Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

This so-called attempt to model human behavior is no such thing. It's inherently collectivist. You can't model individual wants, resources and the actions each takes based on those things.

Time wonders if double-digit unemployment is here to stay. Double-digit unemployment will stay until we reduce the size and scope of government and free our economy from the Federal Reserve. It's so obvious that double-digit unemployment is not natural, why do Americans continue voting for the people in the two parties who force it on us and will continue to make it worse?

Peter Schiff is still buying gold for the long term.

The facts behind the green shoots lie.

HEALTH CARE:

Cato scholar translates Obama's health care speech. Pretty funny.

Reason ridicules Obama for his bogus speech. This is pretty funny too. Facts are stubborn things. Obama has shown that he's such an unserious president, a liar, a phony, a stooge, that even serious writers and thinkers are reduced to ridiculing him.

Mark Steyn raises another hidden but predictable cost of health care in an essay predicting Democrats will force their bill down our throats over the will of the people:

"In 2004, Britain's Health Protection Agency revealed that 44 percent of HIV patients being treated by the National Health Service were not residents of the United Kingdom at all but from southern Africa. In essence, a huge number of AIDS patients in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Swaziland and Lesotho have decided to outsource their health care needs to British taxpayers. Similar trends will manifest themselves here in nothing flat.
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For most of the previous presidency, the Left accused George W. Bush of using 9/11 as a pretext to attack Iraq. Since January, his successor has used the economic slump as a pretext to "reform" health care. Most voters don't buy it: They see it as Obama's "war of choice," and the more frantically he talks about it as a matter of urgency the weirder it seems. If he's having difficulty selling it, that's because it's not about "health." As I've written before, the appeal of this issue to him and to Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank et al is that governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture – one in which elections are always fought on the Left's issues and on the Left's terms, and in which "conservative" parties no longer talk about small government and individual liberty but find themselves retreating to one last pitiful rationale: that they can run the left-wing state more effectively than the Left can."

As soon as the government will pay everybody's medical fees, the US will become the free health care provider to the world. You think illegal immigration is bad now.

Forbes writer calls Obama's health care speech the equivalent of the giving the middle finger to America."If there was anything bipartisan about the speech it was that he embraced every bad big-government idea from both sides. If he prevails, the American public won't get "choice and competition" as he proclaimed, but a one-size-fits-all government-prescribed health care plan that it dare not refuse and dare not challenge.
Perhaps the most striking--and disturbing--thing about the speech was the unblinking confidence Obama exuded while breaking key campaign promises he made to voters.
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Baucus has proposed a bill that would force the uninsured to pay fines on a sliding scale of income, with those making 300% of the poverty level having to cough up as much as $3,800 a year. In short, Americans would have to pay Uncle Sam for the privilege of remaining uninsured. If there were truth-in-labeling laws for Congress, it would be required to call this bill TonySopranoCare.
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In exchange for these bitter tax pills, Obama promised Americans would get eternal health care "security and stability." To deliver that, he would of course ban insurance companies from denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions--tantamount to forcing fire insurance companies to write coverage on a burning building. He would also prohibit insurers from putting any limits on the coverage they offer and cap what they can require patients to pay out-of-pocket.
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Indeed, if Obama really can tame health care costs by making patients even less cost-conscious, I have an even better idea for him: Simply pass a law banning anyone from falling sick and mandate good health for all. If he can suspend the laws of economics, perhaps he can also transcend the laws of physiology."

Rich Lowry identifies 13 steps to creating an Obama speech.

GOVERNMENT DEBT:

The collapse of America through the collapse of Medicare and Social Security has begun with an end to cost of living adjustments for seniors.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Powerful essay from John Gray calls for an end to the destructive war on drugs:

"The war on drugs is a failed policy that has injured far more people than it has protected. Around 14,000 people have died in Mexico's drug wars since the end of 2006, more than 1,000 of them in the first three months of this year. Beyond the overflowing morgues in Mexican border towns, there are uncounted numbers who have been maimed, traumatised or displaced. From Liverpool to Moscow, Tokyo to Detroit, a punitive regime of prohibition has turned streets into battlefields, while drug use has remained embedded in the way we live. The anti-drug crusade will go down as among the greatest follies of modern times."

The war on drugs is not about making Americans safer, healthier or anything else, and it never has been. It's about politicians gaining more power for themselves and their powerful constituencies of lawyers and police officers.

More people over 50 are smoking marijuana than ever. That's one way to teach the kids pot is not cool. I'm sure the government is just drooling to start locking the elderly in cages for smoking pot.

WAR:

This essay is exactly right. The only way to defeat an enemy is to aggressive hunt him down and kill him. Civilian casualties are the fault of the terrorist who hides among civilians and the civilians who allow it. Just ask the Tamil Tigers.

Why is the US planning to build seven military bases in Columbia?

MISC:

I've written questions to scientists wondering what effect our changing magnetic field would have on climate. I never received an answer. Now scientists have discovered that the Earth's magnetic field captures energy from the solar wind, so a changing magnetic field will have consequences for climate.

Another Cato scholar rejects the collectivist ideas at the heart of the president's speech to captive school kids.

Washington D.C. tea party draws 10s of thousands.

Glenn Beck got another radical and corrupt Obama appointee kicked out of his job. Good job, Beck! Keep up the good work. Just stop crying while you do it.

The Census Dept. says it cut ties with ACORN. That would be great news if true. I'm not going to take the Obama administration's word for it.

While the program has ghoulish overtones, I'm surprised by this article on life insurance securities from Lew Rockwell. Wall Street and mortgage securities were the least culpable things to blow up our economy. The Fed did it with the help of Fannie and Freddie and government destroying rational credit checks for housing. The mortgage securities diffused the bomb into our entire financial sector, but they bomb would have been there whether they did that or not. I don't expect an sudden increase in longevity for the elderly either. Maybe the writer hasn't heard of Obamaoppressioncare.

Analysis argues that the US is on the road to failure, not success.

"A key variable in the success or failure of a nation and government like ours is the production of wealth. We the People produce this wealth. When our government selects strategies that impair the production of wealth and that destroy wealth, it causes failure.
Let’s look at six major government strategies that are causing major failure. There are many more. In each case, there is a pattern of persistence. The government failures do not deter it from continuing the failed strategy. The government enlarges them. The end result of such behavior is the ruination of the country."

The list shows many new policies are simply extensions of old policies in ongoing, destructive government strategies.

"Under these kinds of strategies, economic growth, which depends on wealth production (capital accumulation) slows down. Capital goes into hiding. Capital consumption is encouraged. Capital flees from America. The government’s strategies impair the country. They impair the government too. Bush's programs had the effect of slowing the growth of and destroying capital. Now Obama's programs are doing the same and promise even a higher degree of the same.
The end occurs when the U.S. hits the financial wall. To avoid that outcome, the government may reform itself. That path requires that it commit itself to abandoning the sword and promoting free markets. Without constitutional or legal commitment, it will have no credibility, because of its long history of using force. There are no signs whatsoever of the U.S. going in that direction. It is doing the very opposite. Failing that, as the day approaches when the U.S. slams into the financial wall, it can take increasingly stringent measures to defer the date. These will be very unpleasant for Americans, should they occur. The government can impose an array of measures: higher taxes, price and wage controls, controls on the movement of Americans and of capital, seizure of assets and wealth accumulations, and rationing. The government can replace old dollars with new ones with reduced purchasing power. It can control jobs and employment. It can impose forced labor. Or perhaps none of these measures will be adopted. Perhaps there will be a national bankruptcy in which there is a mad scramble to see who is going to absorb the losses."

Neither Republicans nor Democrats will give up their power voluntarily, so we either take their power from them by voting both out of office, or our country is going to collapse. I vote for no collapse.