Posted on 04/15/2015 1:54:18 PM PDT by reaganaut1
In Popular Economics, John Tamny, editor of RealClearMarkets, sets out to refute bad economic ideas and replace them with sound ones. Many books have tried to do that, but what sets Tamny’s apart is how he goes about making the “dismal science,” well, popular. His subtitle is revealing: “What the Rolling Stones, Downton Abbey, and LeBron James can teach you about economics.”
Quite a bit, as it turns out.
To educate is to build a bridge from what a person knows to things he doesn’t yet understand. Tamny does that brilliantly by using sports and popular culture to convey key economic truths. That’s why this book is so useful for those of us who want as many Americans as possible to comprehend fundamental economic principles. Tamny ably demonstrates why laissez-faire is essential to prosperity and progress — and along the way he shows interventionist ideas to be absurd.
Tamny takes dead aim at the mistaken ideas that prop up big government.
On taxation, the conventional wisdom is that high taxes on businesses are necessary to make them pay “their fair share.” Most people also believe that the money extracted from them goes to the government where it is spent “for the public good.”
In his first chapter, Tamny argues that taxes are merely “a price placed on work” by the government. To demonstrate how, he doesn’t start with an economist or a chart, but instead with Keith Richards, the lead guitarist of the Rolling Stones. Richards explained that the band decided to leave England because of the high taxes: “We didn’t know if we would make it, but if we didn’t try, what would we do? Sit in England and they’d give us a penny out of every pound we earned.”
(Excerpt) Read more at fee.org ...
LeBron James, notorious non-tipper!
It’s merely preservation of capital....
Start by getting a million dollars...
Which is not always bad but when it is customary to tip it is in bad form not to do so unless the service was awful.
” Start by getting a million dollars...”
Or 10 or 20.
Of course it is.
LeBron is a bad example. He left a no state income tax state (FL) to head back to a high one (OH).
For later
lebron can’t teach me jack poop! Maybe he can teach me how to be an arrogant prick...
bkmk
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