Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

President Obama's recently resigned chief economist says the tsunami will create a temporary economic boom. The failure of Larry Summers to understand the broken window fallacy is scandalous.

REGULATION:

We often use the ditch digger example to show how dumb Keynesianism is. Maybe it makes sense to use Bastiat's sunlight example. The government could block the sun to stimulate spending on light bulbs. Since the sun heats the earth, it would have the wonderful side effect of ending global warming. Both our economic and environmental problems would solved. I think this is a useful way to ridicule Keynesianism. It worked for Bastiat.

After Microsoft kept charging anti-trust against Google, it opened a lobbying office to protect itself. Now it spends $5.2 million a year lobbying. It climbed deeply into bed with President Obama, and for that, Republicans want to investigate it. I'm a little surprised a Democrat who isn't from Washington state is going after it. What Google hasn't learned yet is corporations have to pay tribute to both parties.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Inflation is theft. Article refutes all supposed benefits.

I love these articles showing just how wrong Ben Bernanke has been in his predictions, especially saying there was no housing bubble. Of course all these were lies. He wasn't wrong. He was lying. Like all aristocrats, that's his job.

POLICE STATE:

TSA discovers some nude-scanners emitting 10x the radiation they expected.

"The TSA says that the records reflect math mistakes and that all the machines are safe. Indeed, even the highest readings listed on some of the records — the numbers that the TSA says were mistakes — appear to be many times less than what the agency says a person absorbs through one day of natural background radiation."

Trust them. What's a little cancer going to hurt?

TSA claims the power to strip search every American traveler.

"The Department of Homeland Security told a federal court that the agency believes it has the legal authority to strip-search every air traveler. The agency made the claim at oral argument in EPIC's lawsuit to suspend the airport body scanner program. The agency also stated that it believed a mandatory strip-search rule could be instituted without any public comment or rulemaking."

As bad as things are, they can and will get worse.

FOREIGN POLICY:

Recommendation for Arab revolutionaries to copy Swiss government, not American.

"US-style regulatory democracy is a government-intensive approach that seeks to regulate almost every facet of human behavior and uses concerns for people's "safety" as a justification for tremendous authoritarianism at home and I might add for our Middle East friends, a neocon military policy of aggression, occupation and natural resource control abroad.

The representative features of democracy also have major flaws because this model allows powerful domestic special interests at home or foreign power elites to easily buy off a majority of parliament members and control the government and monetary policies of the nation state. Just as your dictators or monarchies have been controlled by Western interests allowing the pillaging of your natural resources, it is a very simple matter to buy majority control of representatives who should be representing the citizens but instead sell their souls to outside interests.

The worst problem with US-style democracy is the illusion that individuals or voters have power or control over the government. Yes, you get to vote and protest which on the surface might appear an improvement over a government structure controlled by a few at the top but this brings up the fatal weakness of regulatory and representative democracy as is practiced in Europe and the West today.

In order to create the illusion of benefits to voters, these democracies have to borrow massive amounts of money to buy votes and benefits today and most of the burdensome costs are placed on future generations. Therefore sovereign-debt-financed democracy can only exist as long as investors are willing to purchase the treasury debt obligations to finance this kind of welfare/warfare state. Heavily indebted Europe and America are now rapidly reaching the end of this fatal debt Ponzi scheme cycle as the current and future tax revenues cannot service the debt.

The end of the debt spiral is here for the western democracies and this is why the world economy is crashing and inflation is now destroying the ability of the working poor around the world to feed themselves."

Very concise.

"If our system of democracy worked, America would have a balanced budget and we wouldn’t be facing national bankruptcy. Our dollar would be strong, our free-market economy prosperous and we wouldn’t be building empires, propping up dictators, controlling your oil or invading your territory."

Absolutely.

"You see, here in the United States, we throw the bums out every 2 and 4 years without ever changing anything."

That's not true. We re-elect 90 percent of the same crooks every 2, 4 and 6 years and we wonder why nothing changes.

Report that Mubarak's government in Egypt bombed Christians and blamed the attacks on the Muslim Brotherhood to foment sectarian violence, justify his state of emergency and get more funding from the US.

"In recent years, the Regime in Washington, using what it unblushingly calls terrorism "facilitators," has staged a series of ersatz terrorist plots intended to create the impression that America is under siegeby implacable Jihadist enemies."

Lots of reading to do.

POLITICS:

On government corruption:

"Barack Obama, the man with "the most important job in the world", sure does seem to have a lot of free time on his hands. He recently played his 60th round of golf since becoming president. Obama has also become the first U.S. president to ever produce his own beer. Obama certainly does seem to be enjoying the high life right now. During his first two years in office, Obama enjoyed a total of 10 separate vacations that stretched over a total of 90 vacation days. Wouldn't it be great if we all were given that much vacation time?"

I'd prefer it if he spent all his time on vacation.

MISC:

For a long time, the US banned sales of supercomputers to China as weapons. Now China builds the fastest supercomputers. Now China is using Chinese microprocessors in its supercomputers. Pretty soon China will ban sales of them to the US.

Principles which enabled Americans to build the greatest country in history but which government has undermined.

""Live and let live" works only when it is not "live and let live at my expense." Faith in the politics of plunder has steadily replaced men's confidence in both versions of the invisible hand. It has therefore displaced the older outlook. The messianic state has become the do-gooder state, or the nanny state, or the caretaker state."

I definitely prefer the invisible hand of the marketplace to the heavy hand of government.

Article from July 2001 predicts that WWIII would be a war by the west against Muslims.

"Vietnam is possibly the major reason why the Iraq attack ended so quickly; quick withdrawal obviated any danger that ground troops might get stuck in a major tar baby. But when you're sticking your nose absolutely everywhere it doesn't belong, there are lots of ways to get it bloodied. My guess is that something resembling a Crusade is developing against those who live in the Koran Belt. It won't be overtly religious like the crusades of the Middle Ages, but it will have major cultural undertones. And there's every prospect it will be highly unconventional in nature."

Prescient. Osama bin Laden hated US troops in Saudi Arabia. From an article about the withdraw of US troops from Saudi Arabia:

"It was a major grievance cited by Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network, which Washington blames for the September 11, 2001 attacks on US cities."

Like most Americans, I wasn't paying attention.

"It's a truism that the best defense is a good offense. But it's only true once you're in an active war and are trying to win it. Regrettably, the U.S. is confusing a good offense with running around the world giving offense, and it will only result in starting a war.The only defense against the kind of attack that will open the next conflict is, frankly, to give the attacker no reason to attack. Does Argentina, or Canada, or Italy, or Thailand or, really, any country in the world besides the U.S., have reason to fear a massive ABC [atomic, biological, chemical - LIW] attack? The answer is no. Sure, the Indians and the Pakistanis, the Chinese and the Taiwanese, the North and South Koreans could attack each other. But the source of the threat is discrete. Only the U.S. is running around the world, whacking a hundred different hornets nests."

Boy, did blowback bite us.

"A major power could get away with this in the past. The most the natives could do in retaliation was assassinate the odd dignitary or ambush the odd patrol. But the world has changed. Now, if you antagonize a group badly enough, they're entirely capable of bringing the war to your home ground. The World Trade Center bombing, which should have, by all rights, been a success, and the USS Cole bombing, which was a stunning success, are only the most trivial examples of what's in store."

I wonder what Casey thought of this essay after 9/11. It's amazing how accurate it is.

"Not surprisingly, the Muslims see their lands and culture as having been under constant attack since the Crusades of the Middle Ages. The romantic image of knights in armor battling to free the Holy Land from the infidel is reversed in their eyes. They see hordes of unwashed European barbarians having invaded their homeland on a pretext, intent on rape, pillage, murder and wholesale looting. And, being as objective as possible about it, one has to credit their view.And that was just the start of the Crusades, which continue to this day in the eyes of Muslims. Over the last two centuries, European armies have run roughshod over every Muslim country, now replaced by American armies. The "ragheads" and "kaffirs" in question don't like it any more than Americans would if the Iraqis were bombing New York every day, and had a "no fly" zone set up over the Deep South to protect a Black separatist movement in the area."

Before we can win the war on terror, we have to recognize that the US government has been the aggressor for decades. Once we recognize that, we can win the war on terror by ending US government aggression. It's not like WWII. You couldn't defeat Germany by refusing to fight. But we'll stop the terrorist attacks by stopping the aggression that motivates them to attack us. Obviously that won't stop them all, but once we end US government aggression, we can engage mainstream Muslims in mutually beneficial voluntary exchange, get them on our side, and they'll help hunt down and kill or capture the remaining terrorists. And the hunters shouldn't be military or CIA. They should be private sector actors who have received letters of Marque from Congress. Let's unleash the power of the American entrepreneur on these remaining terrorists instead of the grossly corrupt and incompetent government.

Interest is not only the price of borrowing money, it's also a measure of the discount of future goods versus present goods.