---

Politicians with totalitarian tendency of their fathers are using the latest technology to abuse their power: The new Czech Prime Minister Stanislav Gross (34) is handling the European Commissioner switch pretty invisibly: I've informed him by SMS about what measures we're heading toward. So that he wouldn't know of it only from the press.
Economists are looking into a tankard of pitch-black Guinness's Ale instead of a crystal ball: A study of economics usually reveals that the best time to buy anything is last year

Invisible Hands & Markets: Big government is good for economic freedom
Over at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok recently presented a graph showing a positive correlation between UN measures of gender development and the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom Index. Of course, Alex presented the usual caveats about causation and correlation, but he concluded "at a minimum the graph indicates that capitalism and gender development are compatible contrary to many radicals"
This prompted me to check out how the Economic Freedom index was calculated. The relevant data is all in a spreadsheet, and shows that the index is computed from about 20 components, all rated as scores out of 10, the first of which is general government consumption spending as a percentage of total consumption. Since the Fraser Institute assumes that government consumption is bad for economic freedom, the score out of 10 is negatively correlated with the raw data.
• Diversity of scale in economic enterprises [johnquiggin.com/]
• · See Also Where 140 ex Howard staffers are now
• · · Westfield and Bob Carr's preaching: The NSW Government had intervened. It had passed an Act of Parliament to end the proceedings and preclude any appeal. Even louder protests followed, with public debate about the right of the NSW Government to overrule legal process. However, the anger eventually subsided and the Westfield Eastgardens Shoppingtown went up on its section of the site In light of this, why on earth can't the Carr Government follow the lead of the Wran Government and legislate to protect the $40 million Gazal project with its 62 retail tenants and 450 employees
• · · · The PR scandal that is James Hardie Greg Combet told Lateline last night that Hawker Britten pulled out of the James Hardie deal when they realised it was immoral... two companies were Gavin Anderson and Hawker Briton
• · · · · New paper by Drezner and Farrell called The Power and Politics of Blogs (PDF) A corrective to the worst excesses of the mainstream's haughtiness about its privileged position as our society's information priests: we tell you what you need to know and when
• · · · · · The Princess or the Dragon The children are our nano future Swinburne University of Technology's Centre for Micro-Photonics constructed a model of the Sydney Opera House. Its dimensions are 64 x 38 x 41 micrometers, (yes, I know; not nano, but cool, anyway)