Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Aristocrats using the assassination attempt in Arizona as an excuse to stifle incendiary speech. I can understand why. When people point out that government is violence, that it funds itself through armed robbery and that it has no more legitimacy as any other gang of violent robbers, it undermines the legitimacy of the government. It makes people realize that the government gang has been stealing from them and threatening them with or subjecting them to violence their entire lives, and some on the lunatic fringe respond in kind. This is especially true when the different ruling class factions describe the policies of the other faction in honest terms. That penetrates the illusion doubly well. Political correctness is a tool aristocrats use to empower and enrich themselves at our expense. It's why politicians of both parties constantly call for civility in politics unless they can gain advantage by attacking. Honest descriptions of their actions and the nature of government undermine their legitimacy, and that's why we have to use them. Note that the aristocrats never suggest ending their violence against the people when a lunatic strikes back.

RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS:

Aristocrats are also using the attempted assassination as an excuse to ban firearms near an aristocrat. God forbid the people be able to respond in kind to government violence, which was the primary reason the Second Amendment was added to the Constitution.

ECONOMY:

We often hear about the wonder Swedish economy, but apparently that is untrue.
"In an article (unfortunately available in Swedish onlyDownload PDF) published in the Swedish Economics Association's journal Ekonomisk Debatt in 2009, Ratio Institute economists Bjuggren and Johansson show the sad truth. Relying on public data from the government agency Statistics Sweden ("SCB" in Swedish, an acronym standing for the Central Bureau of Statistics) and using a new classification system to denote ownership, they found that there has been no job creation at all in the private sector from 1950 to 2005."
Zero increase in private sector jobs for 55 years? That's horrific.
"In other words, the classifications used by these economists show the effects of the corporate government by identifying what corporations are owned by government and therefore considered, as government-owned corporations, part of the public sector. The data takes the self-employed into account, as well as foreign ownership, both of which are categorized as "private" (whether owned by foreign governments or not)."
Socialist companies - companies owned by the government - are not counted in the private sector as they shouldn't be. I'm not so sure this tells us much then. We often say governments don't create wealth, but it is possible for a company owned by the government to have a profit motive and to operate in a system of voluntary exchange. I just don't know of any examples.

According to the Wall Street Journal and Heritage Foundation, the US has fallen to ninth in their 2011 Index of Economic Freedom behind Denmark, Ireland and Canada of all places.

TAX AND SPEND:

Ben Bernanke sounds like me in this quote:
"The only real question is whether these adjustments will take place through a careful and deliberative process... or whether [they] will be a rapid and painful response to a looming or actual fiscal crisis."
Here's what I wrote in America's Looming Debt Crisis in March of 2008:
"Drastically cutting spending is inevitable. The only questions are when, how we manage it, and how much pain we suffer."
Government spending is going to be dramatically reduce one way or the other: either by choice or by forced default. The sooner we cut the looting, the less pain we'll suffer.

Lord Geithner reports the US government is bankrupt. Duh.
"The U.S. government is insolvent. Who says so? Timothy F. Geithner, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury.
Geithner sent a letter to Congress on Jan. 6, 2011 asking for the debt limit to be raised. If it is not raised, he warned, the U.S. will default on its debt. In his words:
Never in our history has Congress failed to increase the debt limit when necessary. Failure to raise the limit would precipitate a default by the United States."
He didn’t say that the government will be inconvenienced. He didn’t say that the government would be forced to muddle through by delaying payments, raising taxes, and cutting non-obligatory programs and services. He said the government will default. This means that the government doesn’t have enough cash to pay its obligations to the many and sundry persons to whom it owes cash unless Congress authorizes an issue of even more debt."
Don't raise the debt ceiling.

EDUCATION:

The student loan debt bubble.

Enabling students to escape the government monopoly on schools, homeschooling is the hope for America's future, and it works.
"A new study from the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) estimates that there are over two million children currently being home schooled in the United States. The author of the study, NHERI’s president Dr. Brian D. Ray, analyzed data from both state and federal education agencies as well as private home-school groups, concluding that there are as many as 2.346 million home-schooled students across the nation.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2010 there were about 54 million children between the ages of five and 17 in the U.S"
"While public school officials and education “experts” have tried to denigrate the home schooling option as inferior to the tax-funded marvel of public education, both research and anecdotal evidence has demonstrated that children taught at home perform better than their public school counterparts.
For example, a 2009 study by the NHERI found that home schoolers score an average of 34 to 39 percentile points higher than the norm on standardized achievement tests. According to Dr. Ray, who headed up the research, the national average for home-schooled students ranged from the 84th percentile for language, math, and social studies to the 89th percentile for reading."
Just as you would expect.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Global warming frauds' carbon sequestration project is leaking, killing animals and forcing bubbling water to the surface.
"Then there were the explosions."
Is anybody surprised the actions of the frauds are doing more damage than CO2 ever could?

The global warming frauds change the name of their movement again, this time to "climate challenges". If this movement wasn't so scary, it would be hilarious.

First the Met Office was slammed for it's failure to predict the coldest winter in Britain in 100 years. In response, the scrambling Met Office claimed it had secretly warned the aristocrats of this cold winter while publicly predicting a warm winter. This embarrassed the aristocrats, and they don't like to be embarrassed by their bureaucratic henchmen, so they began an investigation in Parliament. Now the BBC has issued a FOIA request of the whole affair. This is shaping up to be another climategate-like scandal.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Government has managed to ruin many lives with its war on pseudoephedrene, but meth use has continued to rise. Exactly as libertarians predicted.

POLICE STATE:

Now government agents are going to shoot lasers into the eyes of citizens who have the temerity to protest government's violence. Don't worry though. The government says the lasers are safe, and bureaucrats would never lie or be mistaken about something like that. Government has never harmed a citizen.

WAR:

Violence in Iraq drops after many US troops withdrawn. Note this isn't attributed to pulling US troops out so US troops are killing fewer people and inciting fewer attacks in return. Our central planners attribute it to Iraq's central planners even though Iraq's central planners were unable to form a central government pretty much all year. This highlights that when governments initiate less violence against citizens, citizens do less violence in response, but central planners don't want us to realize that.

I'm not scared of China's navy. The Chinese government isn't stupid enough to want war with the US. I'm scared of US aristocrats starting that war.
"Now, Beijing’s new anti-ship missiles are putting US carrier battle groups at grave risk if they come too close to the mainland. This writer has observed numerous naval simulation war games and can attest that no surface vessels, particularly not huge carriers, can withstand barrages of high-speed anti-ship missiles fired from 360 degrees. Some will eventually leak through the US Navy’s layered defenses.
In war, offense almost always commands a decisive advantage over defense. Just one large, high-speed anti-ship missile could put a carrier out of action. Both the Chinese and Indian Navies have deployed such powerful anti-ship missiles specifically configured to damage or sink large aircraft carriers.
However, the US Navy is run by carrier admirals who are as loathe to junk their flattops as were battleship admirals early in World War II. The answer clearly is less super-carriers and more small vessels with remotely piloted aircraft. But that sea change will only come slowly."
Carriers are good for blasting third world countries though, and that's probably what the aristocrats want to do. Yemen, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, etc. are more likely targets.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Defense Sec. Gates says North Korea is becoming a direct threat to the US. In other words, for 65 years, North Korea hasn't been a direct threat to the US, but our government has been killing and threatening the North Koreans anyway. No wonder they developed a nuclear weapon to deter our government. The first thing a person should do when he finds he's digging himself into a hole is stop digging. Get our troops out of Korea and let the South Koreans take care of themselves.

POLITICS:

Here is what the aristocrats and their propagandists are trying to keep people from realizing in the wake of the Tuscon assassination attempt.
"The reality to which increasing numbers of people are becoming aware, is that politics is a violent and corrupt racket that functions on generating fears among those to be ruled. Politicians and other government officials are attracted to political careers not because they want to serve others, but because they have their own visions of what would be "good" for such others, and desire the power to enforce by violence – which is the essence of every government – their expectations. Such people easily find – usually within business organizations and labor unions – people who, unable to prosper in a free market grounded in voluntary transactions, are eager to resort to state violence. "Invisible hands" must be replaced by the "iron fist."
Every piece of legislation enacted by congress, every order issued by a court, every action undertaken by government officials – whether at a state, local, or national level – has behind it the power to enforce such edicts or acts by the most violent methods to which such officials deem it necessary to resort. From the cop on the corner, to SWAT teams, to men and women who torture others, to assassins, to those who conduct capital punishment, to military personnel armed with the deadliest of weapons, the state – supported by the special interests who have no qualms about employing such methods to further their interests – is nothing if not the institutionalization of violence."
The state is the institutionalization of violence against the people everywhere it has power. The more violence government initiates against the people, the more people will respond in kind.
"Whenever I hear politicians bemoan such violence, I am reminded of a scene from one of the Godfather films. As Michael Corleone is in church participating in his grandson’s christening, the priest asks him if he rejects violence, to which Corleone answers "yes," even as his henchmen are going about murdering his adversaries. How politicians can, on any moral or intellectually honest grounds, condemn the violence that they daily legislate and fund, is beyond me. When John McCain angrily weighed in on the Tuscon shootings, I was reminded of his 2008 presidential campaign song-and-dance that went "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.""
Corleone was a piker. Our government is the most successful criminal gang in history. No gang has ever stolen the amount of wealth from the people our government has.

MISC:

Google is squandering its wealth on private planes and yachts. The Google guys will regret this one day.

Yet another study correlates second hand smoke with high blood pressure, but mistakes correlation with causality. Maybe stress in the household is the cause. Until somebody identifies a mechanism and that is confirmed by independent researchers, I'm not buying it. It makes no sense.

Comparing how Hoover and Bush's interventions in our economy halted the market's correcting effect on recessions, creating depressions.

The cause of the problem with college football?
"Lost in all the scandals and the hand-wringing is a very simple truth: The problems of major college athletics is directly tied to the dominance of government-run institutions. Of the 66 BCS conference schools — the top of the college football pyramid — 55 are “public” institutions.* That’s 83%. In all of Division I the percentage is slightly lower — I calculated it at 65% a few years ago — but it’s still an overwhelming majority"
Government corrupts everything it touches.

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