Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Is this your idea of a recovery?

TAX AND SPEND:

Lies and more lies about Obama's stimulus boondoggle:

"President Barack Obama's economic recovery program saved 935 jobs at the Southwest Georgia Community Action Council, an impressive success story for the stimulus plan. Trouble is, only 508 people work there.

The Georgia nonprofit's inflated job count is among persisting errors in the government's latest effort to measure the effect of the $787 billion stimulus plan despite White House promises last week that the new data would undergo an "extensive review" to root out errors discovered in an earlier report.

About two-thirds of the 14,506 jobs claimed to be saved under one federal office, the Administration for Children and Families at Health and Human Services, actually weren't saved at all, according to a review of the latest data by The Associated Press. Instead, that figure includes more than 9,300 existing employees in hundreds of local agencies who received pay raises and benefits and whose jobs weren't saved."

Lying is business as usual in Washington.

Far reaching consequences of the welfare state.

"For many of the working poor, the implicit marginal tax rate is greater than 100 percent. The long-run consequence of undermining the positive incentive to work is, of course, the creation of an underclass acclimated to not working; the supplement of cash and noncash benefits with income from crime and the underground economy; and the government resorting to negative incentives such as mandatory work programs."

Government creates poverty.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Another perspective predicting wild inflation.

"It goes without saying that deflation would have been very painful for any debtor. Consider the most indebted entities: the government, banks, powerful corporations, homeowners, and private equity funds run by insiders. Given these debtors, is it any wonder that the government chooses bailouts rather than letting the market work its exorcism? Every time there is even the slightest deflation, we'll hear Bernanke et al. saying that all hell will break loose unless something is done about it.

If the market were allowed to work, loan defaults would cause bank failures en masse. Bank failures would also wipe out the savings of depositors, because the banks' debt holders will have seniority in bankruptcy proceedings. Yes, all hell will break loose, but only for the people who took imprudent risks like borrowing recklessly or depositing money in unsound banks.

If one bank is allowed to go under and its depositors allowed to be wiped out, you can bet your last dollar that there will be a run on every bank the next day, exacerbating the problem exponentially. The entire banking system would be ruined in a couple of days, with utter chaos, pandemonium, and possibly violence being the rule rather than the exception."

Thanks to fractional reserve banking. Can't have the powers that be that live off of debt pay the price with deflation, can we? Nope. Inflation it is.

HEALTH CARE:

Health care producers petition the government. This will be about as effective as banging their heads against a wall. It starts off wrong by assuming our representatives have good motives. At least it questions their motives at the end which would be wise if our representatives were to read it at all which they won't.

POLITICS:

Rothbard explains why conservatives-Republicans pay lip service to free markets while continually attacking them, and it's basically the same reason I said they pay lip service to small government - to show they're in the club and hypnotize people into continuing to give them more power.

"In domestic affairs, the free-market rhetoric has become simply that: after-dinner talk carrying no enthusiasm or true conviction. Indeed, the promise of laissez-faire now performs the same function for the new American Right as the promise of unlimited abundance under communism did for Stalin. While enslaving and exploiting the Soviet people, Stalin held out a splendid future of utopian abundance that would make current sacrifices worthwhile.

The present-day Right holds out the eventual promise of freedom and the free market after communists shall have been exterminated. If there are any survivors emerging from their civil-defense shelters after the holocaust, they will presumably be allowed to engage in free-market activities, provided, of course, that some other "enemy" shall not have raised its head in the meanwhile."

If you don't believe it's all talk, show me when a Republican other than Reagan (that was a revolution, not the norm) ever actually freed the market. Republicans hated Reagan, and apparently conservatives don't like him either. Paying lip service to Reagan is another meaningless phrase to show you're in the conservative club. That's why they universally support big government candidates like Bush, McCain, Romney, Huckabee, etc. over candidates who actually want to free the market and reduce the size of government. You are what you vote. Rhetoric is meaningless.

WAR:

Now we find out that the Fort Hood shooter had attended a radical mosque in Virginia, he had tried to contract al Qaeda, and intelligence agents knew it. Yet this man was still in the Army counseling US soldiers. This guy is the poster child for who shouldn't be in the military, yet nothing was done. This highlights again how inept our government is. I hope they charge this guy with treason as well as murder, but government is so stupid, I wouldn't bet on it. The imam who advised the shooter also advised three of the 9/11 terrorists. Boortz says what we're all thinking and I've written:

"OK ... excuse me, but I have a question. Here we have this Army Major - a Muslim - a Muslim who apparently posted some rather radical and violent messages on the Internet. Now we learn that he very well have attended this radical Mosque in Virginia. All of this ... and he's still in a position to purchase handguns and murder 13 Americans at Ft. Hood? Where in the hell were our intelligence forces while all of this was going on? Do we have another incidence here of various intelligence agencies keeping tabs on parts of this Muslim goon's life, but not communicating with each other?"

Lieberman says it too.

MEDIA:

Mises's theory of the business cycle makes it into the Wall Street Journal. The mainstreaming of the Austrian School of Economics continues.

MISC:

These people did lose weight by exercising. The headline makes no sense. Exercise burns calories. If you burn more than you take in, you'll lose weight. Of course I always add calories when I exercise, and I imagine other people do to. You get hungrier.

Somali pirates attack tanker 1,000 miles off coast. It's just amazing to me that ships traveling off Somalia aren't carrying snipers and hand held rocket launchers to sink pirate attack boats. Some retired military snipers could make a small fortune in a short period of time hiring out on these ships.

It was kind of sickening watching some of the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall today. Russian President Medvedev, British PM Gordon Brown and Sec. of State Hillary Clinton all spoke, but these three leaders all have much more in common with the Soviets that with free people. I don't know much about Medvedev, but Brown and Clinton never saw an opportunity to take power from the people through government they didn't want to seize. I had to turn the TV off while Clinton struggled not to choke on the word freedom. While Germans celebrate the fall of the wall, the tyrant wannabes continue to transform western countries closer and closer to communism, and we pretend they're champions of freedom.

Obama has turned the slippery slope of government intervention vertical. Just like we knew he would.

"This is not a slippery slope. This is falling off a cliff. As one news story pointed out: "The restrictions were the latest in more than a year's worth of government intervention in matters once considered inviolable aspects of the country's free-market economy and represent a signal moment in the history of the American economic experiment."

Sometimes it's hard to make a case for slippery slopes, because you're trying to oppose an immediate benefit by warning of a future cost. Not this time.

If you put a frog in lukewarm water, and then gradually turn up the temperature to boiling, the frog won't sense the danger, and will eventually be cooked to death, or so the metaphor goes. Throw a frog into boiling water, and it will jump out immediately, rather than be scalded."

Thus the tea parties. Government has been heating us up with little more than croak out of us for a century, but Bush and Obama turned up the heat to fast. People are finally complaining. Better late than never, I guess.