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a crock

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Our old crock pot gave up the ghost after 20 years and we bought a new one.  I’m still counting the improvements in crock pot technology that 20 years of free market competition yielded for less money than the original.

  • a slim oval design
  • glass lid with vent holes
  • ergonomic lid handle with a spoon carrier
  • built-in silicon lid gasket
  • transport clips for locking the lid down for trips to pot lucks
  • removable spoon drip tray
  • bracket for holding the hot lid which also spins around to provide a cord wrap structure
  • easily cleanable aluminum housing
  • lighter weight heating element
  • flip up silicon handles for secure handling
  • 3 stage heating element

No doubt these many improvements did not come from one source.  They came about from multiple innovations by many companies competing to win customers in the free crock pot market.

Imagine how many of these innovations would not have occurred in a government-controlled crock pot market.  Imagine how the absence of competition coupled with the presence of federal oversight and regulation would have cemented that 20 year-old crock pot design into our culture.

Consider the medicare-subsidized and fda-regulated health care industry in America, or the new federally-managed American automobile industry.  Consider driving a 50-year-old Chevy on the island of Cuba.

Governments don’t adapt very well.  It’s not in their nature.

The problem with the left’s legislative agenda for America, which they seem unable to adequately describe in less than a thousand pages of federal spaghetti-legalize, is we’ll never know all of the wonderful human products, behaviors, solutions, and creativity that they preclude from coming into existence.

blowback

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“Because white guilt is a vacuum of moral authority, it makes the moral authority of whites and the legitimacy of American institutions contingent on proving a negative: that they are not racist.  The great power of white guilt comes from the fact that it functions by stigma, like racism itself.  Whites and American institutions are stigmatized as racist until they prove otherwise. . . . .[T]he larger reality is that white guilt leaves no room for moral choice; it does not depend on the goodwill or the genuine decency of people.”  Shelby Steele, White Guilt, 2006.

The moral authority that comes from an absence of moral choice is actually no moral authority.  This is a prescription for endless manipulation–by both blacks and whites–which Steele documents at length.  He also wrote, [Read more…]

Bound to Burn

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Bound to Burn, by Peter Huber

“If we’re truly worried about carbon, we must instead approach it as if the emissions originated in an annual eruption of Mount Krakatoa. Don’t try to persuade the volcano to sign a treaty promising to stop. Focus instead on what might be done to protect and promote the planet’s carbon sinks—the systems that suck carbon back out of the air and bury it.”

…said Daniel Hannan

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“Prime Minister, I see you’ve already mastered the essential craft of the European politician, namely the ability to say one thing in this chamber and a very different thing to your home electorate. [Read more…]

Mont Pelerin Society Links

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Institute of Economic Affairs, London, UK
Hoover Institution, Stanford, CA
The Heritage Foundation, Washington, DC
American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC
Cato Institute, Washington, DC
Atlas Economic Research Foundation, Fairfax, VA
Political Economy Research Center, Bozeman, MT
Centre for Independent Studies, Sydney, Australia
Timbro, Stockholm, Sweden
Ratio, Stockholm, Sweden
Manhattan Institute, New York, NY
International Policy Network, London, UK
Café Hayek Blog
Hayek Scholars’ Page
Laissez Faire Books

Death Tax

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Colorado Ranchers Pray for Death of ‘Death Tax’

Farmers also can use conservation easements. They donate land to a qualifying tax-exempt or governmental organization and agree to keep it as open space or use it for agriculture, said Durst.

Adding up all exemptions, Durst projects that less than 1 percent of farms will be subject to the estate tax in 2009.

It’s interesting how  Ron Durst, senior economist for the Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, and the Associated Press consider donating your land to the government to be a tax exemption.  Let me get this straight, if the government takes a portion of your wealth, that’s taxation, but if you give the government all of your wealth, then it’s a tax exemption. 

I guess so, but only because you’ll have nothing left to tax.

Putin throws Obama under the bus

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“Excessive intervention in economic activity and blind faith in the state’s omnipotence is another possible mistake.

True, the state’s increased role in times of crisis is a natural reaction to market setbacks. Instead of streamlining market mechanisms, some are tempted to expand state economic intervention to the greatest possible extent.

The concentration of surplus assets in the hands of the state is a negative aspect of anti-crisis measures in virtually every nation.

In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state’s role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated.

Nor should we turn a blind eye to the fact that the spirit of free enterprise, including the principle of personal responsibility of businesspeople, investors and shareholders for their decisions, is being eroded in the last few months. There is no reason to believe that we can achieve better results by shifting responsibility onto the state.

And one more point: anti-crisis measures should not escalate into financial populism and a refusal to implement responsible macroeconomic policies. The unjustified swelling of the budgetary deficit and the accumulation of public debts are just as destructive as adventurous stock-jobbing.”

The following text is a transcript of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s speech at the opening ceremony of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Putins speaks at Davos

change that defies belief

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Surreal Spending
The House is poised to take a final vote on the compromise $800-billion spending bill on, appropriately, Friday the 13th, with the Senate likely to follow soon after.

In my 36 years in Washington, I have never seen such a surreal environment, with hundreds of billions of dollars in borrowed taxpayer money being spent without committee hearings or even meaningful public debate over the thousands of new and expanded programs the bill funds. [Read more…]

Obamanomics

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Obamanomics – mp3 audio

“It is absolutely true that we can’t depend on government alone to create jobs or economic growth.”

Oh Please!  With this intriguing bit of hyperbole, President Obama begins his justification for the stimulus package.

— AS IF we could depend on government AT ALL to create jobs or economic growth!

Governments redistribute a fraction of the dollars they collect, and consume the balance with overhead.  The wealth that governments redistribute crowds out private sector opportunities at the point of redistribution, cuts off private sector opportunities at the point of collection, and costs an overhead bureaucracy that adds no productive capacity to society.  It’s a loss proposition in the beginning, middle, and end.

Governments cannot create anything without first taking the means to do so from the private sector, a fact that completely eludes our leftist fear-mongering redistributer-in-Chief.  And he seems like such a nice guy.  Too bad his policies will bury us.

President’s press conference

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60% of Americans want tax cuts to stimulate the economy, and the President thinks he can do it with federal spending on roads and bridges.  Rather than save the jobs that were lost, help the industries that have had to lay off, or directly help those people who have lost jobs, the President suggests those skilled workers go pick up shovels and join highway crews.  Nice work if you can get it I suppose.

After the President’s first press conference, the message is obvious.  The private sector will get no help from Washington in rescuing this economy.  The help the Left have offered is meaningless and hopelessly out of step with people’s real needs.

The private sector must look within, use it’s own creative and productive capacities, decide what needs produced and served in America, and proceed to fill those economic needs.  The private sector must find the capital, take the risks, reward the entrepreneurs, and create real solutions.  In other words, do what only the private sector knows how to do.

Last night, the President who never actually worked in the private sector all but held a funeral for the American private sector.  How would he even recognize a private sector job?

Washington is a town full of empty suits who’s only skill is an ability to promise to spend trillions of dollars that the country does not have, as fast as possible, to build the American socialist state.  Forget that socialism can’t work.  Forget that the wealth they intend to spend does not exist.  The less American producers enable this madness, the better.

At the end of the day, we still have our freedom.  The federal government cannot control us unless we consent.  By refusing federal dollars, we refuse our consent to be controlled.  If private citizens refuse federal health care programs, the feds will be powerless to stop them from seeking the health care of their own choosing.  If private businesses refuse federal money, they will remain masters of their own destiny.

Obama desparately tried to convince us last night that we are helpless and that the federal government is our only savior.  Don’t believe him for a second.  The private sector is what enlivens America.  Other things being equal, market valuations may indicate the economic value of a private firm.  But other things are not equal at this time.  At this time we have a majority party in power with the singular message that we have become worthless.  What changed in the last year that made us worthless?  The Democrats took power.  I, for one, don’t believe a word of their message.

The Democrat message is intended to stampede people headlong into socialism and Obama tells us not to worry too much about the details of his stimulus plan.  Do you think this is the governing wisdom that the Americans who put the Left in power really thought they were going to get?  I don’t.

The bloom is definitely off the One’s rose, and what’s left is a thorny totalitarian.

Thomas Jefferson

"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."

Aristotle

"Only an armed people can be truly free. Only an unarmed people can ever be enslaved."

Karl Popper

“A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is nonscientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.”