Free kibbles

LIBERTY:

While we worry about the big items like health care oppression, the bureaucrats are stealing our liberty from us.

"The United States Government Printing Office publishes the Federal Register. Each issue is a 275-page book, three columns per page. There are about 250 issues published each year, totaling approximately 69,000 pages. These are pages of incoherent rules that apply to every area of our lives. They are written by government lawyers to be interpreted by lawyers and debated by lawyers.

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We have come a long way, baby: in the Federal Register – maybe two million pages...

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In 1983, Harvard University's legal historian Harold Berman summarized the story in a 45-page introduction to his book, Law and Revolution. We are losing our liberties in the West, he said, because of a quiet but relentless legal revolution that has been underway for a century: the transition to administrative law. The executive bureaucracies are writing the regulations and enforcing them through administrative law courts.

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The crucial power to restrict the growth of bureaucracy is the power of the veto. This power used to be imposed by juries. This became the great threat to the power of bureaucracies. This is why they began to substitute administrative law courts for civil courts. There are no juries in administrative law courts. There are only judges on the payroll of the bureaucracies. These administrative law judges interpret the law of their employers. They are funded by their bureaucracies. The defendants must hire their own lawyers to play the legal game of "look it up." Then the administrative law judge decides which lawyer is correct.

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Best of all from the point of the bureaucracy is the principle of the Napoleonic Code: the accused is guilty until proven innocent . . . at his expense. This is contrary to the common law tradition. Common law is being reversed today. The Internal Revenue Service operates in terms of the Napoleonic Code.

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This is why all big-government politicians and their obedient, salaried intellectuals hate anything even remotely resembling the nineteenth-century gold standard. They resent the veto power of gold over the expansion of credit by the banking cartel. This is why they never challenge the central banks. They know who butters their bread: the central banks. They know what the butter is: borrowed fiat money used by governments to expand power.

The politicians and their many hired spokesmen – economics professors, newspaper columnists, think-tank intellectuals – dismiss the gold standard because they understand that this system placed a veto power in the hands of individual holders of IOU's from banks. This restrained the banks. This also limited the ability of governments to borrow money in order to defer tax increases.

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The case for gold as money is the case for cutting the bureaucrats' budgets. It is therefore the case for the restoration of our liberties."

While we're defending what little freedom we have left from the White House and Congress, bureaucrats are killing our freedom with death by 1000 cuts, but I don't think the gold standard is a silver bullet against government oppression. Of course Lincoln had to go off the gold standard to wage the Civil War, so maybe it is. I don't think the US fought any wars while on the gold standard. Apparently the gold standard was in effect during the War of 1812, but it was still funded by inflation.

"It is interesting to note that once the D.C. banks ran out of money and their paper seemed to be worthless, the U.S. government was faced with the dilemma of not being able to finance the war. The D.C. banks suspended payments of gold in December of 1814 and in January of 1815, a month later, peace was declared. They couldn't fight the war without money so they had no choice but to negotiate a peace."

That's pretty interesting. No wonder aristocrats hate the gold standard. It's a powerful limiter on their power.

ECONOMY:

Using numbers uncorrupted by government, economics makes the case we're in a second, Greater Depression.

"The national debt increased by $1.8 trillion in 2009, to $11.9 trillion. The OMB projects the 2010 deficit to reach $1.5 trillion. Even without a new colossal $2 trillion healthcare bureaucracy, deficits were expected to stay in the $1-trillion-per-year range for the next decade. The truth is that deficits will exceed $1 trillion annually and approach $2 trillion by 2019. The national debt would reach $25 trillion by 2019.

An unsustainable trend will not be sustained. The national debt will not reach $25 trillion in 2019. Unless the current policies of the Federal Reserve and Obama administration are reversed, the U.S. economic system will collapse well before that."

The looming debt crisis is here.


Advice to buy commodities and natural resources.

TAX AND SPEND:

The EU isn't going to survive this kind of bitterness.

WAR:

NATO forces execute eight teenagers in Afghanistan in mistaken raid.

POLITICS:

Obama is so divisive, he's splitting Democrats including Rahm Emanuel.

Republicans can't get candidates to run for Senate seats they would be likely to win.

Ron Paul lays out his agenda if he was president. I think the president has a duty to do more. Paul wants to transition to a constitutional government, but the president has no legal authority to run an unconstitutional government during such a transition. From the moment a president is sworn in, he must obey the law, and that means get the government in line with the Constitution. He has to shut down the Dept. of Education, the FCC, the FTC, the FDA, and all other unconstitutional government bureaucracies, shut down all welfare programs, corporate and individual, stop enforcing all unconstitutional laws, and so on. You can't say you're continuing welfare out of compassion for those on welfare, because that means you're continuing to take money from others by force and give it to welfare recipients. There's nothing compassionate about theft. Welfare recipients will have 2 and half months between the election and the swearing-in to make whatever arrangements they want to make. That doesn't mean shutting down Social Security and Medicare. Those aren't welfare because the people who receive the benefits paid into the program. Those programs need to be transitioned to be sustainable while continuing to take care of seniors and preferably phased out over time.

LOCAL:

This sure looks like corruption to me.

MISC:

Private ownership of renewable resources is the key to making them last and thrive.

The president must also shut down this American Community Survey.