Who'd a thunk it?

This is a bit of a surprise. The New York Times recently reported that the business group Standard & Poor's recently released a report arguing that inequality in the US is threatening economic growth.

According to the Times,

The fact that S.&P., an apolitical organization that aims to produce reliable research for bond investors and others, is raising alarms about the risks that emerge from income inequality is a small but important sign of how a debate that has been largely confined to the academic world and left-of-center political sources is becoming more mainstream.

The full report is here. I like the last lines:

The challenge now is to find a path toward more sustainable growth, an essential part of which, in our view, is pulling more Americans out of poverty and bolstering the purchasing power of the middle class. A rising tide lifts all boats...but a lifeboat carrying a few, surrounded by many treading water, risks capsizing.

So like when will they get here?

There was an interesting item in Politico a day or so ago by Nick Hanauer, an "unapologetic capitialist." It was basically a warning to "my fellow zillionaires" that there is a limit to the amount of inequality and exploitation the American people are willing to put up with.

Here's a sample:

..the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.

And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.\

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

Hanauer predicts something on the order of 21st century peasants with pitchforks, metaphorically speaking. So far, I haven't seen a whole lot of signs of that.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, here's Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz arguing that the level of inequality we have today aren't inevitable but are the result of political decisions.

A new state song

Readers of Goat Rope may recall that El Cabrero has launched an unofficial campaign to change the state motto of WV from "Mountaineers are always free" to "You can't make this **** up." I haven't gotten it on the state seal yet, but I'm told these things take time.

Earlier this week, whilst on a daylong road trip, an idea for another state song came to mind. Our main one is one I like, "The West Virginia Hills." Recently, "Take Me Home, Country Roads" as popularized by John Denver, gained semi-official status as well. Aside from the fact that the scenery it describes in the first verse applies mainly to Virginia, I'm not too crazy about that one.

My more serious nominee for at least semi-official song status seems particularly fitting when you consider our recent and more distant past, with things like chemical spills, mine disasters, industrial accidents, exploitation, and poverty. It's Bruce Springsteen's Badlands. Here's the chorus:

Badlands, you gotta live it everyday
Let the broken hearts stand
As the price you've gotta pay
We'll keep pushin' till it's understood
and these badlands start treating us good

I'm still pushing--and so are plenty of my friends and comrades. We haven't quite got there yet.

SPEAKING OF BADLANDS, here's an interesting essay on some and the economy that made them that way.

BAD ECONOMICS. Here's one from Krugman on how we took the wrong path.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Of the Future Fund, pronunciation, lite beer, and sacred honor

I mentioned in earlier posts that I went to North Dakota with several members of the WV legislature to study that state's Legacy Fund, a permanent mineral trust fund from taxes collected from the oil and gas boom up there. (Note: El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia did not pay for my part of the trip.)

Regular readers will recall that I have been working with allies to build support for creating a Future Fund in West Virginia from severance taxes for the last few years. It's a way of turning the extraction of non-renewable resources into a permanent source of wealth for the state.

I learned several things while up  there. One was how to pronounce the name of the city of Minot. I was guessing something like "minnow" or "minute" but it was "my knott." Another takeaway was to drink light beers if one is trying to keep up with the boys.

But I digress...

Back on topic, I heard an eloquent argument about the importance of preparing for the future as a matter of honor from North Dakota Republican state Senator Dwight Cook, who chairs the Finance and Taxation Committee. He told me that we should follow the example of the founders who signed the Declaration of Independence. He argued that the signers weren't acting simply to benefit themselves but rather those who came after. He then talked about how in the last lines of that document they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. He concluding by saying that of those three, you only get to take the last one to the grave.

So there.

SPEAKING OF THE FUTURE FUND, here's some coverage from WV Public Broadcasting and the Daily Mail.

JOB KILLING TECHNOLOGY considered here.

A FAVORITE TARGET OF MINE gets whacked here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

OK

As thousands of Boy Scouts converge on West Virginia, some conspiracy theorists apparently believe that the WV National Guard is part of an evil plot to expand government power. Some of these folks also believe that the government was behind the Boston Marathon bombings. I think the idea is that the Guard or some other conspirator would do something bad that would create a state of emergency that could be exploited.

I guess one advantage of making such predictions is that if they don't happen you can claim credit for stopping them.

LESS WHACKED BUT STILL BAD. Here's a look at some bad economic ideas that are damaging the country.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, the city of Charleston WV is on the verge of getting more farmer-friendly with a new urban agriculture ordinance. 

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Working Man Blues

One of my favorite songs from Bob Dylan's 2006 album Modern Times is the one featured today, Working Man Blues. I found a nice version on YouTube with pictures of working people and their struggles.

That's the musical version. For the statistical one, check out this blog post from the WV Center on Budget and Policy. It shows the different ways the condition of working people in my state has eroded over the years.

As Dylan says, in this struggle, "you can hang  back or fight your best on the front line"--but we could use some help on the front line right about now.

Water and meditation

The theme at Goat Rope these days, with some interruptions, is Moby-Dick and why everyone who hasn't should drop everything and read it. Or listen to a good recording of it. Or do either one again if one already has.

Here's another reason to do it: Melville says things in there that many of us have already thought or felt, only he says it  better. Or maybe he articulates something that was always in us, if somewhat vague and unformed.

Here's an example (and we're still in Chapter 1). Ever since I was a kid, I was drawn to water. Creeks, rivers, ponds, lakes, and the occasional ocean. Even a good mud puddle will do in a pinch. The absence of water, as in a drought, feels to me like the hatred of God. There's something soothing and calming about it.  Sometimes I just want to gaze at it and do nothing.

Ishmael put it way better:

Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries- stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

COALFIELD BLUES. Here's a great AP story on hard times in the coalfields.

TALKING SENSE AGAIN on the economy is Paul Krugman.

SPEAKING OF WHITE WHALES, this one can imitate human speech.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A mighty theme

It's been a long time since I've gone off on a long literary jag, but I feel one coming on now. And the topic is...you guessed it...Moby-Dick. I have hit on that book now and then but am finally up to the challenge of really rolling in it. I was prompted by two events.

First, I found my old, beat up and highlighted copy of the book where it had been lingering in my daughter's house. Second, I listened to Nathaniel Philbrick's Why Read Moby-Dick?, which reminded me how much I love it. I think I can come up with more reasons than he did as to why the book is worth many a read.

As Melville said, "To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it." Perhaps the same can be said of blog posts. While I'm not sure that my series on Moby will be mighty, I can think of no mightier book to base one on.

Consider yourselves forewarned, shipmates.

INCOME INEQUALITY may be a bar to economic growth.

THE WRECKING CREW. Bad economists as WMDs?

THE TRAVAILS OF TRUE LOVE are especially hard for this ancient lizard.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

For a future that works

I've written a lot here lately about how West Virginia needs to create a Future Fund from mineral severance taxes to create a permanent source of wealth from non-renewable resources. The idea seems to be pretty sticky, as the expression goes. Here's a report from WV Public Radio on the idea.

AN ECONOMY FOR EVERYBODY? Here are some ideas about what one might look like.

REMEMBERING GORE VIDAL. Here's a word from his literary executor. By the way, if you haven't tried them, I highly recommend his novels on American history, beginning with Burr on up through the 20th century.

MORE CLIMATE CHANGE STUFF TO DENY here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Frack-a-delic

"Externalities" is an economics term that is often forgotten by worshipers of the market god. An externality is a kind of market failure, an example of a situation in which markets aren't efficient. The most troubling kind is a negative externality, which occurs when the costs of a particular kind of business aren't borne by either the buyer or seller and don't show up on the bottom line. Instead, they are passed on to someone else, often the public, which typically has to clean up the mess if it is going to be cleaned up at all.

I kept thinking about negative externalities while driving around Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling in northern WV. One example are the roads that are chewed up by heaving trucks hauling equipment in and out. Then there is the carbon emitted from the wells and drilling and transport process. Then there are all the nasty chemicals that show up in air, water, and solid waste. Then there is the noise pollution and diminished quality of life for people who live near the operations. Then, what kind of health effects are going to show up down the road? Etc.

People--lots of people--who didn't benefit from the market transaction are going to be paying for this for a long time to come. I know this drilling is going to be done, but I don't think we've gone far enough in regulating it and I don't think anyone yet has any idea what the long term consequences are going to be.


WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? Support for the war in Afghanistan is at an all time low.


A PARADIGM SHIFT in global economic thinking? Maybe, but it hasn't hit here yet.

IN POLITICS, who needs facts?

WHAT ABOUT GOLIATH? An archaeological dig in Israel may shed like on biblical King David's time.

I WANT ONE. Scientists have discovered fossils of a "mini-mammoth" that stood about three feet high.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Mondegreens are us

“Mondegreen” is a term coined by Sylvia Wright for what happens when we mis-hear song lyrics. The word originated when Wright misunderstood the lyrics of an old ballad which she believed contained the lines that said

They have slain the Earl O' Moray,

And Lady Mondegreen.

The real second line said

“and laid him on the green.”

I think most people have come up with their share of Mondegreens, consciously or otherwise. When the Spousal Unit was a kid, she though the lyrics of Johnny and June Carter Cash’s "Jackson" started by saying “We got married in a peanut” instead of a fever.

El Cabrero, of course, is way above such silly errors. Although there was one time when the Stevie Nicks song “Edge of seventeen” came on the radio and I wondered aloud, “why the hell is she singing about a one-winged dove?”

I’ll bet you’ve got a Mondegreen or two up your sleeves as well, Gentle Reader.

FIXING AMERICA. Here's a review of a book on the topic by one of my favorite economists.

THE WHOLE CORPORATIONS/PEOPLE THING is discussed here. 

DOGS LOVE TO SNIFF IT. But who would have thought this could help killer whales?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Of gardens, winter, death and life

"Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." Those lines from the Gospel of John have been on my mind this weekend, as four generations of my family headed to Columbus for the funeral of my favorite aunt.



(And, yes, we did hit a White Castle on the way home.)




Only a week or so before, I planted garlic in our garden. The idea that anything put under the ground in such wicked weather could sprout, grow and thrive months later seems impossible, but it happens.

I broke up the ground with a spading fork, pushed garlic cloves into the dirt with freezing fingers and covered it liberally with old hay and goat manure. Unless something goes wrong, new life will emerge from dirt and decay.

When I try to think in a purely rational way about what happens to us after the Big Checkout, I've always found it as hard to believe that nothing comes after it as it is to believe that anything comes after it.

In the absence of knowing, I'll stick with Bruce: "Everything dies, baby, that's a fact/but maybe everything that dies some day comes back."

ZOMBIE ECONOMICS. Bad ideas are hard to kill.

LEFT BEHIND. Here's a profile from the Charleston Gazette of a miner who died in Massey's Upper Big Branch mine and the widow he left behind.

NO SHOW. WV's newest senator ducked out of controversial votes on the DREAM Act and repealing don't ask/don't tell.

NEANDERTHALS apparently used human bones as tools.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

That's us in the spot light

Back in the proverbial day, it was a big deal--and usually a bad one--for West Virginia to get any attention in the national media. Usually that happened during one of those recurring periods when the nation "rediscovered" Appalachia.

Now it's a common occurrence for us to be in the national spotlight. There may be several reasons for this, including the following:

*The world is, if not flat, at least smaller;

*Political margins are smaller now as well so that even small states can tip the balance;

*West Virginia and other places in Appalachia are, in my grandmother's words, right smack dab in the middle of major issues like climate change and energy; and

*You couldn't make up the **** that happens here.

I'm thinking maybe the last is the biggie.

BY WAY OF EXAMPLE, here's the New York Times on one of many coal controversies going on.

COOL RANT. Here's Ken Ward in Coal Tattoo taking on one of the legion of climate change science deniers.

HERE WE GO AGAIN. Krugman is not amused by the latest attacks on Social Security.

RETHINKING THE ECONOMY. Here are 10 suggestions.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

May Ceiling Cat be with you

Wu is a true believer.

Off and on lately, Goat Rope has been monitoring the progress (perhaps regress would be a better term) of the Conservative Bible Project, which is attempting to remove its "liberal bias."

(It might be easier with different deities.)

Anyhow, a friend was chasing down related links and came across yet another endeavor, the "lolcat Bible Translation Project," which attempts to translate the same into "kitty pidgin," i.e. the imagined language of cats.

Maybe I've been living under a rock, which is a separate issue, but this was new to me. I've seen some of the lolcat pictures but it never occurred to me that someone would try this. I can't say I've read the whole thing, but I did check out Genesis and the Sermon on the Mount.

Here are the first few lines of the creation story, in which Ceiling Cat makes the world:

Boreded Ceiling Cat makes the world.

1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.

2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.

3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1

The website also contains such items as proofs for the existence of Ceiling Cat.

El Cabrero is not officially sanctioning or recommending this version as canonical. However, the picture of Ceiling Cat making the world is worth a look.

Flying Spaghetti Monster, watch out!

MEANWHILE, Bigfoot fans are searching for Sasquatch in WV's Dolly Sods.

MISMEASURING THE ECONOMY. GDP (gross domestic product) can be a misleading measure, according to top economists.

ALL FRINGE, NO BENEFITS. A new report from the Economic Policy Institute shows the continuing erosion of employer-provided health insurance.

COAL CONCESSIONS. The Senate climate change bill has some, but it's unclear whether these will be enough to garner coal state support.e

SICKNESS UNTO DEATH. What would a day be without pondering Kierkegaard and spiritual despair?

HURTS SO GOOD. This item discusses how athletes can deal with the pain of exertion. I've tried some of these tricks and they seem to help.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Pre-Copernican economics

The astronomer Ptolemy, circa 90-168 AD.

Lately Goat Rope has been looking at some of the flaws of some schools of economic of economic theory, especially those of the market fundamentalist variety with their warped view of humans as organic calculators.

Just as I was about to head once more into the breech, a friend passed on a link to this op-ed from the Washington Post by Harold Meyerson that speaks my mind. Here are the first three paragraphs:

"The worldly philosophers" was economist Robert Heilbroner's term for such great economic thinkers as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. Today's free-market economists, by contrast, aren't merely not philosophers. They're not even worldly.

Has any group of professionals ever been so spectacularly wrong? Pre-Copernican astronomers and cosmologists, I suppose, and for the same reason, really: They had an entire, internally consistent, theoretically rich system that described the universe. They were wrong -- the sun and other celestial bodies save the moon didn't actually revolve around the Earth, as they insisted -- but no matter. It was a thing of beauty, their cosmic order. A vast faith was sustained in part by their pseudo-science, a faith from which such free thinkers as Galileo deviated at their own risk.

As it was with the pre- (or anti-) Copernicans, so it is with today's mainstream economists. Theirs is an elegant system, a thing of beauty in itself, as the New York Times' Paul Krugman has argued. It just fails to jell with reality. And unlike the pre-Copernicans, whose dogma posed a threat to those who challenged it but not, at least directly, to anyone else, their latter-day equivalents in the economic profession pose a clear and present danger to the well-being of damned near everyone.

The rest is here and methinks it's well worth reading.

IT'S NOT OVER YET. Support for a public option in health care reform is high despite Tuesday's vote in the Senate finance committee.

WHACKADOODLES revisited.

THE OFFICE-CAR is a dangerous place.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Humans and Econs

One of the cherished ideas (I don't want to degrade the word "myths") of neo-classical economics is that of humans as profit-seeking organic calculators hardwired to act rationally to maximize material self-interest. We can call homo economicus for short.

One problem with this idea is that not a whole lot of such creatures live on this planet. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, authors of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, distinguish between Humans (most of us) and Econs (the mostly imaginary creatures found in economic textbooks). As they put it,

...Whether or not they have ever studied economics, many people seem at least implicitly committed to the idea of homo economicus, or economic man--the notion that each of us thinks and chooses unfailingly well, and thus fits within the textbook picture of human beings offered by economists.

If you look at economics textbooks, you will learn that homo economicus can think like Albert Einstein, store as much memory as IBM's Big Blue, and exercise the willpower of Mahatma Gandhi. Really. But the folks that we know are not like that. Real people have trouble with long division if they don't have a calculator, sometimes forget their spouse's birthday, and have a hangover on New Year's Day. They are not homo economicus; they are homo sapiens. To keep our Latin usage to a minimum we will hereafter refer to these imaginary and real species as Econs and Humans.

The growing field of behavioral economics has shed light on the vast difference between imaginary Econs and real Humans. More on that to come.

PARANOIA REVISITED. This op-ed on political paranoia by yours truly, known informally on this blog as Whackadoodle-ism, appeared in yesterday's Sunday Gazette-Mail and on Common Dreams.

MOVING ON TO FEAR of health care reform, here's another item from the Gazette.

CLIMATE CASSANDRAS. Here's Paul Krugman's latest.

URGENT DINO-BIRD UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Paranoia strikes deep

Senator Rockefeller speaking at a health care town meeting in Charleston. This one was fairly calm.

The theme at Goat Rope this week has been political paranoia, with a special focus on historian Richard Hofstadter's classic essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." The series was inspired in part by today's Whackadoodle political climate and this summer's wild and wooly health care controversy. If this is your first visit, the series started Monday.

As was discussed earlier, there's nothing necessarily new about political paranoia. Today, the trigger may be health care reform. In the past other targets included Freemasonry, the Roman Catholic Church, communist conspiracies, the United Nations, etc.

Taking the long view of history, Hofstadter believed that the tendency to paranoid worldviews is a constant among some people, usually a small minority. But in periods of social strain or major change, these can sometimes erupt into mass movements and political parties.

(Looks like we lucked out...)

He argued that the adherents of such views seem to suffer whether they win or lose. No victory for them is ever complete. Any loss or setback only seems to confirm their darkest imaginings.

Hofstadter concluded by saying that

“We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”

Here’s hoping the latest flare-up of political paranoia won’t cause too much harm.

WILL IT FINALLY HAPPEN? Here's a Gazette editorial on the history of health care reform efforts.

THE CULT OF THE MARKET GOD that dominated much of the field of economics is given a critical review here by Paul Krugman.

TOOL USING ANIMALS? Chimpanzees use more than one.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Paradigms

The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn hit a home run in 1962 when he published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Part of his theory was that in any given period, people make us of dominant models or paradigms to explain the world.

When problems grow with the older paradigm, some innovators develop alternate paradigms to better account for observations. From time to time, the new model triumphs and the old paradigm is put on the shelf--often after a bitter fights and with some people still clinging to the old.

In American economic history, we've seen three paradigms rise and fall (and maybe rise again). One was the classic idea of lassez faire or unregulated capitalism, in which there was little government interference with the economy--although, as I argued in yesterday's post, in reality the government often intervened on behalf of the wealthy.

It wasn't that bad a model in an age of small, independent producers and a truly competitive economy. But as economic power centralized and as economic crises became more and more serious--and even threatened the survival of capitalism itself--another paradigm emerged.

The new model is associated with the great English economist John Maynard Keynes and it recognized that sometimes markets could totally melt down. Keynes advocated a role for regulation, public investments, and transfer payments to promote economic stability and a rising standard of living for all.

This model was dominant from the New Deal era to the Reagan era and it enjoyed considerable success until the oil-related stagflation of the late 1970s. Meanwhile, there were those who were hostile to the Keynesian paradigm from the beginning, even though it may have saved capitalism from an even more serious crisis in the 1930s.

A coalition of right wing politicians and "free market" economists mounted a political and economic assault, promoting a model that is sometimes called "neo-classical." It called for deregulation, tax cuts, reduction or elimination of the social safety net, etc. and has been the dominant model from around 1980 until the latest economic meltdown.

For the life of me, though, I'm amazed that it lasted this long or took so long to crash. At this moment that paradigm is pretty much dead and it's not clear whether the next one will be a revived and updated Keynesianism or something else. Our situation is like that of the old Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times."

SPEAKING OF KEYNES, here's New Republic writer John B. Judis on the continuing relevance of his ideas.

DEAD ENDERS. Opponents of a the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the economic stimulus package developed by the House and supported by President Obama, are pulling out the stops and plugging the failed policies of the past.

COUNTRY MATTERS. Here's an interview with writer Wendell Berry on rural life, community and such.

HERE WE GO AGAIN. WV Supreme Court Justice Brent Benjamin is planning on hearing another case involving Massey Energy. Benjamin, then a political unknown, was elected in 2004 after Massey CEO Don Blankenship spent over $3 million to elect him. The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that questions the propriety of Benjamin participating in cases involving Massey.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, some Mingo County residents are going to sue Massey for polluting their water with coal sludge.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Whose nanny state?

The theme at Goat Rope these days is the bankruptcy of "conservative" economic theory, which is pretty clear these days. But before getting there, I think it's a good idea to clear up some misconceptions.

One such is the idea that progressives want to use the government to redistribute wealth, while those who call themselves conservative believe in leaving it to "the market."

As the economist Dean Baker has pointed out over and over again, the reality is that both use the government to redistribute wealth. The main difference is that the former use it to distribute wealth upward and the latter prefer to use it to benefit those with low or moderate incomes--and this has been true for well over a century.

As Baker points out in his free web book The Conservative Nanny State (linked above), there are any number of ways that state power has been used to spread the wealth upward. These include:

*chartering corporations. These were not present from the day of creation. In fact, corporations are legal entities recognized by governments which protect investors from legal liabilities and enjoy the same legal rights as persons. If a sole proprietor or partnership incurs serious debts or liabilities, the owners are responsible for the whole thing. Corporations protect investors by limiting what they can lose if things go south.

*issuing patents, which give some businesses an artificial monopoly for a period of time as a reward for innovation. I'm not debating the value of the idea, just pointing out that in a really free market system, people would be free to make knock offs of inventions and sell them for less than those who came up with them.

*using state power to break strikes and thwart labor organizing.

*using tax policy to impose relatively heavier burdens on labor than on investment income.

The list could go on and on but you get the idea.

STIMULATE US. If your congressperson is sitting on the fence about the American Renewal and Reinvestment Act, which would help those hardest hit by the recession and help get things moving again, this would be a good time to give them a nudge.

RESTORING THE BALANCE. Here's Robert Reich on the role unions can play in rebuilding the middle class--but we'll need the Employee Free Choice Act to get there.

MILITARY MARRIAGES are often another casualty of war.

SCIENCE IS BACK, which is probably a good thing.

URGENT SPITTING COBRA UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

One step, then another

The Andes Mountains. Not the best place to crash land. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope lately is hard times and how to get through them, a topic to which I will return next week.

Speaking of which, if you think you've got troubles, I highly recommend Edward E. Leslie's Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls: True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors. It is from that book that I came across the Best Advice Ever for dealing with tough times, one that I suggest committing to memory. It makes a pretty good mantra when you need it.

The words come from Henri Guillaumet, a pilot whose plane ran out of fuel in a snowstorm in the Andes. He managed (barely) to survive pain, cold and lots of other nasty stuff. Speaking from bitter experience, he gave this advice:

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.

LESS IS MORE. Getting by with less stuff may not be a totally bad thing.

PRIMING THE PUMP. Here's economist Dean Baker on president-elect Obama's economic stimulus plan.

MISTAKES WERE MADE. In this article, economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz outlines the bad economic policies that led to the current mess.

LET THEM EAT NASTY STUFF. Some possible good news: bacteria that like to eat toxic gunk could help revive dead zones in the world's oceans.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED