Beautiful BAGS Inc.

Business, Free Markets, Homeland Security, Human Accomplishment, Palestinian Authority

Stop and smell the … private economy. It is a rose by any other name. Everywhere you go, an individual, or many individuals in cooperation, are working their hearts out to fulfill niches and needs for profit.

If you cannot appreciate that 100% of the bounty and plenty you enjoy is a result of the voluntary cooperation between men, then you deserve to be transported back to a mud hut in a far-away land, where your wives and daughters wear grass skirts and carry groceries on their heads, and where no man dares to or is capable of dreaming-up businesses like Costco, Overstock.com, or BAGS Inc..

Just as you thought that the Gulag created at the nation’s airports by the Transportation Security Administration was impenetrable—there comes a company to prove you wrong and improve your life.

That business is BAGS Inc.

At a time when airlines are charging customers for seemingly everything from preferred seats to food, it was just a matter of time before the industry started a delivery service. Now luggage-checking passengers on American Airlines can do what the carry-on travelers do. They can get off a plane without stopping or trying to figure out which black suitcase is theirs in the baggage claim area.
“I thought I’d give it a try,” said Sebion, who scheduled a noon tee time at the Army Navy Country Club in Virginia. “It’s ideal for my scenario. I have to go to a meeting. I don’t want to lug the clubs with me.”
Two hours later, Sebion was reunited with his golf clubs at the country club located about 10 miles away.
The service, run by BAGS Inc., is offered at about 200 airports around the country. Other airlines are expected to follow.
In addition to the normal baggage fees, it will cost a passenger $29.95 to have one bag delivered, $39.95 for two bags and $49.95 for three to 10 bags. …BAGS Inc. decided to start the new service after it noticed airlines were getting better at, well, not losing luggage. The company had already partnered with most of the major U.S. airlines to deliver luggage lost or sent to the wrong destination. BAGS Inc. developed the service as another source of revenue, according to Chief Operating Officer Scott Fasano.

For fear of theft by TSA pimps and criminals, I carry a single bag on board with my best garments and shoes. To the rescue comes a flying FedEx or UPS service. Glory!

The Ass With Ears And His Ali Baba Thieves

Barack Obama, Britain, Business, Europe, Healthcare, Socialism

“The Ass With Ears And His Ali Baba Thieves” is the current column, now on RT:

IdiotCare, aka ObamaCare, kicks in once a company is 50 people strong. In a word, as the business begins to grow. The costs imposed by the healthcare mandate compel small business to duck-and-dive so as to stay alive.

In a televised interview, Kari DePhillips, the co-owner of a small PR firm, explained how the health-care law would impact her fledgling enterprise, and what she was doing to stay in business. (Small business, incidentally, is already adept at negotiating the legislative impositions of affirmative-action laws.)

DePhillips, of The Content Factory, told Fox News’ Gerri Willis that she is “scrambling” to comply with the mandate, for she must provide employees with healthcare or face fines. For this plucky woman, the year 2012 will mark the first time the cost of healthcare per employee “broke the $10,000 mark”! “Multiply that by 50,” and this entrepreneur is in hock to the tune of $500,000.

Unless she curtails her ambitions, those are the additional costs America’s Ass With Ears (Barack Obama) will be imposing on Mrs. DePhillips.

Suitably, hiring “fewer people or hiring in a different capacity” were two of the options explored on The Willis Report. The first alludes to part-time, “1099 contractors.”

Moving to the state of New Hampshire, as part of the “Free State Project”— and in the faint hope that the Granite State will nullify the Affordable Care Act—is another option DePhillips intended to explore.

Unmentioned was the incorporation option. Create a new business, at considerable costs, each time your company reaches 49. As this is hardly a viable option, it is best just to stay small.

“I’m a 1099er,” confirms a British reader. “My customers all split their businesses up years ago to stay under 50. Might’ve been the Family Leave Act along with a bunch of other legislation lumped in with it.”

Britain has morphed into a nation of sheep and shopkeepers, whose vaulting ambitions were on display during the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics. I am referring to the song, dance and Hosannas the host country gave to its National Health Service, or NHS.

Like the Europeans and the English, Americans will have to learn not to shoot for the sky. …

Read the complete column, “The Ass With Ears And His Ali Baba Thieves”, on RT.

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A Republican Dick Called Carlson

Classical Liberalism, Elections, Founding Fathers, Individual Rights, Journalism, libertarianism, Liberty, Race, Republicans, Ron Paul

Journalism being what it is these days, this StarTribune report, and most other “reports,” failed to mention the “Where” in their lead story: Over which Senate seat are Kurt Bills (approved by Ron Paul) and Dick Carlson (endorsed, possibly, by the reality TV community) bickering.

(Perhaps we were expected to infer the information a journalistic lead should impart from the name of the newspaper doing the reporting: The Minneapolis StarTribune.)

In any event, Ron Paul stands for sound money, limited government (with respect to welfare and warfare alike), individual liberties and property rights. Unable to deal a blow to the constitutional principles of the American Founding Fathers, a dick called David Carlson—a Republican whose rival Ron Paul has endorsed—is choosing to fight filthily. The political battle is over the U.S. Senate seat of the senior United States Senator from Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar.

WATCH:

I’m David Carlson, and I approve this message because you have the right to know.

The transcript that follows is courtesy of Daily Kos, which, predictably, doesn’t care much about a country buckling under debt, regulation and central planning, just so long as its countrymen are coerced into sharing a single worldview.

Kurt Bills is a disciple of Ron Paul, and now he wants to be our U.S. Senator. What would America have looked like if we had President Paul and Senator Bills? Well, ‘states’ rights first’ means no Civil War to free the slaves. It means women and minorities aren’t voting. We don’t have integration and open schools. Kurt Bills own school could be all male and white. Ron Paul even stated, “Saving the Jews was absolutely none of our business” and that Adolf Hitler was initially a positive force for Germany! In Ron Paul’s and Kurt Bills’ America, black veterans who are unwanted in a restaurant can be told to leave. Ron Paul even said Martin Luther King Jr. seduced underage girls and boys and was a gay pedophile. Kurt Bills, a devoted supporter of Ron Paul, has already had our senate race called the most mismatched in America.
Minnesota, let’s make the battle for our senate seat a serious race and not put up another unelectable, radical candidate. Say no to Ron Paul and Kurt Bills.

From the Star Tribune:

[Carlson’s ad] will not have a wide viewing. Carlson said he spent a few thousand dollars to run it in the western and southwestern suburbs. But it could make a mark on Bills, who has struggled in his quest to unseat Klobuchar.

Carlson is “a 30-year-old former Marine Corps Sergeant,” which gives you an idea of the kind of constitutionally ignorant foot-soldiers for the state the military so often produces.

Doctors Dig In

Barack Obama, Healthcare, Regulation, Socialism

The bloggers at the Washington Post remind me of the pinheads behind the sort of “scientific” research that is often, small mercies, spoofed in the news. You know the kind. A controlled study found that men were more attracted to older women when the women were better looking than their younger counterparts. (Howard Stern before Sirius once read this “discovery” on air.)

The latest ObamaCare-related research revealed at WaPo concerns the unwillingness of doctors to be conscripted into the Gulag of ObamaCare.

The findings were published this afternoon in the journal Health Affairs. Accordingly, a state-by-state survey, looking at doctors’ willingness to accept Medicaid patients, found that “more than three in ten doctors – 31 percent – said no,” they would not be accepting new Medicaid patients.

The WaPo’s wide-eyed bloggers are shocked—shocked, I tell you—over this unintuitive outcome.

OMG.

That could mean that the states with the highest likelihood of expanding Medicaid might be those with the lower reimbursement rates – and fewer doctors willing to accept these patients by proxy.

Another Alice-in-Wonderland moment: California has a problem (really!!!). “1.8 million residents are expected to gain coverage – but fewer than 60 percent of providers accept new patients in the program.”

The WaPo’s brilliant conclusion: “Prior evidence suggests that physicians’ acceptance of Medicaid patients will increase as Medicaid payment rates increase.”

You don’t say!

WaPo, of course, is statism and cretinism personified. The solution to the lack of will to work for free: The money pot will provideth.

Not to worry. The Affordable Care Act provisions have it covered, the WaPo assures its readers. “The law increases Medicaid reimbursements for primary care doctors to match those of Medicare providers.”

As I said, it’s all in the money pot.

Since, of course, there is no bottomless money pot, interventionism invariably leads to socialization of the means of production. In the case of the physician caught in the maelstrom of ObamaCare, expect the doctor to be slowly conscripted in the service of those who claim his services for free.