Paul M. Jones

A government that is big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything away from you – including your Internet freedom.

...

It’s bizarre and entertaining to hear people who yesterday were all about allegedly benign and intelligent government interventions suddenly discovering that in practice, what they get is stupid and vicious legislation that has been captured by a venal and evil interest group.

Yeah, no shit? How…how do they avoid noticing that in reality it’s like this all the time?

...

So here’s a clue: the only way to keep your freedom – on the Internet or anywhere else – is to defend everyone else’s freedom as well, by keeping your government tiny and starved and rigidly constrained in what it can do. Otherwise, the future you’re begging for is SOPAs without end.

Please, read the whole thing. It's short. Via Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » SOPA and the oblivious.

So food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, and subsidized housing, a substantial part of the welfare state, don't count in measuring people's income. And those items, especially food stamps, are a particularly large part of the poor people's income.

That makes Danziger's quote particularly striking. [Of course, I'm assuming that she quoted him correctly. If she didn't, then my apologies to Professor Danziger.] Here are the next two paragraphs in Ms. Yen's piece:

"Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010, but for many low-income families with work-related and medical expenses, they are considered too 'rich' to qualify," said Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty.

"The reality is that prospects for the poor and the near poor are dismal," he said. "If Congress and the states make further cuts, we can expect the number of poor and low-income families to rise for the next several years."

Contrary to Professor Danziger, food stamp programs did not keep the U.S. Census Bureau's measure of poverty from rising even higher. Indeed, even if the effect of food stamp programs on the willingness to earn income is small, any incentive effect at all means that food stamp programs made measured poverty higher. And if the feared cuts that Professor Danziger is referring to are cuts in food stamps [I don't know if that's what he had in mind], those cuts will not cause the number of poor and low-income families to rise.

via How Food Stamps Increase Measured Poverty, David Henderson | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

A simple and memorable way to keep straight the crucial distinction between “economic power” (the power to produce) and “political power” (the power to coerce) is by a terminological duality – “makers” versus takers” – as incorporated in Edmund Contoski’s 1997 book. Despite persistent Marxist claims dating as far back as 1848, these two powers (the economic and political) are in no way synonymous. Indeed, they’re antonymous.

Economic power is creative, productive, and voluntary; it offers incentives, gains, rewards. Political power is destructive and involuntary; you must obey it, for it imposes punishments, losses, and penalties. This is no brief for anarchy, as many libertarians insist; it’s a case for government limited constitutionally to undertaking its only valid purpose – the protection of individual rights (including property rights) against the initiation of force or fraud (whether from home or abroad) – and whose power is limited to penalizing, incarcerating or destroying real criminals (those who rape, rob, pillage, kill, or defraud), not market makers.

via Why Do Takers Obama and Gingrich Attack Creators Like Romney? - Forbes.

The Protester -Person of the Year 2011- Printout - TIME.

Jonas and Wyatt Maines were born identical twins, but from the start each had a distinct personality.

Jonas was all boy. He loved Spiderman, action figures, pirates, and swords.

Wyatt favored pink tutus and beads. At 4, he insisted on a Barbie birthday cake and had a thing for mermaids. On Halloween, Jonas was Buzz Lightyear. Wyatt wanted to be a princess; his mother compromised on a prince costume.

Once, when Wyatt appeared in a sequin shirt and his mother’s heels, his father said: “You don’t want to wear that.’’

“Yes, I do,’’ Wyatt replied.

“Dad, you might as well face it,’’ Wayne recalls Jonas saying. “You have a son and a daughter.’’

...

“Even when we did all the boy events to see if she would ‘conform,’ she would just put her shirt on her head as hair, strap on some heels and join in,’’ Kelly says. “It wasn’t really a matter of encouraging her to be a boy or a girl. That came about naturally.’’

Kelly and Wayne didn’t look at it as a choice their child was making.

“She really is a girl,’’ Kelly says, “a girl born with a birth defect. That’s how she looks at it.’’

Seems like this person, who was physically a boy and treated as a boy and pushed into conforming as a boy, felt like a girl the whole time. Seems hard to argue that's a social construction (nurture) and not an innate characteristic (nature). Via Led by the child who simply knew - The Boston Globe.

I find that, as little as I like excess and overconsumption, voicing that dislike gives power to people and political tendencies that I consider far more dangerous than overconsumption. I’d rather be surrounded by fat people who buy too much stuff than concede any ground at all to busybodies and would-be social engineers.

via Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » Why I love Walmart despite never shopping there.

It’s a terrible bill. Simply by introducing it, the sponsors -- including Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) have violated their oaths of office. In a moral society, they would immediately resign and commit honorable suicide. Since this isn’t such, we must hound them and humiliate them as best we can. They’ll probably try to make that illegal next.

via Instapundit » Blog Archive » PROTESTS: Wikipedia Mulls Total Blackout to Oppose SOPA. “Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales wants to b….

Yes, it's upsetting that some people have so much while other people have so little. It isn't fair. But I accept this unfairness. Indeed, I treasure it. That's because I have a 13-year-old daughter And that's all I hear, "That's not fair," she says. "That's not fair! That's not fair!" And one day I snapped, and I said, "Honey, you're cute, that's not fair. Your family is pretty well off, that's not fair. You were born in America, that's not fair. Darling, you had better get down on your knees and pray that things don't start getting fair for you."

via O'Rourke: If the 1% had less, would the 99% be better off? | Marketplace from American Public Media.

Why can’t civilized people like ourselves simply rely on the police? Well, look around you: Do you see a cop? Unless you happen to be a police officer yourself, or are married to one, you are very unlikely to be attacked in the presence of law enforcement. The role of the police is to respond in the aftermath of a crime and, with a little luck, to catch the person who committed it. If you are ever targeted by a violent predator, whether you and your family are injured or killed will depend on what you do in the first moments of the encounter.? When it comes to survival, therefore, you are entirely on your own. Once you escape and are in a safe place, by all means call the police. But dialing 911 when an intruder has broken into your home is not a strategy for self-defense.[2] 

via The Blog : The Truth about Violence : Sam Harris.

Why should we believe that the motives of people in (cough, cough) “public service” are different from the motives of people in the for-profit sector? Was Jon Corzine a rapacious self-seeker at Goldman Sachs, then a public-spirited man when he was in the Senate and in New Jersey’s governorship, only to revert to form when he went to MF Global? If you doubt that this is true, and suspect that Jon Corzine was the same guy all along, why would you want to give government more power?

via ‘I Simply Do Not Know Where the Money Is’ - By Kevin D. Williamson - The Corner - National Review Online.