Carnival of the Capitalists

This week's tremendous Carnival of the Capitalists is up at The Raw Prawn. Usually I note 1 post that I like (and it sometimes hard to find one). This week I have 4 and they are all great.

• The Conservative Cat has a flash animation showing why third party payer systems (like medicare) don't work as intended.
• Scrivener.net has a post quoting economics Nobel Prize winner Paul Samuelson noting almost 40 years ago that the great thing about social security is that it is a Ponzi scheme.
• Brian Gongol has a tremendous post showing with a little arithmetic that it would have been more cost effective for both sides to buy out all the slaveholders than to have fought the Civil War.
• Ripples... argues that blogging works because it is not a zero-sum game. I agree, but I think the argument could be tightened up - more later if my brain gets working on this.