Maggie's Farm

We do not want to see a Socialist Dem in the White House. But, if were were to end up with one, what "change" should be expected? From Kling on Mandates for Change:

How can the Democrats implement policy changes without large spending increases? The answer is regulation. The business sector is going to be increasingly told what to sell and how to sell it. Particularly in health care and energy, firms are going to be accountable to bureaucrats, not to customers. Products and services will be designed in Washington, not by competition.

Regulations and mandates are an alternative to budgetary spending. For example, if politicians do not want to spend money on recruiting a volunteer army, they can institute a draft. Similarly if politicians do not have the resources on budget to pay for universal health insurance, they can pass a law making the purchase of health insurance mandatory. If such a law is effective, then the uninsured will be "drafted" into the army of the insured.

Aren't we fortunate that the people in gummint are so much smarter than us illietrate red neck goobers?

Related: The usefulness of competition in medical insurance, at Marginal Rev.

"You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I'm not hungry enough to eat six."

Yogi Berra (h/t, My Wealth Builder)

So requests VDH at Pajamas. I agree.

America remains the Land of Opportunity, and the politicians should be extolling that, and bringing inspiration to those who want or need the encouragement instead of pandering to peoples' sense of ineffectiveness and their desire for some "help" from the government which will never arrive without a loss of dignity and freedom.

The politicians should be saying "We'll provide justice, civic peace, protection from external enemies, minimal interference and taxation, and personal freedom so you can go out there and pursue your dreams - whatever they may be."  

Sometimes I think the Dem ideal is for everybody to become a "ward of the State." I find that attitude to be insulting, negative, and destructive to the human spirit. Furthermore, I have minimal respect for anyone who wishes to "govern" me: I desire to be self-governing.

"The most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.' " Ronald Reagan

If you have any doubts about opportunity, read about this guy who built a life with nothing but $25 and a bed in a homeless shelter.

Re Enron and Sarbanes-Oxley, from Criminalizing Capitalism in City Journal:

... in the end, Sarbanes-Oxley has just made it easier for ambitious government attorneys to criminalize bad business judgment and complex accounting in hindsight. Further, in their focus on strengthening legal enforcement, the feds have passed up opportunities to create commonsense protections for investors. Worse still, the government has instilled investors with false confidence by implying that they can rely on prosecutors, not prudence, to protect their market holdings. Now the housing and mortgage meltdown—which could hurt the economy far more than Enron did—is reminding investors that no law or regulation can protect them from economic disruption.

Politicians and business pundits saw Enron’s collapse as an unprecedented market failure that cried out for a new remedy. Hadn’t the country’s best stock analysts believed the Enron “story”—permanently high growth through dazzling innovation? Hadn’t the nation’s bond-rating agencies awarded Enron a rating implying that prudent investors could lend to the doomed company? Hadn’t Enron’s “independent” auditors and outside counsel signed off on its crazy financial statements? And hadn’t Enron employees who had invested heavily in company stock seen their life savings evaporate?

Yet Enron was actually an example of how markets work—messily, sometimes tardily, but in the end with ruthless efficiency. Even as most Wall Street analysts bought Enron’s sales pitch and accepted its financial statements, investors slashed the value of the company’s shares in half—far surpassing declines in the broader market—during the year before the accounting scandal broke. Investors had begun to withhold money before the government launched investigations. When Enron declared bankruptcy in December 2001, the regulators were left only to certify the market’s verdict. Those investors and lenders who hadn’t scrutinized the company lost money, as they should have.

Though Enron didn’t signal a market failure, it was a business failure, of course.

Words: The hidden inferences in words, at Overcoming Bias:

It is a common misconception that you can define a word any way you like.

This would be true if the brain treated words as purely logical constructs, Aristotelian classes, and you never took out any more information than you put in.

Yet the brain goes on about its work of categorization, whether or not we consciously approve... 

The whole thing here.

I am a Mitt fan, but I knew he'd have trouble as yet another East Coast patrician country club Republican. As somebody said on the radio, re Mitt:

We had the best dog food in the world. Best ingredients, the healthiest balanced diet, a great name, the best packaging, the best marketing, and a huge advertising budget.

So why wasn't it successful?

Dogs didn't like it.

Mr. Jacobs opened England's first coffee house in Oxford in 1650. It was two years later that another coffee house was opened in London by a Greek, Pasqua Rosee, in partnership with Daniel Edwards, an Englishman. By 1700 some two thousand such coffee shops were established.

The word "tip" dates back to the old London coffeehouses. Conspicuously placed brass boxes etched with the inscription, "To Insure Promptness," encouraged customers to pay for efficient service. The resulting acronym, TIP, has become a byword.

I also learned on that site that the darker roasts contain less caffeine, and that the coffee tree was introduced to Hawaii as an ornamental plant - not for production.

Photo on left: Ripe Kona coffee beans.

Quote from a WSJ piece, The Happiness Myth (h/t, Dr. Bob):

...a lot of us seemed a lot happier, or at least less restless, before the Happiness Movement began bullying us. Myrna Blyth, a longtime editor in chief of Ladies' Home Journal, made this point explicitly in her 2004 book, "Spin Sisters." Ms. Blyth undertook an informal study of the themes in women's magazines as they evolved over recent decades, and concluded that what women have mostly gotten from their magazines is the message that they're never quite happy enough -- never good enough, never fulfilled enough, never far enough along on the path to "having it all."

Read the whole thing. My simple-minded theories are that, if you wonder whether you're happy, go out and try to please somebody else. Or get on your knees and ask the Lord what He wants you to do. Or go shoot some targets or birds: that always works because happiness is a warm gun.

Those were the first three questions asked of She Who Must Be Obeyed by the young Barristerette's college advisor. No, no, and, sadly, no. ("Big bucks" seems to mean a third to a half million at minimum, with more to follow if your kid doesn't flunk out)

Apparently legacies do not carry too much water anymore except at Princeton, and extracurricular passions matter little unless almost world-class ability has been demonstrated. We were also advised that GPA matters more than the classes taken, so avoid classes in which one cannot excel: schools worry about their magazine rankings, and GPA of kids admitted is a factor in that.

Well, the latter advice made me despair about higher education, because if kids avoid things that are difficult for them in high school for college admission purposes, and then avoid them in college for grad school admission purposes, how will they ever learn what they need to understand the world?

Kids have to take courses in which they cannot excel.

One cannot understand much about this world without calculus, Shakespeare, statistics, economics, chemistry, physics, bio, history, geology, Chaucer, philosophy, religion, music history and theory... etc. Of course, you can learn all these things after you get "educated" in schools (not so easily, though, with statistics and calc) - but then what is formal education good for other than certificate-chasing, professor-employment, and kid-indoctrination?

Sometimes I think I am too old-fashioned for this modern world.

Before I decided to post this little meditation, I ran into this book review/essay re Higher Education's Loss of Purpose. A quote:

...the research ideal devalues the connection with thinkers of the past. The belief that students benefit from participating in a timeless conversation with the great voices of our civilization falls by the wayside.

That was all bad enough, but the tide of political correctness (an edgy term for someone from the heart of mainstream academia) washed over the humanities with the destructive force of a tsunami. Why? Because the insistence of the diversity/multiculturalist crowd that human beings are imprisoned by their immutable characteristics (race, gender, class) means that there is no point in trying to learn from the past. Dead, white males and their “hegemony” are what we must break free of, not learn from. In one of his most penetrating sentences, Kronman asks, “For if my most fundamental attitudes are conditioned by my race and gender, so I cannot help but see and judge the world from the vantage point they fix, how can I ever hope to escape their orbit, subject these attitudes to critical review, and set myself the goal of living in some way other than the one they prescribe?”

Whereas the physical sciences and some of the social sciences have rejected the idea that there is any pedagogical value in “diversity,” the humanities swallowed it whole and thus further degraded their intellectual standing.

Photo on top: An 1837 one-room schoolhouse in Norwalk, CT
Lower image: Harvard College, 1767