Category Archives: Regulation

Fisker, Tesla: Fisting* The Paying Public

Bush, Business, Fascism, Government, Intelligence, Political Philosophy, Private Property, Regulation, Sex, Socialism, Taxation, Technology

Last night we dined at a local eatery in our Washington State town. Parked outside the restaurant was the electric commie car, the Tesla Roadster.

Well of course, the pinkos who proliferate and rule my state are as dumb as they are dastardly.

DUMB because they fail to understand that, “Whether a vehicle is propelled by hydrogen-powered fuel cells or electricity, both electricity and hydrogen don’t magically materialize in the vehicle. They must first be generated. Be it coal, natural gas, nuclear or a hydroelectric dam, these cars are only as clean as the original source of energy that generated the vim that powers them.”

Other than to increase the consumption of gas, because people drive more in them, state-sponsorship of so-called fuel-efficient cars is a grand exercise in compulsory misallocation and waste of capital. It proves that the development of technologies is best left to the market, not to environmental bureaucracies. The electric car is a marvelous metaphor for the legislator’s attempt to shackle the ‘wayward’ consumer. Purchase one, and your best bet is to avoid straying too far from the socket in your garage, or, alternatively, drive with a very long extension cord, lest your vehicle turn into something not nearly as useful as Cinderella’s pumpkin at midnight. The benefits to the consumer are few, much less to the environment, unless a steady discharge of lead, cadmium, and nickel—the byproducts of batteries—is a blessing in disguise.

[“Commie Cars”]

DASTARDLY because the immoral pinko has no qualms about forcefully taking from taxpaying Americans to give to favored state-sponsored interests, like Tesla Motors and Fisker Automotive.

The first “received a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy.”

Here, Republicans deserve to be reminded to hang their heads in shame. “The Department of Energy loan program was created in 2007 during the George Bush administration,” for the purpose of manufacturing the equivalent of the USSR’s “People’s Car.”

The second “has received $193 million of a $529 million Energy Department loan … Fisker Automotive — the electric-car maker that was granted a half-billion-dollar federal loan and on Friday dismissed about 75 percent of its remaining workforce — is purportedly facing a lawsuit from the same firm that sued the government-funded Solyndra company …Fisker laid off 160 of its roughly 210 employees Friday morning from its Anaheim, Calif., location.” (Fox News April 06, 2013.)

Don’t look to GOOGLE to serve you news straight up either. News about the bankruptcy or lack of viability of these subsidiaries of the state does not pop up first in related searches.

Writing in the Mises Institute’s indispensable Free Market, PETER G. KLEIN partially explains the dynamics that underpin these examples of American fascism (state-corporate collaborations). “Partially,” because Dr. Klein omits the private-property variable and philosophical fulcrum. (And the editor of TFM does Dr.Klein a disservice by giving the essay a title that is unexplained in the text: What on earth is “Tang”? Writers/editors should never assume their readers know what they’re talking about.) Explains Klein:

Today, when we look at private companies like Google,
Apple, and Facebook and marvel at their innovations, we
should remember that these companies are constantly
subject to market tests, and that the goods and services
they innovate must be accepted by consumers to be profitable. When they succeed, we know that they are creating value for society because consumers have chosen their products and services over others.
The goods and services produced by the Rand Corporation and the Pentagon and the National Science Foundation do not face any kind of market test. The goods and services they produce are valuable to the directors, and
members of Congress, and to the researchers themselves
who are on the payroll, but the value of this research is
determined arbitrarily.

Tesla and Fisker “produce” for the dim-witted Hollywood and D.C. elites, whom YOU are forced to finance. That’s it.

Fisker and Tesla are fisting* the paying public.

***

* Disclaimer: The reason I know about this practice is because I used to volunteer as an HIV/AIDS counselor in South Africa. Filthy and perverted, it’s an appropriate metaphor for robbery by state and special-interests.

UPDATED: ‘See a Shrink, Lose Your Guns’ (And To Hell With HIPAA)

Government, Individual Rights, Law, Psychiatry, Regulation

“Expect a reduction in the use of counseling services among gun owners,” BAB warned on December 24, 2012. If he thinks that his doctor is likely to pass on information about his mental state to federal or state authorities, how likely is a gun owner to seek help for psychological/marital/familial problems? Not very likely.”

And indeed a troika of traitors—Senators Pat Toomey (R) and Joe Manchin (D), with Chuck Schumer working behind the scenes—are seeking “an amendment in the bill to HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act),” caution the Gun Owners of America.

“…you could have your guns taken away because your private shrink thinks you’re ‘dangerous’ and could send your name directly to the FBI Instant Check system. Did you think it was terrible that 150,000 military veterans had been added into the NICS system because they’d seen a VA shrink about their PTSD? Well guess what? Now it’s going to happen to the rest of the population … by the millions!”

As with all government regulation, there will be unintended consequences that’ll immeasurably compound the problem the proposed, new gun legislation is intended to “remedy.”

Fearing the loss of a natural right to self defense, individuals will avoid seeking help for life’s stressors.

UPDATE: TO HELL WITH HIPAA. “HIPAA Laws,” reports The Blaze, “are likely being compromised and the 4th and 5th Amendments violated,” as New York gestapo proceed to confiscate “weapons and permits where someone has been prescribed psychotropic drugs.”

Balderdash From Berkeley: Taxing Email To Fund Your Local Post Office

Free Markets, Government, Regulation, Taxation, Technology

Given a choice, why would you want to fund the United States Postal Service?

CNN: “A city councilman in Berkeley [where else?], California, floated the idea of taxing emails as part of a broader Internet tax that could be used… to fund your local post office.”

MATT WELCH, of REASON MAGAZINE:

This is like taxing, you know, horse and buggies or taxing cars to keep horse and buggies business. Why are we taxing the great new thing so that we can prop up the bad old thing? It’s completely backwards.
It’s — I mean, the fact that it’s coming in Berkeley, which is not a punch line, it’s the home of the free speech movement 50 years ago, for crying out loud. And we’re going to put a punitive tax on one of the greatest free speech instruments in our lifetime. It’s absurd and sad.
…there’s a thing called an e-mail filter. I mean, I don’t know what you use, but I haven’t seen my cousin from Nigeria e- mail for more than a year simply because there is a spam filter that works, a spam filter that no government gave me, no tax created, no bureaucrat. …
The government is not a jobs program. It just isn’t. It shouldn’t be, rightfully so. And so, the fact that Congress won’t allow a single post office to shut down is part of the problem. If you lift the mandate and open everything up to competition, it would be a much different story.

REIHAN SALAM of National Review:

We have these amazing things called private companies that have actually mostly solved this problem. These days, most of unsolicited mail you get goes into a spam folder and those services are getting better and better over time. … Already people are migrating from one technology that becomes crappy and clogged with spam to another technology. …What the post service does now, the bulk of what they send is what I like to call physical spam which is actually worse for the environment. It’s rather unpleasant and now the postal service is saying the federal government has undermined them by saying they’re saying we have to adequately fund our pension, that’s crazy talk.
And so postal employees are funding ads on my television that are visual spam that are telling us this is some grave injustice they should fund these crazy pension obligations they have built up over years. …
But I don’t see every other industry should have to subsidize postal carries, because they are struggling [and can] use those resources to provide innovative new services.

Read “Warning: Postal Worker Coming to A Clinic Near You” for my “seven-year saga” with the local post office worker’s “sadistic displays of power, honed in a state monopoly, where captive ‘customers’ are pinned down like butterflies by ‘service providers.’ The discretion left to these petty tyrants is wide; fear of being fired minimal, if non-existent.”

Sheryl Sandberg Sandbagged For Forgetting To Blame Men

Feminism, Labor, Political Correctness, Regulation, Sex

As this individualist sees it, Sheryl Sandberg is a remarkable woman who holds unremarkable opinions. There is nothing remotely controversial about what the chief operating officer of Facebook, a Democrat, has said about women’s work on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

Women are too nice. They don’t take credit for their greatness. They don’t raise their hand enough. They don’t “Lean In” (the trite title of Sandberg’s new book) as they should. They “attribute their success to luck, and help from other people,” while men will attribute their success to their own core skills.

Sandberg holds humdrum feminist views. According to this mainstream opinion, society and the patriarchy have conditioned women to be nurturing and apologize for any male-like, go-getter ambitions they harbor.

Interviewer Norah O’Donnell is the very embodiment of banality—and hypocrisy. O’Donnell’s beauty (she is certainly no brainiac) could not have damaged her career on the Idiot Box. Just in case her looks—sorry, “skills”—went unnoticed, O’Donnell has posed as a pin-up.

In any case, O’Donnell the pin-up was having none of it. “But some women will hear that and say, ‘Wow, she’s telling me I’m not working hard enough, I’m not trying hard enough. She’s blaming women…”

Matthew Cooper is another feminist with a Y (chromosome). Cooper took a tougher tack. So sinister were Sandberg’s pronouncements on women that she deserved to be exposed for all the bad (unrelated) things she’d done. Some of these were implied: “She made a billion” was a recrimination of sorts.

Some were asserted: Mr. Cooper saddles Sandberg with the deregulation of the financial sector [where? When?] and the financial crisis. She was only 30 when she helped “repeal the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act that had separated investment banking from the commercial, insured kind. This was, in retrospect, a huge mistake,” noodles Cooper.

This is such bad journalism.

To those of use who put a premium on teasing out the issues with precision, there is no daylight between Sheryl Sandberg and her feminist foes.

Sheryl Sandberg is being sandbagged for forgetting the only acceptable meme: Saddle “society” and the “patriarchy” for any and all female failure.

Nobody has picked on Sandberg for failing to blame biology, which accounts to a greater degree for the observed, aggregate differences in drive and priority setting that separate the sexes.

NORA O’Donnell Showcasing Her Professional Skills :