Government Incompetence

Government Gone Wild

Government Gone Wild oppression by Monty Pelerin –
Our economic problems rightfully dominate the news. However, they are merely symptoms of a bigger, underlying problem: government.

For many, the previous paragraph is heresy. They “know” that government is necessary and good. They “know” that government solves problems and brings order to the chaos that would prevail in its absence. “They” are wrong!

Government has become little more than a carefully crafted myth based on propaganda disseminated by government itself. It has devolved into a scheme of plunder whereby the elites plunder the masses. [Read more…]

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EU Says Water Doesn’t Prevent Dehydration

Water Dehydration EU Socialism Leftism by Bojidar Marinov –
In the middle of a recession and a financial collapse that can easily lead to the breakdown of the European Union, European bureaucrats are spending time and money to decide if water prevents dehydration.

The conclusion? After three years of scientific research, extensive correspondence, and a meeting of 21 top scientists paid by the European Union, the decision was that water actually doesn’t help preventing dehydration. There is no scientific evidence for such a claim. It’s a popular myth that dehydration is caused by less water, and therefore more water helps preventing it. Think of those desert nomads who have to battle dehydration every day: They always look for wells or oases where there is water. Savage, unscientific fools. [Read more…]

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The Artificial Imposition of Poverty

by James Peron –
Most of the world’s poverty is not self-inflicted, yet apparently many seem to think it is.

My experience, living in Africa, tells me otherwise. Much of global poverty is imposed and I don’t mean by evil “multi-national corporations” or “globalization.” Those myths are easily debunked. The real causes of poverty in these nations are not hard to find.

First, however, I’d like to start with what is not the cause of poverty. People in poor nations are not poor because they lack ambition or are lazy. [Read more…]

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Jobs and Deficits: The Moral Equation

Rev. Robert A. Sirico
Rev. Robert A. Sirico
by Rev. Robert A. Sirico –

The Genesis account of creation tells us that from the beginning, humanity was created to work. God puts Adam in the garden to “work and watch over it.” The Scripture provides an insight into our nature: We are all, man and woman, called into this life to find our vocation, the work that is uniquely ours and contributes to the flourishing of the wider community.

This explains why we are naturally so troubled about what appear to be merely economic problems: intractable unemployment and the various schemes put forth by policy makers to spur job creation. But behind the question is the reality that we naturally prefer people to be productive contributors to our economic life.

How we accomplish that is the subject of the debate over our unsustainable budget and debt trajectory. Do we choose those policies that make room for more freedom in the market, unleashing the creative potential of the American worker, business owner and entrepreneur? Or do we default, once more, to political and bureaucratic measures that require heavier burdens of taxation and regulation? [Read more…]

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The Austerity Myth: Federal Spending Up 5% This Year

Government Spending 2000-2011by John Merline –
When Republicans took control of the House in January, they pledged to make deep cuts in federal spending, and in April they succeeded in passing a bill advertised as cutting $38 billion from fiscal 2011’s budget. Then in August, they pushed for a deal to cut an additional $2.4 trillion over the next decade.

Some analysts have blamed these spending cuts for this year’s economic slowdown.

But data released by the Treasury Department on Friday show that, so far, there haven’t been any spending cuts at all.

Higher Spending, Deficits
In fact, in the first nine months of this year, federal spending was $120 billion higher than in the same period in 2010, the data show. That’s an increase of almost 5%. And deficits during this time were $23.5 billion higher. [Read more…]

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Judge Judy – Here’s Who You Support With Taxes

Judge Judy speaks out on where our tax dollars go in the case of Duane Brooks, Jr. who is scamming the government with all of his stipends, subsidies, and assistance – and using none of it for what it was intended for. These are the types of entitled, lazy, and irresponsible individuals your hard work and high taxes help support and enable.

[Read more…]

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The ‘Hunger’ Hoax

Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell
by Thomas Sowell –
Twenty years ago, hysteria swept through the media over “hunger in America.”

Dan Rather opened a CBS Evening News broadcast in 1991 declaring, “one in eight American children is going hungry tonight.” Newsweek, the Associated Press and the Boston Globe repeated this statistic, and many others joined the media chorus, with or without that unsubstantiated statistic.

When the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Agriculture examined people from a variety of income levels, however, they found no evidence of malnutrition among those in the lowest income brackets. Nor was there any significant difference in the intake of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients from one income level to another.

That should have been the end of that hysteria. But the same “hunger in America” theme reappeared years later, when Senator John Edwards was running for Vice President. And others have resurrected that same claim, right up to the present day. [Read more…]

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The Democrats’ Invincible Ignorance

Democrats Lemmings Ignorance by Paul Kengor –

I’ve only recently come to realize the nature of the hurdle this country faces in trying to turn around a stalled economy and horrendous deficit. Here it is: liberal Democrat politicians have completely convinced huge numbers of their followers that our economic/fiscal mess is the result of two principal demons: 1) “the rich,” and 2) the Tea Party. The former, of course, has been a longtime liberal scapegoat; the latter is a new one.

Note that I use the word “followers.” That’s because I’m hearing from a disturbingly high number of people who apparently buy the Democratic Party line with no question whatsoever. They exhibit a remarkable, frightful willingness to act against their own interests in blind service to partisanship and ideology. It’s like a mass self-flagellation. [Read more…]

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British Degeneracy on Parade

British Violence Moral Failure by Theodore Dalrymple

The ferocious criminality exhibited by an uncomfortably large section of the English population during the current riots has not surprised me in the least. I have been writing about it, in its slightly less acute manifestations, for the past 20 years. To have spotted it required no great perspicacity on my part; rather, it took a peculiar cowardly blindness, one regularly displayed by the British intelligentsia and political class, not to see it and not to realize its significance. There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.

Three men were run over and killed as they tried to protect their property in the very area of Birmingham in which I used to work, and through which I walked daily; the large town that I live near when I’m in England has also seen rioting. Only someone who never looked around him and never drew any conclusions from the faces and manner of the young men he saw would have been surprised. [Read more…]

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Couretas: Protect the Poor, Not Poverty Programs

John Couretas
John Couretas
by John Couretas

One of the disturbing aspects of the liberal/progressive faith campaign known as the Circle of Protection is that its organizers have such little regard – indeed are blind to — the innate freedom of the human person.

Their campaign, which has published “A Statement on Why We Need to Protect Programs for the Poor,” equates the welfare of the “least of these” in American society to the amount of assistance they receive from the government — a bizarre view from a community that trades in spiritual verities. Circle of Protection supporters see people locked into their circumstances, stratified into masses permanently in a one-down position, thrown into a class struggle where the life saving protection of “powerful lobbies” is nowhere to be found. And while they argue that budgets are moral documents, their metrics for this fiscal morality are all in dollars and cents. [Read more…]

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