Things that were not immediately obvious to me

Are you familiar with the logic behind Google’s PageRank algorithm? I was thinking about it the other day, and it occurred to me that its operation is rather reminiscent of the income flows in a free market. I expand on this notion below.

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“Lawrence of Arabia” is a pretty good movie, with a lot of great lines. For example, Feisal’s “[w]ith Major Lawrence, mercy is a passion. With me, it is merely good manners. You may judge which motive is the more reliable.”

But the one I want to mention particularly today is spoken by Mr. Dryden:

Let’s have no displays of indignation. You may not have known, but you certainly had suspicions. If we’ve told lies, you’ve told half-lies, and a man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth, but a man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it.

I’m not sure that that’s true, but it might be, and certainly ought to be.

Via Jonah at The Corner: Check out this chart.

Alinsky (indirectly) quotes John L. Lewis, a C.I.O. labor organizer of the 1930s, as saying:

[L]abor and capital may be partners in theory, but they are enemies in fact.

There are a lot of destructive notions afoot in the world, but this one — all too alive today — is one of the worst. The reality is that the making of anything requires both labor and capital. While there will always be a tug-of-war over the question of how the things that are made are divided up between labor and capital (actually: between everyone with any hand in making the things) this does not negate the fact that the making of the things is a partnership. If you have only labor to offer, you need to make a deal with someone who has capital in order for you both to profit.

To conceive of capital as the “enemy” of labor is to, in effect, argue that labor should seek to destroy capital. (That’s how enemies treat each other, after all.) This would be self-destructive in the extreme; even a bad job is better than having no possibilities for employment whatsoever, and the latter case is the end result of the destruction of capital. None of this is to say that everyone shouldn’t try to get the best possible deal for himself, but simply that it’s important to remember that negotiating with a partner is not the same thing as trying to destroy an enemy.