the 2009-'11 state budget, but it seemed to bolster the administration's case for buying the two Talgo train sets, which will increase capacity from 350 to 420 passengers on each trip.

I'm worried about Wisconsin repeating the McGinnis mistake of buying relatively spartan trains.

To help attract riders, the Talgo trains will offer amenities the Hiawatha doesn't have now, [Ron] Adams [of the Wisconsin Department of Transportation] said. Seating will be "first-class for everyone," with wider, more comfortable seats and more leg room, he said.

State officials also want to provide Wi-Fi service on the new trains, Adams said. Other improvements, such as bicycle racks, are still under study, he said. Baggage space will be similar to current trains, and the state doesn't plan to add café cars, he said.

[Republican state senator from River Hills Roberta] Darling remains skeptical.

"People love the Amtrak, they just love the Hiawatha, but I have never heard them demanding that we upgrade the trains so they will ride them," Darling said.

State officials have said the Talgo trains' lightweight construction and tilt-train technology - which lets them take sharp curves at high speeds - would be advantages for 110-mph service on the Milwaukee-to-Madison line and for a planned upgrade to high-speed service all the way from Chicago to Minneapolis-St. Paul.

There's still a lot of work to do to get back to what was routine once. Bear in mind that an eight-coach traditional Hiawatha (.pdf) offered 420 "wider, more comfortable seats and more leg room" ahead of the Super Dome, which had a tap lounge in the bomb bay, and the Super Dome was marshalled ahead of the dining car and at least one parlor car with genuine first-class seating behind the diner. For busy periods, the coach yard could cut in another coach or two.

CHICAGO, CHICAGO. A special panel investigates the candy store in Urbana.

To start, the Illinois Admissions Review Commission urged the university's trustees to resign and had harsh words for the top administrators -- President B. Joseph White and Chancellor Richard Herman -- for acting unethically by enabling an admissions process that allowed subpar students sponsored by powerful people to get into the state's most prestigious public campus.

"The University now finds itself in a full-fledged crisis purely of its own making," the report states. "Public confidence in the University and its leadership has eroded, and the University must set out in earnest to regain the public's trust and repair the damage done to its reputation."

One can generalize the report either to consider the deleterious effect generally of preferential admissions, or to contemplate the pervasiveness of influence trading in Illinois.

Preferences first.

The findings come in the wake of a Chicago Tribune investigation that found more than 800 undergraduate applicants received preferential treatment over the last five years because of their connections to elected officials, generous donors or university trustees. Dozens more benefited from special consideration at the law school and other programs. While it is unknown how many patronage applicants would have gotten in on their own, their acceptance rate is higher than for the entire applicant pool even though they had lower average ACT scores and class ranks, records show.

"The admission of substandard applicants resulted in other, more qualified applicants being denied admission," according to the findings, reached after reviewing about 9,000 pages of documents and hearing more than 40 hours of testimony from dozens of people.

The panel refuted the contention that U. of I. acted no differently than every other selective university, a point argued by White after the Tribune revealed the preferential treatment.

"Over time, a process that may have begun as a seemingly innocuous way to 'track' inquiries from prominent individuals evolved (or devolved) into a 'well-oiled' machine that was perhaps unparalleled among universities in its level of formality and structure," it wrote.

"The admission of substandard applicants resulted in other, more qualified applicants being denied admission." The generalization to legacy admissions and to affirmative action as practiced is straightforward.

The same print edition of the Chicago Tribune that carried this story also carried a story about clout admissions at Chicago's best public high schools.

Federal investigators are trying to determine whether public officials clouted students into Chicago's highly competitive selective enrollment high schools, according to a subpoena the Tribune obtained Thursday.

The July 21 federal grand jury subpoena seeks documents related to how applicants were admitted to the city's nine elite public high schools through a process that allows principals to handpick 5 percent of students.

Prosecutors want city school leaders to turn over correspondence related to the principal selection process, including who applied, who was accepted, what public officials weighed in, as well as test scores, evaluations and recommendations.

Federal investigators also are seeking all policies and guidelines that principals are supposed to use to pick students and an "organizational chart for the central office of the Chicago Board of Education."

The investigation has just begun. Our President will not be named in this investigation as a parent: his children attended the University of Chicago's Laboratory School in Hyde Park, where the black and the white stand shoulder to shoulder against the poor. His role as community organizer is yet to be determined.

Favors for favors, however, are just another day at the office in the Chicago Public Schools.

Earlier this year, [developer Michael] Scott's roles as school board president and as a member of the city's Olympic committee stirred controversy.

In May, he asked all of the city's school principals to form plans to promote the Olympics. Teachers and union officials said Scott's tactics were heavy-handed and they feared retaliation if they did not support [Chicago nmayor Richard] Daley's quest for the Games.

Daley first floated his vision of bringing the Olympics to Chicago in 2005 after previously dismissing the idea as too costly. He assembled an exploratory committee in mid-2006 that included Scott.

Mr Scott then went on to make some strategic land purchases.

Developer Michael Scott Sr., an early member of the mayor's Olympic committee, leads a group planning a residential and commercial project on lots kitty-corner from the proposed Douglas Park sporting venues, a location where land values could jump if the city gets the Olympics.

The plan -- which would include a Nike store -- already has gotten crucial support from the local alderman, who has set aside the lots for Scott and his group.

The city generally sells taxpayer-owned lots for $1 apiece for affordable housing projects, and in other cases negotiates land prices.

The article does not explain how the city came to own the land, whether by sale for delinquent taxes or by eminent domain.

FORGET THE MOTOR CITY. David Frum wonders what murdered Detroit.

Two other factors have to be considered.

The first is the especially and maybe uniquely poisonous quality of Detroit’s race relations. Like Chicago, Detroit attracted hundreds of thousands of black migrants between 1915 and 1960, mostly very unskilled, hoping to gain well-paying employment in factories and warehouses.

Their arrival jeopardized the ambitions of the white working class to raise its wages through unionization. Henry Ford eagerly hired black workers in order to defeat the unions, and in the violent labor clashes of the 1930s, whites and blacks often confronted each other as strikers and strikebreakers.

After the war, the United Autoworkers union tried to integrate blacks into the industrial workforce. But by then automation had begun, and industry’s demand for unskilled labor would first cease to grow, then diminish, then disappear. For many migrants, the promised land soon proved a mirage. Or maybe worse than a mirage. If the promised land did not yield the hoped-for industrial jobs, it offered something else: generous new welfare programs, the ashy false fruit of urban liberalism. The children of the parents who accepted the fruit grew into the criminals who drove first the middle class and then the working class out of the downtown and then altogether out of the city.

That's predictable for a Republican speechwriter. It's incomplete: it was Cicero, not Dearborn, that broke Martin Luther King's heart. A bilateral monopoly-monopsony that divides unsustainable monopoly rents will come undone, racially motivated union-busting tactics or not.

The second factor in Detroit’s decline is the city’s defiant rejection of education and the arts. Pittsburgh has Carnegie-Mellon. Cleveland has Case Western Reserve University. Chicago has the University of Chicago, Northwestern, and a campus of the University of Illinois. Detroit has… Wayne State.

A city that celebrated industrial culture spurned high culture. The Detroit Institute of Arts is very nice. But it does not begin to compare to Cleveland’s museum, let alone the Art Institute of Chicago. Detroit has a symphony orchestra, but its history has been troubled and unstoried in comparison to Philadelphia’s or Cleveland’s. On the plaza in front of the Detroit municipal building is a huge bronze replica of Joe Louis’ fist and arm, as if to say: “Here is a city ruled by brawn.” Brawn counts for very little in the modern world.

That crack about Wayne State (for whatever it's worth, the economics department there made me look so good that Northern Illinois made me an offer I couldn't turn down and Wayne's administration wouldn't match) elicited one angry comment at Mr Frum's site. Southeast Michigan is home to Motown, Madonna, and techno. Judge those cultural contributions as you wish. The social scene, as covered by the newspapers when I was there, tended to be dominated by plastic people who enjoyed such things as powerboat races on the Detroit River and the Grand Prix races, the only time the city streets were clear of Michigan drivers. (They're worse than Illinoisans on average.)

I found the article by way of a Stephen Henderson column in the Detroit Free Press (motto: if the Evil Emperor dies, you'll read about free-agent issues facing the Detroit Lions first) in which the comment section is spirited, if frequently showing evidence that the area was settled by Appalachian sub-literates.

THE FREE SPEECH ZONE IS A WORK AREA. In time for the start of the new academic year, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has awarded the Speech Code of the Month honor to Northern Illinois University.

In the NIU Student Code of Conduct, "harassment" is defined as the "Intentional and wrongful use of words, gestures and actions to annoy, alarm, abuse, embarrass, coerce, intimidate or threaten another person." (Emphasis added.) NIU is a public university, which means it is legally obligated to protect its students' First Amendment rights. Someone over at NIU clearly needs a First Amendment refresher course, because this policy fails miserably, prohibiting large swaths of constitutionally protected expression. While the university may legitimately prevent students from threatening and intimidating one another, it most certainly cannot prohibit students from annoying and embarrassing one another, even intentionally. In fact, satire and parody-which are entitled to particularly strong constitutional protection-are frequently profoundly embarrassing and annoying to their targets.

Yes, but the Fun-Suckers are well entrenched in Student Affairs and all the other usual places.

NIU's policy is a perfect example of the culture that prevails on so many college campuses nowadays, in which there is a presumed right to be free not only from truly disruptive harassment, but also from anything that causes annoyance, discomfort, or offense. Universities' attempts to protect this fictitious "right not to be offended" are harmful on several fronts. First, they undermine the whole notion of the American university as a "marketplace of ideas," where students learn not by rote but by exposure to a variety of different opinions expressed in a variety of different ways-including opinions and forms of expression that may be offensive. Second, they leave students ill-prepared for life after college, when one cannot simply run crying to the nearest dean over every perceived slight or embarrassment. 

So it's not just that NIU, as a public university, cannot maintain a policy like this-although that is, of course, very important, and the university leaves itself vulnerable to a First Amendment lawsuit by doing so. It's also that NIU, as a university that claims to value the rights of free speech and expression, shouldn't maintain a policy like this, because in addition to the legal wrong, it is doing its students a grave disservice. For this reason, NIU is our August 2009 Speech Code of the Month.

It is the Foundation's practice to send notice to university's counsel that the speech code has been recognized as Speech Code of the Month. I trust that the communication also calls headquarters' attention to the Free Speech Zone. The Blogger search function is still Bloggered. But check out RED ALERT and FREE SPEECH ZONE, OR SCARCE RESOURCE for earlier commentary. Perhaps the ribbon-cutting for the renovated central commons will include an announcement that hereafter the entire campus is a free speech zone.

(Disclaimer: I'm a long time supporter (THE WORD GETS OUT) of the Foundation, and it's possible that I invented the speech code widget.)

THE ERIE CANAL WAS OBSOLETE WITHIN FIVE YEARS. Hot Air (via Insta Pundit) presents video of Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) being dealt with rather rudely by some constituents.

The gentleman with the obviously-expensive cap gets the zinger of the day by challenging Hoyer on how Congress could try to force the takeover of the American health-care industry in roughly a fifth of the time it took Barack Obama to pick out a dog for his kids. Instead of answering, Hoyer goes into a long dissertation about the Erie Canal, and how naysayers probably existed back then as well.

In Representative Hoyer's world, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you" isn't a scary phrase.

The Erie Canal? That’s the best Hoyer can do? The canal was built in 1825. Maybe Hoyer remembers it personally, but for voters everywhere and especially the ones arrayed in front of him in this clip, it’s about as relevant as the Bering ice bridge. Sticking with that, though, the Erie Canal project was just that — a project with a start, a middle, and an end. The federal government didn’t have anything to do with the Erie Canal, either; it was built by the state of New York after President Thomas Jefferson rejected the idea as “little short of madness”. It initially cost $7 million, and paid off well — for the state of New York.

It does make good use of the state's geography: the New York Central Railroad and the New York Thruway share the Mohawk Valley with the canal's route. In 1825, something called a railway was hauling coals in England. Come Independence Day, 1827, a groundbreaking ceremony for the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, also a public infrastructure project (called in those days an internal improvement) and a cornerstone laying ceremony for the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road both occurred in Maryland. The proponents of government-provided health insurance have not yet met the burden of proof for some advantage in picking winners.

SURE TO ANNOY THE FUN-SUCKERS. Chocolate covered bacon.

Chocolate-covered bacon is about to become a part of Wisconsin State Fair history, likely - and hopefully - ranking far behind the appearance of a clean-shaven Abraham Lincoln in 1859 and the landing by fledgling flier Arch Hoxsey in an early Wright Bros. plane in 1910.

Don't forget the cream puffs, and a milk chaser. That crunching sound you hear is my arteries hardening.

Perhaps there's a political angle. Pass out chocolate-covered bacon at your Congressman's health-care town meeting.

CALLING OUT THE FUN-SUCKERS. P. J. O'Rourke likes cars, particularly when there aren't any other cars around. That's evident from a recent Wall Street Journal column on the bankruptcy of General Motors.

We embarked upon life in the fast lane with our new paramour. It was a great love story of man and machine. The road to the future was paved with bliss.

Then we got married and moved to the suburbs. Being away from central cities meant Americans had to spend more of their time driving. Over the years away got farther away. Eventually this meant that Americans had to spend all of their time driving. The play date was 40 miles from the Chuck E. Cheese. The swim meet was 40 miles from the cello lesson. The Montessori was 40 miles from the math coach. Mom’s job was 40 miles from Dad’s job and the three-car garage was 40 miles from both.

The car ceased to be object of desire and equipment for adventure and turned into office, rec room, communications hub, breakfast nook and recycling bin—a motorized cup holder. Americans, the richest people on Earth, were stuck in the confines of their crossover SUVs, squeezed into less space than tech-support call-center employees in a Mumbai cubicle farm. Never mind the six-bedroom, eight-bath, pseudo-Tudor with cathedral-ceilinged great room and 1,000-bottle controlled-climate wine cellar. That was a day’s walk away.

More to the point, stuck in the confines of those cars, in traffic with everybody else's cars in the way, on roads neither planned with any objective in mind nor priced in such a way as to make a profit, congested by inefficiently many mal-timed traffic signals.

Enter the Fun-Suckers.

We became sick and tired of our cars and even angry at them. Pointy-headed busybodies of the environmentalist, new urbanist, utopian communitarian ilk blamed the victim. They claimed the car had forced us to live in widely scattered settlements in the great wasteland of big-box stores and the Olive Garden. If we would all just get on our Schwinns or hop a trolley, they said, America could become an archipelago of cozy gulags on the Portland, Ore., model with everyone nestled together in the most sustainably carbon-neutral, diverse and ecologically unimpactful way.

There's a different political interpretation.

But cars didn’t shape our existence; cars let us escape with our lives. We’re way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy’s lines. And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren’t forced to surrender, we were able to retreat.

But our poor cars paid the price. They were flashing swords beaten into dull plowshares. Cars became appliances. Or worse. Nobody’s ticked off at the dryer or the dishwasher, much less the fridge. We recognize these as labor-saving devices. The car, on the other hand, seems to create labor. We hold the car responsible for all the dreary errands to which it needs to be steered.

But before that came the cross-country road race, preferably in a developing country, where the road is not well-defined. Thus Book Review N^o. 28, Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-Bending. The sub-subtitle, which begins, "Celebrating America ..." misleads, as well over half the action, adapted from old magazine, takes place in the aforementioned developing countries. Some interesting people turn up in the stories, and the Fun-Suckers come in for well-deserved stick.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

CONTEMPLATING VANGUARDISM. On one hand, Mrs Alan Greenspan offers an editorial comment while reporting on poll results not favorable to governmental restructuring of health insurance. On the other hand, a government program to buy up and scrap high-fuel-intensity cars runs out of money when the experts underestimate the interest.

If these geniuses are so sure they know how to operate 1/6 of the economy, how come they couldn't even predict how many people would like a free $4500 to trade their car in would be able to make the delicate adjustments to figure out which drugs to approve and which patients to allow payment for their doctor's recommended surgeries if we give the government control over the health industry. And then add in their similar ambitions to figure out the whole energy industry and regulate supply and demand there. Do you have confidence in the government's ability to manage all these industries?

It's easier to get rich reinforcing the establishment's prejudices on television than it is forecasting economic activity for that establishment.

THE DEADLIEST DAY. The single deadliest day in U.S. history is September 17, 1862, when the U.S. Army of the Potomac had an opportunity to trap the rebel army of Northern Virginia against the Potomac River. The Battle of Antietam, which was enough of a victory in the east for President Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, involved piecemeal conflicts involving different corps of the Army of the Potomac against rebel elements that shifted more effectively to protect each other.

In June, I visited the battlefield. Perry D. Jamieson's Death in September: The Antietam Campaign, is a useful guide to the battlefield visitor. The battle featured three major engagements. In the first, Gen^l Hooker's corps attacked from the north through this cornfield. There was little coordination, with U.S. units committed seriatim, enough to push the rebels back but insufficient to overwhelm them.

Mr Jamieson criticizes Gen^l McClellan for failing to give proper orders to his corps commanders. Gen^l Hooker had inconclusive results in this cornfield, going on to ignominy at Chancellorsville. On the other hand, he acquitted himself well at Chattanooga, where he reported to Grant and to Sherman. Draw the obvious conclusion.

Later in the morning, units that might have decided the issue in the cornfield went the wrong way and began a second engagement, in which rebel units entrenched themselves in this sunken road. (Before paving, rural roads turned into gulches as a consequence of frequent use. In rainy season, they may have become good places for a drowning.) The engagement did not last as long as Verdun, but there was, again, much blood spilled for little effect until sufficient forces came up to fire into the ends of the road.


The third major engagement took place at this bridge, now known as Burnside Bridge, for the corps commander with the distinctive whiskers who nearly broke the Army of the Potomac at Fredericksburg. This view shows the approach taken by Burnside's corps, with rebel entrenchments still visible in the hills on the opposite bank.


The view from the entrenchments shows the fields of fire the defenders had on that bridge. Gen^l Burnside did force passage of the bridge, in part by sending troops downstream to a ford. Those troops flanked the defenders. (That attack might have been a precursor of Fredericksburg, in which Gen^l Meade crossed the Rappahannock downstream but was unable to turn the flank behind town.) At Antietam, the slowness of any of the attacks to develop meant the rebels were able to keep sufficient coherence to stay together and fight another two and a half years. Perhaps somewhere there is a counterfactual in which the Army of the Potomac strikes at once, along the entire front, and drives the rebel army to the Potomac, where, unlike Grant at Shiloh, there are neither supporting gunboats nor reinforcements on the other side. Without Vicksburg secured, the rebellion might not have ended immediately, but the end might have come sooner.


Antietam was one of the first battlefields to be photographed extensively, and the images were, as the newsies say, disturbing. William A. Frassanito's Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America's Bloodiest Day, evaluates much of that photographic record. The author identifies some of the individual soldiers and is in some cases able to find other photographs of the participants, sometimes from before the war; in the case of a fortunate few, after the war as well. The subjects tend to be soldiers, non-commissioned officers, and junior officers, the cast whose civilian work in shop or farm is very different from the West Point and political experiences of the commanders.

Thus have our Book Reviews grown to one score and seven.

There is a national cemetery near the battlefield. This monument was put up by surviving veterans of the Turner Rifles of the 20th New York Regiment. (I like to think that they paraded to Beethoven's Yorkscher Marsch.)


In the Wisconsin section of the cemetery lies a rank of unknown soldiers.


The Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery is a monument of the twentieth century. Any Civil War battlefield cemetery will have numerous unknowns buried there.

THE REST OF THE WORLD PERCEIVES EVIL EMPIRE DIFFERENTLY. The country that invented the game brings another gold home.

The U.S. now owns a record four gold medals and one bronze at the FIBA U19 Worlds and has posted a 49-11 all-time record in U19 World Championship play. Argentina (6-3) claimed its first medal at this event with a 58-51 victory over Canada (4-5) in the bronze medal game.

I found the team roster. The frequency count for birth dates doesn't confirm the Outliers conjecture. Eligibility for this tournament includes being born on or after 1 January 1990. Four of the twelve players had a birth date before March 31, not my point estimate of six. Another two were born in the third quarter of 1990 and one in the fourth quarter. Two more have birth dates in the first quarter of 1991, with one each in the second, third, and fourth quarters.

SLOW DOWN, YOU GO TOO FAST. The Wisconsin State Patrol issues an audit of speeding tickets.

Women and men actually receive the same proportion of tickets compared with warnings when pulled over by Wisconsin State Patrol officers.

But here's the good news for Cheeseheads, ladies and gents alike:

Those Illinois drivers got slapped with tickets a higher percentage of the time. One possible reason? In general, they were driving faster.

Wisconsin still has live officers in patrol cars. In Illinois, you're likely to pass a patrol car that perhaps has the radar active, but a blow-up doll in the driver's seat.

Most of that traffic enforcement is on the interstates, where Wisconsin is more generous with 65 mph zones than Illinois is. Off the interstates, it's another matter. Wisconsin posts suburban mile roads five to 20 mph slower than Illinois does on otherwise comparable roads.

BEFORE JONES, MANCUSO, RAMIUS, AND RYAN. Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October has a disgruntled Soviet skipper defect to the United States. Conditions in the Soviet Navy were worse than Mr Clancy knew. Peter Sasgen's Stalking the Red Bear makes use of information he obtained from retired Navy personnel, and possibly from former Soviet sailors. Book Review N^o. 25 gripes that the subtitle, The True Story of a U.S. Cold War Submarine's Covert Operations Against the Soviet Union, overpromises. Some details are disguised to protect sources, which might be expected. There aren't many covert operations in the story. Fast-attack shadows various live-fire exercises, takes hull pictures, avoids counter-detection. Maybe the fiction is more exciting. The appendices, however, which make use of declassified information from World War II, are more interesting than the main story. I may check out the story about the "safety control rod axe man," which U.S. nuclear submarines don't have, but which Soviet ones might have, as a last resort ...

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

MERCANTILIST MYTHS PERSIST. Midwestern states reveal a preference to keep their state university graduates at home. There's something wrong with Blogspot's search function, so this search string (Wisconsin indenture, if you wish to try it) might give you nothing, although the summary at SPARTANS IN THE SHADOW OF DEPAUL explains the argument. None of which matters to Detroit News (motto: we will deliver, on Tuesday) columnist Mike Cox, the state attorney general, who would like to unseat Jennifer Granholm.

In a few weeks, about 40,000 students will begin their college careers at a Michigan university. Unfortunately, when these students are ready to graduate, less than half will choose to stay in Michigan if recent trends hold. Families will see one another less, students educated with billions of our tax dollars will use their talents to build other states' economies, and employers will continue to leave Michigan. Our economy will never turn around if this brain drain continues.

The columnist does not support this claim. It's possible that the next paragraph suggests an improvement in Michigan's business climate, but note that it has nothing to do with the effectiveness of Wayne State or any of the other state universities.

It's hard to blame college graduates for leaving. Michigan has the highest unemployment rate in the nation. States that can provide good-paying jobs have an advantage despite the high quality of life Michigan has to offer.

To regain the upper hand, we must make immediate, bold changes to turn this economy around. The first step is to change our business tax structure (the "jobs tax"), moving it from 48th in the nation to the top 10 by cutting the Michigan Business Tax in half.

That might provoke opposition from the state's universities. Illinois outsources a lot of its higher education to Michigan and Wisconsin, and the state universities have been running on short rations for over fifteen years. Always tradeoffs.

But we also need to demonstrate to our college graduates that keeping them here is a priority for us.

Other states -- like Indiana, North Carolina, and Illinois -- are competing with us for our children. We have to fight back.

That is why we should give our college graduates a three-year income tax exemption, putting money directly into their pockets. This tax credit would be an investment in Michigan's talented graduates and our economy. The funds could help pay down college debt, go toward a home and, most of all, serve as an incentive to use their education in Michigan.

Yes, if there's a job that makes use of a graduate's talents in Michigan. With the finance and related fields and corporate headquarters and research parks around Chicago or Madison or Pittsburgh, that's unlikely, improvements in the business tax or not.

Michigan spends approximately $2 billion per year on higher education. Each time a college graduate leaves the state, the tax dollars that helped pay for that education leave as well.

According to a report by MichiganFuture.org, nearly 50 percent of recent Michigan graduates left our state within a year of graduation. If that departure rate applies to every public university in Michigan, then taxpayers are literally spending $1 billion per year to build the work forces of other states. No state can recover when it is exporting its tax dollars and college graduates.

How much money does Michigan spend on roads and social services to enable employees of the legacy car companies to get to work? Is it not also the case that every time an automobile leaves the state, the tax dollars that helped produce that car leaves as well? (Not to mention the Upper Peninsula ore, an exhaustible resource, that got shipped out in that car, and the Lower Peninsula sand that went into the glass.)

Try this: identify a Michigan resident who completed an advanced degree (law, medicine, research) and then hired out with a white-shoe firm or Mass General or the White House. Make the case that the export of that human capital is bad for Michigan.

WITH SLEIGHT OF HAND THE DEAL WAS STRUCK. There are several Trains for America posts on Wisconsin's purchase of a pair of Hiawatha Talgo trains. One refers to a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel report detailing the rent-seeking that has begun.

State Rep. Jon Richards (D-Milwaukee) and a dozen other Milwaukee-area lawmakers sent a letter to [Talgo USA president Antonio] Perez [surely not the Cincinnati Red?] urging the company to use the Super Steel plant in Milwaukee, Richards said in a news release Wednesday. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett has said he would push hard to win the plant.

“The City of Milwaukee is the economic and transportation hub of the state of Wisconsin and would be perfectly suited to minimize transportation costs of the assembled Talgo train sets,” the letter says. “Talgo train sets could be shipped to the Port of Milwaukee, and upon final assembly, the sets would be placed on the Amtrak Hiawatha line at the nearby Milwaukee Intermodal Station.”

The last time a train set was shipped to the Port of Milwaukee, it was the bilevel 400 coaches of the late 1950s. They came from Pullman's Osgood-Bradley works on a Lake Michigan carferry. The sales tax for delivery in Wisconsin was less than that in Illinois. On the other hand, final assembly of a Hiawatha used to mean rolling the cars out of West Milwaukee Shops, finding suitable power, and switching them to the Everett Street Depot.

Another linked article, from the Wisconsin State Journal, finds some legislative opposition to the single-sourcing of the train. Whether the deal was wired or whether other vendors were slow on the uptake remains to be determined. A Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel report details some of Talgo's advantages.

That's because only Talgo trains have the tilt-train technology to handle tight curves at high speeds without jolting passengers, and because their lightweight construction allows quicker acceleration and deceleration, he said.

Among Wisconsin's planned high-speed rail routes, transportation officials count 17 curves of 2 degrees or more in the 86 miles between Chicago and Milwaukee; 20 such curves in the 79 miles between Milwaukee and Madison; 125 curves in the 266 miles between Madison and the Twin Cities; and 58 curves in the 131 miles between Milwaukee and Green Bay, [Wisconsin Department of Transportation general counsel Robert] Jambois wrote in a May 11 memo to Transportation Secretary Frank Busalacchi.

If the state has to straighten out those curves, track upgrades for high-speed rail would cost $60 million a mile, Jambois said in an interview. But using tilt-train technology cuts the cost to $5 million a mile, he said.

The technology has been improved since the early 1950s, when Patrick McGinnis ordered one such train for the New Haven, to speed things up on the Shore Line ... it came close to Acela timings on tests, without the 150 mph sprints in Rhode Island, and another such train for the Boston and Maine, which describes something like twelve complete circles between Boston and Portland, and whose track was pretty rough.

The technology might permit improvements on the 1939 schedules between La Crosse and the Twin Cities. Hiawathas didn't often get above 75 mph on the left bank of the Father of Waters. East of Tomah, the curves at the Dells had serious speed restrictions. Many of the other curves cited are in yard and terminal areas where speeds aren't going to be that great. I'm not sure what route is being considered for the Green Bay service, although there is a reasonably straight right-of-way that hasn't been built on too severely that would be capable of fast running.

THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS IS STILL EVIL. Econ Log's Arnold Kling sees no reform of medicine in the works.

The basic problem that the Democrats have with health care reform is that when it comes to taking our system away from free markets, there is just not that much farther we can go. We already regulate the practice of medicine and allied health services with licensing cartels. We already regulate individual health insurance practically out of existence, particularly in states that require "community rating" and "must-carry," which force insurance companies to charge the same price to all comers, which means that the only price they can safely charge is the price that assumes you are only asking for insurance because you just came down with a really expensive illness. We already have government insuring the poor and the elderly.

Missing: any contemplation of laws parallel to those for automobile insurance, in which most states require each vehicle to be licensed, but the competing insurance companies generally don't include oil changes and bulb replacements in their base policies. On the other hand, they sometimes throw in sweeteners. My newest policy includes pet coverage, apparently at no additional charge, although I carry checked baggage but not livestock.

OBSERVATION OF THE WEEK. Voluntary Xchange.

We need to ask ourselves how many of these would occur in our own neighborhoods.

Certainly there are many neighborhoods in this country where they wouldn’t.

What is important is not the single problem that occurred in this standoff, but that we have a society where so many things worked right. Most people on the globe don’t.

That, not the Beer Summit, is the real teachable moment. Read and understand.