LFOD made it to the WSJ's "Best of the Web" yesterday: Report: Some Massachusetts Residents Haven’t Moved to New Hampshire Yet.
“Live Free or Die” is New Hampshire’s inspiring motto and it has long been an appealing invitation to the overregulated and overtaxed residents of Massachusetts. New Hampshire has lately become even more inviting and now the state’s brand-new governor could be making the most compelling case yet for relocation.
Early this week a Journal editorial noted that New Hampshire, which has long avoided taxing wage income, has recently eliminated taxes on interest and dividends, too. On Thursday the Granite State inaugurated new Gov. Kelly Ayotte, and she’s expressing a determination to hold the line on spending as well. Here’s the heart of Ms. Ayotte’s very first executive order:
The Commission on Government Efficiency (“COGE”) be established to develop proposals to streamline government, cut inefficient spending, and find the most efficient ways to serve the people of New Hampshire, especially the most vulnerable citizens.
Fans of limited government will love the DOGE vibes. Truth be told, New Hampshire could teach Washington a lot about limited and efficient government. So it’s exciting to see the new governor is eager to give state taxpayers even more for their money. If Ms. Ayotte, a former U.S. senator and state attorney general, is diligent in rejecting spending proposals, the state should continue to prosper. No surprise, New Hampshire has been growing faster and enjoys a much lower unemployment rate than Massachusetts.
BotW's author, James Freeman, provides the bottom line: "Don’t be surprised if more Massachusetts residents embrace legal migration by scooting over the border into New Hampshire."
Also of note:
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Among its other flaws… In his continuing series about his least favorite bureau, Kevin D. Williamson point out: The ATF Is an Arbitrary Regulator.
Consider the saga of the forearm brace, a footlong bit of plastic that might or might not have made you a federal felon, depending on how the ATF is feeling on any given Wednesday morning. Set aside questions about guns and violent crime and think about this as an issue of administrative license being used as a substitute for law made by duly elected lawmakers.
The first thing you need to know about forearm braces is that they are … nonsense. I know I am going to hear from some disabled veteran writing to tell me that forearm braces made it possible for him to shoot again after suffering some terrible injury, and I am sure that is true. But forearm braces really were never about forearm braces. They were about short-barreled rifles (SBRs).
As described earlier in the series, putting a shoulder stock on a handgun with a barrel less than 16 inches long—notice the immediate descent into regulatory minutiae—makes it a short-barreled rifle under the National Firearms Act, and making or having or selling one without a special federal permission slip in the form of an ATF-issued tax stamp is a felonious no-no. If you go into a gun shop and look at these “handguns”—and they say “handgun” right there on the side, to prevent any federally felonious misunderstanding—the thing you’ll notice is that a lot of them don’t look like what you’re thinking of when you think of a handgun. They look like AR-15s or other rifles with shoulder stocks removed and short barrels. Because that is what they are. For example, conventional handguns generally have a magazine well within the grip, but many of these “handguns” have magazines in front of the trigger, as in the familiar AR-pattern rifle and most other semiautomatic rifles as well as many bolt-action rifles. The stock is gone, and you can’t put a new one on without a tax stamp. But you can—or could—put a forearm brace on. And if that forearm brace happened to be roughly in the shape of a folding rifle stock, and if it happened to be just the right size and shape to use as a rifle stock—in that case, then you’ve got your SBR in effect without having to go through the rigamarole with the pile of paperwork and the tax stamp and the fingerprinting and becoming a firearms manufacturer.
And, in case you're wondering if the regulation could get worse: it sure did. The phrase "arbitrary and capricious" appears six times in KDW's short article.
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Can you handle the truth? I think you can, and Megan McArdle supplies it: Here’s the truth: Meta ending fact-checking is a win against censorship. And she leads off with a libertarian insight:
If you want to know who wields power in a society, there’s a simple and effective test: Who supports censorship?
If you see someone advocating for more suppression of dangerous speech — be it heresy, hate speech or “misinformation” — you can be sure they expect their side to have exclusive use of the ban-hammer. The natural corollary is that when censorship regimes collapse, you know a power shift happened. That’s how you should understand the kerfuffle over changes in Meta’s moderation policies.
Bonus link: Biden officials 'screamed' at Meta execs to take down vaccine posts. Or so Zuck tells Joe Rogan. Now.
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RIP, though. Corbin K. Barthold writes an obit at City Journal: Net Neutrality May Finally Be Dead—Good Riddance.
Not long ago, liberals had a nervous breakdown over the decline (or so they imagined) of the Internet. Democrats predicted that we were about to “get the internet one word at a time.” A senator warned that we were on “a road to digital serfdom.” “The internet is dying,” declared the New York Times. There were street protests and death threats. The fear was that, unless the Federal Communications Commission imposed so-called net neutrality—a euphemism, in practice, for heavy-handed common-carrier regulation—we would soon have to pay to access individual websites.
Last week, a federal appellate court likely put to rest the argument over FCC-imposed common-carrier rules. It was a quiet death: protesters didn’t mark the occasion, politicians have gone silent, and the media have moved on—for the simple reason that their cause was spurious, both in law and in practice.
However…
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Not everyone's happy about its demise. For example, Karl Bode at TechDirt: U.S. Media Once Again Fails To Cover The Corrupt Net Neutrality Ruling With Any Clarity.
Last week a corrupt court system bought and paid for by corporations effectively made it illegal for the federal government to protect broadband consumers from widely despised regional telecom monopolies.
That, as we wrote at the time, is at the heart of the death of the several decade net neutrality fight.
But if you read most U.S. press coverage of the ruling, you’d be hard pressed to walk away with that knowledge. Most of the nap-inducing articles can’t even be bothered to mention that U.S. broadband is a failed market dominated by hugely unpopular regional monopolies, coddled and protected by significant state and federal corruption (kind of an important part of the story).
The word "corrupt" appears in the body of Karl's article four times; "corruption" appears not once, not twice, but thrice.
I'm pretty sure the court ruling didn't "effectively ma[k]e it illegal for the federal government to protect broadband consumers". I mean, Congress could pass a law for that.
Oh, but Karl says they're "corrupt" too. Never mind! The only non-"corrupt" folks in D.C. are the FCC commissioners, and then only when the Democrats have a majority.