Most Americans have found out the difference between what Our Founding Fathers gave us and the country we have today. Unfortunately the country we have today, we have a federal government that nobody can really control. It is like the big bully guy on the block that pushes everybody around. And nobody can make the federal government abide by our charter that we bring to it – which is the Constitution. More or less they use the Constitution as a mat to walk upon. Real State’s Rights existed before Appomattox. At that time we the people of the sovereign States could force the federal government to abide by the Constitution. Today the federal government does as it pleases.
If you remember ever reading the Kentucky and Virginia Resolves in 1798, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson wrote the Resolves in which they told the world – and the Kentucky and Virginia Legislatures adopted these Resolutions – that the States did not create the federal government to be their lord and master. We created the federal government to be our servant. And they warned us that if we did not maintain strong state’s Rights the federal government would become our lord and master – in essence a tyrant. And that is what we have today.
Real State’s Rights is that type of state’s rights where the people of the sovereign states can enforce the limitations of the Constitution upon the federal government. And that is the main difference. And that is what we have to get back to.
It is not a Southern idea, it is an American idea. Northerners and Southerners at one time embraced this idea. Unfortunately after Appomattox that idea is now Gone With The Wind.
Both the politicians in Washington and the liberal media have basically told the American people that State’s Rights is just a code word for racism.
I love it when these people talk about we are using code words. I am almost 60 years old. I say what I think. I don’t have to run around and hide from anybody. I tell it like it is and as I feel. If you read any of my books you can tell exactly what I feel and what I believe. So I am not using as code words.
The idea that State’s Right is a code word for something evil is absolutely ridiculous. I know that the liberal media, especially the politically correct liberal media, they like to point to State’s Rights and say, “ … Oh that was just a defense of slavery” “Oh that was a defense of Jim Crowism, segregation, discrimination and things of that nature” “Something that the wicked Southerners were all about, but we don’t want that any more.”
The Truth is that State’s Rights has a very noble origin and it comes from the North as well as the South. Northern States when they entered this Union they embodied within their Constitution and in their adoption of the Constitution the concept of State’s Rights. More than anything else, they feared a strong central government that would become a tyrant.
I understand that anything can be misused, the Bible can be misused. Jim Jones was a preacher. But he misused the Bible. So there are things that can be misused. But we don’t condemn the Bible because Jim Jones misused it. We condemn Jim Jones and his activities. So the same thing is true whether or not we are talking about slavery or segregation. If these things were caused by State’s Rights it was a misuse of State’s Rights.
Now here is something that people don’t realize. Southerners are sometimes left straddled carrying the burden of guilt for slavery and segregation as if we were the ones who invented it. No we didn’t invent slavery, it was invented right after the fall of man in the Garden of Eden. It was part of our sin nature. We didn’t invent slavery. Slavery existed up North as well as it down South. So this is not a Southern institution we are talking about here.
And as far as segregation, I know a lot of people say well the South is the place of segregation. Do you realize that in 1954 when the first Supreme Court decision, Brown vs. Board of Education, where was that board of education from? Do you recall?
Topeka, Kansas.
Now I am not real good on geography, but I don’t think that Kansas is down South, ToTo! So the point is – at that point in time there were 26 States in the United States had laws that discriminated against people of color. It was not just the South. New York City was just as segregated as Montgomery, Alabama at that time. This is not a Southern idea.
Another thing we got to remember – where did these laws come from? Do you have any idea where the laws of segregation came from? …
Most people think they came from Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi. They actually came from New England. The New England States were the first States that segregated black and white school children. Did you know that?
As a matter of fact, when the Supreme Court of the United States made segregation the law of the land in Plessey vs. Ferguson in 1898. Did you know that was a federal Supreme Court that did that, Ray. That wasn’t a Georgia Supreme Court or a Louisiana Supreme Court. That was a federal Supreme Court that said that segregation is now the law of the land in the United States – not just the South – in the United States of America.
Interestingly enough, of the judges that were on the Supreme Court at that time, there was only one Southerner on that Supreme Court. All the judges except for that one Southerner voted for segregation. The Southerner voted against it. How many times have you heard that Ray?
Not Often!
The guy who wrote the opinion, the majority opinion, for the Supreme Court that made segregation the law of the land was from Minnesota, not Mississippi. He based his concept upon a law in Massachusetts in 1845 that segregated white and black school children. But yet, it is always the South that is dumped on and has to carry the burden of that guilt. I am pointing this out for point number one: Southerners aren’t the ones who invented all of this we just have to carry the burden and number two: State’s Rights is something totally removed from that concept.
To give you a real good idea about this – have you ever heard of a guy by the name of Saint George Tucker. Saint George Tucker was an American patriot from Virginia – very well known legal scholar in the early history of the United States. He was from Virginia, he was a Southerner. But in 1803 he wrote some of the earliest pamphlets in opposition to slavery and in opposition to discrimination against people of color. When is the last time that you heard this about this great Southerner and Patriot who was opposed to the discrimination against people of color. You don’t heard things like that!
The reason that you don’t hear it is that you would have to say something nice about Southerners. And oh, we can’t have that, we only use Southerners as an evil person as somebody who we can point our children to and say aren’t you glad you are not like those wicked people down there in the South.
Well folks there you have it, some truth that you didn’t probably know about State’s Rights and about being Southern.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Friday, February 13, 2009
New Stimulas - compromise
Read the new stimulus bill as agreed on by the House and Senate Democrats (Neo-Socialist)
My personal opinion: I'd rather it be done right than fast!
__________________________________________________________________
A group of liberal lawmakers met secretly... literally behind closed doors, and announced that they had reached a "deal" on the so-called "stimulus package" on Wednesday!
What you're not being told is that Republican lawmakers (including Members of the House-Senate Conference Committee) were EXCLUDED from this deal-making session!
We couldn't make this up!
HOW, IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, DO YOU REACH A "DEAL" ON THE LARGEST SPENDING BILL IN THE HISTORY OF OUR NATION (NEARLY $1,000,000,000,000 IN TAXPAYER MONEY) WHEN THE OPPOSITION IS NOT EVEN ALLOWED INTO THE ROOM?
According to Connie Hair, writing on HumanEvents.com:
"Republicans have caught the Democrats in a midnight 'stimulus' power play that seeks to cut Republican conferees out of the House-Senate negotiations to resolve a final version of the Obama 'stimulus' package... . They intend to attempt to shove this $1.3 trillion spending bill through in the dead of the night without Republican input so floor action can take place in both chambers..."
Hair goes on to quote Congressman Mike Pence:
“I think the American people deserve to know that legislation that would comprise an amount equal to the entire discretionary budget of the United States of America is being crafted without a single House Republican in the room.”
Later, we found out that some Republicans WERE in the room (the most likely suspects are Senators Arlen Specter, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe - the three Republicans-In-Name-Only who sided with the Democrats and saved this horrendous socialist "porkulus" bill from a well deserved death).
But according to HumanEvents.com, Senators Charles Grassley and John Thune also confirmed that they DID NOT participate in these secret behind-closed-doors meetings.
That means that - at the very least - the ENTIRE Republican House delegation of conferees and AT LEAST two of the Republican Senate conferees were EXCLUDED!
But that's not the half of it. This so-called "stimulus package" is turning into even more of an Orwellian nightmare!
After reaching a “deal” to rectify differences in the House and Senate versions of this so-called "stimulus package," liberals in Congress now want to SHOVE it onto the floor of the House and the Senate for a QUICKIE VOTE BEFORE ANYONE EVEN HAS THE CHANCE TO READ IT!
We don't know what's in it... you don't know what's in it... most of our elected officials won't even know what's in it!
That's NOT a "deal." THAT'S TYRANNY!
Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, Barack Obama and liberals in Congress may think they have a "deal."
But I say "NO DEAL!"
Make no mistake, the fate of this "porkulus bill" is STILL UNCERTAIN! Support is VERY FRAGILE!
That's why our elected leaders need to hear you say "NO DEAL" one more time and they MUST hear from you NOW because we only have hours to kill this horrendous bill!
If you've ALREADY sent Blast Faxes or made calls to the Senate, please do so AGAIN. If you HAVEN'T made your voice heard yet, this may be your LAST CHANCE! Time is running out!
My personal opinion: I'd rather it be done right than fast!
__________________________________________________________________
A group of liberal lawmakers met secretly... literally behind closed doors, and announced that they had reached a "deal" on the so-called "stimulus package" on Wednesday!
What you're not being told is that Republican lawmakers (including Members of the House-Senate Conference Committee) were EXCLUDED from this deal-making session!
We couldn't make this up!
HOW, IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, DO YOU REACH A "DEAL" ON THE LARGEST SPENDING BILL IN THE HISTORY OF OUR NATION (NEARLY $1,000,000,000,000 IN TAXPAYER MONEY) WHEN THE OPPOSITION IS NOT EVEN ALLOWED INTO THE ROOM?
According to Connie Hair, writing on HumanEvents.com:
"Republicans have caught the Democrats in a midnight 'stimulus' power play that seeks to cut Republican conferees out of the House-Senate negotiations to resolve a final version of the Obama 'stimulus' package... . They intend to attempt to shove this $1.3 trillion spending bill through in the dead of the night without Republican input so floor action can take place in both chambers..."
Hair goes on to quote Congressman Mike Pence:
“I think the American people deserve to know that legislation that would comprise an amount equal to the entire discretionary budget of the United States of America is being crafted without a single House Republican in the room.”
Later, we found out that some Republicans WERE in the room (the most likely suspects are Senators Arlen Specter, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe - the three Republicans-In-Name-Only who sided with the Democrats and saved this horrendous socialist "porkulus" bill from a well deserved death).
But according to HumanEvents.com, Senators Charles Grassley and John Thune also confirmed that they DID NOT participate in these secret behind-closed-doors meetings.
That means that - at the very least - the ENTIRE Republican House delegation of conferees and AT LEAST two of the Republican Senate conferees were EXCLUDED!
But that's not the half of it. This so-called "stimulus package" is turning into even more of an Orwellian nightmare!
After reaching a “deal” to rectify differences in the House and Senate versions of this so-called "stimulus package," liberals in Congress now want to SHOVE it onto the floor of the House and the Senate for a QUICKIE VOTE BEFORE ANYONE EVEN HAS THE CHANCE TO READ IT!
We don't know what's in it... you don't know what's in it... most of our elected officials won't even know what's in it!
That's NOT a "deal." THAT'S TYRANNY!
Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, Barack Obama and liberals in Congress may think they have a "deal."
But I say "NO DEAL!"
Make no mistake, the fate of this "porkulus bill" is STILL UNCERTAIN! Support is VERY FRAGILE!
That's why our elected leaders need to hear you say "NO DEAL" one more time and they MUST hear from you NOW because we only have hours to kill this horrendous bill!
If you've ALREADY sent Blast Faxes or made calls to the Senate, please do so AGAIN. If you HAVEN'T made your voice heard yet, this may be your LAST CHANCE! Time is running out!
Thursday, February 12, 2009
What the Price of Gold Is Telling Us
U.S. House of Representatives, April 25, 2006
What the Price of Gold Is Telling Us
The financial press, and even the network news shows, have begun reporting the price of gold regularly. For twenty years, between 1980 and 2000, the price of gold was rarely mentioned. There was little interest, and the price was either falling or remaining steady.
Since 2001 however, interest in gold has soared along with its price. With the price now over $600 an ounce, a lot more people are becoming interested in gold as an investment and an economic indicator. Much can be learned by understanding what the rising dollar price of gold means.
The rise in gold prices from $250 per ounce in 2001 to over $600 today has drawn investors and speculators into the precious metals market. Though many already have made handsome profits, buying gold per se should not be touted as a good investment. After all, gold earns no interest and its quality never changes. It’s static, and does not grow as sound investments should.
It’s more accurate to say that one might invest in a gold or silver mining company, where management, labor costs, and the nature of new discoveries all play a vital role in determining the quality of the investment and the profits made.
Buying gold and holding it is somewhat analogous to converting one’s savings into one hundred dollar bills and hiding them under the mattress – yet not exactly the same. Both gold and dollars are considered money, and holding money does not qualify as an investment. There’s a big difference between the two however, since by holding paper money one loses purchasing power. The purchasing power of commodity money, e.g., gold, however, goes up if the government devalues the circulating fiat currency.
Holding gold is protection or insurance against government’s proclivity to debase its currency. The purchasing power of gold goes up not because it’s a so-called good investment; it goes up in value only because the paper currency goes down in value. In our current situation, that means the dollar.
One of the characteristics of commodity money – one that originated naturally in the marketplace – is that it must serve as a store of value. Gold and silver meet that test – paper does not. Because of this profound difference, the incentive and wisdom of holding emergency funds in the form of gold becomes attractive when the official currency is being devalued. It’s more attractive than trying to save wealth in the form of a fiat currency, even when earning some nominal interest. The lack of earned interest on gold is not a problem once people realize the purchasing power of their currency is declining faster than the interest rates they might earn. The purchasing power of gold can rise even faster than increases in the cost of living.
The point is that most who buy gold do so to protect against a depreciating currency rather than as an investment in the classical sense. Americans understand this less than citizens of other countries; some nations have suffered from severe monetary inflation that literally led to the destruction of their national currency. Though our inflation – i.e., the depreciation of the U.S. dollar – has been insidious, average Americans are unaware of how this occurs. For instance, few Americans know nor seem concerned that the 1913 pre-Federal Reserve dollar is now worth only four cents. Officially, our central bankers and our politicians express no fear that the course on which we are set is fraught with great danger to our economy and our political system. The belief that money created out of thin air can work economic miracles, if only properly “managed,” is pervasive in D.C.
In many ways we shouldn’t be surprised about this trust in such an unsound system. For at least four generations our government-run universities have systematically preached a monetary doctrine justifying the so-called wisdom of paper money over the “foolishness” of sound money. Not only that, paper money has worked surprisingly well in the past 35 years – the years the world has accepted pure paper money as currency. Alan Greenspan bragged that central bankers in these several decades have gained the knowledge necessary to make paper money respond as if it were gold. This removes the problem of obtaining gold to back currency, and hence frees politicians from the rigid discipline a gold standard imposes.
Many central bankers in the last 15 years became so confident they had achieved this milestone that they sold off large hoards of their gold reserves. At other times they tried to prove that paper works better than gold by artificially propping up the dollar by suppressing market gold prices. This recent deception failed just as it did in the 1960s, when our government tried to hold gold artificially low at $35 an ounce. But since they could not truly repeal the economic laws regarding money, just as many central bankers sold, others bought. It’s fascinating that the European central banks sold gold while Asian central banks bought it over the last several years.
Since gold has proven to be the real money of the ages, we see once again a shift in wealth from the West to the East, just as we saw a loss of our industrial base in the same direction. Though Treasury officials deny any U.S. sales or loans of our official gold holdings, no audits are permitted so no one can be certain.
The special nature of the dollar as the reserve currency of the world has allowed this game to last longer than it would have otherwise. But the fact that gold has gone from $252 per ounce to over $600 means there is concern about the future of the dollar. The higher the price for gold, the greater the concern for the dollar. Instead of dwelling on the dollar price of gold, we should be talking about the depreciation of the dollar. In 1934 a dollar was worth 1/20th of an ounce of gold; $20 bought an ounce of gold. Today a dollar is worth 1/600th of an ounce of gold, meaning it takes $600 to buy one ounce of gold.
The number of dollars created by the Federal Reserve, and through the fractional reserve banking system, is crucial in determining how the market assesses the relationship of the dollar and gold. Though there’s a strong correlation, it’s not instantaneous or perfectly predictable. There are many variables to consider, but in the long term the dollar price of gold represents past inflation of the money supply. Equally important, it represents the anticipation of how much new money will be created in the future. This introduces the factor of trust and confidence in our monetary authorities and our politicians. And these days the American people are casting a vote of “no confidence” in this regard, and for good reasons.
The incentive for central bankers to create new money out of thin air is twofold. One is to practice central economic planning through the manipulation of interest rates. The second is to monetize the escalating federal debt politicians create and thrive on.
Today no one in Washington believes for a minute that runaway deficits are going to be curtailed. In March alone, the federal government created an historic $85 billion deficit. The current supplemental bill going through Congress has grown from $92 billion to over $106 billion, and everyone knows it will not draw President Bush’s first veto. Most knowledgeable people therefore assume that inflation of the money supply is not only going to continue, but accelerate. This anticipation, plus the fact that many new dollars have been created over the past 15 years that have not yet been fully discounted, guarantees the further depreciation of the dollar in terms of gold.
There’s no single measurement that reveals what the Fed has done in the recent past or tells us exactly what it’s about to do in the future. Forget about the lip service given to transparency by new Fed Chairman Bernanke. Not only is this administration one of the most secretive across the board in our history, the current Fed firmly supports denying the most important measurement of current monetary policy to Congress, the financial community, and the American public. Because of a lack of interest and poor understanding of monetary policy, Congress has expressed essentially no concern about the significant change in reporting statistics on the money supply.
Beginning in March, though planned before Bernanke arrived at the Fed, the central bank discontinued compiling and reporting the monetary aggregate known as M3. M3 is the best description of how quickly the Fed is creating new money and credit. Common sense tells us that a government central bank creating new money out of thin air depreciates the value of each dollar in circulation. Yet this report is no longer available to us and Congress makes no demands to receive it.
Though M3 is the most helpful statistic to track Fed activity, it by no means tells us everything we need to know about trends in monetary policy. Total bank credit, still available to us, gives us indirect information reflecting the Fed’s inflationary policies. But ultimately the markets will figure out exactly what the Fed is up to, and then individuals, financial institutions, governments, and other central bankers will act accordingly. The fact that our money supply is rising significantly cannot be hidden from the markets.
The response in time will drive the dollar down, while driving interest rates and commodity prices up. Already we see this trend developing, which surely will accelerate in the not too distant future. Part of this reaction will be from those who seek a haven to protect their wealth – not invest – by treating gold and silver as universal and historic money. This means holding fewer dollars that are decreasing in value while holding gold as it increases in value.
A soaring gold price is a vote of “no confidence” in the central bank and the dollar. This certainly was the case in 1979 and 1980. Today, gold prices reflect a growing restlessness with the increasing money supply, our budgetary and trade deficits, our unfunded liabilities, and the inability of Congress and the administration to reign in runaway spending.
Denying us statistical information, manipulating interest rates, and artificially trying to keep gold prices in check won’t help in the long run. If the markets are fooled short term, it only means the adjustments will be much more dramatic later on. And in the meantime, other market imbalances develop.
The Fed tries to keep the consumer spending spree going, not through hard work and savings, but by creating artificial wealth in stock markets bubbles and housing bubbles. When these distortions run their course and are discovered, the corrections will be quite painful.
Likewise, a fiat monetary system encourages speculation and unsound borrowing. As problems develop, scapegoats are sought and frequently found in foreign nations. This prompts many to demand altering exchange rates and protectionist measures. The sentiment for this type of solution is growing each day.
Though everyone decries inflation, trade imbalances, economic downturns, and federal deficits, few attempt a closer study of our monetary system and how these events are interrelated. Even if it were recognized that a gold standard without monetary inflation would be advantageous, few in Washington would accept the political disadvantages of living with the discipline of gold – since it serves as a check on government size and power. This is a sad commentary on the politics of today. The best analogy to our affinity for government spending, borrowing, and inflating is that of a drug addict who knows if he doesn’t quit he’ll die; yet he can’t quit because of the heavy price required to overcome the dependency. The right choice is very difficult, but remaining addicted to drugs guarantees the death of the patient, while our addiction to deficit spending, debt, and inflation guarantees the collapse of our economy.
Special interest groups, who vigorously compete for federal dollars, want to perpetuate the system rather than admit to a dangerous addiction. Those who champion welfare for the poor, entitlements for the middle class, or war contracts for the military industrial corporations, all agree on the so-called benefits bestowed by the Fed’s power to counterfeit fiat money. Bankers, who benefit from our fractional reserve system, likewise never criticize the Fed, especially since it’s the lender of last resort that bails out financial institutions when crises arise. And it’s true, special interests and bankers do benefit from the Fed, and may well get bailed out – just as we saw with the Long-Term Capital Management fund crisis a few years ago. In the past, companies like Lockheed and Chrysler benefited as well. But what the Fed cannot do is guarantee the market will maintain trust in the worthiness of the dollar. Current policy guarantees that the integrity of the dollar will be undermined. Exactly when this will occur, and the extent of the resulting damage to financial system, cannot be known for sure – but it is coming. There are plenty of indications already on the horizon.
Foreign policy plays a significant role in the economy and the value of the dollar. A foreign policy of militarism and empire building cannot be supported through direct taxation. The American people would never tolerate the taxes required to pay immediately for overseas wars, under the discipline of a gold standard. Borrowing and creating new money is much more politically palatable. It hides and delays the real costs of war, and the people are lulled into complacency – especially since the wars we fight are couched in terms of patriotism, spreading the ideas of freedom, and stamping out terrorism. Unnecessary wars and fiat currencies go hand-in-hand, while a gold standard encourages a sensible foreign policy.
The cost of war is enormously detrimental; it significantly contributes to the economic instability of the nation by boosting spending, deficits, and inflation. Funds used for war are funds that could have remained in the productive economy to raise the standard of living of Americans now unemployed, underemployed, or barely living on the margin.
Yet even these costs may be preferable to paying for war with huge tax increases. This is because although fiat dollars are theoretically worthless, value is imbued by the trust placed in them by the world’s financial community. Subjective trust in a currency can override objective knowledge about government policies, but only for a limited time.
Economic strength and military power contribute to the trust in a currency; in today’s world trust in the U.S. dollar is not earned and therefore fragile. The history of the dollar, being as good as gold up until 1971, is helpful in maintaining an artificially higher value for the dollar than deserved.
Foreign policy contributes to the crisis when the spending to maintain our worldwide military commitments becomes prohibitive, and inflationary pressures accelerate. But the real crisis hits when the world realizes the king has no clothes, in that the dollar has no backing, and we face a military setback even greater than we already are experiencing in Iraq. Our token friends may quickly transform into vocal enemies once the attack on the dollar begins.
False trust placed in the dollar once was helpful to us, but panic and rejection of the dollar will develop into a real financial crisis. Then we will have no other option but to tighten our belts, go back to work, stop borrowing, start saving, and rebuild our industrial base, while adjusting to a lower standard of living for most Americans.
Counterfeiting the nation’s money is a serious offense. The founders were especially adamant about avoiding the chaos, inflation, and destruction associated with the Continental dollar. That’s why the Constitution is clear that only gold and silver should be legal tender in the United States. In 1792 the Coinage Act authorized the death penalty for any private citizen who counterfeited the currency. Too bad they weren’t explicit that counterfeiting by government officials is just as detrimental to the economy and the value of the dollar.
In wartime, many nations actually operated counterfeiting programs to undermine our dollar, but never to a disastrous level. The enemy knew how harmful excessive creation of new money could be to the dollar and our economy. But it seems we never learned the dangers of creating new money out of thin air. We don’t need an Arab nation or the Chinese to undermine our system with a counterfeiting operation. We do it ourselves, with all the disadvantages that would occur if others did it to us. Today we hear threats from some Arab, Muslim, and far Eastern countries about undermining the dollar system – not by dishonest counterfeiting, but by initiating an alternative monetary system based on gold. Wouldn’t that be ironic? Such an event theoretically could do great harm to us. This day may well come, not so much as a direct political attack on the dollar system but out of necessity to restore confidence in money once again.
Historically, paper money never has lasted for long periods of time, while gold has survived thousands of years of attacks by political interests and big government. In time, the world once again will restore trust in the monetary system by making some currency as good as gold.
Gold, or any acceptable market commodity money, is required to preserve liberty. Monopoly control by government of a system that creates fiat money out of thin air guarantees the loss of liberty. No matter how well-intended our militarism is portrayed, or how happily the promises of wonderful programs for the poor are promoted, inflating the money supply to pay these bills makes government bigger. Empires always fail, and expenses always exceed projections. Harmful unintended consequences are the rule, not the exception. Welfare for the poor is inefficient and wasteful. The beneficiaries are rarely the poor themselves, but instead the politicians, bureaucrats, or the wealthy. The same is true of all foreign aid – it’s nothing more than a program that steals from the poor in a rich country and gives to the rich leaders of a poor country. Whether it’s war or welfare payments, it always means higher taxes, inflation, and debt. Whether it’s the extraction of wealth from the productive economy, the distortion of the market by interest rate manipulation, or spending for war and welfare, it can’t happen without infringing upon personal liberty.
At home the war on poverty, terrorism, drugs, or foreign rulers provides an opportunity for authoritarians to rise to power, individuals who think nothing of violating the people’s rights to privacy and freedom of speech. They believe their role is to protect the secrecy of government, rather than protect the privacy of citizens. Unfortunately, that is the atmosphere under which we live today, with essentially no respect for the Bill of Rights.
Though great economic harm comes from a government monopoly fiat monetary system, the loss of liberty associated with it is equally troubling. Just as empires are self-limiting in terms of money and manpower, so too is a monetary system based on illusion and fraud. When the end comes we will be given an opportunity to choose once again between honest money and liberty on one hand; chaos, poverty, and authoritarianism on the other.
The economic harm done by a fiat monetary system is pervasive, dangerous, and unfair. Though runaway inflation is injurious to almost everyone, it is more insidious for certain groups. Once inflation is recognized as a tax, it becomes clear the tax is regressive: penalizing the poor and middle class more than the rich and politically privileged. Price inflation, a consequence of inflating the money supply by the central bank, hits poor and marginal workers first and foremost. It especially penalizes savers, retirees, those on fixed incomes, and anyone who trusts government promises. Small businesses and individual enterprises suffer more than the financial elite, who borrow large sums before the money loses value. Those who are on the receiving end of government contracts – especially in the military industrial complex during wartime – receive undeserved benefits.
It’s a mistake to blame high gasoline and oil prices on price gouging. If we impose new taxes or fix prices, while ignoring monetary inflation, corporate subsidies, and excessive regulations, shortages will result. The market is the only way to determine the best price for any commodity. The law of supply and demand cannot be repealed. The real problems arise when government planners give subsidies to energy companies and favor one form of energy over another.
Energy prices are rising for many reasons: Inflation; increased demand from China and India; decreased supply resulting from our invasion of Iraq; anticipated disruption of supply as we push regime change in Iran; regulatory restrictions on gasoline production; government interference in the free market development of alternative fuels; and subsidies to big oil such as free leases and grants for research and development.
Interestingly, the cost of oil and gas is actually much higher than we pay at the retail level. Much of the DOD budget is spent protecting “our” oil supplies, and if such spending is factored in gasoline probably costs us more than $5 a gallon. The sad irony is that this military effort to secure cheap oil supplies inevitably backfires, and actually curtails supplies and boosts prices at the pump. The waste and fraud in issuing contracts to large corporations for work in Iraq only add to price increases.
When problems arise under conditions that exist today, it’s a serious error to blame the little bit of the free market that still functions. Last summer the market worked efficiently after Katrina – gas hit $3 a gallon, but soon supplies increased, usage went down, and the price returned to $2. In the 1980s, market forces took oil from $40 per barrel to $10 per barrel, and no one cried for the oil companies that went bankrupt. Today’s increases are for the reasons mentioned above. It’s natural for labor to seek its highest wage, and businesses to strive for the greatest profit. That’s the way the market works. When the free market is allowed to work, it’s the consumer who ultimately determines price and quality, with labor and business accommodating consumer choices. Once this process is distorted by government, prices rise excessively, labor costs and profits are negatively affected, and problems emerge. Instead of fixing the problem, politicians and demagogues respond by demanding windfall profits taxes and price controls, while never questioning how previous government interference caused the whole mess in the first place. Never let it be said that higher oil prices and profits cause inflation; inflation of the money supply causes higher prices!
Since keeping interest rates below market levels is synonymous with new money creation by the Fed, the resulting business cycle, higher cost of living, and job losses all can be laid at the doorstep of the Fed. This burden hits the poor the most, making Fed taxation by inflation the worst of all regressive taxes. Statistics about revenues generated by the income tax are grossly misleading; in reality much harm is done by our welfare/warfare system supposedly designed to help the poor and tax the rich. Only sound money can rectify the blatant injustice of this destructive system.
The Founders understood this great danger, and voted overwhelmingly to reject “emitting bills of credit,” the term they used for paper or fiat money. It’s too bad the knowledge and advice of our founders, and their mandate in the Constitution, are ignored today at our great peril. The current surge in gold prices – which reflects our dollar’s devaluation – is warning us to pay closer attention to our fiscal, monetary, entitlement, and foreign policy.
Meaning of the Gold Price – Summation
A recent headline in the financial press announced that gold prices surged over concern that confrontation with Iran will further push oil prices higher. This may well reflect the current situation, but higher gold prices mainly reflect monetary expansion by the Federal Reserve. Dwelling on current events and their effect on gold prices reflects concern for symptoms rather than an understanding of the actual cause of these price increases. Without an enormous increase in the money supply over the past 35 years and a worldwide paper monetary system, this increase in the price of gold would not have occurred.
Certainly geo-political events in the Middle East under a gold standard would not alter its price, though they could affect the supply of oil and cause oil prices to rise. Only under conditions created by excessive paper money would one expect all or most prices to rise. This is a mere reflection of the devaluation of the dollar.
Particular things to remember:
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If one endorses small government and maximum liberty, one must support commodity money.
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One of the strongest restraints against unnecessary war is a gold standard.
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Deficit financing by government is severely restricted by sound money.
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The harmful effects of the business cycle are virtually eliminated with an honest gold standard.
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Saving and thrift are encouraged by a gold standard; and discouraged by paper money.
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Price inflation, with generally rising price levels, is characteristic of paper money. Reports that the consumer price index and the producer price index are rising are distractions: the real cause of inflation is the Fed’s creation of new money.
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Interest rate manipulation by central bank helps the rich, the banks, the government, and the politicians.
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Paper money permits the regressive inflation tax to be passed off on the poor and the middle class.
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Speculative financial bubbles are characteristic of paper money – not gold.
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Paper money encourages economic and political chaos, which subsequently causes a search for scapegoats rather than blaming the central bank.
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Dangerous protectionist measures frequently are implemented to compensate for the dislocations caused by fiat money.
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Paper money, inflation, and the conditions they create contribute to the problems of illegal immigration.
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The value of gold is remarkably stable.
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The dollar price of gold reflects dollar depreciation.
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Holding gold helps preserve and store wealth, but technically gold is not a true investment.
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Since 2001 the dollar has been devalued by 60%.
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In 1934 FDR devalued the dollar by 41%.
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In 1971 Nixon devalued the dollar by 7.9%.
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In 1973 Nixon devalued the dollar by 10%.
These were momentous monetary events, and every knowledgeable person worldwide paid close attention. Major changes were endured in 1979 and 1980 to save the dollar from disintegration. This involved a severe recession, interest rates over 21%, and general price inflation of 15%.
Today we face a 60% devaluation and counting, yet no one seems to care. It’s of greater significance than the three events mentioned above. And yet the one measurement that best reflects the degree of inflation, the Fed and our government deny us. Since March, M3 reporting has been discontinued. For starters, I’d like to see Congress demand that this report be resumed. I fully believe the American people and Congress are entitled to this information. Will we one day complain about false intelligence, as we have with the Iraq war? Will we complain about not having enough information to address monetary policy after it’s too late?
If ever there was a time to get a handle on what sound money is and what it means, that time is today.
Inflation, as exposed by high gold prices, transfers wealth from the middle class to the rich, as real wages decline while the salaries of CEOs, movie stars, and athletes skyrocket – along with the profits of the military industrial complex, the oil industry, and other special interests.
A sharply rising gold price is a vote of “no confidence” in Congress’ ability to control the budget, the Fed’s ability to control the money supply, and the administration’s ability to bring stability to the Middle East.
Ultimately, the gold price is a measurement of trust in the currency and the politicians who run the country. It’s been that way for a long time, and is not about to change.
If we care about the financial system, the tax system, and the monumental debt we’re accumulating, we must start talking about the benefits and discipline that come only with a commodity standard of money – money the government and central banks absolutely cannot create out of thin air.
Economic law dictates reform at some point. But should we wait until the dollar is 1/1,000 of an ounce of gold or 1/2,000 of an ounce of gold? The longer we wait, the more people suffer and the more difficult reforms become. Runaway inflation inevitably leads to political chaos, something numerous countries have suffered throughout the 20th century. The worst example of course was the German inflation of the 1920s that led to the rise of Hitler. Even the communist takeover of China was associated with runaway inflation brought on by Chinese Nationalists. The time for action is now, and it is up to the American people and the U.S. Congress to demand it.
by Ron Paul
Business Intelligence (Middle East) - 02/12/2009
Source: BullionVault , Author: Adrian Ash
Gold hits seven-month high with fresh records for non-US buyers
INTERNATIONAL. The price of gold held steady ahead of the US opening on Thursday, recording the best London Gold Fix in seven months at US$944 an ounce.
World stock markets tumbled despite US lawmakers nearing final approval of their US$789 billion stimulus bill.
Eurozone, Indian, British, Canadian, Australian and Swiss investors all saw the gold price reach new all-time highs.
"Relentless buying....renewed fund buying interest....investment pouring into gold," is how three major gold dealers describe Wednesday's 3.1% jump in spot gold prices, the sharpest gain so far this year.
Crude oil meantime slipped below US$36 per barrel early on Thursday, while government bond prices rose, pushing 10-year US Treasury yields down to 2.75%.
New data showed European industrial production sinking by one-eighth in Dec. compared with a year earlier. Japanese wholesale prices fell for the first time in 5 years last month, slipping by 0.2% and marking the return of deflation.
Credit Suisse, the Swiss banking group, reported a record quarterly loss of CHF 6 billion (US$5.2 billion), while insurance giant Swiss Re lost its CEO, Jacques Aigrain. Shareholders in Belgium's ailing Fortis Bank rejected a US$20 billion takeover by BNP Paribas.
"[It was] the SPDR gold ETF that drove the spot market through resistance at US$930 yesterday to paint a very bullish picture," according to a technical note from Mitsui.
Wednesday was "the third largest daily addition to this fund since its inception at 1.3 million ounces," the gold dealer adds.
"Approximately US$4.5 billion has flowed into this fund since the start of the year – safe haven buying in force!"
All told, the gold ETF funds sponsored by marketing-group the World Gold Council (WGC) yesterday added 45.5 tonnes of gold – swelling by 4.3% – to reach a new record hoard of 1,107 tonnes.
The gold is held in trust, mostly at London's HSBC bank, with investors – led by institutional buyers – then holding shares in the trust.
Faced with a one-third collapse in the value of Russian Rubles, high-net worth individuals in Russia are also pouring money into gold, reports Reuters, demanding physical gold bullion – whether as bars or coins – as well as "gold accounts" at the government-owned Sberbank, Russia's largest lender.
"Russians opened 170,000 new accounts which track the price of precious metals last year," according to Sberbank's head of forex operations, buying the equivalent of 55 tonnes of metal and "taking the total number of such deposits to around 300,000."
Over in India, however – home to the world's hungriest gold jewelry market – "gold buyers are not forthcoming," says Daman Prakash, head of the MNC Bullion wholesalers in Chennai.
"I can only sit and wait for my customers, even though we are in the midst of a wedding season. Gold demand is not even trickling in. I am stuck with my gold and silver stocks since mid-December."
Gold has risen in value for India owners in 26 of the last 38 years. Today the gold price in Rupees leapt to new all-time highs above INR 14,500 per 10 grams, while the New Delhi government approved a capital injection of INR 38 billion (US$778 millio) into three major banks, staged over two years.
Staged over two years, the cash should "increase their capital adequacy ratio" according to Minister for Home Affairs P Chidambaram.
Across in Dublin, the Irish government announced a fresh €7 billion (US$9 billion) cash injection for Allied Irish and the Bank of Ireland, collecting warrants worth 25% of each lender in return.
"In terms of capital, I believe we got it right," claims Ireland's Finance Minister Brian Lenihan.
"No government in the world has been able to devise a totally satisfactory scheme of risk assessment. We will continue to work on that."
In London, City watchdog the Financial Services Authority (FSA) joined the row over risk management at now-failed mortgage lender HBOS by claiming it was concerned by the bank's behaviour both before and after it sacked global risk manager, Paul Moore, in 2004.
Moore claims he took a "substantial" pay-off after the group's CEO, Sir James Crosby, sacked him for warning that "the bank was moving too fast."
Sir James yesterday quit his new role as a non-exec' director of the FSA, claiming there was "no substance to [Moore's] allegations."
On the political front – and ahead of this weekend's emergency G7 meeting of leaders from the West's largest economies – German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück accused France of "indirect protectionism" after it offered a €6 billion loan (US$7.8 billion) to auto-makers Renault and PSA Peugeot-Citroen, provided they don't close any French factories.
"The priority is to keep industry in France. Have no doubt about that," said French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde today.
New US President Barack Obama's Buy American campaign will also be at issue when the G7 meets in Rome according to a Canadian delegate.
Looking ahead to central bank gold in 2009, rubber-stamping sales of 403 tonnes will be just "a formality" according to a spokeswoman from the International Monetary Fund.
"There are no plans to change the proposal," she said in an interview for Reuters. "The package of IMF governance reforms, including gold sales, was submitted to the US Congress last November, but will need to be reintroduced as a formality.
"The timeline will depend on the Congress' schedule."
During the IMF Gold Sales of 1976 to 1980 – when the central banks' banker sold 1,600 tonnes of gold – the spot gold price in US Dollars rose eight-fold regardless.
Note: Formerly City correspondent for The Daily Reckoning in London and head of editorial at the UK's leading financial advisory for private investors, Adrian Ash is the editor of Gold News and head of research at BullionVault, where you can buy gold today vaulted in Zurich on US$3 spreads and 0.8% dealing fees.
For details, log on to www.BullionVault.com
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(note: to be filed under section "links" new subsection "The Wisdom of Ron Paul")
What the Price of Gold Is Telling Us
The financial press, and even the network news shows, have begun reporting the price of gold regularly. For twenty years, between 1980 and 2000, the price of gold was rarely mentioned. There was little interest, and the price was either falling or remaining steady.
Since 2001 however, interest in gold has soared along with its price. With the price now over $600 an ounce, a lot more people are becoming interested in gold as an investment and an economic indicator. Much can be learned by understanding what the rising dollar price of gold means.
The rise in gold prices from $250 per ounce in 2001 to over $600 today has drawn investors and speculators into the precious metals market. Though many already have made handsome profits, buying gold per se should not be touted as a good investment. After all, gold earns no interest and its quality never changes. It’s static, and does not grow as sound investments should.
It’s more accurate to say that one might invest in a gold or silver mining company, where management, labor costs, and the nature of new discoveries all play a vital role in determining the quality of the investment and the profits made.
Buying gold and holding it is somewhat analogous to converting one’s savings into one hundred dollar bills and hiding them under the mattress – yet not exactly the same. Both gold and dollars are considered money, and holding money does not qualify as an investment. There’s a big difference between the two however, since by holding paper money one loses purchasing power. The purchasing power of commodity money, e.g., gold, however, goes up if the government devalues the circulating fiat currency.
Holding gold is protection or insurance against government’s proclivity to debase its currency. The purchasing power of gold goes up not because it’s a so-called good investment; it goes up in value only because the paper currency goes down in value. In our current situation, that means the dollar.
One of the characteristics of commodity money – one that originated naturally in the marketplace – is that it must serve as a store of value. Gold and silver meet that test – paper does not. Because of this profound difference, the incentive and wisdom of holding emergency funds in the form of gold becomes attractive when the official currency is being devalued. It’s more attractive than trying to save wealth in the form of a fiat currency, even when earning some nominal interest. The lack of earned interest on gold is not a problem once people realize the purchasing power of their currency is declining faster than the interest rates they might earn. The purchasing power of gold can rise even faster than increases in the cost of living.
The point is that most who buy gold do so to protect against a depreciating currency rather than as an investment in the classical sense. Americans understand this less than citizens of other countries; some nations have suffered from severe monetary inflation that literally led to the destruction of their national currency. Though our inflation – i.e., the depreciation of the U.S. dollar – has been insidious, average Americans are unaware of how this occurs. For instance, few Americans know nor seem concerned that the 1913 pre-Federal Reserve dollar is now worth only four cents. Officially, our central bankers and our politicians express no fear that the course on which we are set is fraught with great danger to our economy and our political system. The belief that money created out of thin air can work economic miracles, if only properly “managed,” is pervasive in D.C.
In many ways we shouldn’t be surprised about this trust in such an unsound system. For at least four generations our government-run universities have systematically preached a monetary doctrine justifying the so-called wisdom of paper money over the “foolishness” of sound money. Not only that, paper money has worked surprisingly well in the past 35 years – the years the world has accepted pure paper money as currency. Alan Greenspan bragged that central bankers in these several decades have gained the knowledge necessary to make paper money respond as if it were gold. This removes the problem of obtaining gold to back currency, and hence frees politicians from the rigid discipline a gold standard imposes.
Many central bankers in the last 15 years became so confident they had achieved this milestone that they sold off large hoards of their gold reserves. At other times they tried to prove that paper works better than gold by artificially propping up the dollar by suppressing market gold prices. This recent deception failed just as it did in the 1960s, when our government tried to hold gold artificially low at $35 an ounce. But since they could not truly repeal the economic laws regarding money, just as many central bankers sold, others bought. It’s fascinating that the European central banks sold gold while Asian central banks bought it over the last several years.
Since gold has proven to be the real money of the ages, we see once again a shift in wealth from the West to the East, just as we saw a loss of our industrial base in the same direction. Though Treasury officials deny any U.S. sales or loans of our official gold holdings, no audits are permitted so no one can be certain.
The special nature of the dollar as the reserve currency of the world has allowed this game to last longer than it would have otherwise. But the fact that gold has gone from $252 per ounce to over $600 means there is concern about the future of the dollar. The higher the price for gold, the greater the concern for the dollar. Instead of dwelling on the dollar price of gold, we should be talking about the depreciation of the dollar. In 1934 a dollar was worth 1/20th of an ounce of gold; $20 bought an ounce of gold. Today a dollar is worth 1/600th of an ounce of gold, meaning it takes $600 to buy one ounce of gold.
The number of dollars created by the Federal Reserve, and through the fractional reserve banking system, is crucial in determining how the market assesses the relationship of the dollar and gold. Though there’s a strong correlation, it’s not instantaneous or perfectly predictable. There are many variables to consider, but in the long term the dollar price of gold represents past inflation of the money supply. Equally important, it represents the anticipation of how much new money will be created in the future. This introduces the factor of trust and confidence in our monetary authorities and our politicians. And these days the American people are casting a vote of “no confidence” in this regard, and for good reasons.
The incentive for central bankers to create new money out of thin air is twofold. One is to practice central economic planning through the manipulation of interest rates. The second is to monetize the escalating federal debt politicians create and thrive on.
Today no one in Washington believes for a minute that runaway deficits are going to be curtailed. In March alone, the federal government created an historic $85 billion deficit. The current supplemental bill going through Congress has grown from $92 billion to over $106 billion, and everyone knows it will not draw President Bush’s first veto. Most knowledgeable people therefore assume that inflation of the money supply is not only going to continue, but accelerate. This anticipation, plus the fact that many new dollars have been created over the past 15 years that have not yet been fully discounted, guarantees the further depreciation of the dollar in terms of gold.
There’s no single measurement that reveals what the Fed has done in the recent past or tells us exactly what it’s about to do in the future. Forget about the lip service given to transparency by new Fed Chairman Bernanke. Not only is this administration one of the most secretive across the board in our history, the current Fed firmly supports denying the most important measurement of current monetary policy to Congress, the financial community, and the American public. Because of a lack of interest and poor understanding of monetary policy, Congress has expressed essentially no concern about the significant change in reporting statistics on the money supply.
Beginning in March, though planned before Bernanke arrived at the Fed, the central bank discontinued compiling and reporting the monetary aggregate known as M3. M3 is the best description of how quickly the Fed is creating new money and credit. Common sense tells us that a government central bank creating new money out of thin air depreciates the value of each dollar in circulation. Yet this report is no longer available to us and Congress makes no demands to receive it.
Though M3 is the most helpful statistic to track Fed activity, it by no means tells us everything we need to know about trends in monetary policy. Total bank credit, still available to us, gives us indirect information reflecting the Fed’s inflationary policies. But ultimately the markets will figure out exactly what the Fed is up to, and then individuals, financial institutions, governments, and other central bankers will act accordingly. The fact that our money supply is rising significantly cannot be hidden from the markets.
The response in time will drive the dollar down, while driving interest rates and commodity prices up. Already we see this trend developing, which surely will accelerate in the not too distant future. Part of this reaction will be from those who seek a haven to protect their wealth – not invest – by treating gold and silver as universal and historic money. This means holding fewer dollars that are decreasing in value while holding gold as it increases in value.
A soaring gold price is a vote of “no confidence” in the central bank and the dollar. This certainly was the case in 1979 and 1980. Today, gold prices reflect a growing restlessness with the increasing money supply, our budgetary and trade deficits, our unfunded liabilities, and the inability of Congress and the administration to reign in runaway spending.
Denying us statistical information, manipulating interest rates, and artificially trying to keep gold prices in check won’t help in the long run. If the markets are fooled short term, it only means the adjustments will be much more dramatic later on. And in the meantime, other market imbalances develop.
The Fed tries to keep the consumer spending spree going, not through hard work and savings, but by creating artificial wealth in stock markets bubbles and housing bubbles. When these distortions run their course and are discovered, the corrections will be quite painful.
Likewise, a fiat monetary system encourages speculation and unsound borrowing. As problems develop, scapegoats are sought and frequently found in foreign nations. This prompts many to demand altering exchange rates and protectionist measures. The sentiment for this type of solution is growing each day.
Though everyone decries inflation, trade imbalances, economic downturns, and federal deficits, few attempt a closer study of our monetary system and how these events are interrelated. Even if it were recognized that a gold standard without monetary inflation would be advantageous, few in Washington would accept the political disadvantages of living with the discipline of gold – since it serves as a check on government size and power. This is a sad commentary on the politics of today. The best analogy to our affinity for government spending, borrowing, and inflating is that of a drug addict who knows if he doesn’t quit he’ll die; yet he can’t quit because of the heavy price required to overcome the dependency. The right choice is very difficult, but remaining addicted to drugs guarantees the death of the patient, while our addiction to deficit spending, debt, and inflation guarantees the collapse of our economy.
Special interest groups, who vigorously compete for federal dollars, want to perpetuate the system rather than admit to a dangerous addiction. Those who champion welfare for the poor, entitlements for the middle class, or war contracts for the military industrial corporations, all agree on the so-called benefits bestowed by the Fed’s power to counterfeit fiat money. Bankers, who benefit from our fractional reserve system, likewise never criticize the Fed, especially since it’s the lender of last resort that bails out financial institutions when crises arise. And it’s true, special interests and bankers do benefit from the Fed, and may well get bailed out – just as we saw with the Long-Term Capital Management fund crisis a few years ago. In the past, companies like Lockheed and Chrysler benefited as well. But what the Fed cannot do is guarantee the market will maintain trust in the worthiness of the dollar. Current policy guarantees that the integrity of the dollar will be undermined. Exactly when this will occur, and the extent of the resulting damage to financial system, cannot be known for sure – but it is coming. There are plenty of indications already on the horizon.
Foreign policy plays a significant role in the economy and the value of the dollar. A foreign policy of militarism and empire building cannot be supported through direct taxation. The American people would never tolerate the taxes required to pay immediately for overseas wars, under the discipline of a gold standard. Borrowing and creating new money is much more politically palatable. It hides and delays the real costs of war, and the people are lulled into complacency – especially since the wars we fight are couched in terms of patriotism, spreading the ideas of freedom, and stamping out terrorism. Unnecessary wars and fiat currencies go hand-in-hand, while a gold standard encourages a sensible foreign policy.
The cost of war is enormously detrimental; it significantly contributes to the economic instability of the nation by boosting spending, deficits, and inflation. Funds used for war are funds that could have remained in the productive economy to raise the standard of living of Americans now unemployed, underemployed, or barely living on the margin.
Yet even these costs may be preferable to paying for war with huge tax increases. This is because although fiat dollars are theoretically worthless, value is imbued by the trust placed in them by the world’s financial community. Subjective trust in a currency can override objective knowledge about government policies, but only for a limited time.
Economic strength and military power contribute to the trust in a currency; in today’s world trust in the U.S. dollar is not earned and therefore fragile. The history of the dollar, being as good as gold up until 1971, is helpful in maintaining an artificially higher value for the dollar than deserved.
Foreign policy contributes to the crisis when the spending to maintain our worldwide military commitments becomes prohibitive, and inflationary pressures accelerate. But the real crisis hits when the world realizes the king has no clothes, in that the dollar has no backing, and we face a military setback even greater than we already are experiencing in Iraq. Our token friends may quickly transform into vocal enemies once the attack on the dollar begins.
False trust placed in the dollar once was helpful to us, but panic and rejection of the dollar will develop into a real financial crisis. Then we will have no other option but to tighten our belts, go back to work, stop borrowing, start saving, and rebuild our industrial base, while adjusting to a lower standard of living for most Americans.
Counterfeiting the nation’s money is a serious offense. The founders were especially adamant about avoiding the chaos, inflation, and destruction associated with the Continental dollar. That’s why the Constitution is clear that only gold and silver should be legal tender in the United States. In 1792 the Coinage Act authorized the death penalty for any private citizen who counterfeited the currency. Too bad they weren’t explicit that counterfeiting by government officials is just as detrimental to the economy and the value of the dollar.
In wartime, many nations actually operated counterfeiting programs to undermine our dollar, but never to a disastrous level. The enemy knew how harmful excessive creation of new money could be to the dollar and our economy. But it seems we never learned the dangers of creating new money out of thin air. We don’t need an Arab nation or the Chinese to undermine our system with a counterfeiting operation. We do it ourselves, with all the disadvantages that would occur if others did it to us. Today we hear threats from some Arab, Muslim, and far Eastern countries about undermining the dollar system – not by dishonest counterfeiting, but by initiating an alternative monetary system based on gold. Wouldn’t that be ironic? Such an event theoretically could do great harm to us. This day may well come, not so much as a direct political attack on the dollar system but out of necessity to restore confidence in money once again.
Historically, paper money never has lasted for long periods of time, while gold has survived thousands of years of attacks by political interests and big government. In time, the world once again will restore trust in the monetary system by making some currency as good as gold.
Gold, or any acceptable market commodity money, is required to preserve liberty. Monopoly control by government of a system that creates fiat money out of thin air guarantees the loss of liberty. No matter how well-intended our militarism is portrayed, or how happily the promises of wonderful programs for the poor are promoted, inflating the money supply to pay these bills makes government bigger. Empires always fail, and expenses always exceed projections. Harmful unintended consequences are the rule, not the exception. Welfare for the poor is inefficient and wasteful. The beneficiaries are rarely the poor themselves, but instead the politicians, bureaucrats, or the wealthy. The same is true of all foreign aid – it’s nothing more than a program that steals from the poor in a rich country and gives to the rich leaders of a poor country. Whether it’s war or welfare payments, it always means higher taxes, inflation, and debt. Whether it’s the extraction of wealth from the productive economy, the distortion of the market by interest rate manipulation, or spending for war and welfare, it can’t happen without infringing upon personal liberty.
At home the war on poverty, terrorism, drugs, or foreign rulers provides an opportunity for authoritarians to rise to power, individuals who think nothing of violating the people’s rights to privacy and freedom of speech. They believe their role is to protect the secrecy of government, rather than protect the privacy of citizens. Unfortunately, that is the atmosphere under which we live today, with essentially no respect for the Bill of Rights.
Though great economic harm comes from a government monopoly fiat monetary system, the loss of liberty associated with it is equally troubling. Just as empires are self-limiting in terms of money and manpower, so too is a monetary system based on illusion and fraud. When the end comes we will be given an opportunity to choose once again between honest money and liberty on one hand; chaos, poverty, and authoritarianism on the other.
The economic harm done by a fiat monetary system is pervasive, dangerous, and unfair. Though runaway inflation is injurious to almost everyone, it is more insidious for certain groups. Once inflation is recognized as a tax, it becomes clear the tax is regressive: penalizing the poor and middle class more than the rich and politically privileged. Price inflation, a consequence of inflating the money supply by the central bank, hits poor and marginal workers first and foremost. It especially penalizes savers, retirees, those on fixed incomes, and anyone who trusts government promises. Small businesses and individual enterprises suffer more than the financial elite, who borrow large sums before the money loses value. Those who are on the receiving end of government contracts – especially in the military industrial complex during wartime – receive undeserved benefits.
It’s a mistake to blame high gasoline and oil prices on price gouging. If we impose new taxes or fix prices, while ignoring monetary inflation, corporate subsidies, and excessive regulations, shortages will result. The market is the only way to determine the best price for any commodity. The law of supply and demand cannot be repealed. The real problems arise when government planners give subsidies to energy companies and favor one form of energy over another.
Energy prices are rising for many reasons: Inflation; increased demand from China and India; decreased supply resulting from our invasion of Iraq; anticipated disruption of supply as we push regime change in Iran; regulatory restrictions on gasoline production; government interference in the free market development of alternative fuels; and subsidies to big oil such as free leases and grants for research and development.
Interestingly, the cost of oil and gas is actually much higher than we pay at the retail level. Much of the DOD budget is spent protecting “our” oil supplies, and if such spending is factored in gasoline probably costs us more than $5 a gallon. The sad irony is that this military effort to secure cheap oil supplies inevitably backfires, and actually curtails supplies and boosts prices at the pump. The waste and fraud in issuing contracts to large corporations for work in Iraq only add to price increases.
When problems arise under conditions that exist today, it’s a serious error to blame the little bit of the free market that still functions. Last summer the market worked efficiently after Katrina – gas hit $3 a gallon, but soon supplies increased, usage went down, and the price returned to $2. In the 1980s, market forces took oil from $40 per barrel to $10 per barrel, and no one cried for the oil companies that went bankrupt. Today’s increases are for the reasons mentioned above. It’s natural for labor to seek its highest wage, and businesses to strive for the greatest profit. That’s the way the market works. When the free market is allowed to work, it’s the consumer who ultimately determines price and quality, with labor and business accommodating consumer choices. Once this process is distorted by government, prices rise excessively, labor costs and profits are negatively affected, and problems emerge. Instead of fixing the problem, politicians and demagogues respond by demanding windfall profits taxes and price controls, while never questioning how previous government interference caused the whole mess in the first place. Never let it be said that higher oil prices and profits cause inflation; inflation of the money supply causes higher prices!
Since keeping interest rates below market levels is synonymous with new money creation by the Fed, the resulting business cycle, higher cost of living, and job losses all can be laid at the doorstep of the Fed. This burden hits the poor the most, making Fed taxation by inflation the worst of all regressive taxes. Statistics about revenues generated by the income tax are grossly misleading; in reality much harm is done by our welfare/warfare system supposedly designed to help the poor and tax the rich. Only sound money can rectify the blatant injustice of this destructive system.
The Founders understood this great danger, and voted overwhelmingly to reject “emitting bills of credit,” the term they used for paper or fiat money. It’s too bad the knowledge and advice of our founders, and their mandate in the Constitution, are ignored today at our great peril. The current surge in gold prices – which reflects our dollar’s devaluation – is warning us to pay closer attention to our fiscal, monetary, entitlement, and foreign policy.
Meaning of the Gold Price – Summation
A recent headline in the financial press announced that gold prices surged over concern that confrontation with Iran will further push oil prices higher. This may well reflect the current situation, but higher gold prices mainly reflect monetary expansion by the Federal Reserve. Dwelling on current events and their effect on gold prices reflects concern for symptoms rather than an understanding of the actual cause of these price increases. Without an enormous increase in the money supply over the past 35 years and a worldwide paper monetary system, this increase in the price of gold would not have occurred.
Certainly geo-political events in the Middle East under a gold standard would not alter its price, though they could affect the supply of oil and cause oil prices to rise. Only under conditions created by excessive paper money would one expect all or most prices to rise. This is a mere reflection of the devaluation of the dollar.
Particular things to remember:
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If one endorses small government and maximum liberty, one must support commodity money.
*
One of the strongest restraints against unnecessary war is a gold standard.
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Deficit financing by government is severely restricted by sound money.
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The harmful effects of the business cycle are virtually eliminated with an honest gold standard.
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Saving and thrift are encouraged by a gold standard; and discouraged by paper money.
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Price inflation, with generally rising price levels, is characteristic of paper money. Reports that the consumer price index and the producer price index are rising are distractions: the real cause of inflation is the Fed’s creation of new money.
*
Interest rate manipulation by central bank helps the rich, the banks, the government, and the politicians.
*
Paper money permits the regressive inflation tax to be passed off on the poor and the middle class.
*
Speculative financial bubbles are characteristic of paper money – not gold.
*
Paper money encourages economic and political chaos, which subsequently causes a search for scapegoats rather than blaming the central bank.
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Dangerous protectionist measures frequently are implemented to compensate for the dislocations caused by fiat money.
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Paper money, inflation, and the conditions they create contribute to the problems of illegal immigration.
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The value of gold is remarkably stable.
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The dollar price of gold reflects dollar depreciation.
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Holding gold helps preserve and store wealth, but technically gold is not a true investment.
*
Since 2001 the dollar has been devalued by 60%.
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In 1934 FDR devalued the dollar by 41%.
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In 1971 Nixon devalued the dollar by 7.9%.
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In 1973 Nixon devalued the dollar by 10%.
These were momentous monetary events, and every knowledgeable person worldwide paid close attention. Major changes were endured in 1979 and 1980 to save the dollar from disintegration. This involved a severe recession, interest rates over 21%, and general price inflation of 15%.
Today we face a 60% devaluation and counting, yet no one seems to care. It’s of greater significance than the three events mentioned above. And yet the one measurement that best reflects the degree of inflation, the Fed and our government deny us. Since March, M3 reporting has been discontinued. For starters, I’d like to see Congress demand that this report be resumed. I fully believe the American people and Congress are entitled to this information. Will we one day complain about false intelligence, as we have with the Iraq war? Will we complain about not having enough information to address monetary policy after it’s too late?
If ever there was a time to get a handle on what sound money is and what it means, that time is today.
Inflation, as exposed by high gold prices, transfers wealth from the middle class to the rich, as real wages decline while the salaries of CEOs, movie stars, and athletes skyrocket – along with the profits of the military industrial complex, the oil industry, and other special interests.
A sharply rising gold price is a vote of “no confidence” in Congress’ ability to control the budget, the Fed’s ability to control the money supply, and the administration’s ability to bring stability to the Middle East.
Ultimately, the gold price is a measurement of trust in the currency and the politicians who run the country. It’s been that way for a long time, and is not about to change.
If we care about the financial system, the tax system, and the monumental debt we’re accumulating, we must start talking about the benefits and discipline that come only with a commodity standard of money – money the government and central banks absolutely cannot create out of thin air.
Economic law dictates reform at some point. But should we wait until the dollar is 1/1,000 of an ounce of gold or 1/2,000 of an ounce of gold? The longer we wait, the more people suffer and the more difficult reforms become. Runaway inflation inevitably leads to political chaos, something numerous countries have suffered throughout the 20th century. The worst example of course was the German inflation of the 1920s that led to the rise of Hitler. Even the communist takeover of China was associated with runaway inflation brought on by Chinese Nationalists. The time for action is now, and it is up to the American people and the U.S. Congress to demand it.
by Ron Paul
Business Intelligence (Middle East) - 02/12/2009
Source: BullionVault , Author: Adrian Ash
Gold hits seven-month high with fresh records for non-US buyers
INTERNATIONAL. The price of gold held steady ahead of the US opening on Thursday, recording the best London Gold Fix in seven months at US$944 an ounce.
World stock markets tumbled despite US lawmakers nearing final approval of their US$789 billion stimulus bill.
Eurozone, Indian, British, Canadian, Australian and Swiss investors all saw the gold price reach new all-time highs.
"Relentless buying....renewed fund buying interest....investment pouring into gold," is how three major gold dealers describe Wednesday's 3.1% jump in spot gold prices, the sharpest gain so far this year.
Crude oil meantime slipped below US$36 per barrel early on Thursday, while government bond prices rose, pushing 10-year US Treasury yields down to 2.75%.
New data showed European industrial production sinking by one-eighth in Dec. compared with a year earlier. Japanese wholesale prices fell for the first time in 5 years last month, slipping by 0.2% and marking the return of deflation.
Credit Suisse, the Swiss banking group, reported a record quarterly loss of CHF 6 billion (US$5.2 billion), while insurance giant Swiss Re lost its CEO, Jacques Aigrain. Shareholders in Belgium's ailing Fortis Bank rejected a US$20 billion takeover by BNP Paribas.
"[It was] the SPDR gold ETF that drove the spot market through resistance at US$930 yesterday to paint a very bullish picture," according to a technical note from Mitsui.
Wednesday was "the third largest daily addition to this fund since its inception at 1.3 million ounces," the gold dealer adds.
"Approximately US$4.5 billion has flowed into this fund since the start of the year – safe haven buying in force!"
All told, the gold ETF funds sponsored by marketing-group the World Gold Council (WGC) yesterday added 45.5 tonnes of gold – swelling by 4.3% – to reach a new record hoard of 1,107 tonnes.
The gold is held in trust, mostly at London's HSBC bank, with investors – led by institutional buyers – then holding shares in the trust.
Faced with a one-third collapse in the value of Russian Rubles, high-net worth individuals in Russia are also pouring money into gold, reports Reuters, demanding physical gold bullion – whether as bars or coins – as well as "gold accounts" at the government-owned Sberbank, Russia's largest lender.
"Russians opened 170,000 new accounts which track the price of precious metals last year," according to Sberbank's head of forex operations, buying the equivalent of 55 tonnes of metal and "taking the total number of such deposits to around 300,000."
Over in India, however – home to the world's hungriest gold jewelry market – "gold buyers are not forthcoming," says Daman Prakash, head of the MNC Bullion wholesalers in Chennai.
"I can only sit and wait for my customers, even though we are in the midst of a wedding season. Gold demand is not even trickling in. I am stuck with my gold and silver stocks since mid-December."
Gold has risen in value for India owners in 26 of the last 38 years. Today the gold price in Rupees leapt to new all-time highs above INR 14,500 per 10 grams, while the New Delhi government approved a capital injection of INR 38 billion (US$778 millio) into three major banks, staged over two years.
Staged over two years, the cash should "increase their capital adequacy ratio" according to Minister for Home Affairs P Chidambaram.
Across in Dublin, the Irish government announced a fresh €7 billion (US$9 billion) cash injection for Allied Irish and the Bank of Ireland, collecting warrants worth 25% of each lender in return.
"In terms of capital, I believe we got it right," claims Ireland's Finance Minister Brian Lenihan.
"No government in the world has been able to devise a totally satisfactory scheme of risk assessment. We will continue to work on that."
In London, City watchdog the Financial Services Authority (FSA) joined the row over risk management at now-failed mortgage lender HBOS by claiming it was concerned by the bank's behaviour both before and after it sacked global risk manager, Paul Moore, in 2004.
Moore claims he took a "substantial" pay-off after the group's CEO, Sir James Crosby, sacked him for warning that "the bank was moving too fast."
Sir James yesterday quit his new role as a non-exec' director of the FSA, claiming there was "no substance to [Moore's] allegations."
On the political front – and ahead of this weekend's emergency G7 meeting of leaders from the West's largest economies – German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück accused France of "indirect protectionism" after it offered a €6 billion loan (US$7.8 billion) to auto-makers Renault and PSA Peugeot-Citroen, provided they don't close any French factories.
"The priority is to keep industry in France. Have no doubt about that," said French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde today.
New US President Barack Obama's Buy American campaign will also be at issue when the G7 meets in Rome according to a Canadian delegate.
Looking ahead to central bank gold in 2009, rubber-stamping sales of 403 tonnes will be just "a formality" according to a spokeswoman from the International Monetary Fund.
"There are no plans to change the proposal," she said in an interview for Reuters. "The package of IMF governance reforms, including gold sales, was submitted to the US Congress last November, but will need to be reintroduced as a formality.
"The timeline will depend on the Congress' schedule."
During the IMF Gold Sales of 1976 to 1980 – when the central banks' banker sold 1,600 tonnes of gold – the spot gold price in US Dollars rose eight-fold regardless.
Note: Formerly City correspondent for The Daily Reckoning in London and head of editorial at the UK's leading financial advisory for private investors, Adrian Ash is the editor of Gold News and head of research at BullionVault, where you can buy gold today vaulted in Zurich on US$3 spreads and 0.8% dealing fees.
For details, log on to www.BullionVault.com
_________________________________________________________
(note: to be filed under section "links" new subsection "The Wisdom of Ron Paul")
Stimulus Agreement
The House And Senate Agree On A Compromise $789 Billion Measure, With Details Still Murky On What Items Were Added And Dropped In The Conference Committee.
After just one day of negotiations, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid [D-Nev.] announced on Feb. 11 that the House and Senate had reached a deal on a revised stimulus plan that calls for $789 billion to be spent over two years. The bill, which represents the largest attempt to jump-start the U.S. economy in modern times, "creates more jobs than the original Senate bill and spends less than the original House bill," Reid said.
Final votes in the House and Senate are expected by the end of this week. Congressional leaders have said they want the bill on President Barack Obama's desk by Monday, Feb. 16.
The bill, which reconciled an $838 billion Senate version and an $819 billion House version, includes relief measures for unemployed and low-income Americans. Those provisions, such as extended unemployment benefits and more funding for food stamps and health coverage, are expected to stimulate the economy right away.
Infrastructure Investment
The bill also contains investment in infrastructure and renewable-energy projects, and it reinstates some of what the Senate bill had cut from the House bill in terms of funding for cash-strapped states and school construction. Final details of the plan -- including the size of various tax cuts, the amount of money granted to states, and the extent of health-care help for the jobless -- were still being determined in discussions Wednesday night.
About 35% of the funding in the revised bill will go toward tax relief for individuals and companies, according to Senator Susan Collins [R-Me.], one of the three moderate Republicans who voted for the original Senate bill, which passed 61 to 37. The revised bill is expected to preserve Obama's "Make Work Pay" tax cut, a break for millions of lower- and middle-income taxpayers. However, centrist lawmakers were pressing to reduce that from $500 a year for most individuals and $1,000 a year for most families to $400 and $800, respectively.
Other reductions were likely for a $15,000 tax credit that was included on the Senate side for all home purchases made over the next year, as well as for an income-tax credit the Senate set for buyers of new cars. The Auto Assistance Ownership Amendment was to allow car buyers an income-tax deduction for the cost of automobile sales taxes and interest payments on car loans. The tax break as defined by the Senate would apply to the first $49,500 in the price of a new car purchased between Nov. 12, 2008, and Dec. 31, 2009. Consumers with incomes of up to $125,000 and couples earning as much as $250,000 could qualify.
The compromise bill is expected to restore some of the aid to states that totaled $79 billion in the House plan. That was cut to $39 billion in the Senate. Some Democrats expressed worry that the final tally of state funding wouldn't be enough; they decried cuts in school construction funds as well. House Democrats were looking to secure as much as $9 billion for school repairs; Senator Tom Harkin [D-Iowa] told reporters that about $6 billion would be set aside, and officials said it could be spent only on repair and modernization work.
Push to Create Jobs
The aid to states was particularly contentious, with some Democrats saying it would deliver some of the biggest bang-for-the-buck in the stimulus bill. A dollar in aid to state governments to stave off cuts in services or layoffs yields $1.36 in total economic payoff, and a dollar in infrastructure investment yields $1.59, according to an estimate by Moodys.com (MCO). That's significantly higher than the boost from tax cuts, according to some economists.
In an appearance to announce the agreement with Senate Majority Leader Reid, Collins told reporters that infrastructure spending in the new bill is robust. She said that in the final version, "we were able to increase the amount of infrastructure spending," which she called "the most powerful component in this bill to create jobs." She said the bill contains about $150 billion for infrastructure, including transportation, environmental, broadband, and other projects.
Advocates for the unemployed said that they were generally pleased with the provisions the stimulus bills proposed to shore up aid. The U.S. unemployment rate swelled to 7.6% in January.
"It's a huge step forward for unemployed workers," says Maurice Emsellem, policy director of the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group for low-wage workers. However, on Feb. 11 lawmakers were still negotiating whether to include a $10.8 billion provision from the House bill, cut from the Senate bill, that would help unemployed workers maintain health-care insurance.
"It will be disappointing if they don't come through with the Medicaid provision for unemployed workers," says Emsellem. "They need immediate help."
http://www.turnto23.com/money/18698230/detail.html
After just one day of negotiations, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid [D-Nev.] announced on Feb. 11 that the House and Senate had reached a deal on a revised stimulus plan that calls for $789 billion to be spent over two years. The bill, which represents the largest attempt to jump-start the U.S. economy in modern times, "creates more jobs than the original Senate bill and spends less than the original House bill," Reid said.
Final votes in the House and Senate are expected by the end of this week. Congressional leaders have said they want the bill on President Barack Obama's desk by Monday, Feb. 16.
The bill, which reconciled an $838 billion Senate version and an $819 billion House version, includes relief measures for unemployed and low-income Americans. Those provisions, such as extended unemployment benefits and more funding for food stamps and health coverage, are expected to stimulate the economy right away.
Infrastructure Investment
The bill also contains investment in infrastructure and renewable-energy projects, and it reinstates some of what the Senate bill had cut from the House bill in terms of funding for cash-strapped states and school construction. Final details of the plan -- including the size of various tax cuts, the amount of money granted to states, and the extent of health-care help for the jobless -- were still being determined in discussions Wednesday night.
About 35% of the funding in the revised bill will go toward tax relief for individuals and companies, according to Senator Susan Collins [R-Me.], one of the three moderate Republicans who voted for the original Senate bill, which passed 61 to 37. The revised bill is expected to preserve Obama's "Make Work Pay" tax cut, a break for millions of lower- and middle-income taxpayers. However, centrist lawmakers were pressing to reduce that from $500 a year for most individuals and $1,000 a year for most families to $400 and $800, respectively.
Other reductions were likely for a $15,000 tax credit that was included on the Senate side for all home purchases made over the next year, as well as for an income-tax credit the Senate set for buyers of new cars. The Auto Assistance Ownership Amendment was to allow car buyers an income-tax deduction for the cost of automobile sales taxes and interest payments on car loans. The tax break as defined by the Senate would apply to the first $49,500 in the price of a new car purchased between Nov. 12, 2008, and Dec. 31, 2009. Consumers with incomes of up to $125,000 and couples earning as much as $250,000 could qualify.
The compromise bill is expected to restore some of the aid to states that totaled $79 billion in the House plan. That was cut to $39 billion in the Senate. Some Democrats expressed worry that the final tally of state funding wouldn't be enough; they decried cuts in school construction funds as well. House Democrats were looking to secure as much as $9 billion for school repairs; Senator Tom Harkin [D-Iowa] told reporters that about $6 billion would be set aside, and officials said it could be spent only on repair and modernization work.
Push to Create Jobs
The aid to states was particularly contentious, with some Democrats saying it would deliver some of the biggest bang-for-the-buck in the stimulus bill. A dollar in aid to state governments to stave off cuts in services or layoffs yields $1.36 in total economic payoff, and a dollar in infrastructure investment yields $1.59, according to an estimate by Moodys.com (MCO). That's significantly higher than the boost from tax cuts, according to some economists.
In an appearance to announce the agreement with Senate Majority Leader Reid, Collins told reporters that infrastructure spending in the new bill is robust. She said that in the final version, "we were able to increase the amount of infrastructure spending," which she called "the most powerful component in this bill to create jobs." She said the bill contains about $150 billion for infrastructure, including transportation, environmental, broadband, and other projects.
Advocates for the unemployed said that they were generally pleased with the provisions the stimulus bills proposed to shore up aid. The U.S. unemployment rate swelled to 7.6% in January.
"It's a huge step forward for unemployed workers," says Maurice Emsellem, policy director of the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group for low-wage workers. However, on Feb. 11 lawmakers were still negotiating whether to include a $10.8 billion provision from the House bill, cut from the Senate bill, that would help unemployed workers maintain health-care insurance.
"It will be disappointing if they don't come through with the Medicaid provision for unemployed workers," says Emsellem. "They need immediate help."
http://www.turnto23.com/money/18698230/detail.html
More ambitious domestic agenda? HR1"stimulus"
The New York Times - February 11, 2009
The question now is whether the $789 billion economic stimulus plan agreed to by Congressional leaders on Wednesday is the opening act for a more ambitious domestic agenda from President Obama or a harbinger of reduced expectations.
... it hammered home the reality of bigger, more "activist" government... a hastily patched-together response to an increasingly dire situation.
On the domestic issues Mr. Obama ran and won on — health care, education, climate change, rebalancing the distribution of wealth — the legislation does little more than promise there will be more to come.
________________________________________
More Socialism, why am I not surprised?
Clearly people don't know and/or understand history or they would know/understand that Socialism has been tried many times and it has never worked and never will... it always leads too something worse, usually communism, tyranny and the like.
The question now is whether the $789 billion economic stimulus plan agreed to by Congressional leaders on Wednesday is the opening act for a more ambitious domestic agenda from President Obama or a harbinger of reduced expectations.
... it hammered home the reality of bigger, more "activist" government... a hastily patched-together response to an increasingly dire situation.
On the domestic issues Mr. Obama ran and won on — health care, education, climate change, rebalancing the distribution of wealth — the legislation does little more than promise there will be more to come.
________________________________________
More Socialism, why am I not surprised?
Clearly people don't know and/or understand history or they would know/understand that Socialism has been tried many times and it has never worked and never will... it always leads too something worse, usually communism, tyranny and the like.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Mystery of "Evolution vs Creation" Solved
If both sides would open their minds a little everyone would see that science and religion do not contradict one another.
The beginning of Genesis is a repairing of the Earth and the beginning of todays humans and science verifies this.
The very first sentence of Genesis[1:1] is a statement... "In the Beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth." PERIOD!
Get a concordance and look up the words "was", "without form", and "void" in Genesis 1:2. You will see what is translated as the English word "was" should better be translated as the phrase 'It came to pass'. Or if you want a word for word translation, instead of "was" it should be "became". It's only one of 2 places in the bible that it is translated as "was" out of the total of 75 times it was used, and the other place could also use "became".
Look up the original Hebrew for "without form" and "void". They also mean "chaotic" and "empty". As you can see, there is no word for word equivalence in English for the Hebrew words of "hayah", "tohuw" and "bohuw". Taking their full meaning it becomes clear that there was a lot of time between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2.
It is the events that are not mentioned between these two verses that led up to the earth becoming a chaotic wasteland. The missing information solves the mystery of "Evolution vs Creation".
Before God created what we now call the Universe, he had created Angels. Angels were created as helpers. They were created for a specific purpose and they, unlike mankind, cannot die nor can they improve their station. They have self will and independence and are eternal beings.
Creating Angels was Phase I of the plan of God. Phase II was the creation of the Universe. God created the Universe so that it would support physical life. So, the Universe was created so life could evolve.
[I have no problem with the Big Bang or Darwin's Theory of Evolution. God always starts small like a mustard seed. The Universe started very small and look how big it is now.]
God gave the Angels the task of searching the Infinities that contained the Universe until they found the green jewel, or the Earth. God revealed his plan to his Angels. A plan so important to God, that he sent Lucifer and the third of the Angels under his leadership to come to Earth and help the lifeforms here achieve their ultimate potential. And for millions and millions of years all was according to God's plan.
Lucifer ruled the earth for billions of years. God guided the progress on earth several times by having Lucifer send calamities for the purpose of accelerating the evolution of life. God had a grand plan that needed evolution to produce ever more intelligent beings. After the Ages of the Great Lizards, a new form of life came upon the scene with warm blood, hair and intelligence. It was the Age of Mammals. About 2 million years ago proto-man appeared.
When the Mother Earth brought forth mankind. Cro-Magnon Paleolithic Period to the Neolithic Era. Cities began to be built in 6th and 5th millennium B.C. and city-states were just beginning around 4,000 B.C. It was during the beginning of the city states and metal working societies that Lucifer became aware of true nature of God's plan for mankind. God asked Lucifer to reveal the Father to his creation and help them become sons and daughters of God. Lucifer finally understood the full meaning of what a souls ultimate potential to be. God's plan is to create millions and billions of God Beings through soul evolution. We are the part of God that is experiencing this universe.
Lucifer felt anger and betrayal and hated mankind. He thought he would always be the Third Highest in the Infinite Realities. Instead he discovers God is creating God by the Billions and it was Lucifer's Pride to be of the Highest. Lucifer felt he had to maintain his most high status at all cost. Lucifer had council with his Angels and they formed a plan of violence and revenge. This was known as the Rebellion of Lucifer.
The cost was a War of Angels of such violence that it ultimately ended the Jewel of Earth's ability to sustain life. Lucifer made war against the throne of God. God commanded Michael to resist Lucifer. Michael and his Angels fought with Lucifer and his Angels. Lucifer tried to overthrow Heaven but was defeated and was forced to return back to earth. Lucifer fell like a bolt of lightening. The Angels that rebelled with Lucifer were hurled back to earth. God had commanded Lucifer to watch over this earth and Lucifer had not yet been relieved of his duty.
Lucifer became enraged at his banishment to the very Earth he had once desired and now had come to hate. To add insult to injury, Lucifer was still under the command of God to help mankind achieve their destiny. This further enraged Lucifer. It was loathsome to him to be commanded to help beings achieve a station higher than he. The Mother Earth contained the very seed of billions of Gods. God seeds that someday would all exist higher and more glorious than he. Gods more powerful than he. Lucifer devised a plan to destroy the Earth's life giving properties. This is how the Earth ultimately became chaotic and empty of life.
Science is only verifying what different "masters" of religions have believed for centuries and probably what we all understood before we were split (the tower of babel).
The beginning of Genesis is a repairing of the Earth and the beginning of todays humans and science verifies this.
The very first sentence of Genesis[1:1] is a statement... "In the Beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth." PERIOD!
Get a concordance and look up the words "was", "without form", and "void" in Genesis 1:2. You will see what is translated as the English word "was" should better be translated as the phrase 'It came to pass'. Or if you want a word for word translation, instead of "was" it should be "became". It's only one of 2 places in the bible that it is translated as "was" out of the total of 75 times it was used, and the other place could also use "became".
Look up the original Hebrew for "without form" and "void". They also mean "chaotic" and "empty". As you can see, there is no word for word equivalence in English for the Hebrew words of "hayah", "tohuw" and "bohuw". Taking their full meaning it becomes clear that there was a lot of time between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2.
It is the events that are not mentioned between these two verses that led up to the earth becoming a chaotic wasteland. The missing information solves the mystery of "Evolution vs Creation".
Before God created what we now call the Universe, he had created Angels. Angels were created as helpers. They were created for a specific purpose and they, unlike mankind, cannot die nor can they improve their station. They have self will and independence and are eternal beings.
Creating Angels was Phase I of the plan of God. Phase II was the creation of the Universe. God created the Universe so that it would support physical life. So, the Universe was created so life could evolve.
[I have no problem with the Big Bang or Darwin's Theory of Evolution. God always starts small like a mustard seed. The Universe started very small and look how big it is now.]
God gave the Angels the task of searching the Infinities that contained the Universe until they found the green jewel, or the Earth. God revealed his plan to his Angels. A plan so important to God, that he sent Lucifer and the third of the Angels under his leadership to come to Earth and help the lifeforms here achieve their ultimate potential. And for millions and millions of years all was according to God's plan.
Lucifer ruled the earth for billions of years. God guided the progress on earth several times by having Lucifer send calamities for the purpose of accelerating the evolution of life. God had a grand plan that needed evolution to produce ever more intelligent beings. After the Ages of the Great Lizards, a new form of life came upon the scene with warm blood, hair and intelligence. It was the Age of Mammals. About 2 million years ago proto-man appeared.
When the Mother Earth brought forth mankind. Cro-Magnon Paleolithic Period to the Neolithic Era. Cities began to be built in 6th and 5th millennium B.C. and city-states were just beginning around 4,000 B.C. It was during the beginning of the city states and metal working societies that Lucifer became aware of true nature of God's plan for mankind. God asked Lucifer to reveal the Father to his creation and help them become sons and daughters of God. Lucifer finally understood the full meaning of what a souls ultimate potential to be. God's plan is to create millions and billions of God Beings through soul evolution. We are the part of God that is experiencing this universe.
Lucifer felt anger and betrayal and hated mankind. He thought he would always be the Third Highest in the Infinite Realities. Instead he discovers God is creating God by the Billions and it was Lucifer's Pride to be of the Highest. Lucifer felt he had to maintain his most high status at all cost. Lucifer had council with his Angels and they formed a plan of violence and revenge. This was known as the Rebellion of Lucifer.
The cost was a War of Angels of such violence that it ultimately ended the Jewel of Earth's ability to sustain life. Lucifer made war against the throne of God. God commanded Michael to resist Lucifer. Michael and his Angels fought with Lucifer and his Angels. Lucifer tried to overthrow Heaven but was defeated and was forced to return back to earth. Lucifer fell like a bolt of lightening. The Angels that rebelled with Lucifer were hurled back to earth. God had commanded Lucifer to watch over this earth and Lucifer had not yet been relieved of his duty.
Lucifer became enraged at his banishment to the very Earth he had once desired and now had come to hate. To add insult to injury, Lucifer was still under the command of God to help mankind achieve their destiny. This further enraged Lucifer. It was loathsome to him to be commanded to help beings achieve a station higher than he. The Mother Earth contained the very seed of billions of Gods. God seeds that someday would all exist higher and more glorious than he. Gods more powerful than he. Lucifer devised a plan to destroy the Earth's life giving properties. This is how the Earth ultimately became chaotic and empty of life.
Science is only verifying what different "masters" of religions have believed for centuries and probably what we all understood before we were split (the tower of babel).
Sunday, February 8, 2009
H.R. 17: Citizens' Self-Defense Act of 2009
H.R. 17: Citizens' Self-Defense Act of 2009
To protect the right to obtain firearms for security, and to use firearms in defense of self, family, or home, and to provide for the enforcement of such right.
To protect the right to obtain firearms for security, and to use firearms in defense of self, family, or home, and to provide for the enforcement of such right.
A BILL
To protect the right to obtain firearms for security, and to use firearms in defense of self, family, or home, and to provide for the enforcement of such right.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the ‘Citizens’ Self-Defense Act of 2009’.
SEC. 2. FINDINGS.
The Congress finds the following:
(1) Police cannot protect, and are not legally liable for failing to protect, individual citizens, as evidenced by the following:
(A) The courts have consistently ruled that the police do not have an obligation to protect individuals, only the public in general. For example, in Warren v. District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. App. 1981), the court stated: ‘[C]ourts have without exception concluded that when a municipality or other governmental entity undertakes to furnish police services, it assumes a duty only to the public at large and not to individual members of the community.’.
(B) Former Florida Attorney General Jim Smith told Florida legislators that police responded to only 200,000 of 700,000 calls for help to Dade County authorities.
(C) The United States Department of Justice found that, in 1989, there were 168,881 crimes of violence for which police had not responded within 1 hour.
(2) Citizens frequently must use firearms to defend themselves, as evidenced by the following:
(A) Every year, more than 2,400,000 people in the United States use a gun to defend themselves against criminals--or more than 6,500 people a day. This means that, each year, firearms are used 60 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives.
(B) Of the 2,400,000 self-defense cases, more than 192,000 are by women defending themselves against sexual abuse.
(C) Of the 2,400,000 times citizens use their guns to defend themselves every year, 92 percent merely brandish their gun or fire a warning shot to scare off their attackers. Less than 8 percent of the time, does a citizen kill or wound his or her attacker.
(3) Law-abiding citizens, seeking only to provide for their families’ defense, are routinely prosecuted for brandishing or using a firearm in self-defense. For example:
(A) In 1986, Don Bennett of Oak Park, Illinois, was shot at by 2 men who had just stolen $1,200 in cash and jewelry from his suburban Chicago service station. The police arrested Bennett for violating Oak Park’s handgun ban. The police never caught the actual criminals.
(B) Ronald Biggs, a resident of Goldsboro, North Carolina, was arrested for shooting an intruder in 1990. Four men broke into Biggs’ residence one night, ransacked the home and then assaulted him with a baseball bat. When Biggs attempted to escape through the back door, the group chased him and Biggs turned and shot one of the assailants in the stomach. Biggs was arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon--a felony. His assailants were charged with misdemeanors.
(C) Don Campbell of Port Huron, Michigan, was arrested, jailed, and criminally charged after he shot a criminal assailant in 1991. The thief had broken into Campbell’s store and attacked him. The prosecutor plea-bargained with the assailant and planned to use him to testify against Campbell for felonious use of a firearm. Only after intense community pressure did the prosecutor finally drop the charges.
(4) The courts have granted immunity from prosecution to police officers who use firearms in the line of duty. Similarly, law-abiding citizens who use firearms to protect themselves, their families, and their homes against violent felons should not be subject to lawsuits by the violent felons who sought to victimize them.
SEC. 3. RIGHT TO OBTAIN FIREARMS FOR SECURITY, AND TO USE FIREARMS IN DEFENSE OF SELF, FAMILY, OR HOME; ENFORCEMENT.
(a) Reaffirmation of Right- A person not prohibited from receiving a firearm by Section 922(g) of title 18, United States Code, shall have the right to obtain firearms for security, and to use firearms--
(1) in defense of self or family against a reasonably perceived threat of imminent and unlawful infliction of serious bodily injury;
(2) in defense of self or family in the course of the commission by another person of a violent felony against the person or a member of the person’s family; and
(3) in defense of the person’s home in the course of the commission of a felony by another person.
(b) Firearm Defined- As used in subsection (a), the term ‘firearm’ means--
(1) a shotgun (as defined in section 921(a)(5) of title 18, United States Code);
(2) a rifle (as defined in section 921(a)(7) of title 18, United States Code); or
(3) a handgun (as defined in section 10 of Public Law 99-408).
(c) Enforcement of Right-
(1) IN GENERAL- A person whose right under subsection (a) is violated in any manner may bring an action in any United States district court against the United States, any State, or any person for damages, injunctive relief, and such other relief as the court deems appropriate.
(2) AUTHORITY TO AWARD A REASONABLE ATTORNEY’S FEE- In an action brought under paragraph (1), the court, in its discretion, may allow the prevailing plaintiff a reasonable attorney’s fee as part of the costs.
(3) STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS- An action may not be brought under paragraph (1) after the 5-year period that begins with the date the violation described in paragraph (1) is discovered.
U.S. congressional elections in 2010
U.S. congressional elections in 2010
The U.S. general elections to elect members for Congress will be held the first Tuesday, November 2010.Alabama
* Sen. Richard Shelby, Republican incumbent
Alaska
* Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Republican incumbent
Arizona
* Sen. John McCain, Republican incumbent
Arkansas
* Sen. Blanche Lincoln, Democratic incumbent
California
* Sen. Barbara Boxer, Democratic incumbent
Connecticut
* Sen. Christopher Dodd, Democratic incumbent
Florida
* Sen. Mel Martinez, Republican incumbent
Georgia
* Sen. Johnny Isakson, Republican incumbent
Idaho
* Sen. Mike Crapo, Republican incumbent
Hawaii
* Sen. Dan Inouye, Democratic incumbent
Illinois
* Sen. Barack Obama, Democratic incumbent
Indiana
* Sen. Evan Bayh, Democratic incumbent
Iowa
* Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Republican incumbent
Kentucky
* Sen. Jim Bunning, Republican incumbent
Louisiana
* Sen. David Vitter, Republican incumbent
Maryland
* Sen. Barbara Mikulski, Democratic incumbent
Missouri
* Sen. Christopher Bond, Republican incumbent
Nevada
* Sen. Harry Reid, Democratic incumbent
New Hampshire
* Sen. Judd Gregg, Republican incumbent
New York
* Sen. Chuck Schumer, Democratic incumbent
North Dakota
* Sen. Byron Dorgan, Democratic incumbent
Ohio
* Sen. George Voinovich, Republican incumbent
Oregon
* Sen. Ron Wyden, Democratic incumbent
Pennsylvania
* Sen. Arlen Specter, Republican incumbent
South Carolina
* Sen. Jim DeMint, Republican incumbent
South Dakota
* Sen. John Thune, Republican incumbent
Utah
* Sen. Bob Bennett, Republican incumbent
Vermont
* Sen. Patrick Leahy, Democratic incumbent
Virginia
* Sen. Richard Burr, Republican incumbent
Washington
* Sen. Patty Murray, Democratic incumbent
Wisconsin
* Sen. Russ Feingold, Democratic incumbent
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Democrats i.e. Neo-Socialist are to blame
Going very much against the media meme that the current financial crisis is all George W. Bush and the Republicans' fault, Bill Clinton on Thursday told ABC's Chris Cuomo that Democrats for years have been "resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was President to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac"
Whether he knew it or not, Clinton was going against virtually all press outlets that have been pointing fingers at Republicans since this crisis began, and likely much to the dismay of such folk actually agreed with a Fox News segment aired on Tuesday's "Special Report"
Whether he knew it or not, Clinton was going against virtually all press outlets that have been pointing fingers at Republicans since this crisis began, and likely much to the dismay of such folk actually agreed with a Fox News segment aired on Tuesday's "Special Report"
BRIT HUME, HOST: In the recent spate of government bailouts, buyouts and rescues, the federal takeovers of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are arguably the biggest of them all. And those two firms are also arguably the biggest reason for the credit crisis in the first place. So the question arises -- how did this come to be? Chief Washington correspondent Jim Angle reports.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JIM ANGLE, CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): There is one nagging question behind all the debate over how to get out of this mess.
CHRIS DODD (D-CT), SENATE BANKING COMMITTEE CHMN: American taxpayers are angry and they demand to know how we arrived at this moment.
ELIZABETH DOLE (R), NORTH CAROLINA SENATOR: My constituents, and indeed taxpayers across the nation are asking how we arrived at this crisis. It is infuriating.
ANGLE: But Senator Dole and others think they know the answer, and it's something the Senate tried to fix three years ago but was thwarted.
DOLE: To the mismanagement of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which was made possible by weak oversight and little accountability.
MEL MARTINEZ (R), FLORIDA SENATOR: A lot of what we're dealing with today has its origins in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
ANGLE: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, backed by the federal government, buy mortgage loans from the lenders who make them. But four years ago, both were in trouble over shoddy accounting. Fannie Mae Chief Franklin Raines, President Clinton's former budget director, was fired. To placate those in Congress who watched over them, Fannie and Freddie promised to do more to help poor people get mortgages. That led them to buy riskier and riskier home loans from private lenders creating incentives for everyone to make shakier loans.
PETER WALLISON, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE: The problem is that they encouraged very bad mortgages to be made by banks and other institutions, because Fannie and Freddie would buy them.
ANGLE: Eventually, they bought trillions of dollars worth of mortgages, a substantial portion of them based on poor credit, then resold many of them to financial institutions who thought they were safe because the federal government was behind them.
WALLISON: As a result of this appearance that they were backed by the government, people never paid very much attention to the assets they were acquiring or the risks they were taking.
ANGLE: And so shaky mortgages spread throughout the system. But in 2005, the Senate Banking Committee, then chaired by Republican Richard Shelby, tried to rein in the two organizations bypassing some strong new regulations.
WALLISON: Which would have prevented Fannie and Freddie from acquiring this bad -- these bad mortgages. It actually gave a new regulator for Fannie and Freddie the kinds of powers that a bank regulator had.
ANGLE: All the Republicans voted for it. All the Democrats, including the current chairman, Senator Chris Dodd, voted against it, and that was after Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan had issued a stark warning to senators that Fannie and Freddie were playing with fire. Greenspan said without stronger regulations, "We increase the possibility of insolvency and crisis. Without restrictions on the size of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, we put at risk our ability to preserve safe and sound financial markets in the United States."
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ANGLE: Which turned out to be exactly right, but because Democrats blocked it, those new regulations never got consideration by the full Senate and died. So that's how we got into this mess, and how we missed a chance to avoid it. Getting out of it now, of course, will be a lot more difficult -- Brit.
Two days later, former President Clinton agreed:
CHRIS CUOMO, ABC NEWS: A little surprising for you to hear the Democrats saying, "This came out of nowhere, this is all about the Republicans. We had nothing to do with this." Nancy Pelosi saying it. She signed the '99 Gramm Bill. She knew what was going on with the SEC. They're all sophisticated people. Is that playing politics in this situation?
BILL CLINTON: Well, maybe everybody does that a little bit. I think the responsibility the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was President to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Imagine that!
Kudos to Cuomo for asking the question, and kudos to Clinton for being so honest, especially in an election year.
The only question remains whether other news outlets will follow suit and begin telling the American people just how many proposals Republicans have made in the past decade to impose tighter regulations and oversight on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and how such efforts were routinely thwarted by Democrats.
By Noel Sheppard September 25, 2008 - 10:25 ET—Noel Sheppard is the Associate Editor of NewsBusters.
_______________________________________________________
posted August 28, 2008
President Clinton gave a fantastic speech in which he spoke about his prosperous presidency which created an economic boom in the 1990s. What he intentionally left out is that in the six years of his eight-year reign, President Clinton had a conservative Republican Congress who kept him accountable regarding America's fiscal situation at the time.
The Republican Congress made the effort which allowed for a balanced budget and a surplus thereby triggering economic prosperity.
That, ladies and gentleman, is the truth and reality he chose not to mention.
~Carl Miller
President Clinton left office with what appeared to be a budget surplus, at least on paper, but still had significant national debt. He also left office with a nation headed into recession with the actual figures having been hidden for almost a year and the so-called "day traders" a'fixin' ta lose their collective tushis. We had a "dot-com" industry that had been built upon the premise that a business could be started, run, and then sold at a profit without ever earning a profit ... without even the intent of earning a profit ... which sounds suspiciously like government. I'll never forget the day I called a friend during the year double naught:
Moi - "How's things Ern?"
Ern - "Let me call you back in a couple of days. Already today I've lost 11 grand, every stock I own is headed south on a bullet train, and it's only 9:30 in the morning."
Then, just after President Bush took office and it was becoming painfully evident that the country was in dire financial trouble we got hit with the most serious attack on American soil ever. Almost 3,000 people were killed for no more serious crime than to be going to work in the morning. This included men, women, and children ... most of them civilians.
To be sure, our Republican controlled congress at the time did my children and grandchildren no favors as they spent like drunken government functionaries who've never had a real job in their lives. Neither did President Bush do them any favors as he refused to break out that VETO pen, but what has the Democratically controlled congress done in the last two years? They not only continued the trend, but accelerated it. Their policies have almost doubled the price of gas and they've required that we burn what had been food in our gas tanks. Now there's real wisdom, eh? And then we have those who want to run down the road at 25 miles an hour, wearing their skinny nuthin's on two whimpy little wheels, with 18 wheelers and cars that weigh 3,000 pounds, expecting to be treated equally on the roads when, at the same time, they don't see any reason to obey the same rules of the road. Corn squeezins are for drinking, not pouring into a gas tank.
A jar of my Folger's instant has increased by 50% ... in the last year and a half.
Shredded cheese for The Girls' breakfast has almost doubled. A bell pepper was a buck and a half at Wally's joint last week. We're being invaded by illegals daily. A loaf of bread, the cheap stuff that's not fit for much more than feeding the ducks at Soddy Lake, is almost 2 bucks.
And we're supposed to trust any of them? Phooey!
I need chocolate, while I'm contemplating global warming and watching the outside thermometer dip below 70 degrees after a high today that didn't even reach 90 ... in August.
~Royce E. Burrage Jr.
Financial Crisis Explained Part 4 - Must See Video
Here is another video that shows how democrat policies, including the actions of Barack Obama, led us to the current financial crisis. Ed Morrissey breaks it down here. Previous videos are here, here, and here.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
socialism won't work
American socialism won't work
By DENNIS CLAYSON
If there is anything to be learned in this election cycle it is that many Americans, perhaps the majority, want the government to take care of them. They not only tolerate a Nanny State, they want a Nanny State.
I find this development troubling.
Nannies are employed to care for children. Children are not expected to act, think or react to logic the same as adults. Even in minor emergencies, they are expected to run to their nanny for protection.
Where the nanny gets her resources, or her information, is of no concern to the child as long as she is taken care of and protected from anything in the world that may be threatening, either real or imaginary.
One of the problems with a Nanny State is that the state and the children are made up of the same people. If the citizens are children, then their representatives in government also are children, and having the most important government on the planet being controlled and run by children is not a comforting thought.
Playrooms ruled by children may appear idyllic at times, but more often than not, they can degenerate into the nightmare portrayed in "The Lord of the Flies."
There is another problem. Not everyone is a child, and the human sharks are attracted to naïve children with illogical beliefs of freedom and economics like fresh blood in the water.
Governments that promise you everything are lying to you. If they obtain the power to approximate this ability, they have become socialistic and tyrannical.
Socialistic governments do not produce workers' paradises, or places where everyone is educated and has "free" health care. These exist only in the lies these states call demographics. They produce festering hell holes that impoverish entire nations and drive the human spirit into a nihilistic sickness that even drugs, alcohol and rampant sex can't alleviate.
Wealth is not "spread around." Poverty is, while the powerful get fabulously wealthy.
This is not hypothetical. It has all been tried. Socialism does not work as advertised. It has been implemented by Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Kim Jong-Il, who the CIA estimates has salted away $5 billion while his people starve.
If these are not enough, we could add Tito, Nasser and the Pol Pot. If you think socialism fails because of some fluke of culture, we could add Castro and Hugo Chavez, or even African socialism as showcased by Julius Nyerere, who may have been one of the more principled leaders in a long line of body bag tyrants who promised social Edens and delivered death, poverty, and famine.
If you don't want free markets, but don't want communism, then you could call for a third way. That also has been done and gave the world Mussolini and Hitler.
History has even done experiments with this. How about a controlled experiment in which we take a country with the same climate, culture, language, and history and split it down the middle? We will establish socialism on one side and relative free markets on the other, and then we will wait fifty years to see what happens.
It has been done. Germany, once the most advanced country in the world, was split down the middle into East and West Germany and with what result? Korea, a land of peasants, was split down the middle. The free market side is a prosperous modern nation. The socialist half is a hellhole with starving people watched night and day for the least sign of rebellion.
But the dreams of economic illiterates and those into Santa Claus economics don't die easily, especially when wedded to liberal arrogance.
You see, some "modern" person or group can make socialism work because the rest just didn't do it right, or they weren't as smart.
The idea that Obama or some government bureaucrats are more intelligent than all the men I listed earlier is laughable. The idea that a modern American has more stomach for the struggle, or more will to wade through blood up to his knees to impose a socialist vision on the unwilling, is so absurd as to be contemptible.
American socialism will be no improvement on the other varieties. If anything it will be worse because we will have soft-handed children doing men's work.
But like all pampered children, we don't want to hear this; we just want to be taken care of.
http://www.wcfcourier.com/articles/2008/11/02/columnists/clayson/10724374.txt
_______________________________________________________________
I find this development troubling.
Nannies are employed to care for children. Children are not expected to act, think or react to logic the same as adults. Even in minor emergencies, they are expected to run to their nanny for protection.
Where the nanny gets her resources, or her information, is of no concern to the child as long as she is taken care of and protected from anything in the world that may be threatening, either real or imaginary.
One of the problems with a Nanny State is that the state and the children are made up of the same people. If the citizens are children, then their representatives in government also are children, and having the most important government on the planet being controlled and run by children is not a comforting thought.
Playrooms ruled by children may appear idyllic at times, but more often than not, they can degenerate into the nightmare portrayed in "The Lord of the Flies."
There is another problem. Not everyone is a child, and the human sharks are attracted to naïve children with illogical beliefs of freedom and economics like fresh blood in the water.
Governments that promise you everything are lying to you. If they obtain the power to approximate this ability, they have become socialistic and tyrannical.
Socialistic governments do not produce workers' paradises, or places where everyone is educated and has "free" health care. These exist only in the lies these states call demographics. They produce festering hell holes that impoverish entire nations and drive the human spirit into a nihilistic sickness that even drugs, alcohol and rampant sex can't alleviate.
Wealth is not "spread around." Poverty is, while the powerful get fabulously wealthy.
This is not hypothetical. It has all been tried. Socialism does not work as advertised. It has been implemented by Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Kim Jong-Il, who the CIA estimates has salted away $5 billion while his people starve.
If these are not enough, we could add Tito, Nasser and the Pol Pot. If you think socialism fails because of some fluke of culture, we could add Castro and Hugo Chavez, or even African socialism as showcased by Julius Nyerere, who may have been one of the more principled leaders in a long line of body bag tyrants who promised social Edens and delivered death, poverty, and famine.
If you don't want free markets, but don't want communism, then you could call for a third way. That also has been done and gave the world Mussolini and Hitler.
History has even done experiments with this. How about a controlled experiment in which we take a country with the same climate, culture, language, and history and split it down the middle? We will establish socialism on one side and relative free markets on the other, and then we will wait fifty years to see what happens.
It has been done. Germany, once the most advanced country in the world, was split down the middle into East and West Germany and with what result? Korea, a land of peasants, was split down the middle. The free market side is a prosperous modern nation. The socialist half is a hellhole with starving people watched night and day for the least sign of rebellion.
But the dreams of economic illiterates and those into Santa Claus economics don't die easily, especially when wedded to liberal arrogance.
You see, some "modern" person or group can make socialism work because the rest just didn't do it right, or they weren't as smart.
The idea that Obama or some government bureaucrats are more intelligent than all the men I listed earlier is laughable. The idea that a modern American has more stomach for the struggle, or more will to wade through blood up to his knees to impose a socialist vision on the unwilling, is so absurd as to be contemptible.
American socialism will be no improvement on the other varieties. If anything it will be worse because we will have soft-handed children doing men's work.
But like all pampered children, we don't want to hear this; we just want to be taken care of.
http://www.wcfcourier.com/articles/2008/11/02/columnists/clayson/10724374.txt
_______________________________________________________________
In Britain we can see a perfect example of why socialism doesn't work. Healthcare is "free" in the sense that it's paid for by taxes, but apparently some people (such as fat people and smokers) are putting more strain on the system than it can bear. The government has responded by proposing "healthy lifestyle contracts" that doctors would encourage their patients to follow as a part of treatment.
Naturally, this "oppressive" proposal had fat smokers up in arms.
She's right about one thing: this does represent the tax-payers telling the poor that they need to take better care of their health. But, that's unfair! Well, it would be, except for the fact that the tax-payers are paying for the medical care these others consume. If I were paying for my neighbor's car, I would certainly insist that he take good care of it and not waste the money I was spending.Claire Rayner, president of the Patients' Association, branded the proposal to ask smokers and overweight people to sign healthy lifestyle contracts as "oppressive and obscene".
She said the implication of the plan was to blame people for their own poor health and suggest that they would have to pay more for healthcare because they had brought their illness on themselves.
Ms Rayner said: "This is a nasty middle class document. It's the Tuscan bread and olive oil set telling people they can't eat pizzas and burgers.
You can't have liberty and socialism. It's just not possible for people to live however they want and have society pick up the tab by subsidizing the cost of dangerous behaviors. Because of economic realities, you have to pick: either you have freedom to make dangerous decisions and bear the cost for yourself, or society picks up the tab for everything bad that happens but also has the authority and power to make many decisions for you.
When a child lives at home with his parents, he necessarily lives under their rules. He can't just destroy stuff or leave food or dirty clothes everywhere because it puts impossible strain on the people providing for him. When a child grows up and lives on his own, he (eventually) learns to minimize harmful behaviours due to the cost of dealing with the aftermath. Same with healthcare and lifestyle, socialized jobs and productivity, you name it. There's a liberty/security trade-off that cannot be avoided.
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