Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

The more government takes over our economy, the richer the rich get and the poorer the middle class and poor get. That's what government is all about: looting the masses on behalf of the ruling elite.

How many months are we going to see Obama concentrating on the economy? All he does it make it worse.

REGULATION:

Texas Attorney General investigating Google to see if searches favor Google services over their competitors. So what if they do? If you don't like it, use a different search engine or develop your own.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

How Bernanke and the too-big-to-fail banks are stealthily monetizing US debt and how it will lead to hyper-inflation:

"A lot of people—myself included—think that the Fed, the Treasury and the American Zombies are colluding in a triangular trade in Treasury bonds, carrying out a de facto Stealth Monetization: The Treasury issues the debt to finance fiscal spending, the TBTF banks buy them, with money provided to them by the Fed."

Being able to legally counterfeit money is a nice racket if you can get it.

"The first of the asset managers or TBTF [to-big-to-fail - LIW] banks who are out of Treasuries will look for a place to park their cash—obviously. Where will all this ready cash go?

Commodities."

"By the end of the day of this panic, commodities will have risen between 50% and 100%. By week’s end, we’re talking 150% to 250%. (My private guess is gold will be finessed, but silver will shoot up the most—to $100 an ounce within the week.)"

Instant, massive inflation. Hyper-inflation. I doubt stuff like this can be accurately predicted in this kind of detail, individuals act, but computers do the big trading on Wall Street, and herd mentality often appears.

US treasuries as a termite-ridden house.

"But who is buying all this new Federal government debt? Why, that’s very simple: The Federal Reserve. 

The reason that the Federal government could go into the aforementioned massive spending spree was precisely because of the Federal Reserve’s bail-out: The Fed created money out of thin air (as is their power), in order to buy Toxic Assets from the Too Big To Fail banks. The banks, in turn, took this cash and bought Treasuries—which financed the Federal government’s deficit. 

This is what I call Stealth Monetization: Unlike in some banana republics, which dispense with the niceties and simply turn on the printing presses whenever they need more money to spend, the U.S. Federal government and the U.S. Federal Reserve got creative, and used the TBTF banks to essentially hide the monetization of the fiscal debt in plain sight."

What a scam.

"Many people complain that the bail-out money the TBTF banks received was never lent out—oh, but they’re wrong: The money was lent out. It was lent out to the Federal government.  

  

After all, what did the TBTF banks do, with all that cash they got from the Federal Reserve for unloading all those Toxic Assets? Why, they went and bought themselves boatloads of Treasury bonds. "

We keep hearing they're saving the reserves at the Fed, but this must be happening too.

"What happens when a debtor becomes so over-extended that he cannot possibly pay back his loans? Naturally: They default—or they try to wriggle their way out of the debt, by giving you something less valuable than what you are owed. 

  

It is not controversial to say—and indeed, it is widely discussed—that the U.S. Treasury has only two options: Default on Treasury bonds, or debase the currency by way of inflation, so that the nominal value of Treasuries is stable, but their real value decays by inflationary attrition."

Even talking about defaulting would trigger the hyper-inflation discussed above.

"Yields of Treasuries are at absurd lows, there is a veritable T-bond rally every single day that equities drop even just a bit—in other words, Treasuries are in a bubble. Why? Because the market knows that Bernanke and the Fed will backstop Treasuries— 

  

—backstop them right off the cliff."

Are you scared yet?

EDUCATION:

Vouchers are not libertarian. All government spending is destructive. All government spending is funded by theft. All government money is poisoned with politics and regulations, so vouchers are a means for government to seize control over and poison private schools, completing the already nearly complete government monopoly over the education of children. The private sector can supply vouchers if Americans chose to do so voluntarily.

HEALTH CARE:

Because our health care system is dominated by government, prescription drug use doubled in less than ten years.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

As if promoting phony science wasn't bad enough, now the IPCC has been busted for plagiarism.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Isn't it funny how even the totalitarian mentality of aristocrats wanes in the face of falling tax revenue? This guy wants to paint the legalization movement in California as a fight for liberty, and I'm sure it is for a few, I have no doubt the vast majority of support for this is to grow government revenue, and that's the opposite of liberty.

POLICE STATE:

Arizona prostitute arrested and left for four hours in outdoor prison cell without water died. Naturally the government absolves itself of any responsibility. The government's idea of justice is to assault and kill peaceful Americans with impunity.

Criminal investigation threatens manslaughter charges against seven Italian scientists for failing to predict an earthquake.

WAR:

False story lines promoted about the war in Iraq.

LOCAL:

Local charity can't meet payroll because government has looted so much money from the people, they have little left to give.

MISC:

Craigslist caves to busybodies and shuts down adult section. The government must have been threatening them.

Moderate drinkers live longer than teetotalers.

Myths about Reagan's libertarian policies.

Why do people submit to the violence of government?

"Why do people, in all times and places, obey the commands of the government, acquiesce in their own subjection, consent to their own enslavement? Martin's answer was that they're born that way. We should ask ourselves, he wrote, whether "at bottom all political, ethical and philosophic convictions" might not be "due to personal temperament and incapable of being accounted for by reason.""

It's easier and less risky than resisting. While the number of citizens far outweighs the number of rulers, the number of rulers is much greater than one or two or a handful. It takes a collective effort to successfully resist, and humans are not collectivist by nature. I doubt this applies in the Milgram experiment. I doubt the "teachers" had any fear of attack by the experimenters, so there's other factors involved.

"The psychological explanation is that under certain circumstances the ordinary individual is both able and willing to "view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person's wishes," so that "he therefore no longer considers himself responsible for his actions." The sociological explanation is that under certain circumstances most individuals abandon any attempt at independent thinking and simply conform to what they feel is expected of them — what they have absorbed, mostly unthinkingly, from the culture in which they have grown up and now live."

I find both these concepts alien. Obviously I've done work I was told to do despite thinking it was not the best use of my time, but that's not the same thing as hurting somebody because another told me to.