2. A great idea.

3. The Taranto Principle.

4. The Obama administration plumbs new depths in divisiveness using the First Lady as an attack dog.

5. The last time I posted about EMP, the idea was debunked in comments. But if it is really impossible, a lot of people have not heard the news.

6. Alexander Marriott shows how to detect fake internet quotes.

2. President Robespierre.

3. The solutions are out there.

4. Obama’s political skills are lacking.

5. Why does Peter Schiff even bother trying to reason with these people?

6. California’s economic suicide. I’m seriously think it’s time to move…

We get an awful lot of spam comments here. They make me laugh because they are written as if english were a spammer’s second language, or maybe third.

“I am learning good informations from your prolific writings. I love this blog!”

“This is being so deep! I must tell all the peoples about your blog!”

Gotta love it.

UPDATE: Got this one today, October 22, 2011:

I am really satisfied with this posting that you have given us. This is really a stupendous work done by you. Thank you and looking for more posts

Unlike the Tea Party, which was a spontaneous reaction to the Democrats’ frightening power grabs, OWS (or the Flea Party) is a calculated movement orchestrated by the leadership on the left. An ad in Craig’s List offered people between $350-$650 a week to protest. Behind the ads is the Working Families Party, which is tied to ACORN. The money for the “Occupied Wall Street Journal” comes from George Soros, among others.

So there is something happening here. But what exactly? Here is my explanation, as informed by my understanding of Austrian economics.

The mixed economy is a combination of freedom and controls. It is freedom “regulated” by the state, but the controls are not yet dictatorship. All the economic problems in a mixed economy come from the state intervening in the free market. Statist propapaganda is aimed at hiding the state’s role in our problems, and keeping the blame on freedom. They do this by demonizing the rich.

Ludwig von Mises explained why the mixed economy leads to ever greater government control, and eventually to dictatorship. Don Lavoie (PDF) summarizes the Mises Interventionist Thesis:

Attempts to violently manipulate the outcomes of [the market] process lead to reactions that the intervener can neither specifically predict nor effectively prevent. Efforts to make the initial intervention work as designed must take the form of ever-wider and more obtrusive interventions, which are in further conflict with the workings of the market mechanism. In the end the interventionists must either extend their activities to the point where the process has been completely sabotaged or they must abandon their quest to control the market. Any “middle way” between the extremes may, of course, be advocated but would consist in a series of haphazard shocks to the system….

We are in an economic crisis created entirely by state intervention in the economy, through onerous regulations, taxes and misallocation of capital caused by the Federal Reserve. Corporate greed and corruption cannot affect an entire economy; only the government can do that. I believe we are at a pivotal moment: will we begin to repeal the intervention or intervene even more and plunge toward total state control?

Me, I’m not optimistic. The chances are our next president will be Mitt Romney, a Rockefeller Republican. He won’t repeal a damned thing. ObamaCare will be cemented into place and we will continue down the road to serfdom. We might not run to the abyss of dictatorship as fast as the Democrats want, but we’ll get there.

As Mises himself wrote,

It is indeed one of the principal drawbacks of every kind of interventionism that it is so difficult to reverse the process.

With nothing but nihilists on the left and fools on the right, there is little hope.

And that’s what’s happening here.

The EPA is regulating industry to death.

First, check out this video promoting a new book from Encounter.

Second, read about the EPA violating property rights in the name of protecting “wetlands.”

Third, read how the EPA will shut down 28 gigawatts of energy.

Of course, to the MSM anyone who sounds off about these power grabs is a nutty extremist and probably a racist. Nothing to see here, folks, move along.

I would say that if you’re not afraid, you’re either a leftist or you’re not paying attention.

So why don’t these rich leftists start a campaign to get the wealthy to volunteer to give more money to the federal government? They don’t need to wait for the state to confiscate it.

They don’t do it, I believe, because there is something more fundamental than money at stake here. They want state control of the individual. This is not about more or less money in the US treasury, it’s about liberty vs. power.

Should the individual be in control of his own life for his own selfish ends? Or should the state force the individual to sacrifice for the collective?

The smarmy rich liberal feels uncomfortable without chains tying him down. It’s too bad his opposition to freedom will have us all in fetters.

I have a smidgeon of sympathy for the Congresswoman. From a statist politician’s point of view, the question is impossible to answer. If they were honest, they would say 0% — the money should be appropriated by disinterested philosopher-kings who would then redistribute it to each according to his needs.

But statists can never be entirely honest. They know that in America you have to fool the selfish voters in order to attain and keep power. Oh, the contempt for the unwashed masses this must breed in the political elite! 

For me the answer is easy: 100%. All taxation is theft. Funding the government should be voluntary.

Rep. Schakowsky says we tax to fund things we as a nation do together. As an example she cites looking for a cure for cancer. The state takes your money to find a cure for cancer. What could be wrong with that?

You know why I don’t want the state taking my money to find a cure for cancer? Because I want someone to find a cure for cancer. Health is an important value to most people.

To find a cure for cancer we need more wealth creation, and we need to spend our dollars efficiently. This means we need to be free. Freedom creates most wealth and uses it most efficiently.

Anyone who really cared about curing cancer would want to dismantle the welfare-regulatory state and let capitalism create wealth. That wealth would be spent by free individuals according to their values, and certainly some of them would value a cure for cancer. The last thing you would want is for appropriated wealth to be wasted by bureaucrats who would lose their sinecure if cancer went the way of polio.

It looks to me like Rep. Schakowsky does not really care about finding a cure for cancer — not as much as she cares about power. I think she really lusts for control over the benighted masses to whom she must grovel and lie every two years.

World Net Daily leads the campaign to prove Obama is constitutionally ineligible to be president. Their latest post on the issue claims that the White House is in panic mode over Jerome Corsi’s book, Where’s the Birth Certificate?

The White House is not panicking at all. Quite the opposite: they want the birthers front and center in the 2012 presidential race. Not only do the conspiracy theorists distract from Obama’s record in the Oval Office, but they turn off moderates and independents. Without independents Obama has no chance of winning reelection.

Obama is the worst president in my lifetime. He is a far-left, anti-American ideologue. We have a radical in the White House. In his college days he was a serious, revolutionary communist. Since then he has learned from Alinsky to work within the system to “fundamentally change the United States of America.”

He has expanded the state at home and groveled before dictators abroad. His methods have been consistently authoritarian; what he can’t get Congress to pass, he threatens to force on America through his czars and bureaucratic agencies. His spending and regulating have brought us the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

On top of his fervent statism, he is inexperienced, incompetent and oddly detached. The only thing to improve during his time in office is Obama’s golf handicap.

Obama is a thorough altruist and egalitarian. He is motivated not to increase prosperity, but to “spread the wealth around.” As Rabbi Aryeh Spero puts it,

As with all references to “responsibility,” domestic or foreign, Obama sees responsibility as a type of sacrifice by the more powerful to those less powerful, be it redistribution of wealth or sacrificing one’s optimal protection when weighed against how it effects those he considers innocent.

Whenever an emotional event such as 9/11 comes along, Obama talks about community service. In his mind profound values and morality are all about sacrifice to the collective. Sacrifice is Obama’s moral ideal, and he is on a mission to improve every American’s soul by giving us all the opportunity to give until it hurts. Uncle Barry knows what is good for you — whether you like it or not.

On every issue and in every aspect, President Obama is the perfect nightmare. It has been said that the only issue of religion in 2012 is that if Obama is reelected, then God help us all.

Now, to the birthers all of this is of secondary importance. What’s really important is that Obama’s father had dual citizenship, and our Founding Fathers considered that enough to make one ineligible to serve as President.

Let me put it this way. Even if the birthers are 100% right, they are wrong to make an issue out of Obama’s birth. They are saying, in effect, that Obama’s statism at home, appeasement abroad and totalitarian tactics are not as important as a technicality. They are as futile as the John Birch Society in the 1960′s, who showed no understanding of abstract, philosophical principles and instead made everything in politics a conspiracy.

It is a crime to downplay Obama’s record for a second. The right needs to make a vigorous, principled argument showing the connection between Obama’s radical ideas and our miserable economy. We can’t waste time on some legal technicality of dubious worth — even if Obama is covering something up. We need to stop pursuing scandals and start attacking his statist record. It’s not the Democrats’ weaknesses and lies that are destroying America, but their proudly held morality.

The most disturbing thing about the birthers is that they adopt leftist methods. Instead of attacking ideas and policies, they make it all about the man. They ignore philosophic principles to focus on the concrete-bound circumstances of Obama’s birth. The dumbing down of America comes to right-wing politics.

This might sound a bit over the top, but I honestly worry that freedom in American will not survive another four years of Obama. We must kill this monster, even if it means electing some bonehead religious conservative. The birthers could help the country they love by just shutting up.

It is currently being laughed off the internet, which is a good sign. The Democrats look like the gang that can’t shoot straight.

Amy Peikoff calls it a case study of how force stops thinking. Victor Davis Hanson notes the similarity to Stasi tactics and to the defunct Journolist.

One Democrat defender says this is just what Clinton did with his “Rapid Response,” and I think that is true. The Democrats still live with the legacy of the 1988 presidential race between Dukakis and Bush. The Republicans demolished Dukakis, who did not respond adequately to attacks. Since then the Democrats have been determined to fight back against all attacks — but they don’t fight the ideas, they delegitimize and intimidate the attackers.

The Democrats are prone to these tone deaf campaigns of intimidation because they are what their base wants. Nothing gets the left so motivated as asking them to attack right-wingers. This is how your raise money on the left. This is the idea behind Media Matters and George Soros’s other operations.

The Democrats don’t ask their base to defend ideas and principles. What ideas to they have? What principles, other than the pursuit of power, do they hold dear? But ask them to attack those evil right-wingers, and you get the juices flowing.

You might remember that during the early years of the Bush 43 presidency, the Democrat base was furious with their legislators because they were not attacking Bush the way the Republicans attacked Clinton. Never mind that Clinton was a walking scandal factory and Bush was by political standards fairly honest; the base wanted blood.

It goes back to morality. The Democrats are altruist-collectivist-statists. It is self-evident to them that they are moral people — and so their opponents must be immoral. The left is good, the right is evil. They would sooner question the law of gravity than this assumption.

Leftists believe that in any conflict with the right their primary task is not to refute ideas, but to reveal their opponents’ wickedness. Ideas actually get in the way because those cunning right-wingers use them to manipulate the minds of unsuspecting Americans. Opponents of ObamaCare were called nazis, KKK, mean-spirited, racists, a mob, and so on. And the substance of the bill? As Nancy Pelosi said, we’ll have to pass it to find out what’s in it. They did not bother with a serious debate of the issues; instead their energy went into demonizing and smearing the right.

Attack Watch is just one more sign that the left is out of ideas. They are an intellectual black hole and a spent force.

A few questions come to mind after reading the letter. Do these thoughts represent Ayn Rand’s mature philosophic thinking? Is it realistic to believe Christianity could resolve its moral contradictions and rid itself of altruism when its metaphysics and epistemology conflict with reality? Does this letter contradict Leonard Peikoff’s recent thinking about religion? Why was this letter not in Letters of Ayn Rand?

Watch this video of Nancy Pelosi explaining economic issues.

She makes two jaw-dropping points.

1. Rich people have no rational reason to want to keep their money from being taken by the state and redistributed to the less wealthy. They must want to keep their money because they want immortality.

Pelosi does not understand that investment and growth depend on savings. The more capital one accumulates, the more he can use to create values. Every venture, from founding a factory to a corner lemonade stand, was started by accumulated wealth.

More money means more values to achieve. You can’t have too much money any more than you can have too much health.

When the state takes money from the rich it is used less efficiently. Almost three quarters of welfare spending goes to the bureaucracy. As a consequence, everyone’s standard of living declines. Money that might have gone to new inventions, scientific research, devices to make homemaking easier, ballet companies — you name it — goes instead to Washington, D.C., where it is wasted. If statists really wanted people to be better off and happier, they would get out of the way; somehow, this is the one thing they never do.

2. Republicans oppose the minimum wage in order to keep the poor in debt because that means more fees to bankers.

Pelosi does not understand that a minimum wage destroys jobs. It hurts young people at the beginning of their productive life, and inculcates the habit and expectation of dependence on the government — which the statists really want.

Moreover, if the poor work, then they accumulate wealth. Where do they put that wealth? Why, they put it in banks, which helps the banks more than any piddling fees the poor might pay on loans, if banks gave loans to starving people in the first place.

Nancy Pelosi has obviously never read a good economics book. Her ignorance makes her think those who oppose greater state control of the economy must be bad people.

Nancy Pelosi is one of the five most powerful people in America, and she is stupid. Really stupid. So stupid it’s scary.

UPDATE: Minor edits.

No, it’s not because greedy corporations gin up phony news to make money. No, it’s not essentially because cynical politicians love catastrophes for the opportunity to look good helping victims (although that is a corollary reason).

The reason is much deeper that any of that; it goes to our culture’s fundamental idea of man’s nature. Widespread disaster represents the metaphysical essence of altruism. Catastrophe is not the accidental to altruists, it’s the way things should be.

The altruist sees productivity, achievement and happiness as accidents. Successful people are lucky freaks, bound by their success to help normal people — the weak and downtrodden.

Remember back in the ’90s when Al Gore in a convention speech called healthy people “temporarily able”? That’s the altruist vision of man: we’re all victims or potential victims. The essence of life, the really important thing, is helping victims. Morality is not about happiness and how to live well; it’s the duty to sacrifice for others.

So media and politicians cannot help themselves at the prospect of disaster. They want it. The routine of daily life — people going about their business, pursuing happiness, achieving goals — this is as false to the altruist as the world of facts is to the Platonist. But potential disaster brings them to life, for they see it as the chance to escape the illusions of happiness and success and find true morality in sacrifice.

One thing bothers me about this. FDR used WWII to extend state power and spread collective sacrifice across the land. Would it not be in Obama’s interest to get America in a major war? Leviathan cannot grow without crises.

Another question: since we owe so much money to China, would it be in the American state’s interest to foment a war with China and then declare our debts wiped clean off the books? Or am I getting into paranoid conspiracy theory lala-land here?

2. James Valliant takes on Ayn Rand’s critics.

3. This headline made me laugh.

4. Send a gun to defend a British home. (That’s from a campaign in 1940.)

5. I thought this was one of my funniest Tweets. I write this with some trepidation because a lot of people don’t appreciate my humor.

6. Douglas J. Feith and Seth Cropsey analyse the Obama Doctrine.

“Pres Obama, show some guts & arrest the CEO of Standard & Poors. These criminals brought down the economy in 2008& now they will do it again,” Mr. Moore wrote.

…the world is looking for about $4 trillion dollars of real cuts. And what we’re being offered, depending on how you score it, is about $7 billion dollars of cuts from fiscal year 2012. That’s, what, about the United States government borrows every thirty hours. So in other words, we have spent a month negotiating, in real terms, a cut that represents what the United States government borrows every 30 hours.

Democrats and Republicans are like two doctors arguing about how to put a bandaid on the cut of man who has cancer. They’re focused on a trivial issue and evading the real problem. The status of America’s credit rating will not mean much if we don’t solve the spending and borrowing problem.

As Yaron Brook explains, if we don’t do something now, by 2025 entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare will be spending every penny of revenue. Our politicians refuse to face reality.

Change is hard. For generations politicians have found a pragmatic solution that works well — for politicians: expand the welfare state, borrow and tax, and put off the long-term problems for the next guy to deal with. It’s worked for a long time, and today’s politicians desperately want this formula to continue.

There is only one problem the pragmatists don’t see and can’t understand: reality. Putting off the problem of deficit spending and expanding government obligations cannot go on forever. The problems can no longer be passed to the next guy. The people in power now need to confront government spending.

And they can’t do it. They are terrified that if they try to make substantial cuts they will lose the next election. The Democrat plan seems to be to demagogue any cuts for political advantage. From Mark Steyn again:

That thoughtful observer of the passing parade, Nancy Pelosi, weighed in on the “debt ceiling” negotiations the other day: “What we’re trying to do is save the world from the Republican budget. We’re trying to save life on this planet as we know it today.”

This is the kind of ludicrous politicizing of the problem you get from the left. The Republicans might be a little better — they’re not politicizing the bandaid — but they too evade the cancer. Even Paul Ryan’s budget, which the left portrayed as pushing grandma in a wheel chair off a cliff, only reduces the amount of spending increase, but does not reduce spending.

I think what we are seeing, in both America and Europe, is the death of the welfare state. It has only been around since the 1880′s in Bismark’s Germany. In the 1930′s FDR brought it to America. It might have collapsed sooner in Europe had not America subsidized their defense since WWII. It might have collapsed sooner in America had not the computer made every aspect of the economy more efficient.

Now we are at the point that hard decisions must be made. We need leaders, but today’s politicians have not shown themselves to be up to the task. Amid the coming crises and economic pain, it will be fun to watch reality slap our current politicians in the face. There will be some justice in that, for what it’s worth.

The use of efficiency mandates to snuff out the standard light bulb was an exercise of unadulterated crony capitalism. It came about after big bulb manufacturers, frustrated by their customers’ refusal to switch from cheap throwaway incandescents to the far more profitable compact fluorescents touted by greens, decided to play hardball.

“So some years ago,’’ The New York Times Magazine noted last month, “Philips [Electronics] formed a coalition with environmental groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, to push for higher standards. ‘We felt that we needed to . . . show that the best-known lighting technology, the incandescent light bulb, is at the end of its lifetime,’ says Harry Verhaar, the company’s head of strategic sustainability initiatives.’’

Other corporations joined the plot, lobbying Congress to croak a product Americans overwhelmingly like and compel them to buy the more expensive substitute the industry was eager to sell them. The entire scheme, a lobbyist for the National Electrical Manufacturers Association testified candidly in 2007, was “at the industry’s initiative.’’ Unable to convince consumers to voluntarily abandon Edison’s light bulb, Big Business got the government to force the issue.

So the law was driven by America’s suicidal corporations. The combination of environmentalist moral approval and more profits must have been too much for the fools in charge.

I have one disagreement with Jacoby. This is not “crony capitalism” — there is no such thing. Capitalism is the unfettered free market. Corporations working with the government to restrict competition is crony socialism, also known as fascism. Don’t let the Orren Boyles of the world give capitalism a bad name.

Embroiled by legal battles for more than 25 years, two U.S. Navy ships are finally headed to the scrap heap without ever having sailed and despite the fact that they’re almost completely finished.

According to Hampton Roads, the USNS Bejamin Isherwood and the USNS Henry Eckford were commissioned in 1985 at the Pennsylvania Shipbuilding Co. to carry fuel to the Navy’s fleet around the globe.

When the company defaulted on its Navy contract in 1989 the 660-foot ships were sent to Florida for completion, but cost disputes terminated that contract in 1993.

Since then, the vessels have sat 95 and 84 percent complete at the mouth of the James River as part of the mothballed ghost fleet.

Do you think any private shipping company would let two ships sit around almost complete for 18 years? This is a good example of the difference between bureaucracy in the public sector and profit-seeking companies in the private sector. And the statists want to turn every aspect of our lives over to bureaucrats — from health care to carbon dioxide emissions to the stock market to the banks to car companies to workplace rules to how much fat we can eat to where we can smoke a cigarette (until cigarettes are banned altogether).