I was in Hong Kong last week. The Chinese paid for it so there is no need to wonder whether state money was being spent to send a professor overseas. In fact, Iowa simply taxes my income and takes, without consent, a portion of my labor.

While on these long trips, a person experiences a variety of news outlets from different countries and typically has the time to actually look at these sources. Some random thoughts:

I have maintained for years that liberals live inside a closed cultural bubble. Nothing exemplifies this better than to see an article written by a journalist explaining why journalists are not biased.

They will inevitably contradict their own arguments, and seem to be totally oblivious to the fact. While on my trip, I read an article maintaining that journalists have no bias. The writer made his point and then suggested that it wouldn't matter too much if they did, because they didn't always get what they wanted. After all, he wrote, Nixon and Reagan would never have been elected if the press actually had any power.

There is no contradiction here if you live in a closed cultural bubble.

More random musing from the international media: Michel Rocard, the former prime minister of France, and leader of the Socialist Party, wrote an editorial for a Hong Kong paper.

I quote: "Of course, capitalism remains more compatible with human freedom than communism ever was. But it is now blindingly obvious that capitalism is too unstable to survive without strong public regulation."

Leftists have always been good at making nonsense sound profound, so let me interpret.

Monsieur Rocard is saying that all that stuff that socialists preached for a hundred years didn't work, and (Oh, can we say it out loud?) communism is incompatible with human freedom, which freedom apparently is a good thing. But it is only a good thing as long as the wise can regulate the masses so that the masses won't run off after wealth to their own detriment, or get ripped off by the evil persons (the

"oppressors") that the "saviors" (the smart people on the left) need to protect us against. In other words, we need a controlled economy (like communism, but called something else) to make freedom work, but controlled economies are not compatible with freedom, which freedom is good.

Economies like those in Hong Kong are booming because people there don't really pay much attention to people like Rocard.

Hong Kong has no sales tax, no withholding taxes, no capital gains tax, no tax for Social Security, no value-added tax, no tariffs on imports and no personal tax on income from financial assets. There is a progressive tax rate on labor income, but a flat tax of 17.5 percent on corporate profits.

The government is running a record surplus, which they are returning to the taxpayers.

People must suffer there without the guiding hand of social nannyism.

Not at all. It is Iowa, not Hong Kong, that can't afford to maintain its infrastructure, and can't afford to pay its teachers. It is Iowa where people can't afford health care, and where young people feel helpless to change their economic situations.

Ironically, it is foreign governments that have embraced Milton Friedman's five principles of effective governance.

1. Government should have strong anti-inflationary policy. Inflation is a form of theft. One of the primary functions of a government is to enforce the law equally, and to protect its citizens against things like theft.

2. Governments should be agents of the people and not dispensers of favors and benefits. I would take this one step further. All governmental transfer payments should be made unconstitutional.

Governments could raise funds for legitimate functions, but it is not a legitimate function to take property from one citizen and give it to another.

3. Government should keep its nose out of people's economic business.

The government should not know how much you make, where or how you made it, or how you spent it. It should be none of the government's business to know your business.

4. Government should keep its nose out of people's private lives. Amen.

5. Free discussion and political democracy will convince, or could be used to convince people to adopt the first four.

Where were Friedman's principles published? I'm sorry to say, but it was not in the United States.