I don’t think this article reaches the right conclusion, namely, to let markets do the regulating, but it does point out the absurdity of government regulation:

Government oversight of day care seems like a good idea—you wouldn’t want children cooped up in an airless basement—but this proposal went far beyond basic health and safety.

The new rules would dictate exactly how to do just about everything: how many block sets (“at least two (2) … with a minimum of ten (10) blocks per set”), where the children can play with the blocks (on “a flat building surface” that is “not in the main traffic area”) and when caregivers must wash their hands (before “eating food,” “after wiping a child’s nose,” etc.).

This is the way regulation works in America: Regulators try to imagine every possible mistake and then dictate a solution. The complexity is astounding.

Under a recent federal directive, the number of health-care reimbursement categories will soon increase from 18,000 to 140,000, including 21 separate categories for “spacecraft accidents” and 12 for bee stings. There are over 140 million words of binding federal statutes and regulations, and states and municipalities add several billion more.

. . . .

Consider our federal special-education laws, passed in the mid-1970s to end the shameful neglect of the small percentage of students with special needs. Special ed has now grown to consume 20% of the total K-12 budget in the U.S. Programs for gifted children, by contrast, get less than half of 1%.

Is this the correct balance? No one is even asking the question, because the regulations dictate the outcome.

Many Norwegians who live close to Sweden do their grocery shopping across the border where prices are lower, but to import butter has proven more difficult.

“They (Norway) have, as we see it, very restrictive trading politics, borderline protectionist,” Jonas Carlberg at the Swedish Dairy Association (Svensk Mjölk) told daily Dagens Nyheter, adding that the high custom duty is a way to protect domestic production in Norway.

But the shortage has made people turn to desperate measures, according to news agency TT.

A Russian man was caught on Friday trying to bring 90 kilogrammes of butter over the Swedish border to Norway without paying the custom duty. (Read more)

Prices spike as butter shortage spreads through Norway (Read more)

A comment from reddit:

In Norway, all milk and butter production is ruled over by an old and state-sanctioned cartel/corporation called TINE. The goal of TINE is to raise the prices on dairy products as high as humanly possible; with this, they have great success. For example: Currently, one litre of milk costs 14 Norwegian kroner = 2.431184 US$. Keep in mind that 1 US gallon = 3.78541178 litres and you can calculate the price/gallon for yourself…

As a result of this huge overprice, the result is the same as it always have been: overproduction. More is being produced, than sold. So what happens?

TINE implements quotas; each farmer is only allowed to produce x amounts of milk each year. This year, however, the production was smaller than otherwise due to the weather. So what does TINE do?

Nothing. Every grain of their being is geared towards reducing production, so they have no ideological idea that they can even do anything else. In spite of this shortage having been advertised from months and months away, they never increased the quotas for the farmers that could produce more.

I would also like to point out a couple of dirty tricks the TINE corporation uses to shut down any and all competition:

They have invented the Jarlsberg cheese, a cheese that was made exclusively to use much milk; they also lobbied for export subsidies for said cheese. We use milk worth 90 NOK to produce Jarlsberg, then it is exported for around 35-40 NOK; the other 50 NOK, around 8-9$, are subsidized by the state. This way we pay the Americans to eat our surplus milk storage and keep prices high.

Oh, and they have also blocked our enjoyment of Edamer. You see, some time ago dutch edamer cheese got popular in Norway. TINE lobbied the department of agriculture and had a tariff put up, then started producing their own shitty copies.

Same story with feta cheese. Around the early 2000′s, Arla corporation that operates in Denmark/Sweden started marketing and creating a market for feta cheese in Norway. They made great success with this. What happened then was that TINE sent a little letter to the agricultural ministry, which was, as per custom, precided over by a previous TINE CEO, and had them reinterpret the rules creatively. Previously imported cheese was judged based on the weight of the cheese itself; feta cheese on the other hand is lying in an oil solution to give it taste. Now the rules were suddenly interpreted so that the oil solution is counted as part of the cheese, thus doubling the import tolls on feta cheese. Oh and suddenly TINE launched their own shitty feta rip offs on the market as well.

tl;dr: The “butter crisis” is a result of a centrally planned Soviet-system of milk production, coupled with a rush for profit by the TINE corporation. As a result the consumer is sucked dry by the unscrupulous monopolist cunts.

Gold broke below $1,600 an ounce for the first time since early October, as a sharply weaker euro and losses in other markets prompted investors to raise cash by selling precious-metals holdings.

Gold, which has tarnished its image as a haven in recent months by moving in step with riskier assets like stocks and other commodities, tumbled 5% Wednesday as a broad-market rout saw investors shed holdings in favor of cash. (Read more)

Zero Hedge: Gold “Rehypothecation” Unwind Begins: HSBC Sues MF Global Over Disputed Ownership of Physical Gold.
physical gold in the hands of the very same insolvent financial syndicate of daisy-chained underfunded organizations, where the premature (or overdue) end of one now means the end of all, is also just as unsafe, if not more. Which is why we read with great distress a just broken story by Bloomberg according to which HSBC, that other great gold “depository” after JP Morgan (and the custodian of none other than GLD) is suing MG Global “to establish whether he or another person is the rightful owner of gold worth about $850,000 and silver bars underlying contracts between the brokerage and a client.” The notional amount is irrelevant: it could have been $0.01 or $1 trillion: what is very much relevant however, is whether or not MF Global was rehypothecating (there is that word again), or lending, or repoing, or whatever you want to call it, that one physical asset that it should not have been transferring ownership rights to under any circumstances. Essentially, this is at the heart of the whole commingling situation: was MF Global using rehypothecated client gold to satisfy liabilities? The thought alone should send shivers up the spine of all those gold “bugs” who have been warning about precisely this for years. Because the implications could be staggering.

Banks Build Contingency for Breakup of the Euro For the growing chorus of observers who fear that a breakup of the euro zone might be at hand, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has a pointed rebuke: It’s never going to happen.

But some banks are no longer so sure, especially as the sovereign debt crisis threatened to ensnare Germany itself this week, when investors began to question the nation’s stature as Europe’s main pillar of stability.

On Friday, Standard & Poor’s downgraded Belgium’s credit standing to AA from AA+, saying it might not be able to cut its towering debt load any time soon. Ratings agencies this week cautioned that France could lose its AAA rating if the crisis grew. On Thursday, agencies lowered the ratings of Portugal and Hungary to junk.

While European leaders still say there is no need to draw up a Plan B, some of the world’s biggest banks, and their supervisors, are doing just that.

. . . .

Banks including Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital and Nomura issued a cascade of reports this week examining the likelihood of a breakup of the euro zone. “The euro zone financial crisis has entered a far more dangerous phase,” analysts at Nomura wrote on Friday. Unless the European Central Bank steps in to help where politicians have failed, “a euro breakup now appears probable rather than possible,” the bank said. (Read more)

Premarket: Now Germany can’t sell bonds One of Germany’s worst bond sales since the launch of the euro sparked concerns the debt crisis was even beginning to threaten Berlin.The Bundesbank was forced to buy 39 per cent of the 6 billion euros of debt Germany had hoped to sell to investors after banks bought just 3.644 billion euros of the issue. (Read more)

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse. (Read more)

The last two years marked a significant shift in central banks’ attitudes toward gold. Since 1988, central banks have been net sellers of the precious metal. Lacking convertibility of their paper currencies into the commodity, this occurrence makes perfect sense. Why hold a physical asset with costly storage fees when there is no risk that it will ever be needed? Better to hold an interest-bearing (and easily stored) asset like a government security to earn a profit in the interim. So goes the typical explanation for why central banks load their balance sheets with financial assets instead of physical ones.

Yet over the last two years a dramatic shift in gold purchases has occurred. In the third quarter of this year alone, net gold purchases by central banks amounted to 150 tons — more than double the amount of the whole yearly total of 2010. For the first time in over 20 years, central banks of the world are buying more gold than they are divesting themselves of.

Yet if central banks deal exclusively in nonconvertible (and fiat) money, what explains the sudden change of heart? (Read more)

Reddit comment: “the Fed is running happy hour for alcoholics, and unless you show up drunk and covered in your own vomit, you aren’t included.”

A move by central bankers on Wednesday to contain the European debt crisis resulted in euphoria in global stock markets, but it also prompted skeptics to wonder: will this time be different? (Read more)

Imagine I walk across the street and buy a loaf of bread from a baker. I hand money and wanted bread, so I am happy. The baker had bread and wanted money, so he is happy. The world has become a better place with more people having had their more urgent needs satisfied.

This explanation should be identical if the street happens to be, say the U.S.-Canadian border. Alas, it is not. Suddenly macro-economists in both governments either rejoice or grieve, for a trade deficit and a trade surplus of $2.99 has been created.

Of course, this is macro-economic nonsense. It stems from a collection of fallacies, starting with they fallacy that countries trade. They don’t. A country is a collection of people held together at gun point and forced (also at gun point) to pay taxes to the same group of criminals. Countries don’t trade, individuals do.

ECONOMISTS are constantly urging governments to adopt policies that would reduce global imbalances—which, in crude terms, means that China should slash its current-account surplus and America its deficit. Yet they ignore the biggest imbalance of all: the current-account surplus that planet Earth appears to run with extraterrestrials. In theory, countries’ current-account balances should all sum to zero because one country’s export is another’s import. However, if you add up all countries’ reported current-account transactions (exports minus imports of goods and services, net investment income, workers’ remittances and other transfers), the world exported $331 billion more than it imported in 2010, according to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook. The fund forecasts that the global current-account surplus will rise to almost $700 billion by 2014. (Read more)

From Open Europe‘s news summary of November 22nd:

Commission wants right to intervene directly in member states’ budgets;
German government: Eurobonds no “panacea” for eurozone crisis
In an interview with FTD, EU Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs Olli Rehn argues for “the functioning of the eurozone to be improved through better coordination and tighter fiscal surveillance”, which would include having to clear national budgets in Brussels in order to ensure that rules on budgetary stability are adhered to. According to a draft copy of the Commission’s legislative package seen by Süddeutsche Zeitung, member states would have to submit their draft budgets to Brussels by April 15 in order for the Commission to provide comments and suggestions. The budget would then be discussed nationally and resubmitted by October 15 in order to get the Commission’s final approval. Rehn argues that the Treaty changes urged by Germany would not be necessary to achieve this, although he added that the Commission did not exclude this possibility. Handelsblatt reports that a source close to German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that her goal is a Treaty amendment which allows for similar budgetary intervention and an enforcement role for the European Court of Justice, and according to experts, such a change can be achieved through a protocol added to the EU Treaties.

Commentary by Patrick Barron:

The crisis in Europe is a textbook example (Austrian economics textbook, that is…) of how the adverse consequence of one failed market intervention leads to another and another until the state, or in this case the European Union super state, controls all economic life at the expense of personal liberty.

The failed attempt at establishing a common currency has created a tragedy of the commons (see Philipp Bagus’ excellent book The Tragedy of the Euro), whereby the most irresponsible nations are rewarded for their irresponsibility. Now, instead of simply abandoning the failed project and considering something with a real track record–dare I say “gold standard” or money freely chosen by the market?–the elitists of Europe plan to move to the next step of trying to run the supposedly independent and sovereign countries that comprise the European Monetary Union from their cushy desks in Brussels.

What is really amazing to me is not this debacle, but the fact that so many seemingly intelligent people really believe that government keeps our food safe.

How did we get to the point that bureaucrats in Washington DC are telling the rest of us what is or is not a vegetable?

Congress passed a revised agriculture appropriations bill last week, essentially making it easier to count pizza sauce as a serving of vegetables. The move has drawn widespread outrage from consumer advocates and pundits, who see “pizza is a vegetable.” as outlandish.

There’s just one little misperception: Congress didn’t declare pizza to be a vegetable. And, from a strictly nutritional standpoint, there’s decent evidence that lawmakers didn’t exactly bungle this decision.

Let’s revisit the facts: Despite what one might expect from the headlines, if you scour the agriculture appropriations bill, referenced in numerous stories, you won’t find a single mention of the word “pizza,” or even “vegetable,” for that matter.

This is not a fight over pizza. It is, instead, a fight about tomato paste. Specifically, it’s a fight about how much of the product counts as one serving of vegetables.

Right now, tomato paste gets a sort of special treatment under school lunch regulations. Just “an eighth of a cup of tomato paste is credited with as much nutritional value as half a cup of vegetables,” my colleague Dina ElBoghdady explained last week. (Read more)