Politics Versus Gold

Inflation is a quiet but effective way for the government to transfer resources from the people to itself, without raising taxes. A hundred dollar bill would buy less in 1998 than a $20 bill would buy in the 1960s. This means that anyone who kept his money in a safe over those years would have lost 80 percent of its value, because no safe can keep your money safe from politicians who control the printing presses.

That is why some people buy gold when they lose confidence in the government's managing of its money. Usually that is when inflation is either under way or looming on the horizon. When many people start transferring their wealth from dollars into gold, that restricts the ability of politicians to steal from them through inflation.

Inflation does not arrive out of nowhere like a plague of locusts. It is not an act of God which can only be corrected by government intervention. Most people are not aware of the cause of inflation. No one will learn the cause by watching the networks or reading the newspapers because these media either do not understand the cause or they are complicit in covering up the cause. But we know the cause, don't we? And so does Thomas Sowell...

Healthcare Reform: A Huge Misdiagnosis

Anyone with a basic understanding of Austrian economics could have predicted the unintended consequences of these new healthcare policies.  Central planning never increases choices and quality or cuts costs as promised.  Price controls and government mandates always create artificial scarcity.  Healthcare is not a right, nor a privilege.  It is a product, like food or clothing.  As with any good or service, the free market regulation of supply and demand provides the optimum quality to the maximum number of people.  Once we realize the problems we are trying to solve today were created by government intervention beginning in the 1960’s, we can begin to put patients and doctors back in control of healthcare, rather than third party oligopolies and government bureaucrats.  The sooner, the better.

Ron Paul refuses to jump off the cliff with all the lemmings in Congress.

Exception Among Equities

The debt will be defaulted on one way or another. The trouble is they're almost certainly going to default on it through inflation, by destroying the currency, which is much worse than defaulting on it overtly. That's because inflation will wipe out the relatively few people who are prudent in this country, those who are actually saving money. Because they generally save in the form of dollars, they're going to wipe them out financially.

It's just horrible. Runaway inflation will reward the profligates who are in debt – people who've been living above their means. And punish the producers who've been saving and trying to build capital. That's in addition to the fact it will destroy millions of productive enterprises. A runaway inflation is the worst thing that can happen to a society, short of a major war. They just should default on it honestly, as it were.

The US has no way to repay its massive debt. What will the politicos do when payment is demanded by the creditors? They will either inflate or default says Doug Casey.

Who Are the Experts on Gold?

The intellectuals are committed to the expansion of the power of the state. Even those members of the academic community who say that they are not in favor of the expansion of the power of the state are, in fact, in favor of the expansion of the power of the state in the central institutional area that coordinates all other economic decisions: the monetary system.

Because of this, individuals who have decided that the fiat currencies of the world are unreliable, because the politicians are unreliable, face an uphill battle. They face ridicule. They may face self-doubt. They hear constantly that gold is not a good investment, that gold is not a reliable standard for the monetary system, that gold is a barbarous relic. They must take a stand against these anti-gold opinions, and they feel hard-pressed to come up with answers against the technical criticisms of the gold standard. I have watched this for over 40 years.

The dollar is falling and gold is soaring. Got gold? Or are you waiting? Read Gary North's column if you are waiting.

Ron Paul: We Need Austrian Economics

"The Constitution should protect our privancy and government should be totally open. Today government is totally closed, everything is done secretly. You can't even evaluate, you don't know what's going on and the people are being watched, cameras are everywhere. Every financial transaction, 1099's for every $600 transaction - I mean, that is the revolution that has to come." ~ Ron Paul

Private Sector to Play “Atlas” in “The Debt Repayment Story

The Astonishingly Worse News (AWN) is that this crushing weight of $2.418 trillion of credit card debt is only a tiny 6% of all the $11.7 trillion in private debt!

And, since you are now paying attention to the fact that there are less than 100 million workers in the private sector and who are the only people who can produce enough profits with which to pay all of this private debt, you instantly calculate that this is $117,000 per worker! Yow!

In case you were wondering, as I wondered, the $11.7 trillion in total private debt (according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York) is composed of 74% mortgage debt, 6% of the debt is from a revolving line of Home Equity credit, 7% of total debt is auto loans, 4% is student loans and 3% is classified as “other” debt! Wow! That’s a lot of debt!

Government has set a poor example for its citizens by spending above its means. Following this example, private citizens are mired in a morass of debt and are trying to recover by saving, economizing and paying off their creditors. Government criticizes Americans for this behavior and continues to squander its resources since we can no longer afford to squander ours. The Mogambo Guru is livid to the point of losing it.

We're Still Waiting

We will go through our federal budget — page by page, line by line — eliminating those programs we don't need.

– President Elect Barack Obama, November 2008

With all due respect
Mr. President, we're still waiting.

The Cato Institute sends a reminder to the President, and to us as well, that politicians will lie like a rug to get elected when they have no intention of ever honoring those pledges.

The European Banking Crisis: Next Phase

[I]t is clear that all modern governments are heading for the Great Default. All of them play games with their versions of Social Security and Medicare. The accounting systems of all modern nations are exercises in deception of the public. Everyone inside the top echelon of governments know this. This has been written about in the intelligentsia's media for years.

 

There is no political will to resist the voters, who want something for nothing. There is no willingness of voters to listen to the truth. The politician in any nation who trots out the figures and says, "There will be a default," loses at the next election.

The problem is universal. The deferral of dealing with it is well-developed. We are told in the United States that the system can be saved with just a few minor adjustments. Congress never makes these minor adjustments. Why not? Because they are not minor. They are politically suicidal. 

Politicians have dug a hole from which they cannot emerge without admitting their economic foolishness. They are unwilling to do this because their political careers would be over. Gary North explains.

Liberal Crackup

While America's liberal elite have not reached the depths of tyrants such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler, they share a common vision and, as such, differ only in degree but not kind. Both denounce free markets and voluntary exchange. They are for control and coercion by the state. They believe they have superior wisdom to the masses and they have been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. They, like any other tyrant, have what they see as good reasons for restricting the freedom of others. 

Don't like Obamacare? You're a racist. Don't like taxes and regulations? You're a right wing nut job. Don't like the wars? You're not a patriot. Don't like spending and debt? You're an economic doofus. 

So say our rulers and many in the government controlled media. Walter Williams begs to differ.

9/11 Cover-Up Remains While Questions Mount

If the official story about 9/11 is true, the attacks caught the Bush administration asleep on guard duty. Bush’s incompetent national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, brushed off serious warnings of the impending attack and actually cut spending on anti-terrorism just before 9/11. 

The White House and media were quick to blame Muslims who hated America’s lifestyle and values, launching the concept of "Islamic terrorism" – i.e. that the Muslim faith, not political issues, prompted the attacks. 

This dangerous canard has infected America, leading to a rising tide of Islamophobia. This week’s continued uproar over a Muslim community center in downtown New York, and a Florida preacher’s threat to burn Korans, are the latest doleful example of cultivated religious hatred. 

The suicide team that attacked New York and Washington made clear its aim was: a. to punish the US for backing Israel’s repression of Palestinians; and b. what they called US "occupation" of Saudi Arabia. Though they were all Muslims, religion was not the motivating factor. 

Nine years ago, 19 men who hated America for it's freedom and liberty, that hate incited by Afghani and Iraqi training camps which they attended, were ordered by Osama Bin Laden to attack with airplanes symbols of that freedom and liberty; the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and another unknown target which they failed to hit due to the bravery of a few passengers on a fourth hijacked airliner.

Oh. Really? That is the story we have been told but is it a true accounting of that day and the events leading to it? 

"Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it" ~ Adolf Hitler

Making Government Irrelevant

We the people, unfortunately, have come to believe that it is right and proper to use the power of government to solve all our problems and meet all our needs. Every time one American citizen says “there ought to be a law” to fix some complaint or offense and another one says “government ought to…” to meet some need or want, our government is happy to intervene and in the process take more or our freedom and more of our money. Did you ever stop and wonder why we have all the special interest groups and lobbyists we love to complain about? It is because each one of them represents some group of citizens, small or large, that want to use the power of government for their own ends. In this game there are winners and losers and the animosity between the two increases as the stakes get higher and government becomes larger and more powerful. For every citizen that wants the government to do something, there is another citizen that must pay for it and give up some bit of freedom to accommodate this new government activity.

Politicians are not in the business of enforcing the Constitution. We have become pawns in their quest for power and riches.

The Milgram Experiment

It was about 1550, according to the standard accounts -- about 14 years before the birth of Shakespeare, about 80 years before the birth of John Locke, about 135 years before the birth of Bach -- that a young Frenchman named Etienne de La Boetie, a young man of what we, today, would call college age, about 20 years old, posed what Murray Rothbard would later describe as "the central problem of political philosophy: the mystery of civil obedience. Why do people, in all times and places, obey the commands of the government, which always constitutes a small minority of the society?"

Blind submission to authority is civil obedience. Tyranny is possible because of it. Whence comes civil disobedience? The Milgram Experiment provided some clues.

The right to the fruits of our labor

The economic fundamental is labor. Labor is the human element which makes the fruitful seasons of the earth useful to men. It is men's labor that makes the harvest what it is. That is the economic fundamental: Every one of us is working with material which we did not and could not create, but which was presented to us by Nature.

The moral fundamental is man's right in his labor. This is variously stated. It is sometimes called "the right of property." It is sometimes masked in the command, "Thou shalt not steal." It is the other man's right in his property that makes stealing a crime. When a man has earned his bread, he has a right to that bread. If another steals it, he does more than steal bread; he invades a sacred human right. If we cannot produce we cannot have - but some say if we produce it is only for the capitalists. Capitalists who become such because they provide better means of production are the foundation of society. ...

An excerpt from My Life and Work by Henry Ford, 1922.  Have a happy Labor Day.

The Recovery Road Less Traveled

Across the nation, Big Government is doing all it can to prevent any real, honest progress from taking hold. What the central planners can’t seem to grasp is that, in the same way a teenager must suffer and, in turn, learn from his own mistakes, sometimes an economy must take a few steps backward before it can stride forward again with the renewed confidence and wisdom only experience can bring. The Fed’s “protect growth at all costs” policy either misses or ignores this point entirely. Either way, the result is the same. Mistakes are not corrected. Incompetence is rewarded with bailouts, not punished by bankruptcies. Bad debts are piled up, not paid down. Instead, they are left to form the bedrock of future building site collapses.

Joel Bowman takes a look at the Great Recovery by ignoring the media and, instead, putting his feet on the ground and talking to those in the midst of it.

Why Saving Is Right and Economists Are Wrong

It seems rather obvious that during a downturn of the economy it would be natural for people to save more and spend less: They're uncertain about their jobs; the values of their homes have plummeted (about 30% since the peak in 2006); their stocks have declined, and their debts are high. Isn’t it common sense that people are doing the rational thing by saving? This is something our parents and grandparents understood well.

Yet Keynesian economists, the dominant economic theory today, tell us that consumers should be spending rather than saving. “Don’t you realize,” they say, “that 70% of our economy is based on consumer spending. Why do you think we have all that unemployment? We won’t recover until we can get people to starting buying stuff again!” Since we aren’t spending they've got the government to do our spending for us. Paying one man to dig a hole and paying another man to fill it is, under Keynesian theory, the path to recovery.

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.

Where's the Gold?

Why Shouldn't the Ft. Knox Gold Hoard Be Audited?      

    The little guy from Texas who understands the money problem better than most of his peers in Congress, may call for a peek into Fort Knox.  “If we ever get around to deciding we should use gold in relationship to our currency we ought to know how much is there,” said Rep. Ron Paul. “Our Federal Reserve admits to nothing and they should prove all the gold is there. There is a reason to be suspicious and even if you are not suspicious why wouldn’t you have an audit?” 
   The Treasury Department says the gold (147.3 million ounces) is there, although it hasn't officially been looked at since the Eisenhower administration.  What harm can be done by officially confirming the Treasury's report?  It would ease people's minds, eliminate all the rumors of thievery, and justify the running expense of protecting the vault with 'round the clock military guards, tanks, and helicopters.  
   We should also force the Federal Reserve to allow inspection of its gold hoard in New York. If some wheeling and dealing has caused ownership of U.S. gold to flow into other hands, the people deserve to know it.   The Fed, after all, is a creation of Congress and Congress still holds the power to eliminate the bank. 
   The people own Fort Knox.  Congress is the official representative body of the people.  If the people want to know if 147.3 million ounces of their gold is in place  there's no reason to drag out the question.   Congress merely has to appoint some inspectors and tell them to take a look.  Stalling only raises more questions.

 Spotted this tidbit on Wrisley.com. Do we really believe all that gold is still there? Maybe Goldfinger's plot succeeded or maybe there's some other reason the Feds don't feel comfortable with an audit - a real audit which would determine the net worth of all remaining gold in the government hoard.