Free kibbles

LIBERTY:

All bans are stupid, but banning yellow ribbons for soldiers is super-stupid.

TAX AND SPEND:

Apparently the FairTax guys are pushing to get Charlie Rangel to hold hearings on the FairTax. I don't think the FairTax is going anywhere this session, but I am afraid Congress will empower that bogus, bi-partisan tax hike panel they're talking about. The FairTax probably won't go anywhere next session either. The Republican aristocrats don't want to give up power any more than the Democrats aristocrats. And conservatives are no going to vote out their crappy Republican representatives even though they desperately need to.

This article about Democrats giving the IRS more power over the people illustrates how unlikely it is the FairTax will go anywhere.

The Heritage Foundation explains why stimulus boondoggles never help the economy.

China's centrally planned, empty city.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

A non-Austrian points out how artificially low interest rates created the housing bubble/credit crisis, but stops short of blaming the Fed which controls those interest rates.

"...since most real estate is purchased with borrowed funds, [push] up the price of property in both the commercial and residential sectors. Rising prices, in turn, disguised any potential problems with the borrowers, because if they ran into cash-flow problems, they could always refinance, or sell. Everyone was getting bad signals from the market, and outlandish purchases looked almost rational."

It's that simple. We've become so accustomed to the Fed manipulating interest rates, we never stop to wonder if those rates are giving us bad information. Just like when Nixon put price controls on gas, people never stopped to think that the price was giving us wrong information. The result was gas shortages and gas lines. We've evolved in a system of economic freedom for a hundred thousand years or more. Our genes designed us to believe and act on price information. When prices are manipulated, we make bad decisions because of the bad information.

HEALTH CARE:

The Special Report panel wondered why Obama talked about the terrorist again today. It's because he's distracting us from the Congress's health care oppression meetings. Obama wants the American people talking about terrorism instead of beating up Congress. Don't pull a Special Report and fall for this tactic.

I don't understand this big deal about Obama promising to televise health care debates. The executive and legislative branches are a co-equal branches of government. The president has no power to force Congress to televise anything, and Obama knew it at time he made those promises. The press stupidly failed to point that out during the campaign, and they're stupidly failing to point it out now. His promises were bogus and intended to mislead, like every other promise he made. Anybody who thought the president had the power to make that happen is an idiot and should never vote again. Anybody who thought Obama wanted that to happen is an idiot and should never vote again.

Now Republicans are talking about cameras and transparency. Where was that when they controlled both houses and the presidency? Their complaints are as disingenuous as the Democrats' complaints were when Republicans were in power. They're all just playing political games for their personal gain.

This government run health care is the future for all Americans.

"Burrows said Medicaid insisted on spending $8,000 for a large medical device to do essentially the same task that the iPod and software can do for $375. Aside from the expense difference, the iPhone is much easier to use."

We can all look forward to bigger, bulkier, more expensive, less capable health care services that are rationed.

ENERGY:

Interior secretary makes it harder to drill for oil on "public" lands. What are public lands? How did I become a partial owner of some land. I sure didn't voluntary buy a piece of land. I wonder if somebody can point me to exactly which plot is mine. Is it an acre? Is it a square foot? This is government land, not public land. It's socialized land.

""We don't believe we ought to be drilling anywhere and everywhere," Salazar said at a news conference. "We believe we need a balanced approach and a thoughtful approach" that allows development of oil and gas leases on public lands while also protecting national parks, endangered species and municipal watersheds."

He's saying we need a centrally planned approach. Like that has worked so well anywhere else. It's not his decision. The federal government has no business owning land.

Man calls 911 after his home is broken into only to be arrested, tried and convicted because his wife owned firearms and he had been convicted of a felony as a teenager. That's not how I understand the law, but courts don't care about that. The burglar is still at large.

WAR:

Admiral Mullen says America won't bomb or invade Yemen but reports US special forces are already there training Yemeni forces. Sounds like Vietnam. Mullen and the military doesn't make these decisions. Civilians do.

The Obama administration is using CIA resources to track climate change.

"The nation's top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government's intelligence assets -- including spy satellites and other classified sensors -- to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change ... [this project] has the strong backing of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In the last year, as part of the effort, the collaborators have scrutinized images of Arctic sea ice from reconnaissance satellites in an effort to distinguish things like summer melts from climate trends ..."

Wow and double wow. I guess the CIA agents were too busy tracking climate change to inform the FBI about the underwear bomber. If you ever doubted it's impossible to take the politics out of government bureaucracies and programs, this should settle it once and for all. Partisan politics poisons everything government touches. There's no such thing as good government. Counting on government for security is foolish. On the plus side, at least the CIA isn't spying on us with those resources.

Obama's counter-terrorism chief goes on ski vacation after underwear bomber incident. More proof that government agents, bureaucrats one and all, aren't working on our behalf. They're working on their own behalf like anybody else. But no security company in the private sector would have allowed this guy to go on vacation during the analysis after an attack pertaining to the company's business. It would be unthinkable.

An appeals court says that the government can hold prisoners of war in Guantanamo as long as the war is going on as long as the government can show that the prisoners are tied to al Qaeda. That's a reasonable sounding decision except that the Court has no Constitutional power to interfere in the waging of war. Can you imagine if every Nazi and Japanese prisoner of war we held in WWII had been able to go to court to challenge their imprisonment? Our criminal justice system would have collapsed. It would become a strategy enemies used against us. The Founding Fathers understood that so they gave the Court zero power to interfere with the waging of war, but that doesn't stop our aristocrats from grabbing power anyway.

Blackwater settles lawsuits over death of Iraqi civilians.

More prisoners of war released from Guantanamo rejoin the fight. Who would expect otherwise? What do you think Nazis and Japanese POWs would have done if we had released them from prisoner of war camps during WWII?

Newark TSA guard placed on administrative leave after allowing security breach. I guess that's a start. Perspective: this breach was not a security threat, yet the entire airport was shut down for hours.

Yemeni government warns US government that military action in Yemen would strengthen al Qaeda. Of course it would.

POLITICS:

I don't begrudge Joe Biden time to go visit his ailing mother, but there are 120 million American workers who don't have that opportunity. Politicians want us to believe they are doing the most important work in the world. They want us to believe that they're working on our behalf. They want us to believe they're sacrificing on our behalf. If that were true, Joe Biden would be at work like normal Americans. The problem isn't that Biden is visiting his ailing mother. The problem is we keep fooling ourselves into believing politicians are working our behalf, not their own.

MISC:

A grassroots driven contract from America. Apparently the FairTax leads the list of ideas.

2010 census asks if a person is "negro". I wonder if that was the case in 2000.

Rebellious Ivory coast city, freed from the burden of government, thrives.

"Soroland may not be a breakaway zone, but for seven years the inhabitants of this zone have got used to living without government taxes, customs charges and even water and electricity bills.

Reunification - already under way - will be a challenge to complete.

Hussein Doumbia is one of many local business leaders who have learnt to profit from this vast black market zone.

"Things are a lot cheaper than in the south - we see that people from the south often come here to stock up, above all the military who come for all their electronics - mobile phones, DVDs, televisions, everything," he says."

So they have plenty of services despite no taxes, and everything is much cheaper so commerce thrives. Duh.

"When civil servants fled south, volunteer teachers, like Ali Ouattara, stepped forward to try to keep things going.

"We didn't want the kids to become child soldiers, so we tried to give them something. This is how we became teachers," says Mr Ouattara, who lost his job at the university at the start of the crisis.

Most of the volunteer teachers had limited qualifications and no experience of teaching.

At first they had almost no resources as the schools had been ransacked and the lawlessness meant they were scared to discipline their pupils, who were sometimes armed.

Gradually with contributions from parents, the ad-hoc schools helped save a generation of children, and in some years the rebel zone got better results in national exams than the government zone."

So volunteer schools with untrained teachers do as well or better than government schools. Duh.

"UN observation points along the former ceasefire line have already been dismantled but the most delicate part of reunification - handing over guns and control of taxes - still seems a long way off.

And, seven years without traffic lights, taxes or utility bills develops habits that are hard to budge."

The got along just fine without traffic lights, and they don't want to pay taxes or give up their guns and freedom. Duh. Government is the enemy of human advancement. By definition, government restricts freedom and therefore human advancement and the advance of civilization. But it's important to note this is not no government. It's a tiny government. There's no such thing as no government - that's just code for a government of warlords or tribal chiefs or whatever you want to call them.