In December of last year, I had a post that linked to an essay by Andrew Napolitano full of “What if?” statements. In this video, he asks many of the same questions on his Freedom Watch show.
What a great rant
February 13, 2012I thoroughly enjoy Don Boudreaux’ letters to editors. Can he vent or what?
Money line: "I’m downright repulsed by the media’s habit of mistaking a person’s celebrity for expertise, popularity for acumen, and visibility for enlightenment."
Dear Democrats: stop the demagoguery
February 12, 2012Because the 1% is already paying its "fair share".
The snippet below comes from a post by Clive Crook about income inequality. He includes some interesting comments about the US tax system. (My emphasis.)
If anything, rich Americans contribute a greater share of taxes than do their peers in other industrialized nations. The top 1 percent of U.S. taxpayers paid 40 percent of federal income taxes in 2007. The top 1 percent of British taxpayers paid 24 percent of the corresponding total.
A new report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows that in the middle of the last decade — i.e., after the Bush tax cuts were introduced — the U.S. income tax was about as strongly redistributive as income taxes in Canada, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden. You might have noticed that the CBO report on top incomes was widely quoted, but one finding got less attention: Between 1979 and 2007, “the federal individual income tax became slightly more progressive.”
The awkward truth is that the U.S. income tax system is anomalous not because it taxes the rich lightly but because it taxes everybody else lightly.
Or put in slightly different terms:
A title that’s too long
January 28, 2012This title of this post at Uncrunched.com could have stopped after the third word. (And follow the link to read Mr. Bridges’ article, too.)
Big Government Sucks Tech Industry Into Their Reality
SOPA/PIPA is on the ropes. Senator Reid postponed a vote on the Senate’s version of the bill next Tuesday, and MPAA CEO Chris Dodd is backtracking and humbled.
Yay. We did it, or nearly have.
But Hollywood still has dozens of laws on the books criminalizing file sharing (read this post by attorney Andrew Bridges pointing out how ridiculous the laws are compared to things like jumping the turnstile on the subway.
Congress is the real winner here. They showed that they can and will pass bills that will cause irreparable harm to the tech industry just because Hollywood is willing to pay them off with huge lobbying dollars. And while SOPA/PIPA may be stalled for now, a big part of the reason is that tech companies got into the lobbying game, too. […]
This is how criminal organizations run protection rackets. Congress is doing just that, only it’s completely legal.
Reductio
January 21, 2012An interesting illustration of how little is being done to manage the US debt-limit crisis.
And there’s an ironic side note in this post from Reason’s blog. The first two paragraphs…
Uncle Sam Tells Americans How to Get Out of Debt
After saddling the country with as much new debt as the rest of the world combined in one year flat, one would think that Uncle Sam wouldn’t have the cojones to dish out debt advice to others. But one would be wrong. In an unwitting self-parody worthy of Froma Harrop on The Daily Show, the Federal Trade Commission has created a step-by-step web guide for Americans “Knee-Deep in Debt.”
The first step, says the agency, which represents a government that went over 800 days without passing a budget, is: create a budget! Get a “realistic assessment of how much money you take in and how much money you spend,” it lectures those in financial doo-doo, seemingly oblivious of the fact that its own bosses have promised $60 trillion to a $100 trillion more in entitlements than the country has money to pay for.
At an impasse?
December 28, 2011Here’s a good column by Robert Samuelson at RealClearPolitics that reflects some of my thoughts on the budget cliff the U.S. seems to be determined to drive over. I think there’s a lot to the argument that the problem is too much spending, rather than not enough revenue; so I’m on the no-tax-hike side of that debate rather than the no-spending-cuts side.
But despite my view of the arguments pro or con, I’ve been wondering about the big picture: how the course of spending and taxes will be changed to avoid a government financial melt-down. There are many ways the situation might be resolved and some of them, as Mr. Samuelson hints at, could be pretty unpleasant.
A Country in Denial About Its Fiscal Future
WASHINGTON — There are moments when our political system, whose essential job is to mediate conflicts in broadly acceptable and desirable ways, is simply not up to the task. It fails. This may be one of those moments. What we learned in 2011 is that the frustrating and confusing budget debate may never reach a workable conclusion. It may continue indefinitely until it’s abruptly ended by a severe economic or financial crisis that wrenches control from elected leaders.
We are shifting from “give away politics” to “take away politics.” Since World War II, presidents and Congresses have been in the enviable position of distributing more benefits to more people without requiring ever-steeper taxes. Now, this governing formula no longer works, and politicians face the opposite: taking away — reducing benefits or raising taxes significantly — to prevent government deficits from destabilizing the economy. It is not clear that either Democrats or Republicans can navigate the change.
Our political system has failed before. Conflicts that could not be resolved through debate, compromise and legislation were settled in more primitive and violent ways. The Civil War was the greatest and most tragic failure; leaders couldn’t end slavery peacefully. In our time, the social protests and disorders of the 1960s — the civil rights and anti-war movements and urban riots — almost overwhelmed the political process. So did double-digit inflation, peaking at 13 percent in 1979 and 1980, which for years defied efforts to control it.
Clueless
December 17, 2011Eric Raymond wrote a great post about the protest over the Stop Internet Piracy Act. Here’s the first half or so – but RTWT.
A government that is big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything away from you – including your Internet freedom.
That’s the thought that keeps running through my head as I contemplate the full-scale panic going on right now about SOPA, the “Stop Internet Piracy Act”.
It’s a bad bill, all right. It’s a terrible bill – awful from start to finish, idiotic to the core, corruptly pandering to a powerful special-interest group at the cost of everyone else’s liberty.
But I can’t help noticing that a lot of the righteous panic about it is being ginned up by people who were cheerfully on board for the last seventeen or so government power grabs – cap and trade, campaign finance “reform”, the incandescent lightbulb ban, Obamacare, you name it – and I have to wonder…
Don’t these people ever learn? Anything? Do they even listen to themselves?
Bill of Rights Day
December 15, 2011Here’s Cato’s quick review of the current state of affairs.
And if you think Mr. Lynch is too pessimistic, see this: Indefinite Military Detention Measure Passes On Bill Of Rights Day.
Five will get you ten that some U.S. citizen will be indefinitely detained by the military – right here in the "homeland" – within the next 5 years. Any takers?
What if?
December 5, 2011Andrew Napolitano, host of Fox’s Freedom Watch talk show, wrote an essay for Taki’s magazine. I don’t watch Freedom Watch (since I don’t watch television) but I enjoy the clips of it I see on YouTube. I think the Judge is a bit of a firebrand – which will become evident if you read the whole essay – but I also think that may be a good attitude these days.
Here’s the first paragraph to whet your appetite:
What if the Constitution No Longer Applied?
What if the whole purpose of the Constitution was to limit the government? What if Congress’s enumerated powers in the Constitution no longer limited Congress, but were actually used as justification to extend Congress’s authority over every realm of human life? What if the president, meant to be an equal to Congress, has become a democratically elected, term-limited monarch? What if the president assumed everything he did was legal just because he’s the president? What if he could interrupt your regularly scheduled radio and TV programming for a special message from him? What if he could declare war on his own? What if he could read your emails and texts without a search warrant? What if he could kill you without warning?
Litigating for liberty
November 29, 2011Here’s an interesting video marking the Institute for Justice‘s 20th anniversary.
Don Boudreax tells why
November 12, 2011I enjoy reading Boudreax’ & Russ Roberts’ blog, Cafe Hayek. In this clip, Boudreax gives the basis for the outlook he so consistently espouses there. (His letters to editors are great.)
libertarianism.org
November 5, 2011The Cato Institute has launched at new site at that URL. In its own words:
Libertarianism.org is a resource on the theory and history of liberty, broadly construed. Libertarianism takes many forms and the blogs, essays, and videos here explore them all.
Here’s their "60 Second Introduction".
And David Boaz delivers an Introduction to Libertarian Thought in a 20-minute video on the Introduction page.
It looks interesting and will bear watching & reading, I think.
Not quite the DMV in Pennsylvania
September 3, 2011This is a bit of follow-up to my Not quite the DMV post, which was about visiting a state-run liquor store in Iowa in the 70s.
Jacob Sullum asked an amusing question this week at Reason’s blog about Pennsylvania’s fumbling attempts to update how wine is sold there.
How Does a Wine Monopoly Lose Money?
In a report issued today, Pennsylvania Auditor General Jack Wagner says the state liquor control board’s wine vending machines, a wonderful illustration of what happens when a government monopoly tries to act more like a business, are operating at a loss, costing taxpayers more than $1 million since they were introduced a year ago. “We think the wine kiosk program has failed,” Wagner said at a press conference, “and it needs dramatic, radical changes if the program is going to continue to exist.” […]
When they are working, the kiosks dispense a limited selection of wines at limited locations and times (not on Sunday, of course!) to customers who present ID, look into a camera monitored by a state employee, breathe into a blood-alcohol meter, and swipe a credit card. The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (PLCB) originally expected to have 100 kiosks in grocery stores throughout the state, each selling 30 to 50 bottles a day. But only 32 machines were ever up and running at one time, and only 15 manged to hit the bottom end of that sales target.
The Reason article does not say that all wine sold in Pennsylvania is sold through these kiosk machines. The kiosks are placed in stores that aren’t operated by the state. Hence all the nonsense about ID, camera monitoring and breathalyzer testing. Can you believe all that? The state-employee-monitored camera is a nice touch, isn’t it? Straight out of 1984.
Gee, I wonder why they’re not selling much wine? Want to bet on how many repeat customers the kiosk machines get? I wouldn’t use them twice.
There are state-run stores, though, where wine is sold. Here’s an amusing rant by Rob Dreher about them: Why I hate buying wine in PA.
So I doubt that Pennsylvania is losing money selling wine when sales from its state-run stores are considered.
Penn Jillette doesn’t know
August 20, 2011There’s lots of good stuff in this opinion piece by Penn Jillette, especially for those who had trouble with Epistemology 101.
I’ve always thought that people shouldn’t be embarrassed to admit ignorance. I’d much rather hear that you don’t know than to hear some face-saving claim to knowledge that you don’t have. I’m reminded of the aphorism, "It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so."
Here’s a snippet from Jillette’s op-ed.
My friend Richard Feynman said, “I don’t know.” I heard him say it several times. He said it just like Harold, the mentally handicapped dishwasher I worked with when I was a young man making minimum wage at Famous Bill’s Restaurant in Greenfield, Massachusetts.
“I don’t know” is not an apology. There’s no shame. It’s a simple statement of fact. When Richard Feynman didn’t know, he often worked harder than anyone else to find out, but while he didn’t know, he said, “I don’t know.”
When I found Jillette’s piece linked in a Samizdata post, this was ‘graph it quoted.
It’s amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness.
An excellent choice of adjective
August 20, 2011William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection described the Democrats and Obama as having a voracious appetite for class warfare. I thought that was a great description and that voracious was an excellent choice of adjective.
The Legal Insurrection post quotes (and links) a post at The Tax Foundation blog. Here’s a snippet from that Tax Foundation post. But go RTWT; it’s brief.
The Facts Contradict Obama’s Calls for Higher Taxes on the Rich and Corporations
During his attempt to calm the markets yesterday, President Obama once again signaled his belief that America needs higher, not lower taxes. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Obama’s remarks had “included a call for tax changes that would boost payments from ‘wealthy Americans and corporations,’ but this phrase was taken out at the last minute. None the less, Mr. Obama seems obsessed with the notion that wealthy Americans and corporations are not paying enough taxes.
The President’s notions are not, however, grounded in fact. Let’s review the data on individual taxpayers first:
Recently released IRS data for 2009, shows that taxpayers earning over $200,000 paid 50 percent of the $866 billion in total income taxes paid that year, or $434 billion. Skeptics will say, “That’s because they earn the majority of the income in America”. Not so. These taxpayers earned 25 percent of the $7.6 trillion in total adjusted gross income in the country that year.
And the Obama administration just can’t seem to figure out what’s wrong with the economy (link to another Legal Insurrection post).
One would think they’d never heard of regime uncertainty, eh?
So maybe I’m not delusional
August 13, 2011It’s always amazed me that anyone tries to make a Constitutional argument for the individual mandate – the requirement to buy health insurance – portion of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. I’ve mentioned earlier that Radley Balko nailed that angle pretty well.
So it’s reassuring to hear a(nother) federal court agree that Congress doesn’t have the authority to pass such a law.
Posted on August 12, 2011, 1:35PM | Peter Suderman
No, Congress can’t just decree that individuals must buy a private product, even if the market has unique properties. To do so would be more than unprecedented; it would be an unconstitutional overreach. That’s the gist of what an 11th Circuit appeals court said today when it ruled in favor of 26 state governments by saying that the federal requirement to purchase health insurance contained in last year’s health care overhaul is unconstitutional. From the ruling:
The individual mandate exceeds Congress’s enumerated commerce power and is unconstitutional. This economic mandate represents a wholly novel and potentially unbounded assertion of congressional authority: the ability to compel Americans to purchase an expensive health insurance product they have elected not to buy, and to make them re-purchase that insurance product every month for their entire lives. We have not found any generally applicable, judicially enforceable limiting principle that would permit us to uphold the mandate without obliterating the boundaries inherent in the system of enumerated congressional powers. “Uniqueness” is not a constitutional principle in any antecedent Supreme Court decision.
However, the panel, made up of two Democratic appointees and one GOP-appointed judge, did overturn lower court Judge Roger Vinson’s decision to invalidate the entire law, preferring to strike only the mandate and related provisions.
It will be interesting to see whether the Supreme Court agrees with this circuit court. Decisions on the matter have gone both ways in different courts.
Amen, Mr. President
August 13, 2011When I was a kid of 12, delivering the Peoria Journal Star to the people on my route, I started reading Ann Landers’ advice column. I recall something she often said to advice-seekers: "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day."
That’s the first thought that popped into my head when I read the article quoted below.
Obama: Something is wrong with country’s politics
HOLLAND, Mich.
Seeking to align himself with a public beleaguered by economic uncertainty and frustrated by Washington, President Barack Obama declared Thursday: “There is nothing wrong with our country. There is something wrong with our politics.”
His toughly worded message — he said there was frustration in his voice, in case anyone missed the point — came amid a series of polls showing that people are disgusted with political dysfunction and are dispensing blame all around, including on Obama.
I think you’re absolutely right, Mr. President. There is something wrong with our politics.
What could that be?
Maybe it’s because your administration has been asserting control over more and more segments of the economy and those have become politicized? Health care, auto makers, large investment banks all come to mind as examples of the crony capitalism you espouse – where the businesses being bailed out or subsidized start to spend their efforts seeking political favors instead of focusing on their customers and markets. Of course, a lot of this started during the Bush administration but you’ve had three years to change course. And haven’t.
Maybe it’s because your administration uses the political system to pay for political backing by labor unions? Here’s an interesting chart I ran across this week.
Maybe it’s because all levels of government continue to impose relatively minor but annoying regulations — like those on light bulbs and lemonade stands? This isn’t your personal responsibility, of course. On the other hand, it fits right in with the leadership example your administration sets.
Maybe it’s because the way your administration has expanded the political sphere over more and more areas of peoples’ lives means that you’re going to see a lot of resentment of that expansion?
Or maybe it’s your party’s never-ending spending increases in the face of record deficits and debt levels? All the debt ceiling deal did was make some promises about slowing the rate of increases in spending in the future. It didn’t actually reduce current spending. That was a great compromise, wasn’t it? Yep, just what a bad balance sheet needed.
I think what’s wrong with our politics, Mr. President, isn’t that the Congress won’t stop wrangling about toeing your administration’s line.
The problem is that your administration has an unreasonable line that many of us aren’t at all interested in toeing. I hope my representative continues to vote to obstruct your policies.
God bless gridlock.
Business management myths
August 6, 2011This is an old piece; it’s from 2006. But I found it very entertaining, since I’ve often wondered exactly what it is that people learn at business management schools.
Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead
By Matthew Stewart
During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions. Those who saw through my disguise assumed I made up for my youth with a fabulous education in management. They were wrong about that. I don’t have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy—nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise. Before I took a job telling managers of large corporations things that they arguably should have known already, my work experience was limited to part-time gigs tutoring surly undergraduates in the ways of Hegel and Nietzsche and to a handful of summer jobs, mostly in the less appetizing ends of the fast-food industry.
The strange thing about my utter lack of education in management was that it didn’t seem to matter. As a principal and founding partner of a consulting firm that eventually grew to 600 employees, I interviewed, hired, and worked alongside hundreds of business-school graduates, and the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like “out-of-the-box thinking,” “win-win situation,” and “core competencies.” When it came to picking teammates, I generally held out higher hopes for those individuals who had used their university years to learn about something other than business administration.
Plus I’d like to keep a link to it handy for times when I need to refute some particular example of MBA-style nonsense.
It looks like John Barlow was right
July 29, 2011In the week following 9-11, I came across a message John Perry Barlow had sent to his friends, assuring them that he was OK. (He’d been in New York City during the attack, I believe.) In that message, he went on to mention that he thought the police state in America would only get more oppressive as a result of the attack on the Twin Towers.
At the time, I thought his prediction was probably right: things would get more oppressive. But I thought his calling America a ‘police state’ was a little over the top.
In the intervening years, I seem to have come across more and more cases like the one below. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading Radley Balko’s The Agitator and he often documents police and prosecutors’ abuses — with a special focus on what he calls puppycide. (That’s one of his many posts on the topic.)
Balko did a paper called Overkill a few years back, when he was at the Cato Institute, which is all about the militarization of police forces in the U.S.
Or maybe it’s that I’ve seen too many St. Louis County patrolmen walking around in fatigues and paratrooper boots. It’s not all that rare to run into one of them at the local QuikTrip where I buy coffee. It makes me wonder: when did Missouri turn into Franco’s Spain?
So the sad tale below — about a 135-pound homeless man who was beaten to death by police — isn’t much of a surprise now. And I’ve had to re-evaluate Mr. Barlow’s remarks ten years ago. He was right in one way or the other: we may have been living a police state then but, even if not, it seems we are now.
Homeless Man Dies After Being Brutally Beaten by Five Fullerton Cops
Kelly Thomas’ father, a retired Orange County police officer, did not recognize his own son when he went watch him die at the UC Irvine Medical Center after police beat him into a coma on July 5. The officers were responding to a call about vandalized cars when they found Thomas, a homeless schizophrenic, and attempted to search him
Images and video at the link. They’re not pretty; in fact, they’re pretty disgusting.
No Truce With Kings 