NY Assembly Bill seeks to outlaw salt

BILL NUMBER:A10129

TITLE OF BILL: An act to amend the general business law, in relation to
prohibiting the use of salt in the preparation of food by restaurants

PURPOSE OR GENERAL IDEA OF BILL: To prohibit restaurants from using
salt when preparing customers’ meals. Customers will have the discretion
to add salt to their own meal after it has been prepared.

SUMMARY OF SPECIFIC PROVISIONS: The general business law is amended by
adding a new section 399-bbb, which would prohibit the use of salt by
owner or operators of a restaurant when preparing food for consumption
by customers.

JUSTIFICATION: This legislation will give customers the option to add
salt after the meal has been prepared for them. In this way, consumers
have more control over the amount of sodium they intake, and are given
the option to exercise healthier diets and healthier lifestyles. (Read more from assembly.state.ny.us)

Exploitation — 6 of the 10 richest counties in U.S. are in DC area

(From washingtonexaminer.com)

I like Hans Hermann Hoppe’s resurrection of the terms “exploiters” and “exploited.” In his essay, Marxist and Austrian class analysis, he describes the surprisingly common ancestry and common ground between the Marxist and Austrian Schools, then explains how the Marxist depart down the road to tyranny and depravity with their patently absurd Exploitation Theory, which misidentifies the exploiters.

The exploiters are NOT the owners of capital (business men). The exploiters are those who instead of producing goods and services society voluntarily consumes, feast in the coercive sector of the economy — on wealth taken from the voluntary sector of the economy by force or threat of force. These are the exploiters.

And I suspect they are the people who largely make up the 6 out of the 10 richest counties in the U.S. which are around DC.

The Scandinavian-Welfare Myth Revisited

It is always good to look at the history of a country when examining its economic performance. Stefan Karlsson did just that back in 2006 in an excellent article on the economic history of Sweden. I will therefore only give a brief overview of this subject before focusing on the central point of this article.

Karlsson wrote the following:

As a result of its free market policies, the resourcefulness of its people, and its successful avoidance of war, Sweden had the highest per-capita income growth in the world between 1870 and 1950, by which time Sweden had become one of the world’s richest countries.

. . . .

Indeed, thanks to its “neutrality” during WWII, Sweden was never bombed or invaded.[1] This left Sweden’s industries intact and unharmed, which, along with its free-market-oriented economy, enabled the country to profit extensively from the reconstruction of war-torn continental Europe: Sweden exported huge amounts of goods and natural resources to the rest of Europe, fueling an economic boom in Sweden that lasted for over two decades.[2] As Karlsson points out, during this time “Sweden was still one of the freest economies in the world, and government spending relative to GDP was in fact below the American level.”

On the back of this boom the Swedish government began setting up a massive welfare state throughout the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, causing government spending to skyrocket to more than 50 percent of GDP. At one point during the mid-’70s, the top marginal tax rate was an unbelievable 102 percent.

One of the people who were burdened with this tax was Astrid Lindgren, the famous author of children’s books best known for her Pippi Longstocking series. In 1976 she wrote a satirical short story published in one of Sweden’s biggest newspapers, where she told the tale of a troubled children’s-books author called Pomperipossa, who lived in the fictional kingdom of Monismania. Among other things, Pomperipossa pondered why the more she earned, the less she got to keep, and why people like her were being economically punished by the government simply for writing popular children’s books. The story also mentions that in Monismania one could escape some of the taxes by purchasing real-estate property, which is exactly what the Swedish secretary of the treasury, Gunnar Sträng, had been doing at that time.

Lindgren’s story stirred up a fierce tax debate in Sweden, and for the first time in 44 years the incumbent Social Democratic Party lost the general elections.

The Swedish economy was in an uphill struggle throughout the ’70s, mainly because the increasingly socialist policies had caused the economy to stagnate and lag behind the rest of the world. Many other European countries had caught up with Sweden and its monstrous welfare state and were now outperforming the country economically.

In an effort to save the economy, the government carried out extensive reform and liberalizations throughout the ’80s and ’90s, cutting taxes and welfare expenditures, abolishing government monopolies, reducing regulation, floating the currency, and permitting more private alternatives in the public sector.

This increase in economic freedom is partially illustrated in Fig. 1, which comes from the Heritage Foundation’s annual Index of Economic Freedom.

. . . .

We have seen that while the Scandinavian countries have extremely high amounts of what Rothbard called binary intervention, i.e., taxation, their saving grace is their relatively lower amount of triangular intervention, i.e., regulation. This puts the Scandinavian countries on a level playing field with other developed countries and helps explain why they are able to have equal or higher living standards. The misconception that the other Western countries are a lot more free-market oriented than Scandinavia is very unfortunate; it feeds the notion that more government expansion would bring joy and happiness to all, when in fact it would make things worse.

However, the real point of all this is that the world at large is so unfree that even the massive Scandinavian welfare states can be considered among the “most free” countries in the world. While things have generally moved in the right direction in Scandinavia in terms of increased economic freedom, the very opposite trend seems to be taking place in several other countries, particularly the United States. Seeing as the United States has already descended to the level of Denmark in terms of economic freedom, one can only wonder how long it will be before it finds itself approaching Finland, Norway, and Sweden. (Read more from mises.org)

Policing in the U.S.S.A.

I have friends who are cops. I don’t hate cops, but I’m wary of the government monopoly on violence. It’s important to remain vigilant for excesses.

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I can imagine some expert saying about this animated gif: “to the untrained eye, this may look like police brutality, but . . .” (Large file may load slowly.)

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Brave NYPD Officer Exposes Corruption – Cops Ordered to Make Arrests to Meet Quota

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Police beat man to death at DUI checkpoint

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Driving 70 in a 65. Woman tased for getting out license too slowly

Is The Federal Reserve Insolvent?

The ongoing troubles at the GSEs are no secret: it is public knowledge that Fannie had a 5.38% delinquency rate at December, while Freddie just passed the 4% threshold in January; both continue to rise rapidly each month. The fact that the mortgage-bond spread has just hit a record tight is merely an ongoing artifact of the Fed’s endless meddling in the mortgage market, with the sole purpose of keeping rates artificially low, and preventing banks from being forced to take massive writedowns on their entire loan book. This is all well known. What, however, seems to have escaped public attention is what the impact of these delinquencies is on the one largest holder of Mortgage Backed Securities, the Federal Reserve. What also seems to have escaped the public is that the Fed is now the world’s largest bank, with total assets near $2.3 trillion.

. . . .

A 5% realized haircut on MBS alone would result in a complete elimination of the Fed’s capital balance. Applying a 10% or even 15% haircut, results in a capital deficiency of $50 billion and $100 billion respectively. (Read more from zerohedge.com)

Texas Textbook Troubles

In my own field of work, university education, there are a great many who scoff at the idea of privatization, something that is exactly how a free society should handle all education from primary to post graduate schools. There is no excuse for government to be responsible for educating young people or anyone else for that matter. Not only is it destructive of educational impartiality to entrust schools to governments – only if there is variety can impartiality be at least approximated – but the threat of out and out indoctrination is most real when one monolithic agency, with the power to coercively collect funds for its operations and conscript its students, runs “education.”

Yes, thousands of professor and teachers want the government to be in charge but after this has been accomplished, as it has for a couple of centuries throughout America and elsewhere, there is no escaping the turf fight that takes over educational policy, especially when it comes to such courses as history, civics, and even biology and the textbooks teachers are required to use in them. (Read more from thedailybell.com)