Agricrap

My grandfather was a farmer; believe me when I say I’m all in favor of family farming as a lifestyle. But massive subsidies are wrecking markets, doing substantial humanitarian damage, and promoting environmental destruction. Stay tuned in the next few weeks for an opportunity to fight farming subsidies.

Long live Britain! No more gun bans!

Hope for a change

This week, America commemorates two momentous occasions. This year, the first African American president was inaugurated. He takes office on the promise of respecting the dignity of the poor, the needy, the sick, the immigrant, the prisoner, the homosexual, and the outcast. This is change we can believe in.

Hopefully, so is this.

Bush is a regulate and spend liberal!

Michael Tanner over at Cato is very, very right. Obama can blame Bush or he can blame the free market for America’s recent problems, but blaming both is just ridiculous. The massive trends towards privatization and deregulation in the past eight years that Obama went all Kucinich on during the campaign are not a part of observable reality. If anything, they stopped when Clinton left office.

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/01/13/of-course-that-implies-he-had-principles/

“President Bush says that he ‘chucked aside my free-market principles’ when faced with the current financial crisis. Well, duh!

The president said that he had no choice because he was “concerned that the credit freeze would cause us to be headed toward a depression greater than the Great Depression.” Even if one accepts that rather contestable premise, one is tempted to ask what caused him to chuck aside conservative and free market principles when he:

* Increased federal domestic discretionary spending (even before the bailout) faster than any president since Lyndon Johnson.
* Enacted the largest new entitlement program since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, an unfunded Medicare prescription drug benefit that could add as much as $11.2 trillion to the program’s unfunded liabilities;
* Dramatically increased federal control over local schools while increasing federal education spending by nearly 61 percent;
* Signed a campaign finance bill that greatly restricts freedom of speech, despite saying he believed it was unconstitutional;
* Authorized warrantless wiretapping and given vast new powers to law enforcement;
* Federalized airport security and created a new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security;
* Added roughly 7,000 pages of new federal regulations, bringing the cost of federal regulations to the economy to more than $1.1 trillion;
* Enacted a $1.5 billion program to promote marriage;
* Proposed a $1.7 billion initiative to develop a hydrogen-powered car;
* Abandoned traditional conservative support for free trade by imposing tariffs and other import restrictions on steel and lumber;
* Expanded President Clinton’s national service program;
* Increased farm subsidies;
* Launched an array of new regulations on corporate governance and accounting; and
* Generally did more to centralize government power in the executive branch than any administration since Richard Nixon.”

Ever seen a train coming down the tracks?

Funny thing is, 3 years and 30 million poor retirees later, the “progressive” media will still spin this to look like greedy corporations screwing helpless Americans:

http://reason.com/news/show/130843.html

Radical Biblical Capitalism

An occasionally-flawed, yet ultimately consistent, rebuttal to “Christian” socialism: http://mises.org/story/2918

Equality has held steady for twenty years…

…but income reporting on tax forms has not. See pages 20 and 21 for the fastest visual evidence that the top percent of richest Americans is doing no better today compared to everyone else than it was in 1987. Read the rest to see why it looks like they are in many publications.

Click to access pa586.pdf

Pacem in Terris

Among other things, Cardinal Renato Martino said, “Look at the conditions in Gaza: more and more, it resembles a big concentration camp.”

People of conscience everywhere must remember that Palestine has been occupied for forty years. Regardless of the merits of this particular offensive or that one, the occupation has left 60% of Gazans without clean drinking water every day. It has disenfranchised 2.5 million people in their own homeland and violated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by denying these people a homeland. It has led to the destruction of countless families, livelihoods, and ideals.

No matter what these coming weeks bring, ending the illegal and permanent military and political occupation of Palestine must be at the forefront of Middle Eastern peace efforts and humanitarian work today and for however long it takes until Palestine is free.

1967 is over. 42 years later, it is high time to acknowledge the sovereignty and self-determination of the people of Palestine and their right to govern, trade, and live as they choose as a member of the community of nations.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7817019.stm

Pacem in Terris

Among other things, Cardinal Renato Martino said, “Look at the conditions in Gaza: more and more, it resembles a big concentration camp.”

People of conscience everywhere must remember that Palestine has been occupied for forty years. Regardless of the merits of this particular offensive or that one, the occupation has left 60% of Gazans without clean drinking water every day. It has disenfranchised 2.5 million people in their own homeland and violated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by denying these people a homeland. It has led to the destruction of countless families, livelihoods, and ideals.

No matter what these coming weeks bring, ending the illegal and permanent military and political occupation of Palestine must be at the forefront of Middle Eastern peace efforts and humanitarian work today and for however long it takes until Palestine is free.

1967 is over. 42 years later, it is high time to acknowledge the sovereignty and self-determination of the people of Palestine and their right to govern, trade, and live as they choose as a member of the community of nations.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7817019.stm

Rise of the Unqualified

Sanjay Gupta, 39, has been offered the position of Surgeon General by President-Elect Obama. You likely remember him from CNN, where he serves as top medical adviser. Performing emergency surgery on a few Iraq War vets is fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but it qualifies you to be head up the American government’s public health care bureaucracy about as much as Ben Goodman is qualified to sit on the War Powers Committee because he (presumably) attended Model UN one year.

Leon Panetta has been nominated to serve as the director of the CIA. He is best known for being a Washington insider who can pull strings for presidents and make politics happen. During his terms in Congress, he never sat on the Intelligence Committee. Since then, much of his work has focused on protecting the world’s oceans. If confirmed, he will be in charge of rooting out corruption and abuse, hunting for Osama bin Laden, and discovering the truth about nukes in North Korea and Iran, and at the sprightly age of 70, leading the entirety of America’s covert intelligence operations.

Timothy Geithner has been nominated to serve as Secretary of the Treasury. In his 47 years of life, he has enjoyed fly fishing, tennis, skateboarding, and cussing. His qualifications include advising the government to buy out AIG and Bear Sterns (but not Lehman Brothers) and helping spend US dollars to bail out Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, and Thailand in the past two decades.

President-Elect Obama, 47, served part of a term in the Senate. He is best known for a riveting convention speech in 2004, immediately after which he began running for president. He introduced two pieces of legislation in his Senate years: one to prevent nuclear proliferation and one to set up a website to track government spending, which he pledges to increase. He becomes leader of the free world in 14 days.

Michael Novak, a lifelong Democrat and Catholic intellectual, wrote in the latest edition of First Things about some of the lack of foresight that got our economy into a mess. Perhaps it is worth reflecting on what happens when good intentions result in awful things when executed by people who simply don’t know what they’re doing:

“The core of the crisis lay in the field of mortgages…. Beginning with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, the political system helped create this mess. The aim was a noble one: to put as many poor people in homes as possible. And it had its early successes, with more than a million poor people coming to own their own homes for the first time. Indeed, in the 1990s (under the leadership of Franklin Raines and Leland Brendsel) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—mortgage lenders secured by government commitments—were given this as their leading purpose.

This was a goal I had shared since at least my 1971 book The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, and I applauded Fannie Mae for this achievement—despite the foresight of my colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute who warned of the eventual costs to the nation. Many in Congress cheered as well, but gradually they did more than cheer. They began to violate age-old banking cautions and practices: forbidding mortgage lenders to demand down payments or to do strict scrutiny of the ability of new borrowers to make regular mortgage payments. They also made mortgage lenders subject to lawsuits—by special-interest groups and pressure groups—if they insisted on what for generations had been thought to be due diligence.

These decisions attracted swarms of speculators to new homes to take advantage of these wholly new and unheard-of incentives. A great many mortgages were granted to well-off people who made use of the incredibly lenient terms to buy or build extra homes for resale. Many economic conservatives warned against this Ponzi scheme. Several attempts by Republican members of the Congress to introduce serious reforms were rebuffed by the friends of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in Congress, who insisted that the financing of these two enterprises were [sic] sound and safe: Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, and Christopher Dodd, prominently, with many others joining in.

Independent investigators at last inspected the Fannie Mae accounting books, and massive irregularities were discovered. Top leadership was obliged to resign. But fundamental regulatory changes were blocked. The loose, unregulated practices, defended in the name of noble intentions, were allowed to stand. In a crucial way, the mortgage crisis of 2008 was initiated by specific acts passed by Congress and fiercely defended against detailed warnings about the dreadful consequences to come. All those warnings were dismissed as politically motivated, but they turned out to be accurate.”