Fester's Den - uncle, anarchist, ladies man...

29% of Coloradoan's have no savings

2012-02-01T08:09:00.000-08:00

This morning there was a news story that said 29% of Coloradoan's have no savings, they cannot weather an unexpected expense. This type of story saddens me tremendously. But these stories also piss me off! They piss me off because the blame is always put on the poor person who doesn't save. To some extent this is where the blames lies, but to a large extent the blame truly lies with the failed monetary policies of the federal reserve and the government.

Currently on Bankrate the highest one year CD earns 1.08% with a 25k minimum! What kind of idiot thinks that investing in savings is a worthwhile mechanism for maintaining or growing wealth? Even by the governments own distorted accounting, inflation is closer to 3% which means every dollar getting a 1% return is losing 2% in purchasing power, and frankly the government is lying about the inflation rate and the true inflation rate is much higher. The incentives are all wrong. If interests rates were higher it would encourage more savings, but the government is forcing interest rates lower than inflation, which encourages more debt and less savings. This policy works out great for those who don't save and have access to borrow at these absurdly low rates, but poor people cannot get into this game, their debt comes mostly in the form of high interest credit card debt, which means the credit card companies are borrowing from the federal reserve at rates at 1% or below and then using that money to pay off their customers credit card charges, and then charging their customers 10-30% interest rates on that money they also borrowed, it is a scam of magnificent proportions.

In a free market interest rates are determined by the availability of money. The more savings that are available to be lent out, the lower interest rates will be, the less savings available to be lent out, the higher interest rates will be.

At the end of the article, they also suggest putting money in savings through a company 401k, this defeats the entire concept of the rest of the article which focuses on the need for savings in the case of emergency. Money saved in a 401k is not useful if your car breaks down, or you have an unexpected medical issue, or lose your job. For these kinds of expenses you need a more liquid form of savings.

Fester's financial advice: Don't count on a tax return

2012-01-27T15:03:00.000-08:00

One quick piece of financial advice. Don't plan on getting a tax refund from the government until after you have filled out your taxes. The tax code constantly changes, your life situation constantly changes, deductions come and go, rates change from year to year, a tax refund is simply not something you should count on getting each year.

With tax season upon us I have heard more than one person say something along the lines of “I hope to get my W-2's soon since, I cannot wait to get my tax return”. I believe this is folly, counting on a tax return before you have actually done your taxes is not a good idea. A tax return should be treated in the same way you might treat a win at the casino, it is nice to get the extra money, but nothing you should plan on getting. Even if you have gotten a return every year for the last 10, don't count on one for this year. You are likely to have forgotten some fact that will change your tax liability. It can happen to anyone, a friend of mine only now realized that he owes taxes on his unemployment income which didn't have taxes automatically deducted and he has gone from being confident in getting a return, to possibly having to write a check to the government.

The Big Waste

2012-01-15T18:56:00.000-08:00

I watched this show on food network called “The Big Waste” and it was about the huge amount of food that is wasted everyday in America, thrown out, discarded and otherwise going to waste. The primary point seemed to be to scold the consumer for being too spoiled for perfect produce and other foods. However, when looked at it from the perspective of an economist and libertarian all the waste seems perfectly natural given the conditions we are forced into as consumers. It is also apparent that waste is not a problem many concern themselves with in very many areas of the food chain.

A big part of the show was showing produce that is discarded because of bruising, misshapen product and discoloration. It was emphasized that there is nothing really wrong with this food. I agree there is nothing inedible about the food, however when I am at the store and see something for sale and it is all the exact same price, even though the quality varies, as a rational being I will chose the best I can get from the selection. Why would a person buy the bruised apples and pay the same price as the non-bruised apples? The fact is that as long as stores refuse to offer more discounted products, they will be throwing a lot of product away. If there was truly a concern for food waste, the answer is simply to incorporate a graded pricing system. Someone might not buy those carrot odds and ends for $2 a package, but for 50¢ they may look far more attractive.

Another part was to show all the food that went into the dumpster. In many places it is illegal to dumpster dive, and even when it is not illegal, many stores and restaurants lock the dumpsters up, either by locking the actual dumpster, or by placing them in locked fenced in areas. If the food is inaccessible it will spoil before it could possibly be saved. Also I recently heard from a co-worker who works in the produce department at a Super Wal-Mart that they are not allowed to take the food that is thrown-out home with them and they must throw it away. I am sure the policy is in place to try and prevent employee theft, but the practice also encourages more waste.

The next part is something Food Network did not directly talk about, but the show made it very clear, government regulations prevent a ton of edible food from being available. In the show they had a guy from the FDA sticking a thermometer in all of the food and he was ready to throw anything out that didn't pass this ridiculous test. The problem was that who knows what temperatures these foods had been at before he tested them. He talked a lot about bacteria and whatnot, but he never tested for anything like that. He said that a chunk of prosciutto was too warm to be safe. What a joke, in Europe you often see salted and smoked meats hanging in the open in stores, meats like prosciutto don't even need refrigerated, but he would not allow the food to be used. They also showed tons and tons of good vegetables that have been tossed out, vegetables that would make excellent food for pigs, but the 1980 swine protection act makes following the law and feeding pigs waste, even straight vegetables, very difficult to fully comply with the law to the point that most pig farms will simply not bother with it and will instead feed them a less nutritious diet of grain based feeds. There are also numerous other regulations that when followed result in a lot of good food going to waste.

Overall I think the show made a good point, that there is too much food wasted, but since the underlying causes of the waste were not addressed I am not sure how much good it is going to do. Instead, it becomes just one more instance of “yeah that seems bad, but not bad enough to change my personal behavior, or the law, or really anything.”

Rush Limbaugh is a dick

2012-01-10T09:23:00.000-08:00

I know this will not be a controversial statement, but Rush Limbaugh is a dick. I don't listen to him and haven't for many years, but back in the early 1990's I did listen to him. I was a real fan and listened after work nearly everyday, I was a ditto head. It wasn't that I agreed with everything he said, but I agreed with many things he said and found the show to be entertaining and I agreed with him enough to not be too insulted. Back then he talked about reducing the size of government, he criticized Bill Clinton for his nation building in Kosovo. He slammed the department of education, the EPA and other government agencies and called for their abolishment, he talked about privatizing social security, and many other things that libertarians would favor along with republicans. He didn't speak much about issues like drugs. So there were a lot of libertarian leaning ditto heads and I was one of them.

Now he has changed, he no longer promotes issues, he is only about the red team versus the blue team. He doesn't care about the issues he used to promote, now it is just about dogging any politician who wears the wrong color. He may pretend he is still about issues, but he only cares when the issue is presented by a democrat, he gives a pass to republicans who promote the exact same thing. This is made extremely clear when it comes to his opposition to Ron Paul, who promotes many of the ideas he trumpeted in the 90's. I saw this clip where a Ron Paul supporter called into his show and claimed to be a ditto head who disagreed with him on some issues and that is why she supports Ron Paul, his response was to claim she could not be a ditto head and must be a radical liberal. I don't think this is a fair portrayal of republicans who support a policy small government, who are against nation building, who are for states rights, and who want to follow the constitution. In most ways Ron Paul supporters are 1990's era ditto heads. I have moved on and would never listen to Rush again, but I can sympathize with this caller, because at one point I was a regular Rush listener, and I can understand being a ditto head who supports Ron Paul. I support Ron Paul, even though Ron Paul is for more government than I would like to see, he is still a big improvement over the other choices. I also would say that I am not a radical liberal and have never been one, and anyone who has known me for any amount of time would know that I am not a liberal in the current meaning of big government warfare/welfare policy.

Drums of war pound out lies, lies, and damned lies

2012-01-03T10:49:00.000-08:00

As the drums of war are starting to beat, please keep the past lies, lies, and damned lies in mind whenever you hear the new lies that the media and the politicians will be spewing.

Lol, the turn of the century sowed only misery (and light bulbs, refrigerators and car, etc)

2011-12-30T14:51:00.000-08:00

In a thread on facebook I saw this:

Oh, the early 20th century where we had the Great Depression? Child labor? Dark satanic mills? Yes, that worked out great. If your name was Rockefeller.

It never 'worked OK once'. To the degree that market fundamentalism has been tried it has sown only misery for the many, to the benefit of a few.

What is he talking about, the freest time in America is when the modern world was created (after the civil war before the new deal). The light bulb was invented, the car started to be produced, the telephone was invented, airplanes, radio, movies, recorded music, tractors, washing machines, refrigerators, etc. Virtually everything that makes the modern lifestyle was created and popularized during this time that he claims had sown only misery for the many. If anything we are in a slump of innovation today by comparison. Yeah it never worked out, what a joke. I guess the masses were just too oppressed by their new cars, and washing machines. Also this child labor boogieman drives me nuts, so what if there was child labor in the early part of the century, you do know that there has always been child labor, all throughout history, until the industrial revolution made it so machines could replace human labor, thus making it so fewer people had to work to produce the same amount or more, this is what allowed children to be free of labor, not the government.

Remember this? Government claims Blockbuster monopoly and blocks merger with Hollywood Video

2011-12-21T10:54:00.000-08:00

Everyday the government makes claims that are laughable, but sometimes they seem more laughable a few years after the fact then they seemed at the time. Case in point, in 2005 the FTC blocked a proposed merger of Blockbuster Video and Hollywood Video, making the claim that this merger would create a monopoly in the video rental business. Even at the time this seemed ridiculous, in 2005 Netflix was already a large company, video on demand was already available, and internet video streaming was obviously on the horizon. Now both companies are bankrupt, squeezed out by competition the government refused to acknowledge even existed.

Young Turks call out Bill O'Reilly

2011-12-21T07:40:00.000-08:00

Young Turks call out Bill O'Reilly over Iran. Out of one side of the scumbag Bill O'Reilly's mouth he says that war with Iran would be devastating, out of the other side of his mouth he says Ron Paul is disqualified as not just a candidate, but as an American because of his foreign policy, or at least that is how I took it, you may think O'Reilly was trying to say he is saying this as "an American and not as a Journalist", but I think he meant that Ron Paul's views disqualify him as an American and then he sort of backtracked.

Do you want your epitaph to read: "he consumed much and produced little"

2011-12-15T15:23:00.000-08:00

The other day on the Peter Schiff Show, Peter was arguing with a Keynesian economist who was making the claim that it is consumption and not production that drives an economy. He was wrong of course, it is savings and production, and not consumption, that drives an economy. But let's pretend for a second this idea is correct, is it how you would want to live your life? When I die, I don't want to be remembered for living a life of consumption. I would much rather be remembered for all of the good I have done, all of the good I have produced in my lifetime. All of the people I have helped for things I have done, things I have added to the world, not for things I have taken away from the world.

Fester's financial advice, housing.

2011-11-23T10:35:00.000-08:00

There seems to be this misconception out there that housing is a commodity that should rise in value over time and at least keep up with inflation on the average. This is not really the case. Housing is a consumer good, just like your car and television, and will decrease in value over time as it is being used more and more. I believe there is a case to be made that land is a commodity and will generally maintain or increase in value over time, but what sits on that land is going to get wore out, rot away, and otherwise lose value. It is hard to say that the roof on a house will lose value, the carpet will lose value, the appliances lose value, and yet the overall house should gain in value and somehow expect this to make sense in the long run.

The idea that housing “always rises in value” is based on faulty logic and a skewed perception of reality, mostly by people who live in cities. It is true that in many areas of the country if you look at a chart of housing values over the last 100 years or so, you will see a steady increase in value and this has skewed the perception of the people living in those areas and created an expectation that this is the norm, when in fact it was a fluke. Many things happened in that time that account for the rise in value of (some) housing. First, the population grew very quickly. Second, there was a mass migration from rural areas to urban areas. Third, the banking system was set up to be controlled by the central bank that allowed fractional reserve lending to become the norm. So what happened was that demand increased for housing in urban areas and at the same time it became easier to get loans from banks (and unlike other loans the interest could be deducted from a person's tax liabilities), creating a century long boom. I don't expect this to hold into the future. The increased demand for the land the houses sit on this made up for the all or some of the loss of value in the buildings sitting on the land in urban population centers. The recent boom was because low interest rates allowed consumers to borrow more money for lower monthly payments and this brought up the overall value of the housing as consumers realized that they could buy more expensive housing, sellers raised their prices respectively. I know there were some other factors, but this is the very basic story.

One thing to note is that housing has went down in value in many places, rural America, industrial cities that have lost large employers (Detroit, Cleveland, etc). So if you have this idea that housing should always increase in value, I would like you to knock that thought out your mind right now, as it is not a universal truth. You may be lucky enough to have purchased a house in a community that will still be a desirable place to live well into the future and so your housing might hold its value, but there are no guarantees and you should not hold any expectations of such, especially as the population stops increasing and the migration from rural farm towns to urban centers comes to an end (at this point there are not a lot of rural people left to migrate and technology is not replacing farm hands at nearly the same rate as it was over the last 100 years). My understanding is also that the US would be experiencing a negative growth in population if it were not for immigration (which the government seems to want to further restrict).

Does this mean that it is a bad idea to buy a home? No. The reality is that you need a place to live, and if your choice is to buy or to rent, then you have to consider your own needs and your lifestyle to determine which makes financial sense to you. If you plan on living in the same place for 10 or more years, it is likely to be better to buy. If you move around a lot, then renting is better. If your choice is to rent a cheap one bedroom apartment or buy a big four bedroom house, renting is likely the better option since you need to compare apples to apples when looking to buy. It may make sense to buy a condo that is similar to what you rent, but likely would not make sense to buy a house that is far more extravagant than what you would chose as a renter. Due to the market distortions created by government, buying is often the better choice, they artificially restrict new construction through zoning and other laws, they allow you to write off the interest on the mortgage from your taxes, and distort the market in other ways, but you should not count on these things from the government into the future, so just be aware it is a gamble. Buy a house for the same reason you buy a car, you need it for its utility, not for its investment potential. If you want an investment property, either learn the real estate trade, or buy a REIT, but don't buy the house you plan to live in and expect it to be anything other than a consumer good.

More about Warren Buffet and this claim he only pays 17% in taxes

2011-11-10T17:38:00.000-08:00

I hear this "the billionaire only pays 17% in taxes, which is less than his secretary" crap all of the time, it comes from an article that Warren Buffett wrote claiming as much, only he lied and now the left uses that as some sort of rallying call. The truth is that Buffett pays more than he said in his article. First off he is not subject to income taxes because he takes no income (to be more accurate he takes an income of 100k, which is tiny compared to his billions in net worth) so when he needs money he sells BH (Berkshire-Hathaway) stock and only pays the 15% capital gains tax and 2.4% in other taxes I assume he is referring to the capped social security taxes and the income tax on his salary), so that is where he gets this 17% figure that gets cited over and over again.

The problem is that he owns the majority of BH and the corporate taxes they pay, really comes out of his profits and pockets. Some companies pay almost nothing in corporate taxes because they award the CEO huge amounts of pay and the CEO then pays high personal income taxes, with BH they pay corporate taxes on the profits other companies might have paid their CEO and then written off their bottom line. Buffett indirectly pays the corporate taxes, and then also pays the capital gains tax when he sells his stock. He is really paying a much higher tax rate than he claims, and I don't believe he is too stupid to understand this, so I can only assume he is lying for some political reason.

It is hard to know how much BH pays in corporate taxes since it seems they owe back taxes, but if they were paying the taxes it would be a corporate rate of 29% so add that to the 17% Buffett is paying in capital gains and he is paying closer to 50% in taxes.

The thing that really irks me about the whole thing is that he is looked at as a hero of the left for claiming he supports higher taxes for the rich, all while being a tax dodger himself and the left eats it up like candy. He has also benefited from the bailouts, owning major shares in Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, US Bancorp, and American Express. In the Peter Schiff goes to Occupy Wall Street video he is confronted with some protester who throws out this idea that “the rich pay 17% in taxes”, this comes from Buffett's article, but they are also down there protesting against bailouts and the rich, but still they will hold up his article as if it was written by god himself.

Occupy Atlanta, being duped by irresponsible Cop

2011-11-09T05:08:00.000-08:00

When I got up this morning I found a facebook friend had posted this article about Occupy Atlanta setting up encampment to save a police officers home after the he had written an email explaining he was being foreclosed on to someone in the Occupy movement. I attempted to try and find out why this police officer was “unjustly” being foreclosed upon as the protesters are claiming, and I was unable to find anything. Police officers have extremely stable jobs with decent wages, most making 50k or more a year. Interest rates are extremely low right now, I really have to wonder why this officer could not afford to pay his mortgage. I ended up finding that the location of the house is “4197 Shoreside Circle Snellville, GA”. This allowed me to find out information on the house, but not the Rorey family, However, finding out about the house was enough to cast further doubt in my already suspicious mind. According to Trulia this house last sold on December 27th, 2010. Less than a year ago, for $172,454, which should be affordable for a police officer. You normally have to be several months behind in your mortgage before the foreclosure proceeding begin. This indicates to me that they moved in less than a year ago and basically never made a mortgage payment, I am not sure I can see the unjust nature of the foreclosure. I think these occupy people are being duped by irresponsible people to support a cause that will make them look even more foolish than they already appear to be.

Engineering Students drop out or change career paths

2011-11-05T14:34:00.000-07:00

I found this article on why engineering and science majors seem to drop out, or change directions when in college. It is interesting and I believe it is reflective of the failures of government education. Engineering should be one of the most interesting fields of study, and yet the government somehow manages to kill the desire of young people to pursue this career. I am in this field and have found something peculiar, I work in an engineering role without an engineering degree, some of my co-workers have engineering degrees and some do not. All of my co-workers who have engineering degrees fall into one of two categories, either they were older when they got the degree or they got their degree (or the majority of classes) from a non public university setting, like Devry, or they started out in a community college and then moved on to a more formal university. I don't think I work with anyone who went into an engineering degree straight out of high school and graduated with an engineering degree. I have two cousins who started university after high school in science and engineering studies who both switched out within three semesters. There is something wrong here, both of these boys are extremely smart and should have thrived as engineers.

If you know a young person who is considering becoming an engineer, I would advise them to not go straight to university studying engineering. It seems to be the death nail and seems to be a motivation killer, with all of these dry math lecture courses killing the desire to keep going when in the real world most of these equations are not pressing things to know. The field is really pretty fun as you see the things you do giving you the desired effects and solving puzzles when things do not work the same way you expected them to. If you want to be an engineer, the better path seems to be to start out with a smaller educational goal then move on to an engineering degree. I have managed to work in an engineering field with only an associates in telecommunications, but I work with many who started out getting associates in computer networking or electronics or similar fields and who then went on to get bachelors degrees. Really there is a decent demand for skilled employees in computer/electronics and engineering fields and it is high enough that employers are often willing to take a chance on a non-degreed person if they have shown proficiency and really the pay is not that much different between a fully degreed engineer and a person working in an engineering field with a degree in information technology or similar. After you manage to get that first job, experience becomes more important to future employers than education.

Peter Schiff at OWS

2011-10-29T07:38:00.001-07:00

Peter Schiff who I like and often listen to his radio show, went down to the occupy Wall Street and had a few conversations with people there. Reason TV documented the event. This is only 20 minutes of the 4-5 hours that he was there, but it is very interesting.

One lady he spoke to claimed she was in the 1% which should mean that she makes over 350k a year, she then claimed she only pays 10% in taxes. I don't know how she pulls this off, if she earns a regular income she would be in a marginal rate of 35% even with deductions, it is hard to believe these would cut 25% off of her rate, she would also have to pay medicare tax which is 3% on all her earnings (between her and her employers contributions) and about 13% for social security on the first 107k (which may be a large percentage of her income or may not be, we don't have enough info for that). Then she most likely pays state taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, and various other taxes. Perhaps she is a not working for a paycheck and gets her money through capital gains, then she would pay a rate of 17% (plus the other less commonly sited taxes I mentioned). So the only thing that seems clear to me is that she is either lying or has paid a professional tax accountant or lawyer a lot of money to find loopholes, not commonly used tax deductions, and tax shelters, so that she can avoid higher taxes. Normally I would not care, but it seems hypocritical when she is then out there saying others should pay more.

I also do not like this Warren Buffett meme at all. First off it is not true that he pays less in taxes than his secretary, but even if it were true, this is solely because he has actively created a pay structure designed to avoid paying taxes, again I would not care, but he advocates for others who cannot get the same pay structures and tax shelters, pay a higher rate.

Last thought, at the end a lot of people claimed they were capitalists and supporters, but if that is actually true then they have terrible PR, because what I see is a lot of jealousy of success, a blood lust for higher taxes on anyone more successful than them (even though I am not sure what these people believe will be done with any additional revenue, because I expect it to go to more wars, more prisons, and more injustice once handed over to the government), and a plea for more handouts from the government.

Ron Paul is right, end the student loan program

2011-10-25T14:03:00.000-07:00

Ron Paul wants to get rid of the federal student loan program, and I fully support him on this.

Student loans might work out for some, but many students find they enslave them in debt before the student even knows what they are doing or how these loans will effect their futures. It is my belief that colleges base their tuition rates on how much students can pay, so as the government grants and loans more money to students, the tuition increases proportionally and the students are harmed more and more and led further into a life of perpetual debt, the colleges benefit and the students are harmed by this cycle. Debt is indentured servitude as far as I am concerned, and should be avoided as best as you can, it restricts your choices and worsens your standard of living in the long run.

Recently Steve Jobs died, he dropped out of college, but imagine if he had not dropped out and had graduated with massive debt, he would not have been able to start apple, he would have been forced to get a job at a corporation in order to have the steady high income job he would have needed to repay the loans. By not having that debt burden over his head, he was able to be more entrepreneurial.

One big problem with these loans is that the amount of money someone needs to live on while going to college, has no bearing on what they will be able earn once out of college, so a person getting an engineering degree where they have a good chance of being able to pay the loans back, is able to borrow the same amount as the person getting a degree in art history, where the jobs are few and the pay is virtually non-existent. This creates a situation where people are leaving college extremely in debt and unable to find work that pays enough to repay their loans. I think without the government interference banks would be much more careful in who they loaned to and for how much. I don't think student loans would disappear in a free market, but I do think they would be lessened and those people who qualify for them would be in serious degrees with a high probability of good job prospects in the future.

[Side tangent] One thing that is curious to me about this whole debate over student loans is that I have had many friends and co-workers who have vocally complained about the credit card companies sending their kids a credit card while their kid is in college, even when that kid has no job! They think this is completely irresponsible behavior on the part of the credit card company (and I agree), but at the same time almost all of those kids are going tens of thousands of dollars into debt on student loans, which is much more irresponsible than a thousand dollars in credit card debt. [/Side Tangent]

Adam Vs. The Man on the occupy DC crowd

2011-10-18T08:10:00.000-07:00

It should be a good sign when people are upset enough at the current state of things that they are willing to take to the street, but I am having a mighty difficult time getting behind this "Occupy" movement and it is representatives like this that are the reason. If you think the corporations exert too much influence on the government and since the government has a monopoly on violence this leads to bad results because then the corporations also exert a monopoly on violence by using the government, these corporation use that power the government has against their would be competitors, they use it to get favors and tax money, etc., the solution is not to grow the government so the corporations can by proxy have even more power. The solution is to reduce or eliminate the power the government has so the corporations have nothing to gain by bribing politicians.

starvation is not a good strategy for punishing "corporate farmers"

2011-10-11T08:41:00.000-07:00

I had a brief conversation with a co-worker this morning that bothers me. He is a liberal type and a big supporter of this Occupy Wall Street thing, and during our conversation he referenced the “99%” and the “1%” to prove his point. However, the only point I really got from it is that he does not understand economics at all.

He asked if I had heard about the fact that crops were rotting due to “illegals leaving Alabama” and what I thought about it. I told him I think it sucks and it is an extremely sad day for America when crops are not harvested due to political blundering based on racial hatred and economic ignorance. He said he thought the “rich corporate farmers” deserved it because they had been mistreating immigrant farm hands for years and all they had to do was pay better and there would be dozens of unemployed Americans lining up to take those jobs.

There are so many fallacies with his train of thought that I hardly know where to begin. First off, I believe there is no such a thing as an illegal person. People are people, and that is all, it doesn't matter if their moms expelled them on one plot of land or another, they are people and deserve the opportunity to contract to work for whomever they want, wherever that job is, and for whatever wages are agreed upon. To me this is the only moral position, because to oppose this position means you do not believe people should be able to work for whom they wish, live where they wish to live, and earn as much as they can doing what they wish to do.

Looking at this from an economist perspective and not just the moral perspective it is also hard to understand his position. I am having trouble understanding how higher prices for food because some was left to rot in the fields is good for anyone. The farmers have to compete on a worldwide level and if their costs are too high then they will be unable to export food around the world and in many cases there is not enough demand in the US to accommodate all of the food that is grown here. This limits the amount of pay a farm hand can earn, however from everything I have read the pay is based on productivity and is generally well above minimum wage. The pay is also high enough to convince immigrant workers to leave their homes in Mexico and other places and travel thousands of miles for the work, often times making enough in a few months to allow them to move back to Mexico in the non-harvest season and living without the need to work. That does not sound abusive to me, you work for five months a year really hard, and then don't need to work the rest of the year.

I also have to really question this idea that the farmers effected by this are all wealthy corporate farmers. Many of these Alabama farmers are small time operations with fewer than 100 acres. 100 acres will not make you rich, many are vegetable farmers who receive very little or nothing in farm subsidies. I would rather buy my sweet potatoes from Alabama, but if there is no one to harvest them then I will get them from South America. I don't even know where they come from when buying from the grocery store. How on earth is this a good thing? Are people really this short sighted? They are willing to starve or suffer higher prices for food just to punish some supposed rich corporate farmers?

If you really are against corporate farmers, the answer is not to restrict immigration, but to be more selective in who you buy food from. Find small farms, buy from local sources when available, buy from co-ops where you know exactly where the food comes from. Buy a cow or a section of a cow from a local farmer and store it in your freezer. Punishing whole communities, punishing hard working people who are looking for a better life is not the answer. It would also be good to advocate a cessation of farm subsidies and the government encouraging large corporate farms in their farm policies.

I also don't see Americans lining up for these jobs at any wage, harvesting is a skill learned over time. Even if Americans would be willing to do the work, they are unskilled at it and therefor would be less productive. This means the level of pay they make is low, since they are not paid by the hour, but by how productive they are. It also creates the need for the farm owner to find more employees than typical due to the lower productivity of each individual employee.

Interest rates so low, Obama must hate old people who want to live on retirement savings!

2011-10-04T15:22:00.000-07:00

I feel sorry right now for all of my baby boomer aged friends. I am sure they believed they might be able to retire or take it a bit easy and live at least partially on income from savings. At 1% interest I don't see how any of them could have even close to enough money to make this a reality.

Low interest rates are only good for wealthy people with a lot of debt, and governments. Wealthy people can gets loans at the low rates and tend to invest in ways that will pay a greater dividend then the artificially low rates, so they like it. Governments, like low interest rates because they can borrow more for less and it makes it easier to balance their budgets, but to me this is a negative, it encourages both wealthy investors and governments to borrow in excess and place bets on the future with that money, the wealthy tend to be successful at this and they wind up even richer, the government tends to be really shitty at this and they wind up bringing down countries in this manner. Farmers seem to like low interest rates as well. The reasons here are two fold, one reason is that most farmers live most of the year on borrowed money, borrowing to plant and pay living expenses until harvest and paying off the debt after harvest. The second reason is that commodities tend to perform well compared to interest rates under conditions like we have today, especially when food price increases are outpacing interest rates.

Low interest rates aren't good for old people or poor people. They are not good for middle class people with low debt, or high savings, they aren't good for companies that hold cash or are trying to accumulate capital to invest in new equipment instead of borrowing for new equipment, etc. Poor people do not tend to have levels of debt, since they earn so little it is hard for them to obtain credit, if they do have any debt it is typically in the form of a credit card and the interest they pay on that is very high even when other rates are low, so they don't tend to benefit. Old people are hit the hardest by low interest rates, they tend to seek out stable investments like treasury binds and bank CD's and when these pay an interest rate that is lower than the rate of inflation they are losing money every year. Low interest rates seem to be a mixed bag for middle class young people, on one hand they may benefit if they are buying a house or other large purchase, on the other hand they lose when they save money. Overall I think it is a negative for nearly everyone.

In a free market, which we do not have, interest rates are determined like everything else, by supply and demand. When savings rates are high and there is a lot of money saved looking for people to borrow it, interest rates fall. When lots of consumption is going on very little savings is happening, interest rates increase since there is very little savings available for lending out. This natural back and forth is a beautiful thing, unfortunately it has been distorted beyond all recognition by the federal reserve and the government and people are truly suffering under these policies.

Who is standing up for Peter these days?

2011-10-04T10:52:00.001-07:00

I am feeling crankish about politics lately. I think I am feeling very frustrated because I have so many friends who can clearly see many problems, however they keep looking at the government as the solution, and they seem to completely ignore the role the government played in creating the problems in the first place. Until people are willing to stand up to the government and tell them that they have no more authority over them, that they do not have the consent of the governed, that they are no longer allowed to steal from Peter to pay Paul, then it is all just pointless politics. Instead all I hear is that one side says they don't want the government to steal from Peter to pay Paul, instead they want the government to steal from Peter to pay John, the other side says that paying Paul is better than John, nobody is saying “hey, what about Peter, what gives you the right to steal from him and pay any of these other assholes?”.

Penn is the man

2011-09-21T07:19:00.000-07:00

Great interview with Penn Jillette. His world view is very similar to mine, and I love the guy.

Quit deluding yourselves, Greenspan is not for free markets

2011-09-20T09:18:00.000-07:00

I don't think it is too controversial to say that politicians lie. Since I know politicians lie, I do not put any stock into their words and try to only look at their actions and the results of their actions. So it frustrates me to no end when I see people believe a politicians words over their actions and I have been hearing a lot of this lately. Don't tell me that Reagan believed in smaller government, when the government grew so exponentially under Reagan as president. Don't tell me Obama is anti-war, when his actions clearly show he is not. Don't tell me that the politically connected asshole Warren Buffett thinks the rich should be taxed more, when he has structured his pay to avoid most taxes and has not offered to voluntarily pay anything extra. Today I heard this doozy, “Devoted market fundamentalist Alan Greenspan now in favor of tax increases”. If you look at actions and not rhetoric, there is nothing to indicate that Greenspan believes in the free market in any way, shape or form, he believes in price fixing from an overarching power, the furthest thing possible from the free market.

In the free market interest rates are set by the availability of savings to lend out. When people save more money there is more money to lend out and so interest rates decline. When there is less savings, there are fewer funds available for lending out, so interest rates rise. This is how interest rates are determined in the free market. This has absolutely nothing to do with how interest rates were determined during the Greenspan years, so it is a complete lie to say he is a devotee of the free market. It doesn't matter if at one point he was a friend of Ayn Rand, or wrote papers about the free market, or any of that stuff. Simply look at his record and you can see that he is full of shit.

The police are not there when you need them.

2011-09-13T07:48:00.000-07:00

My neighbor runs a business called the “Game Truck”. It is a for hire trailer that provides a space for multiple gamers to play video games at once and it is popular for tween and teen boys birthday parties, because it provides a way for 10 kids to battle each other at once on the latest video game. They might spend a lot of time at home playing these games, but at home they can only play against one other person most of the time, with the game truck the possibilities open up far more. It seems most popular for the age group that is too young for drinking parties and too old for clowns and bouncy castles. I saw her yesterday and she said that this past weekend the game trailer was robbed of about $10,000 worth of equipment, from games to gaming devices like playstations and Wii's to the televisions, even the cans of cleaner!

She called the police to report the incident. This is what the police are for right? To investigate large crimes against property and people? I advocate ending the government police and replace them with security you hire yourself, but I often run into resistance and people will tell me “one day you will need the police and then you will change your tune”. So I think she was harmed, her business is currently shut down and she is losing money, she suffered major property loss, this is the kind of thing the cops should be investigating. So what did the “brave” boys in blue do to help? They sent one cop out, he glanced around and told her to file a report online. Then he said he needed to leave. She asked if he was going to attempt to get fingerprints or anything and he said “it won't do any good”. How does he know? Then he left claiming he had to go because they were understaffed in the area. Leaving her to fill out an online report, claiming the insurance would respond faster if she did the online thing instead of having him fill out a report.

This pisses me off, it is basically the exact same thing that the police told my mother when her house was broken into a couple of months ago. If they are not there to investigate property crimes then what are they there for? The drug war apparently...

The day after my neighbors game truck was broken into, she saw nine squad cars all at one house a few houses down from where we live and a couple of dozen cops surround the house and yelling things like “They are still in the house, I see them”. They broke the gate to the back yard and it sounded like a lot of excitement. Maybe they had found the criminals who had robbed her truck! A couple of hours later she saw two guys sitting in front of the house that had been raided earlier that day and so she approached them and asked them what it had all been about. They revealed to her that the people in the house had been raided for growing marijuana. She gets robbed and the police hardly have enough staff to even send a single cop out, but they have enough cops to send 20 police on a raid of someone who is growing a couple of pot plants in a backroom.

Is it any wonder people don't like the police. When you are victimized, they are too understaffed to do anything, but when they want to victimize others for fairly peaceful activities like growing plants in a spare bedroom or not wearing a seat belt, they have plenty of resources.

The truthers are out there!

2011-09-12T12:20:00.000-07:00

9/11 came and went, I don't really care that much about it. It was a tragedy that was wholly preventable, if the US had not decided they needed to be the world's policeman, then they would not be the target of the worlds criminals.

There seems to be a small segment of the population that are obsessed with “getting to the bottom” of the 9/11 story. They spend hours and hours researching the events of 9/11, they try and figure out how hot the fire would have had to be in order to bring the towers down, they look into ideas like a sonic ray device turning the buildings into dust, controlled demolition, etc. I don't get the point. I have had libertarians try and convince me that 9/11 is a gateway to libertarian thought and this is what makes it useful. The idea being that if someone accepts 9/11 was perpetrated by the government then it will create a distrust of the government as a whole and open people to libertarianism. I think this is folly and a waste of time, even if this has been the case and some libertarians have came from the truther movement, it is not the best approach.

At least for me, I don't really take a side on the 9/11 thing. I don't know if it was an "inside" job or not. I already accept that the government is evil, so it really doesn't make much of a difference to my position. The problem I have with arguing about 9/11 is that I don't like to deal with these arguments where both sides make good points, and I feel like this is what makes getting my position across more difficult than it is worth. I think the conspiracy crowd makes some interesting observations, but seems to be missing pieces of the puzzle and so are the main liners.

Why waste time on something like 9/11 which even if the smoking gun comes out that proves the conspiracy crowd right, what is that going to change? It changed nothing when the Tonkin incident came out. There have been new revelations about FDR's prior knowledge about Pearl Harbor, I don't think anyone believes the JFK story presented by the government, we know the government infected Guatemalan's with syphilis, and yet none of that matters to most people, it has not changed a damn thing. Why not stick with causes and arguments where we have a solid case, not based on conjecture, but solid evidence or at least solid moral grounding? I mean trying to convince a person that 9/11 was an inside job and this is why they should oppose government is going to be a difficult task, trying to convince them that the cops can get away with murder and this is why they should oppose the system is much easier. Trying to convince them that the politicians are in the pockets of the corporations is easy compared to a murky conspiracy about 9/11, and these types of arguments are cumulative. I think these are more useful arguments, I plant an idea like “the politicians are taking their marching orders from the banksters” which is initially met with resistance and then over time I bring more and more stories to my co-workers or friends attention until eventually they see my side. Whereas 9/11 I have to convince them on this one event and there are not a dozen new cases a year where the government is taking down new skyscrapers to help build my case. If it was an inside job, then I guess we just have to accept that it accomplished its goals for the government and they have not felt a need to take anymore actions in the last 10 years.

I am not sure about anyone else, but I am pretty good at discussing libertarian ideas, even so I am lucky if I get 5 minutes with someone to pitch some libertarian concept before they lose interest. Is my best bet in 5 minutes time to try to convince them of 9/11 and then try and use this as leverage for opposing the state as a whole? I simply don't think so. If I spend hours upon hours researching 9/11 truth, that is time I could have spent developing more timely arguments that have a more direct impact on peoples current lives and can be presented much more quickly and easily and have a better chance of convincing others at least about one topic. If I convince a statist that 9/11 was an inside job orchestrated by Dick Cheney or something and I am so successful the whole world agrees with me, then what happens? They put old Dick on trial along with one or two people in the CIA and call it over and then the statist goes back to their support of big government, now that the evildoers have been punished. Rosie O'Donnell is a 9/11 truther, but it doesn't seem to have moved her towards an anarchist position, she just seems to use it to help prove that republicans are evil. It doesn't strike at the root. If instead I convince a person that they own their body and the government should not be able to tell them what they can or cannot put into their body, that has lasting ramifications no matter who is in charge and once that person has accepted that concept as truth, then they see why everything from drug laws to trans fat bans are to be opposed and it becomes less about who is to blame, who did it, and more about principle, even if they remain statist in general they have moved more towards a libertarian position on many issues from this one seemingly simple change in perspective.

Fester is cranky when it comes to titles

2011-09-07T14:33:00.000-07:00

I am the ultimate crank on titles. I don't like them. I don't really even like Mr. and Mrs., I don't like Dr., I don't like calling a judge “your honor”. I don't mind descriptive titles for what you do for a living, for instance accountant, engineer, store manager, florist, auto mechanic, etc. These to me do not represent an attempt to gain status, as much as they are descriptions of what you do and possibly your role within the limited confines of a specific organization, but not designed to elevate you above others in the wider world.

I recently got into an argument about the use of the word “doctor” when used in a non medical setting by someone with a PhD. I simply refuse to call a non-medical person “doctor”, I might call an MD “doctor” on occasion just to avoid conflict since I will often say I am going to the “doctor's office” and thus I tend to see calling an MD a doctor to be more descriptive than status elevating, but a PhD in accounting? I don't really care if they have an advanced degree I don't see how the title is descriptive of what they do and so I do not want to use the term. I don't have history on my side on this except among the Quakers who refuse to use titles that are designed to elevate one person over another. I am a friend with them on this.

Doctor is common in the US, so it is what brought up the argument, but if I lived somewhere with royalty I would refuse to call someone a duke or duchess, prince or princess as well. Simply put if you have a title that you use to make yourself feel like you are superior to another person, do not expect me to address you by it. I am fine with “John the auto mechanic”, but I am not okay with “Dr. John, the auto mechanic” who also has a PhD in art history, but found that he couldn't get a very good paying job with his education, and likes to act superior to his peers by calling himself “doctor”.

Festers financial advice part 3

2011-08-30T11:04:00.000-07:00

The first rule of investing is don't lose money.

A co-worker asked the other day what to do with his 401k. This is a very tricky question and a lot depends on your circumstances, the choices you have in your 401k, when you plan to retire, etc. However, I can tell you what I have done and I decided to go this way after much trial and error. The company I work for matches up to the first 4% of your contribution. There are limited choices and the two main choices we are offered are stock funds and bond funds. The choices don't really seem to be all that diverse, there are several choices but they all seem to be really similar in composition for their group (i.e. stocks, bonds). If given any choice to invest in I recommend the Permanent Portfolio, which is outlined in Harry Browne's book Fail Safe Investing. However, for the 401k this was not anywhere near an option. So what I have done is contribute the 4% that gets matched (and in my case the match is 100%) I invested it in a low yield, but stable bond fund. Technically inflation is growing at a faster rate than the return on the bond fund I am invested in, but because of the company match for every $1000 I put in the company matches $1000, and the yield is 3% or so. I am not losing any money in actual dollars and compared to my counterparts who invested in stocks that have seen negative yields over the years even after the matching funds, and after the company match I am making about a 103% return on investment, this has got to be a win. Where my co-workers have seen declines in the total dollar value of their 401k, I have only seen gains in recent years (at one point I was more foolish and lost a lot of money trying to win at the rigged game of the stock market, you live and learn sometimes).

Here is what you need to know about mutual funds, almost none out perform the market over the long run. The manager of the fund always gets paid, even when the fund loses value. The stock market has reached a point where smart people have become very good at being vultures using its ups and down to get rich at other peoples expense and you are part of the “other people” group. I say no more than 25% of your saving should be in stocks, and that 25% should be in a fund like the vanguard 500 fund where they do very little active management and have a low expense ratio, forget about these supposed “experts” who suck, and forget about thinking you are the next Warren Buffett, if you are then you don't need my advice.

One last thing, NEVER, EVER, EVER, put all of your money into one stock. The co-worker that brought me to write this post had a large percentage of his 401k in the stock of the company we work for. This is the worst possible idea. If the company goes belly up or suffers some major downfall (think Enron) then you are not only out of a job, but your entire savings has been wiped out as well.

Fester's Financial advice part 2

2011-08-29T15:34:00.000-07:00

I was having a discussion with a co-worker the other day and he mentioned that his wife wants to retire in 5 years, but he is worried about the financial hit they would take if she were to retire and asked my opinion on what would be the best investment with a goal of early retirement for his wife in mind. I answered “pay off your house”.

I asked him “how much is your mortgage?” he said $1200 a month. He still owes over $100,000 on his house, but it is still his best option even if he is currently paying a low rate of interest. Here is why: If you can be fairly sure of getting about a 5% return on your savings/investments you would need $240,000 in savings to earn $1200 a month from your investments, and possibly more if you figure that you may have to pay taxes on the interest you earn. However, you could get the same effect to your lifestyle by paying off the house, so investing $100,000 into your house is like saving or investing $240,000 in a vehicle that has a 5% rate of return. Right now they combine their incomes and need to bring in an extra $1,200 a month just to cover the mortgage. In a scenario where the house was paid off his wife could at least change to part time work and take a $1,200 a month pay cut and their lifestyle would not have to suffer at all.

Tyranny in the desert

2011-08-25T15:48:00.000-07:00

This is sad, LA county forcing people off of their land. The speculation is that they are doing this because if a highway is put in the area, the land will become valuable, and the same government insiders who control the nuisance department, also would have most inside information about where any potential government land development would go.

Fester's financial advice

2011-08-24T06:28:00.000-07:00

I could have been a personal financial planner, and I considered it at one point. If I thought that anyone would actually listen to my advice, I might have done it. Unfortunately my experience is that people with financial issues rarely want to take the actual steps needed in order for them to get their lives in order, so I don't think I would find that line of work very rewarding. I can see myself giving advice and watching in bewilderment as the advice I give is repeatedly ignored, even by those who came to me seeking advice and over time becoming less and less satisfied with that as a career.

It seems that with tough financial times, more people are open to listening to sound financial advice now.

If I could give people one piece of advice and nothing else, I would tell them to save a little bit of money. No matter how in debt you are, the key to wealth is keeping the money you make. If you are in debt, this seems counter intuitive to save. However, the truth is that you will never escape the debt cycle until you start to save. Make any adjustments to your lifestyle you need to accommodate this. Save something, anything! For most people the minimum I would say is $25 a week. It seems like the best advice would be to pay off debt first and then save, but I believe this to not be the case and in studies done it seems saving is more important than paying off debt. You get the spiraling debt effect if you don't save. What this means is that you find say $200 a month in savings by cutting out some partying or something, you put that towards your credit card and neglect to save any money. Then your car breaks down, so what do you do? You put the repairs on your credit card and now you are right back to where you were, or worse off! Only once you have a significant enough savings to cover any likely emergency would I then recommend paying the debt down, and even once you are in this position I would still recommend you continue to save a little so if you save $200 a month for 5 months and get a cushion of $1000 and decided this is enough to cover most emergencies you are likely to encounter, I would say continue to add $20 a month into your savings and use the other $180 to pay the debts down). Once you are ready to start paying down your debt, I would pay for the lowest amount owed bill first, so let's say you have a Sears card on it and you owe $1000 on it, pay that off first, then use the money you save from both the minimum you were paying on the Sears card, and the extra you were applying to the principle on the debt to pay off the next lowest debt you have, keep doing the same thing until you have all of your debt paid off and don't get any new debt (that is what the emergency fund is for, to pay for any new unexpected thing that may come up).

If you follow this advice, and stop accumulating new debt, you will be out of debt within a few years and can get your life on track. Taxes are slavery, but debt is voluntary indentured servitude to the banksters, and neither are good if your goal is personal freedom.

Capitalism, A Love Story... Review

2011-08-16T10:42:00.000-07:00

I watched “Capitalism-A love Story” a couple of nights ago. I don't think Michael Moore's definition of capitalism is the same as mine. He seems to think it is a political system, and I don't. It is true some people confuse fascism and capitalism, but capitalism is the free market at work without government involvement, the second the government gets involved in a transaction between two parties it ceases to be a free market transaction and becomes something else. Whether that interference is through regulation, taxes, government granted monopoly, or other medium, it is no longer a free market transaction and should no longer count as an act of capitalism, at the minimum it becomes an act of corporatism.

I often wonder if Moore believes his own crap, since in his movies he seems to find the worst examples of the point he is trying to illustrate and this to me hurts his overall message and I wonder if it is intentional.

In the case of Capitalism, he cites a corrupt government judge who shut down a government youth prison, contracted with a “private” firm to build a new youth prison and then the new prison and the judge shared the profits that were made by imprisoning teenagers. I just don't see a company hired by the government, getting all of its business from the government and working with the government courts to pull off a scheme like this as being capitalistic in any way. When a “private” firm, earns 100% of its revenue through government contracts can it still be considered to be independent from the government?

He profiles two people who had their homes repossessed and expects us to feel sorry for how they were mistreated by the banks. I feel sorry for some people who have had their homes repossessed, but he seemed to find two of the worst examples possible. First was a guy whose family had owned the property he was living on for four generations. To me this sounds like he inherited property that should have been paid off 100 years ago, so how the hell did the bank lay claim to it? The only explanation is that he refinanced the property and cashed in on the equity at some point and then was unable to pay it back. Second example, a family that had owned their home for 22 years before it was repossessed. 22 years and they still are upside down? They had 22 years to pay off the house and never did? You know my philosophy on home ownership is that if it takes more than 15 years to pay off your home, you cannot afford it. Besides how much could they possibly owe on the original mortgage after 22 years? That house was not an expensive house now and 22 years ago it would have been far less expensive. It is hard to feel sorry for them knowing the likely back story is that the kept refinancing the equity in their house even though they are poor as dirt, until it came back to haunt them. Also the true failure of capitalism in this case is that the banks gave so many loans to those who never should have gotten them, and they did this because of political pressure and unspoken guarantees of a bailout.

He spends a lot of time focused on a couple of regional airline pilots and how little money they make. The thing is that capitalism is a supply and demand equation, there are far more people who want to be pilots, then there is demand for commercial pilots, this means a pilots skills simply don't command high salaries, especially those only certified for smaller airplanes. I feel somewhat sorry for them, but really if you can't live on a pilots salary, don't go into the field.

He acts like a fool driving around an armored car to various banks trying to get taxpayer money back. However, the banks (as evil as they are) did not take the tax money from the citizens in the first place, nor did they have the authority to bail themselves out with tax money, only the government had that authority, so it seems like a problem with the government misallocating tax money more than a problem with capitalism.

Overall I was not impressed. He made almost no convincing arguments, his solution at the end was stupid “support democracy”. There were a few funny moments, where he had clipped together funny bits, but it was not enough to save his movie from the overwhelming problem of showing government failures and blaming them on “capitalism” and showing peoples poor choices and blaming them on “capitalism” as well. Maybe the movie would have worked better if he had defined his meaning of capitalism at the beginning of the movie so we would all be on the same page while watching it. Because if his definition of capitalism is the government using its power to force companies to bribe government officials and then reward the companies who are the best at bribing them and harm companies that are the worst at bribing government officials, then I would agree capitalism under that definition sucks.

Ron Paul like floor 13 to the media, pretend it does not exist

2011-08-16T07:59:00.001-07:00

I know John Stewart does not support Ron Paul, but even he can see the sham that the media is when it comes to discussing Ron Paul.

Another reason not answer the door

2011-08-10T11:48:00.000-07:00

Ding Dong, I am from the government and I am here to help (you out of your money that is).

When the FHA gets out of the way, Here comes the neighborhood!

2011-08-08T15:54:00.000-07:00

I have noticed my neighborhood has improved in the last few years, a much higher quality person has been moving in to my little community and petty vandalism and petty theft is down. It seems like new people moving in are also better off financially, have a better education, etc. Since the cost of housing here has also been driven down over the last few years, you would expect the opposite. So what might cause this apparent dichotomy? The answer is simple, the FHA will not loan for my complex since it is a “Patio Home” community and that is simply too unusual of a type of housing for the FHA to know what to do with it, so they just disqualify it from the get-go. For those that don't know a patio home is a stand alone house connected to its neighboring house by a patio, so its a cross between a tradition home and a town home.

How does not qualifying for an FHA loan improve the neighborhood? A few years ago when it seemed like any loser with a $1000 and a pulse could qualify for a home loan, the neighborhood really started to go south. There were a lot of shifty, unstable types moving in. After the housing crash most of these people had their homes repossessed by the banks and they were kicked out. This created a dramatic drop in the value of the homes here, and good deals were to be had for anyone who could qualify. However, the standard for qualification went way up, you need better credit and a higher down payment now than what the banks previously required. Now the only low down payment, high risk borrower who has any chance of getting a loan has only one choice, the FHA and those people can't buy a house in my community since the FHA does not loan for patio homes. Over time the neighborhood has improved as the bad risks have failed to keep up with their mortgage payments, and the people buying the houses vacated by those people are middle class people with decent credit and good down payments, who gravitated to the patio home community because it offers an affordable low maintenance way to get into a house with more size and features than more traditional houses on a dollar for dollar basis (more bang for the buck!). I am glad now, more than ever that I bought a home that is not "FHA Approved".

The Hidden Costs of "Free" Education

2011-08-02T06:56:00.000-07:00

The other night on “Free Talk Live” they were discussing government schools and how they should be abolished. This was on the Saturday night show where they have a lot of non-libertarian listeners, so there were a lot of calls where the callers basically said “people could not afford to pay for their kids schooling if it were not for the government distributing the costs across the whole of the community”. It is my contention that people already cannot afford the “free” school they send their kids to. The pursuit of “free” schools has created massive amounts of debt for families, has financially destroyed families, has contributed to the housing crash and the recession and is partly to blame for creating ghettos in urban areas.

My reasoning here is anecdotal from the people I know around my community. In Denver where I live, across the the metro housing prices vary widely. A large 3 bedroom house with a garage and yard, can sell for as low as 150k in the poor areas of town, and upwards of 500k in some of the nicer areas, the same exact house if you move its location will double or triple in value depending on where it is located. What justifies difference in price is often the school district. Since you have to live in the same school district you send your kids to there is a migration by parents who want the best education for their kids from areas with lower quality government schools to what they perceive as higher quality government schools, along with the better school district comes higher housing prices. A family that could easily afford the 150k house passes it up because of the school district and ends up spending 300k on a house they really cannot afford in order to get their kids into a better school district. They go into debt they cannot afford, they have to finance the house using a 30 year note (which is ridiculous and if you have to extend a mortgage to 30 years, you cannot afford that house!). When they look at how much they spend on their kids education they only look at the cost of the property taxes, so they see the $3000 a year they spend on property taxes and think that they are getting a good deal for 2 kids, however they fail to include the extra 150k they spent trying to find a house in a better school district and the extra interest on that money in their calculations. They also don't see the social costs of the move by responsible parents who leave certain areas of town in mass creating pockets of ever declining areas of town that appear to be on a downward spiral that would not exist if the responsible and successful people in them were not driven out in an effort to obtain a better education for their kids, leaving behind only the less upwardly mobile. Also all of these people in housing that was more expensive then what they could actually afford was a large contributing factor in the housing crises. The societal ramifications of “free” government schools is so great that I don't believe most Americans even have any understanding of how destructive this policy has been, especially they way it is currently set up where your school is tied solely to where you live.

80% of Americans want higher taxes? They sure don't act like it

2011-07-15T19:14:00.000-07:00

I saw an article today that parroted the claim by some democrats that “80 percent of people support higher taxes”. This is a lie. Perhaps its not the politicians who are lying, and it is the group of people they polled, but somebody is lying. For this post I am going to pretend that the statistic is accurate and 80% of people answered some pollster that they support higher taxes.

I know this is a lie because the actions of people betray their words. The other day I had a little back and forth about the mortgage interest deduction on income taxes. But why were we even discussing this? If the statistic is true 80% of those who qualify for this tax deduction don't take it. 80% of people with kids, simply don't claim those kids as dependents, and 80% of people refuse to take any other tax deduction, including their personal deduction right? So only 20% of tax payers take any sort of deduction. I mean you are not going to get thrown in a cage for overpaying, or not claiming deductions that you are qualified for, so I assume those 80% of people (I must be in the minority) don't claim any deductions. This is the only logical conclusion I can make when I hear someone claim they are for higher taxes, that at the minimum they don't take any deductions, otherwise I assume they are lying, perhaps they also donate to the treasury above and beyond, but it seems doubtful, that would take effort, but not taking a deduction when filling out the tax form is actually easier than claiming. Just fill out the EZ form and don't even claim yourself..

One reason libertarians are DOOMED

2011-06-21T10:58:00.000-07:00

I often argue with my friend Mary (not her real name) about political issues, she is a pro-government person in almost every respect. So we are basically on the opposite ends of the political spectrum. She toes the democrat line on some things like welfare, education, etc, and the republican line on things like security and tightening the borders, etc, and is pretty much a totalitarian.

So a typical argument of ours goes something like this:
Fester “Taxes are theft”
Mary “taxes are not theft they are the price we pay for the the services government provides like roads, schools and defense, etc, etc.”.

I will never convince her otherwise, and for obvious reasons. Even though she likes to use the collectivist speak of “we” in reality she really pays NO TAXES so to her it seems as if the government is providing all of these services at a reasonable cost (and by reasonable I mean free). She is giving nothing and getting something for it, so she will never agree to my position. She is part of the local PTA, but she has never done anything except rent her whole adult life, so she has no idea how much of her rent goes to property taxes and when her rent is raised, the blame always lands on the “greedy” landlord and not the government. She doesn't work (she does have a small business where she sells overpriced vibrators at parties, but that makes her very little money), and has kids, so each year when filling out her income tax forms, she gets a check for $3000 more than she actually paid in. She sends her kids to government school, which even if they don't get any kind of education from that, she gets a free babysitting service. She might claim that she pays some taxes, but I have to wonder where? She lives in Nevada, where there is no sales tax on food, nor is there an income tax. She gets far more back from the federal government than she puts in. The casinos are heavily taxed and that is where the state and cities get most of the funding for the “services” that are provided. She lives in a comparable way to most other people, and even though she thinks she is poor, really it is hard to tell. She lives in a house that gives each of her kids their own bedroom, she drives a fairly new car, she has cable internet and cable TV, she has a washer and dryer and a costco membership. She will claim poverty, but she seems to live as well as people who are middle class and earn a lot more, but then have to pay a lot of their income in taxes and instead of getting a big check every year from the government, have to send the government a big check. She doesn't spend a lot on food since her kids often eat at school with a subsidized meal, and then at home a large portion of the monthly food bill is paid for using food stamps. She is all for socialized healthcare, and why not? She knows that she won't be paying for it.

We all know people like Mary, people who think the government is great because for them it is a one way street, they get the good without the bad. I don't know that these people will ever be convinced of how bad the government is until the heavy hand of the government clinches into a fist and punches them in the face.

Stop unwanted phone calls for free, and government free!

2011-06-15T11:58:00.000-07:00

A few years ago electronic devices called call zappers were becoming popular means to deter unwanted calls from solicitors, pollsters and politicians. They work on the principle that most of these calls originate not from a person dialing a telephone number but rather from a machine that dials massive amounts of telephone numbers, generally referred to as auto-dialers. One thing with these machines is they are normally programmed to listen for certain triggers to determine if they should play a standard message that will be left on an answering machine, connect you to a live person or remove the dialed number from the machines list of numbers. I am interested in the last of these options. The way these devices worked is that the auto-dialers listen for a disconnect tone and if they hear it, no matter what else it hears, it determines that the number is no longer in service and removes the number from its list of active numbers. So these devices would pick up the line and play a dsconnect tone before passing the call to the answering machine.

Call zappers went out of style once the government created the so called “do not call” list. The politicians acted like they were doing it in the response to demand from their constituents who were demanding they do something about all of the unwanted calls people were getting. In reality the reason they wanted to create the do not call list was that call zappers were becoming very popular and they worked, they worked too well, not only did they stop telemarketers, but they also stopped the calls from the politicians campaigns and from charities whose main functions were to support the government and lobby for new measures. The politicians created the do not call list and then they exempted themselves as well as charities and also “companies you have a history of doing business with”.

If this election season you do not want to get calls from pollsters, or from Obama telling you why you should support his favorite lapdog in the congress, or even these charity pick-up services that request donations of clothes, which by itself is not such a big deal, only they call every two days! All of these calls will stop if you record this disconnect tone on your answering machine greeting or on your voice mail greeting prior to your personalized greeting. Auto-dialers will think the number is no longer in service and will remove you from their list.

Here is the disconnect tone for your use:

Disconnect tone by Flag in Flames

Productivity increases, and prices increase? Thanks government

2011-06-14T15:31:00.000-07:00

The internet has made the world magnificently more productive than what it was in the past. Things that used to take hours or days, or even minutes (like sending a fax) can now be done in mere seconds. You can have a face to face meeting with someone halfway around the world without any travel. Access a libraries worth of information in seconds, find that law reference instantaneously, etc. It is great. Typically as productivity increases prices decrease, as something becomes less costly to produce the less is charged for that service. So why has there really not been any noticeable deflation in most areas of the economy? The answer of course is the federal reserve and the government. They have systematically stolen all of the wealth created by higher levels of productivity. This has been done through tax increases, and inflation of the dollar supply.

I get depressed when I see the state of the world. The fact that people think it takes two people working to make ends meet in this day and age, where one person can produce as much value as three or four people in the past because of increases in technology that make us all more productive. However, because if the liars and thieves in government, more people are working and working longer than ever and to what end? To support a larger, more bloated more inefficient government.

Pawn Stars gold for car transaction

2011-06-07T13:10:00.000-07:00

I was watching Pawn Stars last night and a man wanted to trade his antique car for gold. What I found interesting about this was that the pawn shop owner Rick said that he couldn't trade the car for the gold because that would be illegal, so he had to buy the car in federal reserve notes and then have the guy give him the money back and then he sold the man some gold coins paid for with the money Rick had just given the man. The whole transaction was rendered ridiculous by these stupid laws.

The whole idea of preventing a value for value trade of one good for another without some paper intermediary completely goes against the nature of man, and the only reason these laws are in place is because of the greed of government. You can't trade value for value because the government is so evil, stupid and greedy that they cannot figure out how to steal a portion of a trade like a car for a necklace, so they force the trade be done with a worthless medium of fake money they have created and its only value is the value created by the use of violence. The greed of the government cannot be satiated even for value to value trades where no profit is being made. I am sure they believe they should get a portion of this trade in taxes, but why? If a value for value trade was done and no profit was made on either end, how much in taxes does the government consider “fair” and based on what criteria?

Now I know that the government considers themselves so special that all taxes are just and right and fair in their minds, and they believe they have a right to a portion of any transaction made, but the reality is that they do not have any such right and it is merely a reflection of the wealth and power that has corrupted government officials for millennia. I just cannot see how this is different from a slave master who allows his slave to work outside of the plantation and then allows the slave to keep half of his earnings.

Nobody has the will to balance the budget

2011-06-01T17:46:00.000-07:00

I watched last weeks Stossel episode last night (yes I am a bit behind). He had representatives from 5 “think tanks” there to lay out their plans to balance the budget, each of these “think tanks” had been given $200,000 to come up with a plan. Of the 5 plans represented only one actually balanced the budget. Two of the plans thought that more spending would balance the budget (how this happens is beyond me and I am fairly well versed in economics). None of them eliminated any significant government agencies. Most did not really cut military spending, one said we hope for war to end by 2015, but this is a pipe dream as long as the infrastructure is there for politicians to start wars, they will find new enemies to start wars with. It is like the kid who carries drum sticks wherever he goes, he finds new things to use as a drum. I was disappointed, but not surprised by the results.

Almost all the plans included tax increases. One of the liberal think tanks kept trying to say that taxes were higher under Clinton and the economy did just fine, this is true, but it is not because of higher taxes that the economy progressed, it was in spite of higher taxes, the reason for the boom under Clinton was that productivity was increasing at an amazing rate because the 90's were when the internet really became a reality in the way we know it.

In my world, I would balance the budget by starting a systematic shutdown of the government. I would start off easy enough and end the war on drugs, shut down the DEA, reduce budgets of the FBI and CIA since they would no longer need to worry about drug prohibition. Then I would start reducing the military by shutting down all overseas bases. I would end the department of education. I would end all corporate welfare and farm subsidies. Once this was all accomplished I would start hitting the entitlements by allowing people to opt out of social security, both in collecting SS and paying into SS and then I would implement a plan to phase it out, same with medicare. I would eliminate tariffs and would open the borders and shut down all immigration related departments as well as customs which would not be needed in a society free of tariffs and restrictions on drugs, immigration and other contraband. Unfortunately my plan will never even be considered by politicians, and instead of a relatively slow ratcheting down of government so that the actual services government provides can transition away from government and to the free market, instead the politicians will grow government until there is a Soviet style collapse, this is the lesson that history teaches, but politicians never learn.

A few thoughts on Osama Bin Laden's (OBL) death.

2011-05-03T11:20:00.000-07:00

My first thought was that I was surprised the government was claiming to have killed him at this time, since I had believed he was probably already dead. The reports were that OBL was on dialysis and then former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto had made the claim that Osama had been murdered (this was before she was murdered) and there has been little evidence of OBL's existence for the past several years, every once in a while a grainy video or weird audio was claimed to be from OBL, but I never really thought these were very conclusive proof of his continued life.

I am not going to be a “deather” I will take the government's word that they finally found and killed him after 9 years of failure they finally got their man. From the accounts I have read the hit on OBL was nothing less than cold blooded murder. It appears they had asked him to surrender and when he did not, even though he was unarmed, they shot him in the head (twice). He never stood trial, he was never convicted of a crime, he was simply murdered by the Navy SEAL assassination team. I don't believe in the death penalty, but even if I did I would not support a policy of a pre-trial death penalty. This sets the precedent that any criminal can be murdered if it suits political means.

The last thought I have is that since 9/11 the US government has given the Pakistan government about 18 billion dollars in foreign aid, much of that was for military purposes, supposedly because they were aiding the US in the “war on terror”, then OBL was found to be less than a half mile from the headquarters of the Pakistani Military Academy, this would make it seem likely the Pakistan military knew where he was and was likely protecting him since this compound (which is more like a mansion than the cold Afghanistan cave he was supposedly bunkered up in) had been his home reportedly for 5 years. This makes me think that there is at least a good possibility that the Pakistani military didn't want OBL to be found, lest it stop the US taxpayer gravy train. Screwing taxpayers both ways, paying to try and locate him, and paying to keep him hidden.

TSA molests beauty queen

2011-04-28T15:10:00.000-07:00

The TSA makes me sick. This chick is fine as wine and I would love to touch her where the sun don't shine, but I would be in jail if I did, and so should these fuckers, a badge does not give you the right to violate people.

here is the FIF song TSA, it was written and made very quickly, but it captures my rage well.
TSA by Flag in Flames

Keynes vs Hayek round 2

2011-04-28T15:01:00.000-07:00

I am an economics geek, so I found this video enthralling. Keynes vs Hayek round 2, rapping your economics.

Pirate Radio

2011-04-26T19:35:00.001-07:00

I saw the movie Pirate Radio a few days ago and I have to say, it is a great film! I enjoyed it more than Atlas Shrugged and felt it was equally as libertarian in theme, maybe a bit more libertine in some ways. If you haven't seen it and lean libertarian and like tales of rock and roll, you must see this movie.

A quick synopsis of the movie would be that it is about a heroic crew of radio DJ's who are fighting the British government and censorship in an effort to bring rock and roll to the oppressed masses in the socialist England of the not too distant past. The government had banned rock radio from the official channels and so the pirate radio crew played from a boat stationed a couple of miles off of the English coast, away from the intrusive censorship laws. This does not stop the evil government officials from seeking to shut them down, even though they are not breaking any laws. A great line in the movie is when the government official is told that they are not breaking any laws and he responds “that's the nice thing about being in government, if they are not breaking any laws, we simply change the law!”.

Sheldon Richman and schools

2011-04-25T14:59:00.000-07:00

The other day at work I managed to raise the ire of a coworker by stating that "there is no such a thing as a good government school", of course he got defensive and said "I have to disagree, my kids go to a good public school". I didn't mean to start an argument, and I am sure his kids go to a better government school when compared to other government schools. I said that because to me the structure of the government school system is flawed and no amount of money or effort will remedy the problem as long as the one size fits all structure remains in place.

On a related topic, I had dinner with some friends who have a teenage boy in the government school system, I asked him about his classes, what they did in school, etc. On one hand it sounded like he was doing a lot, being young and in a trigonometry class (something I never even took in high school), on the other hand he described class after class where they watched movies, youtube videos and other stuff like that. His mom even told me in an almost proud fashion "they are very into multimedia at his school". I am not sure about this. I find kids working at restaurants who cannot calculate correct change in their heads, despite supposedly being taught algebra by fifth grade, and the multimedia thing seems great for lazy teachers. This is just one case, but it gave me a glimpse into the school system that I don't see.

Sheldon Richman agrees with me on schools and the need to eliminate all government education. It is not only the morally right thing to so to eliminate the theft that is behind the taxation used to fund these schools, but it is also the right thing to do in terms of an overall improvement in the quality of education most kids will receive.

Adam vs the Man

2011-04-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

I have been watching Adam vs The Man. I like it, a 30 minute daily show presenting current events from a libertarian perspective. I like his presentation better than Judge Napalitano. I like the Stossel show as well, but it is a once weekly show.

http://www.adamvstheman.com/

Atlas Shrugged Movie

2011-04-18T14:13:00.000-07:00

Went to see Atlas Shrugged

If you liked the book, I think you will like the movie. I liked the book, but read it about 15 years ago (actually I listened to the book, on cassette!) so I had forgotten as much as I remembered.

The movie was very true to the book which was both a bonus and a curse, the bonus because it allowed many of the ideas in the book to be presented, a curse because like the book at times it was slow and wordy. At times it had the feel of a soap opera.

I normally like my movies to be action packed and full of ultraviolence, so this was definitely a slower movie for me, but overall it was fun. It got exciting towards the end. After seeing so many movies about some cop, some military “hero” or other bureaucrat, it was a refreshing change to see a movie where the heroes are all smart, driven, hard working people. These are real life heroes, men and women who work hard to create something beautiful, instead most films are about those who seek to destroy things instead of build things.

New FIF song

2011-04-13T15:20:00.001-07:00

New Flag in Flames song has been posted. Government it is a cancer.

http://flag-in-flames.blogspot.com/2011/04/cancer.html

What does give mean? What does take mean?

2011-04-12T07:38:00.000-07:00

I watched last weeks episode of Stossel last night. He had a liberal on explaining his take on the budget plan. He said “The republicans plan will take food from the mouths of the poor while giving the richest people in America a fat paycheck”. His argument would be persuasive if you accept his definitions of the words "GIVE" and "TAKE". In the world I live in "give" means to give someone something they didn't previously have, and "take" means to take something from someone they already have, however this liberal commentator reverses the meaning of these words to make his argument. When he says “The republicans plan will take food from the mouths of the poor”, he meant that the plan will not give food stamp recipients as much in future food stamp dollars. When he says “They are giving the richest people in America a fat paycheck” he means the government is not taking as much in tax money from people. It is completely ass backwards and that kind of rhetoric is why a serious discussion and debate cannot be had on the issues that confront people, if an agreement on the definition of simple to understand words like give and take cannot be agreed on then what about more esoteric words like “terror”, “war”, “poverty” and many other words where the definitions are already far more subjective?

I support an abolition of the entire federal government, so I don't see cuts of any sort as a bad thing. This puts me at odds with the spend happy liberals. However, I believe that if the only way you can craft a persuasive argument for your ideas is to change the definition of words in order to create an argument that is acceptable to people then you have already lost the debate. I hope most people are smart enough to see through this kind of crap, but unfortunately I do not have a lot of hope in this matter. Politicians have already ruined the term "cut" as in "the government cut spending". In my world if I say I cut my food budget, I mean something like I went from having a food budget of $100 to $80, but in government speak cutting the budget means going from spending $100 to spending $102, and the cut was because at some point in the past they believed they would be able to spend $105.

Government shut down tricks

2011-04-08T05:27:00.000-07:00

If the government shuts down, on the news you will hear mostly stories about how people are on vacation and could not get into some national park, or are leaving for vacation and cannot get passports. The funny thing is that passports and most national parks are self funding entities so they only shut those down to build public pressure to have all these government functions restored.

Great intro into Voluntaryism

2011-04-05T07:31:00.001-07:00

50 minute long intro into voluntarism, this is actually very well done and is entertaining. If you have a friend who does not understand the philosophy of voluntary interaction for all issues, but is willing to learn, direct him/her to this video.

Liberal gets his butt handed to him over Libya

2011-03-31T14:26:00.000-07:00

This is pretty funny, Ed Schultz has his head so far up Obama's ass that he cannot see that military action against Libya is a bad idea. I am sure if McCain had won in the last election he would be singing a different tune, but a partisan doesn't have to make any consistent sense, they only have to suck up to their masters in Washington and tow the party line. What is funny is to hear how the tune changes about war as soon as a democrat is in office.

I have to think Scott Horton is right on this and that the President is supporting the "freedom fighters" in Libya in an effort to change the story from "America is backing all of these evil dictators and giving them billions of dollars", to "America is supporting the rebels" (at least in this one country, and it has effectively changed the news coverage and the story is longer about how many dictators Obama is cozy with and how many billions we have given to horrible dictators who exterminate their own people.

Why pay off a mortgage with todays more expensive dollars?

2011-03-22T11:51:00.000-07:00

I believe the US is going to go into a period of extreme inflation over the next few years.

The other day I was asked why would I be paying off my house sooner than needed if I thought inflation is coming, why pay with today's more valuable dollars what you can pay later with less valuable dollars? It is a fair question and deserves a fair answer. The reason basically boils down to I am trying to get my financial house in order before the shit hits the fan.

Although it may be true that in the future I could pay back my mortgage with reduced dollars, if gas is $10 a gallon and food is 3-4x as expensive as it currently is, if everything we buy has risen in price, sure my fixed rate mortgage might not seem like such an expense in comparison, but it may be that so many other things have risen in cost to the point where I can no longer afford my mortgage, no matter how relatively inexpensive to my other bills it has become. My mortgage is one of the few expenses I can pay off now, and this opens that money up for future expenses. Lets say that right now I make $2000 a month, and spend $1000 on mortgage, $500 on home related bills, and $500 on food and luxuries. I am living like most people and it is pretty much paycheck to paycheck. If everything remains constant then I am doing just fine, but what if the price of food and energy goes up and suddenly I need $750 for home related bills like electricity and $750 for food and stuff. I may be able to cut back to some extent, but how much? Could I cut back enough to keep those expenses at my current costs? Maybe I could make more money, but then again maybe not, I am getting older and some of my more valuable skills have lost some luster as technology has made them obsolete. In this scenario I have very little flexibility. Now imagine if I pay off the mortgage expense, I then have an extra $1000 a month in cushion and can absorb even a 100% increase in the cost of everything else. If I am wrong and the inflation does not hit, then I am even better off because I have an extra $1000 a month to invest or do whatever with and my other expenses have not risen. If I am right, I can handle the change mush easier than my peers, who will be scrambling to live a lifestyle even remotely close to what they currently live. I do not see a down side.

I cannot truly predict the future, but I can predict with great certainty that in the future I will need a place to live, I can also predict that the lower my living expenses are the better off I will be. I don't need a magic ball to see this.

Like it or not, tea party types, probably not sock puppets

2011-03-18T16:17:00.000-07:00

One of my lefty friends posted an article on facebook about the military using software that creates fake online personalities that it then uses to promote its own propaganda. The idea is terrible and is likely to cause more harm than good, because then people will suspect that real posters with opposing views are merely fake persona's created by some ominous organization. Much like agent provocateurs, once someone is outed as a fake it will only add fuel to the fire of the opposition.

Now the fun part, as soon as he posted this article two of his friends posted some inane crap about suspecting that most tea baggers are probably fake profiles using this technology. I don't buy it, first off the article focused in on government agencies using this method to try and sway the conversation, so it is unlikely that the government would try and gin up support for a group like the tea party which is at least moderately anti-government. There are two types of tea party members, the majority are flag waving republican types who don't like Obomber, but love Glen Beck, the military, and all things republican. However, there is another group of tea party types who are much more radical and are more the Ron Paul faction of the tea party then the Sarah Palin faction. I cannot see the government wanting to promote the agenda of Ron Paul in any circumstance.

I think my friend realized I was probably correct in my assertion that it is unlikely for the government to wish to promote the tea party agenda as so much of it is anti-government, anti-imperialism, and anti-Obama. So he changed tactics and said that it can be used by anyone who can afford the fee and maybe is being used by people like the Koch brothers. This seems unlikely as well, but lets pretend that this is the case and wealthy people are paying someone to create fake profiles and post articles and whatnot that support whatever the rich persons agenda is. Would it really matter much? Let's say Charles Koch pays some people to promote some issue he supports like lower taxes and he was successful, then George Soros pays people to pretend like they oppose lower taxes, then is it not a wash? Also many, many more of the extremely wealthy are left leaning democrats than any more radical republican or libertarian types. Rich tea party types and libertarians are far outnumbered by people like Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and others who are more statist and liberal leaning and are also very rich. If anything the most likely to use this concept besides the government are those who benefit from the corrupt government policies, and that mostly consists of large corporations that make their money from government action like companies involved in the military industrial complex, banks, prison industrial complex, and colleges that get large grants from the government. Otherwise it may be companies who are involved in a PR nightmare, like BP during the oil spill, but that will pretty obvious.

Obey the Dot!

2011-03-10T15:35:00.000-08:00

Fun with Larken rose.

Stupid Union Joke proven to be stupid even by liberal standards

2011-03-01T10:22:00.000-08:00

One of my facebook friends posted this “joke” and then I see it on Livejournal a couple of days later:

"A unionized public employee, a member of the Tea Party and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table there is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies, looks at the tea partier and says,"look out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie".

It is not funny and not accurate. A more accurate, and equally as unfunny version would read something like this:

"A tea party member and a CEO form a working arrangement where the tea party guy contracts with the CEO to bake 12 cookies, the CEO takes 8 since it was his flour, water and sugar used to bake the cookies, and the tea partier keeps 4 cookies for his labor, then government takes two cookies from the tea partier and four from the CEO and gives it to the "public employee" who did not have anything to do with the making of the cookies".

What is not acknowledged in the original “joke” is the the public union employee will get his cookies one way or another and likely it is by using the guns of government to steal cookies from both the CEO and the tea partier (who to me represents the working class taxpayer for the purposes of this joke).

Parking Customer Service

2011-02-22T12:05:00.000-08:00

I received a parking ticket a week ago, I decided to call the parking bureau and point out the injustice of their system. There are lots of funny parts to this conversation, the agent admitted there is no victim, that the fine is arbitrary, that the basic crime is not being psychic enough to predetermine how long something is going to take. About 6 minutes long.

Calling parking by Flag in Flames

Parking meters run on an unethical business model

2011-02-17T16:31:00.000-08:00

Imagine you find a great deal on a hotel so you stay the night. The checkout time on the room is 10:00 am. You actually checkout at 10:10 am, because you were running slightly behind. Now imagine if the hotel tells you that since you checked out late they are going to charge you the dollar equivalent of a months worth of room fees. When you confront them about it they tell you it is to teach you a lesson to always checkout on time. You then find out that they have structured their business plan on the assumption that a large percentage of people will not be able to checkout on time and they will then get this windfall and when you confront them about they say “well, we give people a good deal on the hotel room, but then make up for the loss with dummies like you who can't read the card on the door that says “Checkout at 10:00”. This would seem like a really immoral and ridiculous way to do the business model and the hotel would likely go out of business once the word spread of their unethical business practices. The ethical way to resolve this would be to charge for the extra time or at the most charge for another nights stay, but then at least give the party the option of staying another night since they paid for it it. Anything more would be excessive in most peoples eyes, and it certainly would be considered unethical if the hotel took steps towards making it difficult to know when checkout time was and being able to get to the checkout on time just so they could get more of these "late checkout time penalties".

Now if you have read this far, you probably agree that this would be a poor business model and that is why we don't see this model used in business. We do see this model model used in government however, namely this is exactly the way parking meters work. The more ethical way of dealing with parking would be to give the spots in front of houses/businesses to those owners and let them decide how they wish to deal with the parking spots. In lieu of that they would need to come up with some way of paying for the spot when you leave a spot instead of when you arrive so how long you actually stayed can be assessed instead of forcing you to try and guess how long your stay is going to be before hand.

Don't boycott Chick-Fil-A, boycott the government

2011-02-09T11:18:00.000-08:00

A friend on facebook posted a while back that we should boycott Target because they supported some organization that was against government recognition of gay marriage. Then more recently another friend posted that Chick-Fil-A should be boycotted for the same reason. However, it seems to me that in both of these cases the problem gays have is not with Target or Chick-Fil-A, but rather with the governments current marriage policy. It seems to me that these companies owners are in support of the current government policy. Instead of trying to keep a list of all of the various evil CEO's who support the status quo, why not instead boycott the government until they do as you want? This seems to really strike at the root of the problem. Of course they won't do that because unlike target or chick-fil-a, if you refuse to do “business” with the government, you will be attacked and violence will be inflicted upon you.

Cops are liars, even when they are on the Biggest Loser

2011-02-04T08:01:00.000-08:00

Another biggest loser post. I think this show is one of the only shows I watch that tends to have annoying political messages in it (intended or not) and that is why I post about it.

This season there was a pair of cops Dan and Don, twin brothers who were both long time police officers. They really did not represent their profession in a positive light, but probably an accurate light. They both left the show after intentionally gaining weight. They were both fairly lazy compared to the other players, but the real problem is that both were liars and neither seemed to even admit to themselves that they were acting in an immoral fashion and lying and cheating to get to their own goals (in this case it was to get kicked off the show). Here is how it played out:

Both cops gained weight at a weigh in. One goes home because he misses his family. Both deny that they did anything to gain weight and both acted like they were as surprised as anyone. This was obviously a lie, even after being called out by the trainer they still stuck to to their lies and deception. The one cop who remained on the ranch then claims he “doesn't want to go home, he didn't rig the weigh in, and will give 100% to prove it to everyone”. The very next week he gains weight again, and so does his new partner, she admits to rigging the weigh in and then the clincher, after she admits to weight gaining the cop says “I never lie, so I will admit that I rigged the weigh in because I want to go home”. Hold on, he thinks he never lies? How does he figure? The exact same thing happened the previous week and he claimed he did not rig the weigh in and then he only admits to rigging the second weigh in after the scam was exposed by a more honest player. He also had claimed earlier that he did not want to go home and was going to give it his all, I don't know if he really thought this at the time or not, but he was either deceiving himself or straight up lying and I have to go with lying due to his track record of lying on the show. I have seen many other players over the years use similar deception and tricks, it always bothers me, but this one was worse because in the past the guilty party always seemed a little remorseful about their actions, but in this case it seemed like these police officers didn't even know they were doing anything wrong. I don't think there is anything wrong with wanting to go home, or with water gaining so that you will go home, but there is something wrong with lying about it. It also bothers me that these two were cops in their real life. The reason it bothers me that they were police officers is that I know that most police are lairs and are corrupted, but they generally try to create an image of the virtuous public servant and despite all of the evidence to the contrary people sometimes still believe this myth and on this show it was not even mentioned that the two players who were most deceptive were also those that some members of the public hold in higher esteem than your average Joe, even though the average Joes on the show showed themselves to be superior in every way over the two officers.

Another police abuse video that will make you sick.

2011-02-04T06:27:00.000-08:00

"Don't worry it is just a few bad apples, the system is just fine..."

Watch and ask yourself if you still believe this crap about a few bad apples. Not only are the cops out of control, but the judges and district attorneys as well. This video makes me sick because I know it is not any kind of isolated incident. After one cop kicks the suspect in the head a dozen times, he moves around and starts kicking him in the groin a few times.

This video makes me sick.

Why would one believe that new "high speed rail" travelers would not be subject to TSA pat downs?

2011-01-26T07:44:00.000-08:00

Even if you believe that the government is going to spend billions upon billions in an ill-conceived attempt to build high speed rail across the north American continent, what on earth would lead one to believe that the TSA would not have their grubby little fingers fondling you at the train stations? They are already doing random checks at bus stations and Amtrak stations with their VIPER team. If anything the pat downs and the police state tactics are going to be worse over time and not better.

There is no Palin-Loughner link, get over it

2011-01-11T06:54:00.000-08:00

Question: What do Sarah Palin and Jared Lee Loughner have in common? Answer: Nothing

So why is it that on my facebook page my democrat friends keep posting articles showing a map created before the election that shows congress people targeted by the GOP to try and knock out of office as some sort of connection to the Arizona shootings.

First off let me make this very clear, I am no fan of Sarah Palin and so I am not taking her side out of any sort of affection for her.

There is no evidence at all that Loughner ever saw that map, that it influenced him in any way or that he he listened to or was a follower of anything Sarah Palin did or said, I repeat NO EVIDENCE of any of this. Why are they trying to link the two then and make it seem like Loughner took Palins map as some sort of guide to who to kill, when in fact he seemed to have an obsession with this Giffords woman going back to 2007 when he asked her a nonsensical question that she didn't know how to answer to his liking. The answer is simple and it is an old trick, link two unrelated people in peoples minds to discredit one of them and allow for the transfer of hatred of one to the other. This is the tactic that was used to link Saddam Hussein to Osama Bin Laden even though in reality there was no connection, it was so effective that at one time something like 45% of the population thought Saddam plotted with Osama to pull of the attack on 9/11 or he was at least helping Osama in some way, of course there was no connection in reality. They did this by putting out articles that said things like “the terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden's whereabouts are unknown [stop] Saddam Hussein is harboring terrorists in Iraq and offering them protection [stop]”. This is the same tactic the left is now using to try and link Palin with Loughner. They keep linking an article that says:

“Sarah Palin has a special responsibility and opportunity in the wake of the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. For it was Sarah Palin and Sarah Palin alone who earlier put the crosshairs of a gun on Rep. Giffords.”

The problem is that Sarah Palin does not have any sort of special responsibility for the attempted assassination of Giffords. In fact it unclear what the politics of Loughner really were, it is clear that in high school his classmates considered him a liberal, and now he is obsessed with language and currency. What is not as clear is that he had followed any republican politicians or talk show hosts or anyone of these supposed “inciters”. To try and link him to Sarah Palin is intellectually dishonest and stinks of unthinking partisanship. There are plenty of things to dislike Palin for, without having to invent nonexistent connections to Loughner and the shooting in Arizona. If there is a connection of some sort it has yet to come out and until it does this is irresponsible behavior on the part of the lefties attempting to connect the two.

Massacre 7 people shot, but only one worth talking about

2011-01-09T15:46:00.000-08:00

I don't know much about this shooting in Arizona. I have not researched the shooter or anything else. I have only read one article on the incident and this is how it started out:

TUCSON, Arizona – An initial portrait of the man accused of shooting Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in the head in an attack that also killed six people outside a Tucson grocery store slowly began to emerge,

Now here is the problem I have with the mainstream media, they lionize politicians. I read that sentence and read “one important person from the ruling elite was shot, and six mundanes not even worth naming were killed...”. Then politicians wonder why some people are disgusted with them.

Stop the red light camera madness!

2011-01-04T13:37:00.000-08:00

Aurora Colorado currently has four red light cameras. They are adding another ten cameras. The bureaucrats who are doing this are making the false claim that these cameras increase safety. However, accidents actually increased at 3 of the 4 intersections with red light cameras. Overall total accident numbers combined at the four intersections remained nearly identical in the comparison (168 vs 169) in a one year period.

For more information visit:
http://www.cragaurora.com/

The world's most important drum break

2010-12-17T07:45:00.000-08:00

Here is a very interesting video about a 6 second drum break that has been sampled hundreds of times and used in many ways, by many creative people, and how this explosion of creative projects that utilized this sample was only made possible because the original copyright owner never pursued any kind of legal action towards those who used this sample. Copyright laws are out of control, and as a musician who uses samples as my main tool, I can tell you from personal experience that it sucks to always have to think about where your sample came from and if it is going to cause you trouble in the future (I don't believe in intellectual property, but it doesn't mean that someone cannot use the government against me in this regard).

Funny as I write this a song by M.I.A. came on and they are a sample heavy band that I hope understands the fallacy of copyright and how it destroys creativity instead of benefiting creative endeavors. Copyright is great for corporations, and terrible for artists.

The government created wikileaks

2010-12-02T16:23:00.000-08:00

“The way to make government responsible is to hold it accountable. And the way to make government accountable is make it transparent"- Barack Obama 1/21/09

The government created wikileaks. Not in the literal sense, but in the market sense. There is a need and desire for transparency. In the marketplace, whenever there is a need, there are going to be people to step in and fill that need. Wikileaks has stepped in to fill that void. If governments were not so secretive then there would be no need for wikileaks.

The US government claims it has to be “the worlds police”, if this is the case then they need to operate in the open and explain their actions. They may not like wikileaks since they cannot control what gets released, when it gets released, and how it is released (some have accused wikileaks of editing). But the government created the need for wikileaks by building an empire on secrets, violence and corruption. They have attacked other countries based on information that turned out to be falsified, they have misled the American people over and over again, and continually show themselves to not be worthy of trust.

Perfect decisions are only possible with perfect knowledge, and even though this is never really possible, it is made less possible the more information is kept secret from you, this holds true in all aspects of life. The less you know, the more likely you are to make bad decisions. Wikileaks is doing the world a favor by exposing more secrets and providing everyone with a greater level of information upon which they can make future decisions.

The green, the gold

2010-11-23T10:04:00.000-08:00

I have been trying to write a song using these lyrics for a long time and have not been able to come up with vocals sounding how I want them to sound. So for now I am just publishing the lyrics. How often do you hear a song about fiat currency? I want to change that, I just wish I had a better singing voice.

The green
the Gold
the young
the Old

The green
The gold
The lies that have been told

One was created through nature
One was created through crime

One is just a baby
One has stood the test of time

The green
The Gold
The young
The Old

The green
The gold
The lies that have been told

Gold is a metal that remains true
Green is a paper that loses its hue

The green
The gold
The truth
The lies
One creates goodwill
One we should despise

The green
The gold
The lies that have been told

Republicans like to threaten to end NPR funding only when they know it will be vetoed

2010-11-19T07:08:00.001-08:00

Two people have posted on my facebook about some bill that republicans are trying to push through to eliminate NPR funding. First it is an empty gesture by the republicans because they know that Obama would veto the bill, if they were serious they would have done this while Bush was in office and the congress and senate was majority republican. Secondly, why should taxes fund this one radio station? There is no reason for it and the funding should be eliminated. I don't want my tax money going to NPR any more than I want tax money going to Fox News. I wonder how these people who are so afraid of NPR not getting stolen money would feel about stolen money going to Fox. I have a FB policy of not discussing politics very often due to the pointlessness of it all, the limitations of facebook do not allow for any discussion more deep than “Friends post: I had a great time last night. My response: click the “like” button.

TSA - perverts with perverse incentives

2010-11-18T07:51:00.000-08:00

In the free market airlines have a financial incentive to offer safe and secure flights, they also have an incentive to make the travel experience as seamless as possible for its customers. Their job should be to find ways of providing security that is invisible to the average customer. This is how most businesses operate. However, airlines are an exception, they have government goons providing their security. These goons don't care if they inconvenience the airlines customers, because they are not paid by the airlines, they are paid by taxes unrelated to whether a person flies on an airline or not. Their goal is not to provide a pleasant flying experience, their goal is not even to provide airline security, they claim they are providing airline security, but the facts are (and they know it) that if the airlines suffer another terrorist attack it will be a boon for the TSA, they will see their funding increase, not decrease after they have been proven to be failures. So they operate on a perverse set of incentives, one to act like they are doing something by making their actions as visible as possible whether or not those actions have any real effect, this harms the consumers, the second incentive is to fail, this harms everyone.

So lately we have seen the kinds of abuses these perverse incentives lead to and expect to hear many more horror stories, and what can you do? Nothing really. You can complain but as long as they are not paid in direct relation to the service they provide there really is little anyone can do, except put some sort of political pressure on those claiming to run the show by exposing the abuses and the stupidity.

I wrote a punk rock song about the TSA, and all of my thoughtful criticism boiled down to the main line “I've got a shiny badge, now let me touch your vag, it doesn't matter what you say because I know that you will still PAY!”

TSA by Flag in Flames

Music in an IP free world, my view

2010-11-10T07:47:00.000-08:00

As some of you know I have been slacking on my blogging because I have been concentrating on making music (see http://flag-in-flames.blogspot.com). This has meant that music, the state of the industry and music related things have been on my mind extensively the last few months. I am against the idea of intellectual property, so how does this work when you are also a musician, and if all IP laws related to music were to go away tomorrow and suddenly all music was available for free download with no threat of violence against those who might partake in downloading, how would this effect the industry? I have been thinking about it and have been cruising around the Music site that hosts my songs, soundcloud, and I have come to the realization that there is about to be a new golden age in music and what is currently holding it back are IP laws. Contrary to the popular misconception that IP laws encourage the creative process, I believe they discourage it.

To illustrate this let's look at a popular rap artist, Tupac. He released only a couple of albums while he was alive, yet he recorded 10 songs for every one song that ever made it to the album, since his death those lost songs have been released by his family. Had he not died, it is likely that those unreleased songs would never have seen the light of day. They never would have passed the muster of the filter that is the big record companies who would have said these other songs were not of a high enough standard or would not have enough mass appeal to make them enough money, etc. He is a special case due to an early death all of his cutting room floor (so to speak) material has been released postmortem. However, his case does make you wonder what other musicians have stored away unreleased because the record companies didn't think they would be successful enough to make a profit on. Take the idea that recorded music can be seriously profitable out of the equation and you take away the incentive for musicians to not release all of the stuff they make, whether or not it passes muster from some record executive. In today's model musicians would be breaking their contracts with the record labels if they simply released the songs for free on the internet that the labels did not want to have on their newest albums.

Also as the barriers to entry get ever lower it allows more and more people to unleash their creative potential through music, video, etc. Currently IP just gets in the way, there are literally millions of ways any song or video could be mashed up, many of them may even be better than the originals, but IP law makes it much more difficult to pursue this line of creative endeavor. Get rid of IP and you get rid of the barriers that are preventing creative people from releasing their inner creativity on the public, much of it will be crap, but much of it will be amazing stuff. I see the advent of new technology as the ushering in of a new dawn for musical creativity, for the fan of music this will be a great thing. For musicians the lower costs of recording, production, release and distribution will be a great thing. The only ones who will be negatively effected will be record executives, and has-been musicians who thought that they would live off of royalties on a song they wrote while in high school all the way to retirement.

I see a day when all musicians release all of their recorded music for free on the internet, and if they desire to make a living doing music then they focus their efforts on live shows, using the internet and music downloads in the way that musicians in the past used the radio, as a way to promote their music so that people would come out to see them live. Let's face it, IP as it relates to music has only been a concept for the last 50-100 years since the record player was invented and records starting getting popular, before that people wrote songs and sang songs to entertain and they sang other peoples songs without any hesitation. They made a living, and so will musicians into the IP free future. The record executives will lose most of their power, but there will always be a need for some organization to help promote artists so the artist can be heard. This will be the new role for the recording industry, to market and promote bands. However, the roles will reverse. In the current structure a musician signs up with a record label and they end up essentially working for the label, the label dictates to them what songs go on the album, how much they will advertise the new album, who the band can tour with, and a host of other things, the musicians become the employees of the label. In the future as I envision it, the roles will reverse, a musician will hire a musical agent to promote their music and get it into the ears of the general public, but the musicians will dictate how this is done, they will decide on what songs they want to release, they will have the control. This will end stories like you would often hear in the 1980's where a label would sign a new band, give them 10 cents per album sold, promote the hell out of the first album and then on the second album when the band would get $1 per album sold the label would refuse to promote it. Giving the 1980's a glut of one hit wonders. Or situations like Prince ran into where the record label actually claimed to own his name, in my vision of the IP free future the label/promoter, or whatever their new title would be would work for Prince and not the other way around, much like a talent agent.

WTF do politicians know about Johnny Cash?

2010-11-05T07:19:00.000-07:00

I was watching this biography on the singer Johnny Cash last night on the bio channel. I like Johnny Cash and think he was one of the greatest American singers in recent history, his voice had the power to hit you on an emotional level and this is a rare feat. That is why I have many Johnny Cash albums, with my favorites being those he made during his waning years when he teamed up with Rick Rubin as his producer.

I liked the documentary alright, but one part really ate at my craw. They kept interviewing Al Gore and Lamar Alexander about Cash. I have to ask, what the fuck do those stupid fucking politicians know about Johnny Cash? They aren't musicians who worked with him, they are not family or friends. They aren't even musicians who never worked with him, but can relate on a professional level simply because they share the same career and many of the same trials and tribulations that come from that. They are just blowhards who don't know anymore about Johnny Cash or his life than the average Johnny Cash fan. In fact the average fan probably knows more about him as the average fan can relate to his life more than those stupid, rich, whores, whose main goal in life is to steal as much from productive people and direct it into the non-productive parasitic class in government.

To be a little more fair, I was more upset to see Al Gore interviewed than Lamar Alexander, who at least is known to be a decent amateur country western piano player. But if they wanted to find some average country piano player, there are plenty in every southern church playing gospel tracks, you don't need to go to the halls of corruption in Washington DC to find them.

Survivors

2010-09-29T17:46:00.001-07:00

I just finished watching the British TV series Survivors. I had it recorded for several months and had not got around to watching it. I must say I thoroughly enjoyed the series and am sad that it has been canceled. If it is available through netflix or something and you lean libertarian then I would say get this series.
The premise is one where a deadly virus has wiped out 99% of the population. The remaining survivors have to fend for themselves in all ways. I felt that the show leaned a bit too hard on the idea that people would gravitate towards dog eat dog extremism instead of cooperation a bit too much, but then again if people cooperated without excessive conflict, then the show would lose most of its drama. The best parts were when the group that show followed had encounters with another group led by a former bureaucrat who was desperate to create a new government and in the creation of her new government she had to fully expose the violence that is all governments.

Tis the season for crappy political ads

2010-09-23T08:18:00.000-07:00

This is the season for horrid political ads. One thing I noticed is that the democrats are putting out commercials that say things like “my republican opponent wants to take away your birth control options”. Is this the best they have? The republicans of course are attacking the policies that Obama pushed through, so at least they are a bit more timely, but when GWB was president they were as worthless claiming their opponents were "big spenders" and not mentioning how much the government grew under GW.

Also have I ever told you how much I hate political signs? Yeah I hate them, not because they are political in nature, but even signs for Libertarian candidates don't tell you anything about the candidates themselves. I would prefer a bumper sticker slogan, then a candidates name something like “immigrants will cross the border over my cold dead body – Tom Tancredo” or “If its good enough for Obama, its good enough for me – Michael Bennett”, “I miss George Bush – Ken Buck” (okay I am in Colorado and so all of these are Colorado politicians, but I am sure you could just replace the names for politicians in your area).

Biggest Loser continues to worship the state

2010-09-22T08:40:00.000-07:00

I generally like the show “The Biggest Loser”, but so often anymore I get disgusted by its constant statist propaganda. I watched last nights show and they were basically in the process of doing tryouts for the show so they had went to various cities across the US to find candidates. In the episode however they kept saying things like “obesity will cost the state of Michigan 12 billion dollars in x amount of time”. How does obesity cost “the state”? It doesn't unless the politicians chose to let it cost taxpayers. If the politicians redirect tax money to pay for obesity related illness than that is their problem and not the fat persons. It also implies that somehow taxpayers should be, and are, responsible to pay for other peoples poor decisions. If you dislike the idea of tax money paying to treat fat people, don't blame the fat people, blame the politicians.

Next week is sure to be a statist filled episode as well, because the preview showed the contestants being trained by the marine corps. I am sure there will be a lot of bullshit about “their sacrifice for our freedoms”. If this were true then we should be getting ever freer as we have virtually been in a non-stop war somewhere in the world for at least the last 60 years. In cases where some level of additional freedoms have been achieved like civil rights for minorities and gays, it is hard to see how the constant military actions around the world have had any impact in helping gain these rights.

Fuck Dr. Ann de Wees Allen and her silly attempts to copyright her fucking name!

2010-09-21T08:03:00.000-07:00

Fuck Dr. Ann de Wees Allen and her silly attempts to copyright her fucking name!
Fuck Dr. Ann de Wees Allen and her silly attempts to copyright her fucking name!
Fuck Dr. Ann de Wees Allen and her silly attempts to copyright her fucking name!
Fuck Dr. Ann de Wees Allen and her silly attempts to copyright her fucking name!
Fuck Dr. Ann de Wees Allen and her silly attempts to copyright her fucking name!
Fuck Dr. Ann de Wees Allen and her silly attempts to copyright her fucking name!
Fuck Dr. Ann de Wees Allen and her silly attempts to copyright her fucking name!

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100915/00102711022.shtml

TLS picks up my blog post "Hoarders"

2010-09-14T19:18:00.000-07:00

The Libertarian Standard Picked up my Hoarders post! It is great to see my little read blog got the attention of such a great site. In case you haven't read TLS before it seems to be a cross between Reason's hit and run and the Mises blog.

To see only my post go to:
http://www.libertarianstandard.com/2010/09/13/a-reprieve-from-bureaucrats/

Hoarders

2010-09-11T18:53:00.000-07:00

The other day a friend on facebook commented on the show “Hoarders”. In this show they have a psychologist and a junk clean up crew come into a house and clean it up. She was upset because she did not feel as if the crew helped the people they cleaned up because they only spend about a week at the house and she didn't feel like this was enough time to address the deep psychological issues these people have.

While I agree that these people probably have mental issues that are not being addressed by the show, if you watch the show you will notice that almost all of the people who ask to go on the show have a legal issue surrounding the hoarding. These people are being pursued by code enforcement officers, by child protective services, by fire marshals, etc. They may not be getting the psychological help they need, but they are getting a reprieve from the evil government officials who would kick these people out of their homes, or steal their children away from them, etc. It may only be temporary, but if it gives them another year of peace from the bureaucrats then the show is doing a good service to these people.

Uncle Sam Cracks me up

2010-09-08T12:24:00.000-07:00

It's funny because its true.

More on the Mosque

2010-08-30T05:18:00.000-07:00

Free Talk Live finally talked about this mosque in NYC, and I heard some callers arguments for why they oppose it. The main argument from many seemed to be that it is being built with “terrorist money”. I don't believe that this is true, however for discussions sake let's pretend that it is true. How much would a 13 story skyscraper in the heart of NYC cost to build? I am not sure, but I expect it is at least 20 million. If the “terrorists” funding this mosque are not allowed to build their mosque/community center with this money, what else could 20 million buy a “terrorist”? It could buy a couple of jet planes, it could buy many surface to air anti-aircraft launchers and missiles, it could hire dozens of professional killers, it could purchase the makings for millions of IED's, it could purchase millions of bullets, a million gallons of diesel to help start fires all over the US. So if you really think this is terrorist money, ask yourself, is building a mosque really what you don't want them doing to do with their money?

Denver Police beating videos, captured by the police's own cameras!

2010-08-28T18:06:00.000-07:00

I haven't been posting much lately and in fact I haven't been watching or reading much news or reading many blogs, just a handful and skimming them at that. However there have been some interesting things happening. The most angering from my perspective has got to be the two police videos that recently emerged showing Denver cops beating people up. Copblock covers the story well and provides the two videos.

One of the most interesting facts about these two cases is that in both cases the damning video was actually filmed by the ubiquitous government cameras. Many of which were paid for by money the city got for hosting the democratic convention. At the time the police were claiming that they would help solve all kinds of crimes. I haven't heard much about the cameras and how helpful they have been in solving everyday crime, but they have been helpful in exposing the criminal behavior of the police themselves. I don't expect this is what the police thought would be the end result of all of these cameras, they may not have wanted the things in the first place had they known.

http://www.copblock.org/605/a-history-of-violence/

Obama needs to set NYC zoning rules?

2010-08-16T15:44:00.001-07:00

I had the misfortune of flipping through the radio on my way home from work and happened upon a conservative radio host, who seems to have nothing positive to say about Obama and had nothing negative to say about Bush, ranting about Obama and some silly Mosque in NYC. He thought Obama should oppose the building of the thing. Even if you believe in government, doesn't it seem silly to think that the president of the USA should be involving himself in what amounts to a local zoning issue? Maybe he brought it upon himself, I don't keep up with the news very well these days, but it seems really silly to me that this issue has become an issue for the president.

Music, the long lasting way to transmit a message

2010-08-03T19:26:00.000-07:00

I have been making music lately and not blogging. So now I am blogging about making music. My real goal with the music is to make good industrial music. Unique and catchy while pushing some boundaries all while remaining accessible to those who like the genre of dance industrial. So far I think I am accomplishing that goal. I am not happy with the lyrics on Empire, but I am generally happy with what I have made so far.

A side effect of the music project however has been that it can help spread libertarian ideas. This is a minor goal, but it may prove to be one of the most effective forms of activism I have been a part of. I hadn't really thought much about it until the other day when I was at a friends party and I was discussing the political themes that have run through my music so far. While we were talking about this the Beach Boys came on. I asked him “how old is this?”, our best guess was 45+ years. I don't expect to ever have any hits or anything popular, but do to the nature of the internet it is possible that people will still be downloading my music in 100 years, even after I die it could live on. Granted less than one person a year may like the music, but unlike more transitory things like podcasts and blogs that focus so much on the here and now, music tends to be much longer lasting. It also tends to be something listened to over and over, making music with a message that much more powerful. The hard part is making music that people might like and carries a message. The majority of music you hear these days means nothing. Of course I have no idea if anyone will care in a few years, but if I continue to make interesting music, at some point somebody will take notice.

Maybe nobody will ever listen to my music, but very few read this blog or ever accepted libertarian ideas based on my outreach when I helped the LP, so even if it is in vain, it is no more in vain than other things I have done in the past. In the mean time I like my own music and listen to it myself.

Quick update and music blog

2010-07-23T12:25:00.001-07:00

Sorry for not posting much lately, I have been working on my music project. I think my goals with it are coming along okay. Today a friend of my wife commented that her 12 year old son said of my new song "Human Farms" was funky. I consider that a win as that song conveys a message it is unlikely this boy would have ever encountered otherwise, both of his parents would consider themselves liberals and the father currently works for the government and the mother worked for the government prior to quiting to become a full time mother.

To keep up with the music stuff I am doing please visit:

http://flag-in-flames.blogspot.com

Flag in Flames

2010-07-05T19:58:00.001-07:00

I am making some industrial style music and noise. If you like it, feel free to download it and feel free to pass it around. I am still new at it, but some of the stuff is coming along pretty well. All recorded in my home, so it is not all studio quality, more demo quality. Thanks. ~ Fester

Latest tracks by Flag in Flames

Census and the “American Community Survey”

2010-06-23T19:46:00.000-07:00

Okay so I told you that while I was at work the census people came to my house and my wife gave them the census information for the 2010 census. This was a short form. Well, after I threw away the original census form I received an even bigger version from the American community survey, that I also threw away. Now the community survey people have got my home phone number, and they keep calling. My wife answered the other day and told them only that she had already answered their questions, then they tried to explain that “no that was for this other census and not the one I am calling about” at that point my wife said “I gave you enough information last time” and hung up. I was so proud of her. She is turning into a little non-cooperative.

I guess they didn't like her response so they called again and this time I picked up the phone. The lady asked me if they had the right address and I answered that the phone was registered to that address but I couldn't say if they had reached that address with their call. Then she asked if I was the head of the household. I told her I would not answer any question from the government. Then she asked if I had received the American Community Survey in the mail. I repeated that I would not answer any questions from the government. She kept asking if I had received this survey in the mail, I kept answering that I would not answer any question from the government. On her third attempt to get me to answer she really pissed me off because she said “I'll take that as a yes”, to which I quickly responded “I didn't say that”, but she hung up on me at that point.

I bought a new phone a few months ago and this new phone does not have a function to use the answering machine as a recording device to record phone calls like all of my previous phones had. That sucks for calls like this.

If you see something, say something

2010-06-11T20:26:00.000-07:00

When I was in New York I had a funny moment. We were going back to the hotel and it was fairly late at night. Riding on the New York subway, I was standing and there was a sign right in front of me, the sign said “If you see something, say something” and had a picture of a lone box tied up in twine.

On this subway car over in the corner was a person. I presume he was a homeless person, sitting in the corner of the subway car. This guy was wearing a thick winter coat with a hoodie over his head, it was freaking 90 degrees and I was in a tee shirt and shorts and was sweating bullets. You could not see him at all. The only thing I could make out was that he was a black person, he may not have even been a “he”, but I think it was a he. He had one of these stand up shopping carts with the large back wheels. On the cart there were two box shaped objects stacked upon each other, both box shaped objects were covered in black plastic bags so you could not see what was in them, and he kept reaching into the one on top. It appeared to me he kept pulling out a bottle of booze and adding it to a plastic cup he was carrying. However, it could have been anything.

I really thought it was funny that I was standing by a sign that wanted me to report some strange behavior, but nobody seemed to think this was at all unusual of a sight. A man wearing a thick winter coat in the middle of summer, pushing a cart containing two boxes that were wrapped in black plastic, that is perfectly normal, but someone forgetting their backpack on the train, that is unusual.

Addams Family Musical takes jab at homeschoolers

2010-06-09T17:34:00.000-07:00

I have been out of town with no internet access in my hotel. I went to New York City. While there I went to see the Addams Family Musical on Broadway. I liked the show, but there were a few things I didn't like. There was one part when Wednesday's new boyfriend started dropping poetic references, and Wednesday exclaimed “I don't get your references, I was homeschooled”. The crowd laughed, but I couldn't help thinking that home schoolers would be more likely to get obscure poetic references like Ulysses by Lord Tennyson than your typical public school educated student, not that either is all that likely to get the reference.

If Unions help protect "workers" from those greedy capitalists, then who do unions protect government workers from?

2010-05-28T06:24:00.000-07:00

Something that has always bothered me is the idea that government employees should have union representation. I grew up in a democratic household and was told that unions were good because they helped workers get more of the profit of the companies they worked for, so the rewards were not as top heavy in industries like the auto industry. Of course this view has a lot of problems with it, but let's go with this narrative for a minute.

If the point of unions is to prevent the capitalist owners of corporations from keeping all of the profits for themselves and not sharing enough with their employees then what is the point of government workers being union? How do these negotiations go? Do the union reps go to the government and say “you have stolen X amount of money from the citizens and we want a bigger cut”? It is different to say “this company made X amount of dollars last year because of our efforts, so we believe we deserve a pay raise”. The thing to me is that when a worker for a corporation contributes to the success of the corporation then it can be measured and judged by the amount of profit the corporation sees. The same cannot be said of a government employee. A teacher's salary for instance comes mostly from property taxes (in my area at least) how much I pay in property taxes has nothing to do with how good a teachers performs their job. If local property values increase is it because of a teacher, if they decrease is it because of a teacher, should their pay be dependent on property tax revenues? In a free market system parents who thought a teacher was doing a good job would reward the teacher by either being willing to pay more for their services or would at least help recommend the teacher or school to other parents. With a corporation when the profits drop in theory at least the corporation could lower the compensation rates for its union employees and then raise them back up when the profits recover. I know that in reality this rarely happens because of laws that favor the unions in negotiations over the companies, especially in the rust belt states.

What about the police? If they step up their revenue generation by setting up speed traps all over town or stealing peoples property when they have found tiny amounts of marijuana on the premise and generally pissing off the residents of an area, is this how they justify more pay? Do they point to lower crime rates and a higher percentage of solved crimes to justify their pay? Or do they simply point to an increase in sales tax revenue or something along those lines? Do firefighters point to an increase or a decrease in fires to try and justify a pay increase? In the newspaper it always seems like an increase in fires and fire damage is how the firefighters justify their pay, exactly the opposite of how the free market would work.

Shooting at some food, when up from the ground came a bubbling crude

2010-05-27T20:03:00.000-07:00

The oil leak in the Gulf coast is a big disaster, it is a lot of oil spilling at once in one place. It needs to be plugged up as soon as possible. However, I do not think it is the end of the world disaster that many of my liberal friends are making it out to be.

Remember the intro to the old television show the Beverly Hillbillies? In it Jed is hunting a rabbit and stumbles upon a pool of oil and the rest is history, he becomes very rich at the discovery of oil flowing out of the ground and onto his land. This is something that really does happen. In fact it happens all of the time, and it even happens on the ocean floor, letting that oil seep into the ocean. The ocean can handle some oil mixing with it. It can handle the amount of oil the BP leak is spitting out, and in fact the Gulf gets that much oil in natural oil seeps every year. The difference is that this is not as spread out, either by location or by time.

The point is that once the BP leak is plugged, the oil will mostly evaporate and the heavier parts of the oil will fall to the ocean floor as sediment. It is not the disaster of the century. It is a problem that needs to be addressed in a timely manner, but it is not worthy of the freakout some people are having.

Census

2010-05-17T19:44:00.000-07:00

Even though I had refused to comply with the census this year, I guess my wife didn't have the same objections as I did. The census guy came to our house and she answered the questions he asked. Probably nothing bad will come out of it. At least we are not Middle Eastern or Japanese.

Don't download this song...

2010-05-17T18:20:00.000-07:00

Funny and strikes a chord. I recently mentioned Tommy Chong, and here he is mentioned in this song.

Would you push the button? Apparently you would.

2010-05-14T14:26:00.000-07:00

I remember watching this show years ago, it was the Twilight Zone. The story went like this:

A man shows up at a families house and offers them $200,000 dollars if they are willing to push a button. The catch is that if they push the button someone they do not know and will never meet will die. At the end they push the button, only they realize that after they did the button disappears and they are told “this button goes to someone they do not know and will never meet”. The implication is that if the next family pushes the button, they are the ones who will die.

The question is would you push the button? Yes you would, and you prove this everyday if you support government. This is the exact same deal government offers you, only on a slightly smaller scale.

A bureaucrat comes to a family and says “if you check this box, I will give your kids a free education”, the catch is that someone you do not know will lose their home and will be forced into a homeless shelter, an old person you don't know will lose their home and will be forced to live with their kids, a child you don't know will have to forgo braces because their family has to make a choice between paying property taxes and braces. So they check the box. This scenario plays out over and over, the rewards change, but the loss is always there and until the one who loses is you it seems like you are getting a good deal.

Would you check the box? Are government handouts worth the pain the government inflicts? Sadly for most the answer is yes.

A/K/A Tommy Chong

2010-05-13T19:48:00.000-07:00

I watched the documentary A/K/A Tommy Chong, and I have to say it was one of the best documentaries I have seen in a long time. It documented the arrest and imprisonment of Tommy Chong for selling bongs through the internet. The government spent 12 million dollars to take Chong down. It was a travesty of justice. It discusses the way the government set him up, then raided his house with a SWAT team. His 8+ months in prison. How they tried to make an example of him due to his fame. The good news is that Chong became an activist after going to prison, prior to that he had never really been an activist for marijuana legalization.

When this event happened I was disappointed with Tommy for taking the low road in my opinion and trying to make a deal and apologize, etc. I felt like he should have taken it to trial and made it known that selling a pipe is not a criminal act and he should not serve a day in prison and demanded a jury trial. Unlike many activists he had the money to take it all the way and get more attention to the issue than anyone else really could. However, watching this documentary gave me more appreciation for what he did do. Being more of an activist myself I would have handled it differently than he did, but I appreciate what he did. Now that I have seen this movie I can see that if nothing else making this movie is him making a serious statement against the insane war on drugs.

Dogs shot, kids terrorized, man arrested, over a bag of pot

2010-05-05T16:02:00.000-07:00

Disgusting. The only criminals here are the police.

H/T

Should a person be able to live where they choose or not? That is the question.

2010-04-30T06:36:00.000-07:00

Lately with the new law in Arizona, immigration has been on peoples minds. I have had several friends on facebook post something about it. People really try and make the issue far more complicated than it needs to be. They like to look at numbers, and at whether some paper was filled out properly, some fee paid on time, etc.

I don't give a crap about any of that. I look at it from a freedom perspective. If a person is truly free then they should be free to chose where they want to live. It seems simple to me if you cannot chose to live where you want to live then you are not free. Freedom is my objective, so I object to any law in any country that would try and tell a person where they may or may not live. As long as a person can find a house or apartment, etc., wherever they want to live I have no objections to them living there. I don't have the controlling mindset that wishes to control who moves to my city or even my neighborhood.

I emigrated from Oklahoma to Colorado 13 years ago. How much paperwork should I have had to fill out before being allowed to move? Should I have needed a lawyer to help me get through this paperwork? How many thousands of dollars should it have cost me, just in fees and lawyers, and how would this have benefited Colorado? At the time I moved I was a low skilled worker as this was prior to my education and my subsequent pursuit of an engineering field that I currently work in. If you look at Oklahoma and Colorado as countries instead of states, it is clear that Oklahoma is a far less prosperous than Colorado.

Capitalisms natural state is monopoly? What a crock

2010-04-28T18:35:00.000-07:00

I turned on talk radio yesterday (not something I normally do as I am a podcast listener most of the time). I turned it to the “progressive” radio station. The host made this statement

“The natural state of unregulated capitalism is to foment monopolies, because as a company grows it buys up its competition and in cases where it can't, it will use tactics like predatory pricing and other tricks to drive its competition out of businesses. This is why we need government regulations to prevent this from happening”.

I was thinking about this all day and still cannot wrap my head around his statement. I understand his theory, but it seems to have no basis in reality. There are many businesses that do not have much in the way of government regulation and very few of them seem to even have as few as a few dozen major players in the field. The only exception I could think of was Microsoft and its desktop Operating Systems, and Microsoft seems to lose market share everyday. For the most part it seems that the industries that have a few dominant players are the most regulated industries, electricity, cable, telephone, banking, airlines, etc.

If the talk show hosts theory is correct, then wouldn't McDonald's have used its market share to kill off all other fast food restaurants? Wouldn't Comaq or HP have monopolized the computer industry, wouldn't KC Original Barbeque Sauce have eliminated all the other hundreds of BBQ sauce choices? Wal-Mart would have eliminated all other grocery, clothes, and drug stores.

His theory really falls apart when you look at reality, the problem is that there are too many people with too many different tastes all demanding different products and services and they place different amounts of preference on different things, some might prefer low prices to good customer service, others want more selection, others want high quality products, even if the price is higher and the selection is lower.

The other problem is with big business itself, as any business grows it becomes more slow to respond to the demands of its customers, it becomes more bureaucratic, this creates a downward spiral that is the reason that one time kings in their respective fields are now hardly even on the map, Sears, IBM, Woolworth's, and others. If the theory of capitalism's natural progression towards monopoly without government interference then you would expect these companies to still be king, because they would have continued to use their power to crush all the competition as it tried to rise up.

The exceptions you see are in fields like the cable company, the telephone company, the electric company, and the like. What these companies have in common is not their natural tendency towards monopoly, but rather the government's propping up of their monopolies. These companies have worked with government at various levels to use the force of government to keep competition out.

Some stifling of competition is more obvious than others, but is is almost always there when you see a few companies with a hold on the market share. It may be as obvious as the government contracts with the electricity providers, or as hidden as the regulations that have made it virtually impossible to open a new tire manufacturing plant, or as I mentioned in my post below about the high cost of a liquor license.

Homer Simpson - Agorist bar owner

2010-04-24T08:10:00.000-07:00

I was recently reminded of an episode of the Simpson's. It is the one where Homer opens a bar in his own garage.

One of my friends is trying to open a bar, the government is demanding over $30,000 to get a permission slip from them that allows him to legally sell drinks at his bar, he believes this is a good deal as some people have had to pay as much as $60,000. It makes me think that Homer was right to take the agorist approach.

The government is not offering him anything in return for this money, except to not throw him in jail for selling a product that his customers are demanding. This also means that he will have to raise his prices to cover his expenses, and these are not only the rent and obvious expenses, but also this license fee. If he wanted to open a bar that caters to a small sub-section of the population (like the goth crowd for instance), he would not be able to as there is no way the local goth crowd could afford to buy enough booze to even recover the cost of the liquor license. This limits the choices people have to not only create the kind of business they wish to create, but it also limits the choices consumers have. He is also prevented from catering to smokers by state law, he is prevented from catering to anyone under 21 by law, he has to find his niche in a very narrow space approved by the government.

I am not sure how a person can still believe that the United is the land of opportunity, when that opportunity is closed off to anyone who doesn't happen to have the money to pay the government copious amount of extortion money in order to live out their dream.

What would happen if everyone just told the government to piss off and started opening their businesses without first asking permission or getting licensed and then to not cooperate when the thugs in government came around demanding fees and fines for trying to live as a free person?

Is property theft?

2010-04-19T19:42:00.000-07:00

I am the new king of the united states and so all of the land contained within the united states is now mine! Now, I am taking your house unless you pay me to NOT take it.

Sometimes you will hear someone say “property is theft”. This is a statement that can easily be misunderstood because it is makes people think that all property is theft and therefor a person should be against private property, this is wrong and is a misreading of the quote by Proudhon, who lived in a time when property could only be owned by the monarchy.

The first thing that needs to be understood is that there are two types of property law-made and labor-made property. Law-made property is theft, labor-made property is not theft.

Labor made property is what most people think of as property. It is your house, it is your car, it is all of the things you have. You accumulated these things through your labor, you either built or created these things yourself, or more likely you put your labor into whatever you are good at and traded that labor for the labor of someone good at building a house or car, etc, using money as the medium of exchange. Libertarians believe this kind of property is sacrosanct and should be respected and is the foundation for a civilized society. It is natural for people to want to improve their lifestyle through the accumulation of things that make life more comfortable. The ability to have possessions of your own is what motivates some people to invent and innovate in the hopes of becoming wealthy.

Law-made property is what I would consider theft. Law made property is when a government/king/bureaucrat or other despot claims a massive land mass. The king cannot homestead that much land, in almost every circumstance in history the land that has been claimed is already being used by individuals who do have claim to the property as labor-made property. The only legitimate claim to property has to be based on labor, it cannot be based on law or force, if it is based on force than it is stolen land. However, this is the basis for all government land, it is also the basis for property taxes. The claim is that the ultimate owner of all property is the government, therefor you have to pay the masters their tribute.

Police encounter story on MP3

2010-04-17T19:10:00.000-07:00

I called into Free talk Live to share my police encounter story. If you are interested the archieve can be found here, I was the first caller so the first 15-20 minutes or so are me. Some people get more from audio than the written story.

Download here or go to freetalklive.com and download the episode for April 16th:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/ftl/FTL2010-04-16.mp3

Crazy People and silver Bracelets

2010-04-16T07:18:00.000-07:00

Last night I was placed in metal bracelets for a short amount of time. I had went over to a friends house to help her (I will call her flash to help keep her identity secret) clean up after her roommate had went on a violent rampage and had trashed the house. Earlier in the day she had called the police because she was worried about her roommate (he will be known as *******). Calling the police is not anything I would ever recommend doing as nothing good will come from that, but alas she is not a libertarian and it wasn't any of my business to tell her what to do. So 12 hours after she had called the police we had went back to the house and were cleaning up when they had decided they would “check in” to make sure everything was alright. It was just Barb, Flash and me and all we were doing is cleaning the house up a bit when they came. I don't talk to police officers voluntarily so I stayed cleaning in the kitchen while Flash talked to the police in the living room. One of the cops, the younger one started nosing around the bedrooms, so I stopped and kept an eye on him, cops are not to be trusted and nobody had said he could walk around the house. It was obvious nothing was going on at that point in time and that the person they wanted to talk to was not home. I guess this cop did not like me eying him so he approached me and said “can I see your identification?” in the way cops do where they phrase it as a question but intone it as an order. I told him no as he had no reason to need to see my ID. Then he made up some horseshit about how “this is a dangerous job and we need to know who we are dealing with, cops gets killed all of the time”, I responded that he is full of shit and knows it and when he becomes a fisherman, then he can talk to me about how dangerous his job is. Then they tried another tactic on me and that was to say “for all we know you are ******* (flash's roommate) and these girls just didn't tell us you were him because they were scared”, I responded that there are plenty of pictures of ******* around and it is obvious I am not him, and even if I were him, there is no evidence ******** has committed any crime. They came back with “destroying property is a crime”, of course that led me to tell them “no it isn't if the property you destroy is your own property”. Then they asked me again for my ID, I asked them what is their reasonable and articulatable suspicion that I have been involved in a crime and would be the basis for me having to provide them with identification? They had no answer except to say “it is the law in Colorado if a police officer asked you to identify yourself then you must identify yourself”. Notice the wording of the cops, I have to identify myself, but rookie cop had said I had to show him my identification, these are two separate things. I may be required by law to state my name, but I am not required to show identification on a terry stop. Then they asked me again if I would show them my identification and once again I said no. Then they handcuffed me and pulled out my wallet the older cop was the first one to look in my wallet, he saw my insurance card and stuff and didn't find my ID and put it back, having been satisfied that I was not *******. The rookie was not satisfied with this and asked where my ID was, I told him it is in my wallet but the other guy didn't look in the right place. So rookie cop, pulled out my wallet with one hand and tried to hold onto my arm with the other hand and went through my wallet, spilling out my money and finally finding my ID. Finding out I wasn't ***** was not enough for rookie, he asked the other cop “aren't you going to run that?”, then the other cop felt like he had to run my name. After that we all sat there for 20 minutes looking at each other and I was in handcuffs as well as being held by the rookie cop. Finally my name came back clear and they left.