Ben Stein on American enterprise

Via Signal vs. Noise (which has now been added to my RSS aggregator), here's an awesome article from Ben Stein giving 12 items on How to Ruin American Enterprise.

3) Create a culture that blames the other guy for everything and discourages any form of individual self-restraint or self-control. Promote litigation to punish tobacco companies on the theory that they compel innocent people to smoke. Make it second nature for someone who is overweight to blame the restaurant that served him fries. Encourage a legal process that can kill a drug company for any mistakes in self-medication. Make it a general rule that anyone with more money than a plaintiff is responsible for anything harmful that a plaintiff does. Promulgate the pitiful joke that Americans are hereby exempt from any responsibility for their own actions--so long as there are deep pockets around to be rifled.

10) Enact a tax system that encourages class antagonism and punishes saving, while rewarding indebtedness, frivolity and consumption. Tax the fruits of labor many times:

First tax it as income. Then tax it as real or personal property. Then tax it as capital gains. Then tax it again, at a staggeringly high level, at death. This way, Americans are taught that only fools save, and that it is entirely proper for us to have the lowest savings rate in the developed world. This will deprive us of much-needed capital for new investment, for innovation and our own personal aspirations. It will compel us to ask foreigners for ever more capital and allow them to own more of America. It will also promote an attitude of carelessness about the future and, once again, encourage disrespect for law.

And Ben Stein has one of the most interesting lists of credentials of anybody anywhere:

Benjamin J. Stein is a lawyer, economist, writer and actor, and host of the game show Win Ben Stein's Money.

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Programming languages as user interface

As I was reading the excellent When good interfaces go crufty tonight it reminded me of another post I had read the other day, Usability of a language.

I never really thought of a programming language as a "user interface" until now. Cruft can be applied to programming languages too. That's why Perl is being rewritten.

It's interesting that there are many different views of programming languages and code written in those languages. High level assembly, theorem prover, declarative statement... I'd never thought of "human interface to the computer" before.

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