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I am not making this up.

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I am not making this up.

Read it.

Here’s the problem for states that want to pry more money out of the wallets of rich people. It never works because people, investment capital and businesses are mobile: They can leave tax-unfriendly states and move to tax-friendly states.

The tax differential between low-tax and high-tax states is widening, meaning that a relocation from high-tax California or Ohio, to no-income tax Texas or Tennessee, is all the more financially profitable both in terms of lower tax bills and more job opportunities.

Is it coincidence that the two highest tax-rate states in the nation, California and New York, have the biggest fiscal holes to repair? No. Dozens of academic studies — old and new — have found clear and irrefutable statistical evidence that high state and local taxes repel jobs and businesses.

New York and California are nice places to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there.

Charles Stross, British science fiction writer (and one of my Recommended Writers; see right), finds out that travel in the U.S. is about as much fun as you would expect a government-controlled activity to be.

I caught an Amtrak train — the #513 from Seattle to Portland, business class. It was that, or fly (I don’t drive in the US), and I’m fed up with security theatre.

“Security theatre”, of course, being Bruce Schneier’s term for what goes on at airports — making it look like we have security without actually doing much.

I was gobsmacked by how slow and inefficient the process of catching the train in America feels, compared to even the ghastly suboptimization of Virgin or National Express in the UK, never mind Japan Rail. First you book the ticket and a seat. You have to present photo ID to claim a boarding card —like airline travel in the 1950s — an intrusive and annoying but not actually effective security measure. Then you check your bags — all but the two carry-ons you’re allowed— not less than an hour before departure. For boarding, there’s a long queue while all those folks who didn’t think to book a seat present their tickets at the gate and are issued with seat allocations. Only then do folks get to go on board the train — which makes boarding it a half-hour torment rather than a rapid, relatively painless rush.

Our tax dollars at work.

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That’s a rather expansive definition of “we”, of course.

Joel Kotkin limns how the interests of the current ruling class are not identical with the interests of the common weal.

A yuppie stimulus differs from the more traditional approach, which aims to get the front-line, blue-collar types back to work. Instead, it would channel public funds away from those grouchy construction workers – some 30% of whom may soon be out of work – to better heeled, and, in their minds, more deserving “creative” professionals. After all, what stake do the netroots have in making things better for Joe the Plumber?

In contrast, the yuppie bailout focuses on a sure-fire Democratic constituency, the well-educated urban professional. One advocate of such an approach, pundit Richard Florida, has urged President-elect Barack Obama to eschew crude investments in traditional production and a renewed housing market in favor of goodies directed to what he calls “the creative industry.”

Florida sees any focus on restoring manufacturing and housing as a misguided rescue of the “old industrial economy,” in which Americans actually made things and other Americans consumed them. Instead, he suggests, “the first step must be to reduce demand for the core products and lifestyle of the old order.”

So let’s stop worrying about what happens to Detroit, or the crisis in the housing market. In Florida’s view, cars, of course, are demonized as woefully bad for environmental reasons and not particularly friendly to the preferred dense urbanity so attractive to advocates of “hip cool” cities.

Read it.

And, consequently, they are raising a generation of victims.

Which is okay — when the bad times come again, as they always do, it’s the children of the rednecks who will survive, and the children of the ruling class that will fertilize their soil.

Steve Sailer discusses how regressives are going back to the 19th century.

What’s particularly striking is that this legal privilege is more or less hereditary, being passed down to the child from grandparents who currently live in Beverly Hills and from parents who used to live there.

It is, of course, all about money.

I wonder what Thomas Jefferson would have thought.

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Pretty soon they’ll all be going to school in pajamas.

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Sounds like the 1930s all over again. And this time they won’t have a King to pull the plug when it all goes south.

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The driver lost the money to the wind when an envelope he had stuck in the passenger seat pocket of his vehicle came loose during a test drive.

The cash – in 500, 200, and 100 euro notes – fluttered across the motorway in the midst of speeding traffic near the city of Hanover.

Here’s your sign….

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This is not your father’s trade war, a tit-for-tat over champagne or cheese. With countries worldwide desperately trying to keep and create jobs in the midst of a global recession, the spat between the United States and its normally friendly northern neighbor underscores what is emerging as the biggest threat to open commerce during the economic crisis.

Read it.

You mean the global warming alarmist are lying to us? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Peggy Noonan:

The indecipherable language of government has actually become dangerous to the well-being of the nation. As the federal government claims ever greater powers, its language has become vague to the point of meaningless and meaningless to the point of menacing.

Ever notice how policemen and lawyers can’t say “car” or “truck”?

I think I heard “accessing affordable quality health care,” “single payer plan vis-à-vis private multiparty insurers” and “key component of quality improvement.” In any case, she didn’t answer the question, which was a disappointment but not a surprise. No one answers the question anymore.

A New York Times profile recently had her recalling with self-deprecating charm the time her child ran a high fever and she caused a bit of confusion by forgetting to say, “We have to go to the hospital!” and announcing instead, “This unsustainable increase in body temperature requires immediate access to a local quality health-care facility!” I made that up, but it was believable, wasn’t it?

Bryan Caplan has the answer.

A old saying tells us, “Thank goodness we don’t get as much government as we pay for.”  I’m tempted to add, “Yes, and thank goodness politicians don’t actually do exactly what they promised.”  Dishonest politics is sordid, but honest politics is absolutely scary.

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The Republican who challenged Rep. John Murtha in 2008 says a top aide to the embattled Pennsylvania Democrat threatened to have him recalled to active duty in the U.S. Army so he could be court-martialed for engaging in politics while serving in the armed forces.

Bill Russell — who challenged Murtha in 2008 and intends to do so again in 2010 — said Murtha chief of staff John Hugya made the threat during a National Rifle Association event in mid-March.

Ret. Col. Gregory Ritch, a former Army Reserve officer who served as Russell’s commanding officer, said he heard Hugya make a similar threat in January.

John Murtha (D., Pork) is just the gift that keeps on giving … or is that “keeps on taking”?

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Imagine that.

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“In spring 2006 the French government arranged for three bears from Slovenia to be released into the forests near Arbas,” Arcangeli tells me. “Two others were released near other villages. Gendarmerie intelligence warned us that there might be a few protesters, mostly farmers worried about their sheep being attacked. But 250 turned up, smashing anything they could find outside the town hall, trying to break in, spraying paint and throwing bottles of blood. Eighty gendarmes tried to keep order.”

The plan, agreed between Spain, France and Andorra, had been to introduce 15 bears over three years but since the Arbas riots no more have been released.

I guess the protests worked.

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When earlier this week President Obama signed a $410 billion spending bill to keep the government running through the fall, every account of the event noted the 800-pound contradiction in the room. Mr. Obama had campaigned against earmarks, even saying he would cut them back to levels before 1994, the start of the Gingrich-GOP interregnum. Now here was Obama as president signing a bill soaked in earmarks.

Here’s another way of putting it: The U.S. budget is now history’s biggest mountain of swag; it is uncountable goodie bags filled with tax revenue. Mr. Obama’s swag mountain, the fiscal year 2010 “budget,” is $3.59 trillion high (25% of total GDP of about $14 trillion). His $800 billion stimulus bill was another pile of public cash. We the people have concluded that if we don’t use the Honorable John or Nancy or Ted in Congress to get our piece of it, someone else will get it.

Barack Obama isn’t a reformer. He’s the president of Earmark Nation. We are about to enact the Obama federal health-insurance entitlement, which on top of all the other entitlements and their limitless liabilities will require pulling trillions of dollars more into the federal budget. Whatever nominal public good this is supposed to achieve, it means that they, these 535 pols, most of them gerrymandered for life, will decide in perpetuity the details of how to dole it out.

Read it.

The ancient city of Canterbury has found itself the subject of a complaint from homosexual rights activists for not having a gay bar.

Well, if gay is the new black, then they need quotas, right?

Read it.

Those are going to be hard genes to live with. Not to mention the embarrassment.

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And is that necessarily a bad thing? After all, how many people really need hand-made barrels, after all?

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Large places like the U.S. and Europe can survive the fantasies of their ruling classes about environmental pseudo-science; small countries who mistake decadence for sophistication may not. Here’s a classic case.

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

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Apparently these people have never heard of x-ray machines.

“Duh, we’re from the government, and we’re here to help.”

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Students at Oxford University have been banned from reading books on the top shelves of the Bodleian library because the step-ladders used to reach them are against health and safety rules.

Steve Sailer distills the essence.

The conventional wisdom of the Obama Era appears to be that the solution to black underachievement is that we should take poor black children away from their mothers for as long as possible each day and turn them over to nice white people with liberal arts degrees for almost their entire waking hours.

Yeah, that about sums up the entire program of the Ruling Class.

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Pretty bad when a bunch of Arabs have more respect for European history than Europeans do.

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Darwin Award waiting to happen.

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Well, I’m certainly impressed.

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The horror! The horror!

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Arnold Kling ponders the fact that money from the federal government is now the biggest source of revenue for state and local governments.

My prediction is that this will persist even when there is a recovery. It is bad news in many respects. It makes the spenders (in this case, state and local governments) even less accountable for making sure that money is well spent. For the politicians, the incentive to spend other people’s money is big enough when its your own constituents paying the taxes, and it’s even bigger when someone else’s constituents are paying the taxes.

Read it.

And who could blame them? They’ve been down this road before, and it’s full of potholes.

As to “where would they go?”, the classic answer is Switzerland. Or buy a Third World nation somewhere.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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‘Qui procul hinc,’ the legend’s writ,—
The frontier-grave is far away—
‘Qui ante diem periit:
Sed miles, sed pro patria.’

Read it.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in D.C.

Read it.

Rail systems promoted by lovers of mass transit suffer from especially high rates of lying. What does this tell us about the most enthusiastic mass transit supporters?

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

Probably just as well — it’s not as if they had, like, you know, teachers.

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What further sign of the End Times do we need?

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A Labour Party member who expected to be able to stand for election in a local race was denied the opportunity because she was too white — and too Jewish.

All indications are that this well-meaning woman is a whole-hearted supporter of Multiculturalism. Which means that she should have known the rules: political offices, like other spoils, are dealt out on a racial and religious basis. Whites and Jews are not part of the equation in her little corner of Multi-Land, so she had no business expecting things to be any different.

Holman Jenkins reveals an inconvenient truth about the auto industry.

The erosion of the Big Three’s market share since then has really been the erosion of the market for monopoly labor-produced cars. The UAW standard tactic, “pattern bargaining,” which it pursues without embarrassment, would have gotten Bill Gates thrown in jail under the antitrust laws.

In a real bankruptcy, which is the natural fate of companies unable to meet their obligations, Chrysler and GM would be run (or liquidated) for the benefit of their creditors, not their workers. But, here, “pattern bargaining” will remain the law of the Detroit jungle. The UAW will continue to use its unnaturally augmented clout to extract uncompetitive pay and benefits (it can do no other given its internal incentives). As it has for 40 years, Washington will pitch in with one improvisation after another, disguised as energy policy, trade policy, health-care policy or environmental policy, to stop the rivets from popping off. Politics, especially Democratic electoral politics, will play a more dominant role than ever.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Steve Sailer turns over the rock of government education.

When it finally dawns on Obama that if we actually start firing worse teachers and hiring better teachers, we’ll be, on net, firing blacks and hiring whites, you can expect this whole effort to get buried so far under affirmative action that nothing good comes of it.

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I don’t blame them.

Read it. And laugh.

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Well. There it is.

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I’ve always wondered why drug smugglers didn’t start using submarines earlier. These are only semisubmersible and so aren’t true submarines. And, of course, with government tax laws chewing on people who buy luxury boats, boatyards will be turning to such business more and more in order to stay in business.

Your tax dollars at work. Use the law to create a profitable market opportunity, then use that “problem” as an excuse to expand government activity — oh, and government spending, of course.

Read it.

Lisa Ashton, who worked for BMI, was told that she was expected to wear the abaya, a long black robe that leaves only the face uncovered, when she was out in public in the Gulf state.

She was also told that she should walk behind male colleagues irrespective of their rank, in order to conform with the social codes of the conservative country.

In her letter of dismissal, BMI said it was “proportionate” to ask female employees to walk behind men out of respect for Saudi culture.

An employment tribunal in Manchester earlier cleared BMI of sexual discrimination saying it was justified in imposing “rules of a different culture” on staff.

It ruled there was no evidence that women would regard BMI’s requirements on wearing the abaya, or walking behind men, as “placing them under any disadvantage.”

Moral: Don’t fly BMI, the official dhimmi airline of not-so-Great Britain.