Only government researchers would check to see if Toyota's acceleration problems were related to cosmic rays. Note to the government - US cars use the same computer system as the Toyota accelerators.
FASCISM:
Obama's union chief master Andy Stern tells us, "And so all of sudden we are witnessing the first new American economic plan led by the government, not necessarily by the private sector." That's fascism.
ECONOMY:
Sales of new home hit record low in February. The market is still trying to reach bottom so we can start to grow again, but the Fed and government won't let it.
Real estate continues to collapse.
FEDERAL RESERVE:
Central banking as a confidence game - a comparison of what Fed officials said in their testimony in 2007 (how they gain our confidence) and what they did (how they swindle us) and the consequences.
"Inflation is surely a scam and part of the confidence game — printing up money and lowering the value of all dollar-denominated assets while simultaneously benefitting political friends and accomplices is surely a fraud that could be classified as a confidence game. This is even more true because when the people finally lose confidence in the Fed system and realize what the Fed has been doing, the game will be up, the dollar will go down, and the Fed will come to an end!"The sooner the better.
Savings is the food supply of the economy. The economy needs savings to fuel economic growth. In a health economy, the interest rate would signal if we had plenty of savings to grow or if our economy was starving from lack of savings. Central banks corrupt the interest rate and make it signal that we have plenty of savings all the time even when we we're starving our economy of savings. It's as if your doctor put you on a diet of paper and told you you were getting a nutritional meal, but in reality you were starving to death. Central banks starve the economy of savings while sending the signal that we have plenty of savings. No matter what a central bank does, it's harmful because it corrupts the information telling businesses how much savings are available. Because this information is corrupted, seemingly smart people make seemingly foolish mistakes like Wall Street execs made during the last boom. The inevitable result is a crash because our economy is starving and it takes a while to rebuild the savings it needs to grow.
TAX AND SPEND:
Criticism of the FairTax based on the argument that we can't predict the magnitude of the reaction of the people. So better the root of all evil we know than a tremendously simpler evil we haven't tried yet? I don't like that idea. We know for a fact that compliance costs will drop tremendously. That's a good enough reason to prefer the FairTax. It's an indisputable fact that compliance costs would drop tremendously. It's an indisputable fact that the income tax punishes savings and the FairTax doesn't. I don't understand this:
"Because general sales taxes reduce "not just consumption, but the incomes of original factors[,]" it turns out, Rothbard contended: "The general sales tax is therefore an income tax, albeit a rather haphazard one." Id., at p. 934. He then concludes his discussion of the sales tax by noting that "we reach the paradoxical and important conclusion that a tax on consumption will fall more heavily on savings-investment than on consumption in its ultimate incidence." Id. (All italics in original.) In footnote 47 on p. 934, Rothbard says that, despite what some economists say about the sales tax, "…there are few taxes indeed that will not be as bad as the income tax from the point of view of the free market. Certainly sales or excise taxation will not fit the bill.""I agree that that sounds paradoxical so I'm going to have the read the book to understand it, but as the article points out, the FairTax is not a sales tax. It replaces a myriad of taxes already embedded in the price of goods and services we buy with the same price FairTax (one penny more actually). Generally, prices will go up very little (except for the price of imports because they don't contain any embedded taxes right now). The FairTax doesn't add to prices. It replaces the tax burden already embedded in prices.
"Even if sellers can raise their prices to pass along the FairTax, we have no idea how consumers will react, especially during the transition period, to significant price increases."This is a fallacy that destroys the entire analysis. There won't be significant price increases.
"FairTax proponents assure us that because of embedded taxes – taxes on the inputs that raise the price of the final consumer product – the cost of goods sold will drop, perhaps by as much as 22%.
In that case, costs would not increase for consumers and profit wouldn’t fall for sellers (or for any sellers of higher order goods). "At least he follows up with that.
"We might then end up with, among other results, a significant drop in revenue to the federal government.
Normally libertarians wouldn’t care whether a tax proposal might fail and end up reducing revenue to the federal government. In fact, lowering – even eliminating – federal revenue is the goal for most of us. But if the FairTax fails to provide sufficient revenue to the feds, Congress could and would use that as an excuse to pass various (unread) panic-induced bills raising revenue by all sorts of diabolical means."If that were to happen (I believe the FairTax will produce more revenue in the long run - which is a bad thing, imo) a libertarian president would veto those bills and trust in economic fundamentals - more savings leads to economic growth - and power of the expanded liberty of the people who now control 100 percent of their earnings.
"[T]he FairTax doesn’t offer enough to justify the risks that it would fail and invite new taxing schemes and, in addition, prevent the serious consideration of any other tax reform for decades."So we're back where we started: preference for the root of all evil over a tax system that would indisputably cut waste on tax compliance and improve our savings rate and therefore economic growth. That makes no sense. It's a conservative approach - don't change anything - as opposed to the libertarian understanding of economic fundamentals and the benefits of liberty. I'd like to see one of those impressive studies refuting the FairTax. I've read a lot of criticism of the FairTax including at mises.org, and I have yet to see anything with substance.
HEALTH CARE:
If you ever had any doubts that all the aristocrats in Washington care about is the power battle between Republicans and Democrats, this health oppression disaster should have erased them. The people are irrelevant.
Senate Republicans are trying all the ploys they can come up with to derail the reconciliation, but it's too late. The Senate bill is the law. But the hypocrisy knows no bounds as Democrats accuse Republicans of playing politics. Seriously. Normal people couldn't act this way if they tried.
We're all going to be stuck with VA hospital quality care.
Free market health care diagram to contrast with Pelosi's Obamacare chart.Warning - it's really simple. This is priceless.
Judge Napolitano says that it will take on the order of a decade before Obamacare could be declared unconstitutional.
Supporters of Obamacare receive death threats. Every law government passes is a gun pointed at the head of some portion of the population regarding some decisions. Obamacare is a gun pointed at the head of every American every time they make a health care decision or talk to their doctor. Obamacare is the single greatest act of violence our government has perpetrated against us since the civil war. It's no wonder that some people are responding to this violence with violence of their own. The more violence government perpetrates on the people, the more violently the people will respond. That's why the natural right to keep and bear arms acknowledged by the Constitution is the ultimate check on tyranny.
Q and A on Obamacare designed to make it appear a good thing.
Obamacare exempts congressional leaders and the president from having to participate.
Boortz highlights the relationship between Obamacare and the Cloward-Piven strategy.
Obamacare fixes the amount of money insurers can earn on every individual insurance plan by forcing them to rebate any money they take over a certain percentage of costs. This is a fancy way of setting price controls which always have the same effect - shortages and bankruptcies. This might be why, after supporting Obamacare during this entire process, insurance companies suddenly turned against it this month.
The ignorance of Obama supporters is amazing.
What a great analogy - Obama has turned health insurance companies in the Blackwaters of socialized medicine.
It's interesting that the burden on small businesses really kicks in in 2014. That means that small business owners might step up business to make enough money and retire before then. That could provide a short-term economic lift before a bigger crash. I wonder if Democrats planned it that way.
Pelosi gave Stupak our money for airport grants, but he claims that wasn't to buy his vote.
This argument about how Obamacare will affect life expectancy misses the boat. Life expectancy in the US will go down significantly because the profit motive has been weakened. Look what happened to the failure rate in schools since government seized control of them. The same will happen to our life expectancy.
Eight predictions about the consequences of Obamacare.
How government killed Detroit and how it will do the same to health care.
"In 1994, the median sales price of a house in Detroit was about $41,000. The housing bubble pushed it up to about $98,000 in 2003. In March 2009, the price was $13,600. Today, the price is $7,000. Check the price chart.
There has never been a collapse of residential real estate values of this magnitude in peacetime history, anywhere. Detroit is dying.
...
There is no surge of buyers to take advantage of fabulously low prices in Detroit. Can you imagine buying a home for cash for $13,600 in 2009 – a house that had sold for $98,000 six years earlier – and losing half your money? It's incredible."
Oh my goodness.
"The media say nothing because they are caught in a dilemma. If they say that the local government's welfare programs are not really to blame, what does that leave? The unmentionable issue: 82% of the city is Black. So, that means blaming white employers, who discriminate, despite 40 years of Federal anti-discrimination laws. But the main non-employers today are the region's auto companies, and two of the three are partially owned by the U.S. government. One – GM – is mainly owned by the retirement fund of the United Auto Workers. So, the media are not about to blame the auto companies – not now.That leaves that other politically incorrect issue: the rate of illegitimacy, which is in the 80% range. That social phenomenon represents a moral collapse, but the participants were all educated by the tax-funded schools.
Who ya gonna blame?
The media pundits cannot decide, so they simply ignore the collapse. "Detroit? Never heard of it."The lesson of Detroit is this: the experts do not see a collapse coming. They assume that next year will be like today, give or take 3%. They do not believe that anything as complex as a city can collapse. So, they believe that things will continue, as they always have. Taxes need not be cut. Spending need not be cut. Schools should be allowed to educate. Tax-funded welfare programs should be increased. When it comes to tax revenues, "there's always more where that came from."
And then, overnight, the system collapses. The assumptions were wrong. Real estate prices collapse, indicating an irreversible flight of capital from the city. The ability of the government to collect taxes collapses."
This is where the country is headed. This is what the Cloward-Piven strategy is all about. This is President Obama's goal.
"Young American physicians begin with a lot of debt. They need income fast. They will be hired by the HMOs and clinics. They will not reach the salary level of this generation of physicians. They will be upper-middle-class income-earners."
New doctors will have to work so long to pay off their debt, the number of Americans who choose to be doctors will plummet. Just like in Britain and Canada, all doctors will soon be foreigners.
"There will be no roll-back of this law. It is going to be enforced for as long as the U.S. government has money.
That may not be as long as Obama thinks."
I don't know if Obama thinks the government will keep operating long. He just wants to make sure he's looted us as thoroughly as possible on behalf of his Marxist allies before the collapse so they'll win the struggle for power. They won't win.
WAR ON DRUGS:Lew Rockwell wasn't the only one who predicted states would move to legalize and tax marijuana to gain revenue. I predicted it right after the crash in 2008 because that's the real reason prohibition ended. The government's lust for other people's money is stronger than it's lust to prohibit peaceful behavior.
POLICE STATE:
Massachusetts prosecutors pressure Bank of America to cut the principle on underwater mortgages. Prosecutors are stealing from Bank of America on behalf of the owners of underwater mortgages.
"Under pressure by Massachusetts prosecutors, Bank of America Corp. said Wednesday it would reduce mortgage-loan balances as much as 30% for thousands of troubled borrowers, in what could presage a wider government effort to encourage banks to offer debt reduction to ease the mortgage crisis.""Encourage". Orwell would be proud.
POLITICS:
Whenever the people's desire for small government starts to bubble up, liberals always say it will hurt Republicans. I suppose they mean it will hurt Republicans like it hurt Ronald Reagan. If Reagan managed to run in 2012, he'd get at least 75 percent of the vote. But establishment Republicans won't allow a small government candidate to compete for the nomination since Reagan.
If Ron Paul added nullification of Obamacare to his agenda, he'd win the presidency in 2012.
FOREIGN POLICY:
I'm all for the US and Russia cutting nuclear arsenals, but I fear the details will show Obama gave Russia a big victory. He hates America too much to do otherwise.
MISC:
Criticism of OnStar and black boxes.
Free market meal doesn't harm customer despite lack of government control, just like free market meals did for hundreds of years before government seized control of the restaurant business.
Now Obama plans to seize all retirement plans and put every American on one government pension plan. As the pension plan crisis becomes better know, this idea will gain steam.
The crash of 2008 led to the second revival of Austrian Economics. I think I discovered mises.org shortly before that, but probably not by much. I wanted to learn more about the Fed, and I found mises.org in that search.
First Fess Parker then Peter Graves. I guess Robert Culp was called home to make three.
More on the benefits of barefoot running.
Why would somebody call this refinement of Darwin's theory a farewell to Darwinism. That's like dismissing an old scientific theory saying the Earth is spherical because it's not a perfect sphere.
No comments:
Post a Comment