There just never seems to be enough money to fund public education. During the boom years teachers and their unions were constantly complaining that taxpayers were too stingy. That drumbeat was heard throughout the nation. The more money school districts received, the more they asked for.

Imagine if your property taxes set you back $43,000 a year, with 86% of that going to the school system. You justify it if you have two kids in school and it beats paying the freight for private school in the city. But if your kids have flown the coup, why pay?

Starving entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are now being bombarded with offers of capital from Angel investors. Forget the old-school meet the banker and walk ‘em through the business plan nonsense, this can all be done electronically through social media.

[An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Colin Hussey, is available for download.]

Wired.com ran a story today about a great new innovation over at speedtest.net. The site has jumped on the social networking bandwagon and is enabling nerds around the world to engage in the age-old tradition of measuring themselves against their peers. Now anyone can test their internet connection speed and post the results to facebook and even earn “badges” to show off their uber-fast connection to the digital universe.

Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart told a group at that National Association of Business Economics in Arlington, Va. that if the price of oil keeps climbing, the Fed will need to purchase more assets, or QE3.

A firm with 50 employees located in Reston, Virginia calls MERS claims to hold title to half of all the home mortgages (60 million) in America. That’s one big pile of paper for 50 employees to push around. MERS ( Mortgage Electronic Registration System) was created by Fannie and Freddie and the rest of the big mortgage players to make loan securitizarion easier and faster. Forget about the thousands of county recorders around the nation, MERS would make note assignments and recordings passe. This all worked out until borrowers quit paying.

Thanks to all the people who posted interesting comments on my post questioning the suitability of the term “spontaneous order”.

I’d also like to note that, the kind of problems that arise with words which, like “spontaneous”, convey a sense of automaticity with regard to the market is discussed by Mises in Human Action: