Comrades:

Here we are again, a new month which looks a lot like the month just ended, and things aren’t any better. They’ve passed a law up in Washington that allows the feds to revoke your citizenship and put you in durance vile on the word of an Army corporal that you are a terrorist. Sounds more like George Orwell’s nightmares than the U. S. of A. doesn’t it? There were some Republicans along with the Democrats that endorsed that law and voted for it. Treasonous bastards!

Why am I ticked off? Because, I think that one of these days, I’ll write something about a president or a congressman that will be rather harsh (as I already have done) and the NSA’s electronic communications monitors will report me to the Czar of Terrorism Prevention and my number will be up.

I told a fellow with whom I once corresponded about UFO hoaxes and modern mythology that if the Brown Shirts ever broke down my study door and got a look at the numerous books in my shelves written by secular Jews, my goose would be cooked. I dodged that bullet because those goons never made it over here. Now, we can’t be sure that their bastard descendants haven’t.

Bad News on the Recession Recovery Front

Every once in a while, I’ll read something in the public prints besides the comics pages and sure enough, I learn something and it’s usually bad. Let me tell you about some rather dreary stats that Mike Solon, who once was a senior budget staffer in both houses of the U. S. Congress and is now a partner at U. S. Policy Metrics, put together for our use.

At the four-year point of the current recession, real gross domestic product per person is down $1,112 while 5.8 million fewer Americans are working. This is the lowest that real GDP or employment in postwar America have been at the 4 year point after the start of a recession. If the economy had grown and generated jobs at the average rate achieved after the 10 previous postwar recessions, per person GDP would be $4,528 higher and 13.7 million more Americans would be working today.

The only time that recovery has been as snail-like as the present was during the 1930s Great Depression. Under Roosevelt , government spending exploded by 4.6 of GDP from 1932 to 1936, an unparalleled spending spree. The federal debt by the end of 1938 was 150 % above the 1929 level and the regulatory burden mushroomed. The tax burden was destructive. The top individual income tax rate rose from 24 % to 63 % and then to 79 % during the Hoover and Roosevelt terms. Corporate rates increased by 36%.

It is noteworthy that Roosevelt gave speeches in which he castigated “the rich,” calling them “the privileged few” and “economic royalists” instead of “the richest 1%” and “ America ’s millionaires and billionaires.” Instead of sensible and economically obvious solutions from our leaders, we are getting class warfare tirades salvaged from the 1930s. If you’ll recall, we didn’t “recover” back then until some SOB started a war.

But What of the Bureaucracy?

It’s alive and well. Lemme tell you about it.

From Florida – The Collier County Sheriff’s office received a breathless call from an official at the Orange River Elementary School reporting a possible “sex crime.” Deputies proceeded to the school anticipating having to investigate an ugly and repulsive crime involving a 12-year old. What they learned when they arrived was that two girls had been arguing about which of them liked a particular boy more. The argument got heated and one of the 12-year old girls, (obviously a brazen hussy) went over to the boy and kissed him. The deputies, confronted with the facts, conferred with the State Department of Children and Families over the DCF hot line. The agency and the deputies finally agreed the act does not constitute a sex crime. As least, not yet.

New York City – When Darbe Pitosfsky tossed some old newspapers into a sidewalk trash can, a sanitation worker saw her, pursued and stopped her. He demanded her ID and threatened to have her arrested if she didn’t comply. He wrote her a $100 ticket and when she complained he threatened to make it a $300 ticket.

Buenos Aries – The Argentine government has filed criminal charges against MyS Consultories for publishing numbers that show inflation is higher then that the government admits.

Washington State – Who has access to your personal prescription drug records? The answer is: damned near everybody!

Washington State ’s State Health Department has been running a monitoring program to determine the answer to that question. Here’s what they found: The program gives state, local and federal law enforcement officials access to drug records, along with doctors, pharmacists, health licensing and regulatory agencies, medical examiners, coroners, Medicaid officials, state officials who deal with worker’s compensation, Department of Corrections officials and Health Department officials - among others.

Florida – At Fort Lauderdale , an agent for the crack Transportation Security Administration Agency, Nelson Santiago, was going through some luggage when another airline employee saw him take an iPad out of the bag and stuff it down his pants. The witness blew the whistle and Santiago was investigated. Turns out he had stolen about $50,000 worth of stuff from luggage he was checking for prohibited material.

A Union by Any Other Name

In 2008, the industrious Lisa Martinez of Waterford , Connecticut opened a teeth whitening business at a mall. The business thrived. But the Connecticut State Dental Commission, citing “inherent risks,” decided that whitening work could be performed only by licensed dentists, and made it a law. Lisa was notified that she would face a felony charge and a $25,000 fine if she persisted in the business. (The Commission ignored the fact that the usually strict Food and Drug Administration allows anyone, including children, to purchase and use whitening kits without prescription or supervision.)

The Institute for Justice, to which yours truly contributes, challenged the commission in federal court, arguing that the Constitution protects the right to earn a living free from unreasonable regulations that benefit only special interests. An IJ Staff attorney issued a press release to the effect that “the Commission’s ruling has nothing to do with public health or safety and everything to do with protecting licensed dentists from honest competition.”

Max’s Corner

I saw a film clip last week of our President answering a question from an interviewer about raising capital gains taxes. The interviewer pointed out what every economist in the country has know for years, that when capital gains taxes are raised beyond a certain percentage point, the revenue raised by the tax actually decreases. The President brushed that aside, as if unimportant, and said, he was doing it because it was “fair.”

What in hell is “fair?” Life isn’t “fair.” Earthquakes and tsunamis aren’t “fair.” Not even the blasted weather is “fair.”

Our glorious leader seems to be ignorant of the fact that income taxes are for the purpose of gathering funds to operate the government. The expenditures from those funds, even for niceties as social engineering, should be allocated for the common good under a budgeted item when Congress sets the annual budget.

If the President really wants to be “fair,” Congress should enact a flat tax revenue plan instead of the tortured, twisted, perverted and biased tax code we have now, used as a means of rewards and punishments for those politically in or out of favor with the “government,” often influenced by the size of a “contribution” to “campaigns.” If everyone pays the same percentage of his millions or his minimum wage as income tax, then the tax will be “fair.”

Back in 1845, economist John Ramsay McCulloch wrote these incredibly prescient words:

Even if taxes on income were otherwise the most unexceptionable, the adoption of the principle of graduation would make them about the very worst that could be devised. The moment you abandon, in the framing of such taxes, the cardinal principle of exacting from all individuals the same proportion of their income or of their property, you are at sea without rudder or compass, and there is no amount of injustice and folly you may not commit.

The “folly and injustice” is a good descriptor for what we are living with now. I’d say Mr. McCulloch turned out to be a 19th century Nostradamus. We need to listen to him.

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Moving Jobs Back Home

America has lost roughly six million manufacturing jobs since the manufacturing sector peaked in the 1970s. But what has happened to manufacturing output? It has increased. Total production today is 2.5 times its 1972 level in adjusted dollars. In 2010, America produced $1.8 trillion in goods, about $100 billion more than China . And we did it with only about a tenth of the number of China ’s workers. The truth is that, thanks to automation and technological advances, we have increased American productivity spectacularly. Get this: the goods that it took 1,000 American workers to produce in 1950 now requires only 177. So even if China disappeared tomorrow we still would not fill up our factories with tens of thousands of workers.

In this country, we don’t go backward. Someone cited GE’s slogan as appropriate for the whole country: “Progress is our most important product.”
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I’ll spare you the usual homilies or wry quotations this time and wish you well. Oh, and Max says “do your best to live by the Golden Rule.”

Max was irate. He walked in with that expression on his face that someone had done something wasteful and/or stupid in Washington , again.

What’s elevating your blood pressure this morning?” I asked.

He waved a newspaper section at me and huffed, “Did you know that our green subsidy machine has given unholy amounts of cash to no less than 48 new green would-be battery manufacturers or electric car companies?”

“Good grief, no!” I replied in surprise. Forty-eight? That’s forty seven more than we need to build more batteries than anyone needs.”

“Yes, I know,” he blurted. “I was reading a story about another greeny that the taxpayers have subsidized that is filing for bankruptcy. Have you heard of Ener1?”

‘Can’t say that I have. What’s the name, Inner One?”

“It’s spelled E-N-E-R, digit 1. It was one of the dozens of battery companies that were building lithium-ion batteries for the tens of thousands of electric cars General Motors is building,” Max said, rolling his eyes. It’s going into reorganization as if that’s going to help. By the way, it was going to employ 1,700 people to build all those batteries, but it hired only 400.”

“Think of the people that have screwed up the system, Max. All those entrepreneurs went into the battery business because they believed the crap about Americans tearing down the showroom doors to buy electric cars at $40,000 each after subsidy. Now I’m wondering which came first, the chicken or the egg.”

“Chicken or egg?”

“Yes,” I explained. “Did they really do their analyses and figure the potential need for batteries, or did they figure they could stow some big fat government subsidies in off-shore banks before they went belly up?

Max nodded sadly. “I’m very much afraid the subsidies attracted the fringe. Most of those people have had at least an eighth-grade education and can add and multiply numbers. I can’t believe they really thought a non-existent market could support all that production.”

“And to think,” I said, “we have been complaining about the thousands of poor people lining up to get free stuff.”

“I reckon being poor is no longer an iron-clad requirement,” Max mused.

Have you heard of the Mitt Romney syndrome?” Max asked me.

“No, I must have missed that,” I answered. “But then I don’t sit around all day watching the latest news about the primaries. Boooring!”

Nodding agreement, Max said, “Michael Medved mentioned it in a column of his on Tebow hating.”

‘Wait a second,” I pled, “Romney Syndrome, Tebow hatred? I’m about to go into overload”

Ignoring my distress, Max went on. “Medved described it this way: A friend of his was made physically ill during the televising of the New Hampshire primary when the ‘beaming’ Mitt Romney clan made its appearance. The friend said. ‘All those handsome, perfectly controlled, wealthy, teetotalers with their gorgeous wives – I wanted to vomit. There was something unearthly about it. Like some weird superior race on the planet Krypton.’”

When I stopped laughing, I said, “Max, that’s funny as hell. But a little bit disturbing at the same time.”

“That was Medved’s point,” Max replied. “He pointed out that most of us males look at Tebow and see a virtuous rebuke to our own limitations and imperfections. If we were 24, single, supremely athletic, enormously wealthy and adored by millions of young women, how many could wear Tebow’s purity ring?”

Looking back on my inclinations at that age merged with Medved’s fanciful and grandiosely erotic scenario, I answered, “I’m afraid I would have found very little time to play football. Thankfully, I was safely married by that age and guided in the steps of the righteous.”

Max’s eyebrows went up. “By Jesus?” he gasped.

“No, by the memsahib,” I replied. "She kept an eye on me that would burn holes in Formica.”

“And people wonder why I raise so much hell about bureaucracies,” Max said, looking up from the paper and shaking his head.

What’s that, Max?” I asked. “You don’t mean to tell me the super beltway bureaucracy has screwed up again?”

He managed a wry smile. “Again?” he asked. “Don’t you mean ‘still?’”

“Touche’,” I replied. What this time?”

“Remember back in ought, ought seven when they passed that gloriously green law to end our dependence on foreign oil? It was called the ‘Energy Independence and Security Act’ one of those stately overblown names to make the stumblebum bureaucrats sound like they were on the side of the Gods and were going to save us from our own greed and slovenly pollution habits, improve the efficiency of motor vehicles and increase the use of renewable energy resources such as bio-fuels. In fact, by last year, 2011, our gasoline refiners were supposed to be blending 6.6 million gallons of cellulosic bio-fuel into domestic gas and diesel.”

“I remember,” I answered. That was the crap that was to be made from wood chips and grass stems that livestock couldn’t eat. Do you really think anyone believed it could happen? After all, if we did actually end our dependence on foreign oil, the Department of Energy would no longer be required and government could shrink by 16,000 souls. No one is about to let that happen.”

“You nailed it,” Max said, smiling broadly. “The only trouble with the rather grandiose notion is that nobody could figure out a way to make the damned stuff in a quantity larger than a test tube amount in a way that even came close to making it affordable.

“I wondered why I hadn’t heard anything about that magic stuff,” I told him. “I figured they had silently closed the doors, pocketed what taxpayer funds were left over and quietly walked away.”

“Not on your tintype,” Max guffawed. “Since there ain’t any cellulosic fuels, the refiners haven’t been able to blend any of that magic liquid with gasoline and their time limit has run out. They’ve got to pay heavy fines for not complying with the ought-ought seven law.”

“You’re not serious, Max!” I exclaimed. “If that was a movie plot, no one would believe it!”

“Serious as a busted crutch,” he replied. “The refiners have got to be fined for not doing it this year and when next year rolls aground with no sign of these millions of magic gallons of cellulosic elixir, they’ll be fined again.

“One company that was working on finding ways to produce cellulosic bio-fuels was Range Fuels in Georgia,” he went on. That bunch recently went out of business and sold their ‘factory’ for pennies on the dollar. Even with the extensive high resin pine forests of Georgia at their back door, they were unsuccessful in finding an affordable process to turn the timber chips into fuel that would work even with all those taxpayer dollars lavished on them. So the EPA is fining the refiners (which no one in the administration likes anyway) for not using the nonexistent fuel like the law said, and if they can’t come up with 8.65 million gallons this year, they’ll be fined again.

“That sounds like something Mussolini’s Facists would have pulled,” I fretted. “It’s beyond reason. How can they do that?”

“Because they were magnificently stupid in writing the law based on pie in the sky, the politicians aren’t going to admit they screwed up and Obama sure as hell doesn’t want to hear that the magic fuel is only a rumor, so the EPA (a better example of monumental stupidity never did exist, to paraphrase Gilbert and Sullivan) is pressing ahead as if Larry, Curly and Moe aren’t running the country after all.”

I scoffed. “Max, they can always blame it on Bush. Blaming the housing collapse on him instead of every president and congress back to and including Carter worked. Why wouldn’t it work with this too?”

“They’d be pressing their luck,” Max replied. “After all Bush wasn’t known for his green largess.”

“You’re right, of course,” I admitted. “But he sure could start a helluva war, couldn’t he?”

Fellow citizens:

Another year has gone into the dust bin and, as is required, several noted personalities have left us behind to worry about whatever the politicians have invented to distract us from their new record levels of incompetently profligate spending. I will remark on a few of these.

Jane Russell, age 89, has left us to remember more innocent days when we crowded into theaters in lascivious anticipation of “seeing something” on the screen in the Howard Hughes pot boiler called “The Outlaw.” However, we had to be content with glimpsing some impressive cleavage thanks to Ms. Russell and some undergarment engineering by Hughes himself.

Andy Rooney, the curmudgeon that questioned so many pointless customs and inane actions by the famous and infamous said farewell at 92. He enjoyed a good, long run and was clear-minded to the end. I will miss him.

Jack LaLane, indefatigable guru of fitness and nutrition, left us back in January at the age of 96. I have it on good authority that Auld Grim snuck up on him from behind or he would still be around.

And Doctor Death himself, Jack Kevorkian, at 83 finally got an inside look at the unknown realm to which he had introduced so many.

But the one that not only saddens but outrages: Laura Pollan, the founder of the Cuban dissident group Ladies in White whilst in the medical care of a Cuban hospital. She was in state custody at the time of her sudden illness and death. Only her daughter was allowed to visit her in her last hours, in a room filled with Castro’s Security personnel, no doubt to prevent Ms. Pollan from passing dangerous secret plans for more non-violent demonstrations to her daughter. We are supposed to believe the official announcement of “death by natural causes.”

Of course, the efforts of Castro’s goons to silence her will haunt the tyrants to the end, her death casting her purpose, determination and self-sacrifice in gleaming steel.

Strange Harmony of Contrasts

A high school baseball pitcher has sued a baseball bat company after he was hit in the face by a line drive. Dillon Yeaman’s lawyers claimed that the hitter’s aluminum bat had a “design defect” that made the ball come off the bat “too quickly.” They went on to claim that the bat should have borne a label saying “there was a known risk of grave harm” to anyone hit by a fast-moving baseball. The incredibly generous jury awarded Dillon $951,000.

And by contrast, in Fort Worth , Texas Pastor Greg Beutel was minding his own business when a city streetlight fell on his new Hyundai. When he contacted city officials about the $2000 damages, the officials refused responsibility saying, “It was an act of God.”

Indulgent Father?

Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev bought a 10-room New York City apartment for $88 million. He gave it to his 22-year old daughter Ekaterina who is a college student and needs a place to crash when she’s in town. (Does she qualify for membership in the one percent?)

While Others Just Need Discipline

The Skaneateles High School in upper New York State has cancelled its winter ball. It seems that school officials had attempted to ban lascivious dancing (called “grinding” by the cognoscenti) while teaching traditional dances steps as a substitute. However they were unable to stop students “grinding” on the dance floor, so they decided school-wide dances were a thing of the past.
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Max’s Corner

Fellow countrymen:

This country is in deep financial trouble and what it needs now is not some big spender from the Chicago tenderloin, nor a chameleonic slick talker, not a college professor and sure as hell, not some John Bircher. We are desperately in need of a principled, iron-fisted, fiscal conservative, someone who has the guts and the determination to torpedo the growth of government and the further hiring of tens of thousands of overpaid bureaucrats whose occupations will consist mainly in attempting to justify their own existence.

Instead of giving you one of my regular rants, I am reproducing below what Gary Johnson said this past week when he announced he is a candidate for President on the Libertarian Ticket.

"Libertarians talk about all the things they’re not going to do in office. I think my 750 vetoes as governor of New Mexico really gives me a unique voice as to all the things government should not do."

Johnson, founder of one of New Mexico’s largest construction companies, entered politics for the first time by running for Governor of New Mexico in 1994 as a Republican on a conservative, low-tax, anti-crime platform. He beat incumbent Democratic governor Bruce King by 50% to 40%. He cut the 10% annual growth in the state budget by using his gubernatorial veto on half of bills in the first six months in the office. His use of the veto over his two terms gained him the nickname "Governor Veto".

Running again in 1998, he won by 55% to 45% in a blue state. In his second term, he concentrated on the issue of school voucher reforms, as well as campaigning for marijuana decriminalization. During his tenure as governor, he adhered strictly to an anti-tax, anti-bureaucracy program, and set state and national records for his use of veto powers: more than the other 49 contemporary governors put together. He was the first two-term governor in the state’s history.

I’m sick of waiting for some conservative to finally prove himself the nation’s biggest fuddy-duddy. Let’s do something about our problems instead of pretending we are all saints.

For a better, more honest tomorrow,
Maxim Gross.
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The Strait of Hormuz

I see the Iranis are talking big about closing the Strait of Hormuz to oil shipments to protest the economic sanctions the civilized world has imposed on them.

If I were an Iranian in the street, I would be sweating bullets over the big muckey mucks shooting off their mouths. How long would it take for a couple of American destroyers and an aircraft carrier to take on the Iranian navy and litter the strait with the wreckage of Iranian warships? Moreover, do the Iranians really think the Israelis are going to sit around and wring their hands until Iran has a deliverable atomic warhead? If, by some stretch of the imagination, Iran ever put together an atomic weapon and used it against Israel , do any of those former Persians really think that’s going to be the end of it? Over twenty years ago, Soviet intelligence reported that Israel had 200 atomic warheads. How many they have now is any one’s guess. Question: How many atomic weapons does it take to unscrew the Iranian light bulb?

Max’s Irreverence Revisited

Some of you may recall that during December last, I republished a visit with Max in which he told of giving a member of the Roman Catholic movement a hard time over Bernadette’s Grotto and the putative miracles performed by its waters. Because this elicited some severe criticisms by various members of that ancient church, Max wanted me to hasten to reassure my gentle readers that he does not harbor any antipathy or doubt toward the Papist’s practices any more or less than he does any other major religion. To that end, I dug up a visit in which he demonstrates his non-discrimination. I reproduce it here:

The Southern Baptists

I was trimming some bushes in my front yard when I saw Max walking down the street. He had a newspaper under his arm and was smiling that smug smile of his.

I thought, “Hell’s kitchen! The Republicans or the Christians have done something stupid. Again.”

“Don’t let me interrupt your work,” he said. “I thought you’d be composing some more deathless prose, but here you are, sweating like a serf.”

“You’ve already interrupted and I’m ready for a break,” I said. “Let’s go in.”

We went in, I got a bottle of water and we sat down in my study.

“Deathless prose?” I asked, waving my arm over the paper-laden table. “Just how deathless this stuff is will depend on whether or not it’s laminated in plastic.”

“You mean it won’t be read and admired a century or two from now like Byron and Shakespeare and Coleridge?” he asked, chuckling.

“They all had good agents,” I growled. “What’s on your mind? I know something is.”

Max unfolded the paper he was carrying and sat down on my couch. “I see that the Southern Baptists fired a female professor of Hebrew from their Theological Seminary,” he intoned, barely suppressing a smug grin.

“’What in the world did she do?’ I asked, shocked, ‘commit some tasteless female indiscretion?’”

Max grinned. “She had the temerity to be a female. And it says right here in the infallible Christian Bible, right smack dab in First Timothy, ‘I permit no woman to teach or have authority over a man.’”

“You’re not serious!” I exclaimed.

“Serious as leprosy,” he replied. “It seems that Paige Patterson, the Grand Ayatollah of the Southwestern Theological Seminary, said the lady was hired ‘during a momentary lax (sic) of the parameters before he took over.”

“Good grief!” I said. “Couldn’t he just had her wear a burqa and teach from behind a screen like the Saudi female teachers do?”

“Oh, no,” Max said, chuckling again. “It’s not that her male students would be distracted from their studies out of lust for her, it’s just that she’s female and according to Timothy in the infallible Bible, females can’t never teach nuthin’ to men, no way, no how.”

I smacked myself in the forehead with my palm. “Now I remember. The conservative Baptists got control of the Southern Baptist Convention on a platform that the Bible is infallible. But gosh, I didn’t expect anything like that.”

“I was wondering,” Max said. “If they are going to stick that closely with the Bible, are they going to isolate the women?”

“Isolate the women?” I asked. “Whazzat?”

“It says in the infallible Bible, Leviticus Chapter 15, and you should know this,” Max announced seriously. “When women are having their monthly periods, they have to go isolate themselves away from everyone else so folks won’t be contaminated.”

“Oh, oh, big trouble,” I said. “But they’ll never get that done.”

“Why not?”

“The feminist police would be on that like gravy on rice.”

Max nodded. “Come to think of it, those gals just might get a little shrill at that.”

“Shrill?” I exclaimed. “It would sound like the trump of doom and I’d have to agree with them.”
“Amen,” Max said.

“Watch it, Max, you’re turning.”

He held up the paper. “With Christians doing stuff like this? In a pig’s ass!”
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Let us close this first synapse firing of the year with not one, not two, but three quotations from very wise men.

“Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin. It doesn’t work.”
Economist Allen Meltzer

“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”
Hunter S. Thompson

“They don’t even have chicken-fried steak on the menu and they call themselves a five-star restaurant?”
Max Gross

Till next time,
Ron Wade