Monday, June 15, 2009

Iran

This is the big story for a few days now. It could be the biggest story of the year.

I am rooting for a Revolution.

You go to Memeorandum and story after story about Iran.

This is really fast paced and incredible. The crowds they are getting at the protests appear to be massive. I couldn't think of a better thing to happen in the world than for the government of Iran to fall. Sphere: Related Content

Friday, June 5, 2009

Free the Liberty Dollar Four

Lew Rockwell is on the case:

Feds Arrest the Liberty Dollar Competition

The actual charge the feds care about is at the end, that the Liberty Dollar is "intended for use as current money," in direct competition with the state. Should someone be allowed to mint whatever he wants, charge whatever he wants, and try to pass it as money? Of course, so long as no fraud is involved (fraud being a government monopoly). So it is an outrage that these four people have been arrested for non-crimes, and will be tried in a federal kangaroo court, where they will not be allowed to mention the Constitution or many other things, and perhaps be put in cages for years when they are pronounced "guilty."


I am not a big Liberty Dollar guy. I don't own any Liberty Dollars. I thought about getting one as a novelty once. They way our government is running the printing press though I think the argument for the Liberty Dollar gets stonger every day.

Reading this reminded my of The Gold Standard. The government outlawed private ownership of gold in 1933 and they mandated that all safe deposits be opened in the presence of IRS agents.

It seems as if the government is hostile to the community using any of store of value other than the Federal Reserve Note. They want to use the printing press to finance all of their spending, and they don't want competition. There is no way out.

The inflation that is going to hit us is going to be substantial.

Via Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek, here is Keynes on inflation:

By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls . . . become 'profiteers', who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished not less than the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds . . . all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless.


I stand with Lew Rockwell. FREE THE LIBERTY DOLLAR FOUR! Sphere: Related Content

Barney Frank is running the car companies

From the Boston Globe via Greg Mankiw:

Frank intervention extends life of GM's Norton center

The plant manager received word yesterday that Frank had successfully lobbied GM chief executive Fritz Henderson to delay the closing, according to Ridenour.

Frank said he met with Henderson on Wednesday to urge him to reevaluate the center's value to GM. He said he also stressed the loss of jobs would hurt already struggling Massachusetts families.

Frank, whose district includes Norton, said he told Henderson, "Look, I understand that these things have to happen but they don't have to happen in the midst of the worst recession in years."


Frank did so well in his oversight of Fannie and Freddie. I didn't know he was an auto expert to boot. This will not end well. Sphere: Related Content

Socialism 101

This article was from over two years ago:

As US tax rates drop, government's reach grows
Study: 1 in 2 Americans now receives income from government programs.

Slightly over half of all Americans – 52.6 percent – now receive significant income from government programs, according to an analysis by Gary Shilling, an economist in Springfield, N.J. That's up from 49.4 percent in 2000 and far above the 28.3 percent of Americans in 1950. If the trend continues, the percentage could rise within ten years to pass 55 percent, where it stood in 1980 on the eve of President's Reagan's move to scale back the size of government.


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And that was two years ago, before the bailout, the stimulus and the nationalization of the auto industry or the financial sector.

The trolley is off the tracks. Things are bad and they aren't getting better soon. We have been down this path for quite awhile. It isn't all Obama's fault. Obama is a bitch for sure, and he embraces it with open arms. But he didn't start the fire.

We are all screwed.

5% of the people pay over 50% of the federal taxes. 50% don't pay anything. And over 50% get money from the government. That is one way to build a workable majority, at least until the damn breaks.

The collapse is going to be spectacular. Sphere: Related Content

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Drug Cartels Fight Legalization

From Keith Halderman at the Liberty and Power Group Blog

The Drug War Chronicle is reporting that members and candidates of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) are being subject to violent attacks. The SDP Party Chairman Jose Carlos Diaz Cuervo believes this is happening because the party’s platform strongly calls for the legalization of drugs. He asserts that, "doubtless, unlike the federal government, it appears the drug traffickers do understand that the regulation of that market would take the business away from them and would be a more intelligent way to combat them."


It doesn't surprise me that drug cartels understand market forces better than the governments that fight the drug war. Sphere: Related Content

School Reforms on the Brink

From The Wall Street Journal

School Reforms on the Brink
The empire strikes back in Milwaukee and NYC.


The education establishment and its political allies employ multiple methods to keep kids trapped in rotten schools. One tactic is to use control of school boards to prevent or limit the creation of charter schools. Another is to smother existing voucher programs with rules and red tape. Real world examples are currently playing out in Milwaukee and New York City.

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program provides vouchers for some 20,000 low-income, mostly minority children to attend private schools. Because the 20-year-old program polls above 60% with voters, and even higher among minorities, killing it outright would be unpopular. Instead, Democratic Governor Jim Doyle wants to reduce funding and pass "reforms" designed to regulate the program to death. The goal is to discourage private schools from enrolling voucher students and thus force kids to return to unionized public schools.

To that end, Democrats in the state legislature voted last week to cut per-pupil payments to private schools by $165 while increasing public school spending by $400 per student. Taxpayer support for students in the program is only $6,607 per student to begin with, which is less that half of the $13,468 for students in Milwaukee public schools.


They also add this:

The irony is that satisfaction and enrollment at Milwaukee public schools has steadily declined despite these very policies that choice opponents want to impose on successful private schools. A recent evaluation of the Milwaukee choice program found that its high school graduation rate was 85%, compared to 58% for students in the city's public schools. Between 1994 and 2008, the voucher program saved taxpayers more than $180 million. Yet opponents insist these schools need additional regulations to make them more like the public schools that cost more and produce inferior results.


This program is entrenched and popular, so they seek to cut it by stealth. You can simply regulate anything to death. They are increasing the costs of compliance and decreasing the subsidy at the same time. And the more demands you make on a private school, the less private it becomes.

The biggest scare of vouchers to libertarians is that the government will insert itself into private education and corrupt the good schools that we have left. While I have always supported vouchers I have always been aware and afraid of that unintended consequense.

The teachers unions and their allies are in power, and choice advocates are getting a bitter taste of just what that means. The DC voucher program has been ended for all intents and purposes. They will play out the string with the students currently enrolled but nobody new is allowed into the pipeline. Now they are coming after Milwaukee and the Charter Schools of NYC. It is sad.

And this from the party that "Is for the Children". Sphere: Related Content