Budget "cut" theater

The federal government plans to increase spending by $2.5 Trillion over the next 10 years. Republicans and Democrats are arguing over whether they should instead only increase spending by $2.4 Trillion, and whose special interests will benefit most. So, they are quibbling over a totally insignificant difference in how much they will **increase** spending. Nothing is being cut. Nothing is ever cut. This is political theater.

http://reason.com/blog/2013/02/19/what-will-sequestration-really-look-like

http://lewrockwell.com/napolitano/napolitano89.1.html

The heroism of entrepreneurs

Lew Rockwell interviews Whole Foods founder John Mackey about the heroic spirit of business, and how capitalism in a free market creates enormous value for all of society.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/podcast/349-heroic-spirit-of-business/

MSNBC clarifies its function

Glenn Greenwald: "Impressively, David Axelrod left the White House and actually managed to find the only place on earth arguably more devoted to Barack Obama. Finally, American citizens will now be able to hear what journalism has for too long so vindictively denied them: a vibrant debate between Gibbs and Axelrod on how great Obama really is."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/19/msnbc-axelrod-gibbs-obama

Let's actually be better

Connor Friedersdorf: There were almost 10,000 drunk-driving fatalities in 2011 alone. That's the equivalent of three 9/11s in people killed, plus many more seriously injured, every year. Is a majority of Americans ready to lower the blood alcohol limit to 0.01 and to mandate breathalyzers on all ignition switches? Nope. That would be an onerous government intrusion on liberty. I'm fine with that. But it vexes me when the same citizenry faces the significantly lower risk that terrorists pose, spends far more on prevention, and still insists that targeted killings in Yemen and Somalia can't be constrained, because taking more care to save innocents would threaten us.

Many Americans willingly take bigger risks to scuba dive, ride a motorcycle, or eat junk food than they are willing to take to spare the lives of far away kids. As my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates put it, writing on a related subject, "Our problem is we think we're better than we actually are. We've gotten so good at telling ourselves this."

Let's actually be better.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/02/a-republic-demands-courage-from-its-citizens/273108/

The animosity deepens

Glenn Greenwald: "[I]f you continually bomb another country and kill their civilians, not only the people of that country but the part of the world that identifies with it will increasingly despise the country doing it. That's the ultimate irony, the most warped paradox, of US discourse on these issues: the very policies that Americans constantly justify by spouting the Terrorism slogan are exactly what causes anti-American hatred and anti-American Terrorism in the first place."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/15/us-obama-muslims-animosity-deepens

Outlawing Jobs: The Minimum Wage

Murray Rothbard: "In truth, there is only one way to regard a minimum wage law: it is compulsory unemployment, period. The law says: it is illegal, and therefore criminal, for anyone to hire anyone else below the level of X dollars an hour. This means, plainly and simply, that a large number of free and voluntary wage contracts are now outlawed and hence that there will be a large amount of unemployment. Remember that the minimum wage law provides no jobs; it only outlaws them; and outlawed jobs are the inevitable result."

http://mises.org/daily/6367/Outlawing-Jobs-The-Minimum-Wage

Obama's Secret Court for Killing

Judge Andrew Napolitano: "When [the president] kills without due process, he disobeys the laws he has sworn to uphold, no matter who agrees with him. When we talk about killing as if it were golf, we debase ourselves. And when the government kills and we put our heads in the sand, woe to us when there is no place to hide."

http://reason.com/archives/2013/02/14/obamas-secret-court-for-killing

Bad Luck Brian can't catch a break

Henry Hazlitt: "The first thing that happens, for example, when a law is passed that no one shall be paid less than $106 for a forty-hour week is that no one who is not worth $106 a week to an employer will be employed at all. You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him anything less. You merely deprive him of the right to earn the amount that his abilities and situation would permit him to earn, while you deprive the community even of the moderate services that he is capable of rendering. In brief, for a low wage you substitute unemployment. You do harm all around, with no comparable compensation."

Oh, Barack--you slay me

Gene Healy: "For three years now, thanks to Obama administration leaks, we've known that the president claims the right to summarily execute American citizens far from any battlefield. He even joked about it at the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner in 2010, telling the Jonas Brothers to stay away from his daughters: "Two words for you: 'predator drones.' You will never see it coming." (Oh, Barack—you slay me.)"

http://reason.com/archives/2013/02/12/obamas-executive-death-warrants

Human sympathy

Elihu Burritt: "If there is one sentiment that more than another marks the civilization of the present day, it is the interest felt in human life. Sympathy with human suffering is the most distinctive characteristic of our age. Never before in the world's history were there such associated efforts to diminish or prevent suffering. The societies organized for this purpose are almost innumerable. Great calamities by fire, pestilence, or famine are almost drowned by the flood of benevolence thus brought to bear upon them...A shipwreck, a railway accident, or any other catastrophe which destroys human life, produces the same feeling in the community. Sometimes a single life put in peril will fill a nation's heart with anxiety and grief.

"...Now compare the feeling with which the community hears of the loss or peril of a few human lives by these accidents with the feelings with which the news of the death or mutilation of thousands of men, equally precious, on the field of battle is received. How different is the valuation! How different in universal sympathy! War seems to reverse our best and boasted civilization, to carry back human society to the dark ages of barbarism, to cheapen the public appreciation of human life almost to the standard of brute beasts. This has always seemed to me one of war's worst works, because it destroys also the sense of the ruin and misery which the sword makes in the world."

The sword

"The warning that "he who lives by the sword dies by the sword" goes not only for individuals but for entire societies. It is a warning to all of us. A country or a society that lives with the violence of pre-emptive war in fact self-destructs."

http://the-free-foundation.org/tst2-11-2013.html

Guilt

Jacob Hornberger: "However, the problem is that the military can never acknowledge the veteran’s feelings of guilt because that would imply that the U.S. government was wrong to send the troops into Iraq. That’s just not going to happen. The government has to continue maintaining its official line — that it was right to invade the country and Iraq was wrong to defend against the invasion.

How can a person be healed of guilt when he’s being told that he didn’t do anything wrong and that he’s really just suffering from combat stress? Doesn’t relief from guilt require an acknowledgement that the person has done something wrong, as compared to something stressful? Unlike combat stress, doesn’t guilt require confession, repentance, and forgiveness?"

http://fff.org/2013/02/05/guilt-not-ptsd-is-what-afflicts-iraq-war-veterans/