Monthly Archives: February 2011

Archive of posts published in the specified Month

“Why the Worst Get on Top”

This is a critical chapter in Hayek’s 1944 classic, The Road to Serfdom.  The books is a deeply thoughtful examination of why planned economies lead to despotic rule.   In several different parts of the book Hayek explains that the motivation

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Public and Private Reality

When our economy hit the wall in the last quarter of 2008 we, like so many businesses, reacted normally; we reduced the number of payroll employees and hours as much as possible,  eliminated some of the days we used the

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Too Many Great Men

I cannot avoid coming to this conclusion- that there are too many great men in the world; there are too many legislators, organizers, institutors of society, conductors of the people, fathers of nations, etc., etc.  Too many persons place themselves

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Driving Up Costs

One of the early signs of the pending economic collapse in 2007 and 2008 was a sharp drop in truck rental rates. As a result of the severe economic downturn the domestic truck fleet shrunk about 9%.  New trucking regulations

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Fertilizing New Leaders

Looking back for the last few years it is stunning to see how the Democrats squandered their power from the 2006-2008 victories.  They misread their mandate and governed poorly; passing unpopular legislation using the most partisan means.  The damage is

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The Icarus Unions

My first personal experience with unions thirty years ago was an eye opener. The union campaign against our company was built on lies and intimidation.  They got our employees to vote for the union by promising them that they would

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Ends and Means

Unfortunately, the relation between the ends and the means remains widely misunderstood.  Many of those who profess the most individualistic objectives support collectivist means without recognizing the contradiction.  It is tempting to believe that social evils arise from the activities

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Has Israel Become Less Relevant?

It is hard to tell how the uprisings in the Arab world will turn out, but it is interesting to note that the demonstrators are angry at their own government and not blaming the state of Israel for their problems.

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Ignore the Voters at Your own Peril

The Pelosi Congress ignored the voices of the opposition, squelched debate, ran roughshod over the law and proper procedure, and bent every rule to accomplish goals devoid of public support.  When asked about constitutional basis for the mandate of her

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Booing the Truth

It is the nature of politics, or at least it has been, to provide benefits without paying for them.  That in a nutshell is why we have such a huge deficit both on state and national levels.  It takes substantial courage for

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The Tragic Illusion

.. the desire to organize social life according to a unitary plan itself springs largely from a desire for power. .. in order to achieve their end, collectivists must create power of a magnitude never before known, and …  their

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ConstitutionAd_Politico-2011

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Presidential Hopefuls

Politics like any profession has its own set of rules and realities.   Success in another field does not ensure success in this one. Like any job I want to see the applicant not only with experience in the field but

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Breasts of Terror

The Transportation security Administration gave flight attendant Cathy Bossi a pat-down search at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport. When one of the screeners felt up her right breast, the agent asked, “What is this?” Bossi explained that she had a breast removed

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Killing America’s Financial Business

from today’s (2/17/2011) Wall Street Journal Independently Incomeptent: As we’ve argued before, the way to limit the power of big banks is to break them up or take away their subsidies, not to engineer flaws into trading platforms that are

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False Affirmation of Prosperity

If there is one common theme to the vast range of crisis we consider in this book, it is that excessive debt accumulation, whether it be the government, banks, corporation, or consumers, often poses greater systemic risks than it seems

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The Importance of Failure

“Too big to fail” is as antithetical to capitalism and economic growth as sugary high fat diet is to good health. Some free market supporters prefer the phrase “free enterprise” to capitalism, because of the bad name capitalism has developed. 

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Walden Regulated

After Ithaca College asked incoming freshmen to read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, a group of students in the Departmemnt of Environmetnal Studies and Sciences got the idea to build a replica of Thoreau’s famous cabin. The local code enforecment officer

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Democracy is Secondary

As we try to predict what the outcome will be in Egypt we tend to compare it to the last similar conflict, which many think is Iran. But the mistake in Iran began in 1953 when Mohammad Mosaddegh, a democratically

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Equality vs The Rule of Law

.. any policy aiming directly at a substantive ideal of distributive justice must lead to the destruction of the Rule of Law. To produce the same result for different people, it is necessary to treat them differently. To give different

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