In Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey," the most uncomfortable scenes aren't the cyclops or the shipwreck.They're the ones set at home.Dozens of men have moved into Odysseus's palace on Ithaca.
They slaughter his herds.They drain his wine.
They lounge in his hall demanding his wife choose one of them, and every day they consume a little more of an estate none of them will ever own.Telemachus watches it happen.
He is a boy.He has no standing, no army and no idea when — or whether — his father is coming back.That is not a Bronze Age problem.SEN RAND PAUL: MY PLAN WOULD FORCE CONGRESS TO STOP OVERSPENDING YOUR HARD-EARNED MONEYWe will soon be over $40 trillion in national debt.
I have spent my career as an mergers-and-acquisitions banker valuing what things are truly worth, and I can tell you what that number is: it is a claim on people who cannot yet vote — taxation without representation.Matt Damon is Odysseus in "The Odyssey," written, produced and directed by Christopher Nolan.(Melinda Sue Gordon Universal Studios.
All Rights Reserved.)I became a grandfather last year.When I watch my grandson playing, there is one question that never once crosses my mind — how could I steal from him? I don't know a single person who thinks that way.
And yet, collectively, year after year, our politicians buy votes with money belonging to people who haven't been born.That is the hall on Ithaca.The suitors were not monsters.
They were ordinary men, following ordinary incentives, in a house where nobody could stop them.Socrates proposed that "lovers of wisdom" should make decisions for society.Two and a half millennia later, how are we doing? He would say we never understood his "ship of state." The skill that gets a person elected is not the skill required to govern, and we keep being surprised by this.CAPITALISM IS ABOUT INCENTIVES.
STOPPING THE STUPIDITY OF SOCIALISM IS A BIG INCENTIVECut the time frame by 90%, to 1776.The Founders were so wary of faction they warne...