Like wars, forest fires and bad marriages, really stupid laws are much easier to begin than they are to end.

There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power.

You know what an effective deterrent to crime is? Jail! And do you know what kind of criminal penalty actually makes people think twice about committing crimes the next time? The kind that actually comes out of some individual's pocket, not fines that come out of the corporate kitty.

Why is JP Morgan getting so much heat? Maybe because it is a massive international crime syndicate.

It's not a stretch to say the whole financial industry revolves around the compass point of the absolutely safe AAA rating. But the financial crisis happened because AAA ratings stopped being something that had to be earned and turned into something that could be paid for.

The print magazine and print journalism industry is obviously in a great deal of trouble, and one of the things that happened when this business started to give way to the Internet and to broadcast television is that a lot of organizations started cutting specifically investigative journalism and they also started cutting fact-checkers.

Capitalism is a system for determining objective value.