Our Thanksgiving

We had a nice Thanksgiving, and I hope you did too. Here's a brief video of some of the chatter that took place at meal time.

Thanksgiving humility

The free market, to the extent it is allowed to exist, provides us with incalculable benefits through the international division of labor. In this land of plenty, people aren't as thankful as they once were. Why? Austrian economists explain it with the principle of marginal utility. As Gary North writes,

People look at the value of what they have just received as income, and they are less impressed than they were with the previous unit of income. They focus on the immediate – "What have you done for me lately?" – rather than the aggregate level of their existing capital. They conclude, "What’s past is past; what matters most is whatever comes next." . . .

There is a major problem in thinking this way. It is the problem of saying "thank you." . . .

The problem is, we look to the present, not to the past. We look at the marginal unit – the unit of economic decision-making – and not at the aggregate that we have accumulated. We assume that whatever we already possess is well-deserved – merited, we might say – and then we focus our attention on that next, hoped-for "util" of income.

As economic actors, we should recognize that the reason why we are allocating our latest unit of income to a satisfaction that is lower on our value scale is because we already possess so much. We are awash in wealth. We are the beneficiaries of a social order based on private ownership and free exchange, a social order that has made middle-class people rich beyond the wildest dreams of kings a century and a half ago. Or, as P. J. O’Rourke has observed, "When you think of the good old days, think one word: dentistry."

ClimateGate

Scientists cheating to promote a political agenda? With governments drooling for more power and in line to expand exponentially if the global warming zealots get their way, it's easy to understand why we see data tampering, denial, and cover-up.

As the contents of a hacked climate change unit’s server in Britain were exposed on the Internet Friday, the event had some of the scientists involved scrambling to explain their emails and skeptics believing they had found a smoking gun. On the surface, the emails seem to indicate scientists modified data to fit the anthropogenic global warming theory, tried to silence dissenting opinions and reflect a concerted effort to restrict access to climate data possibly by deleting it.

The emails and documents were illegally obtained from a server at Britain’s Climate Research Unit, University of East Anglia and then posted to a Russian server. From there, the file and its contents spread like wildfire across the Internet. Inside are over 1,000 emails and dozens of documents that detail private correspondence among some of the world’s top climate scientists.

The endless reach of the state

Writes Michael Rozeff:

Capital flight is a significant method of eluding the reach of the state and its oppressive regulations and taxes. Money can go anywhere on earth. The U.S. and other states want to close down this escape hatch. If one or a few states that operate tax havens or respect financial privacy do not cooperate, then the U.S. and other states look for ways to break them down.

They've done this to Switzerland and are doing it to all other states where wealth attempts to hide. The rationale is, some people - the very rich - are evading taxes, and this isn't fair. But unless you believe in double standards, cheating a thief is perfectly ethical. The assault on tax havens means less capital will be available for investment worldwide as money literally goes underground. As Rozeff notes, this "is a victory for proto–world government."

IRS calls on Robert Kahre

Murray Rothbard described government as a criminal gang writ large. Here's one example of it.

For a background briefing on the Robert Kahre case, go here.

Man builds stair-climbing wheelchair

Li Rongbiao, 67, and his wife Wang Huifang, 65, live in a fifth floor apartment in Beijing. His wife broke her leg, and it used to take them a half-hour to get from their apartment to the ground floor. Li decided to sell his apartment for £44,000 to spend his time working on an electric wheelchair that could go up and down stairs. After a year's work, he now has a foldable wheelchair that can climb nearly 3,000 steps - the equivalent of 50 floors -- on one charge. Read the story.

When government was a lot smaller, Americans used to invent things like this. Now, our most innovative products are new ways to go into debt while shifting the liability to others.

Blood and Gore, Cap and Trade

The title refers to David Blood, a former Goldman-Sachs exec, and Al Gore, global warming alarmist, Nobel Peace price recipient, and former government employee. According to Paul Mulshine, Blood and Gore are set to make big bucks if the Senate passes the current cap and trade bill.

the British Broadcasting Corp. created quite a stir with an article headlined "What Happened to Global Warming?" In it, BBC climate correspondent Paul Hudson gave a summary of the problems facing the alarmists: "For the last 11 years, we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise."

Hudson went on to cite numerous scientists skeptical of the theory of anthropogenic global warming. But perhaps the most damning observation came from a scientist who supports the theory. Mojib Latif is a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group that set the panic off with its 1996 report on global warming. According to Hudson, Latif concedes "that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years."

Hmmm. Ten to 20 years is what I would call "the near future." Didn’t a certain former vice president of the United States win a Nobel Prize by pushing a movie that told us that the melting of the polar ice would cause sea levels to rise by up to 20 feet "in the near future?"

Perhaps Al Gore was talking about a different future, one in which he gets rich off the panic he helped create. If the Senate passes that cap-and-trade bill that’s now before it, Gore stands to make a fortune through his stake in the investment firm he set up with former Goldman-Sachs exec David Blood to deal in carbon credits.