Category Archives: The State

Eurocrats Award Themselves A Peace Prize

They sure use up all the oxygen in the world, don’t they? A glorified governmental committee awards a close ally of the United Nations with a prize for its “efforts” to do a job it was entrusted to do. Wow!

The Norwegian Nobel Committee (appointed by the Norwegian Parliament) awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Arguably, the OPCW is an arm of the UN. Via Wikipedia:

The organisation is not an agency of the United Nations, but cooperates both on policy and practical issues. On 7 September 2000 the OPCW and the United Nations signed a cooperation agreement outlining how they were to coordinate their activities.[13] The inspectors furthermore travel on United Nations Laissez-Passer in which a sticker is placed explaining their position, and privileges and immunities.[14] The United Nations Regional Groups also operate at the OPCW to govern the rotations on the Executive Council and provide informal discussion platform.

The OPCW received the award for its “efforts to eliminate chemical weapons,” and for “trying to destroy Syria’s stockpiles of nerve gas and other poisonous agents.”

The always unintelligible U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon—does anyone English-speaking understand this man’s mixed metaphors?—approved, of course. Perhaps he will win next year?

“Like the United Nations, the mission of the OPCW was born from a fundamental abhorrence at the atrocities of war,” he said. “Together, we must ensure that the fog of war will never again be composed of poison gas.”

The evil European Union, “which endeavors to herd Europeans by stealth into a supranational European State,” “won the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize for uniting a continent ravaged by two world wars and divided by the Cold War.”

Uniting? As was observed in “Adieu to the Evil EU,” “[a]dding an overarching tier of tyrants—the EU—to European governments has benefited Europeans as a second hangman enhances the health of a condemned man.”

The name of Malala Yousafzai, “the 16-year-old Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban last October for advocating education for girls,” had been floated as another candidate. She is certainly courageous. But she’s a pacifist, venturing recently that if a Taliban attacked her, it would be wrong to defend herself with a shoe, because that would be stooping to his level. Come again?

Higher Rates And Hussein’s Healthcare Go Hand In Hand

Debt, Healthcare, Political Economy, Reason, The State

“You know what the insurance companies are like,” I was told by a statist neighbor, who adores Obama but concedes her healthcare premiums have gone up. How does the irrational individual solve the cognitive incongruity of rising prices and her undying love of the state?

She blames markets.

But even the stupid statist press can deny no longer that “insurance is at dramatically higher rates,” and some of the reasons are these:

First, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) sets minimum standards for benefits, including mental-health and substance-abuse treatment, maternity care, prescription drugs, and rehabilitative care, which were not included in many of the old plans. Also, insurance companies are now required to take all comers, regardless of their health status, and so rates are rising to cover their costs as well.

MORE.

Here The Heritage Foundation is forced into explaining the economically obvious:

…Contrary to a key intention of the legislation, the combination of mandates and taxes will not help to reduce the deficit. In fact, the PPACA will likely increase the deficit by an average $75 billion per year, and as a result, the nation’s publicly held debt will be $753 billion higher at the end of 2020. Such astronomical debt crowds out other productive investments and will lead to an estimated 670,000 lost job opportunities per year. …
he policy combination of spending and taxes alters the macroeconomic performance of the economy and feeds back onto the budget. A dynamic simulation shows that the higher initial costs are not an investment that pays off with a higher return in later years. Indeed, these front-loaded costs slow economic growth with higher inflation and higher interest rates, which overwhelm the benefits the proposal hoped to gain in later years.
The bill’s taxes, penalties, and fees on investors and businesses will decrease the amount of investment in the economy. This reduced investment will in turn lead to a decline in productivity, causing the economy to produce $706 billion less worth of goods and services. A smaller economic pie means that workers earn lower wages and salaries. Higher taxes on investment also put upward pressure on interest rates as investors seek to achieve their after-tax desired rate of return. …
…Lower wages reduce the amount of taxable income that could otherwise have been achieved. This will both increase the deficit and grow the total debt—which in turn puts upward pressure on interest rates and crowds out some savings that could have gone to new productive business investments.
Higher interest rates mean that more American tax dollars will go toward paying the interest on the federal debt rather than paying down the principal. Simulations using dynamic analysis estimate that the government would spend an average $23 billion more per year on interest rate payments over the 2010–2020 year window than it would without the PPACA.

MORE.

And from “Obama’s Politburo Of Proctologists”:

The pit of perverse incentives Papa Obama is engineering includes leveling the insurance industry, which by definition must discern and discriminate between applicants based on their health status (largely under individual control). Under his benevolent rule, private insurers will be subjected to a host of new regulations, “including a requirement to insure all applicants and a prohibition on pricing premiums on the basis of risk,” in the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner’s rendering.
This means one thing: moral hazard. Writes libertarian economist Walter Block: “The greater the protection from the random expenses of sickness the greater the potential over-consumption of the item in question.”
We currently labor under “a seeming patchwork of indemnity insurance arrangements, managed care, private payment, and charity.” Yet the fewer the intermediaries interfering with the primary, patient-doctor relationship, the better the patient’s prognosis. The president’s prescription for too little freedom, however, is even less of the same!

MORE.

UPDATED: Someone Got Out Of Hand In D.C., So She Died (‘Capitol Punishment’)

Crime, Fascism, Government, Law, The State

Blow-by-blow coverage is ongoing in the moron media about an event in Rome. A subject “tried to go through a barrier at the White House with her vehicle Thursday then sped over to the Capitol.” Notice how police deploy the passive form of the verb—“shots may have been fired”—to detract from the fact that it is unclear whose “weapons [were] drawn.”

The end was predictable: “the suspect [was] fatally shot.” Officers managed to miss the 1-year-old baby who was in the car.

Every day police cars engage in wild chases that endanger civilians. No one mows them down.

UPDATE (10/4): “Capitol Punishment: Unarmed mom … gunned down by Capitol Police.” RT has entitled this story correctly, making up for the American media’s cover-up. It as as I surmised in my initial post above. The woman was unarmed; was pursued by police, surrounded and then mowed down in a hail of bullets.

At the moment, the public only knows what little it can glean from the available footage and witness accounts. They say she plowed into a security barrier and hit a Secret Service agent who tried to change her direction by waving.
After the police first opened fire on her, she floored the gas and drove off. But after a high-speed pursuit through Capitol Hill streets, she ran into Capitol Hill police officers, who surrounded her car after she slammed into a barrier. One witness reported one of the officers even sticking his weapon into the open window of Carey’s car.
She wheeled the car around and hit a police cruiser, while almost hitting several more officers, before driving off again. From that moment all that is known is that the officers shouted for her to stop as she moved away. Then shots were fired (multiple reports declare more than a dozen were heard in total) and Carey was killed in the vicinity of the Supreme Court. She received six bullets from police guns.

Glenn Beck says she rammed a barrier a block from the White House.

But that is all it takes to warrant death.

The Warmongers: Not Looking Out For Us

Business, Economy, EU, Free Markets, Iran, Media, Russia, The State

“The Warmongers: Not Looking Out For Us” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

To listen to U.S. government officials there is only an upside to the punitive sanctions imposed on Iran by the United States and a reluctant European Union. Consequently, the emphasis is forever on how to toughen the punishment; never on whether to lift economic sanctions on the long-suffering people of Iran.

But what about the effects of trade boycotts on American businesses?

Chris Harmer of The Institute for the Study of War estimates that the Boeing Company alone forfeits a minimum of $25 billion in business every year because of U.S.-imposed sanctions on Iran, a niche market that is filled by the Russians. Overall, Harmer puts the value to U.S. business of trade lost due to the economic embargo on Iran at approximately $50 billion per annum.

For example, Iran imports $1.5 billion worth of cars a year, the beneficiaries of which are companies like Nissan, Toyota and Peugeot (when they might have been General Motors and Chrysler). Peugeot does an added half a billion dollars’ worth of commerce with Iran just in car parts.

The Iranian economy, moreover, has diversified and is adapting to life without the U.S. The rest of the world—pockets in Europe and most of Asia—has not isolated Iran, with the result that the country has many trading partners other than the U.S. And while Iran has lost petroleum revenue due to sanctions, the trend will not endure. China, Japan and South Korea are hungry for the country’s crude.

Not to be overlooked are the costs to Americans of sanction enforcement, avers Harmer. In addition to the opportunity costs—the missed business aforementioned—there are “direct costs.” The Office of Foreign Asset Control in the U.S. Treasury Department squanders around $1 billion a year in developing lists of “financial institutions that are subject to sanctions,” and then infringing on the rights of individuals and companies to freely exchange privately owned property.

“Indirect costs” are incurred in the course of cultivating a massive U.S. intelligent infrastructure—a veritable alphabet soup of agencies—upon which the Treasury draws in enforcing a regimen of sanctions.

So too are the “deterrent costs” borne by the American taxpayer who pays for patrolling the Persian Gulf, the Northern Arabian Sea, and the Strait of Hormuz. …

… As a general rule, state-enforced boycotts harm honest, hard-working Americans who use the economic means to earn their keep. …”

Read the entire column. “The Warmongers: Not Looking Out For Us” is now on WND.

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