Insider trading is no crime, but the Feds like to bust people on it whenever they need to score political points by making it appear they're tough on Wall Street.
"In the current situation, the expert networks allegedly acquired information from present and former managers of various companies, and then gave the so-called "inside" information to clients who then made investments accordingly. But neither the expert network people nor their clients are alleged to have committed any actual acts of theft or fraud. Did the networks steal the information? Did they engage in any acts of trespassing or breaking and entering to acquire that information? Apparently not."Every investor tries to get as much information as possible so he can make money. There's no way that should be a crime. Ignorance is not a benefit to the market.
"This, by the way, is so elementary that it is amazing that more editorialists and pundits do not make note of it. After all, in the newspaper business a great deal hinges on scooping the competition. Indeed, reporters receive prizes for doing this, namely, jumping ahead of the crowd with information only they got a hold of so as to score! They and their editors should be especially keen on condemning federal insider trading laws – by the logic of such laws, scooping would have to be prohibited…"But what's good the goose does not apply to the gander according to the goose. And never doubt these government agents and aristocrats are making insider trades all the time.
FEDERAL RESERVE:
One line summary of Bernanke's failed policy: you can't fix insolvency with liquidity. Our problem isn't lack of money. It's debt.
EDUCATION:
Interesting observation about school bullying:
"Schools exist to teach children two things: conformity and submission to authority. Anything else a child learns is completely incidental. This is why bullying persists. Forcing children to go to school and be around bullies is part of training them to believe they have to submit to horrible people for the rest of their life."I think this bullying is a natural side-effect of the forced regimentation of schools, but it may well be a desired side-effect from the point of view of the bullies in the government.
POLICE STATE:
This is getting stupider. Houston voters voted to remove red light cameras from Houston streets, but a federal judge ordered the cameras to stay. This is a good lesson for people who think government works for our benefit. It does not. Government works for government's benefit, and judges are on team-confiscation. If the city has a contract, it should just buy it out.
More information shows that the FBI was the main force behind the Oregon plot, not the man they arrested.
You know how people who work out at gyms where flip-flops to protect them from germs and fungus on the floor? Think about all those people at airports forced to walk barefoot by the TSA. Being forced to take off my shoes was what convinced me to stop flying.
The farce that TSA makes us safer.
Because all the radiation from nude-scanners is absorbed by the skin, radiation doses on the skin are up to 20 times higher than the TSA claims.
Cincinnati man spends 2.5 hours arguing with TSA agents who finally pass him without a scan or search. So if you go the airport well over 2.5 hours early, you too might be able to avoid scans and gropes and still make your flight. But probably not.
"'As a US citizen, I have the right to move freely within my country as long as I can demonstrate proof of citizenship and have demonstrated no reasonable cause to be detained.'"You shouldn't have to show proof of citizenship, but I recently read that courts consistently hold than citizens must show ID on demand from a police officer. That's a crock.
"As the situation escalated further airport police were called and more senior TSA officials but Mr Kernan refused to back down, remaining calm throughout.
Eventually causing a stand-off between police and TSA officers over who should resolve the situation, Mr Kernan was told by a superviser: 'Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to escort you out of the terminal to the public area.
'You are to stay with me at all times. Do you understand?'
He was then escorted by the police and no less than 13 TSA officer through security without a hand laid on him.
He said: 'And then came the most ridiculous scene of which I’ve ever been a part.
'I gather my things – jacket, scarf, hat, briefcase, chocolates.
We walk over to the staff entrance and he scans his badge to let me through. We walk down the long hallway that led back to the baggage claim area. We skip the escalators and moving walkways.'
He was then waved away by annoyed officers and said: 'In order to enter the US, I was never touched, I was never “Backscatted,” and I was never metal detected."
Congratulations to this man. Nice job.
WAR:
Texas Gov. Rick Perry's desire to invade Mexico reaches a new level of stupidity.
"What the Pentaloons don’t understand, being armed Boy Scouts who believe their own propaganda – “Ooo-rah! Yes sir! Yes sir! Can do, sir!” is that they usually can’t. The chief reason is that people really, really do not like American soldiers invading their countries, wrecking cities and killing their children. The military, which thinks at right angles, cannot wrap its mind around this difficult thought. Thus Americans invariably begin by thinking, “We are right. We are for democracy. We are trying to help these people. Therefore they will love us.”"They still don't understand that the Afghans don't want them there.
"An essential ingredient in our wars is underestimation of the enemy, reflecting a general American contempt for everybody else. Cheese-eating surrender monkeys, that sort of thing. The Viet Cong were rice-propelled paddy maggots who didn’t have a single B-52. Iraq would be a cake walk, the Afghans were louse-ridden towel-headed farmers, and so on."No kidding.
"Here we come to the final error of American military interventions: the belief that everybody wants to be like America, that they want democracy or are capable of it, that we just have to show them how we want them to live and they will gratefully do it."So true again.
FOREIGN POLICY:
Pat Buchanan says its way past time to get out of Korea.
"Unlike 1950, South Korea is not an impoverished ex-colony of Japan. She is the largest of all the "Asian tigers," a nation with twice the population and 40 times the economy of the North."This is security welfare, and welfare of any kind is destructive to both provider and recipient.
"From 1941 to 1989, she played a great heroic role as defender of freedom, sacrificing and serving mankind, a role of which we can be forever proud. But having won that epochal struggle against the evil empire, we found ourselves in a world for which we were unprepared. Now, like an aging athlete, we keep trying to relive the glory days when all the world looked with awe upon us.
We can't let go, because we don't know what else to do. We live in yesterday – and our rivals look to tomorrow."And we're quickly fading into the history we emulate.
POLITICS:
Former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson may pick up Ron Paul's mantle as the libertarian Republican leader for 2012.
MEDIA:
Commentary on how the media reports on the police state:
"What’s missing from all of these celebrations is an iota of questioning or skepticism. All of the information about this episode — all of it — comes exclusively from an FBI affidavit filed in connection with a Criminal Complaint against Mohamud. As shocking and upsetting as this may be to some, FBI claims are sometimes one-sided, unreliable and even untrue, especially when such claims — as here — are uncorroborated and unexamined."This is why the media is in bed, literally and figuratively, with government, and it's why the mainstream media is dying. It gets all its news from the government. It does no work. It adds no value. It's a parrot for government. It can't afford to bite the hand that feeds it. Therefore it's the propaganda organ of government.
This is why WikiLeaks is so valuable. Not only does it inform, it makes government squirm like government makes us squirm. It looks like government is cyber-attacking WikiLeaks.
MISC:
The effect of patents and copyright on Hollywood. It's good to see Kinsella writing about the perils of centralized innovation. This is something that so far the mises.org anti-IP crew has failed to address, imo.
Spanish woman has laid claim to ownership of the sun and intends to charge royalties for anybody who uses it.
The laws of bureaucracy.
"As a 40-year student of bureaucracy, beginning with Ludwig von Mises's great little book, Bureaucracy (1944), I have come to recognize a series of near laws governing bureaucracy. This one is, as far as I can see, unbreakable, comparable to the law of gravity.
Some bureaucrat will enforce a written rule in such a way as to make the rule and the bureaucracy seem either ridiculous, tyrannical, or both.
There is no way to write the rules so that some bonehead in the system will not find a way to become a thorn in someone's side – a thorn that cries out for removal.
There are corollaries to this iron law of bureaucracy.
The bureaucrat in question will not back down unless forced to from above.
His superiors will regard any public resistance to the interpretation as an attack on the bureaucracy's legitimate turf.
The bureaucracy's senior spokesman will defend the policy as both legitimate and necessary.
Politicians will be pressured by voters to have the policy changed.
The bureaucracy will tell the politicians that disaster will follow any such modification of the policy.
The public will finally get used to it.
The politicians will switch to some other national crisis.
The internal manual will then be rewritten by the senior bureaucrats to make the goof-ball application mandatory.
Senior management will increase the budget so as to enforce the new policy.
Politicians will acquiesce to this increased budget.
This leads me to North's law of bureaucratic expansion:
Any outrageous interpretation of a bureaucratic rule, if widely resisted by the public, will lead to an increased appropriation for the bureaucracy within two fiscal years.
There is an exception.
If the enforcement of the interpretation requires major expenditures for new equipment, the process will take only one fiscal year."This is the nature of government.
"It is fun to imagine that the TSA screeners get their jollies by subjecting people to the process. This is unlikely. Most employees in a bureaucracy want to decrease the number of tasks they are required to perform. Like all of us, the want more for less. Adding a step is not in their self-interest.
On the other hand, it is in the self-interest of their supervisor. Now we come to another law of bureaucracy, an extension of Parkinson's famous law: "Work expands so as to fill the time allotted for its completion." Professor Parkinson had another law, less known but more rigorous: promotions take place when a bureaucrat increases the number of employees subordinate to him. Parkinson worked out the numbers in the 1950s. It was no joke. There is a large body of academic articles devoted to this rule."Let's not confuse the general with the specific. Of course screeners want to do less in general, but they still enjoy forcing hot, young women into the nude scanners to take pictures of them.
I'm all for improving my diet, but I've never heard of anything like this super-nutrient astaxanthin. It comes in krill oil.
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