I have a tendency to stick with pretty broad topics on the political section of this blog.  I don’t deal with “the news of the moment” too often due to the 24 hour news cycle and all the noise that already exists to debate the day’s happenings.  However, I’ve noticed a keen interest in this topic from my friends, many of whom work in retail, or have in the past.  This week, where allowed by law, businesses which accept credit cards are now permitted to pass along the credit card surcharges to the customer, currently ranging from 1.5% to 4.0%. Continue reading →

(First, on a personal note, sorry for the delay on blog posts lately.  I had a good run for a few weeks and I plan to get back to that consistency.  My post tomorrow (hopefully) will explain in more detail.)

I often hear challenges from my conservative libertarian friends when I raise the issue of wage gaps.  They have a complete list of excuses why it’s completely acceptable for someone to make millions while putting others in the unemployment line.  Here’s some of the best lines I’ve heard from C-Level apologists: Continue reading →

There isn’t much of a legitimate “free speech” anymore.  We feel like there is, but let’s take a real step back and think about this for a second.

Where do you practice free speech?  First, we have to rule out pretty much the entire internet, because if you’re posting via social media, you’ve agreed to a Terms of Service that gives the service permission to silence any speech, and since they are a private organization and not part of the government, they are not violating the First Amendment.  Even if you’re posting via your own website, odds are that you’re using some form of blogging software or, at the very least, a commercial hosting service that has its own ToS.  Perhaps they’re not very heavy-handed, but they sure comply with those takedown requests pretty quickly and without question. Continue reading →

“If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.”

– Thomas Sowell

For years, politicians and pundits have shouted about the “bias” in American media.  The typical theory is that everyone with a different narrative is hellbent on turning America into the next USSR, despite not really being able to pinpoint why this makes any sense other than the reporting not matching up with their preconceived notion of how the world should work. Continue reading →