Supreme Court Strikes Down Gun Ban

We now have the right to bear arms, according to the Supreme Court. I can already hear some of the sticklers out there proclaiming that we have had that right for quite a while, it is, after all in the Constitution. You forget one thing. Both sides only read the constitution when it helps their case.

Liberals have been trying to do away with guns and their owners for decades. It started with the absurd Brady Bill and continues today to the outright gun bans in some of America's largest cities. Today, however, the court finally did the right thing.

The second amendment is the amendment that guarantees all the other amendments. It was put into the constitution to guarantee a limit on government. The whole point was that I would be able to defend my family on my own, and not have to exclusively rely on the government for that protection. Today is a major win for freedom, breathe it in.

Daley suports gun ban....

because of all the shootings in his city. The problem is, of course, that Chicago has one of the toughest gun laws in the country. This shows how absurd the current thinking is on guns. The gun ban is certainly not saving anyone's life. The "bad guys" are still able to get guns. In fact, the only people who are not willing to get guns (because they certainly are able to drive 20 miles outside the city to get one) are the law-abiding citizens who want to protect themselves and their families.

The real reason for gun control is the same as every other law passed by the elite majority; they want to control how people act, how they think and who they rely on. The government seeks to command that we own certain things and that we do not own other things. The government should not be able to tell us which bundle of goods to consume, and which bundle of goods to not consume. This is especially true when the Constitution and the Supreme Court all have stated that the government cannot have bans like this.

The arrogance of power is daunting. People like Mayor Daley, the former Mayor of DC, President Obama and the Justices who came out for the gun ban all believe that they are more understand, more powerful and more compassionate than the constitution. This is how democracy begins to fall; our elected leaders do not listen to the documents that supposedly rule them, they do not listen to the people, they only listen to their own whims.

On this happy note, I wish you all a happy Wednesday.

Grads Moving Back Home

According to this article graduates are moving back home at a pretty large rate. This is not bad news, despite the articles dreary tone. This means that recent grads (myself included) are finding it tough out there. They are largely unemployed, thanks to this terrible unemployment rate and are finding it tough to make ends meet.

The real reason they are moving home, however, is that the banks are no longer giving out essentially free loans to anyone with a pulse any more. This is a positive development. After a false boom created by the government shoveling money into the people's hands by printing it and falsely lowering the interest rates, there comes a necessary bust. People spend too much in the boom and save during the bust. This does not have to happen. This goes into the business cycle which will get its own post in the not too-distant future.

The best news from grads moving home is that this will lower housing prices. How is this a good thing? We all want loan policies to be corrected but not prices. Unfortunately, this is impossible. Loans were bad because the prices were bad. The prices of homes need to return to market rates, not artificially inflated rates caused by a government keeping interest rates artificially low by printing cash. People moving home is a positive step in this harsh recession that will hopefully get the market back on track. The government created this mess and now we will have to suffer for it. The prices of housing will hopefully, eventually return to the market rate, as will the interest rates at some point (hopefully, even though I am not nearly as hopeful about the interest rate returning to the market rate).

Best way to help the poor is to take away their rights

This huffington post/ New York times article makes this case. The article bashes the credit settlement industry for "taking advantage of the most vulnerable in their time of need." Of course, this is not what the majority do. The majority get the debtor (the customer) to settle their debt with the credit agencies and take a portion of that settlement as fees. The vast majority of the people in the industry are honest people trying to help people out when they need it.

The worst part of this article is not the villification of the people working in a customer service industry, it is the fixes they are proposing. In order to protect the poor, we need to interfere with their right to contract in certain cases. This is absurd. The rich and powerful (Arianna Huffington and New York Times editor board) always return to this old cliche that the poor are just too stupid to make contracts for themselves that they feel is beneficial. No rational individual would enter into a contract, which this is, if they did not think it was their best bargain. When we begin to understand that, the NYT opinion becomes appallingly clear. They simply do not believe that poor people (or even middle class people who took on too much debt) are irrational to the extent we should remove some of their rights. I dare disagree.

I disagree not only because I think that these companies can sometimes help people, and they can. I disagree because the government should not ever interfere with my rights to improve myself. As long as I am not hurting anyone, who the heck is the government to tell me that I do not have the right to benfit myself, even if they view the facts differently. Do I wish that certain people acted differently? Sure but nothing gives me the right to force my will upon them and nothing (certainly not the constitution) allows the government to force their will upon me.

I just wait for articles like this to cease and the poor to finally get the respect they deserve.

America's Longest Running War

The HuffPo today is talking about Afghanistan as America's longest running war. Well, she is mistaken. Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty in 1964. This is America's longest running war, by far. It is longer and more costly than the war in Afghanistan.

The war on poverty has been a failure under any definition. The war on poverty was meant to basically redistribute wealth from the wealthy and give it to the poor. This has not worked for many reasons. The main reason this has failed is the poor simply became dependent on the state for their well-being. The act was meant to improve the livelihood of the inner city poor. This group is now in just as bad, if not worse shape as they were in the 60's. The major difference is that they no longer rely on their own personal skills for their salary, but depend on taxpayers (future taxpayers at that because we borrow money from China to give to them).

The war on poverty will always fail because we pay people to do it. We pay people to fail. If the poor get a job, they lose the benefits currently gives them. This disincentivizes success. I am not saying life is great on welfare. It is undoubtedly a tough life. That being said, life working for a low wage is also not easy. The major difference is that if you never take that first difficult step of working at the bottom, you cannot get the promotions making your life easier.

While Huffpo and other organizations take aim at the Afghanistan war (and this post should be seen as supporting or not supporting the Afghanistan war) they are missing a larger, and more expensive war that we are doomed to fail because we are incentivizing the opposite behavior we are seeking.

Swine Flu was overly exxagerated... Shocking

Swine flu was not nearly the threat the WHO said it was. The WHO ties to big Pharma are now being blamed for helping fuel the fire of this threat. Of course, anyone who is skeptical of big government and big corporations is not shocked by this, but it does give me an excuse to talk about something that I feel is not discussed nearly enough.

A great deal of people who support small government do not do so because they love big corporations. We do so because we don't trust politicians because we understand the lure of the money of big corporations. We fear the government becomes a tool for the rich that can afford the influence people like me and you can only dream of.

The government becomes a weapon the rich wield while carelessly attacking the poor while destroying their freedoms one at a time. Sound like hyperbole? Hardly. Lets take a look at the H1N1 virus as it is our current example. The rich (big pharma) got millions of dollars of additional research dollars from the government, from our tax dollars. What do we get in return? A vaccine that seems like it was less likely than the government (influenced by big pharma) told us it was. People fell ill because of the vaccine that was not nearly as necessary as we were scared into believing.

The green movement is another example of this. Al Gore's company got a loan of more than 500 million dollars from the US taxpayers. He got a benefit from all of us. Why? He has influence that we do not have. He is forcing his will (of getting cheap or free loans) on us (who are taking a great deal of the risk for him). What rights of ours are violated? The right not to lend the money. This might sound trivial but it isn't. We each have the right to control our own proverbial pursestrings, and the government constantly interferes with this.

There are countless other examples of this being true. Obama covers up for BP while Louisiana suffers. No one can seriously argue that BP's influence over the regulators and the regulation process benefited anyone but themselves. Once again, a large government followed incentives. They get tons of gifts and campaign contributions from these corporations while we watch our wetlands disappear because of the careless acts of a government gone corrupt.

Unions Clarification

After my last post, I thought some more about it and realized I was too harsh on the unions. Unions are fine as long as people are freely allowed to opt in or out of unions without any coercion from any source, be it government, union itself or the employer. If a person chooses to join a union, it is his or her right and should be protected.

I think unions that force you to join simply because you work for a particular company are absurd. Public unions are even more ridiculous and is responsible for a large part of the problems the government is currently having balancing the budget.

I am pro freedom of contract and freedom to contract. This includes the freedom to join a union and freedom to leave a union.

Walmart to Offer College Education to Employees

Walmart is going to begin offering discount and free classes to their employees. Walmart will likely be a recurring theme on this website. I love walmart and really dislike it when people disparage it for no \ reason, other than their personal feelings of superiority and blatant classism.

Walmart does right by their employees in a great deal of the circumstances and this shows the real reason any firm provides services for their employees, the corporation's benefit. If the corporation can benefit from improving their staff, they will do it. Adam Smith discusses the invisible hand where we each act in our own best interest but the coordination of our efforts lead to a better result for others, although that was never our intention.

Here, the company is providing a college education for their employees so they can become more effective managers and employees. There will be more in-house promotions so less need for training, saving the company money in the long run. The employees get a highly discounted education in the process so they win as well. It will be interesting to see how those who are bent on making Walmart the villain, no matter the facts of the situation spin this so Walmart somehow has hurt their employees.

Walmart is doing right by their employees in large part because they have the freedom to create interesting solutions to promote, retain and hire employees. Ford., GM and the like are stuck in arrangements with pushy unions that force the union's will on both the employee and employer alike. The company is not allowed to create a unique solution because it would not be in the thousands of page contract the company and employees are forced to sign. When the market place is not affected by third party coercion, both sides generally win. The quicker people can get a handle on that, the better off we will all be.