The View From 1776
The Majority Consensus
Jeff Lukens recaps our sufferings under anti-Constitutional, atheistic, materialistic socialism.
Stimulating, Shovel-Ready Projects
Editor Paul Greenberg makes an interesting point.
Obama admitted that there really were no shovel-ready, major projects awaiting his stimulus spending in 2009. Domestically that remains true. Obama wants to waste billions on uneconomic and unneeded projects like California’s high-speed railroad that runs through sparsely populated areas and will never be able to cover its out-of-pocket operating costs.
In the Depression of the 1930s Franklin Roosevelt admitted around 1939 that he had poured massive amounts of deficit spending into every project he could think of, all to no avail. Unemployment remained in high double digits. What finally began to shrink unemployment was Roosevelt’s decision to begin building up our military forces in anticipation of entering World War II.
Today we have Obama’s quixotic and dangerous policies, on the one hand, of throwing money away on “green” energy projects, and, on the other hand, cutting back an immediately shovel-ready project: rebuilding our depleted military forces.
The Constitution And Electing The President
Robert Curry continues his exposition of the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment on the founding of our nation.
Atheistic Socialism vs. Classical Toleration
The classical version of toleration was exemplified in John Locke’s 1689 letter on toleration, in which he wrote that it is no business of the sovereign to interfere with any of his subjects’ individual right to believe and to worship as he pleases.
Our sovereign Barack Obama parts company with that ethic, which underlies the Bill of Rights First Amendment. Mr. Obama and his liberal-progressive-socialistic confreres work tirelessly to undermine Judeo-Christian values, promoting a no-limit hedonistic society as the desirable endpoint of personal licentiousness (without personal responsibility.)
Read about Obama’s latest outrage in Michael Gerson’s op-ed article, Obama plays his Catholic allies for fools.
Fed Feeds Distortion
Bernanke’s press conference announcement again booted the stock and bond markets, but did nothing to boost employment.
Kodak vs. Solyndra
Liberal-progressive-socialist state planners are not as successful as private investors in satisfying consumers’ wants.
Ramifications of MF Global
I’m indebted to Barton Bennett for the link to this, albeit extreme, assessment of what happened when a far-left leader of the Democrat-Socialist Party was allowed access to other people’s money.
Transcript for Ann Barnhardt Interview
Quote:
We are now living in a lawless, Marxist, Communist, usurped, what used to be a representative republic but is no more. This is no longer a nation of laws. This has now transformed into a nation of men. It doesn’t matter what crime you commit. In the case of Jon Corzine, this man has stolen in excess of a billion dollars. I think by the time it is all panned out it is going to be closer to $3 billion of customer funds that he stole. Why did he do it? Is he stupid? Well, of course he’s not stupid. This is a former head of Goldman Sachs. This man doesn’t have a low IQ per se. Why in the world would a man wake up in the morning one day and say you know what, I think I am going to steal all the customer seg funds in this FCM that I’m running, which is the biggest FCM in the country. Yeah, that sounds like a good plan. No. Why would a man like that even engage in a nefarious plot like this? Because he knew going into it he could get away with it. And the reason he could get away with it is he is in tight with the Obama regime. He is one of Obama’s highest fundraisers. Earlier this year Jon Corzine had a fundraiser dinner at his New York City apartment for Barack Obama where it was charged at $35,000 a plate.
The Roots of Environmentalism
Luddite environmentalism springs both from baby-boomer pagan mythology, and from blind selfishness.
Environmentalism and the Leisure Class
Quote:
In turning down Keystone, however, the President has uncovered an ugly little secret that has always lurked beneath the surface of environmentalism. Its basic appeal is to the affluent. Despite all the professions of being “liberal” and “against big business,” environmentalism’s main appeal is that it promises to slow the progress of industrial progress. People who are already comfortable with the present state of affairs—who are established in the environment, so to speak—are happy to go along with this. It is not that they have any greater insight into the mysteries and workings of nature. They are happier with the way things are. In fact, environmentalism works to their advantage. The main danger to the affluent is not that they will be denied from improving their estate but that too many other people will achieve what they already have. As the Forest Service used to say, the person who built his mountain cabin last year is an environmentalist. The person who wants to build one this year is a developer.
The So-called Stimulus Is Over, But The Crushing Debt Burden Remains
The fabled Keynesian “multiplier” boost to the economy from government deficit spending once again, as it always has since the 1930s, failed to produce promised results. Now even more wealth, via taxes and currency inflation, will have to be sucked from working citizens to pay off the trillions of dollars of debt Obama fecklessly dumped on workers.
Managing The Economy
The Federal Reserve, among other things, is charged with managing the economy to prevent unemployment. Recently released transcripts of Fed meetings in 2006 demonstrate that even a well-informed elite group of regulators cannot do the job.
The Environmental Gestapo
Poetic Justice
Two liberal-progressive causes motivated by hatred of private enterprise collide head-on in California. Another example of the inherent limitations of state-planners’ minds.
Read Revival Of Iconic California Condor Threatens State’s Wind Farm Boom on the Forbes website.
Historical Obfuscation
In the United States, a large part of historical truth has systematically been smothered or ignored by academics.
More On The Nature Of Inflation
It’s more complex than most citizens assume.
Faith In Fairy Tales And Willful Ignorance
An evolutionary psychologist asserts that evolution in the ways humans use their brains, influenced exclusively by external, materialistic conditions, has made our era the least violent period in history.
Government "Investment" Boondoggle
Each Chevy Volt sold thus far may have as much as $250,000 in state and federal dollars in incentives behind it – a total of $3 billion altogether, according to an analysis by James Hohman, assistant director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
Volt sales, according to the Wall Street Journal, have been anemic, and battery fires have raised safety issues. Sales of its competitor, the Leaf, have been equally disappointing.
The Chevy Volt, like all “investments” imposed by liberal-progressive-socialist state planners, is a flop and a drain on the nation’s limited financial resources. Every such “investment” removes resources otherwise available for creation of real jobs to produce goods that real people willingly buy.
None of this deters liberal-progressive-socialists, whose purpose in life is to displace economic freedom with their presumed wisdom. The rest of us are expected to fall in line and follow orders, while the purchasing power of our earnings and savings is depreciated by inflation and our standard of living is dragged down in the name of socialistic equality.
An International Gold Standard Beats The Rule Of The Governing Elite
In a Forbes Magazine op-ed article Charles Kadlec discusses the assessment published in a Bank of England research paper.
The Cornerstone of Liberal-Progressive-Socialist Ideology
One must start with a deformed theory of human nature to comprehend the rationale for the welfare state.
Understanding The Nature of Inflation
Inflation is a monetary phenomenon. Too few people understand its true nature and its devastating impact on their lifetimes.
Just Doing What Comes Naturally
Even the bluest of mainstream, socialist media express dismay over Jon Corzine’s misconduct. They shouldn’t be surprised by it.
After all, Corzine, a huge financial contributor to the Democrat/Socialist Party when he was co-head of Goldman Sachs, became a Democrat/Socialist Senator from New Jersey, then that state’s governor. In all those roles, Corzine displayed the liberal-progressive-socialist presumption that money other people earn is, of right, property of the socialist state to be redistributed as liberal-progressive-socialists see fit.
It’s hardly a big step from there to the presumption of entitlement to convert $1.2 billion of clients’ money to his firm’s use.
Anti-Job-Creation EPA Twists Evidence
See Tainted EPA Report on Fracking.
Quote:
…it turns out that the EPA drilled two monitoring wells to some 900 feet – much deeper than water wells which are usually at about 300 feet – and indeed found hydrocarbons. In short, they drilled into the natural gas reservoir that has long attracted industry producers…In addition to noting that the EPA had in effect discovered natural gas by drilling into a natural gas reservoir, the company faulted the EPA’s “discovery” of various several man-made chemicals in the deep wells. Curiously, the agency found the same chemicals in the so-called “blank” water samples— the “ultra purified water commonly used in testing to ensure no contamination from field sampling procedures.” As Encana points out, the conclusion suggests “problems associated with EPA methodology”. No kidding.
Encana further complained that the EPA ignored historical evidence of naturally occurring contaminants in the area. They claim that the USGS reported about poor water quality in the 1880s and again in 1959 (preceding the start of drilling in the 1960s) due to “high concentrations of naturally occurring sulfate, total dissolved solids and pH levels which commonly exceed state and federal drinking water standards.” They also fault the EPA for not providing any “qualified” third party objective review of the report.
Obama clearly prefers to create a few dozen"green" jobs that produce energy at two to three times the cost of gasoline, rather than drilling for oil and natural gas, activity that brings thousands of jobs to poorer areas. The same attitude was displayed in his effectively killing Trans Canada’s plan for a pipeline to bring petroleum from Canada into mid-America, a project that would have created an estimated 150,000 jobs.
We Can Fervently Hope So
Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson makes the point that conditions for the unfolding economic disaster in Western Europe are dead ahead for the United States. In both cases, disaster’s source is the same: the religion of liberal-progressive-socialism, which is conceived in fantasy and divorced from reality.
They Can Run, But They Can't Hide Their Crimes Forever
The scoundrels masquerading as climate scientist already have motivated billions of dollars of wasted public funds as “investments” in uneconomic green boondoggles and inflicted unnecessary increases in energy costs on the public, hurting the poor more than anyone else.
Benny Peiser spotlights BBC In Cahoots With Climategate Scientists
Self-Destructive Economic Ignorance
George Reisman on Occupy Wall Street
A Provocative Foreign Policy Perspective
Self Reliance
Where Keynes Went Wrong
What if government spending depresses instead of stimulates?
Michael Moore
Liberal-progressive multiculturalism - our educational euphemism for the one-world-government aspiration of socialism - begets virulent anti-Americanism. Michael Moore, a voluble exemplar of that ethos, understandably is drawn to the liberal media frenzy surrounding the Occupy Wall Street demonstration.
For additional background information, read about Moore’s encomium to Castro and his slandering of anti-Castro Cubans.
Monetary Inflation
SOS! As the Dollar Sinks, So Goes the Recovery
Global Warming and Gnostic Paganism
The modern irruption of religious gnosticism, exemplified in the philosophical materialism of socialism, is a paradigm in which an intellectual elite see themselves alone possessed of special knowledge to restructure societies and perfect human life here on earth.
That sort of hubristic pretension to knowledge is simply a liberal-progressive urge to supplant our Creator God. It was described thousands of years ago in the Biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge to become like God. Such pretension has always resulted in expulsion from Eden.
Lenin and Stalin, backed by their American liberal-progressive supporters, were prepared to liquidate tens of millions of citizens in order to impose socialistic materialism, believing they were creating social, political, and economic perfection for future generations. Today’s believers in man-made global warming are prepared to wreck the world economy, casting millions of people into penury, to finance their schemes for reduction of so-called greenhouse gases.
Read this excerpt from Cardinal George Pell’s Global Warming Policy Forum annual lecture Wednesday at Westminster Cathedral Hall, London.
Democrat/Socialist Prefers Unemployment To Non-Union Jobs
Energy Department’s Stimulus Crime Wave
Jonathan Tobin Comments on the Commentary website.
Quote:
In testimony before the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, Gregory Friedman, the DOE’s Inspector General, said that his office had launched more than 100 criminal investigations in probes of the 2009 stimulus spending that emanated from that department. While the Solyndra debacle has garnered a great deal of attention in recent weeks, the problem goes deeper than the bogus activities of just one company. This government crime wave was focused on false submissions and claims as well as fraudulent use of funds. During the course of his presentation Friedman pointed to the fact that, despite what President Obama claimed at the time, that, “in reality, few ‘shovel ready projects’ existed.”
The Moral Vacuity of OWS
A public ethic based upon the liberal-progressive-socialistic dogma that the masses have a right to confiscate whatever they want is not the platform for a well-ordered society.
Green Job Productivity
This article from the Mises.org website deals with the lack of economic productivity of government jobs in general.
So-called green jobs come under the same analytical rubric. Nominally in the private sector, they would not exist in the absence of government subsidies and discriminatory regulations.
The overwhelming majority of people, even if they think that wind power, solar power, or an automobile running on electricity are good ideas, would walk away when presented with a full-cost bill for the product. Which is why corporate, private, and institutional investors, in a free-market economy where invested funds must earn their keep, won’t knowingly put their money into such deals. They make no economic sense.
From the Keynesian economic perspective of President Obama and his fellow liberal-progressive-socialists, however, an economic project need not be profitable without government intervention. Indeed, profit is equated with the sin of greed.
Keynesian doctrine preaches that government deficit spending is a form of saving and that any government spending on any project, however ridiculous, will stimulate the entire economy to produce more than the amount of the government expenditure.
Regrettably, as experience since 1933, and in our current Great Recession, proves, the real world doesn’t work that way.
ObamaSpeak
In George Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother’s NewSpeak uses ordinary words to mean different things at different times. The objective is to confuse his subjects. Any thought or action becomes potentially treasonous or criminal, paralyzing those who might wish to defend their liberties.
Eric Holder, Obama’s head of the Justice Department, similarly is distorting our language in a way calculated to diminish odds of our national survival.
The Teachers' Union Rip-Off
We get extortion, poor performance, and unconstitutional teaching of socialism as our state religion.
Justice
Schadenfreude is not an admirable emotion. But Jon Corzine deserves his misfortune.
As a Goldman Sachs partner he became immensely wealthy, as did his colleague Robert Rubin, who became Treasury Secretary under President Clinton. Mr. Corzine became a United State Senator, a role in which he did his best to further our national bankruptcy with liberal-progressive-socialist deficit spending. Later, as governor, he essentially bankrupted the state of New Jersey.
Now, displaying the same degree of imprudence, he has driven MF Global, his broker-dealer firm, into bankruptcy. At least he has finally done to his own money what he did his best, as a leading liberal-progressive, to do to the rest of us.
Two Sides To Every Question
Fact and Allah-Gorical fantasy (the delusion that Al Gore is a god capable of determining the world’s climate decades into the future) that verges into deceit.
Liberal-progressives don’t care about the truth. They lust for the power to control everybody else, the power that derives from controlling sources and uses of all the world’s energy.
A Prudent Federal Reserve System
President Nixon severed our last link with sound money in 1971, when he arbitrarily took the United States off the Bretton Woods version of a gold standard.
President Franklin Roosevelt began abandonment of prudence in 1933, when he arbitrarily reneged on contractual promises that Federal debts, including paper currency, had to be paid in gold at the holder’s option (see How FDR Destroyed the Dollar). Until 1933, the U. S. dollar was the among the strongest and most stable currencies in the world. With the stroke of a pen, President Franklin Roosevelt torpedoed it. We are still plagued with the resulting inflation.
The Fed’s number one responsibility ought to be insuring a sound dollar. And a gold standard is the surest way to do that.
The Fed, however, must entirely abandon its hubristic, and humanly impossible, presumption of managing the economy and preventing unemployment.
Recreating A Real Gold Standard
Sanity Makes a Comeback
Governments no longer can avoid confrontation with the destructive costs of green energy and other forms of rampant environmentalism.
The Great Green Energy Crack-Up
Mirror, Mirror On The Wall
Who’s the biggest comedian of all?
Joe Biden has to rank near the top of the list of politicians who entertain us with foot-in-mouth contortions. None of the Republican candidates can lay a glove on his almost 40-year record of comical verbal blunders and outright fabrications.
Read the Washington Post’s Biden’s shocking job-loss figures.
The Fed's Policy Blinders And Blunders
The Federal Reserve attempts more than it can accomplish or should attempt, but neglects what should be its primary duty: maintaining a sound dollar.
Obama Creates Jobs -- In Finland
Finns call summer the green winter. Maybe that led comrade Obama to give them “green” jobs funding.
Buying A Pig In A Poke
Just What Is a “Green” Job? Obama’s minions don’t know; it’s just whatever they decide to call “green.” But that doesn’t stop them from wasting money on undefined targets.
Doing so is in the Keynesian economic tradition, which says that government spending on anything, e.g., digging holes and refilling them the next day, re-digging the day after and re-filling ad infinitum, is “investment” in our future that, Obama promised in 2009, will revitalize the economy and drop unemployment below 8%.
It’s in that vein that New York Times socialist propagandist Paul Krugman clamors to increase Federal deficit spending to at least $8 trillion.
Obama Is A Losing Bet On The Economy
A prominent supporter of the Democrat/Socialist Party assesses the negative impact of Obama administration policies and rhetoric. I strongly oppose the gambling industry in which Mr. Wynn’s company is a major player, but from a purely business and job-creation standpoint, he is on the money.
The Daily Liar
Democrat/Socialist Party campaign tactic: the only thing you can do is lie when your record in office is disastrous.
Washington Post Fact Checker: Biden’s absurd claims about rising rape and murder rates
The truth: Democrat/Socialists want more deficit spending to go to public employee unions, your tax money that will cycle back to them as union support for liberal-progressive-socialist candidates.
Philosophical Materialism On Wheels
When An Intellectual Elite Controls Society
Belief in materialistic determinism, the secularist philosophical basis of liberal-progressive-socialism, fosters collectivistic tyranny. Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are following a well-worn trail leading inevitably in that direction.
Liberal-Progressive Social Engineering In Retrospect
Read Nathan Glazer’s Warning: Social policy often does more harm than good
Prevarication Persists
Obama and his henchmen, having a record dominated by abject economic failure and strong-arm imposition of socialistic programs like Obamacare, appear to have concluded that lying is the best course open to them. It worked for their fellow socialist Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister.
Facility Begets Falsehood
The various Darwinian evolutionary hypotheses all rest upon unproved assertions. In the final analysis, the best they can offer is “probably.”
"Caring" Liberal-Progressives vs. "Heartless" Conservatives
Editor and columnist Paul Greenberg smacks down a liberal-progressive’s pretentious ignorance.
The Rich Don't Fit The Democrat/Socialist Party Stereotype
Read The Backlash Against The Rich, by Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson.
Quote:
The trouble is that the wealthy don’t fit the stereotypes: They aren’t all pampered CEOs, hotshot investment bankers, pop stars and athletes. Many own small and medium-sized companies. Half the wealth of the richest 1% consists of stakes in these firms. That’s double their holdings of stocks, bonds and mutual funds, according to figures compiled by economist Edward Wolff of New York University. Reid would pay for Obama’s jobs plan by taxing the people who are supposed to create jobs. Does that make sense?
Why Obama's Jobs Plan Is A Wasteful Sham
The fatal flaw in Obama’s stimulus programs is the liberal-progressive, Keynesian assumption that government spending on make-work projects or on bolstering public employees’ labor unions has the same effectiveness as well assessed and skillfully executed investment expenditures by successful private businesses such as Apple, Inc. Government stimulus spending produces only a short-term blip in the economy, e.g., cash-for-clunkers, with no lasting improvement in employment or economic productivity.
Obama’s “jobs” plan is as short-sighted as the passenger who pays people to knock holes in the bottom of the boat they occupy in the middle of an ocean.
Government economic interventions always present negative tradeoffs. Interventions such as Obama’s stimulus and jobs programs necessarily deter private business investment, because of businessmen’s uncertainties about future interest rates, taxes, and regulations entailed by those interventions, as we have seen for the past two years. Read Job Creation: Jobs v Obama on the Mises website.
The Essentiality of Individuality
No government run by an intellectual elite has sufficient knowledge, foresight, and wisdom to make correct decisions for all the rest of us.
Government Doesn't Create Real Jobs
Government can spend taxpayers’ money on useless paper-pushing, make-work, or supporting labor unions. None of it, as experience repeatedly proves, adds permanent, real, productive jobs that can create revenues to improve people’s standards of living and taxes to pay for government boondoggles and necessities. Green jobs in particular are as near a total waste as possible.
Liberal-Progressive Insanity?
Collectivist management of the economy has been tried so many times, and failed miserably so many times, that liberal-progressives’ unwavering faith can hardly be regarded as intelligence.
Read Herbert Hoover: Father of the New Deal and Stimulus Packages: 1929 to 2008.
The Socialist Daily Worker, 10/1/11
A pair of responses to Keynesian, macroeconomic “solutions” for stalled economies here and in Europe.
Keynesianism: The (near) 80-year-old fallacy
Krugman: “Save” the euro by inflating it to death
Why A College Education Can Corrupt Your Children
Congressman Paul Ryan, on the Wall Street Journal website, reviews a book that sets forth the liberal-progressive societal ideal that appears to animate President Obama. Columbia University’s Professor Jeffrey Sachs, in The Price of Civilization, explains why fighting the War of Independence put us on the wrong track toward the wrong life goals from day one.
Democrat/Socialist Party At It Again
To make Obama look less awful, a phony chart, reportedly concocted in Nancy Pelosi’s office, falsifies Federal debt increases since President Reagan’s terms in office.
Maybe Pelosi hired Michael Mann, Penn State’s global-warming climatologist, because of his experience in creating fraudulent data exhibits.
The Intolerance of Liberal-Progressive Tolerance
George Will takes a look at Congressman Barney Frank’s threat to silence members of the Federal Reserve board who oppose the Fed’s destructive and ineffective inflationary policies.
European Socialist Citizens Of The World Reject Comrade Obama's Criticism
Floundering desperately for someone else to add to the George W. Bush list of scapegoats to account for his devastating ignorance of economics and business, Comrade Obama has attacked the entire European Union.
Germany, where Obama delivered his 2008 citizen-of-the-world speech to adoring Berlin throngs, has rejected Obama’s “overbearing, arrogant and absurd” pronouncement.
Green Companies Are Not Evergreens
Solar power companies flop, even with massive government subsidies.
Liberal-progressives’ track record of picking useful and viable outlets for their socialistic industrial policy is a disaster, beginning with Franklin Roosevelt’s TVA in the New Deal. TVA has never paid for itself and continues to exist only with government subsidies. Yet private electrical utility companies serving all adjacent areas do as good or better job for their customers and do it profitably.
The explanation is that liberal-progressivism aims for “social democracy,” a theoretical, fairy-tale political state in which private business is regulated and administered by bureaucrats. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are recent prominent examples.
Pump-Priming Futility
It failed for presidents Hoover and Roosevelt in the 1930s Depression, just as it continues to fail for Obama.
Greenhouse-Gas-Climatology Is Not Science
Writing in an op-ed article on the Wall Street Journal website, physicist Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at City College of New York, reports on the turmoil in physics created by experiments suggesting that neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light. If confirmed by other scientists’ experiments around the world, this would have wide-ranging ramifications in the physical sciences, upending key foundations of physics.
In sharp contrast to so-called climatology scientists, who falsify data, hide counter evidence, and engage in efforts to silence critics, Professor Kaku concludes:
Reputations may rise and fall. But in the end, this is a victory for science. No theory is carved in stone. Science is merciless when it comes to testing all theories over and over, at any time, in any place. Unlike religion or politics, science is ultimately decided by experiments, done repeatedly in every form. There are no sacred cows. In science, 100 authorities count for nothing. Experiment counts for everything.
The only possible conclusion is that Al-Gore-led charlatans proclaiming man-made-global warming are not engaged in scientific activity.
The Troy Davis Execution
People opposed to the death penalty were again in vigorous vocality protesting that the possibility alone of a convict’s innocence is sufficient to forestall execution. In fact they also oppose execution in cases where the evidence of guilt is overwhelming, often corroborated by the perpetrator’s confession.
At the same time, these same people (most of them, at least) have no compunctions about murdering millions of babies each year without even a gesture in the direction of due process of law. Stating it plainly, our society has come to the view that sexual promiscuity is a Constitutional “right” that trumps the God-given natural impulse of women to nurture their infants.
The Morality Of The Liberal-Progressive Collectivist State
In Paul Krugman’s perspective, Judeo-Christian spiritual religion is immoral. Only the collectivized, liberal-progressive-socialist political state can be the source of morality.
Today's Liberal-Progressive Hypocrisy
Liberal-progressives are distressed by the Senate and House Republican leadership’s “unprecedented” sending a letter to the Fed Board requesting that the Fed not pursue a new monetary round of debasing the dollar with excess fiat money creation.
This on the heels of Congressman Barney Frank’s recent demand that the law be changed to prevent more conservative regional Federal Reserve banks’ officials from participating in the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). The FOMC is the body that determines the Fed’s monetary policy. Congressman Frank stated that the presence of their dissenting votes has become a “significant constraint” on the Fed’s freedom [to continue debasing the dollar]. In the liberal-progressive lexicon, any discussion or questioning of socialistic policies can only be characterized as vicious obstruction.
The Republican leadership’s letter should probably be seen as no more than a counter to Congressman Frank’s attack, but the so-called mainstream media are color blind to anything other than socialist red.
Mr. Obama, Can You Spare a Dime’s (Worth of Commonsense)?
Liz Peek of the Fiscal Times spotlights one more of Obama’s many counter-productive proposals, this one aimed squarely at the deserving poor.
All of Obama’s supposed programs to jump start the economy and to revive employment have hammered down private business, the one and only source of real economic revival. It’s obvious that his aim is really the socialist-gospel push to wipe out capitalistic individualism and to make everybody a government employee, under the regulatory control of a self-appointed intellectual elite.
How else to explain his relentless obsession with “the rich” that, in this instance, blinds him to the damage he will do to the poor?
Liar! Liar!
Obama is consistent; he lies repeatedly.
Once again the liberal-iconic Washington Post spears deliberate misrepresentations in Obama’s recent speech announcing his “jobs” plan, which is just another welfare-state, deficit spending, re-election ploy.
Democrat/Socialist Party Civil Discourse
Last January, when Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot and others killed by a deranged individual, liberal-progressives were quick to blame conservatives who had disagreed, sometimes in strong language, with Democrat/Socialist Party policies and actions. Mainstream liberal-progressive media self-righteously called for muffling conservative voices in the name of civility.
Obama, the head socialist, remains silent, however, regarding physical violence by labor unions, the poster boys for world socialism and class warfare. His failure to denounce such illegal, destructive action, as well as violent language by labor union leader Jimmie Hoffa, spotlights the noxious hypocrisy of liberal-progressive calls for civil discourse, revealing them as no more than attempts to stifle freedom of speech.
Obama And Bernanke Aim At The Wrong Target
The U.S. economy is stalled, not because of insufficient consumer and government spending, but because of much depressed investment by private businesses.
Economist Robert Higgs lays out the numbers from the Obama administration’s own government bureau. Consumer expenditures and government spending are well above their initial recession levels. Obama’s mis-named jobs plan (really just a re-run of the unsuccessful $800 billion 2009 stimulus plan) obviously is aimed at the wrong economic target, however effective a use of taxpayers’ money it may prove to be to re-elect Obama.
Our intractable unemployment problem results from extremely depressed levels of private business investment. Governments don’t create productive jobs. The only source of productive job creation is private business investment. And such business investment remains depressed because of Obama’s socialistic animus against capitalism and private business.
Liberal-Progressives And Democracy
Pure democracy is little more than a mob looting and destroying society in slow motion. And our version of democracy - Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal welfare state - tends strongly in that direction, far removed from the federal republic established by the Constitution in 1787-89.
Your Money's Worth
You sure don’t get it with Obama and his green jobs obsession, according to the liberal-progressive Washington Post.
Doing Nothing Is The Best Policy
As Thomas Sowell reminds us, economic recessions have become long-enduring and devastating only since presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt initiated liberal-progressive-socialistic intervention by the Federal government in the 1930s. Obama is repeating their mistakes. We may be in for a replay of the 12-year Great Depression or the 1970s stagflation.
Pettifoggery And Impracticality
Michael Barone examines Obama’s attempt at legerdemain.
Same Song, Second Verse
Could be better, but it’s gonna’ be worse.
A New York Times headline in the September 10 edition says it succinctly:
Employers Say Jobs Plan Won’t Lead to Hiring Spur
Socialist State Planning: Obama Wants To Repeat 2009 Stimulus Failure
The president’s so-called jobs plan is a re-run of feckless Keynesian deficit spending, the same sort of spending that earlier produced only higher unemployment and a stagnant economy.
Keynes himself opined that government deficit spending was a form of “saving,” and it mattered not what the deficit money was spent on. That baseless belief seems to be what underlies Obama’s proposed “jobs plan.”
Obama Prevaricates
Even the liberal-progressive Washington Post isn’t buying the president’s claim.
Obama’s whopper of a claim on tax cuts
Socialism Reprised
Reality is far removed from the theoretical vision of socialism as an idyllic society in which people, not as individuals, but as “communities,” control their lives and destinies.
Democrat/Socialist Party Campaign Myth
Were we in paradise, but failed to realize it?
Quote:
Progressives have a narrative that just won’t quit, even when the facts contradict them. Whether it is Paul Krugman or Robert Reich or an editorial writer of the New York Times, the narrative goes like this: From the New Deal to 1981, America was a virtuous, prosperous country that flourished on unionized industries and high tax rates, with many key industries heavily regulated by government.
Nothing Personal; Just Business
A typical, caring, liberal-progressive labor union thug in action; get him a wheel-chair-bound Tea Party member to batter with a baseball bat.
Obama Bombs In State-Planned Industrial Policy
At the beginning of modern socialism, in the 1820s, its founder Henri de Saint-Simon and his band of engineer followers, were confident that businessmen, motivated by profit, were too obtuse to promote innovation and scientific creativity in their fields. Saint-Simon’s engineers became our first social engineers, dedicated to the proposition that only government bureaucrats, who alone presumably would work for the public interest, were capable of selecting which companies and which industries should be promoted or allowed to operate in a good socialist society.
Europe’s government-favored companies since then seldom have competed successfully with their American counterparts (think Machine Bull vs IBM). Obama’s socialist industrial policy has been equally barren.
Wind Energy Costs Outweigh Benefits
Read Paul Driessen’s analysis.
Inflation Wipes Out The Middle Class
Further to the message of Nixon’s Worst Act. read Charles Kadlec’s The Price of Abandoning The Gold Standard in the Forbes website.
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...a gold standard is extraordinarily good at maintaining the buying power of the dollar. From 1948 to 1967 inflation averaged less than 2% per year. Interest rates were low and stable, with the yield on AAA corporate bonds averaging less than 4%. Moreover, if Nixon and his successors had maintained the promise that a dollar was worth 1/35 of an ounce of gold, a barrel of oil today would sell for less than $2.50.
The Truth About Fascism
Everything you were taught in school is wrong.
Liberal-Progressive Policies Raise Black Unemployment
Read Professor Walter Williams’s analysis.
As usually is the case with liberal-progressive policy intentions, good and bad, standards of living are lowered and personal freedoms curtailed.
Green Energy Comes Up Short
In addition to forcing citizens, with a disparate impact on lower-income people, to pay three to six times as much for energy, mandated green energy is dangerously inadequate.
Liberal-Progressivism Flops Again
Thomas Sowell writes that Obama’s new New Deal is suffering the same failures as FDR’s New Deal, for the same sorts of reasons.
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As unusual as 9 percent unemployment rates may seem to the current generation of Americans, unemployment rates stayed in double digits for months and years on end during the 1930s. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration followed policies very similar to those of the Obama administration today. He also got away with it politically by blaming his predecessor.
Even The New York Times Admits It
The self-appointed journal of record for liberal-progressive-socialist propaganda, reports in its August 18, 2011, edition:
Number of Green Jobs Fails to Live Up to Promises.
Bernanke's Bailout Of Foreign Banks
Wall Street and the world banking community have unexpected reason to love the Fed’s debasement of the dollar.
A Provocative Thesis
Jeff Lukens speculates about the role of hedge fund managers in the 2008 presidential election and in the upcoming 2012 election.
The Unity Of The Constitution And The Scottish Enlightenment
Liberal-progressivism - in all its manifestations from Soviet Communism, to European socialism, and Hitler’s National Socialism - is founded in the repeatedly disproved theory that intellectuals can restructure political society in ways that will perfect human nature. Philosophers of the Scottish enlightenment and those who crafted our Constitution were firmly and correctly certain that human nature has always been the same and will remain unchanged.
Robert Curry explores that understanding.
Considering The Alternatives
Obama’s Keynesian interventionist policies clearly have made economic conditions worse. What would have happened if he had made no interventions, as last happened in the deeper recession of 1920-21? What if he had done as Paul Krugman advocates and expanded his deficit spending an additional $6 to $8 trillion?
Obama's Record Of Executive Failure
Jonathan Alter, in a recent Bloomberg column, asks, “Tell me again why Barack Obama has been such a bad president?”
Commentary’s Peter Wehner responds.
Please understand, Obama’s failures are not the failure of his economic policies to live up to the mythology of liberal-progressivism. As I’ve written before, the public’s naive faith that the Federal government (Republicans or Democrat/Socialists) can manage the economy, inculcated by our socialistic educational system for nearly a century, is dangerous nonsense.
The real failure is Obama’s willingness to sacrifice the nation’s recovery and future economic survival to theoretical egalitarian social justice at any price.
Fed Policy Worsens Economic Inequality
Ironically, liberal-progressivism’s social-justice, redistributive, Keynesian, easy money policy depresses GDP growth and job creation, while aggravating income inequality.
Read Rich Danker’s article in Forbes Magazine.
The Fed's Bubblelonian Monetary Policy
The stock market and giant money-center banks are raking in profits, while small businesses and unemployed workers languish.
Is Monetary Inflation Spreading to Consumer Goods?
Read Robert Murphy’s essay on the Mises.org website.
Christianity vs. Socialism
Liberal-progressives frequently assert that socialism is more in accord with original Christianity than Christianity itself.
NASA "Scientists" Inspired By Al Gore
NASA Study: Global Warming May Prompt Alien Attack