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April 26, 2007

Roger Bean Proves that Capitalism Does Not Exist in America

...if he is being arrested. All the rhetoric in the world about free markets, entrepreneurship, rugged individualism, and small businesses means absolutely nothing if the state will arrest you for producing without their permission. The whole vicious travesty is summed up best in the headline I'm seeing as I look into this: "Man Accused of Dental Work in Garage."

Does it get any clearer than that? It's a crime to circumvent the whole rotten official process of formal dentistry and just go provide services to people who want them. The smug chuckling you hear is from the FDA as the small threat to their privileged livelihood is forcibly removed. See the "denturistry" quote below for implicit explanation.

Speaking of forcibly removed, get this next one clear in your head as well.

Palm Beach Post: Man did dental work without license, deputies say

The appearance of the sheriff's office at Bean's home on Sunnyside Drive, just off Gun Club Road west of West Palm Beach, raised the ire of neighbors, who liked the kindly, low-cost neighborhood dentist.

One neighbor even screamed over her fence to warn Bean that agents were surrounding the house.

For that, she got a notice to appear in court on an obstruction-of-justice charge.

Copyright © 2007, The Palm Beach Post. All rights reserved.


Kindly tell the next person who claims we live in a free country to SHUT THE FUCK UP.

South Florida Sun-Sentinel: Palm Beach County man arrested for making false teeth without a license

Ask his neighbors and they'll tell you Roger Bean was the Robin Hood of dentures.

He did fittings and made false teeth for older people who couldn't afford a dentist, and didn't charge them, accepting only donations.

[...]

"There is, of course, health risks with operating this type of facility outside of your house," [Detective Don Zumpano] said.


This guy is the end result of people thinking they have the moral authority to coerce others into living how they want by substituting their judgment for ours. By whatever bankrupt process you wish to call it - representative democracy, monarchy, feudalism - They have set their standards and are going to force You to comply with them. Abandon your values, says the government, or face incarceration.

Denturistry was created to eliminate the dentist -- and a significant amount of the price -- from the denture business, investigators said. In Florida, denture work must be done by a dentist.
Must. There is no negotiation. You may think you own private property and you may think you have the right to earn a living with it, but you'd be wrong in the eyes of the state.
Zumpano said Bean's operation room was "filthy." Even so, people were driving up for service on Tuesday.
Mr. Bean's customers made their choice. They wanted inexpensive and friendly dental work and didn't care if he had a wall of fancy certifications, degrees, awards, licenses, or other costly documents that prove not a damn thing about your ability to do the work you say you can do. They went to his house and took the risk of his "filthy" garage. How dare anyone try to stop their economic exchange, no fundamentally different from me selling lemonade on the street to strangers without Official Permission.

Oh, wait.

Marc Winchester arrived with a missing front tooth. But detectives got there before him. Winchester said Bean, 60, had done denture work for him in the past, and he was showing up again after falling on Monday night.

"I'm surprised," Winchester said. "He didn't seem like the type that would get arrested."


That's because the general population has long since abandoned any rational criteria to judge who is and who isn't a criminal. All that's left is some fuzzy recollection that criminals are shifty-looking people in black clothes who walk around with crowbars and cheap pistols looking for the next quick heist.

In Florida, licensed dentists do denture fittings, said Dr. Phil Bilger, dental director of the Palm Beach County Health Department. "Denturists are not licensed in this state, so they're not held to any standard of care," Bilger said. "There's a whole issue of infection control."

Copyright © 2007, South Florida Sun-Sentinel


...an issue that is the exclusive territory of the patient and the patient's physician to cover.

And just to be absolutely fucking clear about the known facts...There's no indication anyone was injured or received shoddy dentures, said sheriff's Detective Tom Gendreau.

Bullshit from beginning to end. They can't even support their empty rationale with evidence of the real wrongdoing they allegedly wish to prevent.

Either the state should decide who can work and who can produce or it can't. This is a principle, dear reader. Once you've ceded that ground and said yes, there is no theoretical limit to what the government will attempt to control because there will always be some slimy shitbag ready to twist the alleged "limited government" justification until it loses what little meaning it had from the beginning.

If there was any justice in this rotten world, locals would be storming the police compound where he's being held and firing those cops for gross misconduct and breech of contract.

See also: A License to Live, a Permit to Make a Living and Austin Mayor Will Wynn Should Mind His Own Business.

April 19, 2007

*choke-sputter*

After discovering the limits of statism in the waning days of the Cold War, we in the West...

Reihan Salam

What?

April 16, 2007

Fuck Taxes, Flat or Progressive

[Updates below.]

...I had a thought: we could deal-once and for all-with the horrible complexities of the IRS tax system, expand the economy, generate even more revenues, if (you guessed it) we moved to a nice, simple, flat tax system-somewhere around 20 percent for the single tax rate. Blow out all the deductions, all the credits, and bid fond farewell to the labyrinth of complicated rules that no one (including the IRS) understands.

Trust me, good things will happen.

I know, I know, there's nothing perfect in life. But a nice Steve Forbes/Art Laffer flat tax system would be pretty darn close. It would sure make a great benchmark to measure and grade all the assorted half-baked tax proposals coming out of Washington.

A flat tax - think of it.

Larry Kudlow on National Review


Due to those very tax code complexities, the taxes I "owed" this year were over and above what I had withheld from my primary paycheck. That the $760 came from my parents lessens not one bit the anger and irritation I hold against this system. The specific complexity? I decided to make more money and did so in a manner that the IRS treated differently from my normal salary. This was after I tried to take advantage of the little breaks littering the tax code: interest and tuition deductions and so forth.

The end result was a "debt" of around $3,100. In an anarchist society, would I have spent my money on free market alternatives to government-provided services? Certainly and without a doubt. It's not as if that cash would be sitting somewhere unused. I can think of three major purchases right now that I'd put that towards. Beyond consumer goods, if I decided my life and property were in danger beyond my ability to protect them, I might have hired a protection agency to keep an eye on my things. If I decided someone was harming me or my property through their actions, I might have hired a firm to file a lawsuit against them. If I decided I was unable to personally examine the safety of a product I wanted to buy, I might have hired a company to test it for me. I never asked for any of these services and explicitly want many of them to cease to exist entirely: the war on drugs, state control over broadcasting, foreign occupations, the (mis)management of our finances, etc. All of the useful and legitimate things the state wants to do can be done - and done better - when people are let alone to use their property and make of their own minds.

Now, I'm in the 15% tax bracket. Mr. Kudlow, in the final analysis, wants to increase my federal income tax burden. He's embracing the Sicilian Mafia's philosophy of Pagare Tutti, Pagare Meno. Everyone pays, everyone pays less. Except, of course, those of us at or under the 20% mark.

Taxation is theft, Larry. Try thinking about that before how easy it should be for us to bow down before the state's demands on our lives.

UPDATED 7/19/2007 2:18pm
Larry Kudlow, What Unbridled Free Market Capitalism?, and earlier, Larry Kudlow Misses the Forest for the Clinton

April 14, 2007

The Seatbeltless New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine

Billy Beck plunges the knife in a location that so desperately deserves the wound.

A law enforcement official close to the investigation told The Associated Press on Thursday that the governor typically does not wear his seat belt, and that his state trooper detail had not been successful in persuading him.

Mother. Fucking. Hypocritical. Tyrants.

April 12, 2007

The "Problem" With CEO Pay

Jane Galt's attempt to explain away the relatively small practical problems with large CEO salaries totally misses the point of nearly all the criticism aimed at them.

Absolutely: people harping on multi-million dollar compensation packages don't understand the complicated financing that occurs not only when the deals are made but as the deals mature and complete

Absolutely: converting high CEO pay into some "socially useful" function would require the radical realignment of whole industries at a moment's notice

But this doesn't really matter to most of the people who bitch about business executives making 40 times the money of the regular guys working for the company. Their objection is fundamentally moral. They think it is simply wrong for someone to make that much money, regardless of what he or she does. They see big bonuses and they retch. Listen how often people describe the top pay packages as "obscene."

They see inequality as a sin.

Therefore, even if you could rebut their think tank arguments about some objective measure of a negative economic outcome, they'd still fall back on what really bothers them: the free market does not produce egalitarian results. By not confronting that complaint squarely, 90% of today's "free market" defenses are simply wasting their time by, in effect, spending their energies trying to knock down agile straw men with the damned lies of economic statistics.

April 11, 2007

The New Braunfels River Alcohol Rules Lawsuit

The AP via News8Austin: New Braunfels businesses sue over river alcohol rules

A group of New Braunfels business owners is suing the city to block rules intended to control alcohol consumption on the Guadalupe and Comal rivers.

...tick...
Their lawyer says more 10 river outfitters, beer distributors and other individuals make up the group calling itself "Stop The Ordinances Please."

...tock...
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday, seeks to stop four ordinances approved by the City Council in the past year to clamp down on rowdy tubers.

...tick...
The group is challenging rules that limit the size of coolers allowed on the rivers, prohibit alcohol consumption in some riverside parks, and ban Jell-O shots and beer bongs on the rivers.

Copyright 2007 Associated Press, All rights reserved.


That was my father reacting to this bit of news.

He has a rather large emotional investment in policing the assholes who've gradually screwed up his enjoyment of the river over the years.

It's one of those subjects - like immigration, driver's licensing, or taxes - where pretty much no matter what I say, we're going to disagree. I do, however, deeply sympathize with his feelings. There are some real morons out there trashing their surroundings with complete disregard for others and their property.

A Slow, Bitter, Resigned Burn

That's often how I feel when I read the news, watch the TV, and hear the results of opinion polls.

Here's one I discovered today:

A 2006 Gallup Poll found that 46% of Americans believe that God created humans as they are today, whereas 35% invoke evolution under God's guidance. Only 13% of respondents agreed that "human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process." These percentages have fluctuated litte in the past 25 years.

Just under half of the survey's respondents think humans just *popped* into existence at the word of gawd and haven't materially evolved since.

Now, I think that just sucks but I am willing to carve out a measure of respect for those who take a position and stick with it to the end.

When asked the True or False question, "The universe began with a huge explosion," only 35% of Americans and Russians answered True, compared to South Koreans (67%) and Japanese (63%). Similarly, 44% of Americans and Russians answered True to, "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals," well behind Japan (78%), China and the European Union (70%).

But there's a twist. When these same questions were prefaced with "according to the theory of evolution" and "according to astronomers," American respondents were more likely to answer the questions correctly (74 and 62%, respectively).


Toss in an authority figure to the question and the response rate nearly doubles. Fucking weak, guys. Flip science the bird one second and then rush to embrace it when some dude with a title is associated with it. That's disgraceful and aside from more profanity there's no other way I can describe it.

April 09, 2007

Screw Easter!

It hurt to swallow and it hurt to turn my head more than 30º off straight ahead. Joints and old bruises ached. I had to wear a hoody and flannel longjohns under three blankets to keep warm in bed...and then I'd wake up several times sweating through my collar and my socks. I couldn't clear my throat and I couldn't "pop" my ears. I probably consumed 10-14 pills of aspirin and Excedrin and at least 5 shots of NyQuil. From Friday night to about six hours ago, I was thoroughly miserable.

Wonderful weekend.