jtsulli

From the page: "It's one of the ironies of life that people need not understand freedom for it to work, and because of this, there is the perennial danger that they will give it up without realizing the disastrous consequences that follow."

From the page: "Let's start with the alleged problem. Obviously, we have more people texting behind the wheel today than we did in, say, 1985. And undeniably, those people pose a threat. But it's hard to find definitive empirical support for the idea that our highways are awash in BlackBerry-spilled blood. Since 1995, there's been an eightfold increase in cellphone subscribers in the United States, and we've increased the number of minutes spent on cellphones by a factor of 58.

What's happened to traffic fatalities in that time? They've droppedâ€"slightly, but they've dropped. Overall reported accidents since 1997 have dropped, too, from 6.7 million to 6 million. Proponents of a ban on cellphones say those numbers should have dropped more. "We've spent billions on air bags, antilock brakes, better steering, safer cars and roads, but the number of fatalities has remained constant," safety researcher David Strayer told the New York Times in July. "Our return on investment for those billions is zero. And that's because we're using devices in our cars."

Strayer would have a point if he were looking at the right statistics. But we drive a lot more than we did in 1995. Deaths in proportion to passenger miles are a far better indicator of road safety than overall fatalities. In 1995, there were 1.72 deaths for every 100 million miles traveled. By 2007, the figure had dropped to 1.36, a 21 percent decline."

good luck to her.

From the page: "When the BGA (Illinois Better Government Association) sought to investigate how much money community college administrators earn in retirement, they had to file FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests and leap over hurdles to obtain the information. Public servants do not want taxpayers to know that they, the taxpayers, are the real servants, and the public employees the masters. The whole system is medieval in nature: government owns your property, and you must pay annual rent (property taxes). You are the sharecropper, they the property owner. And this is legal, because they pass the laws."

From the page: "The ultimate problem is not campaign finance laws but the degree of power that has been taken upon itself by the state. The government routinely exercises the power of life and death over businesses and industries. With this much power for the taking, it is inevitable, regardless of election finance laws, that someone is going to try to wield the power, either to get a subsidy or a special exception or perhaps to block a competitor. And those who donâ€t chose to weild the power for advantage may soon find they still need to petition the government to block their competitors from doing so. Both Microsoft and Google prospered for years with almost no lobbying spending in Washington, but eventually had to build defensive lobbying efforts as their competitors sought to aim the government at them."

FTP: "Beyond just the concept of individual decision-making, progressives are hugely uncomfortable with capitalism. Ironically, though progressives want to posture as being "dynamic", the fact is that capitalism is in fact too dynamic for them. Industries rise and fall, jobs are won and lost, recessions give way to booms. Progressives want comfort and certainty. They want to lock things down the way they are. They want to know that such and such job will be there tomorrow and next decade, and will always pay at least X amount. That is why, in the end, progressives are all statists, because, to paraphrase Hayek, only a government with totalitarian powers can bring the order and certainty and control of individual decision-making that they crave.

Progressive elements in this country have always tried to freeze commerce, to lock this country’s economy down in its then-current patterns. Progressives in the late 19th century were terrified the American economy was shifting from agriculture to industry. They wanted to stop this, to cement in place patterns where 80-90% of Americans worked on farms. I, for one, am glad they failed, since for all of the soft glow we have in this country around our description of the family farmer, farming was and can still be a brutal, dawn to dusk endeavor that never really rewards the work people put into it.

This story of progressives trying to stop history has continued to repeat itself through the generations. In the seventies and eighties, progressives tried to maintain the traditional dominance of heavy industry like steel and automotive, and to prevent the shift of these industries overseas in favor of more service-oriented industries. Just like the passing of agriculture to industry a century ago inflamed progressives, so too does the current passing of heavy industry to services."

Vile behavior from the teachers union.

A response to some of Obama's tax claims during a speech in Osawatomie.