Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

More on Kagan's dangerous opposition to free speech.

ECONOMY:

Gold at record high. Unless you're shorting everything, gold is the place to be.

TAX AND SPEND:

Reason on unsustainable debt. President Obama is smiling.

Taxpayer funded drivers are a perk Obama gives his advisers. How is that constitutional? They are not necessary and proper.

It's hard to believe a panel appointed by liberals recommended more taxes, diversity and green jobs. How original. How do I know it was appointed by liberals? Come on.

Understanding the euro bailout.

"Make no mistake, this supposed "containment" boondoggle was yet another bailout of the world's largest banks. The majority of the PIIGS's debt (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain) is held by large French and German banks. An outright default would've called into question the solvency of these banks for the second time in two years. In addition to being a bailout for the banks, it offers some respite to the PIIGS governments that were either experiencing or in danger of experiencing civil unrest. And it gives the short-sighted and jittery stock markets a breather. These are the most readily obvious reasons for the bailout.

The bailout, however, sets the stage for far greater problems down the road than if the PIIGS were allowed to default and restructure their debt obligations. The lessons of the public-workers-union riots in Greece are not lost on government dependents in the rest of the PIIGS. Observing their Greek counterparts, they may surmise that if enough buildings and vehicles were burnt, and enough people killed, their cowardly governments will cave in to their demands. Moral hazard rears its ugly head again. Therefore, it's a foregone conclusion that the supposed austerity measures to control spending are doomed to failure."

Doomed to fail bigger and more destructively than if they failed today.

"The idea that California would be allowed to default on its obligations when Greece wasn't is unthinkable."

The idea may be unthinkable today, but the reality may be far different tomorrow. The EU has the US government, the IMF and the Fed to fall back on today. By the time it comes for California to default, the US government and the IMF may be powerless. Only the Fed will remain, and the American people, having watched the growing destructive consequences of these bailouts, may not allow the Fed to bail out California. As badly as the people have abused their power for a century, they could get it right in the face of this crisis. Remember, Obama is trying to spark a class war, but most Americans want to be rich, and they know that opportunity exists when they have economic freedom. Obama will get his collapse, but he won't get the class war and the Marxist revolution he wants. It's going to go the other way. The freedom movement grows every time people march in the streets for more entitlements here, not vice-versa. The US is not Europe.

"The Federal Reserve's involvement warrants a closer examination. The Fed has indicated that it would participate in dollar-swap agreements with the ECB, similar to one it undertook in 2008. Without an audit of the Fed, we can only speculate as to what exactly this swap entails. However, a reasonable guess is an exchange of freshly printed euros by the ECB for freshly printed US dollars by the Fed at the current exchange rates.

The Fed would then use the euros to either directly or indirectly purchase the debt of the eurozone nations. The ECB in turn would use the dollars to purchase US Treasury debt. Therefore, this is just a convoluted scheme to monetize government debt. It's a cinch that the funds necessary for this bailout would be created out of thin air rather than raised via taxes or issuing debt. Only in the world of central banking and thin-air money creation can one bankrupt entity bail out another."

Hello more inflation.

This review of the timeline of the Greek collapse to the trillion dollar euro bailout really shows how the system works. It will work the same here.

"It is beginning to dawn on a minority of voters that the political game is rigged in favor of big banks. It has taken a century for this to begin to register. This is a threat to Establishments everywhere. This was the #1 secret that the Establishments have attempted to conceal."

The banks and the governments are in bed together, and they've been looting us together since banks first formed.

Tax payers pay for environmental lawsuits.

"The federal government spends about the same amount of money funding environmental lawyers as it does to protect endangered species according to an investigation conducted by a Wyoming lawyer who defends farmers and ranchers involved in environmental lawsuits.

According to the Capital Press, Karen Budd-Falen was curious how much money the federal government paid the lawyers who initiated cases against her clients and uncovered more than $4.7 billion in taxpayer money that the government paid to environmental law firms between 2003 and 2007.  That represents an average of $940 million a year, compared to $922 million spent directly on the 986 endangered and threatened species, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s annual report."

So our tax dollars are being used against us in yet another way. No wonder these weirdos can afford to sue to stop every development project. In case anybody still thinks there's such a thing as good government, notice this was done while Republicans controlled the House, Senate and the presidency.

"According to Budd-Falen, environmental groups are eligible for government funds under the Equal Access to Justice Act, which provides for the award of attorney fees to “prevailing parties” in cases against the government."

I don't have a problem with the government paying attorneys fees for people who successful sue the government when the government wrongs them, but this is different, and it's the result of government overreaching its constitutional limits.

Of course ratings agencies should downgrade US bonds. If nothing changes, the US government is going to default.

"In an open letter to Standard & Poor's, Moody's and Fitch on Monday, Martin Weiss argues that the three rating agencies should downgrade U.S. long-term debt. He acknowledges the turmoil it would create, punishing Treasury bonds and causing interest rates to spike. In Weiss's view, however, leaving the AAA-rating untouched could ultimately prove far worse. It gives Congress a free pass to add to the public debt and encourages investors to buy Treasury notes and bonds, whose low yields, he believes, don’t compensate for the dangers.

...

"Worst of all," Weiss writes, "by continuing to reaffirm America's triple-A rating, you help create a false sense of security overall--the recipe for a possible meltdown in the market for U.S. sovereign debts.""

By downgrading the bonds, it would increase public awareness of the consequences of our debt problem and possibly reduce the damage. Unfortunately the ratings agencies enjoy oligopoly protection from the government, and they don't want to lose that status by biting the hand that feeds them. That's why they failed to downgrade the mortgage securities. It's why they're failing to downgrade US treasuries.

"Weiss is hardly a disinterested observer; he's a competitor. The Weiss Group announced last week that it was bringing back its bank and insurance ratings business, Weiss Ratings, after acquiring it from The Street.com. The Weiss Group sold the unit in 2006. Unlike Moody's and S&P, which are paid by companies issuing debt, Weiss Ratings gets its fees from investors."

This is a good deal. Real competition in the ratings business will benefit us all.

Republicans come up with a cool idea to get young people in on cutting government spending by allowing them to vote for programs to cut by texting.

REGULATION:

Bill in Congress would require small businesses to enroll employees in IRAs, making business more expensive, taking money out of the hands of workers, leading to layoffs and putting more small businesses out of business.

A list of all sorts of errors with the Deepwater Horizon oil rig illustrate how regulations not only fail to make businesses safer, they aggravate safety problems by making companies so big and powerful they don't fear the liability as much as they otherwise would.

EDUCATION:

The government-created education bubble has lowered the quality of education like all bubbles lower the quality of the product.

Government school in Illinois punishes students because of Arizona's illegal immigration law by not allowing them to go to Arizona to compete.

HEALTH CARE:

Obamacare isn't even active yet, and the official cost has increased by $115 billion. The real cost is significantly higher than that.

Thomas Sowell on the abominable leftist claim that old people have a duty to die.

"Make no mistake about it, letting old people die is a lot cheaper than spending the kind of money required to keep them alive and well. If a government-run medical system is going to save any serious amount of money, it is almost certain to do so by sacrificing the elderly."

If not for government interference in our health care system, this issue would never have been considered, let alone gain the traction it's gained.

"Back in the days of Aunt Nance Ann [the Great Depression], nobody in our family had ever gone to college. Indeed, none had gone beyond elementary school. Apparently you need a lot of expensive education, sometimes including courses on ethics, before you can start talking about "a duty to die.""

That's why I keep saying the Ivy League leads the world in brainwashing smart people with stupid ideas. Maybe I should start the stupid or evil debate about the Ivy League too.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Criticism of Bill Gates's project to convert sea water into clouds to cool the planet. I wonder how much heat those ships will generate during operation. The laws of thermodynamics won't be denied.

The head of the IPCC has a conflict of interest because he previously worked with the Chicago Carbon Exchange. Imagine that. If this guy believes that man-made CO2 is warming the planet and that a carbon tax and trades scheme is the solution, why shouldn't he be able to profit from it? The problem is the IPCC is biased while it pretends not to be. I hope he looses his shirt in the carbon exchange.

Al Gore's partners in crime at supposedly scientific journals using fakes images to promote their fraud.

Not ones to pass up an opportunity to loot the American people, Kerry and Lieberman introduce 987 page tax and trade bill. Don't be fooled into thinking this bill is DOA.

WAR:

This is a truth we had better embrace:

"But our military power has come up short in recent years. Although the U.S. military scored decisive victories against those individuals in Afghanistan and Iraq who were foolish enough to stand and fight, it has proved incapable of enforcing a rule of law, or delivering security, in many parts of post-Taliban Afghanistan or post-Saddam Iraq… We know that our men and women in uniform can accomplish remarkable things. But we have also begun to appreciate their limitations, the most important of which being that they cannot be everywhere at once."

Our military is the world's greatest deterrent to aggression, but using it for anything other than a deterrent and a response to aggression backfires and makes us less safe.

FOREIGN POLICY:

I think Austin Bay misses the bigger point of the sinking of a South Korean destroyer by stealth torpedo - cheap weapons can sink aircraft carriers too. It doesn't sound like the report can pinpoint exactly who sunk the ship, so even though it was almost certainly North Korea, I don't understand the demand for reparations. I also don't understand how he can extrapolate from a deniable torpedo attack that Kim's and regime are guaranteed to survive to an undeniable nuclear attack that guarantees the death of Kim and his regime in retaliation. I'd like to have seen North Korea stopped from developing the bomb, but it seems it already has. 60 years of isolation didn't stop that. It's time to try something different. End the war, get our troops out of Korea and open up free trade excluding trade with the government. And bombard the place with American radio and TV from robot radio ships. Use those to test equipment to discover those submarines.

POLITICS:

Ron Paul well-positioned in Iowa. Let's hope he runs.

LOCAL:

Sinclair raises tuition by 3.5 percent. Why are we subsidizing this place again?

Montgomery County lost 20 percent of its jobs in the last decade. This is because of high local taxes.

MISC:

British government bans playing pin the tail on the donkey for safety reasons. How blind do you have to be to not see we are committing civilizational suicide?

Great questions:

"Why is liberty always on trial? Why does the burden of proof rest with freedom, private property, and voluntary exchange rather than coercion, socialized property, and compulsory exchange? Why is the assumption or assertion that some people should govern others almost always implicit in the discussion?"

Because like all great apes, we're genetically programmed to socialize in hierarchies. As we evolve, we're breaking out of that programming.

Shadowstats economist develops statistics that show that government statistics always present our economy in a better light than reality for the benefit of politicians.

"John Williams lives in a one-bedroom Oakland apartment just a few blocks behind the Grand Lake Theater. He doesn't like to talk about politics, and he certainly doesn't like to talk about the stock market. He's sixty years old and has a two-man operation: a webmaster and himself. But in the obscure corners of the Internet, he's an unlikely legend, an economist who publishes a newsletter that purports to tell the real truth about the state of the nation's health. His thesis is both simple and surprisingly complex: over the course of thirty years, Washington politicians have pressured federal economists to tweak the methods by which they assess key metrics of the economy, to inflate the numbers and protect the incumbents from voters who would surely rise up in anger, if only they knew the truth.

And the truth, Williams claims, is that the economy has always performed much more poorly than the federal numbers indicate. Prices are higher, fewer people are working, and the economy is growing at a much slower pace. Even now, when the nation faces its greatest crisis since the Great Depression, the real dimensions of the disaster are still being obscured by gimmicks. It's a message that has earned him an odd bit of notoriety, to the clear frustration of some of the country's most prominent economists, who claim that Williams has built a career misrepresenting complex mathematical models and spreading panic.

Take February, for example. What does Williams think was the true state of the economy? The official unemployment rate was listed at 9.7 percent, but according to Williams' models, the real number, including part-time employees and workers who have just given up in despair, is closer to a staggering 21.6 percent. The official February inflation rate was 2.1 percent; Williams argues that it's really around 5.5 percent. And GDP for the fourth quarter of 2009 was not 5.9 percent, as the government claims, but 2.9 percent."

The first job requirement of every politician is to lie without conscience for his or her own benefit, and the result is a government that lies without conscience for the benefit of the politicians. There is on constitutional power to collect these statistics. They are not necessary and proper. The private sector is far better equipped to determine the state of our economy than government. Statistic collection should be abolished.

"Is Williams a crank? Is he cynically selling flawed economic models to panicky investors? Some of the country's most prominent economists certainly think so. But perhaps a better question is: after a catastrophe brought on by people who get paid to be the stewards of our economy, how can you tell who to trust? After all, Williams isn't the only Cassandra out there. Over the last ten years, a small collection of economists, investment analysts, and hedge fund managers were warning that something was dangerously wrong with the economy, only to be openly mocked from the pulpits of CNBC. On subjects from derivatives and subprime loans to Bernie Madoff, experts in suspenders assured us that nothing was wrong."

Exactly. We need to quit calling these people experts and call them what they are - political hacks.

"Soon, Williams said, he began to realize that there were a number of problems in how the government measured the economy – and that he wasn't alone. He conducted surveys of his colleagues in the National Association of Business Economists, and what he found dismayed him. "What I found in my surveys of the quality of government statistics was that most economists realized they were seriously flawed," he said. "I mean like 70 percent."

Worse, he claims that the more his colleagues knew what they were doing, the less faith they had in the government's data. "The first time I did the survey, I had the chief economist for a major retail organization filling it out," Williams said. "And he said, 'You know, I think the retail reports are worthless. I just don't look at it. But they think the money supply is a good one.' A second economist said 'Oh, the money supply is horrible.' What I found is the people who really understood the numbers they were working with thought there were serious problems.""

Even the political hack economists know government statistics are corrupted. The just lie about it.

"This hasn't always been the case, Williams claims; we had a better picture of the economy back in the 1970s, for example. But over time and incrementally, government officials changed the methodology of measuring key economic indicators, painting an ever rosier picture of the economy, which just happened to benefit the incumbent politicians who ran the government. Or as he said in his calm, bland timbre, "Over time there has been a series of methodological shifts in the numbers to tend to create an upside bias in employment and downside in bias in inflation.""

Of course that's how it works. The longer government has its hands on something, the more it corrupts it.


Another person who didn't like the outcome of his voluntary exchange tries to use government's gun to change the outcome.