Feb 24

Dutch City Removes All Traffic Signs; Traffic Accidents Go Down

imagesWe were recently alerted by a lewrockwell.com essay about how traffic safety actually improves when traffic controls are decreased. American car traffic is tremendously overregulated; and there are way too many traffic cops on the roadways.

Within the Lewrockwell.com link is the mention of a Dutch city of 50,000 people, Drachten, which stripped its streets of all traffic signals and signs in the past decade.

Germany’s largest-circulation magazine, Der Speigel reported in 2006 that the number of accidents in Drachten “declined dramatically” after the open traffic design was implemented – See more at: http://alerts.motorists.org/nma-email-newsletter-issue-32/#sthash.Jfkp5K8S.dpuf

Feb 24

17,000 Federal employees made more than $200,000 last year

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Statistically, a federal worker is now more likely to die than to quit. Federal employees are so overpaid that there are multiple books on the shelves of most bookstores on the topic of how to get a federal job.

Those who work in the federal government have hit the lottery. As the American middle class is drained of its wealth and it becomes harder to start businesses or earn a good living in the private sector, America’s wealth is rapidly moving into the public sector.

Now the National Journal reports that at least 17,000 federal workers made more than $200,000 from the taxpayers last year. America is increasingly a landscape of marble and oak-paneled government palaces surrounded by shanty towns and trailer parks occupied by the private sector.

Feb 24

Savers Continue To Be Punished

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If you save anything in modern America, you are an absolute fool. For years, the Federal Reserve Bank has set interest rates well below “natural” levels. (In a free lending market, private banks would tend to charge substantially more interest per dollar lent, and savers could expect substantially higher rates of return for keeping their savings with banks.)

Since the economic recession of 2008, the Federal Reserve has set interest rates at near zero. (Interest rates were already well below natural rates.) This is a powerful incentive to borrow, and a very powerful incentive NOT to save. On February 24, 2015, Fed Chair Janet Yellen announced that the Central Bank would not be hiking rates for the next couple quarters.

In practice, zero-percent interest rates mean that it COSTS BANKS MONEY TO HOLD PEOPLES’ SAVINGS. On the same day the Fed announced it would not raise interest rates, J.P. Morgan bank announced it will start charging its big clients to keep their money in savings.

Savers who keep their money in banks will increasingly find that those banks will CHARGE them fees rather than PAY any interest.

Feb 20

CLIMATOLOGIST RICHARD LINDZEN: GOVERNMENT-FUNDED SCIENCE ALWAYS TENDS TO BE BIASED IN FAVOR OF GOVERNMENT

mhikerDr. Richard Lindzen is an American atmospheric physicist and retired Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In an important interview, Lindzen states (beginning around 7:20) that:

The trouble is all of us scientists are government employees—even if we’re working for private universities. All research is supported by the government. As such we’re very sensitive to what politicians say and believe. That’s a shortcoming.

You have to figure out how to fund science in a way that there are no incentives to artificially promoting things.
When you hear for instance a scientist saying ‘the science is settled,’ you know the person has stepped out of the science.
Whenever you see someone say—instead of answering arguments—‘how could so many people agree if it weren’t true?’ That should be a red flag.

Feb 20

Great Lakes “likely to have the most ice since records began,” says meteorologist

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Meteorologist Joe d’Aleo has studied the weather of the Great Lakes for years. On February 20, 2015, d’Aleo stated that the current state of ice on the Great Lakes is likely greater than at any time since records began.

Feb 20

Medicare Has Cost Ten Times More Than Government Predicted

change4th_deesMedicare was pitched in 1965 as being economically responsible. Its promoters in Congress estimated that the Medicare bill would cost $1.1 billion for the following two years. The day after the bill was signed into law, its costs were widely estimated to be $6.5 billion over a decade. The House Ways and Means Committee said Medicare would cost $12 billion by 1990.

But actual costs of Medicare in its first decade were double the estimates: $13.2 billion. And by 1990, Medicare had cost $98 billion, not $12 billion.

Today Medicare costs at least $457 billion PER YEAR–more than ten times the original estimates–even when inflation is factored in. These figures are from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget’s “President’s Budget: Historical Tables” (2010).

Feb 18

New report says sea level will likely rise by 11 to 21 inches around New York City by the 2050s

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Just as New York City and the U.S. eastern seaboard are experiencing record snow and cold, a panel of heavily-promoted (and undoubtedly massively government-funded) academics have released a report making typically hysterical predictions about the climate in the Big Apple. The report, authored by the professors at the “New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC),” finds that the air temperatures around NYC have risen faster and the sea levels around NYC have risen faster than the observed global rates. In fact, the report claims that sea levels are rising 1.2 inches per decade around the city and temps have increased 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit between 1900 and 2013.

The Panel predicts sea levels around the City may likely rise by at least 11 to 21 inches more by the 2050s. The Panel report displays maps indicating vast losses of acreage around Manhattan, Brooklyn and elsewhere.

As shown by a number of experts, climate-change hysteria is largely driven by socialist ideology and massive research-grant funding by the U.S. (and other) governments. It is used to call for political action such as demands that governments become even more powerful and all-controlling. In 2003 a number of scientists launched the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) to demonstrate that much of what passes for climate-change science by widely-lauded climate “panels” is false, misleading, based on inaccurate models and in some cases fraudulent.

The Nongovernmental International Panel is independently funded and accepts no funding from the oil industry or any other industry.

Academics promoting the socialist manmade-global-warming theology use decidedly ANTI-SCIENCE methods to overcome scholarly criticism. They claim the “science is settled” in THEIR favor (despite the existence of hundreds of countervailing peer-reviewed scientific studies) and call for critics to be silenced and disregarded. In some cases, promoters of climate-change socialism call for the arrests of those who disagree with them.

Feb 16

Lysander Spooner on Democratic Elections and Claims of “Sovereign Immunity” By Government Officials

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In Lysander Spooner’s great essay, “No Treason,” Spooner wrote:

No body of men can be said to authorize a man to act as their agent, to the injury of a third person, unless they do it in so open and authentic a manner as to make themselves personally responsible for his acts. None of the voters in this country appoint their political agents in any open, authentic manner, or in any manner to make themselves responsible for their acts. Therefore these pretended agents cannot legitimately claim to be really agents. Somebody must be responsible for the acts of these pretended agents; and if they cannot show any open and authentic credentials from their principals, they cannot, in law or reason, be said to have any principals. The maxim applies here, that what does not appear, does not exist. If they can show no principals, they have none.

Feb 16

WE MUST NEVER FORGET THE 2004 CREEKSTONE FARMS EPISODE IN KANSAS

cows_deesWhat 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. This bureaucracy costs American taxpayers in excess of a billion dollars annually. Many critics have pointed out that the government’s “inspections” amount to little more than what consumers do on their own when they shop for meat. USDA inspectors simply sniff, poke and look at meat as it is being processed.

In 2003, the government of Japan announced that it would require all beef sold in Japan to be tested for “mad cow disease,” also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE. This of course goes beyond what American beef inspection requires. The official U.S. position on mad cow disease is that concern about the disease is mostly due to hysteria; this position was forged by heavy lobbying by the major U.S. beef processors, along with cattlemens organizations. (Note that I don’t necessarily disagree with this position.)

But if the Japanese wanted their beef to be certified as BSE-free, the rules of capitalism dictate that American beef providers should—in a free market—want to provide such certification. In 2004, a meatpacking plant in Arkansas City, Kansas sought to provide such BSE testing and certification. But the plant—operated by a small firm named Creekstone Farms—was stopped by the USDA. The USDA announced that Creekstone Farms was prohibited from doing any additional testing! The USDA’s actions caused the Kansas meat plant to lay off 150 of its 800 workers in 2005 and to place the rest on part-time status. (About 40 percent of Creekstone’s sales were to Japan.)

Why did the USDA prevent Creekstone Farms from testing its meat for mad cow disease? Probably because of back-room lobbying by the largest American meatpackers (Tyson, Smithfield, Swift, etc.), who viewed Creekstone’s BSE-certification efforts as a source of dangerous competition. The U.S. government denied this, claiming that Creekstone’s BSE-testing system (like Japan’s) wasn’t sufficient to detect mad cow disease with certainty in all animals younger than 30 months. Thus, according to the U.S. government, Creekstone’s additional testing would have given consumers a false sense of security.

Creekstone Farms acknowledged the imperfections of BSE testing. But the issue wasn’t how good the company’s (or any company’s) testing procedures were. The real issue was whether the federal government can deny an American business its right to do the best it can to satisfy its customers.

We must never forget the lesson of the Creekstone Farms episode. Although a decade has passed since this outrage, the episode proves that food safety is not guaranteed by government inspectors. True food safety stems from free-market competition between food providers. And government regulation is often a guise behind which consumers are made to accept goods and services of lower quality.

Feb 15

CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE ESTIMATES THAT OBAMACARE WILL REDUCE TOTAL HOURS WORKED BY 1.5 TO 2 PERCENT

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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 the ACA will reduce the total number of hours worked, on net, by about 1.5 percent to 2.0 percent during the period from 2017 to 2024, almost entirely because workers will choose to supply less labor—given the new taxes and other incentives they will face and the financial benefits some will receive.

The reduction in CBO’s projections of hours worked represents a decline in the number of full-time-equivalent workers of about 2.0 million in 2017, rising to about 2.5 million in 2024.

Of course, the passage of time often reveals that government programs end up costing much more than politicians originally estimate. We predict that the CBO’s estimate of a 1.5 percent to 2.0 percent decline in total hours worked will turn out to be optimistic.