Posts Tagged ‘ economics ’

Marie Antoinette couldn’t get her head around the concept that peasants might resent a lack of bread. I mean, look at her bedroom! So, eventually, her head was forced to observe the resentment in a more detached manner. The Versailles life-style was unsustainable, even if the people living in Versailles thought they could stall the [...]

Peter Pan was a wonderful story for me as a six-year old when the Broadway show was first televised by NBC to help market the new-fangled color TVs. Even though we didn’t have the money for color TV, seeing pirates and flying children cavort above the stage even in black-and-white made the program then the [...]

“Liberals have difficulty understanding the Tea Party because they think it is a bunch of selfish racists. But I think the Tea Party is driven in large part by concerns about fairness. It’s not fairness as equality of outcome. It’s fairness as karma — the idea that good deeds lead to good outcomes, and bad [...]

One of my guilty pleasures is watching the TV show “Alaska State Troopers” on the National Geographic Channel. The pleasure part comes from seeing spectacular scenery and wildlife like moose and bears I’ll never be able to visit in real life. However, the guilty part comes because most episodes also pose the question as to [...]

Over the New Year holiday, a comment by Stephen Marsh in his own post on rent seeking reminded me of something John Dominic Crossan had talked about in his book The Historical Jesus — the parallelism between the concepts of an earthly patron in the development of the Roman Empire, and heavenly patronage as it [...]

Plan A was to have the economy humming by now and see Obama cruise to re-election on the success of Keynesian counter-cyclical stimulus. Hope and change would have proven itself superior to the failed policies of the Republican past and the country would eagerly follow Obama into yet more “transformational” policies in his second term. [...]

Today’s guest post is by long time commenter Cowboy. JMB275 had asked me to share a few thoughts relative to discussing how much market regulation is reasonable, and where to draw the line. I don’t intend for this post to be a total consideration of that question, but perhaps to just serve as an introduction [...]

I know I’m behind the times.  I don’t watch television very often, and I don’t have cable or satellite tv.  But I recently got a Netflix subscription, and I discovered that Sister Wives was on.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve watched all 18 episodes of season 1 and season 2.  It really is entertaining.  [...]

“Only two of the 18 launched lifeboats rescued people after the ship sank. Lifeboat 4 was close by and picked up five people, two of whom later died. Close to an hour later, lifeboat 14 went back and rescued four people, one of whom died afterward. Other people managed to climb onto the lifeboats that floated off [...]

I can remember making 3 bets in my life — all the result of foolish pride leading me astray. Barely above the age of accountability at the time of the first bet, I was sitting in my kitchen while my mother gave me a haircut when she made some terribly offensive remark about how cute [...]

As an insulin-dependent diabetic for more than 47 years, I’ve had to become far more familiar with numbers measuring my medical condition than I’d ever wanted. By my teenage years, I knew what glucose readings meant in regard to how soon and what I had to eat, or how much insulin I needed to inject, [...]