Explaining It To The Employees

Well done:

A.G. (who asks me to use, in this post, only his initials) is a regular reader of Cafe Hayek. He’s 28 years old and is an entrepreneur in Charlotte, North Carolina. His firm employs 25 people, 21 of whom are low-skilled workers. A.G. just sent this memo to his employees:

To All Team Members:

The schedule for next week has been posted. You may notice that hours have been cut back on your schedule. This is across the board, not just you. I don’t want anyone to think they’ve done something wrong to deserve a cut in hours, so I wanted to explain why it’s happening.

There are a couple of reasons for this:

1) May and September are very slow months for our business. Anyone who has worked Sundays recently has seen the drop off in traffic. Now that we’re entering May, that drop off will continue on to other days as well, and it will get worse.

2) The recent increase in the minimum wage to $7.25/hour. Since we’ve opened, I’ve had a lot of people ask why they can’t get more hours, and it’s a great question.

I would LOVE to give everyone all the hours they want, and then some. Our customers would be happier across the board, we could accomplish much more every day, our business would grow, I could hire even more people, and on and on. However, we operate on a tight budget just like any other business, and in order to survive, we have to make money. That means our labor cost (the total amount you are all paid) must stay below a certain percentage of our total sales. If it doesn’t, we go broke and everyone loses their jobs.

Our brilliant Congressmen in Washington, D.C. decided a couple years ago that it would be a good idea to raise the minimum wage by about 40% to $7.25/hour. It just took effect last year. That probably sounds like great news for everyone – more money in everyone’s pockets can only be good, right?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way in the real world. If I’m forced to pay everyone 40% more, I can’t afford to schedule as many employees for as many hours, since our sales aren’t going up by 40%. Remember, I can only afford to pay you guys a certain percentage of all the money coming in the door. That means hours get cut, and everyone ends up poorer.

In a perfect world, it should work the opposite way: you should be free to choose how much you think your skills and time are worth (since you know best), and I should be free to pay you whatever that amount is if I want to hire you. Everyone wins in that case. I get as many good employees as I want that I can afford to pay, and you get valuable job training, references, and relationships to carry into the future.

To prove how bad of a deal minimum wage is for you guys as hard-working job-seekers, just look at this way:

I’m not being forced to pay $7.25/hour; YOU are being forced to accept $7.25/hour no matter what, even if you’d be willing to take less in order to get (or keep) a job.

You can thank our elected officials in Raleigh and Washington for sticking you with such a raw deal.

If you have any questions about any of this or want to talk more about it, please feel free to come see me, the door is always open.

They Try So Very Hard Not To Get It

Powerline:

You'd think the Lamestream Media would give it up, but no: they are determined to push the absurd claim that Tea Partiers are "racists." Never mind that the issues driving the Tea Parties--the constitutional role of the federal government, bailouts and government takeovers, spiraling deficits and out of control spending--self-evidently have nothing to do with race. The smear is the only kind of argument most liberals know, so they press on doggedly.

This time it's Newsweek, carrying out its new mission as a limited-circulation journal of liberal opinion. ("Limited circulation" isn't a strategy, of course, it's an admission of failure.) Newsweek's headline reads, "Are Tea Partiers Racist?" Note the impeccable logic with which the piece begins:

Ever since the Tea Party phenomenon gathered steam last spring, it has been plagued by charges of racism. Placards at rallies have depicted President Barack Obama as a witch doctor, denounced his supposed plans for "white slavery," and likened Congress to a slave owner and the taxpayer to a "n----r." Opponents have seized on these examples as proof that Tea Partiers are angry white folks who can't abide having a black president. Supporters, on the other hand, claim that the hateful signs are the work of a small fringe and that they unfairly malign a movement that simply seeks to rein in big government. In the absence of empirical evidence to support either characterization, the debate has essentially deadlocked.

Is the author of the Newsweek piece a child molester? In the absence of empirical evidence either way, apparently it's 50-50...

...

Read the rest of the post for a description of the questions on a survey which Newsweek proceeds to wildly misinterpret.

Papers For Thee, But Not For Me

A pattern:

So, here's an update on what a lot of liberals think about documentation.

Situations where people must present proper papers:

* When getting your children out of the government-assigned public school and into an elite public school.

* When challenged to prove you have health insurance.

* When you wish to exercise your 2nd Amendment rights and keep and bear arms.

* When you wish to buy alcohol.

* When you wish to buy tobacco.

* When you want to buy a frigging decongestant.

Situations where demanding people present proper papers is absolutely unacceptable and RAAAAACIST!:

* Showing up to vote.

* Getting birth control while a minor and without parental consent or knowledge.

* Getting an abortion while a minor and without parental consent or knowledge.

* Getting public assistance, funded by American citizens and legal, documented aliens.

The common theme, it seems to me, is that the liberals want to make it as easy as they can for you to be dependent from the government, and as difficult as possible to assert your own rights and independence.

But that, of course, is probably wrong. That would be too simple, too predictable. It fits too neatly into my own preconceptions and prejudices.

So, what would be an alternative explanation?

Proof That They Have Nothing

Roger L. Simon:

I have said something like this before, but at the risk of being a bore, and because of the times in which we live, I will repeat myself:

The real reason liberals accuse Tea Partiers of racism is that contemporary American-style liberalism is in rigor mortis. Liberals have nothing else to say or do. Accusations of racism are their last resort.

The European debt crisis — first Greece, then Portugal and now Spain (and Belgium, Ireland and Italy, evidently) — has shown the welfare state to be an unsustainable economic system. The US, UK and Japan, according to the same Financial Times report, are also on similar paths of impoverishment through entitlements.

Many of us have known this for a long time, just from simple math. Entitlements are in essence a Ponzi scheme. Now we have to face that and do something serious about it or our economy (the world economy) will fall apart.

Liberals, leftists or progressives — whatever they choose to call themselves — have a great deal of trouble accepting this. To do so they would have to question a host of positions they have not examined for years, if ever, not to mention have to engage in discussions that could threaten their livelihood and jeopardize their personal and family associations.

Thus the traditional wish to kill the messenger who brings the bad news: the Tea Partiers. And the easiest way to kill them — the most obvious and hoariest of methods – is to accuse them of racism. Never mind that there is no evidence — or what little evidence proffered has been shown to be manufactured prevarication — liberals must continue the racism meme at all costs. There is no other. To engage the Tea Party Movement in a battle of ideas would be suicidal for them, because the basic economic tenet of American liberalism — an increase in government spending and consequent increased national debt is good for society — seems nonsensical to the vast majority of our citizens at this point in history. And for good reason.

This situation could be looked at as an awakening or reawakening for our country, but it is far from completely good news. You don’t have to be Nostradamus to see that relations, in the immediate future at least, between ideological adversaries are going to be increasingly hostile. In the battle to maintain power — and equally as importantly to maintain self-image — many strains of the left will redouble their efforts to define the Tea Party movement as racist, further splitting our society and racializing it. They will seize on any isolated incident of the slightest prejudice as a pretext. And it is not unlikely that they will find what they need somewhere, because any movement of millions contains someone who exhibits some form of racism some time. Again, it’s simple math.

...

This time, however, the backfire should be quite spectacular.

Something For Nothing, Or Bad Metaphysics Leading To Bad Economics

Quick thought: In deciding that Thomas Aquinas is 800 years wronger than we are, we've rejected (for no good reason that I can discern) his completely rational arguments for God, which are of the general form "Not all beings can receive being (or change or motion) from another. There must exist a necessary being, an uncaused cause, an unmoved mover, and this we call God." We need pay no attention to such as Dawkins and his fanboys, when in a fit of what can only be described as philosophical autism, they exclaim, "Oh yeah, then what caused God?!?"

In rejecting Aquinas, we moderns implicitly believe in what can only be called The Ultimate Free Lunch. Should it be any surprise then, that having swallowed this bit of metaphysical insanity, that there should also be a widespread belief that each and every one of us can expect to be taken care of by our neighbor (with appropriate commissions paid to Important Government Middle Men)? Now, if everyone expects to be taken care of without actually working hard (I'm looking at you, Europe!) then whence comes the wealth by which anyone at all can be taken care of? This is the reason that socialism ultimately fails whenever and wherever it is tried.

There is No Free Lunch in this universe, and the quicker we get over the delusion that there is, the better.

Crack Whores Surprised By A Lack Of Respect From The Johns

The poor, poor MSM.

Strong Evidence That Global Warming Is Absolutely Unprecedented

Mike Flynn:

Come, Let Us Reason Together

What is odd about this report?

LiveScience reports.

"Warming temperatures are melting patches of ice that have been in place for thousands of years in the mountains of the Canadian High Arctic and in turn revealing a treasure trove of ancient hunting tools,"

They cite as examples:

In 1997, sheep hunters discovered a 4,300-year-old dart shaft in caribou dung that had become exposed as the ice receded. . . . [Archaeologist Tom] Andrews and his team (including members of the indigenous Shutaot'ine or Mountain Dene) have found 2,400-year-old spear throwing tools, a 1000-year-old ground squirrel snare, and bows and arrows dating back 850 years.

So what does this dire news add up to? Prizes -- the adulation of other correspondents here in the Siberia of the Internet -- to the first correspondent who spots it.......

It Was Already Too Late

Act now!!




Seen here.

"Businesses Will Have To Issue 1099s Whenever They Do More Than $600 Of Business With Another Entity In A Year"

Congress hates the private economy and proves it via an asinine little gem hidden in ObamaCare.

If You Lend Me More Money, I Can Pay Back The Previous Loan, And Brag That I Paid You Back In Full

In other words, SOP for Obama and his car company.

"It Is Possible To Ration Subsistence, But Not Prosperity"

Another good Dr. Zero piece.

You Get What You Subsidize

Will Collier:

A person who’s borrowed only what they could afford to pay back looks at those numbers and says … well, they say things like this:

So lemme get this straight. You just HAD to have that McMansion with the granite countertops and the gold-plated toilets, so you bit on the 5-year ARM thinking oh, sure, you’ll be in upper management by then and making down payments on your summer home in Martha’s Vineyard, and this 6000-square-footer will be small potatoes. In the meantime, I get the split-level built in 1989 with the peeling popcorn ceiling at a fixed rate I know I can afford even if things go south for a while. You get canned, your rate balloons, and suddenly YOU’RE supposed to get help. YOU get six months without having to pay at all, AND get to refinance at a sweetheart rate while you look for another suit job. Where’s mine, Ace? If somebody really got swindled, well then okay, let’s figure something out. I can see a tweak here and a tweak there. But what’s the reward for being responsible? I haven’t found the bank or utility that takes righteousness for payment.

That’s no slavering right-wing tea partier talking; that’s my friend Lein Shory, who among other things is an Obama voter and confirmed liberal.

A variation on the same question can be asked regarding the massive 2009 “stimulus” package, most of which has been routed to propping up profligate state and local governments: why isn’t the so-called public sector cutting back along with the rest of the country? Almost all of the job losses since the late-2008 crash have been in the private sector. States and localities are literally going broke because of irresponsible promises politicians made to government employees. Why should their financial status be any different from, say, construction workers whose jobs dried up in the real estate collapse?

The Obama administration’s 2009 takeover of General Motors and Chrysler, largely to the benefit of the United Auto Workers, was spectacularly unpopular among the electorate at large, despite being billed as an effort to stave off even more unemployment. But what was that buyout if not a transfer of money from the productive businesses and individuals in the country to a union and two companies that had just plain failed to find enough customers? No one in Washington had a good answer for why a pizza store owner in Denver ought to have to pay for cars he didn’t want to buy from Detroit. Heck, even a UAW member at Ford is probably wondering just why his taxes are going to support his competition.

The more you look at the economic situation, the more you see the pattern. Take the banking crisis: irresponsible banks loaned money to irresponsible people, backed by an irresponsible government that’s trying to make up for the whole thing by borrowing and spending more and more money … irresponsibly.

And everybody who didn’t do stupid things with their house or credit or business? We’re being asked — no, that’s not right, we’re being ordered — again and again and again to pay for the bad decisions of the people who did.

A Decidedly Non-Lame GOP Ad

Why be candy-assed when you're actually capable of this (click on Obama photo at the link to see the video)?

First The Pwning, Then The Pants-Wetting

Seeing militant atheists swarm the comments to a David Bentley Hart First Things article is something to behold. They are light years out of their league. DBH's article tears the "New Atheists" to shreds, in a piece that is as erudite as one expects from him. Then the wails and gnashing of teeth begin in the comments. John C. Wright chimes in thusly:

John C. Wright says:
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury,

One wonders whether or not Mr. Hart himself, or some clever forger, decided to post a group of comments, allegedly from atheists, merely intending to show the intellectual shallowness and illogic of which Mr. Hart complains.

Honestly, Mr. Hart writes an article where he says the arguments in certain particular books are arid and shallow, an aridity he contrasts unfavorably with Nietzsche: the point in dispute that he means to prove is that these named books make no serious arguments. The example used is the argument from infinite regress, of which he adroitly shows the limitations.

Then in haughty answer, a group of pretend atheists leave comments ranging from a challenge that Mr. Hart did not proffer an argument for the existence of God, to a victorious bellow stating that no empirical proof of God exists, to an unsupported assertion that the burden of proof rests on the theist to prove theism, not on the atheist to prove atheism.

Does no one notice that these responses have no logical bearing on the topic being discussed?

The proper answer would be to bring out an example from one of these books and to show it is a rigorous and deep argument.

The article was complaining about the poor quality of atheist argument: it was not and did not pretend to be an article setting forth an ontological proof of the existence of God. Saying the article failed to prove God exists has no bearing on whether the modern atheist arguments are poor.

The only argument given here is a metaphysical one, namely, that contingent being presupposes necessary being. It is mentioned only as an example of new atheists not comprehending subtle but clear philosophical distinctions. Not only is this not an empirical argument, but, by its own terms, no contingent fact of any kind could tend to prove or tend to disprove it. The argument is about why anything exists at all, and not about the particular configuration of cause and effect which applies that that small sliver of current existence open to our sense impressions.

So the atheist who offers this as a refutation of that argument is demonstrating, more clearly than Mr. Hart, that at least one new atheist indeed does not comprehend a subtle but clear philosophical distinction.

That the commenter chose a tone of swaggering condescension, talking down to an audience that gets what he misses, merely adds ironic confirmation of Mr. Hart's lament.

Again, stating that the burden of proof lies with the theists to prove God exists shows a similar philistine attitude toward logical argumentation. Supposing we grant the assertion, and suppose further than no Christian argument for the existence of God has been found to carry conviction. What follows? Does it follow that Mr. Dawkins and Mr. Hitchens and others are excused from making strong rather than weak arguments, coherent rather than unrigorous and illogical, displaying insight rather than displaying a contempt and incomprehension of the opposition arguments?

Seriously: suppose it were a court of law. The Defense stands and says the burden of proof is on the Prosecution. The judge and jury nod gravely, for the Defense speaks the truth. The Prosecution gives its case: only eleven of the twelve jurors are convinced (after all, atheism is a rather small minority). The case is insufficiently convincing. Then the Defense stands up, and his witnesses get the time and place of the crime wrong, contradict each other, and, in his closing arguments, the Defense reads the brief he had prepared for a different case, having nothing to do with the current facts or relevant law.

The twelfth juror need not change his mind about the facts of the case, to be sure, but nothing says he must necessarily leap to the defense of the inadequate defense of the Defense.

John C. Wright, esq.

Guilty By Virtue Of Existing

A reflection on the true purpose of "Green" by Robin of Berkeley.

First They Came For Hitler...

This is a sad day.

Great Cartoon

Here.

Alliterative Atomic Alphabet Action

Colorful.

Cartoon

Seen here:

Not Paying The Mortgage As Well As Still Collecting Rents Is Good For Consumer Spending

I hadn't thought of this:

The same can be said of the housing market: without gaming the system, the housing market would go into a free-fall. This holds true not just for the mortgage lenders and Wall Street but also for the American public, many of whom are happily complicit in the fraud perpetrated by the mortgage packagers and lenders, as described by southern Nevada correspondent B.K.:

During the boom years, many (in fact, most) people purchased more than one home. In order to get around the "primary resident" issue (a.k.a. "wink and a nod" clause), contracts were drawn-up under the name of a sister, father, family dog, whatever.

Now - these "investors" are not simply living in one of their primary residences rent-free - they are also collecting rent on the other homes that they stopped making their mortgage payments on last week, month, or last year! This is the reality here in Las Vegas; it is the norm.

When you looker deeper into the economic ramifications of this ongoing housing mess as it relates to consumer spending, you begin to see ... the Deadbeats are so happy to get "free" money on their many homes, they offer attractive deals to tenants. A property that might normally rent for - say - $1,500/mo, is being offered for $1,000/mo. Now that puts extra money in the tenants' pockets to spend on the economy as well.

Bad News Becomes Curiously Generic, Depending On Who Is In Charge

A comment in response to Rick's post concerning the latest polls:

Yeah, and it's about trusting the government. With the other guys in charge the phrase magically transforms into "have confidence in the Republicans, and we broke this into five or six ranges of competence in which the Republicans all suck *ss...according, uh, according to our data, here." With the kiddies in charge it's "trust in the government is at an all time low."

Excellent observation. Do you recall the MSM ever running a poll asking people what they thought about how Democrats specifically were doing at a time when the chips were obviously down?

A New Human Right

Super.

Paid In Full Via Greatly Ramped Up Exports

Iceland makes good:

Inquiring minds are reading a letter from the Icelandic Parliament to Gordon Brown regarding Icesave:

Dear United Kingdom,

In response to your demand to send cash immediately ...Please note the Icelandic Alphabet does not contain the letter "C". We have complied with your request as best as our language allows. It's not easy to conjure up a volcano at will to spew tons of ash. Please consider our debt paid in full.

Respectfully yours,
Iceland

In All Fairness, There Actually Are A Few Reasons To Vote Democrat

Here's ten.

Their Schemes Prove The Opposite

GayPatriot:

We’ve been mentioning for a couple days how some anti-Tea Party (“anti-anti-Big Government”?) provocateurs were planning to pose as Tea Partiers and try to make them look bad. My take was that it shows both how their negative caricature of the movement is clearly inaccurate (otherwise, why would they need to infiltrate to inject it), and that this is how desperate they’ve become. Both are good news.

Jim Geraghty at NRO has an interesting take on the Tea Party infiltrators. From this morning’s “Morning Jolt” email update (subscribe here):

So, just to clarify, the contention of these liberals is that the tea parties must be demonized and discredited because they’re full of violent, angry, often gun-toting extremists with temper-control issues, and their plan to expose this fact is to walk into the middle of a large crowd of said short fuses, who are fed up with being painted as lunatics, carrying obviously outlandish and offensive signs, and then start making racist comments. I presume these liberals think everyone around them will nod approvingly as they insist that the rally’s focus is not runaway spending and the growth of government, but the importance of exposing the president’s role as the greatest Kenyan Deep Cover Agent ever.

Okay, Poli-Cylons, go for it. I just hope you folks studied up on how to make a tourniquet out of a Gadsden flag.

The Difference Is This: The Tea Partiers Aren't Joking

GayPatriot:

To Democrats who demonize the Tea Parties and dismiss the sincerity of our concerns, I ask that you look to the campaign rhetoric of the 2008 Democratic nominee for president of the United States. Barack Obama rode to victory that fall in part by echoing ideas that Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan once championed as they helped turn the once-fledging conservative movement into a national phenomenon.

Obama said he favored “a net spending cut” (which he contended he had proposed “throughout this campaign“). He pledged to pay for spending increases with even bigger cuts. Not just that, he said he was going to “put an end to the run-away spending and the record deficits“.

If Obama, with this rhetoric in his campaign, was appealing to the legitimate concerns of the American people, then why wouldn’t Tea Parties, echoing that very rhetoric, also reflect the sincere concerns of American citizens taking the time to take to the streets this Tax Day?

"Who Wants To Work All Their Lives And Put Their Life Savings Into Something That Resembles Space Mountain At Disney World?"

Excellent short financial article looks at the new bubble in the stock market.

A Great Collection Of Founding Fathers Quotes

Assembled by Bill Whittle.

Not Paying The Mortgage Boosts Consumer Spending

Denninger has some food for thought.

Here's What You Need To Do To Overcome My Baseless Slanders

Helpful advice from pathological leftism:

Telling us just exactly Why Tea Partiers Can’t Shake the Racism Label, Paul Wachter dredges up a few examples of obscure tea party activists who said some rather hateful things. Now, by the Wachter standard, the Democratic Party is sure having a tough time proving that its rank-and-file don’t believe Barack Obama is the Messiah or that the president’s supporters don’t believe opponents of Obamacare are domestic terrorists.

Not just that, this left-winger, while bashing Tea Parties, presumes to tell us just exactly what our problem is, “What might help the tea party avoid accusations of racism would be if it were more forthcoming about what exactly it stands for.”

Um, Paul, we’re against Obama’s big expansion of the federal government and for freedom. Other reporters who took the time to talk to Tea Party activists figured it out. He might have also figured it out had he done the some instead of writing about the angry right-wingers who live inside his head.

Wow, this guy is just plain filled with bile. Expect to see more such screeds on so-called mainstream news outlets in the coming days.

What does "Tea Party" stand for? I know you have to reach really deep into obscure American history to figure that one out.

I Think Not

From today's Drudge Report:

So Put That In Your Pipe And Smoke It

The Anchoress:

I have my own response to the “if only priests were not celibate” lecture but because it is a rather mean answer, I only use it if the lecturer has been rude about it. I ask them: was there a period in your life, where you were celibate, either because you hadn’t started having sex, or you had no one to have sex with?

When they say yes, I ask how they managed, during that time, to battle their instincts to go around sexually abusing adolescents.

For A Guy That Is Positive That He Has Absolutely No Real Future (And Celebrates It), He Sure Is Filled With Passionate Intensity

P.Z. Myers knows that souls do not exist. He also thinks that the prospects of unaccountable non-existence somehow makes atheism the braver choice, with others who believe in a Day of Judgment being the can't-face-the-music wussies. All righty, then.

Link

Update: Warren comments:

Yeah, that old Christian belief about being in danger of eternal torment after death is very obviously just a wish-fulfilment fantasy.

This Blog Seeks To Be Educational, As Well

And monkey kickboxing is something you all need to know about.

link link

Paranoia And Suspicion

In bold display.

Quite A Few More Flivvers Than I Would Have Thought

A movie taken from a Market Street cable car 4 days before the 1906 quake.

Make-Believe Is Fun

Link.

Photoessay: A World Without Nuclear Weapons

Hint: not unicorns and rainbows.

Maybe We Need To Start Putting Warning Labels On Politicians

Link

European Ways Presuppose The Existence Of Something Else. What Could That Something Be?

"We can’t become Europe unless someone else is willing to become America."

--Jonah Goldberg

Link to the column in which he expands on what should be obvious.

Congresspeople Are Just So Much Smarter Than Americans

Neoneocon:

What an oily, condescending, manipulative, lying piece of work she is. Referring to the HCR bill, Pelosi says:

It’s like the back of the refrigerator. You see all these wires and the rest. All you need to know is, you open the door. The light goes on.

I don’t mean to be anti-female, but Pelosi’s suggestion strikes me as something only a woman could have come up with. I have that attitude myself to most mechanical and/or electrical gadgetry and appliances, including computers: don’t tell me how it works, just make it work.

But for a supposed servant of the people to use such a metaphor to refer to a bill that affects us all in such important ways is outrageously and offensively paternalistic (or should I say “maternalistic?”) and flies in the face of what the relationship between the citizens and Congress in this country is meant to be.

Government Efficiency

Mish:

In response to Seattle Trash Collectors Make Average of $109,553 But Want More; 1,600 Apply to Haul Trash if Teamsters Strike I received an Email from Michael about union monopolies in San Francisco.

Michael Writes ...

Here in San Francisco picking up a garbage costs about $37/can per week.

A contractor I know got fed up, canceled his service as did his neighbor. They simply loaded both houses garbage into his truck, took it to the dump and paid the $40 to get rid of it. He charged his friend $10.

As a contractor he had to go to the dump all the time anyway. Pretty soon he had a small business, neighbors paying him $10 instead of $37, a difference of over $1400 per year or the price of a vacation or plasma TV for the family.

He sorted their garbage and turned in the recycling for more money. Normally the neighbors had to keep two cans, sort their garbage themselves and the Garbage monopoly took all the recycling fees anyway.

Pretty soon he hired a couple of neighborhood kids and his crew of 3 did both sides of residential streets at the same time. If you had an old monitor or TV, motor oil, or paint to get rid of he'd take that too, sometimes he'd charge you $5 + what the dump charged for the special item. Need an extra pickup? No problem. He'd work from 5am to 8am and he was earning $200 per day and his workers $75.

The amazing thing he kept telling me was that the larger the truck you had the more money you could make. He was amazed that with only a modified large pickup truck he could make money at a third of what the Garbage company charged.

When the local garbage company and its union found out about "Joe" they complained to the city. Within a year a law was passed stating that garbage service was now mandatory for all residents at the price the city's monopoly charged, which was shortly raised. And Joe? For a while he still took our recyclables until he was fined $4000, even though he had our permission. It appears our household recyclables are owned by the Garbage company, not us, as it subsidizes our low cost of garbage service!

It is clear that monopolies are bad in business or unions and monopoly unions exist to enrich a class of privileged workers at the expense of ordinary workers.

Cheers, Michael

There's more at the link. $37 per can per week?!?

It's A Virtuous, Holy Thing. Militant Atheists Wouldn't Understand.

Professor Myers pukes pea soup as he ponders the writings of Alice von Hildebrand. It's interesting that goodness and the truth makes the guy feel filthy, in need of taking a shower...

Science!

Pascal

On atheists, quoted here.

Congressional Mathematics

H/T The Anchoress.

We've Simply Chosen An Erroneous Narrative

VDH clears things up for the 'squares'.

But Leftists Are The Good People And Can Do Whatever They Want

Indeed:

MEDIA DOUBLE STANDARDS on protests and speech. “What do you think the general media response would be if 10,000 Tea Party activists shut down the streets of a major city, overran the cops, smashed windows, looted stores, and caused millions of dollars in damage? ‘The vast majority of demonstrators were peaceful’? Don’t bet on it.”

Zo's Mailbag

Good impromptu stuff.

Obama's Self-Refuting Nonsense

If you get upset about possible future ill effects now, when nothing has happened yet, you're an unsophisticated fool. If you don't celebrate possible future benefits now, when nothing has happened yet, you're an unsophisticated fool. Heads Obama wins, tails you lose.

Neoneocon highlights the pure sophistry contained in the latest rally speech.

"Come For The Finger-Wagging About Civility, Stay For The George Wallace And Kristallnacht Analogies."

Dog bites man.

"When You Discover People Trapped Inside A Burning Car, You’re Not Doing Them Any Favors By Feeding Change Into The Parking Meter"

Another great Doctor Zero piece.

excerpt:

It’s true that the GOP cannot completely dedicate itself to the repeal of one piece of legislation for the next three years. Instead, they should dedicate themselves to slaying the blasphemous, rotting leviathan that gave birth to ObamaCare, and whose tentacles are visibly squeezing the life out of the American economy. Big Government is a parasite that is more than willing to kill its host. Ordinary people are beginning to see it for what it is. They understand that something is terribly wrong with their government. Now is the time to explain the origins of this leviathan, and put ObamaCare in its proper context… as the final, absurd contortions of a philosophy that acts in complete ignorance, and sometimes outright contempt, for what free people can achieve. Behold the toxic wonder of a bill that forces people to buy a product that it will also cause a shortage of.

In its final years, the Left can only communicate with the thundering stallions of American prosperity using curses and whips. It will answer every problem caused by the taxes and regulations of ObamaCare with more taxes and regulations, until the stallions of progress die beneath the lash, with the last impotent curses of angry and frightened liberals ringing in their ears.

Republicans, you know how this story ends. You’ve seen its miserable ending all over the world, from the ruins of Russia to the sick old men of Europe, dying from the fever of unsustainable entitlements and the chills of terminal demography… and too weak to protest as the shroud of fascism is drawn slowly over them. Repealing ObamaCare, and replacing it with real and meaningful health care reforms grounded in the fertile soil of the free market, should be the beginning of your commitment to guide your country away from this fate. To compromise with those who showed no interest in compromising their lust for power would be surrender. When you discover people trapped inside a burning car, you’re not doing them any favors by feeding change into the parking meter.

As for those moderate and independent voters: the modern Democrat Party has nothing more to offer them. What “moderate” reforms could be applied to a multi-trillion dollar boondoggle, added to an already lethal national debt? No one who allows ObamaCare to survive beyond 2012 can call themselves an “independent.” You won’t be allowed to remain independent of State-controlled medicine. Sixteen thousand new IRS agents will be dropping by your house to explain this in more detail, if you press the issue.

If you’re an independent who takes your vote seriously, you must understand by now that ObamaCare’s failures will be addressed with further assaults on your independence, including massive taxes that will only accelerate the erosion of meaningful freedom. Moderate voters pride themselves on considering ideas from all sides of the political spectrum, and choosing wisely between them. When ObamaCare was signed, the political spectrum shifted violently into the infrared. If we still have it wrapped around our throats in 2013, there won’t be any more ideas from the “right” for you to sagely consider. Your choices will be limited to various frequencies of hard-Left statism. Every serious moderate and independent voter is a Republican now… assuming the GOP has the wit and courage to inspire them, rather than pandering to them.

Politicians, of every party, tend to be slippery and undependable. That’s one of the reasons I don’t want them in charge of my life, or any industry I choose to do business with...

...

We'll Just Make People Do What We Say And All Will Be Well

Obamacare's attack on the restaurant industry (I haven't had time to watch the video, but good points are brought up in Morrissey's post).

Anarchists Will Be Rallying In Favor Of Massive Government Programs Against The Fascists Who Want To Do Away With Them

Details here.

There's Nothing Wrong With Executing The Unborn, Because Catholic Priests Are Rapists

Rick highlights the real logic.