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Talk the CasbahNews Scoop! Snooping on the Scooter suit

Compiled by Geoffrey AndersenUpdated Friday, Feb. 2, 2007, at 6:34 AM ET

(Continued from page 3)

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janeR agrees: "A sting to the behind is better than letting the child go beserk in a tantrum or run out into traffic if they don't get their way." Arkady makes a compelling argument for preserving parental authority in matters of discipline:

In short, there's almost no reward or punishment that someone couldn't see as doing a terrible disservice to the child. The "ban spanking" crowd wants to prevent other parents from using one tool that they don't approve of, but they don't seem to have considered that they could as easily have taken from them the tools they consider appropriate. Each parent decides what rewards and punishments to use. To the maximum reasonable extent, I'm in favor of leaving those calls to them, since they know their children best.

OskarS, a "25 year-old Swede who has never been spanked," writes in to register strong opposition to any form of corporal punishment:

Since I grew up in a world were harming your child was illegal, this whole discussion is completely baffling to me. To say that you can't raise a kid without spanking is so absurd that I can't believe what I'm hearing…
Now, you might say that I'm extremely pacifist, or that I'm too much of a bleeding heart liberal, that I'm out of the norm. I'm really not. Every single parent of small children I have ever known (quite a number of them) would say the exact same thing.

We don't grow wilder or out of control, we don't grow up to be criminals. For those of us who do it's not because they weren't spanked, it's because of bad parenting. And having a lousy parent spank you would not help a whole hell of a lot.

Ouch. Ouch. Geoff, stop that! More in Family Fray. AC … 5:19pm PST

Sunday, Jan. 21, 2007

Information wants to be free. Labor wants to get paid. Is it any wonder nobody's satisfied these days?

The American worker is sick of getting dumped on, judging from responses to Daniel Gross' articles on Unwilling Americans who won't do any Dirty Work. Sarvis, the Fray's resident Upton Sinclair, expresses the prevailing anger most succinctly:

The government is more than happy to intervene in the "free market" for wages at the low end by allowing a steady supply of low-expectation immigrants to come in, by union busting, by disempowering labor wherever they can, by changing the rule on overtime, etc.

Meanwhile, at the upper income levels.... oh wait, they pretty much intervene there too - by enforcing immigrant quotas at the top end, by blocking out qualified competition for doctors and lawyers via licensing rules, by keeping the rules lax for executive pay accounting and disclosure, by keeping shareholders weak, etc.

The government works very hard to keep low wages low and high wages high. So, the next time you hear some nincompoop neocon bleat about "free markets" feel free to haul off and kick their teeth out.

Revrick, the Fray's resident William Jennings Bryan, lays out his own critique of 21^st-century capitalism: