(Links to brief YouTube clips)
Colorado State Senator Greg Brophy
Mountain States Legal Foundation Executive Director William Perry Pendley
a crock
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.
health care competition
blowback
“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
“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.”
pay as you go
Reed, Cole and Ohanian
…said Daniel Hannan
“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…]
Václav Klaus
Act I
(click to enlarge)
May we have an Intermission now? I need a couple drinks before Act II starts.
“We Say It Like It Is”
From the 3/9/09 Investors Business Daily, Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize.
End The Spending
Victims Of Socialism
Let The Inquisition Start With Frank
Home A Loan
Obama Can’t Double-Talk Us Out Of This
It is papers like Investors Business Daily and the Wall Street Journal, newspapers who say it like it is, newspapers who remain relevant, who will not follow the Rocky Mountain News into oblivion.
Mont Pelerin Society Links
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
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
“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.
Porkulus Rex
Read it and weep.
change that defies belief
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
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.
economists discredit stimulus
President’s press conference
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.
Obama goes to the bully pulpit
Barack Obama Washington Post Editorial
re: “…the same old partisan gridlock that stands in the way of action…”
It’s not enough that the Democrats have control of the House, control of the Senate, control of the Presidency, and a liberal majority on the Supreme Court?
When did a limp-wristed majority afraid to act on its’ own beliefs become “partisan gridlock?” You can’t blame Republicans for the Democrats’ lack of courage to support their own convictions.
And elevating Republicans’ reasonable disagreement with socialist programs to the virtual level of a thought crime is frankly Orwellian. If socialist programs had ever accomplished what they set out to do, anywhere, anytime in history that they have been tried, Republicans would probably sign on. But we’ve been down this road of failed big government responses to economic crisis, and many people who lived through the Great Depression are still alive to attest to those socialist failures. The way to stimulate our economy is to get government off our backs and allow people to keep the fruits of their labors.
The stimulus plan the President brought out of the House is built on False Dilemmas, ineffective solutions, poor returns on the dollar, and arbitrary market dislocations. It benefits one class – the government bureaucrat class. Everyone else loses.
Great. The American people get the government they deserve. And the government they got is Democrats who don’t need Republicans to pass their stimulus plan. What they need is to grow a pair, men and women alike, and pass their plans in the light of day as THEIR plans, and be judged by THEIR plans’ results as Democrats. And if they can’t muster the testosterone to be held accountable for their own plans, they have no one to blame but themselves.
And Republicans need to grow some pairs too. Conservative philosophy is worth standing on. They must hold the line and not agree to another dollar of spending or taxation. It would be a big mistake for them to try to blend in with Democrats at this juncture. Look what happened the last time a Republican tried to pass himself off as a Democrat – the McCain campaign lost definitively. Tax and spend is a guaranteed loser for a Republican.
Democrats don’t need bi-partisan support to enact their plans, and each time they ask for it, Republicans should lock their mouths shut and throw away the key. The change Republicans need in Washington is to quit the spending spree that went on under President Bush, learn when to keep their mouths shut, and start acting conservatively.
Also See: Alyssa Lappen on Stimulus Plan
Also See: The Fierce Urgency of Pork