E. Q.

I have always supported the idea that economics needs to be taught more often and at an earlier age. I think it is criminal that we treat "the dismal science" with such contempt (As if it is dismal!)When people graduate from high school, it is assumed they have a "basic" education. After all they will have had something close to 12 English classes, more than 10 years of math and an equal number of assorted science classes, almost none of which will be in economics. To me it makes no sense because economics plays such a large part in your everyday life. And most political contests are nothing less than a vote on competing economic plans. But for some reason we don't seem to think that's important enough to actually go out of our way to make sure the electorate has a basic grasp of economic principles. We have this delusional concept that people already understand, although I have no idea why anybody would think that. You can get a PhD and never set foot in an economics classroom. I have a friend who got her bachelors degree in Political Science without ever taking economics.

But recently I saw a post on the web where a friend of mine, who I consider to be well above average intelligence, wrote about the current flapdoodle concerning public unions in Wisconsin and included his thoughts on the, now notorious, Koch brothers, of Koch Industries. They are the current whipping boys for the liberals, having been sufficiently demonized to the point that they are now the focus of all that is evil. But that is just standard fare for the left. What struck me was how naive he was concerning the brother's wealth and what their motivations were in using that wealth to further their political beliefs. There were several mentions along the lines of "How much money is enough, for one (or two) person?" Then there was a bit of fantasizing about how a "good" person would use that money. I suppose that was to show by contrast that the Koch brothers must be evil and greedy since they were not putting it all in the bank and giving just the interest to pay teachers better. Of course their assumption was that this was an actual alternative for their combined fortune of $72 billion. And there is no doubt that even a very modest rate of return on $72 billion would be a huge number. But as silly as his ideas were, they revealed some even sillier notions about how an economy actually works. He is apparently under the impression paying interest is it's own reward. Seems that bankers are willing to take any amount of cash you have and pay you for the privilege of sitting on it. Of course bankers WILL pay you to hold your money, but only if they then do something even better with it, and that does not include just loaning it out at a higher interest rate to have somebody else sit on it. Eventually somebody has to do something productive with it to make any sense out of paying interest. It can't just be a giant chain letter. Somebody has to take that money and build a pipeline, drill an oil well, buy a truck, pay a driver and ultimately, MAKE A PROFIT!!!

You know profits don't you? They are the evil things that drive greedy men such as the Koch brothers. A common lament of these socialists is their bewilderment at the reasons why these men want to simply make the pile higher. That's their complete assessment of motives and alternatives. Now to be fair, he probably understands that the $72 billion is not in cash (even though that's the way he talks about it.) But it doesn't seem to occur to him that the vast majority of that $72 billion is in the form of hard assets that are keeping more than 80,000 people gainfully employed and paying taxes. This is not something that they will ever view as being for the common good. It's far more likely that they will view it as the Koch brothers exploiting the labor of others so that they can just add to their pile.