Wednesday, June 15, 2011

We're regulated to death

From the NY Post:

The Empire State ranked 50th in George Mason University's biannual "Freedom in the States" rankings.

"New York has by far the highest taxes in the country," the study reads, citing steep levies on property, income and corporations compared to other states.

The high taxes, in turn, fuel massive spending, according to the analysis by George Mason's Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank.

"Spending on public welfare, hospitals, electric power, transit, employee retirement . . . are well above national norms," concludes the report, which covers the 2007-through-2009 period.

Ranking worst in the categories of economic freedom and fiscal policy, New York also landed near the bottom for the categories of personal freedom (48th) and regulatory policy (40th).

The study cites New York's restrictive gun-control and anti-smoking laws and sky-high cigarette taxes and the Big Apple's ban on trans fats.

The researchers also slam New York's "excessive" home-schooling regulations and its strictest-in-the-nation health-insurance rules.

The authors rap New York for curbing the rights of individual property owners. "Eminent domain abuse," the report says, "is rampant and unchecked."


No kidding!

21 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jews run new york city. If that statement is too unpolitically correct, too bad. ANYONE who disagrees with this doesn't have one grain of common sense.

New York City has jew domination written ALL over it. No guns, no cigarettes, ridiculous spending of public funds, politicians from the bottom up are ubiquitous in the political field.


Jews are dramatically overrepresented in the US-senate when in comparison to other groups.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps because, unlike other groups that are discriminated, they fight back and overcome ... unlike the typical Queens resident who rolls over and lets the pols make them a doormat.

Incidentally, the previous comment is written by a hack (who may or may not be Jewish) to help spread the word that no one should take
Queens Crap seriously because if its racism ... and we should all go back to our vacant smiles at all the tiresome 'diverse' 'vibrant' blather we are tirelessly fed.

Anonymous said...

If I wanted to live in Wyoming I would. We have freedom of exit!

Anonymous said...

IT HAS TO END


I just find it so utterly a failure the anti-tobacco crusade. Like all movements their zest is real and their beliefs undeterred by actual science.

People who work together for the real common good, do so with the peoples rights left intact.
The second an agenda steps on people and criminalizes them they have set in motion their own movements failure. Without respecting the rights of the people a movement cannot stand!

Manipulation of science,the taking over of health depts,governmental health agencies,the stacking of politicians that favor your sides agenda.......Its anything but american and more describes a dictatorial roll rather than a constitutionally protected right to exist.

Anonymous said...

Public health and its advocates are fast becoming the most despised and hated group around the world as citizens find themselves criminalized for behavior that isnt a crime.

These ideals of such groups if left unchecked are the foundation stones of even more outlandish laws and less and less freedom for everyone.

A movement such as this can lead to world wars as we saw in the past century.......basic freedom for the basic man keeps the balance and prevents a growing hatred against such movements from spreading their ever growing hate into even bigger arenas of political life.

What drives anti-tobacco isnt just a hatred of smoking its much larger with tobacco just one of their targets,its larger than the obese people they wish to criminalize or the alcohol industry they wish to destroy..........

Their hatred goes much deeper its a hatred of american ideals,its a hatred of anything or anyone who stands in the way of their ideal world!

Its a hatred so vast and deep it has its roots in a socialistic facist way..........

The same as hitlers own party of national socialists..........while not a carbon copy of the nazis the policies are a carbon copy. The fear of such groups is the eugenics attitude such groups hold and when collected together they are the foundings of such political beliefs to surmise the national socialist movement.........

Its to this building ideology that tobacco control and their eugenics beliefs must be stopped.

ew-3 said...

Common sense isn't very common anymore, at least in government.
In psychology there is a condition called "learned helplessness". It's when a person is taught that they are not capable of doing things for themselves. It strikes me that a large part of the population is suffering from that condition. The more complicated the world becomes the more people suffer from this affliction.
Very different from the WWII crowd that defeated Hitler and Tojo then went on to put a man on the moon.
My gut tells me it has a lot to do with television and other forms of media. It tends to emphasize the negative. Ask yourself, how many murders have you witnessed in person? Then ask yourself how many have you seen on TV or even the news. Reality is greatly distorted by the TV or movie screen. But the impression it makes on us is quite strong and our memories have a hard time differentiating where the memory came from.
Being helpless we let someone else do things for us. We want to think their motives are good. But how much of the money collected in tobacco taxes actually are used for anti-tobacco ads? Increasingly government creates these programs, which at first appear to be for our own good, but in the end they are mechanisms to increase government revenue and increase control over us.
Global warming is another one of these. So is the environmental movement. So is public health care. The list gets longer every day.

Anonymous said...

what!?

Anonymous said...

Anon No. 1:

They would have loved you in Nazi Germany 70 years ago; they would love you in Iran today.

Anonymous said...

If New York State ranks #1 then my guess is that California ranks #2. Would not be too surprising for the most liberal of states. Ironically the state economy of NY would have to collapse itself first in order for the people to wake up and see the same garbage they are electing over and over. Then again even if NYS does collapse I'm not certain her ppl would then wake up. Never underestimate the entitlement mentality of New Yorkers. Some of the most well paid workers in this state also happens to be lawyers...

Anonymous said...

Anon -1
Many towns and cities are already bankrupt, but the feds in the last two years are pouring money (the so called stimulus funds) into them to keep them afloat. Sadly this is only delaying the problem and will eventually destroy the federal government.
Check out NYC's stimulus grants and spending here:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/ops/nycstim/html/tracker/tracker.shtml

Stimulus funds are being used to pay teachers, thus easing the burden on the city.

Anonymous said...

Some idiot actually wrote"

"IT HAS TO END
I just find it so utterly a failure the anti-tobacco crusade. Like all movements their zest is real and their beliefs undeterred by actual science."

So, idiot, are you saying that the -facts- correlating tobacco use with disease are false. Where do you get such......thoughts?....The (defunct) Tobacco Institute? -The ones the were created by Mad Ave. to sell Americans that smoking was actually good for you.


Thankfully, intelligent people outnumber idiots like you.

Anonymous said...

The sheer lack of language skills displayed in these comments kind of confirm the need for strict home-schooling regulations. Just saying.

And as far as it goes, we may have the most regulation but we have one of the best economies in the nation. So maybe regulation isn't as stifling as people think.

Anonymous said...

If New York State ranks #1 then my guess is that California ranks #2.

---------------------

It is high on the list. Top-5 IIRC.

NEWSFLASH: States with large populations need lots of rules. Film at 11.

Erik Baard said...

Actually, maybe we're being regulated to life. You'll find a disproportionate number of 'least free" states ranked among the states with the longest life expectancy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_life_expectancy

http://mercatus.org/freedom-50-states-2011/NY

Anonymous said...

It should'a been ranked 51 it's so bad; but hey everybody here says it's the greatest

Anonymous said...

"NEWSFLASH: States with large populations need lots of rules. Film at 11."

Problem is that federal laws are one size fits all. People in WA and LA don't need low volume toilets, they have more water then they know what to do with. Remember the 55MPH speed limit? One size fits all. Same speed limit on the Grand Central Parkway as I25 south of Albuquerque NM? And what happened when they got rid of the federal 55MPH law? Traffic deaths went down! And productivity went up. And we stopped making criminals of people who ignored the speed limit anyway.

And state laws apply equally to Queens and to the remote regions of upstate NY. There is very little in common between the two.

I'd even go so far as to say that laws that work in Manhattan may not be equally useful in Staten Island.

LibertyBoyNYC said...

Yeah let's bring back smoking and automatic weapons. That'll make it much more free.

Besides the tax-and-spend thing, which is obviously out of control, I can't see this survey making any sense whatsoever given NYC's density.

Anonymous said...

When Beame was mayor NYC was more red than Mascow

Anonymous said...

"Anonymous said...
When Beame was mayor NYC was more red than Mascow"

That's it! We have a winner in our Daily Idiot Contest.

Anonymous said...

Where's Mascow?

Jeremy Kareken said...

Anonymous has a point - we really don't have a smoking or shooting section inside our synagogues. It's something I have to ask my rabbi to reconsider.