18 Mar 11

Along with another excellent day at the office, I also enjoyed ...

• listening to Chloe sing one of her songs from her school program today (grandpa is really impressed!)
• talking with Sarah on the phone
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• eating yummy barbeque chicken salad and key lime squares with Hilary, Maude, Megan, Riley, Kate, Ethan, and Floryne
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• seeing the gunite pool after today's pour first hand with Willyne
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• getting excited with Riley as he had fun with the dirt near the horses

Here's some news for all you "Bones" fans out there ... http://terreeeblay.blogspot.com/2011/03/65.html

And if my tax ideas weren't enough political thought for you this week, here is a thought provoking article I found.  It begins with a description of the author's personal experiences in a failed attempt to run for Arizona State Treasurer in 2010.  If you can get past his view of that, on page 2 you will find this gem,

"These two points of view can be traced back—mostly neatly, sometimes not—to the country’s founding, and the intellectual and political duel between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Hamilton believed in providing capital and resources to an educated elite whose growing power would lift the new republic’s economy. He began America’s first industrial conglomerate and thought that businesses required government’s “interference and aid” through special subsidies and great infrastructure projects that would facilitate growth. 

Jefferson had a different perspective. As the great twentieth-century historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote in 1965, “Hamilton wished to concentrate power; Jefferson to diffuse power.” In 1776, he proposed giving every white adult male in Virginia 50 acres of land if they did not already own that much—an essentially egalitarian move to distribute opportunity in that agrarian society. Three decades later, having made the continental-scale purchase of the Louisiana Territory, he suggested 164-acre tracts be carved out and sold at $1.64 an acre and proposed a network of colleges to be built on grants donated by the federal government—visionary proposals that would finally overcome conservative opposition to see fruition in the form of the Homestead Act and the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Aouct, both passed in the spring of 1862.

Jefferson’s ideas carried the day because they fit the times. In 1800, 75 percent of the free workforce were independent farmers, and most of the rest were independent shopkeepers. Only 12 percent had what might be called a “boss.” The word was not even commonly used until the 1830s.

But with the rise of steam and steel, America began to creep toward industrialization and its larger, more complex economic organizations."

If you value learning from history and applying it to present day issues, whether you agree completely with the presenter or not, you will want to read the whole article by Andrei Cherny at http://www.democracyjournal.org/20/individual-age-economics.php?page=1.

I'd be interested in your thoughts and comments.