Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

Unions love to use the power of coercion to enrich themselves, but they hate it when that power is turned against them.

ECONOMY:

Because of cheap money and increasing regulations, companies are merging at record levels. But most of these mergers will fail because the companies are being misinformed about true savings by central bank manipulated interest rates and by being too big to effectively manage.

"The results of CEO buying sprees spurred by cheap Fed-produced money and credit are not new jobs and new products that make our lives better. These corporate shopping extravaganzas are just wasteful malinvestments that destroy capital."

Another example of how government is destroying our wealth, making the Greater Depression even worse.

"Federal Reserve monetary policy over the last couple decades has not produced real economic growth but instead bubble after bubble — with each bubble (or each group of contemporaneous bubbles) being bigger in aggregate and more damaging than the one that preceded it.As economist Kevin Dowd explains, these bubbles destroy part of the capital stock by diverting capital into economically unjustified uses. The central bank's artificially low interest rates make investments appear more profitable than they really are, and this is especially so for investments with long-term horizons, i.e., in Austrian terms, there is an artificial lengthening of the investment horizon."

Government just keeps doing more and more damage, and we electing the same corrupt political parties to increase the damage.

TAX AND SPEND:

If you count state government spending, government spends nearly half of our GDP which is the level it spent during WWII. But since government spending destroys wealth, it would be more accurate to subtract government spending from GDP, which means government is destroying pretty much everything we now produce.

EDUCATION:

The role government funded education in Tunisia and Egypt played in sparking their revolutions. Government funding of college here is having similar effects: grads can't get jobs.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Yet more fraudulent alarmism about rising temperatures and sea levels. You can bet this study was funded by the government.

POLICE STATE:

British man finds cell phone and turns it in to the police who arrest him for the supposed crime of "theft by finding".

WAR:

Iraqi defector code-named Curveball admits he lied about Saddam's WMD program to get the US to invade and topple him. What's sad about this is it gives Bush political cover for invading even though he was looking for a justification.

FOREIGN POLICY:

The danger in Egypt is Egyptians are trading one tyrant for another instead of dissolving tyrannical institutions. What the people want:

"I note that the cry of the Muslim masses in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere in the Middle East is not for Islamofascism, global Islamic conquest, a global Caliphate, the worldwide establishment of Sharia law, a new holocaust, suicide bombers, and terrorists attacks, but for more freedom—something they supposedly hate us for."

Don't tell the warmongers. The sad truth in Egypt:

"Many Egyptians are still euphoric over the ouster of Gen. Mubarak, known to one and all as "pharaoh."Most of them do not yet seem to have realized that the people who have taken over the regime are the very same generals, policemen and tycoons who ran it under Mubarak."

At the very least, the junta has set themselves up as kingmakers. Or they may never relinquish power.

"The dreaded secret police, or "Mukhabarat," is commanded by Gen. Omar Suleiman, who is widely viewed as America’s and Israel’s man in Cairo. Alongside him are Marshall Tantawi, chief of staff Lieutenant General Enan and Ahmed Shafik, also seen as America’s men on the Nile. The US usually had a backup for its favorite dictators; this writer noted last April that Gen. Omer Suleiman was Mubarak’s US-anointed successor. After Anwar Sadat’s assassination, Gen. Mubarak was quickly engineered into power.
The latter two generals attended the Pentagon’s updated version of the US military’s School of the America’s in Panama that recruited Latin American officers for the CIA. Senior ranks of Egypt’s 465,000-man armed forces and the secret police are believed to receive sizable secret stipends from CIA and the Pentagon."

Like I said, the US government had ducks in a row. It didn't get the second duck, but it got the third.

Female CBS reporter beaten and sexually assaulted by Egyptian mob.

The ineffectiveness of our socialist intelligence agencies. Because they have a monopoly, because they're funded by theft, they're just tools for looting the people on behalf of the ruling class. From their point of view, they get more power and wealth by telling politicians what they want to hear. They get more funding by failing than succeeding. All these institutional problems make them incompetent, and it can't be any other way. This si a long list of failures.

"The spooks were astonished when the Berlin Wall went up, and again when it came down. They did not predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, their principal object of study. What do these guys do all day?"

Not to mention India, Pakistan and North Korea developing nukes.

Diplomatic immunity should not cover murder charges. That's crazy. While this sounds like self-defense to me,  it seems bizarre that diplomatic immunity would be in play.

POLITICS:

Ron Paul raising money for Iowa. This is great news. Ron Paul is right: he's more likely to beat Barack Obama than any other Republican. Winning the Republican nomination is the hard part.

Full CPAC straw poll results paint a picture the press refused to report. For example, 84 percent of those polled said the number one political priority is reducing the size and scope of government.

MISC:

Praise for Crisis and Leviathan which explains how war is the primary tool the ruling class uses to seize power for the government.

The implications of the law of diminishing marginal utility.