Political Class Dismissed

President Barack Obama and his Congressional allies are spending money that they know we don’t have on a program that they know isn’t going to work – all in an effort to expand government’s control over the private sector and its reach into the private lives of American citizens.

Sound a bit conspiratorial?

It’s not – at least not when you turn down the partisan rhetoric (on both sides of the debate) and start examining what this monstrosity actually does.

“ObamaCare is really about who commands the country’s medical resources,” an editorial in The Wall Street Journal noted the day before the legislation was passed. “It vastly accelerates the march toward a totally state-driven system, in contrast to reforms that would fix today’s distorted status quo by putting consumers in control.”

With government already purchasing nearly half of all health care services in America (a system that’s rampant with fraud and anti-competitive price-fixing), just who did you think was responsible for the “distorted status quo” that Obamacare ostensibly seeks to correct?

Here’s a hint – it’s not those “evil” insurance companies, which will be receiving nearly a half-trillion dollars in “Obamacare” subsidies.

Read the rest.

Contact your representative today and demand that he/she not vote for the Cap and Trade bill tomorrow.

The decision by Congress to go with a “cap and trade” system over a more straightforward carbon tax, attempts to delude the American people into thinking that this is a “market-based approach.” When really it is an aristocratic-based approach.

Cap and trade would allow the industries that produce pollution to have a government-granted cartel over their respective industries. Just like other infamous cartels, including OPEC on oil and the AMA on doctors, this is bad news for the American people since it all drastically increases the cost of energy. This means that new companies that want to enter the market will have to buy credits that have already been auctioned off.

Each of these cartels creates high barriers to entry for new competitors. For example, “if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted,” as Obama stated on the campaign trail.

Even though it will be hard for a new company to set up shop in the energy industry, after this, the profits from this exclusive cartel will be given to Congress and not to the companies to reinvest into possible innovative efficiencies. This will only add more money to the congressional budget that will undoubtedly be handed out to special interests, undoubtedly in the form of ever-burgeoning “entitlements.”

For the average American, that means higher prices on energy, higher unemployment due to increased costs upon these companies, and even reduced economic output for the whole country causing a decrease in the average American’s income.  [source]

   

Obama even admits, at the 40 second mark, that electricity rates will skyrocket, yet he still advocates this bill which will concentrate more wealth in the hands of a select few while hurting the business climate overall.

*portable tax collecting
*utopian fallacy that government can improve life by putting words on paper in state capitals
*Ludditism–fear of new technologies by old foggies
*junk science–it’s extremely difficult to prove or disprove causation in matters like this–and for the numbskulls in Albany with their pea brains, it’s impossible.
*Revenge of the lesiure class–mostly old farts and retired people who can’t undertsand why the rest of us are out there racing around town like whirling dervishes–we’re trying to making a GD living so we can pay for your pensions!

1. I am not convinced that there is man-made global warming. I’m not saying it isn’t true. I’m saying it has not been proven to my satisfaction. In part, my skepticism is based on the corruption of science brought about by its politicization. Also, the obvious political agenda behind global warming is an additional ground for skepticism.

2. Even if it is true, I believe its extent and its ill effects have been exaggerated and its possible benefits ignored.

3. Even if it is true, it is a mistake to put the government in charge of saving the planet because, with the exception of killing people and seizing and destroying property, government isn’t good at anything. Why rely on this incompetent, corrupt institution to save the planet. It can’t even plow your street properly.

4. Even if it is true, I favor the government doing nothing about it since everyone on the planet is fully capable of responding to the crisis by changing their behavior in ways that quickly and dramatically reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. The market mechanism will be available to provide them with all the goods and services they need in this venture.

5. Even if it is true, I oppose giving government remedial power since this is a recipe for a totalitarian state. That is, since everything we do, including breathing, worsens global warming, then, logically, this would give the government absolute, ruthless, save the planet-type power, over everything we do, every single moment of the day, forever!

That’s why I’m a global warming denier, and damn proud about it.

My fellow Americans.

Government is about to get a lot bigger.

Get ready, suckas!

Largely autonomous, self-serving government agencies accountable to neither the electorate nor the marketplace.

In theory, they are under the influence of the elected officials who appoint their board members. In practice, as I explained here:

Once authorities are up and running and employing a significant number of patronage workers and doing business with politically-connected contractors, the relationship between politicians and authorities is turned upside down. Instead of politicians picking authority bureaucrats, the bureaucrats take an active role in picking the politicians who will ensure their continued employment.

Authorities become largely autonomous, secretive, powerful and self-perpetuating political patronage empires that not only impose huge costs on the public but also skew the results of elections away from those who favor the public good to those who favor the authorities’ good.

We know you’re too busy struggling to survive in a crappy, tax slave economy, to keep up with all the latest scams of the political class. That’s why we created the PCD Nutshell Series.

Each post is a short, crisp explanation of a political issue or bio of a politician.

Read it on the run.

Here’s our current topics:

Unions
Racial, religious and ethnic conflict
Libertarianism
Progressivism
The Blogajevich Scandal
The Bailouts
American Revolution in a Nutshell
Iraq War
The Inner-City Crime Wave

All here.

They use legal coercion to force their wages higher at the expense of non-union labor, business firms, and customers of those firms.

With the death of Marxism (outside the American College), the main source of conflict in today’s world is between and among races, religions and ethnic groups.

There are three main models to restrain such conflicts.

Dictatorship, e.g., Saddam keeping the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites together by brute force and terror.

Democracy. Democracy fails to suppress conflict. In fact, as I argue at length elsewhere, democracy exacerbates conflicts among different groups. Majority groups love democracy; minorities hate it and eventually fight against it.

Libertarianism. The best way for people of different races, religions and ethnic groups to get along is in a libertarian society where the individual rights of all are protected. Those include the right of exclusion from private property and the right of free association, just property rights by another name. When you are not forced to associate with others who are different from you, you don’t consider them a threat to your own lifestyle or culture and you can live amongst them in peace, trading or associating with them or not as you see fit.

The lack of comprehension as to the pacific effects of libertarianism and the bellicose effects of democracy is staggering and will lead to huge social problems.

It should be no surprise that libertarianism leads to peace as libertarianism is peace.

*Machine career politician.

*Tool of the unions.

*Plays ball with the local business elite.

*A moderate Democrat, the opposite of a libertarian.

It’s all about a highly organized minority using political power to exploit the majority.

Human relations are either coercive (based on force or fraud) or voluntary.

Libertarians believe all relations must be voluntary.

In voluntary relations, both parties expect to benefit.

In coercive relations, one party expects to benefit at the other’s expense.

Libertarians believe in a society of voluntary, mutually beneficial relations.

Statists (like Obama) believe in a society where coercive, exploitative relations are necessary, desirable and good.

Progressivism is the notion that “smart” guys with government guns can make society better by forcing individuals to do what they don’t want to do.

The liberal corporate state is corrupt by its very nature and in its entirety since it is a systematic predation of wealth by an organized gang.

Yet, those who support, even love, this organized criminal conspiracy, are trying to convince us that what Blogajevich did is somehow different from what the corporate state does every day.

It’s okay for the Chicago Tribune to mulct $200 million from the taxpayer but when Blago asks for a tip, that’s wrong. Stealing is okay. Stealing from thieves is wrong.

The conceptual underpinnings of the corporate state are now disintegrating along with its fiscal foundations.

It’s fun to watch the flacks of the corporate state, the MSN, struggle to juggle the paradoxes.

All these bailouts are armed robbery, nothing more, nothing less.

Whether you believe we need a government or not, or whether you believe we need a minimal government, all rational persons must agree that when the government uses force and the threat of violent physical force to extract funds from people to give them to large, wealthy corporations, that is armed robbery.

As for bailouts based on the creation of money out of thin air, the same analysis applies. It’s armed robbery. The government has created a legal monopoly on printing money and forces the rest of us to take their otherwise useless paper at gun point. When that power is used to take wealth from us, through inflation, to give it to wealthy corporations, it’s armed robbery.

It’s time for many people to start saying what is patently obvious, that the federal government has become destructive of our liberties and the people have the right to alter or abolish it.

My concept is this: restore and liquidate. Restore the Articles of Confederation (never lawfully revoked anyway—so the law is on our side) and liquidate the federal government.

Anyone have a better idea? This is the current default plan: sit back and watch the country melt away and disintegrate into chaos and civil war. You can drink beer and watch football as a distraction but keep one eye on the street in front of your house for the barbarians at the gate.

*England needed money for war.
*They taxed the Colonists.
*The Colonists didn’t want to pay.
*England sent troops and tax collectors armed with general warrants to find taxable stuff.
*The Colonists got angry and threatened resistance.
*The English decided to seize the Colonists’ guns.
*War broke out.

Lessons:

*War means high taxes.
*Taxes mean invasion of privacy.
*To steal your money and violate your privacy, the government must disarm you first.
*You have the natural right to resist tyranny.
*Gun control was the proximate cause of the American Revolution.
*America was born in an act of resistance to gun control!

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PS: You can see here that conservatives who disparage the Fourth Amendment are disparaging the very founding history of their nation. The Fourth Amendment was designed to prohibit general warrants.

Those who favored this war are now plotting to blame those who didn’t for its failure.

They did the same for Vietnam.

Query: Were we warned in advance that this war would fail unless all those who opposed it supported it? Or were those who opposed it like me ignored and steamrolled over on the path to folly?

There’s an old saying in trial work. If you tell the truth, you don’t have to have a good memory

*Too many teenage boys grow up without fathers in the home to supervise them. They join gangs instead.

*Poor education both because of a poor home environment—too much TV and junk food, too few books—and poor schools that exist primarily to provide high-paying jobs to teachers and administrators.

*Poor economy due to high taxes and burdensome regulations such as occupational licensure, and few opportunities for employment of unskilled workers due to labor laws and taxes.

*Receipt of economic goods is disconnected from productive work. The general message that the world owes you a living translates into the specific message: “Hey you, give me your wallet or I’ll bash your teeth in.”

*The government makes the sale of certain drugs highly profitable by making them illegal, providing unskilled youths with little stake in society a chance to make a few bucks.

There are several other factors, but these are the biggest. It’s a stew of failed big government programs and policies.

Tip to the ladies: if you are going to have a child, marry the father, not the government. That’s the single biggest problem.