In shallow waters, shrimps make fools of dragons.
Chinese Proverb
Guest Quotation of the Day: Do As I Say, Not As I Do
"Liberty
has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the
subjects of the government. The history of liberty is a history of
resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of
governmental power, not the increase of it" -- "Woodrow Wilson, arguably
America's worst president, in a 1912 campaign speech just two months
before being elected and subsequently trampling on one liberty after
another for eight years" - Lawrence Reed, FEE
Chart of the Day
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| Via Reason: http://reason.com/blog/2014/09/15/the-sluggish-economy-slams-recent-colleg |
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| Via Mercatus Center: http://bit.ly/1C7squU |
Image of the Day
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| Via Tom Coburn (R-OK) |
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| http://action.itfacoalition.org/15321/urge-congress-take-action-on-internet-taxation/ |
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| Personally I oppose drug use, but prohibition is bad public policy. |
TSA: Because They Think They Didn't Complete Screening at Point A Insist on Doing It at Point B
HT Reason
Choose Life
Facebook Corner
(The Mackinac Center for Public Policy). Cities around Michigan are looking for every way possible to raise revenue in order to try and pay for their overwhelming pension debt.
So many parasitic self-serving crony unionist trolls in this thread.
(Cato Institute). The ratio of native-born to immigrant unemployment has stayed relatively the same: http://bit.ly/1tWPquo
I also wonder how the numbers changed after the Reagan amnesty. This chart doesn't go back far enough.
Absolute garbage. http://www.itep.org/pdf/undocumentedtaxes.pdf
(The Mackinac Center for Public Policy). "The financial burden of supporting our government has skyrocketed, saddling taxpayers with the bill. While federal government spending has doubled since 2000 and tripled since 1990, the growth of personal income has lagged, rising by less than half since 2000."
http://www.theoaklandpress.com/opinion/20140911/economic-freedom-is-the-recipe-for-prosperity-in-michigan
Once Upon a Time your beloved corporations paid one third the cost of government. Conservative geniuses have reduced that to about 10% and passed the bill to citizens. And while corporations lament the onerous tax burden, so many pay little to nothing. And they get tax deductions for contributions to phony political groups masquerading as charities like The Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
Once Upon a Time your beloved corporations paid one third the cost of government. Conservative geniuses have reduced that to about 10% and passed the bill to citizens. And while corporations lament the onerous tax burden, so many pay little to nothing. And they get tax deductions for contributions to phony political groups masquerading as charities like The Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
Idiotic troll! It would be harder to consider a more clueless economic policy than a progressive income tax, and most competent economists would recommend eliminating corporate taxes.
(IPI). Despite all-time highs in the stock market, $7 billion borrowed from the bond market and a massive tax hike in 2011, Illinois’ pension shortfall has nearly doubled since 2008.
It’s time for Illinois to follow the lead of other states and get politicians out of the retirement business.
Gee, you think this might have something to do with the baby boomers retiring?
The stupidity of economically illiterate "progressive" trolls. What part of the fact that Illinois has the most underfunded pension among the states don't you get? Do you think the other states don't have Baby Boomers?
(National Review). A vast majority of Rand Paul supporters support bombing ISIS. http://natl.re/1DaG15c
No, I have been a Rand Paul supporter, and I'm not happy with his betrayal of non-interventionist principles in the ISIS conflict. The surrounding Gulf Region countries, including Iraq itself, have up to 2M soldiers and their own air forces. There is no legitimate US interest at stake. Rand is more concerned about the idiotic "isolationist" smear.
(IPI). A contract dispute that threatens to trigger a teachers strike in Hinsdale High School District 86 could have far-reaching effects on similar talks throughout the suburbs.
Holy crap! "One-third of the district's teachers are at the top of the pay scale. Right now, they are paid a base salary of about $127,000 a year -- an amount that increases to nearly $130,000 if the new pay scale is adopted." That's obscene...
(Mercatus Center). Why is there no Steve Jobs of health care? Are we snuffing out health care innovation altogether? In USA Today, Robert Graboyes explains how the ACA will impact our health care stagnation: http://bit.ly/1ab3Smw
So much garbage in the comments. There are notorious statistical and metrics problems with international healthcare cost analyses, far too many for me to cite in a short comment. Most of the nationalized healthcare systems focus on general services, but recall that most costs are incurred by a small percentage of very ill people. So where do you expect to see rationing most? People get put on waiting lists for things routinely covered in American healthcare. Americans also pay early adopter prices on innovative pharmaceuticals, which benefits international marketing of said meds. But America still provides the highest quality, innovative healthcare in the world, and there's a notable quality-cost correlation missing from apples and oranges comparisons.
"Health insurance" is misleading, a perverted notion which confounds major medical coverage, reflecting spreading low risk, high cost conditions like cancer, with regular medical expenses. Because of absurd tax policies, we see tax-subsidized ordinary expenses which exacerbate inflationary sector pressures. In addition, we have benefit mandates of special interest groups trying to socialize expenses and state-level cartels, which essentially are barriers to competition.
Finally, the idea that private insurance companies don't provide value is just flatly absurd. I will point out companies like Apple have far higher profit margins, with a fraction of innovation-killing regulatory overreach. This ideological demonization of profits is counterproductive and totally clueless. The REAL solution to our healthcare system woes is the FREE MARKET: allow cross-state competition and risk pooling, reform the occupational cartels, allow more privatized healthcare training institutions, and a million and one other things that government monopoly has used to obfuscate the free market in healthcare. I would hope that Mercatus Center does more to educate the fascist trolls as in this thread.
(Bastiat Institute). Central planning wastes human capital. The state sees human beings as crude means to be used in the pursuit of better macroeconomic statistics. Central planning is inherently bureaucratic, and bureaucracy is inherently against genius. It is a system based on rules, not innovation. Creativity and human flourishing are unapproved deviations from the master plan.
I believe the administrators have a vested interest (say, state funding) in filling seats. So whether the prodigy's creative development would be facilitated by competitions coinciding with school absences, it is subordinated to the dysfunctional bureaucratic incentives.
Proposals
I particularly like this one; ironically, I just sent out a link of the U2 original to a friend earlier today.
My Greatest Hits: September 2014
Of course, a month ago there were a string of days I did not publish because of a family emergency in Texas; my daily blog hits took a toll, and it took a few days after I resumed publication on the 17th to regain more regular readership counts. (I usually tabulate between mid-months.) One one-off post made this month's survey.
- Miscellany: 8/29/14
- Top 10 Pet Peeves for Professors (My Edition)
- Miscellany: 8/23/14
- Miscellany: 8/31/14
- Miscellany: 9/11/14
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| Courtesy of Eric Allie via IPI |
Barry Manilow, "Weekend in New England"
