It Ain’t Any Better With Food

What is far and away the most important global trade commodity? Food. People have to eat.

Before the world’s peoples can afford to purchase from us an iPhone, or a Ford pickup truck – they have to buy (hopefully our) food.

And governments are making sustenance so much more expensive.

Governments raise the prices of everything we try to buy. They do so indirectly – via hidden costs of government we can’t clearly see. Just here in the United States:

America’s Soaring Regulations Cost $1.8 Trillion A Year

That $1.8 trillion is added to the cost of everything we make – including everything we try to sell to the rest of the planet.

Much of that government cost-increase is in the food sector. Farm Bill, anyone? Making it harder for peoples around the world – many of them in abject poverty – to afford food. More

People Want to
Keep Their Coin?

To paraphrase the knight who guarded the Holy Grail in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” Ireland has chosen poorly.

The Emerald Isle has decided to make itself decidedly less attractive to people the world over.

Irish Budget Set to Phase Out Multinationals’ Favourable Tax Arrangement

Ireland is set to announce sweeping changes to its corporate tax structure in its budget on Tuesday, phasing out a loophole that has allowed multinationals to save billions of dollars in tax on their worldwide income.

This is the tax code equivalent of having Jay-Z rewrite Shakespeare. Why would Ireland hamstring itself?

The country has faced sustained criticism over the past 18 months from other European Union members and the United States for its tax rules and Finance Minister Michael Noonan is expected to lay out plans to end an arrangement that has enabled firms such as Google and Apple to cut their overseas tax rates to single digits.

Uber-high tax nations don’t like being scorned. So the EU is trying to force people to like them – which didn’t work in elementary school and won’t work now. And the United States has the highest corporate tax rate on the planet – so we too are in the cafeteria dining alone. More

Think Smaller…Government

Perhaps lost in the incessant, rolling bad news shuffle that is the Barack Obama Administration are the ongoing Hong Kong protests of rising Chinese domestic interference.

This is exactly the sort of thing we freedom lovers and free marketeers feared when in 1984 the British agreed to in 1997 hand over control of the island to the mainland Communists.

To alleviate the concern, the Chinese Communists pledged non-interventionism.

(T)he Chinese government in Beijing promised to let Hong Kong keep its special rights and its autonomy —a deal known as “one country, two systems.”

But we knew the Chinese Communist Party couldn’t forever resist assaulting the golden goose. More

Domestically and Globally

Government growth is a self-perpetuating and self-fulfilling prophecy.

Government is just another organism. Like any organism, its first instinct is self-preservation. Government – and its remora advocates – marshals all their forces should anyone suggest any program be reduced even slightly. As the late, inordinately great Ronald Reagan noted:

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.

Government’s second instinct is “What can I consume next?”We certainly see that in domestic welfare. More

Warren Buffett Inverts His Rule

Remember the “Buffett Rule?”

The Buffett Rule is part of a tax plan proposed by President Barack Obama in 2011. The tax plan would apply a minimum tax rate of 30 percent on individuals making more than a million dollars a year.

Remember for whom it’s named?

The Buffett Rule is named after American investor Warren Buffett, who publicly stated in early 2011 that he believed it was wrong that rich people, like himself, could pay less in federal taxes, as a portion of income, than the middle class, and voiced support for increased income taxes on the wealthy.

Remember what Buffett 2012 said – in his New York Times editorial? More

That is SO Last Century

The Twentieth was the Century of the Welfare State. Governments the world over built and then continuously grew their domestic aid money delivery apparatuses. Tens of trillions of dollars were spent in attempts to raise poor people up and out.

It’s been disastrous.

European Union and the Failed Welfare State

Transforming the Developmental Welfare State in East Asia

More Evidence of the Social Welfare State as a Failure

Much of the planet was dominated by the Soviet Union – whose satellites and clients were just welfare states under the Red umbrella. Communism is the Welfare State in full bloom – and to say it doesn’t work is the century’s greatest understatement. One hundred million people died – and billions more lived nasty, brutish and short lives in abject desolation and destitution. More