'Croynism,The American Way'

Vernonique de Rugy:

In their new book Why Nations Fail, economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson explain a country’s institutions’ impact on its wealth and economic growth. They, for instance, argue “that the ultimate cause for economic success or failure is rooted within each countries’ institutions, and that understanding how those institutions evolve is crucial for development.”

In a recent interview, which I already mentioned this morning, Acemoglu warned us about how in most countries, including the United States, the biggest rent seekers and moochers today are politicians themselves.

But nowadays in most countries, the most extractive elite is the politicians themselves. Think of Greece. You cannot understand the last three decades without understanding corrupt political system. But the same is true even for the United States. The US political system has become dominated by the political elite and the lobbying industry funneling money to them. We are seeing the costs of this at this moment.

Whether America’s institutions have now become more exclusive than inclusive is obviously an empirical question. But there is plenty of extraction going on right now. In this piece, for instance, the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney reports on how companies like Microsoft were given very strong signals that hard work isn’t enough to do business in this country and that the right to produce and sell goods and services also requires, political contributions and lobbying capabilities.

Crony capitalism,where the government picks their favorites,is destroying America.There is no free markets when the government is involved,just coercion.

Disarm The FDA

We have officially become a Marxist-socialist state with the arming of the tyrannical,alphabet soup bureaucracies,that intrude upon and dominate our daily lives!

Hat tip to SayAnythingBlog.com.

Margaret Thatcher On Socialism

You have to love Maggie.She is exactly right.when she says the left is only interested in,'the poor,becoming poorer.'The left,socialist,and progressives world over have only one desire,that is to make everyone dependent upon the government and not upon themselves.

The Problem With Spain's Green Jobs Model

Central planning never works.

Obamacare Goes To The Supreme Court Monday

Charles Krauthammer:

Beginning March 26, the Supreme Court will hear challenges to the law. The American people, by an astonishing two-thirds majority, want the law and/or the individual mandate tossed out by the Court. In practice, however, questions this momentous are generally decided 5 to 4, i.e., they depend on whatever side of the bed Justice Anthony Kennedy gets out of that morning.
Ultimately, the question will hinge on whether the Commerce Clause has any limits. If the federal government can compel a private citizen, under threat of a federally imposed penalty, to engage in a private contract with a private entity (to buy health insurance), is there anything the federal government cannot compel the citizen to do?
If Obamacare is upheld, it fundamentally changes the nature of the American social contract. It means the effective end of a government of enumerated powers — i.e., finite, delineated powers beyond which the government may not go, beyond which lies the free realm of the people and their voluntary institutions. The new post-Obamacare

The whole question in a nutshell is will we remain as we are,a semi-free people barely hanging on to our God given liberty,or will we become a full-blown tyrannical,socialist state,that can order us about like slaves?If the Supreme Court holds to form,tyranny will carry the day and we will have stamped on our behinds,'property of the U.S. government.'

'Now What?'

Verbatim post from Victor Davis Hanson:

The Obama administration’s real problem is existential: What if it gets what it wants, but then finds that either it or the country really is uncomfortable with what it got?

Take energy. We were long ago lectured by hot-house administration plants, including the president himself, about the desirability of high-cost energy in curbing fossil-fuel use and making subsidized wind and solar power and electric transportation competitive. By midsummer, the technocrats may get their wish with $5 or even $6-a-gallon gas (not quite as high as Secretary Chu may once have wanted). Will they say, “But $7 or $8 would have been more truly European”?
And if we were to go back to the “Clinton tax rates” as the president repeats as a daily mantra, then what? The deficit would not drastically be cut, given the huge rates of borrowing, and the budget would not even come close to being balanced. Would the president then come back with, “We need to raise taxes a lot more than just those pay-your-fair-share Clinton-era rates”?
And Obamacare? Once it passed, there were new taxes leveled to pay for it; health-care premiums are rising; the latest squabble with the Catholic Church reminds us that few Americans had any idea about what was in the 2,000-plus-page bill; and soon Medicare will be trimmed to pay for it. In reaction, will the administration say, “We need a truly comprehensive Obamacare II bill?” or “Next round we will offer you a single-payer plan”? or “We had too little government control the first time around”?
Abroad, what comes after “reset” and “outreach”? Outreach 2.0 in which we issue another four to five deadlines to Iran? Reset 1A in which we reapproach Putin from a different direction, or reopen again the reopened and reclosed embassy in Damascus? Leading from way, way behind?
What comes after “the most transparent” administration in history? No more super PACs or a return to public financing of campaigns — in 2016? The revolving door for only ten departing officials, but not 15? Will there be post-class-warfare with fatter cats, corporate-jet fleet owners, “the 10 percenters,” and lots of points at which you need to stop making money? Alligators, moats — and piranhas? Punish all of our enemies?

Socialism never ever delivers the utopia it has promised.In fact it rather exasperates the problems it was supposed to solve in the first place.

The Gospel According To Obama

'The Debt Generation'

Hat tip to The Market Ticker.

5 Minutes To Doomsday

From Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist:


 

It is five minutes to midnight. Two years ago, it appeared that world leaders might address the truly global threats that we face. In many cases, that trend has not continued or been reversed. For that reason, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is moving the clock hand one minute closer to midnight, back to its time in 2007.

What,pray tell,are the "global threats" that have us ticking to our destruction?A nuclear Iran? An Al-Quada having the bomb?Or maybe,just maybe,a weakened United States,led by our fearless,often vacationing leader,Barack Obama?Nope? This:

In fact, the global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth's atmosphere.  The International Energy Agency projects that, unless societies begin building alternatives to carbon-emitting energy technologies over the next five years, the world is doomed to a warmer climate, harsher weather, droughts, famine, water scarcity, rising sea levels, loss of island nations, and increasing ocean acidification.  Since fossil-fuel burning power plants and infrastructure built in 2012-2020 will produce energy — and emissions — for 40 to 50 years, the actions taken in the next few years will set us on a path that will be impossible to redirect.  Even if policy leaders decide in the future to reduce reliance on carbon-emitting technologies, it will be too late.

They forgot to mention that the seas will become a boiling cauldron of blood and locust,giant man eating locust will emerge to devour mankind from off the face of the earth.

How can we avert such a catastrophe?:

The challenges to rid the world of nuclear weapons, harness nuclear power, and meet the nearly inexorable climate disruptions from global warming are complex and interconnected.  In the face of such complex problems, it is difficult to see where the capacity lies to address these challenges.  The political processes in place seem wholly inadequate to meet the challenges to human existence that we confront.

As such, the Science and Security Board is heartened by the Arab Spring, the Occupy movements, political protests in Russia, and by the actions of ordinary citizens in Japan as they call for fair treatment and attention to their needs....................

Yes,we must all repent of our evil capitalist ways and immediately embrace the nirvana that progressive socialism has to offer.Only then and only then,when we all are equally poor and miserable,will we all truly find peace and serinity.

Pennies In Return For Millions

The taxpayers get the shaft again :

LanzaTech, a New Zealand-based biofuel company, paid $5.1 million for the plant in Soperton. Its main financial backer: Vinod Khosla, a California entrepreneur who also bankrolled Range Fuels, and helped secure its government loans, before Range went bust last year.

LanzaTech hasn't received the same type of loans, but the company has received $7 million from the U.S. departments of Energy and Transportation to assist in the development of alternative fuels.

The Range fiasco harkens other, failed renewable energy companies that received major taxpayer funding. California solar panel maker Solyndra got $535 million in federal loan guarantees. Beacon Power of Massachusetts, which makes energy-storage equipment, took in $43 million in federal money. Both filed for bankruptcy last year.

Range cost U.S. taxpayers $64 million and Georgia taxpayers another $6.2 million. Tuesday's sale netted $5.1 million which will help offset losses suffered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Georgia's money, which paid for some of the ethanol-making equipment, won't be recouped outright, but state officials expect LanzaTech to use the machinery.

Sam Shelton, director of research programs at Georgia Tech's Strategic Energy Institute, was long skeptical of Range Fuels' plans and technology.

"It was too damn big a risk for an apparently unproven technology and the due diligence I personally performed on Range would not entice me to invest in it," Shelton said Wednesday. Shelton was invited by Range a few years back to check out its operation in Colorado where it was based.

"Government should not be in the venture capital business selecting technologies," he added.

This is crony capitalism at its finest.If you are politically well connected you can fleece the American taxpayer for almost anything.

Ronald Reagan On Capitalism And Socialism

Their is no better way to get 2012 off to a good start than listening to the wit and wisdom of Ronald Reagan.

'Repo Men'

Kevin D. Williams:

On and on and on it goes: Sen. John Kerry invested aggressively in health-care companies while shaping health-care legislation. Rep. Spencer Bachus (R. Ala.) was a remarkably apt options trader during the days when he had a front-row seat to Congress’s deliberations on the unfolding financial crisis. The Obama administration poured billions of dollars into solar companies, of which the failed Solyndra is the most infamous. But a lot of that money went to other firms, including First Solar, which is owned by billionaire Obama supporter Ted Turner and by Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs is omnipresent. And during the financial crisis, a big piece of Goldman Sachs was bought by Warren Buffett, who stacked up a lot of cash when the government poured money into that struggling investment bank with the support of Barack Obama. When the federal government bought into Goldman Sachs, it negotiated for itself a 5 percent dividend. Warren Buffett got 10 percent — on top of the benefit of having Washington inundate his investment with great rippling streams of taxpayers’ money. Republicans are no saints, either, but Democrats were running the congressional show during such crucial episodes as the implementation of the bailouts and the health-care debate — which were big investment opportunities for political insiders with access to market-moving information. Congress has effectively exempted itself from insider-trading rules, not that the SEC would have the guts to go after a Senator Schumer or a Speaker Pelosi for these exploits. And that — not campaign contributions, not lobbying — is the really stinky petri dish of festering corruption at the nexus of Washington and Wall Street. You want a case for limited government? That’s it. And Wall Street is on the wrong side of the argument, which is one reason free-market conservatives should not romanticize the lords of finance.

These 'lords of finance' and there hench men in Washington are doing nothing less than raping their country.

Everyone is looking for another Reagan to set things straight.Maybe we should be looking for another Andrew Jackson to end the corruption that prevails in Washington and on Wall Street.

The Solar Fraud

From The Market Ticker:  

Look folks, solar is an interesting idea but it's not economically viable. It requires ridiculous amounts of land to be dedicated to it and it only works when the sun is shining (obviously), which isn't all of the time. Industry and personal users, on the other hand, would like electricity to be available any time the switch is thrown. This sets up a rather serious problem, and that's before we start talking about money, which is also an issue.

Solar has never been viable without government subsidy, and that is unlikely to change at any time in the near future. If and when it does it will rise all on its own without a need for anyone to hand out "free money."
But the numbers do not support any sort of mass-investment on this technology. Among other things manufacturing is energy intensive and creates a pollution problem. We've "solved" that by shoving it in the corner (in China), just like we have with so many other things, but in fact that's a public fraud as well.
I'll be interested in solar when it is cost-effective standing alone as a peaking source. There it might indeed, some day, be worthwhile. But the competition for peaking plants today is natural gas, which today is also quite cheap. It may not be tomorrow, but today it is.
As a base load source solar is next-to-worthless as it simply is unable to provide energy on a 24x7 basis, and that's what's required in that role. Whether or not we like it solar simply doesn't pass the economics test as a prime energy source -- and there's nothing that indicates that in the reasonably near future it will.

Solar,like all other "green" energy sources,is a confidence scheme perpetrated on us by Flim-Flam men,both in Big Business and Big Government,to raid the public till.

Margaret Sanger: The Mother Of The Culture Of Death

'Margaret Sanger and the War on Compassion':

Despite the insistence of her ardent supporters that Sanger was caught up in the common thought of her times, she was opposed by many contemporaries, who rejected such theories on the grounds both of faith and of American principles. She may have lived a life of passion, as Jean Baker asserts, but among her great passions was eugenics. It was one of the great legacies she sought to leave to the world.
In many ways, Sanger’s dream has been realized. For generations the sterilization of the poor and the vulnerable has been a reality pushed by government agencies and population-control groups. North Carolina is one of a number of states still debating reparations for victims of the state’s mandatory sterilization program from the mid-20th century. Currently, roughly 90 percent of unborn children diagnosed with Down Syndrome are aborted. Obsessed with plucking the “weeds” from the human garden, Sanger and her fellow eugenicists lost sight of what it means to be human.
In the end, Sanger’s passion waged war on compassion, redefining pregnancy as a battle zone for the survival of the fittest. It is a bleak doctrine, made all the more terrible because of the millions in public funds still being deployed to advance her eugenic struggle.

In many ways Margaret Sanger was more dangerous than,Adolf Hitler.Her ideas on 'social engineering' have not received the stigma of evil as Hitler's ideas of a Aryan super-race has justly received from history.No,her ideas have been embraced by the West,producing abortion on demand and the killing our elderly,in the name of 'the greater good.'In the end,Margaret Sanger,has been a far greater force for evil in this world.

'Statist Delusions'

Mark Steyn:

It would be truer to say that the present situation reflects the total failure of “you’re not on your own” economics — the delusion of statists that government can insulate millions of people from the vicissitudes of life. Europeans have assured their citizens of cradle-to-grave welfare since the end of the Second World War. This may or may not be an admirable notion, but, both economically and demographically, the bill has come due. Greece is being bailed out by Germany in order to save the eurozone but to do so requires the help of the IMF, which is principally funded by the United States. The entire Western world resembles the English parlor game “Pass the Parcel,” in which a gift wrapped in multiple layers of gaudy paper is passed around until the music stops and a lucky child removes the final wrapping from the shrunken gift to discover his small gift. Except that, in this case, underneath all the bulky layers, there is no there there: Broke nations are being bailed out by a broke transnational organization bankrolled by a broke superpower in order to save a broke currency. Good luck with that.
The political class looted the future to bribe the present, confident that tomorrow could be endlessly postponed. Hey, why not? “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day,” says Macbeth. “To borrow, and to borrow, and to borrow,” said the political class, like Macbeth with a heavy cold (to reprise a rare joke from Mrs. Thatcher). And they failed to anticipate that the petty pace would accelerate and overwhelm them. On Thursday, Jon Corzine, former United States senator, former governor of New Jersey, former Goldman Sachs golden boy, and the man who embodies the malign nexus between Big Government and a financial-services sector tap-dancing on derivatives of derivatives, came to Congress to try to explain how the now-bankrupt entity he ran, MF Global, had managed to misplace $1.2 billion. The man once tipped to be Obama’s Treasury secretary and whom Vice President Biden described as the fellow who’s always “the smartest guy in the room” explained his affairs thus: “I simply do not know where the money is.” Does that apply only to his private business or to his years in the Senate, too?

Was J. Edgar Hoover A Homosexual?

Was Hoover a homo?:

This allegation is so old, so singular, and so meritless it ought not bear discussion. Yet repetition lends reliability and many fools believe it to be true.
Claims of Hoover’s homosexuality originated with one Susan Rosenstiel, who stated she witnessed the director in, of all places, The Plaza Hotel in New York City twice during the 1950s wearing women’s clothing. She went on to assert she saw him doing this at what she described as “homosexual orgies” (raising the question why any woman would be present).
No doubt there was already a willingness to propagate the most licentious fabrications about the director, as many factions bore him ill will. There is also the fact that neither he nor his top aide Clyde Tolson ever married. Yet this speaks more toward the extreme dedication to duty of an earlier age than it does of sexuality. Hoover was also romantically involved with actress Dorothy Lamour over a period of years and was involved later with actress Ginger Rogers’s mother.
In examining the tale’s veracity, one should look less at the director and more at Ms. Rosenstiel. She served time at Rikers Island jail for, of all things, perjury on the stand and lying under oath. As if more proof is needed, Rosenstiel did not volunteer this salacious story but was paid to tell it. The singular allegation was never substantiated by anyone at any time or anywhere. When the Soviet KGB archives were unsealed it was learned that they, his erstwhile enemies, had attempted to propagate such a claim.
Worst of all is that Hollywood uses these fallacious allegations of homosexuality as a weapon. The exact people who claim to embrace all aspects of sexuality are the very ones frequently hurling accusations of homosexuality as ridicule. They plead they do so only to unnerve the object of their scorn, yet such proclamations of an “outing” (however false) are hyper-hypocritical. One cannot esteem something one simultaneously uses as a bludgeon. In this, Hollywood ought to be ashamed.
So who was J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI?
A man dedicated to his office and to the country he served. A man who foresaw the hidden and disguised menaces to true freedom we have been seduced into venerating by our willful ignorance of their actual nature. A man who was everything the West once revered but now reviles because it cannot produce men one-tenth so stalwart.J. Edgar Hoover was nothing less than a genuine American hero, and that is why Hollywood must destroy him at all costs.

J. Edgar Hoover kept this country safe from its enemies,both foreign and domestic,for almost 50 years.I firmly believe if a man of his caliber was FBI director in 2001 and before,9-11 would not have happen on his watch.He was homeland security before we turned it into a bureaucracy.

The left hated and still hates this man because he exposed them for who and what they really are,anti-American socialist and communist.They couldn't destroy him while he lived -like they did McCarthy- so they are hell bent on destroying his reputation now.

 

Hat tip to Free North Carolina.

Occupy Richmond Recieving Special Treatment From City Officials

Double standards:

As the person in charge of the 2009 event, Owens said Richmond officials dictated the number of police and emergency personnel they were required to have on site and required a $1 million liability policy to protect the city. Owens said that when a Tea Party member decided to call the mayor’s office to see if the protesters had required any of the necessary permits for the park, the city said that “Occupy Richmond” didn’t have any requirements for them to protest and stay overnight in Kanawha Plaza.

 

“We’re forced to comply with the laws, but yet they don’t have to,” she said. “That’s such a blatantly unequal application of the laws.”

This is what happens under socialism,the government no longer applies the law equally to all,but begins to dispense justice based on favoritism.

Former Soviet Citizen In Dust Up With The Useful Idiots Of OWS

This is a perfect example of Plato's Allegory of the Cave.These supporters of socialism and communism -who BTW have lived in the U.S. all there lives I presume- are telling a man who has lived in the oppression of communism and socialism for 29 years of his life,that he doesn't know what he is talking about.This is just shear stupidity!

'Howard Stern Exposes Occupy Wall St. Moron'

Warning,there is profanity contained in the audio.


Nothing shows the sad state of journalism in this country,than when you get more truth from this foul mouthed shock jock,rather than from the MSM.

Hat tip to Hot Air.

'Obama: "None Of Us Make It On Our Own" Without Government'

Obama:

"Now, I want to be very clear here. Nobody wants to punish success in America. The Republicans talk about class warfare. That’s — our goal is to make success available for everybody. What’s great about this country is you’ve got a good idea, you’ve got a service that nobody else has thought of, you know what, go out there, start a business. Make money. I want everybody out there to be rich. That’s great. Anybody in America should be able to make it if they try."

"But none of us make it on our own. Somebody — an outstanding entrepreneur like a Steve Jobs — somewhere along the line he had a teacher who helped inspire him. All those great Internet businesses wouldn’t have succeeded unless somebody had invested in the government research that helped to create the Internet. We don’t succeed on our own. We succeed because this country has, in previous generations, made investments that allow all of us to succeed."

Wrong,Wrong,Wrong!

Without private business's,like BBN Technologies,the Department of Defence would not have had the Internet to begin with,Mr. President.Its the other way around,without free markets the government wouldn't make it on its own.

The government,like most people is a consumer.Unlike individuals though,the government doesn't create or produce anything,and is totally dependent on what it can purchase from others.

Also,Steve Jobs wasn't inspired by a teacher or anyone else from the government.Steve Jobs was inspired by this man,the creator of Polaroid:

Steve Jobs idolized Edwin Land, and it's clear he learned a lot from him.

Like Jobs, Land dropped out of college. Like Jobs, Land obsessed about function and form. Like Jobs, Land scoffed at the idea of "market research." (Both men believed that consumers don't know what they want until they see it.)

As Ronald Reagan said,"government isn't the answer,it is the problem."