Tag: Money Management Mishaps

The French are Voting with Their Feet

What started as a small movement of capital leaving France is becoming a massive hemorrhaging of capital:

For months now, there has been a steady rumbling of people packing up and moving out. There are few reliable figures of the numbers of people leaving, in part because many are moving within the E.U., where there are no immigration requirements for Europeans. Yet for those of us living in France, the exodus has been notable. Around New Year, a moving truck rolled up to our building and loaded the worldly possessions of the couple and four children living below us as they headed off to Singapore where better prospects awaited the father of the family. Earlier last week, a woman flopped on to a bench next to me in the schoolyard of the school our children both attend, fatigued from apartment-hunting in London, where she is moving with her family next month — driven out by what she describes as the aggravation of running a small business with 35-hour work weeks and by tax hikes introduced by President François Hollande, who was elected last May. “I resisted the move, but it’s become impossible,” she says.

To paraphrase a famous Star Wars quote, “The more you tighten your grip, Hollande, the more people will slip through your fingers.” Statist socialists often believe the solution to a floundering country is to increase taxes. They believe that collapsing countries can be salvaged if only the state is able to collect enough money to keep things going. In the end this never works because people will eventually leave a country if conditions become worse that they’re willing to tolerate. When you have to make a decision between putting food on the table or paying taxes to keep yourself out of prison you tend to disappear in pursuit of greener pastures.

At some point Hollande will be faced with a decision. He will either have to accept the fact his policies are driving people out of France or he will have to close the borders to prevent people from fleeing. If history is any indicator he will choose the latter, which means anybody wanting to flee France needs to do it now.

Americans should take note because this phenomenon is beginning to happen here. Droves of people are fleeing New York and California, two of the most burdensome states in the Union. The federal government has been increase its rate of expropriation for some time and shows no signs of relenting. At some point in America’s future there will be a massive exodus of people, which will likely cause the individual and federal governments to enact border controls to prevent capital from leaving. Fortunately technologies like Bitcoin exist that allow individuals to conceal their wealth from Big Brother’s prying eyes.

Tax Victims to Foot the Bill for the Vikings Stadium

Remember when the Minnesota legislature and Mark Dayton said Minnesota’s tax victims wouldn’t be on the hook to pay for the new Vikings Stadium because proceeds from electronic pull tabs would cover the costs? As it turns out gambling revenues weren’t as high as the estimates had people believing so Minnesotans are going to be paying the bill:

Gov. Mark Dayton wants to rely on new revenues from cigarette and corporate income tax to help pay the state’s share of a new Vikings stadium.

Myron Frans, commissioner of revenue, explained Dayton’s plan to the Tax Conference Committee Thursday.

It would include two funding sources: approximately $24.5 million in one-time revenues from tax on the current cigarette inventory once the tax is increased. Dayton is proposing an increase from the current tax of $1.23 per pack to $2.52 per pack.

It’ll state with cigarette and corporate income tax but I guarantee that the state will be pilfering from everybody in a short while. Meanwhile Zigy Wilf, the owner of the Vikings, will continue enjoying his life as a billionaire thanks, in part, to the fact we’re all paying for his Colosseum.

I always thought the point of bread and circuses was to distract the serfs from their miserable existence not remind them of it.

Who Needs that Much Ammunition

Gun control advocates often freak out when they hear how much ammunition some of us gun owners keep in stock, especially when we shoot competitively. Usually they ask, “Who needs that much ammunition?!” It seems that gun control advocates aren’t the only people asking that question, some members of the state are wondering why other members of the state are buying so much ammunition:

Democratic Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., at the opening of the hearing, ridiculed the concerns as “conspiracy theories” which have “no place” in the committee room.

But Republicans said the purchases raise “serious” questions about waste and accountability.

Chaffetz, who chairs one of the House oversight subcommittees holding the hearing Thursday, revealed that the department currently has more than 260 million rounds in stock. He said the department bought more than 103 million rounds in 2012 and used 116 million that same year — among roughly 70,000 agents.

Comparing that with the small-arms purchases procured by the U.S. Army, he said the DHS is churning through between 1,300 and 1,600 rounds per officer, while the U.S. Army goes through roughly 350 rounds per soldier.

He noted that is “roughly 1,000 rounds more per person.”

“Their officers use what seems to be an exorbitant amount of ammunition,” he said.

It’s rather strange when the military purchases less ammunition per solider than the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) buys per office. Don’t get me wrong, I will often go through more than 1,300 rounds in a shooting season but I’m also footing my own ammunition bill and using my ammunition for sport. In the case of DHS they are expropriating wealth from the general populace to pay for their ammunition purchases and using it to arm agents whose primary job is to expropriate wealth from the general populace. If their agents are going to use ammunition to steal from people they could at least foot the ammunition bill themselves.

Cooking the Books

I have some good news, the United States economy is going to show some improvement soon. I also have some bad news, the only reason the economy is going to show some improvement is because the state is going to manipulate the gross domestic produce (GDP) numbers again:

The U.S. government is about to tweak the way it measures the economy, and some of the biggest changes will affect the entertainment industry.

Under the current system, Sichel told me, Lady Gaga’s sales of concert tickets, online songs and CDs all count toward gross domestic product. But the value of the time she spends in the studio working on new songs isn’t counted. That’s about to change.

This is why one cannot rely on numbers put out by the state. When the numbers begin to look bad the state just cooks the books to make things appear better than they are. That’s why reported unemployment is around 7 to 8 percent but real unemployment is around 22 to 23 percent.

Using Stolen Money to Steal More Money

You have to admire how the state can steal money from you and use it to steal more money:

At least seven U.S. communities that received stimulus money as part of a $373 million government program to educate Americans about obesity and tobacco use potentially violated federal law by using the funds to lobby for higher taxes and new local laws, according to a report by the nonpartisan group Cause of Action.

The findings are part of a 19-month investigation by the nonprofit group on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “Communities Putting Prevention to Work Program.”

First the state stole our money through taxation so it could give it to its cronies. After redistributing wealth from the general populace to the politically well-connected the politically well-connected used that money to push for the state to steal more money because they knew a portion of that money could go back to their coffers. Effectively, through stimulus money, the state created a continuous cycle that can only end when the general populace no longer has any money to take.

Why Terrorism Works

Feat your eyes on the following picture lifted from the BBC’s story covering the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev:

That picture shows very succinctly why terrorism works. For the cost of some explosives and a couple of pressure cookers two individuals have managed to cost the state what must be approaching millions of dollars. The streets of Boston are crawling with expensive police officers, wearing expensive armor, driving expensive armored personnel carriers, and carrying expensive weaponry.

Terrorism works because it exploits basic economics. For very little cost a handful of individuals can excise a heavy toll from the state. Warfare, ultimately, is a competition of economies. The loser of a war is the one who no longer has resources to continue. They lose because they run out of soldiers, guns, ammunition, food, medical supplies, effective countermeasures against the other army’s weapons, etc. Fourth generation warfare tactics, such as terrorism, work because they’re too expensive to counter militarily.

An improvised explosive device, like the bombs used in Boston, can injure and kill multiple people with ease. When killing a soldier you not only kill a person but you also wipe out the resources poured into his training and unrecoverable equipment. If you injure a soldier you not only remove a fighter off from the field, possibly permanently, but you also cost his military resources in medical care. Killing an innocent bystander can also cost the other military morale. Vietnam was an example of this. By killing Vietnamese civilians the United States military generated a great deal of hatred back home and that hatred, often aimed at soldiers, eroded the morale of fighting men.

The Central Banks are Flying Blind

Are you ready for some surprising news? You may want to sit down for this. As it turns out, the central banks haven’t a clue as to what they’re doing:

Growing concern at the International Monetary Fund over the long-term side-effects of interest rates close to zero came as some of the leading figures in central banking conceded they were flying blind when steering their economies.

Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, the former member of the European Central Bank’s executive board, captured the mood at the IMF’s spring meeting, saying: “We don’t fully understand what is happening in advanced economies.”

But the best part of the article the following paragraph:

It is troubling for monetary policy experts that their crisis-fighting tools – rates stuck at zero, money printing operations to bring down longer-term interest rates and encourage private sector spending, and efforts to calm financial market fears – might have nasty side-effects.

Who would have thought that artificially lowering interest rates to nothing, printing billions upon billions of dollars, and sucking people into malinvestment would have any harmful side-effects? Just everybody with an elementary school understanding of basic economics. Unfortunately the politicians decided that Keynes’s mysticism sounded much better than Mises’s deductive logic, which isn’t surprising since Keynes’s mysticism basically said anything the state does to bolster the economy is good whereas Mises said the state should take an entirely hands off approach. Needless to say the state liked the idea of monopolizing the monetary system and it has been downhill ever since.

The Great Bitcoin Crash

Yesterday my prediction based on the utmost scientific research came true. Bitcoin, which has seen a remarkable increase in value compared to dollars, began to crash. Supposedly the cause of this crash was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack:

We’ve reached out to one of the biggest exchanges, Mt. Gox, to see what happened. But another San Francisco-based exchange called TradeHill is saying that the crypto-currency is falling because of apparent distributed denial of service attacks on Mt. Gox and Bitstamp. A denial of service attack happens when an attacker overwhelms a target with external requests, so that it can’t honor regular requests from legitimate users.

All commodities are vulnerable to some amount of manipulation and Bitcoin is no different. The sudden drop in value demonstrates a potential exploit that can be used to make a great deal of money off of Bitcoin. Let’s hypothesize that the DDoS attack was planned some months back. Planning to execute a DDoS attack against several prominent Bitcoin trading sites individuals decided to first buy a large number of Bitcoin as the then current price and then move to manipulate the price by bringing the currency to the media’s attention. After generating a good deal of interest those same individuals begin to trade some Bitcoin for larger amounts of dollars, which raises the high point trade value. Seeing an increase in the high point trade value people uninvolved with the plan begin trading at higher prices. Eventually the system becomes a sort of Ouroboros, a self-feeding cycle that causes the price of Bitcoin to continuously rise. Once the value of Bitcoin has been manipulated high enough the manipulators sell off all of their Bitcoin and begin their DDoS attack. With the most prominent Bitcoin trading sites down the perceived value of Bitcoin tumbles along with it. After that the cycle can begin again. Buy low, manipulate the price higher, instigate a DDoS attack to drop the price, buy low, and so on.

The scenario I just explained is hypothetical, I’m not implying that it is fact. But the scenario is a possibility.

It will be interesting to see what the price of Bitcoin does over the next several days. Will is drop in price? Will it return to the pre-DDoS high? Will it climb even higher?

Paying Twice for Information

California is such an interesting state to watch. Not only is it the state that shows us what happens when you rely on the state for everything, it is currently giving us a glimpse of the aftermath of state reliance. One of the more laughable proposals being put forth by California’s state is double charging denizens for access to public information:

A proposal under consideration in California would significantly limit access to public information by levying a $10 fee any time anyone—including members of the public and the media—wants to look at a court case record in person. While EFF is certainly sympathetic to the budgetary woes facing all levels of government in California, this measure would trade transparency, citizen engagement and the power of a free press for a short-sighted fiscal stop-gap. On the whole, such a fee would do little to fix institutional spending problems while inflicting massive damage to the public trust.

Not only do you pay for the creation of this information through taxes, state issued fines, and other regulatory fees but now you can get pay to read it! On top of soaking California denizens for more money this proposal, from a more cynical point of view, may also discourage individuals from investigating the goings-on of the state they suffer under. If you want to know what dirty little deeds the political bureau of California is up to you’ll have to pay for the privilege.

Potential Winner of the Worst Father of the Year Award

I think I may have found a contender for the Worst Father of the Year Award. Not surprisingly the father is a state thug:

A policeman has shopped his 13-year-old son for fraud after he ran up a £3,700 bill playing iPad games.

PC Doug Crossan, 48, was horrified when his credit card company informed him that son Cameron had blown a small fortune in the App Store.

He claims the teenager, who now faces the possibility of being arrested and questioned by his father’s colleagues, was unaware he was being charged for the in-game purchases and wants Apple to scrap the charge.

But the technology company has refused and his only way of recouping the money is to report the purchases as being fraudulent.

What kind of father would have his kid charged with fraud to recoup a measly £3,700? By having his kid charged the father has put the son at risk of being kidnapped and caged, not to mention the effect such charges could have on the kid’s future. A father willing to sell his son out in the hopes some nebulous entity will refund his money is no father I’d want to suffer. If I were the father I would make the kid pay back the money he spent. Scratch that, if I was the father I wouldn’t have given the kid a password to my iTunes account. Since app and in-app purchases require a password be entered before a purchase has been confirmed the kid wouldn’t have been able to purchase anything.

The lesson here is that you should understand technology before handing to a teenager. Master your technology less it master you.