Category Archives: Law

Minimum Wage, Maximum Economic Illiteracy

Democrats, Economy, Labor, Law, Regulation

The Bill to raise the minimum wage has three Democratic lawmakers — Reps. John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.), Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), and Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Ill.) — swelling with pride.

The “Catching Up to 1968 Act of 2012” … would spike the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10 while mandating that future increases be tied to inflation. Jackson and his Democratic colleagues proclaimed that the legislation would model the 1968 minimum wage rate for inflation in today’s dollars. “This legislation is long-overdue and sorely needed,” Conyers affirmed. “More than 30 million Americans would see their wages increased, which would provide an immediate boost to the economy.”

Today’s youth don’t have the economic smarts with which to understand why they are less likely to be hired under legislation that fixes the price of their labor above its productivity.

Those who claim to represent unemployed youngsters—whose labor-participation rate has been in decline—don’t much care that such legislation circumvents voluntary exchanges in the market. Because government has fixed the price of labor, economic actors are prevented from engaging in mutually beneficial, voluntary exchange.

Still less is the hike justified because it impoverishes. For government can bid wages above market value, but it cannot compel business to hire, the outcome of which is unemployment among the young and the poor.

UPDATED: Arrested for Being a Tomboy (& Talking too Much)

Crime, Fascism, GUNS, Individual Rights, Law, Private Property

They’re getting closer! Those of us who, like young Celia Alchemy Savage, “distrust government,” and, like the 23-year-old Georgia tomboy, believe that “everybody ought to be able to set on their property and do whatever the heck they want to”: Watch out.

Celia Savage, who likes to blow things up on her property or in the forest clearing, was arrested for telling an agent of Police State USA that she liked to “Blow things up. …” especially “toilets in the woods.”

She did nothing wrong, other than blow her mouth off to an officer of the police state. She was not caught in any criminal act, as far as I can tell. There was no plausible cause to search her home. But they did. Based on what they found during that raid, Savage is being “held on federal weapons, explosives and drug charges, and has been denied bond.”

Savage’s Facebook profile, which is also still on the web, lists “explosives” as an interest, her political orientation as “anarchist” and her status as “Push to test. Release to detonate.”
“I despise all law enforcement and any governing authority,” she says in her “about Celia” section.

Had the Georgia resident offered her skills to Uncle Sam’s fighting force, she’d be in the clear, especially if she blew off some “toweled” heads, or peed on them.

What next? Question her likely many Facebook Friends? Perhaps Savage is my friend and I don’t know it?

UPDATE (June 2): “Beware Of People Like … Mercer”:

A secret Missouri State police report, “entitled ‘The Modern Militia Movement,’ and dated February 20, 2009,” is warning about subversives like … me [and YOU].

One of the incriminating telltale signs the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC) is on the look out for are Ron Paul stickers.
I have one on my car. It reads: “Don’t blame me, I supported Ron Paul.”
The MIAC has cultivated an ensnaring network of snitches and spies”—consisting of local, state and federal agencies, as well as the public sector and private entities”—all instructed to keep their eyes peeled for “paraphernalia” associated with the patriot movement. Flags, for example. Guilty again. A magisterial “Don’t Tread On Me” flag snakes across the front page of this website, where my seditious work is stored. The Gadsden flag appears on every other page too. I can’t get enough of “that funky snake,” as my website developer calls the critter.
Indeed, this early American symbol represents some of the values I cherish and champion. The Stars and Stripes stands in stark contrast to the “modest motto” the rattler embodies. Beloved of Republicans, especially, the American flag has ceased to symbolize the ideals of individual and national sovereignty, but stands, rather, for arrogance and imperialism, at home and abroad. …


READ MORE about what could incriminate us in Police State USA.

UPDATED: Organized Vs. Disorganized Crime (US Vs. China)

China, Criminal Injustice, Government, Individual Rights, Justice, Law, Liberty, Private Property, Regulation, The State

Statists stateside have come down harshly on me for even suggesting that your average Egyptian under Mubarak or Libyan under Gadhafi was probably less likely than his American counterpart to be jailed, harassed or have a threatening encounter with the state’s emissaries.

Do you think these former dictators retaliated against “Their People” with diabolical efficiency for selling raw milk and homemade lemonade? Or unintentionally violating Honduran law of which the Hondurans themselves were ignorant? Or attempting to erect a structure on their land?

It’s the difference between organized and disorganized crime: Uncle Sam runs an organized criminal syndicate; Third World despots run disorganized criminal endeavors. It is not unreasonable to suggest that it’s easier to live off the grid in those tin-pot dictatorships America is forever overthrowing, than in the USA, the land of the “free.”

“Illegal Everything,” as John Stossel sees it. He “argue that America has become a country where no one can know what is legal.”

Kids who open lemonade stands are now shutdown by police. I tried to open a lemonade stand legally in NYC. That was quite an adventure. It takes 65 days to get permission from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
With government adding 80,000 pages of rules and regulations every year, it’s no surprise that regular people break laws without even trying.
A small businessman spent 6 years in federal prison for breaking Honduran regulations (and, to make it worse, the Honduran government said he didn’t). A family in Idaho can’t build a home on their land because the EPA says it’s a wetland-but it only resembles a wetland because a government drain malfunctioned and flooded it.

MORE.

UPDATE: “The US Is More Authoritarian Than China,” writes Lew Rockwell:

China is nowhere near as authoritarian as the US, and where authority is exercised it appears to be with more restraint. There is no TSA at Chinese airports. My son has entered the country when the customs and immigration checks were simply closed (because it was outside normal working hours) and walked off the plane and into Beijing.
On the surface, there are a lot of “rules” in China, but no one pays any attention and the authorities don’t enforce them.

As I’ve written, “US In The Red And Getting Redder”:

It’s time we came clean about our economic system. The Chinese are honest about theirs; they call it “socialism with Chinese characteristic.” We call ours free-market capitalism, when in fact it is a Third Way system too: “Socialism with American characteristics.”
The picture of China to emerge from behind those pretty Chinese screens is complex. The embodiment of feng shui it is not. The trend, however, is unmistakable: China is becoming freer, America less free. The devil is in this detail.

Hispanic Hero

Crime, Criminal Injustice, GUNS, Journalism, Justice, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Racism

Big media’s poster boy for a bad-ass white boy appeared in court yesterday. The tards of TV had nothing but bad things to say about the placid, polite, Hispanic young man called George Zimmerman. Unburdened by brains, CNN’s Erin Burnett entertained a body-language expert to decipher Zimmerman’s demeanor. This Western equivalent of an African shaman threw her ancestor’s bones and concluded that the manifestly demure Zimmerman was seething with rage.

Alan Dershowitz, the famed civil libertarian from Harvard Law School, never ceases to impress in the apolitical stands he takes. Dershowitz denounced the prosecution’s case, which I had found suspect when, a week ago, Special prosecutor Corey opted to dismiss the Grand-Jury option.

“Dershowitz Blasts Zimmerman Prosecution: ‘Not Only Immoral, But Stupid,'” reported Breitbart.com (which continues to do good reporting):

With ABC News’ release of the George Zimmerman photo showing blood flowing freely from his head, the question becomes whether Angela Corey, the prosecutor in the case, had access to the photo before charging Zimmerman with second-degree murder.
The arrest affidavit did not mention the photograph, or the bleeding, gashes, and bruises on Zimmermans’ head. Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School stated upon release of the arrest affidavit that it was “so thin that it won’t make it past a judge on a second degree murder charge … everything in the affidavit is completely consistent with a defense of self-defense.”

Bimbo Burnett’s choice of experts countered facts with feelings—and in favor of the cause of Trayvon Martin. One was a black woman with orange hair and peacock-blue eye shadow. She turned out to be a former Florida Judge. The other was the weeping, stammering Judge who presided over the investigation into the death of Anna Nicole Smith.

On March 30, I wrote that “The facts of the case should be reviewed impartially, and the identity of the aggressor in the altercation that left Martin dead determined. The issue, of course, hinges not on who was armed, but on who was first to aggress.”

The image of “Zimmerman’s head bloody, bruised, battered” the media had delayed publishing despite threats to Zimmerman’s life. It is convincing. The neighborhood watchman had been a victim of an assault by Martin, whose memory and innocence the corporate media had cultivated by airing only pictures of an angelic-looking Trayvon, aged 12.