I started reading the Econbrowser blog because it's peak oil-aware founder JD Hamilton posted frequently on The Oil Drum. At some point, Hamilton brought in the very technical Menzie Chinn as co-blogger. Yesterday, in Analogy Watch: "Cairo has come to Wisconsin"? Chinn repudiated the claim Paul Ryan had made on MSNBC:

State workers who have extremely generous benefits packages, [Walker’s] asking that they contribute 12 percent to their health care packages. It’s not a lot, it’s about half of what private-sector employees pay, and he’s getting riots. It’s like Cairo has come to Wisconsin,” Ryan said. “People should be able to express their way, but we’ve got to get this deficit and debt under control in Madison."

... with charts showing that public sector employees make less than private in both wages and total compensation. Which is useful enough, though not really surprising to anyone that has had opportunities in both sectors. The best part of the post, IMO, was JBH's response in the comment section:

The teacher's "strike" in Madison is as much a watershed event as was the PATCO strike President Reagan broke in 1981. This event will reverberate across the nation with major consequences, and history will look back at this as the high-water mark for public sector employees whose productivity measured by student test scores does not warrant their compensation.

This event unfolds in the larger context of what is really going on in this country. A vast swath of ordinary Americans are finally fed up with the nation's decline and are doing something about it at the voting booth. The Tea Party movement is one of many concrete manifestations of this change now upon us. Ordinary hard-working people in the private sector perceive their tax dollars misused and are turning the levers of change. They are enabled by the same new communication technology as were the people demonstrating in Tunis and Cairo. Formerly only elites had access to knowledge, the priesthoods of academia, press, and politics. That is all changing now in a way similar to the change that swept Europe after Gutenberg invented the printing press. The wave of revolt against tyranny in the Middle East and the sea change underway here in the US against "tyranny" -- the most egregious being the Federal government's ever-greater intrusion into privates lives and pocketbooks -- are part of a larger organic whole. And events will move far more swiftly today with the instantaneity of the technology and massive new access to knowledge that this technology provides.

The comments to opinion pieces in the mainstream press by mostly politically biased writers, and the comments on blog sites like this, are often more insightful about real world matters than the original provoking article. Naturally enough, for there is no monopoly on creative insight. All people have it, it is our inheritance as humans. The thing that has changed is mass access by everyone to the store of knowledge that is exponentially growing. No longer is knowledge the restricted privilege of inbred schools such as that of economics which could not even see the financial crisis of 2008 coming. Moreover, Egypt and Tunisia inform us that this technological revolution also enables new forms of organization and networking amongst the broad public, where by the laws of evolution it is predictable that many creative new ideas are going to populate the niches and crowd out the many bad ideas that currently reign.

In a nutshell, power is devolving back to the people and competition in the marketplace for ideas has only now in the scope of history finally at long last truly begun.

The first commenter after JBH assumed he was endorsing the Tea Party, but I see him/her endorsing people making their voices heard, which will include confused and misled people as well as those of us who already know everything. And I fully agree that the best information is often in the comments section.