Thawing relations with Russia is a smart thing. Allowing Russia to play us like a fiddle is not. The US should be the originator of US foreign policy, not Russia. We should be acting, not reacting. We should invite Russia to the table and get concession from them in response to our decision to pull out of NATO and to draw down in Afghanistan. We should get concessions from China in response to our decision to pull out of South Korea and to draw down forces in Japan. We should be setting the agenda, not Russia.
Gordon Brown should keep his mouth shut about the definition of marriage in the US. Like we need some pompous, incompetent British aristocrat who's calling for a world-wide attack on freedom named a world-wide New Deal lecturing the US about freedom. Our problem is we're becoming too much like Britain, not vice-versa, and one of the many ways we should differentiate ourselves is by taking the power to define marriage away from government.
Illinois legislators declare Pluto a planet. Even if everything in Illinois was perfect, this would be stupid. I wonder where in the Illinois constitution it gives the legislature the power to define what is and isn't a planet.
So Obama has a mortgage rescue plan and the House just passed a cramdown bill. Obama can't just be detailing a program that's already passed the House. These must be 2 plans, probably designed to sound innocuous separately but wreak the maximum amount of havoc on our economy once combined.
It looks like Republicans have enough votes to put off the $410 omnibus spending bill laden with 9,000 earmarks, so the Senate delays the vote. I guess Harry Reid will add some more pork to buy the votes he needs. This is one reason pork is much more destructive than the small amount of money it actually spends.
At least one bank is trying to give the poisoned federal bailout money back, but the Feds won't take it. This is the first of many. Look for this to become a big issue.
Cato could learn a lifetime of lessons from reading a few Mises articles. The head of the Mises Institute minces no words, and we're all better off for his honesty and bluntness:
It's raining, pouring, economic fallacies by the hour, followed by a flood of horrible policy that is driving us ever further into economic depression. The regime in charge has really gone nuts, revealing itself as both deeply ignorant and horribly evil. We find ourselves facing the horror of what has always been the Achilles heel of the left wing: its abysmal ignorance of economic science. The ideological tendency has gone from Keynesianism to outright socialism in a matter of a few weeks. And the trajectory seems to be accelerated mainly by the logic of the interventionist cycle: bad policy leads to bad results that are addressed through bad policy, and so on, straight down the fast track to serfdom. Obama's attachment to "transparency" — the buzzword of the day — allows all intelligent people to observe the sickening sight in real time, and to the cheers of the kept class of intellectual phonies like Ben Bernanke and Paul Krugman.
...Thus all our favorite conservatives are starting to make sense. The American Spectator is alarmed. Rush Limbaugh sounds like LRC. The American Conservative has temporarily dropped its love of protectionism to warn of dollar inflation. The love of war has gone AWOL at National Review. The Heritage Foundation is warning that government spending and taxation are driving us to ruin. Pat Buchanan is defending the free market!
Where were these people during the last eight years of Bush's misrule? Asleep or seeking preferment or something. It's not as if Obama caused this crisis; he is only making it worse. In any case, the Right has begun to turn to the side of truth and justice, precisely as they did during Clinton's rule, and this is all to the good, in general.
But just in case we are observing yet another expedient shift [we are - LIW], it might be a good idea to understand precisely why socialism is a bad idea. The Obama administration doesn't seem to get it. And there is plenty to get. Socialism crushes human rights, builds the state, impinges on the liberty of conscience, and breeds social, cultural, and economic degeneration.
...
Ludwig von Mises in 1920, however, added something special and new to the critique of socialism. He said that socialism in all its forms cannot accommodate any economic development beyond the hunter-gatherer stage. And the reason has to do with the socialist attack on the ownership and exchange of capital goods. Without ownership, there is no exchange, and so prices do not emerge. Here is his 1920 essay, which says it all.
Without market prices for capital goods, accounting is not possible. You don't know if you are making money or losing money, saving resources or wasting them, doing the right thing or not doing the right thing. Think of all the decisions that have to be made on the production end that require you to know whether you are wasting resources or not. With steel, do you make more buildings or trains? Or do you make cutlery or computers? Or cars or cables?
You can't just rely on assessing consumer demand. The demand for stuff is infinite. What matters are choices in light of foregone alternatives. These can't be discerned with polls or intuition. What matters here is the weighting of all alternative uses of resources. They can only be worked out in real time, in light of the choices of consumers and the profitable production decisions of producers.
None of this is possible if you don't have real market prices providing the real stuff that makes cost accounting possible. Collectivize property and you abolish the market for capital goods. No prices emerge. Every choice you make is arbitrary. There is no more rationality remaining. You just end up groping around in the dark.
Wake up America and read the essays!
This summary explains the mass delusion that grips our world:
Click at your own risk. This is the NYT article explaining how ridiculous economists are for failing to embrace socialism in light of the current and perfectly obvious failure of the free market. So you can take a market and beat it, tax it, regulate it, subsidize it, flood it with fake money, punish its performers and reward its losers, hobble its capital sector, strangle consumers, nationalize stuff at will, and erect every barrier to trade and cooperation, and STILL call it a market. When the scheme fails, it's the free market that failed, so clearly we need the totalitarian state to sweep into action.Author contrasts the invisible hand of the free market that brings order and prosperity from individual decision of self-interested people in a free market to the the reverse invisible-hand that creates chaos and poverty when powerful aristocrats apply political decisions to our economy.
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