The Wall Street Journal has compiled some of the most flagrant flopping performances from the World Cup.  You can watch some of the best athletes in the world participate in this shameful practice. Just imagine some of the best American football, basketball or hockey players fake an injury on camera game after game.

After Barack Obama’s victory in the 2009 election, one of my favorite pieces of commentary was the South Park episode “About Last Night”. The episode tells the story of election night reactions in South Park, all the while mocking McCain supporters for believing Obama’s election to be a disaster and mocking Obama supporters for believing that their candidate could actually change everything – essentially criticizing everyone for overreacting in one way or another. At the time, this seemed like a very reasonable approach to take – after all, no matter how bad Barack Obama was as President, he couldn’t be that bad. Time has shown that President Obama is, in fact, that bad. Socialized medicine, a devalued dollar, a soaring deficit, restrictions of personal freedom, a complete lack of transparency… the list goes on. President Obama has shown himself to be a collectivist through and through – and certainly not afraid to use the government’s monopoly on the use of force to achieve his goals.

Undoubtedly, many Americans voted for President Obama because they genuinely believed in his message of “hope” and “change”. But now that the true nature of his agenda has been revealed, Americans have a responsibility to each other to elect leaders that will respect the rights of everyone. Remember that consensus is not reached in a democratic system. When a law is made, it is not because all Americans have agreed on a given course of action. Instead, consensus is reached on the basis of majority rule and then imposed on the whole of society. Because consensus is imposed and not reached, the default government position on any given issue should be that of inaction. That is not a typo. The most moral and practical thing a government can do is usually nothing. Any action by government constitutes an imposition by force of a particular viewpoint on some who do not share that viewpoint. This is why so many government actions constitute a violation of individual rights – because every government action constitutes the use of force. At times, this use of force is necessary. Some taxes must be levied to pay for essential government services and to compensate for negative externalities, armies must be maintained, essential government salaries must be paid, etc. – but the government has no place in areas such as workplace diversity, health care, and the money supply (to name only a few of very many). In these areas, government involvement usually means that some majority is forcing its views on a minority, and individual rights are being violated. When the majority knowingly and willingly votes for candidates and policies that will violate individual rights, those individuals that comprise the majority are guilty of oppressing their minority brethren.

As mentioned above, even President Obama’s harshest opponents did not anticipate the scale of government expansion that has taken place since his election. But now that the full truth is known, any American that continues to support President Obama is guilty of trampling the rights of his fellow citizens. This is the real evil of collectivism – its insistence that men be pitted against one another. Individualists have no need to quarrel, we demand nothing of our brothers, seeking only to trade by mutual consent and to mutual advantage. While collectivism is a cancer that makes every man his neighbor’s enemy.

NORML points to two recent studies that points to marijuana as a possible treatment option for both cancer and Alzheimer’s.

…researchers at the State University of New York (SUNY), Upstate Medical University in Syracuse published data in the June issue of the journal Pharmacology concluding that the administration of the plant cannabinoids delta-8-THC and delta-9-THC halted cellular respiration and tumor growth in human oral cancer cells. Specifically, investigators reported that cannabinoids were a “potent inhibitor” of Tu183 human cancer cells, a notoriously difficult to treat type of oral cancer.

Furthermore:

Similarly, preclinical data published online last week in the journal Cell Communication and Signaling reported that the administration of the non-psychoactive cannabinoid cannabidiol (CBD) increases adult neurogenesis (the active production of new neurons) in laboratory animals. Authors speculated that cannabis’ pro-neurogenic effects may explain why the plant appears to be useful in the treatment of certain neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s disease or ALS.

So the curing of Alzheimer’s is grounds for destroying fetuses in order to gain access to fetal stem cells, but not legalizing a piece of shrubbery? Once again, logic takes a back seat to government intervention and populist opinion.

Usain Bolt has decided against participating in a London race to avoid paying high British taxes on his endorsement income. According to the Associate Press:

The Olympic and world champion in the 100 and 200 meters said he decided to skip the event after his agent informed him he would lose money by competing in London.

“I’m definitely not going to run [in Crystal Palace],” Bolt said Monday.

Bolt’s agent Ricky Simms told The Associated Press the British tax law stipulates that foreign sports stars have to pay taxes on their worldwide endorsements, a situation that “in recent sports has kept a lot of the big stars in other sports away from Britain.”

“Usain is possibly the first athlete to have endorsements at the level where he stands, but he would see his fees greatly diminish after taxes,” Simms said.

Meanwhile, Britain’s sports minister Hugh Robertson told the BBC that he will “see what he can do” to help help Bolt with the tax concession.

By Nathan Yang

The elitist social network BeautifulPeople.com generated a lot of publicity during the 2010 FIFA World Cup for running an attractiveness survey of all starting footballers. In particular, the media seemed to be obsessed about which player and teams received the honor of being the ugliest. We thought that it would be fun to explain why some players/teams are deemed to be attractive, while others are not using the information provided by the networking site.

The resulting paper is “Wealth and Status: Analyzing the Perceived Attractiveness of 2010 FIFA World Cup Players“. Our main objective is to see whether there is indeed a connection between social status – attractiveness in this case – and wealth. Research outside of economics suggests that the connection between status and wealth is not necessary.

Our analysis has two layers: 1) drivers for individual status (eg: Anaface scientific measure of beauty, age, height, race, performance) and 2) drivers for country status (eg: GDP per capita, measure of income inequality, number of internet users, FIFA team ranking). By decomposing the variance of each player’s rating into these two layers, we can ultimately estimate what each country’s social status is. The graph below shows a positive association between wealth and status.

This result cannot be explained using the explanation that wealthy teams have better ranked teams, as the correlation between FIFA ranking and GDP per capita is statistically insignificant.

Why is showing a positive correlation between wealth and status interesting? Because wealth = status is a common assumption in the analysis and explanation of conspicuous consumption. The famous economist/sociologist Thorstein Veblen explained that the wealthy spend lavishly as a means of separating themselves from the poor and thereby establishing their place in society’s hierarchy. The wealthy are motivated by this as it is assumed that fancy stuff imples wealthy implies status. A link between wealth and status has not been established empirically… and that is what our paper sets out to do.

To some extent, our research suggests that Veblen was right.

Nathan Yang is a Ph.D candidate at the University of Toronto’s Economics Department.

Dr. Thomas Sowell has some rather ominous thoughts on the current political and economic state of affairs:

Not only has all the runaway spending and rapid escalation of the deficit to record levels failed to make any real headway in reducing unemployment, all this money pumped into the economy has also failed to produce inflation. The latter is a good thing in itself but its implications are sobering.

How can you pour trillions of dollars into the economy and not even see the price level go up significantly? Economists have long known that it is not just the amount of money, but also the speed with which it circulates, that affects the price level.

Last year the Wall Street Journal reported that the velocity of circulation of money in the American economy has plummeted to its lowest level in half a century. Money that people don’t spend does not cause inflation. It also does not stimulate the economy.

As Dr. Sowell points out, this reluctance to spend money is not surprising on the part of business. In such an unstable political environment (particularly one in which asset confiscation is taken so lightly), businesses will of course be wary of investing capital. Sowell continues by focusing on the warnings displayed by the rising price of gold:

For the first time, more gold is being bought as an investment to be held as a hedge against a currently non-existent inflation than is being bought by the makers of jewelry. There may not be any inflation now, but eventually that money is going to start moving, and so will the price level.

Despite a big decline in the amount of gold used to make jewelry, the demand for gold as an investment has risen so steeply as to more than make up for the reduced demand for gold jewelry, and has in fact pushed the price of gold to record high levels.

What does all this say? That people don’t know what to expect next from this administration, which seldom lets a month go by without some new anti-business laws, policies or rhetoric.

Unfortunately, it will not be those responsible for this stagnation that bear the brunt of the consequences, as Dr. Sowell concludes:

There is no free lunch– and the biggest price of all is paid by people who are unemployed because politicians cannot leave the economy alone to recover, as the American economy has repeatedly recovered faster when left alone than when politicians decided that they have to “do something.”