I'm a free market conservative/libertarian, and I call em as I see em. I believe strongly in Austrian economic principles, personal liberties, and small governments. I believe these are the necessary ingredients to a prosperous and moral nation.
Sen. John McCain visited rebels in Syria on Monday, his communications director confirmed to CNN, making the Arizona Republican the highest ranking elected official from the United States to visit the war-torn country.
Brian Rogers confirmed a report that originally appeared on The Daily Beast, which indicated McCain entered Syria through Turkey, and remained in the country for several hours.
Obama's new budget increases taxes on flavored vodka. All because ridiculous government regulations already gave an unfair advantage (and lower taxes) to imported vodkas (which are more likely to be flavored). So instead of fixing the problem (the stupid regulations), the government is ADDING a tax to balance things out in the end.
CNN said tonight on TV that Republican Scott Walker "narrowly defeats" Democrat Tom Barrett with only a 57%-42% win. That's odd because back in November '08, CNN called Obama's 53%-46% an "overwhelming victory".
Wow. The English language sure changed a lot in 3 1/2 years!
This is not news. This has been reported extensively in books for the past 15 years. Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower detailed how Bin Laden USED to be wealthy, but once he left his family and spent his inheritance on Al Qaeda, recruiting, and training in the 90's and early 2000's, he was broke. The media, for some reason until now, failed to report this important fact and continued portraying Bin Laden as a charismatic billionaire who could go on funding attacks against the U.S. for decades. It's all hogwash.
There was something familiar about all of Obama’s campaign speeches for years, but I couldn’t really put my finger on it. Something was tying all these speeches together. There was a recurring theme. But I couldn’t put it into words.
I finally figured it out.
EVERY SINGLE campaign speech that Obama has given tells his audience that they are victims of some nefarious force out there and that only He and Democrat-led government programs can protect them and rescue them from such an overwhelming threat.
I’m not kidding. There are no exceptions. Every! Single! Speech!
Obama’s support among women lately has been declining, and Romney’s has been rising. I guess—maybe—modern women are tired of being treated like pathetic weaklings that need some big strong man or big strong politician or big strong government program to save them.
Women’s empowerment over the past 60 years has been all about how women no longer need someone to give them everything they need. All they want is to be treated as equals, treated with respect, treated like they are necessary and important to society. But Obama comes along and tells them they will never be equals, so they must rely on him (a “big strong man”) to save them.
I guess even for The Anointed One, eventually you have to stop being condescending to everybody around you. Eventually.
I've been thinking more about the European (and specifically Friedrich Hayek's) confusion over the American use of the terms liberal and conservative. To the European crowd, they think we have the terms backwards, since in Europe the term liberal tends to refer to the "liberation" of oneself from the control of the older monarchial governments that once prevailed across the continent. An in fact, it was this "classical liberal" ideology that gave birth to the United States and dominated political thought here until the mid-20th century.
But that's when the "modern liberal" ideology, which has socialism in its genealogy, started taking root in this country and now dominates academia and mainstream media. It is this new political thought that has commandeered the liberal identity and is not just a far cry from the European concept of a liberal, it is oftentimes a polar opposite.
And because classical liberal thinking makes up the foundation of traditional American culture and politics, those who hold the old ways close to their hearts are, by American definition, conservatives. Whereas in Europe, the term conservative has always referred to those with a fondness for strong monarchies and the societal organization and law & order that come with that form of government.
So after 200 years, in a near complete reversal, the modern day liberal in the United States is now defined as someone with a preference for a strong government (but not a monarchy) and a strongly organized society, a sort of "moderate socialist". Meanwhile the term conservative is now defining people who prefer smaller governments and more individual freedom.
Hayek writes about his confusion over our use of these terms in The Road to Serfdom and I've seen the same sentiments echoes repeatedly in German and British media. It's pretty interesting though how we use these terms so differently and how we arrived at this point.
I believe there are so many fallacies, failed theories, and erroneous planning in the world of Economics because of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The great thinkers, planners, and mathematicians fail to account for the human factor and, in particular, how human beings react to their changing surroundings.
We are not robots. We will not do what you say. We may act one way today but a different way tomorrow. We do not know our futures, and therefore neither do you. We will not respond to incentives the way you think we will. We will not respond to all incentives. We all will not respond to incentives the same way.
Economics fails not because it’s a faulty science but because our "leaders" see it as a means of controlling us, our wealth, and our potential to produce. Regardless of the merits of their intentions, Economics cannot be used to control or predict; it can only be used to measure and explain. As Adam Smith tried in vain to tell us...the greatest amount of wealth will not be created by organizing people toward a common goal but by leaving them alone to work towards their own individual goals.
Of the hundreds of examples of planned economies in the past 3000 years, none of them have matched the level of production of the Invisible Hand, which has sadly been seen rarely, such as in parts of American history, tiny pockets of Europe, and in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and only a few other places.
We are doomed to produce less than our potential because we let our “leaders” tell us what to do. The stronger they get, the more power they have, and the more parts of the economy they control…the poorer we will be.
We are at an ideological crossroads in American history. It is coming down to this…Do you want a government that leaves you alone to succeed or fail on your own merits, hard work, and ingenuity or one that takes things from other people against their will to give to you?
A growing number of Americans have discovered that if they combine their voting power together, they can use the government as their hired thugs: to steal money, property, food, and other unearned resources from a shrinking class of “Haves”.
But with fewer and fewer people working to actually produce the “stuff” we all need or want and instead just using government force to steal from everybody else, we WILL run out of enough producers to make the stuff in the first place.
I’d like to congratulate the Democrat party. Sometime in the 1950s, they were hijacked by ideological socialists hell-bent on destroying the American economy and American culture. They are about 90% complete.
For 24 of those months, the Democrats controlled all three major parts of the government (Executive, Senate, and House).
For the final 7 months, the Democrats have controlled 2/3 of the government.
So the Republicans have controlled about 7.5% of the federal government during Obama’s time in office, but they get all the blame for the problems in the economy?
There is nobody, I repeat NOBODY, with a brain, outside of Obama’s koolaide-drinking hardcore blind base, that thinks the Republicans are responsible for any problem whatsoever around us.
To all you Democrats that are out there running around trying to blame all these problems on the Republicans…you look really, really stupid.
Don’t get me wrong, Ron Paul is a great GOP presidential candidate and masterfully explains Austrian economic theory better than I’ve heard from any politician. His eagerness and will to abolish the Federal Reserve and return us to the Gold Standard are two great tactics for restoring America’s diminishing prosperity and superpower status.
U.S. foreign policy in southeast Asia at the time was based on the Domino Theory, which demanded that we support any opposition to communism because once a country fell, others in the region would also fall to communism, like dominos. This would theoretically lead to millions of political executions, thousands of political prisons, skyrocketing poverty, and mass starvation. Liberals mocked it, Ron Paul opposed it then and now, and the mainstream media deemed it ridiculous.
But it was true.
EVERYTHING the Domino Theory predicted came to fruition. One after another, southeast Asian nations fell to communism, a half-century of prosperity vanished, tens of millions of people were killed on battlefields or executed, and millions more would starve over the following 30 years.
Ron Paul was wrong then, and he’s wrong now.
South Vietnam was an ally of ours. They were invaded by a ruthless, well-armed, and well-funded communist neighbor to their north, and they asked for our help. If Ron Paul thinks we should turn our back on our allies every time they are in trouble, we’re not going to have many allies left. Why would they trust us? Or a better question is, Why would they trust President Ron Paul?
I know most people aren’t paying attention at all to the current debate over the federal government budget, simply because they are clueless as to what’s at stake. They have lived their lives in relative comfort, all their basic needs being met just by working a steady job, taking out a few loans when they want something they don’t have the cash for, and just relying on the wise politicians to keep everything going.
Those days are over.
Let me be more blunt. Your standard of living has just peaked sometime in the past 5 years. For the rest of your life, you will not have as much “stuff” as you have now.
Watch this cute video about where we’ve been and where we’re going:
It’s really not that complicated. The federal government spends a WHOLE LOT more than it actually takes in. Regardless of all the naysaying you hear from the media and politicians, almost ALL government spending is simply giving money or free stuff to people. A LOT of people. But as the spending gets bigger and bigger every year and the money brought in stays almost the same (mostly because of the recession), we are approaching a breaking point.
This CANNOT go on forever. It’s like renting an apartment that costs twice as much as your actual monthly take-home pay. Since you can’t afford it, you just put the rest on credit cards. You pay only the minimums every month and just apply for more credit cards. Every couple of months you get a new card, max it out, and add its monthly minimum payment to your big stack of bills. Eventually, you will reach a point when, even while paying only the minimums, your monthly credit card bills are bigger than your paycheck. Credit card companies will want their money, and they will get it, one way or another. You can only refinance so many times. The banks will want their money back. You can’t go on stealing from them forever. Game over. You lose.
Now at the federal government level, this problem is a lot bigger with much more dire consequences. You see, most of this debt isn’t held by credit card companies with sensitive PR departments. It’s held by foreign countries. With militaries. And no sense of humor.
When the government reaches a point that it can no longer pay back the trillions of dollars that it has borrowed from China, what do you think is going to happen? You think they can just print more and China will take it as payment? Not likely. If they just print more, the money becomes worthless. China gave us the trillions of dollars back when the dollar could buy 2 apples. They are NOT going to take the same trillions of dollars back when it takes 5 dollars to buy one apple. No way, no how.
Instead China will demand the apples, not the money that can’t buy apples anymore. Or maybe some money from another country that still has the ability to buy apples. They aren’t likely to “negotiate” either. That’s a lot of apples. And they have a lot of mouths to feed. And they don’t have a sense of humor. This is where their military comes in. They will use it to demand what’s due to them. And the ENTIRE WORLD will back them. You can’t just take money from somebody, promise to give it back, then only give back a little bit of it and expect them to go away happy.
And that’s only the half of it.
Remember all that money the government has been borrowing from China to give away to the American people or to buy stuff to give to the American people? Well, when China figures out our government can’t pay them back anymore, they’re going to stop loaning the USA the money. No money = no freebies to the American people. And that’s a LOT of American people that are going to stop getting their freebies. And, of course, the biggest problem here is that they have been receiving their freebies for so long and they have been given so many promises by politicians, they believe they have earned these freebies and have a right to them. Just like in Greece, when you take away peoples’ free stuff, they get very, very, very angry.
And nobody will be there to bail us out. I promise you.
Because of the nature of financial dealings, both of these problems – China and the pissed-off entitled Americans – are going to occur at roughly the same time, with horrible consequences.
1) China will launch a large-scale war and invade the United States.
2) The entitled Americans will ignite a civil war.
These two things are inevitable. And they will happen within the next thirty years.
There is one, EXACTLY 1…let me repeat, there is ONLY ONE way to prevent the destruction of the United States. There are NO OTHER FEASIBLE SOLUTIONS:
We must reduce the size of the federal government to LESS THAN ONE-THIRD of its current size.
There is absolutely no other way. I don’t care about all the lies you hear in the media. There is no other way. Your country will cease to exist within 30 years and tens of millions of people will die if this doesn’t happen.
The is probably the most common question I read from Democrats who claim they want to compromise with Republicans.
The answer is pretty simple: Because Republicans refuse to kill any chance of an economic recovery and increase unemployment just so the Democrats can continue their unfathomable social program expansions and trillions of dollars in free handouts to their special interest groups.
The Republicans believe it is because of these Democrats’ issues that got us into this predicament to begin with! It’s absolutely, 100%, completely ABSURD to continue on such a destructive path!
It’s like a crack addict losing his job, car, house, and all his money then becoming confused and belligerent because his brother won’t give him $20 to buy another crack rock.
Yesterday on PBS, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) said this:
“I am a little bit aggravated by this hype that somehow Al Qaeda is going to take over this organization. There is no evidence...And in addition to that, you know, you have got to go a long way to be worse than Qaddafi”
…breaking barriers by becoming the first female VP candidate on a major party ticket.
I was in elementary school when she ran, but some of us remember her for something far more important: losing an election by the biggest landslide in nearly 50 years. Lucky for everybody on the planet, the Democrats lost and Reagan won…the economy took off, the Berlin wall came down, we won the Cold War, and the world would go on to see its greatest victory for liberty and largest economic expansion in history.
It’s a good thing Ferraro didn’t break any bigger barriers.
A recent article says that poverty levels in the U.S. are expected to reach 15% in an upcoming report, the highest in nearly 50 years. Obama has been saying more often lately that the key to reducing poverty is creating jobs. He is correct! But temporary stimulus jobs created by the government shifting money around in the economy is NOT the way to do it!!
John Maynard Keynes has been proven time and time again to be WRONG! His theory of massive government deficit spending to try to reduce the effects of recessions has one again become a catastrophic failure!
The only jobs that can bring us out of a recession and reduce poverty must be a result of long-term investment into capital projects that raise levels of production. Businesses at all levels of the supply chain must be convinced that the orders coming down the chain are NOT temporary but recurring sales.
Business leaders do not make long-term decisions like full-time hiring, expansion, inventory level increases, etc., just because there was a blip in the sales this month. These ridiculous infrastructure projects of FDR's and Obama's have NO effect on long-term job creation.
Full-time jobs are created by employers who have confidence that their sales are up PERMANENTLY. Sure, companies that receive part of a $700 billion stimulus package are going to be thrilled, but they will NOT use this to create jobs. That would be insane. They'll use it to pay down debt, fix some delayed maintenance issues, maybe repave the parking lot, or put it in the bank.
You want to create jobs across the board? Reduce or eliminate the corporate income tax, personal income tax, sales tax, or any of these other taxes that serve no purpose other than to shift wealth out of the private sector and into the hands of government bureaucrats.
I'm sick and tired of public school teachers whining about there not being enough money in the schools. It's all a bunch of bull! I've had it with them guilting everybody into agreeing to yet ANOTHER increase in their property taxes this year. Nearly everyone in the private sector has been affected negatively by this recession: lost jobs, salary cuts, benefit cuts, salary freezes, hours cut, etc. When's the last time a TEACHER suffered from any of these things? Ha!
I'd like to see one of these greedy teachers explain to little Sally the REAL reason why her parents both lost their jobs this year: "Sorry sweetie, I know your parents are unemployed, you won't have a Christmas, you've lost your health insurance, your grandmother is moving into the Projects, and you're about to lose your house and all, but I really need to retire with a full pension and free health care before I turn 47."
The central banking and political world are up in arms about a planned John Maynard Keynes book burning.
The burning was announced by Jeff Berwick, Chief Editor of The Dollar Vigilante, to take place on December 23, the anniversary of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
Top central bankers in the United States warned that flimsy economic theories would be in danger if the burning of a copy of John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest & Money went ahead.
"What is most dangerous," stated one central banker, "is if this causes people to even logically think for more than a few moments about economics then this entire structure we've built could begin to collapse. We've done a great job for a long time telling the average man on the street that economics is too difficult to understand."
According to USA Today, About a dozen communities around the country are now printing and issuing their own currency, like the Detroit Cheers, Ithaca Hours, and Massachusetts Berkshares.
Although this practice did become widespread during the Great Depression, it was NOT because of bank closings, as the article mentions. Under the governship of Benjamin Strong before his untimely death before the Depression in 1928, the Federal Reserve of New York justifiably wielded its power to head off runs on banks by printing MORE currency and loaning more money to commercial banks and bank associations. This put a lot more currency in the hands of banks that customers thought were on the verge of collapsing.
Because of the nature of the industry, banks had access to only 5-10% of the cash needed to fulfill the withdrawal demands of every customer desposit. When customers got wind of a bank’s potential failure, they would rush to the bank to withdraw their own money. If the bank complied with every request, they were forced to seek emergency funds and loans from the Federal Reserve, other banks, or bank associations. So a bank run that wasn’t headed off could cause a domino effect. Strong's policy to supply the banks with a little more cash during bank runs saved dozens of bank closings during the 1920’s and actually delayed the Depression by at least 2 years.
After his death in 1928, the Federal Reserve, under EUROPEAN PRESSURE, was more scared about tiny fluctuations in inflation (that these emergency distributions of cash to banks caused) than they were about the closings of banks and the public's loss of confidence in the banking system. So when bank closings began in mid-1929, and in particular the collapse of the Bank of United States in New York in 1930, the Federal Reserve began REDUCING the printing of currency and loans to banks. This caused even more bank closings, eventually reaching into the thousands by 1933, costing Herbert Hoover the 1932 Presidential election.
So the Federal Reserve, under new direction and new policy at the beginning of the Depression was the REAL CULPRIT of the Depression, NOT PRIVATE BANKS. They simply didn't do their job and caused the largest economic failure in world history.
In response to a lack of federal notes, communities all over the United States started issuing their own currency. They saved a lot of local banks, local businesses, and jobs. But the Federal Government had created such a catastrophe; local banks and communities could only ride it out. And they would have helped end the Depression by 1936 if Roosevelt hadn't bankrupted the country with the "New Deal", precisely the formula that Obama is ruining the country with today.
As if the irrational, irresponsible, illogical, and gullible public needed more fuel on the fire of their unjust outrage over AIG’s 400-employee bonus program, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal tells anyone that will listen—so far, this includes CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and Associated Press—that AIG understated the total of its March bonuses by $53 million.
As it turns out, Blumenthal, and everyone working in the Connecticut Attorney General’s office, missed one small detail: they included in their 2009 total the bonuses AIG distributed to employees and openly reported to the Treasury Department in 2008!