Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from August, 2009

"The Shock Doctrine": A Deliberate Destruction of the Free Market

One of the purposes of existence is to serve one another so that we might become equal. This is the essence of the free market, as well as of the "Invisible Hand" of which the great economist Adam Smith wrote. Yet despite what free market principles may have been espoused lately, America has not had a truly free market for decades. Achieving a truly free market is not done by taking advantage of catastrophe, or by tearing down in order to build up. Yet through exactly such tearing down, referred to by author Naomi Klein as "The Shock Doctrine", the United States has promulgated a counterfeit version of the free market that has given freedom in general a bad name. The Soviet Union was a powerful machine, but it was much less powerful than American foreign policy gave it credit for. Based on a fraudulent representation of the Soviet Threat in the western hemisphere, the free market has come to have an undeserved bad name. As a result, nearly all of the American fo

Global Warming: A Perspective from an Actual Scientist

History demonstrates that climate change is related to a variety of things, of which all the CO2 in the world is a very minuscule contributor. So says a real scientist, Ian Plimer. Real science is unrelated to politics. Unlike perhaps any other clearly observable phenomenon, the science of global warming has been diluted beyond recognition by the shrill cries of Hollywood and related non-scientific opinion. "Climate science lacks scientific discipline." So writes Ian Plimer, Australia's most respected geologist, and author of the book Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science . Science, Plimer says, is based on evidence, and not on computer models, which have Insurance modelers did not factor in two Boeing 767 jets destroying the World Trade Center... Natural systems are far more complex already been proven to be grossly inaccurate in predicting the temperatures for even the first few years of the 21st century. Science, he says, is based on evidence, not

Without World War I, Would We Have had 9/11?

Might the leaders of Western countries have known just how damaging World War I would be to Christianity, to Islam, to the West, and to the Middle East? Sadly, the Great War was fought for nothing but irrepressible pride. In retrospect, it is probable to imagine that, had WWI never been fought, a cataclysmic attack on American soil, such as the one that happened on September 11, 2001, would have never occurred. But even without retrospect, it would have been, nearly one hundred years ago, elementary to predict such an eventual backlash. From the perspective of malice toward Islam, it is easy in retrospect to see how Western encroachment into Muslim lands would have triggered a vicious backlash against Christians in Asia Minor and the Levant. A more Who would have imagined a century ago, that the pride of dictators, oligarchs, and gun runners would effect a needless world war, which would in turn lead to the fall of the Twin Towers? The exact target would have been hard to foretell,

Health Care: If Government is the Problem, Why Are We Giving Them More Control of It?

I agree with President Obama--health care in the United States is in desperate need of fixing. I even agree with some of his proposed solutions. But a national health care/insurance scheme would be a debacle. The federal government currently has the grubby paws of minutiae tightly wrapped around even private health care in the several states. Could it be that government is a bigger cause of the skyrocketing cost of health care than government would have you believe? Recently on the Liberty Rountable radio program , host Sam Bushman spoke of his experience trying to pay a doctor bill. The receptionist eventually told him that it didn't matter whether he didn't have insurance and wanted to pay in cash--the federal government required Under a national health care regime, private care will become almost extinct for the same reason that private schools are few and far between. Almost no one can afford to pay for both. Thus quality health care will become another product that on

Cash for Clunkers is Theft

If you want to help someone buy a new car that gets much better gas mileage than the clunker they currently own, write them a check. But don't steal my money under the false impression that government can do a better job of solving problems than individual initiative can. Members of the Obama administration admitted a day or two ago to being very surprised at how "successful" the Cash for Clunkers program has been. Because of such high demand, the original funding of the program has run out. It takes a pretty dense government official to NOT understand that if you give something away there will be a lot of people that want it. The other thing they haven't thought about is that the Cash for Clunkers program is theft. For nearly every problem that government claims to have solved, it turns out to have created at least one more problem. The Cash for Clunkers program is one such program that is fraught with residual problems. It encourages dishonesty. It forces Ame