Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

China blocking news of Egyptian revolution for fear one may start there.

SOCIALISM:

How capitalists create socialism.

"Capital consists of labor products set aside to facilitate greater production, and capitalists are those who own and operate such accumulations. In that capacity, they can only benefit society. But the owners of capital have never been satisfied to reap the profits of production. In addition, they have since the beginning of capitalism sought to augment their income by securing from the ruling regime some enforceable special privilege."

That's why businesses are smothered under suffocating regulations. On politicians:

"The State, far from being an impersonal fiction, consists of men who are called politicians but whose inclinations are not unlike those of other men. The only difference between the politician and the rest of mankind is that he is invested with the power to compel other men to do what they do not want to do, or to refrain from doing what they want to do."

But that difference attracts the worst of men to politics. On welfare:

"The trade of privilege for power appealed mostly to the State. The proletariat really never approached the State for privilege; it was actually handed to them by the power-hungry politicians in exchange for their suffrage. Every subsidy to the "poor" (in a democracy) was thought up by a bureaucrat or a candidate for office, the candidate to achieve political preferment, the bureaucrat to improve his prerogatives and his perquisites."

On taxes:

"...the size of the bureaucracy can be used as a measure of State power. The founding fathers were well aware of this phenomenon, and sought to limit the area of State intervention by putting strict limits on its taxing powers. But all that was done away with when the income-tax amendment was added to the Constitution. Without income taxation, socialism is impossible; with it, socialism is inevitable."

On how it ends:

"A society of all thieves is an impossibility; somebody has to produce something for others to steal. But the State does not know that and continues to take as much as it can lay its hands on, through increased taxation or inflation, to assuage its insatiable appetite for power. At long last it levies directly on capital — not satisfied with its take from inflation — and at that point both labor and capital lie down on the job. Why work when there is nothing in it?

It is then that socialism comes into its own; the State takes over the capital structure of the country, or parts of it, in an effort to keep production going so that it will have something to tax. The State must live in its accustomed style. When the State takes over capital it abolishes all privileges, for both capitalists and workers, and its minions then constitute the only privileged class; everybody works for them. Socialism is the end-product of an economy sucked dry by privilege."

Great essay. Short, but it covers a lot of ground.

ECONOMY:

Government has seduced more Americans into massive credit card debt, helping bolster the illusion of an economic recovery. 59.9 percent.

TAX AND SPEND:

As governments decline under massive debt, they are raising taxes on people who try to take their money and flee the country.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

New book lists many benefits of increased atmospheric CO2.

Because all the surface station temperature records are controlled by frauds, because they keep their data and their methodologies secret and because they refuse to address the many criticisms of their temperature records, a new group is creating a new record using a published methodology, significantly more surface station records, and it will be open for all to use, analyze and criticize. This could be a huge deal depending on the results. Hopefully it will blow the frauds out of the water.

It turns out those LED lightbulbs that are part of the government's plan to wipe out incandescent bulbs and therefore have been marketed as eco-friendly are sources of heavy metal pollution.

Al Gore's global warming scam was never about the environment. It was always about money and power.

"It was Gore, speaking before a 2007 U.S. Joint House Energy and Science Committee, who said, "As soon as carbon has a price, you’re going to see a wave of investment in it." It was P.T. Barnum who said, "There’s a sucker born every minute."

It was always about the money. If it took a global hoax, a fraud perpetrated by the United Nations’ IPCC and given the complete support of the mainstream media, so be it.

My question is this: If the government could bring Bernie Madoff to justice for perpetrating a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, why has Al Gore been given a pass for being the face and voice of the global-warming fraud and, by extension, the exchanges established to buy and sell worthless carbon credits? Isn't lying under oath to Congress a crime?"

I assume that's a rhetorical question. Even for the scientists involved, it was always about the money and power. Those scientists who propagated the fraud were rewarded with big taxpayer funded grants and seats in prestigious, taxpayer funded organizations. Government money corrupts everything it touches.

How Republicans cut spending for EPA's CO2 regulations. Let's hope that makes it through.

FOREIGN POLICY:

I can't figure out what happened in Egypt from this article. It's terrible. It's clear Mubarak stepped down, though it tries to muddy that up too. What's unclear is whether Suleiman or the army is in charge. The LA Times asks the pertinent question: Now what? It seems to me that pretty every revolution ends up empowering a government that oppresses and loots the people much like the one the people overthrew. This article claims the army, not Suleiman, is in charge. It looks like the US wins either way. Clearly the US maneuvered Suleiman into the VP slot in hopes he would take over and little would change, but the military is a wholly owned subsidiary of the US too.

Republican leaders refuse to cut aid to the Israeli government.

POLITICS:

A definition of corruption:

"A more meaningful definition – certainly when it comes to political corruption – is: a betrayal of a trust for personal gain."

That sounds like the real definition of representative government too.

"As Tacitus said in the second century A.D., "The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." It's absolutely predictable that as all these governments around the world – and I mean all of them – respond to the ongoing crisis with an ever-accelerating onslaught of new laws, there will be more and more corruption – and frustration with that corruption.Tacitus was right. But he could just as accurately have said, "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state," because lots of laws engender lots of corruption. In other words, corruption isn't the problem. The state and its laws are the problem, to which corruption is an unsavory and unaesthetic – but necessary – solution. Laws create corruption, and corruption engenders laws."

The weight of laws and the amount a government spends are good measures of corruption.

LOCAL:

The war on drugs kills another man. I don't want to diminish the responsibility of the driver, but if heroin was legal, this man would be alive today.

MISC:

Pat Buchanan gives Bush the Younger a history lesson.

Another Icelandic volcano seems poised to blow, and it could dwarf the effects of the last one.