• Dan K. wants me to write about the differing approaches to designing currency. Namely, the British just had an open competition to design their new currency, and it looks terrific. Score one for distributed intelligence. The U.S Treasury, by contrast, just redesigned the $5 bill, and put a giant purple five on it. You can see them both here. My guess is that the giant purple five isn't just ugly, but also hard to counterfeit. Meanwhile, the new state quarters are pretty cool, and their design process is up to the governor in each state. I think the real lesson here is that coins are far better than bills -- how could things printed on metal not look better? • Nick Beaudrot wants a comprehensive list of books written by bloggers. I don't have one. But Matt Yglesias's upcoming book is really, really, really good. I was worried it would be a friend's band sort of thing, where you have to read it and say nice things about it, but in fact, it's sort of lame. Not so. Be excited. • Jim wants more attention given to this Vanity Fair article that details the government's effort to make torture look like a bottom-up phenomenon, when really it was being imposed from the top-down. He's right, it should get more attention, and be widely read. • Joe K. (again!) points to this Jeff Frankel piece wondering whether McCain buys into the Laffer Curve -- particularly given that its namesake, Arthur Laffer, just signed on as his adviser. This also brings us to an odd place where both Grover Norquist -- of the starve-the-beast tax theory -- and Arthur Laffer are backing McCain. But, as Frankel notes, "If [Norquist's] proposition were true, and the supply side hypothesis were also true, it would lead to the nonsensical proposition that Republican presidents should raise tax rates in order to [increase] tax revenue (Laffer) and thereby reduce government spending (Starve the Beast). I challenge some candidate to run on that platform!" I guarantee you that McCain will, during the course of this campaign, embrace both propositions, run on that platform, and still be hailed as a deficite hawk and fiscal moderate by the media.
