Free kibbles

LIBERTY:

Check out the text of the salt ban ordinance proposed in New York City.

"3 S 399-BBB. PROHIBITION ON SALT; RESTAURANTS. 1. NO OWNER OR OPERATOR OF A RESTAURANT IN THIS STATE SHALL USE SALT IN ANY FORM IN THE PREPARATION OF ANY FOOD FOR CONSUMPTION BY CUSTOMERS OF SUCH RESTAURANT,  INCLUDING FOOD PREPARED TO BE CONSUMED ON THE PREMISES OF SUCH RESTAURANT OR OFF OF SUCH PREMISES."

"in any form..." All food has salt in it. This bill literally bans all food in restaurants.


This is the new America: Shut Up and Pay Up. If you haven't sensed that, you aren't paying attention.

"A wealth of unnecessary and petty [regulations] here engenders a whole army of clerks, each of whom carries out his task with a degree of pedantry and inflexibility, and a self-important air solely designed to add significance to the least significant employment. He refrains from speaking, but you can see him thinking, more or less: "Make way for me; I am a cog in the mighty machine of state.""

Wow. How descriptive of the modern US is that 171 year old quote? One of the things I've realized from reading mises.org is that all our problems are just repeats from the past. I always knew there were parallels, but the extent to which we're repeating the mistakes of the past is amazing.

""If I’m the bad guy to the average citizen … and their taxes have to go up to cover my raise, I’m very sorry about that, but I have to look out for myself and my membership," grunted Chris Mesley, president of the Albany, New York Police Officer's Union. "As the president of the `local,' I will not accept `zeroes' [no increase in salaries or benefits]. If that means ... ticking off some taxpayers, then so be it."

It would be difficult to find a more candid expression of the parasite class's predatory contempt for the productive than the words that departed Mesley's snout. The police union capo will occasionally remove that appendage from the public trough just long enough to spew demands for an ever-larger share of the wealth produced through the honest labor of others, or to justify some corrupt privilege he claims as a "cog in the mighty machine of state." In all of this he is entirely typical of the army of public employees pillaging what little remains of America's wealth.

A brave resident of Albany who identified himself as "Justin" pointed out in an admirably confrontational speech to that city's Common Council that the city's median annual household income in 2009 was about $33,000. In the same year, Mesley – who was hired as a patrol officer in 1992 – received a base salary of $70,289, while also scarfing down at least another $30,000 for serving as union president.

"Chris Mesley is making three times or more the median salary and is complaining that he might not get a raise," Justin observed. "The sense of entitlement of Chris Mesley and all those who think alike has led to the pilfering of state and city coffers. They are like leeches, sucking the taxpayers dry, and that's an insult to leeches. At least leeches know when to let go.""

But blaming government workers is passing the buck. We did this to ourselves. Good for Justin for making his  voice heard, though it's probably too little, too late. The picture of the AIG financial services chief in the Che Geuvera T-shirt is priceless. Obama cronies love their mass murderers.

"Another [AIG] employee excoriated politicians who had condemned the subsidized bonuses as hypocrites who really ought to dispense with the pretense of public-spiritedness and revel unabashedly in the vulgar rewards of statist opportunism: "They only care about the next election, just like we only care about the next bonus. Well, none of them cares about the country, [just as] none of us cares about the institution. They really don't care, and I really don't care. And frankly, if a trillion dollars gets lost, fine.""

This is what we've done to our country by transforming our society from a relatively free one to a system dominated by the violence of government.


STATES' RIGHTS:


Thomas Jefferson on nullification.

TAX AND SPEND:

Unions may be the only group that Democrats don't wan to raise taxes on. This isn't about principle. Neither Republicans nor Democrats ever want to raise taxes on their special interests if they can help it.

Obama wants to make high-speed internet an entitlement.

Government stimulus does not generate economic growth.

Senator Inhofe proposes to freeze discretionary spending. Where was that during the Bush years? The minority always wants to freeze spending when they're in the minority. That's to keep the majority from buying more votes than them. It's just a political ploy, not a principled stand against big government.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

The US government can't inflate its way out of its debt problem.

Interesting point about fiat money:

"In a sound banking system, in which money is a commodity like gold, money can't disappear. It can change ownership, but it can't disappear. But in our current system, it can dry up and blow away as easily as it can be created."

Not only is it way too easy to inflate in a fiat money system, but it's way to easy to deflate. Hard money is stabilizer. I really like this advice.

"Liquidate: Get rid of any assets you have that might have been favored by the old economy but are likely to be blown away by the new one. That would include speculative real estate holdings in formerly hot markets. Maybe even sell your house, if you can, and rent instead. Or, for sure if you keep your house, get a big mortgage at a fixed low rate that will probably be inflated out of existence. And get rid of your houseful of stuff – the junk filling your basement, your attic, that storage unit you're renting – anything you don't really need. Turn it into cash.

Consolidate: Cut your expenses to the bone and consolidate your assets. The best way to do that is to buy gold and silver in cash form (coins) and put them away as savings. The other critical element is getting a major portion of your assets offshore.

Speculate: With the government creating bubbles through its mammoth spending programs, and other bubbles popping, like the collapse of more major corporations, take chances on winning big on bets placed on these trends. It's possible in such volatile times to make a lot of money, just as you do for subscribers to the International Speculator, and Marin does for the Energy Report.

Create: In the coming years, the world is likely to change as radically as it did entering the industrial revolution. This is going to be a really major change, economically, politically, technologically, demographically, socially, militarily – the whole ball of wax. This is a good time to look around and ask yourself, not, "Who will give me a job?" but, "What goods and services can I provide that people will need in the future and pay me for?" What worked during the late Long Boom won't work – in order to create, you're going to have to think creatively."

It would have been better to liquidate in 2007. Better now than later though. As far as create, I still think buying a farm would be a tremendous investment.

This is a clear statement of one major problem with the Fed's policies:

"In reality, employment's future is being decided in the credit markets. Here, the US Federal Reserve's zero interest rate policy is redirecting investment capital towards government. When banks can borrow from the Fed at zero percent and buy long-dated US Treasuries yielding 3% to 4%, there is little incentive to take the risks inherent in business lending. Business credit is, therefore, tighter than even a severe recession would ordinarily dictate. This lack of credit is starving the private sector's ability to create jobs."

Thanks, Bernanke.

HEALTH CARE:

CBO revises cost estimate for the Senate bill up showing it will cost $875 billion over the first 10 years (though most provisions don't kick in until after four years, so they aren't counted over 10 years), and it will supposedly reduce the deficit by $114 billion. This is baloney.The CBO can only score what Democrats let them, and Democrats have hidden trillions in costs. As Cato explains:

"That document — unlike the CBO’s score of the Clinton health plan — includes no cost estimates of the legislation’s private-sector mandates.  As I have written previously, the private-sector mandates accounted for 60 percent of the cost of the Clinton plan.  The Obama plan is remarkably similar, which is probably why Democrats have systematically suppressed any such estimates this time around.

President Obama has implicitly acknowledged that the CBO estimates do not reflect the legislation’s full cost.  Yet it has now been 265 days since Congress saw the first version of the Obama health plan, and we’re still waiting for a full cost estimate."

It's a scam.

Are the Democrats on the verge of rebelling against Obamacare?

"[A] solid majority of Americans opposes the massive health-reform plan. Four-fifths of those who oppose the plan strongly oppose it…while only half of those who support the plan do so strongly. Many more Americans believe the legislation will worsen their health care, cost them more personally and add significantly to the national deficit. Never in our experience as pollsters can we recall such self-deluding misconstruction of survey data…"

This is from Democrat polsters, and Cato thinks it might be the first salvo in a Democrat revolt. Let's hope so.

I agree with this assessment of Obama and why he's fixated with taking over health care.

"But the problem is that President Obama believes in his own messianism too deeply for that. His goal is not to remake his party as it could be but "remake this world as it should be." In his book Dreams From My Father Obama gives the distinct impression that his gifts are too great for the smallness of our political stage. He regrets not having been born during the civil rights era when the grandness of the cause would have measured up to the grandness of his ambition. He is in search of something big that will allow him to make his mark on the world as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King did. Hence, the defeat of ObamaCare would not just be par for the course in the rough-and-tumble world of politics for him. It would be sign of his ordinariness, his mortality, and that, to him, is unendurable."

It's all about Obama.


The Senate parliamentarian put the kibosh on all those tricks the House wanted to pull. In order to use reconciliation, the House must pass the Senate bill as is and Obama must sign it into law. Only after that happens, can the Senate modify the law through reconciliation. This means House Democrats must trust Obama and Senate Democrats to make the changes they want, but neither Obama nor Senate Democrats would have any incentive to do that after the bill is signed into law. Obama, Pelosi and Reid have already engineered a massacre of the Democrats come November, so House Democrats would be fools to trust Obama or Senate Democrats. The problem is Biden could overrule the Senate parliamentarian, but that would prompt Republicans to shut down the Senate.


Nobody is going to arrest the CEOs of insurance companies, but this list of grievances sounds accurate to me. Our political process is a process of bribes. That's all it is. Politics as usual is corruption. I've read reports of insurance companies dropping people who developed expensive illnesses. That sounds like breach of contract to me. What's the point of buying insurance to cover an illness if the insurance company can drop you after you develop it? Either there's a drop provision in the contract or the government has empowered insurance companies to break contracts with impunity. I don't know which.

Democrats' attempt to seize control of our health care sector has driven employers to shift health care costs onto employees. This article is misleading. The costs were always on employees. Companies didn't provide insurance out of the goodness of their hearts. They transfered wages to health insurance. Making employees bear more costs will lower health care costs.

I don't put much weight on doctors' threats to quit practicing if Obamacare is passed. What are they going to do? Throw away 10 years of higher education? Are they going to go dig ditches? These polls express doctor frustration, but they aren't realistic. I'm sure a number of older doctors will retire instead of dealing with the harassment, and the number of doctors will fall, but not by huge amounts.

Why not universal car insurance?

"What moral rights can the poor claim on the property of those who own plenty? If one man owns ten automobiles and I own none, do I have the right to claim one of those ten automobiles as my own? Is the government justified in forcefully redistributing an automobile to me in order to (seemingly) raise my standard of living?

Do the rich have a moral responsibility to give the poor what they would otherwise have to work for? Whether it is security or health care or our own exaggerated example, universal car insurance, the morality of forceful redistribution of property is dubious at best."

It's not dubious at all. It's clearly immoral because

"... taxation is theft. It consists of an entity (government) or an individual (the tax collector) forcefully expropriating another's property."

It's just that simple.

POLICE STATE:

Cities arresting citizens for overdue library books.

WAR:

Government is blaming the internet for allowing al Qaeda to recruit, train and arm the underwear bomber in weeks. Naturally this is an excuse to seize control of the internet. Yes, tools can be used for evil, but we don't give government control over hammers. This is a charade meant to restrict our speech and empower government at our expense.

POLITICS:

Obama's job approval numbers keep falling. I'm surprised they're as high as they are. He's done nothing popular or good for the country.

The House voted to have the ethics committee investigate Nancy Pelosi's handling of Massa. That's like having a mafia don investigate himself.

Obama Justice Department quashes FBI investigation of ACORN.

MISC:

CDC uses shopper cards to track salmonella. There goes more of our privacy.

"Never before had the CDC successfully mined the mountain of data that supermarket chains compile.

"It was really exciting. It was a break in the investigation for sure," CDC epidemiologist Casey Barton Behravesh said."

Invading people's privacy is really exciting for bureaucrats.

Linux iPad clones. There's no chance that big, heavy device will replace my ereader.

We've got 1.5 million years to figure out how to protect the earth from a bunch of comets. We better get started.