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Lately I’ve been trying to think of ways to use free market strategies in different ways. I’m fascinated by the simple, yet complex, relationship between supply and demand can be. For instance, we use a lot of corn for ethanol, so farmers want to grow more corn, so they grow less of other crops, so other foods can be more expensive.  We’re not growing enough corn, so corn prices rise as well. Corn also gets fed to cows, so scarce corn means higher prices, which equals higher beef prices or a switch to a grassier diet.

And so on.

If you’re interested in these types of relationships, I highly recommend Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt. Lots of neat linkages between things you wouldn’t necessarily associate with each other.

In this same train of thought, I read a great article about taxes in The Wall Street Journal that uses IRS data to analyze how the cut in the dividend tax actually raised tax revenues. As tax rates fell, investors were more likely to target investments that gave dividends and companies were more likely to issue divendends.  The loss from lowering the tax percentage was more than made up by getting more transactions to tax.

Let’s try a couple more wacky ideas!

People should recycle. It’s not that hard to separate your plastic and glass and cans and put them in a different container for them to be taken away and re-used.

Yet (at least here in Olathe) it costs me a monthly fee for recycling but I can put as much trash out as I want. Instead, I’d like to encourage less trash and more recycling.  So, switch the two.  Recycling would be free and you would pay for each bag of trash you put out (maybe you have to use the city-supplied trash bags, for instance.) Suddenly, people are motivated to use less and to recycle more.

If you’ve got any more ideas, I’d love to hear them!

I have grand plans for a garden on our new lot.  An abundance of fresh food shall flow from it, or something.

I saw this book called “The $64 Tomato” where Bill adds up all the costs of his garden and divides it into the amount of produce received, coming up with $64 per tomato.  It made me wonder “Do I really want a garden?  Is it really worth it?”  So, I decided to check out the book from the library to see what he’d gone through, trying to get a little perspective on what I’m about to get into.

I found this excerpt online, as well:

Bridget arrived for her interview late, breathless, and blond. As we drank herbal tea around the kitchen table, she dug deep into a leather portfolio, emerging with glossy photographs of gardens she had designed for previous clients. Anne ooh-aahed over the photographs, which looked like rather ordinary gardens to me, but to be fair, I was only seeing them peripherally. My eyes were riveted on the hands holding the photographs. Delicate, lightly freckled hands with dirty—filthy—fingernails. Real gardener’s fingernails. The effect was startling, at once repulsive and erotic. The phrase whore in the bedroom, horticulturist in the garden popped into my head. I tried to blink it away. When I finally looked up, Bridget smiled and squinted her crinkly green eyes at me. A winkless wink.

Had I been caught ogling her dirty hands? After reviewing her credentials and our project, we strolled through the property, Bridget and I falling into lockstep as Anne trailed slightly behind. Passing various anonymous plants and flowers, Bridget would point to what was to me some nameless weedy shrub and exclaim in a breathless whisper something like, “Ah, a beautiful Maximus clitoris.” She knew all the botanical names, the Latin rolling off her tongue like steamy profanity in the heat of passion.

We hired Bridget on the spot, without interviewing anyone else. It seems she’d made an impression on Anne as well.

“Did you notice her beautiful teeth?” Anne sighed as Bridget drove off in her battered Toyota, vanishing in a cloud of smoke and noise.

Beautiful teeth? Who were we talking about, Seabiscuit? My wife, a physician, tends to be a little clinical at times. Sometimes I catch her taking my pulse or listening to my heart murmur while I think we’re making love. So the fact that she would sit across from a beautiful woman and mainly notice her teeth should not have surprised me. In fact, Anne is fascinated with, and jealous of, anyone with better teeth than she, which is to say just about anyone born after about 1970.

“Her teeth? Not really,” I said, being more interested in my burgeoning dirty-fingernail fetish.

I’m looking forward to it.

For a while, I was interested in book-making.  As in, the process of which a book is made by creating folios and stitching them together with a binding to make a book.  I made some of my own books by printing out Project Gutenberg public-domain texts and stitching them together.  Unfortunately, I’m not sure where they are at the moment.

When J.K. Rowling created this hand-written and hand-illustrated book, I thought it was amazing.  She called it “The Tales of Beedle the Bard” and put one up for auction for charity.  Amazon.com bought it and has a wonderful page of pictures of the book (of which the pictures on this page came from) along with some history and spoilers of the stories if you can’t wait for it to come out.

Finally, they’re releasing the book to print. There’s the $100 Collectors Edition and the $8 Standard Edition (which is still cheap for a hardcover book.)

Now, I just have to resist reading the stories before it comes out on December 4th!