Well, I made it all the way to episode 100! If you've been listening, thanks so much. If you haven't, might as well start now.

I start out the show with greetings and feedback from listeners. Yes, there are people out there actually listening to this, and I appreciate it very much.

Then we take a trip back to Camelot, as Mark Twain's character did in "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court". In that book, there is a short chapter about ... economics. No, really. And it's trying to teach a lesson that, over a hundred years later, we're still having to relearn.

Mentioned links:

Hornet Archives (MOD/Tracker music) (https://hornet.org/)

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, chapter 33 (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/86/86-h/86-h.htm#c33) [Project Gutenburg]

10 Nations With the Highest Minimum Wage…and What They Pay For It (http://liberallogic101.com/?p=18384)

This is how the minimum wage is actually hurting workers (http://rare.us/story/this-is-how-the-minimum-wage-is-actually-hurting-workers/)

Wal-Mart Pay Raise Tops Minimum Wage For Half-Million Employees (http://dailycaller.com/2015/02/19/wal-mart-pay-raise-tops-minimum-wage-for-half-million-employees/)

Show transcript

When my kids were younger, I read many books out loud to them. I was hoping to instill in them a love for reading, as well as demonstrating to them how watching the movie that was based on a book was not at all like reading the book. We started with shorter stories, like The Secret Garden, and we eventually worked our way up to The Lord of the Rings, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. One thing about reading out loud is that you need to come up with different voices for the characters, or listeners will get easily confused. I’d use my own voice for the protagonist, since he or she would presumably have the most to say, and thus I wouldn’t be reading so much of the book in a made-up voice. Just a hint if you decide to do it.

One of the books we read was by Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. In it, the main character, who lived in the year 1879, suddenly finds himself in Camelot in the year 528. One might consider it something of science fiction, on par with Jules Verne. But it’s no fluff piece of tachyons and androids. Twain used the past to make commentary on his present; praising the good and criticizing the bad, with Twain’s characteristic humor. I found myself explaining some of the vocabulary and concepts to my kids as I read it, but with the explanations, I think – I hope – that they were able to grasp some of what Twain was saying, such as they could at their ages.

The story gets off into such details that a movie would never do it justice. Some of these details and tangents let us understand how, for example, the lack of education had an effect on the peasantry of the day, and how it was used to manipulate them. There is a particularly relevant passage in chapter 33 that I would like to read today. The chapter is titled, “Sixth Century Political Economyâ€. See what I mean? Not exactly the name of a chapter you’d expect to find in a Doctor Who or Star Trek novel. “Star Wars episode 7; The Economy of an Empire!†No, not gonna’ happen. Yet Twain, in his entertaining style, manages to make such a discussion both humorous and educational at the same time. In this passage, which I’m abridging slightly, the protagonist is having an economic discussion with a local blacksmith, Dowley, after a nice dinner. Dowley is trying to demonstrate how the economics of the small kingdom he lives in are better than others. I want you to listen to Dowley’s points and see if they remind you of something that you hear even to this day. Mark Twain, though speaking to people of his own time, indeed speaks down the centuries.

---

[Note: In the podcast episode, I cut out some of this text for time (and redundancy). This is the text of the section of chapter 33 that I took my reading from.]