Italian economist, engineer and political activist Vilfredo Pareto was born on July 15, 1848, in Paris, where his father had fled due to political difficulties.
Pareto should be more famous, for his explanation of the 80/20 rule, and for his contribution to making better things, the Pareto chart. Many economic texts ignore his work almost completely. Quality management texts ignore his life, too — generally mentioning the principles they borrow, but offering no explanation.
Vilfredo Pareto, Wikipedia image; why are there so few photographs of the man, who died in 1923?
The Pareto index is a measure of the inequality of income distribution.
The Pareto chart is a special type of histogram, used to view causes of a problem in order of severity from largest to smallest. It is a statistical tool that graphically demonstrates the Pareto principle or the 80-20 rule.
And now you, dear reader, having just skimmed the surface of the pool of information on Vilfredo Pareto, know more about the man than 99.99% of the rest of the people on the planet. Welcome to the tip-top 0.01%.
A mystery I attribute to low readership: I’ve posted much of this information before. In several years, not once has anyone criticized these posts as supporting fascism, the most common mis-directed criticism of Pareto.
Italian economist, engineer and political activist Vilfredo Pareto was born on July 15, 1848, in Paris, where his father had fled due to political difficulties.
Pareto should be more famous, for his explanation of the 80/20 rule, and for his contribution to making better things, the Pareto chart. Many economic texts ignore his work almost completely. Quality management texts ignore his life, too — generally mentioning the principles they borrow, but offering no explanation.
The Pareto index is a measure of the inequality of income distribution.
The Pareto chart is a special type of histogram, used to view causes of a problem in order of severity from largest to smallest. It is a statistical tool that graphically demonstrates the Pareto principle or the 80-20 rule.
And now you, dear reader, having just skimmed the surface of the pool of information on Vilfredo Pareto, know more about the man than 99.99% of the rest of the people on the planet. Welcome to the tip-top 0.01%.
In a new book, author Jack Russell Weinstein argues that we should pay more attention to Adam Smith’s first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and not allow Smith’s humanitarian pleas for good community be hijacked by libertarians, conservatives or liberals.
Weinstein builds upon Smithian harmony, explaining that while life is not always commercial, it is always communal. Community, in turn, derives its lifeblood from “imagination,” because imagination creates the capacity for sympathy. Unlike Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers, Smith “presumes human difference” as a necessary and inherent aspect of civilization, rejecting the Kantian ideal of “noncontextual normativity.” Smith recognized that cultural, temporal, and social differences shaped norms and values, making it impossible to create a single, all-inclusive norm of human behavior. This is why sympathy is so important. It offers a means that is natural to the human condition—our desire to commiserate with our fellow man—to bridge the gap between our differences.
Smith believed that “political society is not derived from a social contract,” according to Weinstein. Instead, society is a natural expression of what it means to be human. The state of nature for Smith is one of community, and the ultimate questions related to human society are questions of morality and virtue, not economics and politics. Thus, a broad, morally robust education rooted in a particular community is essential to forming sympathetic individuals. While Smith did not idealize the role of education—it could not completely eliminate human selfishness and vanity—he believed it had the power to “direct vanity to proper objects” and to “convert competing passions into a harmonious character.”
[The blog post’s headline should be read with more than a hint of sarcasm; hate to have to explain that.]
Joseph Stalin would have to have been drunk to call the U.S. “healthy,” and to have complimented America’s patriotism, morality and spiritual life. Even then, it would be unlikely. Why does this quote keep circulating?
This has been floating around Tea Party and other shallow venues for a while, but I’ll wager Stalin did not say it:
“America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: Its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within.”
Perhaps more telling: Is it likely that Joe Stalin ever would have called the U.S. “a healthy body?” Stalin was of a school that claimed capitalism was diseased, and America was infested with a soon-to-be terminal case. If he called America “diseased” by patriotism and religion, it would be consistent with other statements, but his calling America healthy for patriotism and spiritual life, it’s inconsistent with other claims he made, about America and about capitalism (see Stalin’s 1929 remonstrance to the U.S. Communist Party, for example).
So, Dear Readers, my request to you: Can you offer the source of this quote, Joseph Stalin or not?
Why would a false claim from Stalin get such a life on the internet?
Update, March 15, 2012: I’m calling this one: It’s a bogus quote. Joseph Stalin didn’t say it. Not as many comments here as e-mails and comments on other discussion boards and Facebook — no one has come even close to anything like the line above from Stalin. No source quoting the line even bothers to give a decade, let alone a year, a location, and a citation that would pass muster in a sophomore high school English class. Tea Partiers, you’ve tried to twist history again — stop it.
Update March 1, 2013: If you’re checking in here studying for a DBQ for an AP class, please tell us in comments, which AP class, and what city you’re in. Thanks.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Barack Obama has managed to tack on a bit over a trillion dollars to the national debt, mostly in a successful effort to keep the U.S. and the world from plunging into a Greater Depression. We haven’t shaken off the harmful effects of the Republican assault on capitalism during the previous years’ assaults on the Constitution, science, education and other American institutions.
But in the alternate universe of conservative thought, Obama’s put $15 trillion in new debts on the books. Being off by a factor of 10 to 15 is an accomplishment worthy of someone wholly unconnected with reality. That would be Victor Davis Hanson in this case. Not sure why, but some search took me to a blog called The Clue Batting Cage — batting away clues to reality is a sport to them, I suppose. There I found this post:
Despite nearly $15 trillion in federal debt, the administration apparently wants to defy the rules of logic and do more of what made things worse in the first place, under the euphemism of “investments.” American popular culture has coined all sorts of proverbial warnings about such mindless devotion to destructive rote: “Don’t flog a dead horse,” “If you are in a hole, stop digging,” and “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
No matter: The administration still adheres to the logical fallacy that the toxic medicine cannot be proven to be useless or harmful, because there was supposedly never enough of it given. And the proof is that the worsening patient is still not quite dead. : That there is never enough spending is a seductive fallacy because it never requires any empirical proof: If millions of those supported by the state have lost their self-reliance and self-initiative, perhaps it is because millions supported by the state were not supported well enough, and so in response, some resorted to stealing things they could not afford.
How many others could possibly be with these yahoos, looking through the telescope backwards?
Looking through a telescope the wrong way. Unknown source.
It’s difficult to reconcile the idea of someone who recommends Bob Park’s blog, and approves of Victor Hanson’s blather at the same time.
But then I look closer. You missed the boat completely. You didn’t even recommend the right Bob Park, but some imposter named Parks. You missed reality by one letter.
Reality is not an opinion, not that I expect you’ll ever change your opinion on that.
Lay off of Morgan’s blog for a while, maybe read some science or something. You may not feel better in the morning, but soon, and for the rest of your life.
9:38 PM
The author complains that my comments are too acid, and that the National Science Foundation is a “government site.”
If you call a private foundation the government supports, independent from the government by design to keep its advice unbiased, does that make it a government site?
A wise person said that you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t get to by reason in the first place. That’s the problem with the Tea Party in the first place. It’s also the problem in the second place, and the third place, and on all issues.
To the Tea Party mindset, they are all five-legged dogs.
Tea Party’s five-legged dog, by Esther Derby.com
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum’s reluctant grip on reality appeared to be vanishing fast in a stop in Iowa, Thursday. He said America’s schools are for indoctrination of students, and he doesn’t like the current round of indoctrination.
Geeze, this ought to be in The Onion. Is Santorum really this disconnected from America and life? Are there actually people out there who don’t look around for the guys in the white clothes with straight jackets and nets when they hear him say this stuff?
I don’t generally cite to The Huffington Post, but when the warning claxons go off, you ought to see if there’s danger before dismissing them as error:
Rick Santorum woos voters in Orange City, Iowa - Des Moines Register photo
During a stop in Iowa on Thursday, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum said that “schools indoctrinate our children,” the Des Moines Registerreports.
“You wonder why young people can vote and flock for a guy like Barack Obama and say, if you look at the surveys, that socialism is better than capitalism — well, that’s because they don’t understand America,” he explained, according to the Register. “I said ‘indoctrination’ and I meant it,” he said.
What survey does he have that claims any group in America, other than the Tea Party or the American Communist Party, say socialism is better than capitalism? Since curricula in every state teach the opposite, the existence of such a poll would be powerful evidence of critical thinking powers in students that most teachers would not attest to.
Maybe more important, perhaps we should worry about just what all those thousands of nice Baptist ladies are teaching our kids in Texas, eh? Not to mention the Lutheran ladies in Iowa. Santorum is sniping at teachers, but if you look at the demographics, it makes little sense. Teachers are, like the rest of America, about 90% Christian, God-fearing, flag-waving American patriots.
Well, nothing Santorum says makes much sense, does it? Santorum lent support to the War on Education.
Santorum argued that the country’s education system is leaving students with an insufficient grasp of history. His remarks come with the widely-anticipated Ames Straw poll — a table-setter event for next year’s Iowa caucuses — less than two weeks away.
What in the hell do the schools in Ames, Iowa, look like, that Santorum can say that stuff about them?
By the way, if people learned history accurately in high school, Rick Santorum wouldn’t stand a chance in any election today. But I digress.
The Des Moines Register article adds the details that Santorum made note of recent testing that shows American kids don’t know enough about American history — always the case, by the way — and that a college prof from Kansas said he gives his students the test required of immigrants applying for citizenship, and most can’t pass the test.
I’m game: Let’s give the test to Santorum. If he doesn’t pass, though, we can’t deport him. We have no vehicles capable of getting to Mars.
HP offers information that may explain Santorum’s insanity: The same article notes he’s touring Iowa in two vans with his seven children. In this heat?
Does the Iowa division of child protective services know about this? How about the division that worries about children torturing their parents?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
That’s not just irresponsible and sloppy: Boortz clearly has a grudge and will tell any falsehood to push his agenda of hatred.
Birds of a feather: Texas deficit champion Rick Perry, who refused to talk about his $18 billion deficit in Texas, with Neil Boortz, who spread a hoax about Hillary Clinton in 2008, and now spreads old hoaxes about President Obama.
Boortz posts this at his site, probably as a warning for what his philosophy of reporting is:
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it.”
Frederic Bastiat
Just before Thanksgiving last year, a J. P. Morgan official wrote a humorous piece of conjecture for his weekly newsletter — a week when most of the markets in the U.S. were closed, and so there was little news. Michael Cembalest, the chief investment officer for J. P. Morgan, without serious research wrote a piece wondering about what he saw as a lack of private sector experience in Obama’s cabinet in those positions in Cembalest’s view that are concerned most with job creation.
The spin meisters at American Enterprise Institute abused Cembalest’s rank conjectures as a “research report,” created a hoax saying Obama’s cabinet is the least qualified in history, and the thing went viral among otherwise ungainfully-employed bloggers (a lot like Neil Boortz).
Last year J.P. Morgan thought it might be interesting to look into the private sector experience of Obama’s Cabinet. America, after all, was in the middle of an economic disaster and the thought was that the president might actually look to some people with a record of success in the private sector for advice. So a study is done comparing Obama’s Cabinet to the cabinets of presidents going back to 1900. secretaries of State, Commerce, Treasury, Agriculture, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Energy and Housing and Urban Development were included. The J.P Morgan study looked at the percentages of cabinet members with prior private sector experience, and the results were amazing.
The presidential cabinet with the highest percentage of private sector experience was that of Dwight Eisenhower at around 58%. The lowest — until Obama — was Kennedy at about 28%. The average ran between 35% and 40% … until, as I said, Obama. Care to guess what percentage of Obama’s cabinet has prior private sector experience? Try 7%.
All totaled, Obama’s cabinet is one of the certifiably most brainy, most successful and most decorated of any president at any time. His cabinet brings extensive and extremely successful private sector experience coupled with outstanding and considerable successful experience in government and elective politics.
AEI’s claim that the cabinet lacks private sector experience is astoundingly in error, with 77% of the 22 members showing private sector experience — according to the [standards of the] bizarre chart [from AEI], putting Obama’s cabinet in the premiere levels of private sector experience. The chart looks more and more like a hoax that AEI fell sucker to — and so did others.
Boortz is eight months late, and the whole truth short. Shame on him.
Not just false stuff — old, moldy false stuff. Atlantans, and all Americans, deserve better reporting, even from hack commentators.
_____________
Coda: Sage advice, but . . .
Boortz includes this warning on his website:
ALWAYS REMEMBER
Don’t believe anything you read on this web page, or, for that matter, anything you hear on The Neal Boortz Show, unless it is consistent with what you already know to be true, or unless you have taken the time to research the matter to prove its accuracy to your satisfaction. This is known as “doing your homework.”
Great advice — but no excuse for sloppy reporting. He should follow his own rule. On this piece, Boortz didn’t do his homework in any fashion. He’s turning in somebody else’s crap, without reading it in advance, it appears.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
With these new Social Studies TEKS, TX students won’t know what such a
book is about.
Small bit of humor from a truly sad situation. One of the leaders of the Texas State Soviet of Education defended the evisceration and defenestration of social studies standards saying they didn’t need to listen to liberal college professors.
In economics, the professor was a conservative, well-respected economics professor from Texas A&M University, one of the most conservative state universities in the nation (with a Corps of Cadets numbering in the thousands and tradition deeper than Palo Duro Canyon and broader than the Gulf of Mexico). Calling these people “liberal” is tantamount to complaining about the communism espoused by Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower — that is, it demonstrates a divorce from reality and rationality.
In the grand scheme of things it’s not a huge problem, but it’s more than a trifle. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to fully comprehend market economics in the U.S. without understanding what capitalism is, and how it works. Teachers will be left to find their own materials to explain “free enterprise” and, if the students ever make it into a real economics course in college, they will discover “free enterprise” is a quaint, political term that is not discussed in serious economics circles. Texas students will, once again, be pushed to the hindmost by Don McLeroy’s odd views of America and what he doesn’t want Americans to know.
For example, look at the Council for Economic Education — while “capitalism” is not the only word they use for market-based economies, you’ll have a tougher time finding any definition of “free enterprise.” Or, more telling, look at the Advanced Placement courses, or the International Baccalaureate courses. AP and IB courses are the most academically rigorous courses offered in American high schools. The Texas TEKS step away from such rigor, however (while the Texas Education Agency rides Texas schools to add rigor — go figure). IB courses talk a lot about enterprise, but they don’t censor “capitalism,” nor do they pretend it’s not an important concept.
At the very conservative and very good Library of Economics and Liberty (which every social studies teacher should have bookmarked and should use extensively), a search for “free enterprise” produces 77 entries (today). “Capitalism” produces almost ten times as much, with more than 750 listings.
Which phrase do you think is more useful in studying American economics, history and politics?
Teachers will deal with it. It’s one more hurdle to overcome on the path to trying to educate Texas students. It’s one more roadblock to their learning what they need to keep the freedom in America.
Capitalism - Warren Buffett - BusinessWeek image
Free Enterprise - Bernie Madoff
The real difference? Literature on capitalism frequently address the issue of moral investments, and the need for some regulation to bolster the Invisible Hand in producing discipline to steer markets from immoral and harmful investments. The essential history politics economic question of the 20th and 21st centuries is, can economic freedom exist without political freedom, and which one is more crucial to the other? We know from every period of chaos in history when governments did not function well, but bandits did, that free enterprise can exist without either political freedom or economic freedom. I think of it like this:
Capitalism
Free Enterprise
Adam Smith
Blackbeard the Pirate
Warren Buffett
Bernie Madoff
Investing
Spending
Building institutions
Taking profits
Retail
Robbery
Wholesale
Extortion
Save for a rainy day
debt-equity swap
Antitrust enforcement to keep markets fair
Don’t get caught, hope for acquittal
Milton Friedman
P. T. Barnum
Ludwig von Mises
Charles Ponzi
Friedrich von Hayek
Richard Cheney, “deficits don’t matter”
Paul Krugman
Kato Kaelin
Stockholders
Victims and suckers
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Here’s an education and Texas issue I’ve not done justice to: The Texas State Board of Education is working to gut social studies curricula in Texas, with a special vent on history, which they appear to think is not fundamentalist Christian enough, and economics, where they think “capitalism” is, somehow, a dirty word.
Do I exaggerate? Very little, if at all. Really.
There’s a lot to say. I may have another post on it this week. In the meantime, the indefatigable Texas Freedom Network works to organize for the hearing on the issue in January. SBOE hopes it will be a quiet, non-confrontational meeting, and they will do whatever they can to prevent Texans from telling them to have good history standards that make great students. So it’s important that you speak up — especially if you’re a Texan. Here’s what TFN said in an e-mail alert:
Make Your Voice Heard at January Public Hearing
The process of revising social studies curriculum standards for Texas public schools is moving into a critical stage. And a public hearing the board has scheduled for January may be the only opportunity for you to speak out against the far right’s efforts to corrupt standards for history, government and other social studies classes.
The final drafts of the proposed standards prepared by writing teams made up of teachers, academics and other community members are reflective of mainstream academic scholarship in the various subject areas. It is clear that members of these writing teams largely resisted intense political pressure from far right, rejecting attempts to remove key civil rights figures and make other politically motivated revisions. (See the Background section at the bottom of this e-mail for a more detailed account of the politicization of this curriculum process.)
The State Board of Education so far has scheduled only one public hearing on the proposed standards. That hearing is likely to occur either on January 13 or January 14 in Austin.
If you are interested in speaking at the hearing, pleaseclick here. TFN will help you register to speak before the board and be an effective voice against efforts to politicize our children’s classrooms.
This may be the only opportunity the board provides for Texans to speak out on the proposed standards. If we are to prevent far-right SBOE members from turning social studies classrooms into tools for promoting political agendas, then it’s critical that the board hears from people like you! Click here to sign up for more information on how to testify in January.
Background on Social Studies Review Process to Date
Earlier this year, TFN exposed and derailed several attempts by the far right to hijack the social studies curriculum revision process. Members of the state board – or their appointees to review panels and writing teams – tried at various times to:
Remove civil rights champions like César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall from the standards, calling them poor examples of citizenship
Turn Joseph McCarthy – who discredited himself and dishonored Congress with his infamous Red-baiting smear campaign in the 1950s – into an American hero
Rewrite history and portray America’s Founders as intending to establish a Christian nation with laws based on a fundamentalist reading of the Bible
Members of the writing teams largely rejected these fringe ideas in the final drafts of the standards they submitted to the board. Chávez and Marshall remain in the curriculum. The American history standards do not whitewash the damaging history of McCarthyism. And under the proposed standards students would still learn that the Founders created a nation in which all people are free to worship – or not – as they choose without coercion or interference by government.
We must ensure that the board adopts curriculum standards that reflect mainstream academic scholarship in social studies. This is vitally important because the results of this decision will be reflected in the next generation of social studies textbooks around the country.
High school sophomores in Texas study world history, and juniors study U.S. history. At 16 and 17 years old, they have difficulty figuring out the fuss over the Berlin Wall. It’s just pictures in their textbook.
The Wall was already three or four years gone when they were born. They don’t remember living with the Soviet Union at all — it’s been Russia to them for their entire lives.
I have some hopes that the celebrations set for this week will aid their understanding, on the 20th anniversary of the breaching and destruction of the wall.
Caption from CBC: "Dominoes are placed where the Berlin Wall once stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate in the German capital. (Herbert Knosowski/Associated Press)"
About 1,000 plastic foam dominoes will fall to the ground Monday along the route where the Berlin Wall once stood to mark the 20th anniversary of the crumbling of the Cold War barrier.
The 2.3-metre-high blocks, painted by schoolchildren, stretch for 1.5 kilometres in a path near the Brandenburg Gate and the German parliament.
Former Polish leader Lech Walesa, whose pro-democracy movement Solidarity played a key role in ending communism in Eastern Europe, will tip the first domino at 8 p.m. local time.
I made one visit to the wall, late on a night in 1988. American Airlines explored the possibility of taking over the service authorized from Munich to Berlin. Soviet and East German rules required passenger flights to stay at a very uncomfortable 10,000 feet. Pan Am had the route, but Pan Am was in trouble. We spent a day with Berlin airport authorities and real estate agents trying to figure out how to set up a reservations office and other ground facilities. European airports tended to force foreign carriers to share gate facilities, which was a problem, and we devoted a lot of time to gathering data for computer lines.
But then, after a smashing dinner of sausage and German-style potatoes in a great, small Berlin pub, we talked our taxi driver into giving us a tour of the wall. He drove a spot near the Brandenburg gate, and there on a chain link fence keeping westerners from the wall were eight fresh wreaths. Eight people had died trying to cross from East Berlin to West Berlin in the previous six months. One wreath for each death.
Just over a year later, the Berlin Wall itself would be gone.
West Berlin acted much like a normal, western European city. But the wall was there as a constant reminder of the oppression on the other side, a dull fog to constantly dim even the sunniest day.
Old posts on the Berlin Wall here at the bathtub are suddenly popular — usually they get a lot of hits after March when U.S. schools get to the post-World War II era, the Cold War and the Berlin airlift. I imagine the current popularity has something to do with the anniversary.
I hope somebody has some great video of the dominoes toppling.
Dominoes acerbicly note the irony: While the U.S. feared nations would fall under communism in a “domino effect,” especially in Southeast Asia (Indochina), communism broke up in a domino effect, as one communist-dominated country after another found freedom near the end of the Cold War. Why has no one done a serious essay on the domino effect of freedom?
Italian economist, engineer and political activist Vilfredo Pareto was born on July 15, 1848, in Paris, where his father had fled due to political difficulties.
Pareto should be more famous, for his explanation of the 80/20 rule, and for his contribution to making better things, the Pareto chart. Many economic texts ignore his work almost completely.
The Pareto index is a measure of the inequality of income distribution.
The Pareto chart is a special type of histogram, used to view causes of a problem in order of severity from largest to smallest. It is a statistical tool that graphically demonstrates the Pareto principle or the 80-20 rule.
Great idea. Really. There’s a lot of campaign stuff left over. Rather than dump it, they’re selling it cheap.
Image from the Obama campaign site, June 2009
Government and politics teachers can stock up on the stuff to decorate the room. AP Government teacher Mrs. Richie, at Duncanville High School had a collection of bumperstickers that went back 30 years before she retired (where did that collection go?)
Over at Republican National Headquarters, they’re having a sale on politicians, I hear. Entire Congressional committee minorities, cheap. Izzat so? Not really. Really?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
In October, a Portland real estate blogger picked up on the post at Strange Maps. His post related information — but in the comments, one fellow urged we sell off the lands. Oregon has a good amount of land held in trust by federal agencies, but it’s far from the the highest percentage. Oregon has benefited from public lands more than many other states. Who would suggest selling off assets?
The Capitalist Digest — which misappropriates Jefferson’s warning to the clergy (famously engraved around the rotunda of the Jefferson Memorial, but I digress) — displayed a remarkable lack of historic perspective and a unfamiliarity with capitalist property law, declaring that the federal government’s holding lands in trust was one of the things Marx and Engels wished to see (November 10, not a week after the election). Had Marx and Engels actually meant that wise land stewardship was something to be striven for, that public lands should be used to the public good, they would have been in the bosom of capitalism when they did so (I suspect they were not in favor of poor stewardship.) The Capitalist Digest would urge burning Milton Friedman and Jesus Christ if their names had appeared in the Communist Manifesto. This is not a bunch that works on principles and reason. Under U.S. law, federal land management is not communist at all with small exceptions made to support American cattlemen, sheep ranchers and mineral and oil extractors, and I doubt that the Capitalist Digest really intended to indict American oil producers, miners and livestock operations. The Capitalist Digest blames their insanity on Robert Higgs at the Independent Institute, as if The Capitalist Digest can’t make up their own minds.
None of these sites gives any serious thought to the idea. None provides a scintilla of an iota of analysis to indicate it would be a good idea.
As one of the the principal spokesmen for the Sagebrush Rebellion in the early days, I want it known that I’ve thought these issues through, and argued them through, and followed the documentation for 30 years (Holy frijole! I’m old!). Issues with public lands revolve around stewardship. Bad stewardship is not improved by a change in ownership. Ownership change has all too often only led to worse stewardship. Selling off the public lands is a generally stupid idea.
Certain local circumstances change the nature of a tiny handful of such deals — but not often, not in many places, and not enough to make a significant contribution to retiring any debt the federal government owns.
It’s troubling that such a flurry of stupidity strikes now, during a transition of presidents. This is how stupid ideas get traction, like kudzu on a cotton farm, while no one is paying deep attention. Let’s put this idea back into its coffin with a sagebrush stake in its heart.
Update 2014: The original GSA map showing percentages of federal holdings in each state (including Indian Reservations as federal holdings), as published in Strange Maps when it was still active.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Struck in Traffic works to lay claim to the title of King of the Economics Carnival with his bi-weekly American Economics Blog Carnival. Two editions since I last posted on it (though I confess, I visited a couple of other occasions thinking I would post).
For those correspondents who argue with me that the U.S. faces a crisis of turning to socialism, I invite you to find either posts advocating socialist policies (5-years plans, anyone?), or from obviously Marxist or socialist economists. Tell us what you find in comments, please, I dare you.
And I wonder: Do students learn the meaning of the word “sepulchre” anymore? Would they get the reference to a “white sepulchre?”
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 