Pun Salad

Our headline is a quote from an old SNL sketch. Apropos of nothing, except the FDA might swoop down on Lorne Michaels and demand that future showings of that sketch include a warning for folks with milk allergies.

Because, as Dominic Pino points out: the FDA Thinks You Don't Know Butter Contains Milk.

I ran upstairs to check whether my butter had the life-saving label. Whew, it does.

And, dear reader, even the label on the half-gallon of milk I picked up last week has the inconspicuous, but potentially life-saving text:

CONTAINS: MILK.

Yes, Dominic Pino: the FDA thinks you don't know that milk contains milk.

Elon, abolishing the FDA outright may not be on your radar (although it should be). But maybe hack off some employees whose job it is to ensure grocery stores don't try to bamboozle us by not telling us that milk contains milk.

Not for the first time, I recalled my GOVERNMENT WARNING post from 2012, "inspired" by the GOVERNMENT WARNING Uncle Stupid requires on all adult beverage containers. I suggested the following be prominently displayed on every government building, project, TSA checkpoint, or publication. Every speech by a government employee would need to include it at the end. Because if they can require political ads to say "… I approved this message" in their taglines, they can certainly require this at the end of (for example) the State of the Union Message:

The problem is knowing where to stop.

Also of note:

• All I ask of you Is make my wildest dreams come true. Bryan Caplan asks the musical question: Whose Standards Are Too High?

  In my eyes, every election is a trainwreck. Two proudly irrational tribes rally behind two self-congratulatory demagogic mediocrities as if they were the Second Coming. Listening to any “serious” candidate speak is torture. It’s like sitting in on the class presentations of C students, knowing that one of these C students will, on the basis of their half-baked words, become the most powerful person on Earth. What a disgraceful system.

  You can tell me “One of these candidates must be the lesser evil” from dawn to dusk. But I just can’t stop thinking, “They all make my flesh crawl — and if you don’t feel the same way, there is something very wrong with you.”

  Bryan makes the eminently reasonable request: hold government action to the same standards you think ought to apply to the private sector. An attitude that fits in well with our lead item above.

  And it is literally a revolutionary attitude.

  (Headline reference explained here.)

• The future has friends. Virginia Postrel has long been one, and she writes about Abundance, Progress, and the Future of American Politics.

  As a Never Trumper, I find myself strangely hopeful—not optimistic, but hopeful—about the election results. For starters, while the race was close, the results were unambiguous, saving the country the trauma of court cases, lawfare, riots, and further civic unraveling. Unable to tell themselves that Trump didn’t really win, serious Democrats are opting for normal post-election self-examination rather than Resistance and Russia-blaming. And, of course, since Trump won, he and his followers won’t be attacking Capitol Hill this time around.

  The primary source of my hope lies elsewhere. I spent October immersed in the growing intellectual and political movement in favor of progress and abundance. People of both parties and none—and non-Americans like my U.K. friends at Works in Progress and the European ecomodernists at WePlanet—are working to counter today’s widespread cynicism, discontentment, and frustration with ideas that emphasize innovation, growth, and an expansive future. Instead of preaching zero-sum politics, where the difference between parties lies the targets they choose to demonize, they emphasize creating a widespread sense that life is getting better.

  VP sees the potential for a comeback of … well, I can't think of any better word than "neoliberalism": an appreciation of free markets, deregulation, and (above all) government minding its own business.

  They will probably have to come up with a better label than "neoliberalism", though. That's a red flag for too many folks these days.

• Francis Fukuyama is no Bryan Caplan. He's pretty reasonable and mellow as he pens A Letter To Elon Musk. He's not a fan of brute force hacking away entire swaths of departments and bureaucrats, and here's his bottom line:

  So here’s the deal. You will never be able to run the government the way you run your companies. But you can do a lot to make it more efficient. The trick is to avoid simplistic moves like mass layoffs and the closing of entire agencies. Remember that Donald Trump’s appointee Rick Perry wanted to close the Department of Energy, not realizing that one of its most important functions was to run the system of national laboratories that were responsible for, among other things, research on nuclear weapons and energy. You will also run into the problem that Congress has a say in how the government operates. Even if that branch is controlled by Republicans, they will have equities in different parts of the American state, and may not allow you to violate statutes that they had earlier endorsed.

  We need to cut back government regulation of many parts of the private sector. But we also need to deregulate the government itself, and allow those who work for it to actually do their jobs. If Donald Trump wants to help the American people, he needs to see the government not as an enemy to be dismantled, but as an effective and indeed necessary means of doing so.

  So we'll see what happens. I, for one, would mostly prefer that Trump and Musk err on the side of draconian hacking away. I could be wrong.