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Old January 13th, 2010 #1
Alex Linder
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Default Government Sector vs Private Sector

3. From the top 10 richest counties in the United States, 5 are located in the D.C. metro area. The top 3 on the list are Loudon County VA, Fairfax County VA, and Howard County MD. Many have said that America has transformed from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. But now, we have a new transformation at hand. With all the wealth in D.C., we're apparently switching from a service economy to a propaganda and doublespeak economy.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/vuk/vuk30.1.html
 
Old February 18th, 2010 #2
Fred
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We are switching to a Commie/Jew economy.
We did not really lose our manufacturing base. We gave it away. In the name of "globalism" or a global economy we allowed treacherous trade deals to be imposed on the American public. The price is our freedom and our nation.

The first steps were to make Jewish/Gangster run unions to infest our industries. Then to open the borders to products from other nations while they in turn close their borders to our like products. A good example is the inability to buy a Cadillac in Korea or Japan. Finally to open our borders to slave labor made products form our communist enemy China. All of this was a lose, lose, and lose climate for America.

Their is no such thing as a solely service based economy. It will constantly lose wealth and is not sustainable.

The Winners?
Well, That is easy. Rich Kikes.
How?
America will have a harder time in rising against Jewish tyranny. An Interdependent world economy is created which makes it very difficult for a politician to "Buck" the system and have America become nationalistic in nature. Meanwhile the Jewish international bankers become richer and more powerful. You on the other hand will have to compete with slave labor and live on mud wages.
Nothing good about for the White Man but it sure is good for Kikes. If you don't like it you are a hater!
 
Old February 18th, 2010 #3
Rick Ronsavelle
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The world economy is dependent upon Whiteman's continuing sanction (support) of evil system. Is there any limit to white ass-kissing?
 
Old April 10th, 2012 #4
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Leviathan

By Iain Murray

February 3, 2011 4:00 A.M. How many Americans work in government? That’s a difficult question to answer. Officially, as of 2009, the federal government employed 2.8 million individuals out of a total U.S. workforce of 236 million — just over 1 percent of the workforce. But it’s not quite as simple as that. Add in uniformed military personnel, and the figure goes up to just under 4.4 million. There are also 66,000 people who work in the legislative branch and for federal courts. That makes the figure around 2 percent of the workforce.

Yet even that doesn’t tell the full story. A lot of government work is done by contractors or grantees — from arms manufacturers to local charities, from environmental-advocacy groups to university researchers. A lot of the work they do is funded nearly entirely by taxpayers, so they should count as part of the federal government. Unfortunately, we can’t ask the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) how many government contractors and grantees there are. They don’t keep such records.

Instead, we can ask Prof. Paul Light of New York University, who has estimated the size of these shadowy branches of government. As he points out, while there are many good reasons for the government to use contractors (should the feds really be in the business of making dentures for veterans, as they were until the 1950s?), the use of contracts and grants also hides the true size of government:

[The federal government] uses contracts, grants, and mandates to state and local governments to hide its true size, thereby creating the illusion that it is smaller than it actually is, and give its departments and agencies much greater flexibility in hiring labor, thereby creating the illusion that the civil-service system is somehow working effectively.

OPM’s failure to keep records of the number of quasi-governmental employees indicates a lack of accountability, as Professor Light says:

Contractors and grantees do not keep count of their employees, in part because doing so would allow the federal government . . . to estimate actual labor costs.

Nevertheless, Professor Light was able to come up with some useful estimates by using the federal government’s procurement database. When he added up all the numbers, he found that the true size of the federal government was about 11 million: 1.8 million civil servants, 870,000 postal workers, 1.4 million military personnel, 4.4 million contractors, and 2.5 million grantees.

However, this turned out to be a low-water mark. Over the next few years, even before 9/11, the true size of government increased significantly, almost all in the “shadow” sector. By 2005, the federal government employed 14.6 million people: 1.9 million civil servants, 770,000 postal workers, 1.44 million uniformed service personnel, 7.6 million contractors, and 2.9 million grantees. This amounted to a ratio of five and a half “shadow” government employees for every civil servant on the federal payroll. Since 1999, the government had grown by over 4.5 million employees.

Professor Light’s figures are from 2006, but there can be little doubt that the size of the federal government has increased still further since. There are those new contractors and grantees working on “stimulus” projects to add. Then there are the employees of bailed-out and partially nationalized firms: General Motors (still owned in large part by the government despite the sale of stock in November 2010), AIG, and a large number of banks. GM alone employs 300,000 people. In addition, government has increased its mandates and general spending.

All of which suggests a significant expansion in “shadow” government employment since 2005. Even if it grew at the same rate as it did between 1999 and 2005 (a conservative assumption), that would suggest a further 4.7 million employees dependent on taxpayer funding since 2005, bringing the total true size of the federal government to just under 20 million employees.

Yet the federal government isn’t all. Despite its huge budgets, state and local governments dwarf Washington in direct employment. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 3.8 million full-time and 1.5 million part-time employees on state payrolls. Local governments add a further 11 million full-time and 3.2 million part-time personnel. This means that state and local governments combined employ 19.5 million Americans.

When we add up the true size of the federal workforce — civil servants, postal workers, military personnel, contractors, grantees, and bailed-out businesses — and add in state- and local-government employees — civil servants, teachers, firefighters, and police officers — we reach the astonishing figure of nearly 40 million Americans employed in some way by government. That means that about 17 percent of the American labor pool — one in every six workers — owes its living to the taxpayer.

— Iain Murray is vice president for strategy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/258768
 
Old April 10th, 2012 #5
Alex Linder
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Leviathan

By Iain Murray

February 3, 2011 4:00 A.M. How many Americans work in government? That’s a difficult question to answer. Officially, as of 2009, the federal government employed 2.8 million individuals out of a total U.S. workforce of 236 million — just over 1 percent of the workforce. But it’s not quite as simple as that. Add in uniformed military personnel, and the figure goes up to just under 4.4 million. There are also 66,000 people who work in the legislative branch and for federal courts. That makes the figure around 2 percent of the workforce.

Yet even that doesn’t tell the full story. A lot of government work is done by contractors or grantees — from arms manufacturers to local charities, from environmental-advocacy groups to university researchers. A lot of the work they do is funded nearly entirely by taxpayers, so they should count as part of the federal government. Unfortunately, we can’t ask the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) how many government contractors and grantees there are. They don’t keep such records.

Instead, we can ask Prof. Paul Light of New York University, who has estimated the size of these shadowy branches of government. As he points out, while there are many good reasons for the government to use contractors (should the feds really be in the business of making dentures for veterans, as they were until the 1950s?), the use of contracts and grants also hides the true size of government:

[The federal government] uses contracts, grants, and mandates to state and local governments to hide its true size, thereby creating the illusion that it is smaller than it actually is, and give its departments and agencies much greater flexibility in hiring labor, thereby creating the illusion that the civil-service system is somehow working effectively.

OPM’s failure to keep records of the number of quasi-governmental employees indicates a lack of accountability, as Professor Light says:

Contractors and grantees do not keep count of their employees, in part because doing so would allow the federal government . . . to estimate actual labor costs.

Nevertheless, Professor Light was able to come up with some useful estimates by using the federal government’s procurement database. When he added up all the numbers, he found that the true size of the federal government was about 11 million: 1.8 million civil servants, 870,000 postal workers, 1.4 million military personnel, 4.4 million contractors, and 2.5 million grantees.

However, this turned out to be a low-water mark. Over the next few years, even before 9/11, the true size of government increased significantly, almost all in the “shadow” sector. By 2005, the federal government employed 14.6 million people: 1.9 million civil servants, 770,000 postal workers, 1.44 million uniformed service personnel, 7.6 million contractors, and 2.9 million grantees. This amounted to a ratio of five and a half “shadow” government employees for every civil servant on the federal payroll. Since 1999, the government had grown by over 4.5 million employees.

Professor Light’s figures are from 2006, but there can be little doubt that the size of the federal government has increased still further since. There are those new contractors and grantees working on “stimulus” projects to add. Then there are the employees of bailed-out and partially nationalized firms: General Motors (still owned in large part by the government despite the sale of stock in November 2010), AIG, and a large number of banks. GM alone employs 300,000 people. In addition, government has increased its mandates and general spending.

All of which suggests a significant expansion in “shadow” government employment since 2005. Even if it grew at the same rate as it did between 1999 and 2005 (a conservative assumption), that would suggest a further 4.7 million employees dependent on taxpayer funding since 2005, bringing the total true size of the federal government to just under 20 million employees.

Yet the federal government isn’t all. Despite its huge budgets, state and local governments dwarf Washington in direct employment. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 3.8 million full-time and 1.5 million part-time employees on state payrolls. Local governments add a further 11 million full-time and 3.2 million part-time personnel. This means that state and local governments combined employ 19.5 million Americans.

When we add up the true size of the federal workforce — civil servants, postal workers, military personnel, contractors, grantees, and bailed-out businesses — and add in state- and local-government employees — civil servants, teachers, firefighters, and police officers — we reach the astonishing figure of nearly 40 million Americans employed in some way by government. That means that about 17 percent of the American labor pool — one in every six workers — owes its living to the taxpayer.

— Iain Murray is vice president for strategy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/258768
 
Old April 10th, 2012 #6
Alex Linder
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[gary north on the above]

Tax Burden: 40 Million Government Workers
Written by Gary North on April 6, 2012

How many people work for governments in the United States. Let’s look at the numbers.

The usual estimate of the number of employees of the U.S. government is 2.8 million. The estimate is fake. This does not count military personnel. But most important, it does not count contract workers paid by the federal government.

The Office of Personnel Management does not keep track of these workers. That would give the game away.

One man has estimated the total: Prof. Paul Light of New York University.

[The federal government] uses contracts, grants, and mandates to state and local governments to hide its true size, thereby creating the illusion that it is smaller than it actually is, and give its departments and agencies much greater flexibility in hiring labor, thereby creating the illusion that the civil-service system is somehow working effectively. . . .

Contractors and grantees do not keep count of their employees, in part because doing so would allow the federal government . . . to estimate actual labor costs.

Here is his estimate: 11 million, broken down as follows: 1.8 million civil servants, 870,000 postal workers, 1.4 million military personnel, 4.4 million contractors, and 2.5 million grantees. These figures are from 2006.

Yet the federal government isn’t all. Despite its huge budgets, state and local governments dwarf Washington in direct employment. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 3.8 million full-time and 1.5 million part-time employees on state payrolls. Local governments add a further 11 million full-time and 3.2 million part-time personnel. This means that state and local governments combined employ 19.5 million Americans.

When we add up the true size of the federal workforce — civil servants, postal workers, military personnel, contractors, grantees, and bailed-out businesses — and add in state- and local-government employees — civil servants, teachers, firefighters, and police officers — we reach the astonishing figure of nearly 40 million Americans employed in some way by government. That means that about 17 percent of the American labor pool — one in every six workers — owes its living to the taxpayer.

There is going to be a government default at some point. Tens of millions of these people will lose their jobs. The private sector will have to absorb them.

Think of the Great Depression, when government was a small percentage of the labor market. There was 25% unemployment in 1933.

Think of what will happen in the Great Default. There will be a spurt in unemployment, but then these people will at long last be forced to become productive. There will be an increase in national productivity. These people will suffer sharp declines in their income. But taxes will fall for the rest of us.

It will be the turning point for America’s comparative decline. This nation will rebound. No nation is better positioned for economic growth as a result of bankrupt governments. But the pain will be excruciating for the people who are on government payrolls today. As for government pensions, forget about it. Gone. As for government labor unions: also gone.
 
Old April 24th, 2012 #7
Alex Linder
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[examples of huge waste that all government entails]

Something Rotten in the State

by Patrick J. Buchanan

With the number of Secret Service members and agents caught up in the partying-with-prostitutes scandal in Cartagena now at a dozen, and six already gone, how much wider and deeper does this go?

No one can take pleasure in seeing Secret Service agents – whose deserved reputation is that they will "take a bullet" for the president, his family and all whom they protect – shamed and disgraced.

Yet one would have to be naive to believe this was some isolated incident. No sooner was the first day's work done in Cartagena than 20 hookers were trooping into the hotel rooms of SS agents, supervisors and members of the military advance team.

And Sen. Charles Grassley asks a relevant question.

As the Secret Service travel and work in close contact with the White House Advance Office and White House Communications Agency, was the Obama staff oblivious to this misconduct? If they were aware of it, did no one report it to the White House chief of staff?

Hostile intelligence services often use "honey traps" to ensnare U.S. diplomats and journalists. Thus this hookers-and-agents scandal is no laughing matter.

And it hit just as we learned that the General Services Administration, purchasing agent for the U.S. government, shelled out $823,000 on a party for 300 employees at a casino-spa in Las Vegas, where the hired entertainment included a mind reader, a clown and a $75,000 bicycle-building exercise.

Jeff Neeley, the GSA western regional commissioner, invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than testify to Congress about what is now being investigated as criminal misconduct.

President Obama's appointee to head GSA, Martha Johnson, has resigned.

Infinitely larger in terms of the tax dollars looted or lost is the Solyndra scandal, where a green technology company favored by the White House went belly up after receiving an endorsement visit from Obama and an astonishing half-billion dollars in federal loan guarantees.

These events all point to a culture of entitlement born of a belief that now that the Democratic Party, the Party of Government, is again running the government, we can "let the good times roll" once more.

And so we see President Obama for six months literally campaigning on the public dime. Not a day seems to pass that he is not helicoptering off the White House lawn on Marine One to Andrews Air Force Base to board Air Force One to fly to some swing state, while his staff finds an official cover event so the White House can charge most of the trip to taxpayers.

Has any other president spent so many days campaigning, half a year and a year before the traditional Labor Day start of the election season, or used tax dollars so flagrantly to buy re-election?

The sense of entitlement appears to extend to the Obama family.

In 2010, at the bottom of the Great Recession, Michelle Obama, accompanied by daughter Sasha and friends, took Air force Two to Spain for a lavish vacation. The first lady paid for her stay at a five-star hotel in Marbella, but the cost of flying her there and moving her about, with scores of Secret Service agents, had to run into the millions.

And the trip came at a time when President Obama was instructing the nation on the need to sacrifice and the number of Americans on food stamps was setting a new record every month.

How many so-called "1 percenters" project a lifestyle as lavish?

Last December, flying out of the District of Columbia in separate planes, the first couple took a two-week Christmas vacation at a resort in Hawaii, the taxpayers' cost of which has been estimated at $4 million. Winters in Hawaii, summers in the Vineyard, and with it all subsidized by taxpayers?

What kind of example is this? Where is the spirit of sacrifice here?

Is this the same president who talks about having inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s?

Lately, we learned that Leon Panetta, in the 10 months he has been secretary of defense, has spent $860,000 of taxpayers' money on 27 separate trips to his home in Monterey, Calif.

Curing Leon of his homesickness is getting expensive.

What all of the above reveals is how the Party of Government views the government. They see its perks, privileges and power as their entitlements, their inheritance, their patrimony.

And there is some truth to that.

After all, the bureaucracy was built up in the New Deal and Great Society, and remains dyed-in-the-wool Democratic.

Even when the GOP wins the White House, the conservatives are outsiders in this city. Even when Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan won their 49-state landslides, neither came even close to carrying Washington, D.C., the sole Electoral College precinct that has never gone Republican.

While John McCain lost the nation by eight points to Obama, he lost Washington, D.C., by 86 points. This is Obama's town. He owns it.

But if a noxious aroma of self-indulgence and corruption is arising from it, it is Obama's problem, and it is no longer a small one.

April 21, 2012

Patrick J. Buchanan [send him mail] is co-founder and editor of The American Conservative. He is also the author of seven books, including Where the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. His latest book is Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? See his website.

http://lewrockwell.com/buchanan/buchanan233.html
 
Old April 24th, 2012 #8
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Most folks do not know how close Keynesianism is to outright psychosis.

Under Keynesianism, it is not possible to waste money. What used to be called "waste" (in the dark age) is now called "purchasing power stimulus."

Older superstitions claimed that wealth creates spending. Modern, scientific economics knows that spending creates wealth, and that older, orthodox economists had their shorts on backwards.

Let's say three aircraft carriers suffice for defense, but six are built. Aren't the last three waste? No, the money spent is purchasing power- that is the essence of a viable economy.

Money spent on parties goes to the hotel, the suppliers and so on who spend. There is no waste (!)- the wheels of the economy are kept spinning.

If workers are hired to dig a hole, and then put the dirt back in, isn't that clearly waste? Only to superstitious (suspicious) minds. The money will circulate, keeping the economy from collapse.

We owe our high standard of living to all this spending. The spending must continue, or the economy will freeze up and we will all perish.

Apparently many actually believe that. . .

The Chinese follow the West in jacking up their numbers by useless building
(cities instead of aircraft carriers):

 
Old April 26th, 2012 #9
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It happened in New Zealand. In the mid-1980s, nobody would have guessed that New Zealand, which was becoming the shallow end of the gene pool, would see a socialist by the name of Roger Douglas rise to power and act with a lot of common sense. He fired two-thirds of government employees, got rid of import duties, and cut the income tax by 50 percent. New Zealand went from being a tired backwater to quite an acceptable place in a very short time. If it could happen in New Zealand, it can certainly happen in Argentina as well.

http://lewrockwell.com/casey/casey120.html
 
Old April 26th, 2012 #10
Rick Ronsavelle
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Default Libertarianism, Kiwi-Style

1. Rogernomics is not libertarianism!

Let me start by exploding a myth about New Zealand's economy: it is not, nor has it ever been, anything remotely approaching a free market. Rogernomics, the name given for the economic policies of Roger Douglas, Minister of Finance in the 1984-1990 Labour Government, is not libertarianism. Douglas was at best a lukewarm free-marketeer and most certainly not a defender of individual liberty. The best analysis I have seen on the economic reforms is the article Antipodean Altruism by Lindsay Perigo, which is also due to be published in the Libertarian Alliance pamphlet series.

The reform process failed because it lacked any underlying philosophy of individual rights. The reformers upheld the same altruistic premises as their socialist counterparts and simply saw free markets as a better means for delivering their altruistic ends. This was famously underscored by a well-known businessman, Sir Robert Jones, who once said to Roger Douglas and a prominent group of reformers something like, "You would all advocate slavery if you thought it would have a good economic outcome." The response summed up the reform movement: Jones was sent a book from one of the reformers explaining how slavery did not in fact lead to good economic outcomes.

As politicians, the reformers remained in thrall to so-called 'political realities,' meaning they would renege on any point of principle and simply force through by stealth those reforms they could get away with. Lacking both a coherent individualist philosophy and the backbone to defend any principles they did happen to hold, the reformers found themselves supporting an even bigger state sector and greater intrusions on people's lives than before the supposed free market reforms began. The reforms themselves can be characterised as a reduction in the big, obvious, direct mechanisms of the state, but a massive increase in less obvious bureaucratic regulation.

And through it all the populace remained as socialist as it ever was. New Zealand is populated by 3 million people and 60 million sheep, but many just say 63 million sheeple. When the socialist majority found itself unable to vote out the reform process, since both major parties promoted essentially the same policies, it simply reorganised to have the electoral system changed to the German 'mixed member proportional' style of proportional representation, under which any party gaining more than 5% of the vote obtains a proportional number of seats in Parliament. Inevitably, in the 1999 elections a resurgent left-wing Labour Party was instated in coalition with an even more left-wing party called the Alliance. The reform process is now in rapid retreat, and the sheeple celebrate while the economy collapses (figures out today show quarterly GDP growth as negative for the first time in several years).

Thus when I refer to the New Zealand 'libertarian movement' I do not refer to the earlier reformers or to their newer political guise - a party formed by Roger Douglas in the mid-1990s called ACT, which has managed to gain about 7% of the vote. ACT stands for the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers; however we in the libertarian movement refer to it as the Association of Compulsion Touters. ACT makes the same errors as the earlier reformers – lukewarm support for free-markets, and a philosophy of altruism and sacrifice of the individual instead of one based on individual rights. That the libertarian movement shares some of ACT's economic policies is almost incidental, in much the same way as the fact that we agree with the Greens on drug decriminalisation, which of course ACT opposes.

http://www.freeradical.co.nz/content/44/sturm.php

Last edited by Rick Ronsavelle; April 27th, 2012 at 12:09 PM.
 
Old April 26th, 2012 #11
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Interesting. Points up the importance of being principled, if you have the right principles, rather than being pragmatic.
 
Old May 13th, 2012 #12
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Real Heroes
Posted by Lew Rockwell on May 13, 2012 11:18 AM

Writes Hal Cranmer:

Here is a letter I just wrote to the editor of my hometown newspaper. I am really tired of all the letters worshipping our military 'heroes'. Thanks for inspiring me.

To the Editor,

Please don’t call me ‘America Hater’. It’s tough for me to understand all this military worship. I retired from the military. I flew Special Operations aircraft and logged combat time. I flew supersonic jets in pilot training. It was a blast.

How did I ‘defend freedom’? Our government today limits our freedom by regulating EVERY aspect of our lives. But those same politicians order the military to go ‘defend our freedom’.

Compare that to the private sector. Businesses ask for nothing except a chance to make your life better and they work their butt off to do it, or go out of business. In the military the taxpayers were forced to pay for my flying. American private businesses have shown the world why freedom is so wonderful by giving us the greatest wealth in history. Business has done this despite being hamstrung by ridiculous regulations from our ‘freedom-defending’ government. What has the military, through the government, given us? From 1981-2001, there were 42 suicide missions against the US. From 9/11 to 2011, there were 1,833, according to The University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Terrorism.

Don’t military members die for our freedom? In 2010, there were 462 combat-related deaths. The military had more deaths from suicide than combat in 2010. Were all those deaths ‘worth it’? I have never felt threatened by an Afghani or Iraqi. 9/11 was run by Saudis that trained in Minnesota.

In 2010 6,210 private sector workers died to IMPROVE your freedom according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. More truckers and farmers were killed doing their jobs, than military were killed doing theirs. If you look at deaths per 100,000 workers, military doesn’t even break the top 10.

Yet I am always thanked for my military service and told by the media that my corporation is greedy and evil. Next time you feel like thanking someone, don’t thank me. Thank an entrepreneur or private sector employee.
 
Old May 13th, 2012 #13
Alex Linder
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The Tide Turns
Posted by Lew Rockwell on May 13, 2012 09:56 AM

Writes John Keller:

I normally skim comments on various political and economic articles to see what arguments for or against a particular position "normal" people are taking. While the Forbes article you linked to may be subject to LRC selection bias, look at the amazingly sound arguments against taxation, military service, and the government. For every nostrum posted there are 5 well-reasoned, articulate responses. Viva the Ron Paul (and LRC!) Revolution!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansol...-facebook-ipo/
 
Old May 13th, 2012 #14
Alex Linder
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[from above link in response to comments on story about Facebook biggie renouncing US citizenship and becoming a thing of Singapore]

David Allen 1 day ago

Good for Eduardo!

In response to Anon:

Paying taxes on income and capital are indefensible – when the government has first claim on your income then the amount of your slavery is defined by fiat. “Thou shalt not steal except by Majority Vote” is still stealing.

In any case- a US Judge-Judge Learned Hand- ruled that no one is obligated to arrange his (her) affairs in order to pay more taxes.

It is no co-incidence that the Income Tax Amendment was passed at the same time as the Federal Reserve Act-just in time to sucker the American people to pay, go into debt and die for the 20th Century “War to End All Wars” Part 1/2/3/4/5 and 21st Century 5/6.

As far as soldiers defending our freedoms-the last time that occured was in the Revolutionary War and War between the States (Southern Side). Otherwise the rest of the Wars have been for Aggression or for war profits.

Remember, Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel; (anon)
I would add also the first refuge these days.
 
Old May 13th, 2012 #15
Alex Linder
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[from above link in response to comments on story about Facebook biggie renouncing US citizenship and becoming a thing of Singapore]

David Allen 1 day ago

Good for Eduardo!

In response to Anon:

Paying taxes on income and capital are indefensible – when the government has first claim on your income then the amount of your slavery is defined by fiat. “Thou shalt not steal except by Majority Vote” is still stealing.

In any case- a US Judge-Judge Learned Hand- ruled that no one is obligated to arrange his (her) affairs in order to pay more taxes.

It is no co-incidence that the Income Tax Amendment was passed at the same time as the Federal Reserve Act-just in time to sucker the American people to pay, go into debt and die for the 20th Century “War to End All Wars” Part 1/2/3/4/5 and 21st Century 5/6.

As far as soldiers defending our freedoms-the last time that occured was in the Revolutionary War and War between the States (Southern Side). Otherwise the rest of the Wars have been for Aggression or for war profits.

Remember, Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel; (anon)
I would add also the first refuge these days.
 
Old May 13th, 2012 #16
Rick Ronsavelle
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9/11 was run by Saudis that trained in Minnesota.

I thought they trained in Wisconsin!!!
 
Old May 16th, 2012 #17
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John Williams: The Real Unemployment Rate: 22% – Not 8.1%
The coming fiscal cliff: hyperinflation on track for 2014

http://lewrockwell.com/rep3/john-wil...ment-rate.html
 
Old July 24th, 2012 #18
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Gordon Crovitz: Who Really Invented the Internet?

Contrary to legend, it wasn't the federal government, and the Internet had nothing to do with maintaining communications during a war.
By L. GORDON CROVITZ

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A telling moment in the presidential race came recently when Barack Obama said: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." He justified elevating bureaucrats over entrepreneurs by referring to bridges and roads, adding: "The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet."

It's an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way.

For many technologists, the idea of the Internet traces to Vannevar Bush, the presidential science adviser during World War II who oversaw the development of radar and the Manhattan Project. In a 1946 article in The Atlantic titled "As We May Think," Bush defined an ambitious peacetime goal for technologists: Build what he called a "memex" through which "wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified."

That fired imaginations, and by the 1960s technologists were trying to connect separate physical communications networks into one global network—a "world-wide web." The federal government was involved, modestly, via the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Its goal was not maintaining communications during a nuclear attack, and it didn't build the Internet. Robert Taylor, who ran the ARPA program in the 1960s, sent an email to fellow technologists in 2004 setting the record straight: "The creation of the Arpanet was not motivated by considerations of war. The Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer networks."

If the government didn't invent the Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet's backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.

But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.

According to a book about Xerox PARC, "Dealers of Lightning" (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn't wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves. "We have a more immediate problem than they do," Robert Metcalfe told his colleague John Shoch in 1973. "We have more networks than they do." Mr. Shoch later recalled that ARPA staffers "were working under government funding and university contracts. They had contract administrators . . . and all that slow, lugubrious behavior to contend with."

So having created the Internet, why didn't Xerox become the biggest company in the world? The answer explains the disconnect between a government-led view of business and how innovation actually happens.

Executives at Xerox headquarters in Rochester, N.Y., were focused on selling copiers. From their standpoint, the Ethernet was important only so that people in an office could link computers to share a copier. Then, in 1979, Steve Jobs negotiated an agreement whereby Xerox's venture-capital division invested $1 million in Apple, with the requirement that Jobs get a full briefing on all the Xerox PARC innovations. "They just had no idea what they had," Jobs later said, after launching hugely profitable Apple computers using concepts developed by Xerox.

Xerox's copier business was lucrative for decades, but the company eventually had years of losses during the digital revolution. Xerox managers can console themselves that it's rare for a company to make the transition from one technology era to another.

As for the government's role, the Internet was fully privatized in 1995, when a remaining piece of the network run by the National Science Foundation was closed—just as the commercial Web began to boom. Blogger Brian Carnell wrote in 1999: "The Internet, in fact, reaffirms the basic free market critique of large government. Here for 30 years the government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but it languished. . . . In less than a decade, private concerns have taken that protocol and created one of the most important technological revolutions of the millennia."

It's important to understand the history of the Internet because it's too often wrongly cited to justify big government. It's also important to recognize that building great technology businesses requires both innovation and the skills to bring innovations to market. As the contrast between Xerox and Apple shows, few business leaders succeed in this challenge. Those who do—not the government—deserve the credit for making it happen.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...008406518.html
 
Old August 23rd, 2012 #19
Alex Linder
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DiLorenzo Devastates the State

by David Gordon

Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government • By Thomas J. DiLorenzo • Mises Institute, 2012 • xi + 219 pages

Thomas DiLorenzo is probably best known to the public for his revisionist studies of Lincoln, but he has a wide range of economic and historical interests.[1] Organized Crime, a collection of 52 short articles by him, shows again and again his keen eye for the striking historical detail that exactly illustrates the point he wants to make.

It will come as no surprise to readers of the Mises Daily that price control does not work. But DiLorenzo still manages to come up with an unexpected point about this familiar topic. The Nazi leader Hermann Goering warned the American occupation authorities that they stood in danger of repeating the mistakes of his own recently fallen regime. Speaking to the American correspondent (and, by the way, later American Ambassador to Switzerland) Henry Taylor, Goering said,

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Your America is doing many things in the economic field which we found out caused us so much trouble. You are trying to control peoples' wages and prices – peoples' work. If you do that you must control peoples' lives. And no country can do that part way. I tried and it failed. Nor can any country do it all the way either. I tried that too and it failed. You are no better planners than we. I should think your economists would read what happened here. (p. 5)
Unfortunately the American government has not managed to equal the level of insight here displayed by the late and unlamented Reichsmarschall. The Obama administration brought suit against

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a proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile USA. According to the New York Times on August 31, 2011, stopping the merger would supposedly "help save jobs of American workers." (p. 24)
To this contention, DiLorenzo offers a brilliant riposte. Just as the mercantilists wrongly thought that the way to national wealth was to amass gold and silver, so do the modern opponents of economic progress falsely believe that full employment requires that existing jobs be conserved: "The Obama mercantilists apparently believed that existing jobs, not gold, must be hoarded" (p. 25).

DiLorenzo readily refutes the fallacy:

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They [the Obama administration] failed to recognize that the economy is dynamic, with jobs constantly being created and destroyed as new-and-improved industries and business practices replace the older and less efficient ones (efficient in serving consumers, that is). (p. 25)
DiLorenzo supports the Austrian analysis of the business cycle over the monetarist view of Milton Friedman, but this fact does not prevent him from making use of Friedman's apt insights on other topics. Thus, writing about the current healthcare crisis, he calls attention to an important study Friedman published in 1992:

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Friedman noted that 56 percent of all hospitals in America were privately owned as for-profit enterprises in 1910.... It took decades, but by the early 1990s government had taken over nearly the entire hospital industry.... Friedman's key contention was that, as with all bureaucratic systems, government-owned or government-controlled healthcare created a situation whereby increased "inputs" such as expenditures on equipment, infrastructure, and the salaries of medical professionals, actually led to decreased "output" in terms of the quantity and quality of medical care.... This kind of result is present in all government-run bureaucracies because of the absence there of any kind of market feedback mechanism. Since there are no profits in an accounting sense in government, there is no reliable mechanism for rewarding good performance and penalizing poor performance. (pp. 26–7, emphasis in original)
DiLorenzo also notes Friedman's comment that

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if the average tariff rate in America were a few percentage points lower than it would otherwise be thanks to influence of academic economists, that would more than justify all of their salaries and then some because of the wealth-enhancing effects of freer trade. (p. ix)
In order fully to benefit from free trade, peaceful relations among nations are obviously desirable if not outright essential. There have been cases of warring nations that continued to engage in trade; but, obviously, states engaged in war are concerned with other things than social cooperation through the free market. If a nation wishes to gain as much as possible from trade, then, it seems well-advised for it to pursue a foreign policy of peace.

So much seems simple commonsense; but those who advocate such a policy are often smeared as "isolationists." DiLorenzo quite properly points out that this name entirely reverses the truth. It is the supposed isolationists who favor the greatest attainable commerce with other nations, and it is their interventionist opponents who disrupt trade by involving us in unnecessary wars. He suggests calling such people "instigationists": Not bad. Jews is better, but instigationists is good.

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War leads to isolationism. People interact peacefully and beneficially in the free market; they kill each other when they are at war.... The real "isolationists" who seek to destroy the peaceful cooperation among the people of the world are a group of people who might be called "instigationists." They are the egomaniacs and rent seekers ... who instigate wars with their lying, conniving, and manipulating behavior. They typically have never participated in a war, or even the peace-time military, themselves, and are deservedly labeled as "chickenhawks" by many commentators.[2] (pp. 45–47)
Readers of the book who expect DiLorenzo to say something about Lincoln and his war policy will not be disappointed. In pursuit of his policy of imposing the American System of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay on the recalcitrant Confederacy, Lincoln ruthlessly suppressed opposition. In such stifling of dissent, he was joined by the Radical Republicans in Congress.

In telling the story "of how the Republican Party engaged in a Stalinist spasm of political repression" (p. 91), DiLorenzo makes apt use of a book by the Lincoln scholar William Marvel, Lincoln's Darkest Year: The War in 1862. In one respect, I fear, he has been misled by his source. The Republican-controlled Senate in 1862 expelled one of its most senior members, the Democrat Jesse Bright of Indiana. Following Marvel, he says,

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Using the excuse that, in the years before the war, Senator Bright "had known and admired [fellow Senator] Jefferson Davis of Mississippi," the Republican Party accused Senator Bright ... of "retroactive treason" and expelled him with a bare two-thirds majority vote. (p. 91, quoting Marvel)
There was rather more to it than that. An arms dealer had been apprehended who had on his person a letter of introduction to Davis, written by Bright. This was the principal charge that led to the expulsion.

Nevertheless, Marvel and DiLorenzo are on firm ground in their general condemnation of the Republican policy of repression.

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Even Democrats running for Congress were imprisoned before election day.... Republican Party thugs were not above beatings and murder of Northern civilians who dissented from the "Grand Ole Party" line. (p. 92, emphasis in original)
Unfortunately, matters only worsened as the war continued.

DiLorenzo views with shrewd skepticism attempts by his fellow economists to provide theoretical justifications for interference with the free market. The much-ballyhooed area of "happiness research" has proved a fertile source of such justifications, and DiLorenzo rejects them all.

Regardless of the success of the free market in generating an ever-increasing abundance of material goods, happiness researchers such as the Swiss economist Bruno Frey complain that increases in wealth do not always carry with them increases in happiness. Instead of exclusive concentration on raising production, policymakers should endeavor more directly to address the sources of unhappiness. For example, even if poor people get more money, they may find upsetting the still-greater wealth of the rich. Do we not have here a reason for remedial action by the state? The negative externalities that result from disparities in wealth should not be ignored.

DiLorenzo responds that the

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assertions about the supposed ability of happiness researchers to finally measure utility simply ignore all the reasons that have been accepted for decades by the economics profession as to why utility is "ordinal" instead of cardinal and not measurable. (p. 186)
Happiness researchers often make use of public-opinion surveys in their attempts to determine levels of happiness, and against them DiLorenzo invokes the weighty authority of Murray Rothbard:

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Not only will a person's valuation differ when talking about them [choices] from when he is actually choosing, but there is also no guarantee that he is telling the truth. (p. 187, quoting Rothbard)
As to the supposed negative external effects on the poor imposed by the wealthy, DiLorenzo makes a penetrating observation:

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The supposed "negative external effect" is the envy by poorer people. But it has always been true that intellectuals, not the poor, have been the chief advocates of egalitarianism. Most poor people want to become richer. It is the intellectual class that is so often obsessed with envy and hatred of people who are more financially successful than they are. That they can manipulate survey questions that are used to make it appear that this view comes from "the poor" and not themselves does not make this statement untrue. (p. 189)
Organized Crime is an outstanding presentation of the main themes of DiLorenzo's career as a scholar. Anyone who values a historically informed and well-written defense of freedom will gain a great deal from reading the book and absorbing its lessons.


Notes

[1] See, for example, his The Real Lincoln and Lincoln Unmasked, and my reviews of these in The Mises Review, Summer 2002 and Summer 2007, respectively.

[2] There were, though, some noninterventionists who opposed international free trade, such as Charles Beard.

http://lewrockwell.com/gordon/gordon101.html
 
Old August 23rd, 2012 #20
Rick Ronsavelle
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Default 21M health care workers to be unionized under obamacare

Since the government sector has done such a great job at managing social security, the postal service, and the extension of mortgage credit why not also mandate that every health care worker in the country become a federal, state or local employee?

According to a new book by Mallory Factor, the effort is already underway. When the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare, becomes fully effective on January 1, 2014 it’ll open the door for America’s 21 million healthcare workers to the join the government dole as paid employees of the State.

What, you thought Obamacare would only socialize the actual medical care and services, and leave the rest of the system operating as a free market?

A booklet published by SEIU during the 2008 election season called for “building a new American health care system,” in part by “organizing workers.” The publication argued for outcomes nearly identical to those later adopted in the Obamacare legislation.

In 2010 the SEIU elected Mary Key Henry as its new International President. Henry’s background was in health care organizing. She led efforts to unionize workers at Beverly nursing homes, Catholic Health Care West, Tenet Healthcare Corporation and HCA Healthcare.

Factor, who is also a Forbes columnist and senior editor of money and politics for The Street.com, recounts emails from former federal Office of Labor-Management Standards staffer Don Loos, now a senior adviser to the president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.

It is clear that Big Labor is banking on the probability that all healthcare workers eventually become federal, state, and municipal healthcare employees,” Loos told Factor. That, he said, would make them eligible for involuntary unionization through public-sector unions like AFSCME and the SEIU.

“Obamacare is an SEIU and AFSCME membership ‘net,’” Loos claimed, “designed to eventually capture 21 million forced-dues paying government workers.” New health care jobs created by Obamacare, he said, will eventually be filled by “federal, state, and municipal healthcare employees.”

The Obamacare law, once fully implemented, will dramatically increase the number of health care workers receiving payment for their services through government programs, including Medicaid and so-called “public option” government-run insurance plans.

“The government employee unions can then enlist pro-union state governments to treat these health care workers as ‘government employees,’” Factor told The Daily Caller, “and unionize them just like they unionized the care providers” themselves.

“For every million additional health care workers unionized in the 27 non-right-to-work states,” he told TheDC, “the unions stand to earn $1 billion in dues.”

Factor writes in “Shadowbosses” that Canada’s national health care system has provided an apt example. Heritage Foundation labor economist James Sherk told him that “60 percent of Canadian health care workers and a stunning 80 percent of nurses belong to unions — more than quadruple the levels in America.”

Only 10 percent of them were union members before the advent of socialized medicine in Canada, Factor said.

Source: The Daily Caller

Twenty one billion dollars in new revenue can be quite a motivating factor for union leadership and explains why they are organizing thousands of existing organized laborers across the country to put pressure on their elected representatives and existing health care providers. With the majority of Congressional representatives willing to sell their souls to the highest bidder, twenty million more donors supporting the unions through dues would do wonders for their campaign budgets.

We can fully expect to see America’s health care labor force unionized. First through voluntary means, then through legislative mandates that force all new healthcare workers entering the field to join a federal or state sponsored union.

One day soon a trip to the emergency room involving a broken leg or heart attack may very well be met with, “Sorry, we’re on a union break, be back in fifteen.”

http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-new...acare_08202012

Last edited by Rick Ronsavelle; August 23rd, 2012 at 10:54 AM.
 
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