Archive for the ‘Taxes’ Category
Google shifted profits offshore to avoid taxes. Good for them!
Thursday, October 13th, 2011The IRS is investigating how Google shifted some of its profits to offshore subsidiaries to avoid paying taxes on them. Good for Google! I have displayed varying degrees of vocality in my disappointment or disapproval of some of Google's practices in the past, such as the creepiness and Orwellianness of ...
Farhad Manjoo is a raging moron and a danger to society
Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011It's a good thing Slate.com columnist Farhad Manjoo isn't a historian, or he'd probably argue that the best solution to slavery in America would have been to allow blacks an equal chance to enslave white people, because that would be "fair" in his biased, uninformed, unimaginative mind. Amazon.com is resisting the ...
Because in a free society, unfettered corporations would prey on poor, defenseless individuals and extort them for illegitimate and non-consensual “protection fees”
Thursday, July 14th, 2011Yankees fan Christian Lopez, who caught Derek Jeter's 3000th career hit, which was a home run, could owe an extra $14,000 in income taxes next year due to the value of the seats and other perks the Yankees rewarded him in exchange for giving them the ball back and not ...
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 ...
Democrats’ same old “raise taxes” crap
Thursday, March 17th, 2011After 8 years of Republican deficits, inflation, cronyism, and war, the liberal Democrats of this country had a nice opportunity to accomplish something worthwhile, or at least stand for something new and different. Their motto was "hope" and "change", and even if we knew their President and their Congress weren't ...
Big government is only possible because of previous free enterprise, not the other way around
Monday, March 14th, 2011Libertarians should be familiar with the position that the mixed-economy socialism much of the Western world lives under is only affordable because previous decades of relative freedom have enabled a level of economic production and a climate of trust, mutual dependability, and competition that produced the wealth that could (relatively ...
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 ...
Misguided Tea Partiers, misguided Tea Party haters
Monday, April 26th, 2010You know, I actually think it's a shame the Tea Party gatherings receive nothing but ridicule and not discussion or engagement from the liberal Democrats. Really, what's more of a shame is that they deserve a lot of the ridicule, from libertarians and libertarian-ish people, because the movement has become ...
Fish in a barrel 6
Thursday, December 17th, 2009For some combination of reasons, the main one probably being the coming of the Second Great Depression and the need of so many people to save money, the exorbitant price of a college degree is being criticized and questioned more loudly and frequently than I can remember. For instance, Peter ...
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 ...
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 ...
Quote of the day
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009Roderick Long, on the recent anti-tax tea parties: Whichever party is out of power always begins to emphasise its libertarian-sounding side in order to divert anti-government sentiment toward support of that party rather than toward genuine radical opposition to the entire establishment. By the same token, the party that’s in power employs ...
Non-cooperative tax havens
Saturday, April 11th, 2009The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development published a blacklist of countries that it considers "non-cooperative tax havens" in an attempt to call them out, shame them, and sanction them into compliance with the more enlightened, tax-happy governments of the world. On Thursday, G20 leaders agreed to take sanctions against tax ...
Barack Obama: window breaker extraordinaire 2
Sunday, December 7th, 2008From an Associated Press article: President-elect Barack Obama said Saturday that he wants to revive the economy and create jobs by upgrading roads, schools and energy efficiency in a public-works program whose scale has been unseen since construction of the interstate highway system in the 1950s. He offered no price estimate for ...
What If…
Thursday, November 20th, 2008David Z over at No Third Solution has a series of posts in which he talks in great detail about taxes that show he is way more knowledgeable about economic issues than I am. They are quite long, and I will admit to not have read all of them completely yet ...
Michigan ballot proposals
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008I broke down and went to my polling location this morning to vote for one ballot proposal and vote against four of them, and write in "NOBODY" for president, Senate, House of Representatives, state legislature positions, mayor, etc. The ballot proposal I voted Yes on was to legalize medical marijuana ...
On the Use of Language
Monday, November 3rd, 2008As the economic collapse grows larger and larger, should it really surprise anyone that the parasitic government would begin to determine new ways to leech off of the citizenry? Behold. Obviously, private citizens cannot properly save for retirement themselves. No, instead we need a Social Security system Part II. But I don't ...
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 ...
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 ...
TANSTAAFSTVARS
Friday, May 9th, 2008BBC News claims, "A free satellite television and radio service backed by the BBC and ITV launches across the UK." I hope even my non-libertarian friends aren't fooled by any government's claim that something is "free"; obviously it is funded by money that was taken at the point of a ...
Harry Reid doesn’t know what force is
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008Aaron Kinney at Radical Libertarian posted this video of Senate majority leader Harry Reid insisting that income taxation is not forcible. His comment on the video was: "Harry Reid is a confused, stupid man."
Stocks before whore, everyone’s poor
Thursday, March 27th, 2008The March 17 Daily Show had a great couple of segments on the idiotic federal government and Federal Reserve and the recession the United States is in. A rerun of this ran tonight at 8:00, which is why I'm blagging about it now. Talking about the $600 tax refund the State ...
Bar-stool economics
Thursday, March 20th, 2008The tax system of our country analogized to pub-goers. Kelly: To discover the only reason I deemed this link worthy of posting on our blag, notice who its author is. Hat tip: Radley Balko.
The collapse of the nation-state
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008Gary North wrote a fantastic column explaining why he thinks the central government of the United States will slowly decay until it collapses, and why he expects minarchism to return to this country during the lives of his grandchildren. He starts out with a list of government functions that libertarians ...
MSN’s class-warfare-mongering
Monday, January 14th, 2008On MSN.com today, the link to an article in their "Money" section read, "New tax break helps the richest." Um, isn't that another way of saying, "New tax break helps the people who pay the taxes"? The article is about a tax break on mortgage renegotiations and foreclosures that will ...
I just don’t understand
Monday, December 24th, 2007When I was at a friend's apartment for a Christmas party, the subject of paying taxes came up (it's a long story, it was during a game, not a political discussion, so only I, with my obsession with libertarianism and politics, probably read anything into it). This girl who is ...