How regulation in the toy business, and every other business, helps big business and harms small competitors and consumers.
"While Mattel was investing in its factories, it was also investing in Washington. The company had spent a steady $120,000 per year on lobbying from 2002 through 2006, [4] but the number ballooned to $540,000 in 2007, the year of the recall. In 2008, its lobbying expenditures hit $730,000 – more than six times what the company had spent two years before. [5]This is what happens when the people hand over their power over the economy and therefore their lives to government.
...The law sent shivers through the world of thrift stores. Products that were perfectly legal to make and sell in 2008 might be outlawed in 2009. “This has gotten so serious and it is so frightening because we serve consumers that sometimes have no other way to clothe their children,” said Adele Meyer, executive director of the National Association of Resale and Thrift Shops. She added, “You could wipe out a whole industry.” [7]
Thrift stores didn’t have a powerful lobby in Washington...
...
And small craftsmen were threatened by the testing requirement. Every manufacturer, including grandpa in his woodshed, would need to submit its products to an accredited outside testing facility. This would be costly and burdensome. But written into the law was a provision that, while common sense, seriously favored mass-producers.
...
Mattel was deploying the “Overhead Smash”: crowding out smaller competitors and potential start-ups by lobbying for stricter regulation."
ECONOMY:
Government is pushing more and more Americans to forego banks and live in the underground economy.
"The evidence is unambiguous; governments cannot increase tax compliance and decrease the size of the underground economy by ever increasing and more onerous regulations."Government doesn't care. It just seizes their wealth and puts them in prison.
TAX AND SPEND:
Bureau of labor statists show how much damage Obama's first stimulus boondoggle created. So he's looking for a second to do more. Thomas Sowell calls Obama's jobs claims a snow job.
The courts have turned the Constitution upside down, claiming that cutting off funding to ACORN violates the Constitution. So now ACORN has a right to our money. This is crazy. It was bad enough when courts allowed Congress to take our money by force and give it to others, which is blatantly unconstitutional. Now the courts have ruled that others have a right to our money so Congress must go through some due process to stop funding them. That's insane. Why isn't this huge news? We're to the point where we're going to have to take up pitchforks and torches to save our country from our government.
Republicans suggest reducing regulations and tax cuts to create jobs, but the best they can do on spending is say hold it flat. Then they pretend that will reduce the deficit. The only want to reduce the deficit is to cut government spending, but Republicans are as addicted to buying votes with our tax dollars as Democrats.
FEDERAL RESERVE:
Pat Buchanan supports auditing the Federal Reserve and he squarely identifies by far the biggest problem in America:
"An auditors' probe, they wail, would imperil the Fed's independence and expose it to pressure from Congress to keep interest rates low and money flowing when the need of the nation and economy might call for tightening.
...Is it not an admission that, though Congress was created by the Constitution, and the Fed is a creation of Congress, our elected representatives cannot be trusted with the money supply, cannot be trusted with control of the nation's central bank? To have decisions made in the national interest, we need folks who do not have to answer to voters.
If this be true, the republic is closer to its end than its beginning, when Thomas Jefferson said, "In questions of power, let us hear no more of trust in men, but rather bind them down from mischief with the chains of the Constitution.""
We haven't been able to trust Congress to make decisions in the national interest ever. Jefferson understood that. Because we continue to surrender our power and wealth to government, government has dragged us to the brink of the destruction of America. We are far more similar today to the Soviet Union than to the free country the Founding Fathers fought and died for, and we're going the wrong direction. Government was never supposed to lead. The Founding Fathers created government to be a cumbersome, ineffective body fraught with infighting and rivalries that would keep it weak and relatively powerless so the people could lead their own lives and lead the country where they wanted. Needless to say, that's not how it works anymore, and the breakdown started as soon as the constitutional government was created. You can back to the Alien and Sedition Acts and Marbury versus Madison to see how the branches of government conspired to steal power from the states and the people for themselves. Buchanan ends this essay with an assault on the Fed that sounds positively Austrian. I hope that means he abandoned his protectionist crusade.
EDUCATION:
The torches and pitchforks are closer than politicians might think. Detroit citizens call for school administrators and teachers to be jailed over lowest math scores in the country. The sirens told us to give them our children and they would educate them. But we're the ones who were stupid enough to listen. We have nobody to blame for the consequences of our government but ourselves.
I keep saying that the Ivy League is the world's greatest system for brainwashing smart people into believing stupid ideas, so it makes sense that these fantasy educators would compare themselves to Hogwarts to attract students.
HEALTH CARE:
Cato blasts Harry Reid's secret compromise on seven points.
How Congress games the CBO so it will report that bills cost far less than they actually cost. The CBO is supposed to be nonpartisan, but its director is appointed by the Speaker of the House and the head of the Senate. Since Pelosi and Reid nominated this guy, it's no wonder Obama is angry that the guy isn't more partisan. No wonder Obama called him on the carpet in the White House. We're phenomenally lucky. If the CBO had been any more partisan (it already ignores much of the cost of Democrats' bills), Democrats would have passed health care oppression by now. It seems to me that Congress had no intention of this office being non-partisan. If they wanted it non-partisan, they would have included the House and Senate minority leaders in the appointment process.
What do we have to gain with this health care oppression? Right now, every person in America gets health care. Afterward, everybody will still be able to get health care, but it will cost us tremendously more and the care will be lower quality. Usually there's some trade off. In this case Democrats claim their plan will cover millions of people currently not covered. But everybody is covered in some way, so this makes no sense. Reason says the problem is cost, and that's right. Health care oppression will make that problem worse. The third party payer system and not allowing health care to be bought across state lines are the biggest drivers of high costs.
It really is frustrating how Democrats get away with claiming Republicans are the party of big business when Democrats are worse.
"In 2008, Obama raked in more donations from the health sector than John McCain and the rest of the Republican field combined. Drug makers gave Obama $3.58 for every dollar they gave McCain. Pfizer gave to Obama at a 4-1 rate, as did the hospital and nursing home industries. In 2008, the insurance industry gave more money to House Democrats than House Republicans. HMOs give to Democrats over Republicans by a margin of 60 to 40."Somewhere I had a list of 20 sectors of the economy, and the only one which gave more to Republicans was the Chamber of Commerce. I wouldn't mind Republicans being labeled as the party of big business as long as Democrats were labeled as the party of even more big business.
"My biggest objection is not to what isn't true about the claim that the right is the handmaiden to big business, it's to what is true. Too many Republicans think being pro-business is the same as being pro-market. They defend the status quo against bad reforms and think they've defended economic freedom. The status quo stinks. And the sooner Republicans learn that, the sooner they'll deserve to win again."I like that conclusion.
GLOBAL WARMING:
What is the church doing falling for this global warming fraud? What a joke. I'm praying it all falls apart. This conference is horrendously dangerous.
How government funding corrupts science.
"In 2002 I stood in a room of the Smithsonian. One entire wall charted the cooling of our globe over the last 60 million years. This was no straight line. The curve had two steep dips followed by leveling. There were no significant warming periods. Smithsonian scientists inscribed it across some 20 feet of plaster, with timelines.For individual scientists it's the difference between feeding your family or not.
Last year, I went back. That fresco is painted over. The same curve hides behind smoked glass, shrunk to three feet but showing the same cooling trend. Hey, why should the Smithsonian put its tax-free status at risk? If the politicians decide to whip up public fear in a different direction, get with it, oh ye subsidized servants. Downplay that embarrassing old chart and maybe nobody will notice."
Copenhagen degenerating into a showdown between the US and China. This is scary. Contrary to what Cato says, there is a possibility of a deal. As likely as it is that China is just posturing to blame the failure to get a deal on the US, everybody has their price, and President Obama will sell us down the river in a heartbeat to make this deal happen. Besides which, China has over a barrel.
How stupid are we that we empower an oppressive government which we can only stop through lawsuits which are notoriously crap shoots?
I think it's premature to declare tax and trade dead.
"Still, if this Democratic Washington has demonstrated anything, it's that ideology often trumps common sense."Exactly.
CRIMINAL JUSTICE:
Appeals court throws out ticket based on officer who said he could hear how fast the car was going. The sad thing is this reached an appeals court. The sadder thing is the officer was sure he'd get away with this.
POLITICS:
Author blames the Citigroup bailout on newly elected, but not yet president Obama. That's new. Usually we get people blaming things done during the Obama administration on Bush, but we know that Bush was stupidly accommodating to Obama like when he gave money to the auto companies so Obama could seize them after he took office instead of allowing them to go bankrupt while he was in office.
"Now here's where it gets really interesting. It's three weeks after the election. You have a lame-duck president in George W. Bush – still nominally in charge, but in reality already halfway to the golf-and-O'Doul's portion of his career and more than happy to vacate the scene. Left to deal with the still-reeling economy are lame-duck Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former head of Goldman Sachs, and New York Fed chief Timothy Geithner, who served under Bob Rubin in the Clinton White House. Running Obama's economic team are a still-employed Citigroup executive and the son of another Citigroup executive, who himself joined Obama's transition team that same month.So on November 23rd, 2008, a deal is announced in which the government will bail out Rubin's messes at Citigroup with a massive buffet of taxpayer-funded cash and guarantees. It is a terrible deal for the government, almost universally panned by all serious economists, an outrage to anyone who pays taxes. Under the deal, the bank gets $20 billion in cash, on top of the $25 billion it had already received just weeks before as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. But that's just the appetizer. The government also agrees to charge taxpayers for up to $277 billion in losses on troubled Citi assets, many of them those toxic CDOs that Rubin had pushed Citi to invest in. No Citi executives are replaced, and few restrictions are placed on their compensation. It's the sweetheart deal of the century, putting generations of working-stiff taxpayers on the hook to pay off Bob Rubin's fuck-up-rich tenure at Citi. "If you had any doubts at all about the primacy of Wall Street over Main Street," former labor secretary Robert Reich declares when the bailout is announced, "your doubts should be laid to rest."
It is bad enough that one of Bob Rubin's former protégés from the Clinton years, the New York Fed chief Geithner, is intimately involved in the negotiations, which unsurprisingly leave the Federal Reserve massively exposed to future Citi losses. But the real stunner comes only hours after the bailout deal is struck, when the Obama transition team makes a cheerful announcement: Timothy Geithner is going to be Barack Obama's Treasury secretary!
Geithner, in other words, is hired to head the U.S. Treasury by an executive from Citigroup – Michael Froman – before the ink is even dry on a massive government giveaway to Citigroup that Geithner himself was instrumental in delivering. In the annals of brazen political swindles, this one has to go in the all-time Fuck-the-Optics Hall of Fame."
This is quite a story showing how Paulson-Geithner team, both working on behalf of Wall Street, transitioned from the Bush administration to the Obama administration. This backs up my claim that Paulson and Bernanke and apparently Geithner orchestrated a coup under Bush culminating in TARP to bring in Obama and continue running the government on behalf of Goldman-Sachs, Citibank and other Wall Street firms. This is what happens when the people hand over their power over the economy and therefore their lives to government.
Keeping up the charade, the Obama administration rhetorically attacks bankers.
""I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street," Mr. Obama said in an interview to be broadcast on CBS's "60 Minutes" program Sunday evening, according to excerpts made available ahead of the program."Really? The evidence says otherwise. But like I've always claimed, this is part of Obama's long-term plan to overburden our economy, make it collapse, then blame the non-existent free market. He's laying the groundwork right now. Has there ever been anybody else in the world who loved seeing himself on TV so much? By this time next year reporters will be turning down offers to interview him.
MEDIA:
It's nice to see the mainstream media covering the explosion in federal salaries.
I didn't read this article, but the headline "How did Tiger keep his secrets" reminds me of an observation that finally crystallized in my mind today explaining how the press turns from supporting to attacking people overnight. Naturally it's based on economics. When news organizations have more to gain from a powerful person by keeping their secrets, they keep them. When an event makes it more lucrative to destroy that person, the press turns on them like jackals. Before Tiger had the accident, news organizations could make more money off Tiger by buddying up to him for interviews and stories. It's obvious that lots of sports reporters knew about Tiger's infidelities, but breaking that story would cost them access to Tiger, some salary and possibly a job. After the accident, they were better off capitalizing on the story than covering it up. We've seen the same thing with Mel Gibson, Eliot Spitzer and many others. I never really thought about it before today.
MISC:
Evolution causes differing shopping style for men and women. Duh. Hunters and gatherers.
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