- The feds are really going ahead: they want to indict Martha Stewart for the crime of wanting to sell her stocks on the expectation that they will go down in price. William Anderson has written a demolition of the case against her: “Government officials conveniently forget that the other stockholders were going to take losses anyway, thanks to the government’s own actions. For all the accusations directed at Waksal, he did not harm his company or any of his shareholders if he did what the feds have alleged. Instead, the real crime, according to the government, was that family and friends who held ImClone stock did not take the same bath that others took. In other words, because they were not harmed as badly as other shareholders, they are now criminals.”
- The Washington Times runs an interesting piece on a tax that is rarely mentioned: the Universal Service Tax put in place in 1996 to fund universal phone service. This was just before the phone began to look more and more like an anarchonism. Meanwhile, it is netting far less revenue because long-distance rates have fallen and wireless packages have blurred the old distinction between local and long distance. The entire program is riddled with contradictions and problems, and the solution is always the same: raise the tax.
- Pravda proposes the gold ruble but doubts the government would go along: “Why doesn’t Russia use the golden ruble yet? Investment tools are not meant for common people. Probably, the government wants to make Russians save their money in Russian banks. However, people do not trust the bank system anyway. Probably, they want to make Russians save their money in US dollars. A lot of experts believe that about two-thirds of all dollars are not secured with anything. The US Treasury has a goal to trace and destroy those dollars secretly.
- This morning LRC links to:
- King Kristol by Murray Rothbard
- Ron Paul on the Federal Debt Spiral
- Niall Ferguson on the the US as Empire in Denial: “As Iraq is showing, military commands cannot create law and order. Their job is to kill people. The British empire learned that the military must be subservient to civilian power if you are to build civil administrations.”
Indict Martha?
All Rights Reserved ©
