Muda69

https://reason.com/2020/01/02/3-new-years-resolutions-the-government-should-adopt/ Once can only hope. Too bad most members of Congress can only look ahead to their next election cycle, and don't really give a rat's ass about the future of this country and what their irresponsible actions and inaction means for our children and grandchildren.

Not always.

Bernie Sanders Wants to Kill Pro Baseball: https://mises.org/wire/bernie-sanders-wants-kill-pro-baseball More big government, more taxpayers funds wasted, that is the "solution" to everything the Mr. Sanders and all other liberals view as a problem.

Thank you. But you are still the second smartest individual on the GID.

Not in Indiana but asset forfeiture madness: https://reason.com/2019/12/30/missouri-cops-used-federal-loophole-to-seize-2-6-million-from-drivers-who-they-never-charged-with-crimes/

Also bonafide liberal city-states like Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City tend to suck their home states of resources, just ask my downstate Illinois in-laws. No, these metropolises need to be 'cut loose' and become the 51, 52, and 53 states.

? If you are going to sling insults and/or snide remarks at least have the courage to actually say it to that person's "face".

Government Standards Are Making 5-Year-Olds and Kindergarten Teachers Miserable: https://reason.com/2019/12/27/kindergarten-test-standards-reading-math-teachers/ Yet another reason to get government out the education business, and let parents choose.

How is a U.S. congressman using his position of power to sway some SS or Medicare bureaucrat a "scam"? Do you have proof that Mr. Hamilton was getting some kind of kickback, other than perhaps a few votes from his constituents? Like you said..... own it.

You probably need to go somewhere more highbrow than the GID then. Perhaps a message board for MENSA members.................

A non-answer. Typical. And expected.

Sorry, I thought the GID was primarily for entertainment purposes. Also sorry you hold junior high debate in such disdain.....................

So your age makes you an authority on racism then? Kind of makes sense from a "wisdom" perspective.

So you are an authority on racism then?

If a supposed news organization like MSN can't use a simple tool called a 'spell checker' how can one trust the veracity of this 'poll'?

Convinction? Is that the liberal MSM spelling of "conviction"?

Sorry that you can't handle alternative viewpoints that don't come from the MSM.

You really didn't answer my question. Yes, I watch soccer from time to time. It's a beautiful game, with real athletes on the field.

With all the government employees in that video methinks Goshen schools will be receiving communication from the ffrf soon. And don't tell me GHS caved and got rid of the excellent Redskins mascot for the generic and insipid "Redhawk" moniker?

https://reason.com/2019/12/19/the-rise-of-skywalker-shows-its-time-for-j-j-abrams-to-be-impeached-from-star-wars/ I been reading enough reviews along these lines that I'm not sure I want to pay $ at a movie theater to see this anymore. What is really disappointing is the pretty much complete retconning of the events from The Last Jedi. But who am I to kid, I'll schlep over to the theater sometime between Christmas and the New Year to see it. Although I think one of the comments from the above review rings true:

https://mises.org/wire/bernie-sanders-and-robert-reich-dont-just-want-tax-rich-they-want-abolish-billionaires Likewise, Bernie Sanders recently declared on Twitter: Again, note the change in rhetoric here. This isn’t simply about adjusting the tax code to make sure the rich pay their fair share — this is declaring an entire group of people to be off-limits. (Note: after some critics accused Bernie of advocating pogroms, his defenders — and perhaps Bernie himself, though I can’t find it now — clarified that he meant people shouldn’t be allowed to have that much wealth. He didn’t mean "Let’s murder all of today’s billionaires.") This is the context in which I am placing Robert Reich’s blog post. Reich is pushing back against the notion that billionaires are simply productive people who generated a lot of wealth in the market. Reich’s commentary is designed to bolster the calls from some quarters to get rid of billionaires altogether. Robert Reich: Five Ways to Become a Billionaire In the remainder of this post, I’ll quickly go through Reich’s putative “five ways” to become a billionaire. Way No. 1: Exploit a Monopoly Here’s Reich: In the above, Reich has conflated two very different things. If a retailer (such as Amazon) has nearly 50 percent of the sales in an industry, that isn’t a monopoly by any definition. But even if Amazon had 100 percent of the sales, that in itself wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. As Rothbard argued in Man, Economy, and State, just about every seller has a “monopoly” in the sense of “single seller” if we define the product or service narrowly enough. For example, I have a monopoly on economics lectures provided by the Austrian school economist Robert P. Murphy. Yet that’s not what people have in mind when they wring their hands over “monopoly power” in big business. So long as the transactions are all voluntary, then a seller can only “capture” an entire industry by providing a superior product and/or a lower price. For readers who’ve never heard the story, I strongly recommend you check out Burt Folsom’s Myth of the Robber Barons to see how genuine entrepreneurs cut costs and gained market share through serving consumers. (Here’s a short clip of Tom DiLorenzo on C-SPAN correcting the historical record.) So, returning to Reich’s passage above, he is right to complain about government privileges given to the big banks that were bailed out, and — since I have been persuaded by the work of Stephan Kinsella on “intellectual property” (IP) — I also agree that government patents and other forms of IP enforcement are also illegitimate. Yet the solution of course isn’t to enact large taxes on the wealthy. The solution, instead, is to get rid of the illegitimate privileges given to some of the wealthy. Way No. 2: Exploit a Monopoly Reich goes on to the second method: I always love it when progressives point to how awfully the government currently enforces existing laws in order to prove that we just need more government to achieve a just society. Even if we stipulate Reich’s narrative for the sake of argument, the feds let criminal masterminds walk even when they’re caught red-handed. So maybe the system is corrupt and we should try something other than trusting political officials to ensure honesty and integrity on Wall Street? But the deeper flaw here is that “insider trading,” generally speaking, should not be a crime at all. If individual firms have confidentiality agreements that key employees sign, then of course violation of such clauses would be a breach of contract and subject to penalty. But in general, we want people to trade on “inside” information, because it helps reduce the volatility in stock market prices. The average investor is actually helped when experts are maintaining vigilant watch on asset prices and minimizing the impact that a sudden announcement has on the markets. I go into more detail at this link, but suffice it to say that, if you actually think through a typical example of “insider trading,” you’ll see that the “victims” aren’t the general public — instead they are a small group of investors who otherwise would have benefited from dumb luck, but instead are having that “unearned” windfall accrue to someone else with superior knowledge of the asset. Way No. 3: Bribe Politicians to Change the Tax Code The next method is special because it is the goofiest of Reich’s five: Everyone get that? Here Reich is telling us that the way to get a billion dollars is to first, get $50 billion. Then, pay politicians to reduce your tax bill by a billion. Boom! You just made a billion dollars. It’s just that simple. Reich's approach here reminds me of the old Steve Martin routine, where he says (I’m condensing), “You wanna become a millionaire and never pay taxes? First, get a million dollars. Then, when the IRS says you owe them money, just say, ‘I forgot!’” According to Reich, the problem is politicians taking bribes to reform the tax code, and so you’d think the solution would be to punish those politicians for taking bribes. But that’s never what guys like Reich advocate. Instead, the private citizens offering the bribes are the ones who need to be punished, not the politicians for accepting those bribes. Way No. 4: Defraud Investors On this one, I have to be honest. I don’t even get how this works: On Reich’s telling, investors put “hundreds of millions” into a company that never produced a nickel of profit, and then were still willing to pay an additional billion dollars to get Neumann to walk away from the wreckage. If Reich’s narrative was the only relevant factor, these big investors are incredibly stupid, paying a billion dollars for something only worth a fraction of that, at most. Or, we can surmise that there’s more to the story than Reich is letting on. In any event, notice that one of the big investors was JP Morgan — which was the subject of Reich’s “first way” to become a billionaire — so at least these illegitimate billionaires seem to be canceling each other out. Way No. 5: Inheritance Finally we come to the last method: The fifth way to be a billionaire is to get the money from rich parents or relatives. I understand the fun in denigrating the idle rich born with silver spoons in their mouths, but if we’re trying to base government policy decisions on intuitive notions of fairness, then how in the world do we justify taking a huge chunk out of someone’s wealth just to make sure he can’t give it to his kids? To paraphrase a line I heard once from Arthur Laffer (referring to the estate or “death tax” in the late 2000s), “If you’re rich, once you’ve paid your taxes on your income, you’re free to spend it on booze and gambling in Vegas. But if you have the audacity to give it to your kids, that’s a threat to society and we’re going to tax the hell out of it.” The Billionaires No One Talks About What’s funny is that when Bernie Sanders or Robert Reich complain about billionaires per se, they never seem to list these ones: Oprah Winfrey ($2.7 billion), Michael Jordan ($1.9 billion), and J.K. Rowling ($1 billion by this estimate, though she had earlier been on and off the billionaire list because of Britain’s taxes and her large donations). Whatever you think of the merits of these individuals, it would be harder for Bernie to vilify the self-made Oprah, or to criticize the market for paying a boatload of money to the greatest basketball player of all time, and to the author of some of the most beloved books in a generation. More generally, as the global market continues to grow, we are going to see more billionaires. Quick: how many billionaires does the reader think there are, right now? The answer, according to Forbes, is 2,057. Conclusion There are plenty of billionaires who have benefited from special government privileges, or who have engaged in other forms of nefarious behavior. To the extent that we want the government to “do something” about this, the obvious answer is for government to stop giving such privileges to the super rich. However, to the extent that people accumulate wealth through voluntary means, then they should be able to retain it. Whipping up the public to hate billionaires is a very destructive turn in US politics. Progressive leftists always warn about the “harmful rhetoric” on the Right, and of course point to Nazi Germany to end all arguments. Well, we can look at the Reign of Terror in Revolutionary France to see what happens when the masses get fired up against the rich. Agreed. The jealous indignation from Mr. Reich and Mr. Sanders and their desire to use the state to punish the successful is insidious, and ultimately un-American.

Yep. I guess us old fogies are all lucky we didn't die. Looked like a good, clean, hard hit to me. You wear pads and a helmet for a reason, right?

The 'Afghanistan Papers' Confirm Critics' Worst Rears About America's Longest War: https://reason.com/2019/12/20/the-afghanistan-papers-confirm-critics-worst-rears-about-americas-longest-war/ Yep, a true and important travesty is being overshadowed by all Mr. Trump, all the time rhetoric. Shameful.

Yep, both sides of the uni-party are now fighting over whether or not certain witnesses should be called to testify in the Senate trial. That may take weeks of political wrangling to work out.

One can hope. It appears the Republican side of the uni-party in the Senate is going to stonewall their Democratic brethren over the witness issue during the Senate trial. Who knows when the actual articles of impeachment will officially be delivered to the Senate, triggering the trial phase.