Jun 28

THE ONION asks why humanity continues to allow its most power-hungry members to make all of humanity’s decisions.

Lysander Spooner
THE ONION, America’s premier mock newspaper, has long exhibited a libertarian, anti-government streak.

Now THE ONION has hit the nail on the head: “Humanity Surprised It Still Hasn’t Figured Out Better Alternative To Letting Power-Hungry Assholes Decide Everything.”
The same question has been asked repeatedly by economists of the Austrian School, and of social scientists and insightful writers generally. Lysander Spooner’s “No Treason” essay is filled with paragraphs making essentially the same point. Hayek, Mises, Hoppe and Lew Rockwell have made the same point repeatedly: politics is a realm where the vilest and most despicable almost always rise to the top.

Jun 28

Government’s global-warming hysteria mostly based on deliberate manipulation of data.

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Those who study climate (and the political climate debate) are well aware of how the government has presented an exaggerated case for carbon-dioxide-driven global warming: Government-supported scientists have “modeled” warming that doesn’t exist in reality; government-supported scientists have made emotional arguments; government-supported scientists have substituted unreliable temperature proxies cherrypicked to show a colder past (e.g., selected tree rings); government-supported scientists have mixed up rises in CO2 levels and heat to make it appear that rising heat came afterward, etc.

Climatologist Steven Goddard has shown that the case for manmade, CO2-driven global warming is mostly a product of knowing manipulation of past temperature data. See here.

Jun 28

ARCTIC sea ice, like Antarctic sea ice, is expanding, not retracting.

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A prevalent claim of global-warming alarmists is that ice in the arctic is receding. This was a central point of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” movie.

But arctic sea ice has been growing for years and is at its highest level in 10 years. This is consistent with ANTARCTIC sea ice, which is at or near an all-time high. The globe has been cooling, not heating, for a decade or more.

Jun 28

Government Begins Pressuring Medical Profession to Spread Climate-Change Propaganda

BOSTON 2015

“Climate-change” hysteria is very much a movement of the highest government officials, the ultra-rich and wealthy academic elites. It is not a movement of a majority of Americans. The hysteria has been widely promoted by government agencies, and by wealthy political donors. But government global-warming messaging has failed to resonate with voting majorities, who view the climate hysteria as an exaggeration if not a hoax.

The government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting its climate-change agenda. Now the President is pressuring members of the medical profession to spread the government’s climate-change-socialism alarmism during interactions with patients.

“The Obama administration has been hard at work trying to draw a link between global warming and public health issues.”

Jun 27

“Limited Government” Republicans in Kansas–like those in Montana, Nevada, and elsewhere–have just passed one of the largest tax increases in state history.

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NPR has a story about the “conservative,” “limited-government,” “tea-party-controlled” Republican legislature of Kansas. Like the overwhelmingly Republican-controlled legislatures of Nevada, Montana and elsewhere, the Republican-controlled legislature of Kansas has just enacted a budget with some of the highest tax increases in state history.

Jun 27

Obamacare is already causing massive damage to American productivity.

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As many economists predicted, the passage of Obamacare is significantly limiting American productivity and prosperity. “Because of Obamacare,” writes Larry Kudlow, “there’s an additional 0.9 percent Medicare tax on salaries and self-employment income, a 3.8 percent tax increase on capital gains and dividends, a cap on health care flexible spending accounts, a higher threshold for itemized medical expense deductions, and a stiff penalty on employer reimbursements for individual employee health policy premiums.”

According to Kudlow, each of these tax hikes is already producing lower rates of productivity and prosperity in the American economy. Part time workers now account for some 7 million jobs, compared to 4 million part-time jobs during the prior recovery. “Obamacare is a tax on full-time work.”

Kudlow continues, “Obamacare enrollment is coming up short, and the program is unable to sustain an adequate risk pool. Expert health insurance analyst Robert Laszewski and the consulting firm Avalere find that exchanges are succeeding in enrolling low-income individuals but are struggling to attract middle- and higher-income enrollees.”

Laszewski reports that Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas wants a 20 percent rate hike; in Maryland, it’s 34 percent; Oregon’s biggest insurer, Moda Health, wants a 26 percent hike; and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee wants a 36 percent hike.

Jun 26

IRS Continues to Obstruct Justice: “Separation of Powers” Remains Broken.

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Under James Madison’s constitutional theory, the separate branches of government would “check” each others’ powers by applications of their own officers’ rival jealousies. For example, legislators can cut the budgets of the executive branch when executive-branch officers overreach. In practice, such “checking” almost never happens, because all three branches have learned to share in common control and exploitation of the American people.

When it came to light that the IRS has been persecuting “tea party” groups seeking 501(c)(4) status as “social welfare” groups (like thousands of other similar organizations, e.g., the Sierra Club, the NRA, etc.), Congress began investigating.

It soon emerged that the IRS obstructed Congress’s investigation, by, for example, deleting incriminating emails. When the highest-level IRS officials were summoned before committees of Congress, such IRS officials falsely claimed that incriminating emails had been “lost.”

Further investigations followed. It has now emerged that IRS officials have deliberately deleted and concealed incriminating emails AFTER they became aware of congressional investigations (and after their IRS head testified falsely that no emails could be found).

The obvious answer is for Congress to slash the budget of the IRS and force the agency to lay off hundreds. (Prosecuting executive-branch agents is difficult when prosecuting officials are themselves agents and partisans of the executive branch.)

“[Investigators] took possession of the 424 backup tapes and determined that 422 of the 424 tapes were degaussed (i.e., magnetically erased) by IRS employees in Martinsburg on or around March 4, 2014, one month after the IRS realized they were missing e-mails from Lois Lerner, and approximately eight months after the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform requested ‘all documents and communications sent by, received by, or copied to Lois Lerner.’”

The National Review story is here.

Jun 25

U.S. Supreme Court conceptually rewrites Obamacare law in order to uphold it.

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It is a frequent criticism of judges that they are “activists”–politicians in judicial clothing. The reality, however, is that the judiciary is amazingly passive and tends to bend over backward to uphold the ridiculous, unconstitutional, and intrusive measures and enactments of the executive and legislative branches.

Today, June 25, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the extension of Obamacare subsidies into states that did not set up their own “exchanges”–DESPITE THE PLAIN LANGUAGE OF THE STATUTE(S) INDICATING THAT Obamacare subsidies would not apply in such states.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, penned this ridiculous statement: “In this instance, the context and structure of the act compel us to depart from what would otherwise be the most natural reading of the pertinent statutory phrase.”

Justice Scalia dissented, and said to an audience at the Supreme Court building, “We really should start calling this law Scotus-care,” to laughter from the audience.

Jun 24

Study demolishes the myth of multi-generational inherited wealth

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Government trusters and advocates of violent redistribution of wealth frequently claim that the superrich are hoarding and amassing inherited investment wealth at rates that surpass the upward mobility of working classes. For example, government-trusting economist Thomas Piketty made such a claim in his book Capital in the 21st Century (2014). Piketty argued that economic inequality increases as capital accumulates in the hands of ultra-rich families.

But recent research has shattered this argument (again). There is, in fact, rapid turnover among people in the “super rich” category. Estates rise and fall. “[A]t any given time, roughly half of the collective worth of the hyper-wealthy is first-generation earned wealth, not inherited wealth,” according to the authors of the study.

Dynastic wealth accumulation is simply a myth. The reality is that each generation spawns its own entrepreneurs who create vast pools of entirely new wealth, and enjoy their share of it, displacing many of the preceding generations’ entrepreneurial wealth creators. Today, the massive fortunes of the 19th century are largely depleted and almost all of the fortunes generated just a half-century ago are also gone.

The study can be downloaded here. A writeup in Reason Magazine can be found here.

Jun 24

“Five years of wage cuts, tax increases and record unemployment”: Greeks awaken to a New Normal of ever-higher taxes and slavery to pay for their welfare state

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Socialism is a curse that should be wished only on one’s enemies. Every society that embraces it will ultimately become sick and weak.

Greeks are now learning the lesson that years of socialized medicine, welfare, security entitlements and big government must be paid for. The Greek people mortgaged their children’s future a generation ago, and those children have now grown up to experience life under virtual slavery.

Greece, of course, is legendary for its past innovation, invention, arts and learning. But modern Greek industry has died, and Greek innovation has been choked off due to high taxation and regulation.

Greek indebtedness now threatens the European Union itself. The story is here.