Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Jim Rogers is buying euros because he thinks they've been beaten down in the short term and will rise before the ECU finally destroys them. He also thinks BP will survive, and maybe it will, but I still think Obama will at least destroy BP America.

TAX AND SPEND:

Laying off government workers is good for the economy. Most of them will find work in the private sector even in these bad times. These layoffs reduce the number of parasitic jobs and increase the number of productive jobs. That makes us all richer. This is probably the only thing that's kept us from diving into a double-dip so far.

EDUCATION:

By pandering to the lowest common denominator, government has made schools achingly boring for students and teachers alike. No kidding.

"Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?"

Government. This the regimentation and militarization of schools I was talking about. All desks neatly in a row. All the students the same age. All the giant schools are cookie-cutter cutouts. The material is presented in the same regimented fashion everywhere. Government intentionally wipes out the personality, individuality and uniqueness of teachers and students.

"We all are [to blame]. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's."

We have nobody to blame but ourselves for everything government does, and the parents who send their kids to government schools are especially to blame.

"The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible."

That's another thing I keep saying. You can't blame a failure to get an education on a teacher or school or a system. It lies squarely on the shoulders of the student. Sure government schools suck the life out of students and teachers, but the information is there, and it's the responsibility of the student to learn it. Good teachers can help by inspiring and explaining, but ultimately learning is the responsibility of the student.

ENERGY:

Author works hard to find a silver lining in Obama's shakedown of BP.

"Government transfers are never fast, and always expensive – the bureau-rats administering them always manage to skim off a rich layer for themselves – so those idled fishermen and hoteliers may have to wait a while. Some of them are already complaining that BP is too slow, and now that the Feds have the job of making payments, they will find out what waiting really means. That will increase hostility to Washington, and so is no bad result. One other potentially good result is that scrutiny of applications for money is likely to be poor (what do b-rats know about meeting small-business payrolls?)."

No doubt government's management of payouts will be horrendously corrupt and inefficient, eventually making those living in the Gulf who aren't swindlers wish BP had maintained control of the payouts. He adds a reminder of how government made this crisis worse:

"[BP] would have welcomed all manner of help from all manner of people offering it; it tried to do that anyway, but government stepped in and told boat captains to stay in port. Many more would have been at work, moving booms and skimming oil; my wise friend Elmo Zoneball suggests that BP would simply have offered to buy oil recovered from the sea by any method, at whatever rewards per barrel were sufficient to prevent it drifting on-shore. Who knows what ways would be found? Even domestic vacuum cleaners might have been rigged (in reverse) to pump the stuff. Those clever Floridians who demonstrated on YouTube how ordinary hay soaks up oil from water would have taken their Bayliners out to collect as much as they could, and thousands like them; at hundreds of dollars a barrel, there would have been few idle hands around the Gulf. It would have been a kind of peacetime, for-profit Dunkirk."

But no. Obama's boot on the neck of BP keeps it from effectively cleaning up this mess.