The View From 1776

Read Why Detroit Has an Especially Bad Union Problem: Collective bargaining agreements mean the UAW can make or break Big Three CEOs.

Related articles are:

Labor Unions: Socialism’s Shock Troops

Labor Union Greed

Labor-Liberal Incest

Labor Unions Admit They Are Killing American Jobs

Labor Unions: A Brood of Vipers

Labor Unions: Double-Edged Blade

NO ONE IS SMARTER THAN THEIR CRITERIA...
By Jim Baxter
Sgt. USMC
WWII & Korean  War
a point-man/follower of The Lion of Judah
http://www.choicemaker.net

Though the election is over, Gov. Sarah is being attacked by the leftist-humanists because they fear her re-appearance on a future ballot. They are afraid and rightly so! She is a perceptive, excellent candidate to represent  the Founders’ Principles and our American way of life with intelligent courage.

Additionally, since no one is smarter than their criteria, the collectivists are working from a pre-chosen mediocre (and worse) set of man-made, carnal-ruled opinions that delimit perception of consequences-of-choice prior to choosing. In other words, they lack Vision. Based on a universe-sized ignorance, such devices are self-imposed, thus the lefties can accurately and historically be defined as unintelligent.

On the other hand, Sarah and her chosen criteria, which are far superior to any man-made system of opinion, reasonably scare those who possess no practicing standard greater than mediocrity. Their collectivist  opinion rises no higher than eyebrows - or belly-button.

Sarah lives life governed by God’s superior transcendent principles as found in The Holy Bible.  Judeo-Christian principles are the founding precepts of the greatest nation in human history: America!  Including, but not limited to, Human Defined: Earth’s Choicemaker, Unique Individual Value,  Personal Rights and Responsibility, and Representative Government. Add: The Creative Process is a choice-making process and functions best in Freedom.

Sarah is recognized by friends and admirers as a worthy representative of all that is wonderful about America. 2012 will be here shortly. Keep your eye on this courageous intelligent leader  -  and pray! 

The writer gives us both concise definitions of the various manifestations of gold standards (some of which are not real gold standards), and an excellent monetary history.  He makes it clear that fiat money inflation is the acid that has repeatedly corroded our economy since early in the 20th century.

For a list of links to articles that I have posted in the past couple of years on the same general subject, see Helicopter Ben Hovers.

See also How FDR Destroyed the Dollar.

If you believe in man-made global warming, as president-elect Obama and his EPA appointees do, your belief has to be based on blind faith in a reversionary paganism.  Your faith must also be coupled with the conviction that socialist state planners can control, not only our economy, but the entirety of God’s creation.

Your faith is blind ignorance, because there is absolutely zero proof for it.  Regarding the computer models upon which your faith is based, read Top 10 Dud Global Warming Predictions.

As the article states, computer models are not scientific devices to analyze data, seeking a rational hypothesis.  Model builders start with predetermined conclusions and endeavor to fit selected data to those conclusions.  To date, computer models have been completely useless in predicting what actually happened in the past. 

Computer models are devices for projecting what might happen if all of your personal prejudices were actually true.  As the old admonition puts it: “Garbage in, garbage out.”

We can’t even predict with complete accuracy what will happen to the weather in a relatively confined geographic area within the forthcoming week.  Yet Al “The Bloviator” Gore expects his blindly faithful acolytes to accept his predictions of what will happen a decade from now.

Mr. Herbert is about as far left in his liberal-progressive ideology as any writer in today’s mainstream media.  Yet he has glimpsed enough of the truth to identify consumption floated by excessive debt as a cause of our present economic woes.

Read the whole column: Stop Being Stupid.

All conservatives, I believe, will wholeheartedly second Mr. Herbert’s assertion that, “Somehow, over the past few decades, that has become the American way: to pay for things — from wars to Wall Street bonuses to flat-screen TVs to video games — with money that wasn’t there.”

There are, however, important points of divergence reflecting Mr. Herbert’s economic paradigm. 

The picture that Mr. Herbert conveys is of an economy that is, and should be, collectivized and managed by a coterie of experts in Washington; an economy in which individual people and businesses are incapable of making beneficial decisions for themselves; an economy in which only the government has the right to and the ability to make proper choices for use of scarce economic resources.

A few phrases from his column illustrate the point:

... top government officials and financial titans who were supposed to be guarding the nation’s wealth…

We shipped American jobs overseas by the millions and came up with the fiction that this was a good deal for just about everybody. We could have and should have taken the time and made the effort to think globalization through...

“We,” he says, meaning apparently the Federal government, should regulate the process of business globalization.  Just after World War II when countries were still devastated by the war, this was known as currency control, under which no one could exchange his local money for foreign currency or make any kind of investment outside his country without the approval of government ministers.  When currency controls finally were lifted, international trade bloomed and standards of living rose rapidly.

There is broad agreement that we have no choice but to go much more deeply into debt to jump-start the economy. But we have tremendous choices as to how we use that debt.

We should use it to invest in the U.S. — in a world-class infrastructure (in its broadest sense) to serve as the platform for a world-class, 21st-century economy, and in a system of education that actually prepares American youngsters to deal successfully with the real world they will be encountering.

We need to invest in a health care system that improves the quality of American lives, enhances productivity…

We need to care for our environment (if long-term survival means anything to us)...

And, finally, we need to start living within our means and get past the nauseating idea that the essence of our culture and the be-all and end-all of the American economy is the limitless consumption of trashy consumer goods.

The elitist perspective of liberal-progressivism is clearly revealed in Mr. Herbert’s phrase “limitless consumption of trashy consumer goods.” Since the inception of socialist doctrine in Revolutionary France of the early 19th century, socialist intellectuals have maintained that ordinary citizens are offered too many choices of consumer goods.  The assumption is that bureaucratic regulators can manage the economy more efficiently than individual people and businesses and that one means of making the economy more efficient is to limit the numbers of products and services offered to the citizenry.

It’s true that a free-market economy produces a profusion of products, some of which are trashy.  But that is an inseparable part of the liberties for which the colonists fought in 1776.  The right of entrepreneurs to produce things that consumers will buy (apart from criminally connected items) was one of the intentions of the Bill of Rights, which endeavored to protect private economic and political liberties from arbitrary government action of the type favored by liberal-progressives.  Think of the Boston Tea Party, sparked by a British order requiring Boston citizens to purchase taxed tea from a handful of merchants selected by the crown.

Mr. Herbert uses the familiar liberal-progressive-socialist term “investment” for expansion of government regulation, for example a nationalized, socialized health care system. 

Investment, by definition, is expenditures intended to increase future production efficiency and output.  Socialized medicine does nothing of the kind.  It merely transfers money from wealthier people to poorer people, as determined by Federal bureaucrats, while overlaying the process with costly regulations administered by tens of thousands of paper shufflers who add not a whit to the real GDP.  In farming terms, this is known as eating your seed corn.

Liberals as a whole, perhaps not Mr. Herbert, assume that greater funding for teachers’ unions will improve our students’ level of academic achievement.  In reality, Federal funding for education since the inception of President Johnson’s Great Society has produced a steadily declining quality of education.  The only beneficiaries have been the teachers’ unions and the liberal-progressive-politicians whose election campaigns the unions finance.

American education before the Great Society was incomparably better, in fact among the best in the world.  Education then was a strictly local matter, controlled by local school boards that were free to hire and fire teachers on the basis of competence.  And schools were free to expel disruptive students who were interfering with the opportunity of other students to get an education.

Mr. Herbert’s liberal-progressive-socialist paradigm makes it impossible for him to connect the economic dots that form a complete picture of economic reality.  This, no doubt, because the liberal-progressive-socialist economic paradigm is an entirely theoretical construct that must be forced into a box labeled social justice, i.e., redistribution of wealth to make us all equally poor.

Mr. Herbert seems not to recognize that his derogation of rampant consumption funded by debt runs into a head-on collision with one of the most basic doctrinal elements in liberal-progressive-socialism: the belief that consumption is the driver of the economy and that full-employment levels of consumption depend upon government deficit spending.

At bottom, all of the economic phenomena of which he complains originate in welfare-state, social justice programs funded by Federal deficit spending, which is financed by the Federal Reserve’s limitless expansion of the fiat money supply, with its inevitable inflationary effects.

History for centuries records the same set of phenomena attendant upon paying for government expenditures with fiat money that cannot be converted into a valuable commodity like gold.  Prices rise faster than wages, because inflation negatively impacts business costs, which retards job creation and wages increases.  As prices rise (think of the housing boom), money becomes worth less, leading people to save less.  In the early stages of rapidly increasing fiat money expansion (where we are now), interest rates decline, leading people to take speculative risks to attain investment returns high enough to offset the effects of inflation.  Because money steadily loses purchasing power, people are encouraged to borrow increasing amounts of money to fund consumption, expecting to be able to repay the debt in the future with ever cheaper money.

The bottom line is that Mr. Herbert unknowingly is damning the economic orthodoxy of his own liberal-progressive-socialism:  Keynesian economics.  In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes propounded a discredited theory still advocated by liberals like Paul Krugman, which denounced savings as the cause of the Depression and recommended massive government deficit spending to offset private saving. 

In Keynesian doctrine, consumption expenditures, for anything from digging and filling useless holes to funding anti-business regulation, is the route to economic salvation.  This is the nature of President Bush’s earlier economic stimulus plan and of the incoming Obama administration’s $ trillion stimulus plan.

For a more comprehensive depiction of reality, read Ronald J. Pestritto’s Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Theodore Roosevelt Was No Conservative:
There’s a reason he left the GOP to lead the Progressive Party.

As I wrote in Teddy Roosevelt: Progressive President:

In the political sphere, Progressivism is a synonym for socialism, and for our sect called liberalism. Socialism necessitates collectivized power at the highest levels of the political state, leaving open a pathway to totalitarianism.  Teddy Roosevelt was the first President to march along that pathway…

Looking longingly at the scientific and academic excellence achieved under Otto von Bismarck’s German Empire, Croly said that America needed a strong man who would take the bull by the horns, undeterred by the Constitution, and simply impose socialistic collectivism as Bismarck had done when he instituted the world’s first welfare state in 1881…

Teddy Roosevelt, and later to some extent Woodrow Wilson, were the answers to academic intellectuals’ prayers. 

A damn-the-Constitution activist, Teddy Roosevelt became President after William McKinley’s assassination by social-justice anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901.  Without pre-approval from Congress, for example, Teddy committed the nation to the cost of building the Panama Canal and started a civil war in Central America to obtain territorial rights. When asked where in the Constitution he found authority for these actions, Roosevelt said that he knew what the situation required and simply did it, whether Congress would concur or not.  The Constitution, of course, requires that the Senate advise and consent on treaty matters and reserves to Congress the exclusive right to authorize expenditures of Federal funds. 

In the Bismarckian mould, Teddy Roosevelt was a President prepared to take the bull by the horns and overthrow the entrenched ideas of Jeffersonian individuality that stood in the way of intellectuals’ conception of social justice and progress. 

While he was not a devout believer in the religion of socialism, the effect of Teddy Roosevelt’s terms in office was to promote the liberal-socialist cause.  Like all college-educated persons of that era, Roosevelt had been thoroughly exposed to the secular and materialistic doctrine of socialism, first as a Harvard undergraduate, then in public life.  In his defense, it may be said that he confronted an America that was fundamentally different in the economic sphere from the America of 1776.

Liberal-progressives responding to this website usually spew four-letter words (demonstrating an inability to think) or ignore the points made in the website post and attack things not in the post.

Responding to Helicopter Ben Hovers, Mr. Jay commented:

“It is very easy to complain, complain, complain, without suggesting a better course.”

My response:

Liberal-progressive-socialists have interminably demonstrated the truth of that statement, for the past eight years.  Their hatred for President Bush has produced nothing but complaints and accusations. 

Seeing the world as beset by an evil conspiracy, which can be combatted only by esoteric knowledge possessed by the elect (in this case Obama The One) is a fundamental characteristic of the modern-day gnostic religion that is liberal-progressive-socialism.

Mr. Jay, next commented:

“Or perhaps Mr. Brewton favors doing nothing?  Government should just let the economy free fall?  Sort of his version of a pure Darwinian “market-based” solution!  Only the fittest would survive.”

My response:

Far from advocating doing nothing, I have repeatedly called for reversion to policies based on the wisdom of experience, rather than always-failed academic theories of the sort that have bedeviled the nation since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s. 

Among them:

1.  Return to a gold standard, which in the past exerted a hugely beneficial effect in two directions,

First, a sound currency was maintained in a low-inflation economy, which stimulated savings as the basis for sound, long-term investment that produced jobs and a higher standard of living.

Second, without the Fed’s flooding the economy with an over-expansion of money, Congress was restrained from its present-day deficit spending.  Before 1929, both Democrats and Republicans took it for granted the the Federal budget had to be balanced.  That meant no new spending without existing surplus tax revenues, or passing new taxes (with the public resisting the latter strenuously).

2.  Make President Bush’s tax cuts permanent, reduce government spending drastically, and add tax breaks that support and encourage personal savings.  Savings are the only real foundation for productive investment without the speculative manias such as the dot.com tech company boom and the housing bubble.

3.  Repeal the Employment Act of 1946, which charged the Fed with managing the economy, as called for in socialist theory since the first decades of the 19th century.  Alan Greenspan recently testified to Congress that no group of individuals, no matter how intelligent, can possibly absorb and process all the inputs from the economy on a real-time basis.  Chairman Bernanke’s seat-of-the-pants performance has so far borne that out.  Financial markets are still massively in disarray, and he completely failed to forsee the disaster as it approached us.  In fact, only a few months before the sub-prome meltdown, he was parroting John Maynard Keynes’s drivel that the problem was an excess of savings.

4.  Repeal the Wagner Act and make labor unions subject to the anti-trust laws.  Every state with a strong labor union bias has seen steady waning of its business activity and employment base.  Business avoids high taxes and punitive regulation.