Free kibbles

RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS:

The seizure of this man's weapons by police is a reminder than the only reason government requires we register firearms is so it can seize them at its convenience. Turns out his fear was well justified.

ECONOMY:

Reagan cabinet official explains the Austrians were right.

"The Triumph of Politics was published early, mainly in the unflattering sense that I’d not completed my homework. I was hip to statist fiscal and regulatory evils, but had only dimly grasped the Austrian masters’ wisdom on money; that is, in printing money backed by nothing, central banks inherently threaten prosperity. So today I’ll add the proposition that fiscal decay is the inevitable step-child of the very monetary rot that the Austrians -- Mises, Hayek, Rothbard -- so deplored."

The problem is we think too short-term.

"My libertarian screed thus omitted money while cataloging the Reagan Revolution’s lesser shortcomings. These included gargantuan deficits, subsidies for favored Republican constituencies like farmers, homebuilders and exporters, a complete whiff on entitlements, and protectionism for dying industries like steel and textiles -- even for a motorcycle company whose ticker symbol, fittingly, was HOG."

I did the same thing. Monetary policy never crossed my mind until about a year ago."The social-cons, relentless as ever in their bible-thumping and immigrant-bashing, help to elect real socialists, as often as not. And the just-cons continue to turn fiscal responsibility into a bad joke.Last election, 85% of the American people were against the abomination called TARP. But on that central issue, the Republican standard bearer went radio silent while chattering endlessly about appropriations earmarks. But taken together, those 8,000 earmarks add-up to just 15 hours of annual Federal spending. The needless bailout of Wall Street engineered by Bubbles and the Henry "Hammer" Paulson, by contrast, destroyed forever any residual will to control spending that remained on Capitol Hill."Thanks, Bush. The hypocrisy of Republicans, especially Karl Rove, pretending to care about spending makes me want to puke.

"Then the Big Panic will come. In the event, some will look back and wonder why we destroyed our capacity for fiscal governance in order to save the likes of AIG (AIG), Citibank (C), and especially Goldman during the comparatively minor disorder of September ’08. Certainly, the so-called “systemic risk” will have been exposed for the cover story it was.

None of AIG’s alleged CDS time bomb, for example, really mattered. The European banks who were wrapping dodgy assets with AIG’s bogus AAA cover would have gotten bailed out by their own socialist governments, anyway. For Goldman, the loss would have meant six months of bonus accruals. For the big insured US depositories, losses would have meant their Sheila-gram would have come sooner, rather than later.

Then there's the specious claim that the money market funds would have come unglued. Well, they did, and investors in the largest of them, the Reserve Primary Fund, appear to be getting about 98 cents on the dollar -- the Lehman losses and all.

The question thus presents itself: Did a few thousand institutional money managers who should have been watching out for their own risk -- especially the kind which accompanied black box enhanced yield -- really need to be spared even two cents of loss?"

Sounds more like a coup under the guise of a manufactured crisis than an actual crisis.

"Thus, “systemic risk” was but a fig leaf for aggrandizement of the state, and especially its central banking branch. The resulting waste of resources and ballooning of moral hazard was palpable. But the real cost was in the final destruction of political discipline which resulted from the mad rush to TARP.

The Bush era had already aggravated the nation’s fiscal predicament immeasurably. Now the few remaining fiscal stalwarts still in the trenches, such as Senators Shelby and Bunning, were fragged from behind by their own officers. And now, too, the Democrats and socialists had every place to run and no need, politically, to hide even their most wanton raids on the Treasury."

Man is this essay on the mark.

TAX AND SPEND:

On the US debt, I love this quote:

"Frédéric Bastiat must have been looking toward the future of the United States today when he said, "When plunder has become a way of life for a group of people living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it, and a moral code that glorifies it.""

Glorifies it is right.

"Why should my state, South Carolina or other states join the federal government in future poverty, loss of freedoms and lagging economic prosperity with a dismal future determined by their foreign creditors? I say, it is time to free the states and citizens from the dark economic future which Washington and Wall Street have created. Just maybe we can finally be free at last from Washington’s national debt."

I would love to see state legislatures threaten to use their constitutional power to secede in mass. It's going to take the states flexing their muscles to stop the insanity in Washington.

"Jefferson Davis was right when he stated, "I love the Union and the Constitution, but I would rather leave the Union with the Constitution than remain in the Union without it.""

Another great quote.

"A recent, WSJ/NBC poll showed that only 3% of Americans believe the government is doing a good job."

I'd like to know who thinks the federal government is doing a good job.

This is what Democrats call a jobs bill:

"the CBO estimates that this tax break would create anywhere between eight and 18 full-time jobs for every $1 million in tax breaks."

Let's be optimist and call it 18. The least the jobs will cost is $55,556 per job. But if we assume jobs in the private sector average $50,000 a year, we're still losing money. And that's if the jobs created were average jobs. They won't be. This bill, like other government intervention in the marketplace, will cost jobs and make us all poorer.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Bernanke gives the canned version of how he plans to unwind all the Fed's monetary pumping. I wonder if he believes it. I like the not until "the economy is clearly in a sustainable recovery" part. The economy isn't going to reach a sustainable recovery - the illusion of recovery is wholly dependent on his grossly inflationary monetary policy - so his exit strategy is meaningless. This plan is all for show.

EDUCATION:

Walter Williams says allowing blacks to get away with poor language skills steals their opportunities in the future. Not just blacks.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Despite the unraveling of the global warming fraud, the Senate might still pass global warming legislation.

"An alternative proposal increasingly capturing interest on Capitol Hill is the CLEAR Act, sponsored by Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine). The bill would cap the amount of carbon the United States produces and sell pollution permits to those who produce or import dirty fuels. Suppliers would pass these costs to customers, , which would discourage carbon-guzzling. It would also raise costs, of course, but the government would rebate 75 percent of the revenue from the permit auctions back to the populace."

What a scam. We already know that government takes our money from us by force, wastes a bunch of it on government, poisons the rest with politics, then sends it back to us. But they never admit that. In this bill, government is admitting it's going to take money from us by force, waste 25 percent of it on government, poison the rest with politics, then send us 75 percent back. This is what passes for compromise in Washington.

POLICE STATE:

Police officer explains that police officers are above the law because

"“Officers break laws to keep law and order,” announced the headline of Harding’s February 3 “On the Beat” column. Harding explained that because “[t]hose who serve in law enforcement occupy a special niche in society,” they sometimes “have to break the very laws they are sworn to uphold.”"

They're so noble. I only break laws when it's in the interest of the community too. I wonder if the police will consider it OK when I break laws just like them.

WAR:

The music in the national guard video really does evoke religious fervor. Yikes.

US college student arrested by TSA for having Arabic flashcards.

Alternate strategy for Afghanistan involves encouraging disparate tribes to expand ties with their natural allies in the region, denying the Taliban control over the country. The borders of Afghanistan were arbitrarily drawn by the British empire, that's one reason why the tribes powerfully resist any central authority.

I'm glad to see members of both parties trying to block Obama from trying 9/11 war criminals in civilian court. If our civilian courts are perverted to handle war criminals, every American who ends up in court will be treated like a war criminal. If you want to try al Qaeda agents captured in the future in civilian court, then get Congress to end the war by rescinding the authorization for use of force to end this dangerous ambiguity.

FOREIGN POLICY:

The evil of sanctions. I used to think that sanctions made sense because people are responsible for their government, but I can't think of a time when sanctions ever worked to change a regime's behavior. I also no longer think you can hold all the people responsible for the actions of the government. That's like punishing an entire class because one guy shot a spit-ball. But I'm all for sanctioning the agents of governments that pose a danger to the US.

Government supporters and security forces outnumber anti-government protesters in Iran.

"Opposition leaders, who allege the June polls were rigged, need to muster large numbers of demonstrators to persuade Iranians that their movement is still powerful. Mr. Mousavi—a former prime minister and an unsuccessful presidential candidate in the June polls—and other opposition leaders have sought to maintain the movement while reining in the most extreme protesters, who have begun to call for an overthrow of the Islamic Republic. Mr. Mousavi recently urged restraint, saying his movement was peaceful and didn't seek regime change."

If they don't seek regime change, the regime has won. Ahmandinejad is mostly a figurehead, and if Mousavi took his place, he would be too.

US officials reject claims that Iran has enriched uranium to 20 percent. Ahmadinejad probably said that to boost his support domestically. But the bigger story here is that once again Obama refuses to stand up for the lives of Iranian citizens. We know he won't stand up for freedom. He'd get laughed out of office if he tried. But his failure to call on the regime not to harm its own citizens is another sign of Obama's lack of empathy and concern for the lives of others. He identifies with government force against citizens, and along with all the evidence we have of him, it paints a picture of a man who wouldn't hesitate a second to use force against Americans to impose his will. As much as I hate to say it because it's scary as hell, I get the feeling Obama sees the Iranian situation as a learning experience for when he does the same to Americans.

POLITICS:

The difference between the freedom movement and the Tea Party movement.

Ron and Rand Paul interviewed together. Neither one of them seem to think the authorization of use of military force after 9/11 is a declaration of war, but neither say where the Constitution grants Congress that power other than a declaration of war.

I'd love to have one of these warfare/welfare T-shirts.

Unions unhappy with Democrats. Get in line.

MISC:

The Constitution speaks for itself. Constitutional law is a fiction created by men who didn't want their petty lust for power to be constrained by the plain language of the Constitution.

The government wants to track the whereabouts of all cellphones, obviously to track their users. Unfortunately, their logic is sound. Your cellphone effectively broadcasts its location to your cellphone company, so you have no expectation of privacy. You know your cell phone company would sell that info if somebody would pay for it. That expectation of privacy has to be fixed to fit the modern world. But government has no business doing this anyway.