Free kibbles

LIBERTY:

Pat Buchanan lists historic instances of nullification and secession in the US and discusses the current movement.

"For it testifies to their belief and that of millions more that the state they detest is at war with the country they love."

That's what I keep saying. Way too many Americans are so distracted by the wars overseas that they don't recognize that the federal government is conquering America. That's the war we can't afford to lose, but we're losing it rapidly. The others are meaningless in comparison.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Democrats unveil plan to make it painful for corporations to advertise during elections. This doesn't sound like it will be very effective.

TAX AND SPEND:

Guess how many billions behind California is on paying the pension plans of its union government employees.

"Controller John Chiang's office issued a report Tuesday showing the growing divide between what the state owes retirees for health and dental benefits and what it has saved so far.

The gap has grown to nearly $52 billion, about $3.6 billion over last year's estimate."

Guess who will end up paying.

The EU and the euro as a case of the tragedy of the commons as stronger European economies provide incentives for fiscal irresponsibility by PIGS.

"Each government has an incentive to accumulate higher deficits than the rest of the eurozone, because its costs can be externalized. Consequently, in the Eurosystem there is an inbuilt tendency toward continual losses in purchasing power. This overexploitation may finally result in the collapse of the euro.

Any tragedy of the commons can be solved by privatizing the specific resource. But instead of privatization, governments generally prefer regulation.

Such a regulation was installed for the European Monetary Union. It is called the Stability and Growth Pact, and it requires that each country's annual budget deficit is below 3% and its gross public debt not higher than 60% of its GDP. Sanctions were defined to enforce these rules.

Yet the sanctions have never been enacted and the pact is generally ignored. For 2010, all but one member state is expected to have a budget deficit higher than 3%; the general European debt ratio is 88%. Germany, the main country that urged these requirements, was among the first to refuse to fulfill them."

Governments can't even regulate themselves, and governments are simple. Trying to regulate something as unimaginably complex as an economy is absurd.

Germany blocks Greek bailout. That's great news. Once again Angela Merkel seems to be the only western leader who comprehends economics.

"The statement said the 16 EU countries who use the single currency, including Greece, "will take determined and co-ordinated action, if needed, to safeguard financial stability in the euro area as a whole." That was seen as a strong political signal to speculators that the big euro economies such as Germany and France would act persuasively to restore confidence in the currency."

Have you ever heard of a government struggling to restore confidence in gold?

"The parallel is with Ireland which has responded to a similar public finance crisis with savage spending cuts, public sector wage and pension cuts and restored market confidence."

That's the right approach.

I see no hypocrisy with anti-stimulus Republicans trying to funnel stimulus funds to their constituents. The stimulus did not save jobs. It made us all poorer. Any Republican who says so is correct. But the districts that receive stimulus money are better off than districts that don't. It would be stupid for Republicans to allow their constituents to pay for the stimulus but get no fraction of it back. Not only that, but the stimulus is effective at buying votes. For Republicans to sit on the sidelines and allow Democrats to use all the money to buy votes is stupid politics. They can't cede the field to Democrats. Think of it this way - if the government stole a thousand dollars from everybody then turned around and dropped half that money back from a helicopter, you would be stupid if you refused to pick any up.

Government is encouraging people to sign up for welfare programs. That's because the more people who are depend on government, the more power the aristocrats have.

REGULATION:

Republicans want to compromise on new financial regulations.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Getting to know Ben Bernanke.

"Since his first days at the Fed, as a member of the Board of Governors in 2002, Bernanke has promised to be a big printer of money. And since he took over the helm from Greenspan as chairman of the US central bank in 2006, he has fully lived up to this pledge.

Among financial-market operators, Ben Bernanke gained early fame as "helicopter Ben." He announced in a speech in 2002 that the central bank should avoid deflation even by the use of helicopters to drop dollar bills across the land. Indeed, Bernanke's rule at the Federal Reserve Board has been impressive: his management has yielded a series of wild gyrations in the stock and bond market and the market for gold and commodities. This take-off from the apparent brink of deflation to the heights of hyperinflation is his greatest stunt yet."

The aristocrats knew exactly what they were getting when they made Bernanke Fed chief. They wanted somebody who would buy all their debt so they could spend without reservation, and that's exactly what they got. We got the worst economic crisis in US history.

"Blinded by scientism, the chairman obviously is unable to see that no sound conclusion or reliable policy formulation can be reached this way."

That should be "blinded by pseudo-science". Scientists understand they cannot make accurate predictions without complete data. Scientists understand that theories can never be proven and that any time the predictions of a theory differ from the measured data, the theory is wrong. Economists who pretend to be scientists do not. They continue to pretend they can make accurate predictions with inaccurate data, and they fail to dump their theories even though they are proven wrong every day. That's not science. It's religion hiding behind an illusion of science.

Fed negotiating with money market funds to drain $1 trillion of the financial system. If money market funds can't trade with the Fed, what's to negotiate? How would this work? This article doesn't give us the important information. Maybe because it's unavailable.

POLICE STATE:

More on the expectation of privacy problem with modern technology.

"Even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phones thousands of times a year, the legal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws written a generation ago are ambiguous at best. On Friday, the first federal appeals court to consider the topic will hear oral arguments (PDF) in a case that could establish new standards for locating wireless devices.

...

"This is a critical question for privacy in the 21st century," says Kevin Bankston, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who will be arguing on Friday. "If the courts do side with the government, that means that everywhere we go, in the real world and online, will be an open book to the government unprotected by the Fourth Amendment.""

There's no principle to stop government from obtaining these records, and you can bet the aristocrats will not pass laws strengthening our expectation of privacy in the modern age.

"A 2008 court order to T-Mobile in a criminal investigation of a marriage fraud scheme, which was originally sealed and later made public, says: "T-Mobile shall disclose at such intervals and times as directed by (the Department of Homeland Security), latitude and longitude data that establishes the approximate positions of the Subject Wireless Telephone, by unobtrusively initiating a signal on its network that will enable it to determine the locations of the Subject Wireless Telephone.""

Government will not give up this power. They'll say, "If you're not doing anything wrong, you shouldn't care."

"U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisa Lenihan in Pennsylvania denied the Justice Department's attempt to obtain stored location data without a search warrant; prosecutors had invoked a different legal procedure. Lenihan's ruling, in effect, would require police to obtain a search warrant based on probable cause--a more privacy-protective standard.

Lenihan's opinion (PDF)--which, in an unusual show of solidarity, was signed by four other magistrate judges--noted that location information can reveal sensitive information such as health treatments, financial difficulties, marital counseling, and extra-marital affairs."

Of course judges don't want to surrender their power over warrants to to police either, that's why they had this unusual show of solidarity. No aristocrats willingly gives up power. But judges are supposed to make the law. They're supposed to follow the law, and when you're carrying a device that constantly transmits your location, you cannot have an expectation of your location being private.

""The government is arguing that based on precedents from the 1970s, any record held by a third party about us, no matter how invasively collected, is not protected by the Fourth Amendment.""

No matter how invasively collected? We volunteer that information when we put our batteries in our cell phones. No person can claim they didn't know their phone was in contact with a tower. That's how the phones work. That's why they're called "cell" phones.

WAR:

Muslim imams declare that the nude scanners at airports violate their laws on modesty. I think they violate every individual's laws on modesty. You know Ann Coulter is going to have a field day with this.

Just released amazing pictures of ground zero on 9/11 taken from police helicopters that the government has been covering up for years.

"These dramatic images were taken by police photographers in helicopters and it is the first time they have been seen, having been released under a Freedom of Information request made by America's ABC News."

It looks like a pyroclastic flow from a volcano.

How could Blair or anybody else "know" Iraq had no WMDs? Saddam Hussein thought he had WMDs. Weapons inspectors found WMDs. Old ones. Very few of them. But WMDs. What he didn't have and what he thought he did have was stockpiles of WMDs. He did try to buy yellowcake. He did have a nuclear weapons program that was stalled. He had chemical and biological weapons programs that were also stalled. These people who are so blinded by ideology that they won't acknowledge these facts have zero credibility.

Biden tries to take credit for success in Iraq - the success of the strategy that he and Obama fought every step of the way. How funny.

FOREIGN POLICY:

While the Iranian government brutalizes protesters in the streets, it looks forward to seat on the UN Human Rights Council. Only the UN. Iran goes to war with Google. News organizations and the US government condemn the Iranian government for blocking broadcasts, but Obama still hasn't condemned the government for using violence on its citizens. Government pays Basij members to attend pro-government rally. This guy, Amir Abbas Fakhravar, claims the protesters want regime change and outnumbered government supporters. Government supporters beat reformer's wife. The Christian Science Monitor lays it out:

"The latest fear tactics include executions of demonstrators, arrests of top intellectuals and rights activists, detention of a group called Mothers in Mourning (mothers of political prisoners), and torture of detained protesters. Such atrocities simply remind Iranians that this regime, whose leaders helped overthrow the shah 31 years ago, has now reverted to the shah’s brutal methods to keep power and quell dissent."

Obama's lack of empathy for the people of Iran is truly scary, but he even fails to understand the political opportunity to be gained by faking empathy. That's doubly scary. Virtually every American empathizes with the oppressed Iranians. Obama could connect with every American by condemning the Iranian government's violence. But Obama identifies so strongly with the violent Iranian government, that he must not grasp the opportunity. That dangerously sick. Even Lenin and Mao would have taken advantage of the political opportunity. When I started reading up on this, I thought the protests were dying out, but the more I read, the more I think they're growing. The Iranian regime might well fall before it can develop nuclear weapons. The sad part is, if the regime falls, Obama will take credit. Writer suggests changing US policies that favor the Iranian government. PMOI.

POLITICS:

This is how Democrats view bipartisanship:

"Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is rewriting a jobs bill after Democrats complained of too many concessions to Republicans."

I can't help but laugh.

"A Senate Democratic leadership aide said Reid decided to drop the tax extenders after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declined to endorse the Baucus package."

Endorse our bill or else!

"A spokesperson for Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa), the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee and the co-sponsor of the Baucus bill, said Reid’s move risks turning a bipartisan bill into another partisan vote."

It sounds like Reid might be doing Republicans another favor. Every time Republicans compromise away our freedom, they remind the public they're just as bad as Democrats, they have no principles and they don't care about the American people.

Patrick Kennedy retiring so he doesn't get defeated. Excellent. No more Kennedys to rob the American people blind.

MISC:

I'm not the only person who has realized that lack of ability to deal with snow is one symptom of the abject failure of government and a sign our civilization is devolving. It's interesting that snow plows plowed my little street twice after the first snow fall last Friday. They haven't plowed our street since and the second snowfall was heavier here. Because of that failure, our street is a sheet of ice.

Man posed as veterinarian and was quickly dismissed from private sector job. But then he got smarter and got a veterinarian job with government which he kept for four years despite tips that he was a fraud. These are the people who supposedly keep our food supply safe.

Mises scholar destroys Marx's class distinction argument.

"Under capitalism there is a natural tendency for businesses to invest in areas with low wages, driving up those rates to a level commensurate with those in other areas, and inducing workers in low-paying jobs to migrate there. Similarly, as entrepreneurs invest in areas where profits are high, output expands and prices and profits in those areas tend to fall. Thus, far from squeezing out the middle class, the free market tends to eliminate extremes of wealth and poverty, thereby increasing the size of the middle class."

Marx himself observed this, but that didn't stop him from expounding on his bogus theory that ended up being the justification for the murder of over a hundred million people last century.

""Marx left the problem of producing a definition of the concept of social class until much later. The manuscript of the third volume of his magnum opus, Das Kapital, breaks off dramatically at the moment Marx was about to answer the question: 'What constitutes a class?"' Unfortunately, Ossowski concludes, "we do not know what answer he would have given if death had not interrupted his work."

In fact, however, it was not death that interrupted Marx's work: The fragment on classes was actually written prior to the initial publication of volume one of Capital in 1867. Marx died in 1883. That he never returned to the fragment strongly suggests that he had no satisfactory theory of class. The placement of the fragment at the very end of volume three did, nonetheless, accomplish an important strategic objective: it insinuated that Marx did have an answer but was unable to get it down on paper before he died. Engels's placement of the fragment can therefore be seen as a deliberate attempt to cover up the fact that Marx had no valid, defensible definition of class."

It's always politics.

"The only way to make money on the free market is to produce what others want. The better one serves others, the more profit he earns; thus the market is grounded in mutual benefit and harmony of interests. This harmony, however, is transformed into conflict whenever government intervenes. If a business can get the government to keep out competitors [regulations is the main way to do this - LIW], customers no longer have the ability to take their dollars elsewhere. Then, and only then, are companies in a position to raise prices or turn out shoddy products.

In what we may call a libertarian class analysis, exploitation indeed exists, but it is the exploitation that results from the difference between free-market prices and regulated prices. Hence, exploitation is not restricted to capitalists, as is the case with Marxian analysis. Capitalists can exploit consumers through a protective tariff, and workers can exploit capitalists via minimum wages. In the latter case, some workers would also be exploiting others, as wealth is transferred from workers who lose their jobs as a result of the minimum wage to those who remain employed.

The key question is thus, who is likely to control government? The question is really an empirical one, and must be decided on a case-by-case basis. As a general rule, though, those most likely to control government are those with the easiest access, which usually means, as Adam Smith noted, the "rich and powerful.""

The rich and powerful have easier access, but in a democracy, because organized workers have more votes, labor leaders are rich and powerful. This is the basis for the tug of war we see between corporations trying to control government and labor unions trying to control government. No matter which wins, everybody else loses because both are using the coercive power of government to take wealth from the people in general for themselves. They're both getting government to steal from us on their behalf. That's mercantilism. To many Americans mistake our mercantile economy (with some fascism, socialism and communism thrown in) - working on behalf of politically connected forces including politicians, corporations, labor unions and other special interests at our expense - for a free market economy. It's these government interventions in the marketplace that create the tremendous wealth disparity we see in America.

"The distinction between market and government has remained at the core of libertarian thought. Ludwig von Mises, for example, wrote that "our age is full of serious conflicts of economic group interests. But these conflicts are not inherent in the operation of an unhampered capitalist economy. They are the necessary outcome of government policies interfering with the operation of the market.… They are brought about by the fact that mankind has gone back to group privileges and thereby to a new caste system." While this distinction between harmony and conflict, between mutual benefit and the benefit of one individual or group at the expense of another, between market and government, is systematically ignored in Marxian analysis, it is at the center of libertarian class analysis. It is unfortunate that class analysis is so closely associated with Marxism, for it has meant that libertarian class analysis has been largely ignored. This is unfortunate, since it is a sophisticated and powerful tool for analyzing society."

Great conclusion.

Michelle Bachmann says that the US must support Israel or God will curse us and make the US disappear.

"I am convinced in my heart and in my mind that if the United States fails to stand with Israel, that is the end of the United States . . . [W]e have to show that we are inextricably entwined, that as a nation we have been blessed because of our relationship with Israel, and if we reject Israel, then there is a curse that comes into play. And my husband and I are both Christians, and we believe very strongly the verse from Genesis [Genesis 12:3], we believe very strongly that nations also receive blessings as they bless Israel. It is a strong and beautiful principle."

You can't make this stuff up. How do weirdos like this get elected? Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and power attracts dangerous loons who like to lord power over others. That kind of lunacy in aristocrats makes prophesies like Armageddon come true.