Yesterday, the DCist reported that PETA planned a protest outside of the Capital Grille, a meat-centric restaurant here in the nation’s capital.

The point, according to the organization’s press release, is to convince folks that “meat is not green” by showing that the meat and dairy industries contribute to global warming because cows release methane gas into the atmosphere thereby compounding greenhouse gases.

Despite recently released reports that suggest cow-methane production is much less than previously estimated, and that not only cows, but also other animals, marshlands, and anything decomposing produces methane gases, the PETA folks decide to target meat-eaters. Why?

The reason PETA chose meat-eaters as their target is because they are an animal protection group-not a world protection group. The mission of their organization is to prevent animal killing, abuse, and exploitation. They simply latched onto the global warming angle as way to promote their agenda.

CEI staged a counter rally nearby and we were prepared for a shouting match, but to PETA’s credit, they were pretty accepting of our presence. Of course, they may have been a little shy to get in any altercation considering they only had three people and we had about seven folks. We had signs expressing the deliciousness of meat while they had a person dressed as a cow and pamphlets appealing to individuals to consider giving up meat.

While their arguments made it pretty clear that PETA is more concerned with animals than the welfare of humanity, their appeals to the individual to voluntarily change their behavior on an individual level are acceptable and fine way to try and “change the world” and as far as we could tell they weren’t petitioning governments to get involved and prevent the production of meat or consumption of energy as other environmentalists groups do.

Our counter rally, which was more of a pro-meat/pro-humanity rally, seemed to receive a much more enthusiastic reception from passers-by as we handed out Enjoy Capitalism stickers and free sticks of beef jerky.

In the end people love meat and the industrialized production and shipping of meat has substantially improved the quality of life and nutrition for people around the world. Sorry cows.

The IRS might have a lot of dirt on you…but do they have to be so creepy about it?

The incredibly Orwellian video below has been making the rounds lately, but I thought it would be worth a repost.

What makes this video so chilling for me isn’t the simulated satellite camera feed or the narrator’s synthesized voice, but the notion that the IRS knows the power it has over the taxpayer and openly flaunts it to a degree approaching parody. The truth is, there’s nothing funny about paying taxes. Taxes are an act of force initiated by government against an individual.

If you think about it, there are basically three ways of making money:

(1) It’s given as a gift.

(2) It’s earned by trading a good or sevice.

(3) It’s stolen or taken under threat of force.

Think about what happens if you don’t pay your taxes and then tell me, which method does government use?

The Free Kareem protest is going on today at 12 pm outside of the Egyptian Cultural and Educational Bureau on New Hampshire just south of Dupont Circle. If you’ll be in the area, please stop by and show your support for Kareem Amer, the blogger who is serving a four-year prison sentence for criticizing the Egyptian government.

UPDATE: Check out photos and video from today’s rally.

Louisiana police stopped and detained an American citizen for displaying the historic Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flag on his car, World Net Daily reports. The flag has a treasured history in America – named after an American general and statesman, Christopher Gadsden, and was once used by The United States Marine Corps as a motto flag. In any case, political talk show icon G. Gordon Liddy was incensed by the reported incident and is now encouraging patriotic and First Amendment loyalists to go buy a Gadsden flag sticker and put it you-know-where — on your bumper sticker. Just so happens, the Bureaucrash activist group is offering the sticker — along with other politically incorrect, First Amendment-loving t-shirts, stickers, pins and other “contraband.” Visit Bureaucrash.com and click on “contraband” to get your Gadsden flag on.

Edit: Link to the G Gordon Liddy Show podcast, hour 1.

Hundreds of people turned out in the pouring rain for Washington, DC’s Tea Party – one of many tax protest events taking place around the U.S. today. A sea of multi-colored umbrellas filled Lafayette Park, which is situated near the White House. Many protesters made a family day of the outing, carrying homemade signs expressing outrage at the unprecedented government bailouts of the banking and auto industries over the past year, along with the high level of government spending to which taxpayers are now committed to paying back. Check out some photos of the event on CEI’s flickr account.

Bureaucrash just posted a new round of libertarian lolcats to the networking site, Bureaucrash Social. Many are topical. Many are hilarious. Some (such as this one, I think) are both. Check them out and let us know what you think!

Tomorrow, electric utilities and green groups team up at the National Press Club to ask for billions of new spending on what they term energy efficiency. New versions of such stimulus and bailout proposals appear almost daily.

We spend a lot of time at CEI now proposing wealth-enhancing alternatives to these massive wealth transfers to government contractors and corporations. The right “stimulus” instead liberalizes wealth creation, it doesn’t spread around the dwindling wealth that already exists, like a self-appointed Benevolent Vulture; I submit one important approach–especially in today’s crisis situation–is to inventory all the regulations that impact a small business as it grows, and look hard at rollbacks. Below is the rough inventory I’ve compiled over time, but I’m sure it’s out of date and some things have changed. And this doesn’t even addess industry-specific rules (see endnote), which are probably the ones most in need of reform. I heartily welcome any additions and subtractions. We can’t manage something if we can’t measure it.

FEDERAL WORKPLACE REGULATION IMPOSED ON GROWING BUSINESSES* (Draft—Wayne Crews)

ONE EMPLOYEE

-Fair Labor Standards Act (overtime and minimum wage [27% min. wage increase since 1990])
-Social Security matching and deposits
-Medicare, FICA
-Military Selective Service Act (90 days leave for reservists; rehire discharged veterans)
-Equal Pay Act (no sex discrimination in wages)
-Immigration Reform Act (eligibility must be documented)
-Federal Unemployment Tax Act (unemployment compensation)
-Employee Retirement Income Security Act (standards for pension and benefit plans)
-Occupational Safety and Health Act
-Polygraph Protection Act

4 EMPLOYEES: ALL THE ABOVE, PLUS

-Immigration Reform Act (no discrimination with regard to national origin, citizenship, or intention to obtain citizenship)

15 EMPLOYEES: ALL THE ABOVE, PLUS

-Civil Rights Act Title VII (no discrimination with regard to race, color, origin, religion, or sex; pregnancy-related protections; recordkeeping)
-Americans with Disabilities Act (no discrimination, “reasonable accommodations”)

20 EMPLOYEES: ALL THE ABOVE, PLUS

-Age Discrimination Act (no discrimination on the basis of age against those 40 and older)
-Older Worker Benefit Protection Act (benefits for older workers must be commensurate with younger workers)
-COBRA (continuation of medical benefits for up to 18 months upon termination)

25 EMPLOYEES: ALL THE ABOVE, PLUS

-Health Maintenance Organization Act (HMO Option required)
-Veterans’ Reemployment Act (reemployment for persons returning from active duty, reserve, or Nat’l Guard)

50 EMPLOYEES: ALL THE ABOVE, PLUS

-Family and Medical Leave Act (12 weeks unpaid leave or care for newborn or ill family member)

100 EMPLOYEES: ALL THE ABOVE, PLUS

-WARN Act (60-days written plant closing notice)
-Civil Rights Act (annual EEO-1 form)

*Assumes non-union, non-government contractor, with interstate operations and a basic employee benefits package. Includes general workforce-related regulation only. Omitted are categories such as environmental and consumer product safety regulations, and regulations applying to specific types of businesses such as mining, farming, trucking or financial firms.

Maybe not really him, just a new viral email flying around. Pretty funny anyway.

1. The US has made a new weapon that destroys people but keeps the building standing,. Its called the stock market – Jay Leno

2. Do you have any idea how cheap stocks are ?? Wall Street is now being called Wal Mart Street – Jay Leno

3. The difference between a pigeon and a London investment banker. The pigeon can still make a deposit on a BMW

4. What’s the difference between a guy who lost everything in Las Vegas and an investment banker? A tie!

5. The problem with investment bank balance sheet is that on the left side nothing’s right and on the right side nothing’s left.

6. I want to warn people from Nigeria who might be watching our show, if you get any emails from Washington asking for money, it’s a scam. Don’t fall for it – Jay Leno

7. Bush was asked about the credit crunch. He said it was his favourite candy bar – Jay Leno

8. The rescue bill was about 450 pages. President Bush’s copy is even thicker. They had to include pictures – Jay Leno

9. President Bush’s response was to meet some small business owners in San Antonio last week. The small business owners are General Motors, General Electric and Century 21 – Jay Leno

10. What worries me most about the credit crunch, is that if one of my cheques is returned stamped ‘insufficient funds’. I won’t know whether that refers to mine or the bank’s

JOBS, ROADS, BRIDGES, SCHOOLS, BROADBAND, ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORDS, ENERGY…blares the Drudge Report. It’s President-elect Obama’s weekend plan—not to produce, but to transfer yet more of the nation’s dwindling wealth to those with political pull.

On Sunday’s Meet the Press interview he stressed “shovel ready” projects — shoveling from right-hand to left remains the extent of it. Look at the 5-points in the Politico article: Each wave of the wand diverts an awestruck media and a truly fearful public from the “instead of” –from the reality of what free citizens would have done instead with the resources.

Genuine leadership does not consist of promising to take yet more of other people’s stuff and giving it to corporations, government contractors, the GAO and other federal agencies that should’ve already been energy efficient, wasteful “renewable” energy plans, drafty school buildings, inferior broadband schemes, medical-record “computerization” that can’t work anyway because of still other government regulation. New candidates are sure to pop up next week.

I wrote about stimulus follies in an early 2008 report called Still Stimulating Like It’s 1999 and in several followup articles, not knowing the crisis stage we would reach; but the elements of the wrongheadedness of the bailout culture exist in All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Yes, you share; but you don’t take other people’s stuff. That notion seems alien to the political class. Washington’s primary function is wealth transfer rather than the actual modest governing referred to in the Constitution (Fred Smith’s line is a good one: “The Constitution isn’t perfect; but it’s better than what we have now.”)

I was off a few decades in the earlier report: in the “New Steal,” we’re stimulating like it’s 1929. Lessons remain unlearned (speaking of investing in education) among politicians of both parties, to whom freedom is a loophole.

Well, who can possibly be surprised by the revelation that “The federal government’s economic stimulus package will include investment in broadband Internet infrastructure and funds to upgrade and repair the national power grid alongside more traditional funding for road and bridge repair.”

Details, as usual, do not exist, other than the obvious golden chains that come with power grid investment: get the cash, but throw it away on inferior “renewable” investments, thereby draining future wealth and resources (for example, no fuel is “greener”—in the proper sense of the term of using fewer overall resources—than petroleum based gasoline). Meanwhile, government power over energy grows.

Labor groups are not merely being placated with the package but helped spearhead it (they insist “millions” of jobs will be created). This helps assure that future generations will see more fiascoes like the disaster in the current auto industry—yes, tomorrow’s productivity will improve, but the workers who are sent home still get paid (that’s the auto industry’s actual problem).

It is beyond argument that America needs to create what I often call “infrastructure wealth”; we need it just as we need financial wealth, real estate wealth, manufacturing and service wealth, and health-care wealth. But like all wealth creation, the root of that wealth is property rights, not transferred tax dollars and favors.

The proper way to maximize infrastructure wealth–and jobs and customer benefits besides—is to clear the path for free enterprise to build it; Yanking funds from unseen, helpless and dispersed taxpayers, and applying it to Rep. Pelosi’s and President-elect Obama’s high-profile, very vocal recipients is a destructive enterprise, not a weath-building one.

Here are a few better steps, but these are only for starters. These are the sort of programs Washington should be implementing.

– With respect to broadband deployment, declare “Net Neutrality” permanently off the table; announce that proprietary networks and investments will never be expropriated in any fashion, that there will be no forced sharing, only voluntary agreements and alliances. Go here for details on why this is important.
– Remove exclusive franchises that make it illegal, not difficult, for firms to compete with incumbent electric companies. Right now, it’s illegal to run an extension cord across the street. (See “The Free Market Alternative to Mandatory Open Access.”)
– Establish an aggressive campaign to liberalize all network and infrastructure indusrtries, which are now artificially segregated into regulatory silos (telephone, electricity, water, sewer, cable, railroad, airline, air traffic control). This would create opportunities for them to work together and jointly invest in new power lines, fiber to the home, roads, bridges, airports, toll roads and more.
– Relax antitrust so that firms within and across industry sectors can combine and create business plans to bring capitalism and infrastructure wealth creation to the next level.
– Liberalize spectrum and secondary markets in it such that wireless wealth is freely created apart from regulators.

These items are only a start. Other initiatives, like privatization of politically provided services, also need to be re-invigorated. I’ve made it clear elsewhere that I regard the nation as now largely ungovernable because of the expansion of government beyond any semblance of constitutionally limited government.

But we have to start somewhere. Throwing money at infrastructure “stimulus” while leaving 19th Century regulation intact is most emphatically not governing; it is not courageous, and it is not commendable.