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

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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.


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* 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.

For those of you looking to waste your vote on someone other than John McCain or Barack Obama; here are a few cool websites that are trying to break the monopoly the Republocrats have on politics.

Third Party Ticket

Break the Matrix

Campaign for Liberty

I just had to share this op-ed in the New York Sun by John Stossel.

Barack Obama says, "[Today's economic problems are] a stark reminder of the failures of ... an economic philosophy that sees any regulation at all as unwise and unnecessary."

What? Does that mean that until last week the Bush administration embraced the free market? Nonsense. Governments at all levels have regulated and subsidized the housing and financial industries for years. Nothing changed under President Bush.

At the Division of Labour Web log, an economist, Lawrence White, asks: "What deregulation have we had in the last decade? Please tell me. On the contrary, we've had a strengthening of the Community Reinvestment Act, which has encouraged banks to make mortgage loans to borrowers who previously would have been rejected ... "

The government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created precisely to interfere with the housing and mortgage markets. In effect, Freddie and Fannie diverted money to people who wouldn't have qualified for mortgages in a real private market.

Had actual private companies performed these activities, they would have been subject to market checks. But they were not. The results were predictable.

Now that it's all tumbling down, the politicians and pundits blame the free market.

It's not simply misunderstanding. It's demagoguery by people who will never admit that their "progressive" social policies have spawned a taxpayer bill that boggles the mind.

This is a story not of private enterprise but of cynical political opportunism. Moral hazard — the poisonous mix of private profits and taxpayer-covered losses — is what you get when politicians indulge their hubris to redesign society. The bailout of those companies holding bad mortgages — big-business socialism — sets us up for the next crisis.

Maybe the Republican presidential candidate will dissent? Not a chance:

John McCain says, "We are going to fight the greed and irresponsibility on Wall Street. These actions [leading to crisis] stem from failed regulation, reckless management and a casino culture on Wall Street. ... We need strong and effective regulation ... "

He proposes a new bureaucracy, the Mortgage and Financial Institutions Trust, MFI, which he says will "provide troubled institutions with an orderly process to identify bad loans, provide funding and eventually sell them at a profit. ... The MFI will supervise the sale of loan assets at market prices and purchase them as necessary."

A government agency is going to buy bad loans and make a profit selling them. Give me a break.

Senator McCain blames today's problems on "greed," but how can greed be the root of the problem? As Mr. White says, "Greed ... is a constant." Exactly. People were just as greedy five and 50 years ago. Why didn't these troubles occur then?

Irresponsibility induced by government-created perverse incentives is the culprit. For decades politicians of both parties have relieved big companies of the responsibility that market discipline would have imposed. The promise — explicit or implicit — to bail out companies "too big to fail," not to mention regulatory, tax, and trade policies that raise barriers to entry for new competitors — weakens market discipline. That invites recklessness.

What if the government cut Freddie, Fannie, Bear, AIG, and the others loose and let them do what other businesses do on hard times: renegotiate with creditors and revalue assets? Would there be another Great Depression? Not likely. What turned a recession into the Great Depression was the Federal Reserve's contraction of the money supply. I doubt they'd make that mistake twice.

Public officials say the big companies must be saved to prevent a devastating credit "lock." Really? Without a federal bailout, lending wouldn't have resumed? The market wouldn't have sorted it out? Prices wouldn't have found a more solid floor? We'll never know.

As many of you may know, I consider myself a libertarian, and might just be a little biased when it comes to free markets, capitalism and personal liberty. But, that doesn't mean that what Mr. Stossel is saying isn't true.

The "creative destruction" of free-market capitalism encourages innovation that sustains long-term economic growth, even as it destroys the value of established companies.
Bailouts and the like stagnate growth and create the reckless business practices.

Hopefully the american people will make their voices heard and tell our government to stop providing safety nets to businesses that make poor decisions.

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.

From Cato@Liberty:

In a study released today by the Cato Institute, economist and Cato adjunct scholar Shirley Svorny says no:

In the United States, the authority to regulate medical professionals lies with the states. To practice within a state, clinicians must obtain a license from that state’s government. State statutes dictate standards for licensing and disciplining medical professionals. They also list tasks clinicians are allowed to perform. One view is that state licensing of medical professionals assures quality.

In contrast, I argue here that licensure not only fails to protect consumers from incompetent physicians, but, by raising barriers to entry, makes health care more expensive and less accessible. Institutional oversight and a sophisticated network of private accrediting and certification organizations, all motivated by the need to protect reputations and avoid legal liability, offer whatever consumer protections exist today.

Consumers would benefit were states to eliminate professional licensing in medicine and leave education, credentialing, and scope-of-practice decisions entirely to the private sector and the courts.

If eliminating licensing is politically infeasible, some preliminary steps might be generally acceptable. States could increase workforce mobility by recognizing licenses issued by other states. For mid-level clinicians, eliminating education requirements beyond an initial degree would allow employers and consumers to select the appropriate level of expertise. At the very least, state legislators should be alert to the self-interest of medical professional organizations that may lie behind the licensing proposals brought to the legislature for approval.

Svorny’s study is here.