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.
It seems like this guy could use a break.
This kind of story is the flip side of Solyndra, Senator Dodd’s mortgage and other offenses of crony capitalism. The rich and connected get bailouts and special favors while ordinary people who are badly down on their luck get no consideration. That’s inevitable when government is big enough to do all of the things that people who want bigger government want government to do.
I hope publicity brings Mr. Scott some relief.
(Thanks to Rich Vail.)
This week in the neighborhood where I live was designated for the annual bulk-trash pickup so residents were notified a week or more ago. Once a year we can put out on the curb … well, just about anything except concrete rubble and chunks of stone. The city sends out a couple of long open-topped trailer trucks, and a special truck with a large mechanized claw that reaches down and gathers up the bulk items.
I am not one of those people who thrive on discord which may be one of the reasons that I gave up posting on Open Salon yea these many months ago. I am at heart a rather peaceful and well-mannered person who does not actively seek out confrontation, on the internet or in real life … no really, stop laughing! I merely present myself as someone who doesn’t suffer fools lightly, and who will not hesitate to squash them, which has the pleasing result of not being very much bothered by fools. It’s called ‘presence’… and has worked out pretty well, actually online and in real life. I can easily count the number of fools I have squashed … only a dozen or so that I remember. And none of them came back for seconds.
I don’t deliberately slow down to gawk at epic highway pileups either … except that in real life, everyone ahead of you has slowed down anyway, and the full spectrum of destruction is spread before you. And as for epic internet crackups … one can go for months without being made particularly aware of them, but this week my attention was caught by news of the mother-in-law-of all internet crack-ups to do with books. This one I must pay some attention to, as books are my vocation. It’s a more appalling spectacle than the Great Books And Pals/Jacqueline Howett Review Crackup of 2011, which should have served as an object lesson in how an author should not respond to a mildly critical review. This fresh slice of internet literary hell is what I am dubbing the Great Stop the Goodreads Bullies Cluster of 2012.
Tom Smith on Obama’s recent comments about business:
Much could be said about how stupid was President { }'s recent comments about business founders not really having built their businesses by themselves, but rather owing them in large part to things others, especially the government, did for them. You drove on a public road to meet your 457th potential angel investor. Your third grade public school teacher taught you always to say please. And so government gets a lot of the credit for the thing you sweated blood to create. Big surprize. If you build anything, you can absolutely bet people will line up for the credit, like Al Gores for the internet. Failure, you can keep the credit for that.
But here's the question to ask — how many more successful businesses, inventions, products, services, toys, tools, insights, and just plain fun would there be, if government did not in the first place make it so ridiculously difficult to start a business and keep it going? I don't see our young president taking credit on behalf of the state for all the failures it help cause, all the ideas that never got off the ground because the regulatory hurdles were so high, or all the established companies that never had to face competition because they had managed to get their rents written into law. This is part of the seen and not seen insight of Bastiat. What you see is a successful business when it manages to survive, and then people run up, the same people who taxed and regulated it nearly to death, and say I helped! I helped! What you don't see are all the businesses that perished or never got started because of the heavy hand of the state. And it's a very heavy hand.