Skip to main content

Gasoline memories and realities...

I remember a time, when I was about 8 or 9 years old, my mother was painting one of the rooms in our house and needed something to clean her paint brush. She handed me a quarter and a gallon jug and told me to go to the store on the corner and buy a gallon of gasoline. Back then, it was more economical to use gas to clean a paint brush than it was to go buy a can of paint thinner. What a concept!

The other day my son Peter earned a trip to the movie of his choice. He wanted to see Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D. The movie was playing at three theaters. The theatre closest to our house was charging $9/person admission, and the other two were charging only $7/person. Our first impulse was to go to the more distant, but cheaper theater. But then we started thinking about how much the gas would cost to drive our Dodge van. When we did the math, it worked out that it was less expensive to go to the closer theatre and pay the higher admission price.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Agregate Demand and the US Savings Rate

In my last post, I touched on the differences between the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes and Ludwig von Mises. Immediately aftward, I was directed to this story in the New York Times. It seems that americans are saving more instead of spending the their money on consumer goods. Up until this downturn, about 70% of the US Economy was consumer spending, and in 2005, the US Savings rate was negative 2.7%. The "stimulus" is supposed to stimulate spending to get money moving again. But it isn't happening as planned. Folks are saving for down payments because they don't expect to get zero down home mortgages; they're saving to replenish their decimated retirement and college funds. The austrians believe that the best way to "fix" the economy is to allow the "malinvestment" created by the false signals in the economy (from the open market ops and deficit spending) to be liquidated and the resources repurposed into better investments. It'

Calling Evil Good and Good Evil: LDS Policy on Unwed Pregnancies

The opinion piece below was written for publication in the Salt Lake Tribune concurrent with the LDS Church's October General Conference. The Trib couldn't fit it in, so it is published here. My vote in the sustaining was communicated to both the First Presidency and my local ward Bishop separately. This weekend, members of the LDS Church will gather in their great and spacious building on North Temple for their semi-annual General Conference. During one of the sessions, members will be asked to raise their hands in sustaining votes for church leaders. I will not be in attendance, so I will use this article as a means of casting my vote in the negative for all of the Church’s General Authorities who promote and support the church’s policy of “encouraging” all unwed mothers to relinquish their babies for adoption. This encouragement comes in the form of extreme pressure from church leaders and devout family and friends. This policy, which the church stops short of saying is

Why Is History a Required Subject?

My daughter Mara has been asking for Susan Wise Bauer's The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child, Volume 3: Early Modern Times ever since she finished volume 2 . So Santa brought her volume 3 and The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child, Volume 4: The Modern Age: From Victoria's Empire to the End of the USSR for Christmas. She's devouring them, and thought that she got better presents than her sisters who got stereos and MP3 players. At last check, she was reading about the great fire of London, and commenting the need for building codes. (That discussion is food for another post...) I am also very much into history. I have two complete bookcases filled with history and biography, including a complete set of Will Durrants The Story of Civilization and Britanica's 18 Volume The Annals of America and 2 volume Great Issues in American Life (Volumes 1 - 18 and two volume Conspectus) In that context, last night Amy and I were listening to Show