Voluntary Exchange vs. Government Mandates – Mises Daily | Mises Institute

Voluntary Exchange vs. Government Mandates – Mises Daily | Mises Institute.

A short visual explanation of Japan’s debt problem

Via ZeroHedge: Japan’s Debt Crisis Visualized

 

Insanity

Democrats in 2008: How dare those evil banks make loans to people who people with bad credit!

Democrats in 2013: Why aren’t banks making more loans to people with bad credit?

 

Federalism in action

Lawrence Person comparing Texas vs. California Update for February 21, 2013

Manny Pacquiao realizes paying 2/5ths of his fight money in taxes not his idea of a good deal

TaxProf Blog: Manny Pacquiao KO’d by 39.6% Tax Rate, Refuses to Fight in U.S.

The Legacy of The Bernanke

From the Orange County Register: Joel Kotkin: The Age of Bernanke

This new corporatism that is becoming an integral part of the supposedly middle-class oriented Democratic Party. Close Obama advisers, like disgraced investment banker and political fixer Steven Rattner, Obama’s czar for the auto bailout, justify collusional capitalism, both in China and in America’s “too big to fail” regime.

The reality remains that, rhetoric aside, corporate cronyism remains at the core of this administration and, sadly, the once-proudly populist Democratic Party. After his confirmation, we can expect former Citigroup profiteer Jacob Lew to follow Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, working along with Bernanke, to make sure the big Wall Street firms continue to thrive – even if the rest of us don’t.

Oh look, another big-government Republican

Gov. Kasich announced today that as long as everyone else is sucking on a fat new government entitlement, Ohio might as well too.  Well his exact words were:

“We are going to extend Medicaid for the working poor and for those who are jobless trying to find work,”

“It makes great sense for the state of Ohio because it will allow us to provide greater care with our own dollars.”

Actually, other people’s dollars. You know, Federal tax dollars.

We give the Federal government money in taxes, so it can give it to the state (so long as the state does as it is told), so it in turn can spend it on us (so long as we do as we are told).  Could this be any more inefficient?  How much of this money got pissed away by the bureaucratic process?

I can’t even pretend I’m surprised.  We all knew he was an establishment Republican when we elected him.  Lucky for him that Strickland was incompetent; even the big liberal newspapers abandoned Strickland, he was such an awful fiscal steward.

I suppose I am being rather unfair.  Kasich is a result, not the cause.  I just have to look back at my state’s collective vote to keep getting shafted by public sector unions.  That’s the problem: Ohio is loaded with people who think only of what they can take, and I’m not just talking about Democrats.

I swear Texas gets more temping with each passing day.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel cutting off Chicago’s nose to spite its face

George F. Will: The price of moral grandstanding

Politics becomes amusing when liberalism becomes theatrical with high-minded gestures. Chicago’s government, which is not normally known for elevated thinking, is feeling so morally upright and financially flush that it proposes to rise above the banal business of maximizing the value of its employees’ and retirees’ pension fund assets. Although seven funds have cumulative unfunded liabilities of $25 billion, Chicago will sacrifice the growth of those assets to the striking of a political pose so pure it is untainted by practicality.

Emulating New York and California, two deep-blue states with mammoth unfunded pension liabilities, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) has hectored a $5 billion pension fund into divesting its holdings in companies that manufacture firearms.

I know I would be thrilled if my employer was playing politics with my retirement fund. Wouldn’t you be?  Isn’t it worth a little, or more likely a lot, of poverty in your old age so that a politician can act self-righteous?

Now this Kickstarter project is cool

Via Helen’s Page: Milton Friedman for kids? Absolutely! An economic adventure book series for kids (ages 6-12)

The Kickstarter project page: Under the Staircase – An Economic Adventure Series for Kids

There will be both ebook and dead tree versions.  I’m already backing it.

How Thomas Paine is being completely taken out of context

This image and quote from Thomas Paine is being circulated around the net by leftists who are still trying to do damage control from Obama’s “You didn’t build that” attack on business owners.

That quote was taken from a pamphlet Paine wrote during the time of his support of the French Revolution titled, “Thomas Payne à La Législature et au Directoire. Ou la Justice Agraire opposée à la Loi Agraire, et aux privilèges agraires. Prix 15 sols. À Paris, chez la citoyenne Ragouleau, près le Théâtre de la République, No. 229. Et chez les Marchands de Nouveautés.” Gutenberg.org has it here.

Here is the context that was omitted by the left when they started this meme.  From the introduction of the pamphlet, emphasis mine:

Liberty and Property are words expressing all those of our possessions which are not of an intellectual nature. There are two kinds of property. Firstly, natural property, or that which comes to us from the Creator of the universe,—such as the earth, air, water. Secondly, artificial or acquired property,—the invention of men. In the latter equality is impossible; for to distribute it equally it would be necessary that all should have contributed in the same proportion, which can never be the case; and this being the case, every individual would hold on to his own property, as his right share. Equality of natural property is the subject of this little essay. Every individual in the world is born therein with legitimate claims on a certain kind of property, or its equivalent.

This is a direct refutation of everything Obama and the left stand for.