United Liberty

While spending the holiday season in my hometown of Seattle, I came across an article about an independent bookstore that is outmaneuvering the larger competition:

Verano pushes a few buttons and the device sets to work. First, the cover is printed, and then the Kyocera starts spitting the pages of the book inside the transparent chamber. Once the interiors have been printed, a glue pot, which has been heating up and churning to life as the pages have printed, lines the inside spine of the cover with a viscous brown glue, and the pages get pressed into place. A whirring saw-blade arm sizes the book down, and the whole thing is dumped—ker-CHUNK—into a vending slot on the side of the machine. Besides the generic cover (just the title, author’s name, and the name of the bookstore, in aqua blue), the finished copy of the book is virtually indistinguishable from any other paperback in the bookstore. It’s still warm, and it smells of ink. Total time, from inception to completion: 15 minutes. Like all the other public-domain Google Books, the cover price is $8. The store is working on creating a widget for its website in the next few weeks that will enable customers to browse and order books. There will also be a dedicated computer for that purpose available to customers in the bookstore.

Printing out-of-print books is pretty neat, and so is the fact that the bookstore now has almost-immediate access to 800,000 contemporary print-on-demand titles (likeThe Tooth Fairy and A Frolic of His Own) that would normally take four to six weeks for a brick-and-mortar bookstore to acquire (the EBM exponentially increases Third Place’s stock from 200,000 titles to millions), but it’s not the device’s major selling point.

Yes, because Bernanke is just doing such a great job right now. Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul speak alot of sense in this clip from National Public Radio. Remember: centralized power never lets go of itself.

[Editor’s note] We had to remove the NPR embed. For some reason it’s not working. You can listen to the story on Bernanke here.

Al Gore stands to profit from global warming and taxpayer dollars:

Last year Mr Gore’s venture capital firm loaned a small California firm $75m to develop energy-saving technology.

The company, Silver Spring Networks, produces hardware and software to make the electricity grid more efficient.

The deal appeared to pay off in a big way last week, when the Energy Department announced $3.4 billion in smart grid grants, the New York Times reports. Of the total, more than $560 million went to utilities with which Silver Spring has contracts.

The move means that venture capital company Kleiner Perkins and its partners, including Mr Gore, could recoup their investment many times over in coming years.
[…]
“Do you think there is something wrong with being active in business in this country?” Mr. Gore said. “I am proud of it. I am proud of it.”

There is nothing wrong with being active in business and engaging in market competition without government influence or taxpayer dollars. What Al Gore is doing is called rent-seeking and corporatism. He isn’t earning his money fairly because he stands to benefit from climate change legislation and government grants.

Of course, Gore doesn’t believe in a free market, so he sees nothing wrong with getting rich off taxpayers.

That is the question asked by Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight. Besides noting the obvious anti-tax and anti-big government rhetoric, Silver notes a few subtle shifts in policy:

— Republican insiders are increasingly uncertain about whether gay marriage, which was such an important issue for the party over 2000-2004, is any longer a winning issue at all for them. Reaction to the Iowa Supreme Court decision was surprisingly muted in conservative circles. Meanwhile, at least one prominent Republican presidential candidate, Utah’s John Huntsman, has come out in favor of civil unions (although not gay marriage itself).

Steve Coll at the New Yorker argues that there is an irreplaceable good that is provided by newspaper journalism, and that that good is mostly an accident of history:

Tonight as I write this, given that I don’t possess a television and find live-streaming an often frustrating experience on my lap-top computer, I chose to read a prepared text of President Obama’s first State of the Union address rather than listen to it live. Reading such a text can reveal more in some ways, as one isn’t influenced by the mellifluous tones of a well-polished politician’s voice.

As the WSJ recently pointed out, the Federal Government has essentially created a new reality television show that could well be named “Survior: Manhattan”. Unfortunately the drama is denominated in the billions, if not trillions of dollars, and the question of who is going to get booted off the island of private ownership (Manhattan) to the relm of the collective (DC) is one that is significantly exacerbating the crisis.

Not because I believe in bigger government, I don’t. -Obama

 

Many of you watched Obama make his first address to Congress tonight. His speech was concentrated nearly entirely on the economy. He started out by talking about the pitiful state of our economy, and how it is affecting everyone either directly or indirectly. He reiterated the point that America will prevail and recover. I don’t doubt that we will prevail and recover, but not because of Keynesian economic policies that the Democratic Party and Neocons are implementing. Not because of the spending, bailing out, and intervention of the Federal Government.