Your call is very important to us…

In case you were wondering, here are the ten main reasons you aren’t rich, according to Jeffrey Strain at TheStreet.com.

As the Beatles said:

Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9
Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9
Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number…

My libertarian friends might be interested in heading over to Kim Cameron’s Identity Weblog, where most of the recent posts have dealt with fingerprinting. The issue is largely about fingerprinting children in schools, when they don’t have a full grasp of what putting an irrevokable, unique identifier on record like that could mean. On that note, he posted an email he received from Joy Robinson-Van Gilder, a woman here in Illinois who fought tooth and nail to keep her kids from being fingerprinted for a biometric school lunch program. “We know that the data on these children can be sold, given away and anyone who knows how to write a FOIA can have access to this info,” she writes.

Also, Kim reprinted a post from a pro-liberty blog called Nobody’s Business, describing a pilot program in the UK where the government is installing fingerprint scanners at the entrances to pubs and clubs in major cities. This way, in theory, they’ll know who was at a bar when a fight broke out, and “[o]ffenders can be banned from one pub or all of them for a specified time – usually a period of months”. An establishment that doesn’t show a marked decrease in violence could have its license revoked.