Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Shannon Love So I read this post on Instapundit:
THE S.E.C. spitting in the faces of fans. A roundup from Michael Silence.
What are they thinking?
You know what I first thought when I read that? I thought, “The Securities and Exchange Commission has fans?”
I’ve got to get out more.
[Note: This post is a little dated. The events described have been assigned their place in the leftist narrative and swept under the rug. However, I did promise commenter Tdaxp a detailed explanation of why I thought his view of the Gates affair was dead wrong and this post covers that ground. In any case, the event serves as a powerful example of the hold that predefined narratives have over the minds of leftists.]
The incident between Officer James Crowley and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. demonstrates just what a powerful grip fictional narratives have on the minds of leftists. All the leftists in the country, from the President on down, fervently believe that Crowley acted out of racial animosity but they can’t explain what action of Crowley’s indicates his racial animosity. Instead, they must rely on a narrative shared by the subculture to convince each other that Crowley must be wrong.
From Sweetness and Light [h/t Instapundit]:
And speaking of jobs, according to the Southern Policy Center (a 501c3 “charity”) 990 forms as reported, they received $33,526,228 in 2007. The same form reports that their net assets or fund balances in 2007 were $219,551,849.
Holy farken snit! What the hell is a charity group doing with assets of $219 million dollars on an income of 33 million? What good could they possibly do by sitting on that kind of money?
People need to spend more time researching organizations before they donate. People expect the money they donate to be put to work helping the causes they support, not shoveled into a bank vault somewhere to build up corporate assets. How many people would donate their hard-earned money if they knew that the Southern Policy Center was already sitting on $219 million?
It might be time for a law that requires non-profits to publish their income, assets and even the pay of their top executives in every donation solicitation.
Radio talk show host Mark Levin read my “The Dangers of Decompartmentalized Health Care Spending” on the air last night (8/13/09). You can listen to it online here. It starts at roughly the 75:00 mark and goes to 85:00.
Nifty.
In 1900, most people walked to work, school, shopping and socializing. The percentage of the average household’s budget devoted to transportation was so low that the Census bureau didn’t even bother to collect data on it. Today, the average household spends 21% of its budget on transportation. It’s the second biggest single cost after housing yet people take such spending for granted and easily factor it in to their personal budgets. We do so because transportation costs rose slowly over the course of the last half century while other costs, such as food, decreased. Decade after decade we gradually became used to spending more and more for transportation till now the average middle-class family easily accepts spending several thousand dollars a year in transportation costs.
As a thought experiment, imagine that for some reason people never had to individually pay the cost of their own transportation.