Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Jobless Americans benefits to expire. That will prompt many to get jobs, and that's a good thing. Many will switch from being parasites to producers to benefit of us all.

TAX AND SPEND:

The Greek government is privatizing islands to pay off its debt. Why would it have kept 6,000 islands locked away from development? That's nuts. The people of Greece should be livid the country kept that land from their use.

"Only 227 Greek islands are populated and the decision to press ahead with potential sales has also been driven by the inability of the state to develop basic infrastructure, or police most of its islands. The hope is that the sale or long-term lease of some islands will attract investment that will generate jobs and taxable income."

If course it will, that was true last year, last decade, last century, etc. It's ridiculous that the government used its gun to deprive its citizens from the profits of that valuable land.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Divine right didn't go away. It just transformed into immunity for government officials.

"In school, we are taught about an ancient idea that is long out of favor: the divine right of kings. What did it mean? I think most people would find it difficult to say. It meant that there was no earthly court of appeal above the king. The king's judicial word was law, because no higher authority could lawfully overturn his word.

The two revolutions of the seventeenth century brought that doctrine to an end in England and the colonies. First Cromwell (1649), then Parliament (1688) removed kings from their thrones. Over the next century, the West substituted a new doctrine: the divine right of legislatures. This sovereignty was never called divine right, because in the era of the Enlightenment, intellectuals have been hostile to the idea of a God who interferes in history. Civil governments have claimed autonomy, which is another word for divinity. Maybe we can say that divinity abhors a vacuum."

Somebody has to be the final judge of disputes, or else disputes would never be resolved. But no entity should be above the law. To make that happen, there has to be multiple, competing dispute resolution systems. Federalism gave us that to some extent - states could prosecute federal agents - but federalism is practically dead.

"The Federal Reserve System possesses so much sovereignty that it holds the U.S. Government's gold in trust. Anyway, it says it does. There has been no government audit of the gold since 1951. No one in government knows how much gold there is in Fort Knox and the vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a private bank. The government does not assert its right to know."

I want to know where the gold is.

"With the central bank ready to bail out the big banks, the senior managers of these banks can put their banks' capital at risk by investing in high-return, high-risk investments. Think "derivatives." Then think "toxic assets." Then think "exchange our toxic assets at face value for liquid T-bills." This is what the Federal Reserve did for the major banks.

The result? The six largest American banks have been highly profitable in 2010 – far more so than in 2009. But they have made their money through trading, especially high-risk derivatives. They did not make it by lending to businesses. In short, they are back to the pre-2008, pre-TARP world. Happy days are here again! For them."

I wonder how much the Fed governors get paid.

"If Congress nationalizes the FED and inflates, then the FED will have failed. It will be proven for all to see that it was not too big to fail.

On the other hand, if the FED refuses to buy the Treasury's debt, the Federal government will default. It will be proven as not too big to fail."

That'll be interesting. I pick Congress to win. It'll nationalize the Fed and print money to buy its own treasuries before it defaults. Just like this article points out over and over, Congress has all the power. It just refuses to use it with the Fed. But it won't refuse to use it when the Fed stops doing what it wants.

HEALTH CARE:

British doctors call for homeopathy ban. I have mixed feelings about this. The less the government pays for the better, but I don't want to see doctors get a more powerful monopoly on health care.


GLOBAL WARMING:

Picture of shuttle Atlantis docked with international space station silhouetted against unusually quiet sun.

NOAA satellite image showing Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect which has been discounted by the media so far because it inflates temperature readings in cities and the global warming frauds extrapolate those localized temperature increases in cities to the whole planet.

ENERGY:

It turns out that the government owns the oil spill models and it forces oil companies to meet its standards. Inevitably, the government's models are wrong, in the Gulf they predicted no oil from a deep leak would reach land and that it would evaporate, and BP was forced to design based on that erroneous model. Every new layer of the onion we peal back exposes more and more government responsibility for the Gulf oil spill. As Judge Napolitano points out, the oil company gets sued and the bureaucrats get raises.

BP prepares to radically alter the architecture it's using to capture oil showing once again how the private sector is flexible and improves things in contrast to government which is still stuck decades behind.

POLICE STATE:

This is too funny.

"A gang of thieves has stolen everything, including the kitchen sink, from a police station near the World Cup city of Johannesburg."

...

"Politicians said it was 'terrible' that the site had not been properly secured. 

Police have launched an inquiry."

Only government.


WAR:


Criticism of Harry Truman.


POLITICS:


Politics in a two party system has an important quality in common with The Price is Right. You know how in the opening  competition, one person will bid one price, say $950, and the next guy, trying to be closer but not going over, will bid one dollar more, say $951? That's how politics in the two party system works. One candidate will stake out a position, and the next candidate will stake out almost exactly the same position but slightly modified on the side he thinks will win more votes. So if a Democrat wants to increase spending by $1 trillion, Republicans will want to increase spending by $900 billion knowing small government supporters don't have another other viable options.


LOCAL:


State promises to build marina at Ceaser's Creek. Why? If there's a market for a marina, a private individual or group could build one. Why should the state take money from 11 million Ohioans by force to build a marina for some local boaters? No thank you. If this project happens, we'll all be poorer for it.


MISC:


British think tank advocates keeping children who are wards of the state as wards of the state until they're 24. Why not? These people want to make every individual a ward of the state from cradle to grave. The infantilization of the western world continues.