Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Unemployment rate "unexpectedly" drops to 9.7 percent. Notice how everything in our economy is unexpected? That's because central planners have no more of a clue about what all the people are going to do than anybody else. I bet Obama and his partners in crime are strutting around like peacocks like 9.7 percent is some kind of good thing. Here's a key factor - bold mine:

"A separate survey of employers showed payrolls declined by 20,000 as construction companies and state and local governments cut back."

Cutting back government is what will get us out of this depression. Getting people out of parasitic government jobs and back into the productive private sector is the solution to our economic problems. The news is saying one million people quit looking for work. That's not an improvement.

Only 11 percent of American support Keynesian deficit spending while 70 percent reject it. As usual, the American people are smarter than the aristocrats. Also,

"Eighty-three percent (83%) of Americans, in fact, say the size of the federal budget deficit is due more to the unwillingness of politicians to cut government spending than to the reluctance of taxpayers to pay more in taxes."

No kidding.

Essay with great graphs shows how whenever we enter a recession, the Fed drops interest rates, fueling the next inflationary boom that later busts as the soon as the rates start to rise. It also includes a great graph showing that while the CPI is growing steadily, energy, metals and industrial inputs are going through the roof. That's where all the inflation is going, and it will show up in consumer prices down the road.

TAX AND SPEND:

Even liberals are figuring out that welfare for dictators is bad for the countries we send it to.

"All this training and experience has led her to the conclusion that foreign aid is killing Africa. Her book, Dead Aid, proposes that government-to-government aid to Africa should simply be eliminated entirely.

As she points out, real per capita income, lifespan, and other measures have actually fallen in Africa while the continent has absorbed over a trillion dollars in "aid." Between 1970 and 1998, poverty in Africa rose from 11 percent to 66 percent. (The developed world suffered too; imagine if that trillion dollars had been left in the private sector to be invested!)

Aid to governments builds up governments, not economies. Most African governments stay in power by deliberately wrecking their own nation's economy, leaving the faction in control of the aid flow as the only source of wealth (or even sustenance)."

I'm glad she finally figured this out.

Study shows what we already know - when states tax the rich, the rich move to states with lower taxes. Same thing happens with countries.

This rap about the debate between Hayek and Keynes is fantastic. I agree with Tucker that this will prompt more people to learn economics.

EDUCATION:

The college education bubble is about to collapse.

De Tocqueville knew what he was talking about.

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."

Government spending is destroying our country.

You can't bail out Social Security. Social Security is bigger than our entire budget and generally bails out it.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE:

12 year old arrested for doodling on desk.

IRS-CID agents to carry pump shotguns. This is a perfect reminder that underneath the transparent veneer of civilization, government takes money from us by force, government is violence and every law and action government takes involves pointing a gun to our heads.

WAR:

Iraqi terrorists kill 40 more pilgrims. The terrorists are the enemies of mainstream Muslims, and we should make mainstream Muslims our allies against them.

POLITICS:

Tea Party members form new organization. I thought there were lots of Tea Party organizations. Why do we need a national one? This sounds like another way for power brokers to personally gain from the Tea Party movement.

Remember when Obama said he wouldn't have lobbyists in his administration? He has over 40.

MISC:

John McCain introduces legislation to take away our freedom to ingest vitamin and nutritional supplements without government's permission.

The Founding Fathers revolted against King George III, but by today's standards of government and compared to our federal government, King George wasn't that bad. Freedom is not defined by an election. Freedom is defined by having control over every decision in your life. The Founding Fathers had far greater freedom under King George than we do. They could drink whatever milk they liked, smoke whatever they liked, travel abroad without interference, buy property, start a business, build a road all without any interference from government. They had no zoning restrictions, they weren't taxed for schools and they were free to send (or not send) the school of their choice. With the exception of a few items, they could buy, sell or trade anything they wanted with no tax.

"[T]he colonists appear to have been among the lowest-taxed citizens in the entire civilized world."

We sure can't say that today.

"Before he discovered how unfair the Stamp Tax was, [Ben Franklin] had recommended one of his friends back in Philadelphia to become the stamp distributor – a lucrative patronage job. It was only later, when a member of a better-connected clique was awarded the franchise, that Franklin discovered his strident opposition to the measure!"

Human nature never changes.

"Here’s where comparative history comes in. If we look at, say, the city-states of late-Medieval and Renaissance Italy, we can identify a very similar political dynamic at play. In both we find an assortment of states under lax imperial supervision. For neither the Holy Roman Empire nor the British Empire had enough muscle on the ground to dictate affairs. In what constituted a power vacuum, the various mischievous political factions ran wild – indeed in the case of Italy, the factional infighting often lead to foreign wars – as my ambitious war-research study –www.worldwidewarproject.org – amply demonstrates. City-state "wars" don’t have any real "causes" other than the fact that various issues – some often very mundane – somehow become intertwined with the vicious political infighting. Such dynamics can be found in Florence of 1400 as well as in Sam Adams’ Boston of 1775.

Within traditional city-states (or the American colonies) family feuds (stylized by William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet featuring the Capulets v. the Montagues) often create the pivot around which politics revolve. The fact that in New York the Livingston family and their entourage embraced the Patriot cause in 1775 had more to do with the fact their traditional adversaries, the De Lancey family, had remained in the Tory camp than a dispute over any supposed "issue." History frequently chronicles this "agitation for agitation’s sake," which emanates from ceaseless political jockeying."

I think this guy is underestimating the fiercely independent natures of the colonists. They and their ancestors had fled Europe to avoid persecution, to escape the oppression of Europe and to find freedom. But as the power of the colonies grew, it was inevitable that the powers of Europe would infringe on the colonists. The conditions weren't as intolerable as the ones we live under today, but the colonists understood that they would get steadily worse and wanted no part of being dominated by the kings of Europe again. Today we have very little of that fierce independent, revolutionary spirit left. It's been watered down by time, development and by the immigration of so many people who didn't have that same spirit.

"Curiously enough, Sam Adams and other American Patriots were ultimately rescued from their own folly by these same "Friends of America" alluded to above. For the British Whigs, prayed for – indeed actively sought to undermine their own nation’s war effort – lest the British Army subdue the colonists and then, flush with "victory," return home and assist George III in establishing military-style rule to suppress domestic political adversaries in the fashion of Julius Caesar, Oliver Cromwell, or the future Napoleon Bonaparte.

Then too, in the aftermath of the British defeat at the Battle of Yorktown in October 1781 the Opposition Parliamentary Whigs, who had actively schemed for years for the British to "lose" the war, somehow managed to cobble together enough of a Parliamentary majority to bring down Lord North’s Tory administration and replaced it with a new one committed to "peace." Elsewhere, despite the Yorktown debacle, the British had hardly lost the struggle and could very well have continued had political support for prosecution of the war held firm in London. Curiously enough, in similar fashion, the Johnson administration began the process of abandoning the Vietnam War in March 1968 even though – despite the temporarily setback of the Tet Offensive – the United States had hardly been "defeated.""

I always wondered why Cornwallis's surrender ended the war. It always seemed to me that the British could well have continued, but decided it wasn't worth the cost. Sounds like I was right, but I wasn't aware of an anti-war movement in Britain much like the anti-some-war movement we have in the US today.

"Meanwhile, the legal status of American slaves brought by their masters to the British Isles proper remained somewhat ambiguous until the historic 1772 Somersett Decision rendered by the King’s Bench (the equivalent of the British Supreme Court) appeared to strike a blow for freedom. Chief Justice Lord Mansfield had issued a narrow verdict in favor of the particular slave in question, James Somersett, in this one specific case. Indeed Lord Mansfield (by his own admission) had never intended to effect a general emancipation of all British slaves. Nonetheless, exaggerated news of the Somersett ruling quickly reached the colonies and surely alerted Southern colonists to the alarming possibility that if, say, Virginia or South Carolina remained part of the empire, Parliament might someday decree the abolition of slavery – a development which ultimately came to pass in 1833."

I had never heard of fear of Britain abolishing slavery as a motive for the Revolutionary War.

Justice Department Inspector General says Congress stripped him of his power to investigate the Justice Department - which is his only job.