Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Cato points out the flaws in the progressive argument for limiting corporate speech. The main flaw is thinking using force against others is a positive.

STATES RIGHTS:

Arizona legislator wants to bring an incandescent light bulb manufacturer to Arizona and nullify the fed ban on them. That's a great idea. Ohio should do the same. Those florescent bulbs are a scam. The ones I bought a few years ago were supposed to last seven years making them worth the higher price, but they barely last over one year in our hallways. That's only two to three times as long as an incandescent. I was ripped off.

"But he hopes perhaps you can sue if the federal governmentinsists that a phase-out of incandescent-bulb sales applies to Arizona."

Sue? This guy doesn't understand nullification. The whole point of nullification is it doesn't matter what any federal branch says including the courts. You don't sue. You indemnify your citizens from the feds and you arrest any federal agent who tries to enforce the nullified law under color of law.

ECONOMY:

Cato explains how thousands of regulations on top of the well understood government interventions we've read about intersected to create the economic crisis we're experiencing. One previously overlooked way government caused the current economic crisis.

"Each country implemented Basel I on its own schedule and with its own quirks. The United States implemented it in 1991, with several different capital cushions; a 10 percent cushion was required for "well-capitalized" commercial banks, a designation that carries privileges that most banks want. Ten years later, however, came what proved in retrospect to be the pivotal event. The FDIC, the Fed, the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Office of Thrift Supervision issued an amendment to Basel I, the Recourse Rule, that extended the accord's risk differentiations to asset-backed securities (ABS): bonds backed by credit card debt, or car loans — or mortgages — required a mere 2 percent capital cushion, as long as these bonds were rated AA or AAA or were issued by a government-sponsored enterprise (GSE), such as Fannie or Freddie. Thus, where a well-capitalized commercial bank needed to devote $10 of capital to $100 worth of commercial loans or corporate bonds, or $5 to $100 worth of mortgages, it needed to spend only $2 of capital on a mortgage-backed security (MBS) worth $100. A bank interested in reducing its capital cushion — also known as "leveraging up" — would gain a 60 percent benefit from trading its mortgages for MBSs and an 80 percent benefit for trading its commercial loans and corporate securities for MBSs."

When government monopolizes regulation of finances, this is inevitable.

"This litany [of culpable regulations] is not exhaustive. It is meant only to convey the welter of regulations that have grown up across different parts of the economy in such immense profusion that nobody can possibly predict how they will interact with each other. We are, all of us, ignorant of the vast bulk of what the government is doing for us, and what those actions might be doing to us. That is the best explanation for how this perfect regulatory storm happened, and for why it might well happen again."

That's the fatal conceit of central planners. Their own regulations are too complex for them to understand, let alone the nearly infinitely more complex economy.

"The regulators seem to have been as ignorant of the implications of the relevant regulations as the bankers were. The SEC trusted the three rating agencies to continue their reliable performance even after its own 1975 ruling protected them from the market competition that had made their ratings reliable. Nearly everyone, from Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke on down, seemed to be ignorant of the various regulations that were pumping up house prices and pushing down lending standards. And the FDIC, the Fed, the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Office of Thrift Supervision, in promulgating one of those regulations, trusted the three rating companies when they decided that these companies' AA and AAA ratings would be the basis of the immense capital relief that the Recourse Rule conferred on investment-bank-issued mortgage-backed securities. Did the four regulatory bodies that issued the Recourse Rule know that the rating agencies on which they were placing such heavy reliance were an SEC-created oligopoly, with all that this implies? If you read the Recourse Rule, you will find that the answer is no."

Obviously the central planners don't understand the most basic economic principles like free competition. That we give these people power to tell us what we can and can't do and violently attack us if we break their dictates is insane.

"Omniscience cannot be expected of human beings. One really would have had to be a god to master the millions of pages in the Federal Register — not to mention the pages of the Register's state, local, and now international counterparts — so one could pick out the specific group of regulations, issued in different fields over the course of decades, that would end up conspiring to create the greatest banking crisis since the Great Depression. This storm may have been perfect, therefore, but it may not prove to be rare. New regulations are bound to interact unexpectedly with old ones if the regulators, being human, are ignorant of the old ones and of their effects."

Exactly. We're back to the fatal conceit of central planners again - only God can be that smart.

"What I am calling social democracy is, in its form, very different from socialism. Under social democracy, laws and regulations are issued piecemeal, as flexible responses to the side effects of progress — social and economic problems — as they arise, one by one. (Thus the official name: progressivism.) The case-by-case approach is supposed to be the height of pragmatism. But in substance, there is a striking similarity between social democracy and the most utopian socialism. Whether through piecemeal regulation or central planning, both systems share the conceit that modern societies are so legible that the causes of their problems yield easily to inspection. Social democracy rests on the premise that when something goes wrong, somebody — whether the voter, the legislator, or the specialist regulator — will know what to do about it. This is less ambitious than the premise that central planners will know what to do about everything all at once, but it is no different in principle."It's no different at all."This premise would be questionable enough even if we started with a blank legal slate. But we don't. And there is no conceivable way that we, the people — or our agents in government — can know how to solve the problems of modern societies when our efforts have, in fact, been preceded by generations of previous efforts that have littered the ground with a tangle of rules so thick that we can't possibly know what they all say, let alone how they might interact to create another perfect storm."

This is the best analysis from Cato I've read in a long time.

TAX AND SPEND:

Greece's PM, who just the other day asked what the EU was going to do to bail out Greece, says Greece isn't asking for a bailout. OK.

Conservative hypocrisy on government spending for nuclear power plants. These people have no principles or don't understand markets. I don't know which. Get rid of the burdensome regulations and let the market make the best decision.

Paul Ryan isn't afraid of tackling the entitlement problem. But why did he vote for the bailouts? He doesn't understand markets either.

Obama's trains are neither high speed nor profitable. I hope Dayton doesn't fall for that siren song.

Article reports that dental coverage cuts leave California's poor in pain. What it doesn't say is that government interference in our economy including spending like on dental coverage is what made Californians poor in the first place.

REGULATION:

The Commerce Department would more accurately be called the anti-commerce department. Government can do nothing to aid commerce. Everything government does restricts commerce.

HEALTH CARE:

Obama is like a dog with a bone on this health care oppression plan. I thought he was focused on jobs. That's what he said in January. That's what he said last January. How's that working out for us?

GLOBAL WARMING:

The world's biggest story is a non-story in the US.

"In the ninety days — three months exactly at the time of this writing — since the Climategate files story broke, there has been an amazing amount of breakout in the climate science story, with major error after major error being uncovered in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report IV (AR4). There has been the discovery of suspicious conflicts of interest on the part of the chair of the IPCC, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, and the expanding story of the financial connections between the carbon trading cabal and the scientific climate clique in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Dr. Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit has “stepped aside” while under investigation, after which the UK government said it appeared there may have been criminality in CRU’s refusal to fulfill Freedom of Information requests. Scientist members of the IPCC have resigned, not wishing to continue to be associated with the poor quality of work being revealed."

It's a huge scandal.

"It’s been called the “biggest scientific scandal in history.” It has everything to earn Pulitzer consideration: lies and misconduct in high places, political implications, even massive financial transactions that may or may not be legitimate or even legal. It’s big news … as long as you read the Telegraph, the Guardian, the London Times, or even major Indian papers.

It’s no news at all if you read the U.S. mainstream media."

This is why the mainstream media is dying. Their bias prevents them from covering the important stories that affect our lives.

WAR:

Taliban continues to resist in Marjah.

It sounds to me like our politicians have put the lives of Afghan civilians above the lives of US troops too.

"Air support is used to soften targets and provide cover for advancing troops. But Dadkhan contends under the new policy, troops must wait for help from the air and artillery while the civilian impact is weighed.

In one instance cited by Dadkhan, marines last September in the Kunar Province called for air support when they came under fire while searching for a weapons cache. Their request was rejected out of concern for civilians.

An hour after their call for help, the marines, pinned down and running out of ammunition, were finally backed up by helicopters. Four marines and nine Afghan allies were killed, and 22 others wounded.

...

New reports from the military also note the emergence of deadly Taliban snipers, who are inflicting great pain on U.S. troops and are able to more freely operate without the worry of air strikes."

That should never happen. It's another reason we should end this war today.

POLITICS:

The majority of Americans get it.

"[J]ust 21% of voters nationwide believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed.

...

Seventy-one percent (71%) of all voters now view the federal government as a special interest group, and 70% believe that the government and big business typically work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors."

But are they ready to stop voting for Republicans and Democrats?

Nice rant on the hypocrisy of Republicans who, whenever out of power, try to pretend they're libertarians.

LOCAL:

Lack of sales tax forces local governments to cut spending. That's great news because that means government is doing less harm to our economy, but this article presents it as bad news. That's just more of the harmful bias of the media.