No Income Tax = Success

Burt Folsom:

Shortly after the Civil War, Congress made the income tax a flat tax; then in 1872 Congress abolished the income tax completely. The war was over, and the U.S. would continue to stress individual liberty and limited government as the best way to happiness, prosperity and strong national character. As a nation, the U.S. decided to limit the outreach of government and pay off most of our Civil War debt.

When the rest of the world saw the U.S. emphasis on liberty and fiscal restraint, America became a magnet for the wealth of Europeans seeking a stable environment for their capital. The rise of the U.S. as a major world power was just around the corner.

No American income tax from 1872 until 1913. 

Guess which period of time it was when America caught up with the economies of the rest of the world?

More from Burt:

Those who favor class warfare sometimes cite Mark 10:23, which says, “Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, ‘How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God.’”

A closer look at the original Greek language clarifies God’s attitude toward the rich.

According to Greek scholar Kenneth Wuest, a better translation of Mark 10:23 shows that Jesus said, “How hard it is for those who keep on holding onto wealth to enter the kingdom of God.”

As 2 Corinthians 9:7 says, “God loves a cheerful giver.” Wealth is the opportunity to be a giver, and rich people can thus help people around the world.

A Map! of people!

Thanks to Carnivore's Cave, we find a map! of every person in the country:

 

Link!

I now wonder why so much time is spent on blacks in the media.  It seems that Louisiana, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., NYC, and Chicago are where all the blacks live.  You'd think that the news would be all about whites and some about hispanics.

I like maps.

Unemployment Rate

The Whited Sepulchre

Healthcare Spending Growth is Down

Obamacare is working!

The growth in healthcare spending is slowing!

In totally unrelated news, fewer people have full time jobs than they did before and therefore have less health insurance, and so spend less on healthcare than they did before.

In other words, success for Obamacare!

In 2011, national healthcare spending climbed 3.9 percent, the same as the year before. That was the slowest increase since the 1960s - See more at: http://lfb.org/today/obamas-2009-promise-of-cheaper-health-care-has-morphed-into-2013-price-hikes/#sthash.JAe7b9hf.dpuf

Quote of the Day, 8/25/2013

Fill your bath with ketchup and then bathe i was it. It is a most refreshing reward. Imagine your loved ones faces when they see you only wearing vinegar and tomato paste.

- N1GERI4GU3ST

Even "Good" Laws Harm You

Most people think that there is a purpose for having a government.  Most people also think that their government does some good.  Even libertarians think that some government should exist.

But all that government does is funded, one way or another, by first taking from those who produce things and then spending it as they feel like it.

And while that's not pointed out or criticized nearly enough, the point of this post is to explain that even when the government extorts taxes for its funds and then spends them in ways you think are good, it is still hurting, rather than helping you.

There are two ways the government hurts you with "good laws," by forcing you to pay for them, and by preventing you from being as productive as possible.

Let's look at the example of owning a car and the amount of your time that is wasted by the government.

Let's say you buy a car, after paying the government its cut, you need to buy a car license; that's about a half hour of your time spent getting one.  Then you need a new driver's license every ten years; that took me three hours a few months ago, and that comes out to around 1/3 of an hour a year.  Some of us are required to have our car's emissions checked yearly, that'll take me another two hours per year, plus another hour, and some money for an o2 sensor because mine always go bad.  Then you need to get car insurance, which will also take several hours.

Maybe you think requiring all of those things, drivers licenses, car licenses, emissions, etc, is a good thing.  Perhaps it is, but have you ever seen a study comparing the time wasted to the alleged benefits of having these laws?

A thought experiment for you:  Speed limits supposedly save lives.  Since saving lives is good, we want to do whatever saves the most lives, right? 

Speed limits are arbitrarily set.  If they were set, say, 10 mph higher everywhere, we could get from place to place a bit quicker.  If you drove 10 mph quicker to, and from, work each day, you might save 5 minutes per trip.  5 minutes per trip, times 2 trips per day, and 5 days a week, means that a 10 mph increase in the speed limits would mean you have 50 more minutes per week to be productive.  50 minutes per week times 50 weeks in a year equals, about, 42 hours wasted commuting each year because of speed limits.  42 hours per year times 40 years of working equals about 70 extra days of your life spent commuting merely because speed limits are not 10 mph higher.

That might be a fine rational for you.  Spend 70 more days of your life commuting than necessary, and a few lives might be saved. 

But everyone is slowed with our current laws.  1000 people slowed by speed limits at 70 days per year is 70,000 days per year not spent growing food, sewing clothes, inventing medicines, or other wise producing.  How many lives were lost thanks to this law? 

When we hit the point where the days lost to slow speeds exceeds the lives allegedly saved by the speed limits, shouldn't we reconsider them?

Have you ever even heard of a study comparing the lives lost becasue of a specific law compared to the alleged lives saved?

No one ever considers the hidden costs, we only look at the numbers of deaths each year and wish we could do better.

And we still haven't gotten to the fact that the traffic judge, prosecutor, cops, secretaries, etc, the materials, buildings, and cars they all use are not creating food to eat, clothes to wear, or homes to live in.  Each of those lives and resources is unproductive, and therefore wasteful.

The Elephant Whisperer

by Lawrence Anthony

Last year I listed my top ten favorite books of fiction.  A few changes may have happened since, but the top two books on my list are accounts of a pair of some of the most successful elephant hunters.

Commenter Vicomte wrote:

I take issue with your first two recommendations.

HUNTING ELEPHANTS?

Seriously, that's just messed up. If you like reading about that kind of crap, then you must be an awful person. Your obviously not aware of that elephants are kind, gentle creatures, and are very intelligent. Elephants have been known to cry and burry(sic) their dead loved ones. They even burry(sic) people that they find and think are dead. Sometimes they make a mistake and burry(sic) a person that is lost and has fellen(sic) asleep, but that's not there fault we're all human after all.

So if you want to go and read this garbage then I hope you enjoy being by yourself because thats(sic) where you'll be up in your IVORY tower because no one wnats(sic) to be with a jerk that murders animals because their sick and twisted.

If you want to read a good book about elephants by a decent and caring human being that truly appreciates the majesty of these beautiful creatures, I reccommend(sic) The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony.

Firstly, I'd like to point out that some people are just no fun at all.

Secondly, am I being rude, or grammatically correct, in noting his, or her, spelling errors?

But the purpose of this post is to be about the book recommended in his, or her, comment.

To give you an idea of how far behind in my reading list I am, let me point out that I had not planned on reading this book, perhaps just reading a few Amazon reviews of it.  And so when the book was recommended I added it to my Amazon.com "wish list."  Then, last Christmas, my mother was insistent on asking me what I wanted for the holiday.  "Nothing," was not the correct answer, apparently.  So I directed her to my wish list and forgot about the book I was going to read reviews about eventually.  (Fascinating story, huh?)

So here we are with my new book, and I started reading it.

The book is about a guy who bought a game farm in South Africa.  He and his French wife ran (run?) it to show off the animals to tourists.

The author starts by talking about poachers killing animals in his preserve, their selling of the meat, and his attempts to stop them.  And so on, and so forth...

One day he receives a phone call asking him if he wants a small herd of elephants (seven, as it turns out).  He says, "yes," and spends a few chapters talking about his preparations for fencing them in and their transportation, etc.

I've only read a few chapters past this point but I have enough to tell you that Vicomte's idea of elephants being wonderful isn't as rosy a picture as he, and the author of the book would like us to believe.

The author and his wife (did I mention that she is French?  The author is very proud of this fact.) seem to enjoy living amongst the animals of Africa, and he paints a mostly rosy picture of their park and the animals.

But if you merely read the book, you'll notice that not everything is as nice as he leads us to believe.  He tells one story about his dog being harassed by some monkeys.  And one day his dog kills one.  After he pulls the dog away the monkeys silently collect their dead troop member and carried him away.   "I have no idea what they did with the body," he ends the story with.  He leads to that line by pointing out how wonderful nature and the animals are.

Note an excerpt from Vicomte's comment:

Elephants have been known to cry and burry(sic) their dead loved ones.

If you read this story you'd be led to believe the monkeys took their family member always, had a funeral, and buried him with respect...

That's what our author and Vicomte seem to think.  I like their thoughts on the subject.  They make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Would you like to know what the monkeys almost certainly did, in reality?  They took their dead family member away, away from the dangerous dog, and...ate him.  You can't just go around leaving good meat to waste.

And that's much the story throughout as much of the book as I've read so far.  If you stretch you mind enough... and believe hard enough... you to can enjoy the wonderfulness of the world like Vicomte does.

I like the optimism and joy of that thinking, but to think that way you need to ignore reality.

The reason the relocated elephants need to be fenced in is because when they are not, they kill people and destroy homes and food.  "Conservation's Chernobyl," is how the book's author described what would happen if his elephants got out, again.

One more story from the book to more fully illustrate my point: The elephants are kept inside of an electrified fence.  They prefer to not touch it.  During one escape attempt the elephants pushed their least liked kin into the fence and tried to force him through it so that they would not get shocked.  That elephant wasn't pleased with the situation.

I like the pleasantness, too much is mean these days, but that pleasantness isn't reality. 

I'm not sure if I'll finish this book, The Odyssey is calling me.

Incidentally, have you heard about the elephants killing rhinos for fun?