So, as does Ms Henderson, you resort to a string of tu quoque irrelvancies to ameliorate  Castro's policies. No. I resort to a `string of tu quoque' relevancies to help demonstrate that in many ways Cuba is a better place to live than many other countries in the region.

Albania was almost self-sufficient a few years ago, now it's a mess. Albania's bare self-sufficiency was a brutal autarky run by  a police state that apalled even the other  marxist regimes. Besides, since when is the promise of communism a subsistence economy? J. Del Col Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Before you buy.

This is getting more absurd by the minute. Probably the most accurate statement made thus far.  And, I am uncertain whether this will turn into an interesting discussion or merely one of those tiresome matters, but in the hopes of the former, here goes: My point, such as it is, doesn't strike me as all that controversial.  And to illustrate, consider the following: Antonio owns a business

Communisim is not a sin but simply a different governing system whos basic intent was equal distribution of goods. Don't think of communism as a dirty word but a diffrent word.

The personification of business is an intersting phenomenon, by the way.  In the present matter, for example, I have not yet seen anyone note that it is the stockholders of the tobacco questions who must pay any penalties through the reduction of the value of the company which they own.  Since many of these stockholders are those with pension funds who hold such stock, the penalty is widespread.  In any case, the people who lied bear little to none of the cost of the penalties. Tsk, tsk.  The penalties are paid from the proceeds of sales of cigarettes.  The various lawsuits are little more than a device to extract money from present and future smokers.   Well, this is wandering into the matter of tax incidence.  The fine is being levied on the owners of the company.  The owners would obviously like to pass the fine along to the customers.  How much of the fine can be passed along in the form of higher prices depends on: 1) in technical language, the elasticity of the supply and demand curves, 2) in non-technical language, the slopes of the supply and demand curves, 3)in easy-to-understand normal people language...well, I am unfortunately stuck

Tsk, tsk, this is not worthy of you.  What is the alternative for cost-benefit analysis?  The alternative is politics.  Cost-benefit analysis requires that the costs and benefits have quantified using commensurable metrics.   That's a pretty strong claim you're making there, podner (about definitions), and judging by the above, I feel fairly sure that Jim isn't gonna go for it. Without the strong quantification requirement, politics too becomes a matter of CBA and we're right back where we started. I'm reminded of one of the poems in *The Exeter Book* (a 10th- century collection of poetry in Old English), usually known as Precepts, in which a father teaches his son 10 important things to know