"Tyler Durden" of Zero Hedge says we already got 'em!

It couldn't have happened to a nicer country. On March 18, with very little pomp and circumstance, president Obama passed the most recent stimulus act, the $17.5 billion Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act (H.R. 2487), brilliantly goalseeked by the administration's millionaire cronies to abbreviate as HIRE. As it was merely the latest in an endless stream of acts destined to expand the government payroll to infinity, nobody cared about it, or actually read it. Because if anyone had read it, the act would have been known as the Capital Controls Act, as one of the lesser, but infinitely more important provisions on page 27, known as Offset Provisions - Subtitle A—Foreign Account Tax Compliance, institutes just that. In brief, the Provision requires that foreign banks not only withhold 30% of all outgoing capital flows (likely remitting the collection promptly back to the US Treasury) but also disclose the full details of non-exempt account-holders to the US and the IRS. And should this provision be deemed illegal by a given foreign nation's domestic laws (think Switzerland), well the foreign financial institution is required to close the account. It's the law. If you thought you could move your capital to the non-sequestration safety of non-US financial institutions, sorry you lose - the law now says so. Capital Controls are now here and are now fully enforced by the law.

In the remainder of the blog, Tyler breaks down what was actually inside that "jobs" bill  (though this section is only recommended for those who speak legalese.) He also gets it right in terms of where all this is heading -- towards shifting Americans' wealth into long-term treasuries in order to fund the goverment, maybe even in the form of transforming 401ks into annuities.  

It has been said that feminism is ultimately about female empowerment, not gender equality. The subtle difference being that feminists aren't trying to stand on equal ground with men, but taking as much as power as they can to boost their public influence. Regardless, I think there's a much more central point to be made about feminism: it thrives on empowerment, not self-empowerment. Follow me to understand why this is such a big deal.

I find myself ambivalent about an issue that perhaps should concern me more than it does. The FOX-news contributor and Republican controversialist Ann Coulter was kept from speaking at the University of Ottawa by protesting leftist students. She had been warned before her trip by the university's provost, Francois Houle, that "freedom of speech is defined differently in Canada from the way it is in your country." Houle was referring to the fact that Canada and especially the province of Ontario, where Coulter would be speaking, has a complicated speech and publication code criminalizing politically incorrect language. 

Richard Spencer seems as smitten with the tall blonde lady as was the late Sam Francis. I'm afraid I can't second their affections.  

Scott Richert has a good article up at Chronicles in which he argues that the healthcare bill isn't quite the "socialism" that its supporters and detractors imagine it to be.  Depending on your preference, Obamacare will either result in an Atlas Shrugged-like nightmare in which bureaucrats will immiserate entrepreneurs and the public alike or become an efficiently-run public service that will finally cleanse greed and selfishness from the system. Both sides are wrong, says Richert: the fat cats who enriched themselves through the old system will enrich themselves through the new one. 

Though the word "historic" has been thoroughly drummed into my head by the cable news cretins, tonight's healthcare vote didn't in the least mark a turning point in American history. It was instead a last shovel of dirt on what was once a decent and free country. Or perhaps it wasn't quite the last. Some patriots might hope that this most recent outrage in Washington will finally "wake up" the American people to socialism ... but if they weren't awaken by the earlier thefts of liberty and bureaucratizations of their lives over the past century, which were comparatively more dramatic, then there seems little reason to believe that they're in a better position to awaken now. I have no doubt that basic healthcare in this country will become dreadful over the coming decade -- imperceptible at first, of course, a dumb doctor here, a waiting list there... However,  I can say that at no time in my life could a man freely contract with a physician for his services and not have this relationship mediated by countless layers of governmental-corporate paper-pushing and price-fixing. There comes a point when every traditionalist moves from searching for remnants of a moral and constitutional order to conserve and begins instead to long for the collapse of the current system.       

As my past writings on the subject can attest, I think Obamacare is a horrendous, likely ruinous, social program. I can thus summon one and half cheers for the Republican leadership, which despite having backed George W. Bush's unfunded Medicare extension but six years ago, has decided to come out strong against Obamacare, follow the Tea Partiers, and try to "kill the bill."

As a friend wrote to me in an email:

Things can always get worse no matter how much the current system sucks. We should applaud the Republicans here for not trying to reach out and do something "bipartisan." Give me spineless slimeballs over true-believing liberals.

There's truth to that ... but there is also a way in which a political opposition, even a forthright and unwavering one, can do serious intellectual damage to a cause by essentially agreeing with the premises of its adversary and not actually defining what is wrong with the other side.

The budget deficit is much worse than you've heard, says Bud Conrad of Casey Research:

Yesterday, however, I came upon a surprising measure that is as simple as it is effective in helping to understand just how extraordinary today’s deficits are. The measure calculates how big the deficit is, expressed in “constant” dollars – dollars that have the same purchasing power over time.

Using that measure, the current deficit ($1.4 trillion) is a surprising 260% of what the government deficit was in the worst years of WWII, the biggest war we as a nation have ever fought.

The comparison to WWII is relevant and important, because the effort for that war turned this country completely upside down and saw the government commandeer the levers of industry, for example auto makers and refrigerator plants, to make tanks, airplanes, bullets, and bombs. At its peak, the war effort consumed 90% of government spending.

But there’s a crucial difference between then and today: back then we knew that, in time, the war would end and the elevated government spending would be reduced. Today, however, while the cost of military is a still high 20% of federal spending, the vast majority of our government’s expenses are for non-discretionary items, such as Social Security and Medicare, that aren’t expected to be cut. In fact, they are only going to go higher from here.

It is always interesting to note how the Left describe themselves as champions of freedom when, in fact, every day they prove freedom’s worst enemy. That this is the case is perhaps less indicative of dishonesty as it is of their ideology’s incompatibility with freedom: after all, any world-improver who regards man and nature as a machine will inevitably come to regard himself as an engineer, and engineering is all about finding ways to manipulate components in order force a pre-determined outcome. For the Left, of course, those components are you and I. When people who are not of the Left attempt to do the same, the Left calls this authoritarianism, oppression, and totalitarianism.

An increasingly topical area of Leftist oppression has been their efforts to implement environmentalist policies. When scientists began speculating about climate change Leftist politicians quickly realized that the apocalyptic scenarios arising from these speculations afforded them the most politically viable arguments they had had in years for confiscating an even larger proportion of people’s earnings. Desperate for money to fund their loopy and costly programs, they wasted no time in sponsoring information campaigns and identifying whole new areas of taxation. An obvious one has been our rubbish.