Simple Utah Mormon Politics

Summary: Did any of the Duke Lacrosse players rape the stripper at the party in March 2006? I don't know. But I know a whole bunch of them were there. E. D. Hirsch wrote a book a few years back, called Cultural Literacy, about things we need to know in our culture to be able to understand and contribute to society. The problem is nowadays there are certain things that we don't need to know but that are foisted in our faces non-stop anyway, and make us less able to contribute in a meaningful way to society. There has been a running joke among my buddies and I here in Iraq. Almost anytime we get around a television we hear something on the news or on the sports channel about the Duke lacrosse team and an exotic dancer at some party last March. "Did you hear about this Duke thing?" we exclaim to each other as though the story hadn't bored us to death already in the last 3 months. "The lacrosse team supposedly raped a stripper!" "Wow, I hadn...

Summary: Licensure in many cases is simply a license for (1) people to do substandard work, (2) other people to be trusting of people that shouldn’t be trusted, and (3) groups of people to limit entry of others into their profession. In my opinion, licensing in most cases should not be required, but should be an option for people who choose it as a form of insurance that the good or service provided is trustworthy. Here’s what I mean… First, a couple of stories to set the stage. When I was a teenager, my father was on the city council in our town. He was frustrated one time about a man in town who refused to get a building permit to make modifications to his house. As I thought about it, I found myself on the side of the man who didn’t want to get the building permit. Later on, in a different town, I became a member of a city council. Every year, it came time to renew the licenses of every business in town. And nearly every year I asked for a discussion on why we required busin...