Saturday, September 8, 2012

Anthrax and Free Markets

(For some reason a linked video below autostarts wen you come to this page, scroll down to see if you want to watch it, if not hit stop button.  The proceed.)

Now we return to the blog:

See this is how America works.  Extremely dangerous bugs are created in the lab, so bad sometimes they kill the scientists.  Then they get to work on vaccinations to cure the disease they created.  And they poorly manage this expensive vaccination, or maybe not.  A shortage means huge profits when a disaster strikes.  Vaccinations are dangerous in their own right.

Wouldn't you love to have the taxpayers pay for the State to create problems you can profitably solve because you have a monopoly on the solution?

At the same time, cures are available in nature.  But natural cures cannot be patented (yet) and are easily  reproduced for quick and decentralized production and distribution.  No great profits there, only cures.

But once capitalism is admitted, then profits trump all, based on a distorted view of wealth and the term interest, "a right to a profit"  (In its distorted form.).

We need a free market in medicine.

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Fresh From Korea - Gangnam Style



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Friday, September 7, 2012

Safety Net vs Fishing Net

Being self-employed is risky in the sense you do not have to relative security of a safety net.  I don't get unemployment insurance, or any employer-paid insurance.  Everything I get is customer paid.

People who take real risks, say tight-rope walkers, they might have safety nets, but the have a rule: don't look down.  You mind goes where you look.  To have a "safety net" is to look at it, and your mind goes there.  Geronimo!

There are times when I am creating or designing, where I may not be making much of any money at all, for a while.  I am told I would qualify for some sort of aid based on my income.  No thanks, a need to earn keeps me more efficient.

What is it?  100 million Americans are on welfare.  The number of Americans claiming disability has doubled.  Most small business I speak to are afraid to hire for fear the employee is simplyging to put in the minimum time necessary to collect unemployment.  Apple has excellent screening processes for its stores.  Small business do not.

All of that welfare payment represents money, credit, sucked away from productive innovation.  It represents people who have been anesthetized to the point hey cannot innovate.

The face of welfare is a white woman, but the image is man with some African heritage.  Nonetheless, welfare and minority go together.  We know because the USA has strict racial identity codes.

When Margaret Sanger had trouble advancing Planned Parenthood among minorities, she was advised to buy off preachers of some African heritage.  It worked.  But this is not unique among people of African heritage, every country has people willing to sell their own down the river.





She is tired of hearing about the risks businesses take.  What is risky is being poor in America.

Well, it's bankers and republicans who talk about businesses take risks.  One job of businesses is to NOT take risks, to get rid of them.  When the state allowed banks to engage in usury, and then in turn to lend credit at fractional reserve, they had to introduce the idea of "businesses take risks" to get people to employ that extra credit.  People who should not borrow did so, and slavery of sorts, to some degree followed.  So I agree, I too am tired of hearing about businesses taking risks.

But I think she is wrong about equating being poor with experience risk.  Ghetto shoot ups are about being targeted, not about experiencing risk.  And the way out of that is not a "safety net" but freedom.  And certainly to end the state racial categorizations.

The "safety net" the liberals talk about is really a fishing net, for scooping up vast numbers quickly, gutting them, drying them out, consuming them, and then disposing of the waste.  That is no way to treat people.  And it denies the rest of us the good of the contributions we'd otherwise get from people, grounded in the creativity emergent with their freedom.

The banks too have a safety net, and that net led to the problems and denies us the solution.  Defund all safety nets.  Give us freedom.

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Thursday, September 6, 2012

Arms Trade

China Daily complains:


An article published by The Washington Post on Aug 26 said that weapons imported from China fueled regional conflicts and humanitarian crises in Africa, and said that China's arms exports are not in line with its "responsibilities as a global power".
Such claims are not true and invert justice by calling white black and playing the trick of "a thief covering himself by shouting loud". This attitude is deeply rooted in some westerners' superiority complex.
In fact, those who claim to be "responsible arms traders" are not responsible at all. According to a newly released report by the Congressional Research Service of the United States, the arms export of the US in 2011 reached a record high of $66.3 billion, which accounts for nearly 78 percent of the world's total and is three times higher than 2010's figure.


Yes, and those product are highly subsidized.  At the same time China is developing business relationships and cultural exchanges with those areas.

African apprentices practise kung fu at Shaolin Temple
The back needs to be perpendicular, and the arm is too extended.
http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012-09/06/content_15739077.htm

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Wednesday, September 5, 2012

He'd Never Get Elected

Everyone says they don't want to vote for Ron Paul because he'd never get elected.  Except everyone who studies him likes him.  Talk about bringing American together....  Sigh.



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Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Hong Kong Brainwashing

What I love about Hong Kong is their tripwire defense of their freedom.

China, which controls Hong Kong, wants to introduce school books that speak well of China.  What a shocker.  What country does not?

Nonetheless, thousands poured out to support hunger strikers.

One hunger striker was taken away on a stretcher on the third straight day of protests after fasting for more than 40 hours.

Wait, what?  She hasn't eaten since yesterday?  And she fainted?  That's the other thing I like about Hong Kong, the histrionics.  Everything is at the Chinese Opera level.  Makes for a lively milieu.

In the United States, to get a protest going they have to be funded by billionaires first.

Update: Showing a sensitivity and flexibility unknown in a Capitalist Regime, the Communist Regime in China acceded to the protesters' demands.  In USA, State indoctrination continues unchallenged.

We need a new Hong Kong in USA.

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China 35 Years On

Forty years ago Nixon and Mao opened up trade relations with China with Ping Pong teams breaking the ice.  Five years later I was visiting China twice a year as a buyer at the Canton fair, held in Guangzhou, a city to which we were restricted.  It was exotic to meet the old China hands, such as the Canadians who have been trading with China for 20 years. Canadians had maintained relations with China after the revolution.

That was 35 Years ago.  Berkeley is putting together an exhibition of some poster from that time, and here are a few from 1977, when I first went.  There is no way to quite explain what it was like back then.  Different.  These posters only capture the ideal.  But then so do political conventions.








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Monday, September 3, 2012

Honor Labor

Conservative and right wing sorts are supposed to decry the labor movement in USA for its thuggery and interference with the free and orderly operations of the market.  I suppose in some ways people might think I am conservative or right wing, but I don't think so.  I am radical, not extremist.  In my youth my mother called me a wobbly for my views, and I've been a teamster and "once a longshoreman, always a longshoreman" so I guess I am a longshoreman too.

The left pretends to be pro-labor, but then effectively buys them off on the one hand, and ruins the premise by advocating government unions on the other.

So let's run down why we should honor labor, as in unions.

People say there are unions, therefore there are problems.  This is nonsense.  There are problems, therefore there are unions.    People organize to solve problems, and faced with the exploitation of big govt/big business, unions organized to defend themselves.  Show me a unionized business and I will show you lousy management.  If you run your business well, you will not be unionized.

But John, Puget Consumer Coop, your favorite grocery store, is unionized!  Exactly.  You could not find a more whimsical, clueless inept group of mountebanks and do-gooders running anything.  What keeps the place together is there is a union, adult supervision, there to say "no." I can't help it that delusional left wing and good food go together.  Don't blame me, I didn't design the universe.  Happily, as a radical, I can stand working with loony left.  The food is so much better than what the right wingers eat.

docspopuli.com

There is no such thing as outrageous union demands, only outrageous management concessions.  Every anti-union rant begins with some outrageous privilege unions enjoy.  Well, every one was freely negotiated.  The labor rules are both sides must meet and confer, not meet and agree.    Labor can only ask, management can always say no.  In fact, labor has only one option, and that is to ask.  Management has three options: say no, say yes, or manage the company better.  Any excess one might perceive on the part of a union is simply a management concession.

The bane of the union is the "house union."  It is a union set up by management to crowd out a real union.  Government unions are house unions, but they do not directly compete with anyone, since it never occurred to anyone to unionize the govt before FDR.  FDR said no.  Kennedy said yes.  What is new from the experience of govt unions is they kill the host upon which they feed.  At least in private business unions know how far they can go.  There is no rational limit to what the govt can promise govt unions.  On the other hand, there is no limit to the repudiation of any promise that govt makes.  There a crisis is presently unfolding, but no one outside of govt has a dog in that fight.

A quick sketch of the union movement might run like this: the unholy alliance of capitalism and the state overwhelmed the market economy and resistance to the occupying army of industrialists came in the form of the union movement.  The unions simply demand some of the spoils from an unjust system. Fix the problem, and the solution will go away.

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Thomas Jefferson on Intellectual Property

"It has been pretended by some (and in England especially) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions and not merely for their own lives but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even a hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By a universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea."
(Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 1813)

This brings up a couple of points.

Before the state inserted intellectual property rights, the state maintained "patents" in the form of monopolies of another sort.  The idea was customers belonged to a business.  If someone opens a tavern for a group of customers, those customers belong to that tavern, and no one else could open a tavern to compete, since competition is bad.  Read the 18th Century law on this, by Horwitz.



The one aspect of Hong Kong that sticks in the craw is that the state owns the land, there is no private ownership of land, except by rights conveyed through a lease.  The only exception to this is the Church of England Cathedral for whom an inalienable right for perpetuity is recognized.

Although the idea of state ownership is anathema, it seems to more accurately reflect natural law inasmuch as land is your as long as you use it.  In capitalism, land can be aggregated, even unused, and by positive law kept in perpetuity through legal fictions such as trusts, etc.  In Hong Kong, use it or lose it.

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Sunday, September 2, 2012

The Definition Of Gaffe - Rubio

The definition of a gaffe is when a politician accidentally speaks the truth.  Here a rising star I believe accidentally gets what he wants to say backwards, but it is exactly right.  Scroll it to 17.5 minutes, it is his summary line.



The Republicans, as he says, are choosing more government and less freedom.

Getting it exactly backwards is just a mistake, but watch the audience of Republicans roar in approval.

Sigh.
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