Comment Where Hydrogen and Carbon fall in (Score 1) 325
Carbon is #15 at
Nitrogen is #31 at
You can find the full list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth's_crust. I love Wikipedia. That is all.
I don't see why local interest groups shouldn't be allowed to do their own thing. Do you just dislike them because they're not like you? The solution is allowing more groups or individuals exemption from regulation, thus taking away the idea that these few groups are "special".
By the way, since the all-out attack on unions started, real income of American middle and lower-class workers has declined at a steady rate.
Cited by Thomas Sowell in Economic Facts and Fallacies, average real income per household has only risen 6% per household, but has risen 51% per individual, between '69 and '96. Wages have increased significantly, the problem is smaller households. Furthermore, households with higher incomes usually have two or more wage-earners, lower-income households have one or none, making household income a terrible substitute for individual wages in this discussion. Unions have been an important check on the power of big business, but all-out attack or no, they aren't in a regulatory disadvantaged position today. Rather, they're in decline because what they offer either isn't valued by many workers (for lower-wage walmart-type jobs often taken by people who either don't fight for their rights or don't care much about the job anyway/short-term workers) or isn't especially needed (for higher-wage jobs that you have to not suck at to keep).
If it hadn't been the ready availability of easy credit, our standard of living would have plummeted.
Of course, easy credit only returns to bite borrowers in the ass, to the benefit of the banking system.
With your bare hands?!?