Lions and Eagles

Dear Friends, I very much enjoyed the Beer Summit on Racial Understanding last week, and I was honored to be able to attend and meet so many wonderful people. I am sorry to say that I will not be able to make tonight’s Second Summit, though my thoughts and prayers will be with you all. I have had a question on my mind to ask. It is a difficult question, and I hope you will give me your thoughts. This comes from a place of having people around me on different sides, in different camps, who regard each other as enemies, even though I believe they could be friends. You see, it looks to me like that there may be actually two things that people may refer to when they say Black Lives Matter. There is a movement, and there is a particular organization that acts in the name of that movement. I am 100% on board with the movement. With the organization, that group that owns BlackLivesMatter.com, I have much agreement, but I don’t want different ideas that we may have to hurt the places where we...

A good friend sent me an article today that was an interesting read. The crux of the article was that, while Steve Job's genius and willing to be "foolishly" creative contributed to Apple's success, the real credit goes to the government for subsidizing twelve particular technologies that Apple used in their products. This excerpt presents these technologies, and the fact that their development was subsidized by the government, as if to say that they would not have been developed if the government had not been involved. On that basis, the government seems to get all of the credit for Apple's success. But, until someone invents a device to accurately peer into alternate timelines and universes, we can't know for certain how these technologies, or even better, might have been invented on their own. People have been inventing for tens of thousands of years. We're rather good at it. Apple got to be big because their products were good, and their marketing...

Last night I went to a Q&A session with a couple of members of the school board for parents and members of the community. (I'm both.) Very nice event. Very glad I went out, and it was very encouraging to see the good turnout in the room. Steve Brown did a fine job of moderating, offering up questions gathered from parents via Facebook, and live audience had a number of questions as well. I have a few reactions to their questions.

I've had this idea rolling around in my head on the economic effects of health insurance coverage mandates. It started in my mind over contraceptives, but could be applied to just about anything, from prescriptions to doctor visits. My wife had an economics teacher who told her, "If you don't know about supply and demand, you will fail!" You have to understand supply and demand. Quick Micro Econ 101 review. Look at the graph over here. If you've taken an econ class, you should have seen variations on this again and again. The blue line shows that as price goes up, the number of people willing to jump in and buy goes down, and vice versa. Red line shows that when price goes up, sellers are more excited about selling. Somewhere in the middle, the quantity of product that buyers want to buy meets up with the quantity that sellers want to sell, and there we have what we call market equilibrium. That market equilibrium price is what you will pay without insur...