I’ve avoided this topic in recent weeks because it’s too depressing, but this story is too outrageous to ignore. The County of Los Angeles has 199 bureaucrats who “earned” more than $250,000 last year. According to Census Bureau data for 2008, the median household income in the county was 55,000, Here’s a blurb from the […]

This news report demonstrates the lengths to which bureaucrats will go to pick your pocket.  It doesn’t matter if your taxes have already ostensibly paid for government services, many local governments are now double taxing for the use of emergency services, even if they never get out of their vehicle to actually help you. Cary […]

Advocates of big government think it is appropriate for the state to redistribute wealth out of a sense of fairness.  They usually claim to want some form of taking from the wealthy to give to the poor.  But the practice of redistribution is actually quite different.  In reality, redistributive states take from those without political […]

Here’s a very disturbing story I saw on Instapundit. A cop arrested a woman for the supposed crime of not getting off her own front porch. Apparently, the cop didn’t like the fact that she was observing – and perhaps even filming on her cell phone camera – a traffic stop. If there is any […]

Here’s another remarkable story illustrating the incompetence of government. A bureaucrat in Norfolk, VA, got paid for 12 years (including benefits) without ever showing up for work. Depending on the agency, this may actually have been a good thing (I wish IRS bureaucrats did this), but it certainly shows how taxpayer money gets wasted when […]

I take second place to nobody in my view that government is horribly incompetent, but even I’m shocked by this story linked on Drudge. According to a news report out of Indiana, students who take the government’s driver’s ed class are four times more likely to crash than those who don’t take the classes. There […]

I ran across two interesting lists showing how politicians at the state and local level are often just as bad as the ones in Washington, DC. First, Forbes has an article identifying the 10 states with the highest income tax rates. The top rate is a big deterrent to entrepreneurs and investors, but it’s also […]

My default assumption is that all politicians will do the wrong thing when they have to choose between defending freedom and appeasing special interests. Even the ones that spout good rhetoric often do the wrong thing, particularly after a couple of years in office (sort of like being assimilated by the Borg, for you Star […]

Julie Murphy is obviously a dangerous criminal. What else would you call a 7-year-old girl who does something as dangerous and illegal as operating a lemonade stand without getting a $120 temporary restaurant license? Fortunately, the health and safety of the people of Multnomah County were protected when an alert bureaucrat shut down her lemonade […]

If you have municipal bonds issued by the city of Los Angeles, you may want to dump them while there’s still time. The LA Times reports that one-third of the city’s budget in 2015 will get consumed by pensions and benefits for retired bureaucrats. The cost of retirement benefits for Los Angeles city employees will […]