The American Letter Mail Company was started by Lysander Spooner in 1844, competing with the legal monopoly of the United States Post Office (USPO) (now the USPS) in violation of the Private Express Statutes. It succeeded in delivering mail for lower prices, but the U.S. Government challenged Spooner with legal measures, eventually forcing him to cease operations in 1851.
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Tag Archives: War on Commerce
They Wrecked Wiper Fluid Too
I thought of Jeffrey Tucker: “If some product annoys you in surprising ways, there’s a good chance that it is not the invisible hand at work, but rather the regulatory grip that is squeezing the life out of civilization itself.”
And sure enough, over the past two decades, bureaucrats in various state environmental protection agencies, with help from the feds, have placed ever-tighter restrictions on the concentration of cleaning solvents in wiper fluid.
Since the mid-1990s, the amount of cleaning agents in wiper fluid (as a percentage of weight) has fallen in California from roughly 35% to 10%. Texas, too, has a statewide limit of 23.5%. The cities of Atlanta, Ga., and Phoenix, Ariz., also have restrictions, with the former being only 8% by weight. Most other states have limits around 35%. There have also been limits placed on the volume of antifreeze that can be included in pre-mixed fluid. Typically, there are some exceptions made for mountain areas — or regions that are often colder during winter months, as in California — but increasingly, your over-the-counter wiper fluid is often little more than colored water.
While these restrictions are limited to a few states, the effect of the legislation has been widespread, such that retailers often carry products that are compliant even outside of these regulated areas. I surveyed a number of local auto parts stores and found that many products contain solvents in accordance with California’s or Texas’ standards and say as much on their labels.
. . . .
So the solution to such madness is simply to mix your own wiper fluid with the concentrated formula at a higher rate than the packaging suggests. In the winter months, you can add a little antifreeze to your wiper fluid as well. These two fixes will roughly return the wiper fluid to its pre-adulterated state, ensuring clean and ice-free windshields for safer driving.
It truly is a sad commentary that we’ve been reduced to hacking virtually every household appliance and mixing our own cleaning products in order to reverse the trend of regression the state has forced upon us.
Some of these are simple, inexpensive and easily accomplished, even by those not inclined to handiwork, but some can be far more complex and costly. The point is, however, that none of it is even necessary, since the division of labor had solved all of this long before government declared war on our housewares. (Read more)
Government Motors
In particular, an article published by Bloomberg on July 5, 2011 revealed that GM may have been unloading excessive inventory on dealers, a practice known as “channel stuffing,” in order to create the false impression that GM was recovering and sales and revenues were rising.” Luckily, since this is a class action lawsuit, anyone else out there who bought GM on the belief that the company would not engage in precisely the behavior that we have shown month after month to occur, is invited to enjoin the plaintiffs and to sue the company that exists only courtesy of taxpayer generosity (and more importantly, courtesy of labor unions subverting priority rights in bankruptcy, in exchange for presidential votes). Finally, and if nothing else, this lawsuit will certainly force the general co-opted media to pay some more attention to a topic that is quite sensitive for the administration: the business model of the one company that the president is so proud and happy to have saved from the clutches of evil bondholders. (Read more)
***
t looks like General Motors will be throwing everything in but the kitchen sink to help fluff its second quarter earnings numbers. Taxpayers continue to help with the cause as President Obama campaigns on the “success” of GM following the manipulated bankruptcy process that cost taxpayers $50 billion and another $45 billion of tax credits gifted to GM to help protect powerful UAW interests. We now learn that government purchases of GM vehicles rose a whopping 79% in June. (Read more)
European Court Says Getting Sick On Vacation Means You Get A Do-Over
They’re already entitled to four to six weeks of guaranteed vacation leave per year, and now a court there just ruled that workers who happen to fall ill while on vacation are legally entitled to get a do-over on their trip. Who needs tips about how to not get sick on vacation with a loophole like that?
The decision came about after department store workers in Spain brought a case to Spanish court, where they won, arguing that collective bargaining agreements distinguish a clear line between annual leave and sick leave.
The National Association of Large Distribution Businesses then appealed to the Supreme Court in Madrid, which then handed the matter over to Europe’s highest court, says the New York Times.
“The purpose of entitlement to paid annual leave is to enable the worker to rest and enjoy a period of relaxation and leisure,” the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled. “The purpose of entitlement to sick leave is different, since it enables a worker to recover from an illness that has caused him to be unfit for work.”
A previous ruling had held that a sick person could reschedule a trip if they got sick right before it, but has now extended that provision to the vacation itself, saying, “The point at which the temporary incapacity arose is irrelevant.”
All 27 countries in the European Union will be held to the court’s decision. That means 27 potential future homes. (Read more)
Chicago’s swift, surprising[?] decline
Part of me likes it when politicians have to face the consequences of their arrogance and psychopathic policies. But maybe I shouldn’t rejoice. The parasites got what they want — they’ve grown fat enough to weather an economic storm and re-attach themselves once a better host becomes available.
But despite the chorus of praise, it’s becoming evident that the city took a serious turn for the worse during the first decade of the new century. The gleaming towers, swank restaurants, and smart shops remain, but Chicago is experiencing a steep decline quite different from that of many other large cities. . . .
Begin with Chicago’s population decline during the 2000s, an exodus of more than 200,000 people that wiped out the previous decade’s gains. Of the 15 largest cities in the United States in 2010, Chicago was the only one that lost population; indeed, it suffered the second-highest total loss of any city, sandwiched between first-place Detroit and third-place, hurricane-wrecked New Orleans. While New York’s and L.A.’s populations clocked in at record highs in 2010, Chicago’s dropped to a level not seen since 1910. . . .
Chicago’s economy also performed poorly during the first decade of the century. That was a tough decade all over the United States, of course, but the Chicago region lost 7.1 percent of its jobs—the worst performance of any of the country’s ten largest metro areas. Chicago’s vaunted Loop, the second-largest central business district in the nation, did even worse, losing 18.6 percent of its private-sector jobs, according to the Chicago Loop Alliance. . . .
Maria Pappas estimates that within the city of Chicago, there’s a stunning $63,525 in total local government liabilities per household. Not all of this is city debt; the region’s byzantine political structure includes many layers of government, including hundreds of local taxing districts. But pensions for city workers alone are $12 billion underfunded. If benefits aren’t reduced, the city will have to increase its contributions to the pension fund by $710 million a year for the next 50 years, according to the Civic Federation. Chicago’s annual budget, too, has been structurally out of balance, running an annual deficit of about $650 million in recent years. . . .
As dire as Chicago’s finances are, those of Illinois are in even worse shape. The primary cause, once again, is pensions, which are underfunded to the tune of $83 billion. Retirees’ future health care is underfunded an additional $43 billion. There’s a lot of regular debt, too—about $44 billion of it. And Illinois, like Chicago, has run large deficits for some time. Despite raising the individual income tax 66 percent and the corporate tax 46 percent in 2011, the state is projected to end the current fiscal year with an accumulated deficit of $5.2 billion. While California has made headlines by issuing IOUs to companies to which it owes money, Illinois has taken an easier route: it just stopped paying its bills, at one point last year racking up 208,000 of them, totaling $4.5 billion. Some businesses have gone unpaid for nine months or even longer. Unsurprisingly, Illinois has the worst credit rating of any state. Unable to pay its bills, it is de facto bankrupt.
What accounts for Chicago’s miserable performance in the 2000s? The fiscal mess is the easiest part to account for: it is the result of poor leadership and powerful interest groups that benefit from the status quo. Public-union clout is literally written into the state constitution, which prohibits the diminution of state employees’ retirement benefits. Tales of abuse abound, such as the recent story of two lobbyists for a local teachers’ union who, though they had never held government jobs, obtained full government pensions by doing a single day of substitute teaching apiece. . . .
As City Journal senior editor Steven Malanga has written for RealClearMarkets, Illinois “essentially wanted to be a low-tax (or at least a moderate-tax) state with high services and rich employee pensions.” That’s an obviously unsustainable policy formula. The state has also employed a series of gimmicks to cover up persistent deficits—for example, using borrowed money to shore up its pension system and even to pay for current operations. At the city level, Mayor Richard M. Daley papered over deficits with such tricks as a now-infamous parking-meter lease. The city sold the right to parking revenues for 75 years to get $1.1 billion up front. Just two years into the deal, all but $180 million had been spent. . . .
ordinances affecting a specific council district—called a “ward” in Chicago—can’t be passed unless the city council member for that ward, its “alderman,” signs off. One downside of the system is that, as the Chicago Reader reported, over 95 percent of city council legislation is consumed by “ward housekeeping” tasks. More important is that it hands the 50 aldermen nearly dictatorial control over what happens in their wards, from zoning changes to sidewalk café permits. This dumps political risk onto the shoulders of every would-be entrepreneur, who knows that he must stay on the alderman’s good side to be in business. It’s also a recipe for sleaze: 31 aldermen have been convicted of corruption since 1970.
Red tape is another problem for small businesses. Outrages are legion. Scooter’s Frozen Custard was cited by the city for illegally providing outdoor chairs for customers—after being told by the local alderman that it didn’t need a permit. Logan Square Kitchen, a licensed and inspected shared-kitchen operation for upscale food entrepreneurs, has had to clear numerous regulatory hurdles: each of the companies using its kitchen space had to get and pay for a separate license and reinspection, for example, and after the city retroactively classified the kitchen as a banquet hall, its application for various other licenses was rejected until it provided parking spaces. An entrepreneur who wanted to open a children’s playroom to serve families visiting Northwestern Memorial Hospital was told that he needed to get a Public Place of Amusement license—which he couldn’t get, it turned out, because the proposed playroom was too close to a hospital!
And these are exactly the kind of hip, high-end businesses that the city claims to want. . . .
ordinances affecting a specific council district—called a “ward” in Chicago—can’t be passed unless the city council member for that ward, its “alderman,” signs off. One downside of the system is that, as the Chicago Reader reported, over 95 percent of city council legislation is consumed by “ward housekeeping” tasks. More important is that it hands the 50 aldermen nearly dictatorial control over what happens in their wards, from zoning changes to sidewalk café permits. This dumps political risk onto the shoulders of every would-be entrepreneur, who knows that he must stay on the alderman’s good side to be in business. It’s also a recipe for sleaze: 31 aldermen have been convicted of corruption since 1970.
Red tape is another problem for small businesses. Outrages are legion. Scooter’s Frozen Custard was cited by the city for illegally providing outdoor chairs for customers—after being told by the local alderman that it didn’t need a permit. Logan Square Kitchen, a licensed and inspected shared-kitchen operation for upscale food entrepreneurs, has had to clear numerous regulatory hurdles: each of the companies using its kitchen space had to get and pay for a separate license and reinspection, for example, and after the city retroactively classified the kitchen as a banquet hall, its application for various other licenses was rejected until it provided parking spaces. An entrepreneur who wanted to open a children’s playroom to serve families visiting Northwestern Memorial Hospital was told that he needed to get a Public Place of Amusement license—which he couldn’t get, it turned out, because the proposed playroom was too close to a hospital!
And these are exactly the kind of hip, high-end businesses that the city claims to want. (Read more)
Is Human Progress Slowing?
“Whether we look at transportation, energy, commodity production, food production, agro-tech, nanotechnology — that with the exception of computers, we’ve had tremendous slowdown,” he told an audience at Stanford University last month.
“I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed,” he went on. “It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years — part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion. And all the engineering disciplines that had to do with stuff have basically been outlawed one by one.” (Read more)
Humor — Hitler finds out that Scott Walker won the Wisconsin recall election
3-D Printing vs Intellectual Property
Digital technology is reinventing our whole world, in service of you and me. It’s free enterprise on steroids. It’s bypassing the gatekeepers and empowering each of us to invent our own civilization for ourselves, according to our own specifications.
The promise of the future is nothing short of spectacular — provided that those who lack the imagination to see the potential here don’t get their way. Sadly, but predictably, some of the biggest barriers to a bright future are capitalists themselves who fear the future.
A good example is the current hysteria over 3-D printing. This technology has moved with incredible speed from the realm of science fiction to the real world, seemingly in a matter of months. You can get such printers today for as low as $400. These printers allow objects to be transported digitally and literally printed into existence right before your very eyes.
It’s like a miracle! It could change everything we think we know about the transport of physical objects. Rather than sending crates and boats around the world, in the future, we will send only lightweight digits. The potential for bypassing monopolies and entrenched interests is spectacular.
Here is what Andrew Myers reported in Wired magazine last week:
“Last winter, Thomas Valenty bought a MakerBot — an inexpensive 3-D printer that lets you quickly create plastic objects. His brother had some Imperial Guards from the tabletop game Warhammer, so Valenty decided to design a couple of his own Warhammer-style figurines: a two-legged war mecha and a tank.
“He tweaked the designs for a week until he was happy. ‘I put a lot of work into them,’ he says. Then he posted the files for free downloading on Thingiverse, a site that lets you share instructions for printing 3-D objects. Soon other fans were outputting their own copies.
“Until the lawyers showed up.
“Games Workshop, the U.K.-based firm that makes Warhammer, noticed Valenty’s work and sent Thingiverse a takedown notice, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Thingiverse removed the files, and Valenty suddenly became an unwilling combatant in the next digital war: the fight over copying physical objects.”
There we have it. The American Chamber of Commerce — the supposed defender of free enterprise — is in a meltdown panic about new technology, determined to either crush 3-D printing in its crib or at least to make sure it doesn’t grow past its toddler period. (Read more)
The war on progress continues.
Feds threaten to raid summer concerts to seize guitars
The Obama Administration is once again poised to begin harassing Gibson Guitars of Nashville, Tennessee, this time taking its grievances with the company to musicians and fans at summer concerts across the nation.
Administration officials have threatened to raid summer concerts in order to seize what it deems to be illegal guitars made from wood that has been banned. (Read more)
Hindenburg Disaster? The government’s fault.
The Zeppelin company originally preferred the cheaper and more readily obtainable hydrogen, but after 48 of 56 passengers on a British airship were killed in a storm in 1930, Zeppelin’s engineers planned the new design for the safer, nonflammable helium. Unfortunately for Zeppelin, Congress had passed a law in 1927 banning the export of helium because it was a strategic gas with military aviation potential. There was thus no alternative to hydrogen, despite its risks. (Interestingly, the United States lifted the ban on helium after the Hindenburg disaster, although it was reinstated in 1938 after Nazi Germany annexed Austria.) (Read more)
Why France Has So Many 49-Employee Companies
Here’s a curious fact about the French economy: The country has 2.4 times as many companies with 49 employees as with 50. What difference does one employee make? Plenty, according to the French labor code. Once a company has at least 50 employees inside France, management must create three worker councils, introduce profit sharing, and submit restructuring plans to the councils if the company decides to fire workers for economic reasons.
French businesspeople often skirt these restraints by creating new companies rather than expanding existing ones. “I can’t tell you how many times when I was Minister I’d meet an entrepreneur who would tell me about his companies,” Thierry Breton, chief executive officer of consulting firm Atos and Minister of Finance from 2005 to 2007, said at a Paris conference on April 4. “I’d ask, ‘Why companies?’ He’d say, ‘Oh, I have several so that I can keep [the workforce] under 50.’ We have to review our labor code.” (Read more)
“Across Italy police are cracking down on Ferrari and Lamborghini drivers [because they are rich]”
Across Italy police are cracking down on Ferrari and Lamborghini drivers, but not because they are driving too fast. Italy, like so much of southern Europe, is drowning in debt, so police are pursuing drivers to make sure they are declaring – and therefore paying taxes on – earnings that would allow them to afford cars worth as much as half a million dollars.
The targeting is part of an ongoing war on tax cheats, an attempt to shore up $2.5 trillion of the country’s public debt and change a culture that has often prided itself on avoiding taxes. Tax authorities have long carried out much-publicized checks on owners of luxury cars, yachts, even nightclubs that don’t issue proper receipts. But since the unelected, technocratic government took power in November, it has made enforcing tax collections a priority. (Read more)
Atlas will shrug.
Fuel efficient vehicles BLOCKED from US market!?
Rand Paul on Pro Choice — regarding toilets!
This deserves being posted again.
See also, Jeffrey Tucker’s The Relentless Misery of 1.6 Gallons.
IRS commissioner brags that most Americans get a tax refund
In an interview with NPR, Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Doug Shulman insists most people have a positive experience with the IRS:
“When people hear the letters, ‘I-R-S,’ sometimes they have a negative connotation. But 80 percent of Americans get an average of a $3,000 refund. So most people actually have a very pleasant experience with us.”