Archive for the ‘Power elite’ Category
The auto bailout money will not be repaid
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009And there will be more of it. Probably multiple times. Until the automotive industry is a de facto arm of the Imperial Federal Government. If you think this is not an explicit goal of the Obama regime, leave your address in the comments so I can mail you a tall, ...
Ted Kennedy, good riddance
Saturday, August 29th, 2009The more gracious sensibilities inside me prevent me from ranting and raving about what a terrible scourge on humanity Edward Kennedy was, but he really was a terrible senator. I detest the common notion that we should focus only on the recently deceased's good qualities or only say kind things ...
Fish in a barrel
Friday, June 19th, 2009Here are a few issues or news stories that I've come across recently that I could offer easy and obvious solutions or objections to, or that libertarianism has already provided an easy and obvious answer to: Philip Morris supports new FDA regulations on cigarettes. Why, when they've opposed previous interventions in ...
Inequality is fatal?
Thursday, May 14th, 2009In the April 30 issue of Nature, the new book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett is reviewed. Some excerpts from the review: Why are our chances of reaching a great age so affected by wealth and status? The obvious ...
Obamaism is Statism
Friday, April 10th, 2009Out of some strange curiosity I decided to peruse The New Yorker, probably because it is supposed to be a source of good artistic criticism, cultural-political commentary, and humor. One of the first things that caught my eye was "Obamaism" by George Packer. It is supposed to be a commentary ...
Quote of the day
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009"Perhaps the President or Fed Chair or SecTreas could answer why, if these assets are so terrible that the banks (who bought them voluntarily) shouldn't hold them, why the American public should be forced to." —Tim Kern, in a comment on this article at Mises.org
Safety regulations screw the little guy
Monday, March 30th, 2009...and help the rich and powerful. Kevin Carson wrote an excellent article with lots of good details about food-safety regulations (proposed and existing) and children's toy and clothing regulations, which I blagged about previously. The system is designed to screw the little guy and help the rich and well-connected.
Toy lead-content regulations hurt small toy makers
Sunday, February 1st, 2009On Christmas Day I saved this link from Overlawyered.com as a draft in Wordpress, meaning to blag about it, but it took this post on the LRC blag to prompt me to finally write the post. Luckily, the Overlawyered.com post and links therein do all my work for me, so ...
Quote and links of the day
Saturday, January 31st, 2009On the off-chance that you haven't read them, I thoroughly enjoyed this critique of Noam Chomsky and other communist idiots and the ensuing discussion of it at Austro-Athenian Empire. Roderick Long's involvement makes just about everything into a stimulating discussion, if it wasn't already. The quote of the day was provided ...
Early English law screwed the masses to benefit the aristocracy
Thursday, November 13th, 2008In my ongoing and very occasional progression through Bruce Benson's masterpiece The Enterprise of Law, I am learning more and more about the origins of authoritarian (State-originated and -enforced) law and its usurpation of customary (community-originated and reciprocal-incentive-enforced) law in Medieval England. The main thrust of chapter 3 is that ...
The bailout is even worse than we know
Saturday, September 27th, 2008I liked two rants that I found via this Chris Floyd post. The first is by Arthur Silber, whom Floyd is fond of quoting, and with good reason: ...the consequences we are now seeing are irrevocable and unavoidable. The bad debts must be accounted for and written off. A problem of ...
The Republocrats are ALL against us
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008Brad at WendyMcElroy.com is right on the money: If the bailout accomplishes nothing else, it may expose the charade of the "two-party" system to a few more eyes. The Democrats' excuse for supporting so much atrocious Bush legislation (Patriot Act, use of force, Military Commissions Act, warrantless wiretapping, etc.) has traditionally been ...
Michigan government tries to fix problems it caused
Thursday, August 28th, 2008In recent months I have heard about two economic developments in Michigan that have been facilitated by the Michigan state legislature, to benefit the state's struggling economy, which had been in its own mini-recession for years before the rest of the U.S. caught up. The legislature passed movie-filming tax breaks ...
Sarbanes-Oxley: helps big businesses, stifles small ones
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008This is my second post in one night about how, (1) governmental regulations that were meant to help and protect...someone, presumably...actually only help big, wealthy businesses, and, (2) their supporters never actually expected them to do any good for the general public, to begin with. B.K. Marcus writes about "putting the ...
California’s ban on individual genetic risk assessment
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008The state of California is attempting to shut down direct-to-consumer genetic testing. Now, this is just bizarre. I don't even know what to say about it, but I felt I had to condemn it on my web page because it is just so stupid. It is also so typical of ...