Economic podcast series: EconTalk

If you have iTunes, you should check out the podcast series called EconTalk.
They are available at EconTalk. Put your mouse over the Recent Archives selections, whichever one you want. I would suggest going under the "By Featured Guest" and finding Mike Munger from Duke, to start with. "Giving Away Money: An Economist's Guide to Political Life" is a good'un Munger tempered the interviewer's cynicism and some irrational statements, and they had good balanced discussions on certain topics.
The one I put up there is related to government's nature of giving away "free money". In reality, there is fierce competition, otherwise called lobbying, that occurs over who receives government assistance and how much of what type they receive. The comparatively large amounts of wasted money spent in this process of lobbying for the subsidies, tax considerations, land availability, and legislative favors adds to the inherent inefficiency of government planning. In addition, this configuration often crowds out those who have little initial funding to lobby for causes or plan and coordinate public works projects.
A basic conclusion is come to which is essentially that whenever government is made to plan an economy by its selective doling out of capital, there is inherent wastefulness and misdirection created in the game itself (read: don't hate the lobbyist playas, hate the big government game), and that a viable solution might be scaling back on governments role in these regards.
Surely those aren't ideas that baffle you folks, but these guys have some other interesting insights.
"Grab Bag: Munger and Roberts on Recycling, Peak Oil and Steroids" is a good one, too.

EDIT:
Something Russ from EconTalk is involved in and that he mentions a lot is Library of Economics and Liberty
You should check it out...
Fill your braaaaaiiiiins!

Milton Friedman on Limited Government

My education professor, Dr. Unks, mentioned Friedman in class yesterday. When he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago and took an economics course from Professor Friedman (this was in 1957), he heard the best argument for the voucher system of education that he had (and has until this day) ever heard. He then went on to reiterate Friedman's argument, and he was right: it was a very good argument.

Tonight, I ran into Milton Friedman on Limited Government. This is a must see. I find it hard to make any sort of argument against him. Why hasn't our government tuned into this yet?