Puppy Inspectors and SNAP Cards

View 724 Friday, May 18, 2012

The Facebook IPO charges forward, with the share price rising, and everyone is happy. Particularly Eduardo Saverin, whose 4% ownership of Facebook translates into more than a billion dollars. Saverin, born in Brazil and brought here as a child, became a citizen of the United States, and then renounced that citizenship after he fled to Singapore. Singapore has no capital gains tax. The United States, which is fixated on growth (as opposed to, say, small but reliable and sustained profit) has one of the highest capital gains taxes in the world. There is outrage in the United States Senate: Saverin, having enjoyed the hospitality of the United States and having participated in building one of the largest companies in the world, was insufficiently grateful. He should have stood by and paid his taxes like a man (is it politically correct to say things like that now?) and have been glad to do it, rejoicing that he was able to pay his share of SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) cards now issued in lieu of what we used to call Food Stamps. For those who want to know more about how we spend the money that Saverin doesn’t want to pay, see “Food Stamps and the $41 Cake” by Warren Kozak in today’s Wall Street Journal. And never forget the Bunny Inspectors. Incidentally, the authority of that section of the Department of Agriculture has just been expanded to include home kennels who sell puppies: they are getting closer to requiring a Federal license if you sell dogs from your home. Just think. Saverin has passed up the opportunity to pay for Puppy Inspectors as well as Bunny Inspectors.

Democrats in the Senate want that money. The health of the Republic is at stake. Just think , we might have to combine the duty of Puppy Inspector with that of Bunny Inspector! We can’t overwork these tireless civil servants! Go get that expatriate money. The Constitution doesn’t allow ex post facto laws nor does it allow bills of attainder, but surely we can find ways around that. SNAP cards, bunny inspectors, all these Federal marvels: no wonder the government needs more money.

Perhaps the remedy is to raise the capital gains tax. Facebook is going to be valued at a hundred billion dollars. Surely we can shake them down for half of that, which can be used to give SNAP cards to voters.

Federal Food Stamps, Bunny Inspectors, and Puppy Inspectors are activities best left to the states; there is absolutely no reason why these ought to be federal programs, and had these ideas been brought up for discussion at the Convention of 1787 they would not only have been roundly rejected but the very notion that they might become federal activities would have ended the Union before it began. Now we issue Federal SNAP cards. Want to bet that they will be advertising them just before the election? And I know of at least one SNAP card wielded by an illegal alien.  Which, of course, Mr. Saverin will be if he foolishly returns to the United States now that his work in creating Facebook is over. We’ll fix him.

And the beat goes on. We have sown the wind. Now it is time to reap.

Yesterday’s mailbag had this item:

Exploding Liquid Nitrogen: Where Does the Energy Come From?

Jerry

LN2 + H2O = explosions, videorecorded:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/exploding-liquid-nitrogen-where-does-the-energy-come-from/

Ain’t science grand?

Ed

It has generated a lot of mail, which will go in a future mailbag. Thanks to all who commented. For the record, the energy comes from the temperature difference in the tank after the event – it will be smaller than it was before the explosion. The reason the tank explodes is that the liquid nitrogen boils immediately, and being a liquid it mixes readily and has a large surface area exposed to the warm – room temperature, but that’s very hot compared to the boiling temperature of LN2. Fast boiling is another word for very rapid expansion, which is to say an explosion, which sends a layer of water and a large pile of rubber ducks into the air.

What surprised me about the event was that the can itself was lifted off the ground. The shock wave from the boiling LN2 must have distended the bottom of the can violently enough to lift the entire can several inches. I wouldn’t have predicted that in advance.

Anyway it looks like great fun, and let me repeat the warning, don’t do this at home. I survived making several ounces of nitroglycerine many decades ago, and as I look back on it, even though we took a number of precautions (the Encyclopedia Britannica warned us that the reaction was violently exothermic), we were extremely lucky. People bright enough to enjoy that kind of experimentation should survive. Playing with explosives is fun, but the future is in biology anyway. Get your kids a copy of Robert Bruce Thompson’s Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture. I just got a review copy. With luck I’ll be able to start doing the column again and I’ll do a full review, but if you know any bright kids this would be a good present.

The evidence piles in on the Zimmerman/Martin case, and all of it supports the view that the local police and local prosecutors made the right decision in the first place. You can charge Zimmerman with poor judgment, but it does not appear that he started the fight, and it does appear that he was losing it. The likely outcome of all this take years and will be three expensive trials all ended with hung juries. I am not convinced that outcome will be satisfactory to anyone, nor is the example healthy for the Republic.

If you want a picture of the near future, see Kimberly Strassel, Vampire Capitalism, in today’s Wall Street Journal.

This week the Obama campaign debuted its attack on Bain Capital, the private-equity firm Mitt Romney founded. Its two-minute ad purports to tell the story of GS Technologies, a Kansas City-based Bain investment that went bankrupt in 2001.

To hear the Obama campaign, this is a tale of greed: GST was a healthy, happy, quality steelmaker until Bain plundered its worth and stripped its 750 workers of their due. "It was like a vampire," laments one former employee in the ad. "They came in and sucked the life out of us."

Unsurprisingly the real story is a bit different. You can expect to see a lot more of this over the long hot summer. The productive are vampires robbing the poor, and the worst of them flee the country to avoid paying their fare share of taxes. You’ll see a lot of this.