Sep 09

More Businesses are Dying than Starting in America

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According to Jim Clifton, chairman and CEO of Gallup, “for the first time in 35 years, American business deaths now outnumber business births.” See here.

Small business startups are being choked off by mountains of taxes and regulations. “Believe it or not, when measured in per-capita terms, socialist countries such as Denmark, Finland, New Zealand and Sweden now have more startups than [Americans] do,” according to Tom Purcell.
“So does Hungary, formerly part of the Soviet bloc, as well as Italy, which hasn’t had many successes in the economic prosperity column since before the Roman Empire collapsed.”

As recently as 2008, American business startups outpaced shuttered businesses by 100,000.

Sep 08

Wages have nothing to do with miserliness or generosity

john c. goodman

The brilliant economist John C. Goodman is out with another brilliant column. This one about the foolishness of minimum wage laws. See here. :

To summarize: a firm that pays workers more than they are worth cannot survive because it cannot match the prices and the rate of return to investors of its rivals. A firm that pays workers less than what they are worth, cannot survive because it will not be able to retain its employees. Competition in the marketplace tends to determine wages; there is a definite logic to what people are paid; and it has nothing to do with miserliness or generosity.

Sep 08

Obama Claimed CO2 is Melting Glacier that has Actually Been Melting Since 1815–Long Before Rising CO2 Levels

mhiker

Last week, U.S. President Barack Obama was on an Alaska propaganda trip, designed to promote government’s “climate-change” socialism agenda. Give government vastly greater power, says Obama (and hundreds of other U.S. government officials) or everyone is doomed.

To illustrate the government’s hysterical claims, Obama spoke at Alaska’s Exit Glacier, claiming the Glacier is melting rapidly due to manmade CO2 in the atmosphere. Tellingly, Obama claimed the melting of the Exit Glacier is “as good a signpost of Climate Change as anything.”

The problem is that the glacier has been receding since 1815, according to the National Park Service. See here.

And there are other Alaska glaciers that have been growing in recent years! The Hubbard Glacier, the largest calving glacier on the North American Continent (25 percent larger than Rhode Island), has been growing steadily. See here.

Sep 06

Government continues waging war on pain doctors and their patients

tyranny

For years, government drug investigators and prosecutors have sought to act as “supervising physicians” over the medical profession–indicting and imprisoning doctors (and often, their patients) whom the government deems to be dispensing or using too much pain medication.

Pain is a symptom, not an illness, and no two doctors or health experts agree on pain management styles or medication dosages. And the complexity of government regulations make the management of chronic pain very dangerous. In the words of the great Rodney Balko (see here):

As more doctors drop out or are forced out of pain treatment, pain patients grow more desperate. Doctors aren’t permitted to post-date painkiller prescriptions, and patients can’t get refills until their prescription runs out. So they may horde pills when they can, or seek out multiple doctors, often without telling one doctor that they’re seeing others.

In some cases, prosecutors imprison doctors who happen to have patients who are caught reselling pain meds. See the case of Virginia doctor William Hurwitz, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison after a judge falsely instructed jurors they could not consider whether Hurwitz acted in “good faith” when he prescribed large doses of medicine.

In one notorious Florida case, a paraplegic and multiple sclerosis patient named Richard Paey was sentenced to 25 years in prison for “drug distribution” (based solely on the quantity of pills in Paey’s possession, without any evidence that Paey ever “distributed” a single pill). As Balko writes,

Prosecutors claimed that no legitimate pain patient could possibly need the amount of medication Paey was taking. But once Paey was in prison, the state of Florida treated him with the same class of painkillers it put him in prison for possessing, and at the same or higher doses. “It became a comedy of bureaucracies,” Paey told me in a 2007 interview. “One agency prosecutes me for taking too much medication… Then I get to prison, and the doctors examine my records and my medical history, and they decide that as doctors, they have to give me this medication…

(When Paey told his story to the New York Times, he was moved to a higher-security prison, further away from his family, and was put into solitary confinement.)

Now we read that a Florence, Montana doctor has been criminally charged with 400 counts of illegal drug distribution for allegedly overprescribing pain medication to Montana patients. And another Montana doctor, Mark Ibsen, has opted to quit treating chronic pain patients altogether. See here.

Ibsen states that he live in constant fear of DEA investigation and criminal prosecution.

Sep 05

“Disability” Checks Now Sustain 11 Million Americans

industr
There are roughly 300 million Americans. Some 100 million of those are children or retirees. Of the remaining roughly-200 million eligible workers, MORE THAN 5 PERCENT claim to be “disabled” and unable to work. They generally draw monthly “disability” checks for life.

The “labor participation rate” is now near an historic low. See here.

The “disability” “program” is–like all similar programs worldwide–running short on cash. Today the program pays about $142 billion annually–many times the annual budgets of some ten states. See here.

Of course, many “disabled” people could work and work very productively. Numerous studies have documented that those who go on disability checks tend to report drastically lower-than-average lifetime earnings. Indeed, many become trapped in a vortex of poverty from which they can never escape.

Aug 29

Montana Political Candidate Faces Government Accusation of—Purchasing a Domain Name Without Notifying Government

Gianforte

There is a powerful movement among the ranks of government trusters to allow government vastly more power in the area of political regulation.

This movement sometimes calls itself a “campaign finance reform movement” and promotes its pro-government agenda by means of certain innocuous-sounding slogans. It posits that the influence of the private sector on politics must be curtailed or limited by government.

Every single claim made by these campaign-finance “reformers” is untrue. And the entirety of this “reform movement” threatens fundamental principles of First Amendment law.

Yesterday, August 28, 2015, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle (a Montana newspaper that has been feeding its readers a steady diet of deceptive “campaign-finance-reform” messaging) published a front-page (above-the-fold) feature story bearing the headline, “Political complaint filed against Gianforte.”

Here is the link to the BDC article.

Upon reading this, many people would be forgiven for supposing the Montana gubernatorial candidate was being investigated for bribery or other corruption.

But the guy is being investigated for–wait for it–purchasing a domain name and hiring a staffperson before notifying the government that he was going to run for governor. Apparently, the government wants to know EACH AND EVERY MOVE OR IDEA that a person makes or has that might lead to political campaigning.)

Campaign finance “reformers” would actually take American speech and press law back to the days when presses needed to be government-licensed. They seek to create a landscape in which EVERY STEP that a person makes toward criticizing the state must be state approved.

(Note: nothing in this discussion should suggest any support whatsoever for candidate Gianforte.)

Aug 27

Newborn Baby born in Government Health Care System Eaten to Death by Rats

worship2_dees

Here is a blurb about the single-payer government healthcare system in India. According to Tom DiLorenzo:

Healthcare Socialism in India is as awful, or worse, as socialized healthcare anywhere else. As just one recent example, a newborn baby in an incubator in a government hospital in India was eaten to death by rats. The government hospital administrator “consoled” the father by saying not to worry, “you have another son.” No wonder about 70 percent of the Indian people use private-sector health care providers.

Aug 27

Fake Science: The Majority of Experiments by Government-Supported University Psychologists Cannot Be Replicated

Karl Marx

Most government-supported universities are dens of pro-government sentiment masquerading as social science. Government “research” funding supports thousands of university psychologists who churn out studies that–unsurprisingly–support various socialist and pro-government theories and expansive welfare-state economics.

Pro-government voices in academia are becoming increasingly shrill. Witness some of the hysteria surrounding the government’s “manmade-global-warming” claims. See here.

But science must be repeatable to be valid. A scientific experiment should produce the same or similar results each time it is conducted.

Now a major study has tried to repeat some of the most important studies published in the most prominent psychology journals. And shockingly: “a whopping 75% of the social psychology experiments were not replicated, meaning that the originally reported findings vanished when other scientists repeated the experiments.”

See here.

An international team of experts repeated 100 experiments published in top psychology journals and found that they could reproduce only 36% of original findings.

The study, which saw 270 scientists repeat experiments on five continents, was launched by psychologists in the US in response to rising concerns over the reliability of psychology research

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Aug 23

The Medical Industry is Now So Overregulated that Even Government Hospitals Can’t Fill Job Vacancies

dyingfreedom

American health care is so overregulated that the VA SCANDAL THAT BROKE LAST YEAR is still not resolved–and never will be.

In order to “fix” the Veterans Administration health care problems that were much publicized last year, hundreds of new doctors, nurses and staff needed to be hired.

But it turns out that hiring such people is impossible. They don’t exist due to burdensome licensing requirements.

Read this column Cortney O’Brien.

O’Brien indicates that nearly 1 in 3 important positions in VA hospitals are currently vacant. And filling them is impossible or almost impossible.

Several factors play a role in the employee shortfall: The 9 percent attrition rate, lower pay than the private sector, the implementation of Obamacare, which is creating an imbalanced supply and demand environment in medical care, and the burdensome application process, just to name a few. Jean Schaefer, a spokeswoman for the Phoenix VA, said hiring just one person can be an egregiously long process – one that can include up to 18 steps.

Today, more than half of all U.S. doctors are over the age of 50. Young people interested in joining the field are turned away by the mountains of regulations and licensing obstacles. This problem will get worse as rules and regulations drive out future doctors and nurses.

Aug 22

Venezuelan Government Declares Martial Law to Fight “Smugglers”

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Every economic regulation–whether laws governing labor, product quality, or prices of goods or services–creates a black market. And socialist countries which seek to regulate everything suffer (or, rather, experience the comforts and joys of) black markets in every commodity and industry.

Here is a recent BBC story about efforts to thwart free-market transactions in Venezuela–a land of great natural riches which has made itself poorer by years of socialist election victories.

The government of Venezuela is now posting military troops at traffic corridors and border points–and otherwise imposing martial law–to fight “smugglers.”

And, as the BBC reports, the poorest among Venezuelans are suffering most.