Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Bon Jovi Loves My Town

It’s still not to late to enter in the contest on Bon Jovi Loves My Town. We’re getting entries from all over the world. Today we even got one from Kabul, Afghanistan!

Winners get to have their work played on concert screens as it goes on tour with Bon Jovi around the world. They also get assorted prizes.

The Recycling Myth

Recycling is really a scam in many respects. While it sounds like a good idea on paper, it actually uses more energy and creates more pollution in the process. But even more disturbing is the insane make work that the statists create to bedevil the citizenry.  This article by th libertarian Von Mises institute delves into the extreme madness of Sweden’s recycling system. It shows what happens when you let alleged do gooders have too much power.

The latter is actually true: everybody is recycling. But that is the result of government force, not a voluntary choice. The state’s monopolist garbage-collection “service” no longer accepts garbage: they will only collect leftovers and other biodegradables. Any other kind of garbage that accidentally finds its way to your garbage bin can result in a nice little fine (it really isn’t that little) and the whole neighborhood could face increased garbage collection rates (i.e., even larger increases than usual — they tend to increase annually or biannually anyway).

So what do you do with your waste? Most homes have a number of trash bins for different kinds of trash: batteries in one; biodegradables in one; wood in one; colored glass in one, other glass in another; aluminum in one, other metals in another; newspapers in one, hard paper in another, and paper that doesn’t fit these two categories in a third; and plastic of all sorts in another collection of bins. The materials generally have to be cleaned before thrown away — milk cartons with milk in them cannot be recycled just as metal cans cannot have too much of the paper labels left.

The people of Sweden are thus forced to clean their trash before carefully separating different kinds of materials. This is the future, they say, and it is supposedly good for the environment. (What about the economy?)

Add to this all the energy schemes the government is slowly trying to shove down our throat and you can add environmentalism to the list of excuses control freaks are using to take away more liberties and choices. All in the name of “protecting us”.

This stuff is really getting out of hand, and I don’t see a whole lot of answers coming from either political party. Just more of the same. 

Bought and Paid For Candidates

This is just one of many reasons neither of the two leading candidates appeals to me.

Democrat Hillary Clinton has raised more money from lobbyists than any other presidential candidate while Republican John McCain has more of them assisting his campaign.

Clinton took in $823,087 from registered lobbyists and members of their firms in 2007 and the second-biggest recipient was McCain, who took in $416,321, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based group which tracks political giving. Barack Obama, Clinton’s rival for the Democratic nomination, doesn’t take money from registered lobbyists, although he received $86,282 from employees of firms that lobby, according to the center.

McCain has 26 registered lobbyists as campaign advisers or fundraisers compared with 11 for Clinton and none for Obama, according to review of records compiled by Public Citizen, a Washington-based group that favors stronger disclosure laws for lobbyists.