Where are all the female libertarians???

Where are all the female libertarians? 

According to this lady, there aren't many.  Evolution has wired women differently from men.  Go here. 

Hmmmm....

The next next next next Solyndra

They're all going belly-up. 
If their ideas were good, they would've attracted private capital. 

The donors have been rewarded, the victims (you) have been fleeced, and it was all as predictable as the winner of The Texas Rangers vs the Little Sisters Of The Blind softball match. 

Where are the crowds with pitchforks and torches?  Folks, they stole your money, gave it to their friends, called it "green", and they expect you to act like it's business as usual. 

Go here.  If you have time to read about the most recent scam, go here.

 

Kurt Andersen and The Downside Of Liberty

Kurt Andersen has an editorial in the New York Holy Times called "The Downside of Liberty".  He gets it half right:

THIS spring I was on a panel at the Woodstock Writers Festival. An audience member asked a question: Why had the revolution dreamed up in the late 1960s mostly been won on the social and cultural fronts — women’s rights, gay rights, black president, ecology, sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll — but lost in the economic realm, with old-school free-market ideas gaining traction all the time?

There was a long pause. People shrugged and sighed. I had an epiphany, which I offered, bumming out everybody in the room.

What has happened politically, economically, culturally and socially since the sea change of the late ’60s isn’t contradictory or incongruous. It’s all of a piece. For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. Selfishness won.

From the beginning, the American idea embodied a tension between radical individualism and the demands of the commonweal. The document we’re celebrating today says in its second line that axiomatic human rights include “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” — individualism in a nutshell. But the Declaration’s author was not a greed-is-good guy: “Self-love,” Jefferson wrote to a friend 38 years after the Declaration, “is no part of morality. Indeed it is exactly its counterpart. It is the sole antagonist of virtue leading us constantly by our propensities to self-gratification in violation of our moral duties to others.”

IMHO, we've experienced prosperity because our founding documents declare that people should be left the hell alone. 

People make their best decisions when they're trying to decide what to do for themselves and for their own.

If a dude wants to sleep with another man, own 300 guns, get higher than the space shuttle, eat between 6 to 11 helpings of bread and pasta per day, or even fail to read the Harry Potter books, that's his business. 

Selfish?  Maybe. 

But here's another kind of selfishness, and here's where Kurt Andersen goes off the rails. 

When person A forces person B should give his stuff to person C, then person A is one selfish son of a bitch.  Especially if person A takes a wee little bit off the top of the transaction for himself and for his supporters. 

There are lots of ways to be unselfish with your stuff.  Churches, charities, donations to panhandlers, foundations and outright gifts. 

But fighting to keep a pack of Chicago con artists from getting their hands on more of your stuff isn't selfish.  It's common sense. 

There are a lot of people who care about the poor, the uneducated, the hungry and the great unwashed and who want to do something about their problems.  But they want to do it on their own terms, not those of The Teleprompter Jesus. 

So who is more selfish, the guy who wants to control his own stuff, or the egomaniac who wants to control everybody's stuff?

Stephanie Cutter is a racist. There is no other explanation.

I got onto a bunch of mailing lists during the 2008 elections.   That's why this letter from a silly twit named Stephanie Cutter was in my inbox last week. 
She thinks she's attacking Mitt Romney (a worthy goal), but this drivel coulda been written by a Mississippi Klansman who struggled to finish the 8th grade. 

Lord have mercy, what a jingoistic woman. 
And The Teleprompter Jesus should be ashamed of himself for all this racket about The Yellow Peril. 
Here goes....

Whited --

The Washington Post reported this morning that "Mitt Romney's financial company, Bain Capital, invested in a series of firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India."

This is the same guy that goes around the campaign trail talking a huge game about being able to protect American jobs by standing up to foreign countries like China. But now we know that Romney and his partners made millions while sending American jobs overseas.

Where to begin, where to begin.  The computer you're reading this on was made in a foreign country.  Some of the people who made it weren't event Baptists !!!!   They worship strange Gods !!!!  
Look, I've beaten the Free Trade horse to death more times than I care to remember or regurgitate.  Here's a Don Boudreaux argument:

In fact, the critical assumptions on which the economic case for free trade rests are highly descriptive of reality: (1) the ultimate justification for economic activity is to improve living standards for consumers; (2) producers facing competition serve consumers better than do monopolists; (3) each party to a voluntary trade is generally made better off by such trades; and – most importantly – (4) the first three assumptions aren’t nullified merely by putting a national political border between consumers and producers.

The lines of latitude and longitude of the factory don't matter to anyone but Statists collecting payoffs from Crony Capitalists.  Do you really want to ensure that your child has a factory job putting plastic cases on iPhones???  I don't.  And you don't. 

Are you willing to pay 50% more for a lawnmower made in your hometown?  Home state?  Nation?  Continent?  Hemisphere?  Who is going to make the rules for protecting your job?  Who are these angels who are going to ensure that your neighbor gets paid what you think he's worth? 

Ok, back to Stephanie Cutter's plea for racial protectionism.  (Sorry, but I've got to call it racism.  Read it a couple of times.  There's no other explanation that makes sense.)

This is a critical point, and we need to make sure everyone knows it. Check out this video I recorded today, and share it far and wide:



Romney's support of outsourcing didn't just happen in the private sector. As governor of Massachusetts, he vetoed legislation that would have banned companies from shipping state jobs overseas -- and he actually outsourced state jobs to a call center in India.

On shipping state jobs overseas.....If we can save .50 cents an hour on the money stolen from me to pay for "state jobs", we should send those jobs overseas.  Now.
If people were given a choice on their ballots, they would vote for the same thing.  Seriously.  If you could lower your tax bill by, say, 30% by sending all state activity overseas, would you do so? 
Hell yes, you would. 

In contrast, President Obama has a jobs plan that could put up to a million people back to work -- including teachers, cops, firefighters, construction workers, and veterans -- help small businesses create jobs right now, and help to put an end to American jobs being shipped overseas.

Here's the problem with putting American teachers, cops and firefighters back to work.  You have to pay them a ridiculous amount in retirement benefits.  Some who are barely older than me are already retiring.  
That ain't sustainable.  
And did you notice how Stephanie wants to help "small" businesses create jobs, but not McDonald's, IBM, or Amazon?  What's up with that?  

He's also fighting for tax breaks for companies that bring jobs back to America.

Who is going to define what is an American job? 

Mitt Romney is fighting for tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas -- the type of companies he ran in the private sector.

This isn't just a policy position for Romney, it's his economic philosophy -- and it's his record.

Read the article, watch the video, and share them both far and wide -- doesn't get a lot more important than this one.

Thanks,

Stephanie

I'm going to call in sick today so I can spend the morning praying for Stephanie Cutter to get a freakin' clue. 

How Jimmy Carter saved beer

This is from the noted Right-Wing, Libertarian, Free Market, Reactionary magazine The New Republic. 
When you're reading this, think of the strides we could make if we deregulated medicine. 

I am not a drinker, but this, per E.D. Kain, seems like an unappreciated accomplishment for the 39th president:

If you’re a fan of craft beer and microbreweries as opposed to say Bud Light or Coors, you should say a little thank you to Jimmy Carter. Carter could very well be the hero of International Beer Day.

To make a long story short, prohibition led to the dismantling of many small breweries around the nation. When prohibition was lifted, government tightly regulated the market, and small scale producers were essentially shut out of the beer market altogether. Regulations imposed at the time greatly benefited the large beer makers. In 1979, Carter deregulated the beer industry, opening  back up to craft brewers. As the chart below illustrates, this had a really amazing effect on the beer industry: 

Possibly this was all a plot to jack up peanut sales. But it worked.
It's worth noting that Carter got no political credit for this move, and that the benefits didn't appear until long after he departed. Some policy successes -- like a successful war or peace treaty -- yield immediate political dividends. But others produce little change until many years later, by which time everybody has forgotten your policy had anything to do with it.

We're from the IRS and we're here to collect for State Farm

Here's another graphic for you....