THE FEDERAL RESERVE MUST DIE

The United States grew rapidly for 120 years with virtually no inflation. With the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the inflation genie was let out of the bottle. Nixon’s closing of the gold window in 1971 unleashed a tsunami of inflation, covered up by statistical manipulation by the Fed and government.
For those who prefer seeing what real things cost, below is a chart with some key financial items for the average person. If it feels like your family has fallen behind since 1971, you’re right. Your pay has not come close to keeping up with the cost of a new house, a new car or gas to fill up that car. This is why it takes two parents working to just to keep up with inflation.

Items	1971	2007	% Increase
Average Cost of new house	$28,000	$314,000	1121%
Median HH Income	$10,300	$58,700	570%
Average Monthly Rent	$150	$730	487%
Cost of a gallon of Gas	$0.40	$2.80	700%
Average New Car Price	$3,430	$28,000	816%
United States postage Stamp	$0.08	$0.41	512%
Movie Ticket	$1.50	$7.00	467%

What has the Fed done for you or, rather, to you? James Quinn has a list.

Limited Government, An Impossible Dream

I believe our addictive attraction to the power of government to improve our lives is the very thing that has got us into our current predicament, and that government, far from securing our lives, liberty, and property, is the only real threat to them. It actually fosters chaos, and retards the process of mutually beneficial exchange that is the very basis of civilization. Government is the mortal enemy of mankind and civilization. Call it what you may, either free market, creative and peaceful anarchy, or whatever, the alternative to government is the only hope we have of enjoying ourselves, and passing on to our progeny, the blessings of life, liberty, and property. There is no middle ground, and we are engaged in a fierce struggle whose outcome will be monumental.

What are we afraid of? Freedom or government? John Sampson explores the issue.

Audit the Fed!

I'm a big supporter of Ron Paul's efforts to audit the Federal Reserve. Of course, the international bankster elites are balking. Bernanke claims it will interfere with decision making. Nonsense. What it WILL reveal is where the many trillions have gone. Without knowing, it's no different than a bank robbery. It's taxation without representation. We The People must pay all that money back. WITH INTEREST! It amounts to slavery for us and our descendants. It's time to end the Fed!

Instead of Toto pulling back the curtain, it's Ron Paul doing the honors. Nice!

The Fed on the Defensive

Always in the past, the Federal Reserve has remained free from serious criticism. The media are obedient lap dogs. So are the academic economists. The textbooks never point out that the FED is the enforcing arm of a huge cartel. The professors refrain from applying to the FED their analyses in their chapters on cartels.

Today, for the first time, there is a growing audience of intelligent people who are being exposed to the truth about the FED. This has taken place outside Establishment channels, which includes the largest talk radio shows.

The FED has had a 90-year free ride. That ride is over. The FED will never again get off scot-free.

Distrust in the FED is growing among the populace who, until recently, blindly placed their faith in it. Deeds and results, not faith, should be our guide. Secrecy and hubris in political affairs is an indication of deceit and corruption. The refusal to provide answers to legitimate questions is confirmation of that deceit and corruption.

The Political Phase and the Death of Nations

The United States is in the third and fatal stage of a great country’s life-cycle – the political stage. In this stage, money and power migrate from the financial community to the political community. The politicians get away with taking trillions out of the productive economy and spending them on their pet projects and private corruptions.

“Politics is about what works,” someone once said. Someone said it…someone who is an imbecile. Politics is not about what works, it’s about what you can get away with. And what you can get away with is often exactly what doesn’t work at all.

The looters are plundering the remains of what was once a prosperous nation. The Cycle of Democracy is almost complete.

Nancy Pelosi, National Socialist

This Marine vet has a question for his "representative". (Thanks to Karen for the link)

Involuntary Medical Servitude

Medical care is not a right. Medical care is a service provided by doctors and others to individuals who want to purchase it. A patient presents to the doctor with a request for care. The fact that the patient has a serious condition — even a life threatening one — does not entitle him, as his right, to the services of the doctor. To claim that he does means that doctors and others who provide these services have no rights, or that society can deliberately ignore these rights for the "greater good."

Governmental intrusions into our interactions with others can bring unexpected and undesirable results.

Chappaquiddick: No Profile in Kennedy Courage

The details of the July 19 accident were salacious: a Regatta Weekend reunion party at a friend's cottage with all married men (except one) and six women -- the "boiler room girls" -- who had worked together on Robert Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign.

After a day of sailing and heavy drinking, Kennedy drove his black Oldsmobile sedan off a small wooden bridge into Poucho Pond, trapping Kopechne in seven feet of water.

Edward Moore Kennedy -- only 38 and up for re-election the following year-- had violated one of the cardinal rules in politics: "Never get caught with a dead girl or a live boy."

It's a Bumpy Road remembers Ted Kennedy.

Election Fraud? Elections Are a Fraud!

The prize generally goes to the politician who can most convincingly rattle off outrageous whoppers to voters from one side of his mouth, persuade his major campaign contributors that they’ll make their money back a thousand-fold on government contracts and similar graft out of the other, and most deftly suborn the mechanical aspects of the polling to his will by fair means or foul.

But the fraud goes deeper than that. It’s built into the very foundation of democratic politics. The notion that one individual, elected by majority vote, can in any way be said to “represent” the entirety of a constituency based on mere geography is absurd on its face.

"Throw the bums out!" yells the exasperated voter (who voted for the bums in the previous election) as he pulls the lever to elect a new batch of bums.

Competition

In a free market, a business that is complacent about costs learns that its prices are too high when it sees lower-cost competitors winning over its customers. The market — actually, the consumer — holds businesses accountable and keeps them honest. No "public option" is needed.

So the hope for reducing medical costs indeed lies in competition and choice. Today competition is squelched by government regulation and privilege.

But Obama's so-called reforms would not create real competition and choice. They would prohibit it.

We are weary of the health care debate and are prepared for the seemingly unavoidable eventuality of it being mandated upon us. Still, John Stossel's essay caught our attention with his canny analysis of the destructive effects of government intrusion in what should be a free market.

Exposed: The Swine Flu Hoax

If the current H1N1 swine flu virus does become abnormally lethal, there would be three leading explanations: first, that the virus was accidentally released, or escaped, from a laboratory; second, that a disgruntled lab employee unleashed the virus (as happened, according to the official version of events, with the 2001 anthrax attack); or third, that a group, corporation or government agency intentionally released the virus in the interests of profit and power.

The swine flu hysteria is suspicious. A skeptic speaks out.

Misconstruing the Cause of Waste

Waste, by definition, means “spending to no avail or profit.” But observe that when men are free to pursue their own values, they’re incentivized to act carefully. Notably, they evaluate their purchases to ensure that what they receive is worth more to them than what they give up — they profit from their exchanges. Moreover, because everyone is free, competition arises naturally, pressuring suppliers to succeed by offering the best prices.

Accordingly, under individualism, waste is minimized by each person, one transaction at a time. Indeed, the “cost discipline” which free markets are so famous for emerges from this very fact.

Contrast this to the collectivist approach favored by our current politicians.

"Where does the money go? Who cares? It's other people's money." ~ Any politician in DC (except Ron Paul)

Democracy: The God That Failed

How many times in the last decade have the political leaders of either party stood up and declared, “No, we cannot afford this.”

Consider. Friday, the White House conceded that the deficits over the next 10 years will total $2 trillion more than they had reported just months ago. Instead of $7.1 trillion, we will run $9 trillion in deficits.

Meanwhile, the White House demands a new entitlement—health care coverage for 47 million uninsured who can’t afford it or refuse to buy it—that will cost at least $1 trillion over 10 years. Can we afford this—now?

“We can’t afford not to,” comes the retort. This is “a core ethical and moral obligation,” says Barack Obama.

But is it not a core ethical and moral obligation not to debauch the currency in which most of the hard-earned wealth of the American people is invested?

Politicians are too indebted to special interests to cut spending. Pat Buchanan adds up the numbers and they are frightening.

The Welfare State and the Promise of Protection

In the 20th century, especially during the past seventy years, Americans have placed their faith in government — increasingly the federal government. Since Franklin Delano Roosevelt assumed the presidency in 1933, voluntary relief has taken a back seat to government assistance. Eventually, hardly any source of distress remained unattended by a government program. Old age, unemployment, illness, poverty, physical disability, loss of spousal support, childrearing need, workplace injury, consumer misfortune, foolish investment, borrowing blunder, traffic accident, environmental hazard, and loss from flood, fire, or hurricane all became subject to government succor.

Our ancestors relied on themselves; we rely on the welfare state. But the "safety net" that governments have stretched beneath us seems more and more to be a spider's web in which we are entangled and from which we must extricate ourselves if we are to preserve a prosperous and free society.

Robert Higgs on how we became dependent on the federal government.

Danger for the Dollar

“The United States economy is now out of the emergency room and appears to be on a slow path to recovery.”

This is probably the view shared by most economists and most investors. It is not our view. From where we sit there is no recovery underway…and there never will be one. You can recover from a hangover. You can recover from a nasty divorce. You can even recover from an earthquake. But once a depression begins, you can only endure it. Get on with it. Get it over. And then, you can begin rebuilding again. You will never recover the economy you had before the crisis. You must find a new economic model.

Despite the [futile] effort to correct the debt-ridden economy by taking on piles of more debt, we are in the doldrums and recovery is not imminent. And it will get worse before it gets better.

All Aboard the Big Government Bulls**t Train

Thanks to Wrisley for the photo

TSA and Its Brethren

Walking through Penn Station in Baltimore does not meet the definition of probable cause, yet the PA system constantly announces that people are subject to random search.

The knowledge that one may be searched at any time is intimidating, and being searched, humiliating. Yes, it is legal. A judge can always be found who will find constitutional almost anything. Yet the ability to say “no” to causeless searches was a thing that distinguished America from the Soviet Union. It no longer does.

Fred Reed writes a letter to TSA.

Big Government

So if government didn’t "run the country" and protect the "public interest" and do all the things it attempts to do, who would? The answer, in short: people. Workers, volunteers, entrepreneurs, you and me. People, voluntarily cooperating with one another, acting in their own best interest, can solve problems and produce the goods and services we all need and want. It’s called free enterprise – a system where people are allowed to buy, sell, work, and trade without interference, so long as their actions are peaceful and honest. The free market always can solve problems and produce what people need better than government. There are no exceptions.

After which government failure will we finally say that government is big enough now so just stop it?

Who Are the Uninsured?

[W]hen we hear about 45 million Americans without health insurance, it conjures up the notion that all of those are born without health insurance, die without health insurance, and are never insured in between. The reality is that most people without health insurance are uninsured for a relatively short period of time.

Only about 30 percent of the uninsured remain so for more than a year, approximately 16 percent for two years, and less than 2.5 percent for three years or longer. About half are uninsured for six months or less. Notably, because health insurance is too often tied to employment, the working poor who cycle in and out of the job market also cycle in and out of health insurance.

Never let a crisis go to waste and, when no crisis is available, fabricate one on a gullible public.

Lords of War

Americans think that they have “freedom and democracy” and that politicians are held accountable by elections. The fact of the matter is that the United States is ruled by powerful interest groups who control politicians with campaign contributions. Our real rulers are an oligarchy of financial and military/security interests and AIPAC, which influences U.S. foreign policy for the benefit of Israel.

Have a look at economic policy. It is being run for the benefit of large financial concerns, such as Goldman Sachs.

It was the banks, not the millions of Americans, who have lost homes, jobs, health insurance and pensions, that received $700 billion in TARP funds.

The government is not representing "the people", but is, instead, bilking the people to reward the lobbyists.

Paying for Health Care the old-fashioned Libertarian Way: With Cold, Hard Cash $$$

Forget Government involvement. Forget even the Insurance Companies.

Why not return to the traditional purely free market way of seeking and providing health care through direct payment to the Doctor for services rendered.

Seems simple right? Why has this time-honored practice been completely missing from all the discussions by the politicians in Washington? Why hasn't Obama, or even the Republicans, mentioned this truely single payer system?

Out in the Heartland, at least, the people are catching on.

We can do it without the government if we just show a little gumption.

Insuring Health

Johnson introduced Medicaid and Medicare. Formerly, low-income people had been served with health care on the basis of charity, but from then on they were handed a "right" to have it paid for by someone else. Any and all stigma was removed. You offer something for free, people will take it; and they did. The overall cost of US health care started rising sharply in that very decade, and has not looked back since. Like the bumper sticker says, "If you think health care is expensive now, wait until it's free."

The health care debate continues unabated in the news media and town halls. It will eventually be passed in a diluted form which will enable all the politicians to say it was the best they could do in these partisan times. Then, we will have to live with the inevitable consequences of higher premiums and more expensive, rationed health care.

Right War, Wrong Battlefield

The system operates collectively, only collective action within it can be effective, but a message of individual freedom cannot be effectively forwarded by collective means.

The country has the system the majority of voters want, and I don’t want to try to force them to change what they want. Even so, this system can’t work for much longer anyway, the best way to convince people to stop wanting it would be to stop trying to make it work.

Working within the system in any form strengthens it. I don’t want to strengthen it. To the extent that I want anything at all to happen to the system, I want it to starve. But mostly, I don’t want to be a part of it anymore.

The politicians need us to be involved in order to perpetrate their tyranny.

Fort Knox, Fort Hocks or Fort Shocks: Three United States Gold Scenarios

For 72 years, the building at the intersection of Bullion Boulevard and Gold Vault Road in Fort Knox, Kentucky has symbolized the financial strength of the United States of America. The United States Bullion Depository, better known as Fort Knox, is said to contain 147.3 million troy ounces of gold, over half the nation’s total reported gold bullion holdings of 261.5 million troy ounces. The remaining 114 million ounces are said to be stored at the Denver and Philadelphia Mints, the West Point Bullion Depository, and the San Francisco Assay Office. Assuming a price of $1,000 / ounce, the nation’s gold is worth $261.5 billion. If the metal is actually there, it represents the largest sovereign stockpile of gold bullion in the world.

If the gold is actually there? Of course it's there. Isn't it? Stewart Dougherty wants to audit Fort Knox and find out.

Less Government or Lower Wages? You Decide.

I believe that we must restore the conditions that led to our economic preeminence. We must once again become the leader in economic freedom. This entails dismantling a significant portion of our federal and state governments, repealing countless unnecessary regulations, significantly lowering and simplifying taxes, and reinstituting sound money. If we accomplish these tasks, conditions will be ripe for a lasting recovery that solidifies our place at the top of the global economic totem pole.

However, if we neglect these reforms, and instead continue on our present course of more government and less freedom, more borrowing and less savings, more spending and less production, then our standard of living is doomed to fall.

It seems unlikely the prescription offered by Peter Schiff will be followed by the current administration.

Many Gun Owners, the State and Media Agree; 2a Is No Longer Relevant

Here in America in the last seventy plus years, our government and their stooges in the media have sought to relegate the right of a free people to keep and bear arms into a privilege, subject to government approval, rather than an inalienable right. Sadly, many gun owners have agreed to participate in this madness.

I have been consistent in my objections to asking permission and paying for the privilege to carry a weapon on my person, if and when I chose to do so. Yet, the majority of objections I receive to my position come from people who currently own guns and have jumped at the opportunity for government approval to do what they already have the right to do.

Everyday, Americans are arrested and charged with "possessing an unlawful weapon" or some such violation of the law. The 2nd amendment proclaims that the right to bear arms shall not be infringed. Requiring a permit to "lawfully" carry a weapon is an infringement of that right.

The 2nd American Revolution

Now, with Congress in recess and elected representatives less than a stone’s throw away, the public is exploding. The devil is not in the details of the heath care reform, the devil is the government mandating health care. Regardless of how the plan is pitched or what is being promised, to the public the legislation is yet another instance of big government taking another piece out of their lives and making them pay for it; again telling them what they can or cannot do.

Though in its early stages, the “Second American Revolution” is underway.

The town hall protesters are loud and angry but they still want their government goodies like Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security. When they want their freedom and liberty more, the Revolution will truly begin.

The Worst is Ahead of Us

“Not so fast, Mr. Obama.”

In fact, not only have Obama’s policies made this downturn worse, the policies have not yet begun to run their full course, and that means we have further to go before we hit bottom. I do not say this in any partisan spirit; indeed, I believe that the Obama policies pretty much are what John McCain would have done had he been elected.

No, the problem is not partisan politics; the problem is bad economic policy. Really bad economic policy.

Another naysayer who doesn't believe the "good news" we are hearing from the media.

Pink Slip Nation

The American economy shows no signs of reversing its relentless increase in the rate of unemployment. Jobs are disappearing at a rate not seen since the 1981–82 recession.

Companies continue to cut costs by laying off workers. This is the main source of the increase in corporate earnings – not increased output, but decreased output. How is this profitable? Because of increased output per surviving worker. In the midst of recession, businesses are learning how to cut costs. Labor in most businesses is the #1 cost. Cut labor, and you cut costs faster than by cutting anything else.

Workers see what is happening. They are working harder because they are facing pink slips.

We cannot spend our way out of this depression. We could work our way towards prosperity but Cap and Trade legislation is looming, threatening a manufacturing resurgence. Businesses are avoiding taxes and regulations by relocating abroad.

Debt and the Fog of Numbers

The number problems we face are now hopeless. America will never be able to cover its current outstanding debt. We’re effectively finished at all three levels: household, corporate, and government. Who, for instance, can really comprehend what to do about the number problems infesting Fannie Mae and the mortgages associated with her? There’s really only one way out of this predicament: to get ready for a much lower standard of living and much different daily living arrangements. We can’t wrap our minds around this, so the exercise du jour is to play games with numbers to persuade ourselves that we don’t have to face reality. We’re entertaining ourselves with shell games, musical chairs, Chinese fire drills, Ponzi schemes, and Polish blanket tricks (where, to make your blanket longer, you cut twelve inches off the top and sew it onto the bottom).

The national debt is approaching $12 Trillion dollars and the politicians are yawning. They continue to spend more than they can cajole and loot from the taxpayers.

The Bounce Phase of the Economic Depression

Guess how many jobs the US private sector has added over the last 10 years? Almost none. Private sector employment is back to levels of 1999. There are more jobs in restaurants and health care…but many fewer in manufacturing. Net gain: zero.

The only job gains have been in the parasite sector – government. On the evidence, this trend is going to continue. Now, the feds have a new post called “pay czar.” As near as we can tell this is a busybody who undertakes to control salaries in the industries that the feds have bailed out. There will be a lot more jobs running the regulatory/bailout apparatus. Then, too, there are all the make-work jobs of the shovel ready boondoggles the feds began in an effort to replace private spending.

Bill believes the recession depression has only just begun. Jobs, real jobs, not government jobs, are necessary for recovery. Government policies are hindering job growth.

20 Questions for Your Congressman

The government has been "reforming" health-care for sixty years—tax breaks for employer-provided health-insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, encouraging HMOs and managed care, and government health-insurance at the state level in Massachusetts, Maine, Oregon. Government health-care has expanded until it is now more than 50% of all health-care spending. Yet after sixty years of government "reform," the problems with health-care are just getting worse. So why should we believe that even more government is the solution?

This might be a good question to ask your Congressman, if only to flummox him into hemming and hawing and blustering. Robert Tracinski has 19 more questions for the amusement of the town hall mobsters.

It’s Mourning in America

The productive sector workers are also paying for everything the Leviathan State does, such as wars, roads,Imperial adventures, private stadiums, bailouts, counterfeiting, ad infinitum. They also pick up the soaring tabs for 47 million Medicaid and 42 million Medicare recipients.

If this isn’t rampant socialism, it will do until the real thing arrives.

How can 155 million productive workers support themselves, nearly 100 million nonproductive others and a seemingly endless list of government endeavors (most of which could be done more economically and more effectively by the private sector)?

Answer: They can’t.

The economy is running - if you can call it that - on debt and fiat dollars. There will be a reckoning someday.

What Is This "Free Market" We Keep Hearing About?

So, let us say here what it seems that no one anywhere wants to come out and say: the free market is nothing more than all members of society exercising their inalienable rights. It is nothing more and nothing less. Any other system, by definition, violates some or all of these rights.

Every individual has a natural right to labor and to keep the fruits of his labor (his property). This is his only means of pursuing his happiness. There is only one role for government in this area: to defend the property of each individual against theft by another person or group. A truly free market limits government’s role in regards to property to this natural boundary — for any further role constitutes government committing the very crime it exists to prohibit.

The politicians and bureaucrats have exceeded their authority with their interference in the affairs of free men and markets.

What is Seen and What is Unseen: Government “Job Creation”

In the case of public works, Bastiat explained that government produces nothing independent from the resources and labor it diverts from private uses. When government borrows money to create jobs, what is readily seen are people employed and the fruits of their labor. However, what is generally not considered are the many things that could have been produced if the capital had not been removed from the private sector to fund the government programs in the first place. Such policies necessarily benefit some (the favored workers) at the expense of others (those who would have had the jobs that were not created) and eventually the taxpayers, who have to repay the debt.

Alas, there is little evidence that we will soon demand our freedom from government interlopers.

Medicare's Hospital Program Went Broke in 2008. Nobody Noticed.

Medicare is politically untouchable. Old people have been promised coverage, and no politician is going to tell granny she must fork over her life's savings to pay for her own health care expenses. Not yet, anyway. Not this year.

But what about the famous Medicare trust fund? Whenever we read about Medicare's projected deficit, it always refers to Medicare's trust fund. It never says this: "Medicare's trust fund is 100% filled with unmarketable IOUs from the U.S. Treasury." Yet that is the situation. Medicare's trust fund is just like Social Security's.

Fraud, abuse and corruption are rampant in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. There's too much OP (other people's) money and too little oversight and too much temptation for politicians and bureaucrats with sticky fingers and health care providers who rig the system and patients who use their hypochondria to demand unnecessary medical attention. Politicians will not fix it because, in order to do so, they would have to admit failure.

Single-Payer Groceries, Anyone?

If a government-run monopoly is good for healthcare, they will eventually argue, why not food, cars, and other essentials of modern life? They are socialists, after all.

Since I always try to keep a step ahead of the bad guys, it will be useful to think through how say, a single-payer grocery industry would work. Such an exercise will also teach us some lessons about what can be expected of a "single-payer," government-run healthcare monopoly.

What would happen if Sam's Club became Uncle Sam's Club?

How to dress like an “authentic” grass-roots activist

My fellow members of The Mob: Barbara Boxer and Robert Gibbs have panned your fashion sense. Accordingly, I have compiled style tips from “authentic” grass-roots activists to assist you with proper wardrobe choices for your next congressional town hall outings (language warning!). ~ Michelle Malkin

Barbara Boxer criticized the disillusioned protesters at the town hall meetings for being well-dressed. Michelle Malkin provides some fashion advice for future meetings which should elicit OOOH's and AAAH's from your appointed representative. (more photos here)

Why Do You Submit to the People Who Rule You?

Politics is coercion, and still, no matter how much people learn about the establishment and its reason for existence, they sanction it. They sanction it each time they concede to the government’s arbitrary decrees and go along with its mandates. And especially, the masses consent to total control and tyranny each time they vote for any one of these swines. ~ Karen De Coster

Why so upset? We voted for these people didn't we? Well, a majority voted for them in a democratic election. Democracy, then, is the tyranny of the majority (50.1%) over the minority (49.9%). The losers must submit or rebel.

‘You Are Terrifying Us’

People are not automatons. They show up only if they care.

What the town-hall meetings represent is a feeling of rebellion, an uprising against change they do not believe in. And the Democratic response has been stunningly crude and aggressive. It has been to attack. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, accused the people at the meetings of “carrying swastikas and symbols like that.” (Apparently one protester held a hand-lettered sign with a “no” slash over a swastika.) But they are not Nazis, they’re Americans. Some of them looked like they’d actually spent some time fighting Nazis.

Congress is not amused by the revolt of the masses. The "people back home" are not amused by Congress.

WHEN IN DOUBT, BLAME IT ON A MOB MENTALITY

Just can't let this go. It's funny, really, that the Democrats are so scared. They're shell-shocked. How DARE these people show up to protest the Democrat's biggest power grab since FDR? The ungrateful scumbags! The looters know they have to come up with a story, and the best they can do is to demonize the protestors. They insist on pinning any opposition to healthcare reform as a "mob."

Obama insisted he wanted to hear all points of view on his policies. He's hearing them now. The great unwashed are opposing the rush to US bankruptcy. Funny thing is they don't look so much like a "mob" as concerned citizens.

Healthcare Solution: Go Back to Cash

Here’s why healthcare (a.k.a. sick-care) costs cannot be reduced; the entire system is based on vast pools of “free money.” The corporate-America or union/government employee who goes to the doctor pays a few dollars for a visit and drugs; the “real cost” is of no concern. Ditto the “real costs” charged to Medicare and Medicaid.

The link between the “consumer” of healthcare and the provider has been broken for decades. There is no “free market” in healthcare–there isn’t any market at all. We live in a Kafka-esque nightmare system in which “some are more equal than others” and hundreds of thousands of dollars are lavished on worthless tests, procedures and medications for two reasons:

A simpler solution to healthcare is proposed by Charles Hugh Smith.

Our Enemy, the State

It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power. There is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.

We should have listened to Albert Jay Nock when he warned us over 60 years ago.

Luxury Jets for Congress

House Orders Up Three Elite Jets
August 5, 2009
By Paul Singer
Roll Call Staff

Last year, lawmakers excoriated the CEOs of the Big Three automakers for traveling to Washington, D.C., by private jet to attend a hearing about a possible bailout of their companies.

But apparently Congress is not philosophically averse to private air travel: At the end of July, the House approved nearly $200 million for the Air Force to buy three elite Gulfstream jets for ferrying top government officials and Members of Congress.

The Air Force had asked for one Gulfstream 550 jet (price tag: about $65 million) as part of an ongoing upgrade of its passenger air service.

But the House Appropriations Committee, at its own initiative, added to the 2010 Defense appropriations bill another $132 million for two more airplanes and specified that they be assigned to the D.C.-area units that carry Members of Congress, military brass and top government officials.

The politico elites are apparently not interested in flying the same airlines we common folk patronize.

Monumentally Tragic Disappointment on the Horizon

Here, in the dog days of summer, it seems to me that the situation in the USA is so fundamentally bad, so unpromising, so booby-trapped for failure, that I wonder if there has ever been a society so badly deluded as ours. We’re prisoners of our wishes, living in a strange dream-time, oblivious to the forces gathering at the margins of our vision, lost in a wilderness of our own making.

Anything can happen now.

James Howard Kuntsler is pessimistic, or maybe pragmatic, about our economic future.

Obama and the Continuing War on the Poor

The magician lives by his deception. If the audience is ever able to see the reality of what the political class is actually doing, then these magicians would have to practice their magic craft privately. But this kind of fraud exposes them to the danger of spending time in prison (as Bernie Madoff can attest to). If they were not willing to risk jail time, the political class would instead have to work for a living. No longer would it be possible for them to live off of the fruits of other peoples' labor. They are indeed glad that the citizens of the land seem content for the most part to remain blind to the impoverishment they have perpetrated.

Politicians sustain themselves with deception and theft, aided and abetted by the media.

I Worked for the Government Today without Pay

According to the entry for me at Wikipedia, which I hope is reliable, I am a libertarian anarchist. Why would any person who fits that description work for the government at all, not to speak of working without pay? Well, my story is straightforward.

Some time ago I received in the mail from the U.S. Census Bureau a form to be filled out, to wit, the 2007 Survey of Business Owners and Self-Employed Persons questionnaire. I naturally threw it in the trash.

A few weeks later, I received another questionnaire whose cover letter read in part as follows:

Encroachments on our freedom often go unnoticed in our eagerness to reap government largesse.

The Old Order

These deficits will not be financed by borrowing from the American people. That is a lie. No democratic government has ever borrowed from its own people since the beginning of democracy in England in 1688. THE GOVERNMENT WILL PRINT MONEY AND "LEND" TO ITSELF. The U.S money supply will balloon from $1.3 trillion in early 2008 to somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 trillion by 2012. What do you think is going to happen to the value of the U.S. dollar with that kind of a massive increase in the money supply? (The only thing which can stop this and invalidate my $14,000 gold prediction is some kind of political "miracle" such as a sweeping Republican victory in 2010. And even that would require some new-fangled type of Republican who will balance the budget.)

The spectre of inflation is looming says Howard Katz.

Sticking With the Basics

It is the worst recession since the Great Depression because it’s not a recession at all; it’s a depression. And the government is doing its level best to make it a great one.

The key to understanding a depression – or the downswing of the credit cycle – is that demand contracts. Consumers have less to spend. For a very simple reason: they already spent it.

Listen up, because this is important. When you borrow in order to consume, what you are really doing is consuming something today that you would have normally consumed in the future. You spend money you haven’t earned yet on something you’re not really ready to buy. You’ve heard the expression, ‘time is money.’ That’s why borrowing money is really borrowing time. Later, you have to make it up. You have pay off the debt.

Consumers are tapped out with mortgages and credit card debt. They are not in a spending mood. Their jobs, if they still have jobs, are insecure and they are paying off debt to prepare for austere times ahead. A wise maneuver in our opinion. Our politicians and their economists are not wise. They are destructively piling debt on taxpayers for generations to come.

Utopia Versus Freedom

Politicians are already one of the main reasons why medical insurance is so expensive. Insurance is designed to cover risks but politicians are in the business of distributing largesse. Nothing is easier for politicians than to mandate things that insurance companies must cover, without the slightest regard for how such additional coverage will raise the cost of insurance.

If insurance covered only those things that most people are most concerned about-- the high cost of a major medical expense-- the price would be much lower than it is today, with politicians piling on mandate after mandate.

Government involvement in health care - think Medicare and Medicaid - is a principal cause of rising medical costs. It is not rational to think that more government intrusions - think Obama's Health Plan - will reduce medical costs.

DECLINE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

[A] large swath of Americans still believes the nation hasn’t gone off course. These people consider borrowing in order to live beyond their means a rational choice. They expect the government to save them when they get into trouble and think that taxing the rich to pay for a bigger and bigger safety net is a reasonable idea.

In a truly free-market society, this sizable segment of the public would have already learned a brutal lesson they’d remember for the rest of their lives. Instead, the brutal lesson is being learned by people who played by the rules and didn’t take ridiculous risks, but who are now being coerced by the government to pay for the misdeeds of the over-indebted fools who did.

The country is on a course towards more dependence and reliance on government. The protests of the independent and prudent are lost in the cacophony of the looters' laments for bailouts and stimuli.

Cash From Clunkers

The buying spree is good for the car companies, if only for the short term and for certain car models. It’s good, too, for folks who’ve been sitting on an older car or truck but weren’t sure they had the cash to trade it in for something new. Now they get a taxpayer subsidy of up to $4,500, which on some models can be 25% of the purchase price. It’s hardly surprising that Peter is willing to use a donation from his neighbor Paul, midwifed by Uncle Sugar, to class up his driveway.

On the other hand, this is crackpot economics.

Cash for Clunkers. Why not Moola for Mowers, Greenbacks for Groceries, Bucks for Boats, etc.?

Fed Independence Is A Myth

What all who favor a secretive, independent Fed miss is that not only has history shown the Fed's supposed independence to be mythical, but that the Constitution makes plain that the Fed shouldn't be independent. Even more important, the Fed shouldn't so much be conducting monetary policy as it should be blandly following a price rule whereby the dollar's value is stabilized, preferably in terms of gold.

The Federal Reserve is under pressure to open it's books to the light of day. Bernanke is reluctant to do so and is pleading the case for the Fed's independence. John Tamny provides a brief history of previous Fed chairmen.

National Socialist Fascist Communist Healthcare

Send it back to Hell from whence it came.

Test it on the Congress if they think it’s all that. Then vote out all of its wicked supporters. We shouldn’t wish it on our worst enemies. It will be a type of slow-burn euthanasia or biological warfare plied against the American People. It will not come along without eugenic characteristics and coerced abortion. It will not be "free."

Notice how all of these wonderful programs are surgically crafted to exempt the Elite.

There is not a letter in the Constitution to authorize it – Not one Jot.

Bill Huff considers the Constitutionality of government involvement in healthcare.

Suicide and the Insanity of War

Many parents – having been previously conditioned to become state servo-mechanisms – are unavailable to their children at a time when most needed to help question any of this organized insanity. Far too many mothers and fathers, I am sorry to say, end up loving the state more than they do their own children, and content themselves with a folded flag – handed to them by a uniformed officer – as a substitute.

It is not just the soldiers who commit suicide that provide evidence for the pathology of war. Those who die, or end up as cripples, or who desert, or who survive war physically unscathed but remain silently torn up inside, are all victims of this depraved system. I can only imagine the turmoil a young soldier must go through before, as an act of utter despair, deciding to take his or her own life.

Butler Shaffer on Support Our Troops.

Cash for Clunkers, A Case Study in Why Obamanomics Will Fail

If you watch television you’ve seen the ads: “So bring in that old jalopy and get up to $4,500 towards the purchase of a new or select used vehicle. That’s right, get up to $4,500 for that old piece of junk, plus you keep the rebates. You have to hurry! Since funds are limited for this program it’s first come, first served!” Well, we’re about to find out just how limited those funds were. The Obama administration’s cash-for-clunkers program has been such a “success” that in just the first week of full implementation, the $1 billion originally allocated for the program is about to be exhausted already. Does this mean the program is over? We don’t know. Nobody does. And that is just the beginning of why this program is a perfect illustration of why Obamanomics will fail.

Government administrators are ineffectively co-ordinating what should be a relatively simple project; i.e., give people money to trade cars. Of course, government has a long history of bungling when it interferes with markets.

Before you’re forced to get any mandatory vaccinations…

…have your physician sign this:

Physician’s Warranty of Vaccine Safety...

It might also be a good idea to have the IRS sign a warranty verifying the Constitutional use of your tax dollars ;-)

We Are All Jackasses Now

Unemployment shows no sign of improving, either. The stimulus program was supposed to cap joblessness at 8%. Officially, the rate is now 9.5%. Economist David Rosenberg puts the real unemployment rate almost twice that high. And businesses are cutting jobs even faster than expected. Economist Arthur Okun suggested a rule of thumb for predicting unemployment levels in a downturn. But firms are not only laying off redundant workers; they are laying off workers who would normally be spared. What’s more, those who are left are working the shortest weeks ever recorded.

In the past, workers were quick to move to where the jobs were. The Sun Belt traditionally bounced back first. But Florida, California, Arizona and Nevada have been flattened even more than the rest of the nation – by record foreclosures, government cutbacks and bankruptcies. Now, the jobless stay put…and stay unemployed.

Employment is key to economic recovery. Government policies are not friendly to business - they are friendly to government - and government is hiring but business is not. Businesses provide productive jobs. Government provides a paycheck to the unproductive with money taken from the productive. Government jobs will not aid a recovery.

Modern Prohibition and Individual Liberty

Modern Prohibition is a policy whereby the government threatens its citizens with punishment, if they dare step outside the box of drugs like alcohol, tobacco, Prozac, Valium and Tylenol. That punishment threat is backed up by government police, prosecutors and prisons. Add to that government informants, property confiscation without benefit of trial or finding of guilt, cops threatening politicians with a ‘soft on drugs’ label, unless the elected official supports the police cash cow & job security also known as drug policy.

Smoke a joint, go to prison. A retired police officer speaks out on drugs and liberty.

Happy Days Aren't Here Again

We borrowed and spent too much money, bought goods we couldn't afford, built houses we couldn't carry, and developed a service sector economy completely dependent on consumer credit and rising asset prices. All the while, we allowed our industrial base to crumble and our infrastructure to decay.

In order to lay the foundation for real and lasting recovery, market forces must be allowed to repair the damage. However, current policy is counterproductive to this end. Trillions in stimulus dollars have kept the party going, but now what?

Peter Schiff explains how spending money we don't have on stuff we don't need does not bode well for the future.

Why Bernanke Is in Panic Mode

The solvency of the American banking system rests on smoke and mirrors. Bernanke knows this. Congress is ignorant. Congress thinks things are probably OK. But a majority of House members want to be safe. They don't want the folks back home to believe that they are asleep at the wheel, which Congress has been since 1914 with respect to the Federal Reserve. So, a majority of House members co-sponsored Ron Paul's bill to audit the FED.

Barney Frank understands the threat. He has bottled the bill up in committee. This way, members who support the bill can tell the folks back home that it's not their fault. If they are asked about this, they can say, one by one, "I am really sorry. I did my best, but the bill is bottled up in committee. There is nothing I can do."

Of course there is something they can do. They can vote to bring the bill to the floor for a vote. There, they will be exposed to the folks back home. Did they vote "yes" to audit the FED? By co-sponsoring the bill, they can tell the folks back home, "I'm with you on this." By letting Frank bottle it up in committee, they can plead powerlessness. Nice.

It's all smoke and mirrors. It's all about not letting depositors find out how their banks are doing.

Continue reading Gary North's essay.