From Taipan Group
If you’re still not convinced that Europe’s economic leadership has taken leave of its senses, German chancellor Gerhard Schröder today had something for you: At Davos, he proposed an international tax on “speculation.”

Speculation, of course, is the old realsozialist term for “trading.”

The funds created would supposedly be used to provide “debt relief” for African countries… notwithstanding the fact that since WWII, western democracies have donated about a dozen Marshall Plans worth of development funds to corrupt Third World dictators whose unsavory practices the financial communities would be asked to subsidize with this tax.

Like a good little junior partner, Schröder echoed the proposal of French president Jacques Chirac, who had also proposed introducing a 0.1% tax on international “speculation” gains earlier this week. Which throws some light on the rationale: After losing Iraq as a major customer for French and German weaponry and “dual use” industrial equipment, what better way to free up the funds of other Third World dictatorships to buy Exocets “Made in France” than saddle the financial community with their debt?

Let’s take a vote: Me wise magic?

Shuji Nakamura is a smart guy. He is largely responsible for inventing the blue LED, while employed by Nichia Corp., an invention which was very, very lucrative for the company. However, Nakamura-san is a little bit disappointed. You see, he only managed to get the Japanese government to extort 844 million yen ($8.2 million) from his former employer, rather than the 20 billion yen ($194 million) he was hoping for. Extorted? I am assuming so, because in the most comprehensive article I can find on the story, there is no mention of a contract giving him any royalties from his invention.

Look at the legal theory being put forth in the article linked above:

In theory, the appropriate reward for an invention by a corporate employee can be easily calculated by multiplying the profit generated by the invention by the ratio of the employee’s contribution. The district court estimated Nakamura’s contribution at 50 percent, or 60 billion yen, of the profit his invention yielded for the company.

Nakamura-san is obviously on board with this theory now, after all, he invented something that made his company billions. However, would he have been enthusiastic for it had he frittered away a few years in their labs and invented nothing? Then, instead of the salary he likely was paid, he would get nothing at all. Most likely, he would prefer the salary. That is the nature of the typical employer-employee relationship for scientists, like it or not. The employer provides the materials, lab equipment, lab space, assistants, salaries, and cool logos, all at the risk of getting nothing in return. The employee trades that risk of making no money for his efforts for a salary, and perhaps some nominal award should he invent, say, blue LED’s. Any profit-sharing would be negotiated in the employment contract up front.

However, through the magic of the state, Nakamura-san can have it both ways. He simply got the Japanese government to retroactively add a profit-sharing clause to his contract. Remember, without the state, who would make sure our contracts got enforced as written? Oops.

Mr. Johnson’s article at Strike the Root, leaving aside the finer points of whether or not anyone can be charged with “treason” against anything, is more or less drivel from beginning to end. His happy idea of criminalizing policy disagreements would make elections more interesting though - from being “rehearsals for civil war” to actual civil war. Undoubtedly Mr. Johnson would extend his “treason” indictment to anyone who agreed with Bush publicly, wrote articles supporting him, ran political organizations and think tanks facilitating Bush’s treason, or anyone who just happened to vote for Bush. Treason trials all around, my children!

I also note that Mr. Johnson, in his other Strike The Root articles, is given to making assertions like:

“This cornerstone idea, that the Jewish religion through the Hebrew Bible should be used to control the sheep, is what motivates and holds together the Jewish and Christian neocons.”

Oh. Okay, Mr. Johnson! Those sneaky darn Jews! (And Christians too!)

“But threaded throughout this Hebrew Bible is a game plan for the Jews like Leo Strauss, the Kristols, Wolfowitz, ad nauseam, to take and keep the high ground in society and in world affairs.”

says our Mr. Johnson. I like how he can use foreign words like “ad nauseum” - very intellectual! More Johnson wisdom here.

So, does Strike the Root actually pay money for this contemptible shit?

It’s no surprise that Matthew Yglesias wants the state to be your daddy, but has anyone noticed how problematic paternalism is for democracy?

What kind of a father lets the children put all matters up for a binding majority vote? What the hell kind of paternalism is that? The kids aren’t competent to run their own individual lives, but collectively they can be trusted to run everyone’s?

Democratic paternalism is necessarily play-paternalism, it’s one group of children after another pretending to be the parents.

This story really strikes a nerve with me. A four-year-old boy, right between my boys’ ages, accidentally shot by his older brother, aged seven, in my city.

I’m not one to shelter my boys from every danger, and there are likely seven-year-olds, even today, who have been taught to properly respect guns, and could be trusted to handle one without pointing it at anyone. This boy clearly wasn’t one. The article also mentions that one of the boys was playing with a lighter under his covers and set the house on fire to the tune of $20,000 damage just four years ago, at the age of five. Clearly, the parents and grandparents in this case are irresponsible to the point that I wonder how they get dressed in the morning without help.

I’m not advocating protecting children from every possible danger. Responsibility and respect for dangerous objects and situations cannot be learned unless children are exposed to them. However, a child can learn valuable lessons from, say, a hot griddle, a sharp corner, a steak knife, or an electric drill, and survive the experience mostly intact. There’s very little chance that they, or someone else, will die in the process. Guns, on the other hand, along with other things you might own like cars and table saws, are deadly serious tools. Respect for them, and proper handling, must be taught, explained, and demonstrated to children, if they might get exposed to them. Guns are designed to kill. That’s what they do when working properly. An adult, or an already responsible child, can grasp this by having it explained to them once. Small children, who may not even understand the concept of death as a finality, cannot.

Now, I’m not advocating for a law, of course. The article itself demonstrates the futility of that approach:

An Illinois law, passed in 1999, makes it a misdemeanor for a person to store or leave a loaded firearm that a minor can gain access to without permission from a parent or guardian and use it to injure or kill. A firearm is properly stored if it is secured by a trigger lock, placed in a securely locked box or placed in some other location that a reasonable person would believe to be secured from a minor.

The law did no one any good in this situation, as I would expect. Anyone who would leave a gun accessible to an irresponsible seven-year-old is unlikely to change his mind due to the law. ” Let’s see, if my kids find my gun and one gets shot, one of them will die. But wait, I’ll also face a fine and jail time… that settles it, I’m locking it up.”

The guidelines in the law are overkill, in any case, but might be a good starting point for those incapable of thinking, who need a law to tell them what to do, who probably shouldn’t have guns in any case. People even dumber than politicians. A gun in a locked box, or with a trigger lock, is less useful for its intended purpose, which is keeping your young charges from being killed or kidnapped by criminals. No, the only thing required here is basic responsibility on the part of the “adults” in charge. If you have a gun, and you have children in the house, you should know where it is with certainty at all times. You should know that those who can’t handle one properly and responsibly can’t pick it up and play with it. You should be able to get it immediately if you need it–otherwise, why bother having it? You should know how many cartridges are in it. This is the essence of proper gun control.

You can take your children shooting when you judge them responsible enough. They can probably learn respect or at least some understanding of the kind of damage they can do by seeing milk jugs or watermelons shot with hollowpoints (plus, that’s just plain fun for grownups.) You could try a book, like Massad Ayoob’s Gun-Proof Your Children, which I don’t have myself but about which I have heard good things.

Just don’t go through life like a brain-dead moron who thinks that bad things won’t happen since they haven’t so far.

Robert L. Johnson at Strike The Root thinks he is:

George W. Bush likes to surround himself with patriotic trappings. He’s big on talking, to the best of his very limited ability, about God, country, and values. He enjoys playing dress-up as various icons of Americana, like a fighter pilot or a cowboy. But behind this empty facade of being an American patriot, I believe, is treason. Treason to America and her people.

Article III, Section 3 of the US Constitution classifies treason as giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the US. George has done, and is still doing, just that.

Johnson then goes on to document how Bush’s policies have helped Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Now all that may or may not be the case, but it’s really beside the point.The plain fact is that Bush isn’t a “traitor”, because there is no such thing as “treason”. The Constitution of the United States of America is wholly without authority:

The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing. It purports, at most, to be only a contract between persons living eighty years ago. [This essay was written in 1869.] And it can be supposed to have been a contract then only between persons who had already come to years of discretion, so as to be competent to make reasonable and obligatory contracts. Furthermore, we know, historically, that only a small portion even of the people then existing were consulted on the subject, or asked, or permitted to express either their consent or dissent in any formal manner. Those persons, if any, who did give their consent formally, are all dead now. Most of them have been dead forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy years. And the Constitution, so far as it was their contract, died with them.

Johnson wants to put Bush on trial:

George W. Bush needs to be brought up on charges of the high crime of treason. Perhaps jury members can come from families who lost their sons and daughters due to George’s treasonous war in Iraq. They can also come from idealistic and misguided soldiers and Marines who’ve lost their limbs or vision in the war started by liars, cowards, and traitors.

But once again, Lysander Spooner has the answer:

It would be a sufficient answer for him to say to them:

I never knew you. You never made yourselves individually known to me. I never gave my oath to you, as individuals. You may, or you may not, be members of that secret band, who appoint agents to rob and murder other people; but who are cautious not to make themselves individually known, either to such agents, or to those whom their agents are commissioned to rob. If you are members of that band, you have given me no proof that you ever commissioned me to rob others for your benefit. I never knew you, as individuals, and of course never promised you that I would pay over to you the proceeds of my robberies. I committed my robberies on my own account, and for my own profit.

It’s clear that George Bush does not and can not have any obligation, under the Constitution, to the people of the United States of America. His oaths were given to no one, to uphold nothing. They are not now, and never were binding on him to do anything other than as he pleases.

And that means that whatever he does, however evil his conduct, there is and can be No Treason.

CNN:

A Chinese woman wanted in connection with an alleged terror plot against Boston has been in U.S. custody since mid-November and has no known ties to terrorism, the FBI said Saturday.

Mei Xia Dong, one of 14 people being sought by the agency, was arrested November 11 by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents on a suspected immigration violation, the FBI said in a statement posted on its Web site.

She is being held at a facility in San Diego, California, the release said.

So not only is she now not a terrorist, but she’s been in Federal lockup on the other side of the continent for months. Oh, and one more thing:

She had been identified originally by the FBI as a man.

Beck forwards a horrifying glimpse into a brave new libertarian world. Libertarian Girl explains why we need a breast implant tax:

Being a libertarian, I believe that people should be allowed to do whatever they want provided no one else is harmed. But does breast augmentation surgery harm others? I believe the answer is yes.

Breast augmentation surgery is a negative sum game. The surgery increases the recipient’s attractiveness (because men are so stupid), but only at the expense of other women whose natural breasts become less attractive in comparison to the increasing population of surgically augmented women.

If every woman got breast augmentation surgery, it would not change the overall female attractiveness of society (because men would quickly become desensitized to seeing bigger breasts), but would have negative health effects because large numbers of women would suffer from post-surgery complications.

The typical liberal response might be the desire to make the surgery illegal. But I disagree. If a woman wants the surgery badly enough, she should be allowed to obtain it, but only if she pays back the externality she causes.

You get the idea.

This would be middling funny if it were satire, but there seems little hope of that.

Today’s inauguration seems a bit superfluous, doesn’t it? It’s all over the news, people are blogging about it, talking about it around me here at work, having parties and protests about it, and it just seems plain silly. I mean, nothing’s really changing. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, the same person is ultimately responsible for deciding how I will plan financially for my future, educate my children, defend my home, earn a decent living, and help family, friends, and neighbors in need. Luckily, the most qualified candidate has the job.

That would be me.

Before Pejman Yousefzadeh goes much further with with this Conservative/Libertarian Cyber-Coalition idea, he probably ought to check with a a few more libertarians. He thinks:

“…. conservatives and libertarians generally favor aggressive intervention in conducting the war on terrorism.”

Uh, dude? The plain fact is that libertarians overwhelmingly reject an interventionist war on terror. I had to rack my brains to try to come up with a significant pro-war segment of the libertarian spectrum and the best I could come up with is the Ayn Rand Institute. Against that balance the Libertarian Party, LewRockwell.com, Strike The Root, Anti-State.com, Reason, …it isn’t even remotely close.

What can he be thinking of? The examples he gives of libertarians include Glenn Reynolds and Stephen Green. Those are surely popular bloggers, but for all intents and purposes they are Republicans who perhaps quibble with the party on a few issues at the margin.

You know what though? Don’t even worry about it. Libertarians are overwhelmingly anti-interventionist and anti-war but they don’t matter politically. They’re not going to cost you any of your precious elections, they can’t get a dog catcher elected. A lot of them don’t have much interest in your elections.

Jim Henley has a question for the apologists for government torture:

Do you think there’s any ethical difference between choosing to do something to yourself for your own purposes and having other people do it to you without your consent for their purposes?