The passing of local mom and pops is Jack's sermon here.

Jack, that is the kind of stuff that brings tears to my eyes. One of my fundamental beefs with pension trusts is that they get unique tax-break subsidized access to capital and cannot invest in the mom and pops. My whining usually falls upon deaf ears.

Every mom and pop that fizzles, or that never gets started, represents a vanquished dream.

If you compare the market cap of stocks for restaurant chains traded on the stock exchange with the valuation of local business opportunities it is like you are looking at two different worlds. The confinement of pension trust investments to stocks and such creates a premium value based on liquidity, and other factors, and is devastating to investment available for small family businesses. If I were to say that the tax breaks for investment in pension trusts should be eliminated most people would simply call me crazy. Maybe I am.

Italy had been successful for a long time in opposing the big supermarkets but they too fell victim to the big chains. It was just a fact of life associated with joining the EU.

The dry word of an economist focusing on microeconomic mumbo jumbo could never illustrate, with the clarity you have, the real personal effects of the financial world’s belief in the infinite value of aggregation of ownership and control into a blob of lifeless nothingness.

The Big Thinkers cannot find a way to efficiently own mom and pops as well as they can Safeway and Fred Meyers and Wild Oats. The dead-investment in residential property is easy to bond, reaps property tax valuation benefits, and assures a net outflow of interest payments; it is the anti-thesis of economic development. Subsidized retail, selling imported goods made by others, is almost as bad for economic development as dead real estate investments.

Call me crazy. The affordable housing advocates have their entire analysis backwards too. It is not the size of the payment that matters, it is the size of the debt and the ability to eliminate it.

The unwitting big thinkers have the benefit of the bliss that accompanies not knowing any better. It is a disease much like that of Alzheimer’s where the victim never knows that they lost something valuable, like a lost insight. The disease is progressive in both cases.

I can recall nearly puking with disgust when I took a regional economics course and then had to cancel the class after reviewing the material and enduring a couple weeks of class. Lottery money is like magic money that emerged out of thin air, they never take into account that the dollars plunked into the machines are dollars not spent somewhere else, perhaps even at a local grocery store. The incomplete analysis, like with folks trumpeting the praises of the lottery, usually associated with modern political economists makes me sick. The big ideas of little people with little brains are only big in their own minds, it is a relative thing. I'll never get the nod on getting money to perform an economic rationalization on behalf of a politician's big ideas.