SodaStream vs. Statism: When being green isn’t enough

December 2, 2012 by Leave a comment

SodaStreamStatism rests on a fairly simple conceit: the free market is ruled by greed and exploitation, so government intervention is necessary to level the playing field. Inherent in that mindset is the assumption that the government is benevolent, and its actors are without their own selfish motivations. A selective naivety is necessary to maintain this wishful worldview against the constant barrage that is reality, and it leads to some fascinating contradictions. For example, the same group that believes George W. Bush started a war in order to drive up Halliburton’s stock price (or something), never stops to think about the potential pitfalls of handing the government other immense powers, such as defining what the term “health care” will mean.

Politicians are happy to exploit this naivety to accumulate power, feigning self-righteous idealism to mask their ulterior motive. Getting away with anything is possible as long as you claim that you’re doing it for the children, or to uplift the disadvantaged worker, or to strengthen the middle class, or to protect… the bottled soda industry?

We’ll get to that in a second. First, recall O’Brien’s dark reveal at the end of George Orwell’s classic 1984:  Read more of this post

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Barack Obama’s Country for Kids Who Can’t Add Good

November 30, 2012 by 12 Comments

Zoolander and Hansel ponder Matilda's wordsObama’s fundamental transformation of America will hit a new stage when he hires the 100,000 math and science teachers he promised during the 2012 presidential campaign.

What does this mean?

It means we’ll have 2,000 more teachers for each state, one more teacher for every 500 school-age children, and 6,250 more school administrators to oversee these teachers.

One drawback to this math boom exists.

If all these extra teachers generate an uptick in the arithmetical acumen of Obama’s followers, Democrat voters who want to soak the “rich” may actually start doing the math.

This means:

Democrat voters may figure out that taxing the “rich” even at French tax rates wouldn’t cover half of one annual Obama budget.

Democrat voters may figure out the ongoing and exponential increases of unfunded liabilities in Medicare and Social Security mean that if Harry Reid keeps preventing the programs from being re-structured, he’ll soon be protecting the cooked meat of these sacred cows.

Democrat voters may figure out the absurdity of the current fiscal cliff conversation, which revolves around a class warfare argument over Grover Norquist and a few billion dollars in additional tax revenue (theoretically). We’d instead be talking about the $8 trillion a year it will take to keep just Medicare and Social Security going and that the combined gross annual income of every individual in the country making over $66,193 is only $5.1 trillion.

For those who haven’t been educated yet by Obama’s new teachers, that’s a $2.9 trillion gap.

It reminds me of this distillation of the ongoing state of affairs in the Middle East: Read more of this post

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Greed Friday

November 23, 2012 by Leave a comment

Well first of all tell me, is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? … What is greed? Of course none of us are greedy. It’s only the other fella that’s greedy. – Milton Friedman

If you believe that Wall Street greed crashed the American economy, you may be right. But today’s Black Friday Drudge Report headlines should disabuse you of the notion that greed is some special evil inherent to the financial sector. We are a materialist society from top to bottom. The reason Wall Street colluded with government to take advantage of Main Street (and not vice versa) had to do with ability, not greater desire. Or, as Friedman adherent Thomas Sowell would put it: “you can become the greediest person on earth and that will not increase your pay in the slightest.”

Current Drudge Report headlines:  Read more of this post

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Why does it take a disaster to remove the red tape?

November 4, 2012 by Leave a comment

“I instructed my team not to let red tape and bureaucracy get in the way of solving problems” – President Barack Obama, November 3, 2012

After spending the week unexpectedly campaigning with New Jersey governor Chris Christie through the storm-ravaged state, President Obama implied he is a man of action by uttering the above line in his weekly address. Apparently, we are to be impressed and grateful that the president was magnanimous enough to command his government worker minions to back off and be less troublesome while half of New York City and most of the Jersey shore have knee-deep water in what used to be their driveways.

Rest assured that as soon as the water is pumped out of everyone’s living room, and the shattered pieces of boardwalk removed from their front lawns, that all that red tape will be quickly sewn back together.

So why does it take a disaster to get government to remove impediments to solving problems?  Read more of this post

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Solzhenitsyn and the Italian earthquake case

October 24, 2012 by Leave a comment

“The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man’s noblest impulses.” – Alexander Solzhenitsyn, June 8, 1978

Suing because you tripped on an unmarked crack in the sidewalk is child’s play. In Italy, you can now hold someone legally accountable for not putting a proper warning sign on a crack in the earth’s crust:

In a verdict that sent shock waves through the scientific community, an Italian court convicted seven experts of manslaughter on Monday for failing to adequately warn residents of the risk before an earthquake struck central Italy in 2009, killing more than 300 people.

If you think preventative medicine is driving up health care costs, just wait and see what preventative geology or meteorology will do to FEMA’s budget. Like doctors performing medically unnecessary C-sections to avoid lawsuits, unnecessary evacuations of major cities will become a common CYA maneuver on the part of bureaucrats with no incentive to accept any risk. Apart from the visible financial demands such an arrangement will place on nations already on the brink of fiscal ruin, the hidden implications of a frightened scientific community could still be worse:

“It’s a sad day for science,” said seismologist Susan Hough, of the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena, Calif. “It’s unsettling.”
That fellow seismic experts in Italy were singled out in the case “hits you in the gut,” she said.

If the gut is where courage is stored, the metaphor is apt. The risk of public mockery and the scorn of peers will always make a number of innovative thinkers hesitant to stick their necks out, but the threat of jail time will surely cause a dramatic spike in the amount of potential scientific pioneers who choose safer career fields. Read more of this post

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