I finally gave in to the most recent reindeer game on Facebook. This turned out to be an enjoyable effort.

• 1. Despite countless hours spent gaming up until I was 18 or 19 years old, and the successful completion and mastery of many games, I have never defeated Mike Tyson in the Nintendo classic bearing his name.
• 2. I drive to Dunkin Donuts just about every morning to feed both my own addiction to hazelnut flavored coffee, and my Labrador’s daily scarfing of a single glazed munchkin. The drool is nearly unbearable – his too.
• 3. I’ve read more in the last five years than the preceding 27 combined.
• 4. I’m an avid enthusiast of digital camouflage.
• 5. My proudest moment as a musician was entering the Ryman auditorium from the performer’s side entrance before playing on the Opry. I still have the sticker on my case.
• 6. I once owned over 40 flannel shirts from Abercrombie & Fitch – back when their clothing had its last fading remnant of class – not that flannel imparts classiness.
• 7. I very rarely hear humans expressing rational thoughts on the radio.
• 8. John Mayer’s Continuum would be one of my desert island albums. How extremely rare to find an artist with intellectually rich penmanship, a soulful voice, and instrumental aptitude that’s so highly esteemed.
• 9. I spent nearly ten years of my childhood racing go-karts at the state and national level.
• 10. My wife and I are just about polar opposites. Sam will definitely have an array of ideas and attitudes to emulate.
• 11. I’ve never liked my hair. It’s curly when it’s long, straight when it’s short and I have both a cow-lick and a bald spot from a birthmark. I tried clippers in high school once. Unfortunately the anthropometric summary of my head represents a mathematical anomaly - of which hair is a necessary mitigating agent. Extracting physical appearance as a component of my self-esteem has been a wonderfully rewarding endeavor.
• 12. I think Google Maps, with its current feature set and considering the nature of the web as a software platform, is the single most impressive application I’ve ever used.
• 13. As a 12 year-old I had growing pains so badly on one occasion that I literally could not walk.
• 14. I was oblivious to the potential amount of joy and love that a human can sense until the birth of my son.
• 15. One of my 10-year goals (5 years ago) is to have a fully functional, CNC-enabled machine and woodworking shop at home – It’s currently about 2/3 complete.
• 16. I think America has seen her brightest days.
• 17. Bach’s Prelude No. 1 is my favorite classical piece.
• 18. I’m currently learning to weld and sew.
• 19. Only once in my life did I encounter what athletes refer to as “the zone.” I don’t subscribe to any form of the supernatural, but that one-hour period of time will forever standout an inexplicable breach of my consciousness and actions.
• 20. On a 2006 music trip to Europe, Air France “misplaced” about 20K dollars worth of our irreplaceable guitars and gear for 24 hours.
• 21. I used to make light sabers using flashlights and green poster board. Luke was a pansy when he carried the blue one - I chose to emulate excellence.
• 22. I think I could enjoy being a truck driver because there would be plenty of time for music, audio books and introspection, but I couldn’t handle the time away from home.
• 23. I think humans are fundamentally moral, but after being battered by irrationalism for thousands of years, today one has to really develop and nurture a mindset of independent and critical thinking to hold any aspiration of escape from the clutches of modern philosophy.
• 24. In a streak that ended cold in 2007, I’ve consumed an estimated10,000 pop-tarts.
• 25. I think every individual is capable of more than they realize. With focus and mental discipline the human mind is capable of immense achievement.

This is an very clear and concise explanation of deflation as it pertains to our current mixed-economy nightmare. Being somewhat of an economic noob, I had to read it carefully a few times to grasp all the underlying premises - good stuff.

George Reisman is my favorite and most reliable source for coherent and rational economic musings.

A video about this:

From Tito:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Put on your mixed-economy goggles for this one…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dick Morris is a likable and mildly entertaining political analyst, especially compared to the typically vicious riffraff blabbing on the major news networks, but his failure to grasp essentials is blatantly (and sickeningly) clear in this article.

Despite his typically ornamental discourse, he usually offers very keen insights into the bowels of Washington. As an insider on both sides of the isle, this professional politician knows the players and the game so well that he often comes off as almost a snitch revealing some secret esoteric tips. In this piece Morris grimly states his forecast for the next stage of America’s demise. While some of his conclusions will probably be remarkably accurate, his outlining premises are not.

2009-2010 will rank with 1913-14, 1933-36, 1964-65 and 1981-82 as years that will permanently change our government, politics and lives. Just as the stars were aligned for Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson and Reagan, they are aligned for Obama. Simply put, we enter his administration as free-enterprise, market-dominated, laissez-faire America. We will shortly become like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, or Sweden — a socialist democracy in which the government dominates the economy, determines private-sector priorities and offers a vastly expanded range of services to many more people at much higher taxes.

Whoa… sorry Dick, but there’s absolutely nothing laissez faire about America. Even in our infancy there was no strict separation of economy and state. Does he know what the phrase means? Laissez faire is French for “leave alone” - meaning, keep your meddling government hands (not partially, but fully) out of the economy. An economy departs from that unknown ideal with the very first non-objective regulation. And, I hate to steal the thunder of his ominous prediction, but we’ve already eroded into a socialist democracy, and of the very nature that he predicts - surely he knows this.

Obama will accomplish his agenda of “reform” under the rubric of “recovery.” Using the electoral mandate bestowed on a Democratic Congress by restless voters and the economic power given his administration by terrified Americans, he will change our country fundamentally in the name of lifting the depression. His stimulus packages won’t do much to shorten the downturn — although they will make it less painful — but they will do a great deal to change our nation.

That power was given, but not out of desperation alone. Americans lack the fundamental regard for individual rights. Combine that with the de facto mindset of altruism guided by pragmatism, and enough of “the people” will condone any cannibalistic whim for the sake of the tribe. The deadly sanction granted by this nation of victims was done so with the calm indifference of concrete-bound compassion - not out of panic.

In implementing his agenda, Barack Obama will emulate the example of Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Not the liberal mythology of the New Deal, but the actuality of what it accomplished.) When FDR took office, he was enormously successful in averting a total collapse of the banking system and the economy. But his New Deal measures only succeeded in lowering the unemployment rate from 23 percent in 1933, when he took office, to 13 percent in the summer of 1937. It never went lower. And his policies of over-regulation generated such business uncertainty that they triggered a second-term recession. Unemployment in 1938 rose to 17 percent and, in 1940, on the verge of the war-driven recovery, stood at 15 percent. (These data and the real story of Hoover’s and Roosevelt’s missteps, uncolored by ideology, are available in The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes, copyright 2007.)

But he will emulate the same collectivist, Keynesian example of FDR - not only fostering the same outcome, but guided by the same explicit tactics. They are, in principle, cut from the same mold.

Regarding the Shlaes reference as being factual and uncolored, how could FDR’s missteps be classified as such without being colored by an ideology? The term misstep would indicate a flaw or error based on some standard. That standard, and the corresponding ideology which deems them erroneous is reality - precisely what the varying degrees of statism considered by Morris as ideologies are conspicuously lacking as a standard. Morris displays a shocking level of concrete-bound thinking in this passage. Capitalism isn’t even on his radar, primarily because he doesn’t understand it as his first paragraph proves. The only options in his world differ merely in degree of Government meddling.

Obama’s record will be similar, although less wise and more destructive. He will begin by passing every program for which liberals have lusted for decades, from alternative-energy sources to school renovations, infrastructure repairs and technology enhancements. These are all good programs, but they normally would be stretched out for years. But freed of any constraint on the deficit — indeed, empowered by a mandate to raise it as high as possible — Obama will do them all rather quickly.

Good? For whom, and according to what standard? Each program mentioned is beyond the proper role of Government, assumes mass violation of property rights, and will further cripple our economy.

Will he raise taxes? Why should he? With a congressional mandate to run the deficit up as high as need be, there is no reason to raise taxes now and risk aggravating the depression. Instead, Obama will follow the opposite of the Reagan strategy. Reagan cut taxes and increased the deficit so that liberals could not increase spending. Obama will raise spending and increase the deficit so that conservatives cannot cut taxes. And, when the economy is restored, he will raise taxes with impunity, since the only people who will have to pay them would be rich Republicans.

Morris fails to explain how an increase in expenditures, by a non-productive entity inflating our currency, can occur without negative economic results, and by what magic will the economy be restored?

In the name of stabilizing the banking system, Obama will nationalize it. Using Troubled Asset Relief Program funds to write generous checks to needy financial institutions, his administration will demand preferred stock in exchange. Preferred stock gets dividends before common stockholders do. With the massive debt these companies will owe to the government, they will only be able to afford dividends for preferred stockholders — the government, not private investors. So who will buy common stock? And the government will demand that its bills be paid before any profits that might materialize are reinvested in the financial institution, so how will the value of the stocks ever grow? Devoid of private investors, these institutions will fall ever more under government control.

I think his prediction here has merit.

But it is the healthcare system that will experience the most dramatic and traumatic of changes. The current debate between erecting a Medicare-like governmental single payer or channeling coverage through private insurance misses the essential point. Without a lot more doctors, nurses, clinics, equipment and hospital beds, health resources will be strained to the breaking point. The people and equipment that now serve 250 million Americans and largely neglect all but the emergency needs of the other 50 million will now have to serve everyone. And, as government imposes ever more Draconian price controls and income limits on doctors, the supply of practitioners and equipment will decline as the demand escalates. Price increases will be out of the question, so the government will impose healthcare rationing, denying the older and sicker among us the care they need and even barring them from paying for it themselves. (Rationing based on income and price will be seen as immoral.)

Indeed the essential point is never considered, but what Morris deems the essential is only a symptom. There will be a shortage of resources, both professionals and supplies, because socialized medicine violates the rights of all involved parties. Medical professionals are already turning their noses up at a system in which their expertise is wrangled by regulation and the economic distortion of socialization. The coercive monopoly of Government MedCo. will also cripple the market for medical supplies, save the few who’ll jump at the opportunity for a lucrative Government contract.

Finally, he will use the expansive powers of the Federal Communications Commission to impose “local” control and ownership of radio stations and to impose the “fairness doctrine” on talk radio. The effect will be to drive talk radio to the Internet, fundamentally change its economics, and retard its growth for years hence.

Couple this with the impending wedge of Net Neutrality and we’ll have full censorship of all viable media - not to mention a stupid and crippled Internet.

So Obama’s name will be mud by 2012 and probably by 2010 as well. And the Republican Party will make big gains and regain much of its lost power.

I don’t think it will happen so quickly. There’s still a decent sliver of freedom left to pin the blame on. As long as there’s a scapegoat, Obama will remain the darling mascot of the irrational Left. Besides, Conservatives have nothing better to offer - only the same pragmatist notions in a different hue.

But it will be too late to reverse the socialism of much of the economy, the demographic change in the electorate, the rationing of healthcare by the government, the surge of unionization and the crippling of talk radio.

It may be too late to do so without painful depressions, but as long as people are open to the ideas of reason, rights, selfishness (in the true sense of the word) and individualism, there is an opportunity for America to see its brightest days.

I couldn’t agree more with this eloquent farewell:

Not to embrace Obama’s continuation and distillation of your willfully ignorant approach to government and the failed policies that flow directly from it, but here’s wishing the door doesn’t hit your ass on the way out, Mr. President.

So many in this country have deluded themselves into thinking things are really going to change with the new administration. Impending economic doom aside, we’re merely switching from one side of the welfare-statist coin to the other. The new gang will exacerbate our financial turmoil, but despite the fact that Obama is as Keynesian as they come, he’ll merely be the particular collectivist clown in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He’s been dealt (via Life’s Lottery) a flaming bag of irrationality ignited, fueled, and soon-to-be exacerbated by his modus operandi. Yet, all accusatory snarls will point to some imaginary figment which has yet to exist, the “Free Market”, and the regulations will continue to flourish.

Neither party has the philosophical underpinnings required to steer America away from our path to destruction, i.e., towards a strict separation of Government from economics, education and medicine. Neither will abandon altruism as their guide in favor of egoism, refuse collectivism as their mode in reverence to the individual, or deny pragmatism as their means as opposed to a rational objective philosophy based on reason.