first misattribution i did not write the blurb below i made one statement about vp cheney only to wit that he has a short memory i couldn t agree with you more on this in short then economics is not a zero sum game property is not theft the rich don t get rich off the backs of the poor and redistributionist labor theory of value happy horseshit is just that horseshit happy or otherwise however i resent being lumped in a zero sum zealot category for suggesting nothing more than that rich and successful at face value is apropos of nothing and i am beginning to understand that people who immediately and so fiercely object to my ad hominem re cheney align themselves weird sylogisms like if rich then deservedly or if rich then smarter given that i am also beginning to understand why some people need to be rich wrt to meritocracies all hail meritocracies wrt harvard over NUMBER of NUMBER graduates were cum laude interesting curve those eager to be measured got their wish those unwashed shy folk who just live it provide the balast speaking of forbes was reading about peter norton just today in an old issue while waiting for my doctor norton attributes his success to luck imagine geege original message from r a hettinga mailto rah shipwright com sent sunday september NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER pm to geege schuman owen byrne cc gary lawrence murphy mr fork fork spamassassin taint org digital bearer settlement list subject comrade communism was re crony capitalism was re sed s united states roman empire g begin pgp signed message hash shaNUMBER at NUMBER NUMBER am NUMBER on NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER geege schuman wrote most of them seem to have ivy league educations or are ivy league dropouts suggesting to me that they weren t exactly poor to start with actually if i remember correctly from discussion of the list s composition in forbes about five or six years ago the best way to get on the forbes NUMBER is to have no college at all can you say bootstraps boys and girls i knew you could given that an undergraduate liberal arts degree from a state school like say mine is nothing but stuff they should have taught you in a government run high school you ll probably get more of those on the forbes NUMBER as well as time goes on if we ever get around to having a good old fashioned government collapsing transfer payment depression an economic version of this summer s government forest conflagration caused by the same kind of innumeracy that not clear cutting enough forests did out west this summer that should motivate more than a few erst slackers out there including me to learn to actually feed themselves the next category on the forbes NUMBER list is someone with a terminal professional degree like an mba phd md etc from the best school possible why because as of about NUMBER the best way to get into harvard for instance is to be smart not rich don t take my word for it ask their admissions office look at the admissions stats over the years for proof meritocracy american style was invented at the ivy league after world war ii even stanford got the hint and of course chicago taught them all how right practically nobody who goes to a top NUMBER american institution of higher learning can actually afford to go there these days unless of course their parents who couldn t afford to go there themselves got terminal degrees in the last NUMBER years or so and their kids still had to get the grades and biased by intelligence test scores to get in the bizarre irony is that almost all of those people with terminal degrees until they actually own something and hire people or learn to make something for a living all day on a profit and loss basis persist in the practically insane belief like life after death that economics is some kind of zero sum game that dumb people who don t work hard for it make all the money and if someone is smart works hard and is rich then they stole their wealth somehow btw none of you guys out there holding the short end of this rhetorical stick can blame me for the fact that i m using it to beat you severely all over your collective head and shoulders you were apparently too dumb to grab the right end i went to missouri and i don t have a degree in anything actually useful much less a terminal one which means i m broker than anyone on this list it s just that you of all people lots with educations far surpassing my own should just plain know better the facts speak for themselves if you just open your eyes and look there are no epicycles the universe does not orbit the earth and economics is not a zero sum game the cost of anything including ignorance and destitution is the forgone alternative in this case intelligence and effort i will however admit to being educated waay past my level of competence and by the way you discuss economics so have you apparently btw if we ever actually had free markets in this country including the abolition of redistributive income and death taxes all those smart people in the forbes NUMBER would have more money and there would be more self made people on that list in addition most of the people who inherited money on the list would have much less of it not even relatively speaking finally practically all of that new money would have come from economic efficiency and not stolen from someone else investment bubbles or not that efficiency is called progress for those of you in the people s republics of berkeley or cambridge it means more and better stuff cheaper over time a terrible petit bourgeois concept apparently not worthy of teaching by the educational elite or you d know about it by now in economic terms it s also called an increase in general welfare and no virginia i m not talking about extorting money from someone who works and giving it to someone who doesn t in order to keep them from working and they can think of some politician as santa claus come election time in short then economics is not a zero sum game property is not theft the rich don t get rich off the backs of the poor and redistributionist labor theory of value happy horseshit is just that horseshit happy or otherwise to believe otherwise is quite literally given the time marx wrote capital and the manifesto romantic nonsense cheers rah begin pgp signature version pgp NUMBER NUMBER iqa awubpyNUMBERcpxhNUMBERjfNUMBERohaeqlasgcfzhsqmsvuyNUMBERgqjNUMBERwglNUMBERdwzkpihmanrur yyboc icylpNUMBERtlklNUMBERjpwefu zNUMBER end pgp signature r a hettinga mailto rah ibuc com the internet bearer underwriting corporation URL NUMBER farquhar street boston ma NUMBER usa however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity predicting the end of the world has not been found agreeable to experience edward gibbon decline and fall of the roman empire 