IF WE CAN PUT A MAN ON THE MOON.

Look for more posts on this theme in the near future. It's a question I recall wonks of years ago would ask, it would equate designing and budgeting a moon shot with obtaining some other outcome that simply involved a program and a budget. It's often a bad question, as it compares an exercise in applied mathematics on a system with predictable properties with some sort of attempt to influence a complex adaptive system. But that doesn't stop people from posing such false analogies. Movie maker Michael Moore is one of the latest.

Are you proud that nearly 3 billion people on this planet do not have access to clean drinking water when we have the resources and technology to remedy this immediately?

We do? Strikes me that there might be enormous profits for somebody to apply those resources -- care to reinvest some of your movie's earnings?

James Lileks has already done the Fisking of the column. There are all sorts of possibilities for further explication of these questions, some of which Mr Lileks passed over.

Are you proud that one in six children lives in poverty in America?

Does the popular culture encourage those children to aspire to higher standards?

Are you proud that 40 million adult Americans are functional illiterates?

Shall we have a conversation about the follies of the Colleges of Deaducation?

Are you proud that the bulk of the jobs being created these days are low- and minimum-wage jobs?

They are? One has to adapt the work to the available workers, up to one-fourth of whom are functionally illiterate, nicht wahr?

Are you proud of asking your fellow Americans to live on $5.15 an hour?

The participants in econ camp discovered that a substantial majority of minimum wage workers are younger than 25 and often dependents, functional illiteracy notwithstanding.

Are you proud that, according to a National Geographic Society survey, 85% of young adult Americans cannot find Iraq on the map (and 11% cannot find the United States!)?

Haven't we already talked about the exclusion of academic content from the curriculum?