Many Star Wars Photos I'd Never Seen Before!

This is really great, a series of photos from Star Wars -- behind the scenes and so on -- that I for one had never seen before. Great fun.

Wired Magazine on Settlers and Klaus Teuber

I finally read an article from the April issue of Wired magazine, titled "Monopoly Killer". This is a very good article about the boardgame Settlers of Catan, and its creator, Klaus Teuber. It gives the history of the game, the context of the game as helping to launch a revival in board-gaming, the significant strength in this industry that the Germans have, and much more.

I especially enjoyed this article because I play Settlers with my family, having been introduced to it many years ago by my college friends. Actually, we haven't played Settlers very much lately, as we've also gotten hooked on another contemporary game, Ticket to Ride. I highly recommend both games, and perhaps I'll write about them more in the future.

NYT Article about BB&T, Allison, Rand, and Objectivism

See the really good New York Times article about BB&T bank and its chairman John Allison, and the connection with author/philosopher Ayn Rand and her philosophy, Objectivism: Give BB&T Liberty, but Not Bailouts. It talks about Mr. Allison and BB&T, but also the significant increase in interest in Rand and Atlas Shrugged in the past year. It includes criticisms as well (page 2 of the web edition), which I disagree with.

The commonplace overviews of Rand and Objectivism is included, but what was most interesting in this article was the part focusing on Allison and BB&T Bank:

He started at BB&T, once known as the Branch Banking and Trust Company, in 1971 and became chief executive in 1989, when the bank had $4.7 billion in assets.

By the time he retired as C.E.O. in December, he had overseen 60 bank and savings-institution acquisitions and turned BB&T into the 11th-largest bank in the nation, with $152 billion in assets, according to the bank.

A 60-year-old who speaks in a rapid-fire Southern accent, Mr. Allison says the current financial crisis is primarily the government's fault. He criticizes the Fed as trying to manipulate normal business cycles and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as facilitating mortgages to people who couldn't afford them.

The government's remedies have made matters only worse, he says: "Almost everything that has been done since this crisis started is going to reduce our long-term standard of living." Mr. Allison says the government forced BB&T and some other healthy banks to accept TARP money to obscure that they were simply trying to save several large banks like Citigroup.

"Everyone thinks we got some kind of subsidy," he says, noting that his company paid the money back in June, with interest. "It's going to cost us about $250 million for money we didn't want."

He suggests that government get out of the way and let businesses start making money again. An example of how to make money? Look no further than BB&T, which, he says, has a proven formula for success that centers on "an uncompromising commitment to reason."

Under Mr. Allison, new executives were handed a copy of "Atlas Shrugged." All employees get a 30-page pamphlet describing BB&T's philosophy and values: reason, independent thinking and decisions based on facts.

"Wishing something is so does not make it so," Mr. Allison says. "I guarantee that long before the rest of us knew, those geniuses at Lehman Brothers knew that something was wrong, but they evaded it."

Mr. Allison was introduced to Ms. Rand's work in college, when he read her book "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal." He describes egalitarianism as the "most destructive principle in our society" and believes that the best employees should receive the most rewards.

"It's not true that everybody is equal," he says. "A lot of business people don't want to deal with nonperformance."

Mr. Allison cites two examples in which the bank's philosophy guided its real-world decisions.

After the Supreme Court upheld the right of local governments in 2005 to condemn private property and hand it to someone else for commercial development, he says, BB&T refused to make loans to developers who obtained property that way.

He also says BB&T decided not to offer the controversial "pick a payment" mortgages that got so many of its competitors into trouble. Such loans, also known as "option A.R.M.'s" or "negative amortization loans," allow borrowers to make payments that don't even cover the interest on the loans, which causes the amount they owe to grow.

"While we did not foresee the decline in the real estate market, we knew home prices would not continue to appreciate at 15 percent per year forever," he says, adding that his bank knew that pick-a-payment loans would be trouble for many homeowners.

"We believe Rand's concept of the 'trader principle,' where life is about trading value for value, where both parties benefit from the transaction," he says.

...

Although BB&T has had problems during the financial crisis, it has outperformed its peers and remained profitable. After the government stress-tested major banks' balance sheets in May, BB&T wasn't required to raise additional capital.

"The philosophy has clearly been a competitive advantage," Mr. Allison says.

Stossel's latest on Health Care Reform

John Stossel of ABC's 20/20 covered Health Care Reform again recently... see the video on YouTube. Not much new insight or material here, but he's always provocative in his style.

On the Assault on Globovision by the Venzuela Government

There is a good series of videos at YouTube (via Cato) regarding "Globovision and Venezuela's assault on Freedom of the Press". Watch all five to learn more of the terrible acts of the Chavez regime:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5

Who Pays More Income Taxes: The Top 1% or the Bottom 95%?

I've blogged about this before, but here is some updated data from the IRS, via the Tax Foundation, on the topic: Tax Burden of Top 1% Now Exceeds That of Bottom 95%. Not only is that now true about income taxes, but it has been trending this way for some time: from 1987 to 2007, the bottom 95% share's of total income taxes has fallen from 58% to 39.4%, while the share of total income taxes paid by the top 1% has risen from 24.8% to 40.4%. What this means is that the top 1.4 million taxpayers pay a larger share of the income tax burden than all of the bottom 134 million taxpayers combined.

On the Need for a National Food and Shelter Plan

See this posting from Philosoblog, "National Food and Shelter Plan: A Proposal". This funny and clever, but there is an important argument from analogy and reductio ad absurdem provided here.

Shikha Dalmia On the Myth of Free Market Health Care in America

Shikha Dalmia at Forbes.com wrote a good opinion piece on "The Myth of Free Market Health Care in America". She notes similarities between our current system and that of France and Germany, and argues that we do not in fact have a "free market system". A truly free market system would look very different from what we have today -- too bad it isn't even being considered.

On Five Freedoms in Jeopardy

See the article from CNNMoney.com entitled "5 Freedoms You'd Lose in Health Care Reform". The author, Shawn Tully, describes these five:

1. Freedom to choose what's in your plan
2. Freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, or pay your real costs
3. Freedom to choose high-deductible coverage
4. Freedom to keep your existing plan
5. Freedom to choose your doctors

(As always, thanks to FIRM and Dr. Paul Hsieh for providing this link.)

On Healthcare Not Being a Right

Dr. Paul Hsieh has authored another good, short (two page) posting that explains that health care is not a right: The Federal Health Care Muggers. Health care is not a right, just as food, shelter, jobs, etc. are not rights. Paul states this nicely:

Rights are freedoms of action (such as the right to free speech), not automatic claims to goods or services that must be produced by another. Attempting to guarantee an alleged “right” to health care must necessarily violate actual rights.

He then proceeds to describe just how various actual rights will be violated should various health care mandates being discussed these days be put in place. While there are very good economic arguments against national health care schemes, the more fundamental objections are the moral, rights-based ones.

On Rationing vs. the Free Market

I hate it when professional philosophers and other academics, who you'd think would know better, can so muddle and obfuscate important issues by poorly defining their concepts. This happens a lot, with a recent example being an article written in the NY Times by Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, regarding the drive for universal health care in this country. See the concise and very clarifying response by Don Watkins, that clearly defines the difference between rationing and the free market, and obliterates the contradictory concept of "rationing by price". See also Paul Hsieh's posting on this at FIRM (includes link to original article by Singer, which requires NY Times login). As Paul nicely sums up at the end:

By drawing the proper distinction between free markets and rationing, Watkins shows that it is only the free market can create a morally just distribution of goods and services. Only the free market protects the rights of the producers who create those goods in the first place to trade with willing consumers on terms they find mutually acceptable.

If you still aren't convinced, let me ask you this: do you consider all pricing, of all goods, to be the same thing as "rationing" of those goods, that is, on a par with a system where government bureaucrats determined who could have what products? Consider for example children't toys. Is it unfair that you can't afford a particualr toy for your child? Is that "rationing"? Is that the same as if the government decided your family could have toy #1, but your neighbor could have toy #2? Or use any other commodity or service in this example taht you like: cars, homes, food, whatever. Is it "rationing" that you can't afford caviar or the nicest restaurant in town? Is it rationing that you can't afford a BMW? or a trip to Hawaii? or a bigger house? Clearly these are not examples of "rationing" -- there is an essential difference between you not being able to afford something you want, and the government controlling the distribution of a type of product or service and making decisions as to who can have what.

Always keep this essential distinction -- between the free-markets and rationing -- clearly in mind while considering the current debate about health care systems.

Noting the 100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About

I enjoyed this list from Wired magazine: 100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About. Some are definitely true today already, some are in process and likely to be correct, a few are more future-looking and won't literally be true for a long time (if ever). Still, a good list overall.

Hopefully Washington will Learn the Lessons from TennCare

See this good article summarizing what went horribly wrong with TennCare, the programs adopted by Tennessee in their attempt to provide universal health care for their citizens. Four key points made are (read this short article for the explanation of each):

• "Free" Care Is Expensive
• Employers Prefer "Free" Care to Private Care
• There Is a Difference Between Access To Care and Availability Of Care
• Government Control Puts More People In The Exam Room Than Just You And Your Doctor

There are many flaws in our current health care system, though opinions differ on exactly what those flaws are. Hopefully the politicians in Washington will heed the warnings from the history of TennCare -- alas, I'm not holding my breath!

Bert Ely on Incentives vs. Regulation

I always find financial consultant Bert Ely, who I met many times years ago at conferences, worthwhile to listen to. He either makes very good points or asks very insightful questions, or both. Here is a good video interview of him from The Economist magazine, on some aspects of the current financial mess, the recession, and so on, and an important highlight is his stress on the difference between incentives vs. regulation.

Sally Pipes on Canada's Health Care System

I know I've been blogging about this a bit lately, but here is another good video on the healthcare debate: another one noting flaws in the Canadian model. This is a video of part of a talk that Sally Pipes gave at a Cato event recently. She manages to pack a lot into less than eight minutes, noting several stories of the common issue of rationing services, and the stunning hypocrisy of the government leaders in Canada who make use of the "escape valve": coming to the US for services. Something to keep in mind if the US goes down a path that is patterned, in relevant respects, on the Canadian model: what will our escape valve be?

Don't Wash Those Vegetables, or the Government Will Get You!

Read this ridiculous posting for another story of government regulation's strangling business -- this time your loveable local farmer who sells veggies at a farmer's market. Apparently they aren't allowed to wash the vegetables, even if they don't label or package them in any way that indicates they have been washed. They must be sold dirty, as dirty as they came from the field. Wow.

Undercover Video Exposing Government Health Care in Canada

I've seen lots of videos and read lots of articles that criticize the government-run health-care in Canada. There are of course many who praise that system too, including of course many in our government who are urging the US to move more towards a system like Canada. So the average person can be left wondering who to believe in light of such contradictory reports.

But this video, Crowder on Canada, is one of the best I've seen on the subject. The host is a bit annoying in that he is trying so hard to be entertaining. But the value of the video comes from the "undercover" camera segments, in actual government health care facilities in Canada. Plus some of the things that the government employees, and others, have to say, is also quite damning.

I urge everyone to see this video!