Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

A former government supporter realizes the truth:

"I have witnessed the loss of jobs as a direct result of regulations by unnamed and unelected bureaucrats, who are backed up by threats of prosecution from the government. Our government is stifling job creation."

Welcome to libertarianism.

HEALTH CARE:

I don't want edible RFID tags in my food.

Changing from a pyramid to a plate is worthless because the government is still pushing grains.

New strain of E-coli killing people in Britain. How's that government control of the food supply working out for you?

In an article describing how experts are destroying our health care system, we get this wonder definition of expert:

"Drawing from Hayek's analysis and my own personal experience I have determined that the way to become an expert is as follows: don't challenge the prevailing orthodoxy of the institution; learn the history, underlying principles, and the inner workings of the institution; regurgitate the orthodoxy as you've been taught — it's best if you can do this in some sort of thesis paper; and finally, write a book, get yourself on CSPAN, and, if you're lucky, get appointed to a presidential committee."

Sounds like a super-sycophant.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

International carbon market falling. This is a good thing, taking resources from the corrupt political economy back into the productive private economy. Let's hope it collapses completely.

POLICE STATE:

Criticism of the Patriot Act and statism in general.

How politics infects police investigations and why private investigation firms would be superior.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

It's not often I think an article from the Mises Institute is dumb, but this one is dumb.

"Presumably, the goal [of laws against employing illegal immigrants] is to send the message that illegal immigrants need to move on down the road."

The goal is to encourage them to go to their home countries where they can apply to come here legally if they want. If the chose to become criminals instead of leaving, then they will be captured, deported and forbidden from ever returning. He doesn't even list the worst problem with illegal immigrants: many illegally vote and they tend to vote to increase the size of government. We have enough problems with Americans doing that. We don't need to add to our problems with big government by allowing illegal immigrants to pile on.

WAR:

It looks like a full-fledged civil war has broken out in Yemen.

POLITICS:

If book sales were votes, Ron Paul would win. But they're not.

MISC:

I completely understand why people are frustrated with the giant corporations. Their chieftains are part of the ruling class. It’s impossible to tell where the government ends and those corporations begin. I call them the sheriff of Nottingham’s tax collectors. I'm sure those tax collectors enjoyed thriving commerce protected from competition thanks to their partnership with the sheriff as well. They aren’t victims of government. They are eager partners with government. And it’s impossible for any individual to document all the ways in which these corporate chieftains partner with government to loot us, so if a guy can only come up the example that Taco Bell profits from corn subsidies to express his frustration with the partnership between the giant corporation and government, I get that. Each corporation probably has thousands of ways it partners with government, if not more. Why do you think every law the feds pass now is 2,000 lines long? At least he understands that Taco Bell wouldn’t exist in its current form without its partnership with government. Good for him. That won’t stop me from buying tacos there if I get a craving at midnight though.

FDR's brand of fascism.

"It is no wonder, then, as Professor Garraty writes, that "during the first years of the New Deal the German press praised him [Roosevelt] and the New Deal to the skies. … Early New Deal policies seemed to the Nazis essentially like their own and the role of Roosevelt not very different from the Führer's."America under FDR did not, of course, follow Germany and Russia on that fateful road to the bitter end. The main reason for this lies, as scholars such as Seymour Martin Lipset and Aaron L. Friedberg have recently written, in our deeply rooted individualist and antistatist tradition, dating back to colonial and Revolutionary times and never extinguished. Try as he might, Franklin Roosevelt could bend the American system only so far."

That tradition has been badly undermined since then.