Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

People with poor math skills are three times more likely to suffer foreclosure. And you thought that math education was worthless.

TAX AND SPEND:

Obama's new $50 billion bailout program is to bailout state and local governments - a bailout of politicians who don't want to balance their own budgets. Of course this is what he wants. His goal is to collapse the US economy under the burden of government. If state and local government cuts spending,  it'll be harder to destroy America, so Obama wants to increase the federal burden so the states and local governments can maintain or grow their burdens.

"Obama is calling for a taxpayer rescue of the political class to which he belongs, to spare it the painful duty tens of thousands of business executives have had to perform. Private employees – 25 million of whom are out of work, underemployed or have given up looking for jobs – may be expendable, but government workers are not."

This is naive. He's not doing it out of altruism for his political bedfellows. He's doing it to destroy America.

"Obama is thus asking Congress to deepen America's fiscal crisis and put the next generation on the hook for another $50 billion so today's mayors and governors can get an exemption from their political duty.

Where is the justice here?"

It's not about justice. It's about destruction of America as we know it.

"Obama's proposal is thus about taking care of his own and the Democratic Party's political base.

Consider. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the American Federation of Teachers, the Transport Workers Union of America and other government unions in the AFL-CIO are all powerhouses of the Democratic Party.

Obama is proposing a $50 billion payoff for his own voters."

This is true, and it happens to dovetail with his ultimate agenda which apparently Buchanan is not ready to admit.

REGULATION:

Cato jumps on the bandwagon I started by linking the financial crisis and the Gulf oil spill to the failure of government regulation. The regulations enabled these crises to happen. These corporations wouldn't have taken the risks they took in a free market.

Government problems aren't restricted to the federal government. The Dayton airport has to get permission from state government to chase coyotes off runways.

Regulating cave-man technology - the burning of yard waste. This highlights another fallacy of government-lovers - the absence of government regulations, people can do anything they want. On the contrary, in a free society people are not allowed to harm others, so in many cases more restrictions apply, and people are free to settle them through a system of voluntary exchange that enriches both parties.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Greenspan exposed.

"Frederick Sheehan's Panderer to Power documents Greenspan's rise to power, his skill at playing the political game, and his ability to convince virtually all the world that he was perhaps the greatest economist of the age. He accomplished all of this, Sheehan notes, in spite of a record as one of worst forecasters of economic trends at every stage of his career."

Bernanke is following in Greenspan's path. Bernanke's is most noted for supporting even looser monetary policy than Greenspan, and he's been wrong at everything he forcasts.

"Panderer to Power is the story of an economist whose primary skill was self-promotion, and who in the end became increasingly divorced from economic reality."

Sounds like Bernanke again.

"Sheehan excellently catalogs Greenspan's rise to power as an affable technocratic politician who played the part of an economist with a knack for numbers and for justifying inflationary policies that made Presidents and Congressmen happy. Greenspan always told everyone what they wanted to hear. The rich and famous basked in his perceived genius."

The key to success in Washington is telling politicians what they want to hear. That's how all those economists who are always wrong keep their jobs. Sharp criticism of Greenspan.

Robert Murphy offers a simple example showing how fractional reserve banking enables banks, not just the Fed, to create money out of thin air.

EDUCATION:

If all government education bureaucracies were abolished, it would save Americans $600 billion a year and enable every parent to get their school children a high quality education at a tremendously lower price.

"Local governments, state governments, and even the Federal government use tax money and the threat of violence against any parent who does not agree that the state has the right to shape the content of his children's education. This has been going on for so long that most Americans accept this regime as somehow established by natural law."

And we're suffering for it.

"If it were my decision, I would shut off the funding by the state for every school in the United States, including the military academies. This would add something in the range of $600 billion to the private sector. Governments would not be able to persuade parents and others to hand over their money at the point of a gun from one person in order to subsidize the education of another person."

 A man after my own heart, but he should have used the word coerce instead of persuade.

"One of the oddities about life is that a statement regarding a widely believed moral imperative in one area is regarded as morally unsustainable when virtually the same statement is applied to another area. What virtually everybody accepts as self-evident truth in one area is regarded as self-evident error in another area."

This a fallacy. When Einstein developed the theory of relativity, he started with the assumption that the laws of physics were the same everywhere. Space here is subject to the same principles as space everywhere. The same is true of morals. Theft at the point of a gun is always immoral. Being a government agent doesn't make it moral. Powerful comparison to government funding of churches follows.

Tale of two buses - a school bus and a prison bus. Try explaining the difference to a nine year old. This guy doesn't do a very good job. The difference is the people on the prison bus are being removed from society because they're a threat to the safety or property of others. The kids on the school bus are being arbitrarily abused. Of course any individual convicted of a victimless so-called crime is being arbitrarily abused too.

Thomas Sowell makes another fantastic point:

"People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid. Much of the stupidity we see today is induced by our educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities."

Government schools make people stupid by brainwashing them into believing things that aren't true. The Ivy League is the world's leader at this. We just saw how liberals have been made stupid by being taught economic fallacies.

ENERGY:

Reason, along with many others, thinks BP will go bankrupt and taxpayers will be saddled with the clean-up bill. I think this is Obama's plan. He's doing everything in his power to bankrupt BP because it suits his goal of collapsing the US economy. With BP gone, it will take time for the oil industry to reorganize, so oil and gasoline prices will rise, further burdening the people. Obama will also stick taxpayers with the tab for clean-up, further burdening the people. This will accelerate the collapse of the US. I will be very surprised of BP survives Obama.

Obama shamelessly uses Gulf oil spill to advance his tax and trade agenda.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Foxnews presented this story as an illegal immigration story, but that's misinformation. This is a war on drugs story. The Arizona government is warning Americans not to travel in certain areas near the border because they are controlled by drug smugglers, not the US.

"Signs went up a couple weeks ago along the southern side of I-8 between Casa Grande and Gila Bend Arizona. The region is about 80 miles north of the Mexican border and it warns American citizens of the dangers of hiking in the area.

Mexican drug cartels appear to control large areas of Southern Arizona, according to the Pinal County Sheriff. 

According to Borderland Beat, the Pinal County Sherriff says, "We do not have control of this area.""

We hear about lawless areas of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and other countries, but that's been unheard of in America since the end of the Indian wars nearly a century and a half ago. But we losing the war on drugs so badly that drug dealers have taken over US territory.

"Recently law enforcement in the southern Arizona region photographed, using night vision cameras, cartel members with military arms delivering drugs to vehicles along Highway 8.

“We are three counties deep. How is it that you see pictures like these, not American with semi and fully automatic rifles? How is that okay?" the Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu asked.

"We are outgunned, we are out manned and we don't have the resources here locally to fight this," the Sheriff said at a news conference."

We cannot win this war because it's a war on ourselves. The laws of economics are as constant as the law of gravity. If you fear crime, you must advocate ending the war on drugs.

Review of Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Lessons we have failed to learn.

POLICE STATE:

British cop asks woman for sex in exchange for dismissing tickets. I'm sure he and his buddies have done this so often and gotten away with it, he was sure he'd get away with it again.

WAR:

American arrested in Pakistan for hunting bin Laden with a pistol, sword, night vision goggles and Christian literature. The Christian literature is probably what got him in trouble.

Report just published concludes that the 13 Irish civil rights protesters massacred by British paratroopers in 1972 were all innocent. Nothing like waiting 38 years to publish the report. I bet the Irish have known this all along.

Because of the US invasion of Iraq, Iraq is defenseless against its neighbors.

"Iran launched punitive assaults in May and June of this year against another Kurdish group that is waging an insurgency against the Tehran regime. Not only have Iranian forces entered Iraqi territory and killed rebel fighters there, but Iran has now reportedly established a fort on Iraq's side of the border. That step suggests that those troops plan to stay a while. As in the case of Turkey's earlier incursion, Baghdad could do little except issue a mewling diplomatic protest."

Uh oh.

"The reality is that Iraq is a weak player surrounded by neighbors who do not especially wish it well. Quantitative measures alone underscore the extent of the power disparity. According to the latest edition of the International Institute of Strategic Studies' Military Balance, there are 578,269 personnel in Iraq's security forces. But more than 366,000 are Ministry of Interior personnel, trained and equipped to deal with internal-security problems, not foreign military threats. Iraq's bona fide military consists of a fledgling army of 187,000, a navy of 2,000 and an air force of 3,000.

By contrast, Iran deploys nearly 350,000 active-duty army troops, 125,000 naval personnel, and 18,000 air force personnel. They are backed by 125,000 troops in the elite Revolutionary Guard Corps and 350,000 reservists who could be called up on short notice. Turkey fields some 511,000 active-duty forces, including a 402,000-strong army. Those fighters are backed by nearly 379,000 trained reserves. Syria and even Saudi Arabia are also able to deploy more numerous and substantially stronger military forces than Iraq."

This is crazy. This shows once again how central planning is doomed to fail in all things.

And to drive the point home, more on our failure in Afghanistan:

"This week, top U.S. and NATO commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, said the campaign to secure Kandahar, a key Taliban stronghold, will require more time than originally planned. The most astonishing part of Gen. McChrystal's admission was that it took him so long to reach it. There is good reason to be skeptical that the U.S.-led coalition can reduce violence, eradicate corruption, and build a capable Afghan government that can take over the fight before U.S. troops draw down next summer."

After nearly 10 years in Afghanistan, the head general still doesn't have a grasp of the situation.

POLITICS:

Harry Reid to make Social Security a central issue in campaign.

Can Slovakians reverse course and stop falling back into communism and destitution?

Here's one of the great misconceptions that government-lovers have of libertarians.

"[A]ccording to Lilla, this new populist rhetoric of the libertarian mob is "all in the service of neutralizing, not using, political power. It gives voice to those who feel they are being bullied, but this voice has only one, Garbo-like thing to say: I want to be left alone." This rhetoric, Lilla tells us, "appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that.""

Wrong. Libertarians want to work with others in a system of voluntary exchange to solve each other's problems and by doing so solve our common problems. People can't work together in a government dominated society. Government is a gun pointed at everybody's head. Do what government says and don't do what government prohibits or heavily armed men will bust down your door, wrestle you and your loved ones to the ground, and if they don't you, they will lock in irons and drag you into a tiny cage. People can't work together in an environment like that. Every action of government divides people into winners - those who agree with or superficially benefit from the action - and losers - those who disagree with the action or harmed by it. That divisiveness makes it harder for people to work together. Government actions spur anger, hatred and violence. But in a system of voluntary exchange, where each party is enriched by cooperation with others, people can work together to perform seeming miracles. A system of voluntary exchange spurs cooperation, tolerance, happiness and peace. That's what libertarians want.

"Over the past half-century, according to Lilla, a great many of these people have begun "disinvesting in our political institutions and learning to work around them, as individuals." The principal example he gives — and a very good one it is — is the homeschooling movement. "A million and a half students in the United States," he writes, "are now being taught by their parents at home, nearly double the number a decade ago, and representing about fifteen students for every public school in the country.… What's remarkable [about this] is American parents' confidence that they can do better themselves. Many of the more-educated ones probably do, though they are hardly going it alone; they rely on a national but voluntary virtual school system connecting them online, where they circulate curricula, materials, and research." More important, "they are [now] a powerful political lobby, having redirected their energy from local school systems to Washington and state capitals.… They are the only successful libertarian party," Lilla writes, "in the United States.""

That's a perfect example of the kind of cooperation I'm talking about. Those individuals aren't going it alone. By going around the government, these people have managed to work together for education to an extent that is impossible to do under the government school monopoly.

"The only sense in which the likes of Limbaugh, Beck, Palin, the majority of the tea partiers, and the best known and most representative figures on Fox News may be said to represent the growing libertarian impulse or spirit in the land is this: their employment of a lot of libertarian rhetoric that doesn't at all match the policies they endorse and proselytize for is in itself a kind of indirect symptom of the growth of the libertarian spirit. Conservatives have been using libertarian rhetoric for many decades now, but they've increased this tactic recently in response to the very phenomenon Lilla is writing about — the growing spread of the libertarian spirit through the land. Libertarian ideas have come to exercise enough influence among the general public that at least certain major party politicians and major media feel compelled to pretend to espouse them themselves and do all they can to co-opt them."

True. Inn case you think I'm exaggerating about the miracle party, here's an essay on what's commonly called the German Miracle.

MISC:

NASA, which predicted solar cycle 24 would be a powerful cycle and refused to change prediction for quite a while after it was clear solar cycle 24 was a no-show, predicts power solar storms in 2013. I'm skeptical.

Review of the Primal Blueprint.

"The end of the intro is particularly cool when Mark takes a stance against the lazy scape goat of “genetics” for health problems, rather than the individual taking responsibility for their own well being."

That's what kicked me to learn about paleo. I was tired of my doctor saying I had a genetic problem that could only be masked by taking medicine all my life. I didn't believe him.

Can somebody really get fit working out 12 minutes a week? That's gotta be some workout. Body by Science.

Self-serve doggie fountain.

The failure of central planning to control pollution in China is a reminder that property rights, not socialized air, form the basis for a clean environment.

On Thomas Paine.

Is Hillary Clinton ignorant of economics or just lying? Flip a coin.