History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered
heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed.
They won because
they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.
B. C. Forbes
Tweet of the Day
Hillary Clinton, ex-Secretary of State, speaks no foreign languages, but the carpetbagger attempts to speak Southern.https://t.co/TZS6hjiXWB
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) October 25, 2015
I'm tired of hearing Hillary Clinton's false, economically clueless history of Bill's fortuitous inheritance of the seeded Internet economy.
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) October 25, 2015
Hillary Clinton fails to point out that the Dem-led House has failed to balance the budget in decades; Obama has doubled publicly-held debt.
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) October 25, 2015
Hillary Clinton's explanation that Dems have cleaned up after GOP messes and have fixed the economy is rubbish: progressive policy failures.
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) October 25, 2015
The GOP has to clean up after a Dem-caused $1.8T regulatory drag on the economy and unsustainable $19T debt and $210T unfunded liabilities.
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) October 25, 2015
The fascist candidates Clinton and Sanders are ignoring unsustainable mandatory spending, adapting WWE Ryback's tagline: Feed the State More
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) October 25, 2015
Imprimis Pharmaceuticals has overcome the Daraprim price increase through compounded formulations of pyrimethamine: market vs. government.
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) October 25, 2015
Image of the Day
ObamaCare Alternatives, Comments by Goodman
Charles Koch Unplugged
Guest Post Comment: Obama vetos defense appropriation, wants more money for his wars
No, this commentary isn't quite right. Both Obama and the neo-con GOP leadership wanted the defense spending increases the bill provides. Funding Obama's illegal wars wasn't an issue; one of the reasons is that Obama didn't like the way Congress is spending money on crony political earmarks (e.g., for stuff the Pentagon didn't request), tying his hands on base closures and Gitmo.
But it mostly deals with the way that the GOP is trying to budget war spending separately in a way it's not vulnerable to sequester cuts. And the real reason for that is it basically allows the GOP to get more defense spending, without similarly giving him more domestic spending dollars. Cf. Politico:
"Obama’s objection to the bill is tied up in a larger battle with Republicans over federal spending. He wants to lift spending caps for both the Pentagon and other federal agencies — while Republicans are pushing a budget plan that would only lift the caps for the Pentagon. And the defense authorization bill adheres to the GOP budget plan, using the supplemental Overseas Contingency Operations war fund to allow the military to get around the caps."Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/barack-obama-vetoes-defense-bill-215074#ixzz3pYGCDob4"
As FEE points out elsewhere, and I agree, the bloated defense bill should be vetoed--but not for Obama's basic politically-motivated reasons. http://fee.org/anythingpeaceful/obama-vetoes-military-spending-bill-not-for-reasons-youd-hope/
Choose Life: Bless the Beasts and the Children
Facebook Corner
(Acton Institute). The Neo-Calvinist theologian Abraham Kuyper, however, offers a challenge not just to the economic consequences of such a policy but to its consistency, in principle, with another of Senator Sanders’ positions: his support for unions.
From a pro-liberty perspective, workers have the right to associate voluntarily. However, unions are not entitled to corrupt monopoly privileges or various government policies to force de facto contributions to unions. A recent story about Los Angeles unions wanting an exemption from minimum wage laws speaks directly to the posed dilemma.
But a minimum wage necessarily restricts labor competition by taking away the right of lower-skill/experienced workers and employers to contract at a market-clearing rate. This is a direct manipulation of labor supply to artificially raise labor costs by old-fashioned supply and demand.
As another commenter below points out, the initial minimum wage law victimized black workers in Southern textile mills, where wages were more competitive than in the higher-paying Northeast. (My family's roots are in Fall River, MA, one of the textile hubs.) "Governor Charles Hurley of Massachusetts bluntly demanded that Southern wages be hiked so that "Massachusetts [would] have equal competition with other sections of the country, thus affording labor and industry of Massachusetts some degree of assurance that our present industries will not move out of the state."
(Cafe Hayek). I like Gene Epstein’s letter to The Atlantic (shared here with Gene’s kind permission):
In the interview with Bill Gates (“We Need an Energy Miracle,” Nov. 1), the philanthropist compares government with the private sector on the question of which is more inept. According to Gates: “Yes, the government will be somewhat inept–but the private sector is in general inept. How many companies do venture capitalists invest in that go poorly? By far most of them.”
It might have occurred to Gates that the VC’s end up investing in so many ventures that go poorly because the poor performance gets quickly exposed by the private sector’s harsh system of profit-and-loss. With no comparable way to expose its own ineptitude, government is free to keep throwing good money after bad on failed ventures, thus leaving Gates the impression that it is only “somewhat inept.”
Gene Epstein
Economics Books Editor
Barron’s
Gates is a good businessman; he’s a poor economist. And he clearly either has not read or hasn’t absorbed the work of Julian Simon or of Matt Ridley.
How inept was it that Edison had 1000 failures on the way to inventing the lightbulb? Or that 95% of experimental medicines fail to make it to market? Of course, government is more efficient in banning lightbulbs or in letting more people die waiting for its drug approvals.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of the original artist via Young Americans for Freedom |
Aretha Franklin, "Baby, I Love You"
Parent-Child Reunions (via welcomehomeblog.com)
