It's Not Just The Service, It's The Scenery
“…(T)he Federal Aviation Administration has proposed a mandatory $5 billion solution for Donovan and dozens of other Tinicum Township residents and businesses: Cut them a check and bulldoze the whole neighborhood. You want to stay? Too bad.”
Wait just a second here. The City of Philadelphia is broke, stone -cold busted, a wealth-destroyer without regional parallel. Until they get their spending and taxing under control, they have no moral authority to condemn a cardboard box, much less dozens of homes NOT EVEN IN THEIR JURISDICTION.
If we lived under a system that retained any justice, it would be Tinicum condemning the rump of airport property technically within the city’s administration, and kicking their asses back across the Schuylkill River.
But good luck doing that. As we have seen in the $20+ BILLION theft of Albert Barnes’ art collection, the judges that hover around the city like flies around a garbage can are owned by the politicians and Big Men of the City That Stabs You Back. They don’t need no stinking jurisdiction, they just take. “Here’s a dollar, now get lost”.
Meanwhile, the city continues to bleed residents, businesses, and, despite (or due to) carrying rapacious and malign taxation policies to a ridiculous extent, tax dollars. And the people that run it are still living in 1950.
(link courtesy of my wife)
Cyranos Journal Online » Why is America suffering so much from a recession that Germany largely bypassed?
Lots of good observations here from a left perspective, particularly regarding the impact of tax policy on the manufacturing sector, though regulation and Fed meddling play a big role as well. But a few quibbles;
1 Teddy Roosevelt was no hero, he was a tool of Morgan, and his “trust-busting” was no more than a smashing of Morgan’s rivals, principally Rockefeller, followed by cartellization of all industries Morgan controlled. FDR was just as bad, but he played on the side of the Rockefeller – Harriman – Kuhn Loeb group, and busted up Morgan cartels.
2 Technically, the US did not see real economic growth until 1946, when the war ended, and pent-up demand and de-regimentation of the wartime control economy erased 17 years of Depression.
3Subsidizing salaries is NUTS. It’s an admission as a government that you have broken the labor market and you refuse to let it clear. Germany’s labor market is vastly different than the US culturally, politically, ethnically, and with regard to harmful regulation. And protectionism just protects inefficient, uncompetitive industries that destroy wealth, and invites trade retaliation. E.G, Smoot-Hawley.
4 On the other hand, a low, uniform tariff, coupled with VERY light regulation of the export sector tends to build wealth. But our economy is so rife with misregulation and cross-subsidy that it is impossible to know anymore what our leading industries should be.
5Gabriel Kolko and many others have shown, beyond refutation that in the US, regulation is written by and for the biggest players in the regulated industry to disadvantage competitors and cartellize most of the business into the hands of a few gigantic firms, who can then run roughshod over everybody, workers and customers alike. This is an important reason we are in the pickle we are in – the game is rigged, There is no free market, except at very local levels.
6 Finally, Keynesianism is not economics, it is not science, it is superstitious voodoo like CDS and the Federal Reserve itself, a gigantic humbug fabricated to provide justification for the evil things the owners of this country want to do to us. Anyone in authority who puts forth such insane Kenesian notions as “stimulus” spending by government should have his head examined. When the government finally defaults on its paper promises, as bad as things MIGHT have gotten, had Hank Paulson not bailed out his buddies, followed by Obama and Geithner doing the same, it will be a thousand times worse when the stimulus fails. We are talking about hyperinflation, like we experienced in the 1970′s, or worse, like Weimar Germany, and we all know how THAT turned out.
7 I want to know why when Hayek won the Nobel prize for Economics, EVERYONE in the mainstream press, but particularly the left put it down, saying it isn’t really a “Nobel Prize”, they are a bunch of cranks, whatever; when Krugman wins, suddenly it’s a prestigious award, filling the winner with Godlike authority. Well Krugman is a Keynesian, and Hayek was not. When Keynsianism is shown up as a failure, AGAIN, will the mainstream and the left hail Hayek, and Mises, and Rothbard, who were right before the crisis hit, and have been proven right again and again?
They will bollocks. There is no way the Austrians will ever be even grudgingly admitted to be right. It doesn’t serve the powers that be.
via Cyranos Journal Online » Why is America suffering so much from a recession that Germany largely bypassed?.