The first national election in which I voted was 1972, the year that Margaret Chase Smith lost her U.S. Senate seat to Bill Hathaway. I am sure I must have voted for Hathaway, largely because of Senator Smith’s dogged support for American policies in Vietnam. My early political inclinations notwithstanding, I find the Margaret Chase […]
The theory of efficient markets, when applied beyond financial markets, is proposed by those who bridle against government regulation of business. Their idea is that markets will punish bad behavior of individual firms or even whole industries and thus create incentives for firms to produce goods and services without harming employees, consumers, or the environment. […]
We went for the first time this year to the Orono Bog Boardwalk on Monday morning. This is an absolute gem of a resource for the Penobscot Valley community, giving people easy access to a part of our Acadian landscape that is not often so easily visited. If you have never been there you will […]
Readers of Stirring the Pot know that I am deeply concerned about the issues of global climate change and inequality in the United States. Climate change, or the larger issue of global change, is an existential threat to modern human civilization. Inequality strikes at the very heart of the American ideal of “liberty and justice […]
The idea of rent seeking by companies is a common theme of Stirring the Pot. Rent seeking occurs when firms or whole industry groups lobby government bodies to fix the rules of the market to benefit one particular firm or group of firms. This can be as simple as getting the government to buy a […]
One narrative about the Yellow Vest protests in France is that politicians should not adopt energy taxes to change behaviors that lead to climate change. In this telling, the political costs of wise energy policy are too high. This is an overly simple reading of the French experience and is a convenient excuse for those […]
We know when it is a Congressional election year. Like clockwork, in the mail arrives a letter from Maine Second District Representative Bruce Poliquin. The envelope boldly declares: “Public Document Official Business.” At first the letter is a puzzle. What “official business” do we have with this office? Then we remember. Mr. Poliquin uses the […]
For the past few weeks we have heard a Northern Bobwhite singing in our neighborhood. This is a bird we associate with Southern New England, so we were surprised to hear it in Eastern Maine. My first thought was, here is yet another bird whose range has moved north in response to climate change, a […]
The third post for Stirring the Pot in August 2015 was titled Class Warfare and dealt with the problem of inequality in the United States. It is an issue that I have returned to several times since. Inequality continues to erode the social fabric of this nation and the situation grows worse with each passing […]
Not that long ago the purchase of many types of alcoholic beverages in Maine required a visit to a State-run liquor store. This was rooted in the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which ended the Prohibition era in 1933 and allowed states to regulate importation of liquor. But no longer, Maine got out of […]
