VIDEO: Health officials shut down 11-year-old’s cupcake business

Congratulations, Government! Once again you have saved us from the evil clutches of Capitalism and Entrepreneurship, coming to us this time in the guise of an innocent-looking 11-year-old girl.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!!

Why, if you hadn’t stepped in and ruthlessly CRUSHED her successful venture, we might have actually purchased some of these tasty treats, and accidentally enjoyed ourselves! Worse, this young tot might have learned to become self-sufficient and not needed government assistance later in life!

*whew* …THAT was close:

10 Films That Portray Capitalists as Heroes

Have you noticed how movies normally depict capitalists, executives or business owners?

Whether it’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End with the bizarre portrayal of the head of the East India Trading Company, or the main character in There Will Be Blood, business men (and women) are rarely shown sympathetically, often cast as the default villain.

Honestly, it might seem as if all corporate and/or entrepreneurial movie roles are written to be inherently evil, guilty of the sin of simply being in business.

Thankfully, that’s not always the case, and I’d like to share with you 10 films which actually celebrate hard-working entrepreneurs, and show believers in the free market as heroes.

…and yet ANOTHER Obama Stimulus Recipient Bites the Dust

When President Obama took office in 2009, one of his very first acts was to sign the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law. But instead of an actual recovery, what we’ve received ever since has been an economy barely limping along, historically high unemployment and ever-more massive debt. 

And despite years of big talk about jobs having been “created or saved”, cutting the deficit (ha!!), or endless “Recovery Summer(s)”, it’s been obvious for quite some time that his Keynesian plan didn’t work.

We’ve documented plenty of companies which have already gone under, too, despite their generous infusions of Government cash. Each one was problematic for a host of reasons, including:

The Minimum Wage: economist Milton Friedman vs. Elizabeth Warren

Didn’t have a chance to see this until last night, but it’s so groan-worthy that I’m compelled to address it.

Newly elected Senator Elizabeth “Me-A-Heap-Big-Injun” Warren decided to pontificate on the Minimum Wage.

From National Review:

In a hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions last week on “indexing the minimum wage,” Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren inquired of University of Massachusetts professor economics Arindrajit Dube: 

“Unexpected”: Our GDP drops to -0.1%

Ever have a nightmare where you’re falling, and everything happens in super slow-mo?

Where you have time to think “How did I ever get myself INTO this mess?”, or “Why didn’t I do (insert alternate decision here) instead?”

Well, I feel the same way right now, and I dearly wish I was dreaming.

From HotAir:

Economics for Dummies…and Liberals

A classic post on the idiocy of our current economic policy, as seen through the eyes of a businessman.

Our thanks to blogger UTAH over at ‘The Rio Norte Line‘ for the loan…

The Rio Norte Line

Originally posted on October 22, 2011 but re-posted in honor of the fiscal cliff. Still true and the math is just this simple.

People say that government can’t be run like a business. I guess that depends on what the true objectives are. Businesses can’t chase every opportunity or customer and they can’t provide every service or product or they will fail. When viewed in this light, business does have a lot in common with government. I think that is why the Founders gave us the Declaration and the Constitution (and made it changeable, but after a long and thoughtful process). If I look at the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, I would compare them to a business’ statement of core values (the Declaration) and a mission statement (the Constitution).

Sort of like the old analogy, “when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a…

View original post 1,646 more words

Slowing, not Growing

Was listening to the radio while I was doing a home project this weekend. Some guy calls into the talk show and says, basically, that he can’t understand why folks are so upset with President Obama over the economy, since we’d experienced 20-some months of job growth.

And then I just laughed, and shook my head. I hear that same talking point over and over, and over again on MSNBC, ABC, Huffington Post, etc., and it’s spin. Pure, unadulterated spin.

First of all, we’ve covered this already. We aren’t growing. We can’t. There are too many new government restrictions coming at us daily, and the only certainty in the economic landscape is not promising. So you have companies going with the sure things, being unwilling to take the sorts of chances that must happen for an economy to actually grow.

Obama’s recovery, orchestrated wholly by him, has been a disaster. All talks of “It’s Bush’s fault” aside, when you take over a job, a company, etc.,… it can be argued after 6-8 months that you’re working on it. A year: sure, things take time. But over THREE years?? In that amount of time, you need results. And in Obama’s case, we needed to be adding jobs at a much, much greater pace in order to make up the ground that we lost.

And that, ladies and gents, is exactly what is not happenin’.

From Larry Kudlow @ RealClearPolitics.com:

You would think $1 trillion in spending stimulus and $2.5 trillion of Fed pump-priming (via Quantitative Easing – JTR) would produce an economy a whole lot stronger than 1.9 percent gross domestic product, which was the revised first-quarter number. And you’d think all that government spending would deliver a whole lot more jobs than 69,000 in May.

But it hasn’t happened.

The Keynesian government-spending model has proven a complete failure. It’s the Obama model. And it has produced such an anemic recovery that, frankly, at 2 percent growth, we’re back on the front end of a potential recession. If anything goes wrong — like another blow-up in Europe — there’s no safety margin to stop a new recession.

And that brings us to the grim May employment report, which generated only 69,000 nonfarm payrolls. It’s the third consecutive sub par tally, replete with downward revisions for the two prior months. It’s a devastating number for the American economy and a catastrophic number for Obama’s re-election hopes. All momentum on jobs and the economy has evaporated.

Read the whole thing.

—————

Coincidentally, I heard Larry Kudlow being interviewed on Don Wade & Roma (a Chicago radio show) and he summed up his feelings towards the current administration by quoting Oliver Cromwell from 1653:

“You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately… Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

To which I say: Amen.

The Recovery That Wasn’t

Great, great piece by John Merline over at Investors.com about the “recovery” that we keep hearing about. Calling this a recovery is like calling me a pro hockey player: you can say it all day long, but it doesn’t make it true.

A quick highlight:

In his recent speeches on the campaign trail and at official functions, President Obama typically touts the fact that over the past two years, the economy has created more than 4 million new jobs, with more than 1 million in the past six months alone.

At a fundraiser last month, he called this “extraordinary progress.”

But the economic recovery that Obama has presided over has been far from extraordinary. It hasn’t even been ordinary.

—–

The current recovery is so slow, in fact, that it just barely beats GDP growth 11 quarters after the 1980 recession ended — even though there was the intervening long and painful 1981-82 recession. And unless GDP shoots up in Q2, the current recovery will soon be the absolute worst since the Great Depression.

—–

“Unlike previous recoveries, we actually saw household incomes drop faster during the recovery than they did during the recession itself,” said Gordon Green, who co-founded Sentier.

Be sure to read the whole thing.