The Big Think

heh:

Who are the people who tend to run for political office? Political office is hard to get and takes a lot of effort, so only ambitious people seek it. That wouldn’t be so bad if we got smart/ambitious — and the useful kind of smart, not the pointless write-a-doctoral-thesis-on-transgender-Native-American-pottery “smart.”

But what do ambitious, capable people do in this country? They start their own businesses and lead successful lives comfortably away from the fickleness of the ballot box. So that just leaves the people who are ambitious but useless and just love the thought of being able to meddle in all the useful things everyone else is doing. And then the whole election process, where the politicians constantly lie and change their positions on issues to keep their jobs, tends to weed out the people who aren’t also sociopaths. So the system we have has basically set us up to be governed by ambitious, useless sociopaths who love to meddle in everything actual contributors to society are doing. So lawyers, for the most part…

It’s pretty simple: We [should] treat all legislators like lying crooks, because they self-identified as such by running for office; normal people don’t desire to spend other people’s money. Right now, being a representative or a senator is a high-paying, prestigious job that any idiot could do (and some exceptional idiots have done it for years), but if there were a few more drawbacks to being a legislator, maybe the worst of them would stay away. And if they don’t, at least maybe they’ll stay in line more if we let them know we consider them to be the worst of the worst and are keeping an eye on them. Then perhaps they’ll listen to those of us who really are supposed to be in charge in this country, the ones who actually work for a living.

Pretty funny (and sadly true). link. (apologies to my friends in law school… don’t sue me!

A very clear enunciation of the principles that are currently being discussed w/r/t the commerce clause and the future of governmental power.

Is this still true? We’ll see come November.

“Our best hope for changing Washington is not to let hope triumph over experience and believe if we just elected the right person everything would change, but to make the structural changes that will deny the politicians the power they always abuse.”

link

Is ignorance of the law a legitimate excuse? If you’re a police officer who is arresting someone, it apparently is.

“The highest tax bracket income earners, when compared with those people in lower tax brackets, are far more capable of changing their taxable income by hiring lawyers, accountants, deferred income specialists and the like. They can change the location, timing, composition and volume of income to avoid taxation.”

In other words, one of the most important differences between The Rich, and the rest of us, is that The Rich have options.

The options for minimizing tax exposure described by Laffer are not available to middle-class taxpayers. Working stiffs can’t “change the location, timing, composition, and volume of income to avoid taxation.” At lower tax rates, The Rich do pretty much the same thing everyone else does: aggressively take advantage of deductions to pay as little tax as possible. As tax rates increase, The Rich pass through a second stage, in which it becomes reasonable to modify their economic behavior to avoid punitive taxation. These modifications are, by definition, harmful to the overall economy, because they involve taking fewer risks, and generating less taxable income. Generating taxable income is what The Rich hire you for.

A third stage exists. The Rich can simply remove themselves from the economy altogether. Unlike most of us, they can move their business operations, and even their personal residence, on fairly short notice. They can retire early, as many doctors have spoken of doing, rather than shackle themselves to the lumbering ObamaCare cart. They can find plenty of safe harbors for their money.

…there is a sweet spot on the Laffer curve: a point at which tax and regulatory burdens are low enough to encourage the most growth-oriented behavior from wealthy individuals and large corporations, but high enough to generate the income necessary to fund government without running huge deficits. The government must, in turn, live within its means. It must be small enough to survive on the funding provided by this optimum rate of taxation. Obviously, our current federal government has swollen far beyond this size, becoming a tumor that murders its host organism with increasingly frantic demands for greater nourishment.

Soak-the-rich policies are dismal failures, because they rely on controlling the behavior of people who have many options to escape. The promises of such systems depend on capturing extremely agile dollars. Those of us with fewer options, and less liquid income, always end up suffering the fallout from these failures. We live in the dusty spaces left behind when billionaires decide not to follow the scripts prepared for them by Washington social engineers.

We’ll suffer again when massive tax increases slam into a recessionary economy, pulverizing everyone except their ostensible targets.

Read the whole thing.

I asked my parents if they wanted to disown me and tell everyone they did so, but still talk to me in secret. They said no; they want to be my parents. So why should I drag them through the mud with me?

Heartbreaking interview with a former Muslim. It’s a good illustration that there are reasonable Muslim families out there who are trying to do the right thing even as their religion gets corrupted by the hyper-fundamentalist, kill-the-unbeliever crowd.

Cheaper and more efficient, I’m sure.

What is sure to become an important touchstone of modern politics, Angelo M. Codevilla’s seminal article should be must-reading for every American.

Bill Whittle on modern progressivism. Worth a watch.

Some of my more left-leaning friends have derided Whittle for his occasionally snarky tone and “beady eyes”. Yes, he does say a few snarky things in this piece, and I wish he’d moderate them a bit so as not to drive his intelligent opposition into not listening. As far as the “beady eyes” thing goes… that sort of thing has always seemed like an insubstantial reason to refuse to listen to someone.

I’d encourage a watch. It’s worth the 15 minutes.

On the day President Obama was elected, armed men wearing the black berets and jackboots of the New Black Panther Party were stationed at the entrance to a polling place in Philadelphia. They brandished a weapon and intimidated voters and poll watchers. After the election, the Justice Department brought a voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party and those armed thugs. I and other Justice attorneys diligently pursued the case and obtained an entry of default after the defendants ignored the charges. Before a final judgment could be entered in May 2009, our superiors ordered us to dismiss the case.

The New Black Panther case was the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career. Because of the corrupt nature of the dismissal, statements falsely characterizing the case and, most of all, indefensible orders for the career attorneys not to comply with lawful subpoenas investigating the dismissal, this month I resigned my position as a Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney…Attorneys who brought the case are under subpoena to testify, but the department ordered us to ignore the subpoena, lawlessly placing us in an unacceptable legal limbo.

Read the whole article here. This disturbs me quite a bit.

The World Debt Map.

Sure, make fun of Southerners all ya want, Yankees. But when the economy tanks and chips are down, people show where they’d really like to live.

An interesting post on long-term retirement plans (boring sounding, but an interesting post- really!). For instance, what happens in a world where 50% of the children born this year are expected to live to be 104 years old… or more? When 65 becomes the new 40? When Erin’s grandmother was born in 1916 her life expectancy was 55.2 years old.

She lived into her 90′s.

What happens in the next few years when we start to see what was previously extreme life spans become the norm? What about a world where you can expect 125 years? Aubrey de Gray has said that the first person to live to be 1000 years old is probably alive today (given current and expected medical advancements). What happens to retirement savings when you don’t calculate it based on starting to save at 25 and retiring at 65? What if you start at 25 and retire at 90, to live another 30 years? Can the world handle the kind of generational wealth differential that implies? What about the socioeconomic differences that come from a massive population of wealthy and ultra wealthy centenarians in a world that also has indebted college grads? There are some interesting times ahead, indeed.

Michael Graham has some words for Ireland.