Ron Paul was interviewed on Brian and The Judge on FOX Radio this morning. This interview is classic Dr. Paul. Very interesting topics were discussed. Ron Paul was able to describe why he doesn’t like talking about “trickle down or trickle up” economics, but instead wants the financial conversation to focus on freedom and individual liberty.
Brian Kilmeade suggests that if John McCain offered Ron Paul some type of deal that it was possible that McCain could have won the election. Dr. Paul thinks otherwise.
This is definitely worth a listen.
The interview lasts about 11 minutes. Listen below.
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The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.
Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would comply with congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system. Two months later, as the Fed lends far more than that in separate rescue programs that didn’t require approval by Congress, Americans have no idea where their money is going or what securities the banks are pledging in return.
“The collateral is not being adequately disclosed, and that’s a big problem,” said Dan Fuss, vice chairman of Boston- based Loomis Sayles & Co., where he co-manages $17 billion in bonds. “In a liquid market, this wouldn’t matter, but we’re not. The market is very nervous and very thin.”
The beauty of a free market (oh, how I wish we had one!) is that companies that act responsibly and perform well (create quality products or services, create jobs, etc.) will thrive and the ones that act irresponsibly (create subpar products or services, take on risky debt, etc) will fail. It’s Darwinism as its finest. If governments intervene and “prop up” failing businesses, they’re doing nothing more than condoning and legitimizing the poor business practices that caused the businesses to fail in the first place.
In my opinion, GM and Ford have long been really poor companies. I don’t have any firsthand knowledge of their balance sheet, but their products are shoddy at best. If a company puts out junk for a product, why would we want to subsidize it? Today’s article at the Ludwig von Mises Institute comments on the impending bailout of GM:
General Motors has once again approached the federal government with its hand out. It should not be forgotten that in September of 2008, Congress gave the “big three” automakers a loan totaling $25 billion. Now they are back. This time they say that with a mere $50 billion they can turn things around and become profitable in the future. The management of GM and Ford as well as the UAW have been meeting with Nancy Pelosi to arrange a deal. GM claims that if the government does not give them the money they demand it will spell doom for the company and thus the entire US economy.
Let’s consider the impact of GM ceasing to exist — highly unlikely even if they declare bankruptcy. Hypothetically, GM would close its doors and all 266,000 workers would be unemployed, never to find work again, or so GM would have the public believe. GM maintains that it is really in the best interest of the country and economy to continue to support their failing business model. After all, in what kind of a world would the government allow a company that employs 266,000 workers to fail?
Quote of the Day: “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic. Sell not liberty to purchase power.” — Benjamin Franklin
But House Democrats are still pushing for another stimulus package that they will try to pass in a lame duck session. The details are constantly shifting, but this proposal would add another $150 billion to $165 billion to a national debt that has grown by nearly a trillion dollars in the space of about a month.
The good news on this front is that a new stimulus package will once again meet resistance in the Senate, and the Bush White House has signaled that it will not support the package.
Remember, this is your money they’re playing with.
Meanwhile, the talking heads on CNBC are claiming that the stimulus package is needed to prevent budget cuts by state governments that are losing revenues due to the economic downturn. In fact, California has an $8 billion shortfall, and is danger of default. We think downsizing is the answer to this problem, but the politicians and the talking heads think more borrowing is needed. Think of what their argument implies . . .
It’s okay for you to have to downsize your personal budget when times get tight, but no level of government must ever have to downsize, no matter what the circumstances. Government must always remain large, and must always grow, even at the expense of taking more money from the productive economy.
And stay tuned next week for big new announcements designed to move us forward in a bold way.
Thank you for being a part of the growing Downsize DC army.
Jim Babka
President
DownsizeDC.org, Inc.
P.S. Jim Babka will be making his regular Friday appearence on the Jerry Hughes show. Details are here. And Jim will be a guest on the March of Liberty show on Sunday; click here for deails.
Quote of the Day: “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” — William Shakespeare
Subject: Not your usual post-election commentary
The media describes every election as historic, the most important in a generation, etc. When the voting is done they tell us a new era has dawned, that things will change, that nothing will ever be the same, blah, blah, blah.
One aspect of these claims is true, this time. It is both historic and meaningful that the United States has elected its first African-American president. We applaud and celebrate this. We think the significance of this event transcends mere symbolism. Otherwise, the election was what all other elections have been . . .
” . . . a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Can we support this harsh assessment? Consider . . .
The election thoroughly repudiated the Republican Party. They lost the White House in a landslide, and got clobbered in Congressional races. We might assume from this, if elections really produced change, that many Republican policies of the last eight years will be reversed. We predict that almost none of them will be.
A nice little piece from Robert P. Murphy at the Ludwig von Mises Institute critiques (actually tears apart) a recent article from the Wall Street Journal which illustrates a clear misunderstanding of the true nature of our current economic situation, and the “medicine” being offered by the Federal Reserve in the form of additional rate cuts.
I realize the WSJ is in the business of selling newspapers, and that calling injections of Fed funny money “medicine” is a catchy opening. But if our present crisis it the result of prior injections of artificial credit, then the medicine is in fact arsenic. What is especially ironic is that this very article later on alludes to the possibility that the housing boom was fueled by Greenspan’s low rates. In any event, the most recent Fed cut was largely symbolic, since the actual fed funds rate (as opposed to the official “target” set by the Fed) had already been below 1 percent for some time…
Murphy dissects the WJP piece almost line-by-line, and as usual, does a great job of bringing clarity to the situation at hand. Read it all here.
Many of the early settlers of his nation had fled Great Britain to escape the tyranny and mercantilist economic system they had endured, and ultimately ended up in a bloody Revolutionary War to assert their independence. But still there were those, such as Alexander Hamilton and Robert Morris who pushed hard to adopt Great Britain’s central banking system, modeled after the Bank of England. Thomas DiLorenzo, author of Hamilton’s Curse has written an article on this subject for the Ludwig von Mises Institute:
Central banking has been a corrupt, mercantilist scheme and an engine of corporate welfare from its very beginning in the late 18th century. The first central bank, the Bank of North America, was “driven through the Continental Congress by [congressman and financier] Robert Morris in the Spring of 1781,” wrote Murray Rothbard in The Mystery of Banking (p. 191). The Philadelphia businessman Morris had been a defense contractor during the Revolutionary War who “siphoned off millions from the public treasury into contracts to his own … firm and to those of his associates.” He was also “leader of the powerful Nationalist forces” in the new country.
The main objective of the Nationalists, who were also known as Federalists, was essentially to establish an American version of the British mercantilist system, the very system that the Revolution had been fought against. Indeed, it was this system that the ancestors of the Revolutionaries had fled from when they came to America.
Today’s article at the Ludwig von Mises Institute describes the farce that is our political system these days, building on quotes from Jesse Ventura, Walter E. Williams, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Philip Jackson, Murray Rothbard, and James Bovard:
Jesse Ventura, when he’s not talking about 9-11, makes a lot of sense. Describing the two party system to Larry King, he said,
[W]hat you have today is like walking into the grocery store and you go to the soft drink department, and there is only Pepsi and Coke. Those are the two you get to choose from. There is no Mountain Dew, no Root Beer, no Orange. They’re both Colas; one is slightly sweeter than the other, depending on which side of the aisle you are on.
In an interview with Newsmax, he described politicians in the two party system as pro wrestlers.
In pro wrestling, out in front of the people, we make it look like we all hate each other and want to beat the crap out of each other, and that’s how we get your money, [and get you to] come down and buy tickets. They’re the same thing. Out in front of the public and the cameras, they hate each other, are going to beat the crap out of each other, but behind the scenes they’re all going to dinner, cutting deals. And [they're] doing what we did, too — laughing all the way to the bank. And that to me is what you have today, in today’s political world, with these two parties.
Jesse’s right. Our political system is a farce. This year, we have running for president a warmonger who’s a reluctant socialist versus a socialist who’s a reluctant warmonger. We have two parties that claim they’re different, but when the Establishment, the Complex, our shadowy overlords, whatever you want to call them, really want something, they get it. When the Establishment wanted the Bailout in the face of almost universal grassroots opposition, they got it. When the Complex wanted immunity to the telecoms who knowingly spied on Americans, they got it. When our shadowy overlords wanted stormtroopers to brutally stifle protesters during the party conventions, they got it.
But even if voters had a real choice — and even if the politicians followed the majority will on issues that matter — the system would still most likely be a farce. As Augustine observed, without justice, a government is nothing but a band of thieves. Augustine was writing about kingdoms, but his insight applies to democracies as well. Without justice, the ability of the subjects of a government to vote on the laws and rulers that govern them doesn’t make a government any more legitimate than an unjust monarchy. And the founders of this country did not believe democracies were likely to be just.
Liberty Maven
