I like a man who grins when he fights.
Winston Churchill
Speaking Truth to Power
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Let the Market Decide the Number of Cabs
(But Lifting the Existing Cap is a Baby Step Forward)
Facebook Corner
(Tom Woods). While I was in the hospital with my wife, a neocon attacked me repeatedly on my blog. I honestly thought he was a progressive. Turns out he's a neoconservative. When it comes to centralization and nationalism, it's impossible to tell them apart. Neocons = progressives without the sandals.
You aren't the only one. Cato Institute recently published a couple of mildly toned pieces on the Crimea kerfuffle, and the neo-cons went apeshit. I felt alone battling a sea of interventionists. The late Robert Taft, one of the leading authentic voices for conservatives, warned us against meddling in European politics and the provocative nature of NATO. How ironic NATO would be a factor over Crimean secession.
Paleoconservatism (sometimes shortened to paleocon) is a term for a conservative political philosophy found primarily in the United States stressing tradition, limited government, civil society, anti-colonialism and anti-federalism, along with religious, regional, national and Western identity.[1] Chilton Williamson, Jr. describes paleoconservatism as "the expression of rootedness: a sense of place and of history, a sense of self derived from forebears, kin, and culture — an identity that is both collective and personal".[2] Paleoconservatism is not expressed as an ideology and its adherents do not necessarily subscribe to any one party line[3] although critics have disputed this.[4]
Paleoconservatives in the 21st century often highlight their points of disagreement with neoconservatives, especially regarding issues such as military interventionism, illegal immigration and large amounts of legal immigration, multiculturalism, affirmative action, and foreign aid, to which they are opposed.[1] They also criticize social welfare and social democracy, which some refer to as the "therapeutic managerial state",[5] the "welfare-warfare state"[6] or "polite totalitarianism".[7] They see themselves as the legitimate heirs to the American conservative tradition.[8]
Paleocons are protectionists and anti-immigrant. Although Rothbard endorsed Buchanan in 1992, I suspect he saw him as less objectionable than Bush or Clinton. Unlike Buchanan, Rothbard was no tariff-monger. I will admit that people Woods admires, like Rothbard, Mises and Ron Paul, had more nuanced positions on immigration, especially later in their careers, than your typical free market advocate, such as myself. Rothbard and Rockwell considered themselves more as paleo-libertarians and eventually convinced themselves Buchanan was a little too Statist for their tastes.
(Illinois Policy Institute). Today the Illinois Supreme Court struck down the state’s “eavesdropping” law, which had been widely criticized as the most unfair, overbroad law of its kind in the country.
Under Illinois state law, recording someone else’s words without his or her consent was a felony. The law was supposedly intended to protect people’s private conversations, which may seem reasonable enough. In practice, however, the law was often used to stop people from recording and publishing their interactions with government officials.
It's almost a relief to see any court fulfill its primary directive of defending individual rights instead of defining them as ever thinner exceptions to Statist domination. The idea that state officials can use "individual rights" to defeat accountability and transparency is an unconscionable abuse of power and violation of the rule of law and equal protection, the establishment of an untouchable American aristocracy of "civil servants".
(Illinois Policy Institute). Like so many promises made to the American public while promoting ObamaCare, the promise that the new health-care overhaul would save the average family $2,500 per year turned out to be false.
Let's recall this economically illiterate nonsense began under the clueless FDR Administration which was pursuing other economically illiterate policies, i.e., wage/price controls. What everyone with even a modicum of economics understands is what is relevant is total compensation but FDR put up the facade of a workaround to wage controls. The real effect to interventionist policies in the healthcare sector has been to exacerbate sector cost pressures by lessening consumer skin in the game, shifting costs to a shrinking private sector, and discriminately subsidizing (through tax policy) business-sponsored insurance. They want you to believe that through the provably grand illusion of central planning and economies of scale (and "no profits") they can "improve" on the free market and its natural discipline of competition and creative destruction.
But it was just swell when it was Mitt Romney's plan..
Now this is just idiotic. First of all, no conservative Republican ever supported RomneyCare. Second, the whole reason for RomneyCare came into existence had to do with threatened cutoff of federal Medicaid money (the Bush Administration thought non-Medicaid patients were being subsidized). What Romney did was take state contributions to hospitals to reimburse unpaid care and convert them into subsidies for individual policies with a mandate. Romney was between a rock and a hard place--the alternatives were the Feds blowing up Massachusetts state budget or the "progressives"' economically insane single-payer system. It was brilliant from the standpoint of political tactics but unforgiveable from a principled, economics standpoint. But, no, the plans are apples and oranges, including the aggressive expansion of Medicaid, the raiding of Medicare funds, new benefit mandates and taxes, etc. Not to mention Massachusetts was already the poster child for overpriced insurance, having enacted budget buster policies of guaranteed issue and community rating and less than 10% of the population was uninsured before the "reform"--well below the national percentage. And, as everyone know, newly insured patients tend to exacerbate sector price pressures as they tend to consume more health goods and services. Next time do some research before plagiarizing some fascist talking points.
And still the Republican Party of NO has yet to still come up with a viable alternative, oh wait now that it has been chopped apart from its original terms they don't have to. You can NO everything and win
Another clueless "progressive" troll. You idiotically assume the supremacy of a central plan. We no more need the incompetent meddling of federal bureaucrats and politicians. The plan is for the government to get the hell out of the way of the free market and engage in genuine interstate commerce reform, breaking open state regulatory cartels, allow groups to self-insure across state lines, allow nurse practitioners to handle routine health matters, allow insurers to write on risk, not irrational policies of becoming a middleman for ordinary expenses, etc. Only someone of very limited knowledge cannot see the superiority of the free market to decades of government failed policy in this sector.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Jerry Holbert and Townhall |
Cat Stevens, "Randy". To begin with, Randy is a common given name for both genders; for girls, it's a variation of 'Miranda', "worthy of admiration". Some people will interpret the forbidden love theme in a different way than Cat Stevens, now a devout Muslim, married with children, intended. I think of it as being in love with someone your family and/or friends disapprove or don't understand, maybe much younger, or a different race or ethnicity.... My beautiful third sister loves this song, and I think of her every time I hear it... (My favorite Stevens' song is "Remember the Days of the Old Schoolyard", coming up later in the countdown.)
