A word from Ron Paul

On the Federal Reserve:

On Iraq:

Best Buy Calls 911 On Customer Asking For Refund B…

Best Buy calls 911 after Consumerist reader RJH asks for a refund on a nonworking Tony Bennet CD.

Sooooo RJH buys the CD and goes to his car to play it. He gets “Disk read error” three times. RJH walks back in with his three minute old album and receipt and asks for a refund.

The clerk tells him there’s state and federal laws against refunding money. Our guy calls him a fool.

Manager comes and says the guy can have a substitute disk or leave, or else the manager will have him arrested for trespassing.

Guy laughs.

Manager calls 911…

Click the link for the personal story of the person involved.

Why would they even bother with refusing? It’s not like they’d lose anything.

They were lazy people who created more problems for themselves for no reason. Where are the honest people in the world?

Source: consumerist

Prizes for prostitute-free New Year

SEOUL (Reuters) – The South Korean government is handing out gifts for office workers who promise not to visit brothels this holiday season.

“If you promise yourself to make it a healthy night out at the end of the year, and if you recommend this to others, we are giving lots of prizes,” the Ministry of Gender Equality said in an Internet posting.

The ministry is offering to pay companies whose employees pledge not to buy sex after what are typically alcohol-soaked, year-end parties.

A ministry spokesman confirmed the campaign but declined to answer questions about it.

But a ministry official told the Korea Times daily: “Korean corporate culture that includes heavy drinking is also what makes buying sex acceptable as a way for male-bonding, which is proving to be a hard-to-break ritual.”

The ministry is offering movie tickets based on the number of employees who pledge not to visit prostitutes as well as a cash prize of 1 million won ($1,077) for the company which enlists the most employees in the campaign.

Many South Koreans were bewildered by the plan, saying it was a waste of money and gave the impression that South Korean men cannot keep away from brothels.

“Do they really think men buy sex every time they have a dinner party?” wrote one Korean on a comment page of the South Korea’s largest daily Chosun Ilbo.

Why must Governments try and get in the way of Capitalism?

Del.icio.us : Capitalism

Source:  reuters

Power seller turns bad

This is the kind of garbage that gives ebay a bad name, this guy destroyed what looked like a very profitable business for a few thousand dollars.

Maine bans boozy Santa beer label

A beer distributor says Maine is being a Scrooge by barring it from selling a beer with a label depicting Santa Claus enjoying a pint of brew.

In a complaint filed in federal court, Shelton Brothers accuses the Maine Bureau of Liquor Enforcement of censorship for denying applications for labels for Santa’s Butt Winter Porter and two other beers it wants to sell in Maine.

The dispute recalls a similar squabble last year when Connecticut told Shelton Brothers it had problems with its Seriously Bad Elf ale.

The worst part of this story is not the censorship, as bad as it is, but the fact that the state specifically has to approve wine and beer labels.

The state reviews between 10,000 and 12,000 applications a year for beer and wine labels. It typically denies about a dozen a year because they contain inappropriate language or nudity, or might appeal to children, Fleming said.

“Basically, the standard we use is what are people going to see walking up and down a store aisle,” he said.

10,000 – 12,000 beer and wine labels! 12,000! This is what the states are using our money on, a bunch of stuffed shirts sitting around decided what is appropriate for people to see in a liquor store! To see if it appeals to children! How many children are handing out in a liquor store!

Santa Claus is not going to make eight year old start drinking.

Source: CNN 

‘Hitler salute’ Santas

A German chain of shops has removed miniature wooden Santa Claus figures from its shelves and destroyed them after customers complained it looked like they were giving the stiff-armed Hitler salute that is outlawed.

Josef Lange, a spokesman for the Rossmann chain that has 1,200 outlets, told Reuters on Friday the figures depicting Father Christmas with his right arm stiffly upright towards the sky and holding a sack in his left hand upset some customers.

“We were astonished by the reaction,” Lange said.

“It looks like he’s just pointing up to the sky and we were surprised that anyone saw the so-called ‘Hitler salute’ in that. But we responded and had the entire inventory removed and destroyed.”

Going a little too far to erase the sins of the past?

This source has a little more poetic take on the issue.

If Santa Claus were to move away from the North Pole to one of the more populated parts of the world, what political party would he support? His “peace on Earth” message might indicate a left-of-center stance. But what about his Big Brother (“He knows when you’ve been sleeping. He knows when you’re awake) tendencies? Sounds a lot like the Republicans in the United States these days.

Or maybe he’s a fascist? That, at least, is what a report in the Thursday issue of the tabloid Bild seems to indicate. Germans shopping for Christmas trinkets have been shocked recently to discover row upon row of Santa Clauses looking to all the world as if they are giving the Hitler salute — right arm, straight as an arrow, raised skyward. Never mind that St. Nick is carrying a bag of toys and wearing a silly red hat complete with a white pom-pom. Shoppers were sure — these Santas were Nazis.

Source: CNN

US Currency unfair to blind

A federal judge has ruled that the U.S. Treasury Department is violating the law by failing to design and issue currency that is readily distinguishable to blind and visually impaired people.

Judge James Robertson, in a ruling on a suit by the American Council of the Blind, ordered the Treasury to devise a method to tell bills apart.

The judge wrote that the current configuration of paper money violates the Rehabilitation Act’s guarantee of “meaningful access.”

“It can no longer be successfully argued that a blind person has ‘meaningful access’ to currency if she cannot accurately identify paper money without assistance,” Robertson wrote in his ruling.

He further ruled that finding a solution to the problem would not be an “undue burden” on the government and ordered the Treasury Department to begin working on a solution within 30 days.

I shall hold back from my first initial comment, which was “A coin system would solve this problem.” But I decided not too, not because coins are more durable and would have some real metal value, or because of their various size and raised surfaces could be identified without sight… but because it wasn’t really reliant.

But won’t this branch off? Can a blind person use a credit or debt card at a large retail store? Most of them are touch screen, and the telling would probably read it too them… but if the law says they need to be able to do it them self… do all these systems our economy need to change to aid a small minority?

Source: CNN 

The Last Tax-Free Christmas Online?

There can be a guilty little pleasure in buying that $350 iPod or $1,200 laptop online: avoiding the sales tax you’d have to pay at a local store.

Technically, online purchasers owe sales tax to their home states and sometimes their cities or towns at combined rates averaging nearly 7.5%. (Except if they’re from Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire or Oregon, which don’t impose sales taxes.) But the Supreme Court has ruled a state can’t constitutionally require a merchant to collect the tax unless the merchant has some physical connection to that state–say, a warehouse or a store there.

This seems reasonable, the problem being that many states miss out on taxes that they might have been getting if people went and bought their items at a local store. But that isn’t a problem the state has any control over, nor should it be anything they ever consider something that they should worry about.

Sales tax is better than the income tax, or marriage tax, or any of those silly taxes our government comes up with. But it’s still a tax, and all taxes are nothing but a burden on the free market.

Last year, Sen. Michael Enzi, R-Wyo., and Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., introduced similar bills that would require online and catalog merchants (or at least bigger ones) to collect sales taxes for any states that met standards set by the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement (SSUTA). The Enzi-Dorgan proposal stood no chance with taxophobic Republicans in control of the House.

Next year, with Democrats in charge? “The stars are lined up better,” says Harley Duncan, executive director of the Federation of Tax Administrators, which represents state tax officials.

It’s not just the change in partisan control that has raised the states’ hopes. They also believe they can make a stronger case for new collection authority now that the SSUTA, which is designed to harmonize and simplify sales tax laws, is finally operating. As of Jan. 1, 15 states will be full participants in SSUTA, meaning they’ve adopted the required changes to their own laws. State officials spent years haggling over such issues as whether bakery bagels should be considered groceries, which few states tax, or prepared food, which is widely taxed. (The conclusion: If a bakery provides a utensil with your bagel or heats it for you, it counts as prepared food.)

So not only do they want us to pay taxes on all our internet purchases, they also want any state that wants the benefits to join this all powerful taxing authority that will make laws universal taking one of the few controls that the states have left.

Soon all our laws will be controlled completely by the federal government… yippee!

Source: Forbes 

Milton Friedman 1912-2006

Milton Friedman 1912-2006

The article above brings up a solid point, a frightening realization for the incompetence of our law makers. The author, Dr. Ron Paul, is a Congressman from Texas. There are few others who would know the ignorence of congress as well as a member of it.

The majority to Congress does not know basic Economic principle, is what he claims. Which, by the current state of the union, doesn’t seem too far fetched. He also states that our schools do not prepare our children for the real world in Economics or Personal Finance.

It is a scary concept, I can’t claim to know all that I need to about Economics and Personal Finance, but I know a lot more than most people. My lack of knowledge on the subject scares me whenever I deal with money… I can not imagine what total ignorance would be like. My guess would be that this is the cause of runaway debt that haunts people in this country.

Of course, the best part from the article for me is: “The truth is that many politicians and voters essentially believe in a free lunch. They believe in a free lunch because they don’t understand basic economics, and therefore assume government can spend us into prosperity. This is the fallacy that pervades American politics today.”

And as we all know… well I shouldn’t go on.
If you wish to know more about Milton Friedman, try here to get some general information.

A return to a standard currency

Columbia fake bank note king

It isn’t a brain teaser when asked if counterfeiting effects inflation. Although 70m doesn’t seem like a lot, it effects the value of our dollar none the less.

Which is why I back a Gold Standard, more specifically a coin system which the united states had practiced until the end of the civil war. All money was minted as coin, the coins held actual value and contained real gold or silver.

This is the way to go, it insures that our money will not be counterfeited as metals have fixed weights. It will be hard to pull off, yes. But i we use technology to keep track of the value of gold and silver we can make a workable system by which there will be electronic funds backed by a set amount of Gold and Silver tucked away in local and national banks. Each day they system would change the value of goods (the amount of Gold or Silver required to buy the goods) as the market changes. This way we eliminate inflation, and prevent counterfeiting, while creating a cashless society that won’t be governed by made up “credits”.

The issue, for an electronic system to work we would have to give up a cashless society. Which I don’t like. But unless we were to fix the price of these metals (not a good idea) you could only use bulk metal for large purchases. This may give the government what it needs to spy on everyone of our transactions. “Who watches the watchers” becomes the issue.

But we leave ourselves open to a system that will derail itself if it isn’t brought under control.

t this point, this is the best I can come up with. I wish I could do better, for if we continue to print money at the rate we are going. Soon it will become just paper. Then everything collapses in it’s wake.