Category Archives: Regulation

UPDATED: When Cretins ‘Confront’ Creep-In-Chief

Barack Obama, Christianity, Constitution, Founding Fathers, IMMIGRATION, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Regulation

In the age of illiteracy and ignorance, newspaper transcripts are obsolete. So rely on memory I must in relaying what one can take away from Obama’s “presser at the conclusion of the Africa Summit.” And it is, chiefly, that the media, whose duty it is to keep the president on his toes, is really really dim.

Again, Obama called Congress a do-nothing Congress (if only this were true), when the Founding Fathers put in place a constitutional scheme that was intended to gridlock, so as to prevent usurpation of power belonging to the people. That the system failed to preserve freedom is beside the point. Obama still gets away with disgorging misleading dross about the constitutional system’s workings.

Just the other day, the creep-in-chief declared that there was no money to protect the border from tidal waves of central-American juveniles. (That too was the fault of a “do-nothing Congress.”) Today, this interloper found plenty taxpayer money to give to “Africa” so that it could unleash the potential of its women, press, medical men (or witchdoctors, as they are called on that continent), civil institutions, on and on. I’d say this was tantamount to throwing good money after bad, if there was any real money to throw about.

The American media, like the army, is internationalist. They like to present themselves as humanitarians, whose sympathies lie with the world’s poor (unless they personally have to step up, whereupon these left-liberals metamorphose into NIMBYs).

Why, one feeble-minded female demanded, was an Ebola drug, developed in the US and still not approved for use due to Food and Drug Administration regs—yes, regulation can indirectly kill—why was it not being provided to “Africa”? (I don’t think American journos understand that “Africa,” like Europe before the European Union, is made up of many countries.) And was it ethical to test the compound on the infected Christian missionaries—Americans all—who contracted the disease when ministering to the sick and afflicted on the continent.

If they could, the journos would take the ZMapp drug away from these saints who deserve a cure. The selfless saints serving the Lord in Africa would probably agree.

UPDATED (8/7): Partial transcript courtesy of CNN.

Eric Garner: Peaceful Entrepreneur, Killed By Cop

Free Markets, Private Property, Regulation, Taxation, The State

Liberty’s quixotic hero, William Norman Grigg, documents and deconstructs the murder by cop of Eric Garner, chocked to death by Officer Daniel Pantaleo, for doing nothing naturally illicit. Arguably, Garner was being entrepreneurial, trading untaxed cigarettes in defiance of the state’s “slave patrol” and “Comrade” Andrew Cuomo’s “Cigarette Strike Force.” As always, Grigg gets to the nub of the issue, and beautifully so:

“Every time you see me, you want to mess with me! I’m tired of it! It stops today!”

Eric Garner, a peaceful and productive citizen, had suffered years of pointless and unnecessary harassment by the costumed predators employed by the NYPD. He told one of them to leave him alone. Such impudence by a mere Mundane cannot be tolerated, so Garner was murdered in the street in full public view.

Several plainclothes officers were prowling Garner’s Staten Island neighborhood on the afternoon of July 17 seeking to harvest revenue by catching harmless people in the act of committing petty infractions. Police Commissioner William Bratton describes this as “stamping out petty offenses as a way of heading off larger ones.” in practice, this means authorizing police to commit actual crimes in their efforts to turn harmless people into “offenders.” …

The first fatal mistake Garner made was to act as a peacemaker. The second was to assert his self-ownership in the face of someone employed by the contemporary equivalent of a slave patrol. Within minutes, five police officers attacked him, one of them slipping behind him to apply an illegal chokehold. Garner died of cardiac arrest after being swarmed and suffocated in front of numerous horrified witnesses, one of whom captured the entire event – from first confrontation to homicide – on camera. …

“Eric Garner’s exasperated proclamation ‘It stops today!’ is cognate with ‘Don’t tread on me,’ and his murder by an army of occupation immeasurably more vicious and corrupt than the Redcoats could precipitate a long-overdue rebellion against the omnivorous elite that army serves. …”

READ ON.

It’s Official: Obama Care To End Employer-Based Health Care

Business, Healthcare, Labor, Regulation

In “The Glories of Hussein’s Proctology,” I worried that, “Perhaps, like Michelle Malkin, I too will lose my coverage. It is not impossible that even a mammoth like Microsoft, whose chairman trumpets Big Government at every turn, will see the benefits to the bottom line of dropping spouses like myself.”

Our healthcare plan has since altered for the first time ever. The complete coverage we were previously afforded is now a high-deductible, cost-sharing plan with a health-savings account. It had already cost us over 2000 additional dollars in 2013.

A year has gone by, and the New York Times is pleased to bring tidings of these very developments, agreeing for the most with the researchers, S&P Capital IQ, that pushing people like me off coverage we like and want to keep, and onto the Idiot’s exchanges will make us gormless fools “more autonom[y] around [the] management of [our] own health care.”

The NYT is correct in that the third-payer system has turned the employer into “a social service agency.” The answer, however, is not more government, but a free-market in medicine where nothing comes between doctor and patient.

Government Begat Government Which Begat More Government

Government, Intellectual Property Rights, Regulation, War

Myron Pauli on the malignant, metastatic cancer known as government.

Government Begat Government Which Begat Government
By Myron Robert Pauli

My friend at the Federal Trade Commission is assigned to fight “monopoly” in the field of laser eye surgery. The Food and Drug Administration approved ONLY “laser A” and “laser B” for doing eye surgery [of course, WHY did the FDA get to approve lasers and why should ONLY these two lasers be approved over other capable lasers???]. It seems that the Patent and Trademark Office then gave patents (e.g. virtual monopolies) to the companies holding these two lasers (something of which Jefferson and many libertarians disapprove). Then the FTC claimed that these two companies “colluded” in making a monopoly which was, in fact, created by the state power of the FDA and the PTO. In other words, the solution to government-created-problems is, of course, more government.

And then there is a recent article in The Atlantic for government reparations for black Americans – after all, one had government slave codes, government Fugitive Slave Laws, banishment of free blacks, franchise denial, Jim Crow Laws, racist FHA, racist Agriculture Department, racist zoning laws, racist licensing restrictions, racist closed shop laws. Social Security transfers money from black men [who die at age 65] to white/Asian women who live near 90 years. Reparations were given to wealthy widows of 9/11 stockbrokers [another obscenity]… and thus, government should now extract money from Vietnamese refugees in the form of taxes to compensate descendents of people victimized by government in 1850 … and government begat government.

Speaking of Vietnamese refugees, it was the government which sent millions of warfighters (many conscripted with the draft) to fight in senseless wars of nation building in Vietnam, Cambodia, Somalia, Haiti, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan …. where these veterans return with chronic injuries, addictions, and mental problems. The solution, of course, is not to allow them to seek private health care but to dump them into a VA system [chronicled in the movie “Born on the Fourth of July”] which, being government, is an unaccountable, uncompetitive, sovereign monopoly. The solution to problems in the VA or the DC schools or public housing or Amtrak or anything is, naturally, to increase the budget. In the beginning, there was government … and government begat more government … which begat more government. If X fails, try 2X and 3X and 4X. American Dream Downpayment Act begat Housing Bubble begat Wall Street Bailout begat more Income Inequality … solution – more government, of course!

And if Bush#1 is bad, the solution is Clinton#1. If he seems bad, try Bush#2 followed by Obama#1 followed by either Clinton#2 or Bush#3. Plus ca change plus c’est le meme chose (the more things change, the more they remain the same). Tired of the same old routine, folks, then try the New Freedom, the New Deal, the New Frontier, or the New Nixon. The new Messiah will solve the problems of the previous incompetent with “compassionate conservatism” or “hope and change” and “a more responsive government” and “more transparency” which amazingly always means: more laws, more arbitrary secretive government, more debt, more inflation, more drones, more spindoctors, and less liberty. As that noted ‘American-hating extremist’ Thomas Jefferson, observed: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

To Americans, most of whom have Orwellian memory holes, it has always been this way. Government has ALWAYS regulated X and Y and Z and provided for old people or college educations or health care or what not. I listen to the debate on voter ID – since you need a government ID to board a bus or have a drink, then you must have a photo ID to vote (can someone name which signers of the Declaration or the Constitution had photo ID’s ???). If photo ID’s are good enough for Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 hijackers, then they are good enough for everyone…. And so these arguments go … One loss of liberty leads to more. One actual terrorists leads to government reading all our mails and logging in all our phone calls. If government does A to us, then of course it should also do B and C and D …. – government begats government. And the people shout AMEN!

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Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.