Category Archives: The State

TSA , VA, ObamaCare, SandersCare; Gov.Com: Economically They’re The Same

Economy, Government, Healthcare, Homeland Security, Political Economy, Private Property, The State

To the economically literate: It’s your obligation to know by now—especially if you read this space—that nothing the head of the Transportation Security Administration and Homeland Security can say or do will change the fact of “long waits at the nation’s airports” this summer and any other peak travel time.

Lines—overload, undersupply, malfunction—are a function of a government system, whose incentives were explained in “Why Government ‘Care’ Will Never, Ever Work,” and elsewhere:

Since it “manages” money not its own, government has no real incentive to conserve resources, ensure a job is properly done, or deliver on its promises. Entrusted with the administration of assets you don’t own, have no stake in; on behalf of people you don’t know and who have no real recourse against your mismanagement—how long before your on-the-job performance mirrors that of the government? …

… A monopolist, moreover, doesn’t have to please consumers, because he has them cornered. Therefore, in a politburo, political decisions trounce considerations that would win out in the market place. Consider: HealthCare.gov was coded with the goal of harvesting sensitive information from applicants while concealing rip-off prices from them. Why would the Central Planning Board (aka the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in charge of Obamcare) care that such coding has created a hacker’s dream, when their wet dream is to share data culled through HealthCare.gov with the IRS, the DHS, the TSA, on and on?

Like the communist elite, the Congress elite seldom subjects itself to the same health care or the same laws as the people. Unsurprisingly—and by legislative sleight of hand—lawmakers have used their privileged positions to pass laws exempting themselves and their lackeys from liability. “Governmental immunity” is designed to “stop people from suing the government and government employees and officials in many cases.”

With taxpayers ponying up for any … slip … and responsibility collectivized—fear of being fired or penalized is non-existent among the ruling class. Government failure will never see the closing of a government agency, or the firing of nasty, inefficient, over-paid, affirmatively appointed official.

I hope you are able to generalize from healthcare.gov to TSA.gov, to VA.gov and beyond.

Economically, the incentive structure is the same in the TSA , ObamaCare, SandersCare, Gov.Com.

The nationalization of airports by BUSH II was first explored in “WHOSE PROPERTY IS IT ANYWAY?” (June 5, 2002). Read it. Teach it.

NATO Another Noose Around The American People’s Necks

Donald Trump, Europe, Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Nationhood, Neoconservatism, The State

Donald Trump, bless him, puts America First. He can’t help himself. And so it was, again, with his comments against NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. As with any bureaucracy, NATO is good for those it employs. The NATO superstate, however, is bad for The People, who must pay for it and live with its self-perpetuating policies and sinecured politicians.

NATO was “… formed to fight the Soviet Union . … “The USSR evaporated a quarter-century ago,” but like a zombie, “NATO has lurched along, taking on new roles. …”

Foolishly and self-servingly, the establishment, Left and Right, equates what governments do, with what the people need. These shysters, Ted Cruz included, have risen on their hind legs in defense of America’s continued membership in NATO, to the tune of 2 percent of GDP. It’s not a conscious act; like a single-celled amoeba, these single-purpose organisms thrash about in unison to preserve the physical integrity of the state structures that feed them.

Where Trump disappoints slightly is when he talks restructuring instead of disinvesting, but there’s so much one human being can say and promise to do. Mr. Trump is fearless.

How Bad Is Belgium State Security? Very Very Bad

Islam, Jihad, Terrorism, The State

Really farcical is the Atlantic writer’s complaint that Belgium’s “longstanding ethnic fractures”; “divisions between “French- and Flemish-speaking citizens,” and “distrust among different law-enforcement authorities,” “create barriers to effective policing” and “impede communication, investigation, and apprehension of suspected terrorists.”

Yes, let’s add to extant divisions in European countries by bringing into countries already divided more unassimilable Maghrebi Muslims.

Then there’s the alienation blame game:

… Belgium has a sizable Muslim population—roughly on par with that of other Northern European countries—but by some tallies has sent more fighters to join ISIS per capita than any other country in Europe. In Brussels’s Molenbeek neighborhood, the epicenter of Belgian jihadism, there’s high unemployment, an isolated Muslim population, poor education, and a lack of government services. …

… police agencies in different European countries do not cooperate effectively among each other. This creates special challenges, not only because terrorism is transnational but because Europe’s Schengen system makes it possible for people—including attackers—to cross borders with ease. Belgian officials had questioned some of the men involved in the Paris attacks prior to last November, but that information was never shared with French authorities. Since those attacks, European officials have been working to improve communication. …

… Finally, … there’s so much information reaching counterterrorism officials that it’s nearly impossible to sort through it all. [Try working in the private sector; government can never do anything right, b/c the incentives are inverted; the worse they do; the more funding they get.] “You talk about chatter, there’s just too much of it now, so you have all these officials across the world that are trying to neutralize these persistent threats,” he said.

UPDATED: Local, Low Birth Rates & Immigration Are Unrelated, Except By Government

IMMIGRATION, The State, The West, Welfare

The following immigration “argument” has been made by Mark Steyn, and, to be fair, by good guy Pat Buchanan: Westerners are, somehow, unwittingly responsible for the amorphous thing called mass immigration. (That thing just happens, right?) Because westerners won’t procreate at rates deemed acceptable by welfare experts, Third Worlders must be imported to make up for the demographic deficits.

Come again?! And what absolute nonsense.

A low-birth rate people is entitled not to be ethnically cleansed by its government’s immigration policies, even if its people are not reproducing as they “should.” Fertility and immigration are unrelated, except through and by government.

The State and the statists tie the two issues together by using the one, low-birth rates, to excuse the other (mass importation of immigrants).

From “Beck, Wilders, and His Boosters’ Blind Spot”:

… I am told that I don’t understand Mr. Steyn of the dooms-day demographics. So I listened to his “End of Europe” lectures, in which he vividly describes the multitudes of Muslims going forth to North America and Western Europe to be fruitful and multiply and push for Islam. Their Pan-Islamist identity trumps their new assumed identity. Because of numbers, Mark asserts, History is on the march in the Muslim direction. By 2030 much of what we think of as the developed world will be part of the Muslim world.

Here Steyn hits a brick wall. Other than making babies at home and total war abroad, he proposes nothing much at all. Oh yes, if you’re not already fighting (futilely, in my opinion) in Iraq and Afghanistan, you can show your marbles by publishing offensive cartoons, making rightwing movies, and writing right-wing text.

The “One-Man Global Content Provider” is wrong. Demographics need not be destiny. The waning West became what it is not by out-breeding the undeveloped world. We were once great not because of huge numbers, but due to human capital — people of superior ideas and abilities, capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy.

Declining birth rates—and their antidote; the mass immigration imperative—are the excuses statists make for persevering with immigration policies that are guaranteed to destroy western civil society and shore up the State. …

MORE.

UPDATED (3/10):