Sean Captain

Why tax cuts and limited government kill

As a multiethnic, continental superpower, the U.S. is inevitably compared to (and compares itself to) imperial Rome. Look at the monumental marble buildings of Washington DC or in every major city – like New York’s old Penn Station station, designed to imitate the Baths of Caracalla. And don’t forget the Latin script on our money.

And inevitably, whenever things are going badly in the U.S., people try to draw parallels to the “fall” of Rome. But most people don’t understand what really happened to Rome, or even why or when. New scholarship recreates a very different picture – one that is far more relevant to America’s crisis today than the old myth.

In short, decline came to Rome and is coming to the U.S. due to a lack of taxes, limited government, and a loss of caring.

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Steve Jobs has stepped down as CEO of Apple. He hasn’t stepped off the planet. But his resignation yesterday does strike many as marking the endgame for a fairly young but long-ill man.

Still – is it time for obituaries already? (There are far too many tributes to read, but you can get an appreciation from Adam Penenberg’s essay in which every sentence is an excerpt from and link to someone else’s post.)

It depends if you are talking about Steve Jobs as a person or Steve Jobs as Apple CEO – or if there is even a difference.

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For the past week I’ve been following an activist movement with the very heady goal of trying to occupy Wall Street (a la Tahrir square in Cairo) on September 17 to demand – well, something that treats regular folks better.

Their model for action is a “general assembly,” a form of extreme democracy based on total consensus. Sitting through two of their meetings now has been agonizing.

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If America is to follow the example of Egypt, Spain, and Greece, the protest has to go to Wall Street, not Washington.

So says a collection of mostly young organizers planning a Tahrir-Square-style occupation of the New York Financial District, starting on September 17 – and lasting months.

They are talking thousands of people, tents, food services – the whole Arab Spring treatment.

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With all the talk of “the cloud” lately, it’s worth looking at how long-term the Web really is.

I got a lesson in this yesterday while building this new Web site. I was putting together an archive of my writing samples, including some of my favorites. And many were not to be found.

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Last Friday morning I heard the buzz of a tiny circular saw as it sliced through the top of a cornea. Then I smelled the lower part of it burn under a laser.

It was a crappy ten minutes. But a minute afterwards, I could see better than ever in my life. And a few hours later, my vision was 20/20.

Lasik is a generation old. But it still wows people – such as my stunned friends. Because despite the tremendous power of modern (or even 1980s) body hacking, most of us don’t realize – that is, fully, personally realize – that it exists.

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It’s amazing that for a generation so studied and analyzed, we still keep asking “Who are the Millennials?”. (Of course the interest is understandable given the trillions of dollars at stake.)

To the extent that one phrase can describe tens of millions of people, Millennials are the generation of entrepreneurs.

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