Reinke Faces Life

http://tinyurl.com/umrgy

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2006/10/25
/should_we_trade_at_all

Should we trade at all
By Walter E. Williams
Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Dr. Williams serves on the faculty of George Mason University as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and is the author of More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well.

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You might wonder how it is possible for, say, the sugar industry to rip off consumers. After all, consumers are far more numerous than sugar workers and sugar bosses. It’s easy. A lot is at stake for those in the sugar industry, workers and bosses. They dedicate huge resources to pressure Congress into enacting trade restrictions. But how many of us consumers will devote the same resources to unseat a congressman who voted for sugar restrictions that forced us to pay $21 more for the sugar our family uses? It’s the problem of visible beneficiaries of trade restrictions, sugar workers and bosses, gaining at the expense of invisible victims — sugar consumers. We might think of it as congressional price-gouging.

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Doctor Williams has a unique ability to frame an issue so even I can understand it.

Tariffs, taxes, “price supports”, “price floors”, “minimums” are all just things that make us poorer.

Universally poorer.

Every family in Amerika is paying to subsidize the sugar producers in the South, their lobbyists, and the politicians that they have bought and paid for.

When the final history of mankind is written, gubamint will be recognized as the ultimate mental disorder. It will probably be cited as worse than any genocidal maniac who used gubamint. It will be that quain period in human development when, like the Salem Witch trials, Human sacrifice, race wars, and (my particular favorite) genocide, the participant in the era didn’t realize just how STUPID they were being.

Similar to sugar, there are: minimum wage laws, milk price “supports”, minimum cigarette prices, and all manner of other gubamint actions that make us poorer.

What have you done about it?

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/15391426/site/newsweek

Remember Global Cooling?
Why scientists find climate change so hard to predict.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Jerry Adler
Updated: 5:41 p.m. ET Oct. 23, 2006

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Oct. 23, 2006 – In April, 1975, in an issue mostly taken up with stories about the collapse of the American-backed government of South Vietnam, NEWSWEEK published a small back-page article about a very different kind of disaster. Citing “ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically,” the magazine warned of an impending “drastic decline in food production.” Political disruptions stemming from food shortages could affect “just about every nation on earth.” Scientists urged governments to consider emergency action to head off the terrible threat of . . . well, if you had been following the climate-change debates at the time, you’d have known that the threat was: global cooling.

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And, you’re surprised when people don’t believe what they are told.

Weather forecasts. Economic projections. Points spreads.

How many people keep score of their predictions?

I do. I don’t make any. Any more.

The worst part of being a IT Architect is to make long term plans and be unable to change the future.

I call it the “Dephi Oracle” problem.

Yup, I see the brick wall you’re running headlong for. You, it’s still there and your speeding up. Gonna be a crash. Hay, listen up.

Klunk!

Yeah, I know if I was a better predictor, I would have been able to make you listen. Right!

What’s your prediction score?

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff113.html

The Church’s Losing Strategy
by Michael S. Rozeff
October 24, 2006
The Louis M. Jacobs Professor of Finance at University at Buffalo.

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If churches are so short-sighted as to agree to play ball in the state’s ballpark by the state’s rules, and even anxiously elbow their way into the park to sample the goodies, they will have no one to blame but themselves when the state locks and bolts the exits.

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The oft repeated canard “those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it” could be amplified to say “those who don’t understand history are condemned to repeat it”.

In the Middle Ages, the Church was a counterbalance to the State. Who hasn’t read the government propaganda The Three Musketeers, where the valiant servants of the King battle against the evil cardinal. Unlike most kids, I rooted for the Cardinal’s Guard. Even at that tender age, I understood that the Church was voluntary, but the King wasn’t.

At one time in America, before the Gubamint changed it to Amerika, there was lots of competition to help the poor that didn’t involve the theft by the gubamint called taxes.

In my lifetime, I knew people who got help from: the fraternal organizations like the KofC, the Lions, and the Masons; all manner of vets (VFW, American Legion, & DVA); from the Churches (generically referring to the Catholic Church, the various flavors of Protestant, the major strains of Jewish tradition, and even something called the Ethical Culture Society), as well as ad hoc efforts by the local fire department, PBA, or such.

Now they are all but a shell of their former selves. They ceded the moral high ground to the gubamint in exchange for the proverbial thirty pieces of silver.

I remember a time when the poor were really educated in schools that really worked. There were public schools, but there was real competition for students. Parents sent their children to the Churches for a “good education”, or was that an “education in good”.

Eventually, the State’s high taxes and “free offer of education” seduced people into believing they could get something for nothing.

The Church’s didn’t fight that battle, when they could have won. Now they have to fight the battle when they are doomed. Remember Winston Churchill’s advice about fighting that went along the lines “when shall we fight?”. If you don’t fight the battle sooner rather than later, then you will fight it when you are weaker.

The Churches didn’t stand up and fight when it was easy and they were strong. Now they are forced to fight when it is hard and they are weak. Remember the parable of “The Wild and Free Pigs of the Okefenokee Swamp” http://www.geoffmetcalf.com/790.html

And, the cause of Liberty has lost a valuable ally in the war to keep the overbearing gubamint in check.

http://tinyurl.com/y2uuyx

http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/jay_leno_garage/
3475911.html?page=1

title

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Just think: In those days a 17-year-old could go to the motor vehicle bureau to get license plates for a homebuilt, motorcycle-powered vehicle. The folks at the office would say, “What kind of car is that?”

“Oh, I made it myself.”

“Lights work? Horn work? Okay, here are your tags.”

Can you imagine?

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This article gave me a new respect for the American ingenuity of days gone by.

I already like Jay Leno. This just added to that.

This article begs the question of why the gubamint is involved with cars and roads.

We could do much better without their “service”.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/higgs/higgs51.html

How Government Destroys Moral Character
by Robert Higgs
October 23, 2006

Robert Higgs is senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute and editor of The Independent Review. His most recent book is Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy. He is also the author of Resurgence of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11 and Against Leviathan.

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“Thou shalt not steal” is a rule as old as human society itself. It must have been, else no complex human society would have proved viable.

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Government as we know it, however, rests entirely on this kind of sociopathy. Rulers take what does not belong to them and dispose of it to suit themselves.

***AND***

In some cases, especially in societies with governments that attempt to justify their existence and their actions on “democratic” grounds, many people may be taken in by this ideological sleight of hand. They may actually believe that “we tax ourselves” so that the rulers “we choose” can dispose of the loot in ways that “we voted for,” failing to appreciate the gulf that separates this pristine ideological vision from the sordid facts on the ground.

***AND***

The prevailing attitude seems to be the one expressed by farmer Charles Fisher, of Tulare County, California: “Whether it’s right or wrong, if they are offering it, you’re foolish to turn it down.”

In that single sentence, Fisher has encapsulated the rotten core of the welfare state, and he has concisely expressed how such a state destroys the people’s moral character. The loot is there for the taking; you’re a fool not to take it, notwithstanding that your taking it may be wrong. Financial gain trumps moral probity. Don’t be a chump; take the money.

I don’t know Charles Fisher, but if he is like a great many others who profit by despoiling their fellow man, with government acting as the facilitator of the crime, then I suspect that he is probably not the kind of man who would pocket his neighbor’s wallet if he saw it fall to the ground unnoticed, and he is almost certainly not the kind of man who would wait beside the road to carry out an armed robbery of the first passer-by. Yet he will steal from countless strangers – in effect, a little bit from everyone who pays federal taxes – “whether it’s right or wrong,” simply to bulk up his income from farming. (Needless to say, the so-called disaster payments rarely go to anyone who has suffered a genuine disaster; like most of what the government does, this program is for the most part a sham from the get-go.)

***AND***

“The state,” Frédéric Bastiat told us long ago, “is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else.”

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I think, in a nut shell, that this fellow has wrapped up the issue of “government theft” and put a bow on it for us.

Taxes are theft. Thou shalt not steal. Seems pretty obvious to me. You?

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/adams8.html

‘Down, Down to Hell! and Say I Sent Thee!!’
by Charles Adams

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Nero in one of his fits of madness, said that he wanted to abolish all taxes and make a beautiful gift to the human race.” Not a bad idea, unless you want civilized life. For taxes are the fuel that makes civilization run. But if you have bad fuel with impediments, or not properly designed for the engine, then civilization will run badly, and that has happened too many times in history to need explaining

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I am not sure that’s true.

Back in the “golden age”, post-Civil War to pre-WW1, there was negligible taxes and liberty abounded. It wasn’t Nirvana, but it certainly was better than now. I’d like to see it.

If a service is desired, or needed, then the market place will supply it.

Now that’s not a naive wish, but just look at the real world. The market place supplies “stuff”. Greedy people in search of profit anticipate what people will want.

If one thinks of a government service, then see what the “overhead” of that service is. So, let’s take schools. Just compare what the gubamint gives away free and it’s private market alternative. Back during the NJ Florio tax revolt, I showed that total taxation divided by total student (including parochial and private schools) was about 10.5k per student and the most elite Pton school only charges 10.2! There is a cost of using the gubamint as a market intermediary. It’s at least half to two thirds. Parochial grammar schools currently charge about 3k versus the gubamint ~10k in the 90s. Arghh!

Take any government service and you can see the inefficiency in not paying directly.

If you can buy it for a dollar, it will definitely cost two if the gubamint does it and they will have collect four in taxes to have that two.

Obviously, I’m just making up numbers but I know in my gut it’s true.

In 1975, I bought my house and had private garbage. I paid 62.50 a YEAR and they took the cans from the side of the house and put them back. Two years later, the township went into the garbage business. My taxes were raised $285 a year just to pay for the new “service”. Argh! And, the I have to put the cans at the curb and take back up! The funny thing is that it was the SAME company! I just got to pay more for worse service.

So, clearly, if we said no taxes, then I’d STILL have to have my garbage picked up. And, I’d probably have choices like I used to. The incumbent could probably give me a good deal based on signing up lots of my neighbors. And, after a while, there’d be lots of choices.

Only with a gubamint “service”, do I get the “opportunity” to overpay, for a service I may not want, delivered badly, with no one to complain to!

http://www.shadowmonkey.net/articles/general/revolutionaries-a-new-kind-of-candidate.html

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How about, instead of electing yet another harvest of gray-haired hand-shakers who have no interest in office other than the cost of their influence and vote… instead of letting the reins of power stay in the hands of a group of people who have so thoroughly corrupted their offices… and instead of simply handing the power of office back to yet another generation of partisan hacks of either color…

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Candidates that don’t sign the small government pledge, don’t get my vote.

http://www.caglecartoons.com/images/preview/%7B5D03143E-4044-489B-8DA9-6E3747C05B2E%7D.gif

Many a true word is said in jest.

http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2006/tle389-20061015-03.html

Isn’t This Supposed to be Fun?
Darian Worden

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The Rutgers Libertarians had a lot of fun at our anti-drug war brownie giveaway. We got 120 individually-wrapped brownies from a wholesale club. To each of them we attached a pro-liberty message:

• You own yourself.
• You ALONE have the right to decide what to put in your body.
• The War on Drugs is harmful to the liberty and safety of people worldwide.
• The Libertarian Party has opposed drug prohibition since its founding.

Brought to you by Rutgers Libertarians—http://rlibertarians.tripod.com

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I love it. I didn’t know that there were “L”s at RU. They better escape the “Pepuls Republik of Nu Jerzee” at their first opportunity. I’d suggest the Free State Project in NH.

http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2006/tle389-20061015-01.html

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No decent country should have a standing military.

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