"All I Gotta Do Is Die"

The great comedian Myron Cohen used to tell a story in which a man, unhappy at being told he had to do something, replies (in trademark Yiddish accent), "I gotta what? I don't gotta do a goddam thing. All I gotta do is die."

I was reminded of that by the latest column by one of my favorite commentators, David Henderson. A sample:

Last December, I attended a round-table academic conference in which we spent a fair amount of time discussing war and foreign policy. One participant mentioned that after the Japanese government (he actually said "the Japanese") bombed Pearl Harbor, it was obvious that the U.S. government (he said "we") had to go to war with Japan. I replied that that wasn't obvious to me at all. First of all, as my co-author, Charles Hooper, and I point out in our book, Making Great Decisions in Business and Life, and as philosopher David Kelley has so eloquently put it, there's almost nothing we have to do. And you don't think clearly by starting from falsehoods. So, although one might argue that the U.S. government should have made war on Japan, the U.S. government didn't have to: it had a choice.

Read the whole thing. It's a gem.