Fawning over Biden, the Washington Post inspires me to create a Mixed Metaphor award.

Count the mixed metaphors in this one sentence and that will set the mark for all future competitors:

Biden’s twin-barreled economic offensive faces numerous hurdles but has sparked billions of dollars of private-sector investment and changed entrenched corporate practices.

The sentence appears in "Biden scraps reliance on market for faith in broader government role/The administration is pushing businesses to change with a carrot — and a stick."

Had you even realized that Biden had been relying "on market" and avoiding "broader government role"? That's just silly, and it's why I wrote "Fawning over Biden," but I'm interested in counting the metaphors in that one sentence.

Do you see the 6 that I see? Any others?

By the way "a carrot — and a stick" is also a metaphor, but I think the headline writer intended to refer to "carrot or stick," because "carrot and stick" is this:

"With Venezuela in collapse, towns slip into primitive isolation."

A Reuters headline.

At the once-busy beach resort of Patanemo, tourism has evaporated.... These days, its Caribbean shoreline flanked by forested hills receives a different type of visitor: people who walk 10 minutes from a nearby town carrying rice, plantains or bananas in hopes of exchanging them for the fishermen’s latest catch....

“The fish that we catch is to exchange or give away,” said Yofran Arias, one of 15 fishermen who have grown accustomed to a rustic existence even though they live a 15-minute drive from Venezuela’s main port of Puerto Cabello. “Money doesn’t buy anything so it’s better for people to bring food so we can give them fish,” he said, while cleaning bonefish, known for abundant bones and limited commercial value....

“I haven’t been to the city center in almost two years. What would I do there? I don’t have enough (money) to buy a shirt or a pair of shorts,” said a fisherman in Patanemo who identified himself only as Luis. “I’m better off here swapping things to survive.”...

In the mountains of the central state of Lara, residents of the town of Guarico this year found a different way of paying bills - coffee beans. Residents of the coffee-growing region now exchange roasted beans for anything from haircuts to spare parts for agricultural machinery....

Inflation is more than a million percent. The "primitive isolation" is a barter economy. They have absolutely no money.

Here's an article from 2016 in The Atlantic, "The Myth of the Barter Economy/Adam Smith said that quid-pro-quo exchange systems preceded economies based on currency, but there’s no evidence that he was right."

The man who arguably founded modern economic theory, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, popularized the idea that barter was a precursor to money.

In Venezuela, barter is a successor to money, which is some evidence that barter was a precursor to money, but this Atlantic writer, Ilana Strauss, questions whether human beings really ever lived without currency:

[V]arious anthropologists have pointed out that this barter economy has never been witnessed as researchers have traveled to undeveloped parts of the globe.

That was back in 2016.

“No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money,” wrote the Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey in a 1985 paper. “All available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.”...

When barter has appeared, it wasn’t as part of a purely barter economy, and money didn’t emerge from it—rather, it emerged from money. After Rome fell, for instance, Europeans used barter as a substitute for the Roman currency people had gotten used to.

So barter as a successor to money doesn't tend to show that barter was ever a precursor to money....

"But there is a reason Ayn Rand is considered a gateway drug to the right and [Adam] Smith isn’t..."

"... the 'greed is good' ethos, whatever else may be wrong with it, is much sexier, more rebellious, and thus more appealing than staid bourgeois morality. But more to the point, it’s interesting that both [The Daily Caller's Matt] Lewis and [Andrew] Sullivan consider Smith the fons et origo of fiscal conservatism, as defined by support for capitalism. I find it interesting because it’s mistaken, albeit a mistaken belief that is held almost universally."

Mytheos Holt, writing in The American Conservative, would like you to pay more attention to Bernard Mandeville and "The Fable of the Bees."

Which prominent Republicans are signing a Supreme Court brief supporting same-sex marriage?

"The list of signers includes a string of Republican officials and influential thinkers — 75 as of Monday evening — who are not ordinarily associated with gay rights advocacy, including some who are speaking out for the first time and others who have changed their previous positions."

Among them are Meg Whitman, who supported Proposition 8 [a ban on same-sex marriage] when she ran for California governor; Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida and Richard Hanna of New York; Stephen J. Hadley, a Bush national security adviser; Carlos Gutierrez, a commerce secretary to Mr. Bush; James B. Comey, a top Bush Justice Department official; David A. Stockman, President Ronald Reagan’s first budget director; and Deborah Pryce, a former member of the House Republican leadership from Ohio who is retired from Congress....

Actually, this isn't such an impressive list of names. It seems pretty pathetic to me.

[T]he presence of so many well-known former officials — including Christine Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey, and William Weld and Jane Swift, both former governors of Massachusetts — suggests that once Republicans are out of public life they feel freer to speak out against the party’s official platform, which calls for amending the Constitution to define marriage as “the union of one man and one woman.”

Or it suggests Republican governors of New Jersey and Massachusetts aren't that conservative.

But then there's Huntsman:

Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former Utah governor, who favored civil unions but opposed same-sex marriage during his 2012 presidential bid, also signed. Last week, Mr. Huntsman announced his new position in an article titled “Marriage Equality Is a Conservative Cause,” a sign that the 2016 Republican presidential candidates could be divided on the issue for the first time.

This is the first reference I've seen to Huntsman's article, and I'm constantly scanning the web for news stories, especially on the subject of same-sex marriage, especially with the Supreme Court decision pending. Why isn't Huntsman more influential? It's uncanny that this man, a former governor, very nice looking, doesn't get more play among conservatives. Here he is trying to tell conservatives what's conservative, and I don't have to read his article or any response to it to know that conservatives will reject what he's saying out of hand, designating him not a conservative.

But how about not rejecting it out of hand? Put aside your Huntsmanophobia for a moment. He connects marriage equality to free market capitalism:

Marriage is not an issue that people rationalize through the abstract lens of the law; rather it is something understood emotionally through one’s own experience with family, neighbors, and friends. The party of Lincoln should stand with our best tradition of equality and support full civil marriage for all Americans.

This is both the right thing to do and will better allow us to confront the real choice our country is facing: a choice between the Founders’ vision of a limited government that empowers free markets, with a level playing field giving opportunity to all, and a world of crony capitalism and rent-seeking by the most powerful economic interests.

Adam Smith was not only an architect of the modern world of extraordinary economic opportunity, he was a moralist whose first book was The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The foundation of his thought was his insight that free markets and open commerce strengthened our moral fiber by reinforcing the community of shared and reciprocal economic interests. Government, he thought, had to be limited lest it be captured and corrupted by special business interests who wanted protection from competition and the reciprocal requirements of community.

We are at a crossroads. I believe the American people will vote for free markets under equal rules of the game—because there is no opportunity or job growth any other way. But the American people will not hear us out if we stand against their friends, family, and individual liberty.

I'd say that's a bit under-theorized. There's so much padding at the beginning of the article — Republicans need to win over the younger generation and so forth. The ending is a mishmash — a mere hint of an idea that might make sense. What does he say other than equality is good and free market capitalism is also good? There's this odd concession that law doesn't matter, because this is something that people are going to understand emotionally. Rather than make an "abstract" legal argument — why is law only abstract? — he appeals to emotion. You should be for equality because equality is the right principle. First of all, that's abstract. Secondly, the go-with-your-heart, emotion-is-the-answer approach is what leads so many people to oppose same-sex marriage.

The other argument seems to be that the economic issues are what's really important, so let's get this pesky marriage issue behind us so we can move on. People will "vote for free markets" if there are conditions of equality. That suggests that marriage equality is the kind of equality in the marketplace that Adam Smith was talking about. Is it? Maybe, but Huntsman doesn't even attempt to connect that all up. As I said: under-theorized. That's my abstract legalistic view and my from-the-heart emotional view.

"The Difference Between A $99 Suit And A $5,000 Suit..."

"... In One Graphic."

And here's an article about the rare skill involved in making a bespoke suit (and how it's not a profitable business, bereft of economies of scale).

The only way to make money in the perfectionist craftsperson industry, it seems, is to stop being a perfectionist craftsperson....

Just as Adam Smith described in “The Wealth of Nations,” there are huge efficiency gains when one complex process is broken down into constituent parts and each worker specializes in one thing.

The economics of religion.

Business Week has an article about the economic analysis of religion. Here's an interesting passage about terrorism:

The idea that religion involves rational choices extends even to suicide bombers who strike in the name of God. Studies show they are far from depressed loners or brainwashed robots. Instead, says Eli Berman, an associate professor of economics at the University of California at San Diego, suicide bombers typically are motivated young men -- and, rarely, women -- from average backgrounds. Berman, who has studied Hamas, the Taliban, and like groups, says the bombers share a sense of obligation to what amounts to a "mutual-aid society." Says Berman: "They think of themselves as making great sacrifices for a cause -- the way we would think of pilots in the Battle of Britain, or the way the kamikaze thought of themselves."

How should the West fight such terrorism? Berman says one approach would be to promote prosperity through freer markets, which would reduce the supply of potential bombers. [George Mason Professor Laurance R.] Iannaccone gives another answer to the question in a paper called The Market for Martyrs that he presented earlier this year to the American Economic Assn. He argues that the supply of would-be terrorists is impossible to suppress. Instead, it makes sense to reduce demand by disrupting the "firms" that sponsor them.

The article mentions that Adam Smith wrote about religion in "The Wealth of Nations." Here's a passage from Smith that I've used in my Religion and the Constitution class.