Today promises to be a very busy day, but here are a few must-read posts:
Yoani Sanchez continues to post from Cuba: The end of the subsidies
The final speech by Raúl Castro reaffirmed the idea of ending subsidies. Hearing that phrase, we tend to think only of the end of the quota of rationed food we Cubans receive. But the call to do away with symbolic prices and unnecessary “free” services is a double-edge sword which could end up hurting whomever wields it. If we were to be consistent in eliminating paternalism, we’d need to start by reducing the burden of maintaining this obese state infrastructure that we feed from our own pockets. Workers who produce steel, nickel, rum or tobacco, or who are employed in the bar of a hotel, receive a minuscule portion of the sale of their production or of the real cost of their services. The rest goes directly to subsidize an insatiable State.
Go read it all.
Jon Swift has his Best Blog Posts of 2008 (Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves), a monumental roundup of the bloggers’ bests. Thank you, Jon.
Doug Ross found Hamas playing Family Feud: Hamas has a website survey: should it continue rocket attacks?
GM Roper, a Friend I Haven’t Met Yet, looks at a Hamas demonstration and has reason to ask, More Paliwood?
Prof. Richard Landes notices the Revealing Silence at the Egyptian Border: Why does Hamas victimize its own? Richard is blogging from Israel.
Sister Toldjah Gotta love liberal “social engineering”
Via Betsy, Top Ten Marketing Flops Bigger Than Caroline Kennedy
Ilya Somin has A Tale of Texas Takings, “a typical case of the use of eminent domain for the benefit of private interest groups under a thin veneer of advancing the public interest.”