Quote of the Day
Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.Albert Einstein
Guest Quotation of the Day
Remember Obama pushing infrastructure, education, and green energy as "investments"? Did his strategy lead to robust US economic growth, rising income/wealth?
And it must be remembered that the effect of “encouraging” any industry by taxation [in the form of a tariff] is necessarily to discourage other industries, and thus to force labor into the protected industries by driving it out of others. - Henry George (HT Cafe Hayek)Chart of the Day: Bring Them ALL Home...
Pro-Liberty Thought of the Day
What is the Fed Up To? Time For Another Audit...
From Casey Research:
The fed funds rate will remain at zero to 25 basis points from now until we’re all safe and sound. Which might be never. And while the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) whittles $10 billion from the Fed’s monthly securities purchases, the central bank is still gorging itself on $35 billion worth of securities a month and has leveraged its balance sheet skyward to 77 to 1.Bad Elephant of the Year Nominee: Thad Cochran (R-MS)
It’s bad enough that central bankers create money out of nowhere to buy bonds. Now it turns out that’s not all they’re buying. News from London reveals central banks and other government-controlled pools of money are buying stocks.
A study by global research firm Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF) states global public investors “as a whole appear to have built up their investments in publicly quoted equities by at least $1 [trillion] in recent years.”
I made it clear in yesterday's post that I was personally rooting for challenger McDaniel in the race. TPNN describes desperate dirty tactics from the incumbent's campaign (my edits):
Under Mississippi law, voters in one party’s primary must intend to support that party’s nominee in the general election. Recent polls showed McDaniel ahead by 8%-12%. Democrat voters were flooded with robocalls, smearing McDaniel and the pro-freedom, pro-Constitution Tea Party movement as racist, encouraging them to vote for Cochran. The robocall asks voters to say ‘no’ to the Tea Party, ‘no’ to their obstruction, ‘no’ to their disrespectful treatment of the first African-American president.”The call also urges,” If we do nothing, Tea Party candidate Chris McDaniel wins and causes even more problems for President Obama.” One county, Hinds County, drew specific suspicion from the McDaniel campaign. In the June 3 primary, Cochran won the county by 5,300 votes, however, he won there by almost 11,000 votes in the runoff election on Tuesday.
SCOTUS Decision Day: Aereo Loses 6-3 Thumbs DOWN, No General Warrant for Smartphones 9-0 Thumbs UP
From my May 10 post:
I'm not a fearless predictor of judicial decisions; for example, I would never have predicted that Chief Justice Roberts would have ruled in favor of ObamaCare as an exercising of the State's taxing authority. However, given the context of recent decisions affirming the right of political speech, I would be surprised if SCOTUS didn't strike down Ohio's censorship of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony list. Similarly, I would be surprised if SCOTUS allowed warrantless searches of cellphones. I'm less certain about the Aereo case. I would prefer a ruling for Aereo because, as it argues, it is simply an extension of traditional "free" broadcasting. The national broadcasting companies now share in cable revenues, in addition to commercial sponsor revenues. In essence, the cable companies/networks are arguing equal protection.I nailed all of my predictions. I dislike the Aereo decision as I view it as anti-competitive and potentially chilling to the production of innovative services, but given programming copyrights and equal protection, I didn't see how Aereo could expect anything better than a licensing agreement with content providers. As for cellphone searches, as I adlib in FB Corner below, now about the NSA...
Follow-up Odds and Ends
Apparently Meriam Ibrahim, on being rearrested after her dismissed conviction of adultery/apostasy, is being accused of "fraud" for not using her Muslim father's name on travel documents. Nothing new on the alleged hoax on the Victoria Wilcher KFC incident: the grandmother is sticking to the story, and the donation website vendor has frozen its operations until the incident is resolved. I did read a story that the grandmother had left the Jackson area for 15 years and recently moved back and was still getting used to new streets, etc. I'm still puzzled about the post occurring almost a month after the investigation date, which seems related to a posted date of a medical appointment for Victoria; the KFC post discussed an incident the prior week.
Facebook Corner
(Cato Institute). "If the benefits of a minimum wage were as good as its advocates believe, then why stop at $15? Why not $20, or $30, or more? You never hear an answer to that because there is none."
How much CATO getting paid to promote Conservative economic agenda?
Since when is pricing people out of a job a morally responsible decision?
(IPI). Government-mandated maternity/paternity leave is in the news again, thanks to a new pitch by President Barack Obama that comes just as he’s trying to change the conversation before the 2014 election heats up.
Don't you just miss the good old days where us peasants worked during giving birth and got payed pennies. What's wrong with people and all the crazy ideas about treating workers like human beings?!! (Note the sarcasm)
What wrong with people whom don't know the first thing about running a business and are too economically illiterate to understand that there's no such thing as a free lunch and if you raise the cost of labor, there's less demand for labor?
(Independent Institute) SCOTUS unanimously ruled that the police must have a warrant to search mobile phones. From Chief Justice Roberts' opinion in Riley v. California:
"Our cases have recognized that the Fourth Amendment was the founding generation’s response to the reviled “general warrants” and “writs of assistance” of the colonial era, which allowed British officers to rummage through homes in an unrestrained search for evidence of criminal activity. Opposition to such searches was in fact one of the driving forces behind the Revolution itself. In 1761, the patriot James Otis delivered a speech in Boston denouncing the use of writs of assistance. A young John Adams was there, and he would later write that “[e]very man of a crowded audience appeared to me to go away, as I did,ready to take arms against writs of assistance.” According to Adams, Otis’s speech was “the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born.”
Modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience. With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans “the privacies of life,” Boyd, supra, at 630. The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought. Our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cell phone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly simple—get a warrant."
I expected a win; a unanimous ruling makes it sweeter. To hear the Chief Justice acknowledge the issue of general warrants in historical context is freaking awesome. Now about the NSA....
(Drudge Report). SUPREMES STRIKE DOWN POLICE CELLPHONE SNOOPING http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/25/supreme-court-bans-warrantless-cell-phone-searches/
Good. We need to target the NSA next!
frankly i care less about the NSA than i do about the police as they are the ones average everyday folks are likely to have encounters with
The concept is the same--searches amounting to a de facto general warrant.
(Jeffrey Tucker). How easy it is to sweep all of this grim history under the carpet, blaming the Nazis and Hitler and imagining that “we” had nothing to do with it. In fact, it is all part of the deep history of the 20th century, a horrid stain on elite academia, and also a warning about the unity of science and the state. Science makes errors, sometimes ghastly ones. When error is enshrined in law, the consequences can be unthinkable. http://tucker.liberty.me/2014/06/24/how-the-u-s-became-an-extermination-camp/
I don't think we need to think of restricted "gay marriage" recognition as policy intended to suppress related procreation... Of course, we have a softer version of eugenics in the form of sex-selective and disability-based (Down syndrome) abortions, sperm banks and emerging designer baby technologies.
(Mercatus Center of George Mason). The fight for competition in ridesharing has spread internationally. Veronique de Rugy explains why low-income Americans and consumers lose when regulators try to stop this innovation: http://bit.ly/1sBWZ9Q
as if you were really concerned about 'low income' people.
Kudos to the pro-consumer Mercatus Center recognizing the deadweight consumer loss in protectionist policies favoring crony unionists; those consumers often include lower-income individuals on tight budgets with limited transportation options whom need to stretch their limited resources. The Virginia state Luddites will find that it's impossible to put a genie back in the bottle.
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The Gilded Age produced, unlike the modern era of "progressive" hell, growth that lessened consumer inequality, higher wages and increased standard of living. And the "progressives" have brought their own failed domestic and foreign interventions at the point of a gun; the only difference is that they've done it with unsound money and on the backs of our grandchildren.
(Libertarian Republic). Wal-Mart Absolutely CRUSHES New York Times Hit Piece | Liberty Viral
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.../walmart-fact-check-new...
This is a typical polemical economically illiterate piece of defensive "progressive" crap.
Just take, for example, "But by not paying its workers a living wage, which does force some unknown number of them onto public assistance, its policies also arguably eat into a lot of tax revenue. A recent study by Americans For Tax Fairness estimated that Walmart workers cost the U.S. government $6.2 billion a year. The group also estimated that Walmart and its founding Walton family cost the government another $1.6 billion in tax revenue through various tax loopholes."
First of all, WalMart hires people at a commensurate, competitive rate for their skills and experience--if they didn't, they wouldn't be one of the largest employers in America and they would lose employees to competitors. Some arbitrary number picked out of some "progressive"'s ass for "living wage" or related redistributive concept is absolute fiction. And certainly competitors and smaller businesses that pay the same or even less would be subject to the same ludicrous criticism. Note that roughly 98% of jobs pay above minimum-wage--and many, if not most lower-wage earners may be dependents or spouses of the principal breadwinner.
Second, let us all agree that the "progressive" social welfare net is a failure and morally corrupt and should be eliminated; the only effective thing it does is feed the overpaid parasitic bureaucrats. The idea the Walmart is "subsidized" by the federal government is a laughable departure from reality. Look at anytime Walmart opens a location: they have multiple candidates for any position, applicants whom are aware of the going rate for their marketable skills. If the government were subsidizing employees below their market worth, why wouldn't Walmart be hiring even more? It's only because the benefit/productivity doesn't exceed the cost,
Let's point out the real story here: the "living wage" is basically a way for crony unionists to shrink the competing work force and thus artificially increase wages. All that wage/compensation floors achieve in succeeding is make employment for the chronically unemployed all but impossible.
The real solution to improving wages is, like in the Gilded Age, to adopt pro-growth policies: embrace a sound currency by ending the Fed, lower the government cost burden, abolish crony business and union protections, embrace immigration, free markets and free trade, eliminate legally-protected occupational cartels, and privatize at least 75% of government.
Political Humor
- An original: Charlie Rangel told a congregation in 116th St: "God sent us Barack Obama."
God punished Egypt with the 10 Plagues, but we got Barack Obama? Rev Jeremiah Wright said, "God damn America" and sent us Barry...
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Nate Beeler via Townhall |
Dan Fogelberg, "Heart Hotels". If push came to shove and I had to pick a favorite Fogelberg tune, I would pick this one; the melody and arrangement are awesome. Of course, his "Rhythm of the Rain" is one of the most awesome remakes in pop history...
Cool Science: An Embedded Chip Enables a Paralyzed Man To Move His Hand By Thought
(HT Libertarian Republic/Liberty Viral)
