Tag Archives: Regulation

Democrats Hate Gun Owners. Now What?

2 Replies

Last Wednesday, Colorado Governor John “Hick” Hickenlooper signed a partisan Democrat bill that outlawed nearly every pistol and rifle. All Glock pistols, the most popular brand, are now banned. Any magazine that can be “readily modified” to hold more than 15 rounds is now illegal. Perhaps the shop-lifter who sponsored the bill does not know, but almost all magazines are readily modified to hold extra rounds. Since no other state has such a law and Colorado is quite small, manufacturers may not make special 15 round magazines that cannot be modified. Further, existing weapons cannot be transferred, lent, gifted, or inherited. Colorado citizens will now really resemble Old-West denizens because the only sidearm now allowed will resemble John Wayne’s Colt .45 revolver.

V.P. Biden equates anyone who thinks gun-control is pointless and an affront to the values of the Constitution to a “black helicopter” conspiracy theorist. Democrats call gun-rights advocates “gun nuts” and “heartless.” The Old Media is fully engaged in marginalizing the image of gun owners and gun-rights advocates, and all the major TV carriers ban gun advertisements. In short, Democrats and their OM fellow travelers hate guns owners and want to disarm regular, honest people.

The US House will serve as a firewall against national gun-bans this year, and Coloradans who were caught off-guard by a Governor who had recently rejected gun-bans, are organizing politically. The NRA is suing New York for its six round magazine law, so perhaps Colorado is next on their list. The latest Democrat anti-gun-rights Napoleonic charge may well be repelled by common sense and political organization, but the Democrats have made clear that this issue is always a hidden priority. Democrats hate guns and want to disarm responsible citizens. What should be done to contain their totalitarian instincts permanently?

Gun owners are regular people who fully reflect the diversity of the US populace. Hunters, target shooters, homeowners, gun owners are spread across all parts of the US. Guns are also safe; owning a gun is safer than owning a swimming pool. The OM likes to demagogue that people with guns are more likely to commit suicide or be shot themselves. Maybe suicidal people and people who live in dangerous neighborhoods seek out pistols (i.e. Selection bias). In any event gun violence by honest people is rare, and deranged rampages are rarer still. Criminals are both the true source of gun violence and the ones who could not care less about a magazine-size misdemeanor on top of a murder charge.

Self-defense-rights advocates should seek to normalize the public image of gun owners. The left already knows that gun owners are actually pedestrian and mild. That is why far-left activists are attempting to silence gun-owner publications. That is why far-left bureaucrats attempt to raid the homes of fathers who post pictures of their sons exercising good gun safety. The Left’s goal is to maintain the false image of gun owners as irresponsible racists.

Fight back. Post a picture of yourself safely holding a pistol that Hick or Mayor Bloomberg would outlaw. Share your skeet scores on Facebook. Leave an outdoor magazine in your office’s waiting room. Teach a friend who has never held a firearm the rules of safe gun handling, and then take him to the range. Let people know you own a weapon and ask them if they think you are a “nut.” Ask them how many mouth-breathing, drooling “gun-nuts” they actually know. The Democrats waged a long-term battle against gun ownership by building a straw-man gun owner who is racist and paranoid. The battle to secure the right to bear arms will never stop, and the battle’s foundation is exercising The Right responsibly and conspicuously.

CO’s Hick Is Running For President

Leave a reply

Caught up in a wave of anti-gun-rights propaganda and irrational sentiment, the Colorado Legislature will vote today on unconstitutional and pointless anti-gun-rights bills. Among the four anti-gun-rights bills are a ban on magazines greater in capacity than 15 rounds and a requirement for criminal background checks even for private transfers of weapons. Of course, these bills will not prevent a single crime or shooting tragedy; they merely criminalize the lives of decent citizens. Further, since the background check bill is patently unenforceable, it is an obvious stepping stone to gun registration, the real goal of anti-gunners. Nobody should be surprised that once the Democrats took all the reins of power in Colorado, they immediately moved to strip citizens of their gun rights as their first priority. Colorado gerrymandering protects some fairly radical leftists who instinctively hate personal responsibility, especially as expressed in the right to self-defense. The surprise is that Gov. “Hick” Hickenlooper plans to sign the transparently fascist bills into law. The best explanation is that Hick is running for President.

Hick, for those outside of Denver, is not an actual hick. He is a former oil man and restaurateur. Personally he is an elitist, arrogant to the point of being funny, and with no interest or sympathy to anyone beyond his political ambitions. He is a serial tax raiser with an extremely leftist and paternal agenda. However, the far-left Denver Post routinely describes him as a “moderate.” Publicly, Hick courts an image that is a mixture of Western style and geeky aw-shucks charm, but he is really an exceptionally driven politician who has always boxed above his weight. Why, then, did he voluntarily stick his nose into a divisive issue that has always proven to be a loser for Democrats, especially in the West?

Colorado is a divided state. Urban centers such as Denver and Boulder are extreme-Left. Few outsiders realize that these cities are as far left as the North East or California. Denver has produced the socialist, and unhinged, Reps. Schroeder and DeGette. Boulder is the home of Ward Churchill, the professor who lied about being Indian and who called the 9/11 victims “little Eichmanns” because their work supported the evils of US capitalism. Most of the rest of Colorado is center-right, along with other Western States. State wide elections cannot be won solely with the lunatic-left urban vote, hence CO’s US Senators’ avoiding the gun issue with all their might. Hick, by comparison, initiated the gun debate in CO a few days before the CT tragedy. Hick’s predecessor’s union pandering forced him to not seek a second term, so Hick’s volunteering for the gun debate is curious politics at best. No polling exists, but Hick has probably abandoned an easy reelection for a toss-up against a gun-rights Republican.

Hick does not make these kinds of mistakes, and he has never been so bold about anything other than parking meter fees. Either he has gone crazy hanging-out with Hollywood and Washington leftists, or he has focused his sights outside of Colorado.

The conventional Democrat political wisdom is that the GOP is smashed and irrelevant. True or not, most Dems think the real 2016 Presidential Election is the Democrat primary. The US is lurching hard to the left, and Dems are falling over themselves to repudiate moderates like Pres. Clinton and align with socialists like Pres. Obama. Gov. Cuomo recently signed the most unconstitutional and disturbingly fascist gun law ever. Even GOP pols like Gov. Christie are shifting left, presumably to sail this new wind. These governors are national figures who are quite likely to run for President, so why is a backwater governor of a smallish state following their lead? Hick is aligning with the rest of the hard-left presidential field.

Hick wants to be President. He knows that Western Democrat money and votes for such an enterprise are in short supply, so his politics are mirroring the deep blue states along the coasts. Hick does not care what Coloradans want; he wants to be able to share a pleasant meal with Mayor Bloomberg, the extreme collectivist. Should Hick also come out against the Keystone-XL pipeline, his national ambitions may as well be painted on an Occupy Wall Street banner. Of course, the interests of Coloradans who want to live freely and exercise their natural and constitutional rights are merely stepping stones along his way.

Guns, Drugs Prove Society Is Rudderless

Leave a reply

In the time a man can hold his breath, the Colorado State Legislature began its plot to ban and confiscate previously legal semi-automatic weapons. With a new Democrat sweep of all lawmaking powers, the first order of business is to thwart the will of most Coloradans and ban guns and restrict their private transfer. Simultaneously, a political committee is drafting rules for the commercial sale of recreational marijuana. Blessedly, Mayor Bloomberg does not live in CO, but his spirit of central control, arrogance, and fascist allegiance to the common good is alive and growing in the West.

When the voters of CO mostly legalized MJ, Shout Bits haled a bold victory for individual choice and responsibility. Regardless of MJ’s negative consequences (which may be few), it is not the government’s place to tell adults what to do with their own bodies, time, and money. When the government decides what is best for its citizens, it almost always makes poor policy and it also inverts the rightful relation of the People’s sovereignty over the government. Sadly, the Democrats’ attitude toward MJ rights does not transfer to any other individual right. MJ laws do not prove a commitment to liberalism, just a pandering to libertine permissiveness.

Just as the government has no legitimate power to regulate what people do with their own lives, it has no power to restrict gun ownership. The two issues are made of the same fabric. That is why it is sad to see the deep Blue state of CO embrace MJ and gun bans. Simultaneously recognizing people’s natural right to consume MJ, but not to own most semi-automatic weapons is hypocrisy, especially because the right to self-defense is vastly more important than the right to libations. There is no rudder, no standard by which right and wrong are measured in today’s politics.

Somehow, a nation of rights, and individualist ideals has been replaced by do-gooders who think their capricious bans on banalities such as soda drinks, raw milk, and baby formula are both helpful and legal. Of course, their weapons bans are a holy crusade in their twisted minds. In the 1920′s, the US unleashed gangland violence through prohibition, but at least those Americans recognized that their bad idea required a Constitutional Amendment. How times have changed; now a single US Senator can demand retailers stop selling certain completely legal rifles, and his will is obeyed.

The US citizen has slowly abdicated his right and responsibility to make his own decisions. This is exactly the chain of events Hayek believed led to WWII. Yes, too much sugar is unhealthy, and raw milk is a stupid idea that takes food health back 150 years. The price for allowing the government to decide what is best, however, is tyranny, as the latest round of gun confiscation proves. To keep the right to bear arms alive, citizens must resist all nanny state intrusions into the private lives of responsible adults.

So, yes, buy a gun now while you can. However, don’t draw the line of defense at the last, most desperate point. Demand the right to decide what is best on your own in every aspect of life. Once fascist gun confiscators like Bloomberg, and now possibly Gov. Hickenlooper, know they can deny your doctor’s ability to prescribe pain medication, they know they own you. A centrally planned society is the opposite of the US’s purpose, so gun-rights advocates should fight all violations of liberty. This latest gun confiscation fever is just added proof that conservatives need to start thinking libertarian.

Avoid Arguing Policy On Gun Control

Leave a reply

If the Connecticut school massacre was the start of a contest to see who could be the crassest and most exploitive on the gun issue, the Left won in a landslide. Before the victims’ bodies were even taken away by the coroner, the Left was blaming the NRA for the horror. No matter what the circumstances, the Left politicizes gun violence. Rep. Gifford’s shooting was blamed on Gov. Palin and the Tea Party’s indelicate political speech, despite murderer’s being apolitical and deranged. Now that the Left has won the national political battle, they are using the latest tragedy toward their perennial lust for gun bans. Freedom loving people should avoid wading into the Left’s meritless arguments and rather stand for their rights based on principle.

The Left, as typified by Sen. Feinstein, makes varied policy arguments against guns, many patently incorrect. The AR-15 does not fire high caliber rounds, it is not an automatic weapon, but yes, it can be used for hunting just fine. A 30 round magazine does not convey a magical advantage over a 10 round magazine, as it takes about a second to switch magazines and chamber the next round. Saying an ‘assault rifle’ is more dangerous than a similar rifle without a pistol grip is like saying racing stripes on a car make it faster. The list goes on, but the Left feeds on fear and ignorance, not reason. That is why arguing policy with the Left is futile.

Gun bans do not make anyone safer, as anyone living in Chicago should know. Still, while the Left sometimes claims to support the right to self-defense, Democrats always return to their gun confiscation instincts when the political wind is at their backs. Gun bans are usually political losers, so why should the Left bother? Leftist elitists in the Old Media and academia are indoctrinated in the belief that the US is evil. Professors like Louis Seidman think the US Constitution is outdated and optional. Anything that makes the US unique, such as its prosperity or its individual rights, is suspect to the Left. The OM and academic elites look elsewhere for their guidance, and very few countries respect the right to keep and bear arms. Since the US should conform to the ways of Socialist Europe, the US naturally should have a comprehensive gun ban as in Chicago. To the Left, gun bans are more about disdain for US exceptionalism than hatred of guns themselves. The Left just does not like the idea of power’s resting with common people.

The less radical Left concede that some guns are OK, for the purpose of hunting. They call hunting a “legitimate” use for a gun. That is the reason arguing policy is a loser for gun rights because when the Left defines what is legitimate, the noose around gun rights becomes ever tighter. Self-protection is a right, not a social policy. Just as the government may not demand a reason why a suspect remains silent under questioning or refuses to be searched, the government may not question for what purpose a responsible adult choses to own guns. Basic natural rights like speech, free association, and self-defense have always existed, and always will. David Gregory does not need a reason why he possessed a 30 round magazine. The real criminals are those who would deny him the right to own one. Even if a 30 round magazine or a pistol grip rifle is actually of little value, banning them is only a waypoint on the road to total gun bans. That is why those who respect the natural right to self-defense must stand on the firmer ground of principles and rights.

If freedom lovers must argue the practical need for guns, here is one: the US is going to collapse. Hopefully the collapse is far off, but every nation fails and falls into a violent contest for power. Even if the US solves its debt and spending problems, someday a thug will rise to power and seek to enslave Americans. When that day comes, maybe a century from now, who can be trusted with defending freedom? A military in the pocket of this future Caesar or ordinary citizens defending their rights. The US, the greatest nation ever, was founded and secured by the latter group. Better still, a future Caesar might think twice knowing ordinary citizens are heavily armed. For obvious reasons, the Nazis disarmed the populace before rounding up the Jews.

So, don’t apologize for guns. Don’t volunteer to put further limits on the natural right to self-defense in the spirit of compromise. The Left will never be satisfied until the entire US is subjugated as in Chicago or Washington. Basic human rights are universal, but they are often denied by evil governments. That is why rights must be defended, even when their exercise may be unpopular. Pres. Obama mocked natural rights when he derided his enemies for clinging to “guns or religion.” Stand up. Buy a weapon and own it responsibly.

 

Why Politicians Are Like Copper Thieves

Leave a reply

Washington is a criminal enterprise, which is not news. Politicians regularly dole favors to their donors in the form of grants and loan guarantees (Solyndra), theft of private assets for bailouts (Chrysler), and mandates for the use of worthless commodities (corn ethanol). The corruption is endless and goes back to Byzantium; governments are always corrupt because men are corruptible. Due to its size, however, Washington is the greatest criminal enterprise ever assembled. Still, what manner of thief has Washington become? The worst kind.

Popular culture lionizes certain classes of criminals, such as jewel thieves and bank heist masterminds, while it demonizes dirty crimes like armed robberies. Why the difference? Isn’t a thief a thief? Not entirely, and for good reasons. A jewel thief takes from the rich, who by popular belief can afford a loss. He sneaks into a mansion, barely breaking a single window, removes the jewels, and disappears. Nobody is injured, nothing much is damaged, and the jewels go on to flatter another wealthy owner; at least in the movies. Economically, this theft is highly efficient. Wealth is transferred from one person to another with little collateral impact. It is as if the rich victim just handed a stack of cash to the thief.

Dirty crimes involve a high degree of collateral damage as a part of the transfer of wealth. When an armed robber steals a few hundred dollars from a convenience store, the collateral damage is tremendous. People are often murdered, and customers lose faith in the store’s safety, so they shop elsewhere. The damage caused by dirty and unpopular crimes greatly exceeds the value to the thief; people instinctively say “what a waste” when they hear of these crimes.

A particularly wasteful crime trend is copper thieves. Copper thieves steal from construction sites by cutting down installed copper wires and pipes in order to sell the valuable metal as scrap. In doing so, they destroy the value of the labor that installed the copper as well as the finished value of the wire and pipe. Stealing copper whose scrap value may be a few hundred dollars can cause hundreds of thousands of dollars in collateral damage. Economically, copper thieves are among the worst criminals because they cause so much harm for a relatively small personal gain.

So, is Washington’s culture of corruption more like a jewel thief or a copper thief? Washington causes incalculable collateral damage while directing wealth to its friends. As Peter Schweizer’s Throw Them All Out documented, a few hundred thousand dollars thrown at a politician results in tens of millions in graft in return. From the investor’s (i.e. donor’s) point of view, political gamesmanship is the best investment of all. From the taxpayer’s perspective, Washington corruption is nearly a crime against humanity.

Consider corn ethanol. Because each State is equal in the Senate, a swath of low population states that grow corn wield extreme power over Congress’s appropriations. These corn states have forced politicians to mandate ever more corn ethanol in gasoline because it drives up prices and demand for corn. Congress has outlawed the importation of Brazilian sugar and ethanol because it is too competitive. If the goal were to reduce CO2 emissions, Brazilian sugar and ethanol would be the choice, but the goal is to benefit comparatively rich plain state farmers. The result is world hyperinflation in food prices. Corn prices rose from under $2.50 per bushel to $6 thanks to Washington mandates. Since cattle feed on corn, steak prices are rising at 10 times the rate of general inflation. Worldwide prices of substitute staples like rice also rose, causing a food crisis where most people spend most of their income on food. Just like copper thieves, Washington politicians, largely Republican in this case, do not care how many people they hurt to get a few thousand campaign dollars.

On the Democrat side, consider Pres. Obama’s harassment of Chrysler bondholders. In order to bail out his UAW base, Obama stole from the bondholders whose rights were senior to those of the labor union. Obama called on the bondholders to “sacrifice” to benefit the greater good, but his version of the greater good was the UAW, which represents a tiny wealthy sliver of the US’s workforce. The greater cost for Obama’s theft is hidden in the revelation that politics trumps property rights. The Chrysler bondholders were prepared to sue the Government, but they were convinced by Obama’s operatives that they would be beaten down long before prevailing in court. Until this moment, an investor felt he knew his rights, but now any investment can be taken without cause or compensation if the President so wishes. In order to transfer a few million dollars to his cronies, Obama permanently damaged an $8 trillion engine for capital formation and economic growth.

If only Washington acted as the gentlemanly jewel thief, simply giving its stolen cash to its friends. Instead, Washington is like the copper thief, callous to the incidental damage its thievery causes. The next time someone exposes the latest episode of Washington corruption, remember to scale-up the reported graft to include the collateral damage.

Worker Participation Is The Writing On The Wall

Leave a reply

We’ve been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades. – Pres. Obama

Pres. Obama was talking about his government’s laziness in attracting foreign investment (hint Mr. President: less government efforts actually attract investment, not more), but he may as well have been talking about the US in general since he took office. Of course Americans are far from lazy, they just respond to market signals like taxes and regulations, and the percent of adults who now work or wish to work portends doomsday.


Worker Participation Rate (%) By Year (1976-present)
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Worker participation is the percent of adults (16 and over) who are either working or are seeking work. As the chart shows, workforce participation drops off during recessions because some people give up on seeking work and either retire or join a shadow unmeasured economy. Significant drops in participation can be seen during the 1980-82 recession, the 1990 recession, and the 2001 recession, but they all pale to the collapse of worker participation over the past three years. In all the years measuring this metric, there has never been such a dramatic collapse in the percent of people who contribute to the measured economy.

The difference between an adult who works and who does not is the story of the US’s recent troubles. Workers pay taxes and consume fewer public resources like Food Stamps, Medicaid, Section 8, and Unemployment Insurance. Workers support the retired through Social Security and Medicare taxes. The arc of worker participation over the past 35 years mirrors the rise and fall of US prosperity and global standing.

The dramatic rise throughout the ’60s and ’70s reflects women joining the workforce, and followed the Regan revolution of unprecedented prosperity, basically paying for an ever growing government budget and runaway entitlement programs. However, worker participation fell off a cliff almost immediately after Obama took office. Possibly a coincidence, but his brutal FDR-like rhetorical assault on private enterprise, his hyper-regulatory legislation, and his partisan pro-union policies sent a message to employers to stop hiring.

This is not to say that people outside of the workforce do not contribute. For example, a dual income family that once used daycare or a nanny for their children might decide that the mother’s after-tax income would barely cover the cost of these services. When the mother decides to leave the workforce, she takes the worthwhile job of daycare or the nanny, but now all of these parties are not reporting income and paying taxes. By burdening businesses with regulation, taxes, and now the mandate to provide health care, many people find a way to get by outside of the workforce system.

The baby-boom generation that brought the US such fiscal gems as Medicare is retiring, creating a powerful drain on worker participation. The boomers are about a quarter of the US’s population, and without their employment, the US simply cannot pay its bills. Either boomers need to work longer or the US needs qualified immigrants in huge numbers over the next decade; without a workforce to support the retirement of the boomers, the US cannot survive as is.

The US’s worker participation rate is falling to that of socialized Europe. What the world generally sees as European laziness may actually be a rational response to socialism that discourages workforce participation. The US federal debt is likewise approaching that of Europe’s failed economies such as Greece and Italy. US debt is as much caused by overspending as it is anemic economic growth, much like Europe. Rather than a warning that anti-capitalism and over regulation lead to ruin, Europe’s example is a role model for Washington and the Obama administration. If the US’s economy ever rights itself, look to worker participation as the key measure of the turnaround.

Steve Jobs – A Life In Failure

2 Replies

This week Apple co-founder Steve Jobs passed away after a lengthy battle with cancer. As a household name, people naturally mourned the man most had never met. Like his historical comparison, Thomas Edison, Jobs was a brash provocateur, did little of the hands-on inventing in his shop, enjoyed a non-conventional libation, and he oversaw monumental failures. Jobs’s sometimes nemesis, Bill Gates, has many of the same type-A traits, but Microsoft was essentially forbidden to fail, and that is the reason Apple is worth 25% more than Microsoft today.

Failure is the common thread among all great innovators. Edison’s monumental failure was his DC power grid. Westinghouse won the battle to electrify the nation with AC power – a vastly superior technology, yet Edison remains the greatest inventor of his time. Jobs’s failures were epic – the Lisa, Next Computer, the first portable Mac. Under different leadership, Apple also produced the Newton and other disasters. Unlike anything else, failure focuses the mind, redirects resources, and redoubles creative efforts. Most triumphs rise from the rubble of colossal failure. In Apple’s case, it teetered on the brink of insolvency at the end of 2000, only to become the most valuable publicly traded company today.

Microsoft also had its share of failures – Windows Me, Clippy, a host of failed applications. Microsoft’s early history was that of producing a poor first effort, but constantly improving until it dominated the market. The paths of Jobs and Gates diverged when the Government decided Microsoft was too successful. In 1998, a group of AGs and the DOJ responded by shackling Microsoft’s creativity; Microsoft essentially had to clear each new idea or product with government bureaucrats. Anything that might leverage Microsoft’s strengths in the market was forbidden. Microsoft had become akin to a public utility – profitable, but low growth and no innovation. Without the prospect of success, the risks of failure seem too great, and innovation at Microsoft tailed off.

To be sure, Microsoft employees continued to invent new technologies. Microsoft pioneered the tablet PC, touch screen smart phones, speech recognition built into Windows, and a wealth of patents. But Microsoft never bet the farm on any of these innovations, and they never dominated their markets. Most notably, Apple now dominates the tablet market that Microsoft launched a decade ago. Without the incentive and freedom to risk failure, Microsoft lost its way. Now that government oversight has been lifted, Microsoft is aggressively pursuing the markets it pioneered – smart phones and tablet PCs. The freedom to fail is the power to innovate and make the world better.

Shout Bits has argued against government interference in the creative process before, but the story of Steve Jobs is the promise of US exceptionalism, while the story of Microsoft is the decline of innovation when the government disallows failure. Jobs lead the true American life. He failed over and over; his life took as many turns as his short years allowed. He founded a Fortune 500 company, lost it, and eventually rebuilt it. Along the way, he revolutionized computers, movies, music, and telephony. Whenever Jobs took on an industry, those working for the established norm packed their bags.

On the other hand, while Microsoft started out disrupting industries with aggressive risk taking, later it was ensnared by government dictates on what was ‘fair.’ The careers of Jobs and Gates are a cautionary tale to anyone who might believe the government should allocate investments or somehow decide which ideas are to succeed. Even if Pres. Obama had picked a winner in Solyndra, the heavy hand of government would have foreclosed on someone else with an even better idea. Steve Jobs’s career was a celebration of the US’s unique capacity to tolerate the failures that eventually lead to the innovations that build the modern world.