So much to read and learn, and so little time. Thanks in no small measure to the energy that Ron Paul's candidacy unleashed, more people than ever are eager to cut through the propaganda and uncover the truth. But where to start? And how can you get the most out of the time you have to devote to reading and study?
I put together the resources that follow as my way of answering these questions. I've included books (many in free online versions) and articles, as well as audio and video files that are also free. For the current crisis, see especially The Bailout Reader. Take a look also at the reading list Dr. Paul includes in his book The Revolution: A Manifesto. Many of these titles also appear in the categories below: economics, sound money, foreign policy, the Constitution, and civil liberties.
Can we read our way to freedom? No, but we cannot be effective activists in the Ron Paul tradition unless we know some economics and history, and the various depredations, foreign and domestic, of the regime.
Fascism will come at the hands of perfectly authentic Americans who have been working to commit this country to the rule of the bureaucratic state; interfering in the affairs of the states and cities; taking part in the management of industry and finance and agriculture; assuming the role of great national banker and investor, borrowing billions every year and spending them on all sorts of projects through which such a government can paralyse opposition and command public support; marshalling great armies and navies at crushing costs to support the industry of war and preparation for war which will become our nation’s greatest industry; and adding to all this the most romantic adventures in global planning, regeneration, and domination – all to be done under the authority of a powerfully centralised government in which the executive will hold in effect all the powers, with Congress reduced to the role of a debating society.
America today is a nation in trouble. The great fortress of liberty, the country of the most productive, prosperous, and happy people in the world, is now in grave danger. America is under siege by the Dark Side, the forces of statism, while its Knights of Liberty are disarmed, demoralized, and suffering near-fatal wounds.
The country that once elected leaders whose ideas upheld liberty now elects leaders whose sweet-sounding platitudes and woozy promises are all that is required, and whose actual, dangerous ideas need not be examined until after Election Day.
The country that defended property rights now seizes 40-percent of our income in a myriad of taxes imposed by all levels of government—with even larger levies on incomes, profits, investments, and savings on the horizon.
The country that championed capitalism now vilifies our industries, cripples them with regulations, seizes their profits, then declares that the free market has failed and government must take over... Reisman's blog
A recent New York Times article provides two significant pieces of information about Larry Summers, the man designated by President-Elect Obama to be head of the National Economic Council and, as such, according to The Times, “his lead economic adviser inside the White House.” (David Leonhardt, “The Return of Larry Summers,” November 26, 2008, p. B1.)
First, The Times’ article informs its readers that Summers, a former Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton, and later President of Harvard University, so impressed Henry Kissinger that years ago “Kissinger suggested that Mr. Summers be given a White House post in which he was charged with shooting down or fixing bad ideas. Mr. Summers’ loyal protégés — Timothy Geithner, who beat him out to become the next Treasury secretary; Peter Orszag, the next budget director; Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook; and others — say that Mr. Summers can make them smarter in ways that almost no else can.”
The second significant piece of information provided by The Times’ article describes the nature of Mr. Summers’ own ideas. It describes how “His favorite argument today…goes like this: To undo the rise in income inequality since the late ’70s, every household in the top 1 percent of the distribution, which makes $1.7 million on average, would need to write a check for $800,000. This money could then be pooled and used to send out a $10,000 check to every household in the bottom 80 percent of the distribution, those making less than $120,000. Only then would the country be as economically equal as it was three decades ago.”... George Reisman
Disappointing as the administration seems likely to be, it never looked any other way to those of us who avoided being infected by Obamamania. The argument for Sen. Obama was that whoever he was, he was neither the warrior goddess nor the tempestuous, erratic Republican who sang about the possibility of bombing Iran and who thought President Clinton was a wimp for refusing to order a ground invasion of Serbia. Put bluntly: the alternatives to Sen. Obama were worse.
The president-elect's rush to embrace the liberal interventionist establishment in choosing his foreign policy staff suggests that the next four years will be a lot like the last eight in substance if not tone, and a lot like the previous eight years in both substance and tone. This means that anyone who believes in a foreign policy of peace and nonintervention must continue the battle. The fight against the Bush-McCain neocons is over. The fight against the Obama-Clinton liberal interventionists is about to begin.
One is hardly ever shocked anymore: that seems to be the defining characteristic of modernity. Yet I got to experience that rare sensation the other day when I read this blog item on LewRockwell.com. Aha! I thought. So that's why the MSNBCers are hailing the Big Bailout at the top of their lungs – their parent company, General Electric, also owns GE Capital, which was declared "too big to fail" and given its bailout infusion the day after the election.
The timing of this announcement was fairly interesting, as noted by conservative-libertarian columnist Jim Pinkerton. Pinkerton was rightly outraged when, in response to MSNBC's Chris Matthews' comment that his job is to "make this presidency work," he told a Fox News panel:
"Well, Matthews is entitled to his opinion, although if he wants to run for the Senate in Pennsylvania in 2010 as has been widely reported he should resign and not have a platform on the air.
"But I think that the overall culture of MSNBC was established when they changed their slogan, post-election, to 'The Power of Change.' Now, that sounds a little bit familiar to the Obama campaign 'Change We Can Believe In.' Maybe that's not an accident.
"But of course, I think the big story here, I think it goes right to what MSNBC's up to as a strategy, is the news that the FDIC, which is now following election returns, is guaranteeing $139 billion of General Electric Capital debt. That's General Electric Capital, as in General Electric, which is the parent company of MSNBC, CNBC, NBC. Now, for a $139 billion guarantee, I'd consider, I'd probably go more, I'd probably go all the way over to the Olbermann/Maddow territory.$139 billion." Raimondo antiwar.com
Of course there's nothing all that unusual about a spy going to work for a Washington thinktank. Ex-CIA employees do it all the time: so do all sorts of other spooks, who would otherwise be haunting the world's darkest corners. No big deal. But what I've never seen, and don't recall ever hearing about, is the spectacle of a spy for a foreign country being hired by any organization that hopes to influence U.S. foreign policy. Well, here's one for the record books: the Middle East Forum has hired Steve Rosen, once the head of policy development for the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Rosen is accused of stealing highly classified information from the U.S. government and passing it on to Israeli government officials.
Rosen was the sparkplug of AIPAC, known for implementing – with notable success – the powerful lobbying group's efforts to influence the executive branch. The very effective modus operandi of this behind-the-scenes wheeler dealer was summed up by his reported comment that:
"A lobby is like a night flower. It thrives in the dark and dies in the sun." Raimondo antiwar.com
This is F.A. Hayek in 1975 on Meet the Press. If you have never listened to a Mises.org podcast before, you must listen to this. I heard this Friday and I've been haunted by it ever since. A number of points stand out to me.- LewRockwell.com
... IF HE FOUND HIMSELF IN THE SAME FINANCIAL SHAPE AS THE COUNTRY?
Consider what we are about to do. Bush in 2008 spent 21 percent of GDP. States, counties and cities spent another 12 percent. Thus, one third of GDP is spent by government at all levels. Obama and Co. propose to raise that by another 10 percent of GDP. We may soon be north of 40 percent of gross domestic product controlled and spent by government.
A family man in America's condition, awash in debt, spending more than he makes, would cut back consumption, find a second job and get out of debt. Or declare bankruptcy, accept the shame and humiliation, change his wastrel ways and start anew.
MAYBE THEY WERE MORE LUCKY THAN SMART TO BEGIN WITH...
How Scientists Helped Cause Our Financial Crisis
In retrospect, the financial planning by our most sophisticated financial institution looks incredibly stupid. Merrill Lynch never included in its plans the risk that its counterparties could demand more collateral. Citigroup proceeded to dive headlong into the mortgage market on the assumption that a national housing decline was impossible. Everyone, it seems, failed to guard against the risk that they might be forced to sell assets to raise capital during a downturn. So it's worth asking: how did so many rich guys get so dumb?
THE LAST TIME I POSTED ABOUT IT, THE TOTAL WAS $4.28 TRILLION... AND THAT WAS JUST DAYS AGO!
U.S. PLEDGES $7.7 TRILLION IN BAILOUT
Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. government is prepared to provide more than $7.76 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers after guaranteeing $306 billion of Citigroup Inc. debt yesterday. The pledges, amounting to half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, are intended to rescue the financial system after the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.
The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $3.18 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The commitment dwarfs the plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Federal Reserve lending last week was 1,900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis.
WE AREN'T GETTING MANY GOOD SIGNS OUT OF THE NEW PRESIDENT, BUT THIS IS ONE CRUCIAL THING HE CAN DO RIGHT AWAY!
...how might Obama test the water for a better relationship with the Russia of Medvedev and Vladimir Putin?
First, Obama should restate his campaign position that no anti-missile system will be deployed in Poland until fully tested.
Second, he should declare that, as this system is designed to defend against an Iranian ICBM with a nuclear warhead, it will not be deployed until Iran has tested an ICBM and an atomic device.
So long as the Iranian threat remains potential, not actual, there is no need to deploy a U.S. missile defense in Poland against it.
... with time wearing short and the prospect of a new administration descending upon Washington, Bush may shortly act to issue a pre-emptive class-based pardon to insure that his helpers not be prosecuted. And if the pardon is class-based, one prominent beneficiary will be George W. Bush himself.
Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed after the War By Robert Higgs
Evidence from public opinion polls and corporate bond markets shows that FDR’s policies prevented a robust recovery of long-term private investment by significantly reducing investors’ confidence in the durability of private property rights. Not until the New Deal/war economy ended and resources became available for peacetime production did private investment—and the nation’s economic health—fully recover. Independent Institute Click here to download PDF
As one of our readers pointed out, November 16th is Robert Nozick's birthday. I had the good fortune to meet Robert Nozick at a Templeton sponsored two-week long seminar in Newport, RI, and in that context it was easy to juxtapose Nozick with other leading thinkers in legal and political philosophy and economics, political science and history. Nozick at the time had already been battling with cancer, but at the time was in remission (though the cancer would come back again over the next year and cut his life short). Nevertheless, he stood above the crowd with his quick and penetrating mind, and his argumentative abilities. Nozick knocked down one argument after another claiming that freedom was such a contested term that individualism and collectivism could be seen as consistent positions in the freedom philosophy. In conversations with Richard Tuck, Margaret Jane Radin, Michael Sandel, Jeremy Waldron, etc., Nozick was often dismissed as merely clever, until he entered the room then they all shrank as the force of his arguments overwhelmed theirs. He also was particularly approachable during that seminar compared to the other superstars in attendance.
He even listened to me explain why when I teach Anarchy, State and Utopia I stress his "Austrianism" rather than the idea of "rights as trumps." I pointed out to him that his style of reasoning for 2/3rds of the books is that of the "invisible hand explanation" and that qualifies as a more Austrian or Hayekian style of argument than the rights based arguments that many others focus on in either their critique or their endorsement of Nozick.
Posted by Peter Boettke on November 16, 2008 at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (30) | TrackBack (0)
Watch this video about the incredible changes in publishing that have inspired the folks at the Mises Institute to create the greatest online collection of Libertarian political/economic literature in the world. Click here to view the video.
Fortunately, the idea that dropping bombs and human death is somehow good for the economy is just a really ghastly and morbid version of the broken window fallacy -- kind of like arguing that hurricanes are good for the economy (which nobody except TV talking heads takes seriously).
Larry Kudlow's hero, and another phony Conservative comes clean about his politics (sort of). Yes, it's Arthur I-never-heard-so-many-errors-in-seriatim-in-my-life Laffer.
And he still hasn't paid Peter Schiff. Gee, what a surprise.
President-Elect Obama in an interview tonight with 60 minutes was asked directly if the current economic situation is similar to the situation in 1932. His first response showed judgment --- as he put it, in 1932 the unemployment rate was 25% and the economy was in much worse shape than we are facing today. However, he also quickly added that our current situation is the worse situation we have faced since 1932.
His position is not uncommon, but I remain confused by this "argument" whether it is uttered by the President-Elect or by a university colleague or a recognized intellectual foe. The position relies on an assessment of the counter-factual --- that in fact had we not agreed to the $700b plus bailout, the economy would have deteriorated to a 1932 type crisis. We are told simultaneously by President-Elect Obama, my colleague, and my intellectual foe that Hank Paulson has made mistakes in implementation and is still trying to figure it out, and yet that the serious steps we have taken have prevented the economy from sliding into a 1932 type crisis.
But the data on the credit crunch is more complicated than this position lets on, the distortions to market signals caused by government manipulation are real, the perverse incentives created by bailouts will be with us for years, and the costs of rent-seeking are accumulating. $700b becomes $850b which then results in a swarming of special interest groups in DC that cannot be denied their share of the funds.
So I put back to our new President and his team, to my colleague and his loyal followers, and to my intellectual foes and those who agree with them what argument would give them pause about the counterfactual and how much accumulation of the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the current policy path would lead them to shift focus from government's positive role in the economy to the needed restraints on government involvement so market forces can adjust to changing realities and resources can be reallocated to more valued uses? Posted by Peter Boettke on November 16, 2008 at 08:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBack Visit the blog
Today, a major economic crisis is unfolding. New government programs are started daily, and future plans are being made for even more. All are based on the belief that we’re in this mess because free-market capitalism and sound money failed. The obsession is with more spending, bailouts of bad investments, more debt, and further dollar debasement. Many are saying we need an international answer to our problems with the establishment of a world central bank and a single fiat reserve currency. These suggestions are merely more of the same policies that created our mess and are doomed to fail.
At least 90% of the cause for the financial crisis can be laid at the doorstep of the Federal Reserve. It is the manipulation of credit, the money supply, and interest rates that caused the various bubbles to form. Congress added fuel to the fire by various programs and institutions like the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, FDIC, and HUD mandates, which were all backed up by aggressive court rulings.
The Fed has now doled out close to $2 trillion in subsidized loans to troubled banks and other financial institutions. The Federal Reserve and Treasury constantly brag about the need for “transparency” and “oversight,” but it’s all just talk – they want none of it. They want secrecy while the privileged are rescued at the expense of the middle class.
I have often told the young athletes I work with that there are two pains they must choose between -- the pain of hard work, or the pain of regret. I argue that the pain of regret will sting for much longer.
In the context of the Great Depression, one has to remember that after the stock market crash in 1929 market corrections were set in motion. Resources were reallocated, prices adjusted to the new realities. By June of 1930, the economy was recovering, when it was hit with the shock of a massive policy shift on tariffs. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act effectively raised the price on 20,000 imported goods by up to 50%. The consequence of this was the destruction of trade. Market correction (which works through the vehicle of trade) became a full blown economic crisis. Restrictions on the market economy were evident from the simplest of trades to the most complicated contractual relationships.
In other words, policy shocks transformed the pain of correction, into the pain of a crisis. I am deeply concerned that we are repeating this lesson from the Great Depression all over again in the hope of avoiding a particular understanding of the monetary policy failure of the 1929-1933 period. Yes, removing all the oil out of car will make an engine grind to a halt. But the Great Contraction, as Robert Higgs has pointed out in Crisis and Leviathan and in Depression, War and Cold War, cannot alone explain the depth and length of the Great Depression. To understand that, one must examine the policy shocks that prevented market correction through price adjustments and resource reallocation. The microeconomic environment was distorted and plagued by uncertainty. In other words, the exchange network was destroyed by government as attempts were made to minimize the pain of market correction resulted in the pain of economic crisis.
What if this is what we are doing again --- stopping necessary market corrections to imprudent decisions in the past and in the process transforming a correction into a crisis.
With the Bush administration swirling around the drain -- get out the plunger! -- it's now time to stop hyperventilating about the "Iranian bomb." For goodness sakes, let it go!
Ever since the U.S. intelligence community concluded, in that famous National Intelligence Estimate a year ago, that Iran had halted its secret weapons program, assorted neocons and hawks have tried to continue sounding the alarm about Iran, with only limited success. With the election of Obama, now, the hawks are regrouping -- see, the formation of the bipartisan collection of hawks flocking together in United Against Nuclear Iran -- and the usual suspects at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) are venting their spleens. But it's clear that Iran isn't going to build a bomb next week, or next year, or even the year after, and that Obama will have lots and lots of time to deal with this problem in a leisurely manner. So relax. TheNation.com
When future historians argue over the legacy of George W. Bush, the question they confront may be just which bracket of presidential failure he belongs in. Nixon and Johnson? Or Herbert Hoover? President Bush earned his place in the pantheon of disgrace even before he presided over an epochal financial crisis. Absent the atrocities of 9/11, he might have been a mediocrity: a big spender too prone to trust his shallow instincts but able to clear the competence threshold and lacking the sophistication to be truly dangerous. The American Conservative
In true Bush form, the administration has decided it is not going to let our elected officials actually see the draft security Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that lays out the conditions under which some 140,000 U.S troops and tens of thousands of American contractors can operate in Iraq beginning Jan.1. The agreement — contrary to the rosy picture offered by the press earlier this week — is still a source of grave tension in Iraq, evidenced by the brawl that shut down parliament yesterday.
Coming out of an election stupor in which many Americans were erroneously convinced that The Surge had transformed Iraq into a kind of benign third world landscape awash in wreckage but nonetheless “moving forward,” a lot of people won’t know or perhaps care, about the SOFA. They hardly know that, according to reports of journalists who have had the documents translated, that the Iraqis distrust us so much they are insisting we start getting out by June 2009, completely out by 2011 — including any “residual force” Obama was imagining during the campaign. They want limited jurisdiction to prosecute our troops and contractors for crimes and demand that our military ask permission before they arrest anyone or launch operations. Under no circumstances would the U.S allowed be to use Iraqi soil to launch attacks on another country, and permanent bases are out (somewhere, Richard Pearle is weeping).
Meanwhile, the Bush Administration continues the paternalistic approach. Elected officials charged with their constituents’ best interest have been kept entirely out of the loop. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates — who Obama is apparently considering to keep on through next year — and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have been on the Hill “briefing” lawmakers in closed door sessions. Massachusetts Rep. Wiliam Delahunt told Voice of AmericaNews, “There has been no meaningful consultation with Congress during the negotiations of this agreement and the American people for all intents and purposes have been completely left out.”
Congress has been complaining about this for over a year. The Bush Administration just responds in typical fashion — by ignoring them. And by lobbing gems such as these:
The Pentagon’s spokesman, Geoff Morrell, said that American commanders were satisfied with the conditions set in the agreement, including deadlines for withdrawal and constraints on operations.
“I’m not going to get into this — the specifics of this — other than to say that how this agreement is implemented will be worked out between our commanders on the ground and the Iraqi leadership,” he said. “And both seem to be very confident that it provides the framework for them to continue to do all that still needs to be done.”
So just get back to your shopping, leave the big stuff to us. Pathetically, there is a much more open and vigorous debate going on in the Iraqi parliament about the fate of our forces. Perhaps after Jan. 20, when Congress can finally get out from the kids’ table, they can get back to doing the peoples’ business. American Conservative blog
"We had a breather during the final stretch of the presidential election campaign, but the way is now cleared for a renewal of the propaganda campaign urging war with Iran. The latest salvo: a UN report claiming Iran plans on building 3,000 new centrifuges, and headlines are screaming – in the West, at any rate – that Iran will have enough uranium to build a nuclear bomb by sometime next year. Is this true?
Undoubtedly not. To begin with, let’s go through the news accounts: here’s a typical one, a Reuters dispatch, which reports a "stand off" between Tehran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), run by the UN, which monitors nuclear activities of member states. To the ordinary person just glancing at the headline, the assumption is that the "stand off" is over Iran’s unwillingness to keep its nuclear facilities open to inspection. Not so. Yet Reuters reports:
'An inquiry by the UN nuclear watchdog into alleged atom bomb research by Iran has degenerated into a silent standoff a few months after Tehran asserted ‘the matter is over’, UN officials said on Wednesday.'..." Raimondo AntiWar.com
This Polish missile defense system walks into a bar one afternoon and orders six shots of vodka and a beer. The bartender says, "How can you afford to get drunk in the middle of a business day?" and the Polish missile defense system says, "I don't work."
And lo it has come to pass that as the End of Bush Days draws near, Dick Cheney and the neocons are taking their last shot at instigating Cold War II by deploying a ballistic missile defense system that doesn't work to defend against ballistic missiles that don't work either.
President-elect Barack Obama doesn't seem sure whether he approves or not.
Crossing the Punch Line
In May 2008, the breakaway republic of Georgia threatened to invade the breakaway republic of Abkhazia for reasons that nobody cares about anymore. Russia began to build a military base in Abkhazia and Georgia's Prime Minister Giorgi Baramidze said war between Georgia and Russia could break out "tonight, tomorrow, anytime."
In August, Georgia invaded the breakaway republic Ossetia and Russia invaded Georgia. Georgia's Deputy Defense Minister Batu Kutelia said he was surprised that war broke out between Georgia and Russia... www.military.com
Ok, I'm just blue-skying here, but "what if" Prez-Elect Obama were to ask Ron Paul to act as Treasury Secretary?
Some thoughts:
--He's a Republican. Not only that, but he's a Republican primary candidate who the rest of the contenders basically hated, mostly for his repeated statements about where the economy was headed (which pretty much were dead on). You've got a win-win for the Obama camp: "Across the aisle" with a guy who's been beaten up by the rest of the Republican establishment. Talking about having your cake and eating it too: Obama would be able to use the terms "Uniter" without becoming a caricature while lobbing a grenade into the middle of the RNC. caps.fool.com
As I have read countless analysts, including professional economists, offer “solutions” to the financial crisis, I have become more convinced of the importance of capital theory. You see this with the dichotomy people keep drawing between the financial markets and the “real economy,” a distinction that is useful for some purposes but which in this context often reinforces the idea that the stock market is really just a casino.
When the Paulson Plan was first being debated, even sharp, free-market thinkers who are otherwise very solid were recommending instead that “bank recapitalization” was the way to fix things. But if our troubles stem from a diversion of real resources into the housing sector — if too many and too big homes were built at the expense of other possible uses for those inputs — then government financial transfers per se won’t do anything except redistribute the losses.
Just about the only good thing to come out of the housing bubble is that many financial analysts are coming to see the virtue of the Austrian theory of the business cycle. Specifically, though Greenspan did his best to blame deregulation and foreigners who saved too much, many people now think that the Maestro's ultra-low interest rates in the wake of the dot-com crash may very well have sowed the seeds for our current crisis.
Ironically, at the very moment of the free-market economists' intellectual victory, some in our camp want to take away the champagne. Specifically, Tyler Cowen has repeatedly argued on his very popular blog that it was not the Fed but rather an increase in foreigners' savings and appetite for risk, that caused the boom. And in a recent Cato paper, David Henderson and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel defend Greenspan's record, going so far as to say that "Alan Greenspan stands out as the most competent—and arguably the only competent—helmsman of United States monetary policy since the creation of the Federal Reserve System."
Let me warn the reader that I am going to have nothing nice to say about this defense of Greenspan; I think his policies caused or at least made possible the housing boom. As I walk through the specifics of the Henderson and Hummel (H&H) defense, I conclude many of their statements are either misleading or outright falsehoods. Because my critique will be so harsh, I want to stress that I actually know H&H personally, and acknowledge that they are both intelligent and very courageous advocates of economic liberty. So all I can say regarding this particular Cato paper is that either they or I am suffering from a bout of temporary insanity—and the little green elf who hovers over my laptop assures me I'm not the one who's crazy. Bob Murphy Mises.org
The details of the economic “crisis” of late September and early October aren’t exactly simple, but they follow a fairly predictable narrative. (That’s part of the reason it’s hard to use the word “crisis” seriously in regard to these downward economic turns.) And they follow from statist reforms.
In the second half of 2007, after more than a decade of coaxing and prolonging a boom in the U.S. real estate market, the statist sausage-makers at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department ran out of ways to keep the party going.
The Feds had been using various accountancy tricks and monetary manipulations to extend the boom. And they’d done a pretty effective job through the 2000s. The bubbling housing market had lifted many boats. Private-sector real estate lenders had followed the Feds’ tricks — and pressed them far beyond anything the Feds envisioned. The resulting loose credit drove up residential real estate prices and allowed debt-based consumer spending to create the impression of financial expansion. Americans borrowed against the rising value of their homes to buy lots of stuff.
Some statists say that the current economic problems are the result of deregulation. That’s false. They’re the result of a disorienting cycle of crisis and reform. Jim Walsh Liberty Magazine
From Liberty magazine: Commons tragedy — Hugh Morton, who died in 2006, was the owner of North Carolina’s most famous scenic site, Grandfather Mountain, the highest peak in the Blue Ridge mountain range. Under his management, the area was open to tourists but preserved under an agreement with the Nature Conservancy. Morton is a legend because of his successful battles to protect the mountain from intrusion by state and federal highways.
This September, less than two and a half years after his death, Morton’s family announced the sale of the mountain to the state of North Carolina. They announced it with chatter about how the stunning acreage will be “protected for good.”
My thoughts: first, it had been preserved, just fine, privately. Second, both the roads that Morton kept off the mountaintop were government roads, one of them proposed by the state of North Carolina, now the owner. Third, the history of government protection of parks is less impressive than most people think.
One of the earliest articles I wrote for The Wall Street Journal (jointly with Terry Anderson) was about Ravenna Park in Seattle, Washington. In the late 1800s, Ravenna Park was filled with Douglas fir trees, at least one of which was as high as 400 feet. Privately owned, the park was carefully protected and it drew (according to press reports) thousands of tourists a day.
Because of Seattle’s growth and worries that private owners could not preserve such a place for long, the city of Seattle began condemnation proceedings to take over the park. In 1911 it forced the owners, Mr. and Mrs. W.W. Beck, to sell it to the city.
By 1925, all the giant trees were gone, cut down by people (probably city employees) who were seeking firewood. By the early 1970s the park had become a hangout for drug users.
Government ownership is no guarantee — of anything good. Jane S. Shaw Liberty Magazine
We cannot simply put up roadblocks to the emboldened Democratic majority. We need to offer an alternative future. Absent reform, our federal government will double in size within a generation. We must change course from this path of stagnation, and we must have leaders willing to provide a path that keeps alive the American ideal and keeps our government limited.
Our party has become too fearful of our own ideas. Since 1997, congressional Republicans began a steady retreat from principled leadership to political expediency. A party built on spending discipline and government reform succumbed to the siren songs of government expansion and earmarked giveaways. Republicans squandered the opportunity to limit and reshape the relationship between the federal government and the individual.
I ran on these bold ideas and innovative solutions in a congressional district carried by Barack Obama -- yet I received 64% of the vote. I challenge my colleagues to rethink political risk taking.
When, in a very few years, the pundits start to pontificate on the great question: "Who was the Man of the Century?" there is little doubt that they will reach virtually instant consensus. Inevitably, the answer will be: Winston Churchill. Indeed, Professor Harry Jaffa has already informed us that Churchill was not only the Man of the Twentieth Century, but the Man of Many Centuries.[1]
In a way, Churchill as Man of the Century will be appropriate. This has been the century of the State — of the rise and hypertrophic growth of the welfare-warfare state — and Churchill was from first to last a Man of the State, of the welfare state and of the warfare state. War, of course, was his lifelong passion; and, as an admiring historian has written: "Among his other claims to fame, Winston Churchill ranks as one of the founders of the welfare state."[2] Thus, while Churchill never had a principle he did not in the end betray,[3] this does not mean that there was no slant to his actions, no systematic bias. There was, and that bias was towards lowering the barriers to state power. Ralph Raico Mises.org
"Given the speed at which the federal government is throwing money at the financial crisis, the average taxpayer, never mind member of Congress, might not be faulted for losing track. CNBC, however, has been paying very close attention and keeping a running tally of actual spending as well as the commitments involved.
Try $4.28 trillion dollars. That's $4,284,500,000,000 and more than what was spent on WW II, if adjusted for inflation, based on our computations from a variety of estimates and sources.
Not only is it a astronomical amount of money, its' a complicated cocktail of budgeted dollars, actual spending, guarantees, loans, swaps and other market mechanisms by the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and other offices of government taken over roughly the last year, based on government data and news releases. Strictly speaking, not every cent is a direct result of what's called the financial crisis, but it is arguably related to it.
War is a poison. It is a poison that nations and groups must at times ingest to ensure their survival. But, like any poison, it can kill you just as surely as the disease it is meant to eradicate. The poison of war courses unchecked through the body politic of the United States. We believe that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the right to wage war. We embrace the dangerous self-delusion that we are on a providential mission to save the rest of the world from itself, to implant our virtues—which we see as superior to all other virtues—on others, and that we have a right to do this by force. This belief has corrupted Republicans and Democrats alike. And if Barack Obama drinks, as it appears he will, the dark elixir of war and imperial power offered to him by the national security state, he will accelerate the downward spiral of the American empire. TruthDig
Eric Margolis, author of American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World, discusses the repeating of history in Afghanistan, India’s under-the-radar regional influence and sweetheart nuclear deal, ramifications of a future “Pashtunistan”, the precarious economic and political conditions in Pakistan, the possibility of Obama using Bill Clinton as Kashmir peacemaker, the need for a waxing Department of State and waning Pentagon in the foreign policy realm, the Caspian oil pipeline as “Great Game” prize, new accusations about Syria’s nuclear program and the supreme importance of U.S./Russia relations.
"We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.
There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book..
The Princeton Review analyzed the transcripts of the Gore-Bush debates, the Clinton-Bush-Perot debates of 1992, the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960 and the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. It reviewed these transcripts using a standard vocabulary test that indicates the minimum educational standard needed for a reader to grasp the text. During the 2000 debates, George W. Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.7) and Al Gore at a seventh-grade level (7.6). In the 1992 debates, Bill Clinton spoke at a seventh-grade level (7.6), while George H.W. Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.8), as did H. Ross Perot (6.3). In the debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, the candidates spoke in language used by 10th-graders. In the debates of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas the scores were respectively 11.2 and 12.0. In short, today’s political rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a 10-year-old child or an adult with a sixth-grade reading level. It is fitted to this level of comprehension because most Americans speak, think and are entertained at this level. This is why serious film and theater and other serious artistic expression, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of American society. Voltaire was the most famous man of the 18th century. Today the most famous “person” is Mickey Mouse...
The core values of our open society, the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable, are dying. Obama used hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funds to appeal to and manipulate this illiteracy and irrationalism to his advantage, but these forces will prove to be his most deadly nemesis once they collide with the awful reality that awaits us." Chris Hedges
Much of the Western world just honored the millions of soldiers fallen in the two world wars. But we also need to look beyond postwar myths and understand the tragic political mistakes that sent these soldiers to die in wars that might have been avoided.
In his powerful new book, Hitler, Churchill and the Unnecessary War, veteran politician and author Pat Buchanan challenges many historic taboos by claiming that Winston Churchill plunged Britain and its empire, including Canada, into wars whose outcome was disastrous for all concerned.
Other writers, me included, have made the same point for decades, but Buchanan has marshaled a formidable array of facts and historians to support his case. Eric Margolis LewRockwell.com
REMEMBER WHEN THEY SAID THERE WAS NO SUCH THING AS GULF WAR ILLNESS?
MORE FRUITS OF WAR...
Gulf War illness, dismissed by some as a psychosomatic disorder, is a very real illness that affects at least 25 percent of the 700,000 U.S. veterans who took part in the 1991 Gulf War.
It's likely cause was exposure to toxic chemicals that included pesticides that were often overused during the war, as well as a drug given to U.S. troops to protect them from nerve gas....
When veterans with Gulf War illness go to Veterans Administration hospitals for treatment, their problems often aren't taken seriously, Lea Steele, scientific director of the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, which issued the report, and an associate professor at Kansas State University, said. "VA docs often know nothing about it and aren't able to help them. Sometimes they treat them as if they are head cases or malingering," she said.
James Binns is chairman of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses.
It took 20 years to admit that Agent Orange, a defoliant used in the Vietnam war, caused illness, Binns said. "It's now coming up to 17 years on Gulf War illness," he said. "Troop exposures [to these chemicals] were a serious but honest mistake. Covering it up rather than trying to help them has been unconscionable."
SOCIALISM? America can't have that, exclaimed the Republican ticket while Republicans -- whose prescription drug entitlement is the largest expansion of the welfare state since President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society gave birth to Medicare in 1965; and a majority of whom in Congress supported a lavish farm bill at a time of record profits for the less than 2 percent of the American people-cum-corporations who farm -- and their administration were partially nationalizing the banking system, putting Detroit on the dole and looking around to see if some bit of what is smilingly called "the private sector" has been inadvertently left off the ever-expanding list of entities eligible for a bailout from the $1 trillion or so that is to be "spread around."
We all know her now … well, reasonably sane Americans know Sarah Palin as undeniably beautiful … yes, the "Swan-like" destination for all, purportedly "Ugly Ducklings".
The "Dems", however, not only saw the Ugly Duckling instantly, automatically and viscerally – their revulsion seemed cataclysmic – these Progressives and their "Red Lights" went ballistic the second they heard the news:
"John McCain's V. P. pick is Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska!"
"Oh, my God," came the involuntary cry of the ordinarily humanistic, intellectual atheists of the Democratic Party.
If Senator McCain, one thousand years from now, will be remembered for any maverick decision it will be his choice of Sarah Palin for Vice-President.
The Progressive Democrats' worst nightmare had arrived and the inevitable order went out, "We must destroy her!" Michael Moriarty enterstageright.com
The thought scene in the US today resembles that of Russia in 1917, Cuba in 1959 or China in 1948. Incessant calls for "unity" and "fairness," attacks on "divisive," "toxic" and "hateful" language are nothing new – they resemble Germany of 1932 and Venezuela of 1996, today’s Putin’s Russia and Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Listening to the NPR tirades against freedom of speech, famous George Washington’s dictum comes to mind: "It will be found unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon the supposition he may abuse it." We witness another kind of spirit in the city named after him – of praise and adoration of the new beloved leader.
"America Picks Names for New Obama Dog" is the headline of the "Dog Channel and Cat Channel USA." Online survey, conducted by the Channel, asked respondents to write in their picks for the White House’s "first dog" ended up with suggestions like "Yes We Can," "Abrahound Lincoln," "Secretary of State" and "Oprah." Government radio and television triumphant after their hard and victorious campaign work for Democrats and successful pick of the new "president of change" are busy discussing and suggesting his cabinet choices and socialization plans. More...LewRockwell.com: Yuri Maltsev
The present financial crisis is a self-inflicted wound. It started at the Federal Reserve with their cynical neoliberal monetary policies. Any solution, that does not involve the dismantling of the Fed, is unacceptable.
The first thing to realize is that it is not a matter of "fixing" the economy. The economy is fixing itself by purging the unsustainable debt from the system. That's how markets work. Greenspan's low interest rates created a subsidy for debt which--along with the alphabet soup of leveraged derivatives--buoyed the economy along on the biggest wave of speculative financing the world has ever seen. The distortions that were caused by the unprecedented credit expansion stimulated artificial demand that created the appearance of growth and prosperity but, in truth, was nothing more than an equity bubble. Now the bubble has popped and the financial system is returning to the mean. That means that credit will probably contract by 30 to 40 per cent putting us on the path to another Great Depression.
"President Bush has spent the first seven years and ten months of his presidency doing everything in his power to leave the United States in smoldering ruins," said White House spokesperson Dana Perino. "He certainly is not going to let the final days of his tenure go to waste."
While Ms. Perino said that President Bush is proud to have led the U.S. into a "pointless and totally avoidable catastrophe in Iraq" and "the most terrifying financial cataclysm since the Great Depression," he is "in no way prepared to rest on his laurels."
For his part, Mr. Bush took few questions from reporters today, saying that he had to return to the Oval Office to order random airstrikes over Belgium.
THE U.S. WILL EXPERIENCE ITS MOST SEVERE RECESSION SINCE WORLD WAR II, MUCH WORSE AND LONGER AND DEEPER THAN EVEN THE 1974-75 AND 1980-82 RECESSIONS.
The recession will continue until at least the end of 2009 for a cumulative gross domestic product drop of over 4%; the unemployment rate will likely reach 9%. The U.S. consumer is shopped-out, saving less and debt-burdened: This will be the worst consumer recession in decades.
The prospect of a short and shallow six- to eight-month V-shaped recession is out of the window; a U-shaped 18- to 24-month recession is now a certainty, and the probability of a worse, multi-year L-shaped recession (as in Japan in the 1990s) is still small but rising. Even if the economy were to exit a recession by the end of 2009, the recovery could be so weak because of the impairment of the financial system and the credit mechanism that it may feel like a recession even if the economy is technically out of the recession.
I suspect that the malaise that has afflicted the conservative movement is not simply due to the defeat of John McCain and Sarah Palin. I think that their despondency goes much deeper than an electoral defeat. My hunch is that their depression is much more owing to a sense of serious discomfort arising from the knowledge that Democrat Barack Obama is about to acquire all the omnipotent powers that conservatives relinquished to President Bush as part of his “war on terrorism.”
The power to arrest people, including Americans, as “enemy combatants.” Indefinite detention. Torture. Isolation and sensory deprivation. Rendition. Military tribunals. Denial of due process and trial by jury. Suspension of habeas corpus. Secret judicial proceedings. Use of hearsay and tortured testimony. Warrantless searches. Signing statements. Spying on Americans. The power to ignore constitutional and statutory constraints on presidential power. The power to invade and occupy foreign countries with no congressional declaration of war.
Posted by Ryan W. McMaken at November 11, 2008 10:03 PM
Buchanan has quite a talent for fitting numerous errors into a single column. His latest mercantilist screed shows just how little Buchanan understands about both economics and the basic political tenets of classical liberalism.
Let's just go through his article and point out some of the more awful statements, shall we? My comments in brackets:
"Great nations do not have trade partners." [No, Pat, "great" nations may not, but free nations do. People who care about liberty care about freedom, not greatness. Great men are rarely good men, just as great nations are rarely free nations. The Spanish Empire was no doubt "great." But it sure wasn't free.]
"Tariffs on foreign goods are preferable to taxes on U.S. producers."
[Tariffs are taxes on producers. They're a tax on every entrepreneur who has to buy fourth-rate American goods at a higher price for his business instead of the vastly superior foreign goods. Pat thinks that all manufactured goods are only purchased by consumers. It never occurs to him that producers buy things like vans and TVs and ovens and DVD players as part of their business ventures.
Tariffs are just a tax on small-business people and all entrpreneurs. Pat thinks it fine for the government to tell people how to run their businesses.]
"Manufacturing, not finance, is the muscle of the nation."
[This is a variation on what Pat usually says. He usually talks about how the service industry in general is useless to the economy. But on what is this based anyway? Economists used to talk about how only agriculture could be the foundation of a viable economy. That was pure nonsense, as is the theory that manufacturing is the only foundation of a sound economy.
And what's with this "muscle of the nation" stuff? Why are conservatives (and especially Buchanan) so obsessed with words like "muscle" and "emasculate" and "impotence"?]
The rest of the article is just a re-tread of Buchanan's old tirades against Japan. Remember when everyone thought that Japan was going to crush our economy by dumping subsidized steel across our borders? Buchanan attributed Japan's economic success in the 80's and early 90's to economic nationalism. Then Japan went into a prolonged recession for a decade. Now Buchanan is saying the same things about China.
Pat apparently believes that is is a bad thing that, thanks to China, Americans can buy cheap clothing, auto parts, cellular phones, etc., etc.
True, real wages are declining, but it never occurs to Buchanan that inflation, labor unions, massive regulation, and a police state might be putting a damper on the economy.
Remember, Pat cheered on Nixon when he slapped wage and price controls on the economy, and he is still apparently fundamentally incapable of understanding sound economics.
Pat's basic assumption is that the purpose of government is to increase the power and prestige of the nation-state. Liberty is only a secondary, practical consideration. When it comes to economics and foreign policy, Buchanan has never opposed the increase of government power on grounds of property rights, liberty, or anything else we would attribute to libertarianism and classical liberalism.
Private property is okay if it makes the US a "great nation" but property rights are disposable if they don't accomplish that end.
Buchanan's primary problem with the Iraq war has been that it has been damaging to the power and prestige of the state. He doesn't oppose it on grounds of justice, or natural rights, or any other concept associated with classical liberalism. He has always been a realist on the matter, and realism dictates that all foreign policy should accomplish the end of increasing the power, security, and prestige of the state.
He believes that economic policy should accomplish the same end.
I'M REALLY TIRED OF HEARING, "IF I HAD ONLY KNOWN..." FROM LAWMAKERS! ISN'T IT THEIR BUSINESS TO KNOW?
FIRST IT WAS: "If I had only known that Bush was going to start a needless war, I never would have voted to give him authority to start it!"
NOW IT'S: "If I had only known the Paulson was going to throw the money away, I never would have voted to give it to him!"
But the supporters that remain in office (which is most of them) now have a big out. They can go on cable news and say, "This isn't the plan we voted for, we voted for a plan to buy up toxic mortgages so banks could start lending to homeowners again. My constituents are barking mad that the money is just going to banks."
When their furious constituents call up their offices, they can reply, "If I had known what Paulson was going to do with this money, I would've never voted for it. It makes me sick, and I'm doing everything in my power to bail out homeowners."
LOBBYISTS SWARM THE TREASURY FOR PIECE OF THE BAILOUT PIE!
HOW INFLUENCE PEDDLING WORKS...
Alston & Bird, for example, highlights its two biggest stars — former Senator Bob Dole and former Senator Tom Daschle. Mr. Dole “knows Hank Paulson very well” and has been “very helpful” with the financial rescue groups, said David E. Brown, an Alston & Bird partner involved in its effort.
“And of course, Senator Daschle is national co-chair of the Obama campaign,” Mr. Brown added, noting that because Mr. Daschle is not a registered lobbyist, his involvement is limited to “high level advisory and strategic advice.”
Henry Hazlitt wrote this book following his stint at the New York Times as an editorialist. His hope was to reduce the whole teaching of economics to a few principles and explain them in ways that people would never forget. It worked. He relied on some stories by Bastiat and his own impeccable capacity for logical thinking and crystal-clear prose.
He was writing under the influence of Mises himself, of course, but he brought his own special gifts to the project. As just one example, this is the book that made the idea of the "broken window fallacy" so famous.
What thrills us in particular about this new edition is that it is beautiful, it is hardcover, and it is newly typeset for modern readers. It has a full index. It includes a wonderful foreword by Walter Block. It's the right size, shape, and feel – perfect for making this book central to all educational efforts of the future.
This is the book to send to reporters, politicians, pastors, political activists, teachers, or anyone else who needs to know.
Professor Block explains that it was this book that turned him on to economics as a science. He believes that it is probably the most important economics book ever written in the sense that it offers the greatest hope to educating everyone about the meaning of the science.
Written for the non-academic, it has served as the major antidote to fallacies in the popular press, and has appeared in dozens of languages and printings. It's still the quickest way to learn how to think like an economist. And this is why it has been used in the best classrooms more than sixty years.
Many writers have since attempted to beat this book as an introduction, but have never succeeded. Hazlitt's book remains the best. Even if you own this book already, or have several past editions, you will want to have this book as your own as a wonderful testament to its place in the world of ideas.
In putting this edition together, we chose to work from Hazlitt's own first edition because it contains the core of what is crucial here without later updates that only date the book. As with Mises and Human Action, the author's first instincts were the best ones.
"F.A. Hayek was not only a leading champion of liberty in the 20th century. As this massive book reveals, he was also a great economist whose elaboration on monetary theory and the business cycle made him the leading foe of Keynesian theory and policy in the English-speaking world. Here are collected his most important works on these topics: re-typeset, indexed for the first time, and beautifully bound in a 536-page hardbound book..." More...
The Mises Institute has united this book with its natural complement: a detailed reform proposal for a 100 percent gold dollar. "The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar" was written a decade before the last vestiges of the gold standard were abolished. His unique plan for making the dollar sound again still holds up. Some people have said: Rothbard tells us what is wrong with money but not what to do about it. Well, by adding this essay, the problem and the answer are united in a comprehensive whole.
After presenting the basics of money and banking theory, he traces the decline of the dollar from the 18th century to the present, and provides lucid critiques of central banking, New Deal monetary policy, Nixonian fiat money, and fixed exchange rates. He also provides a blueprint for a return to a 100 percent reserve gold standard.
The book made huge theoretical advances. He was the first to prove that the government, and only the government, can destroy money on a mass scale, and he showed exactly how they go about this dirty deed. But just as importantly, it is beautifully written. He tells a thrilling story because he loves the subject so much.
The passion that Murray feels for the topic comes through in the prose and transfers to the reader. Readers become excited about the subject, and tell others. Students tell professors. Some, like the great Ron Paul of Texas, have even run for political office after having read it.
Rothbard shows precisely how banks create money out of thin air and how the central bank, backed by government power, allows them to get away with it. He shows how exchange rates and interest rates would work in a true free market. When it comes to describing the end of the gold standard, he is not content to describe the big trends. He names names and ferrets out all the interest groups involved.
Since Rothbard's death, scholars have worked to assess his legacy, and many of them agree that this little book is one of his most important. Though it has sometimes been inauspiciously packaged and is surprisingly short, its argument took huge strides toward explaining that it is impossible to understand public affairs in our time without understanding money and its destruction.
This volume's contents include:
Preface by Jörg Guido Hülsmann
I. Introduction by Murray Rothbard
II. Money in a Free Society
1. The Value of Exchange
2. Barter
3. Indirect Exchange
4. Benefits of Money
5. The Monetary Unit
6. The Shape of Money
7. Private Coinage
8. The Proper Supply of Money
9. The Problem of Hoarding
10. Stabilize the Price Level?
11. Coexisting Moneys
12. Money-Warehouses
13. Summary
III. Government Meddling With Money
1. The Revenue of Government
2. The Economic Effects of Inflation
3. Compulsory Monopoly of the Mint
4. Debasement
5. Gresham's Law and Coinage
6. Summary: Government and Coinage
7. Permitting Banks to Refuse Payment
8. Central Banking: Removing the Checks on Inflation
9. Central Banking: Directing the Inflation
10. Going Off the Gold Standard
11. Fiat Money and the Gold Problem
12. Fiat Money and Gresham's Law
13. Government and Money
IV. The Monetary Breakdown of the West
1. Phase I: The Classical Gold Standard, 1815-1914
2. Phase II: World War I and After
3. Phase III: The Gold Exchange Standard (Britain and the United States) 1926-1931
4. Phase IV: Fluctuating Fiat Currencies, 1931-1945...
5. Phase V: Bretton Woods and the New Gold Exchange Standard (the United States) 1945 1968
6. Phase VI: The Unraveling of Bretton Woods, 1968-1971
7. Phase VII: The End of Bretton Woods: Fluctuating Fiat Currencies, August-December, 1971
8. Phase VIII: The Smithsonian Agreement, December 1971-February 1973
9. Phase IX: Fluctuating Fiat Currencies, March 1973-?
The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar
Preface by Murray Rothbard
1. The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar
2. Money and Freedom
3. The Dollar: Independent Name or Unit of Weight?
In 1982, Ron Paul served on the U.S. Gold Commission to evaluate the role of gold in the monetary system. In fact, the Commission was his idea. It was carrying forth a promise made in the Republican platform.
Ron couldn't pick the members, so from the beginning, the deck was stacked. The majority was dominated by monetarists, who saw gold as too scarce and paper as just fine. Ron Paul's team was ready, however, with this marvelous minority report.
Rarely has a dissent on a government commission done so much good!
The result wasThe Case for Gold, and it was the greatest result of the commission. It covers the history of gold in the United States, explains that its breakdown was caused by governments, and explains the merit of having sound money: prices reflect market realities, government stays in check, and the people retain their freedom.
The scholarship and rigor impressed even the critics of the minority. Ron and Lewis Lehrman worked with a team of economists that included Murray Rothbard, so it is hardly suprising that such a book would result.
It still holds up as an excellent blueprint for moving beyond paper money and into the age of sound money. In particular, Ron favors complete monetary freedom to use any commodity as money, to make contracts in any money, and an end to the monopolization and printing power of the Federal Reserve.
There is a strong piece of history in this book. Not since the 19th century has a political figure made such a sweeping and devastating case for radical monetary reform. This congressman ran circles around even the experts at the Fed. A dazzling performance indeed, and an inspiring and learned book. More...
The most powerful case against the American central bank ever written. This work begins with a mini-treatment of money and banking theory, and then plunges right in with the real history of the Federal Reserve System. Rothbard covers the struggle between competing elites and how they converged with the Fed.
Rothbard calls for the abolition of the central bank and a restoration of the gold standard. His popular treatment incorporates the best and most up-to-date scholarship on the Fed's origins and effects.
The contents of this volume include:
Introduction: Money and Politics
The Genesis of Money
What is the Optimum Quantity of Money?
Monetary Inflation and Counterfeiting
Legalized Counterfeiting
Loan Banking
Deposit Banking
Problems for the Fractional-Reserve Banker: The Criminal Law
Problems for the Fractional-Reserve Banker: Insolvency
Booms and Busts
Types of Warehouse Receipts
Enter the Central Bank
Easing the Limits on Bank Credit Expansion
The Central Bank Buys Assets
Origins of the Federal Reserve: The Advent of the National Banking System
Origins of the Federal Reserve: Wall Steet Discontent
Putting Cartelization Across: The Progressive Line
Putting a Central Bank Across: Manipulating a Movement, 1897-1902
MORE GREAT RESOURSES FOR LEARNING ABOUT LIBERTARIANISM
A great source for all things Libertarian: www.mises.org.
Hundreds of books, thousands of articles, and thousands of multimedia presentations are available.
Almost all of the books they offer can be purchased in very nice hardback or paperback editions. Many of them can also be downloaded from their site for free.
This is the number one educational site for Libertarians and those who want to learn about this philosophy-of-the-future.
Hundreds and hundreds of beautifully bound books, paperback and hardcover, are available on subjects from History to philosophy to economics and everything in between from a libertarian/classical liberal perspective. A fantastic source for anyone desiring to become acquainted with the age old struggle between Liberty and Statism.
Fighting the financial crisis has put the U.S. on the hook for some $5 trillion a report says. So far. For all the fury over Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's $700 billion emergency economic relief fund, it seems downright puny when compared to the running total of the government's response to the credit crisis.
According to CreditSights, a research firm in New York and London, the U.S. government has put itself on the hook for some $5 trillion, so far, in an attempt to arrest a collapse of the financial system.
Trillions are no hyperbole. The Treasury is set to borrow $550 billion in the current quarter alone and $368 billion in the first quarter of 2009. "Near-term pressures on Treasury finances are much more intense than we had thought," Goldman Sachs economists commented when the government announced its borrowing projections last week.
It may finally be catching up with Uncle Sam. That's what the yield curve may be whispering. But some economists are too deaf, or dumb, to get it.
The yield curve simply is the graph of Treasury yields of increasing maturities, starting from one-month bills to 30-year bonds. The slope of the line typically is ascending -- positive in math terms -- because investors would want more to tie up their money for longer periods, all else being equal. Which it never is.
If they expect yields to rise in the future, they'll want a bigger premium to commit to longer maturities. Otherwise, they'd rather stay short and wait for more generous yields later on. Conversely, if they think rates will fall, investors will want to lock in today's yields for a longer period.
The Treasury yield curve -- from two to 10 years, which is how the bond market tracks it -- has rarely been steeper. The spread is up to 250 basis points (2.5 percentage points, a level matched only in the past quarter century in 2002 and 1992, at the trough of economic cycles.
...they hate the Left more than they hate the state. So in the end, they will back anything that keeps the Left out of power. By anything, I mean anything—military dictatorship, fascist central planning, state management of the whole of the culture. One wonders what horror they think they are preventing by opposing the Left.
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As soon as FDR stopped doling out the cash (in 1937, after the election) the economy crashed again. The stock market plummeted. Five years into the New Deal, in the winter of 1937-1938, two in 10 were again unemployed.
SEVENTY-NINE YEARS distant from the 1929 kick-off of the Great Depression, it is increasingly apparent that the policies of both Hoover and FDR failed to derail the economic chaos that repeated intervention in the economy brought about in both the United States and the world. In the case of FDR, his efforts backfired further in 1937, causing yet another depression-within-the-Great Depression.
"The media and the Washington foreign policy elite breathed a sigh of relief when Barack Obama thumped John McCain in the election. Had John McCain won, there was always the chance that the neoconservatives would have beaten out the Republican realists for his foreign policy soul. With a victory by the liberal Obama, however, the stake would finally be driven into the heart of the "jingoistic" neoconservative vampire.
Yet even after Obama takes power, an evil foreign policy ghoul will still hover over the White House – this time wearing the benign clothes of a compassionate angel. Obama's top foreign policy advisors include Susan Rice, a member of the "muscular liberal" crowd – you know, the same crew that includes the bombing progressives Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke. In a National Public Radio interview during the campaign, Rice decried President George W. Bush's invasion and nation-building adventure in Iraq, while at the same time advocating U.S. intervention and nation-building in Darfur, Sudan."
"If it ever comes to court it should be one of the more interesting libel cases of the decade. The Iraqi National Intelligence Service is threatening to sue Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi politician, for asking who pays for it.
"It is somewhat curious," says Mr Chalabi, "that the intelligence service of a country which is sovereign – that no one really knows who is funding it."
In fact there are very few Iraqis who do not believe they have a very clear idea of who funds Iraq's secret police. Its director is General Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani, who once led a failed coup against Saddam Hussein, and was handpicked by the CIA to run the new security organisation soon after the invasion of 2003. He is believed to have been answering to them ever since."
"This simple yet attractive and intelligent introduction to libertarian ideas, was created by ISIL Director Ken Schoolland (derived from the epilogue to Ken's free market fable The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible) and the late Kerry Pearson (original creator of the flash adaptation). It is maintained, updated and expanded by a creative international team of Steve Cobb (USA), Mario Knesovic (Germany), Kris Haladus (Poland), and Dima Shevchanko (Russia). The project (supported by ISIL) is an international hit. Tell your non-libertarian friends about it! And feel free to copy or link it to your website(s) – just be sure to credit us." ISIL website.
"The Obama bandwagon is moving fast and furious, rolling over the few remaining pockets of dissent even as it prepares to take power. The mainstream media, particularly on television, has lost all sense of objectivity and proportion, and their reporting of the president-elect's doings has taken on a distinctly Soviet air. "Our Glorious Leader Picks the White House Dog" is the emblematic headline of a servile fourth estate. The political atmosphere is positively eerie: amid calls for "unity" and attacks on "toxic" language that is "divisive," there is an odd uniformity of thought similar to the virtual unanimity that gripped the nation in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Groupthink is all the rage, and the media has joined in the fun. Due to this love-fest, they're oblivious to the warning signs that worry us few and scattered skeptics. They somehow missed the Dear Leader's call for a civilian "national security force," for example, one that is "just as well-funded" and "just as powerful" as the U.S. military." Raimondo
THERE SURE HAVE BEEN A LOT OF FORGERIES SWIRLING AROUND... DO THE TERMS "YELLOWCAKE" AND "NIGER" RING A BELL?
DOCUMENTS LINKING IRAN TO NUCLEAR WEAPONS MAY HAVE BEEN FABRICATED!
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has obtained evidence suggesting that documents which have been described as technical studies for a secret Iranian nuclear weapons-related research program may have been fabricated.
The documents in question were acquired by U.S. intelligence in 2004 from a still unknown source -- most of them in the form of electronic files allegedly stolen from a laptop computer belonging to an Iranian researcher. The US has based much of its push for sanctions against Iran on these documents.
The new evidence of possible fraud has increased pressure within the IAEA secretariat to distance the agency from the laptop documents, according to a Vienna-based diplomatic source close to the IAEA, who spoke to RAW STORY on condition of anonymity.
AND BLOOMBERG NEWS HAS TO GO TO COURT TO GET THE FED TO DISCLOSE BAILOUT RECIPIENTS...
Adding together the $170 billion that the Treasury Department has currently agreed to provide banks in additional capital, the $150 billion that the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve are providing to AIG and the $2 trillion that the Federal Reserve has provided banks in emergency loans brings the total assistance to $2.32 trillion.
If the estimated savings from the new tax breaks are included, the assistance would climb to $2.46 trillion. That total does not include other measures not focused directly on banks, such as Treasury Department's $200 billion in support for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Administration's $300 billion HOPE for Homeowners program.
The Bush administration has defended the use of the rescue money to pay dividends to shareholders. The Washington Post reported that banks may pay shareholders more than half the amount they receive from the government over the next three years, basically passing on money that might otherwise support new lending. White House officials say that giving money to shareholders also is important for the economy.
MISH Comment:"Giving money to shareholders is important to the economy." Besides fighting needless wars, that sentence sums up the entire Bush Administration philosophy.
And Republicans have the gall to worry about what Obama will do. Sheeesh.
AMERICA DISCOVERS THAT BAILOUT WILL BE USED TO COVER WALL STREET BONUSES...
... AND YOU EXPECTED WHAT EXACTLY?
"Please explain how miserable performance of biblical proportions warrants any bonuses, particularly using money from me the customer and taxpayer,'' said Glenn Brown, 67, who recently retired after 21 years as a researcher in the department of surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess in Boston and as an adjunct assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. ``I don't understand how they can even conceive of doing that..."
"If these guys were so talented how did this problem happen anyway?'' said Mark Whitling, 63, who works as the chief financial officer of a steel service company that employs 125 people in Eastern Ohio. "We don't feel sorry for them.''
THEN WE'D KNOW THAT HE'S SERIOUS ABOUT THIS "CHANGE" BUSINESS..
THE QUESTIONS PRESIDENT ELECT OBAMA SHOULD ASK HIS C.I.A. BRIEFER...
The president-elect needs to start asking hard questions. Now. Here are some he might want to select for his next briefing:
1. The lead story in Friday's New York Times undercuts the claims of Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili that he was acting in self-defense when he ordered his troops to fire artillery and rockets at the city of Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia. The new information comes from international monitors of the highly respected Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and, oddly, is much closer to the Russian version of what happened.
Task: A two-page memo on who started the fighting and why? Deadline: Monday
From Rockwell's blog: Another Golden Age Posted by Butler Shaffer at November 8, 2008 09:55 AM
The song-and-dance is in full tempo, the world now being informed of a new "golden age" that promises national "greatness," but - as with such ages from the past - will only end up intensifying state power, massive wartime deaths, and economic destruction. A one-word definition of such a phenomenon is "empire" (oops, make that "Empire").
Not one to be late energizing a public mindset on behalf of the "greatness" to be bestowed by the election of Obama the Enlightened Communicator, CNN has a news report with the following words appearing at the bottom of the screen: "Obama's To-Do List: Taking a Cue from Abe and FDR." How encouraging. Each of these slugs was responsible for increasing, exponentially, the powers of government; generating economic dislocation; and helping to slaughter tens of millions of humans in two major wars (618,000 deaths by Lincoln in the U.S. Civil War, and from 50 to 70 million deaths to which FDR contributed during World War II)!
Yet another specter of political supereminence with which to keep the statist misanthropes entertained, and the boobeoisie basking in a dimly-reflected glory, as Obama channels the spirits of two of the most destructive of past presidents. Unless the entire system collapses of its own dead weight and contradictions, those who survive this impending holiday for political visionaries will be left with the task of cleaning up the detritus, in time for a future god-king to "take a cue from Abe, FDR, and Obama." Butler Shaffer
THE LOONY LEFT: NEVER SAY DIE; AND REALLY, STALIN WASN'T THAT BAD
In 1983 the Indiana University historian Robert F. Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union -- the cream of American academia -- in a book titled After Brezhnev. Their conclusion: Any U.S. thought of winning the Cold War was a pipe dream. "The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government," Byrnes said in an interview, summing up the book. "We don't see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system."
Barely six years later, the Soviet empire began falling apart. By 1991 it had vanished from the face of the earth. Did Professor Byrnes call a press conference to offer an apology for the collective stupidity of his colleagues, or for his part in recording it? Did he edit a new work titled Gosh, We Didn't Know Our Ass From Our Elbow? Hardly. Being part of the American chattering class means never having to say you're sorry.
ILANA: The only modern-day Jeffersonian in our accursed Congress is the blessed Rep. Ron Paul. Ron Paul, always and everywhere, wants to bind "government by the chains of the Constitution." He sees the Constitution, to quote, not as "a grant of powers," but, rather, as "a set of limitations." (P. 25) What does this mean?
TOM DILORENZO: In the course of their momentous debate over the nature of American government Jefferson and Hamilton developed two diametrically opposed views of the Constitution. Jefferson was a strict constructionist, as was Madison and others. That's why he proposed a constitutional amendment prior to the Louisiana Purchase, but Congress was too much in a hurry to wait for the process to play itself out. When Hamilton failed to get his way (the way of the New York/New England Federalists) at the constitutional convention, he denounced the Constitution as a "frail and worthless fabric" and developed a strategy for subverting the entire document. His long-winded legalistic tomes instructed generations of lawyers how to pervert the Commerce and General Welfare Clauses, and imaginary "war powers," for example, so that they can be used to expand rather than restrain government. The late Clinton Rossiter, a liberal historian from Cornell University who wrote a book on Hamilton's constitutional thought, celebrated the fact that Hamilton "taught his friends how to read the Constitution." The "formula" for unlimited government, Rossiter wrote approvingly, is "the commerce power + the war powers + the power to tax and spend for the general welfare x the loosest possible reading of the words 'necessary and proper.'" Hamilton and his followers viewed the Constitution as a potential rubber stamp on anything the central government would ever want to do.
ILANA: It's obvious that Sarah Palin hasn't grappled intellectually with the ideas of American liberty (but then neither have her vehement critics, media-anointed pseudo-intellectuals such as Peggy Noonan, David Brooks, and Kathleen Parker). Still, Sarah has some healthy instincts. Only last year, she saluted the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party. How does this make her one of the better guys? Address the Big Lie, spread at first by Federalist and Whig Hamiltonians, that the union usurped the states.
TOM DILORENZO: It was Hamilton who also invented the Big Lie that the states were never sovereign, which is probably the biggest lie in American political history. Just read Article 7 of the Constitution which gave the states the duty to ratify (or not ratify) the document. And of course the "delegated powers" in Article 1, Section 8 were delegated by the states, for their mutual benefit. This is the only area where the "Supremacy Clause" is operative – the delegated powers. The states did not delegate sovereignty, only seventeen specific functions.
Courts and Congress defends a revolutionary thesis. If asked, who has the final say in our government on the meaning of the Constitution, most people would say, the Supreme Court. The Court itself agrees: in the famous Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) decision, it declared that it could not consider reversing Roe v. Wade (1973), because the American people had come to look to the Court as their guide.
William Quirk, one of the most original Constitutional theorists of our time, challenges this view.[1] No, he does not challenge judicial review, the power of the Court to find laws unconstitutional: this he finds solidly based. He criticizes the Court for abuses of interpretation; but so long as the Court sticks to the language of the document, all is well. David Gordon
Hundreds of books, thousands of articles, and thousands of hours of multimedia presentations. All Free, courtesy of the Mises institute. Get a free education and, hopefully, make a contribution at some point.
Each year I like to give a roundup of where we stand in terms of publishing and online resources, and every year I'm struck by how much progress we've made. And yet this year, there is something astounding to share with you.
With 300 books in our catalog, the overwhelming majority of which have been internally published; with an online store that is second to none in the world of pro-liberty publishing; with a website delivering nearly 7 terabytes of data out the door every month to one million unique visitors per month; with nearly the entire corpus of Mises, Rothbard, Hazlitt, Röpke, Hayek, Hutt, Spadaro, Chodorov, Nock, Garrett, Ron Paul, John T. Flynn, Böhm-Bawerk, Menger, Bastiat, Hahn, Say, and Wicksell, among many others, in print and available for free download or purchase in hardcopy; with the complete run of seven journals online, many of which would have otherwise sunk without a trace; and with 30,000 rare books in this physical library begging to be scanned; it is fair to say that the Mises Institute has achieved a level of productivity and effectiveness that none of us imagined possible in the past. Jeff Tucker
Where have the Northern Hemisphere Tropical Cyclones gone the last 2 years? Upon examination of all tropical cyclone activity in the basins throughout the Northern Hemisphere for the past 2 years, a remarkable downward trend in cyclone energy has continued and reached historic levels of inactivity. Even though North Atlantic hurricane activity was expectedly above normal, the Western and Eastern Pacific basins have produced considerably fewer than normal typhoons and hurricanes, respectively in 2008. The image below shows the previous three decades of cyclone energy (as measured by the ACE, a popular metric of climatologists used to measure hurricane energy) for all global ocean basins (green) and for the Northern Hemisphere (blue). Using a 24-month running sum, we see that Northern Hemisphere ACE remains at historical lows. Moreover, there has only been 1 Category 5 typhoon (Jangmi) during the past year. This cyclone activity is consistent with continued colder conditions in the Pacific Ocean and the previous strong La Nina last spring.
Michael Crichton, the million-selling author who made scientific research terrifying and irresistible in such thrillers as "Jurassic Park,""Timeline" and "The Andromeda Strain," has died of cancer, his family said. Crichton died Tuesday in Los Angeles at age 66 after privately battling cancer.
"Through his books, Michael Crichton served as an inspiration to students of all ages, challenged scientists in many fields, and illuminated the mysteries of the world in a way we could all understand," his family said in a statement.
Among those who are bemoaning the election results, one must ask supporters of liberty: given the choices, what would have been a good outcome? We've lived through eight years of what might possibly be the worst executive-driven meltdown of human liberty outside civil or world war in American history, and this is true regarding domestic policy and foreign policy.
A McCain victory would have been perceived at home and abroad as a ratification of the past eight years, and it is hard to imagine a worse course of events than that.
The Obama victory symbolizes a well-deserved repudiation of this ghastly experience. Of course, the Obama victory elicits its own spin, which is also highly dangerous. The main message concerns race. All the headlines blared that a racial barrier had been broken. The subtext here is impossible to miss: heretofore America has been a hopelessly racist country that put up barriers to the advance of people of color...Tragically, Obama does not seem to see that expanding this trend is a pathway forward. For him, the answer is the failed politics of redistribution, a pathway that can only exacerbate racial tension. Far from being a healing force in American life, his success at taking from one group to give to another will only increase conflict.
"The man of system … seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chessboard…" - Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
...Then I realized that there's a close connection between the U.S. government's domestic policy and its foreign policy. In both cases, the government is forcibly taking our resources and, to the extent it finances its activities with deficits, our children's resources, and using them to pursue its own ends. In the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. government brought down foreign governments that it disliked and replaced them with leaders that it likes. In the case of the bailout, the government is putting resources into places where we consumers and investors, with our "dollar votes," have decided we don't want to put them.
In short, the Bush administration has completed the philosophical journey it began with its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush believed that he could get rid of governments in Afghanistan and Iraq and come up with a better government. He was like Adam Smith's "man of system" referenced in the above quote. Bush thought he could plan what Smith called "the great chessboard of human society" in Afghanistan and Iraq. But what he didn't take account of is, in Smith's words, that "every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it." Bush, along with his various appointees, thought he could be a central planner of other societies. Well, as Dr. Phil would ask, "How's that working for you, Mr. Bush?"
"The grip that the Israeli lobby has over both political parties means that any real shift in U.S. Middle Eastern policy is unlikely, whoever is elected president today. It might also be argued that no change in policy outside the Middle East is likely either, except that Obama might talk before he bombs. Given Joe Biden's warning that Obama will respond decisively to a foreign policy test in his first six months, it might even be suggested that a new regime could prove more trigger-happy than the current one.
If Obama wins, it is generally believed that the position of Secretary of State will go to Richard Holbrooke. Holbrooke is not shy when it comes to the use of force, having been the architect of U.S. military engagement in Bosnia in the mid-1990s, but his current views on Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan are not completely clear. Regarding Iraq, he initially supported removing Saddam Hussein but has lately called for a "new strategy" for redeployment of U.S. forces in the region. Holbrooke's aggressiveness combined with Joe Biden's prediction that there will be a major challenge together suggest that Obama will quite likely be supported by his advisers if he is keen to prove that he is not a wimp, so the first six months or so could be a wild ride."
Afghan President Hamid Karzai warned that bombings were not the way to win the war on terrorism, and said he hoped President-elect Obama would make it a priority to stop killing Afghan civilians. US spokesman Commander Jeff Bender said an investigation is ongoing, and “if innocent people were killed in this operation, we apologize and express our condolences.”
The Herat strike was based on a false tip, according to the Afghan government. This strike came after US-led troops came under fire in the hilly area, but it is not as of yet clear why the wedding party ended up being the target of the air strike.
In the case of the neocons, safe haven amounts to a well established network of think tanks, academic citadels and media outlets. Among the scholars and fellows camped out at the American Enterprise Institute are Kagan, John Bolton, Lynne Cheney, David Frum, Newt Gingrich, Irving Kristol (Bill's dad and the "godfather of neoconservatism"), Richard Perle, Gary Schmitt, the completely despicable Paul Wolfowitz and the possibly even more despicable John Yoo. Midge Decter, Steve Forbes and Richard Scaife anchor the board of trustees at the Heritage Foundation; Bill Bennet and Ed Meese hang out there too. Meese, Condi Rice, John Abizaid, Tom Sowell and James Woolsey haunt the hallowed halls of Stanford for the Hoover Institution.
John Yoo, whose sophist interpretation of the president's constitutional powers made young Mr. Bush into a virtual deity, teaches law at the University of California, Berkley. Bill Kristol is on the faculty at Harvard's Kennedy school of Government, and Mackubin Thomas Owens, coauthor of the neocon manifesto Rebuilding America's Defenses, is associate dean of academics at the U.S. Naval War College. Donald Kagan, father of Robert and Fred Kagan, is a professor of history at Yale. Condi will doubtless reclaim her chair at Stanford, even if she has to step over the corpses of half the student body and faculty to get to it.
The longest polygraph school produces newly minted polygraphers in just 14 weeks -- less than half the time it takes to graduate from a typical barber college?
The researcher who developed the U.S. Government's polygraph Test for Espionage and Sabotage "thought the whole security screening program should be shut down?"
The National Academy of Sciences concluded that "[polygraph testing's] accuracy in distinguishing actual or potential security violators from innocent test takers is insufficient to justify reliance on its use in employee security screening in federal agencies?"
You don't have to be a psychopath, go to spy school, or somehow believe your own lies to fool the polygraph? (We'll reveal how it's done.) See the site
Posted by Butler Shaffer at November 4, 2008 12:44 PM
One benefit that may emerge from today's collective seance will be the demise of the Republican Party. The GOP (the Guileful Ossified Plutocrats) is as meaningless to a free society as are legs on a snake. Of course, the Democratic Party is equally destructive of the conditions necessary for a decent society, but it has always been able to assemble a better song-and-dance team with which to persuade Boobus Americanus that it is blessed with the wizardry skills that can overturn the laws of causation and transform lead into gold.
Obama campaigns on the mantra of "hope." Well, if I could "hope" for a better country when I awoke tomorrow morning, it would be for every Republican candidate for every office - with the exception of Ron Paul - to go down to a thunderous defeat. As the only Republican left in the House, Ron would become the ranking member of every committee and subcommittee. He would still get outvoted 434-1, just as he does now with numerous other Republicans around him. But the reality of America having a one-party system would be all the more obvious.
In anticipation of the GOP going down the memory hole - taking its place alongside the Federalists, Whigs, Bull Moose, and other parties - the established order has mounted the case for a revived Republican organization. "We need both the GOP and the Democrats," whined one television babbler. The unstated reason for such a claim is that a two-party system is necessary to maintain the illusion that there are any fundamental differences in thinking within the ruling establishment. Boobus must remain convinced that he has any "choice" as to how - or whether - he is to be ruled by others; the kind of "choice" one has in a grocery store when opting between paper or plastic bags! From Lew Rockwell's blog
TAXPAYERS PAID TWICE WHAT WARREN BUFFETT PAID DAYS EARLIER FOR GOLDMAN SACHS STOCK!
These are dynamite facts that demand immediate action to halt the bailout deal and correct its giveaway terms. Stop payment on the Treasury checks before the bankers can cash them. Open an immediate Congressional investigation into how Paulson and his staff determined such a sweetheart deal for leading players in the financial sector and for their own former employer. Paulson's bailout staff is heavily populated with Goldman Sachs veterans and individuals from other Wall Street firms.
Billionaire Warren Buffett invested $5 billion in Goldman Sachs and bought the same types of securities--preferred stock and warrants to purchase common stock in the future. Only Buffett's preferred shares pay a 10 percent dividend, while the public gets only 5 percent. Dollar for dollar, Buffett received at least seven and perhaps up to 14 times more warrants than Treasury did and his warrants have more favorable terms...
A WAR STREET JOURNAL VIEW OF THE AFTERMATH OF THE CRASH
Wall Street is working its way through the cycle of grief that starts with shock and denial, progresses to accepting responsibility and eventually gets to the stage of learning from mistakes. In contrast, Washington remains stuck in the denial phase, with political leaders refusing to admit that their actions have any responsibility for the credit panic. This matters because regulatory denial is suppressing confidence in markets, especially now that the country's financial capital is in Washington, not in New York.
Last week's congressional hearings included important mea culpas. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan focused on the information gap in the banking industry that he, and others, failed to see. "The best insights of mathematicians and finance experts, supported by major advances in computer and communications technology" had a fatal flaw. "The whole intellectual edifice," he admitted, "collapsed in the summer of last year because the data inputted into the risk management models generally covered only the past two decades, a period of euphoria." WSJ
Most readers of Liberty are very familiar with the philosophical and economic arguments against the state. But what if there were a scientific case for capitalism? What if laboratory researchers could conclusively show that free markets were a better way to organize economies than the state?
That’s the premise of Michael Shermer’s “The Mind of the Market.” Shermer is an industrious fellow: he is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, a columnist for Scientific American, the organizer of a science lecture series in Southern California, the author of nine books, and the editor of one.
Shermer is also a devoted libertarian. He explains that in the mid-1970s, while studying at Pepperdine University, he ran into psychology majors who were studying Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”: “I trudged through the first hundred pages (patience was strongly advised) until the gripping mystery of the man who stopped the motor of the world swept me through the next thousand pages.”
He adds, "Although I now disagree with her ethics of self-interest (science shows that in addition to being selfish, competitive and greedy, we also harbor a great capacity for altruism, cooperation, and charity), reading Rand led me to the extensive body of literature on business, markets, and economics.” Liberty magazine
The Austrian school has been battling the central bank since 1913 and before. Right now, the writings of our tradition are more prominent than ever before, thanks to our great predecessors, our faculty, our students, our donors, our publishing programs, our electronic media, and the desperate search on the part of people all over the world for an explanation of the current crisis, and a new way out.Never have the ideas of the Austrian tradition reached such heights as in recent weeks. I'm pleased to report that the Mises Institute, after 26 years of preparation, was ready in every way. We have economists, historians, philosophers, and many others working at the university level all over the country and the world who have been trained in our programs, such as the Mises University, the Rothbard Graduate Seminar, and the Summer Graduate Fellowships. They were ready to provide answers in a classroom setting and for the media.
"Throw your mind back to September 10, 2001. The price of gas: $1.40 per gallon. The national debt: $5 trillion dollars, sizeable but only about half of what it is today. America had over 3 million more manufacturing jobs. The trade deficit too was around half today's. A budget surplus. The US population: 282 million, about 20 million less than now. And the unkindest cut of all: you were seven years younger.
Good and serene as that time looks in retrospect, things were even better than mere numbers may indicate. Consider this.
The day before 9-11, how many would have accepted a suggestion that seven years later, they would have been illegally spied upon, phones tapped and emails sniffed? That they would be entangled in two foreign wars? That New Orleans would disappear in a baffling act of incompetence and neglect? Or that their government would authorize torture? Or that fabled names in the financial industry would loot and cheat them, under the very eyes and noses of their own government? That insult would be added to injury by their being made to pay for a bailout of the very perpetrators of these same crimes?"
I'M NOT IN THE MILITARY... I HAVEN"T BEEN IN THE MILITARY IN A LONG TIME..
... AND I DON'T CARE WHO'S ELECTED TUESDAY...
He's not my friggin' Commander in Chief!
"This is much more than a semantic irritant. It's a perversion of the Constitution, under which American civilians simply do not have a "commander in chief"; only those in the military -- when it's called into service -- have one (Art. II, Sec. 2).
Worse, "commander in chief" is a military term, which reflects the core military dynamic: superiors issue orders which subordinates obey. That isn't supposed to be the relationship between the U.S. President and civilian American citizens, but because the mindless phrase "our commander in chief" has become interchangeable with "the President," that is exactly the attribute -- supreme, unquestionable authority in all arenas -- which has increasingly come to define the power of the President."
WAR ARCHITECT AND "THE F%^&#ING STUPIDEST GUY ON THE PLANET" LANDS AT HUDSON INSTITUTE
Jim Lobe, Antiwar.com: After Georgetown University decided against renewing his contract, a brief stay as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and his efforts to get a post at the Brookings Institution came to naught, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have found a new home at the Hudson Institute, another predominantly neo-conservative “think tank”...
Hudson, of course, was the first refuge of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby after his 2005 indictment for perjury, but he apparently left after his conviction...
From Wikipedia:
[edit] Former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice According to the long-running Washington newsletter, The Nelson Report, edited by Christopher Nelson, quoting an anonymous source, Feith was standing in for Rumsfeld at a 2003 interagency 'Principals' Meeting' debating the Middle East, and ended his remarks on behalf of the Pentagon. Then-National Security AdvisorCondoleezza Rice said, "Thanks Doug, but when we want the Israeli position we'll invite the ambassador."[24][25] [edit] Former Secretary of State Colin Powell In Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack, then-United States Secretary of StateColin Powellcalled Feith's operation at the Pentagon the "Gestapo" office, alleging that it amounted to a separate, unchecked governing authority within the Pentagon.[26] Soon after publication of the book, Powell said: I don't recall saying that, but it is a terrible term to use and it is out of place, completely out of place. I have known Doug Feith for many years. We have agreed on many issues and disagreed on some. And I just regret that that has gotten into the literature and become a fact.[27] An unnamed Bush administration official said to reporters from Newsday that "Secretary of State Colin Powell complained directly to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld several days ago about Feith's policy shop conducting missions that countered US policy."[28] [edit] Former Pentagon Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski (ret) Lieutenant ColonelKaren Kwiatkowski, who was a Desk Officer in Feith's Policy organization, spoke of Feith's style: "He was very arrogant", describing what it was like to work with him. "He doesn't utilize a wide variety of inputs. He seeks information that confirms what he already thinks. And he may go to jail for leaking classified information to The Weekly Standard."[29] Kwiatkowski believes an article that appeared in The Weekly Standard included a classified memo written by Feith alleging ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. [edit] Former Director of the CIA, George Tenet The chapter "No Authority, Direction, or Control" of George Tenet's memoir deals with the prewar government debate about alleged connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda. According to the Washington Post, Tenet's memoir paints an "unflattering portrait of Feith as a man eager to manipulate intelligence to push the country to war."[30] Tenet refers to Feith's office as "Team Feith", writing that he saw their criticisms about the CIA's Iraq-al Qaeda work as "complete crap." He added that "when the Pentagon inspector general issued a report in February 2007 calling some of Feith's efforts 'inappropriate', Feith shot back. He said peddling his alternative intelligence was simply an exercise in 'good government.' Nonsense (Tenet wrote). This was an example of bad government" (Tenet, page 348). [edit] Former Commander Coalition Forces in Iraq, Gen. Tommy Franks (ret) Before the war in Iraq, the Iraqi National Congress proposed recruiting a brigade of Free Iraqi Forces to enter Iraq with the Americans. Feith supported the idea behind the project. United States ArmyGeneralTommy Franks did not, as reported in the book Cobra II: "Franks remained unenthusiastic, to say the least. After a briefing from [Feith's aide Bill] Luti on his pet project, Franks turned to Feith in a Pentagon corridor, letting him know where he stood: 'I don't have time for this fucking bullshit,' Franks exclaimed."[32] Franks, according to Plan of Attack, says of Feith: "I have to deal with the f&*#ing stupidest guy on the planet almost every day."
[edit] Former Coalition Provisional Authority Official General Jay Garner (Ret.) The former Director of the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for the Coalition Provisional Authority, General Jay Garner, reported to Feith for five months following the invasion of Iraq. As quoted in Thomas E. Ricks's book Fiasco, Garner said of Feith: "I think he's incredibly dangerous. He's a smart guy whose electrons aren't connected, so he arc lights all the time. He can't organize anything." [edit] Former Chief of Staff to the Secretary of State, Larry Wilkerson Regarding Feith and his colleague, David Wurmser, Wilkerson has stated: A lot of these guys, including Wurmser, I looked at as card-carrying members of the Likud party, as I did with Feith. You wouldn’t open their wallet and find a card, but I often wondered if their primary allegiance was to their own country or to Israel. That was the thing that troubled me, because there was so much that they said and did that looked like it was more reflective of Israel's interest than our own.[37] In 2005, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff, publicly stated he could "testify to" Franks' 2004 comment, and added "Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man."[38][39]
The ticking time bomb of overpromised, underfunded public pension plans has finally exploded.
Here are a few headlines to consider:
SAN DIEGO, Oct 29 (Reuters) - The pension fund of San Diego, California, may have lost as much as $1 billion of its $5 billion in assets recently, potentially adding to the financial challenges weighing on the state's second-largest city.
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Colorado PERA, which covers 413,000 employees and retirees, saw its assets plummet from $41 billion at the beginning of the year to $31 billion on Oct. 15.
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Illinois taxpayers may soon be called on to bail out what is arguably the best-funded public pension plan in the state thanks to $3.6 billion in fund losses caused by the spiraling economy.
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At a time when most workers are watching their retirement savings get swallowed up by falling stock prices, it feels like a cruel trick to learn that taxpayers may have to spend $1 billion in 2010 to prop up Los Angeles County public-employee pensions.
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Wall Street's volatility has cost Fresno County's retirement system nearly a third of its value over the past year. In the past year, the county's $3 billion pension system has lost $865 million in market value. The plan has declined in value 29% over the past year and now has about $2.13 billion in assets, Retirement Administrator Roberto Pena said.
The "Dems", however, not only saw the Ugly Duckling instantly, automatically and viscerally – their revulsion seemed cataclysmic – these Progressives and their "Red Lights" went ballistic the second they heard the news:
, issued after material from Soviet archives had substantiated all Conquest’s arguments, “I Told You So, You F***ing 
