Month: January 2012

Ryan was taken aback by how poor people were in the South. He never thought he’d had it all that great, scraping by on $8.50 an hour, but now he saw that it could’ve been a lot worse. In Mississippi or Arkansas—he was never really sure what state they were in, since Dylan had the map, and his exhaustion and paranoia had made the whole journey hallucinatory—he saw houses patched with plywood and plastic sheeting, people sitting on buckets in their yards, entire Main Streets abandoned, their buildings blindfolded and gagged with bricks and boards. He and Dylan began to talk about all the money the government sends overseas when people were drowning right here. They loved America, but it seemed like a place where things could go bad really quickly, and when they did, nobody cared.

A Green Beret demolitions expert who twice had explosives confiscated by the TSA before he tried to board airliners over the holidays has been released to the supervision of his superiors at Fort Bragg on $50,000 bail.

One basic idea is that hard work should be rewarded. Obvious, right? I mean, we’re supposed to be economists here! People respond to incentives, and they are risk averse. A winner-take-all society is not very conducive to hard work; I’m not going to bust my butt for 30 years for a 1% shot at getting into The 1%. But I am going to bust my butt for 30 years if I think this gives me a 90% chance of having a decent house, a family, some security, a reasonably pleasant job, a dog, and a couple of cars in my garage. An ideal middle-class society is one in which everyone, not just anyone, can get ahead via hard work.