Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

How the information age and the low cost of communication thanks to the internet is destroying the nation-state, all of which are built on lies.

"That which we take for granted today is revolutionary. Much of it did not exist during the dot-com bubble. It appeared after that Federal Reserve-created bubble had popped."

This is critical to understand. During the dot.com bubble, real resources, labor and capital, were destroyed by malinvestment: investment in companies that provided no value that would not have occurred without artificially low interest rates created by the Fed. Only after that bubble popped, ending the period of malinvestment, did the internet revolution really take off. Bubbles destroy wealth while creating the illusion of wealth. The recession afterward realocates resources for the real creation of wealth.

ECONOMY:

Mises scholar explains the trouble with economic statistics.

"Economists have been grousing a good deal lately about the deteriorating quality of basic economic statistics — official data on prices, incomes, employment, productivity, and poverty, among other things — and about the lack of government funding to remedy the problem. On its face, the complaint seems reasonable and practical.

But I wonder. Having used official economic statistics from time to time for some 35 years, I would miss them if they were to disappear. Yet, however put out I might be as an economic analyst, I suspect that the world would be a happier place had these figures never been created. Certainly the statistics are often inaccurate or otherwise flawed and hence misleading. An even more serious consideration, however, is that the official statistics help to provide rationales for pernicious policy making."

And here's a perfect example: government's unemployment rate drops significantly in January even though almost no jobs were created.

""It's like the unemployment rate is falling for all the wrong reasons," Hoffman said. "Who the hell can make sense of this report? It's distorted. It's definitely distorted.""

"One reason for January's sharp drop in unemployment is that more workers than ever have grown so discouraged that they have simply stopped looking for work. If an unemployed American stops searching for work, they are no longer counted as officially unemployed. Indeed, the pool of workers who have given up the hunt has reached a stunning new low for this recession: nearly 5 million have dropped out of the labor force completely."

Why would government calculate statistics like that? One reason is to make the government look good. It makes unemployment look lower than it really is. Shadowstats.com puts the real unemployment rate around 23 percent. Another reason is to justify government interference in the economy. Government corrupts everything it touches including statistics.

"Such information is unnecessary for the conduct of a just government but well-nigh indispensable for the operation of a predatory one.[3]"

Yes.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

USGS studying climate change because government can never waste enough money promoting this fraud.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Report that hundreds of thousands of Egyptians protest against Mubarak with no signs of Mubarak supporters. I guess he realized paying them was futile. Bloomberg estimates Mubarak's family fortune at $40-$70 billion. Needless to say, every dime of this money was looted from the people at the point of the government's gun.

LOCAL:

Crews have been repaving and building new road on I-75 through Dayton for years, and now more of the new road has to be closed for more repairs. This isn't the first time this has happened. Government is so transparent. Government will keep I-75 under construction until it goes bankrupt. They'll never finish because they don't want to finish. Road repair and upgrade is a lucrative looting business.