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The taxpayers of New Jersey just shelled out close to half a million dollars to MTV to go toward the production of “Jersey Shore.” Aren’t you proud that your taxes support the fine arts?

Why is the state in the business of funding a TV program? It’s all in the name of economic development, of course. Here’s how the show’s summary reads on the application to the state Economic Development Authority:

“The film is about eight roommates. There is no screenplay. The roommates live in a house and are asked to work in a local establishment on the New Jersey Coast. The cameras capture the interaction among the roommates and how the roommates interact at work and at play in Seaside Heights.”

I don’t watch TV anymore, but something tells me that the description is a bit tamer than what’s really going on. I’m just guessing, though.

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What does it mean to make an investment? It’s pretty straightforward. It’s money that you put into something in hopes of getting a return on it in the future. If I choose to invest $10,000 in XYZ Co., that’s an investment. If someone takes my money by threat of force and spends in on XYZ Co., that’s theft. Some politicians don’t know the difference.

As I expected, the City Council in my suburb raised our sales tax to 10 percent earlier this week. I talked about it when it was first proposed and then when the City Council held a public hearing about it, so I don’t have a lot new to say about it. But something the City Council president said at the vote in favor of the tax irritated me:

Council President Wayne Taylor said the increase is “about reinvesting in the community we all love.”

This is pure arrogance and stupidity. It’s using words that have a clear and definite meaning to cover up what’s really going on. The politician is using force to take money from people in order to spend it the way he wants to spend it. It’s no different than the Mob taking money from people through coercion and then buying businesses with the cash. It’s theft, regardless what the thief does with the money.

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Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book, “It Takes a Village,” is based on the idea that children need to be cared for by an entire community, not just by their own families. She said it was based on an African proverb — “It takes a village to raise a child” — but there are questions about whether it even originated there.

Now it turns out that the maxim isn’t even true. A University of Michigan researcher says that African kids raised in nuclear families do just as well as those raised by extended families or “villages.”

“In the African villages that I study in Mali, children fare as well in nuclear families as they do in extended families,” said Beverly Strassmann, professor of anthropology and faculty associate at the UM Institute for Social Research. “There’s a naïve belief that villages raise children communally, when in reality children are raised by their own families and their survival depends critically on the survival of their mothers.”

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