As an avid viewer of the Suze Orman show, I’ve noticed one interesting thing: Suze Orman doesn’t like tax-refunds. The reason for this isn’t that she dislikes the idea of people getting their own money back. Rather, she dislikes the idea of people giving the government a series of free (0% interest) loans, averaging 6 months.
Software patent infringements are increasingly becoming the subject of litigation. For those not in the programming field, software patents are issued for what I would call programming techniques or methods. An analogy would be if a carpenter patented “the use of nails to secure beams to the wall”, “the use of a roof to keep rain from falling on the interior of a house”, or “the use of cement to create a sidewalk”.
When Guliani ran for mayor of New York in 1993 he mocked that the OTB, a government agency, was “the only bookie joint in New York that loses money.” The current crisis hitting the Dutch health ministry indicates that its agency is “the only ‘joint’ joint in Netherlands that loses money.”
Some quick ruminations on medieval and Thomist economic thought. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas is one of the world’s most reknowned masterpieces of intellectual thought. The medieval intellectuals prohibited the taking of interest, a philosophy fortified by earlier, Aristotelian doctrine.
Denzel Washinton starred in what was a good movie, but could have been a great movie, John Q.
Also as part of the conference this weekend, we also celebrate Lew Rockwell’s 60th birthday. Sto lat!. Lew runs the best think tank in the country which has the best economics site in the world. His little hobby—LewRockwell.com—has turned into the best political site in the world. I say that as someone who was a reader of it before I was a writer for it. (Frankly, I try to put out of my memory whatever I used to do in the morning before LRC went online.
A friend from Wall Street writes: “Eliot Spitzer wiped out $6B in market capitalization of Marsh and McLennan today. That is more damage than 4 hurricanes were able to inflict this year.” Ah, but consider the profits that can be earned from rebuilding!
