No, It's Not.

That's my answer to this Cato ad, anyway:



And, FWIW, both CATO (here: http://healthcare.cato.org/) and the Heritage Foundation (here: http://fixhealthcarepolicy.com/) are excellent references for policy solutions, from a conservative perspective, that really could have a positive impact on health care "reform".

One of the things that drives me crazy is when liberals ignorantly blather on about how "conservatives don't have any solutions to these problems". Yeah, we do. And those two sites feature some of the best solutions.

Also, Heritage's header graphic neatly summarizes the differences in approaches between individual-empowering conservatives and government-growing liberals:

Libertarians for Obama

There was a moment during the 2008 campaign when there was this giant push that libertarians should seriously look at supporting Obama.

At the end of 2006, in the middle of what was that nearly three-year-long primary contest, Cato published Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas's "The Case for the Libertarian Democrat" and accompanying Cato Daily podcasts.

In early 2008, Cato drew attention to the comments of Scott Flanders, CEO of libertarian publisher R. C. Hoiles, who "reasoned that Obama is the best candidate to work on four top libertarian reforms: 1) Iraq withdrawal, 2) restoring the separation of church and state; 3) easing off victimless crimes such as drug use; 4) curtailing the Patriot Act."

And not longer after you had stuff happening like the launch of the Libertarians for Obama blog (tagline: Put aside your skepticism and read on.)

By September, you had people like Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution - a blog which I hold in high regard - making the case for Obama and having their case highlighted by The New York Times.


Fast forward to today.

I'm posting this blog post as a reminder for the next time libertarians start thinking "you know, voting for the most liberal member of the Senate is starting to make a lot of sense!"

Here we are, just shy of 8 months into his Presidency. We've seen the largest growth in government in 50-some years - and that's excluding whatever lurch awaits in his attempt to revamp healthcare via yet-more-government.

And, returning to Scott Flanders' laundry list:

1) We are still in Iraq
2) As the Washington Post reports today, Faith-based initiatives: still goin' strong. (And perhaps even stronger.)
3) And, did you really delude yourself that Obama would change drug policy? Puhleeze. Although, there is that whole Andrew Sullivan fiasco.
4) Which brings us to "Curtailing the Patriot Act." Um, not so much. I'll just quote today's AP headline: "Obama Supports Extending Patriot Act Provisions."

Mr. Flanders: You're oh-for-four. Zero. Out. Of. Four.

As Jon Henke rightly put it in July, here's the Obama response to libertarians: Thanks for the votes, now get lost.


Now, I'm something of a hybrid between a conventional conservative and a libertarian. I can appreciate the libertarian case for John McCain was pretty much nilch, and the case against McCain was tremendously strong. I, too, hate McCain-Feingold, and anyone willing to regulate our Free Speech Rights is no friend of our liberty.

However, please learn this lesson: A liberal is a liberal is a liberal as long as the day is long.

No matter how bad the conservative nominee, it can not justify voting - on a libertarian basis - for the liberal one.

And a second lesson: If you elect a liberal president, who has a liberal super-majority in the Congress, the policy they pass will not resemble what you want. Period.

Stimulus, Illustrated

My inspiration (and, data) comes from Suitably Flip's post by the same name. I wasn't wild about the style of his graphic (spheres? word art?), so I gave it my own make over.

Anyway, here's a graphic I think helps bring some perspective to the Stimulus (it's alternative name — the "Generational Theft Act of 2009" — is appropriately gaining ground) heading to the Senate. I think it's worth sharing. Click for larger.



Referenced "more info" links:

• http://readthestimulus.org/


• http://www.cato.org/fiscalreality


• http://www.cafehayek.com/hayek/stimulus/

This and That

This, Senators Obama and Clinton, is called progress.

And this is another reason I'm gravely concerned about the general '08 election. Any disagreements with Clinton will be painted as sexism; with Obama, racism.

That is how much car prices are going to go up thanks to the new CAFE standards. ($6,000 ... thanks Congress and President Bush!)

And this is why "the idea that the United States, the world's single largest energy consumer, can be independent of the $5 trillion-per-year energy business -- the world's single biggest industry -- is ludicrous on its face". (H/T Pejman Yousefzadeh @ Redstate)

And, finally, that is the kind of 2008 change I'm looking for ... (market-driven).

Oh, OK, one more ... this (read the comments...) is yet another example of the left-leaning community that is Digg failing engage in anything that even approaches civil discourse. It's also a prime example of why I ditched Digg however many months ago, and why I'm glad I've never looked back.

Update: OK, really, just one more: This is reason #7,567,981 Planned Parenthood is evil. (My tax dollars at work, ending lives. That helps me sleep at night. Sign the petition [please!])

Duplicate Podcasts

This is becoming a fairly frequent occurrence for me...

Every so often, a whole slew of episodes of one of my podcasts in iTunes get re-downloaded. For instance, today, the troublesome podcast was Cato Daily Podcast.



Every podcast since March 21, 2007 was re-downloaded. All together, they weighed in at 580.5MB. I don't think this is iTunes fault, but rather some developer / server that decided the RSS guid's should all change. And, by obeying the RSS spec, iTunes says "hey! different guids! must be new podcasts!" and downloads away.

Yesterday (I told you this was happening often!), it was Fox News's Podcasts. Annoyingly - the reason they republished all their recent podcasts is they re-did them, adding 15 seconds of advertisement to the start of them.

The reason this is particularly irksome to me (annoying enough I decided to vent on my blog, anyway), is that my 30GB iPod spends most of it's time with about 29.5GB used. Each day I download maybe 100MB - 200MB of podcasts. I have a smart playlist that shows me podcasts that are two weeks or older, and each morning, I uncheck those old podcasts which keeps me floating along happily around the 29.5GB in-use mark. But when some podcast gives me something like 580.5MB of new podcasts in one day, it really throws a spanner into the works.

I also hate to think of the wasted bandwidth costs these people are paying (I care more about the non profit ones, like Cato.) If you assume 20 cents per GB for bandwidth cost, an utterly unnecessary 580MB being downloaded by, lets say just 1,000 users, is about $120. If it's 10,000 users you've broken $1,000. All because of small stupid guid-glitch.

SiCKO in 56 Words

SiCKO was a very funny film, and I praise Michael Moore for starting the conversation and pointing out many horrors of the U.S. health care system.

But from a policy standpoint – and I say this more in sadness than in anger – SiCKO was so breathtaking a specimen of ignorant propaganda that it would make Pravda blush.

- Michael F. Cannon on the Cato @ Liberty blog

Hurray for Profits!

Excellent commentary from Chris Edwards over at Cato @ Liberty:

Good news from the oil industry: ExxonMobil announced a record after-tax profit of $39.5 billion for 2006.

That is great news because it means the company will have more funds to reinvest in exploration, refinery expansion, drilling platforms, chemical plants, and all those other brilliant machines that American families benefit from every day.

The firm invested $20 billion in exploration, structures, and equipment in 2006 and $18 billion in 2005.

Quite the contrast from Hillary Clinton's position (also available via YouTube):

The other day, the oil companies reported the highest profits in the history of the world.

I want to take those profits, and I want to put them into a strategic energy fund that will begin to fund alternative smart energy, alternatives and technologies that will begin to actually move us toward the direction of independence.

It boggles my mind that there are people who think that the Federal Government would actually do a better job investing in future energy alternatives than a company so amazingly competent they can turn out a record $39.5 billion profit.

Sure, I wish gas cost less at the pump, but I'm still willing to buy about the same amount of gas as I used to because frankly the benefit I receive from the gas I buy outweighs the cost. It's ludicrous to criticise ExxonMobile for making a profit while charging a fair price for a product we find extremely useful. I'm more ludicrous to think it's some how good - or even OK - for the government to rip away a company's profits.

That Pesky Income Gap

For the December 28, 2006 episode (mp3) of Nightline, ABC News led off it's first story with the following introduction:

It was a record year on Wall Street. The DOW passed 12,000. Bonuses for a lucky few executives were stratospheric in the tens of millions of dollars. But it was also a year in which the gap between the haves and the have-nots grew to new heights.

(emphasis mine)

In addition to being extremely pretentious, the introduction's claim is flatly false.

Reporting on this "growing" gap between the "haves" and "have-nots" is nothing new. Back in 2000 CNN ran a story Income gap of richest and poorest widens for U.S. families. At least in 2000 CNN had the good sense to include criticism on the claim from Cato's Stephen Moore. Nightline simply presented it's claim as the Gospel-truth and moved into their main subject matter.

Nightline's lack of accuracy aside, the notion of what Virginia's Senator-elect Jim Webb called the "ever-widening divide" is a notion with no basis in reality.

In the past year, Cato's Alan Reynolds has written two excellent responses on the subject. First, back in March:

This year, even The Wall Street Journal's urge to be politically correct apparently overcame all caution about being statistically correct. The Journal imagined the Fed's report "found a widening gap between households at the top and the bottom of the economic ladder," because "the net worth of the typical family in the bottom 25 percent fell 1.5 percent." A correction the next day mentioned that net worth among the bottom 25 percent had increased by 41.7 percent. But facts won't keep true believers from believing in a widening gap.

Yes, that's right: net worth among the bottom 25 percent had increased by 41.7 percent. Gap or no gap, net worth growing by 40% doesn't warrant press filled with economic and social gloom and doom.

More recently, Reynolds wrote another excellent piece responding to Jim Webb's editorial:

As many others have done, Virginia's Democratic Senator-elect Jim Webb recently complained on this page of an "ever-widening divide" in America, claiming "the top 1% now takes in an astounding 16% of national income, up from 8% in 1980" ("Class Struggle" Nov. 15). Those same figures have been repeatedly echoed in all major newspapers, including this one. Yet the statement is clearly false. The top 1% of households never received anything remotely approaching 16% of personal income (national income includes corporate profits). The top 1% of tax returns accounted for 10.6% of personal income in 2004. But that number too is problematic.

...

Official and academic statistics [show] no clear trend toward increased inequality after 1988 in the distribution of disposable income, consumption, wages or wealth. The incessantly repeated claim that income inequality has widened dramatically over the past 20 years is founded entirely on these seriously flawed and greatly misunderstood estimates of the top 1%'s alleged share of something-or-other.

The politically correct yet factually incorrect claim that the top 1% earns 16% of personal income appears to fill a psychological rather than logical need. Some economists seem ready and willing to supply whatever is demanded. And there is an endless political demand for those able to fabricate problems for which higher taxes are, of course, the preferred solution. In Washington higher taxes are always the solution; only the problems change.

Certainly, some people make more than others. In some cases, a lot more. But if anyone tells you that this gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots" is growing — they simply don't know what they are talking about.