Lift Off

This first post is intended to be an outline. With Upward Down Flight, I plan to give personal reflections on or reactions to current events. This post will be handy to look back on to see just how far off course I've gone.

To start the blog, I will post several recent papers written for an undergraduate course in economics entitled "Issues in Economic Freedom." The instructions for the assignments were to find current news articles and discuss the economic freedom issue related to them. These will be presented pretty much the same as they were written: in memorandum format, with the intended audience being the professor for the course, and with works cited included.

As an Economics major, I would like to remain on that theme in this blog. There are many interesting concepts within the discipline which I would like to explore. I would like to avoid political issues where possible, however politics is inseparably intertwined with economics on many fronts. For the most part, I intend to remain as party neutral as I can. If views I express happen to coincide with those of any particular party, it will be coincidental to the supporting evidence and arguments. I may feel the need to go off topic occasionally and perhaps with this sentence I am giving myself permission.

This first bold step has taken a lot of courage on my part. Opening up a bit of my personal self to the world is somewhat against my nature. At the same time, assuming others find this blog, the nature of some of my posts will be open to a lot of criticism. There will be those who will certainly disagree with what I have to say. Argument is something I often tend to avoid by just "getting along," which is why I say it will take a bit of courage on my part to actually say what I think and face the opposing views and criticisms.

Along those lines, there is the need to have the conviction to stand behind what you write. I think it will be important to believe in what I've written before it is posted. But beliefs and ideologies tend to ebb and flow throughout a person's lifetime. Therefore, there is every likelihood that I will contradict myself at some point. C'est la vie.

Finally, to start something like this, one should have the conviction to keep it going. That will prove the most difficult. Finding the thoughts to write about is usually not nearly so difficult as finding the time to put those thoughts into a coherent and hopefully intelligent message. We'll just have to see how that goes.

Scott