Archive for the ‘Socialism’ Category
Economics link of the day
Thursday, February 11th, 2010I really liked this article that I found from Reddit: Economics In Four Dimensions. Here are two good passages to entice you: The most complex factor in the study of economics is time. Because liberal and statist economic theory does not properly account for the fourth dimension, it rarely predicts economic ...
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, ...
Because in a free society, people would attack each other without provocation or fear of punishment from a higher legal authority
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009A man returns home from drinking one night to find part of his house on fire. He warns everyone, wakes them up, helps them outside, then goes back inside to rescue someone who, he had just learned, was asleep upstairs. Do the police officers at the end of the driveway ...
Fish in a barrel 2
Thursday, September 17th, 2009California tax officials: legal pot would bring $1.4B. No, you still don't quite seem to get it. If it is TAXED and REGULATED, both of which are restrictions or extortions backed with explicit threats of murder, then by definition it is NOT LEGAL. You mean, "Legal except only in the ...
Obama’s speech about socialized medicine
Thursday, September 10th, 2009I didn't watch the Savior of America's speech to Congress about further socializing our health care and insurance industry because I already knew everything he was going to say. Why would I waste my time with it? He probably said our health care system is broken, that it's too costly ...
Socialized medicine links
Thursday, August 27th, 2009I really enjoyed the following writings about health care and the proposed socialization of it in the United States. They say it better than I am (currently) able to, and are all well worth taking the time to read. Two posts from David Z. at No Third Solution: Is it “Un-American” ...
GM’s bankruptcy and government control/ownership
Monday, July 13th, 2009I also liked this post from the Coyote Blag: Though it [General Motors] was able to shed some plants and employees, it will have most of the same stifling work rules on the shop floor. It did, however, manage to shed a lot of interest payments to creditors who ...
Conservatism is fatally flawed
Sunday, June 14th, 2009Is capitalism fatally flawed? asks Paul McDonnold in the Christian Science Monitor. Recessions, like hurricanes, leave wreckage behind—bankrupt businesses, high unemployment, and sometimes even tattered philosophies. No, they don't. Inflationary booms leave bankrupt businesses and unemployment, not to mention devalued currency, behind. Recessions correct those mistakes. The only "tattered philosophy" I've ...
Obama starts inflating the auto bubble
Saturday, April 11th, 2009I don't believe it. Well, of course I do, because I predicted it: The Obama regime has begun inflating the automotive bubble by purchasing 17,600 "green" automobiles from GM, Ford, and Chrysler as part of its counterproductive $787 billion stimulus plan. It will spend $285 million on the automobiles by ...
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
The next two bubbles
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009Based on the Obama regime's policies, both implemented and proposed, I think there is good reason to expect the American economy to experience unsustainable bubbles in the automotive industry and the "green" technology fields. There is ample reason to believe neither one is justified in receiving as much investment or ...
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.
Refutation is simple
Monday, March 23rd, 2009All you have to do is just state something as a fact! Don't believe me? Watch how simple it is! When I saw his list of questions that he would supposedly refute, I was very interested in number 3: "Isn't having to work for a boss in capitalism the same as having ...
My bank gives bailout money back
Saturday, March 7th, 2009Well, it's trying to. The bank I put my non-shiny currency in, TCF Bank, has filed paperwork to give its $361 million of bailout money back to the Imperial Federal Government. It's hard to imagine a libertarian advocating giving money to the government, but the executives at TCF know it ...
We need more competition, not consolidation, in food-inspection agencies
Thursday, February 26th, 2009My experience and my reading has convinced me that more freedom (less government) in a given industry or sector of the economy leads to more, cheaper, and better goods and services. Libertarians take this as a given. Despite the Statist objection to the possibility of competition between rival companies/agencies/organizations in ...
Politics breeds hypocrisy. Who knew?
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009Michiganders must be some of the biggest hypocrites in the American political scene today. All I heard on the radio for the entire fall was how the country needed the auto industry to be bailed out at almost any cost, it was the lifeblood of the middle class, a fundamental ...
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 ...
Troubled assets explained
Saturday, January 31st, 2009Uncharacteristically, I already understood this banking and finance term on my own through reading and hearing about them, but John Carney gives a good explanation of what "troubled asset" means. More important is why it is a terrible idea for the government to buy them or guarantee them; far from ...
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 ...
Water shortages and water-trading between states
Saturday, December 27th, 2008My former state of residence, Georgia, is in a severe drought. It has been for years. It has gotten worse and worse over the last couple of years. Naturally, only government intervention in the water market can cause a true shortage. As far as I understand it, governments in the ...
Chrysler exec makes a visit from Bizarro World
Thursday, December 4th, 2008Chrysler Vice Chairman Jim Press said something that was unintentionally hilarious, in a dark way. "If we have a catastrophic failure of one of these car companies, in this tender environment for the economy, it's a huge blow. It could trigger a depression." He is exactly wrong. Malinvestment in automobiles ...
More thoughts on the auto bailout
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008All I hear about in the news segments of morning radio here in Michigan is how "we" desperately need a government bailout of the Big Three automakers, and how letting them go bankrupt will be a disaster for many industries other than Detroit automakers, and how it isn't fair for ...
The new president’s uphill battle
Saturday, November 8th, 2008Robert Higgs on the dire situation facing the new president: On the stock markets, corporate share prices have fallen precipitously. Unemployment is rising. Housing construction has declined greatly, and home builders are going bankrupt. Many homeowners are losing their homes to foreclosure or tax sale. Many banks and other financial firms ...
Barack Obama, window breaker extraordinaire
Monday, September 29th, 2008Barack Obama and all of his Democratic supporters have already exposed themselves as true economic ignoramuses. It isn't getting any better. The veritable hero among knaves in the mainstream media, John Stossel, writes: Wow. Five million new jobs. All that work building windmills and creating biofuels are the "green jobs" 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 MSM are clueless
Sunday, September 14th, 2008I'm glad that this week I perused Taki's Magazine for the first time in months, since I found this excellent commentary on the Fannie and Freddie government takeover. One amusing aspect of the New York Times’s coverage of the government takeovers of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is that throughout ...
David Theroux on Olympic nationalist-Statism
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008Naturally, a professional writer says many of the same things I said better than I did.
Brave Statists on Mises.org
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008As wrong as they are, I am quite impressed with several of the non-libertarians—and in fact outright socialists—who frequent the Mises blag discussion threads and offer their input as to why a Mises columnist or blagger was way off and why government is actually not so bad, and is necessary, ...
Two Mises columns that expose economic follies
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008Thomas DiLorenzo exposes the moranic follies and the total immorality contained in a ludicrous article in Time magazine about how the next president should fix our economy. I have a feeling that if I had read the vacuous Time article without knowing where it came from, without knowing it was ...
Inflation in Zimbabwe
Saturday, May 24th, 2008Maybe you're familiar with Zimbabwe's brutal racist dictatorship commanded by Robert Mugabe, its runaway inflation, its millions of starved and murdered people, and its hotly contested recent elections. Well, at least there's some humor to be had in all this, at least from our perspective as comfortable Westerners. One Ian ...
The Great Depression, the current recession, and the importance of your vote
Sunday, April 13th, 2008If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal. —Emma Goldman Many comparisons have been made, at least by Austro-libertarian economists, of the Great Depression to the current inflationary recession. The reason the two periods are compared is that both recessions were caused by the same things: the Federal Reserve and ...
My biggest fear
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008The governmental injustice that gives me the most nightmarish flashes, the most cold sweats, the most nerve-wracking fear, is socialized medicine. Reading this news item made the realization that Americans are going to be victims of socialized medicine sooner rather than later hit me quite hard: Most U.S. doctors back ...
Corporate-State Socialism in action
Monday, March 17th, 2008Sheldon Richman wrote two posts in the last two days that are great examples of blag posts about libertarianism and economics for non-libertarians. They are very instructive because they mention ways in which specific State actions help the rich and powerful and screw the little guy. In this case the ...
Why computers work and health care doesn’t
Tuesday, March 11th, 2008I think arguing by analogy is quite effective as a way to introduce an argument to someone whose beliefs are very different from yours. It can be quite instructive. Bill Walker wrote a good article last month about the contrast between the computer industry and the health care industry. Instead ...
“The Moment of Truth” and real trash TV
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008J.H. Huebert is less forgiving of Barack Obama than I am. He implies Obama is evil, in fact.
Honesty and evil
Monday, February 11th, 2008Some recent exchanges with my roommate prompted this post. I have given up writing very critical things about my close friends without their knowledge, so I am not here to secretly lambaste her. Luckily, I don't even think anything very critical of her, so I abstain from criticizing her out ...
It IS happening here
Friday, February 1st, 2008Republocrats currently use fear-mongering on two big issues to garner support for their various State interventions into our lives—terrorism for some, global warming for others. Perhaps it can be said that libertarians also use something akin to fear-mongering in our debate and discussion, though of course I think it is ...
Medical bureaucracy
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008Yesterday I blagged about a biased book reviewer who was skeptical about patients' ability to make rational decisions and look out for their own well-being, and not the least bit skeptical about the ability of a socialist State to make decisions for people and improve economic efficiency. I had another thought ...
Health care bias
Monday, January 14th, 2008In this month's edition of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the book Who Killed Health Care?: America’s $2 trillion medical problem—and the consumer-driven cure by Regina Herzlinger is reviewed by an unsurprisingly biased public health researcher. While the book doubtlessly has many flaws, its central premise is a valid and correct ...
Bueno para los venezolanos
Wednesday, December 26th, 2007There was an article from Time magazine that was published at Yahoo.com, Why Venezuelans Turned on Chavez. Obviously Hugo Chavez is a fascist maniac who wants to become a totalitarian dictator because of how well that's worked in Latin America's past. That, I gathered from the article, is the ...
Eric Hoffer on the neocons
Tuesday, December 25th, 2007If I were in a position of importance at a university and I was able to specify three books that every incoming student must have read before enrolling, I would choose The Law, The True Believer, and The Law again. The True Believer by Eric Hoffer (1951) is about mass ...