The Frugal Libertarian

The city of Philadelphia is sending letters to bloggers demanding $300 for a business license.

For the past three years, Marilyn Bess has operated MS Philly Organic, a small, low-traffic blog that features occasional posts about green living, out of her Manayunk home. Between her blog and infrequent contributions to ehow.com, over the last few years she says she’s made about $50. To Bess, her website is a hobby. To the city of Philadelphia, it’s a potential moneymaker, and the city wants its cut.

In May, the city sent Bess a letter demanding that she pay $300, the price of a business privilege license.

Read the rest here.

Government schools are now taking on cyber-bulling by punishing students for actions that occur outside of school.  I am adding that to the list of reasons my children will never set foot in a government school.

Recently, a father sued on behalf of his daughter after she was suspended for a video that she posted on YouTube.  The video depicts the girl and some of her friends making lewd comments about another student.  A judge ruled in favor of the father, not because the judge believed the school overstepped their boundaries, but because the school was able to pull the video from YouTube quickly, keeping the disruption to the school “minimal”.  Since the disruption was “minimal” the school was wrong to suspend the girl.  This ruling was based on the 1969 Supreme Court Decision Tinker vs. Des Moines Independent School District which stated that “When a student’s speech interferes substantially with the school’s educational mission, a school can impose discipline.”  So, according to the court, if the video was not pulled promptly, the school would have been justified in the suspension.

Now, I am in no way defending the students behavior.  I have no patience for bullies, whether they are teenagers or agents of the state.  But, government schools should have no authority to punish a student for actions that occur outside of school.  If we allowed government schools to have this type of authority, where would we draw the line?  Nutrition, television, video games, how much time spent reading, or an infinite number of other things can substantially interfere with the school’s “educational mission”.  Are we to have agents of the government schools in our homes monitoring these things?  Unfortunately, it may be just a matter of time before that is no longer a question formed in hyperbole.  It may someday be a reality in our ever increasing nanny state.

I am happy to announce that I will now also be blogging at CopBlock.org.  Check it out!

I guess a little public outrage can make the police behave a little better.  It turns out that I was not the only one that thought a jaywalking sting was ridiculous.  It seems many of the cities’ minority groups believe that jaywalking citations are just a pretext for harassing minorities.  I would agree that they are a pretext for harassing citizens and reminding the public who is in charge (a hint: the guys with the guns and tasers are in charge. For now anyway.), but I don’t know if that harassment is aimed at minorities.  It seems to me that cops misbehavior is nondiscriminatory.

Anyway, KC police have now decided to “change the enforcement focus and have officers help guide traffic and pedestrians downtown rather than trying to catch scofflaws.”  What a novel idea,  serving the public in order to promote public safety instead of focusing on writing citations and raising revenue.   We could be on to something.

With thousands of real crimes being committed throughout the city, the Kansas City police have decided that they need to pay special attention to those pesky jaywalkers.  To catch these horrible criminals the KC Police are planning a sting operation complete with undercover cops.    Why bother fighting real crimes against persons or property when you can easily extort more revenue from  hapless citizens?

Many Americans are gearing up to celebrate our Independence Day this weekend.  People will proudly wear their patriotic paraphernalia and pay lip service to the ideals of freedom  and liberty, but if I can’t even cross the street as I choose without the risk of becoming a victim of aggression from armed representatives of the state, how can anyone possibly pretend that this is the “land of the free”.

I think I will celebrate Independence Day by putting on my favorite liberty t-shirt and giving the KC Police a great big proverbial stink palm by stepping off the curb and crossing the street as I see fit.

Who knew that doodling on a desk at school was a crime worthy of handcuffs and arrest.  This is just another reason I will do everything in my power to make sure my children never set foot in a government school.

Minimum wage laws are supposedly meant to help the poor, but the reality is that it prices young low-skilled workers out of the job market.  Basically, employers cut jobs because the wage the government is forcing them to pay is worth more than the labor the employees could provide.   People would probably cut back on how much milk they drank if the government made us pay $10.00 a gallon.  It is the same for labor.  So, I was not surprised by this article saying that unemployment among young workers has increased dramatically since 2007.

According to the Pakistani government, the drone attacks that our “peace” President has been ordering have killed 700 civilians and only 5 accused terrorist.   Read about it here and here.  Still think they hate us because of our freedom?

The tallest man-made structure ever built opened this week in Dubai. The Burj Khalifa Tower stands at a little over 2,700 feet.  This opening comes at a time when Dubai is in the midst of a serious financial crisis.  So should the construction of the tower have clued us into the coming financial collapse?  Probably, according to the Skyscraper Index created by economist Andrew Lawrence.  A paper by Mark Thronton, Skyscrapers and Business Cycle, takes an in depth look at the Skyscraper Index.  It is long but worth a good skimming.   Basically, the paper explains that the Skyscraper Index “shows a correlation between the construction of the world’s tallest building and the business cycle.”  We often see a construction boom before a financial bust, but how accurate is the Skyscraper Index?  According to Thornton, accurate enough that we should probably pay attention the next time construction starts on one of these super-skyscrapers.

The Austrian Business Cycle theory argues that artificially low interest rates, set by central banks, lead to malinvestment of capital.  Businesses will start to favor long term capital projects.  What better example of a long term capital project than a big ass skyscraper.

I am not surprised by the results of a CBS investigation that concluded that H1N1 flu cases may be overestimated.  Apparently, most people that are diagnosed with the H1N1 are not tested.  The CDC decided at the end of July that it was no longer necessary.   I doubt they did so to save resources since that never seems to be a government agency’s priority.  I think it was a purposeful move so that they could continue to fuel the hysteria even if the H1N1 flu was not as bad as they had claimed it would be.  They would hate to be stuck with all those H1N1 vaccines if the bug fizzled out.

I think the majority of people that have “flu-like” symptoms and are therefore told they have H1N1 really only have a nasty cold.  The handful of people that I know that have been told they have H1N1 or that their children have it were sick for a couple days.  The flu, the real flu, last up to two weeks, the fever usually lasting 5 days.  The last time I had the flu (the only time) I was in bed sick for 4 days and felt like crap for about 10.

What I am concerned about is the possibility that H1N1 is actually more deadly than we are being told.  If fewer people really have it than they are saying than the percentage of people that get infected and die would really be higher than is now being reported.  I need to know the real risk of becoming severely sick before I can weigh the risks/benefits of a vaccine that was rushed to the market

I doubt we will ever really know what the real numbers look like.

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