Discovery consists in seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi
Rant of the Day: Obituary of Irwin Schiff By His Son Peter
Schiff was a well-known critic of the income tax. This is an excerpt from Peter's well-written obituary, which I highly recommend to interested readers. I do regard the income tax as economically clueless, perverse policy and any taxes beyond the amount to sustain a minimal State (to provide common defense and protect negative rights/liberty) as legal plunder, but I do not subscribe to Schiff's specific views.
When he passed away on Oct. 16th, 2015 at the age of 87, a political prisoner of that same nation, legally blind and shackled to a hospital bed in a guarded room in intensive care, the free nation he was born into had itself died years earlier. My father had a life-long love affair with our nation’s founding principals and proudly served his country during the Korean War...His last [book], The Federal Mafia; How the Government Illegally Imposes and Unlawfully collects Income Taxes, the first of three editions published in 1992, became the only non-fiction, and second and last book to be banned in America. The only other book being Fanny Hill; Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, banned for obscenity in 1821 and 1963.
The unnecessarily cruel twist in his final years occurred seven years ago when he reached his 80th birthday. At that point the government moved him from an extremely low security federal prison camp in New York State where he was within easy driving distance from family and friends, to a federal correctional institute, first in Indiana and then in Texas. This was done specially to give him access to better medical care. The trade off was that my father was forced to live isolated from those who loved him. Given that visiting him required long flights, car rentals, and hotel stays, his visits were few and far between. Yet while at these supposed superior medical facilities, my father received virtually no medical care at all, not even for the cataracts that left him legally blind, until the skin cancer on his head had spread to just about every organ in his body.
At the time of his diagnosis in early August of this year, he was given four to six mouths to live. We tried to get him out of prison on compassionate release so that he could live out the final months of his life with his family, spending some precious moments with the grandchildren he had barely known.
But he did not live long enough for the bureaucratic process to be completed. Two months after the process began, despite the combined help of a sitting Democratic U.S. congresswoman and a Republican U.S. senator, his petition was still sitting on someone’s desk waiting for yet another signature, even though everyone at the prison actually wanted him released. Even as my father lay dying in intensive care, a phone call came in from a lawyer and the Bureau of Prisons in Washington asking the prison medical representatives for more proof of the serious nature of my father’s condition. As the cancer consumed him his voice changed, and the prison phone system no longer recognized it, so he could not even talk with family members on the phone during his finale month of life.
When his condition deteriorated to the point where he needed to be hospitalized, government employees blindly following orders kept him shackled to his bed. This despite the fact that escape was impossible for an 87 year old terminally ill, legally blind patient who could barely breathe, let alone walk.My thoughts and prayers for the Schiff family survivors. NOTE: Dr. Rand Paul typically donates his time to doing cataract surgery for lower-income people in the US and foreign countries. Our fascist government wouldn't even allow him the option available to free citizens. Disgraceful!
Image of the Day
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| To my troll critics via Libertarian Catholic |
The Greek Debt: Repudiate or No?
I agree with Professor Jones here. Make no mistake: I'm not endorsing the unsustainable Greek State: "With government jobs paying three times the private sector average, a national rail service with a wage bill four times its annual revenue, a public pension system that would pay out generous benefits at fifty for anyone classified as working in “arduous” professions like hairdressing, there is no shortage of taxpayer-funded largesse running rampant through Greek society." It more to do with the political whores who knowingly borrowed money they knew would and/or could have never repaid. What we have is debt which is secured without the knowledge and consent of future taxpayers needed to pay it off, secured by force on captive taxpayers, who have their own State burdens to pay for. Raising taxes and/or labor regulations make economic growth impossible. I'm not talking about bailing out the existing Greek fascist government and its state-of-denial "bread and circuses" collective bribery policies. Only a freaking moron would allow history to repeat itself and allow the fascists to continue the same old same old and build another mountain of debt ripping off either creditors and/or future taxpayers. Greece needs a supply-side/government spending paradigm shift to justify debt repudiation as Doctor Jones suggests.
A Picture is Worth 1000 Words...
My favorite piece of his is the t-shirt he's wearing.
Political Humor
Yum! Test-Tube Burgers....
Facebook Corner
(Rand Paul 2016). The next time Bernie Sanders brings up Denmark...
Read more ===> http://on.rare.us/1OEspqB
The fact is that Sanders is trying to emulate social welfare policies that have slowed European economic growth to a crawl with sticky high unemployment. The fact is there are not nearly enough rich people to plunder to fund left-fascist Sanders' failed policy ideas. Note that the economically illiterate economic nationalist is NOT talking about the Scandinavian countries' lower business taxes and regulation or pro-trade policies.
(Reason). GOP elites may be trying to rescue the Republican party from Donald J. Trump, but what if there's nothing left to save?
Donald "Four Bsnkruptcies" Trump matches up worse against the Democratic left-fascist bozos; I still think in the end that the GOP doesn't want a de facto Obama third term rather than "sending a message". There has been a long string of state polls where Trump's leads are within 5 points (including 2 of the most recent national polls), and even Carson beats him in one or 2. He's a lousy debater, lost a lot of momentum after the last one and he's got a handful ahead of him; he is notoriously thin-skinned, more so than any politician in my lifetime, and hasn't faced a barrage of negative ads, which notoriously killed Gingrich in Florida in 2012. None of the Congressional Republicans support him or his naive policies. His xenophobic immigration, tax and healthcare policies are dead on arrival in Congress, across parties.
The right-fascist demagogue insists that he's in it for the long haul, but if you listen to him, he's proud of insisting he realized ahead of other developers that the Atlantic City casino market was getting killed. There is nothing in Trump's character that would allow his support to dwindle away to single digits. If you look at straw polls, Trump isn't winning any of them and is floundering at the 5% or so level in many of them, so the activists are lined up against him; I doubt that Trump picks up support (unless somehow he starts to look inevitable) beyond 25-33%. I think that support consolidates to a more conventional candidate (say, Marco Rubio, who positions very well against Clinton) just like Santorum became the chief adversary to Romney out of nowhere in 2012.
(Ron Paul). By instituting a minimum wage, government harms the very people it pretends to help. The minimum wage does nothing but outlaw employment below a certain dollar amount. If government arbitrarily sets the the minimum wage at $15/hr, it means that those without the skills and productivity to earn that amount are forced (by law) out of a job. Even if those individuals are ready and willing to work for $12, or $11, or $8/hr, they're out of luck. The government had different plans for them....unemployment. Masquerading a $15 Minimum Wage as "Moral" http://bit.ly/1W1VZ8r
Ron Paul is spot on. Something like 98% of jobs pay more than the minimum wage. Quite often a lower-wage job is a starter job which gets a young or unemployed person a foothold into the job market and the experience and training needed to advance to higher-paying jobs. There is absolutely no credible basis for the government to intervene in the job market, prohibiting lower-wage work--it is simply a crony political policy to manipulate the labor supply in favor of special interests, like unions which worry that a larger work force weakens their bargaining position. Telling a business or potential worker what they can't mutually agree on does not make a business pay more than a fair market price for what the labor contributes to the business.
(Drudge Report). W unloads.
"In his book published earlier this year, Cruz ripped Bush’s record, criticizing elements of his foreign policy and faulting the administration for enabling "bigger government and excessive spending and new entitlements."" Now in his best Steve Urkel impression, Cruz is mock-offended, "Did I do that?"
Ted Cruz is a politically opportunistic, manipulative jerk who has often played a suicidal game of political chicken in quixotic quests, like the 2013 government shutdown, which risked political blowback in the 2014 elections. Rand Paul, on the other hand, has picked his political battles better and has shown an ability to work across the aisle.
The fact that Cruz is brownnosing right-fascist Donald "Four Bankruptcies" Trump, who is not a conservative period and 50 times worse than Bush, hoping for crumbs from the Trump cultists if and when the Trump campaign implodes, tells you all you need to know about Cruz' integrity. Cruz, like the economically illiterate Donald Trump, is unelectable, period, outside of Texas and the last time I checked, the fascist buffoon was leading him there.
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| via Libertarian Catholic |
Choose Life: The Institutional Evil of Planned Parenthood
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Steve Kelley via Townhall |
Meat Loaf, "Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through". What Meat Loaf can do with a Steinman song is scary good. Great melody, percussion arrangement beautifully wrapped around Meal Loaf's power vocals. Here's my favorite Meat Loaf anecdote: "In Los Angeles, Aday formed his first band, "Meat Loaf Soul". During the recording of their first song, he hit a note so high that he managed to blow a fuse on the recording monitor." Now those are great pipes...
The Songwriter Jim Steinman's Original Top 40 version in the early 1980's
Free Speech--Includes the Koch Brothers
Free Your Speech
Today marks the beginning of Free Speech Week, and we're celebrating the diversity and debate of ideas that stem from a tolerant, inclusive campus--even if such an atmosphere is an increasingly rare find.
Posted by Charles Koch Institute on Monday, October 19, 2015
