No. The post was actually this. As you can see, he’s criticizing Steven Horwitz for his cultural leftism. That’s a bit odd, given what he publishes on his website.
]]>Hugh Pickens passes along a NYTimes report on software programs called “zappers,” which allow even technologically illiterate restaurant and store owners to siphon cash from computer cash registers to cheat tax officials. In the old days, restaurant owners who wanted to cheat kept two sets of books. But because cash registers make automated records, hiding the theft requires getting into the machine’s memory and changing that record.
“…the Canadian province of Quebec may be the world leader in prosecuting zapper cases. Since 1997, zappers have figured in more than 230 investigations, according to the tax collecting body Revenu Québec… In making 713 searches of merchants, Revenu Québec found 31 zapper programs that worked on 13 cash register systems. Only two known zapper cases have been prosecuted in the United States… The cash register security industry is focused on protecting patrons and owners from theft by employees, which may be one reason so few zappers are uncovered in the United States. No one hires security experts to protect the government from devious businesses… As hard as zapper software is to detect, it is easy to make, said Jeff Moss, organizer of the annual hacker convention Def Con. ‘If it runs on a Windows system and you are a competent Windows administrator, you can do it,’ he said.”
The article makes it sound as if it’s mostly super rich businesses that are doing this when it’s probably mostly people just struggling to make it. Business aren’t cheating the government out of anything. Really the only thing businesses owe goverment for is the use of their currency because as the current state of affairs stand citizens don’t exactly get to decide what they want to pay for in government, and politicians think they can get a away with spending hundreds of billions of dollars for things most people simply don’t want. I wouldn’t really say that the government has the moral high ground here.
]]>I don’t have any objection to that. It may have sounded like I did in my comment above though.
What I do question is the wisdom of intelligent design and creationism.
]]>Luckily, I am a total quote-devourer, so I think I have the quote you’re referring to in my collection. Lew said, “Always and everywhere, the only serious political issue is what the state should and should not do. All the rest distracts.”
So, in this case, even though you are correct in your point about LRC’s abundance of cultural, social, and strategy-related columns, Lew was referring to political arguments, so here I think he’s right in that specific sense. But maybe you’re thinking of another quote I haven’t read.
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