Stocks are down another $125 so far today.
Obama has just passed a month in office, and he's already alienating the American people at a record pace. Just like many of us predicted. Obama is anti-American. He hates the land of the free and the home of the brave an wants to transform us into the land of the weak and dependent on government. Mainstream Americans are waking up to at least slow down that advance.
Obama's treasury considers buying large state in Citi, effectively nationalizing Citi. Stop the madness. Let it go bankrupt.
After Pakistan military seizes strategic highlands from Taliban, Taliban unilaterally declares cease-fire. How long will civilization keep falling for this trick? The radicals always declare cease-fire when they're on the run, the civilized forces always respect it, then the radicals resupply and rearm and go back on the offensive. The radicals all over the world use this same trick to take advantage of civilization's better nature, and we can't continue to allow them to do that. It leads to perpetual war, which is exactly what we have all around the world. Press the advantage and wipe them out.
Zimbabwe government continues seizing farms from white owners. Why aren't liberals condemning racists in Zimbabwe? If this was white government officials seizing farms from black owners, you'd never hear the end of it from liberals. This is another irresponsible liberal double-standard.
Austrian economist from Australia explains how government creates water and other shortages by price fixing and effectively shows how absurd government's actions are.
Mises scholar details the amount of money financial firms donated to President Obama and Senate Banking committee members, how much money they spent lobbying Congress and how much money they received in return for their investment. The profit margin is 2,500 percent. The essay goes on to quote Mises explaining how in a political marketplace like the one we have today, it's more important to suck up to the politicians than it is to create quality products at a low price. This is exactly why we see income disparity rising so rapidly in the US. Workers don't matter in a political economy. CEO, managers, lobbyists and politicians matter. Liberal policies (include the liberal policies of Republicans) always harm the poor, minorities, and the working class while giving advantages to the richest and most powerful. It's a proven fact that no system creates more equity among the people than the economic freedom of free markets.
Thus, for a total of $114.2 million in political campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures, those banks and financial institutions have received a more than 2,500 percent return on their political "investment" in the form of TARP money.
Apparently Lehman Brothers didn't pay enough tribute to our political masters to be saved. You can bet every corporation in America learned that lesson.
In his ongoing attempt to keep people fooled and confused, Obama is sending mixed messages about fiscal responsibility. That's quite the understatement, but I'm glad at least one mainstream media outlet is at least hinting that Obama is jerking the public around with his talks about cutting spending.
"Why should someone making $45,000 a year pay the same tax rate — 6.75 percent — as someone making 10 or 20 times that amount?" Don't you just love how bass-ackwards that question is? The real question is why should somebody making more money be forced to pay a higher tax rate than somebody making less money. How is that fair? How is that smart? Yet the natural assumption of liberals and their accomplice press is that America should enforce Marx's progressive income tax.
Jail interferes with satanic religious practices. Too bad. My religion is freedom, so being put in jail is a violation of my religion. Why did we ever let people think they can have religious freedom, but no other kind of freedom, in jail? The whole point of jail is that it punishes people by taking away their rights.
I caught segments of Tucker Carlson's show on MSNBC. If he's one of the best communicators of libertarian ideals, no wonder freedom is being destroyed before our eyes. All I saw was a discombobulated dork with a bow-tie. I certainly never saw any principled defense of freedom. Could his credentials be any weaker? My blog has probably been more effective at communicating libertarian ideals than Tucker Carlson. Why in the world would Cato pay this guy?
Already finished Meltdown and wrote a review. Also wrote a review of Economics in One Lesson. I highly recommend both books.
I just ordered the Mystery of Banking. Man, these Mises books rock. I took Econ 101, 102, and 103 as a freshman, and it taught me some fundamentals, but not much other than supply and demand and the difference between wants and needs. But I never learned economics from a book. I learned about free markets and the damage government intervention does to them from observation. I learned to be a libertarian from rational thinking and experience.
Nobody "taught me" to be a libertarian. I learned it in spite of every ideological input in my life. I've never read a libertarian book in my life. Until a week ago, I never read a position book on economics. I'm not even self-taught because that would mean I read books that led me to my current positions. I just came to all these conclusions on my own despite never knowing another libertarian personally or reading anything from another libertarian. Of course, I'm pretty hard core. I call myself a fierce libertarian.
But I'm not an anarchist, and I reject the anarchist wing of the Libertarian party.
And I like Cato. I read Cato online. I pick up things from Cato. Cato is OK. But I've never considered buying a Cato book.
But I LOVE these Mises guys! These guys are fierce libertarians like me. I haven't learned anything fundamental from them, it seems I figured all that out on my own, but I've gained a depth of knowledge and developed more critical arguments from reading them. I'm devouring their reading list. It's like I've been drifting on a ideological boat my whole life, and I finally ran into fellow travelers.
I don't agree with any of them on everything, of course, but man, it's invigorating to read intellectuals who understand the same principles that I understand.
I just dug up a gem of Mises lectures on communism called Communism Unmasked. I haven't read them yet. Because they're lectures, I'm going to look for them in pdf (most of Mises books are in pdf on the Mises web site for those who don't want to buy them) to read. Following up my previous post about not learning my positions from others, I developed my position on communism purely on my own. I watched the Soviet Union, I read about the prinicples of communism, I observed human behavior, and I realized that Marxism on any scale above a few volunteers must always end in a slave state ruled by a horribly depraved individual. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom provided well, reasoned intellectual support for my conclusion, but I had drawn the conclusion long before I heard of either Hayek or The Road to Serfdom.
It's nice to see Mises confirm the same (imo obvious) conclusions.
The approach is systematic but casual. So the reader encounters wonderful insights in the form of short asides. For example: "The worst thing that can happen to a socialist is to have his country ruled by socialists who are not his friends."
As a lecturer, he is steady and relentless. The reader can nearly "hear" him speaking through the prose. And there are times when Mises reveals a level of rhetorical passion that you would never encounter in print. That's because what is printed here are not pre-prepared lectures in the sense that they were written out. They were transcribed by Bettina Bien Greaves from what he actually said.
Thus can we hear this passage: It is not true, as Marx said, that the improvements in technology are available only to the exploiters and that the masses are living in a state much worse than on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. Everything the Marxists say about exploitation is absolutely wrong! Lies! In fact, capitalism made it possible for many persons to survive who wouldn't have otherwise.
I'm looking forward to reading this book too.
That quote "The worst thing that can happen to a socialist is to have his country ruled by socialists who are not his friends." is tremendously telling. In one sentence it explains the radical partisanship between liberals and conservatives in America. To paraphrase, the worst thing that can happen to liberal socialists is to ruled by conservative socialists, and vice versa. That's the quandary we face in America. Liberals hate George Bush's socialism. Conservatives hate Barack Obama's socialism. There's only a few of us freedom lovers who hate socialism regardless of who forces it on us.
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