Après Moi, le Déluge is a fantastic dispatch from Casey’s free daily email service. Here is a highlights.

…it appears that enough time has passed that current generations have completely forgotten the critical connection between the ability of humans to freely pursue their aspirations and economic progress.

You can see this ignorance in the popular demand for even more, not less, meddling in the affairs of humankind. Should this trend continue – and for reasons I will touch on momentarily, I firmly believe it will – then the aspirations of the productive minority will soon be dampened by ever higher taxes and other attempts to "level the playing field" and the global economy, already in tatters, will fall off the edge.

There is no more timely nor acute example of this growing trend than what is currently going on in France. I refer, of course, to the first round of the presidential election process, scheduled for this weekend.

In France, if no candidate attracts no better than 50% of the vote, then the two leading candidates go to a decisive runoff vote, this time around to be held on May 6.

The current president, Nicolas Sarkozy, a conservative in name only, was running at a fairly steady gait toward re-election (thanks to the head start awarded all incumbents), when leading socialist candidate Francois Hollande came out with a proposal to tax anyone with an annual income of over one million euros at a rate of 75%. He also promised to add a tax on all financial transactions and increase taxes on France’s biggest companies to 35% – securing bragging rights as levying the world’s third-highest corporate taxes, the US being #1. This all on top of a 25% VAT, one of the world’s highest. By some calculations, the result of Hollande’s new taxes is that effectively 100% of all incomes over one million euros will now be stripped away by the state.

….

When confronted by reporters about the fact that his 75% tax on high-income owners would raise nowhere enough revenue to offset France’s towering debt and social obligations, Mssr. Hollande was heard to respond:

"It’s not a question of return. It’s a question of morality."

When coercion and theft are considered moral, anything is possible, and none of it good.

“Monetary policy is very different from the days when we were an industrial behemoth.  If you look at the first eight recessions after World War II, when we were a big manufacturer, back then, if the Fed saw a problem they cut rates and boom, manufacturers sparked up their idled plants and factories.”

Richard Yamarone, from KWN.

Our leaders today seemed determined to outdo George Orwell. Another absurd proposal is making its rounds in the cesspool of a city filled with low-life, never-had-a-real-job busy bodies called Washington, D.C.

The Democrats, worried about higher gas prices, want to set up a board that would apply a "windfall profit tax" as high as 100 percent on the sale of oil and gas, according to their legislation. The bill provides no specific guidance for how the board would determine what constitutes a reasonable profit.

Read more about it here.

Never mind that oil company profits have nothing to do with a “windfall profit.” Windfall profits are those gained by counterfeiting dilution. Let’s say I counterfeit money—create millions of dollars out of thin air and take possession of them. Even though I have not produced a thing that has been voted on by a community of consumers with their money, I have instantly become richer at the expense of everyone else who holds that money (as their money has lost purchasing power). This new wealth is windfall wealth.

Some definitions of windfall profit are less technical and merely rely on a profit to be “unexpected” in order for it to be considered windfall.

In any case, it would be a refreshing change if people clamouring for governments to crack down on oil comapny profits would educate themselves on the difference between a profit and a profit margin. Energy companies will continue to rely on huge profits as we move deeper into this period of scarce supply of cheap energy. I.e. it is becoming much more expensive to produce a barrel of oil. Margins have not changed—they can’t if oil companies want to stay in business—but their nominal profits have increased which apparently is what everyone gets their panties in a twist about and allows for endless political posturing.

I recommend making Chris Nelder’s getreallist.com a part of your daily. His slogan is “Deal with reality or it will deal with you.”

The reality is that the supply of cheap oil waning just as demand is skyrocketing. This causes real prices to rise. What causes nominal prices to rise is central bank printing presses which must run nonstop in order to finance such incredible budget deficits by your friendly oil-company-slaying-speculation-blaming federal government.

The claim that unfettered capitalism in the 19th century caused children’s limbs to be scattered all over factory floors and it was only the protective hand of the state that put an end to such cruelty is not only an economic absurdity, it is not only historically inaccurate, but it clearly paves the way for justifying this sort of nonsense.

The Daily Caller reports that the DoL, under the guidance of the Obama Administration, is proposing that child labor laws be modified to prohibit children under the age of 16 from working with animals, for instance, or from being allowed to work with food storage bins. The proposal also seeks to prohibit children from "being employed in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials," which essentially makes it a crime for farmhands to touch produce once it has been picked.

Originally put forward by Labor Secretary Hilda Solis last fall as a way to further protect children from unsafe working conditions, the proposal threatens unprecedented government overreach into the normal operating procedures of private farms. And while the new provisions would reportedly contain an exemption for children working on farms owned by their parents, they would still drastically limit the freedom of children to learn about agriculture from a young age.

Read the rest of the article here.