Negative Space: corporate cronyism
- Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike
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I just saw the second part of the Atlas Shrugged trilogy. It is amazing.
- Blogcon Saturday Night
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If yesterday was a strong day, today was serious. Jim Pethokoukis told a story about giving a talk in front of a bunch of workers at a military bunker, and at the end one of the guys told him that if they got the warning he wouldn’t bother going into the bunker. Because the future Pethokoukis warned of was too depressing.
- Business prospect incentives discourage innovation
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Complicating the law and raising taxes, then lowering them for businesses that know how to lobby local or state governments, is not a recipe for encouraging innovation. It is a recipe for killing it.
- Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father
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David Goldhill, inspired by the unnecessary death of his father in a hospital surrounded by great doctors, nurses, and technology, describes in detail why health care today kills people—and then charges for it. In no other industry could a business fail so miserably, and then send a bill for having failed.
He also argues persuasively that the ACA took all the bad parts of our health care system—and made them worse.
- Christian values at the point of a gun
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Where in the New Testament does Jesus tell us to force our neighbor at gunpoint to give to the poor?
- Crony criminalism
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In California, Democrat Senator Leland Yee has taken cronyism a step further: make it illegal, and then make money on the black market.
- Crony vs. Crony
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The voters will look up and shout “save us!” History will look down, and whisper “no”.
- Do you believe in cronies?
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“Nobody should go broke just because they get sick. They should go broke paying higher premiums to my cronies.”
- Eugenics and Other Evils
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What’s old is new again: unwilling to learn the lessons of the past, those who wish to rule are returning to socialism and cronyism as the only two solutions for all the problems government creates. That is, more government to fix bad government.
- Firewall affordable care act failures
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Because Senate Democrats are not going to repeal the mess that is the ACA, we need to firewall the failing parts of it in order to keep health care and health insurance costs from escalating too much.
- Going Rogue: An American Life
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Unlike politicians who have to fall back on their ancestors for middle-class anecdotes, Palin lived them. In the seventies, her father took them from rural Idaho to greater opportunities in Alaska, but it wasn’t her father who built their family business: it was Todd and Sarah.
- Government oxymoron: anti-corruption laws
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We can’t pass laws to reduce corruption. To reduce corruption we must reduce laws.
- Governor Perry and the role of government
- The Perry Gardasil flap is a very good example of the discussion needed for the role of government; the people trying to divert attention away from Perry’s decision and instead fight an army of strawmen are doing Republicans and independents a disservice.
- Money more important than safe intersections
- When cities make money when laws are broken, they’ll ensure that those laws are broken more often. With red light cameras, this means shortening yellow times to unsafe levels.
- No corporation pays taxes
- Corporations don’t pay taxes. Their employees do, and their customers do. Every dollar that a company has to pay in taxes, that company must pass on to either their employees or their customers, if the company wants to stay in business.
- The Parable of the Primary
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If Republicans are looking to be more Obama than Obama, they couldn’t have found a better cronyist than Donald Trump.
- Please take pity on this health care orphan
- Yeah, because of a massive regulatory bill that kills job creation, young adults don’t have jobs, and because they don’t have jobs, they don’t have health insurance.
- President Obama pokes the bear
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Sometimes you eat the bear; sometimes the bear eats you. Why is President Obama running against his 2008 opponent’s vice-presidential candidate? Why is he lying about her? And why doesn’t he want to discuss real issues?
- President Obama talks about NCLB
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In tough economic times, President Obama unveils a new NCLB program to ensure fairness “from Main Street to Wall Street.” Stephen Price Blair goes to the White House to discuss this new program with the President.
- The President’s freelancers
- If the president told you that he could get the press gunning for you, would you believe him?
- Public Citizen lies to its own supporters about single-payer health care?
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The biggest danger for supporters of single-payer is that the ACA is very, very close to single-payer, and they can’t face that it is causing a catastrophic rise in costs and a corresponding reduction in quality.
- The rich get richer because of big government
- There aren’t enough rich to pay for the big government that the left wants. So they have to redefine rich to mean people like me. The rich can easily get around big government regulations; they can afford to higher lawyers and accountants. I, on the other hand, can’t.
- Romney-Ryan 2012: It’s the only way to be sure
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A highly partisan environment has one major advantage: it means we have a choice.
- Sarah Palin’s Gordian Knot: Slicing crony capitalism
- “Real hope isn’t in an individual. It’s not in a politician, certainly… don’t wait for the permanent political class to reform anything for you. They won’t. They can’t. They can’t even take responsibility for their own actions.”
- Simplifying taxes into complexity
- Most of us look at how complex taxes are, and want to simplify how taxes are calculated. But if you have the beltway mentality that our money isn’t ours, you’ll want to simplify how taxes are collected.
- Socialized gasoline: The bureaucratic miracle of Vehicle-to-Grid
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Vehicle to grid, when managed by governments, will mean taking your car’s fuel and giving it to somebody else who needs it more.
- Tax individuals, not organizations
- Taxes on businesses are just a way of hiding taxes so that people don’t know they’re being taxed.
- Throw Them All Out
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IPO nowadays stands for Invest in Politicians Often. Investing in politicians brings huge returns.
- U.S. PIRG supports Ryan budget plan
- U.S. Public Interest Research Groups calls on Democratic Senate, White House to pass end to subsidies, level playing field for “small businesses and companies that aren’t as connected” as companies like Monsanto, Cargill, Solyndra, and GM.
- What’s wrong with a national sales tax?
- When considering a new tax, consider how easily that tax is abused by the state and by the state’s good intentions.
- Why is the media saying Sanders lost the debate?
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Bernie Sanders spoke an important and inconvenient truth about socialism when he came to Hillary Clinton’s defense at the debates.
- The Wisdom of Partisan
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Throughout history, the people willing to split the baby have been the people who win. Can we break that thread?
More Information
- Big Government once again turns on its Little Partners
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“What Jarrett is saying is that these disloyal insurance companies are obeying the law, but thwarting the will of our great and benevolent leader. They could have chosen to accept gigantic losses and sold the new, mandate-inflated insurance policies at the old prices. They could have made that sacrifice for the State, and the people it represents, and perhaps appealed for bailouts from the limitless Treasury when their business models became unsustainable. And because they did not do those things, you are supposed to hate the Little Partners, while holding the central planners blameless.”
- Governor Palin's Speech at the "Restoring America" Tea Party of America Rally in Indianola, Iowa
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“We sent a new class of leaders to D.C., but immediately the permanent political class tried to co-opt them—because the reality is we are governed by a permanent political class, until we change that. They talk endlessly about cutting government spending, and yet they keep spending more. They talk about massive unsustainable debt, and yet they keep incurring more. They spend, they print, they borrow, they spend more, and then they stick us with the bill. Then they pat their own backs, and they claim that they faced and ‘solved’ the debt crisis that they got us in, but when we were humiliated in front of the world with our country’s…”