UPDATED: Grubby Gruber To Enter ‘Smithsonian Museum of Dumbassery’ (CNN Reports?)

Economy, Ethics, Government, Healthcare, Intelligence, Internet

Jonathan Gruber’s “off-the-cuff” trail of stupidity belongs, as Big Bang’s delicious Leslie Winkle would say, in “the Smithsonian Museum of Dumbassery.” Here the Gruber collection is, as uncovered and tracked, not by major media, but by citizen journalist Rich Weinstein:

* Nancy Pelosi is a Liar Too. Tell me something I don’t already know.

* “Gruber suggesting that states that did not create health insurance exchanges risked giving up the ACA’s subsidies.”

* “Clip from Gruber’s year-old appearance at a University of Pennsylvania health care conference.”

* “Gruber … ‘I have no comment.’”

* Gruby “at a January 2012 symposium.”

* “Scholar”? Gruby on “Ronan Farrow Daily”: ““I was speaking off the cuff and I spoke inappropriately, and I regret making those comments.” Aha.

* Gruber second “stupid” tape, uncovered by Megyn Kelly’s team:

In this next clip from also last year, Mr. Gruber explains how Democrats played with the language of the Obamacare law so that it achieved their goals, by again, fooling the stupid public.”
She then played a short 5-second clip of Gruber, saying the following, that a part of the Obamacare passed because “the American people are too stupid to understand the difference.”
Gruber was talking about the so-called “Cadillac tax” in Obamacare, which increased the tax on high-end insurance packages. The fact that Obamacare would raise taxes was seen as politically toxic. But then-Senator John Kerry came up with the idea of taxing the companies providing the Cadillac plans, rather than taxing Americans directly.

(Via Daily Caller.)

Stupid III clip: “It’s a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter”

… In an effort to add a cost-control measure to Obamacare, former Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who Gruber called a “hero,” successfully pushed through a 40 percent excise tax on insurance companies for plans that cost more than $10,200 for individuals and $27,000 for families.

“A WONDERFUL shopping experience, economists will tell you.” (Read: I am telling you, fools!)

Gruber is a technocrat, not a scholar; a corrupt central planner extraordinaire, high on his own vapor. He has no right to talk economics. Leave it to the Austrians, freak.

UPDATE (11/14): CNN’s Jake Tapper may have let slip a word or two about Grubby, earlier this week. Today, November 14th, 2014, finally fuller coverage on CNN. What a disgrace.

China News

China, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Regulation, Socialism

Yesterday came the news that the Chinese allegedly hacked into the U.S. Postal Service computers, “compromising information about more than 800,000 workers.” Who cares? The real question is why does the dread USPS “employ” 800,000 people? The United States Postal Service should employ one person in charge of … dissolving this bureaucratic blight. No computers; no hacking.

Today we hear that Obama, dressed in Mao garb, has committed Americans ” to “reducing carbon emissions by 26-28 percent,” while agreeing that China will begin to cut back its carbon emissions in … 2030.

Media Matters excoriates conservatives for questioning the deal, but did not appear to question the facts just stated.

MORE:

As part of the new agreement, Obama announced that the U.S. would move much faster in cutting pollution, with a goal to reduce emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent by 2025, compared with 2005 levels. Xi, whose country’s emissions are still growing as it builds new coal plants, didn’t commit to cut emissions by a specific amount. Rather, he set a target for China’s emissions to peak by 2030, or earlier if possible.

Touting ‘Target Liberty’

Economy, Internet, libertarianism, Technology

If anyone can pull it off it’s Robert Wenzel, editor of Economic Policy Journal, and now of Target Liberty. Robert, to whose illustrious websites I contribute, decided to return EPJ to its economic roots, while at the same time designating and editing a new website for libertarian discussion.

At first, the move had the feel of a self-imposed antitrust bust. What was wrong with EPJ as it was? Had the premier libertarian site on the web become too big or too powerful for its own good? (If only.) Is not human action, or homo economicus in action, an all-encompassing proposition, as EPJ had become?

Then there were our dear editor’s idiosyncrasies: Target Liberty was severed from Economic Policy Journal. The new site’s presence on the established EPJ was initially reduced to a black spot (on the right, above the search window), conjuring the black spot of death handed to a condemned pirate, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

Columnists at Target Liberty were without archives. Contributors would struggle to promote the site in the absence of clear links to their work. And our readers were overwhelmingly opposed to the move, pressing their case with an impressive array of arguments.

On the other hand, EPJ had become “multidisciplinary,” arguably the intellectual equivalent of multiculturalism.

“Intellectual disciplines,” historian Keith Windschuttle has written, “were founded in ancient Greece and gained considerable impetus from the work of Aristotle who identified and organized a range of subjects into orderly bodies of learning. … The history of Western knowledge shows the decisive importance of the structuring of disciplines. This structuring allowed the West to benefit from two key innovations: the systematization of research methods, which produced an accretion of consistent findings; and the organization of effective teaching, which permitted a large and accumulating body of knowledge to be transmitted from one generation to the next.” (The Killing of History, Keith Windschuttle, Encounter, pp. 247-250.)

The intellectual discipline is one of the signal achievements of Western Civilization. This explains why those working in the postmodern tradition have striven mightily—reflexively, at least—to dismantle disciplines.

Ultimately, nobody beats Robert Wenzel in providing excellent and abundant content. Still, here are some thoughts on increasing our traffic and making it easier for contributors to promote both sites on their respective websites:

• Continue to write guest columns on other sites. What about Peter Schiff’s Euro Pacific Capital?
• Create a link and archive for each regular contributor on Target Liberty, too.
• Place a link (that is not a black spot) to Target Liberty on Economic Policy Journal. (This has since been accomplished.)
• Put faces to the words: a picture for each of our columnists.
• Encourage columnists to reply to readers.
• Write even catchier headlines.
• Link internally: If a news story is about, say intellectual property, link to an EPJ or TL article on the topic.
• Create an email list and send out a weekly newsletter featuring the best of our contributors (provided I’m in it, of course).
• Promote stories and columns by Tweeting them as well as posting links to Facebook. Contributors can, in turn, share links on their own social media pages. Posts can be made to automatically propagate to social media with automating applications.
• Upgrade the sites so they are mobile- and tablet compatible.
• Explore making an app.

Obamacare: No-Fault Fraud

Healthcare, Law, Republicans, Taxation

Not a peep has the new class of Republican congressmen and senators uttered about the open admission of fraud made by Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of Obamacare.

Proudly and bombastically Grubber touted the charade in which he partook in swindling “stupid” Americans:

… this bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes the bill dies. Okay, so it was written to do that. …. if you had a law that made explicit that healthy people would pay in and sick people would get money, it would not have passed. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever but basically that was really really critical to get this thing to pass… I wish we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this [Obamacare] law than not.

The legal elements of fraud are present:

(1) a false statement of a material fact,(2) knowledge on the part of the defendant that the statement is untrue, (3) intent on the part of the defendant to deceive the alleged victim, (4) justifiable reliance by the alleged victim on the statement, and (5) injury to the alleged victim as a result.

You’d think Republicans would pivot into repeal mode right away. Since when is a supposedly sovereign people compelled to suffer under a law they reject?