BradyLoan.com

It's Just A Little Skin

How do you criticize this?

From an e-mail:

  My name is Gina Elise and I am a 24-year old UCLA grad–spent my first two years at UCSD. I have just completed producing the 2007 “Pin-Ups For Vets” calendar fundraiser which brings in funds for hospitalized Veterans’ programs and also provides a fun pin-up calendar to hosptialized Veterans. I am hand-delivering calendars from donors to the Veterans in the hospital—and I also am sending calendars ordered for deployed military in care packages to Iraq and Afghanistan. Each donor who purchases a calendar receives an acknowledgement from a VA Hospital staff member.

I guess I'm capitalizing on the prurient nature of an attractive young lady in undergarments but her cause is just and I like the 1940's style pinup gals.  If your wife forbids you from hanging this in your workshop, you can do your thing for the brave men overseas and buy a calendar for one of them.

Now I'm an equal opportunity kind of guy.  If I find one that would inspire the brave women serving overseas, I'll post it.  I'd consider the cause myself but the results of that annual New Year's resolution haven't come to fruition, yet.  Come to think of it, neither has the execution of said resolution.

Thanks, Gina.  I know you're getting a boatload of personal promotion from this project but  your website  offers other ways to help out.   

You are a great American, doll !  (it's a 40's term, PC cops)

There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

The title of this blog pretty much says that everything costs SOMETHING, even if it is not a monetary cost.  It's a saying by one of my late heroes.

Thanksgiving wasn't all fun and games for me; it was no free lunch.  Nobel Prize Winner, Milton Friedman, died on Thanksgiving day in San Francisco at age 94.  He is survived by his wife and co-author, Rose Friedman, of 68 years.

I don't think I can put all of the information needed to cover this great man's life so I'll try to give you some of my lifelong observations:

I read "Free to Choose" in 1982 as a junior in high school and watched the subsequent series on PBS (I was a bit of a weird kid).  It absolutely changed my life.  I was raised in a traditional Democrat family.  My grandmother had three pictures framed on the wall:  Pope John Paul 2 , JFK, and FDR.  At this particular point, I was really starting to understand what Ronald Reagan was doing and that Milton Friedman was the theorist behind much of the grand master plan. The beauty of the message the Friedmans' wrote about was personal choice.  The radical thoughts designed to overthrow the oppression of government intervention delighted my passionate teenage mind.  Milton and Rose Friedman caused me to join the Revolution, well, the Reagan Revolution (I told you I was a weird kid).

I read Price Theory,  Bright Promises, Dismal Performance: An Economist's Protest, and There is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch while in college.  They inspired me to take on my Macroeconomics teacher, Dr. Rita Keintz, an avowed Keynesian and fan of John Kenneth Galbraith.  I had so much fun picking apart her theories that I chose her for Microeconomics just to needle her.  I thought I drove her nuts but she loved it.  She used to call me the little Friedman disciple.

His rapier sharp wit and civility is the model I try so hard to emulate in my writing.  There will NEVER be one as good as he.  This is the the guy that counseled Nixon against implementation of wage & price controls (which Nixon ignored) and then joked about it,  in his self-effacing manner,  in his Playboy interview.

I offer my condolences to his widow and colleague, Rose Friedman, the only economist that won an argument with him.  I know that you are sad that you lost your best friend.  Know that a generation of economists grieves also. 

The family has asked that in lieu of flowers or gifts, contributions be made in his honor to the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation.