Yearly Archives: 2012

Archive of posts published in the specified Year

Scammers

Daniel Greenfield write in his blog, Sultan Knish, Carny Nation, 11/10/12 Excerpt: The fools of Carny Nation fancy themselves wise men. After all they eat without paying for it. They get money without working for it. Every baby they pop out

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Envy vs Freedom

Victor Davis Hanson writes Ripples from the Election in The National Review, 12/11/12. Excerpt:  In the new climate of “fat cats,” “corporate jet owners,” “pay your fair share,” “you didn’t build that,” and “1 percent,” the more Americans have, the more

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Stable Money

As Steve Forbes stresses, the role of currencies is to serve as a standard of value, representing a measuring stick of the worth of goods and services.  “Floating the currency is like floating the clock.  Let’s say you floated the

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Socialism, not Capitalism, Is Based Greed

Some implicitly accept the behavioral dream of  “Skinner box” economics of stimulus and response, in which lower rates impart a stimulus of reward for more work and risk-taking, yielding more revenues for the government.  A successful economy, however, is driven

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A Capital Image Problem

  Charles Murray writes in the Review section of the weekend Wall Street Journal, July 28-29/12, Why Capitalism Has an Image Problem. Excerpt: From the dawn of history until the 18th century, every society in the world was impoverished, with

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Capital Ideas

A sampling from  Explaining Conservative Economics in 25 Quotes by John Hawkins in Townhall 8/7/2012: “A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.” — F.A. Hayek “Either immediately or ultimately every

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General Orders No. 11

Jeff Jacoby writes of an interesting chapter in Jewish American History and a tale of atonement in Grant’s Greatest Regret in Townhall,  12/5/12. Excerpts: In December 1862, with the Civil War raging, the Union Army’s efforts to control the movement

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About Those Missing WMDs….

From Investor’sBusiness Daily, Syria’s Chemical Weapons Came From Saddam’s Iraq, 7/19/12 In 2006, former Iraqi general Georges Sada, second in command of the Iraqi Air Force who served under Saddam Hussein before he defected, wrote a comprehensive book, “Saddam’s Secrets.”

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Making Politics Irrelevant

Ultimately we will all adjust to the outcome of the election, but the inane fiscal cliff drama just becomes noise.  Like many of a similar view I am tired of the debate between sides with very little difference. Whether rates

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Tales of The Absurd 2012 12 05

From Gretawire Former AutoZone employee Devin McLean just went ON THE RECORD at 10pm/ET about the night he turned the tables on an armed robber. McLean and his manager were getting ready to close an Virginia AutoZone shop when a

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Why Democracy Fails in the Middle East

Daniel Greenfield write a bit of profound analysis of Democracy in With a Pocketful of Democracy in his blog Sultan Knish Excerpt: In an amoral society, democracy is one of the few things left to us by dead white men

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Aligning Knowledge With Power

The key issue in economics is not aligning incentives with some putative [supposed] public good but aligning knowledge with power. Business investments bring both a financial and epistemic [knowledge] yield. Capitalism catalytically joins the two. Capitalist economies grow because they

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A Tax Increase Reader

There are a lot of sound bites and meaningless phrases used to cover the debate on fiscal reform.  “Fiscal Reform” means cutting expenses for some, increasing taxes for other.  I think I will scream if I hear the phrase ‘fiscal

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Mastering the Message and the Method

Erick Erickson writes in Red State The Incestuous Bleeding of the Republican Party, 11/28/12.  It is a thoroughly researched piece on how the GOP is run by consultants who get paid a fortune and perform very poorly.  This point is also made

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Lessons Unlearned

In The Telegraph, Two-thirds of millionaires left Britain to avoid 50p tax rate by Robert Winnett, 11/27/12 Excerpt: In the 2009-10 tax year, more than 16,000 people declared an annual income of more than £1 million to HM Revenue and

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Jobs and Taxes

“Suppose I hire you to repair my computer. The job is worth $200 to me and doing the job is worth $200 to you. The transaction will occur because we have a meeting of the mind. Now suppose there’s the

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Tax More, Get Less

From The Great 2012 Cashout in the Wall Street Journal, 11/28/12 Excerpts: It’s also a good bet that some of the recent stock market volatility is due to investors seeking to realize capital gains at today’s 15% tax rate, before

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Krugman’s Selective Nostalgia

In The New York Times, Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman writes theTwinkie Manifesto, 11/18/12. In the article Krugman noted how we had strong economic growth in the 1950’s even with much higher tax rates and much stronger trade unions. But

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Regressive Marginal Tax Rates

In the current debate of how best to increase revenues it is important to distinguish between marginal taxes and effective taxes.  Marginal taxes are the taxes you pay on an incremental amount of income.  If the marginal tax rate is

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“Access to a waiting list is not access to health care”

The premise of the very need for health care reform of the nature of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is based on flawed analysis and myths. Myth #1 Access to health insurance is synonymous to access to health care. Plenty of

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