Geoff Stone uses the University of Chicago Law School blog for a screed decrying Republican political operatives:

In the last several national elections, political operatives, exemplified by the Swift Boaters in 2004, have employed a deeply cynical and highly effective strategy to distort and manipulate public discourse. This strategy poses a serious threat to the very foundations of democratic self-governance.

He goes on to explain that attacks on the media are part of this nefarious plan.

To which I say, "Wow! Jump back!"

First, it is certainly true that there is a fair amount of distortion in the current campaign, but it does not seem to me to be systematically more prevalently used by one side than the other.

Second, I would be curious to know if there is any eveidence on the net efficacy of these distortions, i.e. how many people would change their votes if they had access to impartially presented descriptions of candidates records and positions. It seems quite possible the net effect of these distortions by both sides is close to nil becase they cancel each other out.

Third, one does not need so grand a theory to explain why Republicans attack "the [big] media". There is a far simpler rationale: such media tend to favor Democrats, albeit often in subtle ways. This is consistent with many actual statistical studies of media affiliations and biases. In fact, the attacks on the media probably tend to encourage fairer coverage as its personnel redouble their efforts to belie such attacks.

The core cause of political dishonesty is the government at all levels controlling so much of the economy and our lives that there are big incentives to lie to gain control of the levers of government power. Big stakes encourage dirty play.

There is a nice BloggingHeads episode between Bob Wright and Dan Gross on the recent bailouts and financial meltdowns.

One thing both Bob and Daniel ignored in discussing possible regulatory fixes is that regulators aren't inherently any better at perceiving potential problems in advance than are market participants. See this post.

Larry Summers has a good discussion of this phenomenon here and Megan McCardle here.

That's not to say that regulation can't be done better. Regulations help set the characteristics of market institutions and almost any institution can be made better. But like the work of improving institutions, improving regulations is difficult.

Not that there is any practical alternative, but the task is made even more difficult by the fact that those doing the regulation are government entities, which are subject to popular political pressure and pretty crude incentives to do a good job.

With all of the (discouraging) talk of "national service" from Barack Obama and John McCain that focuses on young people, here's another idea (from my wife): require national service from those who want to receive their full social security benefits.

If given the power of fiat I would probably do away with national service programs and replace social security with true insurance against destitution. Even so, I think requiring national service for social security recipients is better than expanding national service incentives for young people for several reasons:

• It gives seniors something productive to do. I believe that age discrimination against people 70 and older is probably a real phenomenon. This would put those people to work. Surely there is plenty most social security recipients could be doing. Maybe even on a contract basis for other private firms to avoid make work jobs.
• Some seniors not opt for national service would receive reduced benefits, increasing the solvency of the system and the looming threat to other taxpayers.
• Young people can get jobs doing anything, they don't need national service. Why rob the country of years of useful work from young people in the private sector, when we can use far less employable older people.

Given the political clout of social security recipients this plan seems far from a political winner. But I would love to see it debated nonetheless! It might have more appeal around the time when every two workers is forced to support a retired social security recipient who isn't doing anything.

Greg Mankiw, suggests he favors the proposal described in the Washington Post to auction landing slots at the three main New York airports.

As my wife works for one of the larger airlines, I have heard about this at the dinner table for years and can pass on some context not mentioned by Mankiw or the Post:

• The larger airlines don't appear to be opposed to auctions, as much as they are to having something that is a de facto property right of theirs already being taken away and auctioned off by the government.
• There are so many perverse effects of government regulation in just the airport aspects of air travel alone that this is pretty clearly the world of "second best" where adding a market mechanism onto many other market distortions isn't necessarily likely to produce an increase in welfare.

That said, I suspect that most large carriers would support wholesale privatization of airports and air traffic control systems. Then you might really escape the world of second best, allocate capacity efficiently and actually get capacity increases in response to market demand.

Ian Dixon reports from a Velocity Micro press release that:

FUZE Media Systems, makers of a whole-home media system that has gained traction in the professional installation industry, and Velocity Micro, makers of high performance PCs, today announced that they have teamed to introduce an entry-level whole-home media system that will be sold at retail to the consumer market. The product, to be called ‘Velocity Micro FUZEBox,’ retails for $1995; available in the 4th quarter through the Velocity Micro website, the companies noted that the product will be available in national retailers for the Christmas season.

Although details are sparse, from reading the press release, the Fuze website and a prior podcast Ian did with Fuze this appears to be an affordable home media server based on Vista Media Center. Although it is more expensive than a system a knowledgeable hobbyist could assemble, it is certainly better priced than most custom-installed media center based systems.

Unlike many home theater PCs, this appears to act as a server rather than a PC that is connected to a TV. I think this trend is a good one as PCs connected to TVs tend to be more prone to problems, more expensive, and more complicated to set up properly. With many good new Vista Media Center extenders out now this sort of approach could really take off.

Fuze seems to bring a custom UPnP based music component, and top-level menu to an otherwise ordinary Media Center setup. These seem like well chosen customizations.

Indeed the UPnP based music component appears to make possible "music only" stations throughout the home that do not require a television.

I have said a number of times that Vista Media Center remains the best multiroom AV system available, I hope that more turnkey systems like this will make it available and desirable for more of the people that could really benefit from it.