The Onion presents a hilarious satire (or is it reality?) Secretary of Defense Humiliated as US Credit Card Rejected. It seems that Rumsfield was uanble to charge Australia’s order for some military hardware on the US credit card:

An interesting exchange takes place in the comment thread on Prof. Anderson’s article about food deserts. One participant contends that Anderson’s article shows that the market is “bad” at providing a reasonable and balanced lifestyle. This raises an important question that every pundit, scholar, and observer should ask: “bad” by what standard? What are the alternatives, and will they work?

Fighting crime is a purely private activity, and Spiderman himself functions as a kind of private vigilante, making up for the failures of the supposed “public good” provisions that the state never gets around to providing. It is these themes – the chaos of the city, the inability of government to stop crime, our dependence out private solutions – that connect with us.

Layoff veteran aims to put outsourcing ban on Nov. ballot: “So Armstrong wants to take the message to voters. He says he and his group are 70 percent of the way toward collecting the roughly 68,000 signatures needed to get Proposal 139, “Protection of American Workers,” onto this year’s ballot. They have two weeks left. The initiative would bar state government from hiring temporary foreign workers here on a visa.

All magic aside, a striking aspect of the Harry Potter books is just how completely normal and bourgeois are all the settings and experiences of the characters, how they live in a world very much like our own and confront all the usual scarcities of time and resources, which is another way of saying that economics is one lens through which to understand the books and their success. Alberto Mingardi has already commented on one aspect of this.

The Wall Street Journal featured a story this week, Property-Tax rise Tiggers Backlash in Some Areas - (paid site $). According to this story, local governments have been raising taxes on residences to fill budget shortfalls. “Governments give a range of reasons for the increases, from gaps caused by cuts in federal revenue to declining commercial bases, rising health-care and pension costs and demands for more school funding.”