From the Agitator:

George Will urges the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down an Illinois law that may be the next step in post-bailout, post-Kelo America: direct transfer of the profits of successful industries to the accounts of those that are failing. The Illinois law attempts to prop up the state’s sagging horse racing industry by requiring the state’s four most profitable casinos to simply hand over 3 percent of gross receipts to Illinois’ horse racing tracks. The bill was recently upheld by the state’s supreme court.

More here.

And the slide towards a new socialism continues.

Sorry for the lack of posts, ladies and gents. It's been a busy few months.
Here's a little something to tide you over.


(Thanks to The Agitator)

Cato@Liberty shows you the difference between free-market, laissez- faire capitalism and corporatism:

The seemingly arcane difference between laissez-faire and corporatism is one of the most important in today’s public policy debates. Laissez-faire means the equality of all before the law, with the state neither helping nor hindering any market actor. Corporatism means offering special favors to those who’ve already succeeded. (Just for starters: “Too big to fail” is corporatism.)

If only this distinction were more clearly understood by lawmakers, journalists, and the general public. Too often all of these groups just use the vague word “capitalism,” which seems mostly intended to split the difference — or to obscure it. But laissez-faire and corporatism are directly opposed to one another, and if more people on the left understood this, they might be far more sympathetic to free markets. Even, perhaps, while keeping a healthy mistrust of corporations.

Here we have a very interesting and informative article about free-markets and the economy by Matt Kibbe of the Freedom Works Foundation written for Reason Magazine:

A

s for Paulson’s desired role to become economic czar and CEO of the American economy, I recommend Hayek’s famous essay, "The Use of Knowledge in Society." Hayek says it best. “If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, the problem which remains is purely one of logic...This, however, is emphatically not the economic problem which society faces...The reason for this is that the 'data' from which the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society 'given' to a single mind which could work out the implications and can never be so given.” This is the same argument both Mises and Hayek used to dismantle the idea that socialist systems could supplant price discovery through the market process with really well-meaning, smart bureaucrats. By now, virtually everyone realizes that a full-on socialist economy brings only human misery to people, particularly to workers who don’t have access to the special favor of the political elite.

Or is that really understood? Listening to Wall Street types and their friends (from both political parties) in office, you would think that free market capitalism is fundamentally broken. Many are downright hysterical in their predictions of gloom and doom. I had read about the phenomenon, but now I actually understand what a “panic on Wall Street” really is. But it is very difficult, in the current legislative panic, to discern fact from fiction. One popular example is the assertion that capital for small businesses is “seizing up.” People I trust have told me this.

Many more people with a vested interest have asserted this. The most popular example widely used in the past few days is the claim that Sonic Drive-Ins were being denied, despite credit worthiness, needed business capital by GE Capital. Even the McCain campaign uses this talking point. It is, inconveniently, an urban myth, just like the guy that had both kidneys stolen and wakes up in an icy bathtub. According to a press statement by the company released on Monday, “GE is just one of many lenders who finance Sonic franchisees and, in fact, many franchisees maintain access to other diversified sources of financing. Furthermore, Sonic has not received any notification from GE Capital, either directly or indirectly, that it will stop financing new loans to Sonic franchisees.”

This is not to say that the economy is not in serious trouble, that capital flows are not being disrupted, or that access to credit is not a problem. The point is that the government is proposing to redistribute $700 billion dollars. That’s more than the annual GDP of Australia. With that much money on the table, expect disinformation to permeate the public debate. Some of that misinformation is intentional, but most is not. As a good Hayekian, I understand that knowledge is dispersed throughout the economy, and that good information only emerges if the discovery process is allowed to function. To put it another way, the only thing I know certainly is that I don’t know everything.

This is not an ivory-tower, think-tank point. It seems to me, during times of economic crisis, that there is an obligation to first do no harm. Should we rush to pass legislation written by tired, 25-year-old legislative staffers in the middle of the night in offices littered with Domino’s boxes and empty vente Starbucks cups? What are the inevitable unintended consequences? My biggest fear is that the plan will do far more harm than good, even in the short run, by propping up poorly performing banks at the expense of well-run institutions ready and able to come in and clean up the mess. And, yes, as Warren Buffet could tell you, they hope to make a healthy profit doing it.

We are talking about legislation that will fundamentally alter the face of American capitalism for at least a generation. Allowing investment banks to go to the government for a $700 billion line of credit is akin to inviting a vampire into the house. If you live, you certainly won’t be the same person when you wake up the next morning.

Assuming that all of the short-term problems are real, and assuming that we are headed into real economic hardship, what should we do? What would Mises do? A quote from Hayek’s Fatal Conceit is instructive: "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they know about what they imagine they can design." (Hat Tip to economist Peter Boettke). Paulson’s audacious power grab has tainted the whole debate, crowding out a more rational conversation about how to remove real barriers to better-functioning markets. Especially after last night's dispiriting Senate vote, and the coming second round in the House of Representatives, that conversation is less likely to happen than ever.

I have to say, with my limited knowledge of economics, it seems to me that Mr. Kibbe knows what he's talking about.

This financial crisis isn't a failure of laissez-faire, free-market capitalism but a failure of corporatism.

From the group’s press release:

Thousand Oaks, CA — A national caucus of Republican activists has urged GOP legislators to stand firm against the “Paulson Bailout” of a corrupt financial regulatory system. “This proposal is a government takeover of the entire U.S. economy,” says Republican Liberty Caucus Chairman William Westmiller, “whose only purpose is to rescue those who made risky bets on bad mortgages.”

The Caucus [www.RLC.org] opposes any taxpayer payoff to rescue those who made bad investments in any sector of the economy. “The problem is not a lack of government control,” says Westmiller, “but rather the decades of market distortions imposed by Congress through subsidies, mandates, guarantees, andconstraints on free-enterprise mortgage offerings.”

The Paulson proposal grants the Secretary of the Treasury total control over all mortgage-related financial instruments, nearly a trillion-dollars in discretionary funds, and the power to nationalize or deputize every financial institution in the nation. “This isn’t a rescue plan,” says Westmiller, “it is an economic police state.”

(Special thanks to United Liberty for the story.)

From the Line is Here:

Really, you don’t say? Economic advantages and disadvantages that are applied through government regulation can lead to ethnic unrest? Wealth redistribution along ethnic lines makes people testy and prone to take out their frustrations on other ethnic groups?

That is just amazing!

In all honesty, it is nice to see a study that highlights this, although anyone who pays attention to African and Balkan politics and conflicts would have been able to tell you this without a study

.

More here.

From Cato@Liberty:

Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear is trying to seize some online casinos. Unlike casinos that are on the land, online casinos are difficult for the government to tax. According to Mr. Beshear, if the tax collectors can’t get their paws on a business, then that business is a “leech” on the community. This type of thinking comes from Statism 101 and will require reading works not listed on the syllabus. Go here and here (pdf).

From the Western Standard:

One of the biggest confusions in the current mess is the claim that it is the result of greed. The problem with that explanation is that greed is always a feature of human interaction. It always has been. Why, all of a sudden, has greed produced so much harm? And why only in one sector of the economy? After all, isn't there plenty of greed elsewhere? Firms are indeed profit seekers. And they will seek after profit where the institutional incentives are such that profit is available. In a free market, firms profit by providing the goods that consumers want at prices they are willing to pay. (My friends, don't stop reading there even if you disagree - now you know how I feel when you claim this mess is a failure of free markets - at least finish this paragraph.) However, regulations and policies and even the rhetoric of powerful political actors can change the incentives to profit. Regulations can make it harder for firms to minimize their risk by requiring that they make loans to marginal borrowers. Government institutions can encourage banks to take on extra risk by offering an implicit government guarantee if those risks fail. Policies can direct self-interest into activities that only serve corporate profits, not the public.

Many of you have rightly criticized the ethanol mandate, which made it profitable for corn growers to switch from growing corn for food to corn for fuel, leading to higher food prices worldwide. What's interesting is that you rightly blamed the policy and did not blame greed and the profit motive! The current financial mess is precisely analogous.

More here.
(via the fine folks at The Line is Here)

The Obama campaign disputes the accuracy of the above advertisement, which is fine. It's also threatened regulatory retaliation against outlets that show it, which isn't fine. Instead of, say, crafting a response ad, Obama's team sent stations a letter [pdf] arguing that "Failure to prevent the airing of 'false and misleading advertising may be 'probative of an underlying abdication of licensee responsibility.'" And, more directly: "For the sake of both FCC licensing requirements and the public interest, your station should refuse to continue to air this advertisement."

This casts Obama's campaign as a bunch of speech-squelching bullies, and it makes the ad itself into a story, guaranteeing that more people will see it. Together with similar efforts elsewhere, the incident says something about how a President Obama might approach media regulation. Obama says he won't restore the Fairness Doctrine, but, he isn't opposed to other, more subtle ways the authorities can influence what is or isn't said on TV and radio. For those of us who have fears based John McCain's piss poor record on free speech issues, it's important to remember that his opponent might not be any better.

The financial crisis that we're dealing with was caused by the government and their stooges.
This is why we are where we are today.


*

* video embed updated 10/02/2008

*In no way, shape, or form does the Professor Politico Show endorse any of the presidential candidates (only because we haven't found one to endorse yet) or their views.

It's like they planned it this way all along.

From TheNewspaper.com:

Private companies in the US are hoping to use red light cameras and speed cameras as the basis for a nationwide surveillance network similar to one that will be active next year in the UK. Redflex and American Traffic Solutions (ATS), the top two photo enforcement providers in the US, are quietly shopping new motorist tracking options to prospective state and local government clients. Redflex explained the company's latest developments in an August 7 meeting with Homestead, Florida officials.

"We are moving into areas such as homeland security on a national level and on a local level," Redflex regional director Cherif Elsadek said. "Optical character recognition is our next roll out which will be coming out in a few months -- probably about five months or so."

The technology would be integrated with the Australian company's existing red light camera and speed camera systems. It allows officials to keep full video records of passing motorists and their passengers, limited only by available hard drive space and the types of cameras installed. To gain public acceptance, the surveillance program is being initially sold as an aid for police looking to solve Amber Alert cases and locate stolen cars.

"Imagine if you had 1500 or 2000 cameras out there that could look out for the partial plate or full plate number across the 21 states where we do business today," Elsadek said. "This is the next step for our technology."

Scary, ain't it.

Here we have an excellent piece from Reason about the hypocrisy of the Hollywood Left.

From Reason:

Andrew Breitbart, long associated with The Drudge Report, prop. of the excellent newsfeed site Breitbart.com, author of The Washington Times col "Big Hollywood," and maker of lists for reason, finds it larfable that Matt Damon is worried about GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin banning books. Breitbart writes:

The sad fact is that actual artistic oppression—book banning in its many modern forms—is a matter of course in the entertainment industry, especially when the underlying product is declared politically incorrect or runs contrary to the interests of Hollywood's political altar, the Democratic Party.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations runs rings around Hollywood's pious First Amendment absolutists.

"I hope you will be reassured that I have no intention of promoting negative images of Muslims or Arabs," director Phil Alden Robinson wrote after changing the script from Muslim terrorists to Austrian neo-Nazis in the Tom Clancy thriller, "The Sum of all Fears." "And I wish you the best in your continuing efforts to combat discrimination."

While Mr. Clancy put up an admirable fight, actor Ben Affleck acquiesced, cashed his multimillion-dollar check and fought the dreaded Austrians, whose flagging Teutonic self-confidence again took a hit. Thanks to Hollywood artistic appeasement, Arab youth in totalitarian Muslim countries indoctrinated in anti-Western thought dodged another esteem bullet....

The silence of the celebrity political class was heartbreaking when Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered by an Islamic radical in retaliation for making "Submission," a critically acclaimed film that portrayed horrific female oppression within the practice of Islam.

Yet Hollywood—quick to find martyrs near to its heart (Valerie Plame, et al)—ignored its fallen Dutch comrade and refused to celebrate the film and its maker, fulfilling his murderer's greatest desire.

More on this story here.(Link via Reason)

From Jacob Sullum @ Reason's Hit & Run blog:

Yesterday the Washington Supreme Court ruled that the state's smoking ban applies to private clubs as well as businesses open to the general public. Washington's Clean Indoor Air Act, passed in 1985, exempts "private facilities which are occasionally open to the public except upon the occasions when [they are] open to the public." An initiative approved by voters in 2005 broadened the ban to cover "places of employment." American Legion Post 149 in Bremerton challenged the Kitsap County Board of Health's attempt to stop its members from smoking at the post home, where all seven employees are relatives of members and all but one smoke, arguing that the exemption for private facilities remained in force. A five-judge majority of the state Supreme Court disagreed. Four judges dissented, with one of them, Richard Sanders, concluding

that if the majority's interpretation of the law is correct, the law is unconstitutional:

I would hold the Act does not apply to the Post Home as a private facility. Alternatively, if the Post Home's status as a private facility does not limit the Act's application, I would hold the Act is void for vagueness; unduly interferes with the Post Home's right of intimate association; violates the Post Home's substantive due process rights absent actual proof of a real and substantial relation between secondhand smoke and workplace dangers; and violates equal protection by distinguishing between two classes of business without reasonable grounds.

Just more government control to keep the sheep in line.
Read more here.

(Thanks to Cato-at-Liberty)
For more visit the above link.

That would be the day the Democrats and Republicans turned their backs on the Constitution of the United States.
From Reason Online's article on the subject:

We must, and we shall, set the tide running again in the cause of freedom. And this party, with its every action, every word, every breath, and every heartbeat, has but a single resolve, and that is freedom.
Barry Goldwater, accepting the 1964 Republican presidential nomination

This year's Republican National Convention had a different theme for each day. Monday was "Serving a Cause Greater than Self." Tuesday was "Service," Wednesday was "Reform," and Thursday was "Peace."

So what was missing? Only what used to be held up as the central ideal of the party. The heirs of Goldwater couldn't spare a day for freedom.

Neither could the Democrats. Their daily topics this year were "One Nation," "Renewing America's Promise," and "Securing America's Future." The party proclaimed "an agenda that emphasizes the security of our nation, strong economic growth, affordable health care for all Americans, retirement security, honest government, and civil rights." Expanding and upholding individual liberty? Not so much.

Forty-four years after Goldwater's declaration, it's clear that collectivism, not individualism, is the reigning creed of Republicans as well as Democrats. Individuals are not valuable and precious in their own right but as a means for those in power to achieve their grand ambitions.

You will scour the presidential nominees' acceptance speeches in vain for any hint that your life is rightfully your own, to be lived in accordance with your beliefs and desires and no one else's. The Founding Fathers set out to protect "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," but Barack Obama has a different idea.

The "essence of America's promise," he declared in Denver, is "individual responsibility and mutual responsibility"—rather than, say, individual freedom and mutual respect for rights. The "promise of America," he said, is "the fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper; I am my sister's keeper."

In reality, that fundamental belief is what you might call the promise of socialism. What has set this country apart since its inception is not the notion of obligations but the notion of rights.

"All previous systems had regarded man as a sacrificial means to the ends of others, and society as an end in itself," wrote the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand. "The United States regarded man as an end in himself, and society as a means to the peaceful, orderly, voluntary co-existence of individuals."

More "Newspeak" from the speech police.

From Protein Wisdom:

– A Utopia, of sorts, where “unity” prevails — even if in order to do so free speech is (like some bad Disney project) “re-imagined” as a right that is heavily policed by the state, with the upshot being that only the speech that doesn’t hurt or offend or cause a rift in the progressive unity continuum is protected, with the rest relegated to a growing repository for what is termed “hate speech.”

The argument goes something like this: in order to have free speech, everyone must be able to have his say. But one is not able to have his say if one’s say is not respected, or is met with “intolerant” counter speech — such that intolerance is equated with a refusal to allow the speech of others equal intellectual standing, regardless of its flaws, inconsistencies, lies, etc.

To point out such things is to engage in a “tyranny of facts” — and as we all know, “tyranny” is bad and ugly and wrong. Thus, in a country increasingly unmoored from Enlightenment thinking and the founders’ animating ideological principles, best captured in classical liberalism and some soft forms of libertarianism, “free speech” has become, perversely, a means by which to grant speech the kind of enforced moral relativism favored by — and in fact demanded by — the totalitarian underpinnings of “progressivism.” As with its sociological counterparts, multiculturalism and the “diversity movement,” acceptable speech is increasingly determined by how little it offends.

Or, to put it another way, free speech — which was conceived as a way to protect unpopular speech from majoritarian tyranny and governmental intimidation — is now, in a perfect Orwellian flip, being re-imagined as a way toward “unity,” by factoring out as hateful those bits of speech that move us further away from a leftist Utopia, where we all stand as one, honoring the state and it charismatic secular godhead.

From the movie's website:

Based on the short story Harrison Bergeron by celebrated author Kurt Vonnegut, 2081 depicts a dystopian future in which, thanks to the 212th Amendment to the Constitution and the unceasing vigilance of the United States Handicapper General, everyone is finally equal... The strong wear weights, the beautiful wear masks and the intelligent wear earpieces that fire off loud noises to keep them from taking unfair advantage of their brains. It is a poetic tale of triumph and tragedy about a broken family, a brutal government, and an act of defiance that changes everything.

Everyone needs to see this movie when it is released. Watch the trailer here.

Here's an excellent story by the fine folks @ NeoLibertarian on the hypocrisy of liberals and other "progressives" when it comes to "cultural imperialism".

From NeoLibertarian:

Today’s object lessons are the importance of international treaties, consensus, and organizations and one of the bugaboos of the left, American cultural imperialism.

One of the consistent, and not always incorrect, themes of criticism of the Bush administration has been its tendency to ‘go it alone’ or more provocatively ‘cowboy’ its way through the world, scorning international associations and treaties and provoking international opinion.

A more general criticism, as in of the whole United States not just of the Bush Administration, is that America practices ‘cultural imperialism,’ i.e. supplanting local culture with our own. This is accepted as always bad, since evidently there is no bigger threat to cultures the world over than being able to get a decent hamburger, but I digress . . .

From the NY Times:

A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The article’s tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States do not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.

The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal will soon rule on whether the cover story of the October 23, 2006, issue of Maclean’s magazine violated a provincial hate speech law.

This series of articles examines commonplace aspects of the American justice system that are actually unique in the world.

Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.

Two members of the Canadian Islamic Congress say the magazine, Maclean’s, Canada’s leading newsweekly, violated a provincial hate speech law by stirring up hatred against Muslims. They say the magazine should be forbidden from saying similar things, forced to publish a rebuttal and made to compensate Muslims for injuring their “dignity, feelings and self-respect.”

The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, which held five days of hearings on those questions here last week, will soon rule on whether Maclean’s violated the law. As spectators lined up for the afternoon session last week, an argument broke out.

“It’s hate speech!” yelled one man.

“It’s free speech!” yelled another.

In the United States, that debate has been settled. Under the First Amendment, newspapers and magazines can say what they like about minorities and religions — even false, provocative or hateful things — without legal consequence.

The Maclean’s article, “The Future Belongs to Islam,” was an excerpt from a book by Mark Steyn called “America Alone” (Regnery, 2006). The title was fitting: The United States, in its treatment of hate speech, as in so many other areas of the law, takes a distinctive legal path.

More here.
This is one of the many things that makes America and Americans exceptional.
Americans take a very individualistic view towards our rights ( there's one exception that comes to mind, but that's for another time), especially our rights to free speech. We believe in the Marketplace of Ideas and that for the most part good ideas are the ones that are the most widely adopted.
The article is a little ambiguous as to what the author's stance is regarding free speech, but seems pretty balanced as far as I can tell. But then again that's up to you to decide.

Oh, and just for the record, I am not a fan of the NY Times. Their reporting is entirely too slanted and has a definite liberal bias. And they've endorsed the restriction of speech in the past when they supported the McCain/Feingold campaign finance reform legislation.

Which would explain my surprise when I read the above article.

Then again, the NY Times has been known to do some decent reporting in the past.

Here's hoping that the Times can become the unbiased and reliable news source they've always claimed they were.

An excellent rant detailing the differences between these two philosophies comes our way from Robb Allen over at The Line is Here:

I shouldn’t blog angry, but if I took the time to calm down before I wrote anything, you’d get biannual posts and like it.

So, this morning I’m talking with a friend at work. Said friend (we’ll call him “Sally”) is a flaming Democrat. Sally tends to be fairly even headed and not a complete socialist twat, but he still has that core belief that for every problem, the is an equal and opposite government program to fix it.

To Sally, the government is a benign entity that only can be corrupted by Republicans. If only Democrats were in charge, nothing bad would ever happen, hence, it is totally permissible to submit every last facet of your life to Uncle Sam’s caring and compassionate scrutiny.

Yet he thinks that the government shouldn’t butt into your home life. Go figure.

More here.