Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“What would be better than FOIA?
An employee of a federal agency, who was sick of constantly having her email searched for records requests, once floated the idea to me of proactive disclosure: Just redact and release everyone’s emails on a rolling basis.”
https://reason.com/2024/11/14/abolish-foia/
Popular pundit says Social Security is a bad idea while apparently understanding very little about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78pefGtjeeo
“France’s government collapsed Wednesday following a vote of no confidence in the country’s prime minister, pushing the country’s political future into chaos and exacerbating its budgetary and looming economic crises.
The successful vote means center-right Prime Minister Michel Barnier will be out of a job, and that French President Emmanuel Macron will need to find someone to replace him. That’s not expected to be an easy task: While the president nominates prime ministers in France, his picks can be ousted at any time by no confidence votes, like Barnier was. And the National Assembly, the lower house of France’s parliament, is almost evenly divided between the far right, a loosely united and contentious left wing, and centrists including Macron’s allies. Few candidates will please all three factions.
Disagreement about who should be prime minister following surprise elections this past summer led to Barnier’s rise. He was seen as a capable, if not popular, choice for the job, and won enough approval to win the prime minister’s post. But he faced a significant challenge of trying to govern without a majority. His recent attempt to push through a 2025 national budget without a vote in the lower house of parliament infuriated lawmakers on both the right and left. As a result, France’s far-right party and its left-wing alliance each put forward no-confidence motions.
Now, France is stuck. Without a prime minister, the government’s ability to pass laws is hampered. In the long term, Barnier’s removal could deepen France’s ongoing budget crisis and is a reflection of an unprecedented polarization in French politics, for which a solution seems far out of reach.”
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/389827/france-government-collapse-budget-economic-crisis-bernier-macron-le-pen
In Argentina things got worse after electing a new president, but there are signs that things are starting to turn around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bxCfN204PM
Two Billionaires’ Big Plan to Shrink Government
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTyCKGYG89M
Venezuela was almost removed from power, but he survived and then was able to sell more oil thanks to the Americans wanting more oil on the market to counter the scarcity caused by the Ukraine war.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6jdF6e0hLc
“is DOGE doomed to fail? Not if its architects take a more realistic approach to cutting government. Fundamental reform of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will require delicate, bipartisan negotiations that are already taking place within parts of Congress. Senate Democrats will not back down from filibustering a partisan GOP Social Security plan just because Musk and Ramaswamy recommended it in a report. Nor will Congress suddenly drop its longstanding opposition to eliminating entire federal departments.
Republicans need to stop overpromising and underdelivering on federal budget policy. Congressional Republicans unrealistically promise to balance the budget within a decade while not even attempting to pass any actual legislation slowing the growth of spending. Musk promises to zero out one-third of federal spending, and Ramaswamy pledges to fire three-quarters of federal employees. It’s all bluster to compensate for ultimately doing nothing.”
https://reason.com/2024/11/21/doge-can-succeed-by-scaling-back-its-ambitions/
“”Every set of extractive institutions is extractive in its own way, while all sets of inclusive institutions are inclusive in pretty much the same way. For example, ancient Rome ran on slavery; Russia on serfdom, Imperial China strictly limited domestic and foreign commerce; India depended upon hereditary castes; the Ottoman Empire relied on tax farming; Spanish colonies on indigenous labor levies; sub-Saharan Africa on slavery; the American South on slavery and later a form of racial apartheid not all that unlike South Africa’s; and the Soviet Union on collectivized labor and capital. The details of extraction differ but the institutions are organized to chiefly benefit elites.
So why don’t extractive elites encourage economic growth? After all, growth would mean more wealth for them to loot. Acemoglu and Robinson show that the institutions that produce economic growth are inevitable threats to the power of reigning elites. The “key idea” of their theory: “The fear of creative destruction is the main reason why there was no sustained increase in living standards between the Neolithic and Industrial revolutions. Technological innovation makes human societies prosperous, but also involves the replacement of the old with the new, and the destruction of the economic privileges and political power of certain people.” Thus throughout history reactionary elites naturally resisted innovation because of their accurate fear that it would produce rivals for their power.””
https://reason.com/2024/10/17/no-prosperity-without-economic-and-political-liberty/
“In fact, most federal criminal prosecutions are immigration, drug and gun cases. The largest numbers of federal inmates are in custody because they were convicted of drug, weapon and sex offenses. The story is similar in state prison systems, where roughly 90 percent of the inmates are in custody because they were convicted of a violent offense, property crime or a drug offense.
The legal system is far from flawless — and plenty of Americans sincerely believe that there are too many laws and regulations in the country — but Gorsuch’s selective and misleadingly presented case studies do not tell us anything particularly useful about it.
To be sure, there are some redeeming features of the book. Gorsuch criticizes occupational licensing requirements, the exorbitant cost of legal services in this country and the ways in which they burden working- and middle-class Americans.
But what’s left out of the book is often just as instructive — if not more so — than what’s in it. His interest in government overreach stops short when it comes to liberal causes.
In an anecdotal book about overzealous prosecutors, there are no stories about people being sent to prison because they mistakenly tried to vote when they weren’t eligible or about laws that make it illegal to give voters water while they wait in line. There are no stories about women being arrested because they had miscarriages, part of the ongoing fallout from the decision by Gorsuch and his fellow Republican appointees to overturn Roe v. Wade.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/10/15/neil-gorsuch-book-supreme-court-00183518
“An estimated 12 people die every day while waiting for a kidney transplant. At least some of those deaths are preventable, and monopoly government contractors shoulder most of the blame.
“Monopolies don’t work and
government-funded monopolies are even worse,” says Jennifer Erickson, a former Obama White House staffer who now works as a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists.”
…
” All told, more than 17,000 kidneys (as well as thousands of other organs) are going to waste each year instead of finding their way to dialysis patients who need a replacement. That’s a tremendous opportunity cost. And because there’s no competition between OPOs, if you’re unlucky enough to need an organ and you live in an area where there’s a poor-performing OPO, you might never get one.”
https://reason.com/2024/09/30/against-government-kidney-monopolies/