Posted by
MAXINE on Thursday, June 25, 2009 11:55:50 AM
Did
you play Monopoly when you were a kid? Did you play it alot? Do you
remember how you felt initially about buying Boardwalk (Mayfair) and
Park Place (Park Lane)? They were too expensive, right? What happens to
the game when a new player enters who can set and change the rules in
the middle of the game, play as many game pieces as they want, and
print and issue money for any purpose in the game to their own whim? It
is not good. Image Credit: allthings.tv
Free-Lunch Faith Vs The Reality Of Economics
On what is beginning to feel like a daily basis, the
Obama Administration, with the unprecedented aid of the mainstream media
(last night, ABC spent most of their broadcast time broadcasting
directly from ... The White House), is attempting to sell the faith of
a free-lunch to a hungry hoard of faithless people.
What is
being sold to the American public is a cure to all process ills and an
improvement in ones life if one would just let the Government take over
and run everything from our Free Enterprise Manufacturing, Healthcare,
and Energy systems (and this is just a start). The Obama Administration
loves to cleave to the argument that with the Government becoming a
"PLAYER" in an enterprise they are promoting competition by delivering
an alternative approach to a marketplace but this logic is grossly
flawed.
The reality of economics that derails this logic is the
it is difficult for anyone to compete on a level playing field when one
of the players is also the referee, and the body that makes the rules
... and prints the money upon which the game is played.
Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free "Chance" card. Image Credit: Ebay
Would anyone play a game on the board game,
MONOPOLY
(our cultural introduction to economics), with a person who had the
ability to create game board pieces without a cost or penalty, print
and issue money to himself without really having to tell anyone when he
expects to use it during the game to purchase pieces and/or set up
hotels and set the rules beyond what had been printed and distributed
at the beginning of the game (example: this player has an unlimited
supply of "Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free" cards)? The answer is NO!
In
every human endeavor there is really NO Free Lunch, and the reality of
economics always shows that when a corrupt and over influential force
enters into the mix of a free enterprise system, the system becomes
corrupted and tilted to the influence that has the ability to change
the common sense rules that govern the system.
Homeschool Real World Math
- Here is another fun addition of real world math. Firstly, we use and
adore Math-U-See consistently throughout the year in our homeschool.
There are days however, that I like to mix it up and do something a
little playful to get them thinking about math in the real world. ///
This morning we played a game of monopoly. We received the newest
version of Monopoly: Here and Now the real World Edition for Christmas.
It is a fun version that incorporates geography, world facts on the
chance and community chest cards, and interesting games pieces that
take the kids literally around the world in every game. /// Our
youngest got to work on basic counting by moving the pieces and rolling
the dice. Our middle worked on basic addition by adding everyone’s dice
together and telling them how far they had to move the pieces and our
oldest had to read out all of the chance and community chest cards for
each player. We had a ton of fun. This particular edition, does not
have money, but cards and a banker machine that you add and subtract
money for each transaction made. By the end of the first game, they
were working through place values in the millions, Large number
addition and subtraction and how to work the key pad which is similar
to a calculator and a keypad on the computer. I wont even get into the
idea of money management and budgeting as more abstract ideas they
begin to absorb through this game. /// All in all, I think I hid a
little real world math by way of a game today. Give it a try it is easy
and fun to do. /// Tomorrow, we will do a little more real world math,
when they get to spend a few real dollars at the zoo to purchase a
drink and choose a few animals they would like to feed. I will hand
them each a zip lock bag of coins and they will have to count their way
out of it. That should be a barrel full of monkeys…excuse the pun.
Grace and Peace to all budding mathematicians in the real world!
Caption & Image Credit: homeschool-diva.com
This excerpted and edited from Townhall.com
Tilting at Green Windmills
by George Will - Townhall.com - Thursday, June 25, 2009
The
Spanish professor is puzzled. Why, Gabriel Calzada wonders, is the U.S.
president recommending that America emulate the Spanish model for
creating "green jobs" in "alternative energy" even though Spain's
unemployment rate is 18.1 percent -- more than double the European
Union average -- partly because of spending on such jobs?
Calzada,
36, an economics professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, has produced
a report which, if true, is inconvenient for the Obama administration's
green agenda, and for some budget assumptions that are dependent upon
it.
Calzada says Spain's torrential spending -- no other nation
has so aggressively supported production of electricity from renewable
sources -- on wind farms and other forms of alternative energy has
indeed created jobs. But Calzada's report concludes that they often are
temporary and have received $752,000 to $800,000 each in subsidies --
wind industry jobs cost even more, $1.4 million each. And each new job
entails the loss of 2.2 other jobs that are either lost or not created
in other industries because of the political allocation -- sub-optimum
in terms of economic efficiency -- of capital. (European media
regularly report "eco-corruption" leaving a "footprint of sleaze" --
gaming the subsidy systems, profiteering from land sales for wind
farms, etc.) Calzada says the creation of jobs in alternative energy
has subtracted about 110,000 jobs from elsewhere in Spain's economy.
----
What
matters most, however, is not that reports such as Calzada's and the
Republicans' are right in every particular. It is, however, hardly
counterintuitive that politically driven investments are economically
counterproductive. Indeed, environmentalists with the courage of their
convictions should argue that the point of such investments is to
subordinate market rationality to the higher agenda of planetary
salvation.
Still, one can be agnostic about both reports while
being dismayed by the frequency with which such findings are ignored
simply because they question policies that are so invested with
righteousness that methodical economic reasoning about their costs and
benefits seems unimportant. When the president speaks of "new green
energy economies" creating "countless well-paying jobs," perhaps they
really are countless, meaning incapable of being counted.
For
fervent believers in governments' abilities to control the climate and
in the urgent need for them to do so, believing is seeing: They see,
through their ideological lenses, governments' green spending as always
paying for itself. This is a free-lunch faith comparable to that of
those few conservatives who believe that tax cuts always completely pay
for themselves by stimulating compensating revenues from economic
growth.
Windmills are iconic in the land of Don Quixote, whose
tilting at them became emblematic of comic futility. Spain's new
windmills are neither amusing nor emblematic of policies America should
emulate. The cheerful and evidently unshakable confidence in such
magical solutions to postulated problems is yet another manifestation
-- Republicans are not immune: No Child Left Behind decrees that by
2014 all American students will be proficient in math and reading -- of
what the late Sen. Pat Moynihan called "the leakage of reality from
American life."
Reference Here>>
Welcome
to the free-lunch faith and evangelism due to the leakage of reality
from American life delivered to us from the Obama Administration, here
in Carter's Second Term!