David McElroy

Everyone was excited when God agreed to be a contestant on Jeopardy, but the show lost a lot of suspense after people realized He knew everything. Norman wasn’t happy with this turn of events.

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I had a great time Wednesday night playing with a smart and gregarious 4-year-old in the checkout line at Target. I’ve been thinking about it ever since, both because it makes me smile and because it makes me wonder why so many adults lose the child-like qualities that make real play so joyful.

It was a long line for a number of people. There was a problem with the register, so we were stuck for a couple of minutes. The woman in front of me had two little girls with her, and the girls went to the wall beyond the checkout line to wait. Then the oldest of the two called out to her mother, “Mom, the ice here costs $1.99.”

The mother smiled and agreed with her that that’s what the sign said. She told me the girl had been learning how to read and understand prices.

“That’s not a lot of money, is it?” the girl asked in our general direction.

The mother was busy talking to the cashier by then, so I responded by telling her that it would be a lot of money for a piece of gum, but it would not be much money for a car. We talked about the relative value of money and prices, and she seemed to understand a lot more than I would expect for her age.

Sarah is 4. Her mother homeschools her older brother and teaches quite a bit to Sarah that surprised me. By the time we finished our brief discussion of money, she came and showed me letters on the magazines in the checkout line.

“Letters work different from numbers,” she told me confidently, apparently in the belief that no one had ever taught me this. She then started showing me a game she had invented involving matching certain letters with other letters on other magazine covers. I’m not entirely sure I understood the rules of her game, because she was laughing too much as she tried to explain. She might have been making it up as she went, for all I know.

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It’s starting to look more and more as though Ayn Rand was a psychic or a prophet, at least when it comes to some economic realities more than 50 years after “Atlas Shrugged” was published.

Last July, I watched a mine operator tell a crowd here in Birmingham that he was quitting because of the attitudes of regulators and the public toward the work he did. Wednesday, I learned that six congressional Democrats are trying to make another part of Rand’s book come true. They’ve proposed a Reasonable Profits Board — to decide how much money oil companies are allowed to profit. The market clearly isn’t good enough for these looters and moochers.

This group of economic illiterates is led by U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio). They want a board — completely appointed by the president — to set a target for what a “reasonable” profit would be for oil companies. Any profit that’s slightly more than that would be taxed at 50 percent of the “excess profit.” If a company’s profit reached more than 105 percent of the allegedly reasonable profit, 100 percent of the “excess profit” would be taken as a tax. The bill is called the Gas Price Spike Act.

There’s no such thing as a “fair profit” or a “reasonable profit.” Those things are determined by one thing and one thing alone — the price point at which a willing buyer and willing seller can come together. If there’s a profit at that point, the seller has an incentive to produce more of the product. If there’s not a profit, the product isn’t going to be produced, because there’s no incentive. People who naively believe they can regulate profits are simply trying to regulate prices from the other end. It won’t work — and there’s no rational basis on which to decide what is “reasonable.”

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