“There is no distinctly American criminal class – except Congress.” — Mark Twain
The US government runs up massive deficits. The US national debt is currently around $35 trillion (wiki.)
That number is too large for anyone to comprehend. Numbers in the hundreds — even in the thousands — make intuitive sense to us. But millions, billions and trillions are incomprehensibly large.
Here’s one way to see how our intuition is incapable of visualizing large numbers. A thousand seconds is a little less than 17 minutes. A million seconds is 12 days. That is easily understood. But then it gets harder to get a feel for the higher order numbers. Continue reading “Buffet on the Deficit”
“And the main, most serious problem of social order and progress is . . . the problem of having the rules obeyed, or preventing cheating. As far as I can see there is no intellectual solution of that problem. No social machinery of “sanctions” will keep the game from breaking up in a quarrel, or a fight (the game of being a society can rarely just dissolve!) unless the participants have an irrational preference to having it go on even when they seem individually to get the worst of it. Or else the society must be maintained by force, from without — for a dictator is not a member of the society he rules — and then it is questionable whether it can be called a society in the moral sense.”
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 