Double Birds

Jack Abramoff recently gave an interview on how he had bribed at least 100 congressional offices .  He said that those numbers were pretty low when it comes to lobbying. Michael Moore entertainingly depicted the revolving doors between Goldman Sachs and Congress.  But like many on the left, he doesn't grasp that the problem isn't that the power of government can be bought and sold.  The problem is that government has power at all. Governmental power is greater than that of any corporation or individual.  Government can take money it has not earned.  No other entity can legitimately do that. The big banks that received the bailouts, received them from the government.  On their own, banks have to get their money from people who voluntarily give it to them.  But not if they lobby Congress. Notice that once lobbyists get some tax money, they can use our taxes to bribe Congress.  Congressmen and crony corporations use the revolving door of lobbying to ...

How much does it cost you to drive down the road? I'm not talking gas prices.  Or car prices.  Or even how much it costs to build and maintain the roads. I'm asking, how much does the government charge you for using its roads. Everything.  All the wealth that you have, or ever will have, according to one bureaucrat. Elizabeth Warren, a woman running for Senate, recently said : "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear:  you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for ; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific...

I finished a couple episodes of the cartoon I've been working on:

In honor of Ludwig von Mises . For liberty .

Most Tea Party people are honest folk who want to change the country for the better.  But many of them have been tea-bagged by talk radio for so long that they have Glenn Beck's balls where their brains should be. A teabag ouroboros A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.  But if you call a turd a rose, it's still a turd. You see, language can be misleading.  The Patriot Act, for example, ranks among the most unpatriotic pieces of legislation ever dragged through the slimy halls of Congress.  So too, the Bachmann-Beck Tea Party is not the real heir to the historic Boston Tea Party. When the Boston Tea Party destroyed thousands of dollars worth of merchandise to protest taxes, they dressed up as Indians to remain anonymous.  They needed to protect their identities from their government in order to avoid prosecution for their crime.  It worked.  We still don't know who took part in the Boston Tea Party. The true children of those early American ac...

There's a lot of talk about Ron Paul being racist (he's not).  The usually reasonable Matt Taibbi even throws in  with the rest of the name-callers on this one.  Well, I'm going to one-up all of you. I'd vote for Ron Paul even if he was racist. Maybe you're racist against old white Republicans. That's right.  If Ron Paul thought that blacks evolved from Mexicans, and Mexicans evolved from sriracha , I'd vote him into public office. Why? For the same reason gays should vote for Ron Paul. Ron Paul thinks marriage should be between a man and a woman.  But he also thinks that individuals should be free to make that decision for themselves. As president, he wouldn't try to inflict his moral views on others.   He would take government out of marriage, and allow marriage to be free (to accomplish this within the restrictions of the Constitution, he would have to allow each state to decide how it would comply with this freedom). So if Ron Paul was the most back...

Bureaucrats in Orem, Utah, are trying to destroy 71-year-old Darrell "Bud" Durrant's livelihood.  Durrant lives off of a $396 retirement.  The bulk of his income comes from pumpkins that he grows on his farm in Lake Shore, and sells from his yard at  112 W. 1600 N. in Orem ,  a distance of  17 miles . He's been selling pumpkins from his yard for 20 years.  But this year, authorities threatened to shut him down. Bud Durrant and his business partner, David Cook. Durrant appealed to the city, and so they will " allow him to sell through this year." City Attorney Paul Johnson said, " It's too bad the city hasn't enforced the law before now ." The city hopes to have a decision by the end of 2011, on whether or not he can sell next year. It seems to me, that shutting down small farmers during a recession is just plain stupid.  It's a cold, impersonal cruelty, that someone would destroy an old farmer's livelihood simply to enforce a nonsen...

Kyle Dewitt lost his job.  He's 19, engaged, has a baby boy.  He went fishing so his family could eat. Local law enforcement fined him $215 for illegal fishing. That's like 100 bucks per ounce! He couldn't afford to pay it, so they threw him in jail for three days. "Land of the freeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. . ." Reminds me of the medieval law against hunting the king's deer.

I voted for Obama in 2008.  I'll vote for Ron Paul in 2012. There was a time, in 2007, when I thought: Even if Obama doesn't win the election, I'd still be willing to give my time and money to whatever he decides to do next. I was convinced that he was our man.  I knew he was going to change the world.  I knew I wanted to change it with him. Then he became president.  The wars continued.  Guantanamo remained open.  The Patriot Act was renewed and not vetoed.  New wars started. I thought: Didn't we vote Bush out? Then I realized:  Even before Obama disillusioned me with his broken promises, his new wars, his abandonment of the Constitution, he had made me a Libertarian. You see, in 2007, when I decided that I would be willing to support him financially, and by volunteering my time—even if he didn't get elected—that's called freedom, or a free market. A year or two after I voted for him, I no longer wanted to support him.  I did not want to giv...

1st Amendment be damned .   Michael Moore wants Obama to imprison those pesky critics at S&P who dared suggest that the U.S. might not have the best credit score . "Kill the rich, and Utopia will follow!" —Michael Moore (edited by Double Birds) Truth be damned .  Politicians should be able to spend all they want, whether they have the means or not.  If they lack money, their buddies at the Federal Reserve can just print it.  How can they not pay their debts with that kind of power? Unfortunately, you can't give something you don't have.  Money is not wealth, nor is it magic unicorn piss that we can sprinkle on all our problems to make them go away.  Printing money and throwing it at our debts will merely make our creditors angrier, as the inflated money we give them becomes worthless in their hands. Moore seems to think the economy has a joystick that the rich can jerk around to make it do what they want.  Unfortunately, it's a bit more compli...

For all of you who have rolled your eyes when I've said that roads should be privatized, consider this: Have you ever been pulled over for speeding?  When the guy with a gun fined you a hundred bucks for going too fast, did it ever seem odd?  What if Costco started tazing , fining, and imprisoning people who drove their shopping carts too fast down the aisles?  Wouldn't you think it odd if a Costco teller pulled a gun on you, and told you to get your ni**er a**  down on the floor, if you, say, were  paralyzed , or black ? 72-year-old woman tased. Respect the elderly, or respect my authoritah ? Why don't we think it odd when it happens on our roads?  Americans are apt to forget that highways were built to prevent popular uprisings .  That speed limits were put in place to force gas rationing .  And public schools never teach that roads are monopolies. Recently, an  Eastern European mayor has used a tank to run over the vehicles of his own ...

Reinvent the road. Win $75 of luxury artisan chocolate . People scoff at me when I say we should privatize roads.   Help me prove these road socialists wrong by inventing the best road this world has ever seen . Submit your road idea to: roadidea@doublebirds.net Deadline: October 1st, 2011.  Format: A picture with a description.  (Pictures can be made in any way, from crayon to photoshop.  Short, imaginative descriptions preferred). Selected ideas will be displayed at doublebirds.net for a public vote. The winner will get $75 worth of Amano chocolate .* I've already thought of the following ideas.  But you might win if you can do them better (not difficult): Bikes have own roads, cars have own roads, semis have own roads. Jet Packs Robot Horses (cars that poop) No Speed Limit.  Only dangerous driving is illegal and . . . Zip lines from hot air balloons and Water slides instead of roads * I reserve the right to extend contest deadline, and make ...

Some small thoughts on Braveheart and The Smurfs . One wants freedom, the other wants his mom to do his laundry. (Edited by Double Birds) At FilmEcon .

Why don't people stop whining and pay their taxes?  Aren't taxes the price we pay for civilization ? And yet many people we consider heroes have been willing to die, rather than pay taxes. Jefferson wrote that " a two-penny duty on tea, unjustly imposed " was enough to spark the American Revolution. The irony pisses Jefferson off. Many of the rebellions you read about in history were tax revolts.  Freedom was equivalent with not paying taxes.  In ancient Rome, free citizens were exempt from most taxes, while their conquered subjects paid them.  The early Islamic empires exempted fellow Muslims from taxes, while their subjects paid. Jesus equated tax-exemption with freedom when he said that the children of kings are free .  Everyone else is subject to the king.  Or, rather, subjected by the king.  Alexander the Great conquered the world, and subjected its inhabitants.  Their subjugation meant that they would pay him taxes, or tribute. ...