March 2015 archive

Seattle City Council Enacts $15 Minimum Wage in 2014, By 2015, Restaurants Respond With “higher menu prices, cheaper, lower-quality ingredients, reduced opening times, and cutting work hours and firing workers”

The Seattle minimum-wage hike will go into effect incrementally over the next several years. Observers are predicting that numerous businesses will shut their doors. Stay tuned! Here is the link.

A Broken Model of Service Delivery: Gigantic Increases in Government Education Spending Have Had No Positive Impact on Student Performance

Government education is a monstrous failure by any measurement. This graph shows that while government spending in education has increased faster than inflation for decades, ALL MEASUREMENTS OF EDUCATION OUTCOMES–whether SAT scores, standardized-test outcomes, or basic reading or math performances–HAVE SHOWN NO IMPROVEMENT. The graph is from the Cato Institute.

Federal Prosecutors Now Threaten to Prosecute People Unless They Convince Their Loved Ones to Plead Guilty

In 2008, federal prosecutors were stymied because Rod Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois, refused to plead guilty to corruption charges. (In recent years, in most American jurisdictions, roughly 80 to 95 percent of all criminal defendants plead guilty and waive their rights to trials.) It has now been revealed that federal prosecutors approached ROBERT …

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World’s Paper Currencies Are Spiraling Lower in Value

Most Americans believe–quite correctly–that the U.S. government is spending recklessly and that its central bank, the Federal Reserve, is printing currency recklessly to prop up U.S. government finances. However, almost all of the other governments of the world are doing the same thing–and most of them are printing money even faster than the U.S. Federal …

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Massive Corruption Behind FCC’s ‘Net Neutrality’ Push Slowly Being Revealed

The Daily Caller is out with a report on the FCC’s 400-page ‘Net Neutrality’ proposals. It is emerging that the FCC majority was lobbied heavily behind the scenes by overt Marxists and government-supremacist billionaires such as George Soros and the trustees of the Ford Foundation. The ideology behind the FCC’s ‘net neutrality’ takeover is overtly …

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Venezuela’s Socialist State-Owned Oil Company Collapses in a Flurry of Arrests, Corruption Probes

All trusters of centrally-planned economies dream the same dream: a utopia of enterprises–owned by the collective–which operate according to principles of sharing instead of profits. Socialist takeovers of oil, mining and industrial firms have occurred many times. And each time the results are the same: poverty, corruption and violence. Socialists worldwide cheered the revolution of …

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“Unfair Pricing” is Sometimes Quite Fair

From the book, “Roads in a Market Economy” by Gabriel Roth (1996, page 63): A more modern example of efficient but’unfair’ pricing . . . was related by P.F. Amos at a conference in 1979: Having taken a bus to the Nepal-India border from Kathmandu, and being first through customs, Mr. R.G. Bullock . . …

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Uplifting Gallup Poll: Government No. 1 problem in the country, Americans say

Government has been named the most important problem facing the country for four straight months and has widened its lead over other concerns (the economy, jobs, healthcare). The Washington Times story is here.

Government Supremacists Panic As Public Loses Trust in Mainstream Television, Government Messaging

Two important stories from March 11, both of which are likely related: The Washington Post, dated March 11, 2015: “Americans are moving faster than ever away from traditional TV”: Between 2012 and 2014, viewers ages 50 through 64 watched one hour and 12 minutes less of traditional TV each week; they increased viewing of videos …

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“Consensus” Climatologists Maintain Decade-Long “Worldwide Collusion” Against Publicly Debating Skeptics

Australian paleoclimatologist Bob Carter is a highly-regarded and articulate debunker of manmade-global-warming alarmists. During a panel discussion sanctioned by the Ayn Rand Institute last year, Professor Carter stated that there has been “worldwide collusion” among government-sponsored scientists who authored the UN IPCC “climate change” reports. A Youtube video of the discussion is here. Dr. Carter’s …

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