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As Jonah Goldberg points at NRO:

As many as 20,370 low-income households in Sangamon County could qualify for a free cell phone and 60 minutes of free monthly talk-time, according to a spokesperson with TracFone Wireless, Inc., a national prepaid cell phone provider.

Jose Fuentes, TracFone’s director of government relations, announced earlier this month that the company would add Illinois to the list of 17 states that offer SafeLink Wireless — a new extension of Lifeline, a government program that has provided affordable landline telephone service to low-income families for 25 years.

“There’s never been a jump into 21st century communications,” Fuentes says. “TracFone came up with this device to bridge that gap.”

The Federal Communications Commission created Lifeline in 1984. SafeLink Wireless will now take the service a step further by offering free cell phones and service for a year to any household that receives federal public housing assistance, food stamps, low income home energy assistance, supplemental security income, temporary assistance for needy families or Medicaid.

I wonder what analogous slippery slope healthcare reform will create.

Why do boys love sweets so much?  When 6-year old Joey uses his allowance to buy a Clark Bar, this raises demand for sugar.  Brazil is a major exporter of sugar so this raises wages for sugarcane farmworkers in Brazil, diverting Brazilian youth away from their next-best employment as footballers.  Because Brazil is dominant in international soccer, this levels the playing field and makes soccer more exciting internationally thereby raising the demand for soccer balls.  Most soccer balls are made in China where labor and resources in China are now diverted to the production of soccer balls away from other uses.  Hannah Montana CD’s are also produced in China and the resulting drop in supply makes it too expensive for Joey’s sister Clara to buy *The Best of Both Worlds* and Joey gets a kick out of that.

That’s the opening of Chapter 3 “Comparative Advantage and International Trade” in our new textbook Modern Principles: Microeconomics which we are excited to announced has just been published this week.  We want to teach you to see how everyday decisions like Joey’s can have important consequences for the world you live in.  And our book breaks the mold for principles textbooks in microeconomics:

1. All existing Microeconomics textbooks print the Income Expansion Path in blue.  We print it in orange.
2. After over a century of futility we have finally figured out how to make the Short-run Average Cost Curves tangent to the Long Run Average Cost curve at their minimum points.  (That was my work, I don’t mind saying.)
3. Its not written by Greg Mankiw (so you can sleep well at night.)

You can learn more and order the book at SeeTheInvisibleHandTakeYourPoorStudentsMoneyYearAfterYearWhenWeReleasePointlessRevisions.com