Free kibbles

Mises scholar calls Goldman-Sachs the most politically powerful financial firm because of its political connections and explains that the reason Goldman is showing profit is it's taking tremendous risks with our tax dollars:

"Goldman knows it is too big to fail. How does it know this? Well, the government bailed out AIG not so much for AIG's sake, but for the sake of big AIG counterparties -- most notably Goldman. Moreover, given the conventional wisdom that the government's primary error in the financial crisis was its failure to bail out Lehman -- a piker compared to Goldman -- it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that it won't repeat that mistake in the future, and let Goldman go down. So Goldman knows it can get bigger, and take more risk. It is the classic heads Goldman wins, tails the sucker taxpayer eats the loss gambit. If nobody steps in to rein in the firm, it will continue to add risk, thereby enhancing the value of the Treasury put hiding in the equity entry on its balance sheet.

Somebody should be stepping in -- but nobody is. Why not? Partly, no doubt, it is Goldman's political heft. It is likely too that important policy makers don't want to crack down on a major source of risk capital to the markets in the fear that this would impede a recovery. Even though in reality, that risk capital is your money and mine, with the exception that we have no chance of capturing the upside, and are left with a good chunk of the downside. This is a piece with the hair-of-the-dog strategy being pursued by Treasury and the Fed."

That's more of the same, but worse, you can believe in. More on the link between the government and Goldman-Sachs. Glenn Beck does a fabulous job showing that TARP was basically a program to rescue Goldman-Sachs and eliminate its competition. Naturally both parties are party to it. Beck talks with Ron Paul about Goldman-Sachs and the Fed. Paul reminds us that Obama got nearly $1 million from Goldman-Sachs.

The American Conservative Union busted for trying to extort money from FedEx so the ACU would back it in its battle with UPS. This is the inevitable result of politics as usual in Washington. When political power is for sale, everybody wants to buy it. And political power is always for sale. It's the only thing of value professional politicians have, so naturally they sell it. The only solution is to take our power back from the politicians.

Photos of Apollo sites. I wonder what the loons who claim it was all faked will say now. Oh wait. That's easy. They'll claim the photos are fakes.

23 of 381 metro areas are showing signs that the recession is slowing locally. That's because many of them are state capitals and growth in state government boosts them while harming the rest of the state. Every state on the map is at the bottom of the economic scale.

Obama says a better opportunity for reforming health care may not come for generations. That's because Americans don't want Obama's reform, which is really more of the same government interference in our health care, but tremendously worse. Americans are increasingly seeing through the Obama power grab agenda, and they don't like it. It would be nice to think that if we stop Obamacare now, we won't have to worry about it again for generations, but that's naive.