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Thursday, July 24, 2014

Miscellany: 7/24/14

Quote of the Day
There are two types of people in this world, good and bad. 
The good sleep better, 
but the bad seem to enjoy the waking hours much more.
Woody Allen

Comment of the Day

MICHIGAN DEPT OF AGRI FORCES FARMER TO DUMP 248 GALLONS OF ORGANIC MILK AND BREAK 1200 FREE RANGE EGGS (HT Lew Rockwell)

Without government, who would destroy the food? - Kevin Jones

Chart of the Day
Courtesy of Mercatus Center
mandatory spending
Tweet of the Day
Image of the Day
Enfield, CT police officer Worden said Maher was thrashing on the ground after officers took him down and that "this thrashing caused one of [his] punches to hit Maher in the right side of his forehead above the eye." The CT state attorney refuses to charge Worden on charges filed by Enfield police department. - Reason

Meriam Ibrahim, who had been sentenced to death over her Christianity, is finally out of Sudan with her new baby, born in jail, meeting with Pope Francis. A step forward for religious liberty. Via Catholic Libertarian
Mike Lee, one of my favorite senators, wins first Paul Revere Patriot Award.
The "Genius" of Ben Bernanke

A Forbes columnist waxes enthusiasm over Bernanke's alleged pitching out of a jam during the 2008 economic tsunami:
To be sure, the negative impacts of the global financial crisis of 2008 were critically muted primarily by the actions of the Federal Reserve.  Under former Chairman Bernanke, the Fed utilized its legal authority to prevent an apocalyptic collapse of the global financial system and a spiraling deflationary scenario. There is little doubt that the decisive steps taken prevented a second great depression. In 2008 massive danger required a massive action, and the Fed’s actions have been proved right.
Now I will point out that the author does ding Bernanke for maintaining record low bubble-prone interest rates and is pointing out unit labor rates are rising at about a 7% pace (and this pattern tends to stay in a multi-year patterns), way above CPI caps, and it's time to step off the ZIRP pedal before Yellon finds herself with escalating inflation and finding a policy risk of recession with one interest rate increase too many. I will say that we'll never know, beyond Bernanke's self-promoting rhetoric, what would if happened if he let some of the megabanks fail. He asserts a giant domino theory taking down the entire global financial system. But take, for instance, the fact that Ford and other auto manufacturers survived the era; most loans were performing, etc. You had primarily a liquidity problem which did not require propping up failing crony banks. I see this as deferring the judgment day. There would have been some short-term pain as resources were reallocated. I'm finding myself drifting more towards an Austrian vs monetarist perspective on this. One of the Austrians I read compared Bernanke to a doctor infecting a patient and then, amputing a limb, claims to have saved the patient's life...



Gruber, the Intellectual Godfather of  Romney/ObamaCare Talks State Exchanges

At roughly 31:30 in the below clip (HT Reason), Gruber fields a question on the state exchanges, and his response is largely consistent with my points in the aftermath of the Halbig decision kerfuffle.

Before getting into the details, an interesting point I don't really discussed in most of the material I've pulled up on the Internet: why state exchanges via a single federal exchange in the first place? It could be working off the Tenth Amendment police powers assigned to the states in health regulation; I suspect that the feds wanted to implement a Medicaid-style sharing agreement with the states where instead of managing state providers, it influenced state policy by putting strings on federal disbursements. I don't think the Dems ever expected to have to establish a federal exchange: a single federal exchange carried significant political risk, a lot of reinventing the wheel, and it was more of a maneuver to pressure the states into complying or cede authority over healthcare marketing to the feds.

But, as I have recently noted, there is often an accounting of net federal outflow from state taxpayers. The Democrats gambled that tying subsidies to state exchanges would be an offer no state could refuse: how would they feel, seeing their own taxpayers subsidize the healthcare of exchange users in other states, while their own state residents wouldn't get their "fair share"?  The Dems thought that the states would suffer a political backlash by leaving subsidies on the table; they probably figured if and when there was a federal exchange, they would have a chance to patch the law, prodded by states clamoring for their "fair share" on the federal exchange. Instead only a trickle of deep blue states implemented exchanges, states not really needing the alleged benefits of ObamaCare. The subsidy policy was NOT a drafting error; the incentives did not work, as anger over a pushing-on-a-string unpopular healthcare law trumped the politics of subsidies. The lawless Obama Administration now faced the reality of a federal exchange with high prices, out of the range of most peoples' budgets without subsidies. They knew with the GOP now controlling the House, the price of fixing the subsidy problem would be political concessions, and they knew that the Dems now faced a political backlash over forcing people to pay for high priced insurance without subsidies. The politically convenient IRS ruling was an intentional bypass of the Congress and unconstitutional.



Hall of Shame, Border Patrol Edition

First, note this excerpt:
Three years ago, in Glik v. Cunniffe, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit upheld a man's First Amendment right to record an arrest on Boston Common. Last week, in Gericke v. Weare, the court upheld a woman's First Amendment right to record a traffic stop in Weare, New Hampshire.

A second incident:
Our trip to Quebec was lovely, thanks. Returning to the U.S., not so much. At the Jackman, Maine, border crossing into the United States, I get interrogated about what I have in my car. "What is your relation to these children?" brusquely demands the young border guard who examines my two daughters' passports and my own."Where is their mother?" "At home, I guess." "Do you have a letter with her permission for you to travel with them?... Now please get out of the car and follow me inside." I grab my iPhone off the dash, hit the record button, and tell him politely: "For my protection, officer, I'm now recording what's happening." He stays silent. I step out of the car, and without warning, he physically attacks—that is, he wrestles the phone from my hand, twisting my arm in the process. "Officer, I do not give you permission to take my phone." I say. "I don't need your permission!” he barks. "As a journalist, I can tell the world, in writing, what questions you ask. In the U.S., anyone has that right. That's certainly not against the law. What's the difference between that and recording the conversation?"...Now, to my surprise, my oldest daughter pipes up, in her sweetest voice. She's 11. "Why are you telling my dad this?" The answer from one of the guards is unexpected: "Because!" [Before they're allowed to leave:] "We'll need you to delete from your phone what you just recorded." In our unsearched car—having ultimately posed no greater threat to the United States than the unthinking importation of three clementines, contraband that the border patrol professionals have bravely confiscated and discarded.
Facebook Corner

(Reason). California government officials are putting a retired 69-year-old Army vet on a leash for the crime of letting his dog off a leash.
We need a leash law on government SOB's.

(IPI). Chicago has the most red-light cameras of any city in the country. Since 2003, the city’s 352 cameras have levied nearly half a billion dollars in fines.
These cameras are sold to the public as a way to promote traffic safety, but the real outcome of the city’s program has been to grift lawful drivers while making sweetheart deals with poorly run companies.
Read more: http://illin.is/1mA08xV
The red light district in Chicago includes the political whores at City Hall.

(Mercatus Center). "This estimate, along with long-term projections from the CBO and others, sends a clear message: the current path is not sustainable."
CUT our war budget. Stop borrowing from Social security. Stop the Bush tax cuts. end the taxable wage cap for social security.
More economic illiterate "progressive" trolls here. First, only about 23% of the budget involved DoD; over 60% of the budget is unsustainable growing mandatory spending, particularly individual benefits. Second, social security has been running a pay-go deficit since 2010 (it has to make up the difference from interest payments or redeeming reserve assets). Not to mention the leftist political whores made it a statutory requirment that the social security reserve must consist only of Treasury debt securities. Third, only Politics of Envy parasites think they are entitled to steal even more out of other people's pockets. By the way, if you stopped smoking weed long enough to read old newspapers, you would realize The (Spendthrift) One won his reversion to Clinton's upper end tax hikes two years ago. Finally, you're essentially trying to change the rules of the game by converting a self-financing system into a redistribution scheme. Even FDR wasn't retarded enough to put retirees on the federal dole; he wanted the upper middle class up to be vested in social security. I believe the studies bear out most of these people won't even come out whole.

(IPI). For the past several years, Metra officials have decided it’s OK to charge customers higher prices for worse service.
Metra officials approved the largest fare hike in the transit system’s history in 2011. Monthly rates were hiked nearly 30%.
And now there is talk of yet another rate hike.
I'm actually surprised that IPI's article didn't focus on the elephant in the room. From Metra's own website: "Its mission was to coordinate and assist public transportation and to serve as the conduit for state and federal subsidies needed to keep the system operational." Since when do other taxpayers, especially drivers paying fuel taxes, have to subsidize public transit users? There's only one REAL solution: privatize it! Of course, the corrupt crony unionists are going to exact their legally plundered economic rents. But expecting public monopolies to allocate resources effectively is like expecting Barry Obama to balance the budget, even once.

(Lew Rockwell). How dare Ron Paul! He speaks the truth about the neocons, whose wars have killed millions, this time after being attacked by regime libertarians, who aren’t much different. 
I wonder if Ron Paul endorses his neocon son.
Rand is not a neo-con, and there's no doubt that Rand is the closest to his Dad across the board of any 2016 prospective candidate. Rand backed his dad in 2012 until he was mathematically eliminated from the race by Romney. I know that the purists are suspect of some of Rand's messages that stray from orthodoxy, but he needs to appeal to a wider coalition and be more pragmatic than his dad's more strident rhetoric.

(Reason). We have a clear split among the federal circuit courts on a legal question of undeniable national importance. Translation: The Supreme Court is likely to get involved.
I think the "confusing" nature of the legislation cited by the Fourth Circuit is a post hoc rationalization by a "progressive" court. To argue that the state qualification was just careless law drafting is completely disingenuous, and I don't think even Chief Justice Roberts can overlook the plain wording of the statute. Bad law has been, can and should be patched by law, not by unaccountable bureaucrats in the Executive Branch; SCOTUS has repeatedly rebuffed the lawless Obama regime. I don't think this is the same as the original case. Will the full DC circuit override the 3-judge panel? I think this does get taken up by SCOTUS because of the nature of the opinions, and I don't think it goes away if an Obama-stacked DC circuit tries to revert Halbig.

More Proposals









Political Cartoon
Courtesy of the original artist via IPI
Courtesy of Gary Varvel via Townhall
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists

Billy Joel, "Movin' Out"

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