I’m getting sick of the debt downgrade issue, so let’s shift to another topic. The title to this post may seem like a joke, but Europe’s bizarre courts have decided to trample the property rights of landlords by ruling that tenants have a “right” to satellite TV and therefore cannot be barred from installing dishes. […]

Last week, we compared a bone-headed display tpqof incompetence by the German government with a perverse form of harassment by a local government in the United States. We have another America-v-Europe contest, but the roles are reversed. This time, the buffoons in Washington get dinged for a spectacular screw-up, and it is a local government […]

Walter Williams has pointed out on many occasions that many government programs and initiatives exist primarily for the benefit of the bureaucracy, and he coined the phrase “poverty pimps” to describe the folks who get comfortable government jobs to operate programs that don’t help – and often hurt – disadvantaged populations. We may need a […]

Or is it another example of the “wussification of America?” I don’t know how to classify this story, other than it is a sad commentary on what is happening to America. Bureaucrats in Maryland, who obviously have too much time on their hands, are issuing rules governing sunscreen on summer camps. Have we really reached […]

Regular readers know that I don’t have high regard for government. I’m willing to believe just about anything bad about politicians and bureaucrats, and I am not the least bit surprised when I hear horror stories about counterproductive government programs riddled with waste, fraud, and abuse. So you can imagine that it takes something truly […]

I’ve largely stopped beating up on the TSA because it seems like a dog-bites-man or sun-rises-in-the-east issue. Do we really learn anything by repetitively discussing the stupidity on one bureaucracy? But sometimes the idiocy reaches such an extreme level that it can’t be ignored. Here are the nauseating details of how TSA bureaucrats confiscated a […]

I’m often amazed at how the political class concocts new rights that can only be fulfilled by trampling on genuine freedoms. In a previous post, I mocked Finland for deciding that broadband access was a human right (which presumably means Finns were being oppressed before Al Gore invented the Internet). Another post sarcastically noted that […]

Somebody just sent me a story from the UK-based Daily Telegraph about two little boys who got in trouble for playing army at school. You may think I’m joking, but here’s a blurb from the report. Staff at Nathaniel Newton Infant School in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, reprimanded the two boys after they were seen making pistol […]

Here’s the kind of story that makes me fear for the future of the nation. It is a disturbing example of both government stupidity and soft tyranny. The police may not be ticketing for smoking in the parks, but they are still ticketing parker visitors for crimes like…eating a doughnut in a playground. Yup, this […]

All I can say is that I’m thankful the United States is not part of the European Union, at least if this little tidbit from the UK-based Telegraph is true. American politicians waste a lot of money, but even I doubt they ever spent tax dollars on something that is simultaneously so idiotic and so […]