UPDATED: RELATIVE Economic Freedom: Canada Clobbers the US

Business, Canada, Economy, Free Markets, Government, Regulation

Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Canada, Denmark, and even Ireland have leapfrogged over the US with respect to economic freedoms, measured by the Heritage Foundation’s 2011 index of Economic Freedom, in accordance with “10 measures that evaluate openness, the rule of law, and competitiveness.

I confess to finding the Heritages’ indices of “individual empowerment, non-discimination [sic], and the promotion of competition” a little vague, if not statist, as they all presuppose a central authority that acts to “empower,” police discrimination, and “promote” competition.

The Canadian Fraser Institute actually considers parameters like the “Size of Government, Legal Structure, Security of Property Rights, Access to Sound Money, Freedom to Trade Internationally, Regulation of Credit, Labor, and Business—all recognizable as fundamental to economic freedom.

You know that American freedoms are on the wane when the very constructs our intellectuals use to measure those freedom are, well, so veiled and politically correct.

UPDATE: RELATIVE ECONOMIC FREEDOMS. Ingemar, these indices are relative. Ireland is not free, not by a long shot. Neither are we. According to the Heritage Foundation, Ireland is economically freer than the US. What you need to take away from this, vis-a-vis the US, is the following: If a think tank that is prone to American boosterism rates Ireland, which is bankrupt, higher than America—we are in bad shape. But then you already knew that.

Power-Crazed Politicians

Crime, Democrats, Free Speech, Politics, Private Property, Regulation

Your sovereigns have some suggestions on how to eliminate any risk from their arduous, daily duties, and further insulate themselves from interacting with the peasants in the provinces of Rome. You can’t wait, right? Ban “bull’s-eyes or crosshairs on a United States congressman or a federal official.” That’s the brainchild of Rep. Jim Clyburn, third ranking Democrat in the House. “Make it a federal crime to use language or symbols that could be perceived as threatening or inciting violence against any federal official or member of Congress.” (Courtesy of Robert Brady, D-Pa.)

As the Boston Herald quipped today, “We’d rather take our chances with a crazed gunman than with crazed politicians.”

I’d be quite happy to stay away from all of them forever-after if they’d promise to keep their distance from me and what’s mine.

Blame The Perversion Of Speech

Crime, English, Free Speech, Free Will Vs. Determinism, Justice, Morality, The State

I venture that it is not speech that dangerously inflames febrile passions and unstable minds, but Orwellian speech; lies that belie reality. A good example are the words of the by-now notorious and odious Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, the Democrat who called Arizona a “Mecca for prejudice and bigotry”—the right-wing kind, naturally. Dupnik has now come out and said that “We see one party trying to block the attempts of another party to make this a better country.”

Ignore, for a moment, the fact that both parties have made the country worse. Consider: How many generations of young people can you raise on Big Lies—the kind that teach that taking from Peter to lavish on Paul at the point of a gun creates a “better country”? That central planning, the kind that crippled the USSR, will make for a “better” USA? That bankruptcy is verboten if you are a private citizen, but quite fine if you are The State; that borrowing money you don’t intend to repay to finance welfare and warfare in perpetuity is for the “better”; that an OPD (Outstanding Public Debt) equaling your GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is good. And that the larger the parasite (government) the healthier the host (the private economy).

Sooner or later the bumpercrops of rudderless dullards we raise in our public schools will become confused and “crazy.” Jared Lee Loughner used grammar and language as metaphors for his mindlessness. After all, the words the society around him transmitted conflicted with the reality he observed. You could say that he was exposed to schizophrenogenic interactions on an ongoing basis.

Whoever said that what we commonly call insanity is a sane response to an insane situation had a point.

It is not the freedom of speech, but the perversion of speech and the inversion of morality that encourage “madness” and mayhem.

All this doesn’t mean that “crazies” that kill are not fully aware of right and wrong: they are.

We are all exposed to what I’ve described. And we are all free to determine how we react to this distorted discourse; namely to the discrepancy between words and what they actually describe.

On Grief And The Aggrieved

Crime, Democrats, Etiquette, Pop-Culture, Republicans, The State, The Zeitgeist

In the aftermath of the Arizona shootings, our masters in modern Rome are foregoing “partisanship” (read principle) and are coming together to spend funds not their own to secure their sorry asses against the statistically minuscule chance that these royal behinds will come to harm. Curiously, House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson is commending House Speaker John Boehner for being “extraordinary in setting the right tone” for “a more enlightened way.”

“A more enlightened way” than what?” It’s almost as though Larson is the aggrieved party and Boehner a member of the offending group. Both parties have assumed these respective roles.

Indeed: “Republicans are clearly responding as if they feel somewhat incriminated,” said University of Michigan political science professor Lisa Disch. “On the one hand, they are acting very quickly to distance themselves from the incident, but on the other hand, they seem to be feeling as if they have been caught at something; caught at using rhetoric that is incendiary.”

On the topic of grief: A day after their child’s dreadful demise, the parents of the “9-year-old girl gunned down in Saturday’s shooting rampage outside an Arizona grocery store” were liberally granting interviews.

To me this is unsettling. We once used to grieve privately—at least initially. These days, there is nothing people will not share and express in public, and ASAP. They have no private selves.

This is part of our festering cultural commons.