I'd say that all those "horrors" of the Enlightenment were Unenlightened rulers cloaking their old attitudes in new, Enlightenment clothes.

I'd say it's not one bureaucrat out of ten that's needed; it's closer to one out of sixty

The links in this article are unusable. They point deep into Microsoft intellectual property requiring logins on someone's private network; the links to the videos are several levels of decoding underneath all of it. If a link is filled with multiple http's, percent signs, and multiple web service names, it's not pointing to the actual videos.

Bear in mind that a large part of the problem was that the hucksters sold a perpetual motion machine: Somehow, if you created a set of derivatives that separated safety from risk and took the risky parts, you could pile all the risk together, re-segregate, and find safety ... and you could do this over and over again, and never worry about all that risk piling up, nor ever worry about system risk. After you've separated the gold from the dross, they would have you believe that you can mix the dross together and get as much gold out as you got the first time. It doesn't work; it can't work. But they bought it because someone could cook numbers until the reality fell off the bones.

... There are rational reasons for licensing cabs and drivers. One is to deter crime by drivers, either against passengers or against anyone else. Another is to reduce congestion in midtown and downtown (though the Bloomberg administration has been turning traffic lanes into bike lanes). But if you do take this approach, should non-drivers be allowed to hold medallion licenses that can extract rent from those who do drive? A medallion owner may need to have other drivers to cover other shifts, but if he doesn't drive at least half a shift, how can he call himself a driver?

A jitney is not a taxi. Taxis carry one person or party at a time, except under special circumstances, and they go where the passenger wants. A jitney is closer to a freelance bus; t takes multiple prties along a route and stops as necessary. That said, I'm in favor of free market solutions, but we have to understand the problem. In NYC, the streets are often packed with taxis. (City administrations prefer taxis to private cars, BTW.)

Also, in the original, it was "their father's magic carpet made of >>steam<<." If anyone needs a poem or song to analyze for a HS or early college English class, this is a wonderful example. It also has economic lessons. What does it mean when everybody in a labor-protected industry is old? And a social-studies lesson to answer the race-baiters: "The sons of Pullman porters, and the sons of engineers ...." The authors had opposite politics, but they reported the facts accurately.

a government default is taking the whole system down. The problem is that there's too little value being in Greece, and too much being consumed. That's not the fault of Germany. It's the fault of Greece, and they know how to fix it. They just don't want to. They'd rather riot in the streets. And to that I have no answer.

The problem isn't that the Fed isn't "leading" or that it is "following." The Fed SHOULD follow: it should keep a stable currency value as measured by the combination of wages and prices, and that means tracking the economy as a whole. Alas, between Keynesian leanings and the Humphry-Hawkins act of 1978, inflation is the official policy of the Fed, and it is following a deranged compass.

A teacher who would say "you don't need skill with arithmetic because we have calculators" is saying that you don't need facility with numbers. When you start to do algebra and need to be able to compute polynomial coefficients in operations you will quickly find yourself crippled. When you need to verify the sanity of calculations, or do a "back-of-the-envelope" calculation, you will become a positive hazard. Great mathematicians know numbers. Euler could (and did) multiply sixteen digit numbers mentally. There's the famous story of the mathematician (Ramanujan?) who observed off-handedly on his sickbed that 12 cubed plus one cubed is equal to ten cubed plus nine cubed.