Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Two weeks ago I drove a twenty-six foot U-Haul truck (I don't recall the make, most likely GMC) for about an hour one day, a few short errands the next, and then for eight or so hours (it's not as quick a trip in a big-ass truck as it is in a car). Then I didn't drive at all for two weeks. Then I drove a twenty-four foot U-Haul GMC truck for many hours (with a handful of pauses for sleep), today driving it another hour to take it from Baltimore to northern Virginia.

So getting into my own car a few hours ago felt ... downright strange. For the first twelve minutes. And quite strange again when I got out of it and didn't have to step way down.

But wow, what a relief to be driving something that accellerates worth a damn, and handles decently at speeds over 75 MPH, again. (The 24' truck had a governor on it, I think, holding it to 70 MPH except going down steep hills. Just as well, since the handling sucked at higher speeds, so I wasn't inclined to go any faster. The 26' truck may or may not have had a governor, but the handling started getting iffy around 68 MPH so I didn't push it.)

I felt so much more comfortable once I got my car up to 75 ... which actually is the subject of a future entry I've been meaning to get around to (but not tonight -- sleepytime is too near to start that if it's going to wind up being as long as I think it will).

Though I'd passed mirrors since returning from Pennsic, an hour or so ago was the first time I actually looked at myself in one since coming back. My initial reaction was, "Whose scalp is that? It can't be mine -- it's the wrong colour." My face and scalp got more sun than I'd realized. Hey, if there was ever any doubt in anyone's mind that I have Mediterranean blood, a look at me now would dispell it.

(My father was extremely fair-skinned. My siblings and I each hit different points on the line between his colour and our mother's, and tan differently as well. I think I'm about in the middle of us as far as that goes.)

Looks like I also picked up a few new freckles. (Yeah, I both tan and freckle.)

"As already stated, I am a devoted practitioner of the economic way of thinking. I am also, as anyone can readily infer from this essay, a staunch defender of markets. Nothing in this essay should be interpreted as a call to replace either one. I would prefer that we learn to celebrate their strengths. I ask only that we do so with a clear consciousness of their limitations. Market systems and the economic way of thinking are necessary but not sufficient conditions for the nurture of a free, prosperous, and just society.

We must also learn to nurture social institutions about which economics can say relatively little that is interesting or important, face-to-face institutions as distinct from the largely impersonal institutions that respond to monetary signals. These are often the very same institutions that the market system tends over time to displace: the family, the church, and the neighborhood."

-- Paul Heyne, Ph.D., author of The Economic Way of Thinking, in "Limitations of the Economic Way of Thinking", Religion & Liberty, July and August 1998 (Volume 8, Number 4) Emphasis added to pull out the "sound bite" portion of the quotation.