Author's posts
Feb 16
WE MUST NEVER FORGET THE 2004 CREEKSTONE FARMS EPISODE IN KANSAS
What would happen if Americans got rid of government meat inspection? Would American consumers be then poisoned by tainted, rancid, rotten or adulterated meat on supermarket shelves? An episode from 2004 answers this question. Since the early 1900s, federal law has required that all meatpacking companies that ship meat interstate be inspected by federal inspectors. …
Feb 15
CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE ESTIMATES THAT OBAMACARE WILL REDUCE TOTAL HOURS WORKED BY 1.5 TO 2 PERCENT
In February 2014, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released an overlooked report on the “Labor Market Effects of the Affordable Care Act.” The Report provided updates of earlier estimates, and by February 2014 the CBO was able to draw on more accurate data than the CBO had cited in its earlier reports. CBO estimates that …
Feb 15
REGULATION OF EMPLOYMENT HAS KEPT YOUNG AND POOR PEOPLE FROM BEING GAINFULLY EMPLOYED
The chartmakers at “Political Calculations” have released a new graph showing “A Decade of Disappearing Teen Jobs” Political Calculations blame minimum wage laws for keeping teens from gainful employment. “As we see in the chart,” write the authors, “the practical effect of all the minimum wage hikes that occurred from 2007 through 2009 was to …
Feb 14
Edward Snowden Reveals that NSA’s Surveillance Is Now Harming the American Economy by an Amount Larger than the NSA’s Budget
Exiled U.S. surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden recently spoke to an audience at Harvard University, via videofeed from Russia. The occasion was the Harvard Institute for Applied Computational Science’s “Data Privacy Symposium” on January 23, 2015. Professor Bruce Schneier joined Snowden for an enlightening discussion. Snowden pointed to published media reports showing that the NSA is …
Feb 13
UPDATE: WE HAVE CHANGED OUR DATE FOR PHOTOGRAPHING GLACIER NATIONAL PARK: New Date is September 13
Previously, we announced a volunteer research project in which we hope to record images of North American glaciers on the precise same dates every year. This research idea is something of a response to official government imagery showing glaciers such as the Grinnell Glacier in Glacier National Park appearing to melt rapidly in recent years. …
Feb 13
People Living in Socialist Hellhole Venezuela Deprived of Basic Medicines As Shelves Empty
Trusters of government (including trusters of government living in America) point to Venezuela as a socialist paradise. But an expose’ posted on “Oxy” reveals that Venezuelans are now without basic medicines due to Venezuela’s policies of price controls, central planning, single-payer slave-plantation healthcare administration, and government-monopoly licensing.
Feb 12
Isis: The New Enemy!
brought to us by “Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives“: http://spellingmistakescostlives.com/ The same guys who brought us the “Action Man: Battlefield Casualties” action figures: http://www.spellingmistakescostlives.com/bethemeat/actionman.htm
Feb 11
Murray Rothbard on Social Security
The great economist Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), in his exhaustive treatise “Man, Economy, and State,” briefly discussed Social Security (2nd ed.2001, pages 957-58): Social security confiscates the income of wage earners, and then, most people presume, it invests the money more wisely than they could themselves, later paying out the money to the former wage earners …
Feb 11
John Stossel on Spontaneous Order
The great libertarian TV journalist and commentator John Stossel is out with a brilliant essay. http://townhall.com/columnists/johnstossel/2015/02/10/spontaneous-order-n1955526?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad= Stossel discusses the theory of spontaneous order: the notion that humans tend to create order in any chaotic setting, without being commanded to do so. In many respects, the debate over spontaneous order is the debate between freedom and …
Feb 10
NBC’s Brian Williams Has Long History of Lying to Promote Government
Brian Williams, lead news anchor of the government-supported NBC news network, has taken a leave of absence after being caught exaggerating his roles in various state- and military-worshipping news stories. Dale Steinreich of Lewrockwell.com writes today (Feb. 10, 2015) to remind us that Brian Williams previously used news content generated by the Lewrockwell.com site without …
