Doug Casey on Voting

Doug: Well, a rational man, which is to say, an ethical man, would almost certainly not vote in this election, or in any other – at least above a local level, where you personally know most of both your neighbors and the candidates.

L: Why? Might not an ethical person want to vote the bums out?

Doug: No. I've thought about this a lot, so let me give you five reasons why no one should vote.
The first reason is that voting is an unethical act, in and of itself. That's because the state is pure, institutionalized coercion. If you believe that coercion is an improper way for people to relate to one another, then you shouldn't engage in a process that formalizes and guarantees the use of coercion...

Bumpy Road will boycott the election on Tuesday. No one will notice or care of course, but that would also be true if we participated in the charade. But if most or all of us refused to play the game, what would the government response be?

The Killing and Reviving of the American Dream

What was once the American dream is turning into the American stasis. We are beginning to awaken to a world that is not a land of opportunity but a country of barriers, thickets, difficulties, and struggles against artificially created potholes on the road to success. And that success is ever more spotty and ever more remote, always threatening to be undermined by the latest political upheaval.

Lew says we can't forge liberty from the shackles of tyranny until we have had enough of it. Had enough yet? 

Leftists, Progressives And Socialists

Let's look at some of the history of socialism and communism.

Nazism is a form of socialism. In fact, Nazi stands for National Socialist German Workers' Party. Nazis murdered 20 million of their own people and in nations they captured. 

The unspeakable acts of Adolf Hitler's Socialist Workers' Party pale in comparison to the horrors committed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Between 1917 and 1987, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and their successors murdered, or were otherwise responsible for the deaths of, 62 million of their own people.

Between 1949 and 1987, Mao Tse-tung and his successors were responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese. The most authoritative tally of history's most murderous regimes is in a book by University of Hawaii's Professor Rudolph J. Rummel, "Death by Government." A wealth of information is provided at his website.

Dr. Walter Williams ponders the possible results of our political choices.

Just Say No!

A few days ago I saw a TV news program showing thousands of people lined up to get applications for federal housing assistance. What they wanted, of course, was to use the government to obtain your money for their benefit. They didn’t seem at all ashamed of their demands, and the reporters at the scene found nothing remarkable about it except the large numbers at the turnout, which reflected, they said, the sad state of the economy. Unfortunately, they didn’t equate the sad state of the economy with precisely the sort of activity being documented.

 We have become a nation of beggars and thieves says Paul Hein.

Plaza II

The poor central bankers. They are victims of their own delusions of competence. They have never actually managed anything successfully. When the economy is expanding, they exacerbate the boom. When it is contracting, they slow down the correction. And now, they fight a currency war not of their own choosing, but of their own making. The war is their response to the correction, which results from the bubble, which was caused largely by the managers themselves.

Bill Bonner feels compassion for the central bankers - NOT!

End The FED. Get The Gold.

What I recommend is simple: the removal of all government authority possessed by the Federal Reserve System. There would be no further legal connection between the Federal Reserve System and the United States government.

What would the result be? Within a few years, the Federal Reserve System would go bankrupt. This has been the fate of the two previous central banks of the United States. They could not operate in a competitive environment. They could operate only by means of a grant of monopolistic power by the United States government. So, I am not at all worried about the operation of the Federal Reserve System without government supervision. Besides, there is no government supervision of the Federal Reserve System. There is supervision of the government by the Federal Reserve System. Congress does not control the FED: the FED controls Congress. This has been true since 1914, and it is not likely to change.

Gary North hypothesizes on the elimination of the Fed and a return to a gold standard.

Oh Help

All will be well, though, because we have democracy. Yes. Democracy: A splendid system astutely crafted, according to some, by malignant arthropods from the wilds of Virginia. Democracy is the highest form of tyranny. It keeps people from noticing that theys have no power over anything. Democracy means “rule of the people,” usually by Wall Street looters and blockhead generals with the minds of giant clams and all sorts of feathers and colored tinsel stuck to them. They look like Byzantine mosaics. And lobbies, never forget the lobbies, draining the treasury in the manner of bloated leeches on a suppurating udder.

Fred is hallucinating on Padre Kino red.

A Spooked Economy in October

So with all this extra money going around, we may appear nominally wealthier, but the reality is, we have barely moved at all.  This is unfortunate especially for the prudent, conscientious savers, whose nest eggs are constantly being devalued.  Unless of course, they have saved in something out of the Fed’s reach, like gold.  While the economy has basically been in a holding pattern against the leeching of wealth by the Fed for 39 years, gold has seen an inflation adjusted increase in value of over 5% per year, if measured in 1971 dollars.  This is due to the Fed’s ability to make dollars plentiful.  And yet, this is the only tactic the Fed can come up with to rescue an economy already devastated by “quantitative easing”, as they call it.

Ron Paul says that government policies are much spookier than Halloween.

The Impossibility of an Informed Electorate

The idea that democracy works better when informed people vote would seem to make sense. However, the case for informed voting breaks down when we consider the difficulties of being well-informed about political options. In economic terms, voters need to evaluate alternatives for public policies and programs. 

Strictly speaking, a rational voter must first estimate the overall effects of altering or abolishing specific public policies and programs. For each federal program or policy there are a range of reforms that might improve its functioning. A fully informed and rational voter would ascertain the best options for governmental reform. It is, however, very difficult to ascertain the effects of reforming even one policy or program.

D.W. MacKenzie on the folly of voting.

Revolt of the Accountants

America is not Greece and knows it's not Greece, but there is a growing sense—I should say fear—that the weighty, mighty, imposing American government itself, whether it meant to or not, has for years been contributing to American behaviors that are neither culturally helpful nor, as we now all say, sustainable: a growing sense of entitlement, of dependency, of resentment and distrust, and an increasing suspicion that everyone else is gaming the system. "I got mine, you get yours." 

A corrupt system created by corrupt politicians is creating a corrupt citizenry says Peggy Noonan.

The failed "war on drugs" should be abandoned

Does your state have a money shortfall?  Why not demand that illicit drugs be legalized and taxed?  Not kidding!
    Harvard economics professor Jeffrey Miron thinks California residents should not only approve legalizing marijuana when they go to the polls next month, but he says that should only be the beginning.
    All drugs should be legalized nationwide, Miron says.  Pot, cocaine, LSD, crystal-meth --- you name it.
    "Legalizing drugs would save roughly $41.3 billion per year in government expenditure on enforcement of prohibition. Of these savings, $25.7 billion would accrue to state and local governments, while $15.6 billion would accrue to the federal government," Miron claims in a recent Cato Institute report he co-authored.  Just say"Yes." 
    This subject is old hat to us.  For years we've been saying drugs presently sold in back alleys should be sold in drug stores and taxed, just as booze was brought out of the alleys in 1933 and sold in legal establishments.  
    We wrote this plank for the Radical Independent Party in 1994:          The failed "war on drugs" should be abandoned in favor of legal control. Under the present arrangement distribution of illicit drugs takes place in back alleys and other secretive places. Prices are high because of the risks involved, and the trade has drawn many young people into criminal activity. The RIP's recommendation: put drugs under the same control as alcohol and other poisons. Then establish a major national promotional campaign to increase awareness of the dangers of addictive substances, including alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, etc.
    No, we don't personally use any illicit substances.  Never even tried cannabis.  But we recognize a failed "drug war" when we see one.

Spotted this commentary on Wrisley.com. John is an octogenarian who recognizes a failed policy when he sees one. Why can't the rest of us see the common sense of legalization. Maybe it's because, as John likes to point out , that "common sense is not all that common."

Politicians Exploit Economic Ignorance

What about the politician who tells us that he's not going to raise taxes on the middle class; instead, he's going to raise corporate income taxes as means to get rich corporations to pay their rightful share of government? If a tax is levied on a corporation, and if it is to survive, it will have one of three responses, or some combination thereof. One response is to raise the price of its product, so who bears the burden? Another response is to lower dividends; again, who bears the burden? Yet another response is to lay off workers. In each case, it is people, not some legal fiction called a corporation, who bear the burden of the tax. 

The politics of deception is exposed by Dr. Williams.

The Powder Keg in Our Future

"Where does the government get the money to spend into the economy in order to compensate for the refusal of consumers to spend money?" When you ask this question, you become alert to the two possible answers: the government either taxes the money that would have been spent by consumers, or else it borrows the money that would have been invested by investors. In other words, the policy of deficit spending does not change the fundamental spending patterns of the society; it just shifts money from one group of investors to another. This should be obvious to anybody with even a minimal understanding of economics, but it is not understood by the vast majority of those scholars with Ph.D.'s in economics.

We are sitting on a powder keg and, if commercial banks light the fuse, the results will be disastrous says Dr. North. He challenges the premises of Keynesian economics and it its practitioners in the administration and at the Fed.

Why Gold Is Rising

The rise in the price of gold indicates that a minority of investors believe that this period of stable money is unlikely to continue. They believe that, despite a slowdown in the domestic economies, the price of gold will continue upward, because there is no way that central bankers will stabilize the money supply, despite the fact that their nations are falling into secondary recessions, or at least are not experiencing economic growth. Central bankers have only one solution. That solution is to inflate. They expand their holdings of government debt, and this expands the monetary base. Only commercial bankers, who decide not to lend all the money that they are legally allowed to lend, keep the expansion of the monetary bases from resulting in the expansion of the money supplies and rising consumer prices.

Gary North explains what the central bankers are up to.

Doug Casey on the Tea Party Movement

The problem, fundamentally, is that people keep on looking to the government to solve their problems. So they come up with a new party or a new movement, and they propose new laws. This is not just the wrong approach, but the exact opposite of the right approach. The only way to get back on the right track is to undo the expansion of government and interference in the economy we've seen over the last 100-plus years. Repeal the laws, abolish the agencies. Get rid of it all, and free to the market to administer its harsh but effective treatments.

Instead, these people just want new and different laws. The prognosis is not good.

Doug Casey discusses Republicans, Democrats and the Tea Party.