Ted Cruz is wrong about what causes job losses

Take a look at the evidence. The job losses we suffered are clearly not from Obamacare.

Shop Local

I have many problems with the buy local movement but here's a practical one. I just spent an hour at four local stores looking for a replacement carafe for my coffeemaker and an academic year planner for my sixth grader. No luck. The carafe was too specialized an item and despite the fact that it is only the second week of school all of the stores are already on to Halloween, leaving only a picked over selection of clearance school supplies. Local stores need to stock things in season, not a season ahead, educate employees about what they carry, have a facility to special order items not on hand, or they are doomed. It only took me 10 minutes to get what I needed on Amazon once I'd given up on buying local.

When You Should Hesitate to Repost

Take Some Responsibility

Having a child is not easy. CTFD, you say. You were ignored for hours every day and you turned out just fine.

Think about that a little harder. When I was a child we lived in a different world. We lived in walkable neighborhoods and spent hours playing impromptu active games outdoors, now my kids need to be driven to soccer or the pool if I want them to get exercise. The schools were adequately funded, now my youngest son’s school district just fired all of the elementary school art, music, and gym teachers. There was a lot less scientific knowledge to master, less computer skills to learn, and fewer standardized tests that put the emphasis on the easy to measure instead of the important.

Yet, despite the more complex world that we live in, “the average child in the United States watches 3 to 4 hours a day of television” with predictable results. The problem, as I see it, is not the small minority of hypercompetitive parents, pushing their kids to get to Harvard, it is the vast majority of parents that don’t take seriously developing their kids potential. The benefits of time spent reading, learning music, foreign languages, and getting regular, vigorous exercise are well documented. but most parents allow television and video games to be the one eyed babysitter, crowding out real development, instead of engaging their kids. So, don’t CTFD -- step up to the plate and parent like it matters. Parenting is no joke.

A moral bankruptcy that leads to an economic nightmare

A friend just posted a link on Facebook to Libertarianism’s Achilles’ heel an article that points out that only societies in which government consumes a substantial percentage of GDP produce a prosperous middle class; In the real world, Libertarian has never succeeded. I won't rehash the arguments here, instead I'll take it a step further and analyze why.

Libertarianism argues that the government that governs least governs best; that people should not have more taken from them than necessary for defense and contract enforcement. I would argue that attitude is immoral. First, lack of regulation leads to every member of society having to bear the cost of others decisions. Your right to drive down a residential street at eighty miles an hour, without insurance, while chugging a beer morally ends where a child might be chasing a soccer ball into the street. Your right to produce limitless pollution morally ends where others may be forced to breathe the air or water that you have poisoned.

Furthermore, we almost all believe that every child should have some opportunity to succeed. In this country, and every other, opportunity depends on who your parents are and the vicissitudes of life. A poor child in an inner city school has far fewer opportunities than a child born to a rich family. Libertarianism makes no allowance for the legitimate, moral function of government to give all citizens a reasonable opportunity to succeed.

The reason that these two immoral stances lead to economic under-performance is that it is horribly inefficient if not impossible for each member of society to need to protect themselves from negative externalities. It is impractical for me to test every toy my child receives for lead paint. The result of the government being starved for money has been insufficient inspection and my kids ending up with toys painted in lead. What is the additional security cost we all bear for a police force that must contend with a society in which semi-automatic weapons are freely available?

The second morally bankrupt stance, that your prospects should be determined by who your parents are costs us even more. In our society a Steve Jobs can be an orphan and still succeed because he can get a good public education, hire an educated workforce, have contracts that can be enforced, deliver products on public roads, and take advantage of government funded basic R&D. Without some leveling of the playing field we leave behind so much human potential that even the richest among us are impoverished. 

The Surest Way To Kill A Tree

The surest way to kill a tree is to give a donation to the Audubon Society, World Wildlife Fund or almost any other major environmental organization. You don't need to give a lot, even $10 will do. Not only will you kill trees; you'll waste water, pollute the air, and increase your carbon footprint.

Why does contributing to an environmental organization have such an adverse effect. Quite simply, they won't give you an option to be excluded from their mailings and once they know you're a donor they'll flood you with mail. Anything to raise that incremental dollar.

Not only will they flood you with mail, but to maximize the impact on the environment they'll pimp your name to every other environmental organization on the planet and those organizations will bury you in paper too.

So, this year, to save the environment, I'm donating to other causes and I'll be lobbying environmental organizations to change their practices.

Uneven Justice

Today's New York Times has articles about Blackwater settling a case involving "unauthorized sales of satellite phones in Sudan; unauthorized military training provided to foreign governments, including Canada’s; illegal possession of automatic weapons; and other violations." Their penalty, a fine and probation.

Another article says that despite the fact that "corporations are on track to pay as much as $8 billion this year to resolve charges of defrauding the government," nobody ever gets charged, much less goes to jail.

“A lot of people on the street, they’re wondering how a company can commit serious violations of securities laws and yet no individuals seem to be involved and no individual responsibility was assessed,” Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island and chairman of a subcommittee that oversees securities regulation, said at a recent hearing.

When banks can defraud homeowners and then use robosigners to foreclose on them, pharmaceutical companies can defraud medicare, and security companies can ignore the laws and run their own foreign policy but we throw kids in jail for smoking pot something is seriously wrong with our priorities. Seems to me that someone needs to stand up for personal responsibility and accountability.