The Market Ticker ® complains that the banks and the regulators are flagrantly and massively violating laws that are necessary for borrowing and lending to work – violating every step that is necessary for the trust to work along the chain, with the result that our entire financial system is massively disfunctional, and continues to leak huge amounts of money. He gives lots of interesting details of a multitude of …
Month: September 2010
Losing to Islam
Islam is theocratic. It intends to conquer. Shariah law, as interpreted by most Muslims, treats women fine. Trouble is, as interpreted by all Muslims, even Sufis, it requires that infidels submit to law that makes them second class to believers and that Muslims fight to impose such law – and we are in fact submitting to such law. The rather small Sufi minority merely propose less drastic measures to impose …
Mao’s murders
Rummel estimated that Mao killed wrongfully killed seventy seven million, and the Black Book of Communism estimates sixty five million – but, of course, it is notoriously difficult to say what a totalitarian terror state based on slavery and mass murder is up to.  They called it an iron curtain because you could not see what was behind it. So how should we judge the accuracy of estimates? One good …
The cause of the crisis
Roissy wonders why the elites are so stuck on the obviously false idea of literal equality. Understood as a species of Christian belief, it makes sense, because the Christians believe that the most important part of the self is immaterial. If it’s immaterial, then material differences have nothing to do with it. So Christians are free to believe pretty much anything they want about this most important part of the self, unconstrained by material evidence of any sort.
The explosive expansion of the state
Government regulatory intervention in the economy is exploding, creating a multitude of invisible taxes, off budget expenditures, and opportunities for corrupt profits by semi private businesses, such Al Gore becoming a billionaire from carbon credits.
Rigging the vote
Why bother rigging the vote; even the tea party supports unsustainable welfare, affirmative action, social security, and healthcare programs. I fear the vote rigging is merely over who gets the gravy, since the major function of government has become handing out the gravy to true believers.
The number of the beast
And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Greece Bans Cash Transactions Over 1,500 Euros The Italian government will ban the use of cash in transactions …
After mass democracy
A couple of hundred years ago, the conventional wisdom was that democracy with broad voter participation was unstable, violent, ruinous, and short lived. A hundred years or so ago the world moved to mass democracy, universal franchise. Many people predicted that this would result in the masses trying to vote themselves rich, resulting in social and economic collapse Well guess what. The masses have been trying to vote themselves rich, …
The end is in sight
For the last hundred years or so, people have been predicting that the welfare and affirmative action state would collapse eventually. Well, it seems that “eventually†is getting close. Arnold Kling has a list of links showing that all the welfare state social democracies are going to hell in a handbasket, with everyone else in even worse trouble than the US. Arnold Kling predicts a US debt crisis between 2015 …