Partisanship Has so Far Been Tea Party Activists' Big Mistake | Gene Healy | Cato Institute: Commentary

Partisanship Has so Far Been Tea Party Activists' Big Mistake | Gene Healy | Cato Institute: Commentary: "57 percent of tea party activists view our last president favorably.

What's going on here? Tea party activists claim they're a group with a principled opposition to big government in all its forms. How can anyone take that claim seriously when the membership embraces a president who personifies everything they're supposed to hate?

Aren't these activists opposed to profligate spending? Then why do they look favorably on 43, who led the largest debt expansion in American history and spent more than his six predecessors, doubling the federal budget during his tenure?

Don't the tea party activists hate bailouts? Have they forgotten which president rammed through the $700 billion TARP, bailed out Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, and gave $17 billion to Chrysler and General Motors after Congress refused to authorize tax dollars for failing automakers?"

"no right-minded supporter of limited government could possibly 'miss' a Republican president who, in Medicare Part D — the free-pills-for-seniors program — engineered the biggest expansion of entitlements between President Lyndon Johnson's Medicare and Obamacare."

An Economy of Liars | Gerald P. O'Driscoll Jr. | Cato Institute: Commentary

An Economy of Liars | Gerald P. O'Driscoll Jr. | Cato Institute: Commentary: "Ludwig von Mises, predicted in the 1930s that communism would eventually fail because it did not rely on prices to allocate resources. He predicted that the wrong goods would be produced: too many of some, too few of others. He was proven correct.

In the U.S today, we are moving away from reliance on honest pricing. The federal government controls 90% of housing finance. Policies to encourage home ownership remain on the books, and more have been added. Fed policies of low interest rates result in capital being misallocated across time."

Religious Persecution International | Doug Bandow | Cato Institute: Commentary

Religious Persecution International | Doug Bandow | Cato Institute: Commentary: "A new study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life explores religious persecution around the world. According to Pew: '64 nations — about one-third of the countries in the world — have high or very high restrictions on religion. But because some of the most restrictive countries are very populous, nearly 70 percent of the world's 6.8 billion people live in countries with high restrictions on religion, the brunt of which often falls on religious minorities.'

Include moderate restrictions, which most Americans also would consider to be intolerable, and more than half of the world's nations limit religious liberty. Fully 86 percent of the globe's people face significant limits on their right to worship God."

Campaign For Liberty — Profits Cure Disease

Campaign For Liberty — Profits Cure Disease: "If you were told you have cancer, would you want Congress to: a) eliminate taxes on companies developing a cure, or b) eliminate their profits?"
"Choose now, because once you are diagnosed with a potentially fatal disease it will be way too late to change your mind."

"The high profits from selling the first units of the cure to the rich provide the investment capital needed to expand production and lower unit costs, making the cure for cancer available to less-wealthy people. If you tax those profits, there is no money to reinvest and the cure will be only for the rich forever."

Campaign For Liberty — Greek To Me

Campaign For Liberty — Greek To Me: "The annual budget deficit in Greece is 12% of GDP; ours is at 11% and climbing. Their public debt is 125% of GDP; ours is over 90% and climbing. More people work for the government in Greece than make things; same here. As economist John Welch put it, Greece is a few chapters ahead of us in the same book. We should read ahead and see how this particular work of economic fiction ends."

Krugman Misleads On Greece � John Stossel

Krugman Misleads On Greece � John Stossel: "In 10 years, under Obama's budget plan, the USA will likely be in same debt position as Greece is now."

Are We a Self-Hating Commercial Society? - Jeffrey A. Tucker - Mises Daily

Are We a Self-Hating Commercial Society? - Jeffrey A. Tucker - Mises Daily: "If buying this cup saves trees, an even better way to save trees is not to buy coffee at all. And it's not clear that lowering the demand for paper is going to actually save trees at all, since a lower demand would eventually mean less reason to plant and renew the resource. And do we really need to save trees anyway? Does someone know the optimal number of trees that are supposed to be alive on the planet at any one time?

The case of socially just coffee is the one that really gets my goat. The coffee plantations that pay the highest wages and offer the most benefits to their workers are the largest, most established, and most well-connected plantations. The smaller, family-owned plantations can't afford all these things, but they are less likely to have access to the rating agencies and export companies. Why, precisely, are consumers supposed to favor the corporate big shots over the family farms, and do so in the name of enlightened social consciousness?"

"Whether a cereal is called "Sugar Smacks" or "Earthen Honey Morsels" is neither here nor there to me, and if some marketing genius figures that the cereal company can make more money with one name over another, good for him and the company. Capitalism is so darn good at what it does that it can even bamboozle muddleheaded socialists to cough up money for its products; that's wonderful."

The Contractors that Couldn't Shoot Straight? | David Isenberg | Cato Institute: Commentary

The Contractors that Couldn't Shoot Straight? | David Isenberg | Cato Institute: Commentary: "For eight years we have been supposedly training the police in Afghanistan. And here is what we have done. We've flushed $6 billion, $6 billion.

Now, am I exaggerating? Let me quote the general in charge of training the police in Afghanistan. This is what General Caldwell said. And I quote, 'It's inconceivable that in fact for eight years we weren't training the police.' He went on to say that essentially we were giving them uniforms."

Avoid Campus Club Conundrum | Ilya Shapiro and Neal McCluskey | Cato Institute: Commentary

Avoid Campus Club Conundrum | Ilya Shapiro and Neal McCluskey | Cato Institute: Commentary: "It is impossible to reconcile free speech with governmentally compelled support of speech. Just as public colleges cannot choose both which student groups to fund and avoid discrimination, they cannot pay a professor without privileging his speech over that of the taxpayers who pay his bills. It also cannot fire him for saying something that taxpayers dislike without the government being guilty of censoring speech.

There is only one complete solution: Government must stop funding higher education — which, after all, is a form of regressive taxation, with lower-income households subsidizing the children of higher-income households (who attend college at a much higher rate). Ultimately, it's the only way to preserve real freedom and equality for each and every American."

New Rules for Your Taxes | Daniel J. Mitchell | Cato Institute: Commentary

New Rules for Your Taxes | Daniel J. Mitchell | Cato Institute: Commentary: "Here's where CBO accounting would be a big help. Why don't you assume that you were going to get a raise of $10,000. Because your pay 'only' went up by $5,000, you can claim your pay was reduced. The IRS will come down on you like a ton of bricks, but you can tell the agents as they cart you away that you were following official government methodology. (Maybe they'll go easy on you when you tell them that an identical approach helped push the IRS budget up to $12 billion.)"

"When filing your taxes, you can fantasize that you moved into a much larger house with a higher mortgage. Then, claim a bigger mortgage interest deduction. Once again, the IRS may frown upon that approach, but perhaps a judge will sympathize if you say you'll pay your full tax bill if and when Congress follows through on the supposed Medicare savings in the Obamacare legislation."