I guess this means we are doomed.

The "Libertarian At A Dinner Party" Halloween Costume

I find this costume terribly offensive.

 First of all, we don't smoke pipes, we do cigars.

Plus, out of the dozen or so copies of "Atlas Shrugged" that we all own, we would never bring our precious hardbacks to a meal at someone else's home. We have the small paperbacks for those events. 

Unlike the clown in this picture, we always, always, always hold the labels of our liquor bottles toward the camera, since we are huge fans of corporations, branding, and private enterprise. 

What else is wrong with this repugnant stereotype? THE GUY'S BOWTIE DOESN'T HAVE LIBERTARIAN PORCUPINES ON IT!! 

(You should always get a LP proofreader to sign off on these images before posting them. God is in the details.) 

And finally, I've never known a libertarian to deliver a "possibly racist rant", publicly or privately. 

But I've heard several rants that would make anyone feel awkward who voted for Obama just because he was a black guy (i.e. - voters who are racists). 

This picture is a stench in the nostrils of the righteous, and in a civilized society, it would be removed from the internet. 

Person Of The Year For 2012

I started the Person Of The Year awards back in 2010, when Thomas Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, decided that ebooks, Kindles and Nooks discriminated against blind people, and banned their use as State College/University textbooks. 

That was a hard act to follow, since Thomas Perez is going to hell for that.  Think of him during the next State Of The Union speech when The Teleprompter Jesus starts making noise about making college more affordable. 

Then, out of nowhere came Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, and chief "business advisor" to the president best known for stating that everyone (except you, of course) should pay more taxes.  General Electric hadn't been paying ANY taxes for a couple of years.  That was enough to snag the 2011 award for Mr. Immelt. 

This year the committee has set forth the following standards:

1) 2012 was defined by Tribalism and "identity politics".  Economic, ethnic, political and social tribalism.  If tribes could be set apart from any larger herds, our politicians did their best to make it happen.  Therefore, the successful candidate for Person Of The Year will have displayed an uncanny ability to identify with unlikely tribes and to help further divide the nation into irrational voting blocs.

2. This was the year of the 1%. And the 98%. And the 47%.  2012's Person Of The Year will be a master of Advanced Victimology of this sort.

3. "You didn't build that." To create is evil.  To be a parasite is a virtue. Most people with a lot of money have their money because they've created more than they've consumed. The successful candidate will be one who believes those people should be punished.

Here's a great character study from the John Galt radio speech in "Atlas Shrugged". Think of our godawful economy and hellish employment rate while digesting this. This is the type of person the committee wants to honor:

In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all those evils, which you held as the cause of your plight. You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty. You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins; it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection.

That's who the committee is looking for this year.
I know she's out there....

Ayn Rand, John Galt, and Original Sin

I just finished reading the John Galt "radio speech" from "Atlas Shrugged".
Parts of the early section are tiresome; the last half is some of the greatest stuff I've ever read.

The short section on "Original Sin" jumped out at me. For those of you who weren't raised in the Bible Belt, Original Sin is a St. Paul/St. Augustine invention which states that ever since Eve ate the forbidden fruit, we've been cursed (pre-birth) as sinners.
In the eyes of God, we're guilty as soon as the doctor cuts the cord. Here's some context from Genesis:

The Fall

3 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

² The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, ³ but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
⁴ “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. ⁵ “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
⁶ When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. ⁷ Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
⁸ Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. ⁹ But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”
¹⁰ He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
¹¹ And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
¹² The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
¹³ Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”
The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
¹⁴ So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,

“Cursed are you above all livestock
    and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
    and you will eat dust
    all the days of your life.
¹⁵ And I will put enmity
    between you and the woman,
    and between your offspring^[a] and hers;
he will crush^[b] your head,
    and you will strike his heel.”

¹⁶ To the woman he said,

“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
    with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
    and he will rule over you.”

¹⁷ To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

“Cursed is the ground because of you;
    through painful toil you will eat food from it
    all the days of your life.
¹⁸ It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
    and you will eat the plants of the field.
¹⁹ By the sweat of your brow
    you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
    since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
    and to dust you will return.”

²⁰ Adam^[c] named his wife Eve,^[d] because she would become the mother of all the living.

²¹ The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. ²² And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” ²³ So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.

For most of my life, I've tried to reconcile my somewhat fundamentalist religious upbringing with the reality that I saw around me. 
I've seen that Knowledge is a good thing, as opposed to being something that is the consequence of a curse. 
I believe that Knowledge keeps us warm, fed, healthy, and happy.  
I believe that people are fundamentally good, and will help each other without being forced to do so at gunpoint. 
I've noticed that a lot of kids who weren't raised in any particular religious rigmarole seem to have fewer problems than some of those who were. 
And, of course, I've noticed that people who don't believe that most foreigners are going to go to hell....well, they get along better with foreigners. 
Here's the section on Original Sin, from John Galt's infamous "radio speech" near the end of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged". 

"Damnation is the start of your morality, destruction is its purpose, means and end. Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accepts his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.


It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose rotting sores are held as some explicable claim upon him - it does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of a value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man.

The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin. A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man's nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.

Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a 'tendency' to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free.

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge - he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil - he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor - he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire - he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy - all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was - that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love - he was not man.

Man's fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he's man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives. They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man."

Damn. 
This book, which was the Gateway Drug into Libertarianism for a lot of people, is slowly making my head explode. 
I've read plenty of excerpts, and skimmed it a few times in the past, but reading all 1200 pages cover-to-cover has been one amazing experience. 
I think I'm going to read Paul Krugman's "The Conscience Of A Liberal", just to cleanse the palate, and then read "Atlas Shrugged" again.  This time with a highlighter. 
We have a lot of problems in the U.S.   According to some, honest accounting would prove that we have more unemployed workers in 2012 than during the Great Depression.  Team Red and Team Blue are putting on Performance Art about an idiotic "Fiscal Cliff" deal.  We're 17 trillion in debt.  Obama is sending drones to kill children, and, incidentally, create more terrorists. 

This could be improved if every industrialist, business owner, and creator were to send John Galt's message to Washington:

"Get The Hell Out Of My Way." 

Tom Smith And His Incredible Bread Machine

Here's an old poem about an entrepreneur and the government.  Classic stuff.  Can't believe I never posted any of it before. 
It was written by an engineer named R.W. Grant in 1966. 
I dare you to think of something besides the Hostess bankruptcy or the public abuse that the Papa John's Pizza founder is now taking....


This is a legend of success and plunder

And a man, Tom Smith,

Who squelched world hunger.

Now Smith, an inventor, has specialized in toys.

So, people were surprised

When they found that he instead

Of making toys, was BAKING BREAD!



The way to make bread he'd conceived

Cost less than people could believe.

And not just make it! This device

Could, in addition, wrap and slice!

The price per loaf, one loaf or many:

The miniscule sum of under a penny.



Can you image what this meant?

Can you comprehend the consequent?

The first time yet the world well fed!

And all because of Tom Smith's bread.



A citation from the President

For Smith's amazing bread.

This and other honors too

Were heaped upon his head.



But isn't it a wondrous thing

How quickly fame is flown?

Smith the hero of today -

Tomorrow, scarcely known.



Yes, the fickle years passed by:

Smith was a millionaire,

But Smith himself was now forgot -

Though bread was everywhere.

People, asked from where it came,

Would very seldom know.

They would simply eat and ask,

"Was not it always so?



However, Smith cared not a bit,

For millions ate his bread,

And "Everything is find," thought he,

"I am rich and they are fed!"



Everything was fine, he thought?

He reckoned not with fate.



Note the sequence of events

Starting on the date

On which the business tax went up.

Then, to a slight extent,

The price on every loaf rose too:

Up to one full cent!



"What's going on? the public cried,

"He's guilty of pure plunder.

He has no right to get so rich

On other people's hunger!"



(A prize cartoon depicted Smith

With fat and drooping jowls

Snatching bread from hungry babes

Indifferent to their howls!)



Well, since the Public does come first,

It could not be denied

That in matters such as this,

The Public must decide.

So, antitrust now took a hand.

Of course, it was appalled

At what it found was going on.

The "Bread trust," it was called.



Now this was getting serious,

So Smith felt that he must

Have a friendly interview

With the men in antitrust.

So, hat in hand, he went to them.



They'd surely been misled;

No rule of law had he defied.

But the their lawyer said:

"The rule of law, in complex times,

Has proved itself deficient.

We much prefer the rule of men!

It's vastly more efficient.

Now, let me state the present rules,"

The lawyer then went on,

"These very simple guidelines

You can rely upon"

You're gouging on your prices if

You charge more than the rest.

But it's unfair competition

If you think you can charge less.



"A second point that we would make

To help avoid confusion:

Don't try to charge the same amount:

That would be collusion!

You must compete. But not too much

For if you do, you see,

Then the market would be yours

And that's monopoly!"



Price too high? Or price too low?

Now, which charge did they make?

Well, they weren't loath to charging both

With Public Good at stake!



In fact, the went on better

They charged "monopoly!"

No muss, no fuss, oh woe is us,

Egad, they charged all three!



"Five years in jail," then the judge then said

"You're lucky it's not worse.

Robber Barons must be taught

Society Comes First!



Now, bread is baked by government.

And as might be expected,

Everything is well controlled:

The public well protected.



True, loaves cost a dollar each.

But our leaders do their best.

The selling price is half a cent.

(Taxes pay the rest!)


Brilliant little poem, isn't it? 

Can someone find Barack Obama's copy of this poem and shred it, and then explain to the dense s.o.b. that it's a Cautionary Tale and not an Instruction Manual for the economy?

On Greed

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Aconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor – your claim upon the energy of the men who produce.

I’ve had this "money speech" from Atlas Shrugged on the bulletin board over my desk for about a year now.  It's great, and I hope you'll hit the link and read all of it. 

There are three ways to get money:

1) Steal it.
2) Win it/Inherit it/Find it.
3) Swap something of value for it.

On the other hand, there are three things you can do with money:

1) Have it stolen from you/Lose it to taxes.
2) Give it away.
3) Swap something of value for it.

When we say that someone is greedy, we usually mean that he hangs on to more of his money or more of his “stuff” than we think a normal person would. He doesn’t give away much of it or swap much of it for other stuff.

But if the greedy man came by his money honestly, through methods #2 or #3, that means he either swapped something of value for the money, or someone else did (probably a parent) who wanted him to have the proceeds.

Webster defines “Greed” as “a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed”. Whether the following people have that selfish and excessive desire isn’t really known, but they do have far more than is needed. They lead off the Fortune 400 list of richest Americans. Here are the Top Ten:

10. Alice Walton | Worth: $20.9 billion (Wal-Mart)
9. Jim Walton | Worth: $21.1 billion (Wal-Mart)
8. Sheldon Adelson | Worth: $21.5 billion (Casinos)
7. George Soros | Worth: 22 billion (Hedge Funds)
6. Christy Walton | $24.5 billion (Wal-Mart)
4. David Koch | Worth: $25 billion (diversified)
4. Charles Koch | Worth: $25 billion (diversified)
3. Larry Ellison | Worth: $33 billion (Oracle)
2. Warren Buffet | Worth: $39 billion (Berkshire Hathaway)
1. Bill Gates | Worth: $59 billion (Microsoft)

I’m writing this on a computer that uses Microsoft programs, I just finished shipping four truckloads of display equipment to Wal-Mart, the facility I’m working in has leased 30,000 square feet of space to TTI (owned by Warren Buffett), and I read websites partially sponsored by the Koch brothers every week. (The Agitator, Cato, etc.) I have no idea what Larry Ellison does, but I’m sure that this laptop is a better machine as a result. George Soros is the only outlier, in that I can’t quite determine how he’s made my life better, other than donating vast sums of money for drug policy reform in the U.S.

Some of these people give away vast sums of their money. Others don’t.  But they didn't have to give away their money to enrich my life. 

By Webster’s definition, though, all of them still have enough money to be considered “greedy”. They’ve wound up with far, far more than anyone needs.

How did they do this happen? Did they steal it? No. Did they find it? No. Did the government give it to them after taking it from someone else? No.

They, or someone in their family, provided goods and services that were worth more than money. You and I voluntarily gave the Waltons, Bill Gates, and the Koch brothers some vast sums of money in exchange for stuff they provided – garden hoses, underwear, or groceries (in the case of the Waltons) software (in the case of Gates) or oil (in the case of Charles and David Koch).

They Ellisons, Gateses, Waltons and Kochs don’t need or want all of the stuff that their money will now buy. And they don’t want to sell their companies.

Bill Gates wrote computer programs that I’ve purchased. Millions of other people have swapped their money for his computer software.  But dammit, I can’t think of a single thing I could create that Bill Gates would want to buy from me.

I want what he’s got, and I want it badly. Bill Gates doesn’t want anything that I have.

Which one of us is greedy?  And which one of us does the world need more of? 

John Galt has left California

My employer, Jukt Micronics, recently opened a west coast warehouse to serve our customers in that region. 
 
Where did we go - L.A.?  Long Beach?  San Diego?  San Fran? 
Nope. 
We opened our west coast warehouse in Phoenix, Arizona.  That's a long way from the coast, where the shipping containers come in, but it's worth the drive.   

No one in his right mind will open anything in California.  The place is a regulatory hell.  The taxes are ridiculous. 

Here's something from Bloomberg News:

California (STOCA1) Governor Jerry Brown’s plan to balance the state budget in part with higher taxes on the wealthy depends on a group of top earners that shrank by one-third from 2007 to 2009.


Tax returns with adjusted gross incomes topping $500,000 fell to 98,610 in 2009, the latest year available, from a recent peak of 146,221 two years earlier, according to data from the Franchise Tax Board, the state agency that collects income and corporate taxes.

Once again, here's the good part:

California (STOCA1) Governor Jerry Brown’s plan to balance the state budget in part with higher taxes on the wealthy depends on a group of top earners that shrank by one-third from 2007 to 2009.

It's called Going Galt.  May the trend continue until Jerry Brown changes his ways. 

The d'Anconia Copper T-Shirt

I know what I'm getting my friend Mike Coyne for Christmas this year !!  (Inside joke)

Go here for the text of the famous d'Anconia money speech from "Atlas Shrugged". 
Go here to purchase the shirt. 
For devotees of Big Government who have difficulty reading, here's a recording. 



"When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed."

The Atlas Shrugged/Bush/Obama Reality Mashup

You've still got time to see it !!! (The movie, I mean.  The actors aren't great, but they're better than the cast of the D.C. Reality Show.) 

Atlas Shrugged - They didn't screw it up.

I went to the local premiere of the Atlas Shrugged movie last night in Southlake. 

Southlake is having an arts festival in the same shopping center as the theatre, and I decided to grab something to eat and check out the artists before the movie started.  I found a great Steak-K-Bob, paid for it, and then decided to step into the beer booth for a Bud Lite. 

Beer Lady: Do you have coupons? 

Me: What?

Beer Lady: You know how it is, sorry for the hassle, but we have to ask you to purchase some coupons at the next table, and then you can redeem the coupons for beer. 

Me: Huh? 

Beer Lady: You know how it is, it's one of the rules of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission.  We're not allowed to sell beer, but we can exchange beer for coupons that were purchased elsewhere. 

So I took four steps to the left, bought four dollars worth of coupons from the Coupon Lady, took another four steps back to the right, and exchanged my coupons with the Beer Lady for a Bud Lite. 

This ritual didn't help anybody, it added unnecessary costs to the transaction, no one would've been harmed if the Beer Lady had been allowed to take my money.  But we can't allow Bud Lite Beer Ladies to simply sell Bud Lite without the State's blessings, can we? 

No.   

This puts one into a fine frame of mind for watching Atlas Shrugged.  Sorry for the digression. 

I hung out with numerous libertarian-types after the movie, and our most common comment was....they didn't screw it up.  Thank God they didn't screw it up. 

The screenplay isn't particularly good, the acting is nothing special, the Reardon Metal tracks and John Galt trains employ special effects that look like early 1980's.  The editing is kinda sloppy.  I was sitting by my friend Michael Coyne, a fine guitarist, and he shared my opinion that some of the background music was good, and some of it seemed borrowed from another movie.  But at least they didn't screw it up !!!

I once spent two years of my life doing metal price quotes.  When pricing metal, there are a lot of factors you have to take into account, and that's just for building fruitstands.  In this movie, Hank Reardon instantly commits to about half a dozen massive metal deals without even calculating the expenses on the back of a napkin.  Granted, he was trying to bed his customer, but one of those deals was for a bridge that rivals anything in North America.  I almost broke out in giggles.  But they didn't screw it up !!!!

I spent last weekend with my daughter at a two-day beer and music event called "Chilifest".  There were people at Chilifest who had an alcoholic beverage in hand for 48 hours.  That was nothing compared to the cast of Atlas Shrugged.  Those actors drank like Prohibition was just around the corner.  I stayed for the end credits, just to see if "Turning Leaf" had paid a product placement fee.  But at least they didn't screw it up !!!

Another problem....Rand's novel is set in an imaginary future.  Since this was a very low-budget production, there wasn't much money for funding any whiz-bang future.  So the future looks like....now, but with lots of trains.  There wasn't much money for the set designer to come up with any elaborate CEO offices, or a corporate Valhalla for the Taggart board meetings.  And the dress that Dagny wears to the Reardon anniversary party?  I think I've seen it before.  On a bridesmaid.  But the bridesmaid's version didn't need ironing.  The filmakers made some mistakes in the movie adaptation of this novel, but at least they didn't totally screw it up !!!

I'll purchase the DVD to this thing because it reflects reality.  Washington crusaders are shown to be the calculating parasites that they are.  Entrepreneurs are shown working longer hours than the people that they support.  This is a movie about a business and corporations, but the CEO's of these corporations are not in an underground lair, plotting to kill all their customers from deep inside a hollowed-out volcano, just so they can increase their margins.  You start thinking....what would happen if the a-holes that run my company went on strike? 

There was a very libertarian audience on hand for the showing in Southlake, so Dagny Taggart's line about "I'll let you and your Washington friends solve that problem" got a massive laugh.  One sequence of headlines and magazine covers had the guys sitting behind me saying things like "saw it today", "now", and "General Electric". 

The audience cheered loudly when the title flashed on the screen, something I think I've only seen done for the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Harry Potter movies. 

They cheered just as loudly when the movie ended, mostly because....they didn't totally screw it up !!!

When the book was released in the late 1950's, mainstream critics ripped it all to pieces, but it has gone on to be one of the bestselling novels of all time, and one of the most influential.  I hope this first installment will earn enough to justify some upgrades on the next two. 

Overall, just because of the subject matter, I'd give it a 6 or 7 on the 10 scale.  It's nowhere near as good as the book, but with only a 20 million dollar budget, it's far superior to the Barack Obama Community Theatre version that has cost us trillions.  Now THAT version is screwed up. 

I hope Atlas doesn't shrug

From Wired magazine:

Nick Newcomen did a road trip over 30 days that covered stretches from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. First, he identified on a map the route he would need to drive to spell out the message. He put a GPS device in his car to trace the route he would follow. Then, he hit the road.

“The main reason I did it is because I am an Ayn Rand fan,” he says. “In my opinion if more people would read her books and take her ideas seriously, the country and world would be a better place — freer, more prosperous and we would have a more optimistic view of the future.”

Newcomen, unlike previous GPS artists, actually traveled the lines he traced on the map. He used a GPS logger (Qstarz BT-Q1000X) to “ink” the message. Starting his trip in Marshall, Texas, he turned on the device when he wanted to write a letter and turned off the device between letters. The recorded GPS data was loaded into Google Earth to produce the image above. below:

Now THAT is dedication. 





Read More http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/08/worlds-biggest-writing/#ixzz0wXkYgIPD

Why tax breaks go to the rich

Here's why the bigest tax cuts go to the wealthy (besides the obvious fact that 43% of us don't pay Federal Income tax at all).  I found it here. 

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that's what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until on day, the owner threw them a curve. "Since you are all such good customers," he said, "I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20." Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share'?

They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer.

So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same percent, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

"I only got a dollar out of the $20,"declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man," but he got $10!"

"Yeah, that's right," exclaimed the fifth man. "I only saved a dollar, too. It's unfair that he got TEN times more than I!"

"That's true!!" shouted the seventh man. "Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!"

"Wait a minute," yelled the first four men in unison. "We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!"

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, boys and girls, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

Drinking overseas, or not drinking at all is also known to fans of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged as "Going Galt".  Also, you can go to Snopes.com for a discussion of who actually wrote this beer parable.

A message from Portugal

A couple of months ago, I started getting hits from a website in Portugal.  A Portuguese guy named Joao has a (mostly) photography blog called Dois Tabefes and had linked to a couple of my rants.    After I commented on his site a couple of times, I got the following email, which I'm reprinting with Joao's permission. 
You may have read about how the stupendous debts of Greece and Portugal are threatening to blow up the Euro, the European Union, and the entire Axis Of Socialism.  (Go to this chart to see a worldwide ranking.  The U.S. is now ahead of Jordan, Nicaragua, and Tunisia in this ranking of the unfortunates.)  Here's Joao, with his personal testimony about how he escaped the darkness:

As with many other libertarian sites I've been discovering lately (yours was from Cpt Capitalism's blog roll, by the way), I thoroughly enjoy reading it daily. It sure is helpful to me, but I'm afraid it won't be of much help in spreading libertarian sites to my circle of friends. Unfortunately Portugal is a very centre-left leaning country and trying to speak about libertarianism to most people is almost the same as being considered a fascist (40 years of "soft"-fascism sure did a lot of intelectual damage around), so in the end, it isn't surprising at all why Portugal is coming next to Greece in government debt.

Oh, and by the way, I came to get acquainted with libertarianism (and the Austrian school of thinking) in a rather amusing way. First I got into AGW skepticism after some research for an academic work, then I got to find a couple of liberal (not american liberal) portuguese blogs, which have been speaking about that subject, and in the middle I got interested in their posts about economic freedom and liberty, Hayek, anti left-wing rants and so on.

One brief interlude here.  The word "liberal", as many of you already know, has the same meaning in Europe that "libertarian" means in the United States.  The word was highjacked by American Statists sometime in the 1930's, as best I can tell.  Look on the blogroll to your right for the "I am 100% Liberal Quiz" to learn a few things about the word, and about yourself. 

Somewhere in between I got to read Road to Serfdom and now i'm reading Atlas Shrugged daily in my cell phone when I go to my university - I'm currently a Ph.D student in environmental engineering. I've started it in November, read 2/3 of it already and I consider it already one of the best books I've read in my 24-yo short life so far.

Greetings,

João

Good Lord in heaven !  Can you imagine plowing through Atlas Shrugged on a cell phone?  How many page views would that be? 
Anyway, that's what's going on with one lonely libertarian in Portugal, where the government is spending everyone into oblivion.  Hope you stay in touch, Joao.   
One other thing....I have no idea what this is in these pics, since my Portuguese is a little rusty.  I want one to take cruising in the Trinity river. 

Obama The Job-Killer

Here's Mark Steyn, in what I think is the best short piece he's ever written. Go here to read the whole thing. Memorize it, then teach it to your children. Give photocopies to the winos along your commute, and give them extra beer money if they promise to spread it far and wide.

Functioning societies depend on agreed rules. If you want to open a business, you do it in Singapore or Ireland, because the rules are known to all parties. You don’t go to Sudan or Zimbabwe, where the rules are whatever the state’s whims happen to be that morning.

That’s why Obama is such a job-killer. Why would a small business take on a new employee? The president’s proposing a soak-the-banks tax that could impact your access to credit. The House has passed a cap-and-trade bill that could impose potentially unlimited regulatory costs. The Senate is in favor of “health” “care” “reform” that will allow the IRS to seize your assets if you and your employees’ health arrangements do not meet the approval of the federal government. Some of these things will pass into law, some of them won’t. But all of them send a consistent, cumulative message: that there are no rules, that they’re being made up as they go along — and that some of them might even be retroactive, as happened this week with Oregon’s new corporate tax.

In such an environment, would you hire anyone? Or would you hunker down and sit things out? Obama can bury it in half a ton of leaden telepromptered sludge but the world has got the message: More Washington, more micro-regulation of every aspect of your life, more multi-trillion-dollar spending, and no agreed rules in a game ever more rigged against you.

John Stossel on Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, and Fish Pedicures

What would happen if the most productive members of society went on strike?

Did you set your Tivo to record Stossel last night? No? Even though it was the segment devoted to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged?
You didn't watch it, even though Atlas Shrugged is 50 years old, a thousand pages long, but recently hit #15 on Amazon.com's fiction bestseller list?
You didn't watch John Stossel and a host of guests critique the Washington D.C. Community Theatre production of the novel? The one adapted for the stage by Barney Frank and Tiny Timmy Geithner?

(Heavy sigh that can be heard by regulators in the basement of Bernanke's Federal Reserve building way over in Dallas....)
At great personal sacrifice, I watched Stossel instead of watching Alabama's Crimson Tide defeat the Texas Longhorns.

Here goes: Stossel's first guest was a banker named John Allison. Allison is a Rand fan, to say the least, and is chairman of BT&T, a North Carolina bank that he grew from nothing into something enormous, largely by avoiding financial gimmicks. Here's what the New York Times has to say about Mr. Allison:

....(Allison) also has a résumé befitting a Rand prophet. He started at BB&T, once known as the Branch Banking and Trust Company, in 1971 and became chief executive in 1989, when the bank had $4.7 billion in assets.
By the time he retired as C.E.O. in December, he had overseen 60 bank and savings-institution acquisitions and turned BB&T into the 11th-largest bank in the nation, with $152 billion in assets, according to the bank.
A 60-year-old who speaks in a rapid-fire Southern accent, Mr. Allison says the current financial crisis is primarily the government’s fault. He criticizes the Fed as trying to manipulate normal business cycles and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as facilitating mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them.
The government’s remedies have made matters only worse, he says: “Almost everything that has been done since this crisis started is going to reduce our long-term standard of living.”
Mr. Allison says the government forced BB&T and some other healthy banks to accept TARP money to obscure that they were simply trying to save several large banks like Citigroup.
“Everyone thinks we got some kind of subsidy,” he says, noting that his company paid the money back in June, with interest. “It’s going to cost us about $250 million for money we didn’t want.”

Allison spent some time trying to distinguish between enlightened self-interest and Ayn's preferred "shock value" term, selfishness. He mentioned that one of the ways this manifests itself in his company is their refusal to loan money in eminent domain projects, and "pick a payment" loans (AKA negative amortization gimmicks. Hit the NYT link above for details.) According to Allison, eminent domain is a threat to property rights, and therefore a threat to our economic system. Negative amortization loans are almost guaranteed to fail.
Neither of these is a win/win situation for the bank/client relationship. Allison says it's in his bank's self-interest to avoid either of these situations for a mere short-term profit.
The topic briefly switched over to government-run schools, and the lack of competition in that system. Here's one of my favorite Allison lines:

"We (at the bank) don't really like being innovative. We're forced to be innovative by the market. But if you have a government-run monolith, it is not going to be innovative, it is not going to be creative."

The next guest was C. Bradley Thompson of Clemson University, who drew some parallels between one of Rand's more bizarre scenes and the incident last fall when Hank Paulson called six bankers into his office and demanded that they take TARP money. Then Thompson and Stossel spent a few minutes playing the Stunt Casting game. Who is Dagney Taggart today? Who is Wesley Mouch? Who is John Galt?

Next up was Yaron Brook, president of The Ayn Rand Institute, who had a great time ridiculing the idea of the United States Of America having a Compensation Czar and a Regulatory Czar. Brook and Thompson discussed the perverse case of General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, who spends about $20,000,000.00 on lobbying for regulations that will restrict competition within G.E.'s core businesses. Immelt has also seen the light and is a big-time proponent of Cap And Trade.
What's in all this for Immelt and G.E.? They gets millions in federal loan guarantees and grants. It's a beautiful system, and everyone is sure there's no Quid Pro Quo involved.

The questions from the audience began with Rand's personal life, which was, as they say, complicated. (Most of what I know about her personal life comes from watching The Passion Of Ayn Rand on DVD a few months ago. Here's a video from the film set to music by Justin Timberlake. Swear to God. I love the internet.)


I'm not a follower of Objectivism, the name Rand gave her philosophy. But let's indulge in an Et Tu argument for a moment.....
Karl Marx developed what his followers say is the most fair, equitable, and humane economic system ever imagined. But he shamefully neglected his own family, and got the housecleaner pregnant.
Look at the public teachings of Jesus, as compared to the constant rebukes he always gave his closest disciples in private.
Most of us have some serious gaps between our spoken principles vs. how we spend our day. Barack Obama, Lord and Savior of us all, for instance. Compare his soaring rhetoric to how he has thrown Greg Craig, Yosi Sergant, Anita Dunn and Van Jones under the bus.

One audience member brought up the question that Libertarians always have to answer: Don't we need some government? John Allison answered first. Government is important. There has to be a system in place to protect individual rights - i.e., a defense system, and a law enforcement system. I don't think anyone mentioned roads, which usually rounds out the minimalist government trifecta.

This question was followed by a first on the Stossel program. A woman got up and ranted about the negative impact of taxes and regulations on small businesses and entrepreneurs (Doh !). She didn't really ask a question. She didn't challenge anything previously said by the panelists. I hope Stossel avoids this type of interchange in the future, because every question from the audience on previous programs was from someone who disagreed with the guest. There's something to be said for limiting the conversation to hostile questions, not Oprah-style softballs.

The conversation almost, but not quite, got into something that I've never heard discussed on television. You know how Obama/Pelosi/Reid talk about Big Business as if it sprang forth from a gaping hole in the lid of hell? But small business is worthy of tax breaks, regulatory slack, plus flowers and back massages on major holidays?
There is no difference. Businesses don't pay taxes, people do. The money paid via business taxes is money taken from the employees of a business. Giving a tax break to the #3 and #4 guys at a small business, while witholding the tax break from the janitor at a mega-business, doesn't make much sense. But it makes us feel good.

Next up was the editor of Reason magazine, Nick Gillespie, in his trademark black leather jacket. (I'm friends with Nick on Facebook - he only has 1,527 other friends, so I'm understandably proud.) He and Stossel were shown getting something called a Fish Pedicure. You stick your feet in a water tank, and little guppies eat the dead skin off your tootsies. Very popular in Asia. (These fish were provided by Mr. John Ho, a Virginia entrepreneur who has almost been regulated out of existence by Nanny State Munchkins.)

I don't think the Libertarian Party has an official position statement on fish pedicures, so I'd like to propose one. "If I want to pay someone to allow his fish to nibble away my callouses and bunions, it's none of the government's business."

The very existence of a growing fish pedicure industry is enough to drive the cosmetology regulators totally apeshit. Stossel brought in a New York state legislator Jeffrey Klein (shown via satellite, because he was in San Juan, Puerto Rico, for a conference). Mr. Klein says that fish pedicures are "dirty, dangerous, and mean to the fish", and he wants to outlaw the practice. Under intense cross-examination, Klein admitted that no one has ever been harmed by a fish pedicure. Klein tried to say that there had been a lot of complaints. Stossel claimed that he'd looked for evidence of complaints and couldn't find any.

And then, it happened. After decades of TV studio audiences mindlessly applauding every regulatory bureaucrat, politician, troll, and hobbit who wants to regulate the _____ industry, Stossel said "Aren't you just a busybody, taking away other people's freedom?"

The audience started applauding. They cheered. They made the same noises that idiots used to make when Bill Clinton said he was going to do something FOR THE CHILDREN® . A living, breathing group of people, on television, actually got the point. They weren't huddled in a dark corner of a bar for a libertarian meetup. They weren't in Ayn Rand Objectivist chatrooms. They were on my television, with a viewing audience that probably numbered in the high 5 digits, and they almost hooted Jeffrey Klein off the screen.

Gillespie: "We're at a point in history where people are wealthier, relatively speaking, and more educated and more in charge of their lives across more different dimensions, and now we're having government come in, and people like New York state legislators, who cannot balance their budgets, who are billions of dollars in debt, who are telling us 'leave the little fish alone'. This is wrong. It's not their business. And it shouldn't be their business to regulate other businesses. Especially now."

It was a great conversation between Gillespie and Stossel, made slightly ridiculous by the cameraman occasionally pulling back and showing that they both had their feet in a fish tank with minnows nibbling their toenails.

There were more questions for Gillespie about motorcycle helmets. cell phone use while driving, and a few other topics. FoxBusiness will probably run this feature 3 or 4 more times before next week. You still have time to catch it. Here's the closing monologue. If the Lou Dobbs clip doesn't make you want to smash your fist through your computer screen, you need to cut back your valium dosage.


John Stossel. Ayn Rand. Capitalism. Atlas Shrugged. Nick Gillespie. A government regulator getting hammered. It was some great television. Better than watching the U.T. Longhorns get hammered, anyway.