Nannystatism

David Brooks, the conservative at the New York Times has a column out today about happiness.

Does money buy happiness….not really.
So his solution?

The overall impression from this research is that economic and professional success exists on the surface of life, and that they emerge out of interpersonal relationships, which are much deeper and more important.

The second impression is that most of us pay attention to the wrong things. Most people vastly overestimate the extent to which more money would improve our lives. Most schools and colleges spend too much time preparing students for careers and not enough preparing them to make social decisions.

Yes, lets let schools and colleges who don’t exactly prepare students for careers either, teach us about interpersonal relationships.

I’m an old crab, but it seems to me that an institution of higher learning who’s job it is, is to teach higher learning should stick with it, vs branching out into relationships. That’s what parents, marriage encounters, therapists, friends and your local bar are for….isn’t it?

Or maybe, while we add the calorie counts onto menus, we can also require that supermarkets get out of the ‘check your own self out’ so that we are forced to interact with people no matter what.

Shareholders

Apparently if it affects shareholders, there is a law that says you have to disclose.

Apparently if you disclose and it affects your employees impression of the goodness of government you have to testify.

Last week, AT&T announced it will take an immediate $1 billion write-down thanks to a new tax in the health bill that will cause Caterpillar ($100 million) and Deere & Co. ($150 million), among other large employers, to do the same. The benefits consultancy Towers Watson estimates that the change may reduce corporate profits by as much as $14 billion over time.
………Not to fear. Waxman, the liberal lion who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is on the case. No, he doesn’t want to change the tax provision — he wants to browbeat the affected corporations. He has called the CEOs of AT&T, Caterpillar and Deere to testify before his committee, accompanying his summons with a far-reaching document request lest the corporations miss the point: This is naked political harassment.