Tag: Government

Reaction Part 1

Two-Minute Hate

Sometimes I wonder when I’m ever going to lose the childish impulse to react in the precise opposite way to officially-mandated stupidity.  Here’s one example of the latter:

Los Angeles would become the largest city in the U.S. to ban the sale of fur products if the City Council approves a proposed law backed by animal activists who say the multibillion-dollar fur industry is rife with cruelty.
The council was expected Tuesday to direct the city attorney to draft a law prohibiting the manufacture or sale of fur products in the city.
The ban would cover apparel made in whole or in part of fur – including clothing, handbags, shoes, hats, earmuffs, jewelry and keychains.

I don’t live in LA, of course, nor would I ever;  but if I did, I’d be buying one of these things tomorrow:

The paws are a nice touch, don’t you think?

I don’t know where I could wear it in order to create the greatest outrage, however;  perhaps some of my California Readers could suggest a few choice locations (e.g. Century City) in Comments?

Ten Inconvenient Facts For Liberals

Politics

The Spectator (U.S. version) lays them out in detail.

The more ambitious liberalism has become in its efforts to transform the United States, the more it has run up against one intransigent circumstance after another. For eight years, the idol worship of Barack Obama gave liberals confidence that they could remediate society and reeducate the citizens. But reality isn’t political. It doesn’t obey the principles of progressives. Some facts aren’t pliable.

Read and enjoy.  Feel free to discuss your favorite fact (if you can decide on just one) in Comments.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD

Speaking of mandatory minimum-wage foolishness:

“Even in a robust economy such as we’re currently enjoying, the laws of supply and demand can’t be overridden. Restaurants still exist in a highly competitive environment and their profit margins remain generally low. A sudden increase in labor costs hits their bottom line immediately so they begin reducing the workforce and/or cutting back on hours for their servers and back of the house workers.
“The state is unable to artificially mandate prosperity without the free market responding to correct for the imbalance. That’s a lesson too many state and municipal governments seem painfully slow to learn.” — Jazz Shaw, via Insty.

VDH Explains The Insanity

Politics

Not for the first time, Victor Davis Hanson explains why the Left have become so totally fucking unhinged:

The National Security Council was weaponized and thus unmasked the names of surveilled Americans and leaked their names to the press to undermine the Trump campaign. The Department of Justice was weaponized to ensure Hillary Clinton was exonerated for her misdeeds concerning her email server and quid pro quo collusion with a variety of foreign and domestic influence peddlers and buyers. The FBI and CIA were weaponized to subvert the Trump campaign, by peddling an unverified smear dossier, paid for by Hillary Clinton, by implanting informants into the Trump campaign, and by undermining a FISA court through dishonest presentations of evidence for warrants to spy on American citizens.
All such behavior was assumed to ensure the landslide Clinton victory and thus would be seen as sacrifice beyond the call of duty to be rewarded by a President Clinton not as illegal behavior to be punished during a Trump administration. And as a result, the more culpability that was exposed, the more the culpable went on the offensive—on the theory that constant attack is the best defense against their own criminal liability.

And they lost, and now they’re going to get investigated and people are (I hope) going to go to jail or face massive fines and criminal records or lose their pensions, or all the above (which I hope even more).  As Conrad Black puts it:

Now they must remove him, or he will try to imprison them, and in fact, they have almost no chance of removing him. We are doomed to a fierce battle that will end quickly if the Republicans hold the House of Representatives and Trump can get rid of Sessions and Rosenstein and indict his enemies, who have certainly asked for it.

It’s no less than the pricks deserve, and here’s a warning note to AG Sessions:  you’d better get it done, or you’ll be lumped in with them for failing to do your duty.

Now Multiply That By A Million

Business, Gummint

I saw this little story via Insty, and it made me not just sad, but furious.  Read it first.

They didn’t lose a fortune, because they never had the opportunity to earn one. Nothing happened. There they sit. And there they’ll stay.

And that’s where the writer is wrong.  You see, economists and accountants have a terms for this phenomenon, and it’s called “opportunity cost” — in other words, the financial cost of a lost opportunity.  Because when people open up their own business and it’s even moderately successful, they have to hire other people to work for them.  Those workers in turn become successful, and pay taxes, and perhaps use the learning to open their own businesses.

The aggregate opportunity cost of this ripple effect, just for this little case study, is potentially millions of dollars.  The Toni & Guy chain of hair salons started in precisely this fashion with a single outlet in the 1960s, as did the JiffyLube chain, back in 1979 — and I chose these two businesses deliberately, because those are the two types of business that the above story deals with.  Who’s to say that Kaitlyn and her husband wouldn’t have had a success story similar to Tony&Guy and JiffyLube?  But we’ll never know, will we, because the heavy hand of government regulation reached into their lives and killed their adventure before it could get started.

So when Donald Trump’s first action as POTUS was to decree that all government departments had to delete multiple regulations for every new one they wanted to promulgate, it was to free people to get going with their businesses and dreams.

Lest we forget, the fucking Democrats are the party of massive regulation and government intrusiveness — and remember that if you’re toying with a “protest” vote against Trump (or a quixotic vote for a third-party no-hoper) in the mid-term elections later this year.  (If you’re a lifetime Democrat voter and want socialism, then you’re at the wrong website and, if I may say, in the wrong country.)

It’s all very well for the economy to grow when manufacturing opens new plants and what have you (which is what Trump has also been making happen) — but that growth is finite.  Individuals starting their own businesses and becoming successful isn’t finite:  that is where America is at its strongest, and that is what will create true economic success for the whole country.  And Donald Trump understands this, and because of it he deserves our unflagging support, if for no other reason.

Skirting The Rules

Business, Funny Stuff

So what to do when you’re working outside in sweltering temperatures, but the ‘Elf & Safety regulations forbid wearing short pants?  You find a way around the rules:

The brickies — who were working in Chertsey, Surrey — were horrified by new health and safety rules forbidding shorts. But when they realised they could get around the ban by wearing women’s clothing thanks to gender equality regulations, they showed up for work in skirts and frocks.  [emphasis added]

And because this story would be no good wifout pichurs:

I love stories like this.  Fuck the bureaucrats.