Archive for June, 2011

Media balance and omissions

June 27, 2011

With the Soros donation to NPR, there doesn’t have to be a quid pro quo. One tactic of the leftist Foundations is to just look for the organizations that already preach the message they want out there and that fit their purposes and fund those. The eco-fanatics don’t have to be conspiratorial, if they’re sincere and meet their purposes, funding is available.

NPR gets corporate contributions, sure, because there are lots of them already compromised, and they know which sides get the good press. Before it became obvious what message had more power, IBM said they were not rushing into retooling the chemicals in their products because the science was uncertain. When they saw that the science didn’t matter, political power did, they started become green. It’s a message that suits the multinationals anyway, more government and super-government control over macro and micro-economies, more guaranteed market through lobbyists and less upstart competition.

I am not so simple-minded as to condemn Fox just because or condemn other media just because, once in a while a contrarian message slips through anyway but they’ll try to suppress mavericks. They all laughed at Ron Paul in 2008 but with alternative little “information sources that could”, his message on the Fed and other things are getting traction and with the votes in 2010 as they are, now all the Republican presidential candidates are starting to use his language, as he put it, and even Gingrich is talking about auditing the Fed (which I’m sure he will never really do).

Beck is not my icon so stop talking like he’s my hero, he’s not. I just speculated that his talking about Soros so much and exposing the actual follow-the-money links to all the leftist causes that pretend they are so “grassroots” and are not. They are the daily Big Brother 1984 propaganda presentations.

Merely entertaining the idea of forced abortions and sterilizations and crediting such Malthusian ideas “in the case of a severe overpopulation growth” is tyrannical enough, at least to the victims. The disclaimer that it’s only for an “emergency” just means they’re getting ready for the next such crisis. It’s a “solution” looking for a problem, like Nixon’s wage and price controls and the Patriot Act. The latter was 2,000 or so pages if memory serves and detailed and it took 30 days for the bill to get to Congress. When has the federal bureaucracy worked so fast without having a plan ready to go from the shelf?

The vote in 2010 and the fact that all the Republican candidates are talking up the tea movement show that they realize that they were the spontaneous force that moved the voters to react against the bailouts (Republicans) and corporate giveaways -aka “stimulus” (Democrats). The unaffordable medical control act is more of the same power grab by the corporate-government complex. And it was not on Fox but the rant by Rick Santelli on CNBC and his call for another “Boston tea party” that lit the fuse that set off tea party demonstrators in the streets.

Advertisement

Keynesian economics has failed.

June 27, 2011

Keynesian economics, full speed ahead since the 1930s, has failed.

Almost as soon as they set up the Fed in 1913, the Austrian economists predicted the Great Depression and the fall of the public gold standard. Roosevelt fulfilled the prediction by illegally and unconstitutionally confiscating all the personally held gold across the country. Then they predicted that the money devaluation would force an agreement. Bretton Woods came around in 1944, agreeing to pay foreign central banks gold for dollars. With Roosevelt the dollar went from $20 an ounce to $35.

The Ausrtiran economists (van Mises et. al. ) predicted the fall of Bretton Woods. Nixon threw out Bretton Woods in 1971, and said we weren’t going to give gold for dollars any more to anybody, and the dollar began its decline in value that continues today.

Germany printed so many marks in the Weimar Republic they used to throw them into the street to steal the carts that carried them. How many dollars in circulation will it take for people to realize that when prices go up it’s because the dollar doesn’t mean as much anymore?

What speculators do is bet on what’s going to happen with the price of a commodity. They cannot drive prices up or down, they just bet on it. If they bet it’s going to go up, they grab the futures on the commodity, so if the real market price goes down then they lose their shirts and nobody notices.

That’s why Obama released 30 million tons of oil reserve. Prices were already going down, but he released the oil because he understands that more supply means lower prices.

It works that way for the dollar too. More supply of dollars means lower “prices” for the dollar, but for the currency that means you get less for your dollar, which means prices go up.

This is not a Democratic Party thing nor is it a Republican Party thing, it’s a printing money scheme. We are the marks. The politicians that play along with the Fed and debt game and free money illusion are the cons (the party bosses in both parties and many of their underlings), those political operatives are the “straight” half of the tag team, and the Fed is the hustler.

Keynesian economics, full speed ahead since the Great Depression, has failed

June 26, 2011

Keynesian economists may make claims about their successes, but Keynesian economics has been a failure everywhere most especially over the long turn. And every period of artificial “prosperity” that rode in on their ideas fell flat against the wall of the next downturn.

The 1990s decade of prosperity was artificial in part from easy money policies and in part from a real “peace dividend”, meaning reduction in military spending, and in part from optimistic investing based on a balanced federal budget.

Drastic reductions in federal budgets always results in more prosperity, because it means less pressure to raise taxes, and it’s not adding to the debt, which reduces investment jitters.

Market pressure always wins anyway. The Fed was created to stop the boom-bust cycle, but the 20th and 21st century has seen much worse than any such cycle of the 19th century, and since we have now reached the limits of the ability of the dollar, even as the world’s reserve currency, to hold back true market forces, we have had a ten-year “recession” that has no end in sight. The pressures of the free market are pushing for dollar devaluation. They won’t default, they’ll just keep printing money.

They have a paradox right now. There’s no saving the value of the dollar, but they have been devaluing it from even before they detached it from the dollar. But it looks like it’s about to hit critical mass. There won’t be a default, they’ll just print more of it.

If the House does what it should, and what Americans obviously wanted in the 2010 elections, and just refuse to let pass another hike in the debt ceiling, one of two things will happen. Obama’s administration will default on debt service, or they will extort the public receiving aid by withholding entitlement checks (they won’t do that, too risky for them too). The first option won’t happen, because they are already in hock to the money-changers in off-line ways, because the Fed and other bankers have happily financed their pie-in-the-sky promises all along so far.

Proverbs 22:7 ¶The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.

So that leaves the option to just print money. They don’t print it, what the Fed does now is just add itself another, oh, say, trillion dollars to their own asset column without the balancing real-world entry the rest of us have to make. Meaning, having to put something in the column for where it came from.

Starndards for weights and measures and coinage of money

June 26, 2011

Some people see a benefit in having a brand name on their clothing, that’s value to them. The only fair way to find out what something is worth is to let natural market forces determine how much they’re willing to pay for it. Preferably not in terms of fake fiat money, but some true standard of measurement of value.

It’s interesting that Congress is authorized by the USA Constitution to set standards for weights and measures, in the same paragraph authorizing coinage of money:

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

And in Section 10, in the list of prohibitions on the States is “make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts”.

Which, in real-world English, actually prohibits the legalization in any state of the use of Federal Reserve Notes as tender. But they paid never mind to the Constitution in 1913 when they passed this law. They said they were doing it to save the poor account holder and the economy itself from the abuses of big bankers, and to make them behave.

So to stop the abuse at the hands of big bankers, they gave control to a privileged group of big Bankers over the whole economy through control of the money and interest rates. And that bank cartel now is the formal and legal owner of the Federal Reserve, which miraculously has escaped all the overwhelming regimen of government financial controls and regulatory mayhem that has burdened all the rest of the private sector.

When is insurance not insurance

June 25, 2011

“Retirement funds” is a misnomer if it’s a government guarantee program. In practice, it’s a tax-funded program where your “contribution” is a tax itself, and in the real world your funds go to somebody else, not to you. Your turn comes later when your check is funded by confiscating it from somebody else.

Ron Paul made a good point about government “insurance” programs, which is not insurance at all. Insurance is a risk-management service, but when government subsidizes anything or guarantees anything, it’s not insurance at all. The abominable Health Care law, a police-enforced glorified HBO cartel, is a type of government controlled utility cartel HBO with a whole lot of nasty surprises thrown in. At plenty of extra charge.

Robbing from your neighbor to “help the poor” is not “charity”

June 25, 2011

Private charity is one thing. Robbing from your neighbor’s pockets to do “charitable work” is self-contradictory. Private contributions to social causes in the poorest countries are TRIPLE government-to-government aid, of which the poor see NOTHING.

Ask Hondurans how much the poor got after Hurricane Mitch or how the auto-coup dictator Mel Zelaya robbed the UN money for the poor to get himself “elected” (wink wink) dictator-for-life. I’m sick of the rich-pig control freak cliques that use the poor for cover for their own abuse of the poor, like Hugo Chavez, where the poor aren’t getting government food distributions or streets fixed and sleep on hospital floors.

Corporal punishment

June 24, 2011

Even Dr. Spock recanted after five decades of shaming young Moms into sparing the rod and spoiling the child and said little tots might need a light slap sometimes.

Maybe you got a couple of good ones. I’ve raised a bunch of kids and every one is different. Some of them need a little tap so they’ll understand because otherwise they don’t, and they’ll run out into the street after the ball that bounced away and they won’t pay attention to you when you tell them stop.

What you think they understand what an electric socket can do?

Even animals are smart enough to nip at their younglings to keep them from rushing into danger.

Corporal punishment

June 24, 2011

Even Dr. Spock recanted after five decades of shaming young Moms into sparing the rod and spoiling the child and said little tots might need a light slap sometimes.

Maybe you got a couple of good ones. I’ve raised a bunch of kids and every one is different. Some of them need a little tap so they’ll understand because otherwise they don’t, and they’ll run out into the street after the ball that bounced away and they won’t pay attention to you when you tell them stop.

What you think they understand what an electric socket can do?

Even animals are smart enough to nip at their younglings to keep them from rushing into danger.

Churches and tax exemption

June 23, 2011

The Supreme Court throughout US history was regarded as a truly separate and sovereign entity. Every church that has signed up for pretty-please permission from the state and from the IRS to have a tax deduction gives up its right to free speech.

Maybe it’s a good idea to remove them from 501c3 eligibility. It’s unconstitutional in the first place, LBJ snuck it there because he didn’t like what a lot of preachers said about him. Tax attorneys and CPAs saw a new politically created market to mine for gold and scared a lot of young ones into it.

Government should get out of the non-profit business anyway. Political football.

Before that they were always regarded as non-taxable, forget exempt, because a taxing power over them was regarded as a violation of the First Amendment.

Remove the 501c3 muzzle, and THEN you’ll see preachers endorse candidates and not just Gore this time. Careful what you wish for.

Polluters attack neighbors property rights, so does the EPA

June 22, 2011

F you give up your natural rights to an arbitrary mini-dictatorship (that’s what the EPA is) you won’t get “a cleaner world” but you’ll certainly get a miserably poor world for those children to live in. Their health will be a lot more endangered than with pollution.

Polluters (CO2 is NOT a pollutant) rob their neighbors of health and create hazards and any such attack on neighbors’ property rights should not go unscathed. Going from there to an unconstitutional requirement to advertise against yourself on your own product does nothing except transfer power to centralized planning.

Power is an intoxicant, and Central planners never got it right in history, and only made it worse. Pollution controls in the Soviet Union resulted in the most toxic nation on earth, and literally killed all the life in an inland sea.

Just like pollution regulations that cost Dow millions to implement that the EPA had to dismantle after their engineers showed the government’s desk jockey experts why it was a waste of money and the place they mandated for the device did absolutely nothing to the actual targeted pollutant.