Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

This case about protests at the funeral of soldiers wouldn't even be an issue if not for the fiction of public property. If the cemetery was private property, the protesters wouldn't be allowed on. The solution to pretty much all social problems can be found in private property rights.

ECONOMY:

The non-expert government economists are surprised the private sector lost jobs in September. Austrian economists are not. Who's the real experts?

REGULATION:

How government is destroying small farms and empowering huge, corporate farms so they can exert more control over our food supply much the same way Mao did in China.

The devastating effects of government regulation of food:

"A quarter of the US – 76 million people – are sickened each year by foodborne diseases, and 5,200 die from them. But less than one-tenth of one percent of these are caused by whole foods, naturally grown and unadulterated by chemicals and drugs."

The regulations put smaller operators out of business so the biggest companies can grow gigantic and not worry about the quality of their product. The FDA takes away their responsibility to make their food safe, and the result is a fantastic number of people getting sick on their products. The small operators that pass under the radar and therefore operate fairly freely produce high quality, health food. Now the government wants to regulate all of the small operators out of business.

"Instead of shutting down large operators like Wright County Egg, which sold half a billion contaminated eggs, state and federal agents raid small businesses that caused no one illness. (Here’s arecent story, not covered in the broadcast, but which adds to the list of small operators being targeted, who have not sickened anyone.)"

"Over the past seventy years, food production has been increasingly monopolized into the hands of fewer and fewer farms. The graph below shows the number of US farms and their size from 1900 to 2007. Where we once had nearly six and half million farms, averaging 147 acres in size, the latest USDA figures show just over two million farms, averaging 418 acres in size. Averages hide the further concentration by farming giants which often lease several different plots. (Data from USDA and Ag Classroom. Click here for larger image.)

Factory foods comprise most of the US diet. Industrial food adulterations are directly responsible for the skyrocketing rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart and neurological diseases. Farmoveruse of antibiotics has led to drug resistance in humans."

We did this to ourselves, but many people are trying to work around the government problem:

"In response, sensible consumers are moving to whole foods grown locally and organically. The number of farmers markets, food co-ops and farm shares is growing exponentially. The USDA Economic Research Service reports that organic farming became one of the fastest growing segments of U.S. agriculture during the 1990s. Certified organic cropland “more than doubled from 1992 to 1997, and doubled again between 1997 and 2001.” It doubled yet again between 2002 and 2005.

As encouraging as this is, only a half a percent of all US farmland is certified organic. That amounted to about 4.8 million acres in 2008, ERS reports.

But Big Food isn’t about to give up any market share without a fight. And Big Food owns government."

And that's the real reason government is trying to wipe out the small farmer. It has nothing to do with food safety. It has everything to do with power and money.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

The government's tax, spend and inflate police led to more job losses in September. Needless to say, the Fed policy will be to inflate some more. Because it's worked so well so far. Gary North says that Keynesians do this because their models tell them so. I don't believe it. They're not stupider than Pavlov's dog. They know that inflating the money supply leads inevitably to economic crisis. Over and over. For millennia. They don't do it because they think it's in our interest. They do it because they're evil. They know damn good and well that inflating the money supply loots the people and transfers wealth to the banksters. They're destroying our country on purpose. Greenspan retired because of the guilt. Bernanke will flee the country to his well prepared escape location to avoid being hanged for his evil.

FOREIGN POLICY:

From old interview with Barry Goldwater: he complains that the Israel lobby has way to much power.

MISC:

Government firefighters stand around and watch home burn because homeowner failed to pay his $75 fire-fighting fee. This could only happen in the government sector. If a private fire-fighting company did this, their customers would drop them, fearing the same could happen to them, and retain a different fire-fighting company. The people who made this decision would be fired. But you can bet nobody will be fired in this case because, get this:

"When a household has not paid the fee, firefighters are required by law to not respond."

You can't make this stuff up. To all you people who think that government exists to protect us and to perform services for us, wake the hell up. Please. Government doesn't give a damn about us except as serfs to loot. In a new development, Jeffrey Tucker reports that this incident is being used to attack free market principles and libertarianism. Bull. Government law mandated this. This could only happen because there's no competition in the firefighting market so homeowners can't change firefighting services. Tucker injects some reason into the debate:

"I don’t get this debate at all. It is not even a real debate. The fire-protection services were governmentservices. The fee in question was a government-mandated fee. The county lines in which the fee was applicable is a government-drawn line that is completely arbitrary. The policy of not putting out the fire was a government policy enforced by the mayor. As he said, in the words of a good bureaucrat, “Anybody that’s not in the city of South Fulton, it’s a service we offer, either they accept it or they don’t.”

So why is the market being criticized here? This was not a real market. Instead, this is precisely what we would expect from government. In a real market, there is no way that a free-enterprise fire service would have refused to provide the homeowner service. They would be in business to provide that service. The fire would have been put out and he would have been charged for the service. It is as simple as that. It is the same as lawn-mowing services or plumbing services or any other type of service. Can we know for sure that the market would provide such services? Well, if insurance companies have anything to say about it, such services would certainly be everywhere."

Of course they would.