“Arlen? It’s Bernie. Tell Zora to get in here. Now. It’s not a drill.”
I remember it every fall. It was a lazy Saturday morning. I hadn’t planned on getting up yet, but the phone call worked faster than a cold shower. I passed the message to my wife. It seemed no time at all before she was in uniform and heading out the door. The good bye lasted longer than usual. I watched her go, a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, wondering if this was going to be the last time.
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We’ve moved, and this is to declare the new site open!
For too long I freeloaded on what was supposed to be an educational tool, and the irony of a site whoose purpose is (among other things) the study/discussion of Good/Evil breaking the rules I agreed to when I joined the site finally got to me.
I don’t like books “exposing” flaws in The DaVinci Code, if for no other reason than they display a lack of sportsmanship. Finding errors in that book is like fishing at a trout farm; the only real question is how many minutes will it take to catch one. That having been said, I’d like to offer a solid recommendation for Ben Witherington’s The Gospel Code.
The major difference between Witherington’s work and the rest is that he limits himself to pointing out just seven major errors, occupying less than the first third of his book. The rest of his book is spent in analysing the deeper errors, made by some more renowned scholars, which tend to feed into books like The DVC.
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Get thee over to the TPM Cafe and read The Stagnation Tax by Sterling Newberry. The man knows what he’s writing about, and more importantly can explain it in terms the rest of us can understand.
Yes, there are the usual sound bytes one can excerpt to support one’s preconceptions, but look past that and read what’s he’s actually saying. He takes on both conservative and liberal economists, and challenges us to look at it with fresh eyes. I direct your attention to this:
The solution Americans chose was to pay the stagnation tax, leave their children alone and at risk to the world, and to pursue hobbies and the cult of small things while others ran the country. They wake up to find that the fees for that management were particularly high, and that it hasn’t outperformed the marketplace – that they wake up today with declining wages, less access to health insurance, less and less affordable housing, less access to moving up the career ladder – and a political system that does not seem to be responding.
His point was that Americans basically decided it was more important to vacate and recreate than it was to participate, that the “return on investment” for their hours was higher if spent that way than if spent on being intested in and attuned to their government. The political system got used to their inattention, and gave us what we see today. And no amount of economic policy changes of any stripe are going to matter to us all as much as “redistributing our work” so that we actually get engaged with directing our government.
(BTW, I’d recommend against reading the comments. Seems like no one there was interested in actually reading the article.)
There’s a basic flaw in the minimum markup law here.
To understand where I’m coming from, let me first say I’m in favor of minimum markups, in principal. They attempt to keep giant chains from undercutting local businesses, driving them out, and then raising prices back up. They don’t always succeed in that endeavor, but they succeed often enough that I feel the benefits of the “tax” (in the form of slightly higher prices) is worth the cost.
But Wisconsin’s law has a design flaw that current gas prices have exposed. It’s based on percentages, a measure that only people who have never run a business and had to set price levels would use. Continue reading
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