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Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Quote of the Day
From the Wall Street Journal’s “Best of the Web:”
To be sure, America has made some racial progress. But the dream of equality will not be truly and fully realized until President Obama’s political detractors treat him with the same respect George W. Bush’s detractors showed him.
President To Fire Reid and Pelosi For Incompetence?
Scott Ott (aka ScrappleFace) wonders why the President, having fired GM CEO Rick Wagoner for incompetence, doesn’t apply the same standards within government.
Quote:
“We cannot give the appearance of using tax dollars to reward leaders who have done a poor job,” said
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Saturday, March 28, 2009
Government as the Agent of Prosperity
A reader asserts that, in the chicken-or-egg-first debate, prosperity is not possible without organization of the economy by government.
David Airth, a reader who frequently posts thought-provoking ripostes to articles appearing on this website, commented in response to AIG Employees’ Side of the Story.
He wrote, in part:
It has always been government that first establishes the favorable circumstances and the common sense in which a healthy economy can and will flourish.
The validity of Mr. Airth’s assertion depends upon how one defines a healthy economy. If by healthy economy is meant one in which production of useful goods is maximized and individual standards of living rise significantly from generation to generation, then I do not believe one can find any such economy prior to the 17th century. Certainly not always has Mr. Airth’s assertion been valid.
Mr. Airth also comments:
Today
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Friday, March 27, 2009
A Response to Simplistic Atheism
Read R. R. Reno’s review of David Hart
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
AIG Employees’ Side of the Story
The President, Congress, and the attorneys general of New York and Connecticut have damned AIG’s bonus recipients, without any consideration of fairness, and without even a gesture in the direction of due process of law. Their motto is, “My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with facts.”
The following op-ed piece piece from the New York Times presents aspects of the bonus payments that got overrun as the President, Congress, and the public rushed to lynch AIG bonus recipients.
March 25, 2009
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Dear A.I.G., I Quit!
The following is a letter sent on Tuesday by Jake DeSantis, an executive vice president of the American International Group
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Another Straw In The Inflationary Wind
Inflation may be encroaching earlier than expected upon the President’s budget. Investors, at home and abroad, already are worried about the disrupting impact of the President’s proposed massive increases in Federal deficit spending as he works to extend socialistic management of the economy by Washington bureaucrats.
The Wall Street Journal, in its March 25th edition, reports:
China has voiced concerns about its dollar-denominated assets in recent weeks as the U.S. government prepares to bring a mountain of new debt to market to finance its economic-recovery plans. The Federal Reserve said last week that it will buy longer-term Treasury securities to keep borrowing costs low, but light demand for government paper could fan interest rates, possibly complicating the U.S. recovery…
Arthur Bass, a bond-futures trader at the brokerage firm Newedge USA in New York, said that he saw Wednesday’s Treasury sell-off as a continued correction from the rally last week after the announcement of the Fed’s plans. He said that Wednesday’s humdrum auction clearly contributes to the declines and that participants should be on the lookout for inflation over the longer haul. But he doesn’t believe that such a trend is imminent quite yet.
“The main issue right now is that there’s just a lot of supply out there,” said Mr. Bass. “The Treasury is selling a lot more than the Fed is buying.”
The weak U.S. auction came after a sale of U.K. government debt Thursday failed, the first failed auction of conventional U.K. government bonds since 1995. Like the U.S., the U.K. is hoping to sell a large quantity of new debt as it looks to stimulate its economy, but there are signs that investors are balking.
The fear is an “inability to control interest rates by governments, which is the next unintended consequence of the huge printing, and is coming earlier than expected,” said Lorenzo Di Mattia, manager of hedge fund Sibilla Global Fund.
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Sic Semper Socialismus
Britain’s socialist Labour Party Prime Minister boldly calls for what American liberal-progressive-socialists are more guarded in advocating: a one-world socialist government.
Britain’s socialist Prime Minister Gordon Brown is calling for steps toward unified world regulatory control of financial institutions. Naturally, under the direction of socialist European nations.
The Wall Street Journal reports on the Prime Minister’s speech before the European Parliament:
Europe should take a central role in establishing a new global financial system and work more closely with the U.S., the U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the European Parliament Tuesday.
“I propose that we as Europe take a central role in replacing what was once called the old Washington consensus with a new and principled economic consensus for our times,” he said in a session held in preparation for the summit of the Group of 20 nations in London April 2.
Mr. Brown has been trying to persuade leaders of the G-20 to back calls by U.S. President Barack Obama for significant new spending measures to try to jump-start the world economy.
“Never in recent years have we had an American leadership so keen to cooperate at all levels with Europe on financial stability, on climate change, on security, on development,” said Mr. Brown.
The model for the Prime Minister’s desiderata is the stultifying EU bureaucracy in Brussels, which seeks to override member nations’ culture and history and homogenize them into obedient satrapies under a collectivized overlordship.
Prime Minister Brown is also, like President Obama, a strong advocate of imposing crippling business taxes and hamstringing regulations to promote “green” programs that will impose Al Gore’s mythology of man-made global warming.
There you have it, folks: when the socialists bring the world’s financial institutions and energy sources under their collectivist councils, they will own the world.
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Tuesday, March 24, 2009
The Constitution Be Damned
Tocqueville forewarned us about the tyranny of majorities that by nature impose ill-considered policies trampling upon individual liberties, liberties which the Bill of Rights was enacted to protect.
The Constitution created a government that people expected to defend them against foreign aggression and to protect the natural law rights of individuals to life, political liberty, and free exercise of private property rights. Today, instead of protecting individual rights against mob will, we have a Federal government that follows the mob and presumes the power to force people to conform to the schemes of academic state-planners.
Decades of left-wing judicial activism and, now, Congressional rage enacted in punitive, ex post facto taxation, are inexorably undermining the Constitution’s intent.
Whatever you may think about the propriety of large bonuses paid to AIG employees, whether you like it or not, the bonuses were paid in accordance with legal contracts executed before AIG received bailout money. Those individuals had a legal right to the money. If the company or the Federal government wished to abrogate the contracts, the spirit infusing the Bill of Rights required them to adjudicate the matter in the courts of law. Among other things, the 14th Amendment declares “...No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Those are also limitations upon the Federal government, which Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, in the Federalist papers, argued were implicit in the Constitution.
As the Anti-Federalists vigorously asserted in the debate over ratification of the Constitution from 1787 to 1789, the citizens of the United States did not fight a war against the arbitrary tyranny of George III and Parliament only to replace them with a powerful Federal government, which they feared could ride roughshod over the people’s individual rights.
In the early decades of Constitutional government, as a bulwark against collectivization of power at the Federal level, the states retained and exercised the largest share of powers affecting citizens in their everyday conduct. In the 20th century, particularly after 1932, the states increasingly were relegated to minor roles as the Federal government usurped more and more tax revenues. The number of Federal regulatory agencies was expanded exponentially and hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations were added. Individuals and businesses found themselves ensnared in a web of red tape.
For a wide-ranging indictment of the mob-spirit tyranny displayed by our current Congress, with the tacit support of the President, read George F. Will’s column in the Washington Post, The Toxic Assets We Elected.
I am indebted to Tom Emerson, who alerted me to Mr. Will’s column.
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Sunday, March 22, 2009
Understanding Obama - One More Aspect
One of the President’s most fundamental aims is to “change” our healthcare system into one resembling the one-payer system in Canada and the UK.
To understand some of what that will mean to you as an individual dealing with medical needs, read Natasha Richardson and “Medical Capital” on the Mises Economics Blog.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Dollar Sinks Under Weight of Helicopter Ben Bernanke’s Latest Fiat Money Dump
As in the burgeoning of the 1970s stagflation, bond investors are beginning to fear onrushing, big-time inflation.
