“For more than a decade, Microsoft went about its business, developing software, selling it to customers, and — happily, legally — making money. Then in 1995, after repeated assaults by the Justice Department’s antitrust division, Microsoft broke down and started playing the Beltway game — defensively at first.”

“Washington politicians and journalists sneered at Microsoft’s initial political innocence. A congressional aide said, “They don’t want to play the D.C. game, that’s clear, and they’ve gotten away with it so far. The problem is, in the long run they won’t be able to.” ”

Full commentary on how government preys on businss by David Boaz @ http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11972

“Under an agreement organized between the two governments last year, the neutral alpine nation famous for its banking secrecy was supposed to divulge the names associated with about 4,500 accounts suspected of sheltering money from the Internal Revenue Service. But a Swiss judge blocked the disclosure because it violated national banking laws.”

Full column on Swiss Banks vs the IRS by Alex Newman @ http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/world-mainmenu-26/europe-mainmenu-35/3798-us-terrorizes-switzerland-over-taxes-banking

“While these figures are dramatic, they pale in comparison to what the federal government owes foreign and domestic investors….”

Full column on our pending doom by Veronique de Rugy @ http://reason.com/archives/2010/05/11/our-unsustainable-debt

“Addressing the Southern Republican Leadership Conference during its third day, Dr. Paul told the audience, “The question has been raised about whether or not our president is a socialist….  I am sure there are some people here who believe it. But in the technical sense, in the economic definition of a what a socialist is, no, he’s not a socialist.”

Dr. Paul continued, “He’s a corporatist. And unfortunately we have corporatists inside the Republican party and that means you take care of corporations and corporations take over and run the country.”

Steven Yates takes an in-depth look at Corporatism and who loves it @ http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/economy/commentary-mainmenu-43/3303-ron-paul-obama-is-another-corporatist-not-a-socialist

“Our mandate must cover the full range of macroeconomic and financial sector policies that bear on global stability in the modern world,” Strauss-Kahn told the annual gathering of the Bretton Woods Committee on Friday. “And that, in many ways, is the bottom line: to strengthen the fund’s role as the guardian of systemic stability.”

Declaring the need for a new “multilateral surveillance” system, the French managing director said what the IMF wants “is a new focus and capacity to deal with systemic risks.”

If approved, the new surveillance procedures “would allow — indeed require — the fund to assess the broader and systemic effects of country-level policies, and the associated risks, in a fundamentally different way,”

Alex Newman exposes new attempts to empower the IMF to deal with the financial crisis @ http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/economy/economics-mainmenu-44/3052-imf-seeks-new-mandate-global-currency

“In the past few months, it has been boosted by liberal-left economists Paul Krugman and Robert Kuttner, as well as French President Nicolas Sarkozy, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, the European Council, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou  (who is also president of the Socialist International) and the U.K.’s Financial Services Authority chairman Lord Adair Turner.”

“Advocates of the Tobin tax, named for the late Yale economics professor and Nobel laureate James Tobin, suggest a tax on foreign currency transactions would engender international currency stability by discouraging speculation. Some politicians, like Gordon Brown and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, have pushed for Tobin taxes at the national level. However, as the British journal The Economist noted,  “Unless a Tobin tax were implemented worldwide, trading would move out of any country that enforced it.” ”

William F. Jasper exposes the push for a new  tax on financial transactions @ http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/politics/2901-qtobin-taxq-and-un-global-taxman-making-a-comeback

“Rather than exclude these accounts from the freeze for fear of appearing weak on defense, the president should mandate that the baseline defense budget also be frozen.”

Lawrence Korb makes the case for a military spending freeze @ http://thinkprogress.org/2010/01/27/spending-defense-freeze/

“But today Congress wants to go into even more debt. According to news reports, on Wednesday, Democrats proposed allowing the federal government to borrow an additional $1.9 trillion to pay its bills, a record increase that would permit the national debt to reach $14.3 trillion (roughly the size of our GDP) to support the federal government’s borrowing through 2010.”

Veronique de Rugy calls on Congress to kick a bad habit cold turkey @ http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/21/the-governments-endless-appeti

David Boaz at The Cato Institute looks at new taxes being considered  @ http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/01/18/democrats-voracious-search-for-new-tax-revenue/

“All this borrowing is only necessary, we are told, because Obama ran up $1.4 trillion of debt in his first year.”

“It’s true that the White House is pushing big spending items, not least of which is his multitrillion-dollar scheme for government-run health care. But many critics, either out of ignorance or malice, are blaming Obama for deficits that are not his fault.”

Daniel J. Mitchell of The Cato Institute aportions the blame @ http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11094

Some Republicans, for instance, complain that Obama tripled the budget deficit in his first year. This assertion is understandable,