Freddie and Fannie aren't the only ones lining up to pick your pocket

How about Detroit's Big 3, as reported in Coyote Blog:

If the world's citizens will not freely lend the Big Three automakers money of their own free will, then Congress is considering using force to make it happen.

Auto industry allies hope to secure up to $50 billion in federal t loans this month to modernize plants and help struggling car makers build more fuel-efficient vehicles.

Congress returns this coming week from its summer break, and the auto industry plans an aggressive lobbying campaign for the low-interest loans.

I'd also like to highlight three of the comments:

I'm sure it's just a coincidence this issue comes up 60 days before a presidential election. I mean it's not like Michigan is going to be a crucial swing state, right?

There's a bit of talk that the Chevy Volt is less of a useful production model and more of a stalking horse for a government bailout. The more information that comes out about it, the more it's the wrong car, for the wrong price, with the wrong specs. But GM needs it to show that they actually are *trying* to develop more efficient vehicles. And why do they need to do that? To convince the government to bail them out.

I think we need a Constitutional Amendment barring the federal government for loaning money to or guaranteeing loans for any private enterprise.

I particularly like that last one; discussing it would at the very least force us to find out all the ways that the State now infiltrates private enterprise.

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A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here: chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.” The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

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As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

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I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...

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