Our high school is just no longer acceptable. It needs to go and we have a golden opportunity to get it replaced with 2/3 of the cost coming from the government. Our need is that great. However, we (the town) still need to pay for the other 1/3 and we have two votes coming up that will let the deal go through.

Not everybody in our town thinks it is a good idea, I think mostly because their taxes will go up. Even though the new high school would pretty much ensure that they recouped what these taxes would be just in the increased property values of their homes, not to mention the myriad other benefits a new facility would bring and the overall strengthening of the community as a whole, they are still against it. I am at a loss as to how best to explain the benefits so I had a friend of mine comment on his blog about what it really means to a community (economically) to get a new school, please check it out;

Shade Tree Economist

Link: http://okgo.forumsunlimited.com/index.php?showtopic=4169

OK Go - This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

I came across this open letter from the band OK Go about the changing nature of the music industry and the unexpected issues that arise from these changes.
Open Letter from OK Go

Link: http://shade-treeeconomist.blogspot.com

I would like to invite all of my readers to check out The Shade Tree Economist. This is a blog that my friend Mike has just started that is concerned with all things economic and businessy. For example, I don't know if any of you out there have heard this, but apparently, the country is in some kind of recession ... who knew? Well, Mike writes about that stuff. He has a great way of making a very complicated subject even more complicated and harder to understand but he is funny when he does it. For example, here is an excerpt from a post he wrote where he compares Socialism and Capitalism;

Allow me to expand on Hayek’s premise by invoking one of the foremost examples of Socialism America has ever produced: Gilligan’s Island. If you think Cuba is the only place that could successfully combine palm trees, pristine beaches, and the triumph of the proletariat I beg you to flip on Nick at Nite and behold a Marxist paradise.

In all seriousness (yeah right, but work with me here) the seven castaways serve as perfect examples of why Socialism cannot scale beyond a handful of people. Each castaway uses his/her talents to produce something that is shared among the group. The Skipper and Gilligan provide manual labor like in the episode where the Skipper shoves a bit in Gilligan’s mouth so his ‘little buddy’ can serve as a 98 pound oxen and plow a field. The Professor provides the intellectual firepower to develop technologies like coconut phones and an amazing array of transistor radio based applications that can do everything but send a radio signal. Mary Ann cooks and cleans in a perky half-shirt and short-shorts combo (yummy). The Howells did nothing, representing the 15 – 20% of every society who feel entitled to leach off the work of others. And Ginger did everybody.

See. Told ya. Makes perfect sense.

For those of you who are interested, Mike and I were actually roommates in college. He was the straight-laced business major and I was the care-free science major, think Odd Couple but with more booze and pharmaceuticals thrown in. I have always enjoyed talking with Mike and reading his stuff mostly because disagreeing with him is a lot of fun. I like to watch as he turns beet red and the little vein on his forehead pulses as I spout off my liberal musings. When we talk our goal is to see who can make the other go apoplectic first.

Whoa, Whoa! Calm down people! It's OK. I know it is hard to believe, but it is possible to have dissenting opinions with someone and remain friends. I know that, officially, the art of conversation died out in 1978 with the release of Three's Company on television, but I can assure you, Mike and I are proof that you can have an intelligent discourse about a subject without resorting to calling someone the mutated spawn of Joseph McCarthy and Adolf Hitler or referring to someone as a commie tree-hugging ankle-biter. We rarely do that, and then, only when tequila shots are imbibed sometime during the conversation. Anyway, check out what he has to say, I think you will find him both entertaining and enlightening.

The Shade Tree Economist