Congratulations to Charlie Cooper, a student at the University of Chicago Business School, who got married earlier this summer. While planning his wedding, Mr. Cooper had the sort of idea that one might expect from a business school student: Why not securitize the wedding?

His thinking, outlined in a humor piece for the University of Chicago student newspaper (chibus.com), went like this: Weddings these days are expensive – really expensive – both for the families of the couple and for the guests, who, after paying for plane tickets and hotel rooms, also feel obliged to buy the newlyweds a Cuisinart. “Why have a market in which all parties lose or forfeit some capital?” he wondered. “Would it be possible to use one party’s costs to offset the other? Was my wedding some bizarre economic transaction in which everyone is a buyer?”

Mr. Cooper had an answer to this traditional conundrum. “We could add all our liabilities to together, split them up into shares and sell them to the guests. The end result being that all caterers, photographers, servers, florists etc. get paid and all guests feel as though they contributed to the wedding, as though they bought us a gift. The wedding could become self financing. It even would have returns to scale, the more people we invited, the bigger the wedding we could have. This is instead of traditional wedding financing which follows that the more people invited invariably incurs more cost. The guests are buyers and the service providers are sellers. All parties are left having purchased something that they find worth their money.”

“I present Collateralized Wedding Obligations,” Mr. Cooper declares, “a type of asset-backed security and structured gift bearing product.”

Sadly, Mr. Cooper’s wife torpedoed the idea. “But then again, she goes to Kellogg,” he says.

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THE LAFFER CURVE IS ALL WRONG

The next time you meet economist Arthur Laffer at a cocktail party, you can whip out a napkin and explain to him why his theory that lower taxes equals higher tax revenue is, well, wrong. At least in theory.

The premise of Mr. Laffer’s argument is quite simple: If the government sets the tax rate at zero, then it will obviously receive no tax revenue, and if it has a 100% tax rate, then it will also receive no revenue because nobody will have any incentive to earn. Thus, the relationship between tax rate and tax revenue has something like an upside-down U shape, with a sweet spot in the middle that maximizes tax revenue. If the tax rates are higher than this sweet spot, then decreasing them will raise revenue. That’s basically what Mr. Laffer said to Vice President Cheney many years ago, who then helped turn the theory into practice under the Reagan administration.

But the anonymous blogger at Bluematter (bluematter.blogspot.com) has a bone to pick with the fundaments of Mr. Laffer’s theory: “A 100% tax rate on everything was tried before, of course: they called it communism. Whereas not advisable, government revenues sure weren’t zero.”

Mere hairsplitting? Perhaps. But the Bluematter blogger continues, “And even if you rule out authoritarian methods, it is very likely that even at such high levels of taxation some market activity would take place simply to support non-market, non-taxable activities. And of course, I would expect considerable social pressure on individuals to work (if you don’t work alongside me, we all die), plus a lot of activity from people who actually enjoy doing their job.”