For the last several years, El Cabrero has been painstakingly crawling through several volumes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I'm now within 200 pages of the end.

 It's been kind of a chore, the literary equivalent of heavy lifting, but it has been rewarded by flashes of brilliance, wit and that great 18th century turn of a phrase. Here's an example of the latter. The occasion is his contemplation of the speed with which the discovery of gunpowder increased the destructiveness of war:

If we contrast the rapid progress of this  mischievous discovery with the slow and laborious advances of reason, science, and the arts of peace, a philosopher, according to his temper, will laugh or weep at the folly of mankind.

Roger that.

BETTER BUT NOT GOOD. Here's Krugman on the latest jobs report.

CITIZENS (NOT) UNITED. E.J. Dionne writes about a really bad court decision here.

DITTO THIS. Here's the Charleston Gazette calling on the legislature to create a mineral tax trust fund for the future.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

An idea for the future

The WV Center on Budget and Policy has been making noise for a while now about how our state can position itself to benefit for the long haul from extractive industries by creating a permanent mineral tax trust fund.

The basic idea is pretty simple, although it could be done in many different ways: set aside a portion of severance taxes for the fund, allow it to build over time and use the interest to fund vital projects. Several states, mostly out west, have already done this and are reaping the benefits.

As a new report from the Center on the subject argues,

Without a permanent fund, the economic benefit from the natural resource extraction will decline along with the natural resources themselves.

A bill to do something like that has been introduced in the state senate, where it was sponsored by senate president Jeff Kessler. Here's hoping the bill makes it. Forward thinking like this is long overdue in West Virginia.

As I've said before in an op-ed for the Gazette, if WV had done something like this decades ago with coal, the southern part of the state might look like Shangri-la by now.