Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

The official unemployment rate is up to 9.6 percent, and Obama wants you to think this is good news. Everybody's claiming this is a better than expected jobs report, but it just goes to show that the government so-called experts are always wrong. The reason the private sector jobs report looks good is the temporary census jobs are over. Therefore some of those people are finding jobs in the productive private sector. Government economists can't understand the difference between parasitic political economy jobs and productive private sector jobs. This shows why we should cut hundreds of thousands of governments to stimulate private sector growth.

TAX AND SPEND:

Heading into the election, Democrats want you to think they're against raising taxes. Don't fall for it.

Obama held workshop for Muslim groups to help them steal more of our taxdollars for their activities.

"The event’s main organizer, the Coordinating Council of Muslim Organizations (CCMO) has long-established ties to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which fostered many Islamist terror groups. Some of CCMO’s member groups were unindicted co-conspirators in the successfully prosecuted terrorist funding trial against the Holy Land Foundation (HLF). Event organizers said they would dedicate themselves to “cutting through red tape” to provide “direct access” to U.S. taxpayer funding for these terrorist funding-related groups."

I thought liberals preferred a hard barrier between church and state. Apparently not Obama regarding Muslims with terrorist ties.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Just like there's no such thing as good government, there's no such thing as good monetary policy. As I often write, the best the Fed can ever do is exactly mimic market forces. Any deviation from market forces harms our economy. That's one of many reasons we should abolish the Fed.

Gary North explains that Bernanke is trapped.

"In his speech, he opened with praise for what a great job the world's central bankers and politicians did to save the economy in 2008.

On the whole, when the eruption of the Panic of 2008 threatened the very foundations of the global economy, the world rose to the challenge, with a remarkable degree of international cooperation, despite very difficult conditions and compressed time frames.

We can take this about as seriously as we would take similar self-praise by the head of FEMA after Katrina. Yet even that's not close enough. It's more like self-praise from the Army Corps of Engineers describing the levies. Maybe we should think of Greenspan as the Army Corps of Engineers and Bernanke as FEMA."

Unfortunately, we're all going down with Bernanke.

EDUCATION:

From Boortz: "A history teacher has been suspended in France for spending too much time teaching students about the Holocaust."

GLOBAL WARMING:

Sometimes the obvious must be stated:

"New climate change mitigation schemes could benefit elites rather than the rural poor"

'Could'? How about 'will'? Guaranteed.

The Discovery hostage crisis is accurately labeled a terrorist attack. There's your home-grown terrorism. When you advocate violence like Gore does, the result is usually violence.

MISC:

Throwing was a significant evolutionary advantage for human beings.

The Milgrim Experiment - shocking obedience to authority. If a pure market economy is so great, why doesn't it exist? See the previous link.

A couple of months back I told Jeffrey Tucker that I thought the modern Austrians had done a poor job of explaining economic scarcity, a concept they understand so completely they pretty much never talk about it, but which I believed others didn't understand and that was a fundamental reason they continued to promote socialism. It's good to see him and Kinsella address that deficiency here in their discussion of scarce and non-scarce goods and IP.

"The failure to understand the distinction between scarce and intrinsically nonscarce goods might also help to explain the persistence of socialist ideology. For example, one possible explanation of the predictable socialist impulse of religious leaders, intellectuals, and artists is that their primary work consists in the production and distribution of nonscarce goods (salvation, ideas, and art) and that this accounts for the failure of the people in these professions to come to terms with the relentless reality of scarcity."

This is a long, meandering essay, not one the best from mises.org, but it is the only thorough discussion of scarcity I've seen there since I began reading there, so I welcome it.