Free kibbles

LIBERTY:

The government shouldn't own our GPS locations, but we can't stop them on fourth amendment grounds. That information is not private. Not only did we make no attempt to keep it private, we specifically broadcast our location to a company which can do anything with it it wants. I wonder if the contract between the customer and the company included a clause that forbid the company from giving out that information. Then we would have done due diligence to make our location private. Is it just that easy?

SOCIALISM:

Justice Department raids three Japanese named auto parts makers in anti-trust investigation. I'm sure there's no ulterior motive (unions) here.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Mises scholar explains the problem with giving government regulatory power over the internet because of so-called net neutrality.

ECONOMY:

Obama's head of the FDIC is encouraging Americans to save money in banks. Of course savings is what we need to get us out of this recession, so on the surface this sounds like Obama advocating sound policy. According to this author, it's not. This message flies directly in the face of politicians' spend, spend, spend message. So what's going on? Obama is afraid of more bank failures. This is stunt to help the banks, not to help Americans and our economy.

"The FDIC has also launched a program to reach the unbanked (households that do not have a checking or a savings account). An estimated 7.7 percent of U.S. households, approximately 9 million, are unbanked and instead rely upon money orders, payday loans, rent-to-own agreements, pawn shops, or refund anticipation loans, to pay their bills. The FDIC wants these unbanked households to begin placing their trust in US banks at a time when trust in bankers is at an all-time low. Since 2007, trust in US banks plummeted 39 percentage points– from 68 to 29."

Now government's push to shut down payday loans makes even more sense. The bankers must have seen this crisis coming all along and been trying to use government's gun to force more Americans to put money into banks. This is another piece of evidence in my personal conspiracy theory that Paulson, Bernanke, Geithner and the bankers executed a coup in 2008 during the TARP crisis."It’s a miracle Americans have exhibited restraint and not pulled all their money out of US banks by now. Certainly the mother of all banks runs looms at any moment. This is why Citibank recently said they have the right to hold your money for 7 days in the event of massive withdrawals from the bank. Bankers know depositors are edgy."I think credit unions are a much safer bet.

"Depositors were paid $145 billion (~1.5%) on their $9.2 trillion of banked money, for a $395 billion net profit for the banks. To put it another way, in a bad year, US banks made 4.75% on their depositors’ money, paid out 1.28% interest to depositors and netted a 3.47% difference, according to FDIC reports."

That's quite a profit.

"This sounds fair. Depositors place their money in a saving account, make 1.28% interest while the bank makes 3.47%. But Americans are never informed of the fractional banking privilege that banksters enjoy. They take $1000 of your money and via fractional banking have the right to make it into $10,000 (make money out of thin air). So your $1000 in a saving account allows bankers to loan out $9000 of newly created money, keep your $1000 in reserve, and make 4.75% interest. So you, the depositor, make $12.80 on $1000 and the bank makes ~$428.00 on your banked money (which has become $9000 of new money). Sound fair? Remember now, your money is losing purchasing power due to inflation, which exceeds your rate of interest on your savings. Today, when you deposit your money in a saving account you are essentially making a donation to the bank."

So the bank makes $428 while paying you $12.80 and charging you fee after fee that costs more than your $12.80, and they're in financial trouble and we had to bail them out. What's wrong with this picture? And it gets worse.

"Back to the topic of inflation, according to the government’s own CPI (consumer price index) inflation calculator, $1000 in the bank has already lost about $10 of purchasing power in the first two-months of 2010. However, the government’s reported CPI differs significantly from the real rate of inflation, which is more like 10–12%."

The inflation monster is eating up your money too. Here's how the government hides inflation from us with its CPI index.

"“If you don't drive or don't eat, maybe the CPI (consumer price index) has a little resemblance to your life. But I don't see how anybody with any ordinary experience could see the CPI is being accurate,” Rutherford said.

Rudolph-Riad Younes, a co-manager of the Julius Baer International Equity Fund, told Barron's magazine this month that if the government counted home prices and energy correctly, the real inflation rate would be between 7 percent and 10 percent.

John Williams, a Dartmouth-trained economist who works as a consultant for a number of Fortune 500 companies, says the only reason the inflation rate is so low is because the Reagan and Clinton administrations rewrote the way the CPI is calculated.

In his monthly online newsletter Shadow Government Statistics, Williams has painstakingly attempted to recreate the inflation rate using its older guidelines. Under his calculations, inflation is actually running at an annualized rate of 9.95 percent."

Annually. That's how much the Fed is robbing us and transferring to the banks and the government. That's a gigantic, hidden tax.


Why would we want to degrade our economy to be more like Europe's? Because Democrats want us all to be equally poor. Except for them.


US manufacturing productivity is up since 1993. Fine. But we're losing manufacturing jobs overseas because our productivity advantage doesn't make up for the cost disadvantage due to taxes.


TAX AND SPEND:


A game plan to keep government from stealing your retirement other than putting all your money into gold, transporting it to Costa Rica , burying it then sitting on it with a gun the rest of your life.

"Rather than creating a mandatory clone of the bankrupt Social Security System, let’s consider a simple, new retirement alternative I call the Ron Paul Freedom IRA. We hope he will introduce a bill along with other members of Congress to create this new Freedom IRA. This will generate publicity about the threat to your existing retirement funds from the Obama Administration and offer a free-market alternative to the forced, mandatory proposals from the left.

Basically this would be an IRA with a $5,000 maximum contribution annually where instead of a tax deduction the individual contributor would received a tax credit for the entire contribution. So the ultimate question for the working taxpayer would be, "would you rather give the first $5,000 each year you owe the IRS to the government or contribute it to your own "ironclad" private IRA account?" For lower income workers who might contribute more than their annual tax bill, the tax credit could be carried forward to future years thus creating a future tax holiday for the participant."

If I can't trust the government to keep its bloody hands off my existing IRA, why would I trust it to keep its bloody hands off this new IRA? Costa Rica is looking better and better.


More protectionism as Obama puts import duty on steel pipe from China. That'll make the price of steel go up and all of us will be poorer for it.

FEDERAL RESERVE:


Tom Woods summarizes the case he made in Meltdown about how the Fed created this economic crisis.


Apparently Ron Paul's challenge of Ben Bernanke on the role of the Fed during Watergate is becoming a big story.


HEALTH CARE:


I agree with the Judge that tort reform is unconstitutional. Interesting personal story:

"Is there anything in the Constitution that empowers Congress to regulate health care or get between patients and their physicians or empower bureaucrats to tell physicians how to practice medicine? In a word, NO. Here is a kinky example. Last week, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) collapsed in his apartment in Cliffside Park, N.J., a few miles south of the George Washington Bridge. When he called an ambulance and it arrived, he directed the driver to bring him to Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City. That direction is today perfectly lawful. Under all three health care proposals (the Senate, House, and presidential versions), such a direction would be unlawful; as an ambulance would be forced to take a patient to the hospital closest to the patient; in Sen. Lautenberg’s case, a small community hospital a few blocks from his apartment. Sen. Lautenberg voted for the Senate proposal that would have denied him the free choice that probably saved his life."

They're voting to kill themselves too. Kinky isn't the word I would use.

GLOBAL WARMING:


Walter Williams doesn't go so far as calling to abolish the EPA and prosecute the climate frauds. That's me.


UN to create "independent" panel to review IPCC. That's like having the Yakuza create an independent panel to investigate the Yakuza. Why do we put up with these charades?


India rejects allowing global warming to become a WTO issue. Good for India.

POLICE STATE:

A proposal for law in a free society driven by judges and common law instead of by legislation.

"Historically, in the common law of England, Roman law, and the Law Merchant, law was formed in large part in thousands of judicial decisions. In these so-called "decentralized law-finding systems," the law evolved as judges, arbitrators, or other jurists discovered legal principles applicable to specific factual situations, building upon legal principles previously discovered, and statutes, or centralized law, played a relatively minor role. Today, however, statutes passed by the legislature are becoming the primary source of law, and law tends to be thought of as being identical to legislation. Yet legislation-based systems cannot be expected to develop law compatible with a free society."

Why would law developed by judges be superior?

"First, judges can only make decisions when asked to do so by the parties concerned. Second, the judge's decision is less far-reaching than legislation because it primarily affects the parties to the dispute, and only occasionally affects third parties or others with no connection to the parties involved. Third, a judge's discretion is limited by the necessity of referring to similar precedents. Legal certainty is thus more attainable in a relatively decentralized law-finding system like the common law, Roman law, or customary law, than in centralized law-making systems where legislation is the primary source of law.

...

Decentralized law-finding systems like the common law, on the other hand, are analogous to free markets in that a natural order, unplanned by government decrees, arises in both. Additionally, as pointed out by Richard Epstein, because alteration of legislation and regulation is likely to have more of a payoff for lobbyists than convincing a judge to change common-law type rules, judges are also less likely to be the target of special interests than are legislators."

Another benefit. This is a very convincing argument.

WAR:


Cato suggests Obama may not pull troops out of Iraq on the agreed upon timeline.


Regarding the Patriot Act reauthorization, Cato reports that "the FBI repeatedly and systematically broke the law by exceeding its authorization to gather information about people’s telecommunications activities."Where are the prosecutions? Good intentions, if they had good intentions, don't cut it, especially with the people with surrender power to. Good intentions don't protect any other American from prosecution, and we have to hold people with power over us to a higher standard. You can't steal from somebody because you have the good intention of helping another with the money (unless you're from the government).


POLITICS:

Author encourages Ron Paul to seize the opportunity provided by his CPAC win and declare as a presidential candidate in 2012. He would have the field to himself for months at least in which to appear all over TV, speak, raise money and organize.

"Not only would he be the only declared candidate at the moment, but he might even be the only declared presidential candidate for the next eleven months. To have the field completely free of challengers and a fearsome grassroots electioneering and fundraising machine already in place is the political strategist’s Holy Grail. All Ron Paul has to do is tell the world he is running in 2012, and his entire movement will spring to life without any challengers standing in his way."

It's an interesting idea.

"The fear and loathing Ron Paul would instill in the powers that be cannot be overstated. In their terrified stupor, the Republican leadership would search far and wide to find a sufficiently servile sock puppet to trot out to oppose Dr. Paul. All they would find, however, is a Mormon version of Ted Kennedy, an old man from Arizona who is clearly off his rocker, and a woman who can’t figure out what she stands for, besides war. The situation for Dr. Paul would only brighten if the Republican National Committee were to push for an early announcement of candidacy from one of these clowns. Indeed, the best possible outcome for Dr. Paul and the movement would be to force the RNC’s hand to pick one of these idiots sooner rather than later. The front-running idiot at the moment is the Mormon version of Ted Kennedy who loves socialized medicine. Life would be good indeed if Dr. Paul could induce the RNC to throw its weight behind a man who supports socialized medicine. That would ensure a Ron Paul run against Barack Obama in 2012!"

Ron Paul going one on one with Mandate Romney would rock. You know none of the establishment candidates will take on Romney over Romneycare, but Paul would.

"The paroxysms of fear that would grip the Obama administration would be equally great, because Ron Paul is actually committed to ending our murderous foreign empire. Obama won the last election on the "peace platform," which was possible only because he was running against a crazy old man, hell-bent on even more war than Bush II. In such company, Obama looked like a "peace candidate." In the company of Dr. Paul, however, Obama can be seen for what he is; namely, a card-carrying member of the same war party that includes Bush II. If Obama knew at this early point that he could possibly be facing Ron Paul in 2012, he would have to start changing his perpetual-war policies right now in order to stand a chance against the real "peace candidate" in two years. Nor could he continue to indulge in his lunatic Keynesianism-meets-corporatism economic policies, because Ron Paul the presidential candidate would publicly expose it all as the quackery it is. Ron Paul is Obama’s worst nightmare in 2012."

No doubt. Paul could win the anti-war crowd from Obama in a heartbeat. Against Obama, he'd win the anti-war left, the anti-corporate welfare left, the anti-Wall Street left, the independents, fiscal conservatives, paleo-conservatives and many other conservatives. And libertarians. The only problem would be the social conservatives who want to use government to force their will on everybody else and neocons who want to wage WWIII, and most of them would vote for Paul anyway because he's Republican even if others started a third party.

MISC:

Chile had a 8.8 magnitude earthquake that killed 82. That's huge. Chile had a 9.5 in 1960. I've never heard of an earthquake that big, probably because that was the biggest all century and I wasn't born yet.

Cyclical view of history based on generations predicts we're entering a period like the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the Great Depression/WWII. Interesting how those things are spaced relatively evenly.

Texas government is secretly saving blood samples of newborns to create a giant DNA database.

"A Texas Tribune review of nine years' worth of e-mails and internal documents on theDepartment of State Health Services’ newborn blood screening program reveals the transfer of hundreds of infant blood spots to an Armed Forces lab to build a national and, someday, international mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) registry. The records, released after the state agreed in December to destroy more than 5 million infant blood spots, also show an effort to limit the public’s knowledge of aspects of the newborn blood program, and to manage the debate around it. But the plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit never saw them, because the state settled the case so quickly that it never reached the discovery phase."

That's just scary. You can bet other states are too.

Discussing the IRS suicide pilot, we get this kernel of wisdom:

"On a moral plane, I think it’s important to remember that groups of people can have no rights that the individuals who compose the group don’t have. In other words, if an individual does not have a right to do something himself, then neither can he delegate that right to a politician, policeman, nor some other authority. If it’s not his to give, he can’t give it.

If I don’t have the right to take money by force from my neighbor, I don’t gain that right by teaming up with others. A bunch of people voting for it doesn’t make it any more right. Suppose, for instance, a neighborhood voted to hire a motorcycle gang to defend it and "authorized" that gang to levy taxes by force, including on residents who didn’t want to go along with the plan. Most people would say that’s wrong. But somehow, if the government does exactly the same thing, people see it as okay."

I like a different analogy. Suppose you and your family are walking down the street and you get approached by a dozen thugs. The thugs tell you that all of you are going to have an election to decide if the thugs are going to take your money from your family by force and distribute it to the thugs. Whether you participate in the election or not is immaterial. The thugs have no right to your money regardless of the election results, regardless of how many thugs there are and regardless if the thugs call themselves a government or not. In a civilized world, might does not make right.

"And the single largest expense in everyone’s life is the government. At least that’s true for productive people."

That is true, and it's nuts. Does the government do more for you than your house? Than your car? Than your toothpaste? No. The government is an obstacle to everything we want to do. It provides no net benefits. It makes us all poorer. We'd be safer from crime without it making everybody poor, divided and angry. We'd be safer from attack without it making foreigners angry at us. It hinders our ability to trade with one another and with foreigners which would reduce both internal and external threats.


A student asks if a libertarian can occupy a rent-controlled apartment. A libertarian should think for himself. I wonder what it's like to have learned that freedom is always the right answer from others instead of on your own. Block sets him straight, but being a professor, he fails to mention the thinking for yourself thing.

"Now for my substantive answer to your query. I oppose fiat currency, and yet have some in my wallet (heck, I never leave home without any; I might want to buy something). I favor the complete privatization of the post office, and, yet, snail-mail letters from time to time. I think that all libraries should be run on a profit and loss basis, not by the government, and yet borrow books from them. I favor the gold standard, but do not limit my purchases and sales to this medium. I oppose public education, and yet was a student at Madison High School, Brooklyn College, and City University of New York; I also taught at the State University of Stony Brook, Baruch College, Rutgers and the University of Central Arkansas, all of them in the so-called public sector. I oppose government roads (heck, my most recent book makes the case for complete privatization) and yet, you’ll never guess how I travel around; yes, on statist streets and roads. Am I a hypocrite? Am I acting incompatibly with libertarianism? I don’t think so."

Of course not. We want to make the world a better place, but we have to live in the world as it is now. We have to play the ball where it lies. But that rent-controlled apartment comes with plenty of hidden costs. I'm also not sure about Block's comment that human being are not hard wired "for implicit cooperation (markets, the free enterprise system, profit and loss)." I think we are. Free markets evolved right along with us. Free markets are the evolutionary principle of the wisdom of crowds applied to humans. The problem is we're also hard wired to take the easy way out - to take things from others by force if possible instead of working to obtain them. Those two evolutionary forces have been competing for millions of years, and they're competing today.


The Washington Times ran a story questioning the official 9/11 story.


How our coinage and paper money has evolved over time to promote government through portraits, symbols and slogans.