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The Department of Health and Human Services is imposing new reviews on health care premium increases of 10% or more. So I was interested to see a letter from my health insurer, which is raising premiums 9% next year but cutting the benefits.

Markets work even when you don’t want them to. Attempting to force markets to do what you want them to do rather than what they want to do never works. That’s an invincible law. Unfortunately, another invincible law is that bureaucrats never learn from history. ‘This time for sure!’

The Other McCain is on the case.

The left is proof positive that not all children are above average.

Tim Cavanaugh looks at why pennies are stupid.

Someday, probably within your lifetime, the one-cent coin will go away. The penny, the first coin minted in the United States, was obviated by inflation before most members of today’s work force were born. Its production cost is more than half again as much as its face value. Its detractors include respected economists, forward-looking realists, and coastal cosmopolitans; its supporters consist largely of sentimentalists, hoarders, the zinc lobby, and the dwindling number of women named Penelope.

Well, if the government would quit inflating our currency, this wouldn’t be a problem.

Read it.

Markets work even when you don’t want them to.

It’s amusing how quickly the people who advocate the legalization of drugs because ‘you can’t stop people from getting and using them’ are nevertheless the first to pummel lawmakers into screwing down restrictions on ‘predatory lending’ on the part of banks and credit card companies, thereby driving high-risk borrowers into the back-alleys of … really predatory lending.

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The companies that build futuristic airport scanners take a more old-fashioned approach when it comes to pushing their business interests in Washington: hiring dozens of former lawmakers, congressional aides and federal employees as their lobbyists.

About eight of every 10 registered lobbyists who work for scanner-technology companies previously held positions in the government or Congress, most commonly in the homeland security, aviation or intelligence fields, a Washington Post review of lobbying-disclosure forms and other data shows.

The surest way to wealth in modern America is to hire a former government employee to get his former colleagues to write your product into the law, then just sit back and watch the (taxpayer) money roll in.

Power Line illuminates the latest power grab by Kathleen Sibelius.

Obamacare figures to be a fount of gangster government if and when it is ever fully implemented. Over time it will render us all subjects of the administrative state.

As Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius is giving us a preview of coming attractions.

The left keeps whining, ‘But what’s wrong with affordable health care for everybody?’ Well, this is what — too much power in the hands of the Federal government over every fargin aspect of your life.

The Other McCain has the goods.

The OECD study — titled ‘Growing Unequal?’ — also found that the ratio of taxes paid to income received by the top 10% was by far the highest in the U.S., at 1.35, compared to 1.1 for France, 1.07 for Germany, 1.01 for Japan and 1.0 for Sweden (i.e., the top decile’s share of Swedish taxes is the same as their share of income). . . .

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Let me show you how this works. Next year, as you probably know, workers subject to Social Security taxes will pay only 4.2 percent of their “covered wages” -wages up to $106,800 – rather than the normal 6.2 percent. This will reduce Social Security’s cash proceeds by $112 billion, according to Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation.

What impact will this cash shortfall have on the Social Security trust fund? None. Zero. Zip.

How can a $112 billion cut in Social Security revenues not affect the trust fund? Because Treasury will give the trust fund the same amount of bonds it would have gotten had the two-percentage-point tax holiday didn’t exist.

In other words, Treasury isn’t selling bonds to Social Security, it is creating them out of thin air and putting them into the trust fund. The missing cash? Uncle Sam will just borrow $112 billion from somewhere.

Read it.

New London, Connecticut ne’er-do-well Jerome Taylor thought his iPhone to be a suitable facsimile for a handgun in his failed attempt to hold up a local restaurant.

John Stossel kicks over a rock.

I often bash government. I say it can’t do anything better than people in a free market.

But the government is unequalled in producing one thing: negative unintended consequences. Show me a government activity, and I will show you bad results that even the program’s advocates probably don’t like.

The Other McCain pulls back the curtain.

The current municipal government is all-black. The population of Pritchard is 84% black. And many (but not all) of the retirees are white.

Does that have something to do with the seeming indifference of the city council to its pension obligations? Perhaps this is irrelevant, but I have a hard time imagining that the New York Times would ignore such a factor if an all-white city government in an 84-percent white town were cheating its black pensioners.

It’s only racism if white people do it.

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As hard as it is to believe, there are unions that would rather see people unemployed than have them work at a company that the union doesn’t like. The Teamsters is apparently one of those unions.

Because it’s all about power. Duh.

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Evidently the message is that children’s bodies are a collective resource that needs to be managed by agents of the state for their own good and the good of society, regardless of what they or their parents think. A fifth-grader at Gebeke’s school displays the sort of counterproductive mentality that the school district is determined to stamp out:

“All my friends say, ‘This really sucks,'” said Misky Salad, a 10-year-old fifth-grader at Chelsea Heights Elementary. “A lot of us feel it should be up to us to determine what we should do with our bodies.”

You can kill your unborn child, but you can’t eat a twinkie. Welcome to the pro-choice world, Misky.

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John D Lavelle was demoted and forced to retire in April 1972 after being relieved of duty for violating presidential restrictions on aerial bombing during the Vietnam War.

He maintained his innocence during congressional hearings held after his dismissal and died in 1979.

Declassified documents and transcripts of President Richard Nixon’s Oval Office audio tapes now show that more aggressive bombing in North Vietnam had been secretly authorised in early 1972.

Nixon’s the one.

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Wouldn’t surprise me any.

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The rule appears to be: Open is for thee, not for me.

Cringely kicks over a rock.

The short story of what’s happening at the FCC is that the agency is trying to grab power over the Internet and to make that happen is paying-off any number of constituencies. With everything eventually going onto the net as a data service, the FCC wants to avoid irrelevancy, so this is how they are doing it with the help of Google and Verizon. Net neutrality partisans appear willing to accept more oversight if it comes with guarantees against packet throttling. And phone companies are willing to accept broader restrictions if they can still throttle or introduce tiered charges on their only networks that matter anymore — wireless.

These new rules, then, establish three fundamental ideas: 1) the FCC has regulatory authority over the U. S. Internet; 2) Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can’t discriminate between data types like video, voice, or torrents on their wired networks, but; 3) wireless ISP’s can discriminate between data types and applications as long as they aren’t giving preferential treatment to their own competing products or services.

A government agency grabbing for power? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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And well they should.

Two Voices of the Crust whine about how their masters are being treated.

The elephant in the room, of course, is that ‘public servant’ no longer describes (if it ever did) government employees. Their priorities are (a) getting paid, (b) getting paid more, (c) keep getting paid once they stop working, and (d) building their little power empires. Serving the public and providing value for the people who pay their salaries don’t enter into it.

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The Wall Street Journal has an editorial about how Oregon’s tax increase to 11% on individual income above $500,000 a year has produced far less revenue than projected. The paper calls it “an instant replay of what happened in Maryland in 2008 when the legislature in Annapolis instituted a millionaire tax. There roughly one-third of the state’s millionaire households vanished from the tax rolls after rates went up.”

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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I’m talking about the political troops who worked their rear ends off to take back the House of Representatives and narrow the gap in the Senate, only to watch Barack Obama and Harry Reid run circles in the closing weeks of the lame duck session around Republicans on everything except the Omnibus bill and the Dream Act.

Nothing of a non-emergency nature should take place in a lame duck session, and Republicans should have stuck to their original guns.  It is absurd and illegitimate that the fate of the nation for years or decades to come is being decided by people who have been thrown out of office.

Which just goes to show you that evil always wins; it’s just a question of whether it wins big or wins small.

Read it.

Well, maybe. There are other issues (like civilian faculty treating military faculty like dog shit) that may stand in the way.

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Apparently, White tried to help the Garcias — and they robbed him, killed him and dismembered his corpse.

From In Cold Blood to Helter Skelter, from the two punks who killed Matthew Shepard to the weirdo who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart, the tale of the petty criminal who eventually makes the major leagues of serious, shocking crime is a very old one.

Another reminder that those who break the law, no matter how ‘trivial’ the offense may be, are people who have demonstrated that they do not possess the psychological curbs against law-breaking that are society’s first line of defense against descent into chaos. The only thing that allows society to function normally is our confidence that the vast majority of people we encounter every day have these curbs. Otherwise you wind up with Beirut or Zimbabwe. That’s why these people need to be removed from any opportunity to interfere with the lives of others; the only argument is about which is the most effective way to do so; and the proper criterion is the welfare of the law-abiders, not the purported ‘rights’ of the law-breakers.

Read it.

April Webster became pregnant by her boyfriend, Nathan Fishbourne, when she was 13.

She gave birth to the couple’s son, Jamie, four weeks ago.

The pair are now negotiating over the baby’s custody arrangements.

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Brendan O’Neill, the editor of spiked, writes a furious and fascinating book review asserting that some neo-Malthsuian progressives are valorizing homosexuality as eco-friendly. Why? Because gays and lesbians are less likely to have children and children despoil Mother Earth. O’Neill notes that he had encountered this sentiment before in Anthony Burgess’ dystopian novel, The Wanting Seed, in which the state harshly discriminates against heterosexual breeders and promotes homosexuality in a future overpopulated Britain. Now O’Neill argues that some anti-ferility elite opinion is beginning to advocate turning dystopian fiction into dystopian fact.

Whenever I see the term ‘breeder’ I always think of Pak Protectors. Gay people as Pak Protectors? Not in this universe.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds kicks over a rock.

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Satellite images pulled from Google Maps showing empty Chinese ‘ghost-cities’ surfaced and went viral yesterday, capping months of allegations that there are allegedly over 64 million brand new vacant apartments in China, enough to house over 200 million people.

The almost post-apocalyptic images of excess property are said to be the result of Chinese government pressure to increase internal economic activity and hence net GDP by any possible means, even building entire cities even when it’s unnecessary.

Thomas Friedman, call your butler.

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Now, this is just stupid. Who the farg cares?

This is just Democrat Bill Richardson grasping for some cheap publicity — like his current trip to North Korea, which is a funny place to be for someone who is supposedly being paid to be the Governor of New Mexico. (He was just as bad as a Congressman, but it got him to the Governor’s mansion, so I guess he learned a bad habit.)

Read it.

Notice how Wikileaks ignores Russia, China, North Korea, all African countries, all Muslim countries — indeed, any country in which we would not be surprised to find the government ‘systematically torturing civilians’ — in order to focus on pro-Western democracies.

What do they know that you don’t?

Read it.

I remember reading detailed investigative reports about the KLA back in 1999, and that’s when it became obvious that we were on the wrong side. It was clear that we were pushing for the establishment of a well-armed Saudi-bankrolled gangster state in the Balkans, and that is exactly what we got.

Megan McArdle kicks over a rock.

Like most left-wing groups, this one is named for the things in which it is not engaged: It has nothing to do with science, nor is it in the public interest.

One shudders to consider that when Patrick Henry stood up in St. John’s Church and declared “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!”, he was offering to exchange his life for a freedom that would then be passed down people like this . . . people who would gleefully toss that freedom away with both hands if, by so doing, they might protect themselves from the harrowing predations of . . . a cheap plastic toy.

Exactly.

Monet Parham, by the way, seems to be an activist employed by the California government to advocate the ingestion of vegetables, though some pains seem to have been taken to obscure this connection.

As I’ve been saying (and the Lamestream Media haven’t) all along.

Read it.

“We’ll present a budget on Jan. 10. It will be a very tough budget, but it will be transparent,” he said. “We’ll lay it out as best I can. We’ve been living in fantasy land. It is much worse than I thought. I’m shocked.”

Uh, Jer, that’s your side what was doin’ it.

“This is really a huge challenge, unprecedented in my lifetime,” Brown told hundreds of educators, union representatives and parents who had gathered at UCLA. “I can’t promise you there won’t be more cuts, because there will be.”

Yeah, right.

These conditions, the budget session made clear, are likely to get worse. The state faces a $28-billion budget gap for the next 18 months, and roughly $20-billion deficits annually through the 2015-16 fiscal year. Non-university education accounts for roughly 40% of state spending, so cuts tend to significantly affect the state schools.

Looks like cuts, eh, Jer?

“The day of reckoning is upon us and I’m determined to bite the bullet, get it done in whatever way the consensus of California can be built,” he said. “Fair, transparent and enduring — that’s my goal.”

Educators responded by calling for an end to cuts, asking for greater discretion at the local level as to how dwindling dollars are spent, urging the state to seek more federal funding and requesting legislation that would allow them to increase local property taxes with 55% of the vote rather than the current requirement of two-thirds.

And there you have it — California heads toward the ditch, and the drivers are arguing over the seatcovers.

Read it.

A timely reminder that, while Russia is no longer a Communist dictatorship, it’s by no means a liberal republic.

Read it.

The headline ought to read, ‘Leftist Activist Government Employee sues McDonald’s Over Happy Meals.’

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Seventeen states banned phosphates from dishwasher detergents because the chemical compounds also pollute lakes, bays and streams. They create algae blooms and starve fish of oxygen.

Sandra Young was so mad that she called Procter & Gamble, which makes Cascade, to complain. But when she did, a company representative told her to be more careful about which pans she puts into her dishwasher.

“He said, ‘Well, if you’re really having that hard of a problem, maybe you should wash your dishes by hand.’ Which I thought was kind of strange for an automatic dishwashing company.”

Susan Baba from Procter & Gamble says the company had no choice. It just wasn’t feasible to make detergent with phosphates for some states and without them for others.

But not everyone is willing to adjust. Sandra Young figured out a way to undo the phosphate ban — at least in her own kitchen.

She bought some trisodium phosphate at a hardware store and started mixing her own formula.

“It seems to be working pretty good,” Young says.

Read it.

The bones of Cecil John Rhodes, the founder of Rhodesia, should be immediately exhumed and sent back to Britain as it is an affront to postcolonial sensibilities, according to a Zimbabwean politician.

Since the ‘postcolonial sensibilities’ displayed in modern Zimbabwe appear to consist of robbery, murder, and totalitarian oppression — much like pre-cololonial Zimbabwe — I imagine that Rhodes wouldn’t mind escaping the country as so many of his fellow Persons of European Ethnicity have done.

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Money from a £60 million programme to prevent violent extremism should be targeted at individuals in danger of radicalisation – like the Stockholm bomber – instead of being used to fund community groups, according to the security minister Baroness Neville-Jones.

‘Security minister’? Yeah, that would really make me feel secure. ‘Give me money or I’ll become a radical!’ Gee, that’s worked so many times before.

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Another example of the heavy hand of government destroying cultural institutions through a hypersensitivity to perceived benefit for the slaves consumers.

Of all the charges against street food vendors, the one that’s had the most staying power is cleanliness. If one views health in terms of code violations, a study has confirmed that many rules, from wearing gloves while preparing food to washing hands, are indeed broken routinely. But despite these rampant rule violations, the study’s authors concede that no hard data links eating street food to higher rates of illness than eating at home or in restaurants. And anyone who’s worked in the industry knows that even legal restaurants aren’t exactly paragons of rule-following, either. In fact, since street food vendors are not hidden from their customers by walls like restaurant cooks, consumers may actually have more information about cleanliness, and may be in a better position to pick food that lives up to their standards.

Aside from street food sold openly in busy city centers, another common category of low-cost food includes the many unlicensed, clandestine restaurants in America’s black urban ghettos. Around since at least the Great Migrations of blacks out of the South, these establishments sit at the margins of society, serving low-cost meals but kept from the light of day by zoning and health rules, compounded by a longstanding mistrust of government. Tyler Cowen has rightly noted how few restaurants one sees as one drives through neighborhoods southeast of the Anacostia River in Washington, DC, but women selling soul food out of their homes or in local meeting places like barbershops appear quite often in Off the Books, Sudhir Venkatesh’s ethnography of the underground urban economy.

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After all, who wouldn’t want a murderer delivering his mail?

I am not making this up.

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In August a team of heavily armed Orange County, Florida, sheriff’s deputies raided several black- and Hispanic-owned barbershops in the Orlando area. There were more raids in September and October. According to the Orlando Sentinel, barbers and customers were held at gunpoint, some in handcuffs, while police turned the shops upside down. A total of nine shops were raided, and 37 people were arrested.

By all appearances, these raids were drug sweeps. Shop owners told the Sentinel police asked where they were hiding illegal drugs and weapons. But in the end, 34 of the 37 arrests were for “barbering without a licence,” a misdemeanor for which only three people have ever served jail time in Florida. Two arrests were for misdemeanor marijuana possession. Just one person was arrested on felony drug and weapon charges.

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Geez, seems as if I’ve been waiting forever for that damned thing to fall over….

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California’s budget crisis has highlighted one of the most important tax issues of our time: a growing dependence on wealthy taxpayers for government revenue.

In a column in yesterday’s Sacramento Bee, Dan Walters cited the need to reduce “the corrosive dependence on income taxes from a handful of wealthy people by broadening the tax base.”

Good luck with that.

In 2005, the richest 13.5% of California taxpayers (or those earning more than $100,000) paid 83% of all income taxes. Capital gains from the top 5% of taxpayers accounted for $100 billion out of the $111 billion in total capital gains reported.

No shit.

What governments need to do (aside from structural cost cuts, of course) is recognize the boom-and-bust nature of today’s wealthy and save money during the booms so they can spend during the busts. That way they can smooth out the inevitable tax swings.

Good luck with that, too.

Steve Sailer gets all the fun stuff.

Read it.

Can’t say that I blame him.

The surgeon’s actions, which are now under investigation, have triggered widespread debate in Germany over just where doctors can or cannot draw an ethical line.

Seems to me they ought to be able to draw it wherever they want to.

Read it.

Apparently there’s a program in Britain that pays kids to stay in school.

I’d love to get in on that….

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Of course — Fella and Ursula.

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Michael Allison, a 41-year-old backyard mechanic from southeastern Illinois, faces up to 75 years in prison for an act most people don’t realize is a crime: recording public officials.

Allison’s predicament is an extreme example of a growing and disturbing trend. As citizens increase their scrutiny of law enforcement officials through technologies such as cell phones, miniature cameras, and devices that wirelessly connect to video-sharing sites such as YouTube and LiveLeak, the cops are increasingly fighting back with force and even jail time—and not just in Illinois. Police across the country are using decades-old wiretapping statutes that did not anticipate iPhones or Droids, combined with broadly written laws against obstructing or interfering with law enforcement, to arrest people who point microphones or video cameras at them. Even in the wake of gross injustices, state legislatures have largely neglected the issue. Meanwhile, technology is enabling the kind of widely distributed citizen documentation that until recently only spy novelists dreamed of. The result is a legal mess of outdated, loosely interpreted statutes and piecemeal court opinions that leave both cops and citizens unsure of when recording becomes a crime.

Read it.

With the exception of, perhaps, Texas governor Rick Perry, no public official wants to publicly admit an obvious fact: The United States of America will likely be forced to invade Mexico. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.  The question then becomes: What to do with Mexico after we invade it and wipe out the drug cartels (as much as can be). Does the United States merely return Mexico to a nation state of corrupt politicians, failed economic policies, and lawlessness, or do we annex Mexico and turn it into the 51st state?

The Mexican government has, so far, been unable to curtail the violence and it is likely that, without intervention, the country will become far more deadly than Afghanistan prior to 9/11. Worse, Islamic terrorists have been long suspected of using Mexico as a gateway into the U.S.

He that hath an ear to hear, let him hear.

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These numbers are big enough that we’re not seeing a clsuter of arty comp lit major-novelist-waiters picking up some cash while living their dream in a garret. The stats show people who probably wouldn’t have gone to college in another era, responded to incentives like cheap loans and went to college in the ’90s or ’00s, graduated at 22- or 23-years-old, and then got the same gigs they would have been qualified for at 18.

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The European Commission has been condemned for spending three million euros hosting a lavish anti-poverty development conference for 6,000 people in Brussels.

It’s all about the Crust.