(1) Inflation Spiked 7.5% In January—Hitting Nearly 40-Year High (Forbes)
Category Archives: Liberals
If destruction be our lot…
(1) How I Responded When My Yoga Studio Reinstituted a Mask Mandate (FEE)
(2) The Obama and COVID cult(s)
(a) Obama Kids: Sing for Change (Pyongyang Remix)
(b) “Vaccinate!” (Harvey Milk Day performance 5/22/2021)
(3) Irony
(a) Ohio by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
NY Times on Government Perversion
Jury duty. You endure CNN and watch some crappy video about how judges don’t legislate from the bench. I don’t typically use my blog to rant so I’ll spare all three of my reader(s) the histrionics. It was a fairly productive morning (completed a workbook my accountant provides me each year) and the lawyer sitting next to me furnished me with a copy of the NY TIMES after he moved onto his Kindle.
There were three articles in it I wanted to mention/cite since each makes the case against BIG government (and the favored policies of the liberals who read that awful paper). It’s also the NY TIMES so you feculent liberals can trust the source.
(1) Britain’s Economy Stalls, in Setback for Cameron
It is that formula that has stirred allegations from the political left in Britain that Mr. Cameron and Mr. Osborne are embarked on an ideological crusade, using Britain’s indebtedness, the worst in Europe, as an excuse to roll back the power of the state.
Limestone Commentary: Um. Fact. Britain’s indebtedness is the worst in Europe. What’s a logical and plausible counter to that indebtedness? How about expanding the power of the state via more spending? What a brilliant, Obama-like, solution!
(2) Who Invests in Low-Income Housing? Google, for One
Mr. Copeman attributed the differential today in tax credit prices from one region to another to “the unintended, perverse consequences” of the Community Reinvestment Act, despite what he said was a need for five million more units in all 50 states. He said banks generally did not make these investments in places where they had no depositors.
Limestone Commentary: Perverse! Fact: When the government tries to legislate equality something perverse always happens. Need a modern day example (the CRA is from 1989)? The Obama administration is passing out health care waivers because what was signed into law is a disaster. And what basis are the waivers being awarded? The government shouldn’t be in the business of picking winners and losers -unless- that was the entire point.
(3) A Growth Agenda for World Economic Forum
Finally, there is liberalization. It has become fashionable to blame the global financial crisis on free markets. But the problem rather was that markets were distorted by bailouts and skewed incentives.
Freeing markets, whether by liberalizing rules on hiring and firing or sweeping away restricted practices in professions, still has the capacity to deliver a big long-term boost to productivity in much of the world. The Davos delegates should grasp this agenda.
Limestone Commentary: Two words- perverse and distorted. Two more…tea and party.
UPDATE
The Wall Street Journal adds context via Virginia Postrel’s Small Crafts vs. Big Government.
Net Neutrality: A government “solution” for a non-problem
(2) The Obama FCC has regulated the Internet
(3) Abolish the FCC
Quote
There is nothing in life that grows and thrives on its own that a liberal won’t come along and want to regulate and control. That is happening here…It’s particularly arrogant with the Internet which is evolving and changing rapidly as anything in the history of communications. I think that in and of itself is scary. -Charles Krauthammer
Limestone Commentary
It has to be doublespeak since the staff at WIRED were advocates (and campaigned for it) since the very beginning.
Weekend 156.0
(1) 12 Awesome Airplane Paint Jobs
(2) How to Turn a Recession into a Depression
(2a) “As hostility to businessmen grows, politicians tax them more heavily, while debasing and inflating the currency to maintain an illusion of prosperity. Then, when these policies cause rising price levels, a deluded populace demands price controls, which ambitious politicians are all too ready to impose.
Every nation has developed and flowered – with art, music, and the other ornaments and means of civilization – only on the basis of flourishing business trade, commerce. This was true of the Phoenicians, Ancient Greece, and Ancient Egypt, the Chinese civilization, the Byzantine Empire, Venice, Florence, Spain, England, France, Germany and the United States. Go through the history of each and you’ll find in its origins that period in which commerce and finance were highly regarded and relatively free in a developing civilization.” – V. Orval Watts
(4) 23 years in the making for just one hour off the travel time: Drilling on world’s longest tunnel stretching 35.4 miles under the Alps is completed
(4a) Boondoggle in the Motor City – Detroit’s Train to Nowhere
(4b) Flashy Projects Have Not Helped Detroit
Socialism: Lather, rinse, repeat
Death of the Postmodernist Dream by Victor Davis Hanson
“The Greek meltdown — with Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain on the brink — has shown that European socialism does not work. Bankruptcy, not politics, is the final arbiter: Individuals, firms, and nations either buy particular bonds or they don’t. And a nation like Greece, in turn, either pays what it has borrowed or it doesn’t. All the op-eds in the New York Times cannot change that fact.”
Socialist Intervention in the Private Sector is Not True Health Care Reform by The American TFP
“Socialism is a utopian ideology that seeks to eliminate human selfishness by destroying individual freedom, private property and free enterprise. Socialists believe they can eliminate injustice by transferring responsibilities from individuals and families to the State. However, their efforts are tantamount to killing the patient to cure his illness.”
Related
Not So Liberating: The Twilight of Liberation Theology
How Hugo Chávez broke my heart
Socialism: Perception versus Reality
Perception
Gordon Brown, said on leaving, “I tried to make the country fairer.”
Source
Reality
At over 50% of national income, the public sector in the U.K. is now as big as in Scandinavia, higher than in Germany, and up from the roughly 40% it accounted for when Margaret Thatcher left power to the early years of Tony Blair’s Labour government.
The scale of Britain’s spending crisis is vast on either side of the ledger: Public spending has risen above 50% of gross domestic product in the last two years, while revenues have fallen below 40%, to their lowest level since the 1960s.
Source
Obama’s Faustian Deal
The We’re-Not-Europe Party (WSJ)
“For Americans, this has been a two-week cram course in what not to be if you hope to have a vibrant future. What was once an unfocused criticism of Mr. Obama and the Democrats, that they are nudging America toward a European-style social-market economy, came to awful life in the panicked, stricken faces of Europe’s leadership: Merkel, Sarkozy, Brown, Papandreou. They look like that because Europe has just seen the bond-market devil.”
Related: The Welfare State’s Death Spiral
Elena Kagan’s College Thesis (on Socialism)
Limestone Commentary
This proverb is apropos: Paradise and hell can be had in this world.