Harming In The Name Of Helping, from Jeff Daiell

From Jeff Daiell, a fellow Libertarian. I really can't think of anything to add to this:

This day, Labor Day, is the perfect day to reflect on how harshly Government deals with the working class and the poor.

Frederic Bastiat said, "The state is the great fiction by which everyone attempts to live at the expense of everyone else". It is also the great reality by which the privileged and the powerful become more privileged and powerful at the expense of small businesses and Labor.

How much higher would the standard of living of working men and women be were their tax burden not so high? Income tax, sales tax, property tax, both paid directly to Government and in the form of higher prices on goods and services, all reduce that standard.

How much higher would the real incomes of men and women in the workforce be were there no laws and regulations reducing (in some cases, eliminating) competition among businesses, when such reduced competition means fewer jobs and thus lower wages?

How much farther up the income ladder could the children of working individuals rise were education a matter for the private sector, given that government schools favor the children of the already-affluent?

How much healthier would members of the working class be if government did not restrict entry into the healing professions, making health care and health insurance unaffordable to so many?

How much safer would working-class neighborhoods be if authorities did not legislate what substances we may or may not ingest, given that such legislation benefits organized crime and reduces the ability of law enforcement to combat murder, rape, burglary, and child molestation?

There are so many more examples, but the point is: Government works on behalf of the wealthy and works against the rest of us -- small businesses, the middle class, Labor, and the poor.

So next year, vote to protect working men and women, by voting to eliminate the statutes and regulations that harm them; vote to benefit the employed by moving politicians and bureaucrats into the ranks of the un-employed.

For Texas and Liberty,

Jeff Daiell

Go here to read Mr. Daiell's blog.

The Weekly Radley - Another warm and fuzzy drug war moment

From the incomparable Radley Balko comes this video of one of the drug war's latest casualties:



For the love of God, why can't they let the poor guy fire one up? Do the pharmaceutical companies not make any money on weed? Do we need to give them some patents?
Or is The War On Drugs as profitable for certain government entities as The War On Terror is for others?
I remember hearing about a huge banner at Fort Worth's General Dynamics/Lockheed Martin military aircraft plant. It was put up soon after the Cold War "ended", and it said "PEACE SUCKS". I dunno if it really existed, but the story reflects the job losses that Fort Worth went through as a result of not having Commies to bomb.
Overall, though, the short-lived peace was very good for us.

Can you imagine the job losses in law enforcement if marijuana was suddenly legal?
Can you imagine the income loss to Drug Lords all over the world?
Can you imagine peace and quiet breaking out along the Texas-Mexico border?

When the U.S. got a wild hair and decided to prohibit alcohol, we experienced a crime wave no one had ever seen before. Bootleggers like Capone and (ahem) Kennedy grew filthy rich by meeting the demands of ordinary citizens. Little old ladies started making bathtub gin. Speakeasies abounded. Since the enterprise fell outside the law, organized crime swarmed in to fill the gap. It got ugly.
Fortunately, people could remember what it was like before Prohibition, and the insane experiment was abandoned after a decade or so.

There aren't many people around who remember marijuana being legal. But they would assure us there was very little drug-related violence associated with the weed.
Why?
Because there was no money in it.

My friend John Spivey has a good argument for those who worry about "what would happen to the kids" if marijuana use was de-criminalized, or legalized. Spivey and I can't remember a time when weed wasn't available for sale at our respective High Schools. We agree that the same situation exists in our kids' schools. The demand is there, the penalties for selling to minors are severe, but the profit is massive.

Legalize it. The demand will still be there, the penalties for selling to minors will still be severe, but the huge profit margin will go away.

Which system will most effectively keep marijuana away from the kids?

In spite of 20 more years of Global Cooling, I hope the dream of warming lives on ! ! !

From The Yid With Lid, who is rapidly becoming one of my favorites....

Scientist Predicts 10-20 Years of Global COOLING

OOPS, Better Buy a new winter coat. At the UN's World Climate Change Conference in Geneva one of the worlds top climate change scientists, predicted that we are facing 10-20 years of global cooling. The Scientist, named Mojib Latif said the cooling would be the result of changes to ocean currents and temperatures in the North Atlantic, a feature known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). Latif also said that the NAO may be partly the cause of warming during the past 30 years. Do they have SUV's in the North Atlantic Ocean? Do they have McMansions? No? Trucking Companies? Then what new activity can we find to be self-righteous about?

Latif says that he is not a global warming skeptic, and says that after the cooling, the world will start warming again:

World's climate could cool first, warm later
by Fred Pearce, Geneva

Forecasts of climate change are about to go seriously out of kilter. One of the world's top climate modellers said Thursday we could be about to enter "one or even two decades during which temperatures cool. If that's the case, can we get some of our Clunkers back?

"People will say this is global warming disappearing," he told more than 1500 of the world's top climate scientists gathering in Geneva at the UN's World Climate Conference.

"I am not one of the sceptics," insisted Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany. "However, we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it." Sorry, Mojib. If you've placed a wager on "cooling", that makes you one of the sceptics. That simple gesture is all that's required to put you on the level of a Holocaust Denier.

Few climate scientists go as far as Latif, an author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But more and more agree that the short-term prognosis for climate change is much less certain than once thought.

This is bad timing. You're dang right, it's bad timing. Can you imagine the money being lost by those who were banking on the Goracle's Green Startup companies? The UN's World Meteorological Organization called the conference in order to draft a global plan for providing "climate services" to the world: that is, to deliver climate predictions useful to everyone from farmers worried about the next rainy season to doctors trying to predict malaria epidemics and builders of dams, roads and other infrastructure who need to assess the risk of floods and droughts 30 years hence.

But some of the climate scientists gathered in Geneva to discuss how this might be done admitted that, on such timescales, natural variability is at least as important as the long-term climate changes from global warming. "In many ways we know more about what will happen in the 2050s than next year," said Vicky Pope from the UK Met Office. Exactly. They don't know jack about either one.

Cold Atlantic

Latif predicted that in the next few years a natural cooling trend would dominate over warming caused by humans. The cooling would be down to cyclical changes to ocean currents and temperatures in the North Atlantic, a feature known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO).

Breaking with climate-change orthodoxy, he said NAO cycles were probably responsible for some of the strong global warming seen in the past three decades. "But how much? The jury is still out," he told the conference. The NAO is now moving into a colder phase.

Scientists have proven that if you put a flame near a oil can it will explode, it has proven that if you drop a bowling ball of the top of the empire state building it will go down, not up. Scientists have not proven that man made carbon emissions will effect our climate.

Until they do, it is just plain nonsense to redesign our economy and cause continued hardships in anticipation of a man-made global warming trend 30 years from now. Any push done today is not about global warming, it is about global redistribution of income.

Well said, Mr. Yid.

Happy Labor Day ! ! !

End The Fed, by Congressman Ron Paul - Pure, Undiluted Greatness

I got an advance copy of a long-awaited book in the mail today. Here's one of the opening paragraphs.

"....After all is said and done, the Fed has one power that is unique to it alone: it enables the creation of money out of thin air....Given that money is one half of every commercial transaction and that whole civilizations literally rise and fall based on the quality of their money, we are talking about an awesome power, one that flies under cover of night. It is the power to weave illusions that appear real as long as they last. That is the very core of the Fed's power.
As President Obama said of the economic boom that went bust: "I think it's important to understand that some of that wealth was illusory in the first place."
Exactly.

Those are among the opening paragraphs of Ron Paul's new book "End The Fed". I'm about halfway through my advance copy (I LOVE my new status as a member of the fourth estate), and so far, the book is pure, undiluted greatness. Brilliant.


When I get through reading a good book, there are markings on about 10% of the pages. By the time I got a few pages into "End The Fed", I was losing the ability to distinguish between the good, the great, the superlative, and the immortal passages that should be tattooed on Ben Bernanke's nether regions.
There's no point in underlining and highlighting in a book when it inspires this kind of frantic vandalism:


Here are a few of Dr. Paul's comments on the Fed's practice of pumping money into the economy whenever it suits them:


"It is and should be a mainstream cause to end the power and secrecy of the Fed. It's my own view that ending the Fed would address the most vexing problems of politics of our time. It would bring and end to dollar depreciation. It would take away from the government the means to fund its endless wars. It would curb the government's attacks on the civil liberties of Americans, stop its vast debt accumulation that will be paid by future generations, and arrest its massive expansions of the welfare state that has turned us into a nation of dependents....Essentially you take away from the government the capacity to expand without limit. It is the first step to restoring constitutional government. Without the Fed, the federal government would have to live within its means. It would still be too big and too intrusive, just like all state governments are today, but the outrageous empire at home and abroad would have to come to and end."


This little snippet got 3 stars in the margin:


"Even the Fed itself claims that part of its job is to keep inflation in check. This is something like the tobacco industry claiming that it is trying to stop smoking or the automobile industry claiming that it is trying to control road congestion. The Fed is in the business of generating inflation.....the entire reason for the Fed's existence is to generate more (inflation), not less of it.
What the largest banks desire is precisely what we might expect any large corporation to desire: privatized profits and socialized losses. The profits come from successful loan activities, sometimes during economic booms. But when the boom turns to bust, the losses are absorbed by third parties and do not affect the bottom line. To cover losses requires a supply of money that stretches to meet bankers' demands.....
Whenever instability turns up, so do efforts to socialize the losses."

Paul goes on to explain the history of the Fed, and how its stated goal was to stabilize the money supply. But then,


"In practice the reality has been much different. One only needs to reflect on the dramatic decline in the value of the dollar that has taken place since the Fed was established in 1913. The goods and services you could buy for $1.00 in 1913 now cost nearly $21.00. Another way to look at this is from the perspective of the purchasing power of the dollar itself. It has fallen to less than $.05 of its 1913 value. We might say that the government and its banking cartel have together stolen $.95 of every dollar as they have pursued a relentlessly inflationary policy."


Dr. Paul gives us a chapter on his intellectual influences, and gives some credit to his grandmother, who knew her Bible well. Shortly after the end of WW2, prices were rising because of inflationary war financing, causing Grandmother Paul to remember Genesis 47:15, a passage describing Joseph has become Pharaoh's Bread Czar:

"So when the money failed in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan, all the Egyptians came to Joseph and said, 'Give us bread, for why should we die in your presence? For the money has failed.' "
Our current problem was well established, even in ancient Egypt. Debased currencies fail. Governments cannot manage money.

That's my new favorite Bible verse. Genesis 47:15.
Dr. Paul also discusses FDR's ham-handed attempts to eliminate competitors of Fed Funny Money:

"Roosevelt, by executive order (6102) in 1933, confiscated all gold held by private citizens, with a few minor exceptions such as numismatic (collector) coins, and levied severe penalties on those who disobeyed. The penalty (for owning gold) was $10,000 and/or ten years in prison. In today's money, that's more like $400,000. It was a rather bold, arrogant move from which much harm has come."

And then he writes:

Before gold became legal in 1975, many gold bugs were buying it. I purchased my first gold shortly after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods Agreement. The law was circumvented by buying numismatic coins (any coin dated 1947 or older was considered a numismatic coin). Mexico accommodated American citizens by minting the beautiful Mexican 50 peso, weighing 1.2 ounces, and placing the date 1947 on it.

I love it. I've read through chapter 3, but will probably finish the book tonight.
You must own this book.
Sometime soon, when we're assured of the official on-sale date, we're going to have the Tarrant County Libertarian Meetup at the Border's Books at Hulen and I-30 in Fort Worth. This book will be the topic for discussion.
Stay tuned.

Another nominee for The Whitey - Charles Rangel

Six or seven months ago, when The Teleprompter Jesus was trying to fill his cabinet, I created something called The Whitey Award. The Whitey is given for the best effort at eliminating government waste. Special consideration is given to nominees who accomplish this by not giving the government any of their money.

Previous nominees include Tom Daschle, Rahm Emmanuel, She Whose Name Is Not Spoken, Tim Geithner, Hilda Solis, and the two guys who wheeled a corpse into a convenience store in an effort to cash the dead guy's Social Security check. (Hey, if that dead man's money had gone back to the government, it would've been spent on Clunkers, stimulus programs, or bailouts, instead of drugs and alcohol.) You can go here to read the qualifications of each Whitey nominee.

Early on in the Obama administration, I thought I was going to have to retire the trophy. The playing field was almost like the Special Olympics: too many winners. Then we went about three months without a new scandal, and we seemed to have achieved tax-paying compliance from those we pay our taxes to.

Then comes Charlie Rangel. Rangel is chair of The House Ways And Means Committee, and controls more money than Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong-Il, or any other socialist I can think of. And he goes to great lengths not to share any of the pile that is his. Here's a blogger named Ripclawe, from someplace in the Caribbean, on Rangel's latest accomplishment:

Representative Charles B. Rangel failed to report hundreds of thousands of dollars in income and assets on his financial disclosure forms for 2002 through 2006, including tens of thousands of dollars in rental income from a Harlem brownstone he sold in 2004, according to records filed this month with the clerk of the House of Representatives.


Mr. Rangel, who is facing investigations by two House subcommittees into his personal finances and fund-raising, filed amended financial disclosure forms on Aug. 12 acknowledging that he had omitted an array of assets, business transactions and sources of income. They include a Merrill Lynch Global account valued between $250,000 and $500,000; tens of thousands of dollars in municipal bonds; and $30,000 to $100,000 in rent from a multifamily brownstone building he owned on West 132nd Street.

So to Representative Charles B. Rangel, you have our respect and undying gratitude for doing your part to eliminate government waste. Your nomination has been recorded, and we wish you good luck beating the rap on this one.
If you ever get your hands on your own tax money, you'll probably just waste it.