Jts5665

Obama to Hispanics: We won't deport relatives if you enroll...


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Premiums rising faster than 8 years before Obamacare -- Combined!


(Second column, 8th story, link)

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One of my favorite services for self-pay patients is Medibid, which allows doctors to bid on providing medical treatments for patients. Back in December, in a blog post on medical tourism, I included the case of Perry Hunt, a 50-year old in California who needed hip replacement surgery. This is the description that originally appeared in a Men’s Health article, which I pasted into my post:

This past June, MediBid helped Perry Hunt, a 50-year-old home developer in Orange County, California, get a new right hip in Texas. Hunt’s local surgeon said the operation would cost $100,000. Hunt was uninsured and did not want to pay that. MediBid had found quotes for India ($8,000), another hospital in California an hour from Hunt’s home ($14,450), and one in San Antonio ($21,000).

Hunt did not want to travel overseas. And even though the Texas surgery would cost far more than the nearby California alternative, he chose to go there because the doctor could perform the procedure with an anterior approach, going in through the front of the hip rather than the buttocks or side, and avoiding cutting through muscle, which makes for less trauma to the body and a speedier recovery…. Hunt was back to playing golf within four months. “I was up walking the very next day,” says Hunt. “I was able to go home the day following surgery, as well, and was given exercises as my rehab. I couldn’t be happier with the results of my experience and the surgery”

Hunt has now done a video describing his experience, which runs about 25 minutes. I thought it would be worth posting here so you can see him talk about how he wound up going through Medibid, his experiences as a self-pay patient, and the quality of the care he received. So here it is:

Inflation rate reaching 57%...


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On the day of his inauguration in 2009, President Barack Obama announced that his administration would be "the most open and transparent in history." It did not take long for that promise to be tossed aside, and it has been clear for quite a while that this administration is perhaps the most secretive in history. A new analysis by the AP of how the administration responds to FOIA requests confirms that it is becoming even more secretive each year:

The Obama administration more often than ever censored government files or outright denied access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.

Basically, the administration is doing everything possible to keep information secret. Despite President Obama's memo to the federal government upon taking office on the importance of openness in responding to FOIA requests, the government has done exactly the opposite. His memo, you may recall, stated:

The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears. Nondisclosure should never be based on an effort to protect the personal interests of Government officials at the expense of those they are supposed to serve. In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies (agencies) should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public.

All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government. The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA.

The presumption of disclosure also means that agencies should take affirmative steps to make information public. They should not wait for specific requests from the public. All agencies should use modern technology to inform citizens about what is known and done by their Government. Disclosure should be timely.

Compare that to the reality:

In a year of intense public interest over the National Security Agency's surveillance programs, the government cited national security to withhold information a record 8,496 times — a 57 percent increase over a year earlier and more than double Obama's first year, when it cited that reason 3,658 times. The Defense Department, including the NSA, and the CIA accounted for nearly all those. The Agriculture Department's Farm Service Agency cited national security six times, the Environmental Protection Agency did twice and the National Park Service once.

And five years after Obama directed agencies to less frequently invoke a "deliberative process" exception to withhold materials describing decision-making behind the scenes, the government did it anyway, a record 81,752 times.

Yes. It appears that "the most transparent administration in history" has never been all that transparent, and it's only getting worse.

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Walter Olson

From a Baltimore Sun article on the regulatory fate of car-sharing services Uber and Lyft, bitterly attacked by their more highly regulated taxi competitors: 

At a recent work session on the issue, Kelley [Sen. Delores G. Kelley, D-Baltimore County] rejected the contention from Lyft and Uber that it’s a matter of consumer choice about whether to use the application to book a ride and they won’t do it if the price is too high. 

“We regulate all sorts of things because the general public is not smart enough to know when they’re about to be fleeced,” Kelley said.

But what about members of the general public who are smart enough to know they’re about to be fleeced, but are unable to do anything about it because it’s lawmakers and market incumbents combining to make that happen? 

USA GIVES UP CONTROL OF NET; NEW GLOBAL GOVERNANCE...


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Yesterday, I came home exhausted.  I have been working late nearly every night for weeks, at a time of year when most of my business is not even open yet (the business is seasonal).  I realized to my immense depression that I have been spending all my time on regulatory compliance.  I have not been pitching new clients or bidding on new prospects or making investments or improving our customer service processes -- though I have ideas for all of these.  I have been 100% dedicated through 14 hour days to just trying to keep up with and adapt to changing government rules.

Break rules, changing minimum wages, heat stress plans, mandatory sexual harassment training, OSHA reporting, EEO reporting, Census reporting, and most recently changing rules on salaried workers that Obama just waived his wand and imposed -- this is what has been consuming me.  I have been trying to roll out a new safety program to the field and can't do it because I keep having to train for one of these new requirements (one learns there is only a limited number of things one can simultaneously roll out to front-line staff).

At some point regulation will accrete so fast that it will be impossible to keep up.  I am going to call that the Regulation Singularity, and for businesses my size, we are fast approaching it.

Prominent libertarian think tanks often rank state business climate by their tax regimes.  I am all for low, sensibly-structured taxes.  But for most of my time, taxes are irrelevant.  We are shutting down businesses left and right in California and it has zero to do with taxes.

In a couple of recent posts, including part six of Character vs. Chemistry, I wrote that the Grand Plans designed by The Anointed to battle obesity will fail because those plans are based on the belief that weight loss is about character, not chemistry.  Well, in the interest of fairness, I feel obligated to point out that not every Grand Plan imposed on us by The Anointed fails because of biochemical ignorance.  Most fail because of economic ignorance.

In fact, to believe that the typical Grand Plan proposed by The Anointed will actually work, you pretty much have to be an economic illiterate.  You have to believe, for example, that young people who already refuse to buy inexpensive health insurance will flock to buy insurance that costs three times as much if you just run some cute ads encouraging them to spend the holidays wearing pajamas and drinking hot chocolate and #GetTalking with their parents about insurance.  That’s how The Anointed believe it should work, so by gosh, that’s how it will work.

Which brings me another Grand Plan to battle obesity:  spending taxpayer money to make sure plenty of fruits and vegetables are available in poor neighborhoods.  That’s why so many poor people are fat, ya see … they don’t have access to the magical fruits and vegetables that guarantee weight loss.  And of course, if we just make the magical fruits and vegetables available, poor people will flock to buy them (elbowing young people flocking to buy expensive insurance out of the way in the process), eat those vegetables, and then lose weight.  That’s how The Anointed believe it should work, so by gosh, that’s how it will work.

If you’re a long-time reader, you may recall that I’ve pointed out the economic fallacies in that Grand Plan before.  Here’s what I wrote in a post three years ago:

Here’s a simple economics lesson:  businesses don’t determine what consumers will buy.  Consumer behavior determines what businesses will produce and sell.  If fast food restaurants thrive in poor neighborhoods while stores that sell fresh fruit and vegetables don’t, there’s a good reason for it.  Using tax dollars to bring more fruits and vegetables to areas where people don’t buy fruits and vegetables isn’t going to reduce childhood obesity.  It’s just going to lead to a lot of rotten fruits and vegetables.

In fact, one corner-store owner in Philadelphia agreed, at the urging of The Anointed, to sell 15-cent bags of apple slices so poor kids would eat more fruit.  He ended up throwing most of them away – at a loss of $500 to his business.

Here’s what I wrote in another post two years ago:

Even if we’re talking about neighborhoods where there truly aren’t as many vegetables being sold, people get the causality backwards.  The local residents aren’t fat because they don’t have access to vegetables.  The vegetables aren’t available because people don’t buy them.

… Here’s what people like Mrs. Obama can’t seem to grasp:  if enough people in those neighborhoods wanted lettuce and fruit in their kids’ lunches, plenty of greedy capitalists would happily move in to sell them.

… No problem then.  The government’s on the job and planning a comprehensive response.  That of course means a really expensive and ultimately futile response.

Well, I guess that depends on your definition of really expensive.  Since I don’t work in the federal government, a figure of, say, $500 million sounds to me like a huge waste if some comprehensive response doesn’t work.  (I mean, geez, imagine if you spent nearly double that on a crappy web site that didn’t work and then had to go spend even more to get it fixed.)

But of course, part of what makes it so awesomely wonderful about being a member of The Anointed is that you get to spend other people’s money to institute your Grand Plans.  No need to start small to test your theory.  No need to try opening Uncle Sam’s Cheep Fruits and Veggie Stand in a few poor neighborhoods to see if people eat more vegetables and lose weight.  No need to stock some existing grocery stores with cheap fruit and track the sales.  Nope, if you’re a member of The Anointed, you may as well go whole-hog and plunk down $500 million in taxpayer dollars.

So here are the latest results:

With the obesity epidemic in full swing and millions of American living in neighborhoods where fruits and vegetables are hard to come by, the Obama administration thought it saw a solution: fund stores that will stock fresh, affordable produce in these deprived areas.

But now, three years and $500 million into the federal Healthy Food Financing Initiative, there’s a problem: A study suggests it’s not working.

Adding supermarkets to areas with short supplies of fresh produce does not lead to improvements in residents’ diets or health outcomes, according to a report published Monday in the February issue of Health Affairs.

So The Anointed in government thought they saw an untapped market for fruits and vegetables that the greedy capitalists somehow missed, but it turns out they were wrong.  Boy, I’ll bet nobody saw that coming.

When a grocery store was opened in one Philadelphia food desert, 26.7 percent of residents made it their main grocery store and 51.4 percent indicated using it for any food shopping, the report found. But among the population that used the new supermarket, the researchers saw no significant improvement in BMI, fruit and vegetable intake, or perceptions of food accessibility, although there was a significant improvement in perception of accessibility to fruits and vegetables.

Well, if people perceive that they have more access to fruits and vegetables without actually buying them, that’s certainly worth $500 million … although it would have been cheaper to just run TV ads telling them that fruits and vegetables were in great supply.

The report was authored by a team of researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Penn State University’s departments of sociology, anthropology, and demography. The study was funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences with support from the Population Research Institute, although neither had a hand in the research design, collection, or analysis.

Awesome.  So we’re spending taxpayer money to study why spending taxpayer money on yet another Grand Plan didn’t work.  Is this a great country or what?

The study needs to be replicated in other neighborhoods and other parts of the United States to confirm or refute these findings, said lead researcher Steven Cummins, professor of population health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The results do, however, mirror findings in the U.K., where researchers created a similar comparison of two neighborhoods in Scotland and observed no net effect on fruit and vegetable intake.

Wow.  It’s almost as if the laws of economics apply all over the world.  But we don’t know that for sure, so we really need to spend more taxpayer money to confirm that spending taxpayer money on yet another Grand Plan didn’t work.

And if the conclusion is borne out, it would suggest that policymakers rethink the Healthy Food Financing Initiative if they want to promote healthier eating and healthier citizens.

Hmmm, let’s see if I can remember what The Anointed conclude when a Grand Plan fails … okay, it came to me:

• The plan was good but people didn’t implement it correctly because they’re stupid.
• The plan was undermined by people who opposed it because they’re evil.
• The plan didn’t go far enough – we need to do same thing again only bigger.

Cummins said in an email that lawmakers ought to consider policies that will change community behavior to incorporate healthy food into everyday diets.

“These might include economic initiatives such as taxes on unhealthy foods and subsidies on healthy foods, marketing initiatives that focus on in-store promotion of healthy food, and programs that focus on skills related to buying and cooking components of a balanced diet,” Cummins said.

Yeah, what we need to do is spend even more taxpayer money trying to tell people what to eat – because it’s worked so well so far.  Then if that doesn’t work, we can spend more taxpayer money to study why spending taxpayer didn’t work.  Oh, and let’s tax the unhealthy foods too.

Anyone care to bet that The Anointed would correctly identify the “unhealthy” foods?

One of the most shocking of Snowden's revelations was that the NSA and GCHQ are deliberately weakening the Internet's security -- either by undermining standards, or by using zero-day vulnerabilities to break into systems. More recent news about the huge scale of attempts to infect computers with malware only compounds that outrage. It's hard to convey to ordinary Internet users the seriousness of what the NSA and GCHQ have done here, but in a brilliant new column in the Guardian, it looks like Cory Doctorow has done just that:

I think there's a good case to be made for security as an exercise in public health. It sounds weird at first, but the parallels are fascinating and deep and instructive.

Here's the basic insight:

If you discovered that your government was hoarding information about water-borne parasites instead of trying to eradicate them; if you discovered that they were more interested in weaponising typhus than they were in curing it, you would demand that your government treat your water-supply with the gravitas and seriousness that it is due.

Because that is precisely what the spying agencies are doing: they are intentionally withholding vital information about threats to your digital health -- the fact that programs you use are vulnerable to infections with malware, or that key security technologies you depend upon have backdoors -- regardless of the serious consequences this might have for you. If you try to imagine doctors doing the same in the case of equivalent threats to your health, you begin to get an idea of the depth of betrayal felt by computer professionals here. Doctorow goes on to point out that this is not just a matter of personal harm; the NSA and GCHQ are degrading the basic digital infrastructure of modern life:

This is the most alarming part of the Snowden revelations: not just that spies are spying on all of us -- that they are actively sabotaging all of our technical infrastructure to ensure that they can continue to spy on us.

There is no way to weaken security in a way that makes it possible to spy on "bad guys" without making all of us vulnerable to bad guys, too. The goal of national security is totally incompatible with the tactic of weakening the nation's information security.

"Virus" has been a term of art in the security world for decades, and with good reason. It's a term that resonates with people, even people with only a cursory grasp of technology. As we strive to make the public and our elected representatives understand what's at stake, let's expand that pathogen/epidemiology metaphor. We'd never allow MI5 to suppress information on curing typhus so they could attack terrorists by infecting them with it. We need to stop allowing the NSA and GCHQ to suppress information on fixing bugs in our computers, phones, cars, houses, planes, and bodies.

Doctorow is right on both counts: we can't allow the NSA and GCHQ to withhold vital information that endangers the digital fabric of society, and the way to stop them is to use this public health metaphor to get that message across to politicians and the general public.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+ Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

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Submitted by Nick Giambruno via Doug Casey's International Man blog,

Most readers are familiar with Peter Schiff. He is a financial commentator and author, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, and is known for accurately predicting the 2008 financial crisis.

He also has a very keen understanding of internationalization. Peter shares with me his strategies in this must-read discussion below that I am happy to bring exclusively to International Man readers. (If you are not already a member, you can join for free here.)

Nick Giambruno: Peter, do you see the potential for another financial crisis in the US playing out in the not-so-distant future?

Peter Schiff: Unfortunately, yes. I mean, how soon is very difficult to tell. In fact, right now you’ve got a high level of complacency. The stock markets are rallying to new highs, nominal highs. People seem to be convinced that the worst is behind us, that the central banks of the world have solved their problems by papering them over. But, you know, I don’t think they’ve solved anything. I think they’ve compounded the underlying problems that caused the last crisis, and so now the next crisis will be that much worse because of what the central banks did, in particular the Federal Reserve.

The Fed is right now trying to prop the economy up, the housing market up with cheap money, and it is operating under the delusion that one day it can take that cheap money away and the economy and the housing market will just sustain on their own, but that’s not possible. The Fed is building an economy that is completely dependent on that cheap money. And so if you take it away, the economy implodes, but if you don’t take it away, then it’s worse.

Nick Giambruno: So what measures do you see coming into place—things such as capital controls?

Peter Schiff: Well, certainly as currencies depreciate, governments look to try to find ways to stop the bleeding. What’s really is going on with inflation is that you have a huge transfer of wealth from savers and lenders to debtors, and of course the US government is the world’s biggest debtor, but a lot of American voters are in debt too.

If you’re a saver and you don’t want to watch your assets confiscated through the printing press, then you’re going to try to protect yourself. You might do that by moving your dollars abroad, converting them to foreign currencies, trying to get out of harm’s way, and that’s when you have the government potentially coming in with capital controls.

Putting taxes on foreign currency transactions or maybe outright prohibiting them altogether, that will make it more difficult for you or more expensive to take protective measures. I think we’ve already got the beginnings of capital controls in the United States. The government is making it very difficult for Americans to do business abroad. Many foreign financial institutions, banks, and even bullion depositories are refusing to do business with American citizens for fear of retaliation by the IRS or other government agencies.

Nick Giambruno: So what can Americans and others living under a desperate government do to minimize this risk?

Peter Schiff: Well, the first thing that you could do is minimize your purchasing power risk. So you don’t have to get your money into a foreign bank or foreign brokerage account to get out of the dollar. I help Americans diversify globally within a US account, but their portfolio consists of foreign assets, whether it’s foreign bonds, government bonds, corporate bonds, foreign stocks, dividend-paying stocks, commodities, or precious metals. These are all things that will protect purchasing power in an inflationary time period, and things that the federal government—the Federal Reserve—can’t levy the inflation tax on.

If you’re more worried about political risk—about the US government seizing your assets—then you want to take the next step. This is not just getting out of the dollar, but getting your money out of the country. But again, the US government is making that more difficult right now.

I know personally. I set up a foreign brokerage firm as a subsidiary of my foreign bank, which I also set up, called Euro Pacific Bank. I did this predominantly for foreigners who were having trouble investing with my US brokerage firm. The securities rules and regulations are now so onerous that it almost caused me to view any foreigner as a terrorist. So if somebody in Australia wanted to open up an account with me, there was so much paperwork involved that oftentimes they would just give up halfway through the process. So what I did is I set up this foreign bank so that I wouldn’t have to operate under those confines, so I can be more competitive to a foreign investor, but I can’t offer these services to Americans.

My foreign bank is no different than many other foreign banks. In order to really protect the privacy of my foreign customers, I can’t accept American customers. And if I accepted American customers, my compliance cost would be so high that I would have to charge my foreign customers more for transactions to try to stay in business. So to mitigate all that regulation and the potential of having to share all the information on my foreign clients with the US government, I’m just not taking American customers with my foreign bank.

Nick Giambruno: So Euro Pacific Bank, where is it headquartered and why did you choose that jurisdiction?

Peter Schiff: It’s in St Vincent and the Grenadines (the Caribbean). I did it for a number of reasons: it’s close to me, but also because of the banking laws. You have secrecy, privacy, and you have no tax. They’re not going to impose any income tax on my company as an offshore bank, they’re also not going to impose any taxes, any withholding taxes on my bank’s customers’ interest income or their capital gains. And no one is going to pierce the wall of secrecy. You’re going to have to go in to a St. Vincent’s court and get a local court order to get any information from my bank.

The bank is regulated, but it’s not nearly as onerous as the type of regulations that I would face trying to do this business from the United States. In fact, some of the things we’re doing offshore might be completely impossible because they would no longer be economically viable if I tried to do them in America, but I can do them offshore because the government doesn’t impose these artificial barriers.

(Editor’s Note: You can find out more about Euro Pacific Bank here.)

Nick Giambruno: Generally speaking, which countries are you particularly bullish on?

Peter Schiff: It’s kind of like a monetary or economic triage; I’m always looking around the world to see which countries are in the least bad shape, which countries are the least reckless and the least irresponsible. You really can’t find any one country that’s doing it perfectly. You just have to find the ones that are making the fewest mistakes.

And I think high on that list are Singapore and Hong Kong. Those markets are relatively free of regulation, free of taxation. I mean, it’s not nonexistent, but on a relative basis you have a lot more freedom there, and so you have a lot more prosperity there. You have much better economic fundamentals. And not just in those two places, but in Southeast Asia in general, in a lot of the emerging economies, you’ll find a lot less government and a lot more freedom. People are working harder, they’re saving, they’re producing, and they’re exporting. You don’t have these trade deficits, budget deficits, and you don’t have armies of people looking to retire on government entitlements. In Europe, we still like Switzerland even though they are making mistakes tying their currency to the euro. I think eventually they will change that policy. Scandinavia, we have been investors in Norway, we’ve been investors in Sweden. Also Australia and New Zealand have been longtime favorites. We’ve been investing down there or even closer to home in Canada. We do have some investments in South America. We’re diversifying around the world trying to get into the right countries, the right currencies, the right asset classes.

Nick Giambruno: On a different note, we’ve seen the number of US citizens renouncing their citizenship sharply increase. We have also seen high-profile people like Tina Turner and Eduardo Saverin give up their US citizenship. Would Tina be eligible to use Euro Pacific Bank?

Peter Schiff: Yes, once you renounce your US citizenship. The only people who can’t bank with me are American citizens, or green card holders. So once you are no longer an American citizen, as long as you don’t reside in the United States, then you are welcome at the bank.

I think a lot of people are doing this obviously for tax reasons, although they can’t necessarily claim it’s for tax reasons. You have to fill out a form if you want to renounce your citizenship—which, by the way, you can only get from a foreign embassy or consulate. Those forms used to be free. Now they’re $500 apiece. So think about that. If they can charge you $500 for that form, they could charge $5,000, they could charge $5,000,000. They could basically make it impossible for you to leave. And they’re trying to make it more difficult ever since Eduardo Saverin from Facebook went to Singapore. Now the government is trying to come up with all sorts of ways to punish Americans who try to give up their citizenship, and this really is the sign of a nation in decay. Fifty years ago, nobody would want to give up American citizenship. They would cherish it. The fact that so many people are paying tremendous amounts of money to get this albatross off their neck shows you how much times have changed, that an American passport is not an asset to be cherished but a liability that people are willing to pay to get rid of.

Nick Giambruno: And what about yourself? Do you believe you are adequately diversified internationally?

Peter Schiff: I think my investments are; I own a lot of foreign stocks. I have a lot of precious metals, I have a lot of mining shares. But I still live in the United States, so I’m obviously still vulnerable here. My family is here, so I haven’t done anything about a physical exit strategy. Although I do think I have financial resources that would afford me the ability to relocate, but I haven’t actually taken any steps other than setting up a foreign business. I have the foreign bank in the Caribbean. I have a brokerage firm Euro Pacific Canada, and so I’ve got offices up there. I’m also thinking about opening up an office in Singapore and trying to move more of my business—particularly my asset management business—to move it from the US. Not only because of favorable tax treatment outside the US, but because of the regulatory environment. If you want to be globally competitive, you need to be in an area where you can minimize these costs because if I have those costs and my competitors don’t, then I am at a disadvantage. And also because I think that over time people are going to be more and more hesitant about sending their money to the United States. So if I’m going to manage money, I might have to manage it offshore, because I think people will be worried about sending it here. They might be worried that the US government might take it.

If it ever gets really, really bad that you feel that you have to leave, by then it might be illegal to take any gold or silver out of the country. Right now you can take more than $10,000 worth of cash or cash equivalents—which would include gold bullion—out of the country as long as you tell the government that you’re taking it. And if you don’t tell them and they catch you, there’s a big fine and jail penalty. But one day it might not be the case. It might be that you are prohibited from taking any significant amount of money out of the country, and who knows what the penalty might be if they catch you. But if it’s already out of the country, then you don’t have to worry, because you’re leaving with nothing and the money is on the other side of the border waiting for you.

Nick Giambruno: So the idea is to preempt capital controls?

Peter Schiff: Yeah, well, you get out the window before they slam it shut. That’s the whole idea, and right now those windows are shutting all around as more and more offshore institutions are saying “no thank you” to an American customer. But the other reason that you want to act sooner too is if they impose exchange controls or fees on purchasing precious metals. They don’t ban them, but they have a big tax on the transaction or a big tax on the foreign exchange. If you want to buy Swiss francs, they can have a transaction tax. You want to get your money out of the dollar before those taxes are imposed, because if you wait until they’re imposed, then you can’t get as much money out, because a lot of it is being lost to taxes. In getting out of the dollar, you’re trying to avoid the inflation tax, but they’re hitting you with some other kind of tax in the process because that’s really what they are trying to do. A lot of people are worrying about the income tax or the estate tax and they go through elaborate means to try to minimize those taxes, but then they leave themselves vulnerable to what might be the biggest tax of all: and that’s the inflation tax. So you have to act to protect yourself before so many people are trying to protect themselves that the government makes it almost impossible to do so.

Editor’s Note: Internationalization is your ultimate insurance policy. Whether it’s with a second passport, offshore physical gold storage, or other measures, it is critically important that you dilute the amount of control the bureaucrats in your home country wield over you by diversifying your political risk. You can find Casey Research’s A-Z guide on internationalization by clicking here.

easyriderr:

TL;DR : Watch this incredible story in video

this is beautiful

Despite the relentless protests of Kiev, and of course the G7 group of world's most indebted nations, in the past two weeks Vladimir Putin once again succeeded in outplaying the west and annexed the Crimea penninsula without firing a single shot (granted there is still potential for material situational deterioration, one which would involve military participation by NATO whose outcome is not exactly clear). The market has "priced in" as much, with prevailing consensus now dictating that Russia will preserve its foothold in the Crimea however without additional attempts for annexation: certainly Poland is hoping and praying as much.

However, as the following photos taken on the Russian side of East Ukraine, one next to Belgorod, and one in the proximity of Rostov, the Russian tanks are now piling up, only not in Crimea, which needs no further Russian military presence, but ostensibly to prepare for the next part of the annexation: that of Russian-speaking east Ukraine.

On the picture below, one can see Russian troops on the move near the border with Ukraine in the Belgorod Oblast, about 20 kilometers from the border with Ukraine near Kharkiv:

)

The indicative location:

 

Meanwhile, on the birder with Crimea, Ukrainian troops are digging in and mining fields in anticipation of Russians rolling out of the Penninsula:

)

H/T @raymond_saint, Censor.net

…. is from an interview with legal scholar Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness“:

Portugal is an excellent example of how it is possible to reduce addiction and abuse and drug related crime in a non-punitive manner without filling prisons and jails. Supposedly, we criminalize drugs because we are so concerned about the harm they cause people, but we wind up inflicting far more pain and suffering than the substances themselves. What are we doing really when we criminalize drugs is not criminalizing substances, but people.

I support a wholesale shift to a public health model for dealing with drug addiction and abuse. How would we treat people abusing if we really cared about them? Would we put them in a cage, saddle them with criminal records that will force them into legal discrimination the rest of their lives? I support the decriminalization of all drugs for personal use. If you possess a substance, we should help you get education and support, not demonize, shame, and punish you for the rest of your life.

NSA Using FACEBOOK to Hack Into Your Computer...


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FERGUSON: Sheryl Sandberg's Brave New Stereotypes...

(Don Boudreaux)

… is from page 15 of David Rose’s excellent 2011 book, The Moral Foundation of Economic Behavior (links added):

Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Gerard Roland (2010) …. presented a model showing that while an ethic of individualism produces dynamic effects on growth, an ethic of collectivism produces only static gains.  They also found evidence that individualism significantly contributes to long-run growth.  In a subsequent paper (Gorodnichenko and Roland, 2011) they explored the effect that other factors might have on long-run growth and found that individualism was the most important and robustly significant factor of all.

...government access.  Clearly Warren Buffet saw the writing on the wall in 2009, that the way to make money in the US was no longer to build products and factories but to invest in lobbying to get crony advantages and giveaways.

This Administration and Senate makes all kinds of progressive noises, but all the while they are running perhaps the greatest expansion of cronyism in US history.  And the smart money knows it.

 

Gene Healy

This Thursday at Cato, we’re hosting an event for a remarkable new book: Betty Medsger’s The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI (RSVP here). As I explain in the Washington Examiner today, it’s a story as riveting as any heist film, and far more significant:  

Forty-three years ago last Saturday, an unlikely band of antiwar activists calling themselves “The Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI” broke into a Bureau branch office in Media, Pennsylvania, making off with reams of classified documents. Despite a manhunt involving 200 agents at its peak, the burglars were never caught, but the files they mailed to selected journalists proved that the agency was waging a secret, unconstitutional war against American citizens.  

As a young Washington Post reporter, Medsger was the first to receive and publish selections from the files—over the protests of then-attorney general (and later Watergate felon) John Mitchell, who called the Post three times falsely claiming that publication would jeopardize national security and threaten agents’ lives. 

Four decades later, those claims echo in former NSA head Michael Hayden’s assertion that the US is “infinitely weaker” because of Snowden’s leaks. Like the apocryphal old saw suggests, if history doesn’t repeat itself, at least it rhymes.

“As if arranged by the gods of irony,” Medsger writes, the very morning Hoover learned of the break-in, then-assistant attorney general William H. Rehnquist (later Chief Justice), in testimony the FBI had helped prepare, told a Senate subcommittee that what little surveillance the government engaged in did not have a “chilling effect” on constitutional rights. Among the first documents Medsger reported weeks later, was a memo urging agents to “enhance the paranoia… get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”

Ironies abound. The burglars timed the heist for March 8, 1971, when the country would be distracted by the “Fight of the Century” between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. Medsger notes the “poetic justice” that the much-spied upon Ali would unwittingly help provide cover for exposure of FBI spying. Oddly, it’s acting attorney general Robert Bork–survivor of the “Saturday Night Massacre” and nobody’s idea of a civil libertarian)–who orders the release of key documents on the COINTELPRO program and urged the incoming attorney general to investigate the program. There’s another vignette where President Nixon speaks to an FBI Academy graduating class about “reestablishing respect for the law”–and the next evening orders Haldeman to have someone break into the Brookings Institution and steal a purloined copy of the Pentagon Papers (a zealous Chuck Colson suggested firebombing the think tank to create a distraction).  

The book is full of “truth is stranger” moments: if a historical novelist made up a scenario where, two days before the burglary, the ringleader, Haverford physics professor William Davidon, goes to the White House for a sit-down with Henry Kissinger to argue about the Vietnam War (thanks, ultimately, to an introduction made by Shirley MacLaine), there’s no way I’d have bought it. Stranger still, at the time, Davidon was an unindicted co-conspirator in a bogus kidnapping case engineered by Hoover in which Catholic peace activists had supposedly plotted to hold Kissinger hostage. Kissinger didn’t take it very seriously, having joked to the press that the plot had been engineered by “three sex-starved nuns.” As the meeting began, Medsger reports, “Kissinger immediately turned to Sister Beverly, sitting on his other side, and apologized for his flippant ‘sex-starved nuns’ comment.”

Last week, an indignant Rep. Mike Pompeo (R.-KA) chastised the organizers of Austin’s South by Southwest conference for inviting Edward Snowden to address the group via video feed: Snowden is “a traitor and a common criminal,” he railed, “whose only apparent qualification is a willingness to steal from his own government.” As I’ve said before, the debate over the content of Snowden’s character is a sideshow: what’s important is what he revealed: secret, unlawful surveillance capabilities that J. Edgar Hoover could hardly have imagined 40+ years ago. Unless we’ve made radical improvements in human nature in the interim, those capabilities–and the temptations they represent–should concern us greatly.

The legacy of the Citizens’ Commission shows that their “willingness to steal from their own government” may have been the only way to stop much greater lawlessness. Here’s what the FBI’s own website says about the burglars:

A radical group called “Citizens’ Committee to Investigate the FBI” broke into the office in Media and stole a wide array of domestic security documents that had not been properly secured. Some of the documents mentioned “Cointelpro”, or Counterintelligence Programs—a series of programs aimed to disrupt some of the more radical groups of the 1950s and 1960s. The leaking of those documents to the news media and politicians and the subsequent criticism, both inside and outside the Bureau, led to a significant reevaluation of FBI domestic security policy.

Medsger quotes Neil Welch, one of the few top agents within the Bureau to oppose COINTELPRO at the time:

“If [the burglars] had been convicted, I would have recommended that they should be given suspended sentences because of the major contribution they made to their country.”

 

 

Below are some selected excerpts from an excellent article in today’s Investor’s Business Daily by John Merline (“70% Of U.S. Spending Is Writing Checks To Individuals“):

Buried deep in a section of President Obama’s budget, released this week, is an eye-opening fact: This year, 70% of all the money the federal government spends will be in the form of direct payments to individuals, an all-time high (see chart above, data here in Table 6.1).

In effect, the government has become primarily a massive money-transfer machine, taking $2.6 trillion from some and handing it back out to others. These government transfers now account for 15% of GDP, another all-time high. In 1991, direct payments accounted for less than half the budget and 10% of GDP. What’s more, the cost of these direct payments is exploding. Even after adjusting for inflation, they’ve shot up 29% under Obama.

Where do these checks go? The biggest chunk, 38.6%, goes to pay health bills, either through Medicare, Medicaid or ObamaCare. A third goes out in the form of Social Security checks. Only 21% goes toward poverty programs — or “income security” as it’s labeled in the budget — and a mere 5% ends up in the hands of veterans.

Interestingly, despite Obama’s frequent pledges to reduce income inequality, the share of direct payments going toward “income security” has dropped from 25% in 2009 to 20% in 2014. (The average share from 1980 to 2008 was 25.4%.) Obama’s Fiscal Year 2015 budget calls for this share to drop to just 17% by 2019, as his programs devote more and more federal tax money to middle-class entitlement programs such as ObamaCare.

This massive shift in federal spending toward direct payments to individuals not only balloons the size of the federal government, it makes cutting the budget all the harder, since any meaningful spending reductions will invariably mean cutting back on some of these check-writing programs.

The Congressional Budget Office figures that, by 2038, Medicare and Social Security alone will eat up 42% of the budget. The explosive growth in these direct-payment programs is also squeezing traditional government functions, such as national defense, which Obama wants to sharply cut. His budget calls for Pentagon spending to drop from $623 billion in 2015 to $570 billion in 2017.

… is from Thomas Sowell, writing in his column today titled “The Left versus Minorities“:

If anyone wanted to pick a time and place where the political left’s avowed concern for minorities was definitively exposed as a fraud, it would be now — and the place would be New York City, where far left Mayor Bill de Blasio has launched an attack on charter schools, cutting their funding, among other things.

These schools have given thousands of low income minority children their only shot at a decent education, which often means their only shot at a decent life. Last year 82 percent of the students at a charter school called Success Academy passed city-wide mathematics exams, compared to 30 percent of the students in the city as a whole.

Why would anybody who has any concern at all about minority young people — or even common decency — want to destroy what progress has already been made?

One big reason, of course, is the teachers’ union, one of Mayor de Blasio’s biggest supporters. But it may be more than that. For many of the true believers on the left, their ideology overrides any concern about the actual fate of flesh-and-blood human beings.

(Don Boudreaux)

Here’s a letter to WTOP radio:

Kate Ryan reports that preservationist Mary Rowse, in an effort to prevent a homeowner from tearing down a 100-year-old house in Chevy Chase, is “collecting signatures from passersby” (“Neighborhood organizes against home ‘tear-down,’ March 10).

Ms. Rowse is collecting cheap currency.  She should instead be collecting cash.  Only if she buys the house from its current owner – someone who pursues his preferences by spending his own money – will we have solid evidence that Ms. Rowse and the passersby truly value the preservation of this house more than its current owner values the prospect of replacing it with a newer home.

Sloganeering and signatures are easy and lay no skin in the game.  Ms. Rowse and those who claim to share her preferences should put their money where their pens are.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA  22030

In short, Ms. Rowse and the pen-wielding passersby prefer to keep the house standing but demand that the bill for satisfying their preferences be footed by the house’s current owner.

UPDATE: This line from Yevdokiya Zagumenova‘s comment to this post deserves to be highlighted in the post itself:

It’s disconcerting that the very same people who rail against the externalized costs of pollution of all kinds think absolutely nothing of forcibly externalizing the cost of their own preferred consumption.