Rating agencies making sovereign debt look bad? Criminalize rating agencies!

EU Considers Ban on Country Ratings

open quoteThis week alone has seen a ratings downgrade for Spain as well as a threat by agencies to review France’s AAA status — and the markets have taken notice. Once again, it would seem, ratings agencies are making things difficult for European countries.

Now, the European Union is considering doing something about it.

European Internal Market Commissioner Michel Barnier is considering a move to ban the agencies from publishing outlook reports on EU countries entangled in a crisis, according to a report in Thursday’s issue of the Financial Times Deutschland newspaper.

In an internal draft of a reform to an EU law applying to ratings agencies obtained by the paper, Barnier proposes providing the new EU securities authority, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), with the right to “temporarily prohibit” the publication of forecasts of a country’s liquidity.close quote (read more)

Un-flipping believable.

What the Turks Can Teach Us about Recycling

open quoteAfter battling the teacher’s union in Wisconsin, that state’s governor, Scott Walker, proposed a state budget that would have eliminated mandatory recycling. The outrage came fast and furious. An editorial at TheJournalTimes.com began with

Recycling has developed into a service too valuable to toss on the scrap heap.

Some officials worry Wisconsin communities will revert to a sort of Wild West dumping ground if Gov. Scott Walker’s budget passes as is. Under the plan, subsidies for local recycling programs would end and municipalities would no longer be required to run those programs.

The editorial went on to say recycling is cleaner than garbage, trims energy use, creates jobs, and keeps tons of waste from ending up in landfills.

The governor quickly folded his plan when he failed to get the backing of key Republican lawmakers, who said his plan goes too far. So Wisconsin residents can look forward to sorting and separating their paper, plastic, and cans under the thumb of Wisconsin authorities. It’s now radical to believe that people should just throw unwanted items away. To allow people to do this is “going too far.”

Forcing people to spend time separating garbage turns the division of labor on its head. . . . Plus, the government mandate gives no consideration to which materials have value in the scrap market.

So while in certain cities of the United States, people are forced to sort through their own garbage, in a number of places in the world, residents throw away their trash with no worries. The trash will be sorted and removed by the estimated 15 million waste pickers in the world.

Spend any time in Istanbul and you see (mostly) men pulling what look to be large canvas bags strapped to steel frames on two wheels. They are everywhere — residential and commercial areas. . . .

Waste pickers collect materials for hours and then take them to depots where junk dealers buy and sell the thrown-away goods. Emir Altıngöller deals in recyclables by the kilogram, buying for 40 kuruÅŸ and selling for 60 kuruÅŸ. On the worst of days he makes 10 lira, while on the best of days it’s ten times that. “He is thankful and content with his lot because he says he appreciates being self-employed,” writes Fatma Turan for Today’s Zaman.

Americans who are forced to recycle receive nothing for separating their glass and plastic and must pay a monthly fee to hand over their recyclables free of charge in the proper bins, on the appointed days, to employees making union wages and working for the local monopoly-protected waste companies.close quote (Read more)

Should There be Shop-Closing Laws?

open quoteA really cool thing is happening in Germany. After decades of strict laws regulating when stores can open and close (Ladenschlussgesetz), the laws are progressively liberalizing. Since 2006, the decision has been left to the individual states. Whereas commercial establishments once could not open their doors before 6 a.m. or keep them open past 10 p.m., now many open earlier and close later.

Consumers are celebrating, while labor unions and regulators are not.

In the United States, we have no national history of such laws, apart from restrictions on Sunday shopping, which are left to the states and counties. And even with these so-called blue laws, the general trend has been toward liberalization.close quote (Read more)

The Duty to Be Free by William Faulkner

open quoteYears ago our fathers founded this nation on the premise of the rights of man. As they expressed it, “the inalienable right of man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

In those days they knew what those words meant, not only the ones who expressed them, but the ones who heard and believed and accepted and subscribed to them. Because until that time, men did not always have those rights. At least, until that time, no nation had ever been founded on the idea that those rights were possible, let alone inalienable. So not only the ones who said the words, but the ones who merely heard them, knew what they meant. Which was this: “Life and liberty in which to pursue happiness. Life free and secure from oppression and tyranny, in which all men would have the liberty to pursue happiness.”

And both of them knew what they meant by “pursue.” They did not mean just to chase happiness, but to work for it. And they both knew what they meant by “happiness” too: not just pleasure, idleness, but peace, dignity, independence and self-respect; that man’s inalienable right was the peace and freedom in which, by his own efforts and sweat, he could gain dignity and independence, owing nothing to any man.

We knew what the words meant then, because we didn’t have these things. And, since we didn’t have them, we knew their worth. . . .

We founded a land, and founded in it not just our right to be free and independent and responsible, but the inalienable duty of man to be free and independent and responsible. What I am talking about is responsibility. Not just the right but the duty of man to be responsible, the necessity of man to be responsible if he wishes to remain free; not just responsible to and for his fellow man, but to himself; the duty of a man, the individual, each individual, every individual, to be responsible for the consequences of his own acts, to pay his own score, owing nothing to any man. . . .

the enemy of our freedom now has changed his shirt, his coat, his face.

He no longer threatens us from across an international boundary, let alone across an ocean. He faces us now from beneath the eagle-perched domes of our capitals and from behind the alphabetical splatters on the doors of welfare and other bureaus of economic or industrial regimentation, dressed not in martial brass but in the habiliments of what the enemy himself has taught us to call peace and progress, a civilization and plenty where we never before had it as good, let alone better. His artillery is a debased and respectless currency which has emasculated the initiative for independence by robbing initiative of the only mutual scale it knew to measure independence by.

The economists and sociologists say that the reason for this condition is too many people. . . . that man’s crime against his freedom is that there are too many of him, is to believe that man’s sufferance on the face of the earth is threatened, not by his environment, but by himself: that he cannot hope to cope with his environment and its evils, because he cannot even cope with his own mass. . . .

And to believe that, you have already written off the hope of man, as they who have reft him of his inalienable right to be responsible have done, and you might as well quit now and let man stew on in peace in his own recordless and oblivious juice, to his deserved and ungrieved doom.

I, for one, decline to believe this. . . .

I believe that the true heirs of the old tough, durable fathers are still capable of responsibility and self-respect, if only they can remember them again.

What we need is not fewer people, but more room between them, where those who would stand on their own feet, could, and those who won’t, might have to. Then the welfare, the relief, the compensation, instead of being nationally sponsored cash prizes for idleness and ineptitude, could go where the old independent uncompromising fathers themselves would have intended it and blessed it. [emphases added]close quote (Read more)

Who’s Suing Whom in the Telecom World?

Ideas are not property. They cannot be property.

Patent Litigation Flow Chart in Telecom Industry

open quotehe picture below (from this Flickr feed) illustrates the large number of lawsuits between players in the telecom sector–most seem to be patent infringement suits or suits based on antitrust law, i.e., totally without merit and a complete waste of resources. Without patent and antitrust law, we would have a less wasteful, less litigious, more competitive market. This ain’t the result of capitalism, but of unlibertarian state law. (H/t Jock Coats)close quote (Read more)

Al Gore, Agenda 21 and Population Control

The population control issue is as far down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory as I usually go. Generally, I encounter it as a vague desire, usually by environmentalist (environ-fascists) to severely decrease the Earth’s population.

I saw a chart in a National Geographic magazine where “Environmental Impact” was calculated as population, multiplied by prosperity, multiplied by technological advancement. Terrifying! This is precisely a war on people and their well-being.

I prefer to believe these things are dreamed up by people who don’t think through the implications of their statements.

open quote
So exactly what is Agenda 21? The following is how the United Nations defines Agenda 21….

Agenda 21 is a comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations System, Governments, and Major Groups in every area in which human impacts on the environment.

When you start doing deep research into Agenda 21, you will find that describing it as a “comprehensive plan” is an understatement. Virtually all forms of human activity impact the environment. The rabid “environmentalists” behind the green agenda intend to take all human activity and put it into a box called “sustainable development”.

One of the key elements of “sustainable development” is population control. The United Nations (along with radical “environmental” leaders such as Al Gore) actually believes that there are far too many people on earth.

So what is the solution?

Sadly, they actually believe that we need to start reducing the population.

Just this week, Al Gore made the following statement regarding population control….

“One of the things we could do about it is to change the technologies, to put out less of this pollution, to stabilize the population, and one of the principle ways of doing that is to empower and educate girls and women. You have to have ubiquitous availability of fertility management so women can choose how many children have, the spacing of the children.

You have to lift child survival rates so that parents feel comfortable having small families and most important – you have to educate girls and empower women. And that’s the most powerful leveraging factor, and when that happens, then the population begins to stabilize and societies begin to make better choices and more balanced choices.”

Do you notice how whenever global leaders talk about “empowering” women these days it always ends up with them having less children?

This population control agenda is also reflected in official UN documents.

The following is language from a UN resolution that was adopted by the UN General Assembly that was designed to further the implementation of Agenda 21….

“….population growth rates have been declining globally, largely as a result of expanded basic education and health care. That trend is projected to lead to a stable world population in the middle of the twenty-first century… The current decline in population growth rates must be further promoted through national and international policies that promote economic development, social development, environmental protection, and poverty eradication, particularly the further expansion of basic education, with full and equal access for girls and women, and health care, including reproductive health care, including both family planning and sexual health, consistent with the report of the International Conference on Population and Development.”

. . . .

The number one commandment of the infamous Georgia Guidestones is this: “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.”

. . . .

the March 2009 U.N. Population Division policy brief begins with the following shocking statement….

What would it take to accelerate fertility decline in the least developed countries?

Apparently the poorest nations are the primary target for the population control freaks over at the UN.

This agenda showed up again when the United Nations Population Fund released its annual State of the World Population Report for 2009 entitled “Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate”.

The following are three quotes that were pulled right out of that document….

1) “Each birth results not only in the emissions attributable to that person in his or her lifetime, but also the emissions of all his or her descendants. Hence, the emissions savings from intended or planned births multiply with time.”

2) “No human is genuinely “carbon neutral,” especially when all greenhouse gases are figured into the equation. Therefore, everyone is part of the problem, so everyone must be part of the solution in some way.”

3) “Strong family planning programmes are in the interests of all countries for greenhouse-gas concerns as well as for broader welfare concerns.”

If no human is “carbon neutral”, then what is the solution?

To those that are obsessed with Agenda 21 and “sustainable development”, the fact that you and I are alive and breathing air is a huge problem.

The population control agenda is also regularly showing up in our newspapers now.

In a recent editorial for the New York Times entitled “The Earth Is Full”, Thomas L. Friedman made the following statement….

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century – when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all – and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

But Friedman is quite moderate compared to many of the “eco-prophets” that are running around out there today.

For example, James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia hypothesis, stated in an interview with the Guardian earlier this year that “democracy must be put on hold” if the fight against global warming is going to be successful and that only “a few people with authority” should be permitted to rule the planet until the crisis is solved.

A Finnish environmentalist named Pentti Linkola has gone even farther than that. Linkola is openly calling for climate change deniers to be “re-educated”, for an eco-fascist world government to be established, for humans to be forcibly sterilized and for the majority of humans to be killed. . . .

Professor of Biology at the University of Texas at Austin Eric R. Pianka is a very prominent advocate of radical human population control.

In an article entitled “What nobody wants to hear, but everyone needs to know”, Pianka made the following shocking statements….

*First, and foremost, we must get out of denial and recognize that Earth simply cannot support many billions of people.

*This planet might be able to support perhaps as many as half a billion people who could live a sustainable life in relative comfort. Human populations must be greatly diminished, and as quickly as possible to limit further environmental damage.

*I do not bear any ill will toward humanity. However, I am convinced that the world WOULD clearly be much better off without so many of us. . . .

The reality is that many of the wealthiest and most prominent people in the world are absolutely obsessed with the green agenda and with population control. Just consider the following quotes….

David Rockefeller: “The negative impact of population growth on all of our planetary ecosystems is becoming appallingly evident.”

CNN Founder Ted Turner: “A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”

Dave Foreman, Earth First Co-Founder: “My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.”

Maurice Strong: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

Michael Oppenheimer: “The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”

This radical agenda is even represented in the White House.

John P. Holdren, Barack Obama’s top science advisor, co-authored a textbook entitled “Ecoscience” back in 1977 in which he actually advocated mass sterilization, compulsory abortion, a one world government and a global police force to enforce population control.

On page 837 of Ecoscience, a claim is made that compulsory abortion would be perfectly legal under the U.S. Constitution….

“Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”

On pages 942 and 943, a call is made for the creation of a “planetary regime” that would control the global economy and enforce population control measures….

“Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime – sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market.”

“The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.”

On page 917, the surrender of U.S. national sovereignty to an international organization is advocated….

“If this could be accomplished, security might be provided by an armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force. Many people have recognized this as a goal, but the way to reach it remains obscure in a world where factionalism seems, if anything, to be increasing. The first step necessarily involves partial surrender of sovereignty to an international organization.”

As mentioned earlier, Holdren is the number one science advisor to Barack Obama.close quote (Read more)

Population “Control” by Murray Rothbard

open quoteMost people exhibit a healthy lack of interest in the United Nations and its endless round of activities and conferences, considering them as boring busywork to sustain increasing hordes of tax-exempt bureaucrats, consultants, and pundits.

All that is true. But there is danger in underestimating the malice of UN activities. For underlying all the tedious nonsense is a continuing and permanent drive for international government despotism to be exercised by faceless and arrogant bureaucrats accountable to no one. The Fabian collectivist drive for power by these people remains unrelenting.

The latest exhibit, of course, is the recent Conference on Population, to be followed next year by an equally ominously entitled “Conference on Women.” The television propaganda by the UN for this year’s conference anticipates next year’s as well, best encapsulated in one of the most idiotically true statements made by anyone in decades: “Raising the standard of living for women will raise the standard of living for everyone.” Substitute “men” for “women” in this sentence, and the absurd banality of this statement becomes evident.

. . . .

The solution, then, is the euphemistically named “population control,” which in essence is the use of government power to encourage, or compel, restrictions on the growth, or on the numbers, of people in existence. Logically, of course, the anti-hu-man-being fanatics (for what is “the population” but an array of humans?) should advocate the murder by government planners of large numbers of existing people, especially in the allegedly overpopulated developing world (or, to use older term, Third World) countries. But something seems to hold them back; perhaps the charge of “racism” that might ensue. Their concentra tion, then, is on restricting the number of future births.

. . . the peak of ZPG [Zero Population Growth] hysteria in the U.S. came in the early 1970s, only to be put to rout when the census of 1970 was published, demonstrating that the ZPGers had actually achieved their goal and that the rate of population growth was already turning downward.

Interestingly enough, it took only a moment for the same people to complain that lower rates of population growth mean an aging population, and who or what is going to support the increasing number of the aged? It was at that point that the joys of early and “dignified” death for the elderly began to make its appearance in the doctrines of left-liberalism.

The standard call of the ZPGers was for a compulsory limit of two babies per woman, after which there would be government-forced sterilization or abortion for the offending female. (The Chinese communists, as is their wont, went the ZPGers one better by putting into force in the 1970s a compulsory limit of one baby per woman per lifetime.) . . .

While the population controllers seem to have given up for advanced countries, they are still big on population control for the Third World. It’s true that if you look at these countries, you see a lot of people starving and in bad economic shape. But it is an elementary fallacy to attribute this correlation to numbers of the population as cause.

In fact, population generally follows movement in standards of living; it doesn’t cause them. Population rises when the demand for labor, and living standards rise, and vice versa. A rising population is generally a sign of, and goes along with, prosperity and economic development. Hong Kong, for example, has one of the densest populations in the world, and yet its standard of living is far higher than the rest of Asia, including, for example, the thinly populated Sinkiang province of China. . . .

The Third World suffers from a lack of economic development due to its lack of rights of private property, its government-imposed production controls, and its acceptance of government foreign aid that squeezes out private investment. The result is too little productive savings, investment, entrepreneurship, and market opportunity. What they desperately need is not more UN controls, whether of population or of anything else, but for international and domestic government to let them alone. Population will adjust on its own. But, of course, economic freedom is the one thing that neither the UN nor any other bureaucratic outfit will bring them.close quote (Read more)

Tax the rich rebuttal

Her:

What sort of person thinks there is nothing wrong with asking the folks tasked with teaching our children to take a 20% cut on a $50,000 annual salary, but think it’s a terrible idea to ask millionaires to pay an additional 3% more in taxes?

Me:

I think taking someones property by threat of force, whether you take 3% or 20%, whether you take from a rich person or a poor person, whether an individual with a gun takes it or a government with a whole police force takes it, is stealing.

I also think the government is grossly incompetent at best, and outright evil at worst, and they don’t need to waste any more of our money.

Her:

I pay taxes willingly, grateful that I am able to band together with others to create something larger than myself. Stealing is when people accept free public education, use it to make something of themselves, and then refuse to help the their neighbors do the same. (This goes for our whole infrastructure.)

Me:

I think your logic breaks down, Carlynn. If I had the choice of not paying taxes and not accepting ANY “public” help. I’d take that deal in a second.

Just because government forces us to all steal from one another, doesn’t make everyone indebted to everybody else.

Inseparable from the idea of liberty is the idea that no one owes anything to his fellow man. The collectivist opponents of this idea often claim the mortal, intellectual, and artistic high ground, which is why I’m eager to site Mario Vargas Llosa and William Faulkner who specifically argued this point here: mises.org/daily/3674

Think of the barbaric implications of your idea. If I steal someone’s money and use a tiny portion of it to buy somebody dinner, is the recipient of that dinner then condemned to have his wealth stolen for the rest of his life?

Her:

I am very familiar with the anti-humanist rhetoric of the libertarians. Every human being begins life at the mercy of others and is sustained by them; grows to maturity and sustains others; grows old and requires care. By virtue of the fact that you have grown to adulthood, you have accepted the care of others. Whether you think this means that you are enslaved to them forever or whether you think this means you are part of an interconnected, sustaining community has to do with your attitude towards life, not with life itself.

Me:

I agree that people require care and mercy. I don’t agree that this justifies mass wealth confiscation by the state.

First of all, welfare for the suffering forms a small percent of the state’s spending. And within welfare programs 80% of the budget goes to sustaining the bureaucracy, not helping the poor.

We disagree and who should help the poor.

To quote Frederic Bastiast’s 1850 essay, The Law:

“Socialism, like the old policy from which it emanates, confounds Government and society. And so, every time we object to a think being done by Government, it concludes that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of education by the state — then we are against education altogether. We object to a State religion – then we would have no religion at all . . . . They might as well accuse us of wishing men not to eat, because we object to the cultivation of corn by the State.”

Her:

I didn’t steal my parents’ wealth when I was eating their food and living in their house, and I won’t think that they are stealing from me when they need my help in old age. This pattern can be extrapolated out in lessening degrees across a society. Taxes are not the government stealing from the people because in a democracy the government is the embodiment of the people. Taxes are one of the contributions that each of us makes to the common good. I think we all wish they weren’t very high, but I’d rather have high taxes and a successful common sphere than low taxes and a failed common sphere.

Me:

“taxes are one of the contributions that each of us makes to the common good.”

1 – assassinating Americans, invading Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uganda, Yemen, infecting unsuspecting Guatemalans with syphilis, spying on American, fondling people at airports, bailing out corrupt banks, giving hundreds of millions of dollars to a “green” company owned by Pelosi’s relative, Guantanamo Bay, et. al. do not consitute the “common good.”

2 – How can you call it a “contribution” when people can and do go to jail for failing to make the contribution? How can you not recognize the violence and brute force behind it?