As I have written elsewhere, I normally cringe when I read the Economics section of most conservative publications. Nothing changed when I picked up last month’s issue of Chronicles. Writing under the heading of “The Economy,” R. Cort Kirkwood has done it again. Jeff Tucker has already drawn our attention to Kirkwood’s anti-Wal-Mart rant in the November issue of Chronicles.
This morning’s New York Times reports on the growing trend of outsourcing government activities via contracting duties to private firms. The result is an increasingly common accounting trick, in which the state can expand its activities while both reducing its size and increasing the scope of activities that occur without public scrutiny.
That Americans do not save enough has been repeated so often it is now widely accepted, especially with baby boom retirements looming. Now, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported that our e personal savings rate was minus one percent for all of 2006.
I am in Bhopal, visiting India after almost three years.
I arrived very early in the morning of 27 January 2007. I took the train from Delhi to Bhopal. At Delhi train station, I stood at the front of the counter in the middle of the cold night for 1.5 hours to buy my ticket; the seller was there all this time, chatting away and drinking tea with others, without recognizing the presence of those lining up. When he got around to selling the ticket, he found several mistakes in my (train-ticket) application form. I faked as much courtesy as I could and did what he wanted.
A particularly important application of our theory of property titles is the case of landed property. For one thing, land is a fixed quotal portion of the earth, and therefore the ground land endures virtually permanently. Historical investigation of land titles therefore would have to go back much further than for other more perishable goods.
In addition to the Downing Street memo, we now have former chief of the CIA’s European division, Tyler Drumheller, in an interview with Spiegel Magazine discussing that the administration ignored CIA advice and used whatever information it could find to justify an invasion of Iraq.
In more lawsuit news, a 16-year-old being sued for online music piracy accused the recording industry on Tuesday of violating antitrust laws, conspiring to defraud the courts and making extortionate threats.
Robert Santangelo and his lawyer, Jordan Glass, responded at length on Tuesday, raising 32 defenses, demanding a jury trial and filing a counterclaim against the companies.
Throughout my ethics class’s viewing of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, I was caught off guard by just how poor the case for human-caused global warming really is. Assuming every claim Gore makes in the movie is true, we are perfectly capable of dealing with things such as climate changes and rises in sea levels.
