Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Emperor Misha is reading up on history:
His Imperial Majesty is currently going through his copy of the Politically Incorrect Guide to American History that a kind reader sent to us, and it is certainly enlightening…Quotes such as this one from FDR when his brilliant plan to hike prices on food while everybody was starving in his Great Depression was struck down by the Supremes:
“Are we going to take the hands of the federal government completely off any effort to adjust the growing of national crops, and go right straight back to the old principle that every farmer is a lord of his own farm and can do anything he wants, raise anything, any old time, in any quantity, and sell any time he wants?”
Why the HORROR! Individuals owning the land they live on, doing with it what they please and keeping the fruits of their labors?
Sound familiar?
Of course, there is the problem of corporatism; the market is not a perfect thing, the marketplace does make its share of monsters that grow in size and power, and ultimately do harm.
But this open letter from the libertarian right to the moderate left addresses that quite handily (hat tip to blogger friend Gerard):
America is suffering from rampant, run-away corporatism and crony capitalism. We are increasingly a plutocracy in which government serves the interests of elite financiers and CEOs at the expense of everyone else.
You know this and you complain loudly about it. But the problem is your fault. You caused this state of affairs. Stop it.
Unlike we libertarianish people, you people actually hold and have been holding significant political power in the US over the past 50 years. What have you done with this power? You’ve greased the corporatist machine every chance you’ve gotten. You’ve made things worse, not better. Our current problems are your fault. You need to stop.
:
You complain, perhaps rightly, that corporations are just too big. Well, yeah, we told you that would happen. When you create complicated tax codes, complicated regulatory regimes, and complicated licensing rules, these regulations naturally select for larger and larger corporations. We told you that would happen. Of course, these increasingly large corporations then capture these rules, codes, and regulations to disadvantage their competitors and exploit the rest of us. We told you that would happen.
I pointed this out years ago: Any good examples you’ll find of capitalism really pissing in its boot, when you look a little closer you’ll find it isn’t really capitalism. Which is to say, it isn’t a completely free market. What you’ll invariably find is, a bunch of big-government crony-capitalist types got some scheme together by which the government would “regulate” an industry, the scheme involved taxpayer money being doled out to their friends in some way, and that’s when the trouble started. As a general rule, this happens with commodities that are most important to us.
The price of a barrel of oil does something within a day or two — “pocket” depressions are created, where all sorts of people who were able to afford to drive to work that Monday, by Thursday, no longer can. The cost involved in having a baby delivered soars by thousands of percentage points within a generation. Tuition. Civil Remedies. Mortgages and rents. Any labor that is unionized — the government gets involved and suddenly we have a new case of “pure and unregulated” capitalism hurting people, except it isn’t pure capitalism.
Ol’ FDR was terrified of the farmer making decisions. There’s the mindset: There’s got to be some system of checks and balances in place, anytime someone decides to do something — unless that someone is me or one of my dear, close friends.
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