Free Speech

I know I said I didn't have time for the blog but I am going to try to make it work because I do enjoy writing blog posts.

Today's post is on free speech.    Free Speech gets talked about a great deal but it always amazes me how many people really don't understand what it truely means.   And more to the point how often people confuse it with the 1st amendment here in the United States.

The 1st amendment says that "The government shall make no law" regarding free speech, meaning you cannot be oppressed or arrested for speaking against the government.   Yet I have see situations where people feel their free speech is supressed and mention free speech.

It's simply amazing how many people clearly don't know anything about the 1st amendment.  What makes it worse is that the people who don't really seem to know anything about it are people that are my age.

What these people who feel they are getting their speech supressed really are talking about is Free Speech.   And even then they get it wrong.

Free Speech means you have the right to say what you wish to say, it doesn't mean there can't or won't be consequences for said speech.   This is unrealistic and this is never how free speech has worked.

You cannot, for example yell "Fire" in a crowded movie theater (Not sure if it's the same rule for yelling "Movie Theater" in a crowded fire house) and if you go up to your boss at work and call him a name, he can still fire you.

Another for instance, there was a guy about my age who was kicked of a Southwest Airlines plane because his shirt had a swear word on it.   The Southwest employee gave him the option of covering up the shirt or turning it inside out to cover it up.  He refused and he cited his right to free speech but was kicked off.

Some people mistakenly in comment sections said that this was a violation of his Free Speech.  Well no, no it was not.  He has the right to free speech, but there can be consequences for his speech.   Not to mention his shirt was a clear violation of the airlines "Contract of Carriage" rules, so regardless of those people who thought he would have a case to sue, the kid would lose in court.

People have to understand, just because you can say something, doesn't always mean you should

Good Morning/Almost Afternoon.  Here is a very interesting article from Router.

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Republicans see Obama as more imminent threat than Putin: Reuters/Ipsos poll

By Roberta Rampton

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A third of Republicans believe President Barack Obama poses an imminent threat to the United States, outranking concerns about Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

A Reuters/Ipsos online poll this month asked 2,809 Americans to rate how much of a threat a list of countries, organizations and individuals posed to the United States on a scale of 1 to 5, with one being no threat and 5 being an imminent threat.

The poll showed 34 percent of Republicans ranked Obama as an imminent threat, ahead of Putin (25 percent), who has been accused of aggression in the Ukraine, and Assad (23 percent). Western governments have alleged that Assad used chlorine gas and barrel bombs on his own citizens.

Given the level of polarization in American politics the results are not that surprising, said Barry Glassner, a sociologist and author of "The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things."

"There tends to be a lot of demonizing of the person who is in the office," Glassner said, adding that "fear mongering" by the Republican and Democratic parties would be a mainstay of the U.S. 2016 presidential campaign.

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The entire article can be found here 

What do you think about the whole situation?  Post a comment and let me know

I will be back tomorrow with new posts

Hi Everyone,

With tons of classwork to deal with and getting over a stomach bug I haven't been up to posting for about a week.

I will get back on task tomorrow as I won't be as busy and I think I will be back to full strength.

Thank you for you paitence.

- Devon

Milton Friedman Versus A Socialist

This is very old footage but very interesting and he makes some very good points about why  For those who aren't familiar with who Milton Friedman is, he was an economist and a very brilliant man. 

For more on Milton Friedman please check out his Wikipedia page here

Here is the video where Milton Friedman goes up against a socialist:

Here is an additional video where Mr. Friedman talks about the value of Free Capitalism

What do you think of these videos?  Post a comment and let me know

Reprint: Pentagon 'loses track' of U.S. weapons in Yemen: Report

With all of my schoolwork I don't have time to post an original post, so I am going to re post an interesting story I saw.  Please feel free to comment and let me know what you think.

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Pentagon 'loses track' of U.S. weapons in Yemen: Report

By Dylan Stableford Yahoo News

 

The ongoing unrest that forced the United States to close its embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, last month also has caused Pentagon officials to admit that they’ve lost track of $500 million in military equipment, including helicopters, Humvees and ammunition, that it donated to the country, The Washington Post reports.

U.S. officials told the newspaper that they fear the “small arms, ammunition, night-vision goggles, patrol boats, vehicles and other supplies” may have slipped into the hands of Iranian-backed rebels or al-Qaida:

In recent weeks, members of Congress have held closed-door meetings with U.S. military officials to press for an accounting of the arms and equipment. Pentagon officials have said that they have little information to go on and that there is little they can do at this point to prevent the weapons and gear from falling into the wrong hands.

“We have to assume it’s completely compromised and gone,” an unnamed legislative aide on Capitol Hill told The Washington Post.

According to the newspaper, this is what is presumed missing:

• 1,250,000 rounds of ammunition
• 200 Glock 9 mm pistols
• 200 M-4 rifles
• 4 Huey II helicopters
• 2 Cessna 208 transport and surveillance aircraft
• 2 coastal patrol boats
• 1 CN-235 transport and surveillance aircraft
• 4 hand-launched Raven drones
• 160 Humvees
• 250 suits of body armor
• 300 sets of night-vision goggles

A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment on the record about the newspaper’s report.

In January, Yemen’s government and its U.S.-backed president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, were toppled by the Iran-backed Shiite Houthi rebels, who seized control of northern Yemeni military bases. In February, a military base in southern Yemen was overrun by militants linked to al-Qaida.

“Yemen is collapsing before our eyes,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned during a February briefing. “We cannot stand by and watch.”

The U.S. Department of Defense had already halted shipments of $125 million in military hardware — “including unarmed ScanEagle drones, other types of aircraft and jeeps” — scheduled for delivery to Yemen this year, The Washington Post reported.

During the evacuation of the Sanaa embassy, U.S. Marines were ordered to destroy their weapons and depart the country unarmed — a move that sparked backlash among some who argued that service members are taught never to leave their weapons behind.

On Tuesday, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Joseph Dunford testified on Capitol Hill, saying the decision was backed by the U.S. Central Command as well the Department of Defense in Washington.

Minnesota Republican Rep. John Kline fired back: “It is an intolerable position for people in uniform to be in a very dangerous situation and have to trust those who put us in that situation while we turn over all weapons.”

Meanwhile, The Associated Press reported that Houthi rebels seized “more than 25 official U.S. vehicles in the wake of the hasty departure of embassy staff.”

 

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Four Reasons a Guaranteed Income Won't Work

Getting back to the topic of Universal Basic Income, Megan McArdleon Bloomberg wrote a very good article on why UBI won't work.

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Last night, I was part of a Wonkblog debate on guaranteed income. The discussion ranged widely, but I thought I’d write up a few of what I think were the most important points:

Cost: Not a few libertarians have embraced the idea as an alternative to the welfare state. Get rid of all the unemployment insurance and just cut everyone a check once a month. There’s a lot to like about this: It has minimal overhead, because you don’t need to verify eligibility beyond citizenship, and it may reduce some of the terrible incentives that poor people face under the current system.

There are a couple of problems with this, however. The first is that zeroing out our current income security system wouldn’t provide much of a basic income. Total federal spending on income security (welfare, unemployment, etc.) is under $600 billion a year. There are 235 million adults in the U.S. Millions of those are undocumented immigrants, but that still leaves you with a lot of people. Getting rid of all of our spending on welfare and so forth would be enough to give each of those people less than $3,000 a year. For a lot of poor people, that’s considerably less than what they’re getting from the government right now.

The problem is that if you try to bring it up to something a bit more generous, the cost quickly escalates. Cutting everyone a check for $1,000 a month, which most people in that room would consider too little to live on, would cost almost $3 trillion. But if you means-test it to control the cost, or try to tax most of the benefits back for people who aren’t low-income, you rapidly lose the efficiency gains and start creating some pretty powerful disincentives to work.

Reciprocity: I made the point that while many societies redistribute more than ours does -- many hunter-gatherers have practiced something close to communism -- that sharing takes place in a strong network of reciprocal obligations. This is not the reciprocity of trading, in which I give you something in exchange for something else right now, and when the trade is finished, so are our obligations to each other. The sharing environment is more like a family, in which the obligations are deep and fairly wide-ranging, but you don’t necessarily know who will collect on them or when.
The guaranteed income is often explicitly touted because it obviates the need for reciprocity; why should you have to work some crappy job just to get the basics you need to live? Or jump through hoops for some social worker? Mike Konczal made the point that bankers don’t have to pee in a cup to get paid.

I oppose drug-testing welfare recipients, because I oppose the drug war. But I think the broader argument for a guaranteed income has some really deep problems. Some are moral: How can you say that the affluent have an obligation to give a considerable portion of their income to their fellow citizens, precisely in order to free said fellow citizens from any obligation to the people who are paying their bills? Others are practical and political: Such a program would not have broad-based political support, and it would be corrosive to civic society.
I think you can make an argument that society should make it possible for those who are willing to contribute to support themselves; I would not be opposed to a system of guaranteed jobs that paid $10,000 a year, or whatever we think this basic income should be. But you cannot sustain a program that posits huge obligations on the part of one group to people who have no reciprocal obligations at all.

After the talk, naturally, someone asked me about trust-fund babies: Why do people worry about welfare recipients but not about people who live off inherited wealth? I think there are a lot of answers to that: The number of people with sufficient inherited wealth to free them from the need to work is very small, and they do not make ongoing demands on everyone else’s monthly paycheck. The broader answer is that I am bourgeois enough to think that trust funds are bad for people, and I have occasionally toyed with the idea of a 100 percent estate tax.

But one thing to point out is that the questioner was actually wrong: The person with inherited wealth usually obtained it by just the sort of nannying that Konczal decried. In order to get the trust fund, they had to submit to many hours of being harangued about their manners, habits and life choices -- and if you know anyone in line for a substantial inheritance, or have read a P.G. Wodehouse novel, you know that their elderly relatives often use the money to control the lives of their potential heirs. The reward may be wildly out of proportion to the amount of harassment they have to suffer, but in very few cases is it a free guarantee.

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You can read the entire article by clicking here but this illistrates some of the same points I made about why Universal Basic income is bad and should be universally rejected.

What do you think about the article?  Post a comment and let me know.

Real World reason $15/hour is a bad idea

I am not going to publish an article today, but I am going to post an article which can be found here about how Seattle raising the minimum wage is already causing businesses to close because the businesses won't be financially viable.  Come April 1st the minimum wage will go up to $11/hour and by 2017 it will be at $15/hour.

Those people who said it wouldn't cause job losses and wouldn't be an impact on businesses are very wrong.
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Restaurants in Seattle Going Dark as $15 an Hour Minimum Wage Looms

by
Rick Moran

Read more: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/03/14/restaurants-in-seattle-going-dark-as-15-an-hour-minimum-wage-looms/#ixzz3UOgpMzkf

I like this simple, elegant explanation from Reason’s Ronald Bailey about the value of labor and the minimum wage:

If all other factors remain equal, the higher the price of a good, the less people will demand it. That’s the law of demand, a fundamental idea in economics. And yet there is no shortage of politicians, pundits, policy wonks, and members of the public who insist that raising the price of labor will not have the effect of lessening the demand for workers. In his 2014 State of the Union Address, for example, President Barack Obama called on Congress to raise the national minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour. He argued that increasing the minimum wage would “grow the economy for everyone” by giving “businesses customers with more spending money.”

A January 2015 working paper by two economists, Robert Pollin and Jeanette Wicks-Lim at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, claims that raising the minimum wage of fast food workers to $15 per hour over a four-year transition period would not necessarily result in “shedding jobs.” The two acknowledge that the “raising the price of anything will reduce demand for that thing, all else equal.” But they believe they’ve found a way to “relax” the all-else-being-equal part, at least as far as the wages of fast food workers go. Pollin and Wicks-Lim argue that “the fast-food industry could fully absorb these wage bill increases through a combination of turnover reductions; trend increases in sales growth; and modest annual price increases over the four-year period.” They further claim that a $15/hour minimum wage would not result in lower profits or the reallocation of funds away from other operations, such as marketing. Amazing

Seattle is going to put that theory to a real world test. Starting April 1, businesses in the city will be forced to raise the minimum wage to $11 an hour, reaching $15 an hour by 2017 for large businesses and 2019 for smaller companies. There are allowances if a business offers health insurance benefits, but all businesses will be paying employees $15 an hour in salary, tips, or benefits by 2021.

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You can read the entire article by clicking here:  http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/03/14/restaurants-in-seattle-going-dark-as-15-an-hour-minimum-wage-looms/

What do you think about the whole situation.  Post a comment and let me know