Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Here is the third and (blessedly) final installment of Dan Mitchell’s Laffer Curve videos. (Here’s the first and here’s the second.)
This one is really exciting – hey, it’s all relative – because he takes the Joint Committee on Taxation to task about how they score changes in tax rates.
Here’s Part 2 of Dan Mitchell’s series on the Laffer Curve. Part 1 is here.
We’re big fans of technology around here, but there are downsides, like having to see and hear Dan, when formerly we only had to read him.
The Washington Post had me utterly fooled with its choices in headlines for a story regarding the killing of a Hezbollah leader that had been targetted by the U.S.
The headline on the Web site has now been changed, but here’s how the email alert and Web headline first appeared.
These are perfectly ambiguous as to who killed whom, and I took them to mean that Hezbollah had killed a target of theirs, someone representing the United States.
All year in 2008, former National Journal Tech Daily editor and Beltway Blogroller Danny Glover will be cataloging all the taxes his family pays.
“How much do you really pay in taxes?” he says. “If you knew, you might get angry. You should — and I hope this blog will get you riled.”
Note the Weekly Tax Bite posts, where he tracks the tax-man’s weekly take in sales taxes, gas taxes, and so on.
Now that Tech Daily is gone, Danny will be devoting his time to AirCongress.
My Cato colleague (and sometime Center for Freedom and Prosperity doyenne) Dan Mitchell caught me coming off the elevator the other day and told me he didn’t believe my recent post about Bull’s Blood and Estonian singing.
“What, you think I made up a trip to Eger, Hungary?”
“No, I don’t believe you had a girlfriend.”
The best way I can think of to get him back is not insults in kind. It’s merely to put his presentation skills and humor on display for all the world to see. Next to Dan, the Laffer curve is actually interesting!
The crumbs laid out for me by my feeds this morning have lead me to the brewing showdown between Daily Kos and Jonah Goldberg. Goldberg’s new book Liberal Fascism is certainly provocatively titled. The cover is no less a tweak. Goldberg talks about it with “Glenn and Helen” here.
Kos’ Thomas Kalinowski proposes a Googlebomb on the title of the book, sending searchers to a criticism of it. All well and good – except that it’s not as fair as letting criticisms of the book rise on their merits. And here’s a problem: Google has taken steps to defuse the Googlebombing technique.
I also saw a Danny Glover post this morning speculating on the declining traffic of the Daily Kos blog. Interestingly, Glover saw the talk of Kos’ decline on National Review Online, a home of none other than Jonah Goldberg.
All very incestuous, and part of the rollerball-politics that doesn’t interest me terribly much. Whatever the case, Goldberg is getting a lot of pre-release awareness for his book which, Googlebomb or Googledud, defeats his opponents’ aims.
Watch the success or failure of the “Liberal Fascism” Googlebomb here.
I was amused to read in the Register about a new breach of UK citizens’ data. Apparently, a disc with data about three million driving test applicants was lost by Pearson Driving Assessments in Iowa, USA. Entertainingly, the article explains:
Most Brits, of course, have no idea where Iowa is and why should they care? But the question remains: what the bleeding nora was the Driving Standards Agency using an Iowa-based company for? Is there no British company that could do whatever it is this bunch of yank chancers was supposed to be doing?
Civil servants can’t guarantee the security of OUR data in this country, and here they are doling it out willy-nilly to shifty, untrustworthy foreigners.
Heads should roll. OUR data should stay in the UK, Its management should not be outsourced all over the planet to save a few pence.
I do my best to stay shifty, and am proud to see my labors finally recognized! More seriously, data security is difficult anywhere – it doesn’t really matter where the data is.
Not that I wanted to make it my full-time job to rip on anti-globalization types – Many are friends of mine! – but I make fun of my friends just like they do me. So here’s some more: I found ValleyWag’s “Snappy Answers to Stupid Hippies” very sustainable and community-based.
Here’s a very appealing Web video that has enough doom ‘n’ gloom to make your head explode.
It’s interesting to see the anti-everything (-trade, -globalization, -consumerism, etc.) worldview summarized so neatly. I would be very unhappy if that was my ideology. The video’s host obviously has not read (or has dismissed) Julian Simon’s The Ultimate Resource – to say nothing of Austrian economics.
There are legitimate concerns expresed in the video – with negative externalities in third world countries, for example. But, um, hiring workers in the third world is not a negative externality. And there’s no acknowledgement of how the rule of law and property rights in those countries would empower and enrich people there.
Still, this is good stuff to consider. I could do without giving or getting all that junque at Christmastime.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
