Government


Thieves and Kidnappers Terrorize Phish Concert

Thugs stole over $1.2 million of good and cash from people attending the Phish concerts in Hampton, Virginia. In addition 194 concertgoers were kidnapped.
It is unfortunate that the band was forced (or agreed) to pay for the 200 supposed peace officers who turned into domestic terrorists.
Is it time for us to create our own protective organizations?

It certainly appears clear that current local, state and federal police organizations not only can not protect us from real criminals but are, themselves, going to continue to use inappropriate force against against those they are supposed to protect.


On politicians, bureaucrats and the punditry

From an entertaining article in Vanity Fair about the financial debacle in Iceland:

After three days in Reykjavík, I receive, more or less out of the blue, two phone calls. The first is from a producer of a leading current-events TV show. All of Iceland watches her show, she says, then asks if I’d come on and be interviewed. ‘About what?’ I ask. ‘We’d like you to explain our financial crisis,’ she says. ‘I’ve only been here three days!’ I say. It doesn’t matter, she says, as no one in Iceland understands what’s happened. They’d enjoy hearing someone try to explain it, even if that person didn’t have any idea what he was talking about—which goes to show, I suppose, that not everything in Iceland is different from other places. As I demur, another call comes, ….

No, not all that different at all.


Keynes Is Still Right

Paul Krugman quotes a clearly correct statement from Keynes:

“The resources of nature and men’s devices,” Keynes wrote, “are just as fertile and productive as they were. The rate of our progress towards solving the material problems of life is not less rapid. We are as capable as before of affording for everyone a high standard of life. … But today we have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand.”

It is still …a delicate machine, the workings of which we do not understand and the obama administration is no more clueful than the previous occupants.
Local and world economies would work much better, perhaps as well as ant colonies, if giants did not continually step in them. Alas, governments have been stepping on the operation of economies for 100s of years and we still have not learned the lesson that we must keep them out; restrain them to their possibly appropriate role of fighting fraud and the use of force.
All the bail out and stimulus schemes already hatched and yet to be born are no better than throwing mud on the wall to see what sticks.

It will be painful to disengage the government gangs but, really, if you want any chance at all of these cycles not continually repeating on ever larger scales we must do so.