The underlying question, answered by the quote, was that the Beatles, regardless of taxes, felt as if they had "enough."

Sadly there are some among us (whom G-man Norquist LOVES to manipulate) who, if they could gather to themselves every penny in the world while the rest of the world died of starvation, would be happy to take the money, blame the starving for their fate, then try to figure out how they could get even more money.

Their relationship to money is equivalent to the relationship of the 1,000 lb. person to food. No matter how much they have, they're never happy. They never feel as if they have enough. They have a clearly-defined psychological dysfunction and we'd probably all feel about them the way we feel about the 1,000 lb. person who can't stop eating, if it weren't for the fact that half of us think we'd be happy if we only had as much as they have, and the other half of us turn away in sadness and disgust at their obvious and unrepentant neurosis and how it's damaging their lives and the life of our nation.

Please! Can NO ONE bring the setec astronomy approach to bear on the bank accounts and network/satellite connections of the weasels, Mr. Drudge, and Mr. Limbaugh (and Ailes and Murdoch)?

Some judiciously applied, factual voiceovers by talented artists, not to mention service interruptions, coupled with sudden, mysteriously-arriving poverty could be tremendously educational, don't you think?

And an apt definition it is...

I can't help but congratulate you on a very catchy (and suggestive) headline, Mr. Rossmeier.

Was that freudian or deliberate?

(and how did Dan Savage know that Ricky boy was into that kind of sex and lusting after black men?)

Between the Republican frat boys "teabagging" their ignorant, sycophantic followers and their continuing production of Santorum, I can't help but think that Foley and Craig are just the ones who got caught and the lot of them are a collection of closet cases.

either...

1) Self-consciously smart enough to be one of the greatest hucksters and snake oil peddlers in modern TV history, or

2) A person with undiagnosed (at least as far as we know) schizoaffective disorder with severe paranoid tendencies (and a persecution complex?).

So all you fans of Becky need to ask yourselves a simple question...

Are you being taken in by Becky?

or

Are you just as crazy as Becky is?

Economists, especially those from the Chicago school, love to pretend that economics is a mathematical science akin to physics. Just get the equations right and everything will work out exactly as predicted (or close enough so that nothing falls down or blows up).

This is NOT the case.

Economics is a predictive art, and would be much better practiced if it were acknowledged that it's closest cousin is meteorology. The trouble is, our current methods of gathering economic data for modeling and predictive purposes is roughly akin to the good old days when weather reports arrived by telegraph from the nearest railroad station and predictions were made by rules of thumb: "red sky at morning, sailor take warning, etc."

Indeed, there's no reason why "reading" the current economic reality to collect relevant real-time data, much as we do with weather conditions nationwide, such data then being channeled into a supercomputer to provide a working model of what's really going on and better quality educated guesses regarding future events, might be a much better way of practicing economics that those we now employ.

Why don't we do this - provide localized stimulus to regions when they're struggling - using other means to slow down overheated areas before they blow up, economically? Because most of our economists are enamored with the idea of the "big score," of using inside knowledge and inside information to massively increase your income, beyond all avarice, at the expense of those unsuspecting people who have trusted your expertise enough to allow you to do so.

As currently practiced, economics is a confidence game, practiced by flim-flam men for the financial benefit of themselves and their friends. They have used their worshipful attitude toward the "free market" and deregulation as a way to make massive space for their confidence games to continue, invisible and unnoticed, until it all came crashing down.

We recognize this as a problem when it's being done by traveling scam artists ripping off malls with shoplifting or credit card scams, or charging massively for "repaving" driveways while only applying a blackening agent that washes off with the first rain. The recent "free market" economic system was nothing more than the same thing on a national scale.

Perhaps the day will yet come when the purpose of economics will be to smooth the rough edges of human economic activity, while providing ample rewards for those who invent the greatest new things, and those who work the hardest, and those with true gifts to bring out the best work and creativity in others, and those with the artistic gifts which allow them to enrich society with their capabilities, a day when dishonest financial activity will be picked up wherever it starts and nipped in the bud before those who can least afford it end up on the hook to pay for the bad bets of the executives of "too big to fail" financial institutions.

But sadly, the only purpose the "economics" of the past 20+ years have served was to put up a smoke screen of numerical b.s., offering respectability, while, behind that smoke screen, the economy was shifted from serving the vast majority of the population into reverse Robin Hood gear, wherein the rich massively and obscenely (and legally) enriched themselves by victimizing everyone else.