THESE WERE SHARP BUSINESSMEN, the four guys who pointed out that there were three dead trees in my backyard that needed to be cut down lest they attract horrible bugs that would infest my entire property. They would cut them down and remove them for $475.

In cash.

We dickered back and forth and finally settled on $350. In cash.

They attacked the trees like ants on ice cream. In 45 minutes, the trees were gone without a trace.

I paid them. In cash.

THE USE OF LARD in cooking is slowly being rehabilitated but the cultural shock of the stuff hasn’t diminished in the slightest.

There I was at the store buying just two products: lard and salt. They sat on the black conveyor belt awaiting checkout at the store. The guy behind me—something like this happens every time I buy lard—asked incredulously: “What are you going to make with that?”

IT’S A STRANGE THING that all the leading progressives feel schadenfreude toward all the Starbucks closings around the country.

I mean, this institution samples all the fashionable attitudes in music, aesthetics, and politics, subtly embracing the ethos of the archlefty consumer class: happy to promote commercialism provided that the commercialism points to all the right environmental and social-justice causes.

DALE STEINREICH ONCE WROTE that Halloween has a “socialist tenor” because “menacing figures arrive at your door uninvited, demand your property, and threaten to perform an unspecified ‘trick’ if you don’t fork over. That’s the way the government works in a nutshell.”

WE’VE ALL SUSPECTED THAT the market economy has a civilizing effect on people, but I’ve rarely seen such a poignant example.

IT WAS THE YEAR 1600 and coffee had become wildly popular all over Europe, just as it had been popular all over the Muslim world since its discovery 900 years earlier. The sitting pope was Clement VIII. His advisers urged him to do something to stop the coffee mania then spreading across Christendom. He tasted the coffee, reflected on its properties, and then, to the astonishment of his advisors, blessed it as a Christian beverage.

Long live the pope!

TODAY THE HIGHEST-PRICE good that people buy besides their house is their car, and this reality leads people to believe that we can’t possibly let the American car industry die. We couldn’t possibly be a real country and a powerful nation without our beloved auto industry, which is so essential to our national well-being. In any case, this is what spokesmen for the big three say.

A REALLY COOL THING IS happening in Germany. After decades of strict laws regulating when stores can open and close (Ladenschlussgesetz), the laws are progressively liberalizing. Since 2006, the decision has been left to the individual states. Whereas commercial establishments once could not open their doors before 6 a.m. or keep them open past 10 p.m., now many open earlier and close later.

Consumers are celebrating, while labor unions and regulators are not.

THE LATEST CHAPTER of John T. Flynn’s Men of Wealth that has my head spinning concerns someone I probably should have known about, except that late-nineteenth-century Wall Street lore is in short supply these days. But thanks to Flynn, I now know all about Hetty Green (1834–1916), whose weird and creepy life now haunts me to no end.