“Let ’Em Gouge: A Defense of Price Gouging” is good libertarian, capitalistic stuff from Cato Institute.  For instance:

[M]any of those . . . who will curse a blue streak if you put them in front of a camera and ask them about “Big Oil” are as we speak putting their houses on the market and enthusiastically gouging the living daylights out of anyone looking for a new home.

Who, me?

Point: getting the highest price is what we have come to expect and practice.  Oil companies are a fat target, but

no one ever rages against real estate price gouging. In fact, the opposite is the case. Business reporters gush about returns and politicians pledge to do whatever it takes to keep the real estate bubble afloat.

What fools we mortals be.  In any case, gouging is

good for everyone in the long run. Gougers are sending an important signal to market actors that something is scarce and that profits are available to those who produce or sell that something.

Yes.  It’s signals like this that tell us where to invest our moola.  A planned economy leaves such figuring up to commissars, who are notoriously no good at it.  The conclusion is clear:

Blame not the price gouger. Blame the government that won’t let the price gouger do his job,

by controlling prices and rationing.  Tell commissars, czars, whatever we call them, to take a hike. 

Northwest Oak Park’s Catholics flock to and generously support St. Giles, which is a monument not only to Catholic faith and culture but to the rise (mostly) of the Irish from proles to bourgeois, and I don’t mean petit.  It’s a grand structure, a “plant” to warm cockles of pastors’ hearts for these 70 or so years.  But what of St. Giles the man?

It’s his day today.  Those in the know and on the go read Saint of the Day for their information, which is “shrouded in mystery,” but so what?  I love a mystery, and so do lots of people. 

Giles died in or around 710 (we think).  One thing is for sure.  He was “one of the most popular saints in the Middle Ages.”  He hosted pilgrims on their way to Compostella in Spain and the Holy Land in a monastery he built.  After he died, he was listed among the 14 Holy Helpers, who were good to pray to when sick or dying — when a fellow needs a friend, to be sure.  St. Christopher, who came a-cropper due to historians’ shooting down his existence, was one of the 14.

In any case, Giles was very big in Sweden, Hungary, and parts of Germany and eventually got a reputation for helping the poor and disabled.  He couldn’t save his monastery hostel, however.  It fell apart some centuries after he died.  It was a sort of sic transit experience (there goes glory), which shows saints have them too.  St. Giles, pray for us.

GW taps his father and Bubba to help in fund raising for New Orleans.  They worked the tsunami beat and have gotten to know each other and enjoy ea. other’s company, per reports.  Conservatives have asked what’s going on here.  Apart from fund raising for big causes, at which Bubba is probably pretty good, there’s the marginalizing of nutty Carter, with his certifying foreign elections of tyrants and thieves, not to mention other quirks and follies dating ‘way back.  Ignore the guy.  Do not add to his cachet in a slightest bit.  Keep him in Plains if possible.  He’s a nuisance and in his way a menace.