The Party Of Slavery

Last night's radio show presented some interesting conversations as one of the guests wasn't vetted to the extent that we knew what to expect. Such instances make for good radio.

J.A. Myerson was a guest with Warner Todd Huston discussing the upcoming march in DC. You can read Myerson's take on the show here. What became evident in short order was not only Myserson not libertarian or even centrist, but left wing. What also became apparent is that the left, the democrats, are the party of slavery.

The reason behind this statement lies in the comment Myerson made about taxes. He said that a tax cut was a spending increase. The is the same diatribe spewed by the ersatz economist Thomas Friedman, who never missed an opportunity to promulgate the government separating money from it's citizens. The only was Myerson's comment might make sense is if it was if cutting spending was impossible. Clearly, it's an incorrect premise as cutting spending is completely possible. The problem is that politicians understand they can bribe us with our own money and their entrenchment, in their minds, depends on it.

The problem, as I have discussed here and here, is that people have become accustomed to government largesse and moreover, the solution to their problems. Here in lies the rub: There is consideration involved. there is no free lunch when a person is the object of largesse of any type. Ask any slave or indentured servant. In the case of taxes, it is capital, taken against our will, to be used for some alleged greater good. You can't opt out of it and if you try, you will be forced to by the barrel of a gun, meaning the full authority of the government through their agents, the police. In essence, taxation is slavery, indentured servitude, and theft. Free will has no traction in that place.

Further on in the conversation, Myerson also espouses the premise that a government option with healthcare is libertarian. This is also false. The government should not and cannot truly be a competitor in the free market, if there is one. The argument could be made that since the government regulates, the market isn't truly free, but that is another discussion. The government operates on funds taken from its citizens. This very action is not libertarian and therefore any "participation" by the government as an agent in the free market is a false one. The government does not earn, it takes and since it makes rules about trade, it can favor itself to be the winner in any market it wishes to dominate. This is not libertarian on any level.

What I did come away with is that Myerson was not the balanced reporter he says he is and that he is a left wing progressive as is our fabian socialist ersatz president Barry O. He also outlined that in his position theft and slavery work just fine for him. He offered no solution other than to imply that raising taxes was the only way to solve our current problem. Theft begets theft I guess.

What I didn't get to say was my solution to the problem at hand. One, I would do away with the IRS. I would institute either a 10% flax tax for corporations and individuals. No deductions. Everyone pays. The budget would based on 75-80% of the previous years pull. The problem with this is the moral issue of stealing money from citizens. It would however provide a more stable money flow. The other option would be to have a consumption tax of 10-12%, which is the one I favor. Both these scenarios would require the removal of all other federal taxes and no deductions. Two, I would cut the government budget 20% the first year and 10% each year for the following 3 years. These numbers are minimum. I would shoot for a 50% cut over 4 years. Every department would be hit, no exceptions. I would also forgo subsidies, foreign and domestic. If something is a good idea, it will stand on its own, and the private sector will fund it and/or the market support it. Necessity is the mother of invention, not tax dollars. And for the record, I am and was against TARP. Failures should be just that, failures. Nothing is learned from a safety net, no matter if it is an individual or a corporation.

Lastly, I was to say that I had a poor choice of words last night. I called Myerson a stupid idiot. This I am mistaken. He is not a stupid idiot, just mistaken and wrong. I am sure we would agree on some libertarian issues, but the role of government is one where I think we depart. The less government we have, the better off all of us will be.

Thank you for reading this blog.

Our current Economic Mess: In Search of a Metaphor...

From the Libertarian Republican:

by Clifford F. Thies

Last year, the Obama administration was claiming credit for “slowing down the rate of job loss.” This year, it is striving for “a soft landing.” This is not a good metaphor. It creates the image of an economy whose descent has reached terminal velocity, like a skydiver whose parachute has failed, who – upon reaching terminal velocity – attempts to survive impact by achieving a soft landing.

In other metaphors that were attempted last year, we were looking for a “V”-shaped recovery as opposed to a “U”-shaped one. In a “V”-shaped recovery, the economy falls hard, and then recovers sharply. The last time we had a “V”-shaped recovery was when Ronald Reagan was President. That recovery resulted in Reagan’s landside re-election in 1984. In a “U”-shaped recovery, the economy lingers in recession for a while before beginning to recover. But, in 2009, we got neither a “V”-shaped nor a “U”-shaped recovery. Instead, we got an “L”-shaped economy. Now, with softening demand and the risk of inflation, we face the prospect of a “W”-shaped economy, sometimes characterized as a “double-dip” recession.

Also in 2009, Congress passed the trillion dollar “stimulus package” requested by the administration. This was one of a series of trillion dollar deals, including bail-outs for government agencies and private-sector financial institutions, for those behind on their mortgages and their student loans, cash for clunkers, leave no public school teacher behind, the umpteenth extension of unemployment benefits, etc., etc. These trillion dollar deals were supposed to prevent the unemployment rate from reaching 8 percent (oh my!). And, instead of the unemployment rate reaching 8 percent (oh my!), it reached 10 percent.

The “stimulus package,” I suppose, was not supposed to work like Viagra: you know, relatively quickly. Instead, it’s supposed to work like Cialis: “when the moment is right.”

Thus, the search for the right metaphor continues. Richard Nixon dealt with “inflation psychology.” Gerald Ford with “stagflation.” Jimmy Carter, “malaise.” What metaphor will characterize the economic woes of the current administration? How about the “Giant Slalom Economy,” where the economy weaves back and forth while on a downhill slide? Or, the “Chinese Water Torture Economy,” where the steady trickle of bad news turns everybody so fatalistically pessimistic that nobody is willing to invest in a new or expanding business? Or, the “Down is Up Economy,” where, after a while, double-digit unemployment becomes normal. With a “Down is Up Economy,” President Obama could be viewed as a Great President, like Franklin D. Roosevelt who demonstrated leadership during an eight-year period, from 1933 to 1941, when the unemployment rate continued above 10 percent.

If a “Down is Up Economy” seems far-fetched, simply recall the “Up is Down Economy” of 2006. Back then, the Democrats were calling an economy with only 5 percent unemployment and with no inflation, “the worst economy since the Great Depression.” That year, the Democrats took over the Congress and two years later the White House as well.

Dr. Thies is the Eldon R. Lindsay Chair of Free Enterprise & Professor of Economics and Finance, Shenandoah University, Virginia

Is Paul Volcker Looking For a Job?

I know Ben Benanke has already been confirmed as fed chief again, but when I read Paul Volcker's article in The New York Times, he really dances around the concept of "too big to fail". He really doesn't, in my estimation, make a good case for bailing out banks, or any other private entity. Just that "Aggressive action by governments and central banks — really unprecedented in both magnitude and scope — has been necessary to revive and maintain market functions." He really doesn't disagree with Obama much, and doesn't really offer a solution other than "protection against the outliers".  While we should limit the possible effect hedge markets have on banking, I do not see the need to bail the banks out in the future. They will have learned nothing from this experience. May be banking and hedge funds need to be separate entities, and have rules about what can be invested in hedge funds along with how and who. The hedge funds inversely leveraged the debt to the point of it being toxic to everyone. It's like turning a stick of dynamite into a 50 megaton bomb.


What is missing here is a solution that the banks should have come up with as opposed to having their hand out. It wasn't forthcoming. Volcker either is pitching for a future seat as chairman of the fed when Bernanke get the bus backed over him, or he's trying to stay on the inside with Obama. Nothing really changes in either case. It's more of the Wesley Mouch big government largesse to banks at our expense and detriment. We do not exist because of banks, but the reverse, and the same can be said of the government. It's about time corporations and government recognize the proper relationship and realize they serve us, not themselves. We also have to take responsibility for voting in self-absorbed, self-agrandizing, and selfish politicians that pass acts like the CRA, and go after corporations because they will not operate outside of good business practices. Lest's be clear here: The government enable people at large to borrow money they knew they could not pay back, and live beyond their means for a short while. The banks followed suit because of fear of being litigated against or in violation or the CRA. On top of this we had government lending institutions like freddie and fannie leading the way with bad lending practices, and then when the shit hit the fan, the bad loans were securitized into instruments the hedge funds tried to bury, there you have the stick of dynamite transmogrified into tsar bomba. To add to it, politicians like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd to mention only two, benefited with special preferential loans fro lending institutions. The only people left out in the cold to clean up afterwards were the american people not caught up in the mortgage bubble mania.

We don't don't need Paul Volcker or Ben Bernanke. We certainly don't need Alan Greenspan. If Milton Friedman was alive, I'd say give him a shot, but he's dead. If it were up to me, I'd have a sit down with Dr. Thomas Sowell and ask him what he thought. Too bad it isn't up to me, because now we'll have the FDR II show for the next 3 years. We remember how that went.

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What's Next?

What's next? What will Obama do since according to John Batchelor, he's lost the political narrative? While John believes this is about who controls the fairy tale, I like to deal in reality. I do agree that Obama has lost the information battle at this point as people have responded the opposite of what he expected. How did this happen?

One, Obama mistaken believes that because he is the first black man elected president and that the democrats won a clear majority in both houses that somehow this was a mandate to implement his progressivist socialist-fascist agenda. He was wrong.

It was a rebuke of 8 years of Bush, the war on terror and tiring of the same old shit. Bush failed to lead the country, particularly after the 2004 elections. It was a series of blunders, some of which were rolled up in the Iraq War, some were with his domestic policies that reeked of constituency pandering and showed his true nature as not being a conservative or libertarian and his overall inability to sell sell cheap water to an arab in the desert. I think some of this blame goes to Karl Rove as the win at any cost in 2004 led us down the wrong road and ultimately, created a power and leadership vacuum that allowed Obama to waltz in the white house.

Running up to the election, we ran into a fiscal crisis where it was decided that some companies were too big to fail. Enter the age of Atlas Shrugged. Citizens watched as the TARP bill was passed, and later after the elections, the ARRA was passed, both with majority opposition from the populace. Politicians ignored the cries of the citizenry against these bills, but to no avail. His Arrogance, King Barack "George III" Obama, believed that not only did he control the narrative, the the help of the 4th branch of government, but that his mandate to institute socialism in this country was fait accompli. What he didn't count on was that the people had had enough.

Like FDR before him, Obama wants to transform American into some sort of quasi-socialist democracy by cultivating and promulgating constituencies that will be beholding to his power to create programs that benefit them. In the end, it's all about him. Like FDR, he craves the power, limelight and adoration and will do anything to keep power. What he didn't count on was that people are more anti-socialist than he bargained for because we've had 60-70 years to see the failures of FDR and also LBJ, not to mention all of Europe. We don't want that.

So what now? It is my assertion that Obama and his minions will try to create or create a situation that will both marginalize the liberty movement and rally people around him. It may be a manufactured Pearl Harbor, or Oklahoma City bombing, or may be something else, but whatever it is, he will try to use it to assert his agenda, control the narrative as it were, and carry out his transformation of this country into a socialist country. While Obama is a coward that does not like to confront his adversaries, he likes to be right, even if the evidence proves otherwise. It's a matter of ego for him, and he won't take this laying down, as in his mind he has a mandate.

My prediction is that in the next 12 months, he will try something, as if he and the dems continue to lose the narrative, they are out in 2010 and probably in 2012. That just won't do, at least for him. And if he does do something, it could backfire like the Boston Massacre and cause the people to rally in opposition to the throne. Where were you?

Inspiration from Michael Savage.

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Chuck Grassley Is At It Again

Chuck Grassley, from now on known as The Chuckster, is at it again. He wants the bankers at AIG to commit seppuku, and at the very least bow deeply in apology before doing so. Where have we heard that before? Of course The Chuckster must be deeply honored for winning the IotW award, and is now shooting for the IotY award or at least a nomination. Chuck, I don't know what planet you come from. I really don't. You monkeys in congress invented this problem, you made it worse by passing TARP, you feckless pezzo di merda, and now you want the bankers to either kill themselves or apologize like a japanese executive would? You are out of touch. May be you would like to lead by example? The only people on the good ship lollipop that are more delusional than you are Chris Dodd and Barny Frank. I should throw in the vampiress Bella Pelosi. I guess it could be worse. We could have two senator Harkins here in Iowa, or may be Governor Mike Gronstal has designs on your job, but bud, you need to go. You still haven't made a case for TARP, or ARRA, and you certainly haven't acquitted yourself well, Mr. Earmark. Being a senator requires more than bringing home the bacon at any cost.

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Stimulus?

Barack Hussein Obama has his bowels in an uproar over the fact that the republicans (and the American People) are holding back their support for this bill. Each party involved has their own priorities in this fiasco, so lets take a little closer look at them. 

President Obama has to pay back a lot of people for his getting into office. The only people that are being stimulated by this bill are people that supported BHO and people that work for the government. Look at the subsidies promised to ACORN for example. We will pay billions to this corrupt organization because they committed fraud to put another fraud in office. 

The democrats in congress want this bill to go through as is because one, like republicans, and most politicians, they want to make it look like they are doing something. call it busybody disease if you will. If they aren't doing something, no matter how feckless on one hand or outright corrupt or insane on the other, they feel they aren't doing their job. What they don't realize is that the less they do on our behalf, the better off we would be. The other MO for the democrats is that they are in on the BHO group think to move us towards socialism. Look for items in the bill that pertain to healthcare, welfare and education. Yet another reason for the pork is just because they feel they can do it. 

Now, with the republicans, the figure they can make political hay out of this by not supporting the bill and letting it hang on the democrats neck like an albatross. The problem is that too few of them truly agree with common sense americans that the bill is horse shit and they suffer from the same busybody disease as the democrats. They look at polls and judge how long they have to appear to fight the bill to get the greatest benefit all the while back room negotiating for the pork and earmarks they can believe in. Just like TARP, they will get on board when they have been bought off cheaply. 

There is next to nothing in this bill that will get us out of any recession or depression. In fact, it will makes things worse. This quote has been making the rounds lately and I thought it would make a good lesson for our ersatz president: "You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it". This has been attributed to Dr. Adrian Rogers, although I have my doubts. Still, it rings true, and right now, Mr Obama and his cadre of socialist mountebanks are preparing to implement not only unwanted and feckless obligations, but obligations for which all of us will be in peonage for quite some time to come. 

Right now it doesn't look good. My guess is that the republicans will fold because they don't want to been seen as feckless for doing nothing, so they will barter for their own pork. Right now, the best we can hope for is a change in voting habits in 2010. I have to wonder if there aren't several million people right now wondering why they voted for this incompetent hope and change freak from Chicagoland. Right now we are stuck with this double talking charlatan and his equally tergiversating distaff. 

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THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY: HERE COMES SOCIALISM

THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY: HERE COMES SOCIALISM

By DICK MORRIS

Published on TheHill.com on January 20, 2009

2009-2010 will rank with 1913-14, 1933-36, 1964-65 and 1981-82 as years that will permanently change our government, politics and lives. Just as the stars were aligned for Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson and Reagan, they are aligned for Obama. Simply put, we enter his administration as free-enterprise, market-dominated, laissez-faire America. We will shortly become like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, or Sweden — a socialist democracy in which the government dominates the economy, determines private-sector priorities and offers a vastly expanded range of services to many more people at much higher taxes.

Obama will accomplish his agenda of “reform” under the rubric of “recovery.” Using the electoral mandate bestowed on a Democratic Congress by restless voters and the economic power given his administration by terrified Americans, he will change our country fundamentally in the name of lifting the depression. His stimulus packages won’t do much to shorten the downturn — although they will make it less painful — but they will do a great deal to change our nation.

In implementing his agenda, Barack Obama will emulate the example of Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Not the liberal mythology of the New Deal, but the actuality of what it accomplished.) When FDR took office, he was enormously successful in averting a total collapse of the banking system and the economy. But his New Deal measures only succeeded in lowering the unemployment rate from 23 percent in 1933, when he took office, to 13 percent in the summer of 1937. It never went lower. And his policies of over-regulation generated such business uncertainty that they triggered a second-term recession. Unemployment in 1938 rose to 17 percent and, in 1940, on the verge of the war-driven recovery, stood at 15 percent. (These data and the real story of Hoover’s and Roosevelt’s missteps, uncolored by ideology, are available in The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes, copyright 2007.)

But in the name of a largely unsuccessful effort to end the Depression, Roosevelt passed crucial and permanent reforms that have dominated our lives ever since, including Social Security, the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, unionization under the Wagner Act, the federal minimum wage and a host of other fundamental changes.

Obama’s record will be similar, although less wise and more destructive. He will begin by passing every program for which liberals have lusted for decades, from alternative-energy sources to school renovations, infrastructure repairs and technology enhancements. These are all good programs, but they normally would be stretched out for years. But freed of any constraint on the deficit — indeed, empowered by a mandate to raise it as high as possible — Obama will do them all rather quickly.

But it is not his spending that will transform our political system, it is his tax and welfare policies. In the name of short-term stimulus, he will give every American family (who makes less than $200,000) a welfare check of $1,000 euphemistically called a refundable tax credit. And he will so sharply cut taxes on the middle class and the poor that the number of Americans who pay no federal income tax will rise from the current one-third of all households to more than half. In the process, he will create a permanent electoral majority that does not pay taxes, but counts on ever-expanding welfare checks from the government. The dependency on the dole, formerly limited in pre-Clinton days to 14 million women and children on Aid to Families with Dependent Children, will now grow to a clear majority of the American population.

Will he raise taxes? Why should he? With a congressional mandate to run the deficit up as high as need be, there is no reason to raise taxes now and risk aggravating the depression. Instead, Obama will follow the opposite of the Reagan strategy. Reagan cut taxes and increased the deficit so that liberals could not increase spending. Obama will raise spending and increase the deficit so that conservatives cannot cut taxes. And, when the economy is restored, he will raise taxes with impunity, since the only people who will have to pay them would be rich Republicans.

In the name of stabilizing the banking system, Obama will nationalize it. Using Troubled Asset Relief Program funds to write generous checks to needy financial institutions, his administration will demand preferred stock in exchange. Preferred stock gets dividends before common stockholders do. With the massive debt these companies will owe to the government, they will only be able to afford dividends for preferred stockholders — the government, not private investors. So who will buy common stock? And the government will demand that its bills be paid before any profits that might materialize are reinvested in the financial institution, so how will the value of the stocks ever grow? Devoid of private investors, these institutions will fall ever more under government control.

Obama will begin the process by limiting executive compensation. Then he will urge restructuring and lowering of home mortgages in danger of default (as the feds have already done with Citibank).

Then will come guidance on the loans to make and government instructions on the types of enterprises to favor. God grant that some Blagojevich type is not in charge of the program, using his power to line his pockets. The United States will find itself with an economic system comparable to that of Japan, where the all-powerful bureaucracy at MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) manages the economy, often making mistakes like giving mainframe computers priority over the development of laptops.

But it is the healthcare system that will experience the most dramatic and traumatic of changes. The current debate between erecting a Medicare-like governmental single payer or channeling coverage through private insurance misses the essential point. Without a lot more doctors, nurses, clinics, equipment and hospital beds, health resources will be strained to the breaking point. The people and equipment that now serve 250 million Americans and largely neglect all but the emergency needs of the other 50 million will now have to serve everyone. And, as government imposes ever more Draconian price controls and income limits on doctors, the supply of practitioners and equipment will decline as the demand escalates. Price increases will be out of the question, so the government will impose healthcare rationing, denying the older and sicker among us the care they need and even barring them from paying for it themselves. (Rationing based on income and price will be seen as immoral.)

And Obama will move to change permanently the partisan balance in America. He will move quickly to legalize all those who have been in America for five years, albeit illegally, and to smooth their paths to citizenship and voting. He will weaken border controls in an attempt to hike the Latino vote as high as he can in order to make red states like Texas into blue states like California. By the time he is finished, Latinos and African-Americans will cast a combined 30 percent of the vote. If they go by top-heavy margins for the Democrats, as they did in 2008, it will assure Democratic domination (until they move up the economic ladder and become good Republicans).

And he will enact the check-off card system for determining labor union representation, repealing the secret ballot in union elections. The result will be to raise the proportion of the labor force in unions up to the high teens from the current level of about 12 percent.

Finally, he will use the expansive powers of the Federal Communications Commission to impose “local” control and ownership of radio stations and to impose the “fairness doctrine” on talk radio. The effect will be to drive talk radio to the Internet, fundamentally change its economics, and retard its growth for years hence.

But none of these changes will cure the depression. It will end when the private sector works through the high debt levels that triggered the collapse in the first place. And, then, the large stimulus package deficits will likely lead to rapid inflation, probably necessitating a second recession to cure it.

So Obama’s name will be mud by 2012 and probably by 2010 as well. And the Republican Party will make big gains and regain much of its lost power.


***COPYRIGHT EILEEN MCGANN AND DICK MORRIS 2009. REPRINTS WITH PERMISSION ONLY***

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The Financial Mess: Whose Fault is it?

It's interesting that the same scumbags, like Barney Frank, who is one literally, denounced efforts to prevent the problems and they now blame the Bush administration. Too many democrats were benefiting from Fannie and Freddie to stop the insanity. Here it right from their own mouths. They can't hide from their own words. Now were are left paying for their mistakes. 

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Guess Who is the Unemployed Politician?

This progenitor of TARP and an all around machiavellian sfacime will find himself unemployed soon enough. I am sure his tin cup wall street cronies will find him a cushy job at some hedge fund sure enough, but to see him go is a reward enough. 

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