Obama: more warlike than Bush?

It would seem so. At least lately, the president who campaigned to great effect on a platform of ending America's perpetual wars and closing illegal prisons at guantanamo and elsewhere, just gave a bunch of bunker-busting bombs to Israel, in honor of a request that the Bush administration turned down.

Presumably, this is to enable them to bomb Iran's underground nuclear facilities.

If Israel and Iran want to annihilate each other, that is a decision that rests on their conscience. Such would be folly, but it's their business. Not ours. And given our track record in the Middle East, who would be surprised if we were arming Iran, too?

The Epitome of Nonsense.

There’s almost nothing accurate in this.

Without the entrepreneur’s capital, what good would those roads be?
Without the jobs he creates, who would buy those goods?
Without robbing the capitalist at every turn, how would these police and fire brigades be paid? How would “the rest of us” pay for those roads to be built? By the jobless masses? The 51% who rely on the other 49% to pay for their alleged “social contract?”

Not to mention, the capitalist does in fact have to worry about marauding bands, every single day of his life. Not just in the form of citizen mobs, from whom he may or may not be protected by the Police. (See: London, LA, Edmonton, Longview…)

But also from the marauders at the Local, State, and Federal level, who owe their purpose and continued existence to nothing more than their superior talent for robbing productivity; who glory in their insatiable hunger to feast upon the fruits of both labor and capital. They then arrogantly praise themselves for handing the excrement of their feasting to those who are neither capitalist nor laborer, but only a lesser form of parasite.

Hooray for Lotteries!

Here in South Carolina, we have the “South Carolina Education Lottery,” so named because a portion of the proceeds goes to fund higher education in the state. At the local JUCO, for example, with the lottery scholarship, tuition for a full-time student is around 700 dollars per semester. I just finished a Master’s degree, where I had the distinct privilege of paying about $2500 per class, so that’s pretty cheap.

The Nature Boy says "Who needs formula?"

It is, of course, fashionable to decry lotteries as taxes on the poor and the stupid; and such they are. But that’s what makes the lottery such a fantastic and positive redistributionist scheme.

The vast majority of players are taken from the dependent classes, many of whom receive a great deal of government support ranging from food stamps to housing assistance and health insurance.

The lottery is their chance to “give back,” to use a term popular among those who conflate success with some sort of nefarious theft. They are not giving back to the disadvantaged masses, to be sure. Rather, they are giving back to the middle class, from whose labor their existence is legally, if immorally wrested.

In essence, they are funding their own future, as the lottery is surely the only way you could fool the poor into chipping in a little bit of assistance to help pay for the college education of the next generation of workers. It is an investment in their own future, as they help defray the educational costs of those who will one day enter the workforce and be saddled with the burdens imposed by the welfare state.

So I say, up with the Lottery!

I don't really endorse the lottery system so heartily. As a publicly run system, it is a disaster. I find it tragic that so many squander what little means of support they have in pursuit of the phantom dream of striking it rich. But the lottery-education connection is instructive, because, as a microcosm of a poorly-conceived government program, it reveals much about the psyche of the architects of such programs; and what most of us really, instinctively think about wealth redistribution.

Advocates of redistribution may obfuscate the issue by vilifying “the rich,” and justify their theft with such spurious arguments as “they don't need it.” But ultimately, when we broaden the scope of the redistributionist policy in question, we find that most people begin to feel a sense of revulsion, because of what the idea truly entails.

It's not just stealing from the rich to give to the poor, or stealing from the poor to give to the rich that's wrong; it's stealing. We know this instinctively, but many tend to be apathetic, at best, until they become the victim of the theft. But it is this theft, and the arbitrary and unwilling transfer of goods between individuals that forms the basis of modern government; it is both the raison d'etre and the modus operandi of the state.

And the state-run lottery system reveals many of the disgusting characteristics of this system that we find so repulsive.

We see the fraudulent ways it justifies and then enacts its collection and expenditure of money; the hypocrisy of banning raffles, online poker, and sports betting, while running the largest gambling operation in the world. And most of all, the lottery underscores the obvious truth that underlies everything else: The State does not care about you. You are a number, an entry in an accounting book. Nothing more. For all the high-minded platitudes that politicians like to spew about doing things for “the children” and raising the poor from poverty, they heartily endorse any and every revenue scheme, however immoral, even those that prey upon the most vulnerable. They would as soon tax the poor as tax the rich, if that was equally politically expedient. And in the case of lotteries, apparently, it is.

Peter Schiff not allowed to create Jobs

Clearly Schiff is unaware that the government has a "jobs bill."

Big Brother is Watching You

Remember how in East Germany children were encouraged to snitch on their parents?

It seems that we are fast approaching that point here.

"Homeland Security’s See Something, Say Something snitch campaign is now so pervasive that Big Sis has extended the message to coffee cups, recruiting jittery coffee drinkers to spot terrorists as part of a deal with the Maryland Transit Administration, which used DHS funds to purchase the ads.


"The message appears on the sleeve of coffee cups and reads, “If you see something, say something…Report unattended bags and unusual behavior to police or transit personnel.”

The image features a Big Brother eye motif above the lettering.


According to a spokesman, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security provided the funds to pay for the ad and the Maryland Transit Administration duly complied. The DHS has partnered with numerous public and private entities, including Wal-Mart and the NFL, to promote its See Something, Say Something campaign, the PSA’s for which feature predominantly white middle class Americans characterized as terrorists engaging in “suspicious behavior” such as talking to police officers or using video cameras."
What we really need is a "mind your own business campaign." If you see someone doing something you don't like, ask yourself this: "Is this person aggressing against someone's person or property? If the answer is no, then mind your own business.

These kinds of things fuel the "snitches get stitches" mentality that sometimes predominates, where people feel that anything is better than citizens doing the work of the gestapo for them.

Don't worry, there's a tax for that.

Governments will tax anything they can get away with: Windows, Urine, Beards...all that matters is them taking your money.

Here's a partial list of some of the most absurd.

The Faces of Evil

These domestic terrorists were arrested because they refused, for religious reasons, to put a dayglo orange triangle on the back of their horse drawn carts. Because if you can't see a buggy with a horse attached, you'll definitely see a small orange triangle on the back of said buggy.

We are all very fortunate to our masters protectors in government for taking these threats to society off the streets. I bet they even have facilities to manufacture the WMD known as raw milk, with plans to unleash it upon us...

Full story here.

(On a related note, I'm afraid the next person I hear say "they hate us for our freedom," is going to force me to violate my non-aggression principles.)

Is Social Security a Ponzi Scheme? Even Worse.

This is by Robert Murphy.

Ever since Rick Perry derided Social Security as a Ponzi scheme, economists and other pundits have jumped into the fray. Progressive blogger Matt Yglesias says it's "nuts" for anyone to talk like this, because Social Security merely relies on future economic growth — just like a private pension plan. Free-market economist Alex Tabarrok responded to Yglesias with links to arch-Keynesians (and Nobel laureates) Paul Samuelson and Paul Krugman, both comparing Social Security to a "Ponzi game."
In the present article I have three aims: First, I will point out that the critics are right; to the extent that Social Security "worked," it was because of its resemblance to a classic Ponzi scheme. Second, I will show how private-sector retirement planning operates nothing like this. Third, I will defend the good name of Charles Ponzi from the scurrilous comparisons — what he did was nothing like the racket known as Social Security.

Social Security's "Ponzi Game Aspects"

Paul Krugman is a famous guy with a long record of strong opinions. It's to be expected that periodically these will come back to bite him. His usual tack is to deny that his old columns meant what their plain-word reading would indicate. For example, Krugman can't believe anybody thought this column (from 2002) should be construed as his endorsement of Greenspan trying to create a housing bubble.
When it comes to Social Security, here's what Krugman wrote in late 1996:

Social Security is structured from the point of view of the recipients as if it were an ordinary retirement plan: what you get out depends on what you put in. So it does not look like a redistributionist scheme. In practice it has turned out to be strongly redistributionist, but only because of its Ponzi game aspect, in which each generation takes more out than it put in. Well, the Ponzi game will soon be over, thanks to changing demographics, so that the typical recipient henceforth will get only about as much as he or she put in (and today's young may well get less than they put in).

As with his unfortunate housing-bubble article, here too Krugman has had to do damage control. After the above column floated around the Internet, Krugman tried to quell the giggling, claiming that anyone who tried to use him in support of Republican claims was playing "word games." Krugman then gave a link to this fascinating history of the original Ponzi scheme, courtesy of — the Social Security Administration! (It seems they must get this a lot.)
I was curious to see how the Social Security Administration would defend itself from the charge that it was a Ponzi scheme. Here's what they say:

In contrast to a Ponzi scheme, dependent upon an unsustainable progression, a common financial arrangement is the so-called "pay-as-you-go" system. Some private pension systems, as well as Social Security, have used this design. A pay-as-you-go system can be visualized as a pipeline, with money from current contributors coming in the front end and money to current beneficiaries paid out the back end.…

There is a superficial analogy between pyramid or Ponzi schemes and pay-as-you-go programs in that in both money from later participants goes to pay the benefits of earlier participants. But that is where the similarity ends.…
As long as the amount of money coming in the front end of the pipe maintains a rough balance with the money paid out, the system can continue forever. There is no unsustainable progression driving the mechanism of a pay-as-you-go pension system and so it is not a pyramid or Ponzi scheme.

Contrary to the claims of Yglesias, Krugman, and the Social Security Administration, I don't think the "Ponzi scheme" charge is unfair in the slightest. When critics say Social Security is "unsustainable," they quite obviously mean that it can't keep up the current taxing and benefit schedules. Either taxes on workers will go up, promised benefits will be reduced, or some combination of the two. Krugman's 1996 column confirms that analysis, and the Social Security Administration's pipeline does too.
Up until now, retirees have been taking out more than they put in, and that can't continue — this pattern relied on finding ever more workers to join the system. In other words, it was a classic Ponzi scheme. I am not here to endorse candidate Rick Perry, but the point of his charge is obviously true: each generation can't keep taking more out of the system than it put in, once the demographics change.
The SSA's pipeline graphic is interesting. If that is ultimately what Social Security turns into, and if each generation of workers merely takes out "what it originally put in," then it means workers will earn a zero-percent (real) return on their "contributions" into the system.
Yes, that would certainly be "sustainable" in an accounting sense (at least with a stable age distribution in the population), but would it work politically? If politicians frankly told voters, "When we take $1,000 from you at age 25, don't worry, that $1,000 will be waiting for you when you're 65," would they be happy with this arrangement? Charles Ponzi too could have made his scheme more sustainable if he promised his investors a 0 percent rate of return, but then nobody would have been interested.
In fairness, Matt Yglesias points out that the pipeline method can yield a positive rate of return. If the workers at the left end of the pipe always pump in, say, 15 percent of their paycheck, then (if productivity grows over time as it normally does) 50 years later, when they are on the other end of the pipe, there will be more dollars shooting out. However, in this scenario we're back to an arrangement where each generation gets out more than it put in — what Krugman himself thought was a "Ponzi game aspect." In any event, Yglesias's framework is still vulnerable to demographic shifts.

Why Private-Sector Retirement Planning Works

The confusion in popular discussions of Social Security partly rests on the general ignorance of how an entire community can actually become richer through saving and investment. In other words, a lot of people believe (whether or not they've really thought it through carefully) that for every Sally out there who's saving $10,000 per year, there must be some Jim who's racking up $10,000 in debt. Therefore, whenever Sally starts living off her savings, people imagine that Jim must be cutting back on his own standard of living. At the communal level — so the thinking goes — everything is a wash, and we're just changing the distribution of "total output" based on which people were frugal and which were spendthrifts.
This mindset is totally wrong. I explain things methodically in chapter 10 of my introductory textbook, but here's the gist: It's possible for everyone in the entire community to "live below his means," that is, to consume less than his income and to save. The economy is then physically capable of reducing the output of consumption goods (TVs, sports cars, steak dinners, etc.) and increasing the output of investment or capital goods (drill presses, fertilizer, MRI machines, etc.). In the future, the larger quantities of various tools and equipment make the workers more productive than they otherwise would have been. That's why the standard of living can rise; the community is physically capable of cranking out more goods and services because of the past investments.
Think of it like this: During his working career, a farmer takes some of his crop every year and uses it to buy a component for a tractor. One year he buys a tire, another year he buys a steering wheel, and so on. After working for 45 years, the farmer is ready to retire. By this point, he has assembled a brand-new tractor. Now he no longer needs to use his labor to earn an income. Instead, he rents out use of the tractor to the younger workers (who otherwise would have to use their bare hands to till the soil, etc.).
From a certain viewpoint, the retired farmer would be "skimming off the top" every time he ate an ear of corn harvested after he no longer worked the fields himself. After all, that corn would be part of that year's harvest, so if the retired farmer ate it, there would be less corn available to the people who actually picked it. Yet the retired man's consumption wouldn't be financed through a "contribution" or "redistribution" from the young workers that year.
On the contrary, those young workers would be earning their full market wage (and if they were smart, they'd be saving some of it for their own retirement). The retired farmer would buy the corn on the open market, with the income he earned from renting out his tractor. There would be more corn to go around because he had spent decades assembling the tractor, and others in his cohort had built up stockpiles of fertilizer, hoes, irrigation equipment, etc.
Obviously my tale isn't realistic, but it serves to get across the essence of voluntary retirement planning. People can get out more than they put in (measured in physical terms) because of what Böhm-Bawerk called the superior physical productivity of roundabout processes. As I complained during the debates over George W. Bush's "privatization" proposals, many supposedly pro-market reformers want to get the magic of compound interest without the discipline of saving for decades.

A (Very Qualified) Defense of Charles Ponzi

Above I've explained why the "Ponzi scheme" accusation is accurate, in the context of modern political debates. However, there is a very important sense in which it is unfair — unfair to Charles Ponzi.
It's true that Ponzi engaged in fraud; his victims never would have "invested" with him, had he accurately explained the business model. Libertarians therefore agree with everybody else that Charles Ponzi was a criminal and would have to face legal consequences in any just legal order.
However, so far as we know Ponzi never threatened anybody. He didn't tell struggling young workers, "Give me 15 percent of your paycheck every week, so that I can make you a fantastic return — or else I'll send goons to kidnap you."
In this respect, Social Security isn't a Ponzi scheme after all. It's more analogous to mobsters shaking down people for protection money, because otherwise "bad things could happen."

 Conclusion

The complaints about Social Security are accurate: The only reason it has enjoyed such "success" thus far is that it relied on increasing contributions from each new generation of workers. Now that the demographics have turned against the system, it is literally unsustainable. We will see increased taxes on workers, reduced payments to beneficiaries, or some combination of the two.

$25 $22

In the voluntary private sector, people can plan for their own retirement through genuine saving and investment. They don't need to extract concessions from the next generation of workers, because the retirees' prior savings allow the creation of capital goods that will provide income when their bodies no longer can do so.

Finally, in one important respect a classic Ponzi scheme is less dangerous than Social Security: It relies on fooling people into voluntarily handing over their money. Once the fraud is detected, the danger is eliminated. In contrast, American workers have no choice but to "contribute" to Social Security, whether they like the deal or not.

They hate us for our freedom?

Christianity and Liberty

This is a pretty thoughtful explanation of the compatibility of libertarianism and Christianity. I have little use for the "Official Libertarian Party," because my impression is that they are primarily libertines, with no philosophical or moral basis; just a desire to be left alone. I could be wrong about this, and the following video gives me hope that I am.

More on Rick Perry, From the Texas RLC.

Perry's a jerk, and it's his attitude, the chip on his shoulder, that endears him to a few. But he loves big government, and he hasn't the courage to actually stand up to the Federal Government. He does like to hear himself talk.

Here is a piece by the Texas Chapter of the Republican Liberty Caucus, i.e. the good Republicans.

Why not Rick Perry?

As soon as he entered the race, rick Perry rocketed to the front of the polls. This proves a couple of things. First, most "likely Republican voters" do not waste much time thinking. They just listen to what the talk radio or other media guys tell them, and then immediately make decisions accordingly. Second, Perry's anti-government rhetoric is pretty popular right now, and few are prepared to look into whether someone's record has anything to do with such verbal posturing. Exhibit A: Mitt Romney. B: Rick Perry.

By now it's widely known that Perry was a Democrat, thought Al Gore was America's great hope, and became a Republican when he saw this as an easier path to electoral success. This is nothing new; it happens almost as often as politicians change their state of residency so they can run for office. In Perry's case, it's significant, though. He promised that he would "still vote the same principles, only with an R after my name.” And Perry's record as governor of Texas proves the sincerity of his statement.



Perry rose to national prominence a couple of years ago, threatening nullification or secession if the Federal Government continued to overexert its authority.
In governing Texas. He was perceived as a champion of liberty and limited government; even as a "right-wing extremist." But is any of this actually the case, or is it just the type of conservative posturing that Texans who advocate big government tend to engage in when they seek the presidency?

Consider Perry's actual record, not the one that exists in the twisted and largely ignorant minds of Glenn Beck and Mark Levin.

As governor of Texas for eleven years, Perry doubled state spending and ran a deficit that was the third largest in the nation. He was saved by Federal Government stimulus.

He raised taxes twice. He tried to use an executive order to force schoolgirls to be vaccinated against HPV, an STD; no doubt more as a kickback to the makers of Gardasil than anything else.

And, despite all the nullification/secessionist bluster, when Perry had an actual opportunity to fight back against the Federal Government, he failed. Perry helped kill a bill that would have limited the intrusiveness of the TSA in Texas airports. What a cowardly move. Or perhaps it's just politicking...

Perry likes to crow about his jobs record; Texas has created more jobs since 2002 than any other state, by a large margin. But it is debatable how much of this has to do with the governor's office. Much of it simply has to do with population growth. The majority of Perry's efforts in this area involved essentially bribing companies to move to Texas, using funds provided primarily by tax increases. Furthermore:

o More people (17.6% vs 16.9%) work for the government in Texas than at the Federal level.

o Texas added 25% more government jobs in the month of May than the prior 12 months combined.

o When you eliminate “migrant farm workers” and kids working Summer jobs (ie: short term employment) jobs from Perry’s “miracle”, his percentage plummets to under 20%.

o When you break that percentage down, close to 40% of the jobs added in the past two years have been minimum wage with no benefits.

o Texas leads the nation in the number of uninsured workers.

As president, Perry won't be able to depend on population growth, poaching jobs from other countries by means of corporate welfare, or Obama's "create government jobs" strategy; at least not with any credibility. Texas can keep him.

Ron Paul Rally in Columbia

On Labor day, my wife and I took the kids up to Columbia, SC for a Ron Paul rally, the first campaign event we've attended. which followed Jim Demint's invitation-only forum. The room was packed with a tremendous, excitable crowd, many of whom spent their time before and after the rally waving signs on the street.


I took away two significant impressions from the event. First, the diversity of the crowd was incredible. And I don't mean diversity of ethnicity or race; I mean diversity of everything: occupation, background, outlook, political and religious affiliation. I'm not one to worship at the altar of diversity. per se. Too often it is nothing more than a smoke screen used to obfuscate the relative weakness or insignificance of ideas; a form of argumentum ad populum dependent on classes, rather than numbers. But in this case it was different. We had jokingly expected that, in light of the event's location (next to the campus of the University of South Carolina), there would be a big crowd of college students simply interested in drug legalization. But the reality which greeted us was altogether unexpected: other families with young children, elderly veterans, bikers, Southern gentlemen, hippies, and hipsters. college students. And at least two Murray Rothbard t-shirts, which warmed my anarcho-capitalist heart. The diversity which greeted us was significant because they were brought together, not by charisma or the promise of an endless variety of free lunches, but by a set of transcendent, shared ideals: Liberty. Peace. Personal Responsibility. These shared value unified a group that represented nearly every demographic category one could think to define.

Of greater significance was the message, and the crowd's response to that message. No one swooned, spouting drivel about “not having to worry about paying our mortgage or put gas in our cars.” Indeed, the man of the hour spoke of the inflationary danger that virtually guarantees that we will have to worry about such matters in the near future. That Paul's message is dramatically different is no great revelation; it is the way his message is received that is a surprise. Most politicians tell the crowd what they think they want to hear. “I share your values,” “Our country is the best, no matter what,” or “a chicken in every pot, a fancy car in every driveway.” Ron Paul tells crowds the truth; that which they need to hear. He explains Austrian business cycle theory, which is the only plausible explanation for the recent economic malaise from which we've not recovered. He warns of the threat of hyperinflation and the negative ramifications of artificially lowered interest rates. On this particular evening, Dr. Paul made a statement that was decidedly different; and the crowd reacted with raucous applause. He pointed out that there is no such thing as liberty without personal responsibility. And we roared with applause. He is running, not to govern us, but to restrain the state to the extent that it will allow self-governance. That's what makes Ron Paul different. On this night, this crowd understood that, and gloried in it. Let's hope that a majority of Americans follow suit.

Seasteading and MURDER

S. Molyneaux on the death-ocracy