Thursday, November 22, 2007

Excess Hoggage - Humans from Earth Edition

By Libby

Song in my head.

You can put away the champagne. Scotty McCellan isn't really going to out Bush. It was just a cheap publicity trick.

The warmongers want to spin the return of Iraqis to Baghdad from exile in Syria as proof the surge worked. The real story is more complicated.

Our cops are no longer keepers of the peace. They're paramilitary enforcers run amok.

Injured Iraq vet Jordan Fox won't have to give back his signing bonus after all. He wants to know what about all the other soldiers who have also been dunned by the DoD.

Interesting debate in comments between myself and Zenpundit on the trouble with Libertarians.

It's time to knock off no-knock warrants before another innocent American dies.

Deconstructing signs of progress in Iraq. I would love to wear those rose colored glasses but everything's relative.

And more reasons, travelers are avoiding America. Oddly, most tourists prefer not to be subjected to fascist tactics.

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11 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I've had beef with him in the past over foreign policy but I have to side with the zenpundit here. government intervention DOES lead to monopolies even if the policymakers have good intentions. human action, not human planning as von mises said.

10:21:00 AM  
Blogger Libby Spencer said...

I think it's more of a catch-22 Lester. The government wouldn't enable the monopolies if the corporations didn't have the money they make on controlling the markets in order to fund the campaigns. Somehow we have to break that circle.

11:14:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

the way to break the circle is to take power away from the federal government.

3:10:00 PM  
Blogger Libby Spencer said...

And leave the corporations with no oversight whatsoever? I don't think that will fix it Lester.

4:22:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

what would they need oversight from? charging low prices? making products people want? they already have many many expensive methods for overseeing them and none of them work. in fact, they manipulate them for their own ends. corporations LOVE regulation, especially if they are well connected in washinton. what we want is them to actually have to participate in capitalism. if that were the case yuo would never have heard of halliburton or boeing because they don'tmake it on their merits but their well placed lobby.

10:01:00 AM  
Blogger Libby Spencer said...

We can't rid of the corporations so we need the government to start acting as a check on them. Granted it doesn't now, but that can be fixed. Leaving them to own devices is why we started regulating in the first place. There was a time we had children being as maltreated in factories as any third world country.

11:00:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

yeah. It was called the industrial revolution and it built this country. Who you prefer young children in "third world countries", say, prostitute themselves in place of working in sweatshops? would you prefer they just died? people have to eat.

we have a 3 trillion dollar budget and 38 million people living below the poverty line. so much for your theory of the state as kindly benefactor

3:09:00 PM  
Blogger Libby Spencer said...

Like I keep telling you it's not the system, it's the people running it Lester. We're spending all our money on war instead of on our people. That doesn't make the government bad, it means we have bad 'leaders.'

3:27:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I disagree. It's the same system. it's the same wasteful spending, beaurocracy and corruption. conservatives say the same thing you are saying but in reverse. they criticize the welfare state and the nanny state but lionize the military. Reagan got elected largely because the tax burden was simply too high for alot of people. We weren't in any wars then. But I completely agree that military spending is the biggest waste ever of taxpayer funds. by far. also, liberals start alot of wars. between vietnam and "the great society" LBJ was pretty much the dictionary defination of what i am talking abuot.

also, you should consider learning a little about economics at some point. i advise foreigners it's a frequent area of conversation for americans and a good way to break the ice. If you can explain the difference between marx. keynes and adam smith you are not showing it in threads like this.

4:15:00 PM  
Blogger Libby Spencer said...

No I'm not an economist. I only follow the current trends from a sociological point of view. I have no interest in theories.

4:25:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

well, i'm not an economist either. maybe an extremely bad perpetual amateur one. My point is it's a science and I don't know that preogressives should be hostile to science.

also, from a sociological point of view, I think it's pretty obvious which types of systems people do better under. unless you think waiting in line all day to get toilet paper and sausages made of horse meat a la the USSR is the way.

9:34:00 AM  

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