Miscellaneous Crap

My nutjob neighbor down the road is still displaying a sign calling Barack Obama "Redistributor in chief". He's also flying his USG flag at half mast. Doesn't he realize that redistribution is going on right now and has been for decades? The Bush regime has been especially adept at redistributing taxpayer money to corporations and military contractors and rich people.

I've come across a few folks who have pondered moving to a gulch and withholding their "productivity". In most cases, I don't think the rest of the world would notice. Who are these so called "productive" people anyway? Bankers, lawyers, financiers, executives? Nah. We're all pretty much parasites, or at best symbiotes akin to the bacteria in our guts. We might add some value to the organism (or not) but we're not what drives it. The working and middle classes are the engine of prosperity. There's probably not a lot of Randians on the assembly line at GM, but I bet you'd find a few in the executive cafeteria driving the company into the ground.

I have been thinking about how our "contributions" to school taxes can be viewed as a kind of investment (it's involuntary, but I feel better if I can imagine a return). If we pay approximately $10,000 per year in school taxes and this pays to educate half of a child in our district, after 12 years of education and 4 years of college, we will have paid $155,000 (including a modest rate of interest). If the beneficiary starts paying into Social Security right away and we live just 25 years after retirement, we'll get our money back. Also other half students we have supported will be paying into the system, so we may very well come out ahead. Unless we die too soon. This way we get the benefit of children to support us in our old age without actually having to have any around. It's win-win.

Why does society let any business get "too big to fail"? Who benefits from the embiggening of companies? If we bail out the car companies, let's break them up into smaller entities.