Bryan Caplan calls out the bleeding hearts.

“What if a poor person gets sick, doesn’t have insurance, and can’t get friends, family, or charity to pay for treatment?”

“What if an elderly person gets defrauded out of his entire retirement and the perpetrator vanishes into thin air?”

“What if a child is starving on the street, and no one voluntarily feeds him?”

“What if someone just can’t find a job?”

If you’re a libertarian, you face what-ifs like this all the time.  The point, normally, is to make you say, “Tough luck” and look like a monster.  What puzzles me, though, is why libertarians rarely ask analogous questions.  Like:

“What if Congress passes an unjust law, the President signs it, and the Supreme Court upholds it?”

“What if the government conscripts you to fight in an unjust war, and you die a horrible death?”

“What if a poor person drinks and gambles away his welfare check?”

“What if the government denies you permission to legally work?”

“What if the President decides your ethnicity is a national security risk and puts you in a concentration camp, and the Supreme Court declares his action constitutional?”

“What if a person lives an extremely unhealthy lifestyle, so by the time they’re retired, they’re in constant pain no matter how generous their Medicare coverage is?”

“What happens if a President lies to start a war, and voters don’t particularly care?”

Once you start the what-if game, it’s hard to stop.

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Earlier this year, Hampton, Virginia police shut down a 19-month cigarette smuggling sting operation because officers are suspected of the inappropriate use of funds and personal property. The operation yielded no arrests or criminal charges.

Launched in June 2010, the operation was originally a joint investigation with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), but Hampton officers discovered an ATF agent (who had originally approached them about setting up the sting) was selling cigarettes on the side. The ATF withdrew from the case, and in September 2011 its agent was sentenced to over three years in jail.

Q: Why did you get a job with the government?

A: Because that’s where the money is.

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Perhaps I need a new category: Why Big Business Is Perfectly Comfortable In Bed With Big Government.

While some may be glad that a private company—not a government agency—is tasked with EBT transactions, the GAI report reveals that JP Morgan does not use the same fraud detection systems commonly used by today’s credit card companies.  In fact, federal and state agencies—not EBT processors—are the ones tasked with policing food stamp fraud.

And why would they care? It’s just ‘government money’; they get their cut, whatever happens.

Watch it.

Who’ll be the first to cry ‘raaaaacist’?

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One wonders what would have happened had Barack Obama not promised not to raise taxes on the middle class. Perhaps none of us would have any money left. (Except him and his rich friends, of course.)

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No institution is more responsible for the recent explosion of patent litigation in the software industry, the rise of patent trolls, and the proliferation of patent thickets than the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The patent court’s thirtieth birthday this week is a good time to ask whether it was a mistake to give the nation’s most patent-friendly appeals court such broad authority over the patent system.

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As news breaks that 57 more Fast and Furious weapons have been found in Mexico, it is also being confirmed that some of those weapons were used to slaughter 14 Mexican teenagers and wound 12 more near Ciudad Juarez.

According to reports, a group of armed commandos parked outside a birthday party attended by high school and college students on January 30, 2010, and opened fire with some of the weapons which had been smuggled across the border during the Fast and Furious operation.

Nobody has gone to jail. Nobody has been fired. Just your tax dollars at work.

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In New England, there remains one granite pillar against the tyranny of high tax burdens, found within the spirit of New Hampshire. This November, leadership from the State Legislature will attempt to end the creeping encroachment of the personal income tax applied to gaming winnings and interest from dividends. The New Hampshire Income Tax Amendment, known as CACR (13), would ban all forms of personal income taxes applied to a natural person.

The tax on ‘unearned income’ has long been a blot on the tax record of New Hampshire. Getting rid of it would certainly be a step in the right direction.

A good example of how state tax factors matter across state boundaries can be observed within the tale of Essex County, MA, which borders Rockingham County, NH. Over the last fifteen years, more than 23,000 taxpayers have left Rockingham County for Essex County, taking with them just over $1 billion in net AGI. However, during that same time more than 49,500 taxpayers have moved from Essex County to Rockingham County – thereby bringing more than $2.46 billion in net AGI to New Hampshire. This long-term trend from relatively high-tax states toward lower-tax regimes is typical for most states, even when close borders are not shared.

But New Hampshire is increasingly filling up with flotsam from neighboring socialists states like Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine, who bring their high-tax, grow-government attitudes with them. How long can it hold out, as the rest of New England becomes a Soviet-style collective? We’ll find out.

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Bad Mafia! No cannoli!

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Well, you know, I worry about these things.

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Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

Of course, those of us who have visited Detroit find it no surprise.

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Good. Maybe then the Global Warming alarmists will STFU.

(NB: Business Insider is a left-wing rag, and it’s pulling from The Guardian, another left-wing rag, so you’re free to believe as much or as little of this as you care to.)

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Pinterest’s user-generated content, which overwhelmingly emphasizes recipes, home decor, and fitness and fashion tips, feels like a reminder that women still seek out the retrograde, materialistic content that women’s magazines have been hawking for decades — and that the internet was supposed to help overcome.

Shame on all those pig-ignorant women who insist on following their own individual interests and refuse to get with the program that their betters have laid out for them!

And some of the most re-pinned recipes are diet ones. Pizza crust made with crumbled cauliflower as a low-carb alternative to dough is almost shockingly popular.

I mean, the nerve!

This isn’t where the internet was supposed to take us. The women I know who work in online women’s media hoped that the online content they created would provide an intellectual but fun alternative to print publications’ predictable fare.

And then that pesky market got in the way! People shouldn’t be allowed to just do what they want! They need to follow directions!

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Well. I guess American can’t suck all that badly.

Perhaps we could make it a general policy to ignore criticism from countries whose people would rather live here than there. That would simplify things immensely.

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 In analyzing that and other longitudinal studies, Dr. Andres determined that Metropolitan Life’s weight recommendations were too high for the early years and too low for later years. Among other things, he observed that the group with the smallest percentages of deaths, or “minimum mortality,” was 10 to 20 percent over the recommended weights and increased with age.

To live longer, he concluded, people should start thin and then gain about six pounds a decade beginning in their early 40s. That advice went against the prevailing wisdom, which held that the most healthful way to age was to maintain the same weight throughout adulthood.

“For some reason the idea has grabbed us that the best weight throughout the life span is that of a 20-year-old,” Dr. Andres said in a 1985 interview with The New York Times. “But there’s just overwhelming evidence now that as you go through life, it’s in your best interests to lay down some fat.”

Dr. Andres was not advocating obesity. “It is not my contention that the fatter the better,” he said. “It is my contention that the desirable range rises with age.”

Sounds good to me.

Read it. And definitely watch the videos.

This is the Babbage Engine at the Computer History Museum in L.A., one of two funded by Nathan Myhrvold in 1991.

Read it.

There are times when the standard comments about dysfunctional black culture are pretty inadequate.

On the other hand, if we had fights and gunshots breaking out at the Oscars, think what it would do for the ratings. I’d watch.

Read it.

 You, American Airlines, should no longer be flying across the Atlantic. You do not have the know-how. You do not have the equipment. And your employees have clearly lost interest in the endeavor. Like the country whose name graces the hulls of your flying ships, you are exhausted and shorn of purpose. You need to stop.

Flight 121 from Paris to New York began on a clear autumn afternoon. It ended over 30 hours later. For those of us without miles, it is probably still going.

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California isn’t just a basket case, it’s a proselytizing basket case, with its environmental zealots, community organizers, and wishful economic thinkers aggressively selling their ideas to other states and to the federal government. As Laer demonstrates, while the recession is slowing the other forty-nine states from buying into California’s governing philosophy, the Obama government is an enthusiastic supporter. Another four years of Obama, and California won’t be the only bankrupt crazy place in America.

…

Because California had long been blessed with enormous natural resources and a vital, growing population, it had the wealth to keep the impractical Progressive dream going for decades. It could abs0rb the enormous financial and human losses from almost heroic bureaucratic ineptitude (Chapter 5); laws and regulations that suck the life out of both new and established businesses (Chapter 6); ridiculous educational experiments and an all-powerful teachers union that has little interest in student well-being and education (Chapter 7);* environmentalism run amok (Chapter 8); and public sector unions and pensions that have managed to go wherever one ends up when “amok” is a distant memory (Chapter 9).

The Economist, somewhat late to the party.

WHAT could well be the next great technological disruption is fermenting away, out of sight, in small workshops, college labs, garages and basements. Tinkerers with machines that turn binary digits into molecules are pioneering a whole new way of making things—one that could well rewrite the rules of manufacturing in much the same way as the PC trashed the traditional world of computing.

Read it.

Don’t you feel more secure? I sure feel more secure.

The TSA: Bringing Third-World corruption to a First-World neighborhood near you.

Yet another reason not to fly.