Jts5665

(Don Boudreaux)

… is from David Boaz’s recent post at Cato@Liberty, “Russia Imposes Embargo on Itself“:

The American economist Henry George wrote, “What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.” In Russia, Vladimir Putin started a war and then, in response to mild American and European sanctions, retaliated by imposing greater sanctions—on his own people.

Yep.

CNN does it again...

 

 

h/t @finansakrobat

Philadelphia single mom Shaneen Allen got a concealed carry permit (CCW) and handgun after being the victim of two separate robberies in the past year. After an "honest mistake" in which she drove into New Jersey with the gun in her car, she also received a court date and faces up to 11.5 years in prison for violating NJ gun and ammunition laws.

Fox News reports that Allen was pulled over on October 1 for an "unsafe lane change" after entering NJ and told the officer she had a CCW and a .380 handgun in the vehicle. The handgun was "loaded with hollow-point bullets."

Allen was charged with "unlawful possession of the weapon and possession of hollow-point bullets." She had only owned the gun for one week prior to her arrest and has no criminal record.

Mediaite.com reports that when Allen appeared in court on August 5 she learned that "she faces a maximum of 11.5 years in prison—ten for the [weapon] possession, 18 months for the bullets." Moreover, the judge in the case "refused Allen the ability to enter into a 'pretrial intervention' program to avoid jail time."

The prosecution offered Allen a "five year... plea bargain with no option for parole for 3.5 years."

Allen is the single mother of two young sons.

Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.

Note that in 2012 women earned a majority of the top 7 most conferred bachelor’s degrees (health, psychology, education, biology, visual/performing arts, communication and English) and a slight minority in business (48%) and social sciences (49%). Men earned a solid majority in only one degree – engineering. And yet which of the gender imbalances gets all of the attention?

The EFF has revealed a very disturbing attempt by the US government to flat out secretly delete portions of a public court transcript over the belief that its lawyers may have slipped up and revealed classified information. This came from the recent hearing in the longstanding EFF case Jewel v. NSA, regarding a challenge to NSA surveillance (which began long before the Snowden revelations). After the hearing ended, apparently things took a turn for the bizarre, in which the government quietly notified the judge that it believed one of its attorneys had accidentally revealed classified information during the (very open) hearing, and hoped to remove that information from the transcript, and pretend that it never happened. The EFF fought it, and eventually the government backed down (perhaps realizing it hadn't really revealed anything):

On June 6, the court held a long hearing in Jewel in a crowded, open courtroom, widely covered by the press. We were even on the local TV news on two stations. At the end, the Judge ordered both sides to request a transcript since he ordered us to do additional briefing. But when it was over, the government secretly, and surprisingly sought permission to “remove” classified information from the transcript, and even indicated that it wanted to do so secretly, so the public could never even know that they had done so.

We rightly considered this an outrageous request and vigorously opposed it. The public has a First Amendment right not only to attend the hearing but to have an accurate transcript of it. Moreover, the federal law governing court reporting requires that “each session of the court” be “recorded verbatim” and that the transcript be certified by the court reporter as “a correct statement of the testimony taken and the proceedings had.” 28 U.S.C. § 753(b).

The Court allowed the government a first look at the transcript and indicated that it was going to hold the government to a very high standard and would not allow the government to manufacture a misleading transcript by hiding the fact of any redactions. Ultimately, the government said that it had *not* revealed classified information at the hearing and removed its request.But the incident speaks volumes about the dangers of allowing the government free rein to claim secrecy in court proceedings and otherwise.

It's great that this ended well, but it seems immensely troubling that the government even sought to do this in the first place. Of course, I would imagine this might lead some to scour the full transcript (embedded below) to see if there's any tidbit of information that the government didn't really mean to claim.

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(Don Boudreaux)

The Russian government wants to punish America for sanctions the U.S. government imposed on Russia over the Russian government’s involvement in the hostilities in Ukraine.  So what does the Russian government do?  Its chosen means for punishing America is to prevent the Russian people from buying food from America.

“We’ll show you, Comrade Uncle Sammy!  We’ll not consume the valuable products that citizens of your country offer to us at attractive prices!  Take that!!!”

The Russian government is upset with Uncle Sam because the latter government had earlier restricted Americans’ abilities to purchase at attractive prices valuable products offered to them by Russian producers.

It’s crazy: governments routinely attempt to punish each other by each harming its own people.

Even crazier: many pundits and professors continue to find government to be a sensible, even magnificent, institution worthy of our loyalty, admiration, and obedience.

…..

“I’ll reduce my consumption to punish you,” says U to R.

“Yeah?!  Well I’ll reduce my consumption, too.  That’ll show you,” responds R in fearsome retaliation to U‘s frightening threat.

“But I can reduce my consumption more than you can reduce yours!” boasts U.

“Just you wait, U!  I’ll outdo you at reducing consumption!” R barks in reply.

….

Of course, the reason such trade sanctions have any hope of working is because producers in each country are special-interest groups.  They get heard; they are politically powerful.  The general public as such, and consumers as such, are largely ignored by politicians.  So because a policy by government U that harms producers in country R might create pressure on politicians in R to adopt policies more to the liking of government U, government U pursues that policy despite the fact that the very nature of the policy is to harm large numbers of citizens of country U.

A new white paper from Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund puts a target on GOP operative Henry Barbour for his role in incendiary racial appeals in the Mississippi GOP Senate primary.

“Henry Barbour was the field general in an unprecedented campaign to smear a fellow Republican, so desperate was his family to cling to power,” Jenny Beth Martin, the chair of TPPCF, said in the statement provided exclusively to Breitbart News. “We’re used to these tactics from Democrats: desperate appeals to emotion, fear-mongering, even playing the ‘Klan’ card. Who would have thought the Barbour machine would finance such despicable race-baiting?”

During the campaign, a super PAC run by Barbour, Mississippi Conservatives, provided funds to Democratic operatives and organizations that put out literature and ran radio ads. These ads said that voting for incumbent Sen. Cochran was a means of stopping the Tea Party and preventing his primary challenger, state Sen. Chris McDaniel, from “roll[ing] back the hand of time,” among other examples.

According to National Review, Barbour, the nephew of former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, vehemently denied to Republican colleagues having any role in the ads, before finally admitting to it in an interview with reporter Eliana Johnson, saying colorful remarks McDaniel made on talk radio a decade ago, and efforts to prevent voter fraud invited the scrutiny from black Democrats.

“Many Mississippians, who were already disgusted by McDaniel’s race-baiting talk-radio-show comments, heard the code words that insinuated that African Americans were not welcome in the Republican primary,” Barbour told National Review.

Monday, however, a Democratic activist said she had funded one particularly vicious ad that raised the specter of the KKK, and Barbour was quoted saying, “I am glad the people really behind this despicable KKK ad have been revealed, because Sen. Cochran’s opponents have falsely accused our group and others of running it. As I have said from the start, I had zero to do with it.”

There are also outstanding questions about the KKK ad, and the Democratic activist’s claims may not necessarily be true, either; the radio station that ran the ads backed up previous allegations against political operatives in Mississippi connected with Barbour. The radio station owner said Democratic operative Greg Brand was behind the ads—something Brand denies. If Brand was involved, it confirms a lot more connections back to the Barbours and Cochran’s allies. Radio station WMGO owner Jerry Lousteau said that if Brand is denying being involved, “he is lying.”

The new white paper from Tea Party Patriots outlines the nexus between the Barbour-run super PAC and the race-baiting ads that proliferated in Mississippi in the waning days of the race, helping drive Democratic turnout that gave Cochran his victory in the GOP primary.

Martin is calling on Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus—who is holding meetings right now in Chicago with all RNC members—to censure Barbour for his conduct in Mississippi.

“Chairman Priebus and members of the Committee, if you do nothing, you sanction Henry Barbour’s conduct,” Martin said, adding:

Is this why he was on the Committee’s hand-picked group to study ‘minority outreach’ after 2012? Well Reince, maybe I didn’t get the memo, but shouldn’t the GOP reach out to minorities with the conservative values in the party platform? Or is Henry’s method of fear-mongering with food stamps and school lunches the way to recruit African-Americans?

“By not repudiating such despicable conduct, you’ll tell 183,000 conservatives in Mississippi, ‘Yes, it’s fine that Democrats chose your nominee, and yes, the Barbour machine had to be preserved at all costs,’” Martin said in her statement, speaking directly to Priebus. “And Reince, never again accuse Harry Reid or Eric Holder of playing the race card. Because by your silence you’ve forfeited the right to complain, and have endorsed the shameful tactic yourself.”

The Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund white paper on Henry Barbour’s role in race-baiting ads is 24 pages long, and it opens with the statement that “Henry Barbour is not telling the truth.”

Before detailing how Henry Barbour’s denials are false, the white paper reads:

Henry Barbour, Republican National Committeeman from Mississippi, repeatedly claims in public that he had nothing to do with the race-baiting flyers and robocalls that were deployed against Republican State Senator Chris McDaniel during the June 3, 2014 Mississippi Republican U.S. Senate primary election and the June 24, 2014 Mississippi Republican U.S. Senate runoff election.

“Henry Barbour directed a PAC that provided the funding that produced and disseminated vile racial slurs against REPUBLICAN state Senator Chris McDaniel and his REPUBLICAN and conservative supporters,” the white paper reads. 

It continues:

The Mississippi Conservatives PAC, under Barbour’s direction, funded (through illegal means) various operatives and organizations of dubious background to implement a deliberate and premeditated strategy of vicious race-baiting and fear mongering over issues of race during the runoff election between incumbent Thad Cochran and challenger Chris McDaniel. Henry Barbour deliberately chose to use well-known Democrat operatives and organizations in a character assassination scheme – the kind that the professional Left has perfected, and which Republicans abhor – in order to destroy the reputation of a loyal, fellow Republican, a current Mississippi state legislator in good standing and a Republican Party member since the age of 13, whose only offense was to announce and run for a Senate seat held by an incumbent Republican. (NOTE: Sen. Chris McDaniel announced for the U.S. Senate seat well before incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran had announced – and at a time when most observers believed that Sen. Cochran was not seeking reelection.)

TPPCF notes that the evidence against Barbour “raises serious and troubling questions” about “his behavior during the primary and the runoff campaign, and his evasions and downright falsehoods to the RNC afterwards.”

TPPCF thinks that the RNC and Republican leaders can’t legitimately demand certain standards of behavior from the Democrats and President Barack Obama if they can’t live by their own rules. “Every day, Republican Party officials demand that President Obama and the Democrats act responsibly and with the consent of the American people,” TPPCF wrote. “We think this is a perfect opportunity for the leaders of the Grand Old Party to demonstrate to their base and to all Americans that they will enthusiastically live up to the same standards that they demand of the President and his Party.”

Specifically, TPPCF is demanding the RNC censure Henry Barbour and issue a public statement condemning the actions he and others took to try to smear Tea Partiers as racists. 

The white paper then walks through how Barbour’s Mississippi Conservatives pro-Cochran super PAC used race-baiting tactics to get Democrats to voted for Cochran on June 24. 

“In the days immediately following the June 3 primary election, pro-Cochran forces inside the Mississippi GOP and its allies scrambled to find a new strategy,” TPPCF wrote, adding:

Given the results of the June 3 primary, it was clear that Cochran could not win a majority of REPUBLICAN votes in the June 24 runoff – so the strategist began to develop a plan NOT to rely only on the votes of Republican primary voters. Henry Barbour and his allies determined to go outside the GOP voters in Mississippi and to rely on a provision of Mississippi law that allows any voter – including Democrats – who do not vote in the Democratic primary to vote in the REPUBLICAN runoff election. Mississippi law does not require voters to state a party preference when they register to vote, so any registered voter who had not cast a ballot in the Democratic primary on June 3 was eligible to vote in the June 24 GOP Senate runoff.

TPPCF noted that Barbour’s goal – which he was very public about – was to “flood” the June 24 runoff with Democrats, and to do so "with Democrats who could be frightened into supporting Thad Cochran ... based on leftist, Democratic race-baiting, rather than time-honored Republican principles. And that is exactly what they did,” TPPCF wrote. 

Furthermore:

Mississippi Conservatives PAC, under the direction of Henry Barbour, raised funds from the national GOP establishment to then fund the efforts of All Citizens for Mississippi PAC – a new PAC established by Bishop Ronnie Crudup Sr. of the New Horizon Church International just before the Mississippi primary on June 3. This new PAC shares its street address and Treasurer with the church. This new PAC violated federal campaign finance law by not filing required FEC reports until well after the close the June 24 runoff election.

Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings show that Crudup’s new PAC raised money from only one source: Henry Barbour’s Mississippi Conservatives super PAC.

TPPCF details how Crudup’s “All Citizens for Mississippi PAC,” quickly “essentially became a cut-out” for Henry Barbour’s shop, and specifically pounded out advertisements into the black community accusing Chris McDaniel and the Tea Party of being racists—so they needed to support Cochran to keep a conservative out of office.

TPPCF cites three major examples of All Citizens for Mississippi’s race-baiting with Henry Barbour’s money. “All Citizens for Mississippi PAC produced and disseminated at least one flyer that claimed that ‘the tea party intends to prevent you from voting.’” 

“All Citizens for Mississippi PAC also produced and aired radio ads,” the white paper continued, asserting: 

One said, "A victory by tea party candidate Chris McDaniel is a loss for the state of Mississippi. It is a loss for public education. ... It is a loss for the citizens of this state in a time of natural disaster, for our public universities and particularly our historically black universities. A victory for Chris McDaniel is a loss for the reputation of this state for race, for race relationships between blacks and whites and other ethnic groups. Mississippi can't afford Chris McDaniel."

“A second radio ad produced and aired by All Citizens for Mississippi PAC said, ‘I'm Pastor Siggers, Pastor of the Mt. Olive Baptist Church. These are some tough times. ... And tough times call for tough decisions. A time when there is an effort to roll back the hand of time.'" The white paper went on to state, "I'm talking about the race for the U.S. Senate between Thad Cochran and tea-party candidate Chris McDaniels [sic]. I know that traditionally we as a community don't vote Republican, but for this special election, we need to turn out in record numbers to push back against this tea party effort."

As you’ll undoubtedly see if you decide to read the entire article (and why wouldn’t you?), some trainees place the cart before the horse and make things more complicated than they have to be. Rocket science is hard. Long division is hard. Figuring out why women love Hugh Grant movies is hard. Lifting weights should not be hard.

I was asked by Stack Magazine to write an article aimed towards guys (but the message applies to women too!) who tend to have a hard time making progress with their exercise routine – namely their resistance training routine.

Or what I affectionally refer to as “lifting heavy stuff.”

To be candid, the message is nothing revolutionary and it’s probably one you’ve read or have been told time and time again. But it’s something that bears repeating, and frankly, despite how often it’s trumpeted, people somehow fail to allow the message to stick

Akin to how people continue to text while behind the wheel of a car or are constantly being told to put the toilet seat back down.

Yeah, kinda like that.

The Weakling’s Guide to Workout Out

NOTE:  as a small favor, if you liked the article on Stack, PLEASE share it through your social media outlets. If you didn’t like it, pffft, whatever….;o)

Timothy Sandefur

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals today tossed out the latest constitutional challenge to Obamacare, which argues that if the individual mandate is a “tax,” as the Supreme Court said it is, it’s still unconstitutional because it did not originate in the House of Representatives, as the Constitution requires. I argued the case on behalf of entrepreneur Matt Sissel in May.

Today’s decision, written by Judge Judith Rogers and joined by Judges Cornelia Pillard and Robert Wilkins, holds that while the mandate may be a “tax,” it isn’t a “bill for raising revenue,” and is therefore exempt from the Origination Clause.

What’s the difference between a tax and a bill for raising revenue? Some court decisions have held that there are things that may appear to be taxes but are actually only penalties designed to enforce other kinds of laws. For example, in a 1943 case called Rodgers v. United States, the court of appeals said that a tax that was imposed on people for growing more wheat than the government allowed (that’s the same wheat law that was at issue in the infamous Wickard v. Filburn) wasn’t really a tax, but just an enforcement penalty or a fine. Such penalties aren’t “bills for raising revenue,” so they don’t have to start in the House.

The problem with that line of argument is that in NFIB v. Sebelius, the Supreme Court said that the individual mandate, whatever else it might be, is not a penalty or a fine. That’s just why Chief Justice Roberts concluded that it was a tax! And that means that no such exemption should apply.

Today’s D.C. Circuit decision acknowledges this, but holds that there is another variety of tax that isn’t a “bill for raising revenue.” And that is, taxes whose “main object or aim” is something other than generating income for the government. According to this “purposive approach,” the court says, the court should look to “the primary aim” of the bill to decide whether the Origination Clause applies—without regard for whether it will “generate substantial revenues.”

But the Supreme Court has never endorsed this vague “purposive approach,” and for good reason. Laws often have many “objects or aims”—particularly in an era of massive omnibus bills. The ACA is over 2,000 pages long, with provisions on all sorts of different subjects. Which one is its “main” object? What is the “main” object of a “stimulus package” or a general appropriations bill? What about a tax imposed to support the military? Is its “main object” to raise money—or to support the military? If judges are free to decide what the “main object or aim” of a bill is, and to apply the Constitution or not accordingly, then they should at least have some objective criteria for making that call…and the court can point to none. That’s because the Constitution makes no distinction, and the constitutional analysis does not hinge on what the “main object or aim” of a bill is. Instead, the question is whether the bill levies a tax, and puts that money into the general treasury for Congress to spend at will—which Obamacare’s individual mandate tax does.

Worse, the vague “purposive approach” creates a loophole that the Senate can easily walk through to originate revenue-raising bills. All it needs to do is originate a tax by saying that its main purpose is some other thing. One reason we know that isn’t what the Constitution says is that the Framers rejected a proposed draft of the Origination Clause that would have applied only to “[b]ills for raising money for the purpose of revenue.” The reason is obvious: because the vague “purpose” test would allow Congress to evade constitutional limits too easily.

There’s remarkably little Supreme Court precedent interpreting the Origination Clause. It seems likely that the Sissel case will change that eventually.

(Don Boudreaux)

Commenting on this post, Peter Maxted argues that economists (such as myself) who repeatedly point out that minimum-wage legislation reduces the employment options of low-skilled workers miss the point.  If I grasp his point adequately, Mr. Maxted insists that the relevant policy question is one of costs compared to benefits: do the costs of minimum-wage legislation outweigh the benefits?  Pointing out that minimum-wage legislation has costs is an insufficient basis for concluding that minimum-wage legislation is undesirable.  He’s correct.  Yet the reality that the downsides of policy Z must always be compared with upsides of policy Z does not, contrary to Mr. Maxted’s implication, mean that the basic economic argument used to make a case against minimum-wage legislation does not supply very sturdy grounds for opposing such legislation.

I posted, in the comments section of that post, a longish response to Mr. Maxted’s comment.  I’ll not repeat here what I said there.  Instead, here I offer a draft of the sort of public speech that a pro-minimum-wage politician or pundit would give if he or she were true to the scientific spirit urged by Mr. Maxted:

Fellow Americans,

I propose that the minimum-wage be raised.  A higher minimum wage will cause some low-skilled workers’ wages to rise; therefore, many of these workers’ annual incomes will rise.  And who can object to that happy outcome?!

But you must know, fellow Americans, that this hike in the minimum wage will also likely cause some other low-skilled workers to lose their jobs, and yet others who would otherwise have found employment at the lower wage to not find employment.  These workers will remain unemployed indefinitely.  We don’t know who these unfortunate workers are; they will not know who they are.  Yet the logic of economics assures us that they will almost certainly exist.

So you must beware of those politicians and pundits who endorse a higher minimum wage as if it will unambiguously help all low-skilled, low-paid workers.  You must be on guard against the constant over-selling of this policy, often as if it were cost-free – such as when (to pick just one example from among multitudes) President Obama said last month, “[w]hen … you raise the minimum wage, you give a bigger chance to folks who are climbing the ladder, working hard….  And the whole economy does better, including businesses.”

Such claims, which are standard fare among those of us who press for raising the minimum wage, are unscientific; they’re based either on no, or on faulty, economic reasoning.  Such claims promise a free lunch, or at least a lunch that is free to all low-skilled workers.

Be aware also that the distribution of the benefits of minimum-wage legislation are likely not to be in favor of the workers who are most in need of higher wages.  Obliged to pay higher wages for workers to fill entry-level jobs, employers will have a surplus of workers to choose from.  The workers who will get and keep jobs at the higher minimum wage will disproportionately be workers who are least in need of this artificial privilege.  These workers will mostly be white, well-educated teens from well-to-do neighborhoods; the workers who will be the ones who are cast indefinitely into the ranks of the unemployed – whose hourly pay will fall to $0.00 – will disproportionately be minority teens and young adults from the inner city, as well as immigrants: people whose level of education, whose command of English, whose social connections are not as high or as strong as those of teenagers from high-income families living in places such as Fairfax County, VA, Montgomery County, MD, Bergen County, NJ, or Westchester County, NY.

So understand, as you join me in supporting a higher minimum wage, that the beneficiaries will disproportionately be people who are least in need of special privileges, while the people who bear the burden of the costs of the higher minimum wage will disproportionately be those who are most in need of employment even at wages lower than the legislated minimum.

Note also that even those workers who are fortunate enough to be employed at the higher minimum wage will likely suffer work conditions worse than they would in the absence of a legislated minimum wage.  Most employers of low-skilled, entry-level workers – firms such fast-food restaurants, lawn-care services, and motels – operate in highly competitive industries.  These firms have no excess profits out of which they can, even if they wished, pay the mandated higher wages without cutting costs on some other fronts.  So employers of minimum-wage workers will demand more work effort per hour from their low-skilled workers – these employers will be less lenient with employees who use work time for personal matters – they’ll pay fewer fringe benefits – they’ll be less able to afford to hire workers for overtime work (which is one reason that I said in my opening line that not all, but only “many,” of these workers who are employed at the minimum wage will experience higher annual incomes).

Yet despite these economic realities, I support a higher minimum wage because I believe that the benefits to the workers who will receive higher hourly wages as a result outweigh the costs to those who will be rendered indefinitely unemployed or channeled into the underground economy.

Please join me in supporting this policy to promote social justice!

(Don Boudreaux)

…from page 61 of David Mamet’s 2011 book, The Secret Knowledge (original emphasis):

Hayek calls this utopian vision The Road to Serfdom.  And we see it in operation here, as we are in the process of choosing, as a society, between Liberty – the freedom from the State to pursue happiness, and a supposed but impossible Equality, which, as it could only be brought about by a State capable and empowered to function in all facets of life, means totalitarianism and eventual dictatorship.

Obama refers to self 68 times at US-Africa Summit...


(Second column, 5th story, link)

---

Related stories:

BARACK BRO WRITES TELL-ALL...

The Union Street Guest House in Hudson, New York, joins the small group of businesses who have attempted to levy fees against customers who leave negative reviews. It's an exclusive group that no business should want to be a part of, one that includes the infamous and possibly French geek gadget re-shipper KlearGear.

Page Six was the first to report on this customer-unfriendly clause residing in the rental terms and conditions:

If you stay here to attend a wedding and leave us a negative review on any internet site you agree to a $500. fine for each negative review.

If you have booked the Inn for a wedding or other type of event anywhere in the region and given us a deposit of any kind for guests to stay at USGH there will be a $500 fine that will be deducted from your deposit for every negative review of USGH placed on any internet site by anyone in your party and/or attending your wedding or event (this is due to the fact that your guests may not understand what we offer and we expect you to explain that to them).

Not only is the clause incredibly stupid and openly antagonistic, but it holds renters responsible for the actions of anyone in their party, including guests whose experience may have been drastically different than the renting party's. It even tells renters to spread the news that no negative reviews should be posted, which should be enough to tell potential customers to rent elsewhere.

Now, the Union Street Guest House has all the negative reviews it will ever need. As soon as this started spreading around the internet, it's Yelp page quickly filled up with negative reviews, forcing the business to offer this "explanation" on its Facebook page.

The policy regarding wedding fines was put on our site as a tongue-in-cheek response to a wedding many years ago. It was meant to be taken down long ago and certainly was never enforced.

Oh. Well, LOL… I guess. I'm not sure the "it was all a joke" defense is going to undo the damage done by its decision to insert this language into its rental terms, no matter what the original impetus. This also doesn't explain why a lousy joke was allowed to be part of the official policies for nearly two years (it appeared sometime between August and October 2012). It's gone now, but there's still an edge to USGH's voice in the amended terms, which indicates the Guest House is in no hurry to hand out refunds, return deposits or deal with chargebacks.

CANCEL AT YOUR OWN RISK, WE DO NOT ACCEPT ALL CANCELLATION REQUESTS...

If you file for a charge-back (request a refund directly from your amex or bank card) or file a complaint to any 3rd party organization during that time you are responsible for any fees associated with it and doing so will only hold up the refund process...

The deposit will not be refunded until we feel that everything is 100% resolved (we reserve the right to refund at any time). If you hold the entire Inn you are responsible for every room. There are no "releasing" rooms prior. If there are any unused rooms you forfeit your entire deposit. All chargebacks and any other fees related to any charges from anyone in your party (that they have not paid) will be deducted from your deposit.

According to Page Six, there's also a bit of an edge to its voice in its handling of earlier negative reviews:

For any bad reviews that do make it online, the innkeepers aggressively post “mean spirited nonsense,” and “she made all of this up.”

In response to a review complaining of rude treatment over a bucket of ice, the proprietors shot back: “I know you guys wanted to hang out and get drunk for 2 days and that is fine. I was really really sorry that you showed up in the summer when it was 105 degrees . . . I was so so so sorry that our ice maker and fridge were not working and not accessible.”

It would seem obvious that there are better places to spend your money, especially since the chance of you receiving your deposit seem incredibly slim. The most objectionable part of the terms has been removed, but only because it went completely public. At no time during the last two years did the Guest House take down this clause, which seems to indicate that it wasn't the inside joke it's now pretending it was.

I don't know why this lesson even needs to be learned at this point. If businesses haven't figured out that attempting to suppress bad reviews almost invariably only results in more bad reviews, this sort of stupidity and inevitable backlash should be viewed as nothing more than culling the herd. If you'd rather try to silence unhappy customers than address the problems in your own business, you deserve to have your reputation torched to the ground. But don't blame the internet. This fire was started by the Union Street Guest House itself.

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(Don Boudreaux)

Congratulations are due to Zac Gochenour, who successfully defended his excellent dissertation on Monday afternoon in Carow Hall on George Mason University’s Fairfax campus.  Dr. Gochenour (who will soon start his career as an assistant professor at Western Carolina University) began his academic study of economics as an undergraduate at George Mason.  Bryan Caplan served as chairman of Zac’s dissertation committee; Pete Leeson and I had the honor of serving as the other two members of Zac’s committee.

Zac’s dissertation is on the economics and political economy of immigration.  Here’s a brief passage from page 14 of chapter 2 – a chapter that details the history of efforts in the United States to restrict immigration:

The 47th Congress saw the most action on immigration of any to that point; ultimately, three major acts concerning immigration were enacted. The first concerned regulations for vessels carrying immigrants: the new bill added minimums for carrying capacity and deck area per passenger.

(Fortunately, President Arthur vetoed this 1882 act.)

Note that these Congressional acts were the handiwork of people hostile to immigrants.  Yet lookie here!  We find among the legislative tactics used by these anti-immigrant types a legislative mandate that, on its surface, makes life better for immigrants: larger ships and more space for immigrants traveling to America.

The lesson here is not only that legislators’ unsavory intentions are easily hidden behind fine-sounding statutory language, but also that one tried and true way for government to inflict harm on disfavored groups is to mandate benefits for those groups.  By mandating more ship space for immigrants en route to America, many members of Congress in the early 1880s understood that the actual result of the mandate would be fewer ships willing to carry immigrants to America or higher fees charged to people wishing to gain passage on ships bound for the United States.  Either way, the mandated minimum-space requirement (had Pres. Arthur not vetoed it) would have raised the cost to shipowners of carrying immigrants and, thus, would have restricted the options of those non-Americans who wished to immigrate to America.  Immigrants would have suffered from this statute that, on its surface, made them better off.

Pretty statutory words are crafted to achieve ugly actual outcomes – outcomes that are, at any rate, decidedly different from any results that credulous people infer from the literal texts of statutes.

A similar effect is in play (to mention only one of many real-world examples) with minimum-wage legislation: the words of the legislation proclaim a desire to improve the lot of low-skilled workers.  But the actual effects of the legislation – effects that are the direct result of government mandating that private businesses supply a minimum amount of benefits to poor workers – harm those workers.  The results of such legislation are fewer employment options for the very workers that the words of the legislation lead credulous people to believe government seeks to help.

….

As much as I would love to have more office space at GMU than I now have – and as much as I’d love (even more!) to have a higher (oh, say, a 40 percent higher) salary than I now have – I would vigorously oppose any efforts to mandate such improved benefits for middle-aged academic economists in America.  For purely selfish reasons I know that I am too likely to suffer if such ‘benefits’ are mandated for me.

To mandate that Smith offer more benefits to Jones whenever he deals with Jones is to mandate that Smith incur higher costs whenever he deals with Jones.  To avoid such higher costs, Smith typically reacts by reducing, or even completely eliminating, his dealings with Jones.  Jones’s lot is not improved as a result; it’s worsened.

WASHPOST: Global Warming Could Make Worse...


(Second column, 21st story, link)

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(Don Boudreaux)

… is from pages 201-202 of my colleague Richard Wagner’s insightful 2007 book, Fiscal Sociology and the Theory of Public Finance (links added):

Rent seeking describes what people have in mind by lobbying.  It refers to the payments people make to secure political favors.  A sports magnate would like special tax treatment for a stadium he is building.  He lobbies to get this enacted.  Or, more likely, hires someone to do this for him, most likely a defeated or retired legislator.  But rent seeking is only part of the story of money and politics, and perhaps only the minor part.  Rent extraction may be even more significant.  It refers to the payments people make to avoid being victimized by politically harmful measures.  If rent seeking were called bribery were it to occur between private persons, rent extraction would be called extortion.

There is one significant difference between rent seeking and rent extraction that should not be ignored, which may explain why the former has received more attention than the latter.  With rent seeking, politicians are portrayed as relatively passive victims.  They are deluged by lobbyists, and on occasion capitulate to those interests.  The politician is caught in a squeeze between the intensity of special interests and the quietude of the public interest.

With rent extraction, politicians are in the forefront of the action.  They are the initiators who continually look for targets.  Those targets have a choice.  They can ignore the politicians and lose a lot of wealth.  Or they can participate politically, thereby softening their losses.

… is from Karr Ingham, economist for the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers, from a recent presentation in Houston where he predicted that crude oil production in Texas will surpass its 1972 all-time high within two years:

When oil companies get richer, they don’t pocket their money. They invest in future projects. They drill. They pay people. That’s how economic growth is generated.

MP: Damn those evil, greedy oil companies…. they make money, and they invest, they drill, they pay workers, etc……

I’ve featured the Surgery Center of Oklahoma many times on CD, see posts here, here and here, and watch video above of a special report on the surgery center. Unlike most other medical providers, the Surgery Center of Oklahoma actually posts transparent pricing and offers deeply-discounted, payable-in-advance, cash-only medical procedures. The center does accept private insurance, but it does not accept Medicaid or Medicare — government regulations won’t allow them to post transparent prices online. If any competitor offers a lower price, the Surgery Center will match or beat it, so patients can be guaranteed of getting the lowest price possible.

Here’s a recent news report that illustrates just how much money can be saved when a clinic or hospital operates according to free-market principles and is not burderned by the highly bureaucratic, costly system of government-regulated Medicare and Medicaid.

Oklahoma City-based Surgery Center of Oklahoma has saved the Oklahoma County government approximately $573,000 in medical bills in the five months of its agreement with the county to provide surgery for public employees, according to a report from The City Sentinel.

As of July 17, the “ambulatory surgery center” (ASC) has performed 89 surgeries on public employees at a cost of nearly $336,000, just over one-third of the potential total cost of the surgeries through other providers, according to the Oklahoma County Budget Board. “At a conservative level…it looks like we will save about $1.3 million over 12 months,” said Jon Wilkerson, director of human resources, benefits and payroll for the county, in the report.

In addition to providing direct and huge savings for its patients, the Surgery Center of Oklahoma is also imposing market discipline on its competitors (not unlike the discipline Walmart imposes on Target, etc.), as clinic co-founder Dr. Keith Smith explains here:

“Hospitals are having to match our prices because patients are printing their prices and holding that in one hand and holding a ticket to Oklahoma City in the other hand and asking that hospital to step up,” Dr. Smith said. “So we’re actually causing a deflationary effect on pricing all over the United States.”

MP: We would have a lot more market-based, low overhead, consumer driven health care, and a lot more “price wars” for surgery and other medical procedures if the medical industry moved in the direction of the business model of the Surgery Center of Oklahoma. Unfortunately, the Unaffordable Care Act is taking us in exactly the opposite direction: high overhead health care based on traditional third-party payments that are not transparent to patients, with costs that will tend to escalate over time due to the lack of market incentives and competition, along with the high cost of government red-tape, bureaucracy and paperwork.

Automated eyes...


(Third column, 15th story, link)

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Sarah hasn't written a book here, she's written an encyclopedia. This is a massive book, 432 pages, full color and fully indexed.

Fabulous

The Paleo Approach details in enormous, um, detail her recommended approach using mostly diet to stem the symptoms of autoimmune disease.

Except that it's much more than this.

This book is about the body: how the immune system works; blood sugar regulation; leaky gut; possibly the most comprehensive run down of the hormonal system I've read in a popular book.

I also have one copy of The Paleo Approach to giveaway!

The post The Paleo Approach by Sarah Ballantyne, PhD appeared first on PaleoNonPaleo.

Written by: Kevin Cann

 

Depression is still often looked at by the masses as a state of mind that we can just simply snap right out of.  I am writing this article today in hopes of educating as many people as I can regarding the true nature of depression.  According to researchers at Stanford University the cause of depression is attributed 50% to genetics, and the other 50% attributed to other factors.  This conclusion was drawn on research with identical and non-identical twins as well as looking at adopted children with a predisposition to depression (http://depressiongenetics.stanford.edu/mddandgenes.html ).

Diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and even cancer have ties to our genetics.  We do not tell people with these diseases to just “snap out of it”, because it is not that simple.  The same can be said about depression.  Evidence has been mounting showing disruption in the hypothalamic-pituitary adrenal axis (HPA) in those that suffer from depression.  Researchers decided to look at this section of the human brain because depression is also linked to cognitive decline on top of the emotional instability.  What researchers have been discovering is game changing.

Research is beginning to show deficits in glucocorticoid receptor (GR) mediated negative feedback.  This would make sense in light that increased stress leads to increased rates of depression.  Our glucocorticoids are a group of our stress hormones, with cortisol being the most popular. GR’s are responsible for binding to the stress hormones and relaying their messages to cells.  When there are deficits in the GR, the stress hormone’s signal is not read and relayed and we need an increased level of that same hormone to get the message across.  One gene in-particular is being linked to the decreased ability someone has in managing stress and it is classified as the NR3C1 gene.  Interestingly enough in rats maternal behavior can alter another gene, NGF1-A, which controls GR activity (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19089807 ).  This would explain how stress can lead to epigenetic changes that lead to us becoming depressed.

That study was done on rats, so let us look at a study that was performed on humans.  Researchers looked at pregnant mothers with treated and untreated depressive disorders and looked at the methylation status of the NR3C1 gene.  They concluded by stating that newborn methylation status of NR3C1 was effected by the mother’s mood during the third trimester of pregnancy (http://www.landesbioscience.com/journals/epigenetics/OberlanderEPI3-2.pdf ).

Why would the mother’s mood directly affect the child’s mood and predispose him or her to negative emotional well-being later in life?  Could there really be a survival benefit to this?  The time in utero and early on in life is a critical period for CNS development.  Some newborns develop emotional resilience during this time and others develop an increased risk for mental illness (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2965301/ ).  Perhaps this is evolution trying to figure out the best way to handle the stressors of modern society?

Serotonin is our neurotransmitter responsible for our mood.  Low levels are associated with increased risk of depression, anxiety, and irritability.  In fact, most anti-depressant medications work upon this pathway to try to alleviate the symptoms associated with anxiety and depression.  Serotonin also plays a critical role in gene expression in helping us deal with stress.

Rats that are groomed more from their mothers show increased levels of serotonin.  These increased levels of serotonin increase NGF1-A gene expression and they show lower levels of glucocorticoids, a group of stress hormones, later in life (http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v12/n3/fig_tab/nn0309-241_F1.html ).  Knowing that serotonin plays a critical role in the expression of favorable genes to assist us in managing stress, we need to make sure that we do not become deficient in this important neurotransmitter.  This makes managing stress, sleeping, and eating a diet high in nutrient dense food important as they all play critical roles in serotonin production, and poor sleep, food choices, and increased stress levels can actually deplete us of serotonin.

Depression is not just a frame of mind that we can just snap out of.  Just like other diseases there is a genetic component to it.  Our mother’s mood during pregnancy as well as our genetic lineage predispose us to either emotional resiliency or increased risk of mood disorders.  The good news is that just because we are genetically predisposed to depression doesn’t mean that these genes need to express themselves.  Our epigenome is an amazingly adaptive machine and we can take part in lifestyle behaviors that will quiet our negative genes and allow us to express positive mood genes.  This includes sleeping well, eating a healthy diet of nutrient dense foods, having quality social relationships, managing stress, and getting adequate sunlight.  Following those lifestyle rules will not only help with depression, but with other ailments as well.

 

 

 

 

This is not exactly shocking news, but it is disappointing all the same to learn that Apple is making it even easier for governments to spy on its users.

Apple has endowed iPhones with undocumented functions that allow unauthorized people in privileged positions to wirelessly connect and harvest pictures, text messages, and other sensitive data without entering a password or PIN, a forensic scientist warned over the weekend.

Jonathan Zdziarski, an iOS jailbreaker and forensic expert, told attendees of the Hope X conference that he can't be sure Apple engineers enabled the mechanisms with the intention of accommodating surveillance by the National Security Agency and law enforcement groups. Still, he said some of the services serve little or no purpose other than to make huge amounts of data available to anyone who has access to a computer, alarm clock, or other device that has ever been paired with a targeted device.

Zdziarski said the service that raises the most concern is known as com.apple.mobile.file_relay. It dishes out a staggering amount of data—including account data for e-mail, Twitter, iCloud, and other services, a full copy of the address book including deleted entries, the user cache folder, logs of geographic positions, and a complete dump of the user photo album—all without requiring a backup password to be entered.

So much for that whole liberal countercultural vibe Apple has been riding for decades. It was one thing to construct a walled garden. It's another to hand Big Brother a secret key to it.