A Geek With Guns

If you want to get any medicine that contains pseudoephedrine you’re in for a lot of fun. Because pseudoephedrine is used to manufacture meth and meth has been declared verboten by the state pseudoephedrine has become a controlled substance. In order to pick up even basic cold or allergy medicine you must go to the counter, present ID, get the purchase recorded, and make sure you don’t accidentally buy more than you’re allowed. Bruce Schneier, being a security minded bloke, found an article that talks about the cost of enforcing these controls:

Now, personally, I sincerely doubt that the pharmaceutical industry has reliable estimates of how many of their purchasers actually have colds–or that they would share data indicating that half of their revenues came from meth cooks. But let’s say this is accurate: half of all pseudoephedrine is sold to meth labs. That still wouldn’t mean that manufacturers of cold medicines are making “hundreds of millions of dollars a year” off of the stuff–not in the sense that they end up hundreds of millions of dollars richer. The margins on off-patent medicines are not high, and in retail, 50% or more of the cost of the product is retailer and distributor markup*. Then there’s the costs of manufacturing.

But this is sort of a side issue. What really bothers me is the way that Humphreys–and others who show up in the comments–regard the rather extraordinary cost of making PSE prescription-only as too trivial to mention.

Let’s return to those 15 million cold sufferers. Assume that on average, they want one box a year. That’s going to require a visit to the doctor. At an average copay of $20, their costs alone would be $300 million a year, but of course, the health care system is also paying a substantial amount for the doctor’s visit. The average reimbursement from private insurance is $130; for Medicare, it’s about $60. Medicaid pays less, but that’s why people on Medicaid have such a hard time finding a doctor. So average those two together, and add the copays, and you’ve got at least $1.5 billion in direct costs to obtain a simple decongestant. But that doesn’t include the hassle and possibly lost wages for the doctor’s visits. Nor the possible secondary effects of putting more demands on an already none-too-plentiful supply of primary care physicians.

$1.5 billion of additional costs just to enforce the government’s desire on prohibiting the possession and use of a specific substance. As with any government prohibition the cost is not merely financial but in the reduction of quality of life:

Of course, those wouldn’t be the real costs, because lots of people wouldn’t be able to take the time for a doctor’s visit. So they’d just be more miserable while their colds last. What’s the cost of that–in suffering, in lost productivity?

Many substances made illegal by the federal government have medicinal, or other, uses. Cannabis has been shown to help in the fight against cancer but has been declared illegal so billions of dollars have to be spent in order to research alternative methods of providing the same affects. Between the costs in enforcing the prohibition, finding alternatives, and the cost to consumers tacked on to recover the costs of researching alternatives the government has pissed away money that could have been used for far more productive uses. Instead people are forced to pay additional taxes to fund the war on drugs, which means each person has less money to use in improving their quality of life.

In the case of pseudoephedrine controls people could be forced to simply suffer symptoms that we’ve been able to mitigate for a reasonable price because the additional costs required to enforce these government controls are simply too much for most people to bear (compared to dealing with their cold symptoms). Doctors will also have less time to treat the truly sick as they’ll have their time taken up by those suffering minor ailments that need prescriptions to get medicine that was previously easy to obtain (and thus cheaper).

Let’s stop this constant attack on our quality of life by getting the government out.

Greece, or more specifically Athens, is suffering from outbursts of rioting that have resulted in wide spread destruction of property:

In Athens, about 150 stores were vandalised and looted in Sunday night’s riot, and about 45 buildings were seriously burnt, many beyond repair, according to the Athens Chamber of Commerce and Industry. It estimated the losses in the ”tens of millions” of dollars.

These riots were started, in part, because of the recently passed austerity measures that will result in the decrease of benefits and pay for government employees:

The austerity measures include:

• 15,000 public-sector job cuts
• liberalisation of labour laws
• lowering the minimum wage by 20% from 751 euros a month to 600 euros

The austerity measures were put into place in order to secure a $170 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as Greece has become insolvent. While all of this has been covered by major media outlets they have failed to explain how this situation arose. When looking back at how Greece found itself in its current situation we find a road paved in collectivism and broken promises.

Let’s begin with collectivism. Roughly 22% of those employed in Greece work for the government in some capacity. As the government employes such a high number of people austerity measures, such as those passed in Greece, that effect public employees have widespread consequences. As government produce no wealth (it exists off of taxation, which is stolen wealth) every person employed by the government is a net loss as far as the economy is concerned. To pay for these employees the government of Greece has imposed an income tax that ranges from nothing all the way up to 40%. In addition to an income tax rate that can range up to 40% there is also a value added tax (VAT) that ranges from 4.5% to 23%.

In addition to paying the vast number of government employees the high tax rate in Greece is also used to fund “free” public education, state provided healthcare, and other collectivist programs.

Greece also has some interesting labor laws [PDF] including mandated maximum 40 hour work weeks (although some exceptions can be made to exceed the 40 hour maximum) and a minimum wage of €751.39 a month (approximately $987.92 a month as of this writing).

The labor laws are most interesting in this case as they compose a list of promises made by the government of Greece. Basically the government of Greece told its people they will enjoy no more than 40 hours a week of work and will make a minimum of $987.92 each month. Now the government is reneging on its promise by slashing minimum wage by 20% (making it roughly $790.34 a month) and removing other guarantees that were made. It is also laying off 15,000 people whom were promised jobs by the government. The bottom line is the people are pissed because promises that were made to them are being broken.

Worse yet these promises were made in exchange for the tax rate the people of Greece had forced upon them. The government basically said they were going to take up to 40% of each person’s income and even more money through the VAT tax to pay for the promises being made. These austerity measures void many of those promises without also reducing the tax rate. Denizens of Greece are getting less for the same price and they’re unhappy about it (rightfully so).

Unfortunately this is an outcome that can’t be avoided when the government is expected to provide services. As governments pay for everything using money stolen through taxation there is no wealth generated nor can the market provide feedback on whether or not the desired services are being provided and if they are being provided efficiently. When people expect governments to provide even more services they often fail to realize that money for those services must come from somewhere and that somewhere is the pockets of the people. Since government have no market feedback that tells them if they’re providing services efficiently the cost for those government provided services is always higher than comparable privately provided services. By having the government provide a service you’re actually costing yourself money.

But the perfect storm comes when the government is unable to continue providing its services. This happens when they not only run out of money, but also run out of people to buy up their ever increasing debet. At that point a decision has to be made; either increase taxes or cut services. When you’re taxing people absurd amounts already increasing taxes even more is not going to be received well. If you don’t increase taxes and are forced to cut services it is not going to be received well. Basically a catch-22 exists and will only lead to hardship and anger and that anger usually manifests itself into protests and sometimes rioting.

What Greece is experiencing is unavoidable when collectivists get their way.

This week on Politics: The Reality Television Show for Suckers, Obama puts forth a new tax plan that he claims will increase government revenue by $1.5 trillion:

US President Barack Obama has proposed to raise taxes on the wealthy in his 2013 budget, prompting an election year spending showdown with Republicans.

The proposal includes $1.5 trillion (£950bn) in new taxes, much from allowing Bush-era tax cuts to expire.

Who will win this entirely pointless debate that completely misses the point that the government is simply spending too much money? Could Obama and the Democrats pull off a tax increase that will fail to raise enough money to effect the deficit in any notable way or will the Republicans shut down the attempted tax increase that is ultimately without consequence? Join us all week on Days of Our Lives Politics as the debate rages on!

While we don’t know who will claim victory, we do know nothing of value will be accomplished!

Through Uncle I learned that Mayor Bloomberg is putting up some major money and buying an advertisement during the Super Bowl to promote his gun bigotry:

He also announced that he and his Boston counterpart, Mayor Thomas Menino, would appear in an anti-illegal gun commercial during the championship game, joining the race for Super Bowl ad space.

The spot shows the two leaders of Mayors Against Illegal guns in an animated discussion and clad in their team jerseys on a couch in front of a television.

Bowls of chips and popcorn along with a football lie on a glass table before them.

The 30-second spot will run regionally because of restrictions against issue-oriented ads on the national broadcast. The Mayor’s Against Illegal guns, which counts Bloomberg among its private donors, funded the clip.

The biggest problem with anti-gunners is that they only know how to do one thing: throw money at something until it goes away. Members of the Brady Campaign, Violence Policy Center, and Mayors Against Illegal Guns have no facts to backup their cause so they simply hope they can spend enough money to make guns go away. Luckily for use throwing money at something never actually makes it go away.

Sua Eccellenza Barack Obama, Capo del Governo, Duce del Fascismo e Fondatore dell’Impero has some very powerful abilities. He can just mention a company during his State of the Union address causing them to instantly go bankrupt:

Andrew Restuccia of The Hill is reporting that Ener1, a battery company that President Obama referenced in his State of The Union Speech on Tuesday as an example of successful energy investments, has just filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.

That’s just two days after the speech.

I believe it’s obvious for all to see that Obama’s words are the touch of death for any company. First Solyndra and now Ener1, I wonder what that next company Obama will point to as a successful investment only to see it go into bankruptcy shortly afterwards. Does this power extent to government agencies? If so I have a list of government agencies for Obama to mention.

I run this website on commodity hardware sitting in my apartment. Needless to say my costs are negligible and consiste of the server, electricity, and an Internet connection. A larger entity that has mission critical servers running twenty-four hours a day, like Amazon, is going to sink a much larger chunk of change into their infrastructure (at least I hope so). Of course Amazon will establish exact lists of needed upgrades and expansion before going forth because they have to maintain profits. What happens when the Internal Revenue Service (Revenuers) decided to upgrade their site? They claim to need $320 million but submit no actual plan:

IRS’ current $320 million investment for its website includes new, more secure portals so that taxpayers can access more information. The new website is expected to go online in 2013.

However, the IRS needs to be more strategic about exactly what online customer services it intends to improve, and what it hopes to achieve, the GAO said.

“IRS does not have concrete plans that define what additional online services the new website will ultimately provide and how much the services will cost,” the report said. “To their credit, IRS officials have begun developing a roadmap that identifies some online services they would like to provide, and IRS has periodically added new online services in the past. However, the roadmap omits several fundamental elements.“

I guess it costs a lot of money to upgrade a website that exists only to assist in the act of theft from the entire United States populace. It would be nice if we knew exactly why it costs that much money though but the Revenuers must have decided we don’t need to know that. If government agencies had to run like private businesses they would be putting for very detailed plans consisting of exact costs and explain how those costs will provide long-term benefits that exceed those initial costs. Instead the government has a blank check and never has to justify any expenditure. Needing more money isn’t a problem for them because they can simply steal more form the populace in the form of tax increases.

I have a simple demand: if government officials are going to demand that everybody pay their “fair share” of taxes then the government must put forth detailed spending reports that account for every dollar that goes out along with justification for those costs.

For those who want to read the Government Accountability Office’s (you have to love how the government gets to determine its own accountability using its own office) report it can be found here [PDF].

The United States gives a lot of money to foreign countries in the form of aid. Truthfully this aid is usually a cheap way of buying off allies in other countries. If you don’t believe me then you should read this:

A new bill approved by Congress last week would again make the Defense Department the premier funder of security assistance to foreign countries, giving it more than double the comparable budget of the agency popularly associated with America’s foreign aid, the State Department.

The $17 billion Pentagon aid budget for the 2012 fiscal year is the second in a row to exceed the State Department’s by $10 billion, a disparity that has begun to provoke debate among foreign policy experts in Washington. Seven years ago, circumstances were reversed, with the State Department spending triple the amount the Pentagon spent on such aid.

Your country doesn’t have enough money to build buildings? No problem, let us give you some money to blow up some of the buildings you already have!

It’s no secret that the United States is broke off its ass and whenever a government is broke is turns to taxpayers to make up the difference. Personally when I’m unable to pay for something I just don’t buy it but when the state is unable to pay for something they use existing laws and enact new ones to increase the amount of money they steal from the populace. As you read this article the Internal Revenue Service (revenuers) and the Department of Justice (DoJ) are expanding their power to forcefully take more money:

US OFFERS SWISS BANKS A DEAL

The United States authorities have offered to lift the threat of legal action against 11 Swiss banks in exchange for information, a Swiss paper reported on Sunday.

The one thing I will say about Swiss banks is that they respect your privacy. Instead of spilling the beans about account holders they tell those curious about their customers where to stick it before saying something offensive in German and booting the nosey individual out on their ass. Unfortunately the United States government doesn’t have the same respect and have been trying to get Swiss banks to unveil customer lists for ages. Now the DoJ is making an outright threat; surrender your customer information or we’re taking your asses to court.

Obviously the revenuers don’t want to be outdone at their own game and have stepped up their game as well:

FEDERAL JUDGE GREEN LIGHTS IRS SEARCH FOR CALIFORNIA GIFT TAX CHEATS

A federal district court judge has given the Internal Revenue Service permission to serve a “John Doe” summons on the California State Board of Equalization demanding the names of residents who transferred property to their children or grandchildren for little or no money, from 2005 to 2010.

The IRS has used John Doe summons to seek lists of American taxpayers unreported offshore accounts at Swiss Bank UBS and at HSBC’s bank in India.

I’m going to let the DoJ and revenuers in on a little secret, you’re not going to find enough concealed wealth or missing tax dollars to make up for the massive deficit. What the government is doing now is equivalent to searching couch cushions for spare change. When you’re trying to pay of a $50,000 student loan there isn’t going to be enough change in your couch to even begin touching the interest payment. The only option our government currently has is to reduce their spending, a strategy they are fighting tooth and nail against. I wonder how long it will be before the revenuers start auditing everybody in the United States.

So much for luck, our glorious government “leaders” managed to compromise and avoid a federal government shutdown:

The deal averts the possibility of US federal agencies shutting down because of a lack of guaranteed funding.

The House of Representatives and the Senate are both expected to vote on the controversial $1tn (£643bn) spending bill on Friday.

Why is it those guys can only cooperate when it comes to fucking the American populace over?

It looks like the federal government is at risk of shutting down for the third time this year:

The threat of a US government shutdown is looming for the third time in 2011 amid division in Congress over how to resolve a payroll tax cut dispute.

Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll actually shutdown this time.