Scarecrow For President

Where Are The Posts?

2009-10-10T09:50:00.000-07:00

Yes, friends. SFP.blogspot.com is slowing down. I'm at the culmination of a decade long project in my personal life and my efforts there have taken away any time for blogging.

But, remember, the point of Scarecrow For President was to share an idea. So, until time allows me to return to regular blogging, I am re-posting the original idea of SFP. See you soon! SB

A modest proposal for American lovers of liberty: for the 2012 presidential race, instead of choosing a candidate, let's create one.

Let's create a candidate who believes in significantly smaller government, a non-interverntionist foreign policy, free trade, sound money, and civil liberties. Let's give this candidate no voting record or political past that can be mined for personal attack, no personal life that needs to be "vetted", and the ability to speak eloquently on our behalf without ever making a gaffe. Let's make the candidate neither black nor white, man nor woman, young nor old, but instead, a perfect blend of whatever the voter wants it to be.

Let's give our candidate the power to present libertarian ideals to America and the world without attaching itself to an ultra-specific platform. Let's not give our opponents any opportunity to pick apart the obscure details of specific policy proposals. Let's remove the temptation to bicker amongst ourselves over differences that are quite trivial when compared to our shared principles.

Let's create a fictitious candidate who "runs" on the Internet via Facebook, Blogger, MySpace, Meetup, LinkedIn, Google and whatever else comes along. Let's continue using the Internet to make the case for less government and more liberty as we have so effectively done for a decade, but also announce that we support Scarecrow For President. In so doing, Scarecrow will come to represent us in a way that a politician never can.

2008 showed that libertarians are numerous enough to make some noise in the national election. Let's start now with our 2012 campaign, but rather than hitching our wagon to Ron Paul, the Libertarian Party, or anyone else whose very identity can be made into a straw man by the media and our political opponents, let's run an actual straw man, and force the political machine to engage our ideas, rather than our standard bearer.

To Audit the Fed

2009-09-29T05:28:00.000-07:00

Barry Ritholz on auditing the Fed:

While I have been critical of the Federal Reserve (especially the Greenspan years), my beef with them has been their judgment and decision-making process. Congress, on the other hand, is a whole different matter. Its not their judgment, but rather, the fact they are owned not by the American people, but by lobbyists, and corporate interests. They have become structurally deformed.

If the Fed has been a major source of problems, Congress is much worse. They were the great enablers of the crisis, readily corruptible, bought and paid for by the banking industry. I find Congress to be the worse of two evils — lacking in objectivity, incapable of producing legitimate regulatory review.

If the Fed is Wall Street’s bitch, then Congress is the Street’s whore.

Tom Woods on the Fed:

Perhaps the most frequent of the claims is that a genuine audit would jeopardize the alleged independence of the Fed. Congress could come to influence or even dictate monetary policy.

This is a red herring. The bill is not designed to empower politicians to increase the money supply, choose interest-rate targets, or adopt any of the rest of the Fed’s central planning apparatus, all of which is better left to the free market than to the Fed or Congress. It seeks nothing more than to open the Fed’s books to public scrutiny. Congress has a moral and legal obligation to oversee institutions it brings into existence. The convoluted scenarios by which merely opening the books will lead to an inflationary catastrophe at the hands of Congress are difficult to take seriously.

Moreover, try to imagine a Fed chairman doggedly seeking to maintain the value of the dollar even if it meant refusing to monetize a massive deficit to fight a war or “stimulate” a depressed economy. It is not possible.

If there is any truth to the idea of Fed independence, it lay in precisely this: the Fed may reward favored friends and constituencies with trillions of dollars in various kinds of assistance, while keeping the public completely in the dark. If that is the independence we’re talking about, no self-respecting American would hesitate for a moment to challenge it.

This idea of opening up the Fed's books is a good one, but it won't happen, at least not in any reasonable way. I'm inclined to agree more with Ritholz. Washington is incapable of positive improvement.

As will all things on the national political scene, Scarecrow's message is: nice try, now do you see that Washington is hopeless and must be abandoned?

Plaxico and Teddy

2009-09-28T06:05:00.000-07:00

I seem to remember that 40 years ago, Ted Kennedy managed to kill someone, a small detail that the authorities on the Kennedy payroll in Massachusetts seemed to forget when they charged him with a misdemeanor for "leaving the scene of an accident."

That Kennedy received a recent near-million-dollar burial of which the extravagance exceeded that of someone from an actual royal family tells us that the political classes are being held to much different standards than someone who actually is a valuable member of society. (Catching the winning touchdown pass in the Super Bowl is a much greater and more socially-useful feat than ramrodding God-awful bills like "No Child Left Behind" and worse into law and tom-catting with Christopher Dodd through the District, and having sex with a bimbo on a sailboat in full view of the rest of the world.)

The political classes – and especially the New York City political classes – protect their own. When the city collapsed financially in 1975, it turned out that city officials were selling municipal bonds to pay off previously-issued municipal bonds, an act that clearly broke a host of fraud statutes. However, no one went to jail despite the fact that the city officials clearly were engaged in a financial swindle that would dwarf even what Bernie Madoff did 30 years later.

From Free Plaxico Burress at LewRockwell.

Spot on. Athletes are scorned for making so much money, but everyone who tunes in and pays does so voluntarily. Not so with a politician.

Precisely

2009-09-26T06:55:00.000-07:00

From a new mongraph, Economic Contractions in the United States: A Failure of Government, by George Mason prof Charles K. Rowley.

"[W]e suggest that the current economic recession, like the extended Great Depression of 1929-1939, represents a failure of government, and of state capitalism [defined as a "heavily-regulated, mixed economy, with governments at national, state and local levels that engage in production, distribution, regulation and coercive wealth transfers, as well as serving as an often uneven-handed referee." P. 56.] that is its creation, certainly not a failure of laissez-faire capitalism." (p. 2)

"The American national myth that FDR and the New Deal ‘pulled the US out of the Great Depression' does not stand up to an examination of the facts." (p. 20)

"The market chaos that ensued [in 2008] can be regarded as the outcome of rational behavior in a dysfunctional state capitalist environment." (p. 60)

"State capitalism rather than laissez-faire capitalism is the primary source of the moral failings which are now the object of populist anger that is being fueled, ironically, by the very politicians who were the chief culprits in stoking the house-price bubble that caused the financial crisis." (p. 61)

"The financial crisis of 2008 in the United States was primarily a failure of government: poor monetary policy, poor fiscal policy, and poor microeconomic policies." (p. 87)

Yes, Megan, there is a villain.

2009-09-22T06:43:00.000-07:00

Megan McArdle:

the search for a villain behind the crisis will ultimately be fruitless. There are two basic narratives of what happened. The first is that bankers had bad incentives: they took massive risks because the profits were so good in the up years that it was worth the risk of the bad, or because they could pass the risks onto some other sucker, or they thought Uncle Sugar would bail them out. The other narrative is that bankers had bad information: they didn't understand the risks they were taking.

I've always preferred narrative B, because Narrative A doesn't make much sense. The CEOs of big banks lost vast sums of money, and their jobs, most of their social status, and so forth. They held onto the worst tranches of their securities, which implies they didn't know how badly they were going to blow up. Etc.

I find it vastly more plausible, if not so comforting, to believe that systems can occasionally produce bad results even if the incentives basically point in the right direction. The FICO score revolution was valuable, but we took it too far. The money sloshing around US markets disguised the problems, because people who got into trouble tapped their home equity, or in a pinch, sold the house at a tidy profit. Everyone from borrowers to regulators was getting the same bad signal, that their behavior was much less risky than it actually was.

Not quite. There is a very clear villain at the root of this: The Fed. Remember - they don't set interest rates, they target them. The market sets interest rates, but the Fed manipulates the market immensely to achieve their target.

The market wanted interest rates to rise in 2002 - 2004, but the Fed flooded the economy to make sure it didn't happen. Financial players responded quite rationally.

The trouble is: we were headed either for massive inflation (remember $5 gas in summer 2008)? or a crash. The Fed took their foot off the pedal and we got a crash.

Found on LewRockwell

2009-09-21T06:20:00.001-07:00

Something Is Up

2009-09-18T06:18:00.001-07:00

Mild upheaval comes and goes. People get angry. People get really angry. People get violent. People vote. Life goes on. It's all just part of the news cycle.

I think what's happening right now is a bit bigger than any upheaval I've seen in my lifetime. We've got millions of seething mad people. They're mad that Washington is spending extreme amounts of money and laying the tab on working people and their children.

The response? "All these protesters are racist and can't stand a black president."

It's that willingness of those in power or in favor of those in power to just blow off all these angry people that makes me think something is up. Angry people don't like being ignored. They will only get angrier. Hopefully they can channel that anger into productive activity that might actually lead to freedom, rather than the violence, which just plays right into the government's hands.

Little Green Footballs

2009-09-17T05:42:00.001-07:00

Don't know if any of you read this popular neocon blog. It's been interesting to watch its evolution.

Little Green Footballs rose to prominence post 9/11 as a hardline supporter of the "War on Terror." Now it spends more than half its posts criticizing the Tea Parties and the Evangelical Fundamentalist wing of the Republican Party (yesterday he posted the infamous and hysterical Kirk Cameron and a banana video).

Bush's most ardent supporters like LGF find a kinship with Obama more than with the sea of angry protesters. The antiwar left has turned out not to be antiwar at all, just anti-Bush. Bush's old friends and Obama's current friends are uniting against a coalition of the evangelical anti-Obamas and the libertarian-leaning Ron Paul folks.

American democracy always moves towards equilibrium, so eventually the anti-government movement will need to find a coalition to join if they want to win the offices. Hopefully they don't. Hopefully they will come to see that their means will never be achieved by playing in the political process, and instead will realize that their numbers are already large enough to initiate a successful nationwide secession from Washington.

But who knows? There is so much rampant militarism in the Tea Party movement -- what a mess America appears if you just look at the political side of it.

Excuse me while I head off to my favorite business blogs so I can read the thoughts of good people doing good things.

Now Carter Is In On the Racism Meme

2009-09-16T05:43:00.000-07:00

The left is all-in now on this protesters-are-racist thing. I'll be interested to see where this goes.

And if you're a conservative protester, thank you for trying to stand up against a tyrannical state. When you start to feel discouraged, remember that there is another strategy that is more likely to get the federal government out of our hair, but a critical mass of us must be on board and willing to take the plunge together.

Old White Men Wielding Martinis and Wearing Dickies

2009-09-14T05:43:00.000-07:00

"I am a citizen of the United States of America. Our government has been overthrown. Our elected President has been exiled. Old white men wielding martinis and wearing dickies have occupied our nation's capital."
--Opening sentences of Stupid White Men by Michael Moore.

There's been an exceptional amount of hand wringing over the behavior of conservatives these days. Wilson's "You Lie!" outburst, the summer of angry town halls, the big demonstrations in Washington and across America.

Obama's defenders are pushing a meme in response that this is all just racism against a black president, coming out in more socially acceptable forms, that when conservatives yell "You Lie!" in their heart, they're calling Obama the N word.

As evidence, the left notes that anger of this sort was absent when Bush dramatically increased the power and scope of the federal government, or even when Clinton was in office.

While I'm sure there are thousands of differing motivations behind all the anti-government activism out there, I think the big difference between now and previous administrations isn't the President's race, it's the availability of social organizing tools on the Internet.

I put Moore's quote atop this post to show that spitting anger at the government and questions of its legitimacy aren't the sole province of the right. In a democracy, whoever loses feels unrepresented. That's the way it is.

In the past, we could kvetch about it to our friends and neighbors, and write a book if we had access. Now, with Facebook, Twitter, Meetup, and the like, it's much easier to organize a crowd and feel like we're doing something.

I will be interested to see what happens when these millions who are protesting, who are doing just what their public school teachers told them democracy was all about, learn that their efforts haven't swayed Washington even a little.

Lehman Anniversary Approaches

2009-09-13T15:47:00.000-07:00

As we near the 1-year anniversary of Lehman, I post this video on naked short selling for anyone who hasn't already seen it. It overstates its case a bit, but is fascinating and exceptionally well made, and begs the question: just what is the SEC doing to protect investors? It throws Martha Stewart in the slammer, but misses Madoff, and does nothing to control the fraud of naked short selling. I suspect that, if the SEC were abolished, the individual exchanges would quickly come up with rules that would get all of this malfeasance under control. With a federal regulatory body in place, the exchanges are interested only in getting a high volume of trades, no matter the social cost. Without such a body enforcing the exact same rules on the NYSE, NASDAQ, and the rest, the exchanges would have to prove to investors that theirs is a safe place to invest, and step 1 would be to end all these shenanigans.

Hedge Funds and the Global Economic Meltdown from Judd Bagley on Vimeo.

Top 5

2009-09-12T18:42:00.000-07:00

Most evil politicians (an easy one - just go by body count)

5. Josip Broz Tito
4. Pol Pot
3. Hitler
2. Stalin
1. Mao (he should actually own the top 100 spots all to himself. this was one evil dude).

Most evil US Presidents:

5. FDR
4. GW Bush
3. Lyndon Johnson
2. Theodore Roosevelt
1. Woodrow Wilson (like Mao, absolutely dominates the list. This was one evil dude).

I foresee Obama ultimately landing at #6.

Good job, protesters

2009-09-12T15:14:00.000-07:00

Although I am more ideologically aligned with the most radical libertarians, who don't see the Tea Party protests as being their thing because there are so many pro-war, anti-abortion, anti-immigration types present, I have great admiration for what's happening in the Tea Party / 9-12 movement.

Many or most of the protesters would disagree with my take (that Washington cannot be reformed and must be abandoned through some form of secession), but I have a sense that, over time, they'll come around. Some day I'll expound on why I'm so confident of that, but for now, I'll just point you to Ten Reasons To Be Happy, if you haven't already read it.

Stimulus Redux

2009-09-11T18:33:00.001-07:00

Health care, health care, o'er the ocean blue....we're talking health care, and hopin to not get swine flu...

I can understand why people throughout America are up in arms about health care. The (already government controlled) system is an inexcusable train wreck that no fully informed person could support, but what is being proposed in Washington is pretty looney.

Hence, we have two angry sides yelling at each other. I feel for both.

I feel for no one who supported "The Stimulus." Health care and Cap'n (Crunch) Trade ultimately might be more destructive, but the stimulus was easily the most retarded piece of legislation ever written in my life.

Barring the absurdist Keynesian arguments supporting that something like a stimulus could even be a benefit to the economy....let's take a moment to look at the basic math of Obama's stimulus.

From The Washington Post just before the stimulus passed:
"Facing an increasingly ominous economic outlook, President Obama and other Democrats are rapidly ratcheting up plans for a massive fiscal stimulus program that could total as much as $700 billion over the next two years....Obama has set a goal of creating or preserving 2.5 million jobs by 2011."

The total was closer to $1 trillion.

Class, grab your pencils and prepare for a long division 'story' problem. Here we go.

The American economy has gone under and millions of people are losing their jobs. The President has come up with a plan to create and save millions of jobs. Congress has given him $1 trillion dollars to spend on his plan. If Obama spends $1 trillion to create 2.5 million jobs, what is the average amount he spends on each job created?

Follow the Bouncing Funny Money

2009-09-09T21:41:00.001-07:00

90s: all stocks, but tech stocks in particular
2001: first half of 2005: all real estate, but American housing in particular
first half of 2005 - first half of 2008: commodities. oil, gold, silver, copper, food..
second half of 2008: US Treasuries, the dollar, the yen.

The loose money of the Fed has resulted in a roving speculative bubble that blobs from one section of the economy to another, sucking real investment along with it as it goes, and leaving tremendous overcapacity behind when it leaves. The amount of loose money pumped in from 2001-2004 grew the blob to such size that we've found trillions of dollars worldwide mis-invested into capital projects with no return. Down goes Bear Sterns, Lehman, Washington Mutual, Wachovia...

What's frightening now is that the over-investment is in US treasuries. At least when the loose money was in housing, a house was built. Now that it's in Treasuries, the loose money is funneled straight into the Washington productivity incinerator, and Obama thinks he's got $900 billion to spend on health care even though he and his predecessors have already hung $300,000 in debt over the head of each and every American.

Is The Republican Party Dead?

2009-09-08T21:02:00.001-07:00

The Death of the Republican Party is easily one of the top 5 memes in the political blogosphere right now.

It's a silly idea. Both parties have been ideologically dead since well before anyone reading this was born. They are two teams selected to play Red Rover during gym class, picked one at a time by the most popular kids in school. The only fabric tying a party together is circumstance and the whims of the influential.

Political parties are coalitions formed of necessity. Our system requires one team to wrap up 50.1% of the population into their tent and they win everything. The parties naturally align towards a 50/50 split. The Republicans were outmaneuvered by the Democrats last election and their coalition shrank. They are feeling the waters right now for the best way to regrow it.

In the interim, the libertarian political activist should make it his highest priority to peel the most open minded conservatives away from the Republican Party and away from participation in Washington elections. The system is unbreakable when it is at its preferred 50/50 equilibrium. It's times like now, when one coalition can steamroll the other, that cracks begin to form and the notion of radical change becomes feasible.

Go Figure, The Stimulus Has Made Things Worse.

2009-09-08T05:45:00.000-07:00

Anyone with an economics background knew the stimulus was utter hogwash. Keynesian economics was discredited in theory as soon as it was published, and in practice by The Great Depression, where the world became a Keynes laboratory and his policy prescriptions made the heartache significantly worse.

But democracy doesn't care about truth. It cares about a narrative that fits the screwed up incentives given to voters and representatives, and a big money grab from property owners to rent seekers is what democracy wanted in response to the downturn. Hence, we got the stimulus.

Obama is now traipsing around telling people how many jobs the stimulus has created or saved.

The graph below was originally created by the Administration to show their predicted unemployment levels with and without stimulus. The dots were added by Innocent Bystanders showing the actual unemployment rate.

In addition to the utter failure to deliver on its promise, the stimulus has added $1 trillion to the national debt. Like the Depression-era Keynesian policies, it has done the exact opposite of what was promised. It didn't bring relief, it just doubled up on the pain.

Hat tip: Greg Mankiw.

YAWN

2009-09-07T20:22:00.001-07:00

Lost in all the hubbub about Obama addressing the students in the government schools tomorrow is something more benign than the nature of an educational system funded by taxation or the secret agenda of an evildoer or whatever.

I tried to read the speech. It's freaking boring.

As such, I suppose it will fit nicely into the average schoolday.

Spreading the Word

2009-09-07T05:29:00.000-07:00

Friday was a good day for the 10 Reasons To Be Happy column. It got the coveted first link on my favorite web site: Strike the Root, and was read live on the air on my favorite radio show: Free Talk Live.

Hello Again

2009-09-06T21:21:00.000-07:00

Back from a vacation...feeling quite refreshed.

Easing in tonight with some copy and paste. We begin with a De Tocqueville quote about democracy:

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes it upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in a perpetual state of childhood: it is well content that people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness, such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

I found that quote at Let A Thousand Nations Bloom. See full post here.

From Human Events, a political protest I can get behind:

Call your local NBC affiliate and tell them to get Olbermann off NBC Sunday Night Football.

From Megan McArdle:

When the fire chief of Jericho, Arkansas, finally got fed up and went to court a few days ago to challenge his second traffic ticket in as many days, the town's entire 7-man police force showed up for the hearing. And then shot him.

Seriously. Apparently a scuffle broke out and one of the cops pulled out his gun and shot the guy in open court. He's OK, but the police department, which was already in deep trouble for its habit of ticketing everything on wheels that rolled through Jericho, has been disbanded and all outstanding tickets have been voided. The town's part-time judge has quit too. And nobody knows what's happened to all the ticket revenue.

Suckers Like Me

2009-09-01T05:37:00.001-07:00

What might happen if the 50+% of American money confiscated in taxes instead stayed in possession of its rightful owners?

One quick adjustment would be a huge increase in wages for suckers like me who choose to work in the private, voluntary sector of the economy.

Did I say sucker? I said it with pride, even though it is true. Check out this graph that Cato produced:

And here's a second graph showing the difference when lucrative federal benefits packages are included:

10 Reasons To Be Happy.

2009-08-30T15:18:00.001-07:00

New post at Fr33 Agents. Ten Reasons To Be Happy.

Politics Trumps Reason & Morality

2009-08-30T05:47:00.000-07:00

From Antiwar.com

Suddenly Afghanistan is in the news, and commentators on the right as well as the left are taking note. Tony Blankley, former chief aide to Newt Gingrich and editor of the Washington Times, joins Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuval and Pat Buchanan in comparing Obama to LBJ – a chief executive with an ambitious liberal domestic program dragged down by his commitment to a losing war.

Citing LBJ’s 1964 taped phone conversations with McGeorge Bundy and Senator Richard Russell, Blankley shows that the President knew he was pushing America into a quagmire in Vietnam: "I don’t think it’s worth fighting for," averred Johnson to Bundy. "What the hell is Vietnam worth to me? What is it worth to the country?"

Americans began asking the same questions a decade or so later, but by then it was too late – hundreds of thousands had already died, and with them the national honor.

That same day, President Johnson spoke with Senator Russell, a friend and confidante, asking his advice on the Vietnam matter. Russell told him "I’d get out: it isn’t important a damn bit." Yes, but the President was worried: "The Republicans are going to make a political issue out of it," he said. "Nixon, Rockefeller and Goldwater all (are) saying let’s move (and) let’s go into the North. … They’d impeach a president … that would run out. Wouldn’t they?"

Against his better judgment, Johnson escalated the Vietnam war, pushing through the Tonkin Gulf resolution, and publicly declaring that it was a war of necessity – a war we could and would win. We know, now, what he really believed: but politics trumped both reason and morality – and, although Blankley avers LBJ was "no monster," I beg to differ. To have gone ahead with such a momentous decision based on a purely political calculation is nothing less than monstrous. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that one of the most corrupt and ruthless presidents in American history has gone on to his singularly just reward. The subversive question Blankley raises is: does Obama risk a similar fate?

"Today President Barack Obama is on the cusp of a fateful policy decision. He has argued consistently that the war in Afghanistan is necessary to deny al-Qaida a base of terrorist operations and to stop the Taliban insurrection from destabilizing nuclear Pakistan. But serious doubts are being raised by many policy experts and an emerging majority of the American and British publics as to whether we have a strategy and the materiel to succeed. Even the optimists believe that a successful counterinsurgency in Afghanistan (and needed as much in Pakistan) will require several years of sustained commitment."

Even then, avers Blankley, it may not be possible — the implication being that the President surely knows this. He also no doubt knows his base will have a hard time following him into the wilds of Waziristan. Blankley avers Republican support for the war will be muted and even tending toward reversal on account of partisan considerations.

"Thus," he writes, "President Obama has a hard decision to make": this is a reference to the review of Afghan military strategy scheduled to take place shortly. Come September, the Middle East will be a major focus of the administration’s concern, and it promises to be historic. Whether or not it turns out to be a historic tragedy remains to be seen. As Blankley puts it:

"In this already politically difficult summer of 2009, President Obama must bring a higher level of intellectual integrity and moral courage to his go/no-go war decision than Lyndon Johnson was capable of 45 years ago. Notwithstanding his prior and current commitment to prosecute the war in Afghanistan — and notwithstanding the ambiguous political effect of his decision — he owes it to both himself and the many young service members who soon may be shipping out to make a new, cold calculation of whether he believes that he has a reasonable chance of successfully leading us in this new stage of the war. I don’t envy him his job at the moment."

Great, Great Theater

2009-08-29T09:06:00.000-07:00

Deep in my heart, I am a dramatist. I adore a good yarn and good theater of any sort. I've been fascinated with 'reality television' since its inception, because of the way it takes snippets of reality and dramatizes it, blurring the old lines.

I love how the cable news networks, combined with the power of the Internet, are now creating a new kind of theater, and a powerfully entertaining one at that. This new theater turns chunks of our daily lives into a giant reality television show. I can hardly imagine anything more amusing than that.

The unexpected genius who has climbed atop this new artform is Glenn Beck. My real life gets in the way and I rarely get to watch his show, but via social networking (an integral part of this new entertainment), I've been hearing a lot about what he's been up to in the past few weeks. Today I watched this video, edited together by Daily Kos with the intent of making him look like a fool.

I think he's a genius. He is a ground-breaking artist of exceptional talent. Like all genius artists, his power lies in the fact that he truly believes in his art.

As a political commentator, he is missing a crucial insight and that is messing up his view of everything. He thinks democracy works, and Washington's actions are intentional. He can't fathom that the utter absurdity of the USA in 2009 is in fact the natural, predictable outcome of our "republic". He thinks the Democrats in Washington have some master plan they're executing, unaware that they are all just individual actors, responding to incentives, whose individual actions add up to a monumental mess.

But that sort of insight isn't what this theater is about. The real world is boring. A fictionalized version of the real world, where politicians can go to Washington with intent to accomplish something and the ability to do so, opens the door for an exciting story with heroes and villains.

And the brilliance in this is he never crosses the line into the Alex Jones space. He just adopts the worldview that what the politicians are doing must have some intentional motive behind it other than their own short-term self interest. That is a fallacy believed by the large majority of Americans. He pushes that fallacy headlong into the reality of what's coming out of Washington, and creates this amazing show.

Keep up the good work, Glenn.

The Great Escape

2009-08-28T05:35:00.000-07:00

"The great escape of our times is escape from personal responsibility for the consequences of one's own behavior." --Thomas Sowell

The Market Rewards The Best

2009-08-27T05:30:00.000-07:00

In the late 90s, there was all this fear that Microsoft was 'being allowed' to become a monopoly and that they would gouge the world and stifle innovation and eat little children.

A post on The Atlantic business blog discusses how the sort of naturally occurring, healthy change in the marketplace that prevented this is inevitable.

Once upon a time, IBM was technology’s superpower. For decades, Big Blue lorded it over an era of big computers in big companies, heavily influencing technology and crushing competitors. Through the mid-1980s, no one could imagine how IBM could stumble.

Then along came personal computers, which ate into IBM’s cost structure and business model until the company lost $5 billion in 1992 and nearly fell to the ground. The PC generation had a new leader: Microsoft. And Microsoft soon towered over the sector.

But the Internet, in turn, has stolen Microsoft’s mojo. Start-ups that used to fret that Microsoft would eat them for breakfast now find the software giant about as threatening as the Abominable Snow Monster after Hermey the Misfit Elf pulled his teeth.

Microsoft, in a way, proved the inevitability of this generational shift. In 1995, then-CEO Bill Gates sent his staff a nine-page memo titled “The Internet Tidal Wave,” detailing how Microsoft could leap from one tech generation to the next. Yet Microsoft failed to make the jump. Everything about the company—its culture, cost structure, bureaucracy—was geared toward making profits from selling complex and expensive software packages. Microsoft never got its collective head into competing against the simple and free stuff available on the Web.

In a market, you can have a near-monopoly on something, if that arrangement is what makes the most sense for consumers. As soon as it doesn't make sense, consumers will go somewhere else.

More on Wholesale Gov't Reboot Movements

2009-08-26T21:38:00.000-07:00

From City Journal:

Frustrated with steep budget deficits, unprecedented spending, and chronic government dysfunction, citizens in a growing number of states are calling for constitutional conventions. In recent weeks, both former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and former New York governor Mario Cuomo have authored op-eds in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, respectively, arguing that the political circus in Albany compels a constitutional convention. Such efforts are already well underway in California, alongside burgeoning drives in Alabama, Arizona, and Michigan. Altogether, 25 percent of the U.S. population lives in these five states. These growing grassroots movements are a sign of the times.

On Torture

2009-08-26T05:41:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan

This is what Bush and Cheney truly achieved in their tragic response to 9/11: two terribly failed, brutally expensive wars, the revival of sectarian warfare and genocide in the Middle East, the end of America's global moral authority, the empowerment of Iran's and North Korea's dictatorships, and the nightmares of Gitmo and Bagram still haunting the new administration.

Dr. Zero

A few weeks ago, Eric Holder saw nothing wrong with Black Panthers using billy clubs to intimidate voters. Today, he thinks intimidating terrorists with cigars is a crime. Holder is the one who should be answering tough questions under oath.

Thomas Paine

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

Commenter at Daily Kos, in a conversation about Dick Cheney.

This mother fucker deserves to have the proctoscope run so far up his ass that we can also check out his tonsils.

Me Either

2009-08-26T05:29:00.001-07:00

From Gardner Goldsmith of Liberty Conspiracy:

"Ted Kennedy is dead. No comment."

Homeschooling Column

2009-08-25T05:42:00.000-07:00

I've written a column at Fr33Agents.com.

Government Prosecuting Government

2009-08-25T05:31:00.001-07:00

Attorney General Eric Holder today confirmed what has been suspected for many weeks: he has ordered what he calls "a preliminary review into whether federal laws were violated in connection with the interrogation of specific detainees at overseas locations."

Sounds good. But we know from experience that government prosecuting government is always a sham. We read a little further and see that this is too:

The scope of the "review" is limited at the outset to those who failed to "act in good faith and within the scope of legal guidance" -- meaning only those interrogators and other officials who exceeded the torture limits which John Yoo and Jay Bybee approved. Those who, with good faith, tortured within the limits of the OLC memos will "be protected from legal jeopardy"

Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/the generals/the CIA/the DOJ will all be immune, and just a few low level lambs will get sacrificed.

No surprise here. This isn't a meaningful look into the torturous excesses of the Bush years, this is politics. The health care debate has become so hot that Obama's getting burned. He's throwing some water on this fire. Bush tortured people, remember? But he's doing so in a way that won't set a precedent that would lead to his own arrest down the line.

Why Didn't This Guy Just Get on the Internet?

2009-08-24T05:54:00.000-07:00

A (long) must-read for anyone who has an interest in the arcane world of academia. It's utter brilliance how absurd this is. It's everything you ever thought it was!

Our institutions of higher learning long ago were politicized out of relevance. Mountains of state revenue keeps that whole world afloat, hence it is more important to do the politically approved research than the correct research.

The actions of the guy in this link are evidence that politics is more important than truth. He could have easily spread the word to the far ends of the earth using the Internet, but instead he insisted on playing by the ridiculous rules of academia.

Fortunately for us, the Internet is blowing this all wide open. As we speak, our absurdist scholarly system is under assault from people who want to get at the truth.

Tip of the Iceburg

2009-08-24T05:37:00.000-07:00

Reader email at Andrew Sullivan:

Warren Buffett has said that there is no higher return that a corporation can earn, historically, than through the investment of cash in the political process. Dollar for dollar he thinks that this activity out earns all other profitmaking ventures. You need to identify dollars invested/contributed against dollars returned. Overall profitability of a corporation,rather than political dollars returned to the contributor, will dilute the figure. No company can earn, in all its other activities, as much as it can earn through political contributions. This is why, in market speak, we have only scratched the surface for political contributions. As more and more people become aware of the returns, the higher the number of corporations that will engage in the political process.

I wonder...will a much higher participation rate in the lobbying process speed us down the road to the day when we all are aware that Washington cannot be fixed and must be abandoned?

How Soon We Forget

2009-08-23T08:15:00.000-07:00

Remember the AIG bonus hubbub last year? Will there be a similar hubbub over this?

From CNN: VA workers given millions in bonuses as vets await checks

WASHINGTON - While hundreds of thousands of disability claims lay backlogged at the Department of Veterans Affairs, thousands of technology employees at the department received $24 million in bonuses, a new report says.

A report issued by the VA's Office of Inspector General said the department issued millions of dollars in awards over a two-year period in 2007 and 2008.

"The frequent and large dollar amount awards given to employees were unusual and often absurd," the report stated.

Four high-level employees received about $60,000, $73,000, $58,000, and $59,000, respectively, according to the report, without sufficient justification. Another employee received a $4,500 performance award within the first 90 days of her employment from a manager who said that she did not even remember her.

Me Too

2009-08-23T05:42:00.001-07:00

From the comments to In the age of Obama, will heavy metal suck again?

Jesse Walker, on August 20th, 2009 at 12:20 pm Said:

a self-indulgent guitar solo is always a good thing

That’s how I feel about trombones.

Krugman's Latest Punch Line

2009-08-22T05:46:00.000-07:00

Knock knock

Who's there?

Krugman.

Krugman who?

Krugman says in his latest op-ed, "Experience with Medicare suggests that a government-run plan would have lower costs than private insurers; in addition, it would introduce more competition and keep premiums down."

BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

May I Return This Government For A New One, Please?

2009-08-21T05:34:00.000-07:00

From California or Bust in this week's New Yorker:

California, it turns out, is ungovernable. Its public schools, once the nation’s best, are now among the worst. Its transportation and water systems are deteriorating. Its prisons are so overcrowded that it has to turn tens of thousands of felons loose. And its legislature has spent most of the year in a farcical effort to pass the annual budget, leaving little or no time for other matters, such as—well, schools, transportation, water, and prisons. This is “normal”: the same thing has happened in eighteen of the past twenty-two years. But the addition of economic disaster to legislative paralysis may have brought California to a tipping point.

A good deal of the trouble may be fairly blamed on the Golden State’s tarnished initiative process, whereby laws and amendments to the state constitution can be proposed by petition and enacted by referendum...

Something remarkable is beginning to happen.

It started almost exactly one year ago, modestly enough, with an op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle. Echoing Jefferson, the author, Jim Wunderman, wrote, “It is our duty to declare that our California government is not only broken, it has become destructive to our future. Therefore, are we not obligated to nullify our government and institute a new one?” He then called for a “citizens’ constitutional convention” to do the nullifying and the instituting. Wunderman heads the Bay Area Council, a business group not normally considered part of the vanguard of the revolution.

The reform movement in California is a very good thing, but will still run into big problems. Ultimately, they plan to put their new government up for a yes or no vote. I predict they learn the hard way that democracy itself is the root of their problems.

I also predict that what's happening now in California is going to spread. By this time next year, there will be a large and growing movement to 'reboot' our government at all levels.

This is both exciting and dangerous.

On the exciting front, options like this one can be put on the table:

Open Source Government, by Robin Hanson (found at A Thousand Nations)

Under what I’ve called `futarchy’, we could continue to use democracy to say what we want, but use speculative markets, similar to the stock market, to decide on the best way to get it. Our elected representatives could formally define and manage an after-the-fact measurement of national welfare, an augmented GDP, while market speculators show us which policies will best help us to achieve improvements in it.

Anyone willing to pay a deposit could put forward a proposal to become policy. Two betting markets then open – one predicting welfare if we adopt the proposal and the other predicting welfare if we don’t. The basic rule would then be: a day after market prices clearly estimate national welfare to be higher given the proposal than without it, that proposal is adopted. If it is adopted, the deposit is refunded 10 times over and investments pay off years later, after national welfare is measured. Speculators can of course sell their entitlement to a share of any pay-off in the future and those who buy low and sell high are rewarded for improving the prediction.

On the dangerous front....up to half the population would like a government that is even more activist and intrusive.

As these new government movements spread, libertarians need to push all participants to include the explicit right of secession in every conversation.

Gary North on College

2009-08-20T05:51:00.000-07:00

From Academia's Bluff, at LRC.

The sad fact is this: most parents don't care about education. They care about accreditation..

Parents seek union cards for their children. But there are so many kids with union cards today that the advantage has disappeared.

What should a wise parent do? Keep the child home and away from the bureaucrats. Get the child apprenticed to a local businessman. Have the child quiz out of the entire B.A.

Add an incentive. The child gets $50,000 in cash – or half the total cost of college – as a graduation present. The child pays for his/her college education. The parent saves a bundle, especially considering how many students drop out. The child gets starting capital. Use it for grad school. Use it for starting a business. Use it for down payments on a few repossessed houses.

Meanwhile, Podunk College gets nothing. This is the way it ought to be until it offers something educationally unique and worth the extra money, or else offers its existing run-of-the mill program on-line for a third of the money that it charges today.

There is stupidity and then there is financially suicidal stupidity. Parents display both. The older the child, the more suicidal the stupidity.

Under no circumstances – none – should a family or a student go into debt for college. The average student graduates with $20,000 of debt. This is suicidal. When graduates marry, they are $40,000 in debt.

Parents, save your money. Have your college-bound children stay at home and pay for their own educations by using AP/CLEP/DSST exams at $60 per course, plus on-line distance education at $100 to $125 per semester unit, plus local apprenticeship with a salary are the way for your children to pay for their own college educations. This takes the risk out of the deal for you. With a 50% drop-out rate, there is huge risk.

If you say, "My child is not smart enough or mature enough to learn on his own," then do not send him off to college. Let him stay home and watch Animal House twice a day until he matures.

Whole article here.

And Now America Declares War on Switzerland?

2009-08-19T10:18:00.000-07:00

What the hell is wrong with Washington? This is TOTALLY UNCOOL.

UBS to divulge more than 4,000 account names

GENEVA - Swiss banking giant UBS AG agreed Wednesday to turn over to the IRS the details of 4,450 accounts suspected of holding undeclared assets by American customers, piercing Switzerland's long-standing tradition of banking secrecy.

This is just unacceptable. Just one post down I'm talking about how fun it is to laugh at democracy's absurdity. But here I am one post later, and this makes me flippin' furious!

Swiss Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf told a news conference in the capital of Bern that the deal lifts the threat of criminal prosecution against UBS, which could have endangered the bank's very existence and dealt a severe blow to the Alpine nation's economy.

In other words, the American government has engaged in an act of warfare against Switzerland. There is no other way to describe this.

The propagandist in me though, sees this as an opportunity.

For decades, there has been an uneasy truce between Washington and the American upper class to the effect of: Washington agrees to allow the productive folks access to the levers of power, upper class Americans agree to look the other way even as they get robbed blind, knowing that their turn to use the government to rob someone else will come.

Today's IRS action is a violation of that truce, and it's an assault on the most productive, effective class of our society. Tick them off too much and they just might lead us all in revolt.

The War Over Health-Care Reform: "Incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing."

2009-08-19T06:36:00.001-07:00

“I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down.”
--HL Mencken

This post at Reason reflects my views on the health care debate more so than anything else I've read out there.

From that post, a reference to someone saying, "It's not a professional wrestling exhibition, it's our democracy."

In 1997 I wrote an opinion piece for my school paper on how the appeal of professional wrestling is that it reminds us so much of our democracy, but then takes it one step further, to the fistfight and resolution where we wish our democracy would go (I happen to be a big fan of pro wrestling, btw). I wrote it because back then, Jesse Ventura was making his first splash into politics.

Funny how little things have changed.

Slavery Bureaucratic

2009-08-19T06:12:00.000-07:00

The New Underground Railroad
by Stephan Kinsella

The underground railroad “was an informal network of secret routes and safe houses used by 19th century Black slaves in the United States to escape to free states and Canada with the aid of abolitionists who were sympathetic to their cause”–was a network of people helping slaves to escape, to get away from oppressive regimes.

Now, slavery means legal ownership of another person. Legal ownership means the legal right to control. Although the antebellum form of slavery has been abolished (in the US at least), the state still maintains legal ownership over us: it claims some ownership rights in our bodies when it claims the right to conscript us, regulate us, jail us for using drugs or evading taxes. So there is still slavery, of another form. It’s partial slavery, perhaps, but it’s slavery–bureaucratic, inescapable, cloying, repressive, democratic slavery.

So, given that there is a modern analogue to chattel slavery, namely state taxation, fines, jail, conscription, regulation–what would the modern analogue to the underground railroad be? Maybe we ought to use that as a modern metaphor: refer to institutions and ways of fighting taxation as a modern Underground Railroad, or try to design a more carefully orchestrated one designed to help people evade state taxes, etc. For example, imagine a data farm on a little island nation, or some kind of banking secrecy system, that we promulgate as The New Underground Railroad–heping you escape tax slavery...Complete post at LRC blog.

2009-08-19T06:03:00.001-07:00

Surfing this morning took me to MotherJones.com, that stalwart institution of the communist left. I had to leave though. The ads were too numerous and intrusive.

Tasering A Woman in Front of Her Kids Without Cause

2009-08-18T22:15:00.000-07:00

Linking to a post on Brad Taylor's blog. He describes it in such detail you should just go check it out.

Normally, I find this sort of stuff too depressing to blog about, but I think it's important that this video get around the Internet.

2009-08-18T06:01:00.000-07:00

Health Care Failure A Symptom of Bigger Ills in Washington:

A failure to pass any version of a bill speaks to a larger, more troubling political issue.

"You can’t reform Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare," says Megan McArdle, referring to previous reform movements. "The one thing that you can do is sometimes pass a program that usually gives things to seniors or go to war. But other than that we don’t have much scope for making any kind of major reforms to the system. We need some way to address that" before the system crumbles.

It's brilliant the way the Republicans have dragged Medicare into this health care debate. There is nothing in America more sacred than Medicare. Try and tinker with it, and you're toast. Obama's trying to extend the government gravy train to more people, so the Republicans have pointed out to seniors that if young people start getting free health care too, that might mean less government money for old people care.

Bring on the crazy anger!

There is no way to reform the system. The only way to stop the utter madness of American democracy is to leave it. Even if we trade in one giant socialist state for 50 smaller socialist states, we'll have made tremendous progress, because each smaller socialist state can then break into still smaller units. When we get to the point where institutions of command and control are small enough that all participants in a command structure personally know one another, we will have a prosperous, civilized society. I'm fine with democracy. I'm fine with republicanism. But only so long as there are no democratic republics larger than a neighborhood association.

2009-08-17T20:57:00.001-07:00

Daily Kos Poetry

2009-08-17T06:18:00.000-07:00

From the comments thread at a Daily Kos entry. I went there to see how they were reacting to yesterday's hint by Sibelius that they might back off on "the public option." As expected, they're all crazed. This was my favorite quote. It's in the middle of a conversation about whether Obama is betraying them or just trying to play the game to get it done:

You protect the back of the person protecting you--if you feel that person has gone over to the dark side--the Goldman Sachs side--you push, not protect, that back.

I'm finding being disappointed by the one I loved to be less annoying than being raped by the one I hated. But, that's not real progress--just less pain.

Elsewhere in the thread, they call him "Daddy".

Today's Turn For the Worse in the Health Care Debate

2009-08-16T16:47:00.000-07:00

From Sibelius today:

"I think there will be a competitor to private insurers," Sebelius said. "That's really the essential part, is you don't turn over the whole new marketplace to private insurance companies and trust them to do the right thing."

WRONG! As we've seen over and over again on this blog and elsewhere, the problem is that private industry doesn't have the whole market. They don't have anything close to it!

Government is the health care insurance provider for 2/3 of the market already! For the remaining 1/3 of providers, government so severely regulates and controls the market that the few players who are allowed in have no functional competition, and for all intents and purposes are merely profit-seeking branches of the government.

If the bill in its present form is passed with just "the public option" removed, all the protests have accomplished nothing. Worse than nothing.

"The public option" is heinous, no doubt. But this bill has a thousand heinous pages that attack small and medium sized businesses, who are the only players left in the country trying to insure people on their own. If it passes without "The Public Option" what we'll see is our already terrible system get even worse, and the market get even more undeserved blame.

Whatever Happened To Kenner?

2009-08-16T05:30:00.000-07:00

Was just wondering, what happened to Kenner, who was the dominant toy manufacturer when I was little.

The answer: bought out by Hasbro.

Postmodern Racism, or Postmortem Socialism

2009-08-15T22:22:00.000-07:00

This column at Daily Kos completely doesn't get it:

That may be the difference; this time we've got a black president, the first one ever, and one that received not a bare minimum of votes but delivered a true political spanking to the conservatives that rallied against him, and maybe that one small fact turns out to be the only thing it takes to turn the usual muttering about federal meddling and states' rights and incipient brownness-slash-socialism into full-on talk of secession and eugenics and organized intimidation explicitly plotted to discredit even the concept of discussing national issues. Because it seems to be the same people -- white, ultra-conservative, mostly from the south and from rural areas -- and the same general arguments, and the same climate of aggressively irrational, proudly uninformed, thoroughly paranoid fury.

Keep thinking that if it makes you feel good.

What's interesting to me is how my personal Facebook page, populated with old chums from high school and college, has EXPLODED in debate over health care. From what I'm seeing, it's not at all about Obama's race, and it's not at all some uninformed diatribe about death panels. It's about people learning from their company benefits department that the house bill would immediately end their health insurance program, forcing them into "the public option." It's about parents terrified at what they're hearing about the national debt, and now hearing that government is going to expand more. It's about working people feeling like they live in a society where they are the suckers who work their tails off to produce something of value while a hundred million others have their easy paychecks funded by tax revenue.

War?

2009-08-15T22:05:00.001-07:00

What War?

Many observers have remarked that Obama's decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan, and also to escalate the campaign of targeted assassinations using drone aircraft, both in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will cause him trouble on the political left.

Not too long ago, with a different president in the White House, the left was obsessed with America's wars. Now, they're not even watching.

Could Peaceful Revolution Be on the Horizon?

2009-08-15T20:44:00.000-07:00

Reading Ron Paul's article at LRC outlining how the proposed health care plan might well be the final stake in the heart of this beast, I wonder if we're a lot closer to big change than we think. In It Can Happen Here, It Might Be Happening Now, I wrote about how the Soviet Union seemed like a solid (but impoverished) empire one day, and was utter toast the next.

From that article:

1. Out of control military budgets.
2. Unsustainable deficits and foreign debt.
3. A balky, unresponsive, corrupt political system, incapable of reform
4. Rampant government interference in the market economy, causing tremendous pricing and investment errors.
5. A shockingly expensive, unwinnable war in Afghanistan .

Those five points bankrupted Moscow. They've bankrupted Washington too.

But in order to collapse, the bankrupt central state first had to be abandoned by localities who resented the central authority.

In early 1990, Lithuania held a giant independence rally. 250,000 people assembled to express their anger at Moscow.

I had written that article shortly after the tax day tea parties, which were unlike anything I had seen before in America. Now we're having a summerlong fight over health care. If this health care bill passes, 250,000 person anti-government rallies will be next.

Between the communists parachuting onto the high school in Red Dawn and the neighborhood getting vaporized in The Day After, my elementary school classmates and I were convinced the Soviets would invade and kill us all before we made it to our next summer vacation. Before we got out of middle school, Gorbachev had resigned and the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time over the Kremlin.

It can happen that fast.

Libertarians need to think now about what we can do to make things better rather than worse in America if severe civil unrest becomes a reality.

I'm thinking tonight about an email I got shortly after writing about the demise of the Soviet Union:

Being born and raised in West Germany, I remembered the growing protests that ultimately brought down the East German government and with it the Soviet Union.

Demonstrators gathered every Monday evening after work first only in the city of Leipzig, but then in many different cities, to protest against their government. They were called "Montagsmaersche" or "Montagsdemonstrationen" (Monday Marches or Monday demonstrations).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monday_demonstrations_in_East_Germany

Since they were held on a regular basis on Mondays (first monthly, than biweekly, later every Monday) they grew in size and locations. Through their continuity and growing nature the demonstrations put a lot of pressure on the politicians, because the protesters realized they "surrounded" (outnumbered) the politicians. The main slogan of the demonstrations was "WIR SIND DAS VOLK" -"WE ARE THE PEOPLE". Imagine thousands of people chanting: "WE ARE THE PEOPLE - WE ARE THE PEOPLE- WE ARE THE PEOPLE". That's extremely powerful and peaceful.

Is it time for something similar in America? Are we ready?

Most of you are here reading this because you read my New Strategy For Liberty column. That column was my first and only experience with something of mine 'going viral.' It blew up on Twitter and Facebook, it was debated in message forums and blogs, and it was read aloud and discussed on a nationally syndicated radio program.

Something about that column really struck a nerve. I still get regular email from people reading it for the first time who are so excited at the prospect of change they are desperate for some plan that might get us there.

It's that desperation that the John Stewart/Chris Matthews/Bill Maher/Rachel Maddows of the world are blind to. They cannot fathom why all these working class stiffs are racing to town hall meetings to shout down their Congressman and anyone else who might have a hand in expanding the government even further. They've come to understand that government is the enemy of anyone who, like them, wants to work for a living and raise a family in peace. They've seen government involvement create extraordinary problems in our financial and health care sectors, and now they watch as government sweeps in and "fixes" those problems by taking more of their money, and more importantly, money from their children.

As I read Ron Paul's frank and obvious diagnosis that Washington is already bankrupt and now they're talking about spending trillions more, as I think about how quickly the Soviet Union unraveled...

What if we picked a date at some point out in the future and said, on this day, if this many people commit to join, all together, we agree to be done with Washington? We agree to stop paying taxes and stop acting like the federal laws have any relevance to us, and we agree to all do it together, to have safety in our numbers. If the rest of you want to continue minding Washington, have at it, but we're done, and as of this date, we no longer recognize their authority at all.

I've been participating in online libertarian chatter for a decade now, and I've lost track of the number of times someone has proposed something like this.

But as I watch what happens around me, as I see Washington spend itself into oblivion even as millions of Americans angrily shout at them to stop, I wonder if this time it's different. I think about how at one time I was a Republican who understood that free markets are best, and thought that we just needed to elect free market politicians to get us there. I wonder if tens of millions of people are on the cusp of making the realization that we all made long ago - the realization that Washington is too fargone to ever come back, that no politician or group of politicians can unravel this mess, that "The Republic" as they fondly call it, is over.

Seizing on the Health Care Chaos to Create New Libertarians

2009-08-14T19:30:00.001-07:00

Health Care has blown up at my work and on my personal Facebook page.

I've found that whenever I explain to someone about how, at root, our health care system is broken because government is messing with both supply and demand, I am now getting rapt attention. This issue, which seems so simple to someone with an economics background, is quite frustrating to most, who are trying to figure it out through the filters of Glenn Beck and Michael Moore. Most intelligent Americans would like to step outside the maelstrom and have the correct opinion, they just don't know where to find it amidst the talk of death panels and astroturf.

Here is the in-a-nutshell explanation that is getting me such a positive response:

"Basic economics teaches us that prices are set at the point where supply meets demand. In the health care market, government artificially increases the demand through subsidies like Medicare. The market would respond to this increase in demand with an increase in supply, but government also severely restricts the supply of health care. The AMA limits the number of doctors allowed, mountains of regulation make it near-impossible for new players to enter the hospital, drug, and insurance markets, government protections lock out new entrants in the fields of medical procedures and devices, and the threat of law suits limits the number of providers only to those who can turn enough revenue to survive the inevitable lawsuits. When artificially increased demand is met with artificially restricted supply, we have a nightmare scenario where health care must be provided at an exorbitant price, or not at all."

Then the question is posed: so what can we do? Like the dealer who gives out free dope hoping to eventually get you hooked on smack, I then seize this opening to initiate a conversation about how superior, market outcomes are near impossible within the absurdity of Washington bureaucracy, and we all need to take seriously the idea of 'rebooting' this system, perhaps through state-level secession.

I'm Really Starting to Enjoy the Spectacle of All This

2009-08-14T19:29:00.000-07:00

Dispatches from the Twitter Wars:

The latest tweet from Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa):

Specter got it all wrong that I ever used words “death boards”. Even liberal press never accused me of that. So change ur last Tweet Arlen

Here’s Sen. Arlen Specter’s (D-Pa.) offending tweet.

Called Senator Grassley to tell him to stop speading myths about health care reform and imaginary “death panels.”

A Good Health Care Policy Primer

2009-08-13T18:38:00.000-07:00

Great Glen Allport column on health care at STR.

What was healthcare like in the U.S.before the 1960s? "Less crappy" would be accurate but not detailed enough for our purpose. In many ways healthcare of the time was primitive; after all, science and technology have advanced hugely in the last half century. But in terms of delivery of services, pricing, and freedom to choose and control one's own medical care, the healthcare market in the pre-HMO, pre-Medicare era was far better than what we have today, and not unlike the modern market for computers and electronics: inexpensive, high-quality, and easy to access.

"Easy access" included house calls by the family doctor, something I remember well from my own childhood. House calls were both common and reasonably priced. An account by Eugene Scheel in the Washington Post tells us that office visits in rural Virginia during the 1950s cost $3, while house calls were $5, in an area where the typical farm wage was $1 an hour. A doctor recalls practicing in the area at the time: "I collected about 80 percent of the money. The rest of them really couldn't pay; they just didn't have it. I don't think any doctor turned anybody down." So an office visit cost the equivalent of three hours wages for a farm hand, while a house call was the equivalent of five hours wages. And a doctor's overhead (much of today's is government-imposed) was low enough that treating the indigent without charge was commonplace.

This also shows why insurance, although increasingly common, was not such a major issue in the 1950s, just as insurance for your computer gear is a non-issue today: prices were low enough that even those at the low end of the economic scale could generally afford them. You don't buy insurance for your computer maintenance and repair (and probably not even for outright loss) just as you don't buy insurance to pay for haircuts. By its nature, insurance is something to help pay catastrophic costs: rebuilding your house if it burns down, for instance, or an equally catastrophic medical problem – as opposed to prescriptions, office visits, and other medical maintenance. You don't buy insurance to cover anything easily affordable, and general healthcare WAS easily affordable in the 1950s – despite, as mentioned earlier, previous decades of interference in healthcare at the federal, state, and local levels. It took even more interference – it took the Great Society mentality of the Johnson years – to begin the process of really wrecking American healthcare.

The column goes on to describe how in less regulated industries such as computing, costs are dramatically decreasing, the opposite of our health care system, where government subsidizes the demand while restricting the supply.

Thursday Evening in America

2009-08-13T18:14:00.001-07:00

Camille Paglia, a heroine of the feminist left, wrote an article in Slate criticizing the Democrats about this health care chaos.

I, for one, voted for Obama and continue to support him...Having said that, I must confess my dismay bordering on horror at the amateurism of the White House apparatus for domestic policy...Case in point: the administration's grotesque mishandling of healthcare reform, one of the most vital issues facing the nation...

The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.

You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you're happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.

These are from the first page of comments. There are 840 like this.

Camille
You are a man of a different gender.
Enjoy your tenured ivory tower. If you ever dare set foot in the real world, you'd find out how much we detest you and your kind.
-- Diable4

Thanks, Salon...
Like we need commentary from another ivory tower "I've got mine so fuck you all" asshat who thinks her sapphic background is some sort of teflon coating from criticism.

Cuntzilla Paglia is under the delusion that she is one of the straight boys. No, Camille, you are not. You are a self-hater with a platform, and you do damage. I cannot tell you how much I personally detest you, you animated piece of garbage.

The Expansion Continues

2009-08-12T05:42:00.000-07:00

Another 45,000 troops to Afghanistan

The United States should send up to 45,000 extra troops to Afghanistan, a senior adviser to the American commander in Kabul has told The Times.

Anthony Cordesman, an influential American academic who is a member of a team that has been advising General Stanley McChrystal, now in charge of Nato forces in Afghanistan, also said that to deal with the threat from the Taleban the size of the Afghan National Army might have to increase to 240,000.

Still relevant:
Ten Questions For Everyone Who Supported Obama

Matthews Stunned That His Guest Isn't A Raving Lunatic

2009-08-11T21:24:00.000-07:00

http://tr.im/weru

I admire the audacity of this dude. He had to know there was a good chance his gun would cause some hubbub.

But more than that, I LOVE that as the interview progressed, Chris Matthews had to resign himself that, while the man in the other seat was completely unpolished and not ready for primetime, he was far from the Hannity drone he expected. Matthews wanted to get some nutjob on the air that he could demolish. What he got was a very typical Ron Paul supporter. Fringy and maybe a bit too hardcore about his guns, but thoughtful and informed.

I saw this ten years ago in the earlier days of the web. Professor types, accustomed to being unchecked in social conversation, were flabbergasted that so many well informed libertarians lurked in the bushes. The libertarians consistently won the online debate and the professors retreated to their classrooms.

It was that victory on the Internet ten years ago that paved the way for all this right-side activism. Yes, it's sloppy, unorganized, and a tad embarrassing right now, but that will change. The Sean Hannity/Rush Limbaugh base are being heavily infiltrated by Lew Rockwell Ron Paulians as we speak, which is already resulting in the makeover of Glenn Beck, who knows the action is with the free market radicals and is pandering to them to #1 ratings. All the while, the Ron Paulians are being courted by the anarchist radicals such as yours truly....

I think we should let the left have their health care. Honestly, they're just tinkering with the existing government system. The protesters should be saying, "You have your single payer; We want a free market" and pushing for the allowance of a shadow system, where there is no regulation or government involvement of any sort allowed.

But I'll take the small steps over no steps. It's clear that a large and quickly growing number of Americans understand that government is the root of our trouble. In the mid 90's, my head was where theirs is now. It takes time to think through all the implications and realize that the only solution is to abandon our centralized democracy altogether.

Rising Health Care Costs

2009-08-11T05:29:00.000-07:00

From MSNBC: Five Reasons Behind Soaring Health Care Costs

1. Your doctor is freaked about getting sued
Experts call it defensive medicine. "Doctors often order unnecessary diagnostic tests, procedures, and therapies to cover their butts in case of a legal dispute."

2. Your insurer pushes more paper than Dunder Mifflin
A third of U.S. health care expenditures goes toward administrative costs. But that money goes to more than just reams of dead trees; it also pays the salaries of everyone from phone operators to top executives, as well as for claims processing and sales.

3. You're female
Research from the National Women's Law Center has found that when buying private health insurance, women have to cough up significantly more than men for identical policies.

4. Your insurer would rather pay to treat a disease than prevent one

5. Your doctor is paid for how much he does for you — not for how well he cares for you
Under the model that most health insurance plans use, physicians make more money with every office visit and procedure they do.

Interesting enough. No qualms from me on number 1 & 2. The lawyers and the paper pushers are indeed the biggest recipients of the absurd payments in health care, where we pay a couple hundred bucks every time someone hands us a tissue. #3 (you're female) is new to me. I expect it has something to do with pregnancy being an option, but I don't know. I'm skeptical of #4 -- I'm reading more and more that these studies showing how much money we'd save if we focused on prevention rather than treatment are bogus. #5 is real, and is the result of too much regulation.

Here are two more reasons they didn't list, even though they are the two biggest reasons of all.

#1 - Government increases the demand for health care by heavily subsidizing it. Medicare/Medicaid and tremendous tax incentives push more money into health care than the market would otherwise allocate.

#2 - At the same time that government increases the demand, it restricts the supply. The AMA has the power in every state to license and limit the number of people legally allowed to provide health care. The most extreme regulation of any industry keeps new hospitals and insurance companies from being built, and limits the activity of those that already exist. The FDA has a tight noose around new chemicals that may be used in health care. A mountain of patents designed around the mountain of regulations protects the few players (mainly GE) who are in to make medical equipment.

The most basic of all economics, day 1 of the freshman class, is supply and demand. If you increase demand or decrease supply, you increase the price. If you do both, you increase the price a lot. If you do both to an absurd degree, you have our health care system.

Another Dude Who Gets It

2009-08-10T13:55:00.001-07:00

How Can We Change Rules?

2009-08-10T05:30:00.000-07:00

Found at Let A Thousand Nations Bloom

More Surfing

2009-08-09T21:09:00.000-07:00

Does Congress need 8 new jets?

The Obama administration had sought $220 million to buy four passenger jets, including two that are currently being leased by the Air Force. Before leaving town for the August break, House lawmakers doubled the aircraft order to eight, at a total cost of $550 million.

Krugman cries racist....again:

the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.

Surfing

2009-08-08T06:12:00.000-07:00

From lewrockwell: Medicare Went Broke in 2008

This year the HI Trust Fund will spend more than its income, and from 2009 through 2017, about $342 billion will need to be transferred from the Federal treasury to cover beneficiaries' hospital insurance costs.

But what about the famous Medicare trust fund? Whenever we read about Medicare's projected deficit, it always refers to Medicare's trust fund. It never says this: "Medicare's trust fund is 100% filled with unmarketable IOUs from the U.S. Treasury." Yet that is the situation. Medicare's trust fund is just like Social Security's.

From Karen DeCoster: Facebook Generates White Flight

Another bunch of crazed, Marxist, divertsity-police sociologists have a new problem for America to address: desegregation on social networking sites. The latest social debacle in this country is that “white, upper-class and college-bound teenagers are migrating to Facebook” (moving out of the neighborhood) and “less educated and nonwhite teenagers” are being left behind, in the ghetto of MySpace....

The whacko nutjob, Danah Boyd, another angry researcher of social divisions, said this:

“What we’re seeing is a modern incarnation of white flight,” Ms. Boyd said. “It should scare the hell out of us.”

Maybe we should just enforce busing on Facebook. Set up quotas on both Facebook and MySpace, and where those quotas don’t line up, the government should bus white folks from the suburbs of Facebook to the inner city of MySpace by closing down their accounts and locking their computers out of potential Facebook registration.

And, in the amused but also flabbergasted at how strange Youtube has made us all department..

In a free market, we'd just ask for our money back.

2009-08-07T05:42:00.000-07:00

Now that health care has turned into a national fistfight, government is clear to do the same old things that ticked us off last year without our notice. Witness: Fannie Mae wants more.

Fannie Mae plans to tap $11 billion in new government aid after posting another massive quarterly loss as the taxpayer bill from the housing market bust keeps growing.

But whatever, government's already won on the financial sector takeover and desecration. Now they have us in a tizzy over tinkering with our health care system.

Scenes like this one are erupting throughout the land. This is the natural outcome of our democracy. While I appreciate and even admire the people trying their darndest to stop the madness, more than anything, I'm sad that we are reduced to this. In a free market, we'd just ask for our money back, knowing that those who failed us would have to make it right if they wanted to survive.

While I believe that doing something is better than doing nothing, I wish the activists would mobilize with those of us on the web who want a different take. Rather than engaging them in political conflict, we should be engaging each other to talk about strategies for leaving the socialists behind. Tax defiance, state level nullification, secession, expatriation -- these are winning tactics. This political protest stuff is their game.

And they're ready to play.
An email from Obama on Wednesday:

from President Barack Obama info@barackobama.com
reply-to info@barackobama.com
date Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 10:21 AM
subject Bring it, Muthafucka

This is the moment our movement was built for.

For one month, the fight for health insurance reform leaves the backrooms of Washington, D.C., and returns to communities across America. Throughout August, members of Congress are back home, where the hands they shake and the voices they hear will not belong to lobbyists, but to people like you.

Home is where we’re strongest. We didn’t win last year’s election together at a committee hearing in D.C. We won it on the doorsteps and the phone lines, at the softball games and the town meetings, and in every part of this great country where people gather to talk about what matters most. And if you’re willing to step up once again, that’s exactly where we’re going to win this historic campaign for the guaranteed, affordable health insurance that every American deserves.

There are those who profit from the status quo, or see this debate as a political game, and they will stop at nothing to block reform. They are filling the airwaves and the internet with outrageous falsehoods to scare people into opposing change. And some people, not surprisingly, are getting pretty nervous. So we’ve got to get out there, fight lies with truth, and set the record straight.

That’s why Organizing for America is putting together thousands of events this month where you can reach out to neighbors, show your support, and make certain your members of Congress know that you’re counting on them to act.

But these canvasses, town halls, and gatherings only make a difference if you turn up to knock on doors, share your views, and show your support. So here’s what I need from you:

Can you commit to join at least one event in your community this month?

In politics, there’s a rule that says when you ask people to get involved, always tell them it’ll be easy. Well, let’s be honest here: Passing comprehensive health insurance reform will not be easy. Every President since Harry Truman has talked about it, and the most powerful and experienced lobbyists in Washington stand in the way.

But every day we don’t act, Americans watch their premiums rise three times faster than wages, small businesses and families are pushed towards bankruptcy, and 14,000 people lose their coverage entirely. The cost of inaction is simply too much for the people of this nation to bear.

So yes, fixing this crisis will not be easy. Our opponents will attack us every day for daring to try. It will require time, and hard work, and there will be days when we don’t know if we have anything more to give. But there comes a moment when we all have to choose between doing what’s easy, and doing what’s right.

This is one of those times. And moments like this are what this movement was built for. So, are you ready?

Please commit now to taking at least one action in your community this month to build support for health insurance reform:

Let’s seize this moment and win this historic victory for our economy, our health and our families.

Thank you,

President Barack Obama

2009-08-07T05:30:00.000-07:00

On my list of the greatest libertarian movies of all time, I'd put Ferris Bueller at #2, just behind Brazil.

Medicare Trumps All

2009-08-06T05:29:00.001-07:00

I wonder if Congress knew in 1960 when they signed the bill making Medicare law that they were going to destroy the world.

Paying for health care for senior citizens has turned out to be government's most potent weapon of all. Seniors vote in larger numbers than any other group, and they are unwilling to give up the benefit even though it is bankrupting the country because, what do they care - they'll be dead soon!

How powerful a weapon is it?

Today I see that bloggers on both sides want to use it as their own WMD.

Mark Kleiman thinks Democrats need to start saying Republicans want to destroy Medicare.

Megan McCardle thinks that Republicans need to start saying that Democrats want to destroy Medicare.

I want to end Medicare. I want to end it immediately. Now that I've said that, I suppose I can never be a politician.

Great, great, work, Naked Emperor

2009-08-05T05:33:00.000-07:00

From Time.com YouTube Wars

We live in a land where a person who goes by the name "NakedEmperor" with editing software and a laptop can rattle the President of the United States.

The Untenable Republican Health Care Position

2009-08-04T06:57:00.000-07:00

From Andrew Sullivan:

I have yet to hear from the tea-bagging right how they plan to prevent soaring healthcare costs from bankrupting private industry and decimating the public purse. And I never heard from them about how they intended to cut spending and balance the budget.

It's too bad he has chosen to get on with that ridiculous tea-bagging meme, but his point is good. The Republican position on health care is untenable. We clearly have a terribly broken system. The Democrats are offering what the public can perceive as a fix (it heavily relies on Bastiat's costs unseen of course, and will make things even worse).

The Republicans understand that the Democrat solution makes a bad situation worse, but have been trapped into defending the current system. It isn't politically feasible in our democracy to propose what must be done to fix health care, because the most important part of a fix is to get rid of Medicare, and senior citizens are the largest, most powerful voting bloc.

Health care is a pivotal issue not just for the size and scope of it, but because it more than anything else demonstrates the utter failure of our democratic republic. We have a dreadful problem here that is the number one concern of Americans and is killing people, and we simply cannot fix it without first fixing the underlying problem. We need to jettison the federal apparatus entirely.

Health Care, Government.

2009-08-04T05:29:00.000-07:00

From the AP: Tax revenues plummeting.

WASHINGTON – The recession is starving the government of tax revenue, just as the president and Congress are piling a major expansion of health care and other programs on the nation's plate and struggling to find money to pay the tab.

The numbers could hardly be more stark: Tax receipts are on pace to drop 18 percent this year, the biggest single-year decline since the Great Depression, while the federal deficit balloons to a record $1.8 trillion.

From Reason: The Myth of Free Market Health Care

ObamaCare's supporters and opponents believe that—unlike Europe—America has something called a free market health care system. So long as this myth holds sway, it will be exceedingly difficult to prescribe free market fixes to America's health care woes—or, conversely, end the lure of big government remedies.

From LRC: Universal Government.

The cost of government has exploded in recent years and if we don’t act fast, the price will continue to soar, eventually leaving affordable government out of the reach of many...

With the new public option, people who wish to remain at their current level of government can do so, but those who are ready to step boldly into the future can opt in. The new plan offers not only more government, but also better, more affordable government. The essential insight is to allow those who opt into the public option to not bear the costs of the plan. They can all get more government for free.

Decades

2009-08-03T06:00:00.000-07:00

"Job security" is a common expression in a place of work to describe one's situation when buried with work to do. I'm thinking of that phrase as I read this.

Afghan war could last for decades:

The Taliban were underestimated by the nations fighting them in Afghanistan, the Defence Minister admitted yesterday.

Sir Nigel Sheinwald, the ambassador to Washington, warned Britain faced a 'long-term commitment' in the country.

...

In an interview with The Boston Globe, Sir Nigel said: 'We're going to have a very long-term commitment to Afghanistan's future. This is not just one year.

'This is going to be for decades. We're going to help them get to a state which can they can ward off the return of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.'

Unfortunately, with governments, they get to determine how much job security they have, regardless of the value of the work.

2009-08-03T05:54:00.000-07:00

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

Government Already Runs Health Care - 2

2009-08-01T15:54:00.000-07:00

From the latest Krugman:

It’s not just that many Americans don’t understand what President Obama is proposing; many people don’t understand the way American health care works right now. They don’t understand, in particular, that getting the government involved in health care wouldn’t be a radical step: the government is already deeply involved, even in private insurance.

Amen, Brother.

Oh wait. Here's the next sentence.

And that government involvement is the only reason our system works at all.

While I think we all should be patient with the average Joe Schmo who grew up in the government schools who might have such a dumb thought, Krugman has a prominent national voice, and the fact that anyone takes him seriously when he says things like Government is the only reason the system works...it's a nice reminder for all the thinking people out there that our democracy empowers people much dumber than you to make decisions about your life and your property.

Ah well...there are still lots of good things about the world. At least it's a sunny day outside.

Anyway, for more on this:

The Numbers Cold and Clear. We Already Have Socialized Medicine.

5-4-3-2-1...Kaboom!

Obama Spying on Antiwar Just As Much As Bush

2009-08-01T06:30:00.001-07:00

The Seattle Port Militarization Resistance (SPMR) group in Washington state thought their listserv coordinator, who went by the name "John Jacob," was one of them: a dedicated antiwar activist and self-described anarchist. They trusted him, they put him in a key position, they befriended him – and then they found out that he was a government informant.

His real name: John Towery (here’s his myspace page, and here is a photo). He claimed to be a civilian employee at Washington state’s Ft. Lewis: in reality, he was and is a functionary of the force protection unit, i.e. military personnel. His job: spying on the antiwar movement.

More...

Casualties of War

2009-07-31T05:08:00.000-07:00

Before the murders started, Anthony Marquez’s mom dialed his sergeant at Fort Carson to warn that her son was poised to kill.

It was February 2006, and the 21-year-old soldier had not been the same since being wounded and coming home from Iraq eight months before. He had violent outbursts and thrashing nightmares. He was devouring pain pills and drinking too much. He always packed a gun.

“It was a dangerous combination. I told them he was a walking time bomb,” said his mother, Teresa Hernandez.

His sergeant told her there was nothing he could do. Then, she said, he started taunting her son, saying things like, “Your mommy called. She says you are going crazy.”

Eight months later, the time bomb exploded when her son used a stun gun to repeatedly shock a small-time drug dealer in Widefield over an ounce of marijuana, then shot him through the heart.

Marquez was the first infantry soldier in his brigade to murder someone after returning from Iraq. But he wasn’t the last.

The above is excerpted from a 2-part article published in The Colorado Springs Gazette. It's mind blowing stuff that deserves a Pulitzer.

How Capitalism Saves Ruby From Corporatism

2009-07-30T20:05:00.000-07:00

Every once in awhile, a link is so good, I don't want to excerpt it, I just want you to rush over and read the whole damn thing. Such is the case with this.

Silent Bailouts

2009-07-29T05:41:00.000-07:00

This blog has given you lots of reasons why large-scale centralized democracy is a dreadful way to organize society. Here's another -- low incentive to pay attention and take action about what the central authority does leads to short attention span on issues of importance.

Witness: The Doctrine of Preemptive Bailouts and the Biggest Bailout you haven’t Heard About: The U.S. Treasury Plan C and the $3.5 Trillion You will be Paying.

The U.S. Treasury is working on an internal project informally called “Plan C” which seeks to deal with further problems in the economy before they occur. The anonymous report came out stating the administration is reluctant to commit any additional money especially to the level mentioned in the report. However this is a disturbing new development in our bailout nation since this is one of the first times that the U.S. Treasury will try to preemptively deal with a financial problem.

....

The amount of maturing loans in commercial real estate will double in 2010 and will continue upward into 2010. This is the next multi-trillion dollar bailout you have yet to hear about. In fact, while many are discussing a second half recovery higher up officials are already planning a bailout for the commercial real estate industry. The challenge with this bailout is you are asking a public with 26,000,000 unemployed and underemployed Americans to shoulder the debt of largely speculative plays.

The majority of voters are oblivious to the sheer magnitude of the mess Washington has created in the past 12 months. Of those few who are aware, they have lost interest because the spectacle has lost its entertainment value. The cable news outlets are plugged into this sentiment and have moved on to Michael Jackson, Health Care, and the Gates arrest.

Now safe from prying eyes, Washington sweeps in to do the real damage.

hat tip: STR

One Way to Restore Economic Growth

2009-07-28T05:43:00.000-07:00

Rick Perry Vows to Fight Obamacare

Gov. Rick Perry, raising the specter of a showdown with the Obama administration, suggested Thursday that he would consider invoking states’ rights protections under the 10th Amendment to resist the president’s healthcare plan, which he said would be "disastrous" for Texas.
Interviewed by conservative talk show host Mark Davis of Dallas’ WBAP/820 AM, Perry said his first hope is that Congress will defeat the plan, which both Perry and Davis described as "Obama Care." But should it pass, Perry predicted that Texas and a "number" of states might resist the federal health mandate.

Why wait until this bill is decided? Why not push Washington out right now? Some states (most notably Alaska) have a lot to lose if we decentralize, but certainly not Texas. If Texas started pushing back on Washington now, over anything, from income taxes to payroll taxes to regulation -- everyone in the state would be much better off.

It might even be a politically feasible argument.

"We're all struggling. The economy's in tatters. As of today, the state of Texas is no longer recognizing (insert any random Washington intrusion into every day life)"

Don't Download This Song

2009-07-27T05:24:00.000-07:00

Alternative title: Lars Ulrich was wrong and Metallica's legacy is forever tainted because of his stupidity.

From NY TIMES: Streaming Services May Sooth Music Industry

After a decade of rampant digital piracy that has helped to gut album sales, a raft of new streaming music sites is making the experience of legally finding and listening to music just as seductive as downloading it free.Many music industry observers now believe that there is a fundamental shift under way: from illegal downloads to licensed streaming services like MySpace Music, imeem and Spotify, where users can play any song, anytime and — coming soon — on any device. These sites are free, supported by ads, and with an expanding catalog of songs, they are finally ready to overshadow the more cumbersome, unauthorized services that can be hard for newcomers to navigate.

How about that? People figuring out ways to make money by giving others what they want...what a concept?

The Weird Al video on the subject.

Look Out For the Self-Recharging Hoover!

2009-07-27T05:14:00.000-07:00

The NY Times much bally-hooed article suggesting we are getting closer to The Singularity was an interesting read. I overheard people discussing the article (fearfully) in a cafe this morning, and tonight ABC discussed it on World News Tonight.

We're certainly moving along and the text seems to imply that Ray Kurzweil's prediction that we are less than a lifetime away from a machine reaching consciousness is still within sight.

But then I saw this picture with this caption. Umm...

This personal robot plugs itself in when it needs a charge. Servant now, master later?

Overconfidence, or Overprinting?

2009-07-26T17:06:00.000-07:00

Malcolm Gladwell has published his latest piece of fascination, this one call The Pyschology of Overconfidence. In it, he argues that extraordinary overconfidence was a factor in the Wall Street meltdown, particularly in the case of Bear Stearns.

All that we can say unequivocally is that overconfidence is, as Wrangham puts it, “globally maladaptive.” When one opponent bluffs, he can score an easy victory. But when everyone bluffs, Wrangham writes, rivals end up “escalating conflicts that only one can win and suffering higher costs than they should if assessment were accurate.”

Gladwell uses the cocksure behavior of the CEO of Bear Stearns, and also the British WWI fiasco at Gallipoli to make his case.

He's careful to make points that can be backed up with evidence in his piece, and for the most part does a good job of showing that all sorts of powerful bankers were behaving with extraordinary arrogance prior to the meltdown, arrogance that was nurtured in a culture where an attitude of confidence is usually rewarded with financial success.

He mis-steps when he suggests that this arrogance can be the primary descriptor behind the meltdown:

The first wave of postmortems on the crash suggests that the roots of Wall Street’s crisis were not structural or cognitive so much as they were psychological.

No, they were in fact structural. While it's true (and fascinating, as always with Gladwell) that a pyschological explanation played a part, what isn't explained is why every industry isn't subject to the same sorts of spectacular meltdowns that banking and finance experienced last year.

In a civilized society, the sorts of pyschological mishaps that Gladwell describes are kept in check by free market forces. If a company president becomes exceptionally arrogant and starts making risky bets, a more conservative counterpart will come up behind him and get the capital from investors who want a more sure thing.

But in banking, those sorts of forces were dramatically distorted by the actions of the Fed from 2001 - 2005. When the Fed sets a target interest rate, they do whatever open market operations are necessary to make that interest rate come about. When they set a super low interest rate following the 2001 recession, debtors jumped in and took advantage. In a marketplace, there would have come a point where a bank would have looked at its balance sheet and seen that it was about to overextend itself with too many loans, and raised its interest rate. But the Fed tempered that response by flooding the banking system with more money to lend, which in turn led to even more lending, which required more money from the Fed to hold down the interest rate...

A dreadfully dangerous cycle gets underway when the Fed forces interest rates down for an extended period. In our case, it resulted in a spectacular amount of new debt issued to anyone and everyone. We very quickly reached a point where normal economic growth could not support this debt without extraordinary price and wage inflation. When the Fed let interest rates start rising again, the whole thing exploded on us.

Yes, people get cocky, and do some amazingly ridiculous things, but the free interaction of all kinds of people: arrogant and humble, risky and conservative, tempers all of this and rewards those who make the correct bets. The 2008 financial meltdown came about because the government interfered with this free interaction.

The Numbers, Cold and Clear. We Already Have Socialized Medicine.

2009-07-24T20:11:00.000-07:00

In a great bit of irony, leftist site Blog For Our Future did a fantastic analysis showing that our health care system is at least 2/3 government controlled already! For some reason, they think this is evidence in favor of giving government complete control, unaware that the entire reason for this discussion is that we all agree that our current health care system is dreadful, embarrassing, unacceptable, and a disgrace.

So, without further adieu, I give you:

Goverment-Funded Health Care? We're Already Two-Thirds There by Sara Robinson.

The inescapable fact of the matter is this:

Only about a third of the country is still dependent on the "dominant" paradigm—private plans paid for by non-government employers. Everybody else in the country—over 200 million of us—gets most or all of their health care via some form of government-subsidized system.

The whole other two-thirds of us. Right now. Today.

When you realize this staggering truth, the entire conversation changes. It's not even a question of whether or not the U.S. government is going to get into the insurance business. We're there. That already happened. The old private-insurer paradigm isn't just failing; the vast majority of Americans left it (or it left them) long ago since, and the government has already taken over where they left off.

This is the kind of fact that most of us know in our bones has to be true somehow. But it turns out there's no "maybe" about it. Let's look at the numbers.
The Fortunate 43 Percent: The Ones We Cover Directly

About 43 percent of all Americans are already getting health care that's directly paid for, one way or another, by some level of government. Here's the breakdown:

32 million government employees and contractors—This group includes 2.7 million federal employees; and 19.3 million state, county, and municipal workers. That's a grand total of 22 million workers who are getting health insurance—usually from privately-contracted insurers—that's been paid for by taxpayers.

In addition, there are an estimated 10 million+ full-time federal contract workers. They're getting their insurance from their own employers; but since these are government contracts, we're still paying their bills in the end.

(Note, however, that this 32 million figure doesn't include these workers' dependents. I made the conservative assumption that most government employees pay an extra out-of-pocket premium for dependent coverage. To the extent that that assumption is wrong, we may also be covering at least some of these workers' spouses and kids.)

58 million recipients of Medicare, Medicaid, and state health care plans -- This includes 47 million Medicare/Medicaid recipients and 11 million mothers and children covered by SCHIP programs.

27.4 million active duty military, reservists, and veterans, plus dependents—This breaks down into 1.4 million active duty troops being served by the military system; and .8 million reservists and 23.6 million veterans who are qualfied to receive care through the VA.

Active duty service members also get free coverage for their dependents. Assuming a ratio of one dependent per active duty service member, that adds another 700,000 Americans getting their care from military doctors.

3 million miscellaneous—This includes 2.3 million Americans in county, state, and federal prisons; 200,000 whose insurance is subsidized by state high-risk pools; and 400,000 Native Americans whose care is provided through tribal health services subsidized by some combination of their own tribal governments and the federal government.

TOTAL: This adds up to about 120,200,000 Americans whose health care coverage is directly paid for by the government. I'm sure there were pockets that were missed by this accounting, and I encourage readers to write and tell me about them.

The 25 percent Left Behind: Not Covered, But We're Paying Anyway

The ones above are the lucky ducks: they've got coverage that's backed by the government—the only institution left whose promises are worth a damn. But among our taxpayer liabilities—both tangible and intangible—we need to count another 25 percent of the population who are going without health care, either partially or altogether. This group includes:

50 million uninsured —The last hard numbers that were published put this figure at 45.5 million. But that was last July—just before the financial collapse began stripping jobs out of the economy at the rate of half a million or more per month. As people lose their jobs, they also lose their health insurance. If this number's not at 50 million yet, it will be in another few months.

25 million underinsured—Beyond the vast and growing pool of uninsured, there are another 25 million Americans who are underinsured. That is: they have bare-bones policies that cover catastrophic care, but not routine doctor's visits; or that have deductibles so high that even routine care will drive them into debt; or that exclude so many conditions that they end up paying out-of-pocket much of the time anyway.

TOTAL: 75 million at-risk Americans who can't depend on either the government or an employer for care. But even though we're not paying their bills (or, more accurately: because we're not paying their bills) the tremendous risks they live with do eventually end up on the public balance sheets, one way or another. According to CAF health care reform expert Mike Elk, "A recent study by Families USA showed that 1 out of 3 Americans under 65 (people over 65 automatically qualify for Medicare) lacked health care for some or all of 2007-2008. The biggest irony is that that of that group, 4 out of 5 were in a household with a full time worker and still could not afford health care."

The first-level effects of this malign neglect are obvious. Because they often delay routine care that catches things while they're small and easy to treat, these are the people may not get seen until they end up in front of an ER doctor in a public hospital. Not only do taxpayers end up paying far more for this high-end service; the patients themselves get less effective care for our money, because the ER system was never designed to provide preventative or follow-up care. This is a colossal waste of time, money, and resources for everyone concerned. (And God help us all of there's ever a major pandemic: this group could spread the bug far and wide before they're finally sick enough to get to a doctor.) In fact, if you were going to design a system to deliver the minimum amount of effective care for the maximum cost, it's hard to imagine how you could possibly do it better than this.

But it's the second-order effects that really come around to bite us on the backside. A recent Harvard study found that over half of all home foreclosures in the US are due to the financial stress of medical bills. Other studies have found that medical debt drives the majority of personal bankruptcies, too. Therefore, the people most at risk for bankruptcy and foreclosure are the ones who fall into this 25 percent.

Too many of these people are just one bad health event—a car accident, a case of pneumonia, a heart condition—away from a complete family breakdown. If the worker gets fired because recovery took too long to suit her employer, she's now sitting at home with a pile of hospital bills, no income, and no insurance. Bankruptcy and foreclosure follow quickly. So do domestic violence, delinquency, and drug abuse—all of which eventually end up costing the whole community, both in tax dollars and lost social capital. And "family values" conservatives are perfectly content to stand by and let it all happen.

Then there's the fact that nobody reaches the age of 50 without developing some kind of "pre-existing condition." A large subset of these uninsured folks are well-educated middle-aged professionals—many of whom are self-employed, or own their own companies—who are simply uninsurable at a price they can afford. Medicare is starting to pay attention to these people, because they've done the math. It turns out that the little problems that these people can't afford to treat properly while they're in their 50s—the creeping blood sugar and the angina and the joint problems—grow into big hairy monster problems by the time these people turn 65. These very expensive deferred-care messes are now devouring a disproportionate amount of its Medicare's entire budget.

Nobody's counting the costs of all this—but anyone who argues that we can afford to have a quarter of the country living on the edge of disaster isn't thinking clearly about how much it costs us all when they finally fall through the cracks.
The Last 32%: Still Getting Employer-Paid Insurance—But For How Long?

Add together the 43 percent who already have access to government-funded coverage, and the 25 percent whose lack of access to reliable care eventually ends up on our bill one way or another, and you get a stunning figure: 68 percent of Americans are, effectively, already depending on taxpayers to pick up the tab for their health care—or for the aftereffects of their lack of it.

Which leaves just 32 percent—under a third of the country—still dependent on traditional employer-based private insurance plans. With everybody else decamped into government-funded plans or the vast limbo of the non-insured, this little slice of the market is all that's left—the prize that insurance companies are fighting so hard right now to hold onto.

32%
The percentage of Americans who rely solely on employer-based private insurance.

68%
The percentage of Americans who already receive some form of publicly supported health care; 43 percent directly; 25 percent indirectly because they are uninsured and thus the cost of their care is subsidized.

Add in the government involvement unmentioned in the article above: the FDA, the AMA, and mountainous, ruinous regulation, and it is clear that health care in America is already a government run system, which makes perfect sense. Outrageously rising costs for worse and worse service; long waits in ugly, dilapidated offices; grouchy, unhelpful service providers; mountains upon mountains of paperwork at every step (actual paperwork, mind you - even in 2009 most doctors are writing notes on a clipboard that someone is then entering into some Digital Equipment Corp server from 1997); and a general air of misery and failure surrounding the whole enterprise -- the American hospital has much more in common with the DMV office than with any private company.

2 Reposts From Andrew Sullivan

2009-07-24T18:12:00.001-07:00

Two really good things on Andrew Sullivan today.

1. A truthful letter from a reader, treated with empathy by Sullivan:

I’m very uncomfortable with the unspoken position that The Daily Dish has taken on the Gates issue, which is that professor Gates is the victim. Personally, as someone with a conservative disposition I believe that Harvard professors should be able to maintain composure and behave professionally even if their feelings are hurt.

Beyond this immediate issue, many posts have me thinking about how many black people are frequently upset because they believe they are unfairly targeted by police officers. When this happens it is surely an indignity and I can empathize. I have run in to some nasty cops in my life and I know the helpless rage. The media give a stage to people with such complaints, which is good. But what about the daily indignities of white people?

I know you won’t print the following and I know you’ll only make more people angry if you do, but as a white man I frequently feel that I am treated with disrespect and hostility by black people. And then there have been times in my professional life when I thought black employees were behaving unprofessionally, but I was scared to say anything because I thought I’d be accused of racism. When the president of the United States defends someone who appears to have behaved like a teenager it makes me fume inside because I keep my composure when I’m treated rudely and I don’t open my mouth and insult people without certainty. These daily indignities are not vented on grand media stages, but are quietly complained about in private.

The latest awesome Vimeo:

Revenge from lernert Engelberts on Vimeo.

Race, Obama, Gates, Yada Yada

2009-07-24T05:30:00.001-07:00

Most of what takes hold in the news doesn't interest me. Michael Jackson, Sotomayor confirmations, Obama approval ratings -- all seem trivial to me. The news runs with these things because the real meat about the level of destruction wrought in Washington is complicated and dry to most people.

But the latest meme du jour, the arrest of a black Harvard professor who was trying to break into his own home, is very interesting to me. My thoughts:

** yes, it's clear this guy was not treated with the respect due to an honest man, and he has a right to be angry.
** yes, his situation might have been completely different were he a white man.

What isn't spoken enough in this story is the way police routinely mistreat anyone and everyone they deal with in communities across the country.

I used to be one of those libertarians who ranted and raved about the way Washington creeped into our lives, but thought little and was mostly skeptical of those who got really irked at local authorities for treating citizens like serfs in a police state.

I've since opened my eyes. If you are a skeptic like I was, go here, or here, or (especially) here.

There is no question that being black in America instantly puts you on the sh*t list with your local cops. But I wonder if we focus on that so much that we miss how likely it is that a police officer will badly misbehave in an interaction with anyone of any race, or how much corruption is rampant in police departments all over America.

We Already Have "the Public Option" - it's the problem

2009-07-23T05:48:00.001-07:00

Interesting that proponents of "A Public Option" are saying it's necessary because it will keep the 'private' companies honest by providing competition.

In doing so, they're admitting that we have a broken market.

If we had a working market in health care, providers would compete with each other.

But most of the available money in this market isn't from consumers; it's from government. The game in health care isn't to attract customers by providing the best service at the best cost. The game is to get in, stay in, and minimize costs once you're in. Because once you're in, you are in. Billions of dollars in government subsidy flow freely to those preferred few allowed to receive them.

A "Public Option" will just increase the flow of this stolen cash, and further increase the problem.

Government In Action

2009-07-22T05:47:00.000-07:00

This is a college professor. Could have been anyone.

Several months ago, the Alabama Department of Revenue decided I’d underpaid on state taxes from ten years earlier. (I wasn’t aware of having done so, but I don’t have those records any more and so can’t prove otherwise.) After they’d added on interest and late fees, the total due was about $12,000. I submitted a request form to pay it off in installments; they never said yes or no to the request form, but I kept sending in payments and they kept cashing them, which led me to be more sanguine than in retrospect I should have been.

Then suddenly today, without warning or announcement (either from the tax department or from my bank), the tax department completely cleared out my checking account, and my savings account, and my mother’s checking account (I guess because we’re joint on it), leaving me $8000 overdrawn to boot.

Coming Up Next...Hitler on How He Rescued the Jews

2009-07-22T05:31:00.000-07:00

Tonight Obama is going on TV to tell us he rescued the economy. The dude's got balls.

$23 trillion.

2009-07-21T20:55:00.000-07:00

A series of bailouts, bank rescues and other economic lifelines could end up costing the federal government as much as $23 trillion, the U.S. government’s watchdog over the effort says – a staggering amount that is nearly double the nation’s entire economic output for a year.

If the feds end up spending that amount, it could be more than the federal government has spent on any single effort in American history.

The $23 trillion number is the amount the government is hypothetically committed to should lots of things "go wrong."

But we all know that in Washington, things always "go wrong." Take Medicare.

When it was being debated in Congress, Medicare was supposed to cost $64 million in its first year. It ended up costing $3 billion.

When it was being written up in Congress, Medicare was projected to cost $ 12 billion by 1990 (a figure that included an allowance for inflation). But in 1990 Medicare actually cost $107 billion. In 2011, it will cost $500 billion.

Absurd? Yes. Infuriating? Yes. Terrifying?

Not necessarily. We've reached the point where this whole business (Washington DC and all it means) will topple under the weight of its own nonsense. Now that we're talking about twice the output of the entire economy in one fell swoop, the significance of fiat money becomes apparent. At some point, the world need only declare that they've had enough, and the dollar becomes worthless.

The question is only when and how it will happen. Get your friends and family to start reading David Friedman or Murray Rothbard. When this puppy blows, we need a big number of people who understand why it happened.

Surge #4

2009-07-21T05:33:00.000-07:00

From the L.A Times:

…the number of DEA agents and analysts in Afghanistan will rise from 13 to 68 by September, and to 81 in 2010. More agents will also be deployed in Pakistan.

Much smaller numbers than Bush's surge in Iraq and Obama's 2 surges in Afghanistan, but even more ridiculous. I am a critic of America's wars in the Middle East, but they aren't nearly as miserably failed as the War on Drugs.

Why So Much Corruption?

2009-07-20T06:05:00.000-07:00

Krumgan says:

"Despite everything that’s happened, I don’t think many people grasp just how raw, how explicit, the corruption of our institutions has become."

He certainly doesn't. His example of corruption is this story from Politico:

The American Conservative Union asked FedEx for a check for $2 million to $3 million in return for the group’s endorsement in a bitter legislative dispute, then flipped and sided with UPS after FedEx refused to pay.

For the $2 million plus, ACU offered a range of services that included: “Producing op-eds and articles written by ACU’s Chairman David Keene and/or other members of the ACU’s board of directors.

Yes, quite corrupt. Yes, quite common.

But why so common? Why does every large company have a lobbying arm that works on Washington, think tanks, universities, state, local, and international governments?

Because government has grown so much that it is everywhere, and the only way to be in the game is to get in the game. FedEx started however many years ago as a legitimate business concern, whose only purpose was to make money through voluntary exchange. At some point, it grew large enough that in order to stay on the level with its competitors, it had to start wining and dining in Washington. Once you're a certain size, the incentives to play that game are too great.

The only way we will end systemic corruption in our society is to strike at the root of it. Our government takes more than half the money made legitimately in America and then redistributes it illegitimately to those who best play the game.

How Washington Works - Part 19

2009-07-19T07:20:00.000-07:00

From The Select Few Are Cashing in:

If you want to know what really matters in Washington, don't go to Capitol Hill for one of those hearings, or pay attention to those staged White House "town meetings." They're just for show. What really happens -- the serious business of Washington -- happens in the shadows, out of sight, off the record. Only occasionally -- and usually only because someone high up stumbles -- do we get a glimpse of just how pervasive the corruption has become.

Case in point: Katharine Weymouth, the publisher of The Washington Post -- one of the most powerful people in DC -- invited top officials from the White House, the Cabinet and Congress to her home for an intimate, off-the-record dinner to discuss health care reform with some of her reporters and editors covering the story.

But CEOs and lobbyists from the health care industry were invited, too, provided they forked over $25,000 a head -- or up to a quarter of a million if they want to sponsor a whole series of these cozy get-togethers. And what is the inducement offered? Nothing less, the invitation read, than "an exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will get it done."
.....
The Economist says America has the worst system in the developed world, wasting $450 billion dollars in redundant administrative costs.

Enter "the select few who actually get it done." Three out of four of the big health care firms lobbying on Capitol Hill have former members of Congress or government staff members on the payroll.

How Drastic Is This Health Care Bill?

2009-07-18T09:49:00.000-07:00

From The NY Times:

The director of the Congressional Budget Office warned Thursday that the legislative proposals so far would not slow the growth of health spending.

When even the CBO is warning that costs won't be contained, you can bet you're looking at a wild bonanza of funding.

The 'public option' in the bill being discussed is modeled after Medicare, which is the greatest example in the entire pantheon of government of cost explosion. Here are some facts (source):

**In actual dollars, we now spend $62 on Medicare for every $1 we spent in 1970.

**Medicare's artificially low, government-set payment-rates lead to rampant cost-shifting, as doctors and hospitals charge higher rates to private individuals and insurers to try to compensate for the below-market fees they receive from Medicare. A recent study by Milliman Inc, a prominent actuarial consulting firm, estimates that this has raised the cost of private health-care by $88 billion annually.

There are many drivers in the crazy health care cost run-up in our nation, all of them created by government. Of those many, Medicare is the most significant. Its own cost is exploding, and it is pushing up the cost of private health insurance too.

**Since 1970, our overall national health expenditures (NHE) apart from Medicare and Medicaid have risen 83 percent in relation to the gross domestic product (GDP). Meanwhile, the cost of Medicare has risen 304 percent versus GDP--and that is without even counting the relatively new Medicare prescription drug benefit.

** Medicare's costs are projected to rise more in the next decade than they have risen in the previous four decades combined, reaching $1 trillion annually--after which, they are projected to rise still faster.

**The United States now has $55 trillion in projected unfunded federal liabilities over the next 75 years. That's money we've already pledged to spend but which our projected budgets don't cover and which we have no plans for how to raise. The vast majority of that figure--about $34 trillion of it--is for Medicare. To put $34 trillion into perspective, it's twice the size of the annual economic output (as measured by GDP) of Germany, Japan, Italy, Russia, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom--combined.

Expanding this madness beyond the elderly and to the entire population will be the biggest game-changing shift since The Civil War. This health care legislation is the most ambitious power grab in the history of the United States Congress.

Don't Let Yourself Get Caught Defending American Health Care

2009-07-17T05:34:00.000-07:00

This exchange from Glenn Beck earlier in the week is floating all over the ether this morning. If you want to skip to the good stuff, go to about 2:50.

Beck is certainly no libertarian, but the call came about because he was correctly arguing on his show that further government control in health care would make America significantly worse off.

And while his reaction was entertaining and achieved the intended outcome (lots of Internet buzz), the exchange is a nice demonstration of how NOT to defend free market health care in a debate with a socialist.

Yes, our current system will get much worse if the latest Congressional plan goes through, but our system is already jacked up beyond reason. Defending the current system is no way to convince someone of the truth on this issue. American health care is indefensible. It is completely, utterly broken and dysfunctional.

It became that way over five decades because we've been steadily moving towards a unique and uniquely screwy form of socialized medicine.

Health care in America is unaffordable for most people because government subsidies in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, and a myriad of tax credits and incentives have created an army of rent seekers who take a big cut of your health care dollars without providing you any medicine. Government has not only subsidized the system, but has created a littany of arcane rules that require paper pushers at every step. Government limits the number of providers allowed to participate in the system. It restricts the entry of new drugs, devices, and procedures allowed, and then provides immense subsidies for those favored few who can get inside to play.

When arguing health care with someone who wants Obama's plan to pass, the correct tack to take is: Obama's plan is just more of the same Washington interference that got us into this mess in the first place. Everything that has grown worse about American health care in the past few decades will only multiply under Obama's plan.

The caller on Beck's program asks him what he would do to fix health care. Beck has no answer for her. Conservatives have an untenable position on this issue. Health care is the number one concern of most Americans, but what needs to be done to improve it isn't politically feasible. Step 1 would be to abolish Medicare/Medicaid and all related programs. Step 2 would be to abolish the FDA and legalize all drugs. Step 3 - strip the AMA of its political power to restrict the number of licensed doctors. Private companies should come up with their own standards and certifications for medical providers, as happens in every functional industry in the world. Step 4 is to remove all laws specific to health care, and allow consumers and businesses to operate and innovate freely.

If ever there was an issue that could serve as a rallying point for a radical departure from the existing American mess, this is it. Our democracy will not allow us to improve our health care system, ever. Elderly Americans, most of them fully dependent on government programs just to stay alive are perhaps the most powerful interest group anywhere in the world.

Instead of defending America's system, Beck should have told the caller she could have it to do with what she will, and in exchange, he and anyone else should be free to opt out entirely and create their own health care system, one that is free from any government involvement at all.

Tax Defiance - Let's Get This Conversation Started

2009-07-16T05:31:00.000-07:00

From Megan McArdle

I also wonder at what point serious political resistance to taxes sets in. I know, it's common to claim that Americans are tax haters. But actually, Americans, even the wealthy, pay their taxes at a rate that would shock an Italian.

In the highest paying zip codes, the effective average combined tax rate (not the marginal rate) on many affluent people is already well over forty percent--I shelled out more than 40% of my really non-lavish journalist's salary when I lived in Manhattan. The repeal of the Bush tax cuts will push some taxpayers into the 50+percent total tax bracket. Is America ready?

That's just taxation that can be measured. Include all the myriad taxes on businesses that are passed on as price increases and the rate is even higher.

But of course, once you're nearing a 50% average tax rate, a 5% tax increase is something like a 10% cut in the taxpayer's take-home pay. And the higher the starting tax rate, the larger the percentage of tangible income the tax increase consumes. Yet because wonks assess tax increases relative to the size of the base rate, an increase from 55% to 60% actually sounds smaller than an increase from 15% to 20%. Yet from the perspective of the taxpayer, the former represents a much greater encroachment on their disposable income.

Serious political resistance to taxation has already set in. The Tea Parties are a new phenomenon. The real question is: how will Americans respond when they see that political protest means nothing? Will Americans be willing to take the needed action (open defiance of unjust law) to reclaim their freedom?

Right now, there are activists already risking their lives and careers by refusing to let Washington take their money. But until a really large chunk of America gets organized and starts talking about doing it together, creating strength and safety in numbers, those poor early leaders are just going to be picked off and carted to jail one by one, further frightening the rest of us from doing what needs to be done.

Nail In The Coffin

2009-07-15T05:58:00.000-07:00

A health care bill written in the house has floated out into the world for review. It's a true monster, worse than anything proposed yet on this front. You gotta hand it to the current Congress. Stimulus, cap n' trade, now this... I think you have to go back to The Civil War to find the last time America's productive capacity was thoroughly and quickly demolished.

Some highlights that borrow heavily from a Washington Post analysis:

The centerpiece is a socialized plan -- which is really three, or maybe four, insurance plans -- pays Medicare rates to hospitals (and Medicare rates plus five percent to physicians) for the first three years and then begins negotiating on its own. It is open to anyone with access to the "Health Insurance Exchange."

The "Health Insurance Exchange" is run by Washington, though states can opt out of the national structure and go it alone if they choose, and if they follow federal rules. In the first year, it accepts those without health insurance, those who are buying health insurance on their own, and small businesses with fewer than 10 people. In the second year, it accepts small businesses with fewer than 20 people. After that, "larger employers as permitted by the Commissioner."

The House bill has subsidies equal to $43,320 for an individual and $88,200 for a family of four.

The Congressional Budget Office has released its estimates for the coverage side of this bill. They project that within 10 years, it will cost $1 trillion and cover 97 percent of the legal population.

Funding for this monster is supposedly paid half way through $500 billion or so in savings from Medicare and Medicaid. The rest comes from a tax on the richest 1.5 percent. The surtax is 1 percent on income between $350,000 and $500,000; 1.5 percent on income between $500,000 and $1,000,000; and 5.4 percent in income above $1,000,000.

No doubt this will get modified a million times before it passes, but even as a start this is an immensely frightening bill. Libertarians and conservatives would do well to be aware of it, not so they can fight for their own weird version of whatever this will be, but so they can organize. If ever there was a rallying cry for secession, this health care bill is it.

A Personal Statement About Blogging

2009-07-14T05:10:00.000-07:00

Well-known blogger retires:

The main reason I started blogging, besides the fact that I thought it would be fun, was that starting sometime in 2002, I thought that my country had gone insane...

That said, it seems to me that the madness is over. There are lots of people I disagree with, and lots of things I really care about, and even some people who seem to me to have misplaced their sanity, but the country as a whole does not seem to me to be crazy any more. Also, it has been nearly five years since I started. And so it seems to me that it's time for me to turn back into a pumpkin and twelve white mice.

Funny. I too started blogging because I thought the country was off the deep end. Unlike Hilzoy, I think the country is quite a bit nuttier now than it was in 2002. In fact, I think we're on the cusp of the sort of historical shift that happens every once in awhile, the last time being WWI. The 'democracies' that rose to power in the West after WWI have all had the same trajectory: over time, the natural incentives of rent seeking interest groups has led to a situation where more than half the current wealth created is confiscated, and most of the future wealth has already been spent through government debt instruments like Treasury bonds and entitlement obligations. America has led the West into a financial abyss from which it won't escape without big structural changes. Those changes could be ugly: the worst authoritarian regimes in history were 'democracies' in trouble.

But those changes, in America especially, could be positive. There are more people in America who understand the benefits of freedom and free markets than any society at any time in the history of the world. My (possibly naive) dream is that through communication with each other, all of us who understand freedom can work together to find a way to unshackle the productive class.

What's Your Caste?

2009-07-13T20:50:00.000-07:00

Must-read post by Thomas Knapp at C4SS.org

As unemployment grows in the private sector, it shrinks among the political classes as government expands. As the incomes of regular Americans shrink from under-employment and inflation, the portion of those incomes demanded by the political class for their projects grows. And make no mistake about it: The political class measures “success” according to the metric of how much wealth it can get away with confiscating and disposing of, not how much wealth it “allows” the productive class to actually create.

There is an up side to the increasingly obvious separation between the productive class and the political class. As the demands of the latter upon the former become more onerous, resistance to those demands is likely to stiffen.

I like his terminology. We are in a unique form of class warfare that is the natural end game of Western Democratic Republics: A growing "Political Class" feeding off a shrinking "Productive Class".

Patience on the Stimulus. Just Wait Until 2026, Please.

2009-07-13T05:33:00.000-07:00

From the AP: Obama Urges Patience on Stimulus

Restating themes he laid out in his weekly radio and Internet address, Obama said in an op-ed posted early Sunday on The Washington Post’s Web site that his $787 billion stimulus program was not expected to return the economy to full health, but to provide a boost that would stop the free fall.

“So far, it has done that,” the president wrote. “It was, from the start, a two-year program, and it will steadily save and create jobs as it ramps up over this summer and fall.”

Fiscal stimulus is a sham, folks. Hoover tried it in 1930 and it made the economy worse. Roosevelt tried it in 1933 - 1938 and it made the economy worse.

Japan tried it in the 90s. Here's from The International Herald Tribune:

If America were to follow Japan's example, it would have to leave its interest rates near zero for the next decade...and add about $10 TRILLION to its public debt. And if it got the same results, you'll be able to sell your house in 2026 for the same price you paid in 1992.

Keynes convinced the world that government spending was necessary in a recession with a silly equation. All the economic activity of a nation, widdled down to this = this + this, without a thought to how changing the government's involvement in a transaction changes the incentives of the parties involved.

Government stimulus of the form Obama pursued this year (spending) makes everyone worse off by drawing funds out of the productive sector and burying them with the paper pushers. Stimulus allows bureaucrats to line their pockets with other people's money, nothing more.

Northern Alliance May Have Murdered 2,000 POW's...

2009-07-12T15:56:00.000-07:00

...and the US government turned a blind eye.

Today, under pressure from human rights groups, Obama has announced he will open an investigation, as well he should.

The mass deaths were brought up anew Friday in a report by The New York Times. It quoted government and human rights officials accusing the Bush administration of failing to investigate the executions of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of prisoners.

The Times pointed to U.S. military and CIA ties to Afghan Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, accused by human rights groups of ordering the killings. The newspaper said the Defense Department and FBI never fully investigated the incident.

Hopefully, whatever accounting comes from this atrocity also comes with self-examination for all of the West in our wars with The Middle East. This conflict long-ago ceased from being one where they were the bad guys and we were the good (if it ever was).

War is to government as football is to a West Texas high school; it's what the institution is all about. Whatever noble intentions a Texas high school might have once had for its football program (sportsmanship, leadership, exercise), they were all lost long ago in favor of winning at all costs. Whatever good the American government thinks it might accomplish in Afghanistan is lost in the execution.

It's easy to talk of sending bombers overseas with posters that say, "Can Osama come out and play?" It's easy to demonstrate our superior firepower, and talk about global geopolitical strategy as if we all lived in a giant game of Risk.

But the truth is that war is about killing people, and killing people is a complicated, messy business. It's hard to always separate out the good guys when you're using bombs and machine guns to kill the bad ones. It's hard to find a partner mixed up in a foreign war who is willing to observe human rights conventions when they've been hunted and killed by the enemy for years.

Mix in the same institutional model that brought us the public schools and the IRS, and you're certain to get all sorts of outcomes you never expected. Incompetence is a defining feature of government. Government incompetence leads to a school system where kids watch movies all day. Government incompetence leads to a tax code that undermines free exchange and forces economic actors to behave irrationally. Government incompetence kills innocent people in foreign wars.

Then relatives and friends of killed innocents become our enemies and must be killed too. Then you need tens of thousands more troops to kill all the new enemies, and they kill more innocents, and we have more enemies, and we send more troops, who kill more innocents....

I could go on all day. Of all the things Washington does that disgust me, this disgusts me most.

What's truly absurd about it is that if government would step out of the way, we greedy capitalists would create a lasting, prosperous peace. I do business with people from around the world, including people in Pakistan, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. I have contacts in these countries I've known for years. We speak on the phone and over email every day. Before the Patriot Act made in impossible for them to get Visas, they used to come and visit me every year. We talk about our children. I know some of their children personally because they've started working in the business. They wish their nations and ours were at peace. They know that these wars threaten their business.

These wars threaten my business too. There are specialty trades in the Middle East that have been nurtured in families for generations. The labor there is cheap. They need the work; we need the economical prices. If government would end the wars and get completely out of the way, more of us would trade. The hatred we have built over there for generations would wane as we became partners helping each other achieve better lives.

But that's all a pipe dream, at least for now, and the best we can hope for is that America will learn the full extent of the tragedy its government is committing across the ocean. To that end, thank God for people like James Risen of the NY Times. May he continue to dig up all the dirt.

Of Course, In Reality, the US Does the Opposite

2009-07-11T10:00:00.000-07:00

US To Trade Gold Reserves For Cash Through Cash4Gold.com

Quote for the Morning

2009-07-11T07:31:00.000-07:00

"The spirit of Nationality is a sour ferment of the new wine of Democracy in the old bottles of Tribalism."
--Arnold Toynbee

Of Course We Need Even More Troops in Afghanistan

2009-07-10T21:30:00.000-07:00

From The Washington Post:

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the newly arrived top commander in Afghanistan, has concluded that the Afghan security forces will have to be far larger than currently planned if President Obama's strategy for winning the war is to succeed, according to senior military officials.

Keep in mind, this is after Obama has already signed off on two massive increases in troops. Shortly after taking office, Obama announced he'd add 17,000 troops to the 36,000 already in Afghanistan. A few weeks later, he made a surprise second announcement that he was sending 17,000 more.

And more troops is just what he announced. In addition to the soldiers and civilians, Obama is also overseeing enormous growth in the number of private military contractors operating in Afghanistan.

If you haven't already read it, perhaps now is a good time to check out the most widely read piece I've ever written: Ten Questions For Everyone Who Supported Obama.