"Just the facts M'am, Just the facts." -- Sgt. Joe Friday
[To] support civil society activists worldwide; and protect at-risk populations, including women, religious minorities, disabled, indigenous, and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) people.
[That’s $Trillion with a “T”]
"The History of the Intelligence State" — an essential 40 min lecture on the origin story of The Blob. Thanks to @Hillsdale for a beautiful event. Timestamps in tweet below pic.twitter.com/GTRrgPpLqt
— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) September 24, 2024
On the subject of masks, gloves, breathing machines, and pharmaceuticals:
Clichés of Socialiism #71
“Speculation should be outlawed.”
In 1869 John Fiske, noted American philosopher, scholar and literary critic, wrote an essay on “The Famine of 1770 in Bengal” (The Unseen World and Other Essays. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1876), Pointing out that a major reason for the severity of the famine was the Prevailing law prohibiting all speculation in rice. The following is excerpted from that essay.
THIS DISASTROUS piece of legislation was due to the universal prevalence of a prejudice from which so-called enlightened communities are not yet wholly free. It is even now customary to heap abuse upon those persons who in a season of scarcity, when prices are rapidly rising, buy up the “necessaries of life,” thereby still increasing for a time the cost of living. Such persons are commonly assailed with specious generalities to the effect that they are enemies of society. People whose only ideas are “moral ideas” regard them as heartless sharpers who fatten upon the misery of their fellow creatures. And it is sometimes hinted that such “practices” ought to be stopped by legislation.
Now, so far is this prejudice, which is a very old one, from being justified by facts, that, instead of being an evil, speculation in breadstuffs and other necessaries is one of the chief agencies by which in modern times and civilized countries a real famine is rendered almost impossible. This natural monopoly operates in two ways. In the first place, by raising prices, it checks consumption, putting every one on shorter allowance until the season of scarcity is over, and thus prevents the scarcity from growing into famine. In the second place, by raising prices, it stimulates importation from those localities where abundance reigns and prices are low. It thus in the long run does much to equalize the pressure of a time of dearth and diminish those extreme oscillations of prices which interfere with the even, healthy course of trade. A government which, in a season of high prices, does anything to check such speculation, acts about as sagely as the skipper of a wrecked vessel who should refuse to put his crew upon half rations.
The Capture of Antwerp
The turning point of the great Dutch Revolution, so far as it concerned the provinces which now constitute Belgium, was the famous siege and capture of Antwerp by Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma. The siege was a long one, and the resistance obstinate, and the city would probably not have been captured if famine had not come to the assistance of the besiegers. It is interesting, therefore, to inquire what steps the civic authorities had taken to prevent such a calamity. They knew that the struggle before them was likely to be the life-and-death struggle of the Southern Netherlands; they knew that there was risk of their being surrounded so that relief from without would be impossible; they knew that their assailant was one of the most astute and unconquerable of men, by far the greatest general of the sixteenth century.
Therefore they proceeded to do just what our Republican Congress, under such circumstances, would probably have done, and just what the New York Tribune, if it had existed in those days, would have advised them to do. Finding that sundry speculators were accumulating and hoarding up provisions in anticipation of a season of high prices, they hastily decided, first of all to put a stop to such “selfish iniquity.” In their eyes the great thing to be done was to make things cheap. They therefore affxed a very low maximum price to everything which could be eaten, and prescribed severe penalties for all who should attempt to take more than the sum by law decreed. If a baker refused to sell his bread for a price which would have been adequate only in a time of great plenty, his shop was to be broken open, and his loaves distributed among the populace. The consequences of this idiotic policy were twofold.
In the first place, the enforced lowness of prices prevented any breadstuffs or other provisions from being brought into the city. It was a long time before Farnese succeeded in so blockading the Scheldt as to prevent ships laden with eatables from coming in below. Corn and preserved meats might have been hurried by thousands of tons into the beleagured city. Friendly Dutch vessels, freighted with abundance, were waiting at the mouth of the river. But all to no purpose. No merchant would expose his valuable ship, with its cargo, to the risk of being sunk by Farnese’s batteries, merely for the sake of finding a market no better than a hundred others which could be entered without incurring danger. No doubt if the merchants of Holland had followed out the maxim Vivre pour autrui, they would have braved ruin and destruction rather than behold their neighbours of Antwerp enslaved.
No doubt if they could have risen to a broad philosophic view of the future interests of the Netherlands, they would have seen that Antwerp must be saved, no matter if some of them were to lose money by it. But men do not yet sacrifice themselves for their fellows, nor do they as a rule look far beyond the present moment and its emergencies. And the business of government is to legislate for men as they are, not as it is supposed they ought to be. If provisions had brought a high price in Antwerp, they would have been carried thither. As it was, the city, by its own stupidity, blockaded itself far more effectually than Farnese could have done it.
In the second place, the enforced lowness of prices prevented any general retrenchment on the part of the citizens. Nobody felt it necessary to economize. Every one bought as much bread, and ate it as freely, as if the government by insuring its cheapness had insured its abundance. So the city lived in high spirits and in gleeful defiance of its besiegers, until all at once provisions gave out, and the government had to step in again to palliate the distress which it had wrought. It constituted itself quartermaster-general to the community, and doled out stinted rations alike to rich and poor, with that stern democratic impartiality peculiar to times of mortal peril.
But this served only, like most artificial palliatives, to lengthen out the misery. At the time of the surrender, not a loaf of bread could be obtained for love or money.
“It’s all about the money, boys!” Big Dan Teague
Health insurance, hospitals, big pharma, retail pharma, healthcare professionals, healthcare equipment and device manufacturing, are in it for the money. And rightly so. Money is the exchange medium that enables people to trade peacefully for what they want. Without money, people kill each other. See Venezuela.
Federal, state and local governments—political organizations—write laws to manage health care and health insurance. The laws they’ve written control prices, the services available, where those services will be provided, how much the patient pays, and most importantly, how much the government funds.
Political organizations follow the money. The biggest, most ossified and intransigent spender is government. Whoever turns that money spigot on gets rich.
That’s why congress isn’t repealing Obamacare. The reason has little to do with patient or voter revolts in 2018 that could favor Democrats, though Democrats certainly portray it as such—a case of making hay while the sun shines.
The reason comes from all of the vested money interests in the great mess of a health market enabled and protected by government. When it comes time to prune it back—i.e. now—no one will step forward to shut off their tap on the government money reservoir.
Politicians want to keep receiving money for their votes on profitable laws, begging the question of who profits.
Government health insurance/practitioner/substance/health transaction controllers and regulators all want to keep their statutory jobs.
Health finance at all levels of funds flow, a massive industry, want to keep their jobs.
And so it goes with the millions of consequential transactions all lubricated by virtually unlimited government money.
The patient entitlement is the tip of the iceberg. The far more pernicious entitlements in the fabric of the health industry—the ones that removal would lead to unemployment of the comfortably well paid—form the scaffold propping the whole thing up.
The mantra offered as a solution—“Single Payor”—would be like throwing gasoline onto a raging fire with the expectation it will perform like water.
The real solution is to reintroduce the highly protected and funded rare birds in all facets of the health industry to competition and market forces.
Because it’s all about the money, boys.
Government by the people seems to be our problem. States, Feds, Regulators, and Planners stand ready for manipulation by interest groups for the institutionalization, legalization and ossification of rules to benefit the health, safety and welfare of the majority.
A veneer of honorable partisan politics provides cover and election rhetoric to periodically move the needle left or right, and re-order the primary beneficiaries under successive elected administrations.
Consent of the governed is a myth. We will be governed one way or another as opportunities for acting freely outside of the rules of our free society shrink each day.
Got an interesting idea with attractive optics that speak to the health, safety and welfare of Americans? Can you generate funding for communications, contributions and legal process? Then you will get to direct the legal machineries at whatever level of government to write some law that must be obeyed.
The tautological requirement is that each new law must be a consistent development from the law already on the books. Our great construct of reasoning grows each day. No human behavior is immune from its reach. More importantly, no human behavior will be permitted to frustrate its objective.
The beneficiaries of whatever class, corporate interest, or personal feature, benefit. The rest provide at least obedience, indirect funding, and implied consent.
I’m sure this is not the system the Founders intended.
Human nature is imperfect. It always was, and so long as we remain human, it always will be. The American Founders built a government system adapted to our imperfect human nature. No other system of government contains mechanisms to mitigate the harmful effects of our imperfect human nature.
The free market also resolves human imperfections. Suppliers and demanders imperfectly attempt to maximize their worth by agreeing on a price for a given exchange of goods or services. Price is the flexible point where they voluntarily meet, and price can be moved by either party to a transaction depending on how each deals with their imperfect circumstances.
The market flexibly harmonizes imperfections while providing the necessary incentives for trade to occur. Without trade, without a market, no substantial incentives exist. Without incentives, goods do not get made and trade does not occur. When trade does not exist, buyers don’t have anything to buy, and everyone stays poorer.
Humans are motivated by the opportunity to benefit themselves more than they are motivated by the opportunity to benefit others. The Left use the pejorative of greed when speaking of our human nature of self interest. But this is our nature. It is neither good nor bad. It’s just the way humans generally are.
With equal validity you could say that it’s human nature to have sex and therefore sex is bad. Oh wait a minute; a lot of people do say that. Let’s not kick that sleeping dog just now.
Which makes more sense to advocate – political and economic systems that offend our human nature, or ones that work with our human nature? The question answers itself and the overwhelming evidence affirms the answer.
Where humans have worked out their differences, their disequilibriums, their inequalities, and their variances through objective, constitutional, rule-of-law-based governments and associated free markets, they have done best.
Where humans have had their political and economic incentives removed through command economics and totalitarian governments, they have done worst.
This is the most important lesson of history, and the Left has still not learned it.
I read Jean Ziegler‘s Betting on Famine. Ziegler is a Social Democrat who worked for the UN and answers the question in his book, “Why the World Still Goes Hungry?”
He reasons that global corporate food oligarchies control food and associated supply-chain product markets to maximize profits, that these same markets inhibit subsistence farming around the world because it competes with their control of food, that sufficient food is a basic human right, that there is more than enough food produced to go around so that no one should starve, and that the free market misallocates food and causes starvation.
Aye yai yai.
Ziegler’s solution – “In parliaments, in international regulatory authorities, we can decide that there must be change; we can decide to make the right to food a priority, to remove food from the realm of market speculation, to protect subsistence agriculture in the name of national heritage and invest in improving it worldwide. The solutions exist; the plans and projects are already drafted. What is lacking is the will of governments.”
Ziegler, the Social Democrats, and the Left think we can just decide to change human nature. You might think, “But this has never been done.” And you’d be right. It’s never been done because it can’t be done. Our nature is our nature. Denying it will only result in predictably negative consequences that come from denial.
If you want to see starvation really take off and become much worse than it already is, put government in control of the food supply. Governments have already re-allocated food resources toward energy production. Governments are funding the growth of food, only to turn around and burn it up.
When governments make mistakes, they create invested constituencies who have financial incentives to resist changes to the government policy. Moreover, government programs are funded from taxpayer revenue which continues to flow regardless of the success of the program. There’s no outcome feedback loop to correct a government mistake. And there’s always the shouting constituency narrowly focused on their government benefit to drown out more sober analysis.
When markets make mistakes, they quickly self correct because no one buys the mistake and it quickly becomes unfunded and goes away.
Unsubsidized markets would have abandoned wind, solar, and food-robbing ethanol long ago. And fewer people would be starving today.
Many generations of Americans have taken our founding principles for granted, [Read more…]
Elections have consequences. Elbert County’s busy liberal-led bureaucracy has been writing up a blizzard of new regulatory laws to govern us good citizens. The liberals appointed by the Republican BOCC members you voted for last November got right on the problem brought to light by the Nyquist affair. But I hope you didn’t think that putting a couple of committed liberals onto the BOCC would bring the platitudes of accountability and transparency they preached into fruition. Those outcomes never had a prayer.
The first Nag to escape the barn is the Special District Regulation with its Addendum A and Addendum B. In the face of one dissenting vote last night, the Planning Commission voted to pass this turkey on to the BOCC – that group with a majority of elected politicians too spineless to actually defend a political position themselves – the group who prefer to hide their more controversial policies at arms length in subordinate off-line committees.
And why not? The strategy of avoiding all contact with controversial decision consequences has worked pretty well for President Obama. Provided you have policy prostitutes willing to lay down for you, why not indeed.
But on the other hand, why would anyone in their right mind risk their capital and time to engage this open ended process? This special district process has no definite time limit, no standards for evaluating a given project, no limits to which third parties can enjoin the process and prolong it, no bar to systemic political intervention in the regulatory scheme, no extent to which a government taking of that private capital and time must be tolerated, and the transparency mechanisms it does contain have no dispositive bearing on an outcome.
Voting stakeholders, the intended beneficiaries of a given special district, are both disenfranchised and fed a dose of inconsequential pablum to assuage their disempowerment at the hands of an anointed cadre’ of enlightened regulators.
In response to the imminent expiration of the County’s moratorium on special district approvals (put in place last January by the new liberal BOCC majority to frustrate the Town of Kiowa’s attempt to exit receivership through the sale of water to oil & gas interests), this new body of regulatory law provides a politically riskless mechanism for a permanent moratorium on all special district approvals, both new ones and modifications to existing special districts. Take that Mr. Nyquist. Touche’ Town of Kiowa.
To say the pendulum’s swung too far the opposite direction is an understatement – it’s gone crashing through the clockworks. And that’s not even the worst of it.
Look to the North. Look to the South. Elbert County is surrounded by Groundwater Management Districts who have regulatory authority over all water issues in their jurisdiction. The North Kiowa Bijou and the Upper Big Sandy GMDs have their own publicly elected directors and their own bureaucracies for implementing each one’s version of water regulatory laws.
Up to now, Elbert County avoided these institutions and their intermediate murky regulatory enterprises over the County’s scarce water resources, preferring instead to remain under the more objective and competent jurisdiction of the Colorado State Engineer.
But that wasn’t enough for the liberals now running things. They took a non-representative advisory water committee of political appointees and inserted them into the special district regulatory scheme, whence they will now flex their regulatory muscle over any substantial project that falls into the web of county planning.
Why go to the voters on the very politically risky question of electing a water management district when you can quietly backdoor one into existence through a regulatory process that, judging by attendance at the meetings, most citizens don’t even know exists? And bonus points – this water regulatory authority isn’t even accountable to the voters!
Transparency and accountability? They’re stealing property rights with one hand while patting you on the head with the other.
B_Imperial
The subject of cutting federal spending isn’t manageable in the abstract. While the “fiscal cliff” and “cutting spending” make for nice sound bites, they convey very little practicable information. Unfortunately the problem is vast, however, it is not impossible. The Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance is a great place to start to understand the elements of the spending problem. It takes 38 typed pages just to list the 2,192 Federal Domestic Assistance programs in all their various types:
A: Formula Grants
B: Project Grants
C: Direct Payments for Specified Use
D: Direct Payments with Unrestricted Use
E: Direct Loans
F: Guaranteed/Insured Loans
G: Insurance
H: Sale, Exchange, or Donation of Property and Goods
I: Use of Property, Facilities, and Equipment
J: Provision of Specialized Services
K: Advisory Services and Counseling
L: Dissemination of Technical Information
M: Training
N: Investigation of Complaints
O: Federal Employment
The above 38 page table is extracted from the 3000+ page CFDA 2012 Print Edition.
Let’s be clear, this is not an optional civics matter for an American citizen. The Founders contemplated that our citizenship would entail a functional understanding of what our Federal government does, and whether it acts within the constitutional limits that authorize it to do those things.
Read the list. Imagine if you can, the tortured logic necessary to make a constitutional justification for each line item on the list. Many will require extended powers of fantasy to do so.
In a rational country governed by the rule of law, those programs least connected to constitutional authority should be the first to go.
The U.S. Supreme Court became the arbiter of legislative constitutionality with the 1803 Marbury decision. But the Court only acts on constitutional questions that the judicial system delivers to it. The Court requires a “case in controversy” to hear a constitutional question, let alone make a decision.
We will not see cases in controversy on the question of the constitutionality for most, if not all, of the 2,192 established Federal Domestic Assistance programs. And we know that under Obamacare, thanks to Justice Roberts, the 2012 list is scheduled to grow substantially (see previous post). We have no grounds to expect the Court to save us from totalitarianism.
But the process of the Courts’ deciding constitutionality in no way impedes or prohibits citizens from making their own assessments of what is constitutional, and exercising their political authority at the ballot box to make it so.
To be sure, the media will not enable this detailed citizens’ decision to proceed. It will continue to toss out sound bites and leave the citizens largely in the dark about the real nature of the problem. And those politicians wed to their pork who do not practice statesmanship will, in like manner, act to thwart any efforts to diminish the power of their pork-enabling offices.
We can save our country from financial ruin. It starts with understanding the real problem. It proceeds to finding and electing men and women who will represent us in the dismantling of the Federal Domestic Assistance state.
B_Imperial
“…[W]hat more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow citizens, a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government; and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.”
DEL SCHWAB
ELBERT COUNTY COMMISSIONER DISTRICT #1
May 26, 2012
Dear Home Owners:
It has come to my attention that an email was sent to Home Owners by a candidate that is running for the position of Elbert County Commissioner. This specifically addresses the Rubbish Ordinance. The information that was sent was biased, inaccurate and sent for political strategy and personal gain. It is my intention to present the facts and clear-up any misunderstandings. The main objective of this Ordinance is to protect Property Owners from the accumulation of junk and rubbish which could impact the value of your property. At no time was this Ordinance designed for revenue gain.
Below are the facts: [Read more…]
In the context of this election season with Republicans engaged in presidential policy debates each week, “Capitol Punishment” should be read right now by every American interested in curing the abuses in Washington.
Jack Abramoff’s prescription for real reform in Washington:
If a recovered alcoholic told you how to quit drinking, you’d listen.
This acronym sums up a great deal of what passes for government around here. A dab of gab grows your government flab.
L.) ELBERT COUNTY OIL & GAS ADVISORY BOARD (ECOGAB)
The Board shall form the Elbert County Oil and Gas Advisory Board (ECOGAB) to provide a forum for the oil and gas industry, the public, impacted landowners, and county government to prevent or minimize conflict associated with oil and gas development through positive and proactive communication and actions that encourage responsible and balanced development of oil and gas resources within Elbert County. ECOGAB shall have two (2) representatives from citizens, two (2) representatives from the oil and gas industry, and one (1) county staff member to hear comments and complaints from county residents regarding oil and gas activity. ECOGAB shall investigate citizen complaints and attempt to resolve complaints If a solution cannot be agreed upon, the matter will be forwarded to the Board and/or COGCC or other regulatory authorities. If a solution can be agreed upon, ECOGAB will report their findings and solution to the Board for appropriate action. Membership to the ECOGAB shall be appointed by the Board.
