In at least one area, the US economic expansion has left a trail of destruction in its wake: on it are members of the profession that pretends to forecast future economic conditions. Gene Epstein of Barron’s, speaking at a Mises Institute conference, cited as an example the famous Wall Street Journal survey of economists, published on a regular basis. It represents ten years of solid failure.
The Republican Congress, fearful of taking on a Democratic president who plays the class-warfare card, again has failed tens of millions of small American businesses and families: The death tax lives. And tens of thousands of small businesses are at risk as long as it survives.
The Virginia legislature has been toying with the idea of curbing or even abolishing sales taxes. The idea comes in response to merchants who fear that they are losing because of the availability of untaxed goods purchased over the web. Whether big changes in the tax code happen this year or five years from now, clearly the battle over net taxation has just begun.
E.O. Wilson of Harvard University is among the world’s most esteemed biologists. An authority on ants, he has won two Pulitzer Prizes and coined the term “sociobiology,” outraging his peers by suggesting that human behavior has some relation to human nature. Sadly, these triumphs seem to have inspired him to lay down the law on everything—a trend that culminated about a year ago in his book Consilience, which purports to unify all branches of science, religion, ethics, and art into a recipe for human happiness.
When one thinks of “death by government,” either those killed by armed members of the state or the millions who have perished in the vast gulags and prisons run by governmental agents usually come to mind. However, government has demonstrated far more creativity in eliminating people than just by shooting or starving them to death. It also has successfully drowned them while destroying property to the tune of billions of dollars. Here are a couple of horror stories.
The technology is Now Available that would allow your grocery store to track the movements of customers across the store using the distinct infrared signature of each individual. By linking the data with information at the checkout counter, the purchasing habits and meanderings of each person could be analyzed.
