Archive for June, 2010
The FCC’s Covert Mission to ‘Balance’ Broadcast Media Ownership
By Chuck Roger • June 30th, 2010 3:25 am
Originally in American Thinker, May 27, 2010. Should Americans be concerned about a Federal Communications Commission official having once suggested that if government doesn’t help minorities reduprint\fcc-covert-print.htmce white ownership of broadcast media, then only violence would assure the protection of minorities’ civil rights?1In the little-noticed 2007 publication “The Erosion of Civil Rights,” Mark Lloyd attempted [...]
Go west, but not too far west, to find self-reliance
By Chuck Roger • June 29th, 2010 8:52 pm
The graph below was plotted by Cato Institute’s Dan Mitchell from data assembled by the Center for Immigration Studies. The horizontal axis represents the percentage of non-poor residents of each state signed up for government assistance–in other words, income redistribution programs. Mitchell calls the measure the Moocher Index. Really study the graph. Allow me to [...]
Gun-fearing liberals with screwed-on crooked heads
By Chuck Roger • June 28th, 2010 8:54 pm
More guns, more crime, right? Emphatically, no! Economist John Lott reports that …all the multiple-victim public shootings in Western Europe have occurred in places where civilians are not permitted to carry guns. The same is true in the United States: All the public shootings in which more than three people have been killed have occurred [...]
Wind and solar power job fantasies
By Chuck Roger • June 25th, 2010 8:54 pm
“Green” energy is the way of the future, right? In a word: No. Consider: Wind turbines are only possible because taxpayers subsidize their production. Navigant Consulting estimated that if federal tax credits for solar power and wind energy were discontinued, these industries would lose 77% of their employees. The statement is part of a Commonwealth [...]
Thuggish teachers’ unions and your tax dollars
By Chuck Roger • June 24th, 2010 8:56 pm
Let’s do a little exercise. Your employer pays you. With part of the income, you pay your property, sales, and income taxes. Part of the taxes go to pay teachers’ salaries. Part of the teachers’ salaries–whether the teachers like it or not–is forcibly extracted before the teachers even see the money. The extracted money gets [...]
‘Leader with a Plan’ Invites a Health Care Nightmare
By Chuck Roger • June 23rd, 2010 3:25 am
Originally in American Thinker, June 6, 2010. The American people are too simple to choose from “an array of products” in “a system as massive and complex as health care. That is for leaders to do.” Behold the words of Donald Berwick — doctor, Harvard professor, and Obama’s nominee to run the Centers for Medicare [...]
Amerifornia, here we come
By Chuck Roger • June 4th, 2010 8:59 pm
In Chief Executive magazine’s survey of “Best and Worst States for Business 2010,” an introductory summary observes: Californians pay among the highest income and sales taxes in the nation, the former exceeding 10 percent in the top brackets. Unemployment statewide is over 12.2 percent, higher than the national average. State politics seems consumed with how [...]
America needs to hit rock bottom
By Chuck Roger • June 3rd, 2010 9:01 pm
The government “stimulus” spending theory of progressive English economist John Maynard Keynes was soundly discredited not only by FDR’s Great Depression follies, but also by LBJ’s Great Society and the Nixon-Carter nonsense of the 1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless, as economist Robert Higgs observes: Now [Keynesian spending] has come roaring back. Of course, the general public, [...]
Beware ‘leaders with plans’
By Chuck Roger • June 1st, 2010 9:03 pm
How should the American people feel about a Harvard professor telling the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) to ignore the free market when setting health care “policy?” Ho-hum, right? Okay, but now what if the particular professor in question were an Obama appointee who could end up setting American health care policy, and the professor [...]
