A minimalist approach to essential, transparent, accountable, flat, adaptable, responsive, solution-based government, rooted in virtuous individual autonomy, traditional values and free markets, with a bias towards reduction of government functionality, cost and scope
Jef Rouner's Adorable 5-year-Daughter, Victim of Ludicrous School Dress Code
The little sweetie is pictured wearing a favorite sun dress with spaghetti straps. I have not been blessed with a beautiful daughter of my own, but Houston school officials decided that when she wore her rainbow sun dress to school on a warm day, it was too risque (showed too much flesh) and forced her to put on a T-shirt over her dress and jeans under the dress. Are public educators really that clueless and perverted? Are we so sexually obsessed a culture that we start projecting sexual issues onto kids just barely school age and innocent sweethearts? Stop putting kids in the middle of a politically correct culture war.
Quote of the Day If there are no stupid questions, then what sort of questions do stupid people ask? Dogbert
Tweet of the Day
"Former President Jimmy Carter said he could never run for president today because he doesn’t have a lot of money." Point FOR inequality!
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) April 29, 2015
"Hillary Clinton wrote an Op-Ed for a paper in Iowa about her plans to help the middle class." The GOP first pledged to lock Bill out of WH.
Olivia Newton-John, "Don't Stop Believing". Not to be confused with Jouney's epic similarly-named song a decade later, this is my favorite Olivia performance and the last of a long run of consecutive #1's on the A/C chart.
Quote of the Day The man who has no imagination has no wings. Muhammad Ali
Image of the Day
Via Independent Institute
Political Humor
No, I don't stay up until 3AM to watch the show, but I've downloaded hundreds of podcast clips from the show....
An Increasingly Libertarian Electorate
Lightening Round
Hillary Clinton Attacks Traditional Pro-Life Institutions: Thumbs DOWN!“Rights have to exist in practice — not just on paper,” Clinton argued. “Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed,:It's not just that Hillary seems to be justifying a Statist assault on religious liberty, on behalf of State-conferred "rights" to kill preborn life. In fact, prohibitions across religions and cultures are no more religious or cultural assaults on "rights" than similar condemnations on lying, murder, theft and adultery.
George W. Bush Resurfaces To Attack Obama's Foreign Policy As Not Neo-Con Enough. Thumbs DOWN! This blog is no fan of Obama's convoluted, unprincipled, inconsistent, failed foreign policy, but for Bush to not have learned from his own failures as well after all these years is disheartening. Bush would supersize Obama's foreign policy mistakes.
SCOTUS Reconsiders the Topic of "Gay Marriage". Thumbs DOWN! I'm somewhat encouraged by Justice Kennedy's concern about the unintended consequences to changing an institution which has evolved over thousands of years, but I'm skeptical that the same SCOTUS that has let stand reversals of several states' legitimate popularly-enacted traditional marriage laws will suddenly reverse the groupthink of all but a few lower courts.
Quote of the Day The best argument against democracy is a five minute talk with the average voter. Winston Churchill
Image of the Day
Victims of Politically Correct Fascism
Direct Disbursement and Charities
Facebook Corner
(IPI).The Cadillac tax, set to take effect in 2018, will impose a 40% excise tax on employer plans with a value above $10,200 for an individual plan and $27,500 for a family plan. Well, the free market solution is to eliminate tax preferences in consumer decisions; the current state of affairs was an artifact of the economic illiterate FDR's imposition of wage-price controls, and labor demand given millions of young American men in the military during WWII. FDR looked the other way as employers saw health insurance as a workaround to wage controls. There was an implicit incentive for unions to maximize untaxed benefits, such as health insurance, including putting ordinary health costs into "insurance". Whereas I am sympathetic to IPI's postion on the government's windfall tax policy, I am not in favor of the status quo that perverts the concept of insurance, confounds the vesting of the consumer in healthcare decisions, violates equal protection (i.e., many people don't a tax break, paying with post-tax dollars), and shifts the tax burden unfairly to other parts of the economy.
Quote of the Day One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important. Bertrand Russell
Tweet of the Day
'Gridlock' is a handicap only to the confirmed Statist.
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) April 26, 2015
Image of the Day
State Parasites in Illinois
I, Aluminum Can
Facebook Corner
(Reason). "It's not fun when you're walking around policing jokes all day long, it's not an attractive pose to people." Term Limits is the only way to change what has become perpetual Gridlock! We don't even allow Libertarian' and others join our National Debates? What's that say about Free Speech? Time to throw all The Dinosaur Politicians out, and start over! Gridlock is a handicap only to the confirmed Statist.
(Reason). The court's job is to protect people from the consequences of their own choices, if those choices violate the Constitution. The problem with the unprincipled judicial surrender of appeasing majoritarian rulemaking is that the political minority can find their unalienable rights arbitrarily defined away, Policy can be volatile, dominated by short-term considerations and/or corrupt special interests, and introduce economic uncertainty.. There is no duty to protect people from their decisions. In fact its an infringement on their freedom. Asinine comment. It's like saying laws against lynching are an infringement on the freedom of lynchers.
Via Huffpo and Lew Rockwell DOWN WITH HETEROPHOBIA!
Hall of Shame: Cops and an Innocent Man Who Died Because He Looked at Them and Ran in the Wrong Neighborhood
Blog-Endorsed Flick
Authoritarian Universities Suppressing Freedom of Politically Incorrect Speech Using Sham Intellectually Vacuous and Nonsensical Grounds of Triggering Behaviors
Facebook Corner
(Reason). Maverick FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai on why net neutrality and government attempts to regulate the Internet are all wrong. If we keep repeating that the problem of monopoly customer abuse doesn't exist, eventually it will substitute for an actual argument. It's bad enough that I begin to wonder whether Reason is getting paid by the ISPs. Retard OP thread. Nick Gillespie debunked this load of crap some time back.
(Mises Institute). Ryan McMaken: Those who advocate for a living wage generally assume that if the cost of living is high, the primary response should be to simply raise wages. This has the political advantage of placing the costs of the “solution” onto a minority group such as employers (with small, poorly capitalized employers being most impacted by these new mandates) and low-skilled employees (whose jobs will be largely replaced by machines or outsourced as a result of the mandate). I work for a retail establishment that CHOSE to raise it's entry level wage. This company also chose to deliver excellent benefits, including vision/dental/401k/maternity and paternity leave well before the mandate for health coverage as a "right". This company is willing to do this to attract better workers, to raise the quality of their product, by choice. Compulsion by the state to pay minimum wage decreases opportunity for those at the bottom of the scale. If Walmart chose to pay their cashiers $15/hr, they'd probably hire fewer people with more skills/productivity to maintain profit levels. That's the aspect of capitalism that people demonize, when it's true of any and every system - human greed will pervert all economic systems but that does not disprove the philosophy or logic of that system. Like representative government, free market economics are ideal when there is complete, ethical participation... which there simply isn't and won't be. But the system addresses the desires and actions of man more logically and realistically than Communism/Socialism, and empowers the individual to benefit society, not the other way around. This makes it easy to see why the rabbit-hole of corporate personhood is a tragedy of perverted Capitalism, not in line with the actual logic of the system. What a freaking load of crap. Your retail employer participates in the market, just like Wal-Mart. YOUR EMPLOYER'S POLICIES ARE PART OF CAPITALISM. Henry Ford also introduced state of the art compensation; in his case, the higher costs were matched with productivity gains. I'm sure your employer is not arbitrarily paying workers above their worth to the business; they probably are highly selective in hiring at higher wages. If Wal-Mart was paying below market, they would find their most productive employees poached by other employers. And, if fact, in shale oil boom town Williston, ND, Wal-Mart started out a number of employee types at $17/hour. Corporation-bashing is a pathetic form of economic illiteracy.
(IPI). Traffic safety rules should focus on ensuring driver and pedestrian safety, but red-light camera systems seem more concerned about healthy ticket revenues. Don't run red lights and u won't have to pay. U run red lights and eventually u or someone else will pay with or without cameras. No, the OP is an authoritarian; whether or not there is a red light, you are still liable when you cause an accident. It's insane playing the "rules are rules" pitch--what about when there's no traffic? Have you ever found your brakes didn't work as you approached a lighted intersection? Have you ever been behind a truck crossing an intersection? Make no mistake--this isn't about public safety; it's about trying to shift the public cost burden unfairly at the expense of drivers. Look at what happens with a power outage and no cops:
