So why not let everyone participate?Under my plan, each American household could borrow $10 million from the Fed at zero interest. The more conservative among us can take that money and buy 10-year Treasury bonds. At the current 2 percent annual interest rate, we can pocket a nice $200,000 a year to live on. The more adventuresome can buy 10-year Greek debt at 21 percent, for an annual income of $2.1 million. Or if Greece is a little too risky for you, go with Portugal, at about 12 percent, or $1.2 million dollars a year. (No sense in getting greedy.)Think of what we can do with all that money. We can pay off our underwater mortgages and replenish our retirement accounts without spending one day ... Continue reading →

There are good boycotts and bad boycotts, writes Bradley Smith in the May 2 Wall Street Journal. The good boycotts, primary boycotts, actually target an organization that has done something wrong—National City Lines, for example, which ran the buses in Montgomery in 1956. The bad boycotts, secondary boycotts, target an organization that is related to an organization that has done something wrong—Target Corp. (TGT), for example, for supporting Tom Emmer, a politician who opposed same-sex marriage. Smith wonders where it ends, and supposes that it will not be a good place: “… opponents of same-sex marriage—who appear to be roughly equal if not superior in number to proponents—could start boycotting companies that contribute to pro-gay rights organizations. Soon everyone is boycotting everyone, trade is restricted, ... Continue reading →

Judy Lynch is driving a forklift, and I am trotting behind her. A plastic stopwatch hangs from my neck on a lanyard, and I am carrying a clipboard, from which I have wiped several years of warehouse dust. The dust, black and sticky, consists mostly of tread particles from solid-rubber forklift wheels. It lies a quarter-inch thick on the concrete. Lynch leaves a furrow as she drives. She asks whether she needs to slow down for me. I assure her that she needs to drive as fast as she always does; I am timing her drive. When she stops, I will note it on my clipboard. And at the end of the week the data on my clipboard will change her job and possibly cost ... Continue reading →

1. First, go to EMS and buy the biggest watch you can find. A foreign special services officer asked me once whether we recruited guys based on the size of their watches or whether we bought everyone a big watch as a reward after training. 2. Cut the sleeves off your shirt. It’s hot in the Middle East, and guys would cut the sleeves off their operational uniforms. It makes sense in certain situations, but I had to tell my team, “Look, I know it’s hot, but I need you to meet safety parameters. You’re gonna get scratched.” 3. Make it your boss’s job to tell you to get a haircut and a shave. 4. Wear sunglasses. Everywhere. I’ll tell my team, “Hey, we’re inside. ... Continue reading →

The American Legislative Exchange Council describes itself as a nonpartisan champion of free markets. But if you spend some time at an ALEC conference (Bloomberg Businessweek did, for an article last year) you will be hard-pressed to find many Democrats. And when the entire conference meets for lunch, you will hear from the podium nothing that would seem out of place in a press release from Eric Cantor’s office. Last year in New Orleans, for example, Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisana, told an ALEC annual meeting, “Defeating the president is crucial to defending our economy,” and “Obama has been a disaster.” I didn’t hear anyone boo. What I did hear was the sound of fevered applause when the conference played a videotaped greeting from Ronald ... Continue reading →

Pssst ... Wanna Buy a Law? When a company needs a state bill passed, the American Legislative Exchange Council can get it done By Brendan Greeley and Alison Fitzgerald Illustration by Luke Best Joey Durel likes to describe himself as a private-sector guy. Before he was elected mayor of Lafayette, La., in 2003, Durel, a Republican, ran a chain of pet stores and several restaurant franchises. He chaired the Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce. Then, in his first months in office, he took what still seems to him a natural step: He agreed to have Lafayette’s municipal electric, water, and sewer utility run fiber-optic cable all the way to the city’s homes. It would compete with copper wire that Lafayette’s two commercial telecom outfits already ... Continue reading →

Heinrich Böll (click for credits) Let’s have a few minutes of fun tracing the genealogy of a story to illustrate the concept of archetypes — the Jungian idea that we tell each other the same timeless stories again and again, in infinitely many variations. (My book is based on that idea: namely, that we see ourselves in the stories of others, whether they lived 2,000 years ago or 2 years ago, or whether they lived at all.) On pages 140-142 of Hannibal and Me, I tell two versions of a short story. (This is the very end of the chapter called Tactics and Strategy in Life, which is about the fiendish difficulty of telling ends from means in life and the consequences of getting it ... Continue reading →

(Updates with Carl Malamud response after this story was published.) Carl Malamud is a California provocateur who’s something of a celebrity among transparency advocates. In the 1990s, he began buying Securities and Exchange Commission filings and putting them online. After a trial period, he took the database down and replaced it with the SEC’s phone number. The outcry that followed drove the commission to create Edgar, its free online filings database that’s now widely used. Last week, Malamud launched his latest public service. He bought and photocopied 73 sets of industrial standards—building codes such as UL 142 (1968) Steel Aboveground Tanks for Flammable and Combustible Liquids—and then FedExed them to 25 businesses and government offices. The boxes weigh 27.9 pounds apiece. They’re wrapped in American ... Continue reading →