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 12
Isis: The New Enemy!
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 in their old age. . . . Compelling everyone to transfer his funds to the government forces him to lose utility. Thus, even on its face, it is difficult to understand the great popularity of the social security program. But the true nature of the program differs greatly from the popular image. For the government does NOT invest the funds it takes in taxes; it simply spends them. . . . The cash, of course, can be obtained only by FURTHER taxation. Thus the public must pay TWICE for one payment of social security. The program is essentially one of making more palatable a general taxation of lower-income, wage-earning groups.
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 tyranny. Trusters of the state tend to believe humans do not spontaneously order themselves without command; while libertarians tend to believe humans order themselves best without central planning.
Stossel describes how skaters at skating rinks spontaneously create order from chaos. Stossel then describes how increased central planning in modern America has dampened progress and made it much more difficult for people to accomplish monumental projects:
Eighty years ago, it took workers only 15 months to build the Empire State Building. But this century, using vastly superior construction equipment, building the new World Trade Center took 10 times as long. Eighty years ago, some trains ran faster than 100 miles per hour, but now even the “high-speed” Acela train averages only 90 miles per hour because government safety rules demand that American trains be heavier.
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 properly crediting the libertarian site.
NBC, like its sister networks MSNBC and CNBC, are branches of General Electric. The Washington Post revealed in 2009 that GE was actually the largest recipient of government bailout money during the 2008-09 economic crash. This was done in secret, apparently upon the grounds that GE’s financial services arm owned a pair of small Utah banks.
NBC has a long history of smearing and/or ignoring libertarian voices, and championing government expansion and intervention into almost all things from early childhood care and education to military deployment to medical care to climate regulation.
Feb 09
Lysander Spooner University Considering New Logo
Check out this new logo. It is a work in progress. Many thanks to Kirsten of the Fully Informed Jury Association.
Feb 09
Modern Government Colleges are Dens of Orwellian Iniquity
College campuses were formerly billed as environments where minds could think freely and where passions for inquiry and discovery could be unleashed. But many of today’s college campuses are zones of Orwellian government thought control. Today, when you cross the street to enter a typical college campus, you enter a world where your thoughts are more controlled and monitored, and where life is more expensive and stultified.
We read today (February 9, 2015) that the University of Michigan has spent $16,000 on a campaign to warn students not to offend anyone with their speech. Words declared unacceptable through the campaign include “crazy,” “insane,” “retarded,” “gay,” “tranny,” “gypped,” “illegal alien,” “fag,” “ghetto” and “raghead.” Remember that the University of Michigan is not a religious or a private institution. It is a ‘PUBLIC’ university—meaning that it is supposed to be subject to the First Amendment’s greatest protections for public spaces. When the University of Michigan issues such speech-chilling decrees, those decrees are the voice of government.
Here is the link:
Feb 08
The Data in in: Government Banking Regulations Help Big Banks, Harm Small Banks
Trusters of government often call for more regulations on businesses. Some government trusters believe that regulations dampen the greed and influence of Fortune 500 corporations and other big businesses. Unfortunately for them the data often conflict with this view. Business regulations invariably harm the smallest businesses and the poor while helping big businesses suppress their competition.
Now a study by Professor Marshall Lux of Harvard University shows that the increased banking regulations of the past decade have greatly harmed small hometown banks while helping multinational banks expand their market shares. Professor Lux, a former chief risk officer for JPMorgan, found that local banks’ share of the American lending market has fallen from more than 40 per cent in 1991 to 22 per cent last year (2014). At the same time, the market share of America’s five biggest banks has jumped from 17 per cent to 41 per cent.
See The Financial Times report here:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/70ff7362-aed4-11e4-ba71-00144feab7de.html#axzz3RCJEH5jI
Feb 08
GOVERNMENT-SUPPORTED MSNBC NETWORK STEADILY LOSING VIEWERS
![LysanderSpoonerUniversity2[1] (2)](https://lysanderspooneruniversity.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/LysanderSpoonerUniversity21-2.jpg)
MSNBC—an alleged news network that ceaselessly calls for more government power and control, now attracts fewer than 55,000 viewers worldwide in the cherished 25-to-54-year-old demographic.
You can find more people than that in the bleachers at some college football games.
MSNBC, like its sister networks NBC and CNBC, are branches of General Electric, one of the world’s largest industrial corporations and a perennial blood-brother to the federal government. The Washington Post revealed in 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/28/AR2009062802955.html?hpid=topnews
that GE was actually the largest recipient of government bailout money during the 2008-09 economic crash. This was done in secret, apparently upon the grounds that GE’s financial services arm owned a pair of small Utah banks.
The content of MSNBC programming, as most viewers are aware, champions government expansion and intervention into almost all things from early childhood care and education to military deployment to medical care to climate regulation.
Feb 08
Government climate agencies caught “adjusting” recent temps upward, older temps downward
Bombshell news in today’s (Feb. 8, 2015) London Telegraph:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/globalwarming/11395516/The-fiddling-with-temperature-data-is-the-biggest-science-scandal-ever.html” title=”Fiddling With Temperatures” target=”_blank”>/embed
Just as with the “Climategate” emails in and out of East Anglia, and the manipulation of data by graduate schools, climate alarmists working for governments have been caught “adjusting” temps upward in recent years, and downward for past years to bolster their arguments for more socialism and government power.
Feb 06
U.S. Army Major Stripped of Silver Star Medal After Criticizing U.S. Strategy
by Roger I. Roots
Years ago I read something by the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould about his trip to Russia. If memory serves me right, Gould was writing about visiting Russia during the end of the Soviet period. Gould remarked that while in a Russian library, he examined the indexes at the ends of various Russian history textbooks. He was curious about how Russia’s historians dealt with all of the horrors of Soviet history. He wrote that the name of Joseph Stalin—one of the central figures in Soviet history, if not THE MOST CENTRAL FIGURE in Soviet history—had been simply written out of the indexes of Soviet textbooks. This was because the Soviet Union had turned against Stalin and Stalinism in the 1970s and ’80s after the passing of “Uncle Joe.”
As an observer of American criminal justice, I have occasionally reflected on the fact that what matters most in the modern criminal justice system is not the nature of an alleged crime but how loyal a defendant is to the expansive modern state. It doesn’t matter how many crimes you’ve committed; all that matters is whether, at the moment of your arrest, you embraced the state and aligned yourself with prosecutors against all of your former friends and family members. A savvy arrestee can even avoid jail time altogether if he quickly agrees to become an informant or a witness for the state against his friends or family–regardless of his crimes.
And now there is further evidence of the Sovietization of the United States. On February 6, 2015, The “Free Beacon” news site published a story about U.S. Special Forces Captain Matt Golsteyn. Golsteyn had been awarded a “Silver Star” medal for heroism during a gun battle in Afghanistan in 2010. http://freebeacon.com/national-security/afghanistan-war-hero-stripped-of-silver-star/ . But after Pentagon Brass read remarks by Golsteyn published in a 2011 book entitled “The Wrong War,” they evidently initiated efforts to strip Golsteyn of his medal. Golsteyn had criticized U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan. Now we read that Golsteyn has been stripped of his Silver Star medal—without so much being charged with any wrongdoing.
