Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

High tech research moving from the US to China because of the burden of government. This is why I question Cato's and the WSJ indices of economic freedom.

TAX AND SPEND:

Republican Paul Ryan says that Obama's 2011 budget will crash the US economy. Obama will be pleased that Ryan confirms he'll achieve that goal. What Ryan fails to point out is that Obama's budget builds off of Bush's titanic budgets and off the $700 billion bailout Ryan voted for. I can't help but laugh at how Republicans are suddenly pretending to care about government spending. But I'll take any ally I can get right now, even if it his hypocritical Republicans.

Here's a dose of reality:

"The latest posting from the Treasury Department shows the National Debt has increased over $2 trillion since President Obama took office.

The debt now stands at $12.6 trillion. On the day Mr. Obama took office it was $10.6 trillion.

President George W. Bush still holds the record for the most debt run up on his watch: $4.9 trillion. But it took him over four years to rack up the first two trillion dollars in debt. It has taken Mr. Obama 421 days.

But the Obama Administration routinely blames the Bush Administration for inheriting a budget surplus and turning it into years of record-breaking deficits and debt -- and then leaving it on the doorstep of the new president."

And Obama is right about that. Our economy crashed while Bush was president, it was a direct result of Bush's out of control spending and Greenspan's out of control inflating, and that led to the tremendous initial debt Obama had to deal with. But instead of fixing the problem, Obama is intentionally making it worse. He's like George Bush's bigger, meaner twin brother.

A record number of Americans don't pay taxes. I bet that number grew all during the Bush administration too. But this article seems to only address income tax, not payroll taxes.

Moodys again threatens US government's AAA rating.

Paul Krugman advocates mercantilism - subsidizing exports and taxing imports - transferring wealth from Americans in general to exporters. I'd like to see the Nobel organization revoke his prize too.

REGULATION:

More power for the FTC?

FEDERAL RESERVE:

The IMF is becoming the world's central bank to central banks. This is going to end badly.

EDUCATION:

I was happy that Texas added Hayek and Friedman to their curriculum, but I don't like them removing Jefferson. This essay does a great job of explaining why central planning of school curriculum is inevitably poisoned by politics to the detriment of students and the country. This is an interesting critique on textbooks in general too. I never really thought about it before, but having students learn history or civics from only one book is terrible.

HEALTH CARE:

Obama accused of using water rationing to buy votes from Democrats on health care. This is what we get for giving government control over the water supply.

The reason the CBO hasn't yet scored the latest Obamacare bill is Democrats haven't finished it. They're working overtime to hide all the costs with budget gimmicks so the CBO can't score them. They're also still writing provisions to buy more votes because they don't have the votes yet.

Apparently Pelosi unveiled the bill today and the CBO's preliminary estimate claimed it would cut the deficit by $138 billion over the next 10 years. What a load of manure.

"Under the bill, the budget office said, the federal government would spend $940 billion over the next 10 years to provide coverage to 32 million people who would otherwise be uninsured."

That's $940 billion in new spending we don't have, yet the CBO says it will cut the deficit by $138 billion. You can't help but laugh. Plus, you know it will cost double that or more like every other government program. This is a joke, and the joke's on us.

Obamacare will increase premiums, the budget, the deficit and kill jobs. That's why Obama wants to pass it so badly. From Obama's point of view, the more damage he does to America, the better. Don't believe the Heritage Foundation? Maybe you'll believe the AP.

It's awful convenient to say Democrats are suddenly taking us down the Road to Serfdom as if we haven't been traveling that road all our lives. Yes, Democrats are intentionally making us poorer. Yes, they're doing it to us on purpose. But this isn't anything new. This has been going on since the Constitution was ratified, and Republicans are nearly as much to blame as Democrats. Both parties have been taking us down the Road to Serfdom since they were formed. What's new is the speed at which they're taking us. Slowing down is not the answer. We need a 180 degree change direction toward freedom.

Article on how Romneycare is bankrupting Massachusetts only mentions Romney one time and only for signing the bill into law. The big cover-up of how Romney is nearly as much an enemy of freedom as Obama is underway. Just like John McCain, the mainstream media will carry water for big-government Mitt Romney until he wins or loses the nomination.

Obama says he won't campaign for any Democrat who doesn't vote for health care oppression. That shows how out of touch he is. He doesn't realize Democrats don't want him to campaign for them. He doesn't realize he's the kiss of death for any Democrat running for office. This is more likely to make Democrats vote against Obamacare.

Washington state Walgreens will no longer take Medicaid patients because they're losing money. This is another step in the collapse of the US, and government will respond with force, accelerating our collapse.

Roadmap of how our health care will go downhill if Obamacare passes.

Obama cancels his trip on Sunday. That means he doesn't have the votes to pass it yet. We can still kill this bill.

US life expectancy predicted to decline. It's already declining in much of the US. The rising curve flattened over decades as government interfered more an more with our health care system, and now government exercises so much power over our lives that life expectancy is going to start declining.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Democrats already have their next assault on us teed up - tax and trade. We already have taxes on gasoline. Who cares of they call them carbon taxes or not? Raising taxes on gas drags the US economy back toward the horse and buggy age. This is another example of how government is the enemy of human progress.

What do they mean, threatening to become?

"After all, the Supreme Court said the EPA had the power, even the obligation, to impose draconian restrictions on so-called greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide. The elected representatives of the American people should just get out of the way."

How is it that public policy critics can be so ignorant of government? The EPA was created to regulate all pollution including air pollution. That means it was created to regulate the air we breathe. The EPA will eventually define oxygen to be a pollutant and control that too.  Because of the nature of government, this process has been inevitable since the EPA was created and can only be stopped by abolishing the EPA. Our elected representatives settled this the day this law was passed. It's a little late to notice it decades later. These ignoramuses should be fired.


Global warming frauds act like they're the victims and plan to mount propaganda campaign to fight back. This should backfire spectacularly.


POLICE STATE:


A free market alternative to government police isn't far fetched. We already have private security, investigators and insurance, and a free market police force would offer similar services. Because multiple companies would compete for our business, they would supply superior quality services at a lower price than the government monopoly we suffer under today.


FOREIGN POLICY:


It's good to see protesters marching in Cuba.


Kim Jong-Il has $4 billion socked away Europe. That's some world-class looting.

POLITICS:

More Americans disapprove of Obama's performance than approve. Who approves? Did they have to poll his White House staff to find somebody?

Obama hypocrisy on transparency. The people who fell for this conman crack me up. I hope they admit they're incompetent to vote and never vote again.

Does the rise of libertarianism doom the Republican party to become a perennial minority party once more? I doubt it. This author has obvious antipathy toward Ayn Rand, and it clouds his analysis. Times have changed. Communism has been overwhelmingly discredited except in the White House. The American people have suffered tremendously under both big Republican government and big Democrat government. This analysis also fails to note that every candidate elected since Obama has been a Republican elected by the tea party energy. This essay is about the hate and wishful thinking of the author. If Paul Ryan, who voted for TARP, is a Randian, she must not have been the libertarian she's portrayed to be. We already know Alan Greenspan, a supposed acolyte, turned out to be a central planner extraordinaire. Her cartoonish, oppressive books must have been just that - cartoons.

MISC:

It's people like this mom who want government to put warning labels on concerts that created the leviathan governments we suffer under.

Nine letter word riddle.

Property rights and declining whale populations. Whales are valuable, and every law government passes to limit how many can be killed increases their value. The result is a black market in whale products, poaching and declining populations. It's the tragedy of the commons. The solution is ownership of whale pods. The same is true for all renewable natural resources like fisheries, forests, animal herds, etc.

"Simply limiting the supply of whales only increases the price per unit of whale on the market. Fisherman who would normally seek other ocean inhabitants may actually be enticed to hunt whales, instead of fish, by the new, inflated price. Thus, like our abysmal record in attempting to battle the supply of illegal drugs,[2] our whaling efforts only help solidify the elementary economic knowledge that you cannot wage a war on supply!"

As long as demand exists, somebody will find a way to supply it unless it goes extinct. We've seen it will buffalo, passenger pigeons, and many African big game animals are on the verge of going extinct. We know the solution.

I would never have thought a George Clooney movie might appeal to anybody from a libertarian perspective, let alone two.

Lord Acton on the American revolution paints it as a natural next step following what we call the French and Indian War and he calls the Seven Years War. This is another point of view that fills in the bigger history of the American Revolution as, at the time, just a skirmish in the bigger world war between France and England. It's interesting that he sees the Revolution as being precipitated by the actions of police and courts laws, not taxes. Lord Acton thinks the problem wasn't as much tax and spend as it was police state, and he cites John Adams as a reference.

"It was a new phase of political history. The American Revolution innovated upon the English Revolution, as the English Revolution innovated on the politics of Bacon or of Hobbes. There was no tyranny to be resented. The colonists were in many ways more completely their own masters than Englishmen at home. They were not roused by the sense of intolerable wrong. The point at issue was a very subtle and refined one, and it required a great deal of mismanagement to make the quarrel irreconcilable.

Successive English governments shifted their ground. They tried the Stamp Act; then the duty on tea and several other articles; then the tea duty alone; and at last something even less than the tea duty. In one thing they were consistent: they never abandoned the right of raising taxes. When the colonists, instigated by Patrick Henry, resisted the use of stamps, and Pitt rejoiced that they had resisted, parliament gave way on that particular measure, declaring that it retained the disputed right. Townshend carried a series of taxes on imports, which produced about three hundred pounds, and were dropped by Lord North.

Then an ingenious plan was devised, which would enforce the right of taxation, but which would not be felt by American pockets, and would, indeed, put money into them, in the shape of a bribe. East Indiamen were allowed to carry tea to American ports without paying toll in England. The Navigation Laws were suspended, that people in New England might drink cheap tea, without smuggling.

The duty in England was a shilling a pound. The duty in America was threepence a pound. The shilling was remitted, so that the colonies had only a duty of threepence to pay instead of a duty of fifteenpence. The tea drinker at Boston got his tea cheaper than the tea drinker at Bristol. The revenue made a sacrifice, it incurred a loss, in order to gratify the discontented colonials. If it was a grievance to pay more for a commodity, how could it be a grievance to pay less for the same commodity?

To gild the pill still further, it was proposed that the threepence should be levied at the British ports, so that the Americans should perceive nothing but the gift, nothing but the welcome fact that their tea was cheaper, and should be spared entirely the taste of the bitterness within. That would have upset the entire scheme. The government would not hear of it. America was to have cheap tea, but was to admit the tax. The sordid purpose was surrendered on our side, and only the constitutional motive was retained, in the belief that the sordid element alone prevailed in the colonies.

That threepence broke up the British empire. Twelve years of renewed contention, ever coming up in altered shape under different ministers, made it clear that the mind of the great parent state was made up, and that all variations of party were illusory. The Americans grew more and more obstinate as they purged the sordid question of interest with which they had begun."

As interesting as this is, I'm not convinced. I sincerely doubt the Revolutionary War was fought over such a trifle no matter the principle. I think it more likely it was fought because the powerful in America were cut out of the process of looting the masses. Of course it was sold on principle, but I think economics had to be the bigger concern for the rich, and without the rich, there'd have been no revolution.

"The British defeat at Saratoga is the event which determined the issue of the conflict. It put an end to the vacillation of France. The French government had to recover the position it had lost in the last war, and watched the course of events for evidence that American resistance was not about to collapse. At the end of 1777 the victory of Saratoga supplied the requisite proof. Volunteers had been allowed to go over, and much war material was furnished through the agency of a comic poet. Now a treaty of alliance was concluded, a small army was sent to sea, and in March 1778 England was informed that France was at war with her. France was followed by Spain, afterwards by Holland."

To us it was the Revolutionary War. To the rest of Europe, it was a world war.

"Then came that phase of war during which the navy of France, under d'Orvilliers in the English Channel, under Suffren in the east, under d'Estaing and De Grasse in the west, proved itself equal to the navy of England. It was by the fleet, not by the land forces, that American independence was gained. But it was by the army officers that American ideas, sufficient to subvert every European state, were transplanted into France. When De Grasse drove the English fleet away from Virginian waters, Cornwallis surrendered the army of the south at Yorktown, as Burgoyne had surrendered with the northern army at Saratoga."

I don't remember learning that the English fleet operated well up the rivers. That seems an important omission from my history education.

"The Federal Constitution did not deal with the question of religious liberty. The rules for the election of the president and for that of the vice president proved a failure. Slavery was deplored, was denounced, and was retained. The absence of a definition of state rights led to the most sanguinary civil war of modern times. Weighed in the scales of liberalism the instrument, as it stood, was a monstrous fraud. And yet, by the development of the principle of federalism, it has produced a community more powerful, more prosperous, more intelligent, and more free than any other which the world has seen."

This is a really interesting perspective.

I didn't realize that only 67 percent of households responded to the census in 2000. That's some serious civil disobedience. I bet compliance is lower this year. And this Pew poll has another flaw - people who won't respond to the census probably won't respond to their polls either.