Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

More on unions.

"This common-sense legal approach to labor unionism began to give way with the Norris-La Guardia Act, signed by Herbert Hoover in 1932. The legislation made "yellow dog" contracts – in which an employee could be required to promise to refrain from union activity as a condition of employment – unenforceable in the courts. The Act also exempted labor unions from prosecution under the Sherman Antitrust Act. Although the Sherman Act should certainly have been (and still should be) repealed, if there were ever an institution guilty of "restraint of trade" it was labor unions, which not only withheld their own labor but which also used intimidation and force to keep down non-union competition. They would henceforth be exempt from behavior that the law deemed criminal in any other context."

The Constitution grants no power to government to coerce people into unions, so it obviously grants no power to transfer that power to unions. It also grants no power to government to allow unions to get away with criminal activity. Because of this corrupt power of coercion, unions work on behalf of union bosses, union thugs and politicians, not workers.

"Furthermore, the Wagner Act gave labor unions a degree of legal insulation afforded to no other group in society. The Act made labor unions immune to claims of vicarious responsibility. In plain English, that means that labor unions are not legally responsible for any violence their members might commit, even if union officials themselves order the violence.

...

Harvard University's Edward Chamberlin once described the unique legal status that labor unions had been granted:

If A is bargaining with B over the sale of his house, and if A were given the privileges of a modern labor union, he would be able (1) to conspire with all other owners of houses not to make any alternative offer to B, using violence or the threat of violence if necessary to prevent them, (2) to deprive B himself of access to any alternative offers, (3) to surround the house of B and cut off all deliveries, including food (except by parcel post), (4) to stop all movement from B's house, so that if he were for instance a doctor he could not sell his services and make a living, and (5) to institute a boycott of B's business. All of these privileges, if he were capable of carrying them out, would no doubt strengthen A's position. But they would not be regarded by anyone as part of "bargaining" – unless A were a labor union.

No wonder Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek once said, "We have now reached a state where [unions] have become uniquely privileged institutions to which the general rules of law do not apply.""

This power of coercion and lawlessness has almost made unions extinct. This coercive, oppositional view of the role of unions is based on the economic fallacy that the economy is a fixed pie. Pitting unions against management is a lose-lose situation. This approach bankrupts companies harming workers and management. Unions and management should work together to increase productivity so both can enjoy greater economic rewards. In order for that to happen, to restore the viability and value of unions and make them partners in productivity, we need to take away that power of coercion and make equal protection under the law apply to unions.

"In a study published jointly in late 2002 by the National Legal and Policy Center and the John M. Olin Institute for Employment Practice and Policy, economists Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway of Ohio University calculated that labor unions have cost the American economy a whopping $50 trillion over the past 50 years alone.

That is not a misprint. "The deadweight economic losses are not one-shot impacts on the economy," the study explains. "What our simulations reveal is the powerful effect of the compounding over more than half a century of what appears at first to be small annual effects." Not surprisingly, the study did find that unionized labor earned wages 15 percent higher than those of their nonunion counterparts, but it also found that wages in general suffered dramatically as a result of an economy that is 30 to 40 percent smaller than it would have been in the absence of labor unionism."

It's not exactly unions that cost this much. It's the illegitimate power of coercion and lawlessness of unions illegitimately granted by government that have cost this much.

ECONOMY:

Gold hits 2010 high.

TAX AND SPEND:

Pennsylvania tax department wants you to know it really is Big Brother. Wow.

REGULATION:

Now the FDA is going to regulate sunscreen. It's about time. That's the most pressing issue in all our lives.

Why the minimum wage keeps teenagers and especially young blacks out of work.

POLICE STATE:

Criminal investigation into Goldman. They should investigate the SEC too.

Another case where one man shoots and kills another but is acquitted because the shooter is a cop. If anybody else had done this, there's no doubt he would have been convicted of murder. And in this case, as all too often, the jury is the problem.

""Time to end this – enough is enough!" According to Officer Stephen Klocker, who was on the scene at the Chuckwagon on June 10 and on the stand as a prosecution witness at Meade's trial, this was what his fellow officer exclaimed as he drew his gun and killed Meservey.

Klocker, a 21-year police veteran, offered his testimony against his own professional interest – and, as police whistleblowers elsewhere would attest, at some risk to his physical safety.

During the trial Everett's municipal government – which faces a lawsuit by Meservey's family, and thus had an interest in seeing Meade acquitted – took the remarkable step of providing the defense with documents intended to undermine Klocker's reliability as a witness. It is ironic, but hardly inexplicable, that the city government didn't make an issue of Klocker's credibility until he testified that another cop had killed a citizen without legal cause or justification."

Like I always say, the most dangerous circumstance the vast majority of Americans will ever experience is a run-in with the police.

Or a border patrol agent.

"The Department of Homeland Security insists that the Fourth Amendment proscription of "unreasonable searches and seizures" doesn't apply to "border enforcement" searches."

Something else we have to end.

WAR:

Only 100 al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

The best solution for illegal immigration is to re-assert property rights. Trespassing is an act of aggression. Every property owner has a natural right to respond to that aggression with aggression of his own and eject the trespassers from his property. Unfortunately governments have trampled all over this right, and rampant illegal immigration is one consequence. If we re-embraced property rights including ending the war on drugs, welfare and minimum wage laws, the illegal immigration problem would disappear. Funny how those same three policies (and government schools) also combine to keep blacks trapped as a permanent underclass in America.

POLITICS:

We know we're having an effect when we force President Obama to defend government.

""Government is what ensures that mines adhere to safety standards and that oil spills are cleaned up by the companies that caused them," he told an estimated 92,000 graduates, faculty and families packed into the Big House stadium, his largest audience since Inauguration Day. "We know that too much government can stifle competition and deprive us of choice and burden us with debt. But we've also seen clearly the dangers of too little government—like when a lack of accountability on Wall Street nearly leads to the collapse of our entire economy.""

Really? I wonder what the people of Louisiana and West Virginia think of the effectiveness of those government regulations. And look how effective they were keeping our financial system from collapsing. Yep, those regulations work really, really well. People who think that other people only do the right thing when they point at a gun at them hate their fellow man. Text of speech.

MISC:

A second oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico has collapsed, lending support to the theory that these rig collapses are the result of leftist terrorism.

The limits of power illustrated by slavery.

Nullification of laws, not voting, is the most effective path to liberty. I've often complained that American no longer practice overt civil disobedience, and that when Americans overwhelmingly reject a law, such as draconian DUI laws, the government never reverses, it just becomes more oppressive. On jury nullification:

"The word jury, at the time this amendment was drafted, had a far different meaning than it is accorded today. The first instructions given a jury by a Supreme Court of the United States were delivered by then Justice John Jay (yes, a jury trial in the Supreme Court):

"It is presumed, that juries are the best judges of facts; it is, on the other hand, presumed that courts are the best judges of law. But still both objects are within your power of decision...you have a right to take it upon yourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy." ~ State of Georgia vs. Brailsford (3 Dall 1).

In reading dictionaries of that era, you will find that John Jay was not inventing something out of thin air. A Jury was defined as a body of men who were expected to judge both the law and the facts in criminal cases. In fact, by the time that Jay gave these instructions, the jury's role as judge of law and fact had already seen it's five hundredth birthday come and go."

I'm all for jury nullification and fully informing juries, but from a practical point of view, our jury system has much bigger problems. The biggest problem is because juries are no longer juries of peers but instead strangers drawn from huge jury pools, juries have no incentive to acquit. The people elect the prosecutor. They elect the judge. They identify with both. They almost never identify with defendants. If they vote to convict, their lives will be unchanged. If they vote to acquit, they or someone they know may be the next victim. Better to err on the safe side. Fully informing these juries would make little difference because of the incentives. That's the biggest reason juries tend to be rubber stamps for the prosecution. The solution is to get back to using juries of peers from the local neighborhood of the crime. Use people who know everybody involved. They have a chance of telling who's lying and who's telling the truth. A jury of peers would be more likely to nullify a law regardless of jury instructions. And don't force people to be jurors against their will so they want to finish as quickly as possible which almost always means convicting. Pay them a fair wage. If criminal justice is as important as we say it is, we should pay jurors a bunch of money. The system intentionally only pays them some tiny amount like $5 a day to help insure convictions.

Secession is not just for states. If thriving areas of states and cities would secede from the areas that loot them, the looting would end. I would love to see New York state secede from New York City. I would love to see California secede from the San Francisco-Los Angeles strip. I'd love to see Illinois secede from Chicago. I'd say Michigan could secede from Detroit, but Detroit is dying, so it may not matter. Without the surrounding states to loot, those cities would be forced to end their welfare looting. Turning giant cities that dominate the looting of Americans into city-states that have to be self-sufficient would solve a ton of our country's problems.

Meta-study (a study of many studies) shows that refined carbs are bad for your heart while fat is neutral. Now that I finished my chili-dogs, I'm going to eat some cookies.

The US is trying to extradite Bobby Fischer from Japan and apparently has been since 2004, and they won't accept his renunciation of citizenship because he didn't do it the government's way. He's wanted for traveling to Yugoslavia to play in a chess match. For all those people who think Americans are free or that government is something other than violence, this is a good case to consider. He should ask for asylum. That's what we're coming to. Everybody used to ask us for asylum. Pretty soon Americans are going to be asking other countries for asylum from predatory taxes and arbitrary prosecutions.

SUV with smoking explosives that do not explode causes evacuation of Time Square.

"A New York Fire Department officer told the Reuters news agency that the SUV had gasoline, propane, burned wires and explosives in it. The firefighter was not authorized to speak to the media and did not give his name."

"Browne said an NYPD mounted policeman spotted a box smoking in the back of the sport utility vehicle and that the area was evacuated shortly after that."

This is going to be interesting. There's been a lot of speculation that the feds might create an incident to rally Americans behind them given their incredible unpopularity, and setting off a smoke bomb in a package of explosives fits the bill perfectly. This could have been a botched terrorist attack, but it sure sounds like a staged event.