Government that is…

Congress is working really hard to take government meddling in the economy to the next level.

The bill, which passed on a 247-171 vote, would give the U.S. Treasury broad powers to prohibit “unreasonable and excessive” compensation and bonuses that are not based on performance standards.

The “Pay for Performance Act of 2009″ is among a number of efforts by Congress to claw back bonuses and curb pay in the wake of public anger over recent executive bonuses at insurer American International Group, which has received a bailout worth up to $180 billion.

“The Pay for Performance Act is based on two simple concepts. One, no one has the right to get rich off taxpayer money, and two, no one should get rich off abject failure,” said one of the bill’s authors, Representative Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat who co-authored the measure. “We should not pay an arsonist to put out his own fire, and we should not be paying an executive to ruin his own bank.”

Congress represents the pure embodiment of that which of both stipulations aim to curb! Why should politicians be exempt from these standards? Don’t worry though, the free-market republicans will stop this madness right?

“There’s no question we need more performance-based pay decisions, but the government deciding and judging the performance of employees in private companies, the secretary of the Treasury deciding whether an employee is performing? I think not,” said Representative Spencer Bachus, an Alabama Republican. “The answer is not a dramatic expansion of government control.“

In other words, “we need more government controls, but only so many new government controls.”

Just another nail in America’s coffin…

Pragmatic economics is bleeding the life out of America. Collectivist politicians have virtually free-reign to unlimited investment backed by our future productivity.

The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the longest recession since the 1930s.

New pledges from the Fed, the Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. include $1 trillion for the Public-Private Investment Program, designed to help investors buy distressed loans and other assets from U.S. banks. The money works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. and 14 times the $899.8 billion of currency in circulation. The nation’s gross domestic product was $14.2 trillion in 2008.

In their minds, there is no amount of looted wealth that is off the table. There is no political or economic effort for which they lack confidence in the American serf to cover by productive effort. If force is required, so be it.

Man’s nature requires him to think, act and maintain the results of doing so. Our tyrannical government knows too well that we only need a certain range of freedom to act within, and only to keep above a certain threshold of the productive results to ensure our likely compliance to their meddling.

As long as our leash is just long enough and they tactfully throttle or camouflage their looting, the majority of marching ants won’t revolt. So long as the majority complies, their party remains funded. Theirs is a game of control. Control the variables that influence man’s actions so that he’ll either fail to notice the attached IV, or he’ll be too busy gasping for air to remove it. The only thing that matters is that he stays alive and the blood keeps flowing.

The debt that the American government is flagrantly piling on our backs will most definitely require them to push the thresholds of statist regulations and taxation to the point where the rational segment of the population, the segment they need the most, will take reproachful offense.

When that revolt does take place, their only option will be to tighten the screws. The more they tighten, the more their house of cards will crumble. The final scene, as so brilliantly portrayed in the climax of Atlas Shrugged, will place them in a most precarious position. Their only remaining recourse to inspire productivity will be threat of death - with the ironic quagmire being obvious. Either way, the productivity fueling their existence will cease.

Leftists are in denial. Sundry media chumps, politicians, even center-left leaning friends and acquaintances are adamantly opposed to tossing out the labels Fascism or Socialism. The thought of explicitly naming the deadly fact that they so earnestly long for is very unpopular and met with passionate challenges to justify such declarations.

Have we really become what they dream of, yet dread to name? I think this question by Myrhaf explicitly drives home the point:

If the state is firing CEO’s and telling businesses how much in bonuses they can get, how is this not fascism? At what point does a mixed economy that is heading toward fascism actually cross the line to fascism?

Driven by the primacy of consciousness, where reality is only a arbitrary product subject to their mental discretion, so long as they don’t call a spade a spade it can remain any object of their choosing. Such evasion enables them to still consider the irrational altruist-collectivist-keynesian nightmare that America has devolved into as a progressive society of hope, so long as they don’t label it with any unbecoming title. Conforming to their moral code, altruism, collectivists seek all the essential aspects of Socialism, but implicit, lingering filaments of reason and rationality demand that they stop short of its full embodiment. They realize that the whole charade rests on the fuel of individual freedom. They want the benefits of freedom but also to wrangle it with statist power, to enjoy the prosperity of Capitalism but under the control of tyranny, to have their cake and eat it too.

Historical fact places them within a precarious quagmire - fact vs. wish. The brutal and undeniable record of statism has ingrained negative connotations in the minds of most luke-warm leftists such that explicitly applying Fascist, Socialist and Communist labels to America would present very uncomfortable contradictions - ones that would be impossible to evade.

As a result, they must try to find a way to camouflage the attack, both to the victims and themselves. One tactic is to think up a lofty title wreaking of sincere benevolence - Universal Health Care, Smart Start, Paycheck Fairness etc. - the other is to debate inessential technicalities in order to persuade that our version of collectivism isn’t pure, or represents a unique approach to establishing stagnant misery.

Societies are in constant movement either towards or away from freedom - in almost all cases away. If we’re not moving towards freedom and the individual, i.e. prosperity, we’re heading towards statism and the collective, i.e. misery. Since this country has long abandoned the former, only the latter remains as our final destination.

Does America more closely resemble laissez faire Capitalism or Fascism? I think without any question the latter.

In yet another inevitable attempt to regulate existence, thermal imaging cameras can now be used to detect any citizens who insist on using more energy than nanny-state environmentalist deem appropriate.

Thermal imaging cameras are being used to create colour-coded maps which will enable council officers to identify offenders and pay them a visit to educate them about the harm to the environment and measures they can take.

Perhaps council officers could benefit from certain education as well - namely the concepts of man’s rights to life, liberty and property, private property.

‘We do a lot on domestic energy conservation already and realised it would be useful to see if any of the homes which were particularly hot were properties where people had not insulated their lofts.

‘We were also able to look at very cold properties and think we might have picked up people on low incomes who are not heating their homes because they cannot afford to.’

This new statist weapon is not only useful in cracking down on subjective-law criminals, but also for identifying wealth redistribution targets - an egalitarian swiss-army knife, if you will.

Lib Dem group leader Stuart Beadle added: ‘Cameras are in place all over today and we have to accept them. So long as the right guidelines are in place and it will bring benefits, I think the scheme is a good thing.’

Of course, we must remind ourselves that these planes, cameras and all the logistics involved are metaphysical facts and must be conformed to as such. And, according to Beadle this is a good scheme, although he neglects to mention whose standard of value his assessment is based on. I doubt the individual who rightfully produced the wealth to pay for such technical luxuries as heat and electricity will appreciate the pestilence of government enviro-thugs offering their “friendly advice”.

Altruist-collectivist-environmentalist-nanny-statism - such is the manner by which a society implodes into stagnant misery. Hatred of life, hatred of man, hatred of wealth, and hatred of reality is the moral of this story.

Our pop-culture president recently went through the dog-and-pony show experience of Leno. We’re now beginning to see that given the opportunity (predicament) to improvise outside of a teleprompter’s demands, this man will reveal his true character.

It began with the president joking about how bad a bowler he is.

Toward the end of his approximately 40-minute taping on the “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” Obama talked about how he’d gotten better at bowling and had been practicing in the White House bowling alley.

“I bowled a 129,” he told Leno.

“That’s very good, Mr. President,” Leno said sarcastically.

But then came the foot-in-mouth moment: “It’s like the Special Olympics or something,” the president said. [emphasis mine]

< sacrastic-response >
Um, like… yea Barack… that shit’s funny yo.
< / sarcastic-response >

Are you kidding me?

Should we consider this notion as enlightened, compassionate or progressive? Does it represent his earnest respect for hope or change? What caliber of intellect carries around such a childish insensitive notion? This ignorant and tasteless blurt is just one candid snippet of the mind that will likely lead America to a much darker time.

Loosen your belt America, we’re just getting started.

Apparently there’s no turning back from America’s suicidal shift into Socialized Medicine. The foundation is laid and the plumbing is on order. The “stimulus” bill has proven to be the ultimate power grabbing utensil.

Republican Senators are questioning whether President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill contains the right mix of tax breaks and cash infusions to jump-start the economy.

Tragically, no one from either party is objecting to the health provisions slipped in without discussion. These provisions reflect the handiwork of Tom Daschle, until recently the nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department.

Tragic indeed - that the left and the right are virtually indistinguishable variants of the same poisonous philosophy. Both consider Government as the supreme agent of egalitarian engineering. Both favor the collective over the individual. Both consider self-sacrifice as their moral standard. Both see man as his brother’s keeper. Both are willing to force their moral tenets on citizens. Both are willing to mandate human misery and trample mounds of human corpses if necessary in order achieve their vision.

Senators should read these provisions and vote against them because they are dangerous to your health. (Page numbers refer to H.R. 1 EH, pdf version).

They are, in fact, dangerous to our health, but they should be opposed as measures outside the role of a proper government precisely because they require the violation of individual rights on a tremendous scale.

The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” (445, 454, 479). Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors.

What would be beneficial is for individual interaction with the health care market to remain private and determined solely on the voluntary judgment of the involved parties. My medical history is the business of myself and those which I choose to interact with.

But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”

And another bloated, inappropriate and menacing arm of the Government is born. By what right does the Government deem the appropriateness or cost-effectiveness of my private health concerns? America justly discarded such guiding notions in 1865, but collectivist-statism has smuggled them back in. The only moral and practical guide for private decisions is the rational judgment of the individuals involved.

What penalties will deter your doctor from going beyond the electronically delivered protocols when your condition is atypical or you need an experimental treatment? The vagueness is intentional. In his book, Daschle proposed an appointed body with vast powers to make the “tough” decisions elected politicians won’t make.

The stimulus bill does that, and calls it the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research (190-192). The goal, Daschle’s book explained, is to slow the development and use of new medications and technologies because they are driving up costs. He praises Europeans for being more willing to accept “hopeless diagnoses” and “forgo experimental treatments,” and he chastises Americans for expecting too much from the health-care system.

Could the threat to our standard of living by Socialization be any more clearly identified than in this sentence?

Diminishing innovation is an inevitable result of socialized medicine that proponents typically dismiss, but here stagnation is explicitly favored over progress in order not to “drive up costs” - a result which history and economics prove as inherent to government intervention in any economic segment. Only in a socialized scheme would experimental treatments drive up cost for anyone other than the patient seeking them. In response, the statist solution to the problem enabled by their unjust system is to prohibit costly medical innovations, which also coincides with their egalitarian notions that no individual should “have access” (earn the right to consume) to better care than others - quite the irrational death-cocktail they’re serving.

The stimulus bill will affect every part of health care, from medical and nursing education, to how patients are treated and how much hospitals get paid. The bill allocates more funding for this bureaucracy than for the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force combined (90-92, 174-177, 181).

We’ve digressed to a nation which, due to the devastation of altruism, spends more looted wealth on regulating when, where, how and with whom individuals endeavor to raise the quality of their lives - a system of voluntary trade to mutual benefit - than towards the military infrastructure dedicated to the rightful defense of our sovereignty.

Unless we discard self-sacrifice as a virtue, discover the supremacy of the individual, and assume reason as our guide, America has seen her brightest days.

[UPDATED]
Stay on top of the fight against Socialized medicine @ FIRM.

Perhaps the most offensive charge one can hurl at the planet’s leading mega-altruist is the accusation of selfishness.

Don’t worry, false alarm. Rest assured, Obama certainly wouldn’t take any measure that could even slightly resemble alignment with America’s best interest. In case any of us can’t quite measure up in the self-sacrifice department, BO’s got our back. He’ll be there for us when need a helping suicidal hand.

“I agree that we can’t send a protectionist message,” he said in an interview with Fox TV. “I want to see what kind of language we can work on this issue. I think it would be a mistake, though, at a time when worldwide trade is declining, for us to start sending a message that somehow we’re just looking after ourselves and not concerned with world trade.”

In other words, “Please EU! Don’t be mad at us… we’re not selfish, we promise to give it all away - or destroy it first!” And by concerned he means willing to toss as many Americans into the sacrificial furnace of altruism as needed to make the point.

As stated by John Galt:

“You have reached the blind alley of the treason you committed when you agreed that you had no right to exist. Once, you believed it was ‘only a compromise’: you conceded it was evil to live for yourself, but moral to live for the sake of your children. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your children, but moral to live for your community. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your community, but moral to live for your country. Now, you are letting this greatest of countries be devoured by any scum from any corner of the earth, while you concede that it is selfish to live for your country and that your moral duty is to live for the globe. A man who has no right to life, has no right to values and will not keep them.” - Atlas Shrugged

I honestly don’t know what would qualify as the most detestable facet of this scenario: the fact that our leaders would subjugate our economic policy to the opinion of the EU or the World Trade Organization; that our economic ignorance is such that trade restrictions would be considered a viable means to boost the economy; that we’ve abandoned virtually all respect for individual rights to the extent that such restrictions are legal; that we feel the need to apologize for (what was incorrectly deemed as) acting in our own self-interest; or the colossal culmination of all of the above - that the only barrier protecting us from more rights-clobbering regulation (exactly what led us into this shit-storm) is that such measures might offend the EU as an act of selfishness.

How such a horrendous muck of neurotic contradictions can appeal to consensus in a modern enlightened society is a stunning tribute to our philosophical decline.

From Tito:

The body that does this is called NICE (National Institute for health and Clinical Excellence) - it has the job of deciding which drugs are available on the NHS.

Ask your average welfare-statist whether or not NICE should approve a life saving drug that costs £0.01 for one years treatment: “Of course!” he will reply. Then ask him whether or not it should approve a drug that costs £100 for a years treatment, he will probably agree again but with less enthusiasm. Now ask him £1000, £100,000 - ask him if its worth 4 times GDP. Eventually he will say no, he will dismiss it as impractical.

Where is this mystery line drawn? What is the intrinsic value of a human life?

Step forth the first immoral politician that dares admit where the line is drawn: something tells me he will be quite unpopular.

For we must check our premises. All value is objective, not intrinsic. Value presupposes the question “Of what value, and to whom?”

As always, the only way out of this swamp of contradiction is to remove the aspect of force. This means a free market in healthcare, a market where a man is free to purchase any treatment he wishes, where he can take any advice he chooses - and where there are no legal limits to the maximum amount of healthcare he can consume in order to survive.

It won’t be long at all before questions like these hit much closer to home. Socialized medicine is an indefensible collaboration of tyrannical notions. In any matter, especially ones where life and death are literally on the line, to harness a man’s ability to make decisions based on his own rational judgment, and according to his own financial means, is the epitome of evil - yet this is precisely the fundamental tenet crucial to any form of socialized medicine.

Of all collectivist schemes, tampering in the field of medicine is the most sinister.

Put on your mixed-economy goggles for this one…

The impending conclusion is that price fluctuation is not due to supply and demand. Note the mindset of these economically ignorant cannibals confused individuals.  What distinguishes real consumers (according to their mindset) from speculators? The difference is need. They use need as their qualifying attribute of a consumer.  The extent of ones need determines their position on the right-trumping social totem pole. In the mind of an altruist, speculators don’t need the commodities the way Bob the gas station owner does, and Bob doesn’t need it the way Joe the truck-driver does. Mr. Speculator is a greedy crook trying to make a profit.  He doesn’t need oil therefore he’s not deemed a proper consumer and shouldn’t be considered in the supply/demand equation.  Speculators are merely moochers feeding off the market and pursuing their selfish ends, while driving up the price for average Joe.  What the market needs, according to the spirit of this video, is Government force via regulation.

What exactly do they think Bob and Jo are using fuel for - charity?

The underlying premise here is that Altruism considers profit as selfish, so speculators are demonized for seeking a profit on commodities futures.  Profit seeking is unjustly denigrated as a flaw in the “free” market which should be corrected by Government force. Who’s right to what are they violating?  None, but in our age of subjective-law it doesn’t matter. They aren’t adhering to the altruist-collectivist playbook, so they must be led to the sacrificial altar.  This of course leads to the fundamental error, or evasion, with this story - the implication that oil price fluctuation is not due to supply and demand, but as a distortion by those greedy speculators buying up all the futures. Speculators bid (purchase) a particular quantity of stuff. That stuff is no longer available, .i.e., supply is reduced. When supply lowers independently of demand, the price goes up. Demand means consumption, regardless of what a consumer does with a product after consuming it. Speculators, even though they don’t actually obtain the product in tangible form, are qualified as consumers just as an individual purchasing gas for and automobile. The price fluctuation is due to supply and demand, and speculators are a component of such demand.

If principles matter, we should remind these clowns who moan about the evil speculators the next time they purchase real-estate, stocks, bonds or any other investment, that doing such is no different in principle than speculating futures.

Unless one can identify whose specific right to what is being forcefully violated by speculators then there’s no legitimate justification for regulating anyone.

This is the exact pattern and nature by which every market suffers erosion and inevitable destruction courtesy of Government meddling. The speculation market is surely on the government lynching radar.

Funny, but infuriating considering the underlying truth.

Ken Pool is making good money. On weekdays, he shows up at 7 a.m. at Ford Motor Co.’s Michigan Truck Plant in Wayne, signs in, and then starts working — on a crossword puzzle. Pool hates the monotony, but the pay is good: more than $31 an hour, plus benefits.

“We just go in and play crossword puzzles, watch videos that someone brings in or read the newspaper,” he says. “Otherwise, I’ve just sat.”

Pool is one of more than 12,000 American autoworkers who, instead of installing windshields or bending sheet metal, spend their days counting the hours in a jobs bank set up by Detroit automakers and Delphi Corp. as part of an extraordinary job security agreement with the United Auto Workers union.

The jobs bank programs were the price the industry paid in the 1980s to win UAW support for controversial efforts to boost productivity through increased automation and more flexible manufacturing.

As part of its restructuring under bankruptcy, Delphi is actively pressing the union to give up the program.

With Wall Street wondering how automakers can afford to pay thousands of workers to do nothing as their market share withers, the union is likely to hear a similar message from the Big Three when their contracts with the UAW expire in 2007 — if not sooner. [emphasis mine]

We know at least one way they can afford it. If a company wants to waste money by paying someone for idleness, that’s their choice, but to do so and then beg to be bailed with looted wealth is a tremendous feat of evil.

Through confiscation at gunpoint is the only way these companies will ever receive a penny from me.

And, apparently Ben Stein has tricked people into considering his economic perspectives, which are as flimsy as his “scientific” ones.

Why not be smart about it and NOT LET AMERICANS GET UNEMPLOYED IN THE FIRST PLACE? (Please pardon the shouting.) There are millions of Americans already hard at work making great American made cars and trucks. Why not keep them on the job? Wouldn’t that be smarter than allowing the whole upper Midwest to fall into oblivion and then rescue it over a fifty year period?

And what’s his moral justification?

Let’s stop the Depression before it starts. Let’s show some fairness and good faith to our own. Let’s bail out the Big Three, help them slim down, shape up, and keep making great cars and trucks. The Big Three are us and if we cannot help ourselves, who can we help?

Until this passage, I dismissed him as a pragmatist willing to compromise his principles for the sake of the moment, but here he reveals the opposite. These are his principles.

Ben is an altruist, his morality is vested (at least partially) in sacrificing himself for others. He is a collectivist, he has no issues with extending and enforcing his altruism (by force) on others, condoning their sacrifice on behalf of the collective. Therefore, Ben thinks it’s fair, by his altruistic-collectivist standards, for government to tax me at gunpoint and handout the loot to a crumbing company rank with incompetence and infested with professional moochers, or to a lazy, freeloading vagrant, or to an elderly person with no savings to live off of because they evaded financial planning for a lifetime. As long as someone’s needs, any needs, are nurtured, the ends justify the means for Ben.

Something is very wrong here.

Indeed.