You Get What You Pay For

The club luncheon brought the okie-doke! I sat next to an annoyingly hypocritical person. He asked me if I was an economist and he pulled out a previous slide and expounded upon me that the ocean should be non-excludable because it resulted in over-fishing. We should issue fishing permits and that penalty against abuses would be so great that no one would do it! Yikes! And all I wanted to do was eat lunch! However, he was elusive with his answers so no sideline hating! Then during the presentation from the executive of the hedge fund group gave use a 50-minute infomercial on why private equity group should buy banks because, even though another company ditched them this past Tuesday, regarding the subprime lending crisis, the federal government was inefficient. Furthermore, he proclaimed the Federal Reserve Bank districts such as Cleveland and Richmond were dubious. Well, as a lifelong Clevelander I would dispute this because Cincinnati had a stock exchange and the brokers would send their business to Cleveland to save their clients and themselves state taxes on their capital gains. Sending them to either Chicago or Saint Louis would result in paying out-of-state and federal taxes. However, the real kicker was that this man was nothing more than a mouthpiece because when he was in government he spoke good about it, but once in the private sector he railed against it! After five minutes I fazed out because I knew the okie-doke when I heard it.

This trait is something that I have fine tuned upon arriving here in Washington, DC because everyone is trying to capitalize on something. Also unlike Cleveland, I really don’t know anyone so keeping my guard up is mandatory! Yet regardless of what happens, the truth never changes.