Why can't we let the people work it out?

Well, I guess my loyal readers deserve another update from me. It's late and I can't sleep, so you're now getting one, much to the dismay of my wakefulness come tomorrow morning.
I've started reading Huck Finn. A few weeks ago, I realized I'd never really read a classic American novel (from that century at least), so it was time. Got a copy at the used bookstore near where we live. I must say, that's one of the most perfect novels I've ever read. It never drags, it has a great story, deep characters, and I've never encountered better humor (in fiction) than Twain. For one of our classes, we have a final paper where we choose any topic that we can relate to Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and I've decided to do mine as a comparison between Huck Finn and Democracy in America: showing how what Tocqueville sees with regards to race, individualism, literature, morality, family, and religion is also observed by Twain through Huck Finn. Or something like that.
Work is okay. It's kind of fun working there, but I think it may be only because I have the assurance that I won't be working at AAAS past a certain date. It has been a good experience, and I've seen a lot of the stuff I wanted to when coming here, but this internship has also shown me that I really don't want an office job for some fifty-odd years of my life--but I think I already knew that.
I write as much as I can in my free time. I need to really "sharpen my craft," as I call it, and hopefully get some more things published, so I can at least have some kind of portfolio to show for myself whenever I hit the career market. Whenever that will be.
This writing here doesn't count. This writing here sucks. This is single draft 3 AM writing.
I want to learn Chinese. Once I've done this, I'll go to China, and start a travel blog there. I will have 5 entries for 10 months.
My economics professor here is the best teacher I've ever had in my life. Seriously. Thomas Rustici, econ professor at George Mason. Before coming here, I had never really formed any strong thoughts about economics, but now I'm becoming a semi-psychotic libertarian. And I like it. Not libertarian like Philip Brooks (that term probably is too socialistic for him, he once defined himself on his facebook as "anarcho-capitalist"), but very disenchanted with the way the government handles economic policy. I'll amend that, it's too weak: I'm extremely baffled and upset and frustrated by politicians' eternal habit of putting needless regulations and taxes on the market, saying that they're helping the people, and oftentimes just needlessly killing a few unlucky citizens and making everyone else's life much, much worse. Professor Rustici has quite a few personal stories that relate the subject to him very ... personally.
In the lecture on minimum wage (hands down the best class lecture I've ever sat in), he told us through tears about his grandfather who immigrated here from Sicily, and while providing the money for a middle-class existence in the '30s, lost his eyesight. He lost his job, and in a few months, the family had spent all their savings, sold all their furniture, taken their older son (my professor's father) out of fifth grade to work 16 hour days in a bakery, and were still so hungry they at one point had to ask their neighbor for the weeds they picked out of their garden to eat. Eventually their catholic church set up a collection for them, and congregation members provided the parents with enough low-paying work to pay for putting meat on the table one night per week (the son never returned to school). But these jobs they were working paid below minimum wage, and when the federal government found out about it, they harassed the family and threatened to put them in jail for making less than minimum wage. They finally had to go do the work secretly in the basement of the church, and were able to make it through the rough years.
Well the class actually applauded when he finished that lecture, and it's certainly been the most powerful one, but he always has the best personal anecdotes and historical examples to back up his points. I'm serious: if everyone in this blamed country even just heard one lecture of this, so many terrible politicians and government economists would lose their jobs that, why, we'd have money! Imagine that. I think I may try to put this class into book form one day. Seriously.