End the War on Freedom

Ron Paul's Texas Straight Talk - Economic Woes and the Federal Reserve: a good summary of how the federal reserve is repsonsible for America's current financial slowdown.

Walter Williams at Capitalism Magazine - Campaign Finance Reform: Wrong Target - was going to write something to day about campaign finance reform, but Mr. Williams did it for me. The way to cure the campaign finance "problem" overnight is to reduce the federal budget by a factor of 100. The current $2+ trillion federal budget amounts to almost $4 billion per legislator. Cut this to $40 million, and there will no longer be much reason to bribe these guys. [zero]

Using Congress is one way to restrict competition. Using mob violence a la Al Capone is another. But why use violence and risk imprisonment or death when the same result can be obtained with campaign contributions? For example, if Archer Daniels Midland's CEO Dwayne Andreas used goons and violence to stop people from buying sugar from Caribbean producers so he could sell more corn syrup, he'd wind up in jail. If he makes big campaign contributions, he gets the same result, without risking imprisonment. Congress just enacts quotas and tariffs.

Rent-seeking is inefficient. Import restraints on Japanese cars during the 1980s cost American car buyers about $4.3 billion. That's about $160,000 per year for each job saved in Detroit. It would have been cheaper to allow the imports and have Congress give each laid-off auto worker $60,000 a year so they could buy a vacation residence in Florida. But to have such an open and above-board wealth transfer would have been politically impossible.

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I say: Forget about campaign finance reform. If Congress did only what it's constitutionally authorized to do, influence-peddling would be a non-issue because Congress wouldn't have the power to grant favors. It might also help if we had a law that read: Whatever Congress does for one American it must do for all Americans. If Congress pays one American not to raise pigs, every American not raising pigs should also receive payments.

Philip Delves Broughton at The Telegraph - Hillary Clinton's rent for office suite goes through the roof - Queen Hitlary is renting the most expensive office space in Senate history. £343,000 per year. According to ConvertIt.com's Currency Converter, this is $489,984 dollars per year. $40,832 per month. Sheesh.[grabbe]

Declan McCullagh at Wired - A Thorn in Hollywood's Side - A good article about Dave Touretzky. He researches rat brains for work, and fights for free speech for fun. I've pointed recently to his DeCSS Gallery and Scientology Secrets page. Dr. Touretzky, I salute you. [wired]

That sounds a lot like libertarianese, and Touretzky said that like many other coders, he is one: "I'm a libertarian with a small L. The big-L Libertarians are anarchist loons. But the little-L libertarians -- it strikes me that most computer people fit in that category. "Everyone who voted for the DMCA should be publicly flogged," Touretzky added."

Microsoft White Paper - Building the User-centric Experience; Microsoft HailStorm - A good overview of Microsoft's vision of Internet III. SOAP over HTTP with a bunch of services targeted towards individuals. It appears that they plan to keep it open, but it's hard to say how open from this paper. They'll make their money on subscription fees for the services they provide. They intend to protect user privacy. They also intend to collect lots of personal information. They plan to ship a developer beta in late 2001 with the full release in 2002. [script]

Finally, Microsoft will not mine, target, sell or publish any HailStorm user data without explicit user consent. Every interaction with a user’s data will always be an affirmative consent opt-in model: personal information can be released only with the explicit authorization of the user who owns that data.

To avoid conflict of interest or perceived conflict of interest around user privacy and ownership of data, there will be no advertising in HailStorm.

Andrew Orlowski at The Register - Pay-to-Play: Microsoft erects .NET tollgate: Hailstorm may be nifty for people other than Microsoft, but they're doing it to make money. Did you expect anything else? They're opening up use of their services to non-Microsoft client software, but will get the money in service use fees. [tomalak]

Hailstorm specs define a namespace for the basics - including contacts, document storage, location and notifications - with the notifications being the element that's obliged to pass through Microsoft's own servers. Doesn't that mean your business communications are reliant on the uptime and availability of Microsoft's servers?

Oh yes it does, and Microsoft saw this one coming...

Will Cate started a discussion about Radio Userland. I responded with some clues about my plans and research to date.

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