Unfortunately, we don’t have great advantage of having Milton Friedman with us during the present “blame the free market” storm that is raging in Washington. Still, it’s nice to have clips of this champion in action.

As I said earlier this week, Eric Holder’s push for an “assault weapons” ban is a misguided policy that will not have any serious impact on Mexican drug cartels. It really ought to be called a “ban on semi-automatic firearms with politically incorrect cosmetic features,” but that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. I am pleased to see that CNN is providing coverage of this that notes (1) the difference between semi-automatic sporting arms and machine guns and (2) that Mexican authorities are not releasing the serial numbers of firearms seized from the gangsters. This is probably because many of these guns are coming from the Mexican government, not American gun stores. The drug cartels are putting up billboards to recruit soldiers and policemen as hired muscle. Don’t be surprised when they walk off the job with the guns you issued them, and don’t shift the blame to the Second Amendment.

The Iranian government has detained another American journalist, Roxana Saberi of NPR. I was waiting to post on this in the event that a concerted effort to free her got spun up, but I’m not seeing anything as yet, so I thought I’d just relate the news.

I met Ms. Saberi once. We were both panelists at a discussion of Iran policy about two years ago, in front of a group of several hundred high school students who were on some sort of DC visit. I found her to be reserved in manner, judicious in thought, and entirely unthreatening. It is unfortunate that the Iranian government does not acknowledge this.

In any case, she should be freed immediately. The Iranian government gets nothing from this sort of thing other than bad press, as it surely recognized when it pointlessly detained and ultimately released Haleh Esfandiari less than two years ago. The Iranians may be using Saberi to wind up (or vent) nationalism in the advent of the June elections, but overall you’d think the Iranian government had more important matters to attend to.

Let her go.

UPDATE: I’m reminded that it isn’t just Saberi that the Iranians have detained. Two Iranian doctors working to prevent HIV have apparently been sent to prison on the grounds that they were “involved in provoking street demonstrations and ethnic unrest in different parts of the country.“You’d think if the Iranians were really concerned about ethnic unrest in different parts of their country, they’d refrain from doing things like having state-run newspapers publish cartoons representing Azeris as cockroaches.

Libby Quaid, the Associated Press’s intrepid DC education correspondent, has just broken the biggest education story of the year to date: Education Secretary Arne Duncan opposes congressional Democrats’ efforts to kick kids out of the DC voucher program and back into the public schools.

While Duncan said he opposes vouchers, he added that, “D.C. is a special case,” saying that “kids already going to private schools on the public dime should be allowed to continue.”

I confess, I’m surprised by even the qualified support for DC vouchers expressed by Duncan — surprised, and delighted. From the sound of it, though, Duncan is suggesting only that existing participants be grandfathered into the program, not that any additional children should be allowed to join them.

And Duncan makes a misstep when he implies that school choice can only “help a handful of children.”

Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and a host of other nations have large school choice programs already. The Dutch program is nearly a century old and private schools enroll nearly three quarters of the student population. As for Duncan’s desire to create new schools that will serve whole neighborhoods, he need only visit Milwaukee to see the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been invested in creating new private schools in some of the most depressed parts of the city, thanks to that city’s private school choice program.

School choice is not only good for kids and communities, it’s good for taxpayers. The government of Florida’s own accountability office reported last year that its statewide k‑12 education tax credit program is saving $1.50 for every dollar it costs to operate.

Will Duncan’s comment rescue the voucher program from Senate Democrats who are set to vote on the bill in question this week? Stay tuned.

There are many people who think that little or no “science” will get done — at least “basic” science that has no evident, immediate, practical applications — unless the federal government pays for it. That is a dubious proposition, but it’s not what really alarms me right now. What really troubles me is that scientists, apparently, can conceive of no end to research worthy of your hard-earned dollars, and see things in Washington looking a lot friendlier to their exploring the final, spending frontier. This quote from an article in Inside Higher Ed today says it all:

Pressed by [Rep. Alan] Mollohan and others for how much money the government ought to be spending on science research and education, [National Academy of Sciences President Ralph J.] Cicerone was clearly reluctant to throw out figures; danger loomed that he would look either greedy or unambitious in appearing to speak for the science establishment.

But he made clear that he would welcome a way of ensuring growth for federal spending on science, perhaps, he said, through a mechanism that tied spending to “the number of highly competitive proposals” agencies receive, to ensure that there is enough money to cover all research proposals that scientific peer review processes grade above a certain level.

When Mollohan asked what was the appropriate “end point” for growth in federal science funds, Cicerone said that “we are so far away from that level that it’s hard to say.”

So science can tell us a lot, but not how far we are from adequate science funding. I, however, can put it in a little perspective: In 2006 the federal government spent more than $31 billion on research at “educational institutions.” If the funding end point is, say, Saturn, then to at least some scientists it seems we haven’t even gotten to the moon.

Get ready for scientists to blast off with your wallets anytime now.

President Obama has promised to make spending on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq more transparent during his term. That’s a step in the right direction, says Christopher A. Preble, director of foreign policy studies, but have Americans looked at the true cost of the wars the nation is fighting?

In today’s Cato Daily Podcast, Preble examines the price the United States has paid for the past six years of war.

The costs of maintaining a US presence in Iraq through the end of 2011…will continue to be quite substantial. We’re spending on the order of $10 to $12 billion dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined each month.…The costs in terms of dollars will continue to be quite high.

Preble is the author of a forthcoming book, The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free, now available for pre-order.

Here’s a new list of bloggers who are citing, discussing and writing about Cato commentary and analysis:

• The Economist blog “Democracy in America” comments on Gene Healy’s DC Examiner op-ed about the rise of executive power.
• On Overton’s Arrow, Carl Oberg cites Doug Bandow’s Cato@Liberty post about the Congressional Budget Office’s prediction that the Obama stimulus plan will ultimately make the country worse off economically.
• Freedom’s Lighthouse posted a video of Daniel J. Mitchell’s commentary about British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s visit to the White House.
• Glob​al​Warm​ing​.org editor William Yeatman discusses Tuesday’s Cato Daily Podcast with Patrick J. Michaels on climate change.
• Aristotle the Geek examines Paul Krugman’s critique of a 2007 Cato Tax & Budget Bulletin about Iceland’s flat tax.
• Brian Doherty reviews Gene Healy’s book, Cult of the Presidency at The Freeman Online.

If you’re blogging about Cato, let us know on Twitter (@catoinstitute) or email cmoody@​cato.​org.