Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Peter Schiff compares Obama to Hoover. I thought Bush was Hoover and Obama was Roosevelt.

"The President spoke optimistically about the future, but in reality there is little evidence to support such an upbeat outlook. He began his speech by assuring us that the worst of the storm had passed. General Custer may have said something similar when the first wave of Indian attacks ebbed at Little Big Horn."

Good one.

"Rather than tightening the reins on the reckless monetary policy that undermined our savings, diminished our industrial output, inflated asset bubbles, and led to reckless speculation on Wall Street and excess consumption on Main Street, we are loosing them further. Rather than repealing regulations that distort markets and create moral hazards, we are adding new ones that do more of the same. Rather than cutting government spending to reduce the burden it places on our economy, we are increasing both the amount of the spending and the size of the burden. Rather than making government smaller so that the private sector can grow, we are making government bigger and forcing the private sector to shrink. Rather than paying off our debts we are taking on even more. Rather than encouraging people to save we are enticing them to spend. Rather than creating jobs, we are merely creating unemployment benefits."

I love when Schiff strings together these comparisons.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

A system of voluntary exchange provides the only effective regulation mechanism ever created.

"But don't markets need regulating? Of course. Markets in which the government hasn't turned criminal regulate themselves without violating anyone's rights. If a bank insists on practicing fractional-reserve lending, for example, and finds itself unable to meet depositor demands, it files for bankruptcy, not a bailout. The free bank is thereby discouraged from creating multiple claims to the same dollar. It cannot ask for a loan from its friendly central banker because it doesn't have one."

Businesses that cheat their customers or suppliers go bankrupt. If officers commit fraud, they are prosecuted. Government regulation suffers from the same fatal conceit as all central planning -the idea that a handful of men are smarter and more capable of performing an unimaginably complex and rapidly evolving task better than all the people combined. We need to unleash the regulating power of 300 million Americans instead of suffering under the impossible to succeed regulation by a handful of bureaucrats.

"The hidden tax of bank inflation is perfectly suited to their ends. It gives the impression that government is an endless source of largess, while shifting the blame for crises and everyday higher prices onto governments' favorite whipping boys, speculators and business people. By depreciating the currency, bank inflation quietly takes wealth from our pockets and gives it to those in on the racket.

The very existence of a fiat-paper money like federal reserve notes precludes the possibility of a free market. "In no period of human history has paper money spontaneously emerged on a free market," Jörg Guido Hülsmann writes in The Ethics of Money Production.

Whenever governments issue the stuff, they of necessity impose a "legal obligation for each citizen to accept it as legal tender." At one point, paper money certificates were "backed" by a certain weight of gold or silver. But with widespread indifference to monetary issues, it proved easy for governments to blame crises on the commodity backing rather than the inflation of the notes. Governments outlawed the use of gold and silver as money so they could inflate with minimal restraint."

We're repeating the mistakes of history, and unless we fix the problem, we'll suffer the same consequences.

The mainstream media is figuring out that our banking and finance industries are a big, secretive cartel.

GLOBAL WARMING:

State governments to implement cap and trade and carbon markets. State governments are still governments and therefore oppressive, but the difference is they have to compete with each other. Citizens will leave these states for states without carbon markets just like people are fleeing California and New York like the sinking they ships they are.

WAR:

The shard-dressed man who helped the underwear bomber avoid the passport check in Amsterdam for his flight to Detroit was a US intelligence agent. Nothing else makes sense given all the evidence. The US didn't revoke the terrorists' visa at the request of counter-terrorism agents because they wanted him in the US. I agree that Kurt Haskell is a hero. You have to read this cover-up attempt to believe it. He refused to cave to pressure from the FBI to change his story, and now he's been vindicated. Every American owes this man a debt of gratitude for exposing the dark and convoluted machinations that our government employs that endanger us. At least there's no evidence the agent knew the guy had a bomb in his pants. This illustrates Security comes from powerful individuals, not doomed-to-fail central planners.

I have mixed feelings about these so-called mind scanners. They're a heck of lot less intrusive than body scanners, and that's a good thing. But are they effective? I'm sure they're advertised to work wonderfully, but that doesn't mean anything. How many false positives and negatives do they get in the real world? Would they highlight all the Muslims who are angry at the US but never intend to raise arms against us? How can it tell the difference? I would hope these would only be used to identify people for additional screening. I'd have no problem with private companies employing them, that way passengers could chose to fly elsewhere if they didn't like them, but anything the government uses against the people it abuses for its own purposes.

Obama to move 9/11 trials out of New York. On what grounds? This isn't a matter of politics. It's a matter of law. If Obama is going to try the terrorists in civilian court, he must do it in the jurisdiction of the crimes. This is another example of Obama's lawlessness. He thinks his power is unlimited except by political factors. The problem isn't where he holds the trial. The problem is he's trying war criminals as civilians in a court system that was intentionally designed not to have that happen. If we pervert our civilian courts into courts for war criminals, those same perversions will used against every US citizen dragged into court. We'll all end up being tried as war criminals. And every person in the world who wages war in the US will end up in our courts. This has got to be part of Obama's plan to collapse the US.

What is it with soldiers and rape? Until we figure out how to solve the rape problem with combat troops, lifting don't ask, don't tell would be irresponsible. Nobody can know what injecting homosexual tension and homophobia into the most stressful situation in human experience will be. I bet it would be explosive. We have an all volunteer military. It's not like gays are being forced to live with that policy against their will.

POLITICS:

House Republicans meet with Obama on TV, feeding the illusion that Obama is a bipartisan president. Republicans should have kept the cameras, but not the reporters, out. The TV works in Obama's favor. The record works in Republicans' favor. Nobody can force others to work with them. If Obama wanted to work with Republicans, he could easily do so by moving their direction. Fortunately for all of us, that hasn't happened. Bipartisanship, i.e. both parties working together to grow their power at our expense, is the most dangerous threat we face. The best we can hope for is for Republicans to remain solidly united against every Democrat policy.

This meeting show Republicans are still clueless about why their fortunes have turned so dramatically. Because they're power-hungry, lying aristocrats just like Democrats, their DNA pushes them to pass laws and compromise so they can buy more votes. They're programmed that way like reptiles so they can't grasp that doing nothing, that being obstructionist, that being the party of no more expansion of government and dramatically differentiating themselves from freedom-hating Democrats is the best thing for them politically and for the people.

Pat Buchanan figured out what I've been saying for a year, the Democrat coalition, because it's inherently contradictory, is tearing itself apart, and Obama can't do anything about it.

"Obama's dilemma, evident in his State of the Union, is that the progressives, who were indispensable to his victories over Hillary, now feel betrayed, especially with apparent abandonment of health insurance reform, while conservative Democrats and independents, who were indispensable in giving Obama his November victory, are angry and alienated and disposed to vote Republican to stop what they see as America's plunge into socialism.

The non-negotiable demands of these two essential elements of Obama's coalition are in irreconcilable conflict."

This is why central planning always fails. This is why our parties ping-pong in power. Central planners cannot please all the people all the time, and over time, they make so many mad they kick the party in power out of power. Freedom is the system that maximized happiness of the people.

MISC:

I've never understood this desire to contact aliens. I think it's related to religion. Any aliens who could come here are at the top of their food chain just like us but way more advanced than we are. There's no reason to think they would look at us and our planet as anything other than raw material for their own advancement.