Two stories, courtesy of Frank in Phoenix, that sum up much about the current America:

Teen earns, learns as he fights roof rats -- Rodent-proofing teaches him real-world business, human skills

State stops teen’s roof rat work

Because much of this debate took place on Mises.org: “Economist’s Challenge Puzzles Free-Trade Believers“ (Washington Post)

The Globalization Fairy will ‘intellectualize’ inflation away.... and you can simply THINK your stomach full, without having to buy any of that increasingly expensive wheat with which to make your bread--as implied in the Q&A after Greenspan’s testimony yesterday.

From this , the following quote from Matthew Rabin : “...We call this “time inconsistent preference,” and it’s hard to convey how categorically, how unambiguously economists have been wrong about this. Economists have assumed a time-consistent discounting, that to whatever degree we care more about today than tomorrow, we care that same amount more about 7 days from now than about 8 days from now.

Jean Chatzky has writen an article explaining how to ge the best financing on your auto-loan. She discusses how to avoid or reduce the markup car dealers will tack on to your auto-loan base rate. Markups average about 3 percentage points extra per consumer.

Writes Carroll Cox, editor of the Pioneer newspaper in Snowflake, Arizona:

In a recent TV debate I enjoyed with a prominent member of the East Coast Internationalist establishment, the usual complacency about the continuation of low inflation (read: published indices of price rises) was combined by my opponent with high words of praise for Alan Greenspan’s sound leadership and a panegyric to the US productivity revolution. Notwithstanding what should therefore be an unqualified endorsement of the vibrancy of the American economy and of the unrivalled supremacy of its economic ‘model’, he did also allow that the fiscal position was a matter of concern and that

Wendy McElroy makes a string of good points about homeschooling in this column from Foxnews.com. Certainly, state education has failed the least of these among us. But here’s another idea. Everyone knows that crime is out of control. Crime is usually traced to poverty, lackluster education, and lack of opportunity. So let’s open up some opportunities. Specifically, let’s liberalize labor markets and legalize drugs.