Busy-ness

So I'm trying to decide how busy is too busy. We've had exactly four piano practices in two weeks (among four kids...do the math), and I don't know how to pack it in. Matching socks are nonexistent in my house, and the last three days at least four pieces of clothing from the kids have come directly from the dryer. My husband and I are trying to carve out time to just talk to each other without my falling asleep right there. That's not a commentary on him--I'm just exhausted. We get up at 5:45 to get moving, have a cup of coffee before the kids are up and trying to find their clothes.

We have a pony 20 minutes away who needs to be ridden at least four times a week. We have three lunches that must be made. Two loads of laundry a day to keep up. (Where do those clothes come from?) One business that needs to be run well. You can't keep great employees running a shop half-way! That doesn't count my husband's business which is actually how we eat, sleep, swim, vacation, school, everything our children and our life. So my shop is only for me. And possibly my shoes...the shoe money.

I feel like I'm not running my true calling, my home, to its best. But I stayed home for eight years with no outside occupation. And when I did that, I went NUTS. Literally. I have the doctor bills to prove it.

So now I'm wondering...what price sanity? What about the balance between my sanity and my home's? Maybe this is just the same boring old balance blah blah blah. But it is weighing on me. The shop may be coming out of the slump of summer. But will it be enough?

Instalanche Redux

Wow! Instapundit posted my questions below, and I had a ton (for me) of traffic here today.  Thanks for a great discussion in the comments, which hopefully will continue.

Instapundit definitely draws a conservative/libertarian kind of commenter, based on what was going on in the comments.  Isn't it interesting that so many comments reflected the belief that everyone should pay some tax, no matter how little.  I really think there's something to the "buy-in"  that the Swedish Social Democrats have figured out. (I think that was "Terminal Frost" who contributed that idea.)

Mostly it bothered me that these basic questions are never even offered, maybe because the answers seem obvious on the surface.  And the vast majority of commenters seemed to agree with this.  I especially liked the point about looking at taxation as a confiscation not of money but of time.  Talk about clarifying the problem!  But apparently SOMEONE believes that it's okay for a large chunk of the electorate to not be taxed.  

I really liked the house discussion.  See, I have a feeling that home ownership has changed, especially in light of the bubble.  How much worse is it to live in a neighborhood with several foreclosed, vacant houses than a full apartment complex? There seems to be room to question encouraging home ownership, even though it's been treated as a tacit good thing for many years.  Same with the college education--it is a given, isn't it, that a college degree is necessary?

Back when I was an actuary, sometimes we would get answers which didn't make any sense.  We couldn't figure out what was wrong in the formulas...it wasn't until we went all the way back to the initial assumptions, to how we framed to the problem, and then we could see that we had been looking at the problem all wrong.  Maybe that's what is going on here.  There needs to be time and space to really examine our principles.  Thanks for participating in the discussion.  I'll try to keep up the questions; please check in once in a while and throw around some answers.

I have questions

And I haven't seen them addressed anywhere, not during the campaign or after.  So I'm just going to lay them out here:

1. Is it good public policy to have your entire electorate pay taxes?  If so, why?  If not, why not?  I'm trying to figure out how it is healthy to have 35-40% of the electorate outside of the income tax system.
2. Why is home-ownership favored so heavily over renting?  Is there something intrinsically better about owning?  Or is it that the type of people who traditionally buy houses are "better" for a community?  And that leads to the question...why should the government incentivize any sort of living arrangement, renting or ownership?
3. Let's assume that cheap-and-easy credit made the run-up in housing prices possible, at least in part. And, this run-up in value has been bad in the long run, because it turns out to be kind of bubbly.  (Okay, really bubbly.)  Now consider the price of a university education, where price increases have been running roughly double inflation.  Is cheap credit to blame for the price inflation there?  Does the availability of credit diminish the price sensitivity to any particular asset, because it defers the pain?  And does it also diminish the relative value of a college degree?  I'm thinking yes, but I want to know what other people think.

I'm serious about these questions.  If you don't normally comment, I wish you would here.  I'd really like to start a dialogue about these things.  Thanks!

UPDATE:  Instalanche!  My first.  Welcome, take a look around, and thanks for the comments!