For What It's Worth

The other day at lunch, my wife began to describe for my son the nature of economics: "You know, there are people who go to school their whole lives to understand money." I did not attend any of these courses. Consequently, there are plenty of things about money that I don't understand.
For example: How is it that there are pools of seemingly uninterrupted cash for Tiger Woods to pay his wife not to talk to anyone ever about what a horrible husband he was. Three quarters of a billion dollars worth of silence. This news came to me on the same day that, once again, the lawmakers in Sacramento failed to pass a budget for the state of California. All kinds of things happen as a result, including our Governator's plan to start paying state employees minimum wage until the budget gets passed. Since the average salary of a state employee is about sixty-five thousand dollars a year, this had the opposite effect of Tiger's settlement. There was a lot of noise. Budget deficits totalling billions of dollars are causing all kinds of racket, and everyone wants to know where their slice of pie is. I don't know much about economics, but a casual glance at USA Today tells me that money is best understood as pie.
The state of California is also going to be paying twenty million dollars to the family of Jaycee Dugard, who spent eighteen years in captivity, in part, because the state's parole board did not effectively monitor her kidnapper, a convicted sex offender. If you ask me, it seems like the state is getting off cheap, but it still begs the question: where does all this money come from?
Meanwhile, back on the sports pages, the Los Angeles Clippers are one of the teams vying to have LeBron James come save their franchise. They are auditioning for the opportunity to write great big free agent checks to Mister James in hopes that he will do something that he never managed to do with his previous team: win a championship.
I understand that much of what makes free enterprise work is the idea of supply and demand. Consumers assign the value for things like Gatorade and street sweeping. Then we stick unions in there and laws to regulate trade and assign taxes and tariffs and suddenly I have lost track completely. To paraphrase Joni Mitchell, whose net worth is probably well over a million dollars, "I've looked at cash from both sides now, from win and lose, and still somehow, it's life's illusions I recall. I really don't know cash at all."