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Monthly Archives: September 2017

Fairness or Fairy Tale?

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It’s been a bizzy week.  This repeat from ten years ago deals with a topic that has become a central issue in People’s Economics – fairness.  This first treatment of the topic wasn’t very helpful.  But it’s an interesting starting point.

Fairness is an important concept in this thing we call Civilization. If we all lived as hunters and gatherers on the grasslands, we wouldn’t have a lot of interaction with large groups of people. The inevitable disputes that arise could be settled by a simple code or the intervention of an elder.

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Faith or Works?

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A lot of people are upset about the direction of the nation. Nearly a two to one ration finds that the nation is on the wrong track, according to a Rasmussen poll. That fits with the ongoing controversies sweeping our mindscapes involving protests of various kinds.

A lack of faith in our government should be one thing which unites us. It’s something of an American tradition, after all. Some think it’s involved in vast conspiracies. Some want to stockpile arms against it. Some think it’s just plain incompetent. Some think our history is a complete lie.

No one, anywhere, thinks that government is going to solve all of our problems. No one trusts it completely. No one thinks our taxation system is completely fair. No one thinks that the system always produces justice.

Yet protests about our system or our government are the surest way to spark a highly emotional shouting match that transcends any ability to get anything done. And there may be a good reason.

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Taking a Knee

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O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Is it ever acceptable to kneel while the national anthem is played? The controversy has deepened now that Trump has weighed in, saying that players who do so should be fired. He faulted the NFL as a unit over this just ahead of this week’s games.

The response from the league has been ferocious. And it is justified. After all, those who kneel are only answering the question with their own emphatic “No!” as is their right as a free people. It is a question we should all be asking ourselves and not the patriotism of those who answer it differently than we do. Anything less means that we are not, indeed, free.

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Life Support

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The Affordable Care Act, ACA or Obamacare, has proven difficult to kill off. In the next eight days we will see if the last, final, we-really-mean-it effort suffers the same fate as the previous attempts.

It should die for even more reasons than the last attempt. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t actually be something of value in Graham-Cassidy which might lead us to even better healthcare in the future. If that fails, it could well lead us to a final calamity for the Republican Party.

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United Nations. Sort of.

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President Trump spoke to the UN today. In all fairness, it could have been worse. And, in many ways, it was a re-iteration of what America has been saying for a long time – we have a big military and we intend to use it, but don’t ask us for money to keep the other operations going.

Yet it was bad enough in one singular sense – there is no place for globalism even as we realize larger threats to the entire planet at once. It was a summary of everything that he and his followers stand for in many ways. But what will it mean to the rest of the world?

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