Friday, April 29, 2011

Roger Ebert on "The One Percenters"

Interesting.  I think that some of his "facts" are biased ...

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/04/the_one-percenters.html

My response ...


I will concede some concern that I have always had about becoming a banana republic, but it is the intervention of government that I fear more than free market.  Government always screws things up.

Liberalism always looks at isolated incidents and distorted facts, but the agenda is always to have the government play Robin Hood while increasing the power of government over our lives.  Either you live in a free society or you don't, and as long as government has the power to benefit some people at the expense of others then you lose freedom.  If you don't want people exploiting the politicians then you don't give government the power in the first place.   The current federal government has far exceeded its constitutional power.

The liberal myth of the free market leading to the collapse of the economy completely ignores the reality that government created this mess, through its GSE's and requirements that banks lend money to people who are not credit worthy.  In a economy not so distorted by the government, banks have no incentive to make bad loans because it is their money they are going to lose.  But if the government requires people to make bad loans while promising to buy up those bad loans and sell them to investors with an implied government backing, how can the banks be called immoral?  They are simply following the rules that the government created.  (If the government guarantees your profit by buying your loan, are you suppose to act morally and say you don't want it?  Who would?  Thus government corrupted our society.)

The top 1% also pay 38% of the federal income taxes.  They are not getting a free ride.

The distress of the Tea Party is that we are rapidly driving off a cliff built out of debt created by government big spenders.  Unless we do something about this, we are in deep deep trouble.

Ebert is the greatest movie critic ever.  I really do like him,  but we will probably never see eye to eye politics.

Best wishes,

John Coffey



Thursday, April 21, 2011

Korean deaths


From: "Larry Trout"

'An estimated 1 million innocent men, women and children have been murdered in North Korean political concentration camps since 1972, academics believe...

Outside observers and nongovernmental organizations estimate that 3.5 million North Koreans died of starvation between 1995 and 1997. They continue to die in huge numbers in a government-organized famine akin to the Holodomor famine-genocide in Ukraine (1932-33), which was orchestrated by Joseph Stalin. Billions in humanitarian aid have been shipped to North Korea, more than enough to feed the nation's population, but government and academic studies have revealed that North Korea systematically diverted the aid, using it to bolster its military might while millions, for whom the aid was intended, starved to death.'

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-will-we-stop-the-genocide-in-north-korea/2011/03/29/AFqXaMEE_story.html

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Spending

'The euro zone has at least admitted that spending a lot more than you earn is unsustainable. Not so the United States.

For graphic and painful evidence, look at the mother of all PowerPoint presentations – the nearly 500-page "USA Inc." report prepared last month by Mary Meeker, the former Morgan Stanley analyst who was dubbed "Queen of the Net" in the mid-1990s, when she predicted that the World Wide Web would take over the planet. She is now a partner at venture capital powerhouse KPCB and her report analyzes the United States as if it were a corporation.

Her picture is compelling, and not pretty. U.S. spending is going from the excessive to the obscene.'

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/commentary/eric-reguly/rampant-spending-has-put-us-in-dire-financial-shape/article1963695/