Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

GM CEO resigns.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

The creator of bubbles wants power to fight creation of bubbles. Easily done. Stop creating money out of thin air.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Australian Senate rejects global warming legislation for a second time under global warming fraud supporting president. Let's hope our Senate does as well.

Global warming propaganda masquerading as science, like the global cooling propaganda masquerading as science before it, threatens to make people stop paying attention to scientists. This is a pervasive phenomena. The more government funds science, the more phony science rises to the top, and eventually the people will just stop listening. In fact, I think that's happened to a large extent. People only listen when the media propaganda machine really ratchets up the alarmism like they did for the global warming fraud.

LOCAL:

Government has had I-75 between Dayton and Cincinnati dangerously under construction since the dawn of time. The result? Left lane closed because of high water. How pathetic.

Xenia man found not guilty of rape charges. That's practically unheard of in today's outrageously prosecutor-biased justice system. Not guilty after only three hours. That's amazing. This girl must have been a the worst liar in the world.

"Magnuson’s attorney, Jay Adams, said prosecutors had no evidence except for the girl’s accusations. “Anyone can make an allegation against anyone,” Adams said. “It’s a scary prospect.”"

That's right. Women can and do use the state to attack men and almost always succeed in convicting him. That's the justice system we made. Prosecutors are elected and promoted on convictions, not justice, and they know that having a woman accuse a man of rape, no matter how bogus the charges, is almost always an easy conviction. The Duke non-rape case is illustrated just how common this is. Fortunately those students were high profile and had money so they managed to avoid being railroaded. Most don't.

MISC:

How freedom and a system of voluntary, cooperative exchange leads to a moral and virtuous society.

"For each of us social cooperation is of course not the ultimate end but a means … But it is a means so central, so universal, so indispensable to the realization of practically all our other ends, that there is little harm in regarding it as an end in itself, and even in treating it as if it were the goal of ethics. In fact, precisely because none of us knows exactly what would give most satisfaction or happiness to others, the best test of our actions or rules of action is the extent to which they promote a social cooperation that best enables each of us to pursue his own ends. Without social cooperation modern man could not achieve the barest fraction of the ends and satisfactions that he has achieved with it. The very subsistence of the immense majority of us depends upon it."

But when government limits the power of voluntary exchange with bans, regulations and mandates, and when government takes money from people by force and gives it to others, it undermines the morality and virtue that freedom re-enforces.

One of many good points: in a society based on voluntary exchange, even the most selfish, greedy, narcissistic and self-serving individuals must win the voluntary cooperation of others to satisfy their desires. The system provides a check on their worst impulses. In a system dominated by the use of force - government - like in America, these worst of all people become the most powerful people in the land - professional politicians - and use force against others to expand their power and satisfy their desires. The system empowers and rewards their worst impulses. This is why you always see moral breakdown in cultures dominated by centralized power. Rome is just the most well known example. The Greeks, Chinese, French, English, Roman Catholic Church, and more all experienced the same inevitable moral decay from all-powerful government. We see it in America today.

Note to Glenn Beck: the breakdown of morals in America isn't the cause of our problems - it's the inevitable symptom of our root problem - big government. You can't just convince Americans to be more moral to fix our problems. That's like trying to heal plague by putting band-aids on the sores. You have to fix the root problem - big government - then morality will follow naturally. Freedom produces a moral society, not vice-versa. Remember the Pilgrims' attempt at communism?

How government has corrupted our way of looking at our world.

"It may be that wary beasts of the forest come around to accepting the hunter's trap as a necessary concomitant of foraging for food. At any rate, the presumably rational human animal has become so inured to political interventions that he cannot think of the making of a living without them; in all his economic calculations his first consideration is, what is the law in the matter? Or, more likely, how can I make use of the law to improve my lot in life? This may be described as a conditioned reflex. It hardly occurs to us that we might do better operating under our own steam, within the limits put upon us by nature, and without political restraints, controls, or subventions. It never enters our minds that these interventionary measures are placed in our path, like the trap, for purposes diametrically opposed to our search for a better living. We automatically accept them as necessary to that purpose."

We don't even know what freedom looks like any more. Because freedom is so alien to us, we can't imagine what it would be like. For 100 years we've been brainwashed into thinking that government provides order because freedom is chaotic. The exact opposite is true.

"Since the beginning of political institutions, there have been attempts to fix wages, control prices, and create capital, all resulting in failure. Such undertakings must fail because the only competence of politics is in compelling men to do what they do not want to do or to refrain from doing what they are inclined to do, and the laws of economics do not come within that scope. They are impervious to coercion. Wages and prices and capital accumulations have laws of their own, laws which are beyond the purview of the policeman.
The assumption that economics is subservient to politics stems from a logical fallacy. Since the State (the machinery of politics) can and does control human behavior, and since men are always engaged in the making of a living, in which the laws of economics operate, it seems to follow that in controlling men the State can also bend these laws to its will. The reasoning is erroneous because it overlooks consequences."

I like this excerpt. We often forget that the laws of economics are laws of nature. Just as government can't change the law of gravity, it can't change the law of supply of demand either. Using force to manipulate supply and demand is guaranteed to create a harmful reaction just as legislating that people who walk off cliffs need not fear gravity would. Fortunately, the people understand the folly of the latter but not the former.

"In 1913 came the amendment that completely unshackled the American State, for with the revenues derived from unlimited income taxation it could henceforth make unlimited forays into the economy of the people. The Sixteenth Amendment not only violated the right of the individual to the product of his efforts, the essential ingredient of freedom, but it also gave the American State the means to become the nation's biggest consumer, employer, banker, manufacturer, and owner of capital. There is now no phase of economic life in which the State is not a factor, there is no enterprise or occupation free of its intervention."

Thanks Democrats and Republicans.

"The metamorphosis of the American State from an apparently harmless establishment to an interventionary machine as powerful as that of Rome at its height took place within a century and a half; the historians estimate that the gestation of the greatest State of antiquity covered four centuries; we travel faster these days. When the grandeur of Rome was at its grandest, the principal preoccupation of the State was the confiscation of the wealth produced by its citizens and subjects; the confiscation was legally formalized, as it is today, and even though it was not sugar-coated with moralisms or ideologically rationalized, some features of modern welfarism were put into practice. Rome had its make-work programs, its gratuities to the unemployed, and its subsidies to industry. These things are necessary to make confiscation palatable and possible.
To the Romans of the times, this order of things probably seemed as normal and proper as it does today. The living are condemned to live in the present, under the prevailing conditions, and their preoccupation with those conditions makes any assessment of the historic trend both difficult and academic. The Romans hardly knew or cared about the "decline" in which they were living and certainly did not worry about the "fall" to which their world was riding. It is only from the vantage point of history, when it is possible to sift the evidence and find a cause-and-effect relationship, that a meaningful estimate of what was happening can be made."

Lust for power trumps learning from history.

The three myths about trash."Holding all of America's garbage for the next one hundred years would require a space only 255 feet high or deep and 10 miles on a side. Landfills welcome the business. Forty percent of what we recycle ends up there anyway. We are not running out of landfill space.
...
Overall, curbside recycling's costs run between 35 percent and 55 percent more than other recycling methods, because it uses huge amounts of capital and labor per pound of material recycled. Recycling itself uses three times more resources than does depositing waste in landfills.
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Recycling is a long-practiced, productive, indeed essential, element of the market system. Informed, voluntary recycling conserves resources and raises our wealth, enabling us to achieve valued ends that would otherwise be impossible. So yes, people do recycle even when they are not forced to do so.

However, forcing people to recycle makes society worse off. Mandated recycling exists mainly because there is plenty of money to be made by labeling products as "green" or "recycled" to get municipal and federal grants.

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