What you are speaking of when saying politicians and bureaucrats might try to deliberately inconvenience citizens over budget "cuts" is what is known as "The Washington Monument Elevator Syndrome." As you know, the Washington Monument is at the opposite end of the mall from the Capitol. It is also very tall. It is run by The National Park Service which is part of the Interior Department. Back in the 1960s long time CBS News commentator Eric Severeid observed that whenever folks at the Interior Department think their budget had been dented, the first thing they shut down is the elevator in the Washington Monument. Thus constituents who have to climb a jillion stairs don't have far to go to complain to their congressmen.

I haven’t seen the movies and I wouldn’t know Will Ferrell if he walked up to me and kicked me. Be that as it may, I have been compiling a list of leading socialists going back to Joachim of Flora (1135?-1202) My list has led me to wonder if Joachim was the last truly idealistic socialist leader. While not universal, the standard leitmotif of leading socialists going back to, say Jan Matthys (1500-1534) and Jan Bockelson (a.k.a. John of Leiden 1509?-1536) has been very simple. Socialist leaders promise everything and steal everything.

Who is John Galt? Barack Obama is turning the whole country into Dee-troit just as Jennifer Granholm turned all of Michigan into Dee-troit.

Mr. Ransom is right, of course. But he is getting shrill. He is getting almost as sarcastic as I am.

Frankly, the people who are buying Treasuries are d**n fools in the face of the government's present fiscal irresponsibility and the Fed's out of control money expansion. They will crash. I lost my old copy of Wealth of Nations so I cannot find where I marked it, but Adam Smith warned something to the effect, "Whenever government having contracted a debt, it is scarce known in history for it to be honourably and in full." I avoid government debt like the plague.

Thanks for the tip on the videos.. To a leftist, all business people are crooks who will take advantage of people if they can to make their "obscene profits." On the other hand, the government is wise, pure, and holy. Thus all businesses must be coercively regulated by government to keep them from exploiting the poor downtrodden workers. I got into a discussion with a Democrat friend about such things yesterday. Actually he did most of the talking. But I could not get through to him the concept of "regulatory capture." Where the crooked businessmen (in contrast to the honest ones) take control of regulatory agencies and use them to bully and cheat their more honest competitors in hopes of driving them out of business.

The notable thing about these charts: notice how volatility in all indicators took off like a skyrocket after The Federal Reserve came into being. One of the reasons Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were so anxious to get rid of the First and Second Banks of the United States was the extreme volatility central bank money manipulations injected into the economy. Jefferson, Jackson, Mises and Hayek are vindicated.

Good article. A point Mr. Ransom missed: thanks to the unions' support of Obamacare and the politicians that inflicted it upon us, more and more people are having to work part time, temp, and contract (job shop). Part timers, temps, and job shoppers are almost impossible to "organize" (i.e. bully into joining a union) because they are constantly mobile changing jobs and locations. The biggest effort of the unions of the last few years has proven their undoing. High taxes on employers and choking regulations are, of course, also adding to the trend. There are so many examples it makes my head spin.

.I wish former Central Michigan University Journalism Department Chairman, Dr. Gilbert O. Maienknecht, would have warned me before talking me into an M.A. in Journalism that, thanks to my degree, the whole world would think I'm a total idiot. For that reason not even McDonald's will hire me because they figure anyone with a journalism degree--ESPECIALLY a graduate degree--is too dumb to flip burgers. After watching the typical evening news broadcast, I can't blame people for thinking that. I am sure it will soon be discovered that people getting JRN degrees leads to global warming. It’s all our fault. And it is a very EMOTIONAL experience.

Good morning! This is not precisely news. Refer to Prof. John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Affluent Society (1957) and the original "the Environmental Handbook" (1970). Look, for that matter at George Orewell's "1984" (1949). The goal is control. Using poverty as a means of suppression and control has been recognized for a long time. These are people who viscerally hate freedom. "Capitalism" is just another name for "Liberty." Barack Obama wants to be Fidel Castro.

Actually, these politicians are human. I call them “Plastic People.” Like Barbie and Ken dolls, they are good-looking on the outside and hollow on the inside. To understand them, look up Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).