Thomas Sowell talking about letting politicians decide you have enough money:

Once you buy the argument that some segment of the citizenry should lose their rights, just because they are envied or resented, you are putting your own rights in jeopardy — quite aside from undermining any moral basis for respecting anybody’s rights. You are opening the floodgates to arbitrary power. And once you open the floodgates, you can’t tell the water where to go.

@Thomas Sowell

While financial reform is needed, there’s no reason to wait for it. Sarbox is already there. And even if financial reform is enacted without loopholes, there’s no reason to think it will be enforced if laws already on the books, such as Sarbox, aren’t. @Robert Reich Fraud on the Street

How we view the Depression today has much to do with how leaders chose to portray their actions then. Whether we realize it or not, we are still reacting to those portrayals more than we are to the actions themselves. What really changed was the way the world’s elite thought of themselves and their institutions. Above all, what happened in the early 1930s was a loss of trust in authority—a loss of faith that the institutions that ordered society could be counted on to provide stability and prosperity for those willing to work for it. Suffering the most damage was the great, but still relatively new and fragile Western idea that anonymous and uncoordinated exchanges among millions of strangers could be trusted to lead to good outcomes without supervision or filtering. @The Real New Deal – John V. C. Nye – The American Interest Magazine

[Harm Bandholz, an economist at Unicredit Markets] said he is concerned that so much of the economic rebound is a result of government spending rather than a revival of private income and jobs. That situation is unsustainable, he said, because the government has had to borrow massively to prop up the economy and cannot continue that binge for long. @American reliance on government at all-time high – Washington Times

The federal government’s size and scope have historically taken big leaps in reaction to war and financial crisis. It’s not unreasonable to worry that in responding to the biggest economic slump since the Great Depression while fighting two wars, we’ll find ourselves with a more expensive, more intrusive public sector and a less free and dynamic private one. @Make It Stop | Newsweek.com

City-states organize by tinkering; nation-states produce bureaucracies, empty suits, Bernankes, deficits, and the toobigtofail. Too obvious. @nntaleb

You get the politicians you deserve.  Arguing over “cutting spending” polarizes Americans because that soundbite is contentless, but elicits a strong emotional response not to a plan but about an imagined recipient (welfare abusers, etc.)  This kind of a debate is an addictive drug. @The Last Psychiatrist: Wrong About Obama II

The Western World has quietly become a civilization that undervalues men and overvalues women, where the state forcibly transfers resources from men to women creating various perverse incentives for otherwise good women to conduct great evil against men and children, and where male nature is vilified but female nature is celebrated.  This is unfair to both genders, and is a recipe for a rapid civilizational decline and displacement, the costs of which will ultimately be borne by a subsequent generation of innocent women, rather than men, as soon as 2020.  @The Futurist: The Misandry Bubble

While there seem to be a lot of legitimate problems in Britain, I’m having a hard time counting this as one of them. The author swings wildly and misses. @Weaponizing Mozart – Reason Magazine

Far from his holier-than-all image, the Dalai Lama supports such questionable causes as India’s nuclear testing, sex with prostitutes and accepting donations from a Japanese terrorist cult.  @Salon Newsreal | His material highness Also, Tibet Is No Shangri-La And the Dalai Lama is not what you think. @Foreign Policy | Tibet Is No Shangri-La