All warfare is based on deception.
Sun Tzu
Blog Quotes of the Day
- Of course businesses and individuals don’t always get it right either. But the damage that government can do is far greater. If I make a mistake, it affects my life, perhaps the lives of my family, and maybe those of a few others. If a business makes a mistake, it can affect thousands more. But if government makes a mistake, it can affect everyone .- Michael Tanner
- Among the many outrages that congressional Democrats have assigned to the sequester is that it could reduce the available slots in the Head Start program by as many as 70,000 children. Yet a 2010 study and a 2012 follow-up analysis by the Department of Health and Human Services found that with a few exceptions, there were no lasting benefits to children participating in Head Start. In fact, “At the end of 3rd grade, there was suggestive evidence of an unfavorable impact — the parents of the Head Start group children reported a significantly lower child grade promotion rate than the parents of the non-Head Start group children.” Head Start may not work, but since 1965, the federal government has spent nearly $200 billion of the taxpayers’ money on it. That’s more than we spent to put a man on the moon (adjusted for inflation).
Obama and Clinton: Failure in Leadership and Accountability
I've not spent a lot of column inches discussing the IRS scandal and the other two scandals. For an administration that has abused administrative discretion, e.g., in immigration policy, which contradicts the very nature of the rule of law, the fact that the administration looked the other way as conservative or pro-liberty groups were, in blatant violation of equal protection, exposed to a discriminatory higher level of scrutiny, didn't really surprise me. Neither did this recent disclosure: "The former head of the Internal Revenue Service said he first learned in the spring of 2012 — in the heat of the presidential campaign — that agents had improperly targeted political groups that vehemently opposed President Barack Obama's policies. But, former Commissioner Douglas Shulman said Tuesday, he didn't tell higher ups in the Treasury Department and he didn't tell members of Congress. And he wouldn't apologize for it." In my opinion, Shulman had an ethical, if not legal obligation to disclose the wrongdoing. Sitting on a scandal with a national election on the line is a contradiction of the very concept of public service, never mind Obama's empty promises of "transparency".
But what I really despise is the way the underlings of Obama and Hillary Clinton have taken the hits in sheltering their higher-ups from allegedly knowing politically inconvenient information. Oh, to be sure, Obama and Clinton have paid lip service to accepting "responsibility", which is why they or their minions have gone out of the way to provide excuses otherwise.
And the Dork of the Week is:
Now, President Zipper, THIS is a Fairy Tale
Professor Reisman, one of my favorite economists, has penned yet another brilliant essay in the aftermath of the horrific Bangladesh factory collapse and yet more bleeding-heart social liberal hand wringing over exploitative sweatshops (for his responsee to the economically deficient fairy tale, see the full essay):
Such demands rest on the belief that, if left free of government interference, the profit motive of businessmen or capitalists leads them to pay subsistence wages to workers compelled to work intolerable hours in sub-human conditions. And, more, that the profits wrung from the workers in this way exist in the hands of the capitalists as a kind of disposable slush fund as it were, at least some more or less substantial portion of which can be given back to the workers from whom they were taken, or used on behalf of those workers, with no negative effect except to deprive the capitalists of some of their ill-gotten gains. It is generally taken for granted that the reason the kind of conditions that prevail in Bangladesh and the rest of the Third World do not exist in the United States and Western Europe is the enactment of labor and social legislation, and that what is needed is to extend such legislation to the countries that do not yet have it.Rand Paul on the Contemptible Grandstanding Over Apple Corp. US Taxes
Apple Corp. did not create the convoluted house of cards of our business tax system which boasts the highest business income tax bracket among major developed economies, even Japan (I mean, it's counterproductive to have an income tax to begin with.) When business resorts to workarounds (see this summary, but this grudging agreement with Paul), the proper response is to simplify/lower//flatten taxes and streamline regulations....
More Learn Liberty Vignettes
Some of these stories will inspire you, like Igor's Russian immigrant family's bootstrapped success story; others are heartbreaking, like when Tucker's intellectually disabled work colleague, given a job by a fellow churchgoer businessman operating on thin margins, was no longer affordable after a minimum-wage increase, or when Adelle's Mom's dream pizza restaurant is the victim of lawsuit abuse following a long-overdue termination of an unprofessional manager.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Chuck Asay and Townhall |
Bruce Springsteen & the E-Street Band, "War". a rare Springsteen remake.
