Thursday, July 31, 2008

ANWR Drilling Would Provide Quick Relief

With record oil prices, many on the Right (as defined with today's labels) have understandably called for the federal government to remove its restrictions on oil exploration and drilling in ANWR (located in Alaska) as well as other federal lands and offshore water areas.[1] They point out that these federal restrictions, in conjunction with local environmental activism, have resulted in the absurd situation where 94 percent of federal land, and 97 percent of federal offshore waters, are not being leased by energy companies. The US government itself estimates that its own prohibitions currently render 18 billion barrels in the outer continental shelf (OCS) and 19 billion barrels located under federal lands off limits. Note that these are very conservative estimates, because nobody has gone out and extensively explored the areas where it is illegal to extract oil!

I'm scratching my head and trying to understand why the Democrats are so adamantly opposed to drilling in ANWR and elsewhere when we are sending billions to other countries in exchange for oil. I consider the ravings of Ms. Pelosi: "I'm trying to save the planet!" and Mr. Reid: "Oil is making us sick!" and I wonder if they're serious. Well, I know they're seriously nuts. Until we can develop economically feasible technologies to incorporate nuclear, solar and wind power in our homes and cars, we are going to require coal and oil. We might as well use what we have instead of paying the Saudis and others for theirs.

The cost of socialism

America was blessed both with abundant natural resources and individual freedom, the backbone of enterprise. The combination rendered American productivity the envy of the world. Based on the strength of our industry and productivity, the American Treasury became the world's largest.

Why would America swap a history of successful capitalism for a murky future of socialism? The answer is politics.

Government intervention in the functioning of the economy is counter-productive.

Consenting to be Abused

Stopped on a lonesome stretch of highway, at the mercy of an armed man who has the power to arrest, very few citizens feel free to refuse. The Illinois State Police report that 94 percent of white motorists and 96 percent of minority ones "consent" to such searches.

Is that because they have nowhere else they'd rather be? Is it because they get a kick from watching a cop take apart their cars in an effort to put them behind bars? Or could it be because they suspect that refusing a cop is far too dangerous?

Just say "no" and they have to let you go. If they really want to search your vehicle, they'll make up a reason to do it and won't need your permission.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Vote 'no' on Election Day

"Voting for a bad candidate of either party is the surest way to waste your vote," Farah says. "If you want to promote real positive political change in America in 2008, the best way is to reject them both – choosing a third-party alternative or writing in another choice. Just imagine the message this will send the Republican and Democratic party establishments if millions of us do that."

At the same time, "None of the Above" strongly encourages participation in the election and makes the case for cleaning house of deeply flawed, entrenched incumbents in Congress who also exceed their authority under the Constitution.

Another voice joins the chorus (see here and here) to not cast a vote for either of the two mainstream candidates.

Environmentalists' Hold on Congress

Let's face it. The average individual American has little or no clout with Congress and can be safely ignored. But it's a different story with groups such as Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club and The Nature Conservancy. When they speak, Congress listens. Unlike the average American, they are well organized, loaded with cash and well positioned to be a disobedient congressman's worse nightmare. Their political and economic success has been a near disaster for our nation.

Walter Williams explains how lobbyists control our politicians with money and influence.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

The Greens are Going Crazy

It’s hard to ignore the fact that the Greens are going crazy, not just in the United States, but around the world. They are increasingly frantic over the opposition being voiced against global warming, one of the greatest hoaxes in modern history.

The Greens have bet everything on global warming as the reason for giving up the use of long established sources of energy such as oil, coal and natural gas. The object has been to slow everything the modern world calls progress.

In India, a spokesman for that nation of one billion people has flatly refused to accept the global warming hoax. China shows no sign of yielding to the global warming lies. The greatest agricultural and mercantile economy to have ever existed, the United States of America, continues to thwart its own growth by yielding to the lies.

Greens are basing their hysteria on weather prognostications over the next hundred years or so by people who cannot predict tomorrow's weather with a high degree of accuracy. They are also assuming we can affect the climate by altering human behavior which is insignificant when compared to global forces beyond our control.

Government Is Our Problem

Reagan's libertarian rhetoric was better than his actual governance or his ability to derail or even downsize the speeding train of Big Government. But his complaint about government is truer than ever.

Behind virtually every major social problem, financial crisis or corruption scandal that afflicts us lies the heavy hand or leaden foot of government, which today in all its levels gobbles up more than 50 percent of our annual GDP and controls more of our lives than ever.

The list of current government fiascoes and crises is long and bipartisan.

A list of abuses and usurpations by our government which is reminiscent of the listing of charges against King George in the Declaration of Independence. Rebellion anyone?

Nothing but pain

"I have days - growing more frequent all the time - when I'm convinced the time is now upon us that some Big Events are about to occur. The world economy and political system will share in the chaos about to be unleashed."

I know what you are thinking. You are saying to yourself, "Hey! That sounds a lot like what the Stupid Loudmouth Mogambo (SLM) is always yammering about, right before he starts getting hysterical about how it is all caused by the Federal Reserve creating too much money and credit, and proceeding from there to heaping justified insults on Congress (except Ron Paul), most of the Supreme Court, the United Nations, all foreigners and malevolent alien beings from outer space who are here to undermine the system prior to conquest by flying saucers and ray guns, which predictably leads to how we are freaking doomed, and if you are not buying gold and silver then you are some kind of drooling idiot!"

The Mogambo Guru regales us with dire news of inflation, deflation, stagflation, personal misery and crushing debt.

Democrats Try to Break Grip of the Senate’s Dr. No

Democrats say Mr. Coburn is also exaggerating the potential costs of the bills he blocks because most of the proposals would require a second round of approval before any money was shelled out.

But Mr. Coburn, as is his wont, begs to differ. He said the Senate was shirking its duty by failing to give closer review to the hundreds of bills that slide through by unanimous consent. And he said Congress should not be clearing the way for billions of dollars in potential new spending — even on meritorious projects — without making reductions elsewhere. Fearful of the public debt piling up, he said he wanted the opportunity to at least propose those cuts.

“We ought not be borrowing and expanding the federal government unless we get rid of stuff that is not working,” he said.

Key quote: “I am not a go-along, get-along guy if I think it is the wrong way to go. I am O.K. taking the consternation of my colleagues. I take my oath seriously.”

He's nicknamed Dr. No because he is an M.D. and he says "No" by blocking spending legislation with procedural objections which require the Senate to actually debate the bills instead of passing them with a voice vote. We need more M.D.'s in Congress like Tom Coburn and Ron Paul.

Monday, July 28, 2008

How separate must church and state be?

A taxpayer-funded program should not be permitted to hire and fire on the basis of what people believe about God or how they choose to run their private lives.

The Bush faith-based initiative allows religiously affiliated social services to engage in this kind of job bias, and it's just plain wrong. Polls repeatedly show that the vast majority of Americans oppose such discrimination in public programs.

The Bush administration has also failed to monitor faith-based grants to ensure that religious groups don't proselytize with public funds. People should be able to get the help they need from their government without being pressured to pray or take part in someone else's religious ritual.

It's time for religious organizations to be subjected to the same rules as any other business - that's what they are. If waitresses are taxed on tips, churches should be taxed on the money put into their offering plates. Churches offer a service just like lawyers. They advise their clients and receive renumeration in return. They should be no more exempt from property taxes than a lawyer's office should be.

A Weak and Dependent People

With its coming bailout of homeowners and mortgage lenders, the federal government refortifies its role as daddy for the American people and the people’s role as child-adults who are dependent on their daddy to take care of them.

The bailout, while strengthening the federal government, makes the American people weaker than ever. A people who look to the government for their sustenance and to protect them from their own mistakes and from the adverse vicissitudes of life will inevitably be a weak people.

The economic question is: How long can these paternalistic programs continue? Is the final day of reckoning just being delayed? After all, don’t forget that these programs of unfunded liabilities stretch all the way back to the New Deal in the 1930s. Every few years, a new crisis materializes, only to be jerry-rigged by the feds. Most everyone assumes that the process can go on forever.

Uncle Sam is running out of options to bail out overextended debtors but insists on rushing to the rescue one more time.

Zombie voters and fortune cookies

Garry Reed lambasts the two presidential candidates:

Obama:
Who are Barack Obama’s supporters?

Picture an old 1950s era black-and-white zombie movie. The undead rise from their graves, begin lurching forward, arms outstretched, eyes vacant, all murmuring eerily in unison, “Change, change, change…”

McCain:
John McCain stands for everything and nothing. He’s too liberal to attract conservatives, too conservative to please liberals, too big government power-wielding authoritarian to interest libertarians.

This is because the John McCain philosophy of governance is a gigantic grab bag of fortune cookies stuffed full of utterly unconnected and inconsistent bits and pieces of political chaff.

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Spending Addicts

In 1947, after the costly war and America's huge investment in the rebuilding of Europe and Japan, the government's total debt stood at $257 billion. It took about 18 years for that figure to double, gradually edging up to $542 billion in 1975.

In many of the postwar years, the government actually operated in the black. It had a surplus of $4 billion in 1947 (the equivalent of about $38.3 billion in current dollars) and modest surpluses in 1948, '49, '51, '56, '57, 1960 and 1969 as well.

The pace of deficit spending and debt accumulation then accelerated. Total federal debt doubled from 1975 to 1982, when it broke the $1 trillion barrier, ending the year at $1.14 trillion. Only five years were needed to double the total again, increasing to $2.35 trillion in 1987. It nearly doubled again over the next seven years, hitting $4.64 trillion in 1994. And if the estimates of government accountants are accurate, it will have doubled again by the end of the current fiscal year, ending the year at $9.65 trillion, heading upward to an estimated $10.5 trillion by the end of the next fiscal year.

FLASH!!! Congress raised the debt limit on Saturday to $10.6 trillion - Bush will surely sign it.

Let's don't vote for President

Potiphar Gride doesn't think either presidential candidate is up to the task of handling the duties of the office and explains why he'll not vote for President.

On August 28th we'll know, officially, who the Democrat nominee for president is. Everybody expects he will be Barrack Obama, but as of now he is merely the presumptive suspect-in-chief. A taxpayer assisted overseas tour is intended to make him look "presidential" but it's all public relations puffery.

Obama has not yet been nominated by his party, but it doesn't matter to me. I don't plan to vote for him. I won't vote for John McCain, either. In fact, I have not voted for a Republican or Democrat presidential nominee since Barry Goldwater in 1964. (You may recall Goldwater's slogan, "In your heart you know he's right.") But Lyndon Johnson prevailed in that election, helped enormously by a TV commercial that showed a little girl picking petals from a daisy. She was obliterated by an atomic bomb, illustrating how the world would be if Goldwater were elected. It was a brilliant bit of propaganda.

In late 1964 I was already fuming over the news that Congress was going to relieve Americans of their silver money. Dimes, quarter-dollars, and half-dollars would be made of copper and nickel starting in January, 1965. President Johnson said, with a straight face, that the new cupro-nickel coins would circulate alongside the silver and would have equal purchasing power. However, the silver completely vanished from circulation before the end of 1965, obeying Gresham's Law which informs us that bad money always chases good money out of circulation. That's when I fully realized the folly of believing what politicians say. One must watch what they DO.

"You haven't voted since 1964?" calls a voice from the back row.

"Didn't say that," I respond. "I said I have not voted for a Republican or Democrat presidential nominee since 1964, so don't pin the blame for the expensive parade to the Oval Office for the past forty-four years on me."

My ballot is usually cast for the Libertarian candidate, although I won't even do that in November. I'll just leave that choice blank to convey the message that I'm tired of the trend to national bankruptcy and will not support a candidate who won't offer a plan to do something about it.

I would love to persuade lots of voters to cast "no" votes for president. It would send a strong message to the national political leaders that they have no popular mandate to pile phenomenal levels of debt upon posterity and steal from us every day through their devilish trick of money inflation.

I know this idea will bring e-mail from well-meaning people who will tell me that if "more people voted things would be better." That's nonsense, of course. What they are saying is "If more people who think as I do would vote, things would be better." Can't you picture these enthusiastic voters going door to door offering a lift to the polls for people who will vote for the opposition?

It's not the total numbers that matter, anyway. In the heyday of the Soviet Union the turnout on election day was about 98 percent. Who will say voters of that era got a good deal? The political opinion of America's adults can be accurately tabulated with a sampling of three or four thousand. There's no need to poll several million people to discover what popular opinion is.

A grumpy acquaintance of mine, "Boiling Ed," repeatedly advises his friends to vote the rascals out. The trouble is the choices are usually so thin we wind up voting another rascal into office to take the place of the one we're voting OUT. If the new hire is not an actual rascal he will be once he gets his hands on the controls of power.

Ed is right, though. The country is riding for a fall. Fifty years ago we were on top. The USA was the world's largest creditor nation. Today we're the world's biggest debtor nation and this week Congress proposes to raise the national debt ceiling to $10.6 trillion from the present $9.8 trillion. The politicians in Washington hope you won't notice.

Can you fix this mess by voting for Senator Obama? No. He has vowed to make it worse. How about Senator McCain? No. He's pledged to failed spendthrift policies of the Bush administration, which has racked up more unpayable debt in two terms than any other administration in the country's history.

Don't vote for either one. In fact, if enough Americans withhold their vote in the presidential race somebody in Congress will push a bill to make voting mandatory. Such nonsense might trigger an eruption among the people (call it a revolution) leading to a return to the U.S. Constitution in which the federal government ceases its role as operator of the inflation machine that is destroying us.

If we stuffed the federal government back into its constitutional straight-jacket who would rule over our comings and goings? Who would regulate our lives and hold our hands when adversity strikes? The individual states, that's who. They'd get their sovereignty back. If the state legislature went too far out of bounds it would be much simpler for the people to take up their pitchforks and march to the state house to prod the politicians into acting responsibly.

Not voting for president is my way of "voting the rascals out." I refuse to vote another rascal in. I couldn't bear the feeling of guilt.

July 24th, 2008

You must remember this: how the mind works

Words fail me. They used to be my friends but now they can't be bothered. They're happy to just leave me in the middle of a thought with a gaping hole where the end of the sentence is supposed to be, thrashing around in my own ridiculous frontal lobes, searching (as I was last week) for the name of the, the, you know... the twirly thing, the wine thing, you know, the chrome, tugging, grunting thing - the popping thing. Come on, man, come on! Corkscrew, yes. It was only a few seconds of gormlessness but how can you forget a word that so brilliantly goes to the trouble of describing itself?

Gormlessness? Well, at least there's a word for it besides senile or demented or Altzheimer's but I probably will not be able to remember it.

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Saturday fun 07-26-2008

Busted for licking cop's face
"We encourage people not to lick our police officers. We want you to like them, not lick them."

US man charged for shooting mower

"It's my lawn mower and my yard, so I can shoot it if I want."

Should the votes of dead people be counted?
"I don't know how someone can say you're a qualified voter if you're deceased."

Boffins to redesign streets for drunks
Researchers came to the staggering realisation that drunk people trip over things.

Assault with a deadly peanut
Police say it's a case of assault with a deadly peanut.

He ventured forth to bring light to the world

And they told of strange and wondrous things that greeted the news of the Child's journey. Around the world, global temperatures began to decline, and the ocean levels fell and the great warming was over.

The Great Prophet Algore of Nobel and Oscar, who many had believed was the anointed one, smiled and told his followers that the Child was the one generations had been waiting for.

And there were other wonderful signs. In the city of the Street at the Wall, spreads on interbank interest rates dropped like manna from Heaven and rates on credit default swaps fell to the ground as dead birds from the almond tree, and the people who had lived in foreclosure were able to borrow again.

Many are so devoted to Obama that they expect miraculous solutions from him. They will be sorely disappointed but his election this fall seems almost a certainty.

The Big Squeeze

Mr. McCain's Web site says he supports accounts only as a "supplement" to Social Security, suggesting that he no longer would allow workers to divert part of their taxes to such accounts. His top economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, says that such ambiguity is intentional. "The history on Social Security has been if you put out specific proposals or preconditions, you polarize the debate and the deal doesn't get done," he told the Los Angeles Times.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, has been much more straightforward about what he would do. It just wouldn't be much. Mr. Obama has ruled out both personal accounts and any change in benefits. Instead he would raise taxes.

Don't expect much discussion on the issue of government entitlement programs during the campaign season. It's embarrassing for the candidates to tell the voters that they have no clue about how to handle the looming crisis of government bankruptcy.

Doctors switch to 'concierge' practices

Sapin has an unusual request for his patients. He wants them to pay an annual retainer of $1,500, a fee that will buy these patients better access and more attention from the busy doctor.

Sapin is among a handful of Arizona doctors who are so frustrated with the pressures of being a primary-care physician that they are striking a new, more exclusive path known as concierge medicine. The practice typically involves charging an annual fee in exchange for better access, longer appointments, more emphasis on preventive care and other medical perks.

"The idea behind it is nothing more than a return to the days of Marcus Welby," said Dr. Steven Knope, a Tucson physician who operates a concierge practice for about 125 patients.

Government regulations are causing doctors to reconsider how they administer to patients. They are cutting out the middleman - i.e. government - and are dealing directly with their patients. Of course, the politicians are not going to like this very much and will probably try to bring the rebellious physicians to their senses with new regulations.

Thanks to Karen de Coster

Friday, July 25, 2008

Counterfeit Money at Wachovia

The following was clipped from wrisley.com - Thanks, John

A Central Florida couple has complained to the Secret Service that an Orlando Wachovia Bank gave them ten counterfeit $100.00 bills among the 36 they withdrew to take to Bank of America. Wachovia is reported to have settled with another party who claimed they were given $40.00 in counterfeit bills. Reports also circulate in Columbia, SC of fake bills occasionally showing up in cash withdrawals. Here's the video report from Florida. Fake Bills.

Here's a link to the official Secret Service web site that describes things to look for when phony bills are suspected. Spotting Counterfeits.

The Opposite of Progress

Why is Congress so unpopular? Because it is often intent upon doing things that will make life in America much worse.

The most important example is continued blockage of access to America's energy resources. No new nuclear power plants have been permitted in decades; no new oil refineries; no additional drilling off the coast of Alaska, California, Florida or parts of the Gulf of Mexico where there are huge amounts of useable energy; and continuing opposition to building liquefied natural gas facilities.

Key quote: "...the congressional priority is increasing the size, scope, reach and spending of the federal government."

Workingman’s blues

Regardless of their political beliefs, American voters are in a horrible mood this year. Democrats are sick of George Bush. Republicans are sick of the Democrats running Congress. Everyone worries about Iraq, either because they think the war should never have been fought, or because of the long, costly and thankless slog it has turned into. The latest violence in Afghanistan is depressing. The culture war grinds on: America is slouching towards Gomorrah or theocracy, depending on your viewpoint. The earth is either cooking or being overrun by eco-fanatics. And the American economy is tottering.

The Economist looks at the realities of the economic times we are in.

Honorable Exit From Empire

Tusk is demanding that America "provide billions of dollars worth of U.S. investment to upgrade Polish air defenses in return for hosting 10 two-stage missile interceptors," said Reuters.

Reflect if you will on what is going on here.

By bringing Poland into NATO, we agreed to defend her against the world's largest nation, Russia, with thousands of nuclear weapons. Now the Polish regime is refusing us permission to site 10 anti-missile missiles on Polish soil, unless we pay Poland billions for the privilege.

Has Uncle Sam gone senile?

Our imperialistic aspirations are costing us billions. Pat Buchanan thinks we can't afford to continue being the world's overlord - nor should we.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Strippers jockey for pole position

So how high can gold go? My usual answer is to first demand an estimate of, "How low can the dollar can go?", which is the same as asking "How low WILL the dollar go?", which is the easiest question on the whole mid-term exam; the answer is that it can, and will, go to zero.

How do I know that the dollar will go to zero value? Because it is a fiat currency, and all of the other thousands of fiat currencies tried by different countries over the millennia have ALL gone to zero! All!

So the height to which gold can go, in dollars, is infinity! And "infinity" is the answer to another question on the mid-term exam, namely, "How much is the market price of gold in dollars if the dollar is worth zero?"

The example of Zimbabwe comes to mind. Wads of $10,000,000 Zimbabwe dollars are required to buy a loaf of bread. Zimbabwe's answer to this problem is to print $10,000,000,000 worthless Zimbabwe dollars.

35 years of drug war failure

So, how's its track record after 35 years of difficult, often dangerous drug-war-making? If the DEA were a heroin addict, it would have overdosed on its own incompetence by age 6.

Despite its failures and the harm it's done to American society, however, the DEA has done more than merely survive. It's become a typically bloated, self-preserving federal bureaucracy whose power, budget and continuing existence bear no relation to its performance

The "War on Drugs" - designed to protect us from ourselves - has made drug dealers wealthy and emboldened many otherwise honest citizens to get in on the action. It has not made a dent in the amount of drugs consumed; it has just made them more lucrative for the dealers.

Excuse Me While I Get My Gun

If you're awakened in the middle of the night by a crash, may you carry a loaded gun with you as you investigate? Evidently not. The Washington Post reports that D.C.'s acting attorney general, Peter Nickles, "said residents could neither keep their guns loaded in anticipation of a problem nor search for an intruder on their property." According to Nickles, if you see an armed criminal charging your home, or in the event of "an actual threat by somebody you believe is out to hurt you," you're allowed to get your gun, unlock it, and load it.

How long will that take?

Too long if the intruder has already unlocked and loaded his weapon - which, of course, he has. D.C. is fighting back against the Supreme Court decision to allow homeowners to defend themselves.

X-Rated Security Screenings

Perry was also taken to a see-through room by a TSA agent when his artificial knee set off the metal detector.

"He yelled at me to get the belt off. 'I told you to get the belt off.' So I took the belt off. He ran his hands down over and pulled the pants down, they went down around my ankle," Perry said.

At that point, Perry was standing in his underwear in public view. He asked to see a supervisor. That made things worse.

"She was yelling 'I have power, I have power, I have power," Perry said.

Mr. Perry said "It makes you feel like you have no rights." Sorry Mr. Perry. Your rights are being removed daily.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

The Mother of All Messes

Republicans are sending around the Internet a photo of a cute little boy whose T-shirt reads: "The mess in my pants is nothing compared to the mess Democrats will make of this country if they win Nov. 2nd."

One can only wonder at the insouciance of this message. Are Republicans unaware of the amazing mess the Bush regime has made? It is impossible to imagine a bigger mess. Republicans have us at war in two countries as a result of Republican lies and deceptions, and we might be in two more wars – Iran and Pakistan – by November. We have alienated the entire Muslim world and most of the rest.

The dollar has lost 60% of its value against the euro, and the once mighty dollar is losing its reserve currency role.

The Republicans’ policies have driven up the price of both oil and gold by 400%.

Inflation is in double digits. Employment is falling.

Click on the title link above to continue reading. Paul Craig Roberts is just getting warmed up. He doesn't think much of the Republicans efforts over the last eight years. If you're expecting things to get better when the Democrats get in the White House however, better buckle up and hang on tight for they won't do much better.

Range of acceptable opinion small

A chart of the PPI over the past 90 years, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, shows prices in this measure holding relatively stable until about the mid-70s and then taking a sharp upturn. Could this be related to the fact that the American dollar was fully taken off of the gold standard in 1971, and full control of the money supply was given to the Fed? Paul's answer is yes, and his solution is a return to the gold standard.

But because this proposed course of action falls so far from what is usually discussed, it is never seriously considered by any in power, nor discussed by the mainstream national media to any significant degree.

This is an individual case of a much broader problem within our political culture: the range of acceptable opinion in our country has shrunken to an almost impossibly narrow range.

True. We would much rather discuss what a candidate's preacher said a few years ago. Political discourse in the mainstream media is relegated to such meanderings and serious topics are found to be embarrassing to the uninformed hosts of so-called news shows or the editors of newspapers.

Black Education

Politicians and the teaching establishment say more money, smaller classes and newer buildings are necessary for black academic excellence. At Frederick Douglass' founding, it didn't have the resources available today. If blacks can achieve at a time when there was far greater poverty, gross discrimination and fewer opportunities, what says blacks cannot achieve today? Whether we want to own up to it or not, the welfare state has done what Jim Crow, gross discrimination and poverty could not have done. It has contributed to the breakdown of the black family structure and has helped establish a set of values alien to traditional values of high moral standards, hard work and achievement.

The government has spent a lot of money on education and the results are stark. Politicians, of course, think they haven't spent enough money to solve the problem. They are asking for just a little more.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Bankrupt "Exploiters"

What we need is more government regulation of lenders, they say, to protect the innocent borrowers from "predatory" lending practices.

Before going further down that road, it may be useful to look back at what got us into this mess in the first place.

It was not that many years ago when there was moral outrage ringing throughout the media because lenders were reluctant to lend in certain neighborhoods and because banks did not approve mortgage loan applications from blacks as often as they approved mortgage loan applications from whites.

Thomas Sowell points out that government interference in the economy caused the mortgage loan fiasco and more government interference is probably not the solution.

Monday, July 21, 2008

Why No Outrage?

"Raise less corn and more hell," Mary Elizabeth Lease harangued Kansas farmers during America's Populist era, but no such voice cries out today. America's 21st-century financial victims make no protest against the Federal Reserve's policy of showering dollars on the people who would seem to need them least.

Phil Gramm says we are just a bunch of whiners. James Grant can't believe we are not whining a lot more and explains why we should be whining - loudly!

America First

Don't get me wrong – I have nothing against foreigners. We can't blame them for milking us out of every dollar they can as long as we continue to elect stupid or corrupt politicians. You needn't pay any attention to all this global baloney you hear. The world has always had a global economy. Why the heck do you think Columbus sailed over here and Marco Polo walked to China?

Charley Reese wonders why we give money to other countries instead of spending it here. It's like all the celebrities and other muckity-mucks who want to help all the poor folks in Africa and elsewhere. There are plenty of people right here who could use some help.

Let's Have Some Love for Nuclear Power

In the U.S. at present, 104 nuclear plants generate about 21% of our electric power. Last November, NRG Energy, of Princeton, N.J., became the first company to file for a license to build a new nuclear plant since the 1970s. Almost a dozen more applications have now also been filed.
While we may be at a turning point, one enormous question still hangs over this revival of nuclear power in the U.S.: Who is going to pay for it?

It's clean and green but environmentalists will bring up Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and The China Syndrome over and over.

Saturday, July 19, 2008

Drug-War Hogwash

The fiasco some people call the "war on drugs" is proof positive that most people learn nothing from history. What happened when the government outlawed the sale of alcohol? It created organized crime, vast organizations that smuggled booze into the country and set up wholesale and retail distribution of it. Since criminal organizations are denied the benefit of the law for settling disputes, you got gang wars for turf and distribution rights.

Charley Reese puts a spotlight on the "War on Drugs".

The Crisis Is Upon Us

I have, for the past 35 years, expressed my grave concern for the future of America. The course we have taken over the past century has threatened our liberties, security and prosperity. In spite of these long-held concerns, I have days – growing more frequent all the time – when I'm convinced the time is now upon us that some Big Events are about to occur. These fast-approaching events will not go unnoticed. They will affect all of us. They will not be limited to just some areas of our country. The world economy and political system will share in the chaos about to be unleashed.

Ron Paul is not given any attention by the mainstream media and, as a result, most Americans don't get to hear his opinions. It's too bad because no one else seems to understand the changes that will be necessary to prevent the impending disaster Ron Paul is predicting.

Friday, July 18, 2008

The Modern Stealth Depression

Yes, it's here. Welcome to the Depression. No, don't drop whatever it is you're doing. Don't get up. It's not going anywhere. It will wait. It's just going to sit over here in the corner and read a magazine while you do whatever it is you need to do.

A Depression doesn't run hot and fierce like some crazed meth burner. A Depression is methodical, purposeful, patient. It will build a shelter out of tree branches and newspaper, light a small, well-contained campfire and wait you out, brother. While you feed on the empty calories of denial and popcorn, it will quietly gather shards of broken dreams and fashion them into a terrible weapon of blunt force reality.

The depression is already here?

Bank unduly scapegoated

Why are the banks “greedy”? Well, according to The Boston Globe-Democrat, Countrywide loaned Taylor $260,000 to buy a condo, and now they actually want her to pay it back!

Heartless bastards.

She stopped making payments after a year, and Countrywide agreed to let her stay in the condo until her niece, who lives with her, finished the school year. But she refuses to leave.

“I’m taking a stand,” she says.

Some Bostonians - particularly those who pay their mortgages every month - may consider Taylor irresponsible. They may think that being evicted from your condo a year after you’ve stopped making the mortgage payment seems completely responsible.

Taylor doesn’t agree.

“Why should I be punished?”

If Congress can come to the rescue of failing banks and companies, why shouldn't it come to the aid of home buyers who can't (or won't) make their mortgage payments?

Making Americans Unsafe

"Hundreds of thousands of people" on a watch list that they have no business being on?

Yes. "Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other ‘suspicious characters,’ with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape," said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.

And this is America, not Nazi Germany?

How can Airport "Security" possibly protect anyone when the idiots cannot differentiate a high-level American government official from a terrorist?

Do you feel safer now?

Thursday, July 17, 2008

America Is Not a Post-Anything

Our 21st-century paralysis is surprising. The United States is not materially exhausted. We sit atop trillions of dollars worth of untapped oil, gas, coal, shale and tar sands.

America could mine more uranium, and reprocess fuels to build hundreds of nuclear plants. American agriculture is blessed with the world's best soils, most developed irrigation systems, and most productive and astute farmers.

There is as much sun and wind in the western United States as anywhere in the world. We have plenty of natural resources and the know-how to make all the wood, steel and cement products we need.

Finally, a note of optimism and hope. We are capable of dealing with our problems by using our resources wisely.

It Is Good for One To Be Free

We must take charge again of our lives: of our money and medicine and education. We must reclaim our Liberty, our peace and prosperity.

That means no more foreign wars, no more central banks to finance those wars, no more central planners, no more bailouts and billions for the bankers. No more worthless, irredeemable paper money, no more foreign aid, no more foreign wars. No more telling the people how to live, or looting us with lies about trust funds that don’t exist. No more stealing oil, which is cheaper to buy anyway, no more indebting our children with trillions borrowed overseas, no more telling our elderly where they can and cannot buy their medicine, and what the can and cannot do to relieve their pain.

No more. No more. No more. That is lesson from their failures. "No more." That is the message to take back home today. "It is time to say no more!"

Who is going to listen if we protest? We moan and groan and we are called whiners and snivelers. We have a statesman in our midst (Ron Paul) but he is regarded by our leaders as a lunatic. There are many other eloquent voices but their protests are going unheeded - so far, at least.

Visitors from the Planet Thrift

The world economy is slowing down. The global financial system is falling apart.

The whole situation is a mess…a disaster for investors…a catastrophe for homeowners…a Waterloo for the financial industry. But it is God's gift to us.

What fun it is to read the paper! So much nonsense! So many clowns! Such drivel…such claptrap…everything is working out just as we expected.

We had to put down our copy of the Financial Times this morning. We were afraid of internal hemorrhage. Besides, our eyes were watering so much we could barely see…

Gloom and doom from Bill Bonner on the financial woes we are facing.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

'Have Nothing To Do With Conquest'

Wars over oil; wars over the religious conflicts of foreigners in which no genuine U.S. national interest at stake; and wars to impose secular democracy on people who will resist it to the death. This situation is surely the antithesis of what the Founders intended when they designed a constitutional system meant to limit the chance of an arbitrary government that inevitably leads to tyranny. The Founders knew – and Americans must relearn – that there is no better definition of tyranny than one that finds an entire nation led into war by the negligence, personal beliefs, or even whims of a single individual – be he or she a king, a dictator, or a popularly elected president.

We are capable of sustaining and defending ourselves within the confines of our borders. Meddlesome intervention not involving self-defense is costly and against the principles upon which this country was founded.

God, Guns and Gold

Everywhere we look, we see more evidence that post-Reagan Republicans and post-Thatcher Tories have given up on free enterprise. They have decided that the problems in the economy are too important to be left to business and Wall Street. Congress needs to intervene, say the meddlers, in order to guarantee the nation a smoothly-functioning financial system.

Everyone seems to feel the same way…the free marketers have had their chance. Now, it's time for a little "adult supervision." But adult supervision in this context - putting politicians in charge of the economy - is like adult entertainment; it is a salacious fantasy.

"When will oil prices go down?" President Bush was asked in his news conference yesterday. "I'm not an economist" President Bush responded. Maybe it's time to have someone who is an economist in the White House.

Oklahoma Rebellion

Both parties and all branches of the federal government have made a mockery of the checks and balances, separation of powers and the republican form of government envisioned by the founders. One of the more disgusting sights for me to is to watch a president, congressman or federal judge take an oath to uphold and defend the United States Constitution, when in reality they either hold constitutional principles in contempt or they are ignorant of those principles.

One state is fighting back. Oklahomans are trying to recover their lost sovereignty. We can only hope other states will follow their lead.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Good as Gold

On a 106-degree May afternoon in 2003, government agents raided several establishments belonging to Southern Nevada businessman Robert “Bobby” Kahre. With guns drawn, officials held more than 20 handcuffed workers in the sun without water as agents collected records and other materials.

Kahre hadn’t committed a crime. He had upset the Internal Revenue Service by paying his workers based on the face value of gold and silver coins, versus the market value in the Federal Reserve system (the value of the coins in U.S. paper dollars). Even though the coins were in circulation, displayed a face value, and were regulated by Congress, the IRS’s confusing and endless tax code did not determine how to handle these gold and silver coins if used for payroll. The tax code only references dollars. It does not distinguish between coined money and paper money.

What is money anyway? Is it a piece of paper with no intrinsic value or is it any medium offered in an exchange of goods or services? If you know, please contact the IRS immediately! They don't quite know how to tax you properly and need your assistance.

Speculation Frenzy: Is it Simple Ignorance or Something Else?

Time and again, we see the typical Congressman (or woman) making statements that boggle the mind, and so I find myself concluding that perhaps they simply are stupid and in need of education.

However, the older I become, the more I realize that the political classes really are not interested in economic education. They have had Ron Paul giving them almost daily lessons that would rival any good content from a Harvard doctorate in the subject, but he always is seen as a fringe character. Thus, I finally have come to realize that these are people who really could care less about the economic damage that they do.

Politicians are driven by political expediency. By placing blame on someone else, they can avoid having blame placed on them. Economic woes are welcomed as an issue with which to harangue their opponents instead of as a problem to be solved. Harry Reid is a prime example.

The Dark Twins of Mortgage Finance

Fannie and Freddie are "too big to fail," no doubt about it. But who has the money to stop them from failing? Where are those Sovereign Wealth Funds when you really need them? We doubt whether they are stupid enough to do it, but what a coup it would be! We mean, if the Sovereign Wealth Funds recapitalized America's largest mortgage lenders. So far, they've contented themselves with a few minor purchases of America's iconic buildings, infrastructure and industries. But if they bought control of Fannie and Freddie, they would hold the mortgage on America's housing too. And they could get rid of trillions of their unwanted dollars.

The chickens are coming home to roost. We cannot bail out Fannie and Freddie without printing more worthless dollars. Investors are getting nervous. Don't be surprised if the mortgage you owe to an American lender now is sold to an Arabian consortium in the near future.

Monday, July 14, 2008

Good Dog, Bad Dog

It seems that no suggestion is so fascist or patently tyrannical that you can't find a few morons-on-the-street to proudly proclaim, "If it makes us all safer, I think it's worth it!" For example, want to take a plane somewhere? Fine, just be ready to be subjected to warrantless searches, insulting inquisitions, and general degrading harassment. But it's for our own good, right? After all, maybe that little old lady WAS going to hijack the plane with her nail-clippers! Better safe than sorry. Right?

Larken Rose questions our commitment to liberty and freedom.

Cable news anchors choking on Jesse Jackson's "nuts"



Funny. News anchors can't quite bring themselves to quote Jesse Jackson's comments.

There Is No Reason to Panic

The only reason the Fed might want to regulate the investment banks is that it believes itself to be somehow at risk. The markets, ever clear-eyed, will read this for what it is -- potential Fed backing if the big investment banks get into trouble. In other words, we are now proposing to introduce a government-created moral hazard into investment banking. The resulting loss of market discipline will replicate the experience with the S&Ls and Fannie and Freddie.

According to reports, not an eye blinked in the House Financial Services Committee when the Fed's bid for more power was laid on the table last Thursday. This is fully consistent with the past willingness of Congress to condone -- and even encourage -- unimpeded growth at Fannie and Freddie.

The financial ruin of the economy is being assured by Congress as they continue to subsidize disastrous policies with money it does not have.

Will the Antiwar Movement Strangle the State?

We are on the right side, at least if America is to someday be a peaceful, constitutional republic, prosperous and free, happy and again a model for the rest of the world. We need do nothing at all and we will still be correct in our antiwar position, and our antiwar beliefs. But if we love our country, and believe in her, we do need to step up the revolution, and we need to fully understand that the health of the state is war. To excise war from the state, we will indeed need to excise a large portion of the state with it. If we act, we may be able to save our country, and help her weather the major shift from a war-based existence to one based on peace and liberty.

The state needs our support to control us. Whether we support it willingly or by coercion is of no concern to the state. Karen Kwiatkowski suggests some ways to begin withdrawing our support from the behemoth.

Enabling Tyranny

The position of the US Government is that the rights granted Americans by the Constitution facilitate terrorism. To be safe from terrorists, the argument goes, we must allow the government to take liberties with the Constitution. This argument gives government the power to set aside the Constitution, and, thus, enables tyranny.

After years of treating the Constitution as a "living document", it has become an antiquity with little basis for governance.

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Recession: With War or Without It?

The good news regarding the economy in general is not backed up by anything specific. The government tells us that the worst is over, but there are almost no indications that the worst is over. The housing market is still in decline. Foreclosures are still rising rapidly. The lenders are not selling foreclosed properties at market prices. Instead, they keep buying back the properties. There is a growing inventory of unsold properties on the books of the lenders. Meanwhile the two major sources of liquidity for the housing market, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are verging on bankruptcy.

If that's the good news, I'm not sure I want to hear the bad news. Continue reading if you think you are ready to hear it.

Friday, July 11, 2008

The (Diminishing) Return of Pandering

In a political season simply oozing hope, change, and historical firsts, here’s something that might actually be encouraging: a widening gulf between promised election-year giveaways and the expressed desires of the populace on the receiving end. Has shameless political pandering become one more item on the long list of services Washington can’t deliver?

Maybe there is hope after all, but as long as Americans look to government for handouts, politicians will promise to deliver the loot.

Desk rage spoils workplace for many Americans

Get out of the way, road rage. Here comes desk rage.

Anger in the workplace -- employees and employers who are grumpy, insulting, short-tempered or worse -- is shockingly common and likely growing as Americans cope with woes of rising costs, job uncertainty or overwhelming debt, experts say.

"It runs the gamut from just rudeness up to pretty extreme abusive behaviors"

It appears the malaise in America is spreading to the workplace. It seems as if we retired from the rat race just in time.

The 'Respectable' People Continue to Make War on the Rest of Us

We can see a pattern in the apparent incoherence of the prohibitionists’ position if we recall that the war on drugs, like all the preceding prohibitionist crusades in American history (some of them still continuing), amounts to a defense of bourgeois WASP conventions against persons and classes deemed less respectable. So, SSRIs, yes, ecstasy, no; Benzodiazepines, yes, heroin, no; a pleasant cocktail party, yes, reefer madness, no; and so forth. Everything turns on the sort of people who tend to consume the substance.

The better sorts have been waging war for centuries to keep the rabble in line.

My recreational drug is OK. Your recreational drug is a menace to (my) society and must be prohibited. Hypocrisy in the drug wars.

TSA vs. passenger

Robin Kassner says "I was thrown across the room, into a metal chair and into a lady, and I was on the floor and realized I was being beat up."

Kassner says police officer Michael Urbina then used excessive force in handcuffing her.

Robin Kassner says "they picked me up and slammed me onto a metal table. Officer Urbina took his forearm and smashed me against the table."

Be sure to click on the video. TSA agents rough up Ms. Kassner for failing to follow their orders. Reason #16 why I'll never fly commercial again.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

A Letter to Liberals

Do you want health care for those who cannot afford it? Then instead of working to have government “solve” the problem by mandating that all citizens be covered by medical insurance, work without government to establish, maintain and support independent charitable clinics and hospitals. Once we cease believing that government is “the answer” and accept that the rest of us, acting on the only basis we have at our disposal – voluntary cooperation, is the only “answer” that there’s ever going to be, our field of activity is wide open and there is much to be done.

As President Reagan said, "Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem."

Casualties of Financial Friendly Fire

Because the world accepted dollars as if they were gold, we only had to counterfeit more dollars, spend them overseas (indirectly encouraging our jobs to go overseas as well) and enjoy unearned prosperity. Those who took our dollars and gave us goods and services were only too anxious to loan those dollars back to us. This allowed us to export our inflation and delay the consequences we now are starting to see.

But it was never destined to last, and now we have to pay the piper. Our huge foreign debt must be paid or liquidated. Our entitlements are coming due just as the world has become more reluctant to hold dollars. The consequence of that decision is price inflation in this country - and that's what we are witnessing today.

The Fed is powerless in the face of the crisis which it has created.

Ban-Happy Busybodies



Saggy pants, fire places, plastic bags, light bulbs, poker—it's all been banned somewhere. Same with owning swine or fowl, feeding pigeons, owning pit bulls, and chomping on trans fats, a naughty little substance that makes food taste better.

The list goes on and on.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

THE IDEA OF AMERICA, PART I

James Bovard provides a vivid description of how today's American state is powerful compared to the English state at the time of the Revolution:

The Massachusetts colonists rebelled after the British agents revived "writs of assistance" that allowed them to search any colonist's property. Modern Americans submit passively to government sweep searches of buses, schools, and housing projects. Virginia revolted in part because King George imposed a two-pence tax on the sale of a pound of tea; Americans today are complacent while Congress imposes billions of dollars of retroactive taxes…Connecticut rebelled in part because the British were undermining the independence of judges; nowadays, federal agencies have the power to act as prosecutor, judge and jury in suits against private citizens. Maine revolted in part because the British Parliament issued a decree confiscating every white pine tree in the colony; modern Americans are largely complacent when local governments impose almost unlimited restrictions on individuals' rights to use their own property. The initial battles of the Revolution occurred after British troops tried to seize the colonists' private weapons; today, residents in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other cities submit to de facto prohibitions on handgun ownership…

Then and now. Amazing and profound changes from the way we were. We cannot hope for a return to the halcyon days of limited government and personal freedom - maybe the good old days weren't all they're cracked up to be - but we can hope for a better use of our assets, both material and intellectual, and less plunder and self destruction by our politicians.

The aid Africa can't afford

President Bush, arriving in Japan on Sunday, made it clear he planned to push other G-8 nations to meet their 2005 promises to increase African aid.

Representatives of rich countries seem united in their belief that Africa would benefit from more international assistance and oblivious to the harm that aid has already inadvertently caused to African populations by propping up Africa's most dysfunctional states.

Instead of serving their people, most African states function as vehicles for the self-enrichment of political elites that have inherited none of the public-spiritedness of their colonial predecessors but all of the latter's contempt for the African masses.

Our altruistic attempts to aid the poor in other countries does not reach the poor but is gobbled up by the despotic rulers of those countries. Duh!

My Plan to Escape the Grip of Foreign Oil

In 1973, the year of the infamous oil embargo, the United States imported about 24% of our oil. In 1990, at the start of the first Gulf War, this had climbed to 42%. Today, we import almost 70% of our oil.

This is a staggering number, particularly for a country that consumes oil the way we do. The U.S. uses nearly a quarter of the world's oil, with just 4% of the population and 3% of the world's reserves. This year, we will spend almost $700 billion on imported oil, which is more than four times the annual cost of our current war in Iraq.

T. Boone Pickens has a plan to make us more energy independent. It should be considered by our politicians. They may accept his proposals or they may consider other alternatives. But they should also have a plan. And they should implement it. Immediately. As Charley Reese has said, "Vibrating one's vocal chords does not turn a shovel of dirt or drill a half-inch."

Political Correctness, Then and Now

Twain held up a mirror to nineteenth-century society, and society didn’t like it one bit.

None of it matters. In fact, according to the American Library Association, few books have been attacked as often as Huckleberry Finn. Since the public schools have been seized by dumbed-down political correctness, teachers are so worried that someone might hyperventilate at the sight of the n-word that they’ve banned America’s greatest anti-racist novel from the classroom.

An example of how political correctness imposes censorship. It affects classroom discussions and political discussions. Free speech is free only if you don't offend anyone and so many people are so easily offended.

Roll Over, Bark, and Beg

If I were a criminal, I would love this guy.

His advice is bad. He says, correctly enough, that most intruders want chiefly to steal things. Think a little. At two a.m., you hear a noise and turn on the lights. You find two guys with knives. You can now identify them. They have knives. Focus on this point. Knives, and you can identify them. Do you see where this leads?

Self defense advice from Fred. Hint: you don't want to wait for them to leave before you call the cops.

Race to the Bottom

The choice is between two men who both want power and relish power. Either one will use it to the fullest in the blind and arrogant belief that he is a savior. It is a case of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. I would not indulge in voting based on the fantasy that I actually could predict what these men would do once they become criminal-in-chief. Either one will surely surprise us in many dreadful ways, and that will be that.

Our dreadful electoral process has promoted to the forefront two candidates who are convinced they can save us all by increasing the power of the state.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

The Market is Responding to the Oil Shock

Initially the automobile wasn't much competition for the horse. Then, around the turn of the century, a series of innovations involving the internal combustion engine and manufacturing (mass production, assembly lines and interchangeable parts) improved performance, reliability and costs. As car prices fell, the horse, the manure and the "typhus fly" were done for.

The same thing may be happening today.

Desperate times always inspire innovation. Tolerance for high gasoline prices is reaching a breaking point and alternatives are beginning to appear from the marketplace.

Monday, July 7, 2008

The Real Meaning of the Fourth of July

Contrary to popular myth, the men who signed the Declaration of Independence were not great Americans. Instead, they were great Englishmen. In fact, they were as much English citizens as Americans today are American citizens. It’s easy to forget that the revolutionaries in 1776 were people who took up arms against their own government.

So how is it that these men are considered patriots? Well, the truth is that their government didn’t consider them patriots at all. Their government considered them to be bad guys – traitors, all of whom deserved to be hanged for treason.

Anarchists are seldom regarded as patriots by the governments which they oppose. They are, until they have successfully overthrown the government, attacked mercilessly and punished as traitors if captured. If the colonial uprising had been unsuccessful, our history books would revere Benedict Arnold and Thomas Jefferson and his cohorts would have been hung.

Magic mushrooms' medical mojo

A team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore this week released the follow-up results of a study involving 36 volunteers who were given psilocybin - the chemical ingredient in "sacred" or "magic" mushrooms - in a carefully controlled laboratory setting.

A questionnaire completed 14 months after the one-day drug trial found the majority of participants considered the experience to be one of the most "personally meaningful and spiritually significant" events of their lives. Even more surprising, they felt the drug had a long-lasting effect that significantly contributed to their overall sense of well-being and life satisfaction.

We are aware of some testing about 40 years ago which bore similar results but the data was not released to scientific researchers.

U.S. debt woes

The massive debt of the federal government is the costly result of special-interest politics, enabled by the evolution of our political system from a constitutional republic, strictly limited in its powers, to a nanny-state democracy that redistributes wealth and tries to be all things to all people. Voters like politicians who spend money to their benefit, but detest politicians who tax them, and so all the political incentives lead toward deficit spending and ever-increasing debt.

The US economy, burdened with debt and stoked by inflation, is headed towards an inevitable confrontation with reality. It cannot possible repay the debt. It can only continue to print more and more worthless dollars to keep the illusion going until the creditors demand payment.

Sunday, July 6, 2008

Salmonella signs point to peppers

Investigators are seeing more signs that the salmonella outbreak blamed on tomatoes might have been caused by tainted jalapeno peppers and have begun collecting samples from restaurants and from the homes of those who have been sickened, according to health officials involved in the probe.

USDA officials, having no idea what caused a possible salmonella outbreak, have cost tomato producers millions and are attempting to do the same to the producers of other produce such as jalapenos, cilantro, and avocadoes.

The Credit Crisis Is Going to Get Worse

Once upon a time, when credit conditions and the costs of borrowing money were normal, the bank opened at 9:00 a.m. and closed at 5:00 p.m. For eight hours a day, bankers made loans and took deposits, and then they went home.

But after 9/11, the Fed opened the spigot. Short-term interest rates went to zero in real terms and then into negative territory. When real interest rates are negative, borrowing money is effectively free – the debt loses value faster than the interest adds up. This led to a series of distortions in the financial sector that are only now coming to light.

Inflating the money supply leads to multiple bad consequences.

Saturday, July 5, 2008

Advice from 1932

Advice from 1932

Although it has hung in our kitchen for several decades the printed advice by Scott Nearing from seventy-six years ago is rarely noticed by anyone. The kitchen is a source of food and drink, not a library. Yesterday, I accidentally knocked its frame from the wall and the glass shattered. This presented me with an opportunity to re-read it.

Before a reader rushes to a computer to inform me that Scott Nearing was an early twentieth century socialist who was booted from his teaching job because of his sympathy with communists, let me save time for us all. I have read his autobiography, The Making of a Radical, and am familiar with the works of his critics as well as his fans. I don't subscribe to his socialist views.

Nearing described himself as pacifist, a socialist, and a vegetarian. He wrote "I became a vegetarian because I was persuaded that life is as valid for other creatures as it is for humans. I do not need dead animal bodies to keep me alive, strong and healthy. Therefore, I will not kill for food." Apparently his vegetarianism wasn't harmful. He lived nearly three weeks beyond his 100th birthday and died on his own terms August 24, 1983.

His "terms" were simple. When he sensed it was time to end life's journey he stopped eating. In his last ten days he existed only on water. No hospitals or doctors, just a peaceful exit at home with his wife, Helen, at his side.

In 1932 Americans were in a jam. A full-blown economic depression descended on the country after the go-go 1920s. It was also the year Nearing offered the advice that is sensible even seventy-six years later. "Eliminate non-essential things," said Nearing. "Keep distractions to a minimum." His suggestion to "Do research and follow trends" may be misunderstood to mean that we should go along with whatever nonsense popular opinion is promoting, but he was really saying we should keep an eye on what's happening so we can avoid the pitfalls popular trends may place in our path.

With a severe economic recession comes a desire by a lot of people to simplify their lives and escape the tangled burdens that nearly overwhelm them. That's when they begin to discover people like Scott and Helen Nearing who "escaped the tangle" in the early 1930s and developed a self-sufficient lifestyle in Vermont. The Nearings attracted a large following in the inflationary '70s and, although they are both deceased, we won't be surprised to hear of renewed interest in their books, such as Living the Good Life.

The Nearings believed that living a well-ordered simple life resulted in living a happy life. The present economic turmoil may be the ideal time to experiment with the old axiom, "Simplify! Simplify!" It certainly worked for them.

July 4th, 2008

The staff curmudgeon at Wrisley.com offered this piece from days of yore to cope with the troubled times of today. (I clipped it because the url will not be a permanent link to this article.)

A Bunch of Spoiled, Whiny Brats

There are fundamental flaws not in the constitutional construct of the United States but in the people who are occupying positions in at least two of the three branches of the US government. The executive and legislative branches, according to polls, are sincerely reviled and that means both Republicans and Democrats get equal measure of disgust. But the two parties and their interested backers simply don’t care because they know the American people have no choice but to vote for one or the other.

Americans are fat and lazy and need to stop whining says John Stanton. Send him an email and tell him why he's wrong.

Ground Zero of National Paralysis

In olden days, Americans needed just 13 and a half months to erect the Empire State Building, four and a half years to build Hoover Dam, and six years, four months to install the Transcontinental Railroad. And yet this Independence Day, six years, nine months, and three weeks have elapsed since September 11, and Ground Zero remains an 80-foot-deep international embarrassment for the United States.

It's way past time to get over it and move on. No matter who attacked us or why, it's time to rebuild instead of morbidly longing for what used to be.

The crazy world of England’s smoking ban

If I had decided to launch myself into the street, reprising the dance routine from Singing in the Rain while wearing nothing but a cheeky grin, I would scarcely have got a more startled reaction. And my companions were no curtain-twitching Presbyterians, shocked by the slightest vice – they were people who hate New Labour’s smoking ban as much as I do. Their shock illustrated how far the illiberal climate in Britain has been internalised. I mean, all I was doing was having a fag.

An illustrative example of how tyranny can creep into our lives. Our fellow citizens are being enlisted to enforce the policies of the state.

Yankee Doodle Curmudgeon

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to save money like a maniac because the government has stolen 30% to 40% of everything you have made, it takes away a lot of the enthusiasm for celebrating the Declaration of Independence. When Jefferson wrote that document, the British were extracting approximately 1% of national income from the American colonies. For the southern colonies, it may have been 2.5%. If we could somehow get back to the tyranny of Great Britain in 1776, I would be willing to celebrate the Fourth of July with greater enthusiasm. But that would take a revolution.

Just when we were getting into the July 4 celebration, Gary North brings us back to reality.

Friday, July 4, 2008

FIXING THE NATION'S SACRED MOMENT

THE impatient patriots here had splendidly short fuses in 1775. Those who tilled the startlingly red clay or who lived in the town named for George III's wife Charlotte might have been bemused had they foreseen the annual hoopla that commemorates July 4, 1776.

What occurred that day in Philadelphia might have been a Declaration of Independence, but the first such was enacted here on May 20, 1775.

George Will defends the celebration of July 4th.

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency


Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

"Here's what we know so far. The presidency started and hit America around 10am EST back on January 20, 2001. Now, so far that presidency has caused some 9 trillion dollars worth of debt. Its left thousands of people dead and, still, even this morning it continues to rage on."

Satire - or not? You decide.

Thursday, July 3, 2008

The Non-Issue that Should Be an Issue

It's the spending, stupid!

When was the last time you heard Senator Obama or Senator McCain give a speech on the bloated public sector? Did Senator Clinton, in her recently concluded presidential bid, ever scold voters who constantly want the government to "give" them more and more services?

These are rhetorical questions. Today our ruling parties tacitly agree that no government department can be eliminated, that major spending reductions are forbidden and that the spending spree must continue.

Shhhh! We're not supposed to talk about spending cuts. After all, we can always print more money.

Over-the-counter cloak and dagger

For all the public hand-wringing private military and security contractors have essentially tactical wartime roles, fulfilling specific tasks ranging from logistical support to guarding infrastructure and people. But private intelligence contractors are part of a strategic role. They are part and parcel of the process that generates the intelligence that decides whether a nation should go to a war in the fist place. Think back to the debates over Iraq concerning aluminum tubes, uranium from Niger, and mobile biological labs and then imagine how confident you would feel if such intelligence was the product of firms whose primary motivation was making a profit.

Who benefits from the war? Certainly it's not the taxpayers. Tim Shorrock's new book, "Spies for Hire" examines the scope and impact of outsourcing military and intelligence functions to private contractors. Do you feel safer now?

End of the Petroleum Age?

How do we know that the petroleum age is drawing to a close? Two key indicators tell us that this is so. First, many of the giant fields that have satisfied our massive thirst over so many years are experiencing diminished output. Second, although the major oil producers are spending more money each year to discover new reserves, they are finding less and less oil. Either of these factors by itself is cause for significant worry; the combination is deadly.

There will probably be enough oil in our lifetime - if you're as old as we are - but eventually, we'll need to find an alternative. I'm sure we will develop a new power source; i.e., solar, nuclear or something we haven't considered yet, but only when our backs are against the wall and we are faced with no other choice. The transition period may be painful. The environmentalists are correct in saying we need to transition to alternative energy sources, not because we are damaging the planet as they fear, but because at some point, we'll run out of petroleum.

McCain: Pump This!

I guess we're beginning to see the problem of basing a political platform on the passing fancies of "centrists." These are people who have no opinions because they know nothing about national issues. They're the ones who check the "not sure/no opinion" box on polls regarding the legalization of cannibalism.

You can't blame them: They're not being paid to know something about national issues. Those people we call "senators" and "representatives."

Ann Coulter points out that politicians who pander to the whims of unenlightened voter blocs instead of standing by their convictions can result in bad policy. By the way, she doesn't think too highly of McCain (or Obama).

Vaguely Resembling Real Price Inflation

What this newspaper ignoramus is saying is that he is some big blowhard expert on economics, but yet he is not remotely aware of the any of the constant jiggling of the CPI over the decades by the corrupt government trying to destroy the inflationary evidence of its gross mismanagement of the economy, culminating in the despicable actions of the odious Alan Greenspan and the equally despicable Michael Boskin in the '90s to introduce such bizarre, inflation-concealing concepts such as "the substitution effect", "the wealth effect", and "quality improvement (hedonic) effects", so that the Consumer Price Index now has only a vague, passing resemblance to real inflation in prices.

An economics lesson in one (long) sentence by the Mogambo Guru.

The DEA Turns 35 This Week!

The Drug Enforcement Administration was created by President Richard Nixon through an Executive Order [on] July [1,] 1973 in order to establish a single unified command to combat "an all-out global war on the drug menace." At its outset, the DEA had 1,470 Special Agents and a budget of less than $75 million. Furthermore, in 1974, the DEA had 43 foreign offices in 31 countries. Today, the DEA has 5,235 Special Agents, a budget of more than $2.3 billion and 86 foreign offices in 62 countries.

"Radical" Russ Belville examines the successes - or lack thereof - of he DEA.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Dire News from My Colleagues

America is not in recession, and who knows -- maybe we'll be less likely to have one if my compatriots would just chill. A recession is defined as two quarters of negative economic growth. We haven't even had one quarter of negative growth.

Yes, growth has slowed, and many people are suffering because of falling home prices and higher food and energy prices. These are real problems, but watching TV, you'd think we were in a recession so severe it must be compared to the Great Depression.

John Stossel thinks the media is fueling the fears by its reporting of the economy and that things aren't as bad as all that. I think he must be wearing rose-colored glasses.

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Previous Quotes

Of course, the politicians can’t solve economic problems for a very simple reason: they are the cause of them. ~ Bill Bonner



"When a system is corrupt it will attract only corrupt people and only the corrupt will flourish. We have provided history with a wonderful example of that. Look at the legislators who sit in not only the American Congress, but in the UK and Australian parliaments, and in governments all across the western world. Only an utterly corrupt system could elevate and reward such second-rate people." Sam Mathid



"What did lasting damage to the nation was not 9/11, it was remembering 9/11. Not only did overreaction to 9/11 play a substantial role in bankrupting the country…it also made Americans fearful and sheepish. They’re convinced the towel-heads are trying to kill them. They believe they can protect themselves by spending trillions of dollars they don’t have on military campaigns that don’t work." ~ Joel Bowman and Bill Bonner



"To inflate a currency is to steal the money citizens have earned and saved and entrusted their government to protect. Any government that betrays that trust and steals that wealth is not only unworthy of support. It is worthy of being overthrown." ~ Pat Buchanan



"Again, circumstances differ and details vary. The principle remains: Disengage, cut your expenses, seek the interstices, and don't believe in anything unless you are sure it was your idea to believe in it. What is coming looks to be ugly. If so, it will be every man for himself, his family, his friends, and what principles he believes. The government doesn’t give a wan, eitolated damn about you." ~Fred Reed



"Hahaha! Do? What can government do, now that it has borrowed itself into bankruptcy and after having encouraged the population to do the same so that everyone faces bankruptcy and ruination unless an inflationary hell created from stimulus spending somehow saves them all? What can they do? Hahaha!" ~ Richard Daughty



"God help this country when someone sits in this chair who doesn't know the military as well as I do." ~ Dwight David Eisenhower (1961)



"I'm angry. Waste always makes me angry and that's what this is, sheer waste!" ~ Rhett Butler



"The U.S. national debt problem simply cannot be fixed under the current system. U.S. government debt has been mathematically designed to expand forever. It is a trap from which there is no escape." ~ The Economic Collapse Blog



"Before the dollar reaches zero Americans should demand a national conversation about the debauchery of the once mighty U.S. dollar." ~ Potiphar Gride



"The political establishment tells us that we are caught up in a "war on terror" which, unlike previous wars, is destined to continue forever. As with all other pronouncements from the state, this characterization of events is grounded in lies. It is not "terrorism" – whatever that word may mean – that threatens the existing power structure, but the collapse of the institutional hierarchies that have ruled mankind for so many years. The struggles that now consume the energies, lives, and material resources of the nation can more accurately be considered as a "war to preserve the institutional order."" ~ Butler Shaffer



"What matter civil rights when the Moslem is at our throats? The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and the vigilance ends liberty." ~ Fred Reed



"WikiLeaks will doubtless try to struggle on. And Assange says he has given the entire diplomatic trove to 100,000 people. By dribs and drabs, shards of truth will get out. But the world’s journalists – and those persons of conscience working in the world’s governments – have been given a hard, harsh, unmistakable lesson in the new realities of our degraded time. Tell a truth that discomforts power, that challenges its domination over our lives, our discourse, our very thoughts, and you will be destroyed. No institution, public or private, will stand with you; the most powerful entities, public and private, will be arrayed against you, backed up by overwhelming violent force. This is where we are now. This is what we are now." ~ Chris Floyd



"We are kidding ourselves when we believe spying, intrigue, and outright military intervention can maintain our international status as a superpower while our domestic economy crumbles in an orgy of debt and monetary debasement." ~ Ron Paul



"The New York Times tells us that astronomers had seriously underestimated the number of stars in the universe. They can’t see the little ones. Which means, their last count was probably a few trillion off. Or maybe a few gazillion off.

Which suggests to us that astronomers and federal debt analysts must be using the same calculators. Both are trillions off the mark." ~ Bill Bonner



"As long as the Federal Reserve system exists, the national debt will keep going up, the money supply will keep going up and the U.S. dollar will continue to decline in value.

This is not because of some big mistake. This is what the Federal Reserve system was designed to do." ~ The Economic Collapse Blog



"Congress always finds money for emergency spending, in the form of supplemental appropriations bills for TARP bailouts, troop surges, and the like. Why is there never an emergency that justifies less spending???" ~ Ron Paul



""The terrorists have won" is a refrain I don't like using. It's sensationalist and ignores inherent complexities. But for the moment, I can't think of a better way of putting it." ~ Patrick Smith



"Quantitative easing has been tried before. Has it ever worked? Nope. Never. Do you dispute it? Give us an example." ~ Bill Bonner



"I think it's like they said during the war with Viet Nam: suppose they had a war, and nobody came? I also like to say: suppose they levied a tax, and nobody paid? And at this time of year: suppose they gave an election, and nobody voted?" ~ Doug Casey



"The leviathan state is the great enemy of American prosperity, the monster that devours wealth. Every bit of economic growth that we experience is due not to the presence of this leviathan, but to the ingenuity of American enterprise in getting around the barriers." ~ Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.



"I believe most Americans find the ideals and principles of socialism, communism and progressivism repugnant, but by our sanctioning greater government centralization and its control over our lives, we become their dupes or, as Lenin said, "useful idiots."" ~ Dr. Walter Williams



"In the 100 years before the Fed was formed, the dollar lost not a penny of its value. In the almost 100 years since, it has lost almost all of them. If the greenback were to lose another 5% of its 1914 value, there would be nothing left at all." ~ Bill Bonner



"If we were to abolish the Federal Reserve System, and if the government would then transfer to American voters all of the gold presently said to be in the vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Fort Knox, we would see the restoration of liberty." ~ Gary North



"Casting a single vote, among over 100 million, is an act of futility." ~ D.W. MacKenzie



" People, as we know, are imperfect. Governments, composed top to bottom of imperfect people wielding power, are very imperfect." ~ Peggy Noonan



" The failed "war on drugs" should be abandoned in favor of legal control." ~ John Wrisley



"[P]rosperity foregone is invisible. In other words, we can never tell how much richer we would have been without today's level of congressional interference in our lives and therefore don't fight it as much as we should." ~ Walter Williams



"The result is self-serving myopia, of which there is plenty in the Tea Party movement. They want to cut spending – but not for their Social Security benefits. They want less government – but they want the government to protect or "create" jobs. They want to close the borders – forgetting that we're all immigrants. They want a "strong national defense" – but they forget that fear has turned the U.S. into a paranoid "national security" state." ~ Doug Casey



"When many people start transferring their wealth from dollars into gold, that restricts the ability of politicians to steal from them through inflation." ~ Thomas Sowell



"Americans have to learn that the government isn't "us." It's an entity that has its own interests, its own life, its own agenda. It views citizens as milk cows – or perhaps even beef cows – strictly as a means to its ends." ~ Doug Casey



"Pay no attention to the little men on the TV screens. That's because they are the little men behind the curtain of coercion. It is not an iron curtain. It is a fiat-money curtain. They believe in the wisdom of men with badges and guns." ~ Gary North



"No wonder we are broke! We spent all our money on free lunches for ourselves, and now we are spending it on delivering “free lunches” to more than half of the population!" ~ Richard Daughty (The Mogambo Guru)



"The moral collapse came when voters trusted governments to tell them the truth. Voters trusted government promises to fund the majority in old age at the expense of the rich. This is a widespread moral collapse." ~ Gary North



"So where is this rage coming from? Why is it flourishing? What will it do to America?" ~ Paul Krugman, Liberal Keynesian Economist



"A day after 9/11, I was asked on CNN if Osama bin Laden was behind the attack. "We have yet to see the evidence," I replied. I maintain this position today." ~ Eric Margolis



"We get the government we want. If we want a government that meets our every need, we will live as beggars and slaves." ~ Patrick Samuels



"The tyrant is but one person, and could scarcely command the obedience of another person, much less of an entire country, if most of the subjects did not grant their obedience by their own consent." ~ Murray Rothbard



"The welfare of the country is squarely up to us as individuals. That is where it should be and that is where it is safest. Governments can promise something for nothing but they cannot deliver." ~ Henry Ford, 1922



"People just aren’t coming in the way they used to, not these past couple of years, anyway. Things are bad. Folks are worried." ~ A Restaurant Owner in Savannah, GA.



"The plethora of stimuli by government fiat have created nothing more than the illusion of economic activity. They are attempts to disguise the chaos caused by political shenanigans." ~ Bumpy Road



"Does it make sense that by printing more pieces of impressive looking green paper that you can create wealth? If that were the case, why aren’t the Zimbabweans the richest people on the planet? Yet, this is what economists believe and this is what the Fed practices." ~ Jeff Harding



"I don’t think the Federal Reserve should exist – it would be best for congress to exert their responsibilities and that is find out what they are doing." ~ Ron Paul



"Times change." ~ Fred Reed



"America isn’t even running on fumes at this point. It is running on delusions." ~ Jim Quinn



"The day of national reckoning has arrived. We will not have a conventional business recovery now, but rather a long hangover of debt liquidation and downsizing ... it's a pity that the modern Republican party offers the American people an irrelevant platform of recycled Keynesianism when the old approach -- balanced budgets, sound money and financial discipline -- is needed more than ever." ~ David Stockman



"The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped us." ~ Peggy Noonan



"It would have been better if the feds had let the market clear…
Let it happen. Let it be. Let the chips fall where they may…so that others can pick them up and get to work again." ~ Bill Bonner



"The taxpayer: That's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take a civil service examination." ~ Ronald Reagan



"Remember the military’s frantic efforts to suppress the photos of torture at Abu Ghraib, photos of prisoners lying in pools of blood while grinning girl soldiers play with them? These had zero tactical importance. They did however threaten to arouse the Pentagon’s worst enemy.

The American public." ~ Fred Reed



"Dear chief secretary, I'm afraid there is no money. Kind regards – and good luck! Liam." ~ Liam Byrne



"[W]ar is the health of the state. The last thing big government proponents want is for peace to break out in the world." ~ Ron Paul



"The money the federal government borrows comes from Americans’ savings. So does the cash that Americans invest in private sector growth. There comes a point where there just aren’t enough savings to satisfy both masters. Unfortunately for economic growth, the government always helps itself first." ~ Veronique de Rugy



"When free market economist Ludwig von Mises was asked what he would do if he were put in charge of the economy, he replied with one word: "Resign." That was the correct answer." ~ Gary North



"[L]iquidity seeps through the economy like acid, corroding US living standards and industrial competitiveness. Because what Wall Street calls 'liquidity,' Main Street calls 'inflation.'" ~ Hemant Kathuria



"Government is the problem; it cannot be the solution." ~ Ron Paul



"It is now easy to see the enthusiasm of the federal government and its economic advisers for the new scheme for a VAT. It allows the government to extract many more funds from the public — to bring about higher prices, lower production, and lower incomes — and yet totally escape the blame, which can easily be loaded on business, unions, or the consumer as the particular administration sees fit." ~ Murray N. Rothbard



"We are no longer dealing with a constitutional republic or even a democracy but an authoritarian oligarchy. In our fight against our government we do no disservice to the vision of Adams, Madison, Jefferson or Washington. The beast trampled their vision long ago. I would think they would be rather proud of our efforts to resist the [sic] its tyranny." ~ Patrick Samuels



"We are in the end stages of the societal and financial system destruction. When you get to the end of a fiat currency system, more and more elements of it become a fraud." ~ Ty Andros



"Americans may have finally given up on big government." ~ Chris Stirewalt



"You are the one who gets up every day to go to work. You’re the one who puts in long hours. You’re the one who makes your job what it is.

What have the politicians done to earn that money?

Absolutely nothing." ~ Harry Browne



"The areas of life that remain outside the government's participation, regulation, surveillance, or manipulation by means of taxes and subsidies have become so few and so trivial they scarcely merit mention." ~ Robert Higgs



"If your intuitive sense is that there is something fundamentally wrong with such high levels of debt and low levels of savings, then you are right." ~ Mark Lutter



"[Y]ou should never confuse the state with a friend. Remember your Miranda rights; any information you give can and will be used against you." ~ Doug Casey



"The Right and the Left are agreed on central banking. This goes back to 1848: the anonymously published Manifesto of the Communist Party, wherein Marx and Engels recommended the creation of a central bank as one of the ten steps to socialize a society." ~ Gary North



"The Constitution’s protections... conveniently disappear when the government considers an emergency important enough." ~ Jacob Huebert



"O! Ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe... . O! Receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind." ~ Thomas Paine



"As government grows, it deprives the private sector of the resources it needs to survive and grow. The result is a lower overall standard of living. Not only are government jobs less productive than private sector jobs, but bureaucratic interference actually makes the remaining private sector jobs less efficient as well." ~ Peter Schiff



"We do not want to see the Fed with more power. We want to see the Fed out of business as well as the end of the SEC and CFTC. As you can see our government and Wall Street are totally corrupt and unless we do something about it they will destroy our country." ~ Bob Chapman



"I don’t know about you, but I consider the IRS and federal mandates to be hostile." ~ Linda Brady Traynham



"Once you accept the precept that government, or anyone, has dominion over you, you are no longer free." ~ Bumpy Road



"When opposing views, theories, and facts are suppressed... then democracy becomes a curse and not a blessing. The idea of democracy as a guardian of freedom rests on this: if we all fear government rule, then we all have a more or less equal interest in keeping government modest, tame, and neutral." ~ Bruce Walker



"What the Federal Reserve still fails to realize is that intervention in the economy is always harmful." ~ Ron Paul



"Americans, or most of them, have proved to be putty in the hands of the police state."" ~ Paul Craig Roberts



"As health insurance premiums rise - as people start clogging doctors offices - as the quality of care gradually declines - there will be more and more cries from the dumb masses for the government to "do something."" ~ Neal Boortz



"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." ~ C. S. Lewis



"In 1776, the American Republic boldly announced its birth with the Declaration of Independence. In 2010, it quietly expired with a declaration of dependence - on government, on entitlement, and on the Democratic party." ~ Matt Patterson



"[A]t some point, the bill-payers are going to resist the payments that previous generations have legislated. What one generation can legislate, a subsequent generation can repeal." ~ Gary North



"It is harder to preserve than to obtain liberty. " ~ John C. Calhoun



"The only remedy short of armed rebellion is civil disobedience at the level of the states. Clear constitutional justification for refusal to obey Washington lies in the Tenth Amendment..." ~ Fred Reed



"We know we have to go somewhere. We know that something like history is leaving us behind. We have no idea how to get to a new place. And we're spending most of our mental energy gaping into the rear-view mirror, which is the last place to look for your destination." ~ James Howard Kunstler



"Social Security's financial problems have been looming for years as the nation's 78 million baby boomers approached retirement age. The oldest are already there. As that huge group of people starts collecting benefits — and stops paying payroll taxes — Social Security's trust funds will shrink, running out of money by 2037..." ~ Stephen Ohlemacher



"We keep hearing that our kids and grandkids will have to pay for the reckless spending spree we've been on, but the bill has arrived earlier than expected and we will be required to make the preliminary payments." ~ Bumpy Road



"One source of politicians’ confusion on this score may stem from the related belief that wealth can simply be created out of thin air. After all, if politicians fund their quixotic job creation schemes with newly-printed dollars, they needn’t raise taxes, right? But unfortunately for them, inflation is in reality just a hidden tax. The devalued dollars left in people’s pockets after monetary inflation will buy fewer actual goods and services." ~ Bradley Doucet



"The majority is wrong on economics because they still, laughably, believe in the proverbial “free lunch”, a childish fiction where somebody gets something and nobody has to pay for it, and the majority are willing to bankrupt themselves, and destroy their own country, by letting Congress try to provide a free lunch to anyone and everyone who walks up with a hand out or a sad story." ~ The Mogambo Guru aka Richard Daughty



"The nation is looking to government for solutions and demanding action. DC has no way out of the dilemma it has created. It cannot afford to continue to appease the dependency it has produced nor does it dare to stop - rebellion would ensue." ~ Bumpy Road



"The status quo and entrenched interests in a two-party system dictate that the sort of change that is now needed won't come voluntarily and, no matter which party is in power, when it comes to spending, they'll both keep doing what they've been doing until the system just stops working." ~ Tim Iacono



"Around the world, politicians have bankrupted their nations, by spending and creating huge welfare states. Welfare states, which cost so much, and once in place, can never be revoked, because of all the created dependents." ~ Don Stott



"Here is the issue in a nutshell. By keeping derelict firms like General Motors afloat, not to mention spending billions on worthless "stimulus" projects and "green jobs," the government also is drawing resources away from the very sectors of the economy that have real strength." ~ William Anderson



"In every nation, it is the same story. The politicians centralize power. The bureaucrats exercise this power. Politicians come and go. Political parties exchange the trappings of authority. The bureaucrats keep their jobs, extend their reach, and consolidate power." ~ Gary North



"Unconstitutional government spending, after all, is doubly an evil: it not only means picking the taxpayer’s pocket, it also means subverting the system of limited and divided government that the Founders created. Just look at how federal spending has corrupted American education." ~ Ron Paul



"The US is trapped. Caught between rising expenditures and the need to borrow more, outstanding US debt is incapable of ever being repaid and should the credit rating of the US ever reflect its actual state, sovereign default, not devaluation would be the result." ~ Darryl Robert Schoon



"An honest appraisal of our country’s downward spiral is necessary to begin the process of redemption. We have continually voted ourselves increased benefits, dependent upon the printing presses of the Federal Reserve to sustain our country’s ponzi scheme. We have pawned our future and the bill will eventually come due." ~ John Eberhard



"At its very core, nullification is mass civil-disobedience to the federal government with the support of the state apparatus. It’s about “We the People” exercising our rights whether the politicians or judges in Washington D.C want to give us “permission” to exercise those rights or not." ~ Michael Boldin



"Once a chap's enjoying the fruits of government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the rest, he couldn't give a hoot about the general societal interest. He's got his, and to hell with everyone else. People's sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense." ~ Mark Steyn



"There is nothing wrong with telling people that taxation is robbery, that regulation is trespass, that drug laws are assault and robbery, that politicians are criminals, and that the state is a monstrous criminal agency." ~ Ben O'Neill



"The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people." ~ Ron Paul



"It is time to choose. If Americans truly are heirs to the Jeffersonian legacy, than it has always been and must always be, not only our right, but our duty as citizens to withdraw consent from any government that becomes destructive of life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness." ~ Josh Eboch



"A maelstrom of government debt, unfunded liabilities, looming energy catastrophe, and consumer collapse is about to hit the United States. There is no politician in Washington DC willing to stand up in front of the American people and tell them the truth about the storms on our horizon." ~ JimQ



"[W]e are repeatedly lied to by our government, on everything, but particularly on the real lack of success, the real cost and the extreme risk of our ongoing and endless "War on Terror."" ~ Karen Kwiatkowski



"With our elected representatives having no resources of their own to dispose, what they give now must be taken back at some point." ~ John Tamny



"Economics itself is a self-correcting system under most circumstances. However, in a world where government is unconstrained, politicians see every minor discomfort as an opportunity for an intervention and a means to gain more power." ~ Monty Pelerin



"Never underestimate the power of a handful of rural red necks, duty-bound, born-again to the Constitution and hell-bent on a free vision of starting the world again. ‘Twas ever thus." ~ Bernie Quigley



"People are freshly aware and concerned about the real-world implications of a $1.6 trillion dollar deficit, of a $14 trillion debt. It will rob America of its economic power, and eventually even of its ability to defend itself. Militaries cost money. And if other countries own our debt, don't they in some new way own us?" ~ Peggy Noonan



"[T]he federal government isn’t a charity; it is a forced transfer machine. The less fortunate, and society as a whole, would be better off if the taxes paid to support inefficient, counterproductive government programs were instead left in the hands of supportive individuals and organizations." ~ Tad DeHaven



"Any solution that doesn’t pay off until we’re all dead is no solution at all. It’s a way of avoiding a solution…which is what Congress desperately wants to do. A real solution will come. But not from Congress. Instead, it will come unbidden. And unwelcome. Like the plague." ~ Bill Bonner



"Without the limitations of sound money, governments will spend without limit. They will spend money to hire their cronies, pay off special interests, give out favors, create dependence and generally distract from the terrible job they do at their chief mandate, which is to protect the liberties of the people. Fiat money is a blank check to government, which is very dangerous, and we are witnessing the death throes of the system as the bills come due and the underlying capital is squandered away." ~ Ron Paul



"You will be forced into another Social Security-like scheme with the proposed mandatory Guaranteed Retirement Annuity, with 5% of your salary confiscated into the program. You will also eventually find your existing retirement funds forced into the government program and you will lose your ability to invest and protect your retirement funds outside of the dollar, government bonds, and the US investment markets at some time in the future. The only questions are when and what the final details of this, the greatest potential wealth confiscation in the history of the world, will be." ~ Ron Holland



"The presidency has systematically stolen the liberty won through the secession from Britain. From Jackson and Lincoln to McKinley and Roosevelt Junior, from Wilson and FDR to Truman and Kennedy, from Nixon and Reagan to Bush and Clinton, it has been the means by which our rights to liberty, property, and self-government have been suppressed." ~ Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.



"Who are ever taxed? Individuals only. Who have property that can be taxed? Individuals only. Who can give their consent to be taxed? Individuals only. Who are ever taxed without their consent? Individuals only. Who, then, are robbed, if taxed without their consent? Individuals only.
If taxation without consent is robbery, the United States government has never had, has not now, and is never likely to have, a single honest dollar in its treasury." ~ Lysander Spooner



"There is no solution to Bernanke's manifold dilemmas other than to end the Fed. Economies are too complex to be handled by a central authority. This lesson was learnt by the central planners of the socialist economies at a high price." ~ Antony Mueller



"When I see people like Paul Ryan addressing large tea party conventions and receiving standing ovations for his budget plan, maybe I will begin to think it is possible to avoid a massive tax increase. But right now, I don't see even the tiniest glimmer of understanding among the tea party crowd about the true nature of our budget problem and what it would take to avoid a major tax increase." ~ Bruce Bartlett



"Their 300 year-old system of credit and debt concocted to drain the productivity of others has succeeded beyond their wildest dreams; but it has come at a cost - their host, society, upon which their profits depend is now collapsing." ~ Darryl Robert Schoon



"If this recovery gets any better nobody will have a job." ~ Neil Charnock



"Washington needs to change its thinking and adopt some common sense priorities. The Constitution gives some excellent limitations that would get us back on the right path if we would simply abide by them." ~ Ron Paul



"[W]hat we are seeing is good times for the public sector and the growing prospect of a continuing and perhaps even deepening recession for everybody else." ~ The Examiner



"The lesson of the history of the U.S. census is this: Any power ceded to a government will be abused, given time. Today, the long-form of the census asks for details of your life that you would never tell a neighbor or a private business." ~ Lew Rockwell



"The stock market is artificially propped up through government purchases of Dow stocks with tax money deposited in broker accounts at such money centers as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, among others. They can levitate the markets indefinitely with Fed Reserve account funds. The U.S. stock market is a fraud. Surely you must understand that." ~ Anonymous Blog Comment



"A politician who has no politically acceptable answer to an inevitable problem is safe for as long as his potential opponents also have no politically acceptable answers. Everyone kicks the can." ~ Gary North



"The two political parties birthed in arrogance play a game of chicken. Neither will risk political suicide to undertake the necessary hard choices. As long as politicians can buy votes with your money they will and they'll win." ~ Bill Flax



"The optimist's brain filters out bad news. They know their dreams of prosperity will come true. Then, when they finally do see that the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train, it's always too late.
I will say it again, gently: A new meltdown is coming. The Great Depression II is coming, soon. And yet, I know your mental filters are working, blocking warnings of a bomb." ~ Paul B. Farrell



"All paper money falls into one of two catagories, those that have failed and those that are going to fail." ~ Ray Elliott



"A refresher course in the study of The Constitution would be useful only to museum curators and historians interested in ancient documents as today's politicians make up their rules as they go with no regard to that quaint old charter of yore. Still, we recommend the perusal of it now and again, if only to ascertain how far we have deviated from its concept and purpose." ~ Bumpy Road



"Don't imagine what you want the Constitution to say or pretend it says something it does not. If you, like the president, don't like what the Constitution says, amend it." ~ Thomas Mitchell



"It should be fairly obvious to anyone who’s paying attention that neither President Obama nor the US Congress can be trusted to even slow the growth of, let alone actually freeze or reduce, government spending." ~ Thomas L. Knapp



"This is what Washington fears most: grass-roots political mobilization. That would threaten the concentration of power, the growth of the debt, and the permanent immunity of the Federal Reserve System more than anything else." ~ Gary North



"[P]eople in this country...have literally been programmed not to see things as they are, but to see them the way the government wants them to see them." ~ Don Cooper



"They do one dumb thing,” said our gardener, speaking of the feds. “Then they do two dumb things so they don’t have to admit they did something dumb in the first place." ~ Bill Bonner



"In 1913, when the Fed was created with the duty of preserving the dollar, one 20-dollar bill could buy one 20-dollar gold piece. Fifty 20-dollar bills are needed today to buy one 20-dollar gold piece. Under the Fed's custody, the U.S. dollar has lost 98 percent of its value." ~ Patrick J. Buchanan



"[T]he problem is that the capacity to imagine freedom – the very source of life for civilization and humanity itself – is being eroded in our society and culture. The less freedom we have, the less people are able to imagine what freedom feels like, and therefore the less they are willing to fight for its restoration." ~ Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.



"[T]he government can not continue to take from Peter, the producer, to spend on Paul, the consumer, at ever higher amounts, in perpetuity. One must produce before one can consume, lest there is nothing left to consume." ~ Michael Pollaro



"[W]elfare at home has rendered a burgeoning social subgroup unable or unwilling to pull its (now grotesquely bloated) weight. The middle class pays dearly—housing these people, schooling them, nursing them for their myriad addictions and self-induced complaints, and then being mugged by them as they trudge home from their highly-taxed jobs." ~ James Jackson



"At the moment that the whole world has accepted that government will centrally plan all of the economy, take care of its citizens from cradle to grave, and rule a worldwide military empire --all with money that comes from nowhere -- at that very moment the age of government will end." ~ Tom Mullen



"Ponzi schemes always hook a generous share of the public. Getting something for nothing is as primitive an imperative as breathing and eating to the free-lunch-craving majority." ~ Stephen Mauzy



"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the United States since the days of Andrew Jackson." ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt



"It is obvious to everyone but an economist that spending twice as much as you earn is not a formula for real prosperity." ~ Bill Bonner



"There are no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved." ~ Ludwig von Mises



"What we notice in our brush with America’s intellectual and political elite is that they are very smart, very well informed, but too busy to stop and think.

They are thinkers. They are always thinking about what to do. But they cannot afford to think radically…about why they should do anything at all." ~ Bill Bonner



"The American people today are fatigued, and while their political leadership promises to lead the nation out of the long, dark tunnel of conflict, there continues to be no light emerging in the distance, only the ever-darkening shadows of wars without end or purpose." ~ Scott Ritter



"The playing field is no longer level. Government is no longer focused on our desires as constituents. It passes laws and regulations to benefit the big businesses and big labor regardless of how much they cost us in money and freedom. This is not the people’s government, it is no longer even a representative republic." ~ Patrick Samuels



"Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer." ~ Thomas Paine ~ Common Sense



"The ObamaCare monstrosity, stuffed with pork and deception, claiming to do what it does not and pretending to do good while inflicting harm, is a national disgrace, an insult to the intelligence of every American and a fitting monument to President Obama's first year in office." ~ Ernest S. Christian AND Gary A. Robbins



"”For many progressives it all seems to be about how they feel about themselves and the sense of self-righteousness that their “generosity” affords them. Of course, self-righteousness is hardly the domain of the left. Having lived through the reign of terror of the “religious right” and their devotion to their belief that they are God’s true representatives on earth, well, it was scary stuff. The left thinks they are on the side of the angels and the right thinks God is on their side." ~ Doug Carkuff



"”Pardon me, but when has the post-1912 Republican Party even tried to repeal a major plank of the enervating socialist welfare state, whether it be the Federal Reserve, the income tax, Social Security, Medicare, or the government's role in the youth indoctrination camps known as "public schools"?" ~ Vin Suprynowicz



"I heartily accept the motto,—”That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe—”That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have." ~ Henry David Thoreau



"The long train of abuses is clear: the constitution has been and is being used every day against the freedoms and rights it is supposed to protect and against the principles and trust that created it." ~ Timothy Baldwin



"If it’s not one thing, it’s another. It’s always something." ~ Roseanne Roseannadanna



"How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it." ~ Henry David Thoreau



"Voters aren't much attracted to traits such as responsible statesmanship in their politicians. The candidate who promises to keep spending money he doesn't have and sending the bill to posterity will win. For now." ~ John Wrisley aka Potiphar Gride



"Goldman Sachs (the final recipient of most of those Government "loans" is borrowing money from the Fed at near-zero interest rates and reinvesting at higher rates in more distant instruments. They are rolling in dough. Right now, you don't even know that you have been robbed, and you won't know it until there is a massive rise in prices." ~ Howard S. Katz



"It is impossible to be charitable with someone else's money. Charity comes from your own heart, not from the government spending your money. When we pay our taxes to the government and it gives that money away, that's not charity, that's welfare. When the government takes more from us than it needs to secure our freedoms, so it can have money to give away, that's not charity, that's theft. And when the government forces hospitals to provide free health care to those who can't or won't care for themselves, that's not charity, that's slavery." ~ Andrew P. Napolitano



"You Americans are so gullible. No, you won't accept communism outright. But we'll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you finally wake up and find you already have communism. We won't have to fight you; we'll so weaken your economy until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands." ~ Nikita Khruschev



"The Fed created the bubble. The White House and Congress goaded banks into making all those subprime mortgages. Fannie and Freddie bought up the lousy paper and turned it into securities. Wall Street banks bought them up and put them on their books as Triple A assets. Federal regulators looked the other way." ~ Patrick J. Buchanan



"Every law enacted is an increase of centralized power and a decrease in individual power. In essence, every time you ask the government to enact a law, even if it is with the best of intentions, to force another to do the “right” thing, you inevitably tighten the noose around your own neck." ~ Jessica Pacholski



"No one today even pretends that the Bill of Rights serves its intended purpose of restraining the Federal Government." ~ Kevin R.C. Gutzman



"[T]he usurpations of power, the encroachments upon liberty, and the arrogant tax-and-spend policies emanating from Washington, D.C., and Wall Street these days are far more egregious than what George Washington and the boys were enduring in 1775–76 at the hands of the British Crown." ~ Chuck Baldwin



"[G]old and silver are anathema to governments. A supply of gold and silver that is limited in supply by nature cannot be inflated, and thus serves as a check on the growth of government. Without the ability to inflate the currency, governments find themselves constrained in their actions, unable to carry on wars of aggression or to appease their overtaxed citizens with bread and circuses." ~ Ron Paul



"Remember this, and remember it well: Government serves itself first and foremost. We’re an afterthought at best and, more often than not, an obstacle to be overcome. Government is inherently an alien institution and its employees are at all times an occupation force. It’s about time we recognized that and started treating them accordingly." ~ Thomas L. Knapp



"Unless there is another Social Security tax increase in 2010, the system will go into red ink mode and stay there." ~ Gary North



"Call 911 only after your shotgun is pumped because the cops will only get there in time to tape off the scene of the crime and stare at your dead body." ~ Karen De Coster



"One of the major problems with the government’s response to the crisis has been the failure to understand that the bust phase is actually the correction of previous errors." ~ Steven Horwitz & Peter Boettke



"Beware of the supposed gifts offered to you by government, for when it gives you things with one hand, the other hand takes away your liberty and independence." ~ Ron Paul



"All the penalties will not be light, nor evenly distributed. There is no way of making them so. There is no instant step from disorder to order. We must face a condition of grim reality, charge off our losses and start afresh. It is the oldest lesson of civilization." ~ Warren G. Harding



"No one owes us gasoline, medicine, food, jobs, or anything else, so why should we criticize the person for the price he charges us or the wage he offers for something that he was not obligated to provide for us in the first place?" ~ Louis Carabini



"To restore a free society to our land requires the abolition of many departments and agencies of the federal government. Chief among these are the twin jugular veins of the welfare-warfare state -- the income tax and the Federal Reserve." ~ Jacob Hornberger



"Even the Supreme Court ought to recognize the "you exist, therefore you're regulated" rationale as a bridge too far. But court-watchers have learned never to underestimate the justices' creativity in inventing new rationalizations for constitutionalizing the unconstitutional." ~ Gene Healy



"What is stupid is believing that politicians are trying to solve our problems, instead of theirs." ~ Thomas Sowell



"By the time today’s 30-year-old gets a family…a house…and a mortgage, he will also have his share of a $20 trillion dollar deficit – not to mention the “off budget” obligations of the US government, a total of more than $100 trillion!" ~ Bill Bonner



"No legal tender law is ever needed to make men take good money; its only use is to make them take bad money." ~ Stephen T. Byington



"A culture that turns a blind eye to government failure, but is quick and unrelenting to blame society's ills on business, will naturally and subliminally embrace socialist solutions. The problem is that when one intervention fails, the government attempts to fix its errors with yet more intervention — a sort of creeping socialism that results in a compounding of waste and inefficiency." ~ Robert J. Herbold and Scott S. Powell



"Anything the government does to discourage capital formation automatically diminishes job creation. By running the largest federal deficits in history, Barack Obama is diverting all available capital to the Treasury, and is in effect waging a war against private capital formation." ~ Peter Schiff



"When an individual acts, he acts with diligence because he needs to achieve the most satisfaction, based on his scale of utility, for his limited dollars. The bureaucrat knows no such limit. He is financed with your money." ~ Fred Buzzeo



"Few realize that fear alone is bringing about our transformation into a country driven by constant warfare to the detriment of our constitutional liberties." ~ Philip M. Giraldi



"Where do you think the $36 billion of money poured into country by the international community have gone? This money went into the pockets of the drug lords and the warlords. There are 18 million people in Afghanistan who live on less than $2 a day while these warlords get rich." ~ Malalai Joya



"[T]he welfare state retards moral and intellectual development. We expect the State — our surrogate parent — to make it all right. The demagogues we call politicians are happy to feed this attitude because it provides occasions for the expansion and exercise of raw power while seeming, like Santa Claus, to give away free goods. Of such things long political careers are made." ~ Sheldon Richman



"The mirage economy can’t return until after the pendulum has swung its full travel to the other side of the arc. That path leads through the valley of a crushing economic depression, one that will radically and permanently alter the lives of middle-class Americans who are almost universally unaccustomed to hardship." ~ David Calderwood



"The TSA bureaucrats expend tens of thousands of committee man-hours to make sure nobody can ever hijack a plane again, or hide explosives in their shoes, or smuggle in explosives in shampoo bottles — stuff that Al Qaeda would never try twice anyway, because they turn on a dime to come up with the next thing the TSA bureaucrats haven’t thought of yet." ~ Kevin Carson



"No statute enacted by man can repeal the inexorable laws of nature. Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too much of government…" ~ Warren G. Harding



"We can understand that cattle may lick the hand of the farmer who lowers an axe to its neck, because cattle are dumb beast that cannot comprehend their real relationship with the farmer, and his imminent plans for them.
What is our excuse?" ~ Stefan Molyneux



"Like a vast ship, America is taking a long time to sink but each day it sinks a little further. The fearsome day awaits, when America, if not quickly recovered by its real citizens, will tilt its nose into the water to begin a rapid and final descent into oblivion ... her many resources saved for whom?" ~ Edwin X Berry, PhD



"[A] new patriotism is needed. As a start, let’s stop worshiping the military and flag and bring back the founders’ old-fashioned respect for liberty and the Constitution." ~ Ivan Eland



"When one is in a deep hole, the first thing to do is stop digging. That means dispensing with the artificial means to prop up the economy when serious medicine is needed, medicine that will be painful but ultimately will lead to economic recovery." ~ William Anderson



"Americans have no greater enemy than their own government. " ~ Paul Craig Roberts



"We have ended up with an incomprehensible maze of laws and regulations that severely constrains the people and expands the government – the exact opposite of what our founders intended." ~ Ron Paul



"War is Peace" ~ George Orwell



"If the American people are to fight expensive wars, provide care for the domestic masses as well as immigrants, subsidize almost anything and anybody who demands it, and keep the pork barrel brimming, they must cough up some big bucks to pay for it." ~ John Wrisley



"We (The USA) are a Paper Tiger...

We have only the power that fear breeds. The Bric countries are seeing that 'power' for the facade that it is.

We are weak; Socially, economically, morally.

Weak. " ~ Ambrose Evans-Pritchard



"Periods of growth…and periods when the mistakes made during the boom are corrected. There’s a time for every purpose under heaven. That’s the way it works. The economy breathes in and it breathes out.

And there’s always some dumb economist trying to smother it with a pillow!" ~ Bill Bonner



"Voting for the lesser of two evils has brought us the promised product: evil." ~ Michael Gaddy



"Let them discover, in the operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it — and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t." ~ Dr. Thomas Hendricks (Atlas Shrugged)



"There are precisely no answers to be found in legitimizing the inherent illegitimacy of government by pandering to it as an institution. The only effective means of reducing government at all is by advocating its fullscale dissolution." ~ Alex R. Knight III



"[I]t is too late here in the USA, and just like it is too late almost everywhere else, too, where years and years of increasing government spending and control means that government IS the economy, and shrinking the size of government obviously shrinks the economy! Hahahaha! Oops!" ~ Richard Daughty aka The Mogambo Guru



"Either we lost it, forgot it, or we deliberately discarded it. Either we decided that freedom was not worth the responsibility of being free, or we forgot that, to be free, a man must assume and maintain and defend his right to be responsible for his freedom." ~ William Faulkner



"Rarely are liberty and prosperity at greater risk than when politicians feel they must “do something”." ~ Ron Paul



"[O]ne ironic result from 9/11 has been that, insofar as the terrorists truly hate our freedom, the government has given the terrorists what they wanted. Our freedom has been under continual attack for the last eight years in the name of fighting terrorism." ~ Anthony Gregory



"[I]n politics, the worst get on top. And there is no accountability: the higher the office, the more criminal wrongdoing a person can get away with." ~ Lew Rockwell



"China is a confirmed large buyer of gold, along with Russia." ~ Adrian Douglas



"If you don’t want kids to die in Afghanistan, don’t send them there." ~ Fred Reed



"How easily we put on those robes and crowns. How casually we wield the scepters of little gods, passing out life and death, determining who is worthy of what and how much, deciding what’s right on the most intimate levels for people we don’t even know." ~ Robert Hawes



"To most of us, bloated central governments seem inevitable because they have been the norm for generations. They have been the norm because they have been stable. Are they still that way? Or is this noisy summer of Tea Parties and townhalls the trickle of a flood that will be upon us soon?" ~ Stewart Browne



" Unfortunately, whatever Obama’s talents, he is not a businessman and certainly not an economist – of any stripe. He has put his faith in a bunch of economic quacks and the result is, and will remain, a moribund economy for years to come." ~ Chris Clancy



"Instead of economic growth and stable prices, (The Fed) has given us a system of government and finance that now threatens the world financial and political institutions. Pursuing the same policy of excessive spending, debt expansion and monetary inflation can only compound the problems that prevent the required corrections. Doubling the money supply didn’t work, quadrupling it won’t work either. Buying up the bad debt of privileged institutions and dumping worthless assets on the American people is morally wrong and economically futile." ~ Representative Ron Paul questioning Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke



"There will always be apologists who by glib fabrication and wily use of words, as well as appeals to emotion, will affirm that there is no such thing as an absolute right, and that government is justified in placing "reasonable" limits on our rights. This line of reasoning is wrong, dead wrong. A right, by definition, is absolute. That is why it is a right, and not something else." ~ John Sampson



"[W]e are in the third and fatal stage of a great country – the political stage. In this stage, the parasites take over. Government governs a lot. And governing a lot costs a lot of money." ~ Bill Bonner



"Profit is the key to competition. Anyone who claims to favor competition but looks down at profit has no idea what he is talking about." ~ John Stossel



" If we are to regain our liberties, we must reassert our responsibilities for ourselves, accepting the consequences of our own actions without appealing to the government for salvation. To continue on the road we Americans have traveled for the past century is ultimately to deliver ourselves completely into the hands of an unlimited government." ~ Robert Higgs



"The basic business model of government is to keep order, protect campaign contributors and lure supporters with the promise of other peoples’ money. The game plan of the typical citizen is even simpler: to be on the receiving end, not the paying end. Over time, more and more of them get into position. And the whole society becomes more costly, and more corrupt." ~ Bill Bonner



"So it isn’t just the rudeness and bullying of Immigrations people, or the confiscation of toothpaste and shampoo and bottled water. It is the sense that the government, if not quite an enemy perhaps, is not friendly, and is endless trouble. For a large and, I thank [sic], growing number of people, the most fervent wish is that the government leave them the hell alone." ~ Fred Reed



"Yes, politicians are malevolent or stupid, most likely the former in my view, but everyone who votes for them is complicit, up to his neck, actively taking part in the most humongous act of armed robbery in the history of man. That is not "insurance"--a perfectly sound idea involving the voluntary sharing of the risk of heavy but unpredictable loss--this is theft, neither more nor less." ~ Jim Davies



"The political divide among freedom activists is between those who want to save the system, and those who are willing to let the system fall." ~ Kyle Bennett



"The radical empowerment and enrichment of Wall Street has transformed our democracy into an aristocracy, making the debt dealers the nation’s new royalty, the government its feudal barons, and the citizens mere serfs who endlessly sweat and toil in fields of debt weeds that grow so fast they can never, ever be harvested." ~ Stewart Dougherty



"The only thing life has taught us is that government programs are unsustainable and threats to our freedoms." ~ Bernard Chapin



"Through our inactions and apathy we have acknowledged the state to be the masters of our lives;... Remember, we traded our rights for security. It is turning out to be one heck of a bad bargain." ~ Michael Gaddy



"We are seeing the worst unemployment rate since 1982. Tens of millions of workers have no memory of that era. They have borrowed and spent on the assumption that nothing like this could happen to them. But it has." ~ Gary North



"Consumers are cutting back…raising chickens in their back yards…driving less…planting gardens and squeezing their nickels. The private sector is de-leveraging. And there won’t be any durable economic boom or lasting bull market on Wall Street until this process is finished." ~ Bill Bonner



"Nothing man can do will stop the out of control Leviathan State from continually expanding. It will devour itself." ~ Jim Paynard



"As Bastiat explained, government doesn’t create wealth; it only diverts it. When government controls wealth it inevitably tends to serve political ends rather than consumers." ~ Larissa Price



"These monsters, who have been given extraordinary powers to rule over you, have become so used to ramping up their powers and stomping their legislative jack boots down on your head, that they are not the slightest bit tolerant of resistance. They loathe your disobedience, your verbal challenges, your hostility to their supremacy." ~ Karen De Coster



"[T]he competition of social power with State power is always disadvantaged, since the State can arrange the terms of competition to suit itself, even to the point of outlawing any exercise of social power whatever in the premises; in other words, giving itself a monopoly." ~ Albert J. Nock



"[t]here is no art which one government sooner learns of another, than that of draining money from the pockets of the people." ~ Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations



"Prices are going up because the dollar is going down. That is all ye know and all ye need to know." ~ Howard S. Katz



"Real demand increases only when real wages increase. Then, people have more purchasing power. Trying to increase demand by borrowing – or stealing – from the future is a scam at best. Even if it works now, it fails later." ~ Bill Bonner



"[I]n exchange for a reliable vote come election time – the government keeps the public satiated and sedated by providing them with an ever-increasing list of “public services.”" ~ James Quinn



"Most of what we now call "government" is unconstitutional." ~ Bill Huff



"By its very nature, the state will persist in looking upon human beings as "assets," as "resources" to be cared for in much the same way as a rancher cares for his cattle. Problems that arise within the herd will be dealt with mechanistically and collectively: anthrax vaccinations and uniform diets for all; individual tastes and preferences being irrelevant to the "greater good."" ~ Butler Shaffer



"The recession is over; long live the depression!" ~ Peter Schiff



"Socialized healthcare is not really free, of course; the true cost is merely hidden, since it is paid for by taxes." ~ Thomas J. DiLorenzo



"I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge carthorse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat." ~ George Orwell



"My daily observances of people never leave me wondering why we live in such a violent, decivilized world where the state is the parent and the religion, and the masses turn to the state to provide for every facet of their lives." ~ Karen De Coster



"One wishes that the nation’s policymakers would realize that their actions to sustain the boom not only are ineffective, but downright harmful." ~ William Anderson



"If we can learn anything from The Fed, it’s that the best way to succeed as a politician is to stretch one’s failure over a long enough period that people won’t remember it." ~ Erik Voorhees



"It was not the millions of now homeless homeowners who were bailed out. It was not the scant remains of American manufacturing--General Motors and Chrysler--that were bailed out. It was the Wall Street Banks." ~ Paul Craig Roberts



"Americans need, not to give up on the Constitution, but instead to stand up for it—because that is what their enemies themselves admit, by their own actions, would be the most effective defense against them." ~ Dr. Edwin Vieira, Jr.



"Cars do not run on water, they run on gasoline. Economies - civilizations themselves - cannot function on simulated money, money that is fraudulent, fictitious and imaginary (in the case of bank money)." ~ Hugo Salinas Price



"What did George III do with his Stamp Act, Townshend Acts or tea tax to compare with what is being done to this generation of Americans by their own government?" ~ Pat Buchanan



"Madoff caused people to lose billions of dollars. The U.S. government has caused people to lose trillions of dollars, and it’s not finished yet." ~ Robert Higgs



"If we persevere in our quixotic quest for a fetishized medical equality we will sacrifice personal freedom as its price. We will become the voluntary slaves of a "compassionate" government that will provide the same low quality health care to everyone." ~ Thomas Szasz



"Our legislators are not sufficiently apprised of the rightful limits of their powers; that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us. No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him." ~ Thomas Jefferson



"How often does the government have to be wrong, and how wrong do they have to be before people and the media stop taking them seriously?" ~ Gerald Celente



"America’s position relative to the rest of the world is weak and in decline. She is not a creditor, she is a debtor. She is not a low-cost competitor; she is a high-cost competitor. She no longer has a free and flexible economy; she has one freighted with central planners, regulators and busybodies." ~ Bill Bonner



"[T]here is no hope for change through peaceful means. When change finally does come, it will be through violence. When the economic pain inflicted on the people reaches unbearable heights, law and order will break down, anarchy and chaos will ensue." ~ Antal E. Fekete



"It is sobering to reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence." ~ Charles A. Beard



"Our government ultimately gives us what we ask for. For the past century, we have increasingly asked it to make us slaves, seduced by the siren's song of comfort and security without responsibility." ~ Tom Mullen



"And if we must have government, let it remain small and insignificant, spending its time cutting ribbons and bickering over nonsense like the color of street signs. Let the rest of us enjoy the freedom to pursue our own happiness." ~ Jim Fedako



"Government is inherently incompetent, and no matter what task it is assigned, it will do it in the most expensive and inefficient way possible." ~ Charley Reese



"H. L. Mencken long ago defined democracy as the “the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” The problem is that those who don’t want it get it, too. When it comes to government programs, there’s no opt-out provision. Alas, what distinguishes “free” from unfree countries is the freedom to speak out, not to opt out. In the latter respect, all are unfree." ~ Sheldon Richman



"I'm sure there must be a historical precedent for the folly that Waxman-Markey represents--ordering the weather to change!--but I can't think of one offhand." ~ John Hinderaker



"We recall coming down with an ailment as a child that prompted our grandmother to call a doctor. Her own poultices and other remedies were not working. A lady physician arrived with a large black leather bag containing vials of pills of all kinds. She looked us over carefully and prescribed something. The cost of the in-home visit - - $2.00! That would be $33.60 in the dollars of 2009. Any doctors making house calls at that rate today?" ~ John Wrisley



"[A] fundamental misconception that underlies all of the societal problems that American society faces today: the belief that there is a conflict between individual rights and the "needs of society." This conflict doesn't exist. Protecting the rights of every individual serves the needs of society. Violating those rights, for whatever purpose, destroys society. In fact, it is by violating the individual rights of its constituents that government causes nearly every societal problem we face." ~ Tom Mullen



"The so-called "watchdog media" is a myth, for pointing out the lies of politicians is the best way to end one’s career as a "prominent journalist." Do this, and your sources of governmental information will be shut off." ~ Thomas J. DiLorenzo



"Barack Obama, and the criminal class on Wall Street, aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest economic crisis in our history, may have fooled us, but the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt." ~ Chris Hedges



"The Chinese have expressed their skepticism by starting to accumulate some gold and commodities. We should do the same." ~ Richard Daughty, aka The Mogambo Guru



"It's easy to understand the lure of government offering to provide everything - whether during the Clinton years or in today's economically vulnerable times. However, as Thomas Jefferson warned, a government big enough to supply you with everything you need is a big enough to take away everything you have." ~ Mark Sanford / Scott W. Atlas



"Can the real Constitution be restored? Probably not. Too many Americans depend on government money under programs the Constitution doesn’t authorize, and money talks with an eloquence Shakespeare could only envy. Ignorant people don’t understand The Federalist Papers, but they understand government checks with their names on them." ~ Joseph Sobran



"Our whole Constitution has been abrogated. The president simply writes an Executive Order to do whatever he wants. Nationalize the banks, take over the insurance industry, automobile industry, health care industry…
None of it is constitutional." ~ Gerald Celente



"You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul." ~ Gandhi



"Spending money someone else earned is like eating a big slice of Black Forest cake and watching someone across the table get fat. You’re likely to ask for seconds." ~ Bill Bonner



"Unfettered democracy -- not unfettered capitalism -- has brought us here. We must choose respect for our inalienable rights over the loot that unfettered democracy can provide us with." ~ Tom Mullen



"Congress, 535 commoditized temple monkeys pawing through the ruins of America in search of bribes. The bicameral whorehouse on Capitol Hill works like a vending machine. You put coins in the slot, select your law, and the desired legislation slides out." ~ Fred Reed



"Most people will not change. Too radical. Not going with the flow. Not betting against the herd.

The best examples in the 20th century were Jews in Germany in 1933. They stayed. This included Jewish bankers, all of whom could have left. They thought they could deal with Hitler. They did not read Mein Kampf. They did not take it seriously." ~ Gary North



"We're out of money now." ~ Barack Obama, May 2009



"[L]ook at the results of the governments' policies, those policies representing the antithesis of freedom. The US populace is probably dumber than it has been at any other time in history, even though a greater number of people are graduating from public high schools and attending colleges than ever before. Our economy teeters on the brink of collapse. Our government is larger, more intrusive and more corrupt than it has ever been. It is also effectively bankrupt minus its monopoly power to print money..." ~ Benjamin Weingarten



"A successful politician is a person who is an expert at winning elections. That's how he gets the job - by winning elections. That is his skill, his career, his area of expertise. Winning elections. In other words, to be president, he needs to be highly skilled at illusion." ~ Richard J. Maybury



"If a society is to change and thrive, it cannot and will not tolerate the state. The state has no creative purpose, only a destructive one." ~ Jeffrey A. Tucker



"I think we should just trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens." ~ Britney Spears



"[W]hatever good or service the State claims it can provide, we can provide ourselves without the State. Whatever good or service the State claims that it provides that we do not want, we can live without." ~ Michael S. Rozeff



"It’s time to don your lifejacket." ~ John Pugsley



"I will tell you there are going to be some people - and it gets to be fewer and fewer - who dislike my tone and forthright comments, but, that is to be expected. Some people hate that my words are in-your-face, and that is because they are looking for a soft solution. They want cotton balls and I pull out a hammer." ~ Karen De Coster



"[T]he current economic crisis is said to be caused by the "excesses" of economic freedom and "too little regulation" of the economy, especially financial markets. This is said by the president and numerous other politicians, with straight faces, despite the facts that there are a dozen executive-branch cabinet departments, over 100 federal agencies, more than 85,000 pages in the Federal Register, and dozens of state and local government agencies that regulate, regiment, tax, and control every aspect of every business in America, and have been doing so for decades." ~ Thomas J. DiLorenzo



"We have the right, as individuals to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity, but as members of Congress we have no right to so appropriate a dollar of the public money." ~ Davy Crockett



"To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so…" ~ Pierre-Joseph Proudhon - 1851



"Did you know... that the people who make Hotwheels and Matchbox cars made more money last year than the people who make Fords, Chryslers and Chevys?" ~ Neal Boortz



"The economy cannot be coerced back into growth with tons of money manure." ~ Gerald Celente



"[T]ime by itself does nothing. It is what we do with time that matters." ~ Thomas Sowell



"If an activity is licensed by the state, then it is a privilege conferred and controlled by the state, and not a right." ~ Jeff Snyder



"A dollar defined in gold terms would not erase all economic mistakes, but it’s a certainty that they would be reduced exponentially." ~ John Tamny



"For all the recent talk of “greed”, the greatest stain on our economy comes not from the imprudent executive. His fate awaits him in the marketplace. Rather, the real shame comes when the state saves the reckless and the venal at the expense of the upright and the decent." ~ Troy Senik



"Like so many disasters, the current economic crisis grew out of policies based on good intentions and mushy thinking." ~ Thomas Sowell



"Without the right to secede, state’s rights are meaningless." ~ Ron Paul



"I began to turn the hours in the car to my advantage, using the time to develop a plan of escape. When it came, it sounded like madness: I was going to leave my job and journey into the wilderness, turning my back on convention in the hope of discovering a new path." ~ Guy Grieve



"The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, bows, spears, firearms or other types of arms. The possession of these elements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues, and tends to permit uprising." ~ Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Japanese Shogun



"The reality of the state is it will take whatever they want from you because they have the guns, the jails and the military." ~ Stefan Molyneux



"We’re all Soviet snitches now." ~ Karen De Coster



"The nanny state, supported by whiners and snivelers, has changed the American psyche from self reliance to state reliance." ~ Bumpy Road



"Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that 'Freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license'; and they will define and define freedom out of existence." ~ Voltairine de Cleyre



"The terror of the Great Crash has been the failure to explain it. People were left with the feeling that massive economic contractions could occur at any moment, without warning, without cause. That fear has been exploited ever since as the major justification for virtually unlimited federal intervention in economic affairs." ~ Alan Reynolds



"Virtually every political movement in America is based upon a promise to provide its followers with other people's property." ~ Tom Mullen



"We had a bubble economy; we had an economy based on Americans spending money they didn’t have and buying products they couldn’t afford or that they didn’t make. We had an economy built on debt, consumer debt, and financial engineering, and our companies were generating profits from accounting rather than from production. And the whole thing was phony; the prosperity was phony." ~ Peter Schiff



"For a sliver of what we currently spend, the U.S. could easily have the leanest, meanest fighting machine on earth, while also getting serious about taking care of our veterans and active military -- but this can happen only if we give up on the notion of a worldwide American empire." ~ Jack Hunter



"Capital is gone; production is no longer supported by the prerequisite quantity and quality of tools and equipment. The economy is literally devouring itself through debt." ~ Antal E. Fekete



"Here in Mexico, unless you break a major law or do something awesomely stupid, the government isn’t much interested in you. This lack of interest is perhaps government’s greatest virtue." ~ Fred Reed



"The sad fact of the matter is that those people who spend their entire careers in so-called public service do not regard themselves as our servants, but as our masters." ~ Burt Prelutsky



"If knowledge sets one free, the first thing the people need to know now is that the current economic emergency was not an accident; it was a crime. It was the theft of a nation, and the victims are its people." ~ Stewart Dougherty



"Those in power want to retain power and get re-elected. Their time horizons are rather short. It hardly pays them to do something for the long-term good, even of the government, especially when that something involves large political risks. To upset one or two constituencies by cutting back their benefits may mean losing office." ~ Michael S. Rozeff



"No matter how much the government controls the economic system, any problem will be blamed on whatever small zone of freedom that remains." ~ Sheldon Richman



"Shift taxes? Increase taxes? Tax the rich? Impose new taxes? Use the tax code to influence public policy? What kind of libertarian tax reform plan is this? How about reduce, cut, eliminate, and abolish taxes? Not deductions, not exemptions, not credits, not shelters, not loopholes — taxes." ~ Laurence M. Vance



"What this administration seems to believe is that on one side, it can decrease the production capacity of the U.S. economy, but on the other side, stimulate it by printing new money. Perhaps this seems like a sound economic plan to a politician, but to anyone with a whit of common sense, it is madness." ~ William Anderson



"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction." ~ E.F. Schumacher



"[F]iat money – it is the root cause of our problems. Without it not only would they have to live within their means, thereby restricting their growth, but also they would not be able to manipulate its supply and price via central banks, thereby eliminating the booms and slumps which follow. " ~ Chris Clancy



"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress." ~ Mark Twain



"Interventions into the free market invariably cause unintended distortions and destroy wealth. These translate into economic and social problems that interventionists tend to blame not on themselves but on the market economy, concluding what is needed is yet more intervention." ~ Anthony Gregory



"Government is now an insolvent enterprise. Government is a Ponzi scheme. Government is a fraud. Government is a bubble that must burst." ~ Michael Rozeff



"Along the 10 blocks closest to my home, the banks (with one exception), the fast-food restaurants (Subway, Dunkin' Donuts, Blimpie), and above all the chain drugstores that crowd onto successive blocks (Rite Aid, Walgreens, Duane Reade) still stand. It's the small places that seem to be dropping like flies. " ~ Tom Engelhardt



"The truth is inflation completely destroys an economy by wiping out savers, crushing those who exist on a fixed income and crippling those at the lowest end of the income scale by raising prices of the most basic goods." ~ Michael Pento



"Call it socialism, fascism, welfare-statism, central planning, inflationism, wealth equalization, or just massive government involvement in the economy, the fact remains: the heavier the hand of government in people's pocketbooks and business activity, the poorer people will be." ~ Jacob Hornberger



"The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects - his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity." ~ Henry Hazlitt



"The FED’s very existence attacks the public welfare. The FED serves only bankers and the federal government, and the latter only because it must. To the extent that inflation ever temporarily changes employment, it is incidental to the FED’s goal of maintaining or building up bank profitability." ~ Michal Rozeff



"If... if... We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! ........... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward." ~ Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918–1956



"How on earth could rational people believe that the same state responsible for plundering us through taxation, stealing the value of our earnings and savings through inflation, and subsidizing Wall Street's multi-trillion-dollar crime spree, will actually protect us from the violence of common criminals when our ongoing economic collapse begets widespread social turmoil?" ~ William Norman Grigg



"It is well that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." ~Henry Ford


"We who espouse human responsibility, we who decry envy, we who are educated and refined, have we by our neglect enabled those who would tyrannize us?" ~ Graham Dugas



"As Lord Keynes observed, "In the long run we're all dead." Well, most of us will be. But not you youngsters, not for a while. So we've figured it out: You're the ultimate credit market, and the rest of us are all preapproved!" ~ Mark Steyn



"The majority of the voters are just dull and mentally inert people who dislike thinking and are easily deceived by the enticing promises of irresponsible pied pipers." ~ Ludwig von Mises



"The truth is that the current system has become corrupted beyond possibility of repair, and needs to be allowed to collapse. It will do so anyway, whether we 'allow' it or not." ~ Sam Mathid



"Government sees a crisis. Government sees an opportunity to get votes. Government rides to the rescue of the "oppressed" by blaming some and oppressing others. The others don't notice until it is too late and then they blame the rich or the greedy. Government sees a crisis..." ~ Bumpy Road



"While Congress does not have constitutional authority for most of what it does, it does have police and military power to inflict great pain and punishment for disobedience." ~ Walter E. Williams



"The commentators have it all wrong. Look on the bright side. The world economy is not in a period of negative growth. It’s in a period of positive collapse! That’s why the Great Depression was so great, after all. What’s positive about this depression is that it is clearing away a generation’s worth of mistakes, misallocations of resources and misplaced confidence." ~ Bill Bonner



"By the end of Bush's presidency, "the dream" had become a nightmare; millions of Americans were living in homes they could not afford. Obama's response was to reward irresponsible behavior with taxpayer money. From Wall Street to Main Street, the more irresponsible your behavior the more taxpayer money you received! Can you see a moral hazard here?" ~ Michael Beitler



"Experience shows that experience is often a very poor teacher indeed. Hence the ghastly spectacle of a President of the United States in 2009 behaving like a shell-shocked socialist circa 1935." ~ Roger Kimball



"This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before." ~ Rahm Emanuel



"A sound society needs sound money." ~ Paul Hein



"If people are struggling to make ends meet, why should taxation to support government be the number one priority? Why does a state have a right to our property to support itself before we do? Why in the hell do they have these big budgets to support in the first place? If we are having trouble paying our own bills, then forget about the state's bills. Let it wither away! If I sound angry, it's because I am." ~ Benjamin Weingarten



"If Americans wish to save America, we must couple our outrage at the government bailouts with a positive vision of a properly limited government." ~ Paul Hsieh



"[T]he economy is subject to public control, and should be wrested from the domination of the ruling class. The bailing out of the system right now is going on with taxpayer funds but without the say of the public. A revolt to gain popular control of the political economy is therefore necessary." ~ John Bellamy Foster



"Mark my words – the establishment is only making matters worse and prolonging the pain. Moreover, by printing insane amounts of paper, the politicians are setting everyone up for an inflationary nightmare!" ~ Puru Saxena



"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" ~ Peter Townsend



"[A]dding trillions of dollars in new debt while also printing trillions from thin air will accelerate and deepen the disaster as surely as the dark of night follows sunset. The carefully-misnamed "stimulus" that so many are cheering is the death knell for what remains of this nation's prosperity and freedom." ~ Glen Allport



"Consumers are now so indebted that they cannot increase their spending by taking on more debt. Thus, whether or not the banks resume lending is beside the point." ~ Paul Craig Roberts



"I don't trust my bank anymore. I was talking to them about a loan, but I decided not to give them one." ~ Guido Cantz



"The leaders of our imperial government are not content to leave the poor masses of the world to their own devices (or, to put it differently, to treat foreigners like human beings capable of taking care of themselves); rather, they are convinced that they have a divinely-ordained mission to take money from their own population of increasingly impoverished and unemployed workers and either use that ill-gotten money to invade foreign lands or give it to other governments." ~ Mark R. Crovelli



"There are two Americas. One America is full of moochers, big and small, corporate and individual, trampling over themselves with their hands out demanding endless bailouts. The other America is full of disgusted, hardworking citizens getting sick of being played for chumps and punished for practicing personal responsibility." ~ Michelle Malkin



"The civil liberties that Bush stole from us are now in Obama’s pocket." ~ Paul Craig Roberts



"What about the latest coup in Africa, referendum in Latin America, and social disorder in the South Pacific?... There is much tragedy in the world, but rarely is there cause for the American government to make these problems America's problems." ~ Doug Bandow



"What would be enough, then? A quadrillion dollars? A googol dollars? Infinity minus one dollars? It'd be interesting to know what "stimulus" figure might make a Keynesian declare, "Now that's too much!" ~ Tom Woods



"Is the stimulus bill a coordinated logical economic program or a hodgepodge assortment of liberal brainfarts?" ~ Bumpy Road



"[B]oth sides of the political aisle represent a grave threat to liberty — though each of a different sort. It is like two people tugging at a turkey's wishbone: the turkey is liberty, and you are the bone." ~ Lew Rockwell



"We have more than enough troops to mind our own business and defend ourselves. It is only for world domination that we have a troop shortage." ~ Ron Paul



"We're done. Pack up and get out. Better yet, don't pack – all that stuff belongs to us in the first place. Just get out. And when you finally, mercifully, do kick the bucket, please make sure it is in some place far away from us, where we won't have to smell the stench of your hideous, rotting corpse." ~ Every Normal Human Being in America and the Rest of the World to the Federal Government of the United States



"You can't fight city hall, but you can pee on the steps and run." ~ Gary North



"To all the chattering class, that so much focuses on those little tiny, yes, porky amendments .. the American people really don't care." ~ Charles Schumer



"Government has been growing insidiously for many years, taking small baby steps to increase their dominion over you and hoping you may not notice what is happening. Today, with the nationalization of banks and corporations and a huge trillion dollar plus spending spree bill, they are taking giant leaps in broad daylight and, because they have invoked mass hysteria and fear, are unconcerned about the outcry from the squeamish few." ~ Bumpy Road



"When you take the king's schilling, you do the king's bidding." ~ Gary North



"You can't spend enough for the Democratic base, or cut taxes enough for the Republican. But in a time when all the grown-ups of America know spending is going to bankrupt us and tax cuts without spending cuts is more of the medicine that's killing us, the same old arguments, which sound less like arguments than compulsive tics, only add to the public sense that no one is in charge." ~ Peggy Noonan



"Each great assault on the free market, whether it be denominated a bailout, a stimulus, or some other species of purported salvation, brings us visibly closer to the complete ruin of an economic order that required centuries to build." ~ Robert Higgs



"Cassandra’s curse was to always tell the truth about the future, but never be believed. If you add to that curse that she would be ridiculed, derided, and shunned for making her predictions, you have a pretty fair approximation of what it feels like to be a libertarian." ~ John Hasnas



"The truth is that we are not threatened by Communism, by drug lords, or by Muslim Jihadists in any serious way. Rather, we have become our own worst enemy." ~ David Lindorff



"Beware the greedy hand of government, thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry." ~ Thomas Paine



"A visual representation of the stimulus package is: Imagine you see a person at work taking buckets of water from the deep end of a swimming pool and dumping them into the shallow end in an attempt to make it deeper. You would deem him stupid. That scenario is equivalent to what Congress and the new president proposes for the economy." ~ Dr. Walter Williams



"The Congress, which had an approval rate of 14% and which just passed a $700 billion bailout over the objections of a majority of Americans, had a re-election rate exceeding 95%." ~ Will Groves



"Using long, drawn-out processes to put money into circulation to meet an emergency is like mailing a letter to the fire department to tell them that your house is on fire." ~ Thomas Sowell



"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." ~ Louis D. Brandeis



"Why is it that the gluttons for power who are constantly preaching their dogmas of "sacrifice" are never willing to apply it to themselves? When I see the statists "sacrificing" their pet taxpayer-funded programs and projects; making massive reductions in government spending; cutting back on wars; and firing tens of thousands of bureaucratic slugs - as private firms must do - then, perhaps, we can believe in some semblance of sincerity on their parts. They might begin by sacrificing the Federal Reserve for the common good!!" ~ Butler Shaffer



"So where do we go from here? Well, here's my post-Inaugural advice. Build up some cash reserves. Got that? Hold Cash! Cash in the mattress. Cash in the bank. Certificates of deposit. Don't try to get too fancy. Just save some cash where you can get hold of it in case you need it pronto." ~ Byron W. King



"We need to wake up and recognize the importance of sound money. We need to reintroduce the work ethic. We must once again cherish savings over consumption. We must recognize that an overextended foreign policy has been the downfall of all great nations.Above all else, we need to simply believe once again in the free society that made America great." ~ Ron Paul



"When the government seeks to circumvent the market with noble goals financed with other people's money, the result is always a trail of tears." ~ Wilt Alston



"I predict that there will be nights when Obama will wish he were still in Springfield." ~ Spengler



"Keynesian theory sounds good, and it would be nice if it made sense, but it has a rather glaring logical fallacy. It overlooks the fact that, in the real world, government can't inject money into the economy without first taking money out of the economy." ~ Daniel J. Mitchell



"Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen." ~ Ayn Rand



"The best stimulus might be to trim — or temporarily eliminate — the payroll tax. That would put money in the hands of the people who need it — and know best how to spend it. But that would be “too ideological” because it rejects the assumption that government knows best, and it would reward taxpayers, not politicians." ~ Jonah Goldberg



"When America's economy was young and competitive it survived slumps and crashes without medical intervention. Now, every passing cold requires feeding tubes. And this latest bout of influenza has the doctors in a panic. They are casting aside warnings and giving the patient masses doses of the old quack treatments. They'll increase the dosage - until they run out of supplies - and then switch to those new, experimental medicines that have recently been used in field trials by Dr. Gono in Zimbabwe. Since they cannot leave well enough alone - the public won't stand for it - they will keep giving bigger and bigger doses, of more and more dangerous medicines, until the patient dies." ~ Bill Bonner



"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before, and it does not work... I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started -- and an enormous debt to boot." ~ Henry Morgenthau (FDR's Treasury Secretary)



"Really, he [George W. Bush] is the most damaging president to this country that we have seen. He'll go down in history. ... It's a history of disasters but they're all paid for by others. He didn't pay for them; the country's paid for them. They're a history of lies; they're a history of lack of respect for the Constitution, lack of respect for the separation of powers. I mean, this is a one-man destruction derby." ~ George Miller



"The time is nearing when a cluster of demands will be placed on government that it is entirely incapable of meeting." ~ Michael S. Rozeff



"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant." ~ John Stuart Mill



"The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the long effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups." ~ Henry Hazlitt



"You want the impossible? You got it. Politicians don't get elected by saying "No" to voters." ~ Thomas Sowell



"Now, the typical household needs a job in order to eat. No, they need two jobs. They don't have gardens. They don't know how to can food…or how to dress a pig. They have bills to pay - not just food, but mortgages, insurance, student loans, health care, gasoline, car payments. Today, usually, both husband and wife work…and they've increased their expenses to the point where if they lose either job they're soon going to run out of money." ~ Bill Bonner



"You can wonder what God or Darwin had in mind. Whatever goes on at corporate, it is well above our pay grade." ~ Fred Reed



"They say we live and learn. Often what we learn is what damn fools we have been." ~ Thomas Sowell



"America is like a formerly grand billionaire, living on a palatial estate that could be foreclosed any day now, blithely carrying on in the same old extravagant way in order to keep up appearances." ~ Justin Raimondo



"Tragically, it is in the nature of government, when its failures are exposed, to claim that if only it had more power it could have performed its duties in the manner it had promised." ~ Briggs Armstrong



"I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system." ~ George W. Bush



"The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!" ~ Henry David Thoreau



"With a budget of over $600 billion and more than 62,000 workers, the SSA is one of the largest pyramid-Ponzi schemes in existence." ~ Tim Swanson



"Don't take on a dime's worth of unnecessary debt...pay off existing debt as fast as you can...learn to live within your means, even if it means eating at home more and cutting costly vacations...and then relax. The world isn't ending. Only adjusting to reality." ~ Potiphar Gride



"It’s seems unlikely, but maybe someday they’ll figure out what has been done to them, and by whom. When that happens, if it ever does, you might not want to be near any Federal Reserve buildings." ~ Larken Rose



"Politicians never accuse you of "greed" for wanting other people's money – only for wanting to keep your own money." ~ Joseph Sobran



"What is left of liberty in America faces an extremely dangerous threat. It is all the more serious because it is not widely recognized as a threat." ~ Michael S. Rozeff



"Once a country in which each man could by and large make the decisions for his own life, we have become a land where the state holds and exercises life-and-death power over every person, group, and institution. The great Moloch government, once confined and cabined, has burst its feeble bonds to dominate us all." ~ Murray N. Rothbard



"Once the problem or crisis is visible, however, it becomes very necessary for politicians to appear to be in charge and to be doing "something" useful to hopefully "fix" the problem. That is the stage we are at currently. I like to call it the phoney fix phase. It is phoney because much of the activity and money spent is primarily a public relations exercise." ~ Arnold Bock



"To be free, the slave must first refuse the master’s gruel." ~ Vin Suprynowicz



"Has it occurred to anyone that the government is now creating dollars in increments of hundreds of billions at a time? It leaves me speechless.
I don't think I need to tell you that there can be nothing good that comes out of this, and the first casualty will be the US Dollar." ~ Enrico Orlandini



"If things are to change, one must realize the extent to which the foundation of tyranny lies in the vast networks of corrupted people with an interest in maintaining tyranny." ~ Étienne de La Boétie



"The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." ~ Margaret Thatcher



"There are limits. A country cannot forever depend on a central bank to keep the economy afloat and the currency functionable through constant acceleration of money supply growth. Eventually the laws of economics will overrule the politicians, the bureaucrats and the central bankers." ~ Ron Paul



"Franklin Roosevelt began removing the dollar from its moorings in 1933. Richard Nixon finished the job in 1971. From a monetary unit based on something of intrinsic value we're now doing business with "money" backed by nothing of value. We're about to be punished for allowing it to happen. " ~ John Wrisley



"Desperate times can call for desperate measures, so maybe you will try to find out from some economist what is going on. You may not get any much better explanation than “There is no free lunch” — which is one of many reasons why economists are not popular.

But there really is no free lunch, except in the world of political rhetoric, a world that so many want to be in, where they can play Santa Claus without even the cost of buying a costume." ~ Thomas Sowell



"Helping one's fellow man in need, by reaching into one's own pockets, is a laudable and praiseworthy goal. Doing the same through coercion and reaching into another's pockets has no redeeming features and is worthy of condemnation." ~ Walter E. Williams



"But let it not be said that we did nothing. Let not those who love the power of the welfare/warfare state label the dissenters of authoritarianism as unpatriotic or uncaring. Patriotism is more closely linked to dissent than it is to conformity and a blind desire for safety and security." ~ Ron Paul



"While central bankers furiously try to reinflate, cheered on by the mainstream financial media, monetary authorities should deflate the money supply, pulling in their horns as consumers are doing. Deflation is a "great liberating force," writes [Jörg Guido] Hülsmann, "because it destroys the economic basis of the social engineers, spin doctors, and brain washers."" ~ Douglas French



"The seepage of government into everywhere is, we are assured, to be temporary and nonpolitical. Well." ~ George Will



"It was the science of economics that first discovered the radical incapacity of the state to make any improvements in the social order. It turns science on its head to invoke economics as a reason for the government to loot and pillage in the name of "stimulating investment." Stimulation here, there, and everywhere amounts to a diminution of freedom, security of property, and prosperity." ~ Lew Rockwell



"If we must have government, it should at least be constitutional. We get what we deserve when we support candidates who hold it in contempt." ~ Paul Hein



"[T]he best thing about John Maynard Keynes is that he is dead. For no other branch of economics sprouts quite as much voodoo logic as the Keynesians manage in their short, pointless lives (or worse, long, pointless lives). " ~ Chan Akya



"The outlook is dark, but it is not entirely without hope. Here and there one can detect a break in the clouds. More and more people are becoming aware that government has nothing to give them without first taking it away from somebody else—or from themselves. Increased handouts to selected groups mean merely increased taxes, or increased deficits and increased inflation." ~ Henry Hazlitt - 1976



"[E]verything going on in Washington today is a recipe for another Great Depression." ~ Thomas J. DiLorenzo



"Government does not grow by seizing our freedoms, but by assuming our responsibilities." ~ Michael Cloud



"It is impossible to mobilize government power on behalf of wealth redistribution without commissioning widespread and wholesale violation of individual rights – beginning, obviously, with the fundamental right to own and dispose of one's wealth and property." ~ William Norman Grigg



"By refusing to allow market forces to rein in excess spending, liquidate bad investments, replenish depleted savings, fund capital investment and help workers transition from the service sector to the manufacturing sector, government is resisting the cure while exacerbating the disease. " ~ Peter Schiff



"“E Pluribus Unum” is no longer our national motto. These three words are: “Do For Me.” As in: What will the government do for me?" ~ Michelle Malkin



"In the clamor for more regulation over our financial institutions, has anybody bothered to ask whether people in government know what they're doing?" ~ Walter Williams



"It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment change has come to America." ~ President-elect Barack Obama



"If you have fundamental disagreements with American politics, reject the whole system. So long as most Americans are swindled by the promises of mass democracy and distracted by its insanities, we cannot be free." ~ Anthony Gregory



"If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent people and they get into office and screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You caused the problem. You voted them in. You have no right to complain." ~ George Carlin



"Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism the reverse is true." ~ Anonymous



"To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. . .I place economy among the first and most important of republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared." ~ Thomas Jefferson



"It is difficult to find many proponents of democracy in the history of political theory. Almost all major thinkers had nothing but contempt for democracy. Even the Founding Fathers of the U.S. , nowadays considered the model of democracy, were strictly opposed to it. Without a single exception, they thought of democracy as nothing but mob-rule." ~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe



"It is clear that the Framers wrote a Constitution as a result of which contracts would be enforced, risk would be real, choices would be free and have consequences, and private property would be sacrosanct.

The $700 billion bailout of large banks that Congress recently enacted runs afoul of virtually all these constitutional principles." ~ Andrew P. Napolitano



"Now my advice for those who die, (Taxman!)
Declare the pennies on your eyes, (Taxman!)
‘Cos I’m the Taxman,
Yeah, I’m the Taxman.
And you’re working for no-one but me,
(Taxman)." ~ George Harrison - Taxman



"We have been lulled into the nanny state by the soothing promises of corrupt politicians." ~ Bumpy Road



"(T)oday's crisis has also led to the massive federal bailout of the financial industry, with Washington picking who wins and who loses. We're told that this arrangement is only temporary. But partnerships involving almost a trillion dollars that grant even greater leverage to Washington have a way of becoming quite terribly permanent." ~ John Kass



"Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. One could readily say the same thing about participating in presidential elections." ~ Paul Armentano



"The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a "warm body" democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction.... [O]nce a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader — the barbarians enter Rome." ~ Robert A. Heinlein



"We should be putting the culprits in jail. Instead, we're going to elect them to Congress - and one of them to the White House. Others will be rewarded with fancy titles and plush offices in Washington and New York." ~ Chip Wood



"Be they Fascist Republicans or Marxist Democrats, one common thread runs through their thinking: there is no right or wrong. There's only a desire to impose their will on the rest of us." ~ Scott McPherson


" Charity at the point of a gun is not done freely and no one feels good about it. Those that are taken from are furious and those that receive are not grateful; instead, they feel entitled and ask for more." ~ Sandra Hamilton



"Socialism is a powerful attraction. It requires the producing classes to share their property with the non-producing classes, which is a very attractive idea for non-producers." ~ John Wrisley



"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." ~ C.S. Lewis


"Has this country gone mad? We have presidential candidates talking about how much they can steal and how much of the loot they will share with us if we vote for them." ~Brian Wilson


"The money circle is closed. This is the ultimate in recycling. The Fed prints it and lends it to the Treasury who lends it to the banks who lend it to Americans who give it up to the Treasury." ~ Michael Rozeff



"The whole lot, every last nickel, has either been doled out in the gutter of political corruption, or flushed down Wall Street's slimy drain; all abetted by a malign, mumbo-jumbo nonsense called Keynesian economics. Nowhere is there reference to prior criminality and stupidity on such a grand scale. There is no historical precedent." ~ Sam Mathid



"A lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns." ~ Mario Puzo, The Godfather



"Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time, and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the eternal God, I will rout you out." ~ President Andrew Jackson 1832



"An incoming tide of credit had made the lives of the masses buoyant for several years, but - like all tides - the flood could only rise so far before the ebb began. We're riding that ebb tide right now and government officials are trying desperately to make it stop and flood again. Nature is having none of it." ~ JW



"When your money is taken by a thief, you get nothing in return. When your money is taken by taxes to support needless bureaucrats, precisely the same situation exists." ~ Henry Hazlitt



"All the world's major countries are conferring, colluding, and conspiring. They're all going to do the same thing. They're all going to take over their banking systems, support their financial industries, bail out important businesses and rescue their citizens from their own mistakes. Where will they get the money for all this? Will they borrow it from each other? Don't be silly; they will print it." ~ Bill Bonner



"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism, they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened." ~ Norman Thomas



"With both McCain and Obama voting for the bailout bill, there is indeed virtually no difference between the GOP and Democratic presidential standard bearers. They are both subservient to the financial elites who influence the federal government's policy agenda." ~ Murray Sabrin



"Republicans. Democrats. They're all in it together, an idea those partisans and their media champions find difficult to accept, even though it seems to me undeniable." ~ Ron Smith



"So a million dollar loss in a private firm will signal the need to save money, cut employees, make better products, or cease to exist. In a bureaucracy, that same loss will result in a million dollar increase in budget for the next year with accompanying increases in staff, salaries and political power. If that same bureaucracy fails to spend/waste all of the annual budget, then that budget is more likely to be cut. Hence, failure is rewarded and success is punished." ~ Don Rasmussen



"It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones." ~ Calvin Coolidge



"Throwing more credit at a market with excess credit only worsens the inevitable economic downturn." ~ Ivan Eland



"Beware of trying to do good with other people's money." ~ Russell Roberts



"Government can't assure competition. Competition happens when government stays out of the way." ~ John Stossel



"Rulers are masters of deception." ~ Michael S. Rozeff



"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion." ~ Oscar Wilde



"We have evolved into that pathetic creature, the neutered 21st Century Bourgeois – perfectly passive prey for them." ~ Marcel Votlucka



"If the government can inflate whenever it wants to spend, it can take away from the people without their agreement everything, their purchasing power, their savings, and so on. From this point of view there disappears even the fundamental principle which everybody sees as the difference between a Communist government and a government based on the idea of individual freedom, the preservation of free markets and the ability of the people to control the government." ~ Ludwig von Mises



"The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history." ~ Ron Paul



"There is nothing more dangerous than when those responsible for a nation’s troubles are believed to be its savior." ~ Darryl Robert Schoon



"Everything that has been done for the last six months has been done to cope with what previous actions were supposed to prevent. A perhaps pertinent axiom: There is no education in the second kick of a mule." ~ George Will



"The solution to the problem is to end government meddling in the market. Government intervention leads to distortions in the market, and government reacts to each distortion by enacting new laws and regulations, which create their own distortions, and so on ad infinitum." ~ Ron Paul



"To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. . .I place economy among the first and most important of republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared." ~ President Thomas Jefferson



"What the Greatest Generation handed down to us -- the richest, most powerful, most self-sufficient republic in history, with the highest standard of living any nation had ever achieved -- the baby boomers, oblivious and self-indulgent to the end, have frittered away." ~ Pat Buchanan



"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools." ~ Herbert Spencer



"If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else's expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves." ~ Thomas Sowell



"I discovered that America is about to have an election. Why? Every time they do that, no good comes of it. You’d think they’d learn." ~ Fred Reed



"A bond of political unity joins together Republicans and Democrats. This bond is based on moral corruption: the politics of plunder. " ~ Gary North



"In our desire to have government become our benefactor and sustainer, we have allowed it to become our taskmaster and overlord. As a result, we have become little more than well-fed, well-entertained slaves to the state. Freedom, as envisioned by our forefathers, is gone." ~ Chuck Baldwin



"We cannot expect withdrawal of troops from Iraq or the Middle East with either of the two major candidates. Expect continued involvement in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Georgia. Neither hints of a non-interventionist foreign policy. Do not expect to hear the rejection of the policy of supporting the American world empire. There will be no emphasis in protecting privacy and civil liberties and the constant surveillance of the American people. Do not expect any serious attempt to curtail the rapidly expanding national debt. And certainly, there will be no hint of addressing the Federal Reserve System and its cozy relationship with big banks and international corporations and the politicians." ~ Ron Paul



"The government is in the business of stacking one monumental fraud on top of another…trying to give everyone the idea that he can live at someone else's expense. Sooner or later, the whole mountain of flimflam falls down." ~ Bill Bonner



"These supposedly brilliant people who "run" government entities lie, steal, and promise the distribution of wealth in order to secure election victory so that they can control and dictate how the plundering will take place, who will be plundered, and who will receive the spoils." ~ Karen De Coster



"Freedom isn't freedom without the right to pursue what you value -- money or knowledge, pleasure or sacrifice, God or atheism, community or misanthropic solitude -- rather than what others think you should value. It includes the right to go to hell, and the right to tell others to do the same." ~ Steve Chapman



"Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none." ~ Thomas Jefferson



"The difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull? Lipstick." ~ Sarah Palin



"There is not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties when it comes to peace, liberty, property, free markets, sound money, and the size and scope of government. The Republican Party is not the lesser of two evils. It is, like the Democratic Party, stupid and evil. " ~ Laurence M. Vance



"Dig deep into Sarah Palin, get all you can, talk to everybody, get every vote, every quote, tell us of her career and life, she may be the next vice president. But don't play games. And leave her kid alone, bitch." ~ Peggy Noonan



"Why don't you get out… breathe the clean air of freedom, and then take your stand, proudly and squarely, not with the despotism of the power elite and the government of the United States, but with the rising movement in opposition to that government? Then you will be libertarians indeed, in act as well as in theory. What hangover, what remnant of devotion to the monster State, is holding you back? " ~ Murray Rothbard



"After all that antiwar rhetoric, including words from Sen. Obama, it turns out that the Democratic party is not at all antiwar – or perhaps they are just spineless." ~ Philip Martin, Former US Marine and Iraq War Veteran



"We seem to be following the familiar path of history where republics slide into empire and eventually a fascist dictatorship. Too bad that freedom, like a good wife, is most appreciated in its absence." ~ Charley Reese



"We are now, for the most part, a nation of subsidized dependents crying to have our bills paid by someone else. Even if we get into a financial mess of our own making we don't want to pay the penalty. We want a bailout." ~ Potiphar Gride (aka John Wrisley)



"The outcome of the 2008 election will confirm the truth of the proposition that it really doesn't matter for whom you vote. Regardless of whether Obama or McCain prevails, the government will be re-elected, and will continue to increase its powers over you." ~ Butler Shaffer



"The Pentagon is using baseball bats to fight mosquitoes. The absurdity of using a B1 intercontinental bomber for close air support is manifest. But you’ve got the plane, the pilots don’t want to miss the war, and so you find something for them to bomb." ~ Fred Reed



"Each and every man's "rights" being consistent and harmonious with each and every other man's "rights"; and all men's rights being immutably fixed, and easily ascertained, by a science that is open to be learned and known by all; a government that does nothing but "equal and exact justice to all men" --- that simply gives to every man his own, and nothing more to any --- has no cause and no occasion for any "political parties." What are these "political parties" but standing armies of robbers, each trying to rob the other, and to prevent being itself robbed by the other?" ~ Lysander Spooner



"Too many people in too many positions of power - including the lumpen voter himself - have too many reasons to want the system to continue unchanged. These people are getting something for nothing - and hoping to put the costs onto the next generation." ~ Bill Bonner



"By a long lure of planned grass a society of bisons may be decoyed to captivity in the Valley of Security.

In moments of uneasiness its bulls may be soothed by the voices of the herders saying: "You are free at any time to go back to the plains. Remember the grass there? It was poor and many of you were hungry."

There is no going back, because, first, these gentle herders are rough with the few who try to start a stampede, and secondly, tame grass is sweet poison. From the eating of it the way of life on the plains is soon forgotten." ~ Garet Garrett



"Old grievances are a heavy burden. Healing is a long process that requires patience and dialogue, with non-use of force an indispensable precondition." ~ Mikhail Gorbachev



"He that lives upon hope will die fasting." ~ Benjamin Franklin



"With the current crisis in American foreign policy, unless we do change our ways, the likelihood that our children, our grandchildren, the next generation is going to enjoy the opportunities that we've had is very slight because we're squandering our power. We are squandering our wealth." ~ Colonel Andrew Bacevich (Army - Ret.)



"We live in an economy that is entirely founded on debt, and we now face a national debt is growing so rapidly that there is going to be a default." ~ Gary North



"Americans have many fine qualities. A capacity to see ourselves as others see us is not high among them." ~ Patrick J. Buchanan



"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." ~ Thomas Jefferson



"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality." ~ H.L. Mencken



"The only major difference between the government and the mafia is that the government calls its bill collector the “IRS” and the mafia calls its bill collector “Big Louie.”" ~ Erick Erickson



"The United States is a nation of laws, badly written and randomly enforced." ~ Frank Zappa



"The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists." ~ Ernest Hemingway



"It is fundamentally un-American to require taxpayers to testify against themselves and be considered guilty until proven innocent. Abolishing the IRS altogether would trigger an avalanche of real growth in the economy. " ~ Ron Paul



"In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant." ~ Charles de Gaulle



"Last week, the low-IQ socialist scumbags in the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. among other legislative horrors raised the debt limit of the U.S.A. by another $800 billion, taking the limit to a staggering $10.6 trillion, so that they could continue to act like the mental defective lowlife collectivist scumbags that they truly, truly are, which is destroying our money and our country, which is why I hate them, and which explains why I intend to vote against every incumbent as often as I can, and urge everyone else to do so, too, (except for the people in Texas who elect Ron Paul), unless I can successfully get the American people stirred up into an unruly mob so that I can take over the country and give myself a nice, big salary, a generous retirement package, and the awesome, unlimited powers of an emperor!" ~ Richard Daughty, The Mogambo Guru



"Whenever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to ensure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery." ~ Benjamin Disraeli



"You see, but you do not observe" ~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes)



"What's *just* has been debated for centuries but let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then tell me how much of what I earn *belongs* to you – and why?" ~ Walter Williams



"As long as Americans continue to accept the failed choices of the two major parties, our country is going to be served up nominees representing the lowest common denominator of acceptability. That's what the notion of voting for the lesser of two evils every four years gives us – continually declining standards of leadership." ~ Joseph Farah



"Government invariably causes problems and does harm to some at the expense of others, no matter where it treads, because it is an evil mix of power and politics." ~ Bill Steigerwald



"A nation that expects the government to prevent churches from burning, to control the price of bread or gasoline, to secure every job, and to find some villain for every dramatic accident risks an even larger loss of life and liberty." ~ William A. Niskanen



"Both presidential candidates claim to favor change. Yet neither has told us what he will do to end Washington's addiction to deficit spending. " ~ William Shughart



"If all U.S. troops were brought home from Europe and Korea, 10,000 rice bowls would be broken. They are the rice bowls of politicians, diplomats, generals, journalists and think tanks who would all have to find another line of work." ~ Pat Buchanan



"The only way to reliably become wealthier is the old fashioned way – you have to spend less than you earn. Try it: spend less than you earn. Then, you’ll have more money. It’s like magic...or something..." ~ Bill Bonner



"Nothing succeeds to survive like a failed government agency and its unconstitutional mission. Of course if a government program were ever successful it would issue it’s own death sentence—no more budget, no more pensions, permanent layoffs, shuttered buildings, a public auction of all its assets. Just the thought gives me a warm feeling inside as a taxpayer. Well…back to reality." ~ The New Liberty



"We must get the Republicans totally out of power, or we will have no country left for the Democrats to mess up." ~ Paul Craig Roberts



"Damn, but I despise politicians." ~ Charley Reese



"Some argue that giving dictatorial powers to the President, just as we have allowed him to run the American empire, is what we should do. That's the great danger, and in this post-911 atmosphere, too many Americans are seeking safety over freedom." ~ Ron Paul



"Politicians are always interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." ~ P.J. O'Rourke



"Alas, no successful civilization in history -- Greece, Rome, England, France, the list goes on -- ever found prosperity through its bureaucrats and lawyers." ~ Victor Davis Hanson



"Foreign policy need do only one thing: protect America so as to allow the domestic expansion of liberty, freedom, and equality of conditions." ~ Michael Scheuer



"There is no stopping history. There's no backing up. Once the wings begin to fall off, the plane is going to crash; there's not much you can do about it." ~ Bill Bonner



"Without the Constitution we have no protection. We simply stand naked before unbridled government power." ~ Paul Craig Roberts



"Ignore the happy-face assessments of the geopolitical strategists. Ignore the happy-face assessment of the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry "Goldman Sachs" Paulson. These assessments are being issued to keep panic from spreading." ~ Gary North



"Electing even a few Libertarians to a governing board, is akin to having a designated driver in a roomful of drunks." ~ Doug Klippel



"The task of weaning various people and groups from the national nipple will not be easy. The sound of whines, bawls, screams and invective will fill the air as the agony of withdrawal pangs finds voice." ~ Linda Bowles



"Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries." ~ Douglas Casey



"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it." ~ Justice Learned Hand



"Something that's free isn't worth much." ~ Theodore J. Forstmann



"The war on "terror" will never be over, it will just change locations. Like the war on drugs, prostitution, pornography, and the many others that will follow, it is a war on humanity. These wars will never be won; the State will just keep creating new boogiemen to frighten us with. The sheep will anxiously anticipate the next fall guy the State offers up as a sacrifice for the war on whatever happens to be next. Be careful, the next pawn could be me or you." ~ Mike Wasdin



"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation." ~ The Declaration of Independence



"I would argue that the most serious threat to the United States is not someone hiding in a cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan but our own fiscal irresponsibility." ~ David Walker - US Comptroller General



"Bigger budgets, more drugs. More arrests, more deaths. More seizures, more potency. More agents, more users. For their thirty-fifth anniversary, perhaps they should change their name to the Drug Encouragement Administration." ~ "Radical" Russ Belville



"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods." ~ H.L. Mencken



"There is no "slippery slope" toward loss of liberty, only a long staircase where each step down must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders." ~ Alan K. Simpson



"For some years now, I've worried that we seem to be more and more like Colonial England – arrogant, racist, overestimating our own capacity and underestimating that of our enemies. As the fate of the British Empire demonstrates, that is a fatal flaw." ~ Charley Reese



"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government – lest it come to dominate our lives and interests." ~ Patrick Henry



"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. … That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." ~ The Declaration of Independence



"We must realize that our privacy and our liberty will always be threatened as long as we instruct our government to manage a welfare state and to operate foreign policy as if we are the world's policemen." ~ Ron Paul



"We have met the enemy and he is us." ~ Pogo



"Most economists believe that a gun, when held by a salaried government official and pointed at a citizen to extract his wealth, can sometimes produce economic growth, whereas a gun held by a thief and pointed at a citizen to extract his wealth always produces economic loss. The first produces something for nothing, whereas the second produces nothing for something. What is the difference? This: the person holding the gun." ~ Gary North



"I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace." ~ George W. Bush


"War is Peace" ~ George Orwell



"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty." ~ John Adams



"If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life. " ~ Henry David Thoreau



"You know, I know, everybody watching this show knows that four years from today, whichever of them is elected, government will be bigger, more expensive, more obtrusive, and more oppressive. If you vote Republican or Democrat, you are giving up. You’re saying ‘I’m never going to be free. America will never be a free country again. I will never get smaller government. So I’m just going to vote for the one I think will take me to hell at the slowest-possible rate." ~ Harry Browne (2000)



"We are living in a sick society filled with people who would not directly steal from their neighbor but who are willing to demand that the government do it for them." ~ William L. Comer



"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hope of its children." ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower


"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office." ~ H. L. Mencken


"No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots." ~ Barbara Ehrenreich


"America was founded by men who understood that the threat of domestic tyranny is as great as any threat from abroad. If we want to be worthy of their legacy, we must resist the rush toward ever-increasing state control of our society. Otherwise, our own government will become a greater threat to our freedoms than any foreign terrorist." ~ Ron Paul


"We Americans have no commission from God to police the world." ~ Benjamin Harrison


"Our military, the one we say fights for freedom and peace around the world, is a grand Gulliver, bound and disabled and continually amazed by what it encounters on the Island of Lilliput." ~ Karen Kwiatkowski


"(C)itizens engaged in self-government need to know what their government is doing and why to guide their political judgments and loyalties." ~ Bruce Fein


"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were once our countrymen." ~ Samuel Adams


"If you were a robber or a rapist, who would you rather have as a victim? Someone who is armed, or someone who is defenseless? Even a stupid criminal knows the answer to that question." ~ Charley Reese


"Our current national debt is quickly approaching $10 trillion and the total amount of our future unfunded liabilities is approaching 60 trillion current dollars. These liabilities are literally overwhelming and continue to grow. We could simple default and ruin the future credit of the government. Alternatively, we could cut the size of government and pay off the debt, but that almost seems laughable in the current political climate. The most likely route is more inflation. " ~ Mark Thornton


"I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of national emergency, even if I'm in a cabinet meeting." ~ Ronald Reagan


"That's what a Congressman or a Senator is for -- to see that too much money don't accumulate in the national Treasury." ~ Will Rogers


"When you rob Peter to pay Paul, Paul never complains." ~ Greg Perry


"I don't want my children fed or clothed by the state, but if I had to choose, I would prefer that to their being educated by the state." ~ Max Victor Belz


"Democracy is a form of government that cannot long survive, for as soon as the people learn that they have a voice in the fiscal policies of the government, they will move to vote for themselves all the money in the treasury and bankrupt the nation." ~ Karl Marx


"These days, everyone would do well to add a pinch of paranoia to his otherwise sunny disposition and trusting nature." ~ Charley Reese


"The entire world economy rests on the consumer; if he ever stops spending money he doesn't have on things he doesn't need -- we're done for." ~ Bill Bonner


". . . whoever desires liberty, should understand these vital facts, viz.: 1. That every man who puts money into the hands of a 'government' (so called), puts into its hands a sword which will be used against him, to extort more money from him, and also to keep him in subjection to its arbitrary will. 2. That those who will take his money, without his consent, in the first place, will use it for his further robbery and enslavement, if he presumes to resist their demands in the future." ~ Lysander Spooner


“It is wise to take the future into account in decisions that one makes today.” ~ Walter Williams


“Freedom can best be exported from the United States by our observance of our own Constitution, setting a good example of how a true republic functions for other nations to emulate.” ~ Warren Mass


“More freedom can never be gained by giving up freedom, no matter the rationale.” ~ Ron Paul


“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. ” ~ George Orwell


“[W]hat painter has drawn Liberty…with an overflowing treasury in her lap and scattering money and exclusive privileges with her hands?” ~ John Taylor


“I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure: which is: Try to please everybody.” ~ Herbert B. Swope


“Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody.” ~ Agatha Christie


“Good morning, Mr. Greenspan. I understand that you did not take my friendly advice last fall. I thought maybe you should look for other employment, but I see you have kept your job.” ~ Ron Paul


“The universe never did make sense; I suspect it was built on government contract.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein


"A politician should have three hats. One for throwing into the ring, one for talking through, and one for pulling rabbits out of if elected." ~ Carl Sandburg


"Make a list of those politicians who do the most to prevent our drilling for our own oil. Then make a list of those politicians who express the most outrage about the high price of gasoline. Don't be surprised if you see the same names on both lists." ~ Thomas Sowell


"For five years, the Americans have not done anything for the Iraqis. What do they think they can do for us in one more year?

am so sick and tired of all this. We just want the Americans to go, and we will try to fix things ourselves." ~ Hussein Jabar


"I'm not one who believes that you simply get to parity by dumping more money into a Soviet-style delivery system." ~ Mark Sanford


"If you think health care is expensive now, wait till you see what it costs when it's free." ~ P.J. O'Rourke


"In free governments, the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns." ~ Benjamin Franklin


"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." ~ Blaise Pascal


"If you're not confused, you're not paying attention." ~ Tom Peters


"A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves." ~ Edward R. Murrow


"A politician looks forward only to the next election. A statesman looks forward to the next generation." ~ Thomas Jefferson


Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed -- and no republic can survive.” ~ John F. Kennedy


“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.” ~ Groucho Marx


"When all think alike, no one thinks very much." ~ Walter Lippman


"Oh, I don't blame Congress. If I had $600 billion at my disposal, I'd be irresponsible, too." ~ Lichty and Wagner


"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." ~ George Orwell


"Many people seem to regard elections as occasions for venting emotions, like cheering for your favorite team or choosing a Homecoming Queen." ~ Thomas Sowell