The new job seems to be going well. Now that I’m settling in, I’ve started blogging duties for the Show-Me Institute.

In my first post, I quoted David Friedman’s illustration of how special-interest politics works:

Special interest politics is a simple game. A hundred people sit in a circle, each with his pocket full of pennies. A politician walks around the outside of the circle, taking a penny from each person. No one minds; who cares about a penny? When he has gotten all the way around the circle, the politician throws fifty cents down in front of one person, who is overjoyed at the unexpected windfall. The process is repeated, ending with a different person. After a hundred rounds everyone is a hundred cents poorer, fifty cents richer, and happy.

I was reminded of this last fall, when Wirkman Virkkala paraphrased it, hesitantly attributing it to David’s dad, Milton. I must confess, I didn’t remember which Friedman wrote it either, and it took me the better part of a half hour of creative Google searching to track down the actual source online: The Machinery of Freedom, David Friedman’s early classic of anarcho-capitalist theory.