Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Apparently the FCC is considering pushing net neutrality just days before Christmas while everybody is distracted with the holiday. I hope this leak is a trial balloon that gets popped. This is bad news.

RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS:

Man imprisoned for brandishing a weapon on his own property to ward off a trespasser. Government has turned our country upside-down.

SOCIALISM:

This claim by union leaders that TSA isn't doing enough to protect poor, little TSA employees from the big, bad public looks like a transparent ploy on the part of the union leaders to entice TSA workers to unionize.

TAX AND SPEND:

Here's a little fact that should be self-evident, but it never hurts to write it down and pass it on:

"In the late 1980s, some economists at Ohio University got together to do a little study for the congressional Joint Economic Committee. They wanted to know what happens when the government increases taxes and therefore collects more money for its coffers. Did government spending grow or did our debts shrink? These bean counters worked and slaved over their research and calculators and came up with something that is now known as the $1.58 study. This is what they found: "Every new dollar of new taxes led to more than one dollar of new spending by Congress. Subsequent revisions of the study over the next decade found similar results.""

That's the nature of government and something to keep in mind whenever an aristocrat claims he wants to raise taxes to balance the budget.

Warren Buffet wants rich people to pay higher taxes, but nothing is stopping him and his fellow billionaires from donating a bunch of money to the government. But I would ask him not to. The more money takes out of the productive private sector and hands over to the parasitic political economy, the poorer we'll all be. I think Buffet knows who butters his bread, the government, and he's working hard to win points with the aristocrats.

I don't agree with the claim that nobody knows what taxes they'll have to pay come Jan. 1. Of course we know. The Bush tax cuts are going to expire. Until Congress does something to change that, you plan for that.

REGULATION:

Regulators have held up Comcast's purchase of NBC Universal for a year, but one of the bureaucrats responsible for the hold up calls Comcast's naming of a new management staff for NBC Universal before government has blessed the deal "presumptuous and arrogant". I bet he's incapable of grasping the irony.

HEALTH CARE:

Notes on the the FDA's misnamed Food Safety boondoggle and banning caffeine.

Americans' salt intake hasn't changed in 50 years.

"The study also noted that although Americans' salt intake has remained relatively constant for almost 50 years, their rates of high blood pressure and heart disease have increased in the past 20 years. But America's ever-rising obesity rates may play a more critical role in this rise than salt intake, the researchers said."

"The average salt intake of the Americans in the Harvard study is similar to that found in international studies, the editorial said. This similarity suggests that humans may need a set amount of salt and are hard-wired to seek it, said McCarron, an adjunct professor with the department of nutrition at University of California-Davis.

McCarron led a 2009 study that analyzed urine samples in 19,151 people in 33 countries over a 24-year period. The average daily sodium intake was 3,726 milligrams a day, even across diverse populations and diets, and with no evidence of change over time. In a 12-year study of more than 13,000 people from Switzerland, also published in 2009, people averaged around 3,680 milligrams a day. "It's spooky how consistent this number is," said McCarron."

Salt regulations aren't about safety. They're about control.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Al Gore admits corn ethanol was a bad policy. Knock me over with a feather. It's not often such an accomplished crook admits that stealing people's money at the point of a gun and using it to enrich others is bad policy.

POLICE STATE:

More evidence the nude scanners are not about safety; they're about enabling the ruling class to lord power over the rest of us.

"'Why not just distort the image into something grotesque so that there isn't anything titillating or exciting about it?' asks Wattenburg, adding that the modification is so simple that 'a 6-year-old could do the same thing with Photoshop... It's probably a few weeks' modification of the program.' Wattenburg said he was rebuffed when he offered the concept to Department of Homeland Security officials four years ago."

What would the perverts do if they couldn't have real nude photos to ogle?

Now even George Will is jumping in the anti-TSA bandwagon. I'm happy for all the followers, but you can tell the people with principles from the people without: the people with principles have been against the TSA all along. I gave up flying after I was forced to remove my shoes one time. The bloggers at lewrockwell.com led the way in documenting the abuses of the nude scanners and gropes. There's no reason for any of it but oppression. The people who jumped on the bandwagon after passengers became outraged are just opportunists.

It turns out that the radiation from TSA nude-scanners is as likely to kill you as a terrorist.

POLICE STATE:

I don't know why Boortz is so convinced Obama would beat Palin in 2012. I don't think this is a fait accompli by any stretch of the imagination. I hope neither of them run, but I think this matchup is highly likely. Antipathy toward Bush and Republicans empowered the most radical leftist in our lifetimes to win the Democrat nomination and ultimately the presidency. Now even worse antipathy toward Obama and Democrats is likely to lead to the nomination of a perceived Republican extremist like Palin. And I see no reason why that antipathy couldn't put her in the White House where she'll immediately earn even worse antipathy because she's not radical in the least.

MISC:

From Boortz:

"If you are an ex-firefighter who has retired early, pulling down $74,624 a year in disability pay for asthma and other lung ailments, it is probably best not to be featured in the news competing in martial-arts kickboxing matches ..."

Power corrupts. Government is power. Therefore government corrupts. This is what government has done to the time-honored noble profession of firefighters.

This guy seems to get it:

"It is not incumbent on a diagnostician to prescribe a remedy, and it would be quackery for him to do so when he has misgivings as to its curative value. It may be that the struggle between Society and the State is inevitable; it may be in the nature of things for the struggle to continue until mutual destruction clears the ground for the emergence of a new Society, to which a new political establishment attaches itself to effect a new doom.

Perhaps the malignancy is inherent in man. It would be silly to suggest that four-footed males, driven by the reproductive urge, ought to know better than engage in deathly battles over possession of females, and it is possible that the historical struggle between the social organization and the political organization is likewise meant to be."

Obviously both freedom and following a leader have both conferred survival advantages on populations throughout mammal, ape and human evolution, so we're stuck with a constant struggle between the two. The way to improve our lives is to identify and implement specific reductions in the power of government, tie the resulting improvements in our lives to those reductions in power, then use that as a basis for pushing for further reductions. If we can tie effect to cause, people will act to improve their lives. The problem we have in the US right now is we don't have time for a long process of this. We have to dramatically reduce the size and scope of government ASAP or America as we know it will not survive. Fortunately for us we have a powerful tool to help us: the Constitution. If we could elect a president who would nullify every unconstitutional program, bureaucracy, regulation, law, etc., we could quickly return to a trajectory of greatness. Unfortunately I've seen no evidence voters have reached that point yet. Maybe by 2012 they will have, there's always hope, but I strongly doubt it. And states might be pulling out of the union before 2016. 2012 might be the last opportunity to save America as we know it.

"Under primitive conditions, he relies on his own powers of resistance to robbery, his personal strength plus such weapons as he has at his disposal. That is his Government. Since this protective occupation interferes with his primary business of producing satisfactions, and is frequently ineffective, he is quite willing to turn it over to a specialist when the size and opulence of Society call for such a service. Government provides the specialized social service of safeguarding the marketplace.

The distinctive feature of this service is that it enjoys a monopoly of coercion. That is the necessary condition for the conduct of the business; any division of authority would defeat the purpose for which Government is set up."

This is a pretty good analysis up to this point, but it fails to acknowledge that government evolves out of family. Even a primitive man doesn't trust only to himself for defense against predation, unless he's been isolated for some reason, in which case he'll quickly die. He trusts to his family. Then to his extended family. Then to his clan. And all of those institutions have leaders. A father. A patriarch. A clan chief. This forms his government. The ideal of government is born from these familial instincts, and that's why we can no more abolish government than we can abolish family.

"Yet, the fact remains that Government is a human organization, consisting of men who are exactly like the men they serve. That is, they too seek to satisfy their desires with the minimum of exertion, and they too are insatiable in their appetites. In addition to the run-of-the-mill desires that possess all men, Government personnel acquire one peculiar to their occupation: the adulation showered on them because they alone exercise coercion. They are people apart.

The honorifics that stem from the exercise of power arouse a passion for power, particularly with men whose capacities would go quite unnoticed in the marketplace, and the temptation is strong to expand the area of power; the negative function of protection is too confining for men of ambition. The tendency then in the world of officialdom is to assume a capacity for positive functions, to invade the marketplace, to undertake to regulate, control, manage, and manipulate its techniques.

In point of fact, it does nothing of the kind, since the techniques are self-operating, and all that political power can accomplish by its interventions is to control human behavior; it effects compliance by the threat of physical punishment. That, indeed, is the be-all and end-all of political power. Yet, such is the makeup of the human that he looks up to, and sometimes worships, the fellow human who dominates his will, and it is this acquired sense of superiority that is the principal profit of officialdom."

In other words, power corrupts. But because the governed see the people in government through the lens of family leaders, they fail to acknowledge it unless the corruption passes the threshold of that instinct. And the act of voting for somebody further blinds them to that corruption. That's why people recognize that all other politicians are corrupt, but they continue to vote for theirs over and over.

"The transition from negative Government to positive State is marked by the use of political power for predatory purposes. In its pursuit of power, officialdom takes into consideration the ineluctable something-for-nothing passion, and proceeds to win the support of segments of Society bent on feathering their nests without picking feathers."

This the first good definition of state I've read, and it makes sense how the mises.org people use it.

"The instrument that puts the State into a bargaining position with its favorites is taxation. In the beginning, when the simple community sets up Government, it is admitted that its operatives cannot be productive and therefore have to be supported by the marketplace. Services must be paid for.

But the manner of paying for Government service poses a problem: taxes are compulsory charges, not voluntary payments, and their collection has to be entrusted to the very people who live by them; the compulsory power entrusted to them is used in the collection of their own wages."

This observation about the importance of taxes is why I advocate taking away the federal government's power to tax. As the agent of the states, the federal government should be forced to subsist on voluntary contributions from the states.

"Pushing on fast through the biography of political institutions, the practice of buying the support of privileged and subsidized groups sloughs off when the State becomes self-sufficient; that is, when the marketplace is completely under its domination. The State then becomes the only privileged class. Custom and necessity reduce Society to a condition of subservience to the bureaucracy and the police, the components of the State."

This is the tipping point we've passed in the US. Only a radical response by voters like the one I hoped for above will save us. Have many times have I written that our government is conquering us?

"This condition is currently known as totalitarianism, but it is in fact nothing but conquest, the conquest of Society by the State. So that, whether or not the State originated in conquest, as some historians hold, the end result of unchecked political institutions is the same: Society is enslaved."

This is the first essay I've read by somebody who really gets it. Excepting the omission that our instinct for government grows out of our family instinct, this guy seems to really get it.

"Sometimes nature will for a while impose abstinence, but the record shows that man is quite capable of overcoming such obstacles to his ambitions. The obstacle he does not seem able to overcome is his inclination to predation, which gives rise to the institution of the State; it is this institution that ultimately induces a climate of uselessness, of lack of interest in striving, and thus destroys the civilization it feeds upon. Or so the record shows: every civilization that declined or was lost carried an all-powerful State on its back."

"At any rate, history tells us, a civilization no more than gets started when a political institution attaches itself to it, feeds on it, and in the end devours it. And the roundelay starts all over again."

There you go. So if we want to reverse this process, we need to nullify every unconstitutional aspect of our federal government somehow, then we need to convince people that the improvement in their lives came from that reduction in the size and scope of government. I like the silver bullet idea of electing a president to do it, but it's not realistic. That's why Tom Wood's book Nullification is so important.