Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Here's the top four headlines on Drudge:

Applications for jobless benefits rise to 462,000...
'Higher-than-expected'...
September home foreclosures top 100,000 for first time...
Inflation, Trade Deficit Surge Higher...

How's that government intervention in the economy working out for you?


The US falls two more places in the Heritage Foundation/WSJ 2010 index of economic freedom.

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The top 10 countries are: Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Switzerland, Canada, the United States, Denmark and Chile.

The bottom 10: Republic of Congo, Solomon Islands, Turkmenistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, Venezuela, Burma, Eritrea, Cuba, Zimbabwe and North Korea.

The index demonstrates what we libertarians have long said: Economic freedom leads to prosperity. Also, the best places to live and fastest-growing economies are among the freest, and vice versa. A society will be materially well off to the extent its people have the liberty to acquire property, start businesses, and trade in a secure legal and political environment.

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Bill Beach, director of the Heritage Foundation's Center for Data Analysis, which compiles the index with The Wall Street Journal, says the index defines "economic freedom" to mean: "You can follow your dreams, express yourself, create a business, do whatever job you want. Government doesn't run labor markets, or plan what business you can open, or over-regulate you."

We asked Beech about the U.S. ranking. "For first time in 16 years, the United States fell from the 'totally free' to 'mostly free' group. That's a terrible development," he said. He fears that if this continues, productive people will leave the United States for freer pastures.

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I ask again: How's that government intervention in the economy working out for you?

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Why is the United States falling behind? "Our spending has been excessive. ... We have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. (Government) takeovers of industries, subsidizing industries ... these are the kinds of moves that happen in Third World countries. ..."

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Our government has transformed the US into a third world country.

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Beach adds that the rule of law declined when the Obama administration declared some contracts to be null and void. For example, bondholders in the auto industry were forced to the back of the creditor line during bankruptcy. And there's more regulation of business, such as the Dodd-Frank law for the financial industry and the new credit-card law. But how could the United States place behind Canada? Isn't Canada practically a socialist country?

"Canada might do health care the wrong way," Beach said, "but by and large they do things the right way." Lately, Canada has lowered tax rates and reduced spending.

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What a novel idea.


But here's the kicker:

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Just so you know ... this 2010 Index of Economic Freedom was compiled from data from the last eight months of the Bush Administration.

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This shows once again how terrible Republicans are, and Obama is like George Bush on steroids. We voted ourselves a lot of pain.


Government is making us all poorer.


TAX AND SPEND:


This is 100 percent certain:

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The Federal government will default. This is not a matter of intellectual speculation. It is a matter of financial speculation. There is no question that Medicare will break the bank in Washington. There will have to be cutbacks in spending. The promises will not come true.

The same is true for Social Security. FICA taxes today are not sufficient to cover the expenses of Social Security, which went into default at the end of fiscal 2010.

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These obligations cannot be met. It's impossible. The government can't help but default. The only question is what form it will take. And our debt problems get worse:

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Then there are the projected on-budget deficits of $1 trillion a year between now and 2020, at which time the government forecasters cease to offer forecasts. But we also know, as Bernanke reminded us on October 4, that these deficits are unsustainable. He also quoted Herb Stein. The planners know that what the forecasters predict will not come true. There will be a default, or else there will be rising interest rates. If there are rising rates, then fewer of the promises by government will come true. The Federal budget will have to be reallocated to pay the interest expenses.

State and local budgets are facing the same problem. The pension and medical care promises to retired government workers will be impossible to pay. This is finally becoming obvious. Yet politicians refuse to face this reality. They are still in the clutches of the state employee unions, especially the National Education Association. But the unions cannot tell the politicians how to persuade voters to consent to the tax hikes that will be required to fulfill the promises. The tax revolt has begun.

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There is no political solution except to dramatically cut spending, and it's a virtual certainty that won't happen until the government collapses.

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There will be great political battles ahead over whose oxen will be gored by the tax revolt. Oldsters will probably be the last to have their budgets cut. But it is sure that this will happen – not just in the United States, but all over the world. He who drops out of the labor force will live to regret it.

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That's for sure.


REGULATION:


Where in the world does government think it gets this kind of power?

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My story began almost three and a half years ago, April 22, 2007, when Swish Marketing, a small (20 person) internet marketing company which I co-founded , received a CID (Civil Investigative Demand) from the FTC. Although the FTC regional office told us we were not the target of their investigation, the CID asked for every email, piece of computer code, and shred of data my company had ever generated. The FTC agents were investigating another company whose advertising we had posted on our web site. We dutifully began the careful task of gathering the requested data and sent it in to the FTC.

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That's just nuts.


FEDERAL RESERVE:


The Producer Price Index took a big jump.

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Though everyone who buys things should be concerned about this inflation in finished goods, the talking heads on CNBC and other news outlets are telling everyone to pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. They tell us that we shouldn’t be concerned about inflation because if one excludes food and energy, inflation of finished goods is a measly .1 percent.  Economists and journalists refer to the PPI without food and energy as the “core PPI” and assure the public that the core number is much more important than the overall PPI. This is true–so long as you aren’t one of those people who eats food or uses fuels to heat your home or commute.

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We are not supposed to worry about inflation because most of the inflation came from meat (5.2% last month) and gasoline (6.1 % last month)? They conveniently neglect to mention that a significant portion of household expenditures are on food and energy. They also neglect to point out that lower income households spend proportionately more of their income on food and energy than do higher income households. This means that the poor are hit the hardest by the inflation categories that “experts” tell us we should ignore.

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Charts show that the PPI has been steadily increasing for nine months. Ouch. Thanks Ben.


HEALTH CARE:


Governors races may determine the future of Obamacare.

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While congressional Republicans won’t be able to repeal health care reform with Barack Obama in the White House, Republican governors and their appointees have the power to throw major roadblocks in the way of reform plans. 

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The article doesn't say it, but nullification is the theme.


The very expensive hidden costs of Obamacare.


The cost of Obamacare plays role in forcing hospitals to shut down.

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A potentially explosive scandal has arisen after it became public that the sale of several Catholic hospitals in Pennsylvania was due in part to increased burdens imposed by the federal health reform legislation, according to the hospitals’ director. However, that message was quickly combated by the Catholic Health Association (CHA), an organization infamous for its role in helping pass the bill despite U.S. bishops’ opposition, which attempted to dismiss the health law’s role in the matter.

Mercy Health Partners CEO Kevin Cook announced earlier this month that three hospitals, Mercy Hospital in Scranton, Mercy Special Care Hospital in Nanticoke, and Mercy Tyler Hospital in Tunkhannock, would be up for sale. Mercy Hospital boasts a venerable history in the Catholic town of Scranton, where it was founded by the Sisters of Mercy in 1917.

Cook revealed in an October 6 WNEP TV report that the sales were "absolutely" related to the higher cost and lesser federal reimbursement ushered in by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare.

"Health care reform is absolutely playing a role. Was it the precipitating factor in this decision? No. But was it a factor in our planning over the next five years? Absolutely," he said.

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Exactly as predicted. I don't want to hear any "unintended consequences" nonsense. The goal of Obamacare was to destroy private health insurance and private health care along with it. It was designed to collapse our health care system so the government could soon implement complete socialized medicine. And it's succeeding already.


GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:


Embattled IPCC chief won't resign because the government aristocrats support his efforts to defraud us and set up a one-world government.


The effect of the Kyoto protocol:

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is that it is OK for the West to burn fossil fuels, as long as the West is also subsidizing hydroelectric dam construction in China …

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This makes perfect sense because carbon credits are modern Catholic indulgences.


This one aspect of government spending that people don't seem to understand. In this case the EPA is using our tax dollars to fund liberal organizations who in turn use our tax dollars to lobby for leftist cause. Everybody complains about the money spent on lobbying, but nobody seems to recognize that all of that money comes from our tax dollars. It all comes from the political economy which is funded by the transfer of wealth from us to the aristocrats' political cronies through tax dollars and regulation.


I have no confidence this editorial directive will make the BBC's coverage of the global warming fraud more honest.


WAR ON DRUGS:


Government fines CVS $75 million for selling Sudafed. You know what else is used for making meth? Bunsen burners. Maybe they should be controlled. And glass tubes. Maybe they should be controlled. And vans. Maybe they should be controlled. And basements. Maybe they should be controlled.


The success of drug decriminalization in Portugal.


POLICE STATE:


Cop shoots dog and unarmed man. This would be a dog bites man story, it happens so frequently we almost never hear about it, but what's different in this story is the cop has been arrested. The Phoenix Law Enforcement Association representative talks about the presumption of innocence and due process, but they sure never care about that when the person arrested isn't a cop.


WAR:


Two studies discover the obvious: Muslims hate us because of our foreign policy.

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In 2004, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld commissioned a task force to study what causes Terrorism, and it concluded that"Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies":  specifically, "American direct intervention in the Muslim world"through our "one sided support in favor of Israel"; support for Islamic tyrannies in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia; and, most of all, "the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan" (the full report is here).

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And the second study:

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Pape. . . will present findings on Capitol Hill Tuesday that argue thatthe majority of suicide terrorism around the world since 1980 has had a common cause: military occupation.

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This suggests a simple solution to terrorism, also verified by the study:

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"We have lots of evidence now that when you put the foreign military presence in, it triggers suicide terrorism campaigns, ... and that when the foreign forces leave, it takes away almost 100% of the terrorist campaign," Pape said in an interview last week on his findings.

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Bring our troops home, all of them, and the war on terror will be over. The aristocrats know this. They don't want to end the war because it makes them richer and more powerful while making us poorer and weaker.


The real motive for the war in Afghanistan is control of resources including an oil pipeline.

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Future historians may well agree that the twenty-first century Silk Road first opened for business on December 14, 2009. That was the day a crucial stretch of pipeline officially went into operation linking the fabulously energy-rich state of Turkmenistan (via Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) to Xinjiang Province in China's far west. Hyperbole did not deter the spectacularly named Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, Turkmenistan's president, from bragging, "This project has not only commercial or economic value. It is also political. China, through its wise and farsighted policy, has become one of the key guarantors of global security."

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Here's the power of a system of voluntary exchange over violence:

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Meanwhile, in the New Great Game in Eurasia, China had the good sense not to send a soldier anywhere or get bogged down in an infinite quagmire in Afghanistan. Instead, the Chinese simply made a direct commercial deal with Turkmenistan and, profiting from that country's disagreements with Moscow, built itself a pipeline which will provide much of the natural gas it needs.

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Once again the Chinese have prospered by applying American values while Americans are being impoverished by employing violence instead.

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Sanctions can be a killer, slowing investment, increasing the cost of trade by over 20%, and severely constricting Tehran's ability to borrow in global markets. Nonetheless, trade between China and Iran grew by 35% in 2009 to $27 billion. So while the West has been slamming Iran with sanctions, embargos, and blockades, Iran has been slowly evolving as a crucial trade corridor for China – as well as Russia and energy-poor India. Unlike the West, they are all investing like crazy there because it's easy to get concessions from the government; it's easy and relatively cheap to build infrastructure; and being on the inside when it comes to Iranian energy reserves is a necessity for any country that wants to be a crucial player in Pipelineistan, that contested chessboard of crucial energy pipelines over which much of the New Great Game in Eurasia takes place. Undoubtedly, the leaders of all three countries are offering thanks to whatever gods they care to worship that Washington continues to make it so easy (and lucrative) for them.

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Another example.


POLITICS:

I hope Ron Paul is the brain of the tea party, but I think most tea partiers are conventional Republican types.


This is bizarre. The Washington Post is tacitly admitting the tea parties aren't racist.

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A new analysis of political signs displayed at a tea party rally in Washington last month reveals that the vast majority of activists expressed narrow concerns about the government's economic and spending policies and steered clear of the racially charged anti-Obama messages that have helped define some media coverage of such events.

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Duh.

MISC:

Book "piracy" is about to explode on a massive scale. No doubt. Government's IP monopoly system is collapsing. Library of Congress warns of music copyright disaster. More IP insanity.


How capitalism saved the Chilean miners.

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A fantastic piece in the WSJ by Daniel Henninger.

If those miners had been trapped a half-mile down like this 25 years ago anywhere on earth, they would be dead. What happened over the past 25 years that meant the difference between life and death for those men? Short answer: the Center Rock drill bit. This is the miracle bit that drilled down to the trapped miners. Center Rock Inc. is a private company in Berlin, Pa. It has 74 employees. The drill’s rig came from Schramm Inc. in West Chester, Pa. Seeing the disaster, Center Rock’s president, Brandon Fisher, called the Chileans to offer his drill. Chile accepted. The miners are alive.

And there were other contributions: cell phones, socks, cables, and much more, from all over the world – innovations from the private sector. Meanwhile, Henniger writes, the US President is running around denouncing people’s “blind faith in the market.”

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I bet government regulations played a role in them being trapped.


Mises scholar analyzes work of Nobel Prize winners. His conclusion?

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There is a crisis in mainstream economics. Simply put, the economists have utterly failed in their promises to policymakers and the public. The work of Diamond, Mortensen, and Pissarides may not be directly to blame, but this year's award is just one more example of how out of touch the economics profession has become. To award economists for their contributions to understanding unemployment — just as it is becoming painfully obvious that the leaders of the field do not understand unemployment — is as unseemly as giving someone a Nobel Peace Prize just as he accelerates foreign military conquests.

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Unseemly.