Afterburner with Bill Whittle - Into the Sea

"This Is Not How a Free Society Treats People"

There's a great guest post over at Zero Hedge by Simon Black . He is commenting on the proposal by Chuckie (don't get between me and that camera if you know what's good for you) Schumer to impose a punitive exit tax on Americans, natural born or naturalized, who renounce their citizenship. he was prompted to do this after hearing the news that Brazilian-born, naturalized US citizen and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin had opted to renounce his US citizenship and that doing so might save him $65 million in capital gains taxes when Facebook completes its IPO. From the post:

But no. Saverin left behind a lot of value and decided to move on to greener pastures in Singapore. Now the do-gooders in Congress are cooking up new legislation (the EX-PATRIOT Act) designed to permanently bar ‘renunciants’ like Saverin from re-entering the United States.

It’s interesting that, rather than change their ways of doing business and introducing legislation that provides incentives for productive people to come here and stay here, they maintain policies that chase people away, and introduce new ones to lock the door after they’re gone.

The lesson here (especially for natural-born citizens) is this: simply by accident of birth, you are born with a lifelong obligation that you never signed up for to finance the corrupt misdealings of the political class. And if you choose to abandon this obligation, they will bar you from ever entering your homeland again.

Regardless of what the propaganda says, this is not how a free society treats people. It might look and feel like a representative democracy on the surface, but under the hood it’s the modern day equivalent of feudal serfdom.

Last year 1,800 American citizens opted to do the same thing as Eduardo Saverin. They did the analysis and decided that the burdens imposed by their citizenship outweighed the benefits. IRS overreach in requiring foreign banks to report on accounts held by US citizens are just making it hard for Americans to open bank accounts where they may be living overseas and the US is the only country on the planet that taxes its citizens on their income earned outside the country. 

Eduardo Saverin made a completely rational decision and he should not be vilified or punished for it.

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Firewall with Bill Whittle - How Did America Become a "Beta Nation?"

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Should You Need a Government License to Make an Honest Living?

It seems like in too many cases the answer has become yes. As the following Institute for Justice video will make clear there are far too many occupations that impose licensing requirements that really have nothing to do with public health and safety and everything to do with protecting the turf of incumbents. The video relates how in 1950 only 1 in 20 workers needed a license for any particular occupation. Now it's 1 in 3. The Institute looked at 102 low to mid-level occupations to see what barriers were thrown in front of people who might desire to make a living in those occupations.

In my state, Arizona, for example, to be able to cut and style hair it is necessary to get a license that requires 1,500 hours of instruction. Not usually one to look to federal government requirements as an example, the Federal Aviation Administration actually seems to have the right balance. To qualify for an Airline Transport Pilot's license, an ATP, the requirement is for a total minimum flight time of 1,500 hours. However, unlike the requirement of 1,500 hours to wield a pair of scissors and possibly do a bad haircut, the actual minimum legal requirement for instruction is roughly 55 to 75 hours spent with an instructor, depending on how you interpret Part 61 of the Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR). The rest is minimum logged time in various buckets; total flight time, cross country, night, instrument, etc. Most of the time is individual practice. You move on to various license levels by FAA check rides your instructor signs you off for when you are ready.

To require so much instruction time to cut hair and so little to gain a license to fly an airlplane that is potentially carrying  hundreds of people is ridiculous on its face. 

Now, with that in mind, here is the video.

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The Train Set - Bill Whittle's Afterburner

An interersting piece on the "love of theory" and what evils it can lead to:



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Video: "If I wanted America to Fail"

Yup. This is how I'd do it too.




(Via Instapundit)
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Is Your State Tax Withholding Actually Going to the State?

Maybe not.

Across the United States more than 2,700 companies are collecting state income taxes from hundreds of thousands of workers – and are keeping the money with the states’ approval, says an eye-opening report published on Thursday.

The report from Good Jobs First, a nonprofit taxpayer watchdog organization funded by Ford, Surdna and other major foundations, identifies 16 states that let companies divert some or all of the state income taxes deducted from workers’ paychecks. None of the states requires notifying the workers, whose withholdings are treated as taxes they paid.

This bribing companies to stay in or relocate to a particular state is galling enough but to use what employees believe are taxes they pay to the state to fund these bribes is immoral. No wonder state governments are always crying poverty and asking us to pay even more.

Read the whole thing.

The Diplomad Has Returned

The Diplomad is, was, a dormant blog that I used to read about 6-7 years ago. Well, it’s back. The author is a now-retired US Foreign Service officer whose last post was Indonesia and who was there at the time of the 2004 earthquake/tsunami off the coast of Sumatra. He is a very incisive writer with not a lot good to say about our current foreign policy, liberal elites, NGOs the UN, etc. I’ll be adding him to my blogroll under the Daily Blog Patrol section. Just for an example of his take-no-prisoners style, read this post from Friday. A sample:

^{I had the misfortune recently of visiting a major university campus. I parked in the faculty lot. My Corvette was the lone representative of American vehicular manufacturing in that lot. I was awash in a tide of cars made in Germany, Japan, and Korea, or by their factories in the US, Mexico, and Canada. That Corvette with its NRA sticker stood out as it was surrounded Alamo-style by these foreign invaders and their Obama and their Co-Exist stickers. Don't get me wrong. I am all for consumers having options, and Americans should have the option to buy foreign cars. I was struck, however, talking to faculty and students by their defense of the Obama bail-out of the car industry and their ostensible support for unionized labor. They could not see the clash between how they spend their own money and how they force taxpayers to spend ours. For whatever reasons, these "highly educated" faculty and students buy cars made overseas or by non-union labor in the US, but insist that the taxpayers subsidize the UAW, which to a large extend caused the near collapse of GM and Chrysler.}

You should read the whole thing, of course.

 

Slowly, Slowly – Bill Whittle

Everyone is familiar with the boiling frog metaphor. A frog tossed into a pot of boiling water will jump out but if you put it in a pot of cold water and turn  on the heat it will die before it realizes it is in trouble. In the video below, Bill Whittle explains how our freedom is gradually disappearing, slowly, slowly in the same way.

 

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Technorati Tags: Bill Whittle,Freedom,Politics

The Sarah Inside the Liberals' Heads

Behold, the mighty Iowahawk. A sample:

Knockity knock!

 

Oh hi there! I was out shooting caribou on the Arctic Cat and saw your synapse lights on, and so I said to myself, "now, gosh darn it, Sarah, you've been living inside this nice person's cerebral cortex for, what is it, almost two years now? By golly, it's about time you dropped in at their frontal lobe with a plate of your famous homemade Alaska welcome wagon cookies and introduced yourself." So anyhoo, I sure hope you like 'em. Don't want to give out a family recipe, but the secret ingredient is baby seal. I clubbed 'em fresh this morning!

 

Oh my goodness... you look kind of confused. I get that a lot! You were probably thinking, "hey, I only wanted to move next door to Sarah Palin -- now what in the goshdarned heck is she doing inside my brain?" Well ya see, the deal is I'm not Sarah, but boy I gotta tell ya, we sure do get mistaken all the time! No, I'm just a plain ol' homunculus Sarah Palin that your own id created to sublimate your deep-seated psychosexual neuroses. Or so those egghead books say, anyway. But if you ask me that sure sounds like a lot of elite Anti-America liberal professor gobbledegook! By the way, your id says hi.

Read the whole thing.

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Bill Whittle and the Merchants of Despair

Constrained vs Unconstrained Government - Bill Whittle

Bill Whittle's latest Firewall video is up an is a informative as usual:

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One More Reason to Avoid Meetings; They Make You Stupid

I've often felt like I've left meetings with fewer IQ points than when I went into them.  Apparently I'm not imagining it.
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Steyn - Brokest Nation in History Fusses About Sex

Mark Steyn has an op-ed over at Investors Business Daily that asks the question; why are we having a debate about birth control when we have much bigger problems (try runaway debt growth) than whether people should be paying for their own birth control or whether their employers should be made to pay for it for them?

The received wisdom among media cynics is that Obama has engaged in an ingenious bit of misdirection by seizing on a pop-culture caricature of Republicans and inviting them to live up to it: Those uptight squares with the hang-ups about fornication have decided to force you to lead the same cheerless sex lives as them.

I notice that in their coverage NPR and the evening news shows generally refer to the controversy as being about "contraception," discreetly avoiding mention of sterilization and pharmacological abortion, as if the GOP have finally jumped the shark in order to prevent you jumping anything at all.

It may well be that the Democrats succeed in establishing this narrative. But anyone who falls for it is a sap. In fact, these two issues — the Obama condoms-for-clunkers giveaway and a debt-to-GDP ratio of 900% by 2075 — are not unconnected. 

Misdirection is exactly what it is and if you buy the nonsense that the Republicans are trying to ban birth control then yes, you are a sap. As Steyn points out, Glenn Reynolds has distilled the misdirection technique down perfectly:

 "It's as if we passed a law requiring mosques to sell bacon and then, when people objected, responded by saying 'What's wrong with bacon? You're trying to ban bacon!!!!'"

Indeed, as the man himself would say.  Read the whole thing (both).

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Why Being a Conservative Sucks, According to Bill Whittle

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