Archive for the ‘Power elite’ Category
Quote of the day
Tuesday, December 13th, 2011How do politicians who arrive in Washington, D.C. as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires? How do they miraculously accumulate wealth at a rate faster than the rest of us? How do politicians' stock portfolios outperform even the best hedge-fund managers'? I answered the question in that ...
Stop the Stop Online Piracy Act!
Saturday, November 12th, 2011The latest attempt from the parasites in Washington to limit the freedom of the internet and all of the benefits that stem from it is called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Its more official, full name is Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation ...
Big government, big corporations, corn syrup, and Galco’s Soda Pop Stop
Saturday, July 16th, 2011This video seems to be popular with the kids around the internets this week. It's about Galco's Soda Pop Stop in Los Angeles, a small, independent soda pop store that seems to sell mostly drinks that I've never heard of, many of which I'm assuming are also made by small ...
End-of-the-month links
Saturday, April 30th, 2011Amazon.com's cancellation of its plans to open a South Carolina distribution center and high-tailing it out of town because the state legislature voted against giving the company a tax exemption are interesting from a libertarian perspective for a couple reasons. First, from a principled anti-tax standpoint, this is one of ...
Julian Sanchez on politically motivated suppression of WikiLeaks
Saturday, December 11th, 2010I really enjoyed Julian Sanchez's entire post Wikileaks and "Economies of Repression", but the conclusion was the best: In the heady days of the 1990s, it was widely assumed that the global Internet was, by its nature, an anarchic zone of untrammeled speech inherently immune from the control of governments quite ...
Links for an ending week
Friday, November 5th, 2010The Fraud Started at the Very Top: With Government Leaders, from Washington's Blag. See their numerous examples of how rating agencies, the Treasury Department, the SEC, the Federal Reserve, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and others committed fraud and helped banks commit fraud. This is truly a devastating list of criminality ...
Another perspective on small business in the era of Big Government
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010I liked this blag post by Philip Greenspun about how his small business suffers, both in absolute terms and relative to the competition, in the face of more government, more regulations, and more lobbyists. One reason I liked it might be because it fits in with our original goal in ...
Great insight from John Taylor Gatto
Monday, August 23rd, 2010LewRockwell.com reprinted the preface to The Underground History of American Public Education by John Taylor Gatto, and it had some quote-worthy passages: I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You have no say at all in choosing ...
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 ...