One Hell of a Show

Posted on 13 September 2017 by Erik Hare | 2 Comments

A busy week calls for a repeat from 2008. Besides, it’s that time of year again …

Football is the most intellectual of all the major sports in the USofA. Go ahead, laugh, but it’s true. All those breaks between plays are more than time for wagging commentary and the occasional Bud commercial, they are a chance for the coach to send in a play that one side will attempt to execute while the other tries to foil it. Raw athletic ability is often thwarted by a clever plan or a quick wit that sees past it. Amid the changing fronts of trench warfare that form the game, a good General is what it takes to win.

But there’s a lot more to football than that. What we’ve learned from the NFL in particular is how important it is to set up a system where everyone has a chance and the rules are evenly enforced. It’s America at its best.

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Improv Act

Posted on 8 September 2017 by Erik Hare | 1 Comment

“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.”
– William Shakespeare (As You Like It)

It’s a trite phrase, a fairly obvious cliché more than 400 years old. Yet like so many of these little sayings it has only stuck around this long because it holds a certain truth. We each have defined roles we play out, hoping that they both fit into the bigger production even as we standout as the star in our own monologues. Where the saying fails, however, is the lack of a written script implied by the credit given to the Bard. A play has to seem true and make sense – but life is rarely just as we like it. Life is more of an improv act.

(This is a repeat from seven years ago. I hope you like it.)

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Pay As You Go

Posted on 6 September 2017 by Erik Hare | 16 Comments

Many people, especially Republicans, wonder about the need for health insurance in the first place. Wouldn’t it just make sense to pay as you go, whipping out the credit card for routine doctor visits?

This sounds ridiculous when considering serious illnesses, but it may make sense in any system for small things. When a sty in my eye became infected I realized I had the perfect opportunity to test out “the system,” to the extent there is one, to see how pay-as-you-go might work.

The short version: I got sick and don’t have insurance. We all have our adventures.

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Unions are Our Future

Posted on 4 September 2017 by Erik Hare | 3 Comments

Labor Day is brought to you by those who brought you the weekend – Organized Labor.

When I worked in Germany for a short time in the 1990s, labor relations often came up. Some of my colleagues were envious of the US system while most hated it. All of them, however, had a term for what they understood our core principle to be – “Hire and Fire”. The idea of an “at will” employee with no job security in law and no loyalty by tradition was alien to Germans.

Compared to the nations in the developed world which we compete with, our position is unusual. It’s a bias at the foundation of our system – a natural outcome of the demand for a flexible workforce. This is also likely to change as more and more skill is needed to do the jobs of tomorrow.

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Objectivism

Posted on 1 September 2017 by Erik Hare | 1 Comment

This piece from 2012 is still relevant today. Sadly, only moreso. As I work through People’s Economics I have been considering the critical philosophical influences on our world. This one, I am sure, must be a dead end. It must be for our survival as a species.

Ayn Rand is one of the most influential authors of American thought in the late twentieth century. It’s hard to find any college educated person under 40 years old who hasn’t had at least a brush with her works and the philosophy of Objectivism. This is fascinating given how little serious critical attention has been paid to her work and how largely unknown it is in other nations. She is the leader of a strong but underground movement, highly cultural and generational.

Rand finally bubbled into parts of the mainstream with the arrival of Paul Ryan, a one-time advocate of her work who advised staffers to read up on their Rand when he was a young congressman. His later disavowal of Rand’s philosophy smelled like a rat to some, who wanted to make an issue out of it. Bad move. Rand and Objectivism do not lend themselves to sound bites or anything remotely simple. The enticement of this mind candy is strong and deep. But what is it?

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