The supporters of socialized healthcare dream that everything will remain the same, except that someone else will pay the bill. But man changes by degree as liberty is lost.
It’s political session, and I know this because my own neighborhood is festooned with political signs that say things like:
Joe
STEVENS
District Attorney
Mark
MAYBERRY
Family Judge
And so on, but they do not just say this once. If you are fan of STEVENS or MAYBERRY you apparently see the need to post not just one or two sign but ten or twenty of them on your property, creating negative externalities for all to see.
Nevada Federal Credit Union has no use for depositor money. “The depressed economy has dried up lending opportunities that Nevada Federal normally has,” credit union CEO Brad Beal told the Las Vegas Review Journal.
Nevada Federal members who only have CDs with the credit union will not be paid any interest. Those that do have other accounts, their CD rate for 12 months is .30%.
With little fanfare, Beijing airport opened an additional new terminal last week. The terminal’s 2-mile long concourse is divided into three sections and connected by a shuttle train. The addition will boost capacity at the airport to 82 million compared with the 52 million who used the airport last year.
[This article originally appeared in Liberty Watch.]
It probably comes from being at middle age. A person starts wondering about things like: What’s life all about? Why are we here? What is happiness? How do we achieve satisfaction? (You know, what Mick Jagger couldn’t get.) Thankfully, there are people out there studying the brain to see what provides us humans with that elusive concept of satisfaction.
“It is a perverse consequence of our fortunate condition that the question of our happiness, or lack of it, presses unhappily hard on us,” writes John Lanchester in the New Yorker. Many people in the world are better off, but no one seems to be happier. Modern humans are “stuck on a ‘hedonic treadmill’: their expectations rise at the same pace as their incomes,” according to Lanchester, “and the happiness they seek remains constantly just out of reach.”
What happens on the Las Vegas Strip drives the rest of Las Vegas. Not a catchy ad line, just a fact. The hopes and dreams of hundreds, if not thousands of small and not-so-small businesses rest on whether the titans of the casino industry invest wisely, attracting millions of people to town so they may leave billions of dollars behind.
Eric Coffin captured the overall bear market funk that permeated this year’s Hard Asset Investment Conference in Las Vegas when he opened his presentation with, “This market stinks. No really, it stinks.” Coffin, co-proprietor of the Hard Rock Analyst, didn’t have many stock picks, so he suggested that attendees “drink heavily” and “don’t get out of your comfort zone.”
A punk economy is doing what legislators around the country could never do: shrink state and local governments. California Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared a fiscal emergency because his state is $40 billion in the red and may actually be completely busted by February. He even “ordered state officials to prepare to furlough and lay off employees to cut costs,” according to Reuters, which would make the Golden State’s 8.4 percent unemployment rate still worse.
