Free kibbles

TAX AND SPEND:

Thomas Sowell is way off base here, claiming Republicans are the poor dupes of Democrats when it comes to raising taxes. Republicans always want to spend nearly as much as Democrats, and that spending has to be paid for, and Republicans know it. A better analogy would be corrupt good cop/ bad cop against the American people with Republicans playing good cop, pretending they don't really want more taxes and more spending.

It would be awesome if LeBron James said one of the reasons he rejected New York or Chicago (if he does) is the high city and state income taxes. You can bet Pat Riley and Mark Cuban used that point when recruiting. And it's an especially big deal for role players who don't make as much.

The myth of the Social Security trust fund.

REGULATION:

Great quote from Boortz: "How can it be that in America after 234 years we still don't have enough regulations and laws to protect our citizens from lawlessness, defend our freedoms and support economic liberty?"

HEALTH CARE:

Remember when Obamacare used to be called Romneycare? The people of Massachusetts are living the pain.

"The deeper problem is that price controls seem to be the only way the political class can salvage a program that was supposed to reduce spending and manifestly has not. Massachusetts now has the highest average premiums in the nation."

This is just what Obama wants - to make us all poorer.

WAR ON DRUGS:

US invades Costa Rica. No doubt Don Obama made them an offer they couldn't refuse.

POLICE STATE:

A fatal flaw of limited government is government always ends up being the judge of itself. The result: police state. Wouldn't it be cool of citizens could drag government officials into citizen courts? Grand juries were originally convened by citizens. We should take that a step further and make them into full-blown courts for government officials.

WAR:

Steele's Afghanistan comments are exposing a rift in the Republican party.

"The War Party is conducting this pre-emptive strike on Steele to send a message to dissenters. In Krauthammer's phrase, it is now a "capital offense" for a Republican leader not to support the Obama troop surge and the Obama-Petraeus policy.

Yet, a majority of Americans oppose the Afghan war. And the point made by Steele about the futility of fighting in Afghanistan has been made by columnists George Will and Tony Blankley, ex-Rep. Joe Scarborough, Ron Paul, and antiwar conservatives and moderates.

When exactly did supporting Obama's war policy become a litmus test for loyal Republicans?

What the War Party is up to here is a naked attempt to impose its orthodoxy, about the threat of "Islamofascism" and the Long War, on the entire GOP, 28 months before a presidential election."

Obama's dividing not only Democrats, but Republicans too. You have to wonder if a small government, peace candidate like Ron Paul wins the nomination, will establishment Republicans sandbag him like they did Goldwater. That's one scenario where Obama wins a second term.

MISC:

Obama has ordered NASA to perform Muslim outreach. This is an egregious example that illustrates how every action government takes, even space flight, is poisoned by politics. It's not just Democrats. It's not just bad politicians. All politicians poison government with politics, and that's one of the reasons every service provided by government is more expensive and lower quality than if it was provided by the private sector.

Ten bad economic decisions from history that destroyed countries.

Analysis of why government experts must always be wrong.

"When future generations of scholars look back on the economic and political disaster enveloping the United States today, three questions should be at the forefront of their minds.

First, they should wonder whether the many generations of politicians that collectively engineered this economic and political disaster were either (1) too outrageously stupid to know that what they were doing would produce such a dreadful catastrophe, or (2) whether they were so evil and underhanded that they did know what they were doing would result in disaster — and yet they did it anyway.

Second, they should wonder how the American people could possibly have been so stupid and gullible as to believe that government spending, borrowing, warring, jailing, regulating, and above all, taxing, could produce anything but an economic and political catastrophe for themselves and their fellow countrymen.

Finally, they should wonder what the heck their predecessors in the academic world were doing before and during the American empire's descent into poverty, tyranny, and war."

When it comes to the actions of aristocrats, the first question must always be: stupid or evil? This is a good description of how history will judge us:

"It should disgust them to learn that virtually all mainstream economists, including the most decorated among them, were so clueless about the impending economic disaster. It should disgust them even further to learn that the only remedy these supposed academic luminaries had to offer the American government and public was to print up more green paper and to borrow more money from the Chinese. It should shock them to learn that the most prestigious political science journals were publishing articles about attitudes toward immigration and race relations at the very momentthat the European monetary union was on the verge of collapsing. It should shock them still further to learn that, at least as late as 2010, many in the discipline of political science still believed in the "democratic peace theory" — at the very moment that Israel, the United States, and the rest of democratic Europe continued their multidecade crusade to raze and depopulate the Middle East."

Here's one of the mechanisms making America a two class society:

"First, the institutions of higher education in America will soon begin to crumble into dust, because poor people (i.e., most Americans going forward) cannot afford to go to college and study under these failed social scientists without any promise of future employment. This is true even though the federal government has commandeered the student loan system away from bankers, because a cheap loan for an expensive education is a complete waste if one cannot find employment afterward. This means that a large proportion of current political scientists and economists will soon be forced to find employment elsewhere, and the ones who do retain their jobs will be completely beholden to the political class that will be supporting and subsidizing their jobs."

It's going to be bad, but it doesn't have to be. I we elected a president in 2012 who would nullify 223 years of unconstitutional laws, we'd have a deep, sharp recession, then recover to enjoy the strongest economy in history.

Robot gets beer from fridge, opens it and delivers it.

Another reason why the Chinese government is better than the US government:

"Macau has been steady. The shocking, unexpected government is the one in Washington. That’s where we get surprises every day. That’s were taxes are changed every five minutes. That’s were you don’t know what to expect tomorrow. To compare political stability and predictability in China to Washington is like comparing Mt. Everest to an ant hill. Macau and China is stable. Washington is not. Is there a businessman or a media person in America who isn’t frightened by the next crazy idea that’s coming from Washington? The financial institutions, the cars, the businessmen, the taxes, the health care, everything is coo coo and God knows what’s next."

No kidding. It must be nice to know the government isn't going to pull the rug out from under you.

What can artists and programmers sell when information is free?

"Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage,

and Findability."

Riches are to be made in the market for free.

A Fed economist who didn't predict the crash of 2007 warns Americans not to trust economics bloggers who did. Who cares about that little thing like being right?

Jeffrey Tucker champions the repeal of the drinking age. That should be an issue for parents and suppliers of alcohol, not government.

"In the 19th century, and looking back even before – prepare yourself to imagine horrific anarchistic nightmares – there were no drinking laws anywhere, so far as anyone can tell. The regulation of drinking and age was left to society, which is to say families, churches, and communities with varying sensibilities who regulated such things with varying degrees of intensity. Probably some kids drank themselves silly, and we all know that this doesn’t happen now (wink, wink), but many others learned to drink responsibly from an early age, even drinking bourbon for breakfast.

Really, it is only because we are somehow used to it that we accept the complete absurdity of a national law that prohibits the sale of beer, wine, and liquor to anyone under the age of 21. Every day, the police are busting up parties, shutting down bars, hectoring restaurants, fining convenience stores, and otherwise bullying people into clean living. We read the news and think: crazy kids; they shouldn’t be doing this.

And yet every day, young people are finding ways around these preposterous restrictions that are hardly every questioned, imbibing with their booze a disdain for the law and a creative spirit of criminality, along with a disposition to binge drink when their legal workarounds succeed."

Isn't that the truth.

"On college campuses, the industry of the fake ID thrives as never before. It seems nearly true that almost every student believes himself or herself in need of getting one. Do the restaurants and bars know this? Of course they do. They have every interest in having these fake IDs look as real as possible to give themselves some degree of legal immunity if someone gets caught. The whole thing is a gigantic fakeroo, a mass exercise in open but unspoken hypocrisy, and everyone knows it.

If you think about it, it is the very definition of a state gone mad that a society would have a law of this sort spread out over an entire nation that tells people that they cannot drink before the age of 21 even as most everyone in a position to do so happily breaks the law."

We're drowning in the insanity of government, but we're so used to it, almost nobody questions it.

"With the two-thirds and more of people under the age of 21 reporting that they have consumed alcohol in the last year, it should be obvious that the law is doing nothing but providing a gigantic excuse for arbitrary police-state impositions on human liberty, and also socializing young people in a habit of hypocrisy and law breaking. It’s like the old Soviet-style joke: they pretend to regulate us and we pretend to be regulated."

The same can be said for the war on drugs.