Crash, Bam, Boom
Favorite Indian joke about the Chinese: How do we know that Adam and Eve were not Chinese? Because they ate the apple, not the snake.
Leonard E. Read records the family tree of an incredible unique individual in I, Pencil.#
I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.
Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that's all I do.
You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery—more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, the wise G. K. Chesterton observed, "We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders."
I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—no, that's too much to ask of anyone—if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—well, because I am seemingly so simple.
Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year.
Wirthlin Worldwide, a market research firm, did an in depth study of the political climate this election. Visit the 2004 Presidential Election Cycle Report Series. It is primarily aimed at how the election effects Corporate America and what it tells about voter/consumer opinions in general. The fourth part is forthcoming.#
The fourth and final report, to be released in January, will recap the final moments of the campaign and reexamine voter response to the 2004 election issues that rise to the top and ultimately influence the key voting blocs to which each party reached out. This last edition of the series will look at the aftermath of the election, trying to assess the mood of the nation, what the voting meant and the ideas likely to influence near-term actions by government. This analysis will define a social and strategic map for businesses in terms of how they think about consumers and themselves in both the short and long term.
Fabio Rojas explains that Americans don't really bowl alone.#
Via Michael Williams is Ron's comment:#
You do have to pay income tax on illegal income in the US. Your tax return is confidential and cannot be legally shared with any other government agency like for example the FBI.
My father was in the Criminal Investigation Division of the IRS for 20 years. Their job is to find criminals that aren't paying their taxes on illegal income and arrest them for tax evasion.
When he was in the Audit division he said he'd often seen returns that said things like "$100,000 smuggling" and as long as they paid the right amount of taxes they wouldn't do anything to them.
The obvious cynical conclusion is the government is more concerned with getting its tax money than arresting criminals. But there is a flip side, in that it gives you a way to arrest people who make money off crime, but don't directly commit it.
The classic example of this was Al Capone. He made lots of money off organized crime, but since he wasn't directly involved and there was no RICO at the time, the government couldn't touch him. Then his accountant turned on him and turned the books over the the IRS. They arrested him for tax evasion.
Tyler Cowen on the rationality of voting.#
This entire debate goes down the wrong lines. Let us start with a simpler question. Should you always make decisions by considering your marginal product alone?
Let's say you were asked to join a firing squad of ten expert marksmen, all shooting at an innocent man, and so good they never miss. Still, they want a louder execution with eleven bullets instead of ten. In return they will donate five dollars to your favorite charity. Should you join and shoot?
Most of us would say no, even though your bullet has no chance of changing the final outcome. Once you buy this conclusion, it is easy to see why people might vote. Most moral judgments reflect some mix of estimated marginal and average products, not just marginal products alone. In part morality means the ability to take a longer-run, universalizable, or more rules-based perspective. So you need not feel guilty if the economist tells you not to vote. Maybe you are not rational in one sense of the word, but surely having a disposition to be moral can be justified.