Topic: Government

Gift Cards: When Good Products Do Bad Things

– April 2, 2021

“For now, Apple is free to keep providing gift cards as before. Which means that scammers will probably not face additional hurdles to coopting gift cards for extortion payments. As for the rest of us, that means we get to keep enjoying a hassle-free gift card experience.” ~ J.P. Koning

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Biden and the Lockdown Governors Need Canute thinking

– April 1, 2021

“No wonder the Central Planners are angry and scared. Benjamin Franklin warned, ‘They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.’ Heaven help us if we prove him right, accepting government mask mandates and personal restrictions ironically for ‘feelings of empowerment.'” ~ Jon Sanders

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The Day that Trump Panicked, and Wrecked His Presidency

– April 1, 2021

“Trump didn’t act like Trump. Positioned to be himself, and in the process scoring monumental victories of the political, economic, and statesmen variety, Trump lost his nerve. We suffer to varying degrees his inability to be true to himself last March to this very day. The problem was that Trump panicked.” ~ John Tamny

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The Time Has Come for Anti-Lockdown Amendments

– April 1, 2021

“Covid-19 exposed what governors could do in the absence of strong reforms. Without swift and deliberate action there will be another episode of drunken power grabs under the guise of a different threat in the not-too-distant future. The time is now for universal sobriety on this matter and for freedom-loving citizens across the country to rise up and say: never again.” ~ Ethan Yang

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Needed: A COVID-19 Lockdown Commission

– March 30, 2021

“America’s independent sector and civil society associations are founded on that very premise—the notion that we can do more in community than in isolation. No segment of American life is better suited to launch and lead a Covid-19 Lockdown Commission—and shine light on this mammoth policy failure—than the independent sector.” ~ Alan W. Dowd

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China Attempts to Silence Western Companies On Xinjiang

– March 28, 2021

“The attacks against Western fashion brands this week are a deliberate and orchestrated effort by the Chinese Communist Party to protect their human rights abuses in Xinjiang in response to recent Western sanctions for slavery in the region. They understand full well that this attack is a brilliant leveraging of the West’s greatest strength, a free and market-based society, against itself by forcing companies to choose between profit and survival over the rights of people they may never be able to save.” ~ Ethan Yang

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Why Is Everyone in Texas Not Dying?

– March 26, 2021

“Now we can see the failure in black, white, and full color, daily appearing on our screens courtesy of the CDC. Has that shaken the pro-lockdown pundit class? Not that much. What an amazing testament to the stubbornness of elite opinion and its bias against basic freedoms. They might all echo the words of Groucho Marx: ‘Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?'” ~ Jeffrey Tucker

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The Presidents of Paine

– March 26, 2021

“America suffers hyper-partisanship even in its courts of law. If Paine still exists on some spiritual plain, he certainly feels the pain of his adopted homeland as it struggles to revivify its founding principles and regain independence from King Woke.” ~ Robert E. Wright

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The Alphabet Soup of Recessions

– March 26, 2021

“Even if the economy is reopened, will small business be able to compete with enhanced unemployment benefits? And, what about their stack of IOUs from renters who are protected from eviction for the duration, and the decriminalization of shoplifting and the right kind of rioting? And, so, our outlook may be for an O-shaped economy; that is, an economy with an empty middle.” ~ Clifford F. Thies

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Lockdown Tyranny: A Personal Retrospective

– March 24, 2021

“Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito declared late last year, ‘The pandemic has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.’ Unfortunately, unless there is a stark ruling from the Supreme Court, shutdowns could return whenever politicians can panic enough citizens with some new threat. But in the long run, people have more to fear from politicians than from viruses.’ ~ James Bovard

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Bigger Can Be Better, When Governments Step Out of The Way!

– March 24, 2021

“If you take a hard glance at instances of big firms being accused of acting like monopolies, you will often find something similar to the Canadian telecoms case. This has an important implication for those who propose remedies to deal with ‘big firms’ (which they take to mean monopoly). Indeed, rather than placing the onus on governments to intervene to regulate these big firms, one is forced to assign blame to governments for protecting some big firms from the threat of competition.” ~ Vincent Geloso

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Common Sense

– March 24, 2021

“If we don’t get some common sense again right quick, the sort of revolution that Paine helped make possible with Common Sense might be next. Planned or not, American and global society has moved very far up the risk-reward tradeoff line, where Left, Right, and Classical Liberal think their respective goals are almost within grasp. But we might end up instead with no winners, just chaos, violence, and poverty.” ~ Robert E. Wright

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