Should the Fretboard Man Fret?

Business, Free Markets, Government, Individual Rights, Law, Music, Natural Law, Regulation, Technology

The house virtuoso does not own a Gibson guitar; he dislikes them with a passion. Being one hell of a neoclassical, instrumental guitarist, Sean Mercer has his reasons. (Listen to the YouTube posted below.) He does, however, own the following fine instruments, which are crafted with assorted hardwoods, some rare, and possibly illegal:

Carvin DC747 (Maple)
Carvin AC275 (Hawaiian Koa body & neck, Ebony bridge)
Carvin AC175 (maple, ebony)
Carvin LB76 (Curly maple)
Carvin IC6 (Walnut, maple)
Carvin NS1 classical (mahogany, ebony bridge & fretboard)
Warwick Streamer (Wenge, maple) – Germany
Warwick Double Buck (Wenge neck, Alder)
Yamaha Classical (Rosewood back & sides, Ebony, Spruce)
Jackson SL1 (maple)
Kramer Stagemaster (Maple, ebony fretboard)
Kramer Pacer (Rosewood fretboard, maple)
Dean 7 string (mahogany body, maple neck, ebony fretboard)
Brian Moore iGuitar (Rosewood fretboard, alder border)

For the possession/importation/smuggling of “rare ebony wood from India used to make some of the world’s most coveted guitars,” US federales have raided the Tennessee plants of Gibson Guitars.

The meek chief executive of Gibson Guitars, Henry Juszkiewicz, pleaded plaintively with the public: “We were not engaged in smuggling. ‘We have been importing fingerboard stock on a regular basis from India for 17 years.'”

He might have pointed to the fact that this is part of the feds’ ongoing criminalization of naturally licit behavior, and that, last he looked, ex post facto prosecutions were unconstitutional. In other words, when Gibson began importing these woods, the practice was legal. It is unconstitutional to criminalize actions that were legal when committed.

Business in the US is anything but Randian; it adopts an obsequious manner with the both the pitchfork-hoisting public and our DC Overlords.

Downsize the “Oink Sector”!

As promised, here is a piece from the CD “Electric Storm,” by instrumental guitarist Sean Mercer. Sean’s compositions were featured in Guitar Player Magazine. Wrote the great Mike Varney:

Sean’s demo showcases his skills as a producer, engineer, writer, performer, and keyboardist. His set of neo-classical instrumentals are [sic] reminiscent at times of works by Tony MacAlpine. Complex arrangements, tightly played ensemble lines, and a grand display of thematic solo work should make this tape of particular interest to neo-classical fusion fans. [Mike Varney, Guitar Player, October 1991]

Leech-In-Chief Robs Job Market

Barack Obama, Business, Debt, Economy, Free Markets, Labor, Political Economy, Regulation

Robbing Peter to pay Paul impoverishes. Put differently: this month, the proverbial Peter was unable to create prosperity that would have redounded to all Americans. The leech-in-chief and the political parasites surrounding him have put in place policies which guarantee that the U.S. job market flat-lines, as it did this month. “The worst performance since last September, the Labor Department said.”

Heartbreaking are the images of “job seekers waiting to enter job fairs”—which in themselves often appear to be feel-good affairs organized by ruthless politicians eager to be perceived as doing something.

In the interim, when he’s not preparing to wow us with his words—a disappearing act would be more welcome—President Obama is hiring. He has just nominated a new bloodsucker to advise him on economics. Does Alan Krueger truly believe that fixing the price of labor via minimum wage laws is not such a bad idea? Apparently so.

Considered a form of price control, minimum wage laws create poverty by creating unemployment among the poor and unskilled. “Fixing the price of labor above the market rate or the productivity of the employee as the minimum wage does causes surpluses of labor. The jobs would exist had government not legislated them out of the reach of those who need them.”

They are the individuals in the images.

BHO is also poised to do some more taxing, printing, and borrowing.

A glimmer of good news can be gleaned from the WSJ report: “Cuts in the public sector entirely offset the private sector’s gain of 17,000 jobs.”

If only the poor people standing in line at these job fairs—often only to meet and greet a greasy politician—understood that every little slash at the “Oink Sector” helps to seed a job in the real sector.

UPDATE II: One more Media Matters con man (A Liberal’s Moral Compass)

Classical Liberalism, Founding Fathers, Ilana Mercer, Journalism, Justice, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Morality, Natural Law, Propaganda, Rights, South-Africa

The following is excerpted from y “One more Media Matters con man,” now on WND.COM:

“Terry Krepel authors a website called ConWebWatch. ‘The focus of ConWebWatch,’ Krepel declares on the site, is ‘the ConWeb—large, well-funded, Internet-based conservative ‘news’ organizations [such as] NewsMax, WorldNetDaily and CNSNews.com.’ (I’ve inserted words in parenthesis so as to alert the reader to the edit. Accurate reporting should enable readers to distinguish editorial from authorial input.)

As a biographical note, Krepel adds that he ‘became employed by Media Matters for America in July 2004.’ At his Huffington-Post perch, Krepel is duly described as a ‘Media Matters senior editor.’ Media Matters for America purports to be a ‘progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.’

Our ace writer ought to have stated that he has been employed at Media Matters since 2004. ‘I became employed’ thus might be ugly English for, ‘I was once but am no longer employed by Media Matters.’ Conversely, perhaps this is a fellow whose intelligible written English is confined to the words ‘racial discrimination’?

Himself Krepel describes as ‘a veteran of 17 years in professional journalism as a newspaper writer, designer and editor. I know the ins and outs of the business and how it can be used and misused—and I see how the conservative Internet media is misusing journalism.’

His mission Krepel defines as documenting ‘the distortions, excesses and hypocrisy of these conservative media sites.’ Almost daily Krepel will dissect what Joseph Farah, Erik Rush, Aaron Klein, Jerome Corsi and others on WND.com and CNSNews.com have to say.

His method, crows Krepel, is to ‘hoist the conservative media on the petard of hypocrisy, accuracy and objectivity’ by ‘using their own words.’

Untrue; at least in my case.

Krepel has libeled me, but not by ‘using [my] own words'” … Disputes about democracy notwithstanding, there can be no disagreement over Krepel’s crappy journalism.”…

The complete column is “One more Media Matters con man,” now on WND.COM.

My new book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is available from Amazon.

A newly formatted, splendid Kindle copy is also on sale.

UPDATE I (Sep. 2): With the same ease with which Krepel left-off quotations around my original words—so as to seamlessly introduce his interpretations of those words—so too could this purveyor of crappy journalism have suddenly “added” the required quotations, once exposed. In anticipation, I have captured the original (June 12) Krepel item. The omission begins with, “Washington and Westminster,” and ends with “the disaster that is post-apartheid South Africa.” Here it is in the original:

UPDATE II: A LIBERAL’S MORAL COMPASS. Terry Krepel thinks he has hit a home run on the Facebook thread at “One more Media Matters con man.” There, Krepel implies that Eugene Terre’Blanche deserved to die, even though the old man was the non-aggressor at the crime scene, and had served his time in jail for his past transgressions (which I am not here adjudicating).
Heaven’s! I’m speechless. All Krepel has demonstrated is that left-liberals (like himself) are every bit as blood thirsty and bereft of a moral compass as the neoconservatives they often critique.
Every remotely sane individual can see where this kind of sentiment leads. And every libertarian can see why the US is in such terrible moral shape. There is no difference between affiliates of the political factions as far as ethics go. “So long as my guy is killing off the guys I dislike—I’m WINNING”: That’s the pervading mindset. Justice be damned.

‘I.O.U.S.A’ Forever After

Barack Obama, Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Political Economy

I am unable to locate the Bloomberg TV segment in which Robert Auerbach, Professor of Public Affairs at the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin, disputed the fiscal multiplier effect with reference to research he had undertaken with Milton Friedman. Crumbs, for sure …

Milton Friedman was no Austrian economist. Neither is Auerbach—but at least he has admitted that after he “transferred from the teachings of Abba Lerner [some frightful Neo-Keynesian] to the teachings of Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago,” he “became convinced that Abba had made a terrible mistake. ‘Heavy reliance’ on running the printing press to finance government spending is not immune to serious consequences. There are substantial immediate effects as well as expectations of inflation and higher interest rates that may well appear over time.”

[SNIP]

The state of political economy in the US being what it is, I can safely copy and paste from past articles a response to current, repeat-offender policies. The latest crazed impetus from Zero and his advisers is a “new” “jobs agenda.” “‘I.O.U.S.A'” was written in 2008 on the occasion of BHO’s first fake money infusion:

“Fresh off the printing press, the trillions in new spending Obama is planning will only make matters worse. Understand, government can’t create wealth; it only consumes it, or moves it about. Not even Magic Man Obama can make sustainable jobs materialize by borrowing and counterfeiting. Only the private sector can create sustainable jobs—-sustainable because driven by consumer preferences, as opposed to bureaucratic whim. The more taxing, printing, and borrowing the government does, in the vain name of job creation, the less capital will the private sector have with which to create long-lasting employment.”