Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

According to Rasmussen:

"A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 75% of Likely U.S. Voters think a free market economy is better than an economy managed by the government. That’s up five points from December 2008 following Barack Obama’s election as president but consistent with findings in surveys since then.

Only 14% think government control of the economy is better. (To see survey question wording, click here)."

That's great news. But the bad news is the aristocrats disagree.

"The Political Class isn’t so sure. Ninety percent (90%) of Mainstream voters prefer a free market economy. Among Political Class voters, however, just 34% feel that way, while 30% like a government-managed economy better and 35% are undecided."

And there you have the gulf that separates aristocrats from the people.

Insight into the nearly invisible banking crisis.

"We've only had 294 failures this cycle, but it is a big deal: adjusted to current dollars, the Depression banking crisis was $100 billion, the S&L crisis was $923 billion, and the current crisis is nearly $8 trillion.

So while FDIC chairwoman Sheila Bair said the current crisis would be "nothing compared with previous cycles, such as the savings-and-loan days," it's actually much bigger, because the financial sector had grown to be nearly half the economy by 2006 — as measured by the earnings of the S&P 500.

But the question is, Why haven't there been more bank failures? In 2008, there were 25 failures, last year there were 140, and so far this year 129 have been seized on Friday nights. The greatest real-estate bubble in history has popped — first residential and now commercial — and we only have 294 failures?"

Read the article for the answer.

This is the inevitable result of government spending and inflationary monetary policy.

"Consumers are buying more luxury items but spending remains tight for everyday essentials such as food and dental care, a USA TODAY analysis finds, suggesting a growing divide between haves and have-nots."

The politically connected rich people always get richer in the political economy. They get to buy items before price inflation hits. Then prices rise and everybody else pays the higher prices, making them poorer. Eventually the money spreads through the economy, but regular people end up with way less than they have to pay in higher prices. Every government intervention in the marketplace exacerbates natural income inequality so a free market economy is as fair as it gets.

Even liberals are predicting a double-dip recession.

TAX AND SPEND:

Obama's claim that taxes are lower now than under Reagan is a lie.

Republicans plan to cut $100 billion from budget in January if they take the House. This may be revolutionary in Washington, but with total federal unfunded liabilities well over $100 trillion, this is just 1/10 of a percent cut. It's meaningless, it's symbolic, and Obama won't let it happen anyway.

REGULATION:

This is why this election will change nothing: despite all this talk about reducing the size of government and making it adhere to the Constitution, 61 percent of Americans support giving the President an internet kill switch. Maybe their copy of the Constitution is different than mine, but my copy doesn't give government any power whatsoever over the internet. Maybe Americans don't realize the internet wasn't around when the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution and that nobody has proposed let alone ratified a constitutional amendment granting government that power. The supposed tea party values are a joke. They're slogans. They're worthless.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Occasionally libertarian Cato is calling for the Fed to inflate more.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Evidence that climategate's Phil Jones illegally deleted emails to avoid FOI requests.

"Acton tells the Sci Tech Committee that nothing has been deleted, but when asked for the documents that Jones specifically asked to be deleted, the university refuses the FOI request on the basis that they no longer have the documents."

Sounds like deleted to me.

Belief that man causes global warming continues to fall.

POLICE STATE:

Is it ironic that the if regular people did the same things to others that TSA agents do to airline customers, they would go to prison for life? Ironic wouldn't be the first word I'd choose. Suggestion to start a letter-writing campaign to Disney to put and end to the nude-scanners and gropes. For the children.

Did Obama really say this?

"The federal government is probably less intrusive now than it was 30 years ago."

Probably.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Apparently the Chinese learned a lot from the downed Ares spy aircraft in 2001, as many of us predicted. I still think it was irresponsible of them not to have abandoned that plane and ditched it in the ocean.

POLITICS:

The US drops out of the top 20 least corrupt nations. If this table was honest, that would have happened about 100 years ago.

If you thought ACORN was really going away and Congress really had cut off funds to it, you're a fool.

"Like a zombie in a horror movie, ACORN is alive! Even worse, it's still in the business of registering Mickey Mouse and dead people to vote -- and the person running its current get-out-the-vote operation is under indictment for felony voter registration fraud."

The zombie comparison is spot on.

Gary North predicts two years of gridlock. Gridlock is a myth. The best we can hope for is two years of gridlock on Obama's huge agenda items, but Congress will silently pass hundreds of new laws, each of them a new, impoverishing act of violence against the American people. We're in a train headed off a cliff at 100 MPH. Republicans want us to believe they'll slow the train to 99 MPH as if that wills save us. But they won't even do that. They might accelerate the train less than Democrats, but the train is going to keep accelerating. Either way we die. Nobody is trying to slow down the train, let alone stop it, let alone turn it around, except Ron Paul.

"Voters got the nation into this canoe and allowed Congress to start paddling a long time ago. Voters could not hear the falls. Anyone who looked at the map of the river of red ink could see where we were headed, but both parties had an incentive to keep this map away from the voters."

It would be more accurate to say voters pushed Congress to start paddling a long time ago. This is an interesting observation:

"I think the Tea Party represents a larger minority of voters who sense that something is wrong, but they are not sure what. They have believed the government all their lives. They believed that the government can overcome a recession, though they are not sure exactly how. They have allowed the Congress to write checks against their future income. These people are common workers.

The people whose futures are really at risk are the top 20% of income earners. They pay most of the Federal taxes. They invest in Treasury debt. Their assets are the most easily confiscated. But they trust the system. They went to college. They studied Keynesian economics. They took American history classes that taught that Roosevelt saved capitalism from itself. They believe it.

They also believe that the government-managed economic system still works well for them. They are mainstream Republicans and Democrats. They still keep the faith. They regard Tea Party types as wild-eyed amateurs who may capsize the canoe."

The true believers will be the next to question government itself.

Political commercials show how successful the left has been at redefining the terms of political debate for the last 100 years.

"Anyone who does not totally buy into the "progressive" agenda and orthodoxy of politically correct, left-leaning Democratic Party is, by definition, "extreme" if not outright bigoted or "crazy" (as Reid has labeled his opponent, Sharron Angle).The point of all this is not simply to bemoan what's happened to political debate in this country, but to point out how successful the Left has been in redefining the terms of that debate. Over the last 30 years, liberals, through their dominance in the media, the universities, the public school systems and major cultural institutions, including television and Hollywood, have redefined what is acceptable and unacceptable in American society. And the docile, largely silent majority of ordinary Americans, who don't relish confrontation and controversy, have allowed these institutional forces to have their way in changing American culture. Up to now."

Don't forget the Republicans, who all support the income tax, the Fed, the Dept. of Education, the FCC, the FTC, the FDA, the EPA, etc., etc. etc. just as much as Democrats. Republicans are every bit as much to blame as Democrats. I cannot understand this insane support many Americans have for Republicans.

MEDIA:

As if NPR isn't rotten enough because of government funding, its CEO is working with the FCC to architect a scheme whereby NPR would become the dominate news network funding by our tax dollars. Both the FCC and government funding of NPR are unconstitutional, but that little detail won't stand in the way of bureaucrats.

MISC:

I'm no fan of the socialist pledge of allegiance, but I love that this crowd broke the rules and said it anyway. This is a sign the American people, en mass, are rejecting authority. It's about time. You have to reject authority before you can be free.

NASA to auction patents. Naturally they won't put them into the public domain. Only the rich and powerful may benefit from the monopoly because they can can feed government's insatiable lust for money.


Here's an old essay from Robert Murphy addressing my contention that an anarcho-capitalist society using only private sector law enforcement would devolve into government by warlords. Here's the email I sent to Murphy concerning this essay:

"I've always claimed an anarcho-capitalist society would inevitably devolve into a society of warlords, so I was happy to discover this essay by you addressing the issue. After reading it, I stand by my claim. You fail to address the root cause of violence, and your argument fails because of it. Government worshipers invariably misjudge the character of humans. They invariably misjudge that government attracts the most violent and depraved people in the country and that it brings out the worst in everybody that works for it. I think anarcho-capitalists are equally guilty of misjudging the character of humans, and I think this quote illustrates that:

"Nonetheless, if the contract theory of government is correct, the vast majority of individuals can agree that they should settle these issues not through force, but rather through an orderly procedure (such as is provided by periodic elections).

But if this does indeed describe a particular population, why would we expect such virtuous people, as consumers, to patronize defense agencies that routinely used force against weak opponents?  Why wouldn’t the vast bulk of reasonable customers patronize defense agencies that had interlocking arbitration agreements, and submitted their legitimate disputes to reputable, disinterested arbitrators?  Why wouldn’t the private, voluntary legal framework function as an orderly mechanism to settle matters of “public policy”?

Again, the above description would not apply to every society in history.  But by the same token, such warlike people would also fail to maintain the rule of law in a limited State."

I don't agree with the contract theory of government, but in this quote you fail to address why the people with a government choose not to use force. The answer is the government would crush them like a bug otherwise. The government cannot be defeated in physical conflict by any private individual or organization, therefore people tend to behave peacefully. The cost of taking property by coercion is too high.

Mammals have been fighting over territory and food - property - for tens of millions of years at least. Humans have at least tens of millions of years of genetic programming pressuring us to fight or steal property when it's easier than working to obtain it. Every human has that programming built into their minds to a greater or lesser extent. That genetic programming didn't change in the last couple thousand years. The only thing that stops humans within a country from fighting and stealing to this day is the certainty that government will crush them like a bug, unless they work for the government of course. Communication and weapon advancements has allowed government to control ever larger tracks of land, but this instinct in humans is as strong today as it ever was. We see it all the time with the never-ending wars all over the world.

But in a society where competing police forces couldn't be crushed like a bug by a higher power, the human instinct to fight and steal property would run rampant just as it has throughout millions of years of evolution. The police forces would seize property, consolidate their territory, establish themselves as a government, then fight each other on the borders to further advance their power the same way humans and our ancestors have been doing for millions of years. No amount of rational discussion can change millions of years of genetic programming. People can't just decide to stop being human. This is why rational arguments about liberty fail to move the majority of the population. It's why I try to make appeals to instinct as well as reason in my essays.

Human nature won't allow a society without some form of government. Instinct is the geneses of the state, not reason. There's no such thing as a human society without government, no matter how much we wish there was. Government is older than humanity. Wolves have pack leaders. Great apes have leaders and a hierarchy of authority. Humans have innumerable types of government, and we can change the people, the rules or the form, but there's no such thing as a society without it. The best we can hope for is to create the smallest, weakest government we can that still has enough power to fend off all internal and external predators, then tie it at the end of a long pole and try to keep control of it."

Here he talks about the legal system in such a society. Here he talks about the appeals process in such a society.