Opinions galore
Someone once said that the value of real estate is determined by three things in this order: location, location and location.
Arkansas has three basic challenges in this order: education, education and education. Improve education and the people of this state can meet all the other challenges we face on our own, thank you. Because we’ll have become an educated, independent citizenry. For a glowing example of our progress, consider the expansion of charter schools by popular demand within the state’s public school system. So students trapped within failing public schools can escape, and their families are given a choice of where to send their kids. What’s not to like?
—————— The quote of the week comes from state Representative Nate Bell (very Independent-Mena). He took exception to making legislators dress up instead of just wearing jeans or whatever they choose. To quote Representative Bell: “Most of those folks [in my district], when they see someone in a suit and tie, it’s an undertaker. It’s a politician trying to raise their taxes. It’s a lawyer trying to lien their property. It’s a banker trying to extort some interest. There are parts of my district that I don’t go to wearing a jacket because folks are sensitive to it and they don’t trust people who wear suits and ties. I grew up in that environment … I’m a part of it.”
It’s remarkable how many seeming problems would go away if we just let folks make their own decisions, including about what clothes they choose to wear. It’s called freedom— and it works.
—————— Let’s hear it for Neel Kashkari, the newest bank president in the Federal Reserve system, who’s already showing signs of becoming the best, for he’s just spoken out in favor of reviving the old Glass-Steagall Act because the current Dodd-Frank “reform” is much too complicated, cumbersome, long and generally still a work in progress that may always be.
But the Glass-Steagall Act, which dates back to the New Deal, is direct, simple and worked for decades. As an idea, it’s an oldie but still a goodie: Just separate commercial and ordinary banking. That is, stop banks from speculating with their depositors’ money, which is what all these new-fangled schemes to revive the economy amount to. Mr. Kashkari says a lot of banks are already too big (too big to fail, they claim) and need to be broken up. Hear, hear. Small is still beautiful and simple is still better than complicated.
—————— But there will always be those who think they can avoid facing even the simplest facts by fiddling with the currency, much like the money cranks of the 19th century who were always coming up with new theories that would solve all our economic woes, whether Bimetallism or the Unlimited Coinage of Silver at a ratio of 16 to 1, or better yet just start up the printing presses. The people will never notice their money is worthless. Yep, the money cranks had an answer for everything. But, as it turned out, a solution for nothing.
The first response of any reckless regime to hard times, someone noticed long ago, is to declare war, which unites the country and gets
folks’ minds off their own troubles, and the second is to inflate the economy.
Today the Bank of Japan offers a textbook example of how well that second policy is working. It’s now been reduced to just giving away money. Naturally it’s called something more sophisticated: negative interest rates. There is no end to the fanciful ways brainy economists will dream up to fool themselves. Anything but encourage real economic growth by lowering taxes and freeing businesses from the suffocating web of regulation that now stifles them. That might require real work, and lead to real progress. No, not that! Instead let’s just play games with monetary policy—and hope people will be fooled. They won’t be, not when the whole swindle goes kaplooey.
—————— It’s easy enough to be a critic. It’s just hard to be a good one. The bad ones have been the target of innumerable criticisms themselves over the years. “A critic,” someone once observed, “is someone who never goes to battle himself, but comes down out of the hills after the fighting is over to shoot the wounded.” Sounds like an editorial writer—or maybe a columnist.
Yet there is no art, no progress, no civilization in general without criticism—as T.S. Eliot well understood. For criticism is an art itself, a necessary one. He added that the best thing a critic can be is “very intelligent.” Which ain’t easy, no matter how many would-be critics have convinced themselves they are. ——————
used to be the motto of the United States of America—from out of many, one. But now it’s more like from out of one, many. Or to use the latest lingo, from out of one Diversity.