“They work for us now…”

Liberty Quotes

” … as all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a
constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to
obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone
occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of
the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power
carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see
that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people
are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has
of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to
suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce
a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh,
get first all the people’s money, then all their lands, and then make them and
their children servants for ever …”
— Benjamin Franklin
(1706-1790) US Founding Father
Source: before the Constitutional Convention, June 2, 1787

“[I]f the public are bound to yield obedience to laws
to which they cannot give their approbation,
they are slaves to those who make such laws and enforce them.”
— Candidus
Pen name of Samuel Adams during the era of the Sons of Liberty
Source: in the Boston Gazette, 1772

Volt Fraud At Government Motors

More evidence of the error of “central planning”…

From IBD:

Volt Fraud At Government Motors

Posted 10/19/2010 06:55 PM ET

Standing behind the first lithium-ion battery off the Brownstown, Mich., assembly line of the Chevrolet Volt in January were, from left, Rep. Sander… View Enlarged Image 

Green Technology: Government Motors’ all-electric car isn’t all-electric and doesn’t get near the touted hundreds of miles per gallon. Like “shovel-ready” jobs, maybe there’s no such thing as “plug-ready” cars either.

The Chevy Volt, hailed by the Obama administration as the electric savior of the auto industry and the planet, makes its debut in showrooms next month, but it’s already being rolled out for test drives by journalists. It appears we’re all being taken for a ride.

When President Obama visited a GM plant in Hamtramck near Detroit a few months ago to drive a Chevy Volt 10 feet off an assembly line, we called the car an “electric Edsel.” Now that it’s about to hit the road, nothing revealed has changed our mind.

Advertised as an all-electric car that could drive 50 miles on its lithium battery, GM addressed concerns about where you plug the thing in en route to grandma’s house by adding a small gasoline engine to help maintain the charge on the battery as it starts to run down. It was still an electric car, we were told, and not a hybrid on steroids.

That’s not quite true. The gasoline engine has been found to be more than a range-extender for the battery. Volt engineers are now admitting that when the vehicle’s lithium-ion battery pack runs down and at speeds near or above 70 mph, the Volt’s gasoline engine will directly drive the front wheels along with the electric motors. That’s not charging the battery — that’s driving the car.

So it’s not an all-electric car, but rather a pricey $41,000 hybrid that requires a taxpayer-funded $7,500 subsidy to get car shoppers to look at it. But gee, even despite the false advertising about the powertrain, isn’t a car that gets 230 miles per gallon of gas worth it?

We heard GM’s then-CEO Fritz Henderson claim the Volt would get 230 miles per gallon in city conditions. Popular Mechanics found the Volt to get about 37.5 mpg in city driving, and Motor Trend reports: “Without any plugging in, (a weeklong trip to Grandma’s house) should return fuel economy in the high 30s to low 40s.”

Car and Driver reported that “getting on the nearest highway and commuting with the 80-mph flow of traffic — basically the worst-case scenario — yielded 26 miles; a fairly spirited backroad loop netted 31; and a carefully modulated cruise below 60 mph pushed the figure into the upper 30s.”

This is what happens when government picks winners and losers in the marketplace and tries to run a business. We are not told that we will be dependent on foreign sources like Bolivia for the lithium to be used in these batteries. Nor are we told about the possible dangers to rescuers and occupants in an accident scenario.

There’s the issue of asking grandma to use her electricity for the three or four hours necessary to recharge your car so you can get home to charge it again. Where’s the electricity going to come from considering that solar and wind don’t work when the sun don’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow? We aren’t building any nukes.

And since electricity rates are necessarily going to skyrocket as a result of this administration’s energy policies and fondness for cap-and-trade, what’s the true cost of operating a not-so-all-electric car like the Volt?

In 2008, candidate Obama pledged to put 1 million plug-in vehicles on the road by 2015. Not likely. It was a tough sell when we thought it was all-electric and could get 230 mpg. It will be a tougher sell now that we find it’s a glorified Prius with the price tag of a BMW that seats only four because of a battery that runs down the center of the car.

President Obama likes to talk about not giving the GOP back the keys to the car. It’s his industrial policy and central planning that have driven us into the ditch.

Russian and American Propaganda

From EPJ:

A Peak Inside Vladimir Putin’s Living Room

At least in Russia, they are not likely to believe this hilarious propaganda–versus the nonsense that’s thrown as us on a daily basis, such as, ObamaCare will be a cost saver.

Anarcho-capitalism Works

An American Experiment in Anarcho-Capitalism: The Not So Wild, Wild West

This paper was written while Terry Anderson was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, 1977-78. While retaining responsibility for any errors, the authors wish to thank Jon Christianson, Murray Rothbard, and Gordon Tullock for their valuable comments.

by Terry L. Anderson and P. J. Hill

Department of Economics, Montana State University

---

The growth of government during this century has attracted the attention of many scholars interested in explaining that growth and in proposing ways to limit it. As a result of this attention, the public choice literature has experienced an upsurge in the interest in anarchy and its implications for social organization. The work of Rawls and Nozick, two volumes edited by Gordon Tullock, Explorations in the Theory of Anarchy, and a hook by David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom, provide examples. The goals of the literature have varied from providing a conceptual framework for comparing Leviathan and its opposite extreme to presenting a formula for the operation of society in a state of anarchy. But nearly all of this work has one common aspect; it explores the “theory of anarchy.” The purpose of this paper is to take us from the theoretical world of anarchy to a case study of its application. To accomplish our task we will first discuss what is meant by “anarcho-capitalism” and present several hypotheses relating to the nature of social organization in this world. These hypotheses will then he tested in the context of the American West during its earliest settlement. We propose to examine property rights formulation and protection under voluntary organizations such as private protection agencies, vigilantes, wagon trains, and early mining camps. Although the early West was not completely anarchistic, we believe that government as a legitimate agency of coercion was absent for a long enough period to provide insights into the operation and viability of property rights in the absence of a formal state. The nature of contracts for the provision of “public goods” and the evolution of western “laws” for the period from 1830 to 1900 will provide the data for this case study.

The West during this time often is perceived as a place of great chaos, with little respect for property or life. Our research indicates that this was not the case; property rights were protected and civil order prevailed. Private agencies provided the necessary basis for an orderly society in which property was protected and conflicts were resolved. These agencies often did not qualify as governments because they did not have a legal monopoly on “keeping order.” They soon discovered that “warfare” was a costly way of resolving disputes and lower cost methods of settlement (arbitration, courts, etc.) resulted. In summary, this paper argues that a characterization of the American West as chaotic would appear to be incorrect.

Anarchy: Order or Chaos?

Though the first dictionary definition of anarchy is “the state of having no government,” many people believe that the third definition, “confusion or chaos generally,” is more appropriate since it is a necessary result of the first. If we were to engage seriously in the task of dismantling the government as it exists in the U.S., the political economist would find no scarcity of programs to eliminate. However, as the dismantling continued, the decisions would become more and more difficult, with the last “public goods” to be dealt with probably being programs designed to define and enforce property rights. Consider the following two categories of responses to this problem:

continue reading…

How Capitalism Saved the Miners in Chile

From WSJ:

Capitalism Saved the Miners
The profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at the mine rescue site.
By DANIEL HENNINGER

It needs to be said. The rescue of the Chilean miners is a smashing victory for free-market capitalism.

Amid the boundless human joy of the miners’ liberation, it may seem churlish to make such a claim. It is churlish. These are churlish times, and the stakes are high.

In the United States, with 9.6% unemployment, a notably angry electorate will go to the polls shortly and dump one political party in favor of the other, on which no love is lost. The president of the U.S. is campaigning across the country making this statement at nearly every stop:

“The basic idea is that if we put our blind faith in the market and we let corporations do whatever they want and we leave everybody else to fend for themselves, then America somehow automatically is going to grow and prosper.”

Uh, yeah. That’s a caricature of the basic idea, but basically that’s right. Ask the miners.

If those miners had been trapped a half-mile down like this 25 years ago anywhere on earth, they would be dead. What happened over the past 25 years that meant the difference between life and death for those men?

Short answer: the Center Rock drill bit.

This is the miracle bit that drilled down to the trapped miners. Center Rock Inc. is a private company in Berlin, Pa. It has 74 employees. The drill’s rig came from Schramm Inc. in West Chester, Pa. Seeing the disaster, Center Rock’s president, Brandon Fisher, called the Chileans to offer his drill. Chile accepted. The miners are alive.

Longer answer: The Center Rock drill, heretofore not featured on websites like Engadget or Gizmodo, is in fact a piece of tough technology developed by a small company in it for the money, for profit. That’s why they innovated down-the-hole hammer drilling. If they make money, they can do more innovation.

This profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at that Chilean mine. The high-strength cable winding around the big wheel atop that simple rig is from Germany. Japan supplied the super-flexible, fiber-optic communications cable that linked the miners to the world above.

A remarkable Sept. 30 story about all this by the Journal’s Matt Moffett was a compendium of astonishing things that showed up in the Atacama Desert from the distant corners of capitalism.

Samsung of South Korea supplied a cellphone that has its own projector. Jeffrey Gabbay, the founder of Cupron Inc. in Richmond, Va., supplied socks made with copper fiber that consumed foot bacteria, and minimized odor and infection.

Chile’s health minister, Jaime Manalich, said, “I never realized that kind of thing actually existed.”

The profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at the mine rescue site.

That’s right. In an open economy, you will never know what is out there on the leading developmental edge of this or that industry. But the reality behind the miracles is the same: Someone innovates something useful, makes money from it, and re-innovates, or someone else trumps their innovation. Most of the time, no one notices. All it does is create jobs, wealth and well-being. But without this system running in the background, without the year-over-year progress embedded in these capitalist innovations, those trapped miners would be dead.

Some will recoil at these triumphalist claims for free-market capitalism. Why make them now?

Here’s why. When a catastrophe like this occurs—others that come to mind are the BP well blowout, Hurricane Katrina, various disasters in China—a government has all its chips pushed to the center of the table. Chile succeeds (it rebuilt after the February earthquake with phenomenal speed). China flounders. Two American administrations left the public agog as they stumbled through the mess.

Still, what the political class understands is that all such disasters wash away eventually, and that life in a developed nation reverts to a tolerable norm. If the Obama administration refuses to complete free-trade agreements with Colombia, South Korea and Panama, no big deal. It’s only politics.

But that’s not true. Getting a nation’s economics right is more important than at any time since the end of World War II. Chile, Colombia, Peru and Brazil are pulling away from the rest of their hapless South American neighbors. China, India and others are simply copying or buying the West’s accomplishments.

The U.S. has a government led by a mindset obsessed with 250K-a-year “millionaires” and given to mocking “our blind faith in the market.” In a fast-moving world filled with nations intent on catching up with or passing us, this policy path is a waste of time.

The miners’ rescue is a thrilling moment for Chile, an imprimatur on its rising status. But I’m thinking of that 74-person outfit in Berlin, Pa., whose high-tech drill bit opened the earth to free them. You know there are tens of thousands of stories like this in the U.S., as big as Google and small as Center Rock. I’m glad one of them helped save the Chileans. What’s needed now is a new American economic model that lets our innovators rescue the rest of us.

Write to henninger@wsj.com

Mr. T and Gold

http://www.youtube.com/v/pWAu7FmKbYc?version=3

The Killing and Reviving of the American Dream

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

USA Today loves to run lifestyle features that purport to show how we are living, what we are doing, what we like and what we don’t like – premised on a collectivist assumption that all our preferences can be tracked and characterized with these aggregate claims.

Most of the time, these features are silly. It’s not really true that we are all listening to Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber, or tweeting what we had for breakfast.

However, the other day, the paper offered a roundup of how the great recession has affected American life. The business cycle is one of those forces that does indeed affect everyone, so perhaps it makes sense to examine what the paper had to say.

The trends are gleaned from US Census data, which provide a look at how economic downturns can devastate a society, and offer a glimpse into a theme that the Austrian tradition has long emphasized. Economics isn’t just about trade statistics, retail sales or GDP. It is the very pith of life.

What the Census data indicate is that our mobility has been drastically curtailed from what it was a few years ago. The number of people who have not moved from one home to another, from one community to another, has risen substantially.

From an economic point of view, this makes sense. Maybe people are afraid to put their houses on sale for fear of discovering what price the market will bear. Many people sunk vast sums into their houses under the assumption, alive for decades, that homes would forever go up in price. This turns out to be the great myth that has devastated family finances across the country.

Another factor affecting mobility has been the tight labor market. Jobs are just not easy to come by, and it is especially difficult to transport a boom-time salary to another location during the bust. Market pressures during recessions are always downward. The safest path is to stay put.

Another trend is the delay in marriage. For the first time since the data have been tracked, the share of women 18 and older who are married fell below 50%. The share of the population age 25 to 34 that is unmarried jumped from 34.5% in 2000 to 46.3% nine years later. This is a massive social trend, dictated by economic realities.

There is a general tendency to marry in secure economic times, and to put this decision off during periods of economic uncertainty. Moreover, falling incomes and tighter labor markets give women, in particular, less to gain from a marriage, because there is far less likelihood that a household can get by on a single income.

continue reading…

John Lennon: Overpopulation is a myth

Individual Rights

“Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).”
– Ayn Rand