Ginny

Perhaps an indication of why the very rich and very poor tend to lean left and the middle right might be reflected in a report by Chris Myers for the “Small Business Survival Committee”, a townhall member organization. (Thanks to Captain’s Quarters.) Myers argues that Kerry only voted “for” small businesses 13 times out of 101 votes. Not surprisingly, the 101 votes were concerned with affordable health coverage in ways supported by the small business community, tort reform, access to global markets, regulation, government spending on “corporate welfare”, and tax relief.

I don’t know about policy or this group, but the conclusions seem representative of the traditional liberal/conservative (or big government/entrepreneur) split. Myers summarizes:

[S]mall businesses make up more than 99.7 percent of all employers and create 75 percent of the net new jobs in our economy. Small businesses with employees start-up at a rate of over 500,000 per year and create more than 50 percent of the nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP).

In other words, Kerry’s policies on small businesses are no more likely to lower the unemployment rate than are his proposed restrictions on “Benedict Arnold corporations.”

What is an economist’s perspective on Steve Verdon’s “Record Deficit”? (Thanks to Instapundit.) What kind of context do we need for the budget information and what kind of context to understand Verdon? Given the nature of this war (clearly different from WWII), is Verdon’s point useful or irrelevant?

Returning to teaching and trying not to obsess about the tragedies in Russia nor the convention glitz, I’m finding the power and pleasure that narrative has always given me. Narrative and character. We can return to these again and again. But this week, insights come from an increasingly useful source, Steven Pinker. His dialogue with Rebecca Goldstein in Seed discusses the role of character and narrative in terms of literature. My reading is, I am sure, naïve; my training has been in neither philosophy nor science. Still, this interview points to the reasons many of us (in the old days) thought the study of literature was worthwhile. As is often true of Pinker, this interview has the buoyancy we associate with Emerson and Whitman, accepting joyfully the complexity and diversity of experience, always assuming there is an order and significance within the apparently random and hugely various human experiences they embrace. Pinker is certainly not looking backward, but he looks forward with the same optimism and sense of purpose of those old nineteenth century thinkers. The editors choose one of Goldstein’s observations to introduce the essay – one that sounds like Whitman or Emerson: “There’s a sea change throughout the culture. . . We’re allowing ourselves to be stunned by immensity and by our own cognitive incapacities.”

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The least knowledgeable of “Chicago Boyz” asks: The Detroit News’ graphic of the effect of Bush’s tax cuts (via Instapundit) is interesting. Is their observation: “What a victory for compassionate conservatism. Everybody gets an income tax cut, and when it’s all done the rich end up paying proportionately more” accurate, inaccurate, a good thing, a bad one?

The tale of two bicycles, linked by Instapundit and commented on by Volokh, makes broad economic points. Advocates often complain about the punishment meted out to those who prey on the poor. This seems wildly disproportional. It reflects a certain lack of imagination; caught up in the moment, sympathies extend across the room but not across time.

Tangentially, I remembered an experience from the early seventies. My children laugh at our life in Austin before they were born – but now they live in similar places. Then, Austin reflected both red neck and hippy culture and was brought together in that first Willie picnic, at Dripping Springs. There was less of the Yuppie culture that came (and went) with the dot.com boom. We spent our first married years in a house previously rented by a drug dealer. People would show up at odd hours trying to score dope and we were repeatedly robbed, in a petty sort of way. (Once, for instance, a sheet and blanket disappeared from the waterbed, although the other sheet and quilt remained.) We didn’t have much, so it never bothered me. And a nice thing about the old drug dealer was that his incontinent monkey had left the house in such bad repair the landlord repaneled & painted. We loved Austin; it was quirky and fun. Once we started thinking about children, our perspective broadened and lifted. We wanted a bit more control and were willing to take on some responsibility–we needed to grow up.

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