This may not be the most popular thing to say, but ... Just move? If you are the head of a large household living in an area where the cost of living is too high to support your dependents, you would do a whole lot of good for them and yourself by starting new in some other part of the country. At the very least it would be wise to relocate across the Bay. I realize that people have families, social networks, and sma…
The value of your labor relative to housing is dropping every year too you know. The notion of re-balancing forces is a nice simple story but the price of housing relative to income has risen nationwide for decades. There is a similar story for medical care and even food. So yes it's fun to believe in the invisible hand and Adam Smith's 200 year old thesis. But the reality is that the value of all labor is simply bei…
Smith was keenly aware of the dangers of mercantilism and WoN is anything but an argument for unrestrained capitalism. Indeed, the second most observation in the book, after the one about the fact that butchers and bakers are motivated by self-interest rather than generosity, is that “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”