Dec 4, 2018

Without an Obamacare penalty, many are planning to drop health plans. The consequences could be dire.

fromTheHill: Evidence that mandates are only necessary when persuasion has no chance. Premiums, even for a bronze plan with a deductible of more than $6,000, can cost more than $500 a month.
Economic Policy: Statism Versus The Free Market     Regulation Nation

Census confirms: 63 percent of ‘non-citizens’ on welfare, 4.6 million households

fromWashingtonExaminer: A majority of “non-citizens,” including those with legal green card rights, are tapping into welfare programs set up to help poor and ailing Americans says a Census Bureau finding.
The Welfare State: Promoting Dependency

The aggressive (and subtle) faces of coercion

fromCSMonitor: China today: The portrait is appalling. Obedience is enforced at gunpoint. Fear is widespread. The desire to change others is put above every other consideration. 
Government is Watching Every Move You Make

George H.W. Bush's legacy holds little, nothing for libertarians to celebrate

fromReason: There is little to celebrate and much to criticize.
Politics and Other Official Acts of Corruption

Our deficits may finally be coming home to roost

fromTheHill: The fact that our government is able to print money means that outright default is extremely unlikely; rather, the cost of excessive borrowing shows up in more subtle ways.
Economic Policy: Statism Versus The Free Market

Author's anger after his book about reducing plastic is sent out shrink-wrapped in PLASTIC

fromDailyMail: An eco-friendly author has been left raging after copies of his anti-plastic book were dispatched wrapped in plastic. Hilarious.
Political Correctness and Other Nitwittery

September 17, 2018

The cure for homelessness

fromMises: One of most fascinating aspects of progressives is the blindness they display to the adverse consequences of their very own government programs.
Economic Policy: Statism Versus The Free Market         The Welfare State: Promoting Dependence

VIDEO: Charles Murray - Regulation Nation: A Strategy to Fight Back

fromLibertyPen/YouTube: Charles Murray puts forward a strategy to confront regulatory state tyranny.
Regulation Nation

Congress just passed a $150 billion spending package without any consideration for looming deficit

fromReason: Just days after the latest CBO projections showed the deficit getting worse, Congress signs off on another bi-partisan spending increase.
Economic Policy: Statism Versus The Free Market

The game is rigged: Congress invites no consumer privacy advocates to its consumer privacy hearing

fromEFF: The upcoming hearing at the Senate Commerce Committee may be the launch pad for this strategy of undoing stronger state laws.
The Government is Not Us         Government is Watching Every Move You Make

WATCH: Cops dump 17 rounds into ‘good samaritan’ veteran as he tried to break up a fight

fromReason: A father of three and a Navy veteran was gunned down by two police officers as he tried to be a good Samaritan and break up a fight outside of a Portland bar. As usual, the cops are excused of accountability.
Police State America

Google caught on camera showing its bias

fromReason: The video within the article is evidence of the tech elitists who believe they should control what citizens see in searches so that Trump's trashed and all the successful things go unseen. 
Media Bias on Parade

May 13, 2016

How a “location API” allows cops to figure out where we all are in real-time

fromCreators: Last week, The New York Times reported on Securus, a prison telecom company that has a service enabling law enforcement officers to locate most American cell phones within seconds.
Government is Watching Every Move You Make     Police State America

Texas Health Department considers cracking down on CBD

fromCreators: Why would government keep patients from a harmless pain-relieving substance? Because they can. They are regulators and the mission of regulators is to destroy options.
Regulation Nation    The War Against Unapproved Voluntary Exchange

Feds collect record taxes through April; still run $385.4B deficit

fromCNSNews: Politicians succeeded to transfer more wealth from individuals to themselves but could not constrain their drunken-sailor spending.
Economic Policy: Statism Versus The Free Market

New law: Kansas cops can no longer have sex during traffic stops

fromCreators: This is no doubt about revenue. Good news: traffic citations can no longer be bartered away. 
Bad news: the police unions are not happy.
Police State America

The new battle over genetic privacy: How DNA sites became a police weapon

fromNewstatesman: Police are using sites such as GEDMatch.com to revive historic crime investigations.
Government is Watching Every Move You Make

VIDEO: Cop savagely beats his own daughter at school, and no one tries to stop him

fromTheFreeThought: Do you really think he treats the general public better than his own daughter?
Police State America

February 27, 2018

The federal government's finances are a total wreck

fromReason: And the biggest liabilities don’t even appear on the official balance sheet.
Economic Policy: Statism Versus The Free Market

State takes child from parents because they refused to allow her to become transgender

fromTheFreeThoughtProject: Because they wanted their daughter to speak to a therapist instead of undergoing hormone treatment to become transgender, a couple has had their parental rights taken away.
Political Correctness and Other Nitwittery      Police State America

CNN town hall evidence of media bias

fromTheMorningCall: The propaganda machine never sleeps.
Media Bias on Parade

Shooting Survivor: ‘CNN gave me a scripted question’ after denying question of armed guards

fromSHTFPlan: Anyone believing CNN has an agenda other than that of the anti-gun global elites is not paying attention.
Media Bias on Parade

Man removes feds’ spy cam, they demand it back, he refuses and sues

fromTheFreeThoughtProject: A cycle of CBP agents making incursions onto the ranch and Palacios telling them to leave continued for years—that is, until he found the camera, believed to be part of an effort to monitor the border.
The Government is Not Us        

CNN’s Chris Cuomo melts down after spreading fake news about AR-15 purchase

fromBreitbart: CNN’s Chris Cuomo, the anti-Trump pundit who hosts CNN’s failing morning show, spread fake news about a gun purchase and then melted down after he was called out for it.
Media Bias on Parade    2nd Amendment Assaults

January 8, 2018

VIDEO: How the State justifies homicide

fromLibertyPen/YouTube: From Crime Watch Daily, a Mesa cop faces the legal system after he executes an unarmed man who violated no laws.

Police State America

Regulations at 'lowest count since records began being kept in the mid-1970s'

fromReason: Economy advances while administrative state recedes; lefty commentators hardest hit.
Regulation Nation

Trillion-Dollar Deficit Deja Vu

fromReason: Debt and deficits mount as lawmakers remain addicted to borrowing and spending.
Economic Policy: Statism Versus The Free Market

This week in media bias history: Kennedy would have helped woman, if he hadn’t drowned her

fromNewsBusters: Every day in 2018, research director Rich Noyes will be tweeting out “This Day in Media Bias History” from the files of NewsBusters and the MRC. Here’s a recap of the first week’s examples.
Media Bias on Parade

It’s time to decriminalize marijuana

fromNationalReview: Rather than blaming Jeff Sessions for enforcing the law, Congress should pass new legislation and put it on the president’s desk. It’s time to do the right thing the right, constitutional way.
The War on Unapproved Voluntary Exchange    Individual Liberty: America's First Principle

VIDEO: Harry Browne - Our obese federal government

fromLibertyPen/YouTube: Former Libertarian presidential candidate Harry Browne joins radio host Art Bell for a conversation on the relentless growth of the federal government.
The Government is Not Us     Politics and Other Official Acts of Corruption

October 23, 2017

America has built the most comfortable civilization in the world

from PJMedia: Human civilization can be described as a long crawl away from a life that was nasty, brutal and short.
America is winning that race.
The Pursuit of Happiness

3 stories that show Big Brother is alive and well

from The Daily Bell: 1. Getting Clever with Fear to Restrict the Internet. 2. Prosecutors pick a target, THEN find a crime.
3. Fitbit and pacemaker info used to catch criminals.
Government is Watching Every Move You Make

Why you may need a passport next year to fly from city to city within the United States 

from Reason: A passport to fly within the country, but no ID to vote. Government serves the politician not the people.
Regulation Nation

U.S. ran $666 billion deficit in fiscal 2017, sixth highest on record

from Wall Street Journal: "U.S. revenue and spending both hit record highs in fiscal 2017.
Economic Policy: Statism vs. The Free Market

Alabama police use asset forfeiture to ruin an innocent small business owner

from Reason: How government has set things up so police departments can take anything they want with impunity.
Police State America    The Government is Not Us

Former NFL players say league should allow players to use marijuana to treat pain, injuries

from Reason: Former player: If there's any sport or league that should be leading the way in experiments with cannibis,
of course it's the NFL.
The War on Unapproved Voluntary Exchange

Walter E Williams: Trade Deficit Angst

Donald Trump's primary bluster.   Let's look at the political angst over trade deficits. A trade deficit is when people in one country buy more from another country than the other country's people buy from them. There cannot be a trade deficit in a true economic sense. Let's examine this. I buy more from my grocer than he buys from me. That   ... MORE

Victor Davis Hansen: The Medicine Has Stopped Working

In search of fixes for a fossilized economy.     The U.S. economy grew at an anemic rate of less than 1 percent in the last quarter of 2015. While the unemployment rate has dipped below 5 percent, the all-important labor force participation rate is at a historic low of just 62.7 percent. More than 90 million able-bodied adults are either not   ... MORE

VIDEO: ObamaCare Is Buckling Under The Weight Of Reality

Peter Suderman: Democrats And Republicans Team Up To Bust The Budget With A $1.8 Trillion Spending Package

Politicians indulge themselves at taxpayer expense.     One way to understand the massive federal spending package is as a compromise between Republicans and Democrats to ignore the deficit. The deal is made of two different elements—a 2,009-page omnibus that folds in 12 appropriations bills and calls for $1.1 trillion in spending,     ... MORE

Feds Collect Record 2015 Tax Haul: $19,346 Per Worker

by Michael Lotfi.       Gov't overspent by nearly $530 billion anyway. According to a monthly treasury statement, through the first eleven months of fiscal year 2015 (Oct. 1, 2014 – end of August), the United States federal government has collected a record-breaking haul in tax revenue. In total, the feds have collected over $2.8 trillion so far, which     ... MORE

VIDEO: Milton Friedman - Deficits & Government Spending

VIDEO: Is Our Debt A Revenue Or Spending Problem?

Steve Chapman: Government Debt On The Road To Ruin

Promise today, figure out how to pay tomorrow.  Americans are addicted to living beyond their means, at least when it comes to the functions of government. That's why the federal debt tripled over the past decade and under President Barack Obama's budget plan would keep growing indefinitely. Why not? If you don't have to pay for all   ... MORE

AP: Obama Relies On Accounting Tricks To Pad Numbers

by Andrew Taylor.   President Barack Obama’s budget is relying on a series of familiar accounting tricks to show $1.8 trillion in deficit reduction over a decade, an amount that would shrink by almost half if they were excluded. But so-called “pay-go” rules officially require tax cuts and new spending on the mandatory side of the ledger to be balanced by  ...  MORE

VIDEO: John Stossel - Privatize Everything

America's Unsustainable Long-Term Debt Trajectory

by Peter Suderman.       In the past year or so, the White House has become increasingly aggressive in touting President Obama’s achievements in reducing the deficit. The deficit has been “cut by more than half since 2009,” a 2013 blog post by the White House Office of Management and Budget declared, pointing to the shrinking of  ... MORE

Taxpayers Cough Up Record Amount As Deficits Increase

Government's unquenchable thirst for revenue.        Federal tax revenues continue to run at a record pace (in inflation-adjusted dollars) in fiscal 2014, as the federal government’s total receipts for the fiscal year closed May at an unprecedented $1,934,919,000,000, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement. Despite record revenue, the     ... MORE

Jeffrey Dorfman: The Government That Cried Wolf

Debt ceiling deja vu.         On February 7 the United States will once again reach its statutory debt limit, meaning it cannot legally borrow any more money. Since the obvious option of cutting spending to match the amount of revenue that the government collects is off the table for some inexplicable reason, Congress will have to pass a new, higher    ... MORE

Peter Schiff: Debt Ceiling Delusions

Debt accumulation does not equal economic growth.     The popular take on the current debt ceiling stand-off is that the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party has a delusional belief that it can hit the brakes on new debt creation without bringing on an economic catastrophe. While Republicans are indeed kidding themselves   ... MORE