2016: Obama’s America | Official Movie Site

Posted on August 26, 2012 by Dude Where's My Freedom?

2016: Obama’s America | Official Movie Site.

I went to see this movie last night.  I expected the theater to be deserted, but it was nearly packed (I live in a VERY blue state, but the town I went to see the movie in is conservative-leaning).  The audience was mostly old people, but I was still pretty impressed.

I thought the movie was fairly interesting, if not especially important or convincing.  The premise of most of the movie is Dinesh D’Souza (generally a commentator I enjoy, even though he leans neocon) asking the question, “Where did Obama get his crazy socialist beliefs from?”  Spoilers, the answer is his parents, but particularly his father (who he never really knew).  It’s an interesting premise, but I’m not sure it stands up to serious scrutiny.  D’Souza claims that Obama’s actions and beliefs are unprecedented for an American president.  I’m not entirely sure that’s true.  Sure, Obama is a socialist, but am I really supposed to believe he’s more of a socialist than Jimmy Carter?  Than LBJ, inventor of medicare?  Than FDR?  Nothing Obama has proposed yet even comes close to some of the New Deal programs that FDR got away with, including the actual confiscation of privately owned gold and literal wage and price controls.

The other problem with the, “Obama is a socialist because of his crazy Kenyan father,” argument is that it doesn’t explain all the OTHER socialists out there.  While it’s entirely possible that Obama’s unusual background strongly influenced his beliefs, how would you explain, say, Ted Kennedy, someone with basically the exact opposite background and upbringing from Obama but with essentially the same ideals and positions?

The “story of Obama’s life” portion of the movie (which is essentially a documentary version of his book, “Dreams from my Father,” but with a negative spin) takes up about the first two thirds of the movie, which leaves only one third for the title premise of, “What does America look like in 2016 if Obama is re-elected?”  This portion of the movie falls flat, mainly because it doesn’t get enough time to explore issues in a thorough and serious manner.  Yes, it’s true that Obama’s middle-east policy may strengthen tyrannical regimes, but the issue is more complicated and deserves much more than a quick map of the middle east slowly being shaded green with “UNITED STATES OF ISLAM” captioned over it.  A five-minute discussion of the budget deficit and Obamacare doesn’t really give you much that you haven’t already heard either.  With so little time dedicated to these issues, I ended up feeling that the movie would have been better just not mentioning them at all and being devoted entirely to Obama’s life and upbringing.

I said above that the movie is interesting, but not important.  I say it’s not important because it doesn’t really tell you much you don’t already know.  The “Obama’s life” segment tells you about his background, but his background doesn’t really matter, his beliefs do.  The “2016” segment doesn’t explore issues in enough detail to be of any use.  Anyone who is politically informed enough to know this movie exists will already know the extent of the issues that are discussed.

The “interesting” part makes it worth the cost of admission though.  Love him or hate him, Obama is not only a historically significant figure, but he has a pretty damn interesting life story.  During the 2008 election, everyone seemed to be really excited about how “historic” it was that a (half) black man was being elected.  Yet, for some reason, the only people who actually seemed to be interested in who the man was, where he came from, how he spent his childhood, etc. were conservatives who wanted to use that information against him.  For some odd reason, none of his devoted followers on the left found it all that interesting that Obama’s story is far more interesting and complex than “the first black President.”  He’s not just the first black President.  He’s the first multi-racial President.  He’s the first President from Hawaii.  I’m going to guess (may very well be wrong on this one) that he’s the first President whose father and grandfather were polygamists and who spent his formative childhood years in a foreign country.  Whether you think these facts make him less qualified to be President or not, surely we can all agree that they’re somewhat interesting?  Surely we can all agree that the story of Obama’s life is a hell of a lot more compelling than the story of George Bush (either), Bill Clinton, or Richard Nixon, right?

I continue to be amazed that leftists don’t seem to think so.  That in order to protect their political interests, they would rather this interesting story go completely untold.  I know many conservatives who are very interested to know what his dissertation was about (we don’t, because his college records have all been sealed), but I don’t know any leftist supporters of his who seem to care, or be the least bit curious about it.  Odd, isn’t it?

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Republicans Hope, But Don’t Change | Euro Pacific Canada

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Dude Where's My Freedom?

Republicans Hope, But Don’t Change | Euro Pacific Canada.

Peter Schiff nails it, as usual.  I’ve commented before on how Romney and Obama do not offer a real choice.  This piece elaborates on that.  It’s almost disgusting to see the two candidates (and remember, the media tells you that they are completely opposed and offer dramatically different visions for America) arguing with each other over who loves Medicare more.

The lefties consider Paul Ryan to be an extremist?  What exactly would they call someone who says “We should get rid of Medicare completely and totally starting tomorrow?”  While that would certainly be extreme when compared to Obamney, the concept of allowing people to keep their money and purchase their own medical services, medical insurance, and save for their own retirements is not extreme whatsoever.

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Yes, Economics Applies to Medicine Too

Posted on August 16, 2012 by Dude Where's My Freedom?

John C. Goodman: Why the Doctor Can’t See You – WSJ.com.

It amazes me that articles like this are necessary.  That so many people seem to believe that the fundamental principles of Economics simply no longer apply when you’re talking about medicine (or “health care” as they like to call it these days).

The facts are very simple.  Everyone on the left (and many on the right) would like you to believe that through government intervention, we can increase the quality of medicine, increase the total amount of medicine provided (by providing insurance to those who currently have none) AND lower the cost of medicine, all at the same time.

Anyone who is even familiar with the concept of a supply and demand curve will immediately know that this is impossible.  The only way to accomplish such things is through massive technological innovation combined with a fair amount of time.  But nobody advocating for state control of medicine is proposing that this will be achieved through technological innovation.  They are proposing that it will be achieved by adding an extra layer of bureaucracy.

When someone looks you in the eye and claims that more bureaucracy will increase the quality of a service, the amount of a service, and decrease the cost of a service, that is the very definition of refuge in audacity.  A smaller lie would easily be detected and discredited, but such a huge and obvious lie is assumed to have some credibility.

Thomas Sowell says it best…

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Arthur Laffer: The Real ‘Stimulus’ Record – WSJ.com

Posted on August 8, 2012 by Dude Where's My Freedom?

Arthur Laffer: The Real ‘Stimulus’ Record – WSJ.com.

This piece from Arthur Laffer has been making the rounds a lot lately.  Of course everything he says is absolutely spot-on.  But of course, the left will ignore the statistics.  They will insist that we’ve been engaging in austerity for the last few years.  They will insist that the problem is not too much spending, but too little revenue (even though revenue as a percentage of GDP has remained constant while spending has continually risen to historically high levels).

This one quote needs to be repeated over and over and over again until they start to get it.

” For every additional government dollar spent there is an additional private dollar taken. All the stimulus to the spending recipients is matched on a dollar-for-dollar basis every minute of every day by a depressant placed on the people who pay for these transfers.”

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Is “Cyber-Terrorism” an actual threat?

Posted on August 4, 2012 by Dude Where's My Freedom?

Does Cybercrime Really Cost $1 Trillion? – ProPublica.

After defeat of cybersecurity bill, Obama weighs executive order – The Hill’s Hillicon Valley.

The recent defeat of the Cybersecurity Act in the Senate has brought some added attention onto the semi-frequent claims of legislators and pundits alike of the threat of “cyber-terrorism” or “cyber-crime” that Americans face.  This seems to be a non-partisan issue, in the sense that Democrats and Republicans alike seem to agree that the threat is real, present, and significant (the Republican filibuster in the Senate was over the regulatory requirements of the specific legislation, and not a dispute as to the presence of the threat in general).  As a libertarian who still listens to conservative talk radio, I can tell you that the thought of computer hackers working for the Chinese military constantly attempting to destroy our nation via computer attacks is regularly brought up and generally acknowledged as fact.  The mainstream media seems to think so too.

As usual, any time that democrats, republicans, and the media all agree on something, my instinct is to assume that the something is incorrect.  When it comes to the issue of “cyber-security” I have one simple question, if the threat is so large, why haven’t we ever experienced such an attack?  I think most of us understand that, heavily exaggerated though it may be, actual terrorism is a real threat that exists.  We know this because we have seen it.  We’ve seen the airplanes hit the towers.  We’ve witnessed first hand the dramatic loss of life, as well as economic costs, that can potentially happen as a result of actual terrorism.

“Cyber-terrorism,” on the other hand, continues to be a hypothetical.  We are told that the United States faces near constant cyber-threats from individuals as well as hostile foreign governments.  We are told that these attacks could have hugely devastating consequences, shutting down our power grid, our transportation systems, our financial systems, and generally bringing our entire way of life to a screeching halt.  But nobody has ever seen that happen.  Personally, I’ve never known such a thing to occur even on a small level.  What exactly is the worst cyber-attack in the nation’s history?  The theft of 80 million Playstation Network accounts?  High profile websites being shut down for a few hours?  Not exactly “the end of civilization as we know it,” now is it?

Given that we’ve yet to witness any severe disruptions from cyber-terrorism, I’ve determined that one of three scenarios must be true:

1.  The government is lying to us about the volume of the threat.  In this scenario, rather than constant attacks, the attacks are few and far between.  Few enough that they can be easily noticed and stopped.

2.  The government is lying to us about the potential consequences of the threat.  In this scenario, attacks may be constant, but the amount of potential damage they can do is not nearly the society-ending catastrophes painted in the media.

3.  The government is being completely honest about both the volume and potential consequences of the threat, but government agents (presumably the NSA?) are just that damn good at preventing it that the rogue individuals and the organized Chinese hacker divisions have been stopped literally 100% of the time.

So tell me, which do you think is most likely?

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The two most important words in the Declaration of Independence

Posted on July 4, 2012 by Dude Where's My Freedom?

“among these”

No, I’m not crazy, just bear with me for a moment.

We all know that modern governments are comprised almost entirely of power-hungry statists.  We know that when a new law is considered, there is zero obligation for the government to justify why it has the power to enact this law, but rather, the obligation rests entirely on the public to attempt to prove why it does not (and even then, they usually just ignore it).  When you speak to a non-libertarian about “natural law” they usually look at you as if you told them you had been abducted by aliens.

On the fourth of July, a lot of attention is paid to the Declaration of Independence, and for good reason.  It is essentially the founding document of our country.  The entire philosophy behind the American experiment can be summed up in the most famous sentence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

There are a lot of significant aspects of that sentence that are largely ignored by the government today.  Most neocons will concentrate on the “by their Creator” aspect, which is important to be sure.  But I would suggest that the most important two words are “among these.”

The use of the words “among these” rather than “and they are” or “which are” or something like that clearly states that our God-given rights are not limited to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Those aren’t our only unalienable rights, they are just a few examples of them.  This is where natural law comes into play.  The right to private property, for instance, is a natural right, despite not appearing in the declaration of independence (or explicitly in the constitution, for that matter).  At the time, the founders were obviously relying on the common sense of the American people to understand that a document listing all of your rights would be ridiculous and unnecessary.  You see this in the constitution as well, which specifically includes the ninth amendment, which states:  “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”  Unfortunately, this amendment is typically ignored by the statists in power today.  If only the founders knew what was coming, they might have taken the extra time to explicitly list every imaginable right and explicitly forbid the government from abridging them.  Although, if the second amendment is any indication, that really wouldn’t stop them at all.

To summarize:  The use of the words “among these” in the Declaration of Independence clearly indicates that the founders were making no attempt to limit the scope of natural rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” but rather were just providing examples of some of our natural rights.

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In Focus – Not Where They Hoped They’d Be – The Atlantic

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Dude Where's My Freedom?

In Focus – Not Where They Hoped They’d Be – The Atlantic.

Stories like this one always seem to rub me the wrong way.  The point is always to portray the result as somehow deeply tragic.  Look at these poor souls who devoted great time and expense into an education in one field, only to end up in a completely different field where little or no education is required at all.  To a certain extent, there is a tragedy involved.  Typically, the suggestion is that the tragedy is that the individual currently holds a service-industry job when they would prefer to have a different one.  But I disagree.  I would say the tragedy is that these people went to school at all.  That they wasted so much time and money on an education that obviously did not benefit them.

In anything even close to a free market, these types of incidents are bound to occur.  Given that the market for education in a particular field and the market for labor in a particular field are completely and totally different, there should be absolutely zero expectation of the supply and demand of a particular job matching up perfectly at any given time.  Factor in the fact that highly desirable fields of study often have little practical value in the workplace, while some of the jobs with the most practical value are incredibly difficult to learn, and outcomes like these should not surprise us in the least.

Also, there’s always a little tone of elitism in articles like this.  Something like:  “Look at this guy, he spent five years getting his PHD in Art History, and now here he is, *gasp*, working at a McDonalds with these lowly uneducated peons!!”  The simple fact of the matter is that we need service industry jobs.  The current job market would suggest that we need a hell of a lot more waiters than we need psychologists, corporate auditors, art historians, and whatever the hell a “religious studies” major is supposed to do.  The recent push in western societies for everyone to go to college is almost an indirect suggestion that we don’t need any service industry jobs at all.  How will that work exactly?

The tragedy for Marcin Lubowicki is not that he is an assistant manager at a McDonalds.  It is that had he skipped college entirely, he would probably be a district manager by now, and much better off financially.

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Evolution or Revolution? Romney isn’t either.

Posted on June 12, 2012 by Dude Where's My Freedom?

Rand Paul | Romney | The revolution can be evolutionary: An open letter to fans of Ron Paul | The Daily Caller.

This article is typical of the latest assault on Ron Paul supporters coming from neocon and GOP loyalists.  Emboldened by Rand Paul’s recent defection to the Romney camp, they are coming in for the killing blow.  Unfortunately, many Paul supporters, worn out from the months of assault, are starting to crack.  They are starting to waver.  They are starting to consider the benefits of appeasement.

“Evolution not revolution” is what Glenn Beck recently said on his radio show.  Sure, you may be disappointed you can’t get Ron Paul into the White House, but just stick with Mitt Romney and we’ll change things a little at a time.  Incrementally.  It’ll be fine.  After all, he’s right about a lot of things, isn’t he?  He’s not a Communist like Obama, right?  You don’t want another four years of Obama do you?

Let me ask the Glenn Becks of the world.  For what reason should I believe that Mitt Romney represents an “evolution” towards the principles that Ron Paul espouses.  On what issues does Romney substantially agree with Ron Paul?  It seems to me that on every major issue, Romney actually agrees with someone we had eight years ago, George W. Bush.  Did the Bush presidency “evolve” us towards greater freedom?  Did electing a neocon in 2000 (complete with a GOP dominated House and Senate) get us closer to, or farther away from the principles of Ron Paul?

Do not buy into these lies.  Romney does NOT represent a slower path towards the same ends as Ron Paul.  He represents a slower path towards the same ends as Barack Obama.  He is in favor of state run medical care.  He believes that government stimulus is necessary to keep the economy going.  He is a complete believer in Keynesianism.  The “conservative” media wants you to believe that the guy who favors an income tax of 35% (Romney) is somehow closer to Ron Paul (who favors a 0% income tax) than he is to Barack Obama (who favors a 40% income tax).

Stand up to this nonsense.  Refuse to be suckered in by the appeasement platform of libertarians in name only.  If Ron Paul doesn’t run as an independent, either vote for Gary Johnson, or write him in.  Mitt Romney is NOT on our side.

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Bloomberg’s Economic Fallacy

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Dude Where's My Freedom?

The Conservative media has been completely up in arms over Michael Bloomberg’s latest nanny state attempt to stomp on free markets and your natural right to free trade.  This proposed legislation is obviously an example of tyrannical, out of control government where the state assumes the right to micromanage your life.

But that angle has already been covered exhaustively by a large number of media outlets, so that’s not what I’m here to talk about.  I’m here to talk about a very specific defense of this proposal, made initially by Bloomberg but parroted by leftists lining up in the comments section of blogs to defend his idiotic policy.  Bloomberg has claimed “Nobody is taking away any of your rights.”  He and his supporters claim that they are not “banning” soda.  That you can still drink as much soda as you like, you just have to buy it in multiple containers.

Let me apologize in advance to those of you who actually engage in critical thinking on a regular basis because this is going to seem overwhelmingly obvious to you, but it has to be said because there are Keynesians out there who don’t know any better…

A 48oz cup of soda is NOT the same product as four 12oz cans of soda.

Got that?

Bloomberg is absolutely banning things and taking away your rights.  Specifically, he is banning large sodas, and one large soda is NOT the same product as many small sodas, and I can prove it.  Twice.

Thought experiment #1:  Imagine you have to walk across the city and you’re very thirsty.  You think you’re about thirsty enough to drink 48oz of Pepsi.  Which would you rather take with you on your walk?  One 48oz cup or four 12oz cans?  If you have any preference at all, you just proved Bloomberg is banning a product and taking away your rights.

Thought experiment #2:  Go to your local 7-11.  Fill up two 16oz cups of soda and proceed to the register.  When the clerk attempts to charge you a higher price than you expected, immediately demand that he charge you the same price as you would have paid for one 32oz soda.  If he refuses and kicks you out of his store, he just proved that Bloomberg is banning a product and taking away your rights.

The simple fact of the matter is that no bureaucrat can dictate whether products are interchangeable or not.  Only the marketplace can.  The very fact that 32 and 48 and 64oz cups even exist is proof that they are NOT interchangeable with many smaller cups of soda.  This seems like a very minor and pointless argument in the grand scheme of things, but we absolutely cannot allow such economic fallacies to go unchallenged.  That’s how society ends up with people thinking that Paul Krugman actually has something of value to say.

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If you don’t like America, why don’t you just leave?

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Dude Where's My Freedom?

Senators to Unveil the ‘Ex-Patriot Act’ to Respond to Facebook’s Saverin’s Tax ‘Scheme’

Unless you happen to be rich.  In that case, we not only don’t want you to leave, but we are going to impose draconian penalties on you if you attempt to do so.  The “why don’t you just move” argument has been used against me multiple times, usually by people who have absolutely no idea that the United States is one of the few countries that continues to tax you even if you live overseas and that the only way to escape the tax burden (and the moral culpability for the actions your taxes pay for) is to renounce your citizenship, a long, burdensome, complicated, and expensive process.

So thankfully, Congress is here to make it longer, more burdensome, more complicated, and more expensive.  Odd.  For a group of people who seemingly hate the rich so much, why are they so against them leaving?

If Congress was TRULY wanting to prevent expatriation by eliminating tax incentives, they’d lower the taxes.  But that’s not what they want.  They want to make it clear that we are their property, and that resistance is futile.

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