Jeffrey Tucker vs The Fed

Jeffrey Tucker makes the Case Against the Federal Reserve and the Banking Cartel

Hitler ended the Great Depression

Playboy Interview: Paul Krugman:

PLAYBOY: Arcade Fire delivers hope, but Wall Street failed us. The Rubin crowd failed us. Greenspan failed us. Who are the nonmusical heroes we can look forward to? Who’s going to save the United States of America? KRUGMAN: Heroes who could be in a position to move stuff any time soon, I don’t see. The fact is the Great Depression ended largely thanks to a guy named Adolf Hitler. He created a human catastrophe, which also led to a lot of government spending. As you know, I’m famous for worrying about space aliens. It looks like it has to be some forcing event. Obviously you don’t operate on that basis, so what people like me will do is keep hammering on this stuff and hopefully it will eventually break through. The safety net has been enough to avoid mass suffering, to muffle it. People are exhausting their savings. This is where you start to wonder how much individuals really do matter. Maybe there is somebody on the political scene who will emerge. I don’t know where that comes from. But the big lesson I’ve taken from 10 years of punditry is that the story is never over. Who knows where we might be in four or five years?

Tides of Political Thought

Milton Friedman on Tides of Political Thought in Modern History

In this 1999 video from an International Society for Individual Liberty conference in Costa Rica, economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman delivers a live lecture to the audience through a teleconferencing system. Friedman speaks about various "tides" of economic and political ideas throughout the modern era, beginning with the lassiez-faire influence of the Adam Smith tide in the 1700s, progressing through the Fabian tide of big government authoritarianism during the greater portion of the 20th century, and concluding with the contemporaneous Hayek tide and the resurgence of classical liberal ideas following the collapse of some of the world's largest and most restrictive authoritarian states.

Trotsky, Stalin y Lenin: el Bueno, el Malo y el Feo

Trotsky, Stalin y Lenin: el Bueno, el Malo y el Feo:

Toda revolución tiene su mitología. La de la rusa se construyó sobre tres grandes caracteres: Trotsky, el Bueno; Stalin, el Malo, y Lenin, el Feo. Los tres son falsos y no permiten entender la verdadera dinámica que llevó a la creación del primer Estado totalitario.

Lev Davídovich Bronstein, alias Trotsky .. Se supone que el Bueno, luchador, soñador, profeta y mártir, fue bueno, es decir, humano, generoso, opuesto a cualquier violencia excesiva, amigo del pueblo, etc. Veamos cómo hablaba el Bueno en defensa de la guillotina, un poco antes de tomar el poder ..

Sin embargo, a los asesinos románticos se los perdona e idealiza, especialmente si han muerto por sus ideales. Lo que fascina en Trotsky, como en el Che Guevara, es su desenfadada convicción de estar haciendo el bien, liberando a la Humanidad de todo mal habido y por haber. Pero es justamente eso lo que los torna tan peligrosos: su finalidad deslumbrante los lleva a usar cualquier medio, a sacrificar masivamente a los seres humanos de carne y hueso para redimir a la Humanidad.

.. fueron innumerables los progres, para no hablar de los comunistas, que estuvieron dispuestos a alabar a Stalin a sabiendas del coste terrible de su dictadura. Tal vez no conocían la extensión exacta de la barbarie, pero eso no era lo importante. Imbuidos de la misma visión de la historia que inspiraba a Stalin, veían la violencia ejercida como un costo necesario de la obra de liberación de la humanidad ..

Pero Stalin no era más perverso que Trotsky, Lenin o Marx. Todos ellos eran profetas de un mismo ideal que lleva ínsito el afán genocida en su propósito de arrasarlo todo para cambiarlo todo, en su proyecto de crear un hombre nuevo, para lo que se requiere la destrucción del hombre realmente existente.

Nos queda el Feo, Lenin .. Quien dictó esta orden y llevó Rusia a la hecatombe de los años 1918-1922, con sus nueve millones de muertos en combates, represiones, hambrunas y epidemias, podía, sin embargo, tal como los verdugos del Holocausto, dormir tranquilo y satisfecho, ya que creía estar ejerciendo, con las palabras usadas por Hitler para definir el nazismo, la "voluntad de crear la Humanidad de nuevo".

Differences

What’s the Difference between a Libertarian, a Supply-Sider, a Keynesian, and an IMF Bureaucrat?:

Semáforos monetários

The Parable of the Broken Traffic Lights:

Suppose on some sunny afternoon in a large city somewhere in the western world, a man discovers on awaking from a two-hour nap that several hundred car accidents had occurred in the city while he slept .. As his brain slowly awakens, he stumbles across the likely culprit: Something must be wrong with the traffic lights .. Soon it hits him: It’s not that the traffic lights were not functioning at all, but rather they were all green ..

Our man begins to watch the coverage of the accidents on TV, where breathless commentators are blaming the crashes on the irrational and reckless behavior of drivers. He thinks: “That’s not fair. They did not act irrationally; they simply responded reasonably to a signal whose meaning they’ve long understood.” .. in this case that the cross-traffic has stopped, even the most rational, cautious drivers will get into accidents at intersections ..

.. it was the reality of the post-2001 boom that generated the financial crisis and Great Recession. The Austrian economist Israel Kirzner has long used traffic lights as an analogy for prices ..

When the central bank intervenes, however, it turns all the lights green .. This, like traffic patterns with broken signals, is not sustainable and will eventually lead to the economic equivalent of car crashes: the onset of a recession as this discoordination is revealed.

.. The next time a friend blames the boom and bust on irrational investors, you might recall our protagonist’s city and say: “The irrationality, dear friend, is not in our markets but in our government, that is, the central bank.”

The $8 billion iPod

A propósito de SPA preocupada com o número de falências na área da restauração,

O Conselho de Administração da SPA encara com a maior preocupação os números agora revelados que apontam para um aumento da ordem dos 60% a 70% dos estabelecimentos de restauração que encerraram as portas nos meses de Janeiro e Fevereiro de 2012, tendo este aumento como referência comparativa a situação de 2011. Este agravamento deve-se, sobretudo, ao aumento do IVA da restauração.

Estes números representam, além de um significativo agravamento das condições de vida da população portuguesa, uma inevitável redução das cobranças a efectuar na área da Execução Pública, sector vital para a estabilidade financeira da SPA e naturalmente para os autores.

Rob Reid: The $8 billion iPod

The music industry lobby group, the Recording Industry Association of America, is notorious for claiming enormous sums in economic losses, and has had a hit or miss record trying to defend such claims in court. In one case, a court rejected the RIAA’s calculations, stating,

Plaintiffs are suggesting an award that is more money than the entire music recording industry has made since Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877

Trade Promotes Peace

Does Trade Promote Peace?

Libertarianism is here to stay

Libertarianism is here to stay:

Libertarian philosophy places an emphasis on means rather than ends. It renews the ideals of classical liberalism by stressing that the government doesn’t know the goal of human existence, and it shouldn’t tell individuals how to lead their lives. Instead, this philosophy seeks to ensure the health of the system that is best suited to individuals seeking whatever ends they see fit: the free and voluntary exchange of unimpeded commerce.

We need to get away from the idea that we can impose our own morality upon others and that the government is the arena for this to happen. This, more than anything else, is what threatens to tear this country apart, when we derive so much economic benefit from being a big, diverse, unified nation. Morality is the domain of individuals and communities – not the government.

Dr. Paul’s views stem from a primarily economic viewpoint, but there are important philosophical dimensions to libertarianism as well. It is the difference between trying to codify every aspect of life to make it safe and fair and trying to embrace the freedom of the unknown future that has made America such a wonderful and ennobling place to live. It is the idea that government exists to perpetuate life and liberty, not to define the form liberty takes.

It requires a tremendous leap of faith to resist the urge to meddle in the economy, but the momentous lesson of Austrian economics, borne out of countless disasters of the 20th century, is that the more governments try to direct economies towards a certain end, the more they destroy the very mechanisms by which prosperity and agency are generated: voluntary exchange.

Keynesians know your limits!

Women know your limits!

Public Schools Must Be Abolished

Santorum And Harvard Anarchist Agree: Public Schools Must Be Abolished:

To appreciate how people could be so willfully blind as to permit such a ubiquitous malevolent presence as slavery, one needs only to look at American public schools. The analogy between public schooling and slavery is presented solely to demonstrate that both are socially destructive institutions that are sustained by the belief that oppression, when it is even acknowledged, is necessary and beneficial ..

Learned helplessness is a vital feature and takes place very early when children discover that they will never be permitted to follow their passions. This is axiomatic due to the inexorably rigid curriculum, structure, and design that must accompany processing large numbers of students. Every aspect of student life is controlled, including their surroundings, what they can do, how they can act, and what and how they may think. Public school students are under constant surveillance. Hallways and classrooms are monitored. Permission must be obtained to talk, leave the classroom, and even to use the bathroom. Lockers, backpacks, and persons are routinely searched. In many schools, police patrol the building and grounds. 95% of those police carry firearms. Break times are generally shorter than what prisoners of war are required to receive under the terms of the Third Geneva Convention. In fact, public schools consistently violate Articles 17, 18, 22, 25, 26, 38, 51, 52, 53, and 99, which govern discipline, labor demands, personal effects, general health and well being, diet, and exposure to humiliation. It is remarkable that parents voluntarily subject their children to conditions that would be considered war crimes if their children were enemy combatants.

The general philosophy of public schools is that civil rights are at odds with learning. Fear, humiliation, and degradation are routinely seen as indispensable educational tools. Because schooling numerous children at the same time requires submission and conformity, social efficiency must always dictate and be the final arbiter in all decisions involving public school administration.

Consequently, obedience to authority emerges as the most important lesson that any student will learn ..

The insistence that alternatives to public schooling must be presented in any discussion that attacks public schooling is a diversionary tactic that need not be entertained. Abolition of slavery was not postponed until there was a clear vision for how to integrate millions of former slaves into society ..

Gerrymandering (5)

Na continuação de Gerrymandering (4),


Gerrymandering Explained

The Fairness Fraud

The 'Fairness' Fraud por Thomas Sowell:

.. How does allowing politicians to take more money in taxes from successful people, to squander in ways that will improve their own reelection prospects, make anything more "fair" for others?

Even if additional tax revenue all went to poor single mothers – which it will not – the multiple problems of children raised by poor single mothers would not be cured by throwing money at them. Indeed, the skyrocketing of unwed motherhood began when government welfare programs began throwing money at teenage girls who got pregnant.

Children born and raised without fathers are a major problem to society and to themselves. There is nothing "fair" about increasing the number of such children.

To ask whether life is fair – either here and now, or at any time or place around the world, over the past several thousand years – is to ask a question whose answer is obvious. Life has seldom been within shouting distance of fair, in the sense of even approximately equal prospects of success.

Countries whose politicians have been able to squander ever larger amounts of a nation's resources have not only failed to make the world more fair, the concentration of more resources and power in these politicians' hands has led to results that were often counterproductive at best, and bloodily catastrophic at worst.

Simple Rules for a Complex World

No seguimento de Simplicity is Beautiful, e embora fraquinho no que diz respeito à "necessidade" do Estado, vale a pena prestar atenção:


Exploring Liberty: Simple Rules for a Complex World

The Santa Claus Government

The Santa Claus Government:

.. I .. believe that government should be like Santa, but in another way: unseen, unheard and questionable as the whether it even exists or not. This is a model that the anarcho-curious can quite easily grab on to and help perpetuate. Surely it’s harder to convince the statists that their belief in mandatory government is false than it is to tell them that the government is actually secretly in charge of everything and everything good that the free market does is actually the government. Just like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, children can grow up believing in government and when they come of age we can reveal to them that everything they thought the government was doing is being handled by private individuals working in the market. The statists will be happy thinking that government controls everything and will not seek to ruin our lives because they’re scared that if someone doesn’t control everything bad things will happen.

The only downside to all this is that we will be forced to lie to our statist friends and family about what is really going on lest they become despondent and confused because they’ve just found out their whole world is a lie. You may have a friend that you really want to tell, but exposing them to the idea that they are actually responsible for their own actions and have been their entire life is a concept too shocking for most people. Just like a parent taking their hands off a kid’s bike when they’re learning to ride, it’s something that has to be done silently lest the rider lose confidence and crash. It’s up to you to keep your statist friends and family ignorant so they don’t freak out and actually try to govern us.

Estado mínimo e tirania

No Western Govt Has Ever Claimed The Power To Do This! Not Hitler! Not Stalin! Not Russia Or China!

Constituições

I No Longer Want To “Restore The Constitution”:

Consider that constitutions are pieces of paper that purport to give some arbitrary body of men the legitimacy to rob people at the point of a gun in order to supposedly secure “their liberties.” I don’t know about you, but armed robbery seems like a ridiculous way to secure someone’s “liberty”.

The Constitution codifies and legitimizes mass theft, war and the imposition of regulations upon commercial enterprise that ought not to exist in the first place. Constitutions, no matter how they are written, ALWAYS reduce individual liberty because they always seek to legitimize coercively funded State power and centralize it within some governing body.

Constitutions are not voluntary contracts that people agree to. If you happen to disagree with being robbed at the point of a gun, you have no recourse other than to die at the hands of an army of costumed men defending your property from them. Either you pay or you can resist and die. Why anyone would want to support a document that legitimizes this situation is beyond me.

Constitutions are documents created by powerful people who seek to acquire and legitimize more power unto themselves. Constitutions legitimize mass theft, extortion, war and other heinous crimes against humanity. Constitutions centralize power. Constitutions violate the non-aggression principle as they are imposed upon everyone regardless of their consent.

Religious Liberty

Imam, Priest, Rabbi: Religious Liberty and The Birth Control Mandate

Libertarians and elections

Libertarians and elections (and why it is necessary to get involved now)

Nearly all libertarians are political, but very few are in office and that’s where a lot of our problems start .. Many libertarians oppose operating within the current system, as it’s taking part in what they see as an immoral system, Now unless you have enough money to go out and start your own country in the middle of the desert or ocean away from the tax man, this is stupid and will do you no favours. In the western world if you want to be taken seriously, you have to play the politics game.

It would be a very sad thing if liberty were allowed to stagnate and turn into a cesspool of conspiracy theorists and survivalist nutjobs. It is imperative that libertarians, both prominent old ones and newcomers just discovering how terrible the government is, are vocal in their ideas and actively try to change the system for the better.

Of course it’s hard to come to terms with the fact that at least for the foreseeable future, we’re going to have to choose between the lesser of two evils, it doesn’t mean you can’t try to change things from within. Look at what Ron Paul is doing over in the US at the moment. He may not be winning but he’s got every other republican candidate talking about auditing the fed, real cuts to spending and maybe even questioning the sacred cow of military spending. Gary Johnson (arguably the more libertarian of the two) on the other hand is a possible election spoiler with his attempt to run for the Libertarian Party nomination splitting the libertarian vote and perhaps putting Obama back in for another 4 years. Thankfully in Australia, where we have preferential voting, we don’t have that problem, we can all vote for greater liberty whilst hedging our bets by preferencing the less tyrannical of the two major parties, whichever one happens to be that particular election.

Order

The Search for the Weaver of Dreams ... by Russell Roberts

The Myth of the Greater Good

The Myth of the Greater Good:

I—and most other people, I assume—grew up being taught that the end doesn’t justify the means. Basically, this is an injunction not to rationalize one’s behavior while using other people as mere means to one’s ends.

.. why is the principle that the end doesn’t justify the means absent from most discussion of government policy? Why are political measures routinely defended on the sole basis that they will bring about some good consequence that supposedly outweighs the costs (from the perspective of those who propose them)? This happens all the time ..

In all these cases and more, those who proffer the government policy seem to think that all they need do is identify a consequence as the “greater good” and the discussion is over. The end justifies the means ..

.. there are always costs to—and therefore victims of—any government action. Government is force, and “[c]oercive intervention . . . signifies per se that the individual or individuals coerced would not have done what they are now doing were it not for the intervention” (Murray Rothbard, Power and Market). ..

The proponents of such measures never tell us why the benefits they aim for are more important than the benefits other people will have to do without. But of course they couldn’t tell us: The benefits are incommensurable.

Furthermore, apart from the material loss, the victims’ progressive loss of freedom is real both in the immediate instance as well as with respect to the precedent set for future government action (the slippery slope). Intervention begets intervention as policy makers try to clean up the mess their previous actions created.

.. considerations apart from the end are highly relevant—such as the injunction never to use another person as a mere means. To ignore those considerations is to mock human dignity and countenance the slave principle.

That’s basic to how we ordinarily think about morality. But politicians and those who leech off their power flout this insight as a matter of course.

Censoring the past

Ezra Levant: Larry Miller Is Right & Irwin Cotler...well don't get him started

BÓNUS: Censoring Hitler — and the past

Simplicity is Beautiful

Principles of Law: Simplicity is Beautiful:

The U.S. Constitution is a model of simplicity. You can read the whole thing in under a half hour. And that is the secret of its success. It doesn’t need to outline the specifics of agricultural or trade policy. That’s Congress’ job.

The EU’s de facto constitution runs well over 200 pages. Where the U.S. Constitution paints with a broad brush, the European Union fills in every last detail. Most countries, including the U.S., are turning to this top-down model and rejecting the Constitution’s more bottom-up approach.

The reason is a shift in the intellectual climate. Negative rights are out of fashion now. Positive rights are all the rage. Negative rights are the kind that pervade the U.S. Constitution: don’t hit other people, don’t take their stuff, don’t break your contracts. Don’t, don’t don’t.

Positive rights do sound nice, but in practice they are profoundly illiberal. That is because positive rights often contradict each other. If I break a bone and my doctor has a legal right to be on vacation, one of us has to have our positive rights violated. That means someone has to decide. Someone with a lot of power. Life and death, in some cases. A government with the power to make those kinds of decisions is very powerful indeed. Positive rights systems require large, powerful governments. Rights violations are both frequent and arbitary.

Negative rights have no such conflicts. That’s a big reason why the U.S. Constitution is so simply constructed .. The majority of the document is about placing strict limits on those powers. When the people are left alone, they largely prosper. Let them build from the bottom up. The view from the top on down is too distant to catch the necessary details.

In the law, as in so many other areas, simplicity is beautiful.

Brown M&Ms

Brown M&Ms from Van Halen

dismantling corporatism

Romney’s “Free Enterprise System”: As Statist as Stalin’s Five-Year Plan:

.. it was deliberate collusion between the state and big business, especially in the 1850s and the Gilded Age, to set up a centralized corporate economy. There simply wouldn’t have been an economy dominated by large manufacturers and wholesalers serving a single national market, were it not for things like railroad land grants and other subsidies to make long-distance distribution artificially cheap, and the pooling or exchange of industrial patents to cartelize markets. Not to mention gunboat diplomacy to make sure overbuilt U.S. industry could operate at capacity.

This was a top-down revolution, in which the state was very much involved ..

The managerial/professional New Class of corporate managers was first recruited from industrial engineers after the Civil War, and around the turn of the 20th century the new corporate-state alliance gave rise to other centralized institutions (bureaucratic charitable foundations, universities, large urban public school systems) that served as auxiliaries to the corporate state either by processing human resources for it, or by mitigating the human casualties of corporate rule (e.g., managing the underclass through the welfare and prison systems).

And now, after 150 years of this .. it’s in the process of being dismantled by human action. Despite the system’s attempts to indoctrinate us to the contrary, we are not powerless. We’re in the midst of another Great Uprising .. And unlike the last time, this time the technological revolution has put the advantage on the side of the Uprising. This time it’s us building the revolution, and the corporate state finds itself fighting a desperate rearguard action to stop us.

The Expansion of Federal Power

FDR, The New Deal, and The Expansion of Federal Power with Authors Burton and Anita Folsom

Why Is There a Euro Crisis?

Why Is There a Euro Crisis? por Philipp Bagus:

Today's banks are not free-market institutions. They live in a symbiosis with governments that they are financing. The banks' survival depends on privileges and government interventions.

Europeans politicians want the euro to survive. For it to do so, they think that they have to rescue irresponsible governments with public money. Banks are the main creditors of such governments. Thus, bank stocks soared.

The spending mess goes in a circle. Banks have financed irresponsible governments such as that of Greece. Now the Greek government partially defaults. As a consequence, European governments rescue banks by bailing them out directly or by giving loans to the Greek government. Banks can then continue to finance governments ..

In order to support the banking system during the crisis and to limit the number of bankruptcies, central banks had to keep interest rates at historically low levels. They thereby facilitated the accumulation of government debts. Consequently, the pressure on central banks to print the governments' way out of their debt crisis is building up.

Instead of allowing the market to react to credit expansion, governments increased their debts and sacrificed the value of the currencies we are using. The remedy to the distortions caused by credit expansion would have been the fast liquidation of malinvestments, banks, and governments. As the innocent users of the currencies are paying for the bailouts, it is difficult not to be a liquidationist.

the Morality and Role of Capitalism

Na continuação de The Evolution of Liberalism,


Douglas Rasmussen on the Morality and Role of Capitalism

Northeast Passage

Was the Northeast Passage first navigated in 1660?:

David Melgueiro, a Portuguese navigator, might have been the first to navigate the Northeast Passage (known now as Northern Sea Route), between 1660 and 1662, more than 200 years before Adolf Erik Nordenskjöld, who did it ​​in 1878.

Sobretudo interessante...

China and Transportation

China and Transportation: What We Can Learn In The United States

White Rose Society

White Rose Society:

The White Rose (German: die Weiße Rose) was a non-violent, intellectual resistance group in Nazi Germany, consisting of students from the University of Munich and their philosophy professor. The group became known for an anonymous leaflet and graffiti campaign, lasting from June 1942 until February 1943, that called for active opposition to dictator Adolf Hitler's regime.

The six most recognized members of the group were arrested by the Gestapo and beheaded in 1943. The text of their sixth leaflet was smuggled by Helmuth James Graf von Moltke out of Germany through Scandinavia to the United Kingdom, and in July 1943 copies of it were dropped over Germany by Allied planes, retitled "The Manifesto of the Students of Munich."

Arquivo dos panfletos

Ron Paul @ Arizona

All Of Ron Paul's Highlights At The GOP CNN Arizona Debate
part 1 | part 2

Corporatism Is Not the Free Market

Corporatism Is Not the Free Market:

The managerial state has assumed responsibility for looking after everything from the incomes of the middle class to the profitability of large corporations to industrial advancement. This system . . . is . . . an economic order that harks back to Bismarck in the late nineteenth century and Mussolini in the twentieth: corporatism.

In various ways, corporatism chokes off the dynamism that makes for engaging work, faster economic growth, and greater opportunity and inclusiveness. It maintains lethargic, wasteful, unproductive, and well-connected firms at the expense of dynamic newcomers and outsiders, and favors declared goals such as industrialization, economic development, and national greatness over individuals’ economic freedom and responsibility. Today, airlines, auto manufacturers, agricultural companies, media, investment banks, hedge funds, and much more has [sic] at some point been deemed too important to weather the free market on its own, receiving a helping hand from government in the name of the “public good.”

.. dysfunctional corporations that survive despite their gross inability to serve their customers; sclerotic economies with slow output growth, a dearth of engaging work, scant opportunities for young people; governments bankrupted by their efforts to palliate these problems; and increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of those connected enough to be on the right side of the corporatist deal.

Daniel Hannan @ CPAC

Full Speech Daniel Hannan at CPAC 2012 » The Right Scoop

Nazi Exceptionalism

Nazi Exceptionalism; or, How Godwin’s Law Gets It Backward:

Godwin’s Law, by treating Nazi Germany as some sort of unique, metaphysical evil in human history, essentially nullifies its practical lessons for people in other times and places. Although Nazi precedents are now used as symbols of ultimate evil — just look at Darth Vader — they didn’t seem anywhere so dramatic to the German people at the time they were happening.

Nazi repression came about incrementally, in the background, as people lived their ordinary daily lives. Each new upward ratcheting of the security state was justified as something not all that novel or unprecedented, just a common sense measure undertaken from practical concerns for “security.”

The tenor of CNN’s coverage of Russia’s “aggression” against Georgia in August 2008 was hardly different from that of the German press in response to Poland’s alleged aggression against ethnic Germans in Danzig in 1939. And if the United States attacks Iran based on a recycled version of the Iraqi WMD lies of nine years ago, you can be absolutely certain the major news networks will dust off the red-white-and-blue bunting and the Wall of Heroes, reporting America’s “defensive” action against the “Iranian threat” as straight news. After all, things like the Diem overthrow and the Tonkin Gulf Incident have nothing at all in common with the SS black flag operation in Danzig.

People are people, and the lessons of history apply to all of us. If you kid yourself otherwise, you’re setting yourself up for a fall.

America’s Future

Is Harrisburg's Nightmare America's Future?

Anticommons

Anticommons is Too Common:

Rent-control creates what the legal scholar Michael Heller describes as a “tragedy of the anticommons.”* This tragedy arises when too many people can veto decisions on moving property from one use to another. Without rent-control, authority to decide the use of an apartment rests exclusively with that apartment’s owner, subject only to the terms of the lease he or she signs with tenants. With rent-control, however, this authority is shared with tenants (beyond the terms of their lease) and with the rent-control board. The need to get so many people to unanimously approve changes in how property is used stifles the market’s capacity to move property from lower-valued to higher-valued uses.

Heller explained that the “tragedy of the anticommons” significantly slowed economic development in post-Soviet Russia. How sad that housing in modern-day New York City suffers from the very same government-created tragedy.

Freedom2Trade

Eurasia Freedom2Trade Campaign English

Corporativismo e a bolha imobiliária (2)

No seguimento de Corporativismo e a bolha imobiliária, Local Governments Also To Blame For Housing Crisis:

Most narratives of the financial-mortgage-housing crisis tend to focus on what are essentially demand-side factors. Whether it is federal mortgage subsidies, like Fannie Mae, or reduced interest rates via loose monetary policy, these policies increase the demand for housing by allowing, and encouraging, more buyers to enter the market. As I’ve written in more detail elsewhere, this narrative ignores the supply side of the market.

So who has the most influence over housing supply? Local governments. A recent article in the January 2012 issue of the Journal of Urban Economics provides empirical evidence ”that more restrictive residential land use regulations and geographic land constraints are linked to larger booms and busts in housing prices. The natural and man-made constraints also amplify price responses to the subprime mortgage credit expansion during the decade, leading to greater price increases in the boom and subsequently bigger losses.” ..

The lesson here is that if we want to avoid future property booms and busts, with their devastating impact on financial institutions, we also need to reform our local land use controls to allow for the more rapid response of supply to changes in demand. Again, it wasn’t a lack of regulation that caused the crisis, but too much regulation, particularly of the land/housing market.

Intervenção de AMN (11)

No seguimento de Intervenção de AMN (10)


Queixam-se da governamentalização da RTP e querem manter 2 canais...

Corporativismo e a bolha imobiliária

Corrupted Capitalism and the Housing Crisis:

Capitalism is (or was) an “economic system in which capital was privately owned and traded; owners of capital got to judge how best to use it, and could draw on the foresight and creative ideas of entrepreneurs and innovative thinkers.” The main dynamic of the market system is the relationship between the producer and the consumer. Corporatism, by contrast, brings to the fore the role of the “managerial state,” in which the government takes on an increasingly larger task in telling producers what they should produce and consumers what they should consume. This can be done in many ways, some more implicit and others more aggressive. Corporatism is distinct from socialism, because under corporatism the means of production (capital) remain in private hands. But the private firms are not simply free to respond to market signals. Instead, under a corporatist structure, the government directs firms in the ways in which they should employ their resources, sometimes through moral suasion, but more often through regulation, tax policy, and legal directives. Fascism, which uses coercion, bullying, and demagoguery to control private firms, is an extreme form of corporatism.

The consequences of contemporary corporatism can be seen most strikingly in the recent growth and collapse of the housing market bubble. It would be hard to overstate the role of the government in fostering the conditions leading up to the collapse. For decades politicians have been extolling the ideal of home ownership as constitutive of the “American dream,” in speeches and in concrete policy ..

.. various administrations and legislative sessions have pursued domestic policies that intend to make good on the American promise of homeownership for all. Whether or not homeownership is something that is good for everyone was never seriously questioned; the only question was the way in which the government could persuade, incentivize, and even coerce individuals and institutions to become home mortgage borrowers and lenders. The phrase “ownership society” takes on a much more tragic connotation when uttered on this side of the millions of foreclosures that occurred during this crisis.

suicídio fiscal made easy

Zero Hedge

Acabar com o défice, star-wars-style

A Modest Proposal To Boost US GDP By $852 Quadrillion: Build The Imperial Death Star:

As such we propose that the US, already the world's most expansionist and aggressive foreign policy power .. should one up itself and build the true symbol of its contemporary socio-historical status: the Imperial Death Star. Yet the real benefit in addition to blowing up various alien world that refuse to bail out the world's central bank confederacy, is that the cost of construction of said Keynesian masterpiece, would be an epic $852 quadrillion, which in turn would go straight to US GDP.

Ron Paul after Maine

Ron Paul speech after Maine Caucus results CNN 2/11/12

Euro-bullying

EU Threatens Tiny Switzerland Over Low Taxes:

Despite not being a member of the European Union, Switzerland is under intense pressure from Brussels to raise taxes as companies flee high-tax EU welfare states in favor of more business-friendly Swiss cantons. And if the nation refuses to bow down soon, so-called “eurocrats” are threatening retaliation.

The Swiss model works so well that even as the EU and its single euro currency face a crisis of monumental proportions and possible economic implosion, Switzerland’s economy is doing just fine. Its GDP per capita is about double the EU’s, while its unemployment rate is around half.

The Swiss government also consistently posts budget surpluses as its bloated EU neighbors drown in debt and seek bailouts. In fact, Switzerland is even helping to fund the handouts for profligate European regimes. And its economy is the most competitive in the world, according to the global competitiveness index.

With a heavily armed population of less than eight million, Switzerland has maintained its sovereignty and independence through two world wars raging on all sides and the more recent erection of the EU, which now completely surrounds the tiny alpine nation. With a decentralized system of government, the Swiss have also been able to largely preserve their liberty despite constant European pressure.

Incredibly, EU bosses claim to consider low corporate tax rates a form of subsidies. And if the Swiss refuse to comply with European demands, the punishment could be devastating — especially because Switzerland depends so heavily on international trade.

Of course, the EU is not the only ailing powerhouse to bully the Swiss. Last year, the U.S. government was terrorizing the nation about its banking and tax laws, too. And the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — which has essentially become a “cartel” for bloated welfare regimes — also consistently targets Switzerland’s economic liberty.

Some critics said the EU was using Switzerland as a scapegoat for its own self-made economic crisis. Others lambasted European leaders for terrorizing the tiny country instead of fixing the EU’s own problems — possibly by using the Swiss model that seems to work so well for Switzerland.

hurtful socialism

Noble savagery

The Noble Savage:

Human beings have not, can not, and never will live in harmony with nature. Our prosperity and health depend on technology driven by energy. We exercise our intelligence to command nature, and were admonished by Francis Bacon to exercise our dominion with “sound reason and true religion.” When we are told that our primary energy source, oil, is “making us sick,” or that we are “addicted” to oil, these are only the latest examples of otherwise rational persons descending into gibberish after swooning to the lure of the Noble Savage. This ignorant exultation of the primitive can only lead us back to the Stone Age.

Restoring Honor

Ron Paul: Restoring Honor. Restoring America.

United States military deployments

United States military deployments (Wikipedia):

The military of the United States is deployed in more than 150 countries around the world, with more than 205,118 of its 1,425,113[1] active-duty personnel serving outside the United States and its territories. Most of these overseas personnel are deployed in combat zones in the Middle east, as part of the War on Terror. Many of the remainder are located at installations activated during the Cold War, by which the US government sought to challenge the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War II.

The U.S. military "is in 130 countries. We have 900 bases around the world."Ron Paul says U.S. has military personnel in 130 nations and 900 overseas bases:

During the Sept. 12, 2011, Republican presidential debate in Tampa, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas -- a staunch advocate of limited government and a more modest military footprint -- offered a surprising statistic about the reach of the U.S. armed forces.

"We're under great threat, because we occupy so many countries," Paul said. "We're in 130 countries. We have 900 bases around the world. We're going broke. The purpose of al-Qaida was to attack us, invite us over there, where they can target us. And they have been doing it. They have more attacks against us and the American interests per month than occurred in all the years before 9/11, but we're there occupying their land. And if we think that we can do that and not have retaliation, we're kidding ourselves. We have to be honest with ourselves. What would we do if another country, say, China, did to us what we do to all those countries over there?"

Libertarians

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Citação Liberal do Dia

Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law.

Edward Abbey

Markets Not Capitalism

"Markets Not Capitalism," Says Professor Gary Chartier

Social Pathology

Rising Black Social Pathology por Walter Williams:

Many black students are alien and hostile to the education process. They are permitted to make education impossible for other students. Their misbehavior and violence require schools to divert resources away from education and spend them on security, such as hiring school police and purchasing metal detectors, all of which does little for school safety. The violent school climate discourages the highest-skilled teachers from teaching at schools where they risk assaults, intimidation and theft. At a bare minimum, part of the solution to school violence and poor academic performance should be the expulsion of students who engage in assaults and disrespectful behavior. You say, "What's to be done for these students?" Even if we don't know what to do with them, how compassionate and intelligent is it to permit them to make education impossible for other students?

The fact that black parents, teachers, politicians and civil rights organizations tolerate and make excuses for the despicable and destructive behavior of so many young blacks is a gross betrayal of the memory, struggle, sacrifice, sweat and blood of our ancestors. The sorry and tragic state of black education is not going to be turned around until there's a change in what's acceptable and unacceptable behavior by young people. That change has to come from within the black community.

lobbyists keep pot illegal

CPAC retired police officer explains how big money lobbyists keep pot illegal

Culpar al capitalismo del corporativismo

Culpar al capitalismo del corporativismo, por Edmund S. Phelps y Ammous:

Ahora el sistema capitalista se ha corrompido. El Estado gestor ha asumido el cometido de ocuparse de todo: desde los ingresos de la clase media hasta los beneficios de las grandes empresas y el progreso industrial. Sin embargo, el sistema no es capitalismo, sino un orden económico que se remonta a Bismark, al final del siglo XIX, y a Mussolini, en el siglo XX: el corporativismo.

En sus diversas formas, el corporativismo ahoga el dinamismo que contribuye al trabajo atractivo, un crecimiento económico más rápido, mayores oportunidades y menos exclusión. Mantiene empresas letárgicas, despilfarradoras, improductivas y bien relacionadas con el poder a expensas de emprendedores dinámicos y ajenos a él y prefiere objetivos declarados, como, por ejemplo, la industrialización, el desarrollo económico y la grandeza nacional, a la libertad económica y la responsabilidad de los individuos. En la actualidad, se ha llegado a considerar que compañías aéreas, fabricantes de automóviles, empresas agrarias, medios de comunicación, bancos de inversión, fondos de cobertura y muchos más eran demasiado importantes para afrontar por sí solos el mercado libre, por lo que han recibido ayudas del Estado en nombre del “bien público”.

Los costos del corporativismo resultan aparentes a nuestro alrededor: empresas disfuncionales que sobreviven pese a su flagrante incapacidad para servir a sus clientes; economías escleróticas con un lento aumento de la producción; escasez de trabajo atractivo y de oportunidades para los jóvenes; Estados en quiebra por las medidas adoptadas para paliar esos problemas y una concentración en aumento de la riqueza en manos de quienes están lo suficientemente bien relacionados para beneficiarse del pacto corporativista.

La legitimidad del corporativismo se está erosionando, junto con la salud fiscal de los gobiernos que han contado con él. Si los políticos no pueden revocarlo, el corporativismo se destruirá a sí mismo y quedará enterrado bajo las deudas y las suspensiones de pagos y de los desacreditados escombros corporativistas podría resurgir un sistema capitalista. Entonces “capitalismo” tendría de nuevo su significado verdadero, en lugar del que le han atribuido los corporativistas que procuraban ocultarse tras él y los socialistas que deseaban denigrarlo.

The Economics of Valentine’s Day

The Economics of Valentine's Day

Small Government, Big Military Incompatible

Small Government, Big Military Incompatible:

I maintain small-government conservatism and big-government military spending are inherently contradictory. Simply put, maintaining and expanding a substantial U.S. military presence throughout the world for 60 years has proved incredibly expensive and has inevitably “grown” the size of government. Major wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq (not to mention extensive bombing and missile attacks in Yugoslavia and Libya) have all have been associated with significant increases in government spending and an unsustainable national debt.

It’s time for fiscal conservatives to face reality: Our interventionist foreign policy has contributed to our near-bankruptcy. We have a $16 trillion national debt, tax revenue that covers only 60 percent of current expenditures, and an inability to pay our bills without massive borrowing or Federal Reserve money inflation.

Bluntly put, our federal government is broken. Can and should we fund legitimate domestic defense? Of course. But should we continue to pay for so-called “wars of opportunity,” the subsidization of our prosperous European allies, or nation building in Africa or in the Middle East? No way.

Poverty & Dependence

Poverty & Dependence

Abortion, Left and Right

Abortion, Left and Right:

I hear nobody saying, "Wait a minute. Government should not be in the business of either financing or forbidding abortions. If you want an abortion, that's your absolute right -- and your absolute responsibility to find a way to pay for it." In fact, this is true of all medical care, or any commodity, product or service that one wants or needs. Your need or desire for it does not impose an obligation on a stranger to pay for it!

Leftists claim to be "pro-choice" but they couldn't care less about the choice of people who disagree with them to act on their own judgment or consciences. This tells you all you need to know about the tyranny underlying "liberalism" as we know it. Similarly, social conservatives are just as happy to use the force of government to impose their will on others. They don't want consenting adults of the same sex to enter into contractual agreements, and they don't want women who choose to not become mothers to exercise their individual right not to do so.

.. Religious conservatives .. They're offended by the fact that people are having abortions. So what? .. Don't have one yourself. Everywhere you turn, there's a social conservative offended by something.

Liberals are no better. They're not offended by the same things as social conservatives. They're deeply offended by anyone being successful, especially if that means making a lot of money (which it usually does). They're deeply offended by imbalances or inequities of any kind, even though differences in strength and ability are an inherent part of human nature. They're at war with reality, and they expect government to turn the natural into what they consider the ideal-- an "ideal" that every time it's practiced or attempted (as in socialism, fascism or Communism) turns into an unspeakable nightmare for millions.

Delegates

Doug Wead on The Rachel Maddow Show MSNBC 2/10/12

A saque

Onde estão os liberais?:

Eu faço parte da geração que foi fodida por consecutivas políticas socialistas e que se viu forçada a emigrar. São estes mesmos que se vêem agora na eminência de não poder voltar sem que o facto de trazer mais de 48 mil euros para o país permita a um qualquer burocrata invadir a sua privacidade. Leram bem: qualquer emigrante (por definição alguém que não tem declarações fiscais que provem a sua riqueza) que regresse a Portugal com mais de 48 mil euros na conta bancária poderá ser constituido arguido e vêr a sua privacidade invadida.

É a cedência ao socialismo mais radical que, por incrível que pareça, só poderá ser parado pela constituição de Abril.

Take Freedom Back

Are you ready to Take America Back?

Words vs. Subsidies

Words vs. Subsidies:

I simply dislike preachy people trying to save others from evils du jour. But part of my reaction springs from the contradiction between Ms. Obama’s preaching and Mr. Obama’s legislating.

Obamacare severely and artificially restricts insurers from applying exclusions based on a patient’s pre-existing conditions. People choosing unhealthy diets, therefore, no longer have to worry that their choices will reduce their access to health insurance. This legislation thus removes an incentive – one supplied by market forces – for people to make healthier dietary choices.

So on one hand we have Ms. Obama using smiles and words to encourage Americans to eat healthier foods, while Mr. Obama uses other people’s money to pay Americans to ignore his wife’s advice.

Wanna guess which of these Obamas will have the greatest effect on people’s actual diets?

Primary Elections Explained

Primary Elections Explained (v1.1)

memoria historica

Unanimidad contra Garzón por 'laminar el derecho de defensa':

En una sentencia demoledora, el Tribunal Supremo ha condenado este jueves a once años de inhabilitación al juez Baltasar Garzón por un delito de prevaricación al interceptar las conversaciones entre los principales imputados en la trama Gürtel y sus letrados en los locutorios carcelarios de Soto del Real (Madrid). La prevaricación, consistente en dictar resoluciones injustas a sabiendas de que lo son, es el delito más grave que se le puede atribuir a un miembro del Poder Judicial.

La Sala, compuesta por siete magistrados, entiende de forma unánime que Garzón "restringió de forma arbitraria" el derecho de defensa –un derecho fundamental reconocido por la Constitución ..

En términos muy duros, la sentencia señala que Garzón colocó "a todo el proceso penal español, teóricamente dotado de las garantías constitucionales y legales propias de un Estado de Derecho contemporáneo, al nivel de los sistemas políticos y procesales característicos de tiempos ya superados, (...) admitiendo prácticas que en los tiempos actuales solo se encuentran en los regímenes totalitarios en los que todo se considera válido para obtener la información que interesa, o se supone que interesa, al Estado".

El Tribunal Supremo, que afirma que no hay en sus anales un precedente como éste donde un juez ordenara grabar las conversaciones entre imputados en una trama de corrupción y todas las defensas, añade que con esta medida también se pudo afectar a otros derechos como el de la intimidad, el secreto profesional o el derecho a no declarar ante un juez.

BÓNUS:
- Las piruetas jurídicas que han llevado a Garzón al banquillo
- La prescripción del delito de cohecho salva a Garzón de un tercer juicio
- Garzón planea encabezar un nuevo partido para aglutinar a los 'indignados'