Destroy the Economy to Save the Economy

Biden is explicit about it.

Where are the intelligent? Where are those that understand that the economy is an integrated whole? Where are those that understand that money stolen from those who have it and given to those who don't does not put money in the hands of the creators of businesses and jobs? Why is there so much emphasis put on the destruction of wealth and none on the principles to be be followed in order to create it?

Is this stupidity or intended? And who should pay rather than who will pay for this reversal of cause and effect?

Will someone please tell me where this has ever worked?

S e a of D e b t

Called on Race-Baiting

I'm posting this vid because it is the FIRST TIME I have seen a black man call out a Congressman on race-baiting. It's about time. I can't help but think that any self-respecting black person who has a mind quite capable of ascertaining facts and making his/her own choices is getting real tired of always being cloyingly categorized as nothing more than a member of collective called BLACK. This is evidence for how racist the Democratic Party really is. It USES blacks as a group whenever it needs to trot out its moral superiority. It’s disgusting. Here it is so clear that for Barbara Boxer, human beings are not ends themselves – only something to be USED for her purposes. Besides that she behaves like an agenda-driven Panzer. Wake up America.

If you are interested in this topic, you will enjoy a black man's post on the subject: Boxer vs. The Uppity Negro.

A Cartoon from 1934

Chicago Tribune
1934

Those unwilling to learn the lessons of the past
are condemned to repeat them.

An economic bubble takes an average of two years to correct itself - with one requirement: that the economy is free to make the correction. In the 30s, that correction was stretched to 10 years and even then it was not in the process of correcting itself. It was the war that drafted the unemployed (many to their death) and put the women and old folks to work.

A free economy designs itself to provide whatever the people in the economy need and are willing to work for. It is constantly correcting itself unless the government intervenes and thwarts the corrective process - the mechanism that led to the crash in 1929 and the collapse in 2008 as well as other bubbles between those times. The rational government action is to cut spending, get rid of onerous and irrational regulations, and sell off assets, all in order to lower taxes so that people can use their resources for productive effort. No one, including the individual, the county, the state or the country, can borrow and spend their way out of lost income. The way out is to create and produce some value that one can live on, either directly or through exchange with other people for the things one needs. Political freedom, including economic freedom, is the underlying requirement for this to occur.

Ask yourself: Is this happening now? If not, why not? And the answer is somewhat different than it was in the 30s. Then socialism was an erroneous, but inspired ideal. Its failure was not perceived until the fall of the Berlin Wall whereupon the whole world could see the utter poverty, the imprisoned and tortured people who didn't agree with the system, the starving of millions and the massive waste of resources - all caused by government planning and control. Given that socialism is a failure, what is different now? The motive? Looks like it could be. So, what is the motive now?

Hint: The Greater Good is not the motive. That is the cover, the drapes that soften the window so the unvarnished truth is not realized.

Think about it.

Why Are Things Upside Down?

[I posted this comment on the Ann Althouse website where she was taking on Maureen Dowd for blasting Palin.]

If you go to a basketball, football or baseball game, you go to see the game. You don't go to see the referees.

The government is supposed to be in the background making sure the players, the individuals in society, are playing the game according to the rules. Government only makes sense as a background activity.

Now the government is a foreground activity. Everything revolves around it. It changes the rules and the score at whim - whatever it wants to do, thinking only of itself, not its purpose.

Of course, MDowd is attracted to this reversal. The government is where the bullies hang out. They love it. And bullies are not nice nor fun people. Few like them, not even the other bullies.

Who wants to play on any team that gets jerked around in this way? Not me.

Here We Go Again

[This written in 1943.]

“It is generally recognized that mankind has achieved, since its rise from savagery, a miraculous progress in the realm of its material culture – and none whatever in the realm of its ethics. Our homes are superior to the cave of the Neanderthal man, but our morals are no better than his – worse, if anything, for we do not have his excuse for ignorance. There is no act of inhumanity which he perpetrated and which we do not perpetrate, except that he did not possess our exquisite means of perpetrating it and he could never equal our present scale. In a recently published book (The Spirit of Enterprise by Edgard M. Queeny), the author – intent upon a hymn to human progress – spends five pages describing man’s material triumphs. Then he adds: “Our morals have come a long way too. The mere thought of a feast on a loose piece of human flesh, which to the Bushmen brings mouth-watering longing, is to us horrid and nauseating.” This is all he can offers, without equivocation, for ten thousand years of man’s spiritual growth. And even this claim is open to question, because cannibalism occurred in Soviet Russia in the famines of 1921 and 1933, and God only knows or can bear the sight of what is occurring in Europe now.

“Why has man displayed such magnificent capacity for progress in the material realm and yet remained stagnant on the level of savagery in his spiritual stature? This discrepancy has been recognized, decried, deplored denounced by everyone. It has never been explained. Countless explanations of evil and remedies for it have been offered through the centuries. None of them worked. None of them cured or explained anything.

“Yet that which mankind holds as its moral ideal has been known and accepted for centuries. The basic principle of men’s morality has not changed since the beginning of recorded history. Under their superficial differences of symbolism, ritual and metaphysical justification, all great ethical systems from the Orient up, all religions, all human schools of thought have held a single moral axiom; the idea of selflessness. That which proceeds from love of self is evil; that which proceeds from love of others is good. Self-sacrifice, self-denial and self-renunciation have ever been considered the essence of virtue. In no other matter has mankind held to such total unity, so completely and for so long. Altruism is the doctrine which holds that man must live for others and place others above self. Humanity has proclaimed its moral ideal unanimously. It has never been questioned. It has always been the ideal of altruism. [Later in this chapter, AR notes that the cultures of ancient Greece and capitalist America were at least partial exceptions to this rule. ed.]

“This ideal has never been reached. In spite of its statement and restatement, in every land, in every age, in every language, in spite of its professed acceptance by all, mankind’s history has not been a growing record of benevolence, justice and brother-love, but an accelerating progression of horror, cruelty, and shame. Baffled, men have accepted the explanation that man is essentially evil; man is weak and imperfect; he doesn’t want to do good. The noble ideal of altruism is never quite to be achieved, only approximated; man is immoral by nature.

“But look back at mankind’s record. Every major horror of history was perpetrated – not by reason of and in the name of that which men held as evil, that is , selfishness – but through, by, for and in the name of an altruistic purpose. The Inquisition. Religious wars. Civil wars. The French Revolution. The German Revolution. The Russian Revolution. No act of selfishness has ever equaled the carnages perpetrated by disciples of altruism. Nor has any egoist ever roused masses of fanatical followers by enjoining them to go out to fight for his personal gain. Every leader gathered men through the slogans of a selfless purpose, through the plea for this self-sacrifice to a high altruistic goal: the salvation of others’ souls, the spread of enlightenment, the common good of their state.

“It is said that self-seeking hypocrites used these virtuous sentiments to delude their followers and achieve personal ends. Doubtless, there have been such and a great many of them. But they never caused the bloody terrors caused by the purest 'idealists.' The worst butchers were the most sincere. Robespierre asked and wished nothing for himself. Lenin asked and wished nothing for himself. But the record of Attila is that of an amateur compared to theirs. At the apex of every great tragedy of mankind there stands the figure of an incorruptible altruist. Yet, after every disaster men have said: 'The ideal was right, but Robespierre was the wrong man to put it into practice,' (of Torquemada, or Cromwell, or Lenin, or Hitler, or Stalin) and have gone on to try it again. [Watch The Triumph of the Will and notice how sincere Hitler is when he expresses his ideal for all the German people. SCB]

“But what is one to think of creatures who are willing, century after century, to bear every form of agony, every kind of martyrdom, for the sake of that which they consider their moral ideal? Are they creatures devoid of moral instinct? Is not the determination to act according to one’s conception of right, no matter what the price, precisely the attribute of a high moral sense? Men have been robbed, enslaved, tortured, slaughtered in the name of altruism. They have accepted, forgiven, and borne it, because their ideal demanded it of them. The price they have paid in unspeakable suffering should have granted them, at least, a badge of virtue.

“But the nature of their ideal has robbed them even of this earned honor.

“A true premise, once accepted, leads to a greater truth and a clearer knowledge with each subsequent step deduced from it. A false premise leads to a greater falsehood and a blacker evil, until, followed to its ultimate conclusion, it brings total destruction, as it must. The spiritual tragedy of mankind has now reached this last step. The spectacle of horror which the world presents at this moment has never been equaled and cannot be surpassed. This is the end of the blind alley of men’s thinking. And there is no way out – save all the way back, to the beginning, to the first principle which permitted men to be led into this.

“The ideal of altruism has now taken its ultimate toll. We are the witnesses of its climax. We see mankind destroying itself before our eyes. We see the price it is paying. We glance back at its history and we see the prince it has paid. But we look on and say: 'This noble ideal is beyond human nature, because men are imperfect and evil.'

“Isn’t it time to stop and to question that noble ideal instead?”

[This was written by Ayn Rand, September 4, 1943, in the middle of WWII. The source for this excerpt is Journals of Ayn Rand. This writing was never published in this form during her lifetime. It became the basis of Atlas Shrugged and the final form of her philosophy. After the publishing of Atlas Shrugged, she worked to present her philosophy in non-fiction form and published many books and articles to that effect. Fifty two years after Atlas Shrugged published in 1957, people are looking for a new philosophical basis for human action and the organization of society. Many can see that the United States is now poised to be the last great country to topple into this same abyss.

Ayn Rand's ideas are no less true today. We are in the grip of a major call to this same destructive ideal carried out by his dictatorship in the form of Barack Obama. Socialism and dictatorship fail wherever tried. But it is not socialism per se that has his words live for people. It is this horrible, stinking moral ideal which has been spread through every institution and church. The attempt to achieve it will not achieve it.

But I don't think that Obama cares to achieve it. His actions belie his rhetoric. He does care to use what you erroneously consider the best within you to mold you to his power. This is how he keeps his motives invisible to the unquestioning masses.

It is the moral ideal that is false as an ideal. People are not inherently evil. They possess free will and choose whether to be right or wrong, good or evil.

A person who is called to make a difference for other people as his primary motivation for living in the world is called by this error. It is not the proper call to goodness. No.

You do that which you want your life to be comprised of, present the results of your work, and when someone wants what you have to offer, he will buy it and accept it – of his own free will. He doesn't have to accept YOU. You've done that already if your moral base is correct. But this motivation depends on what Rand later calls the Virtue of Selfishness.

America has a fairly strong grasp of rational self-interest, rational egoism. Dont' let that go.

To hell, I say, with the sonorous siren song of Barack Obama. SCB]

Democrat Rebuff of Fannie & Freddie Clean-up

This video speaks for itself. Caught red-handed!



And I'm supposed to think the Democrat Party is the best Party (maybe that should be a small "p") for the economy?

In the bailout bill being hammered out and festooned with earmarks right now, a huge grant of any profit (20%) is scheduled to go to ACORN, supposedly a low-end housing organization. What it really is a voter registration organization and its purpose it to register Democrats. It has been charged with illegal activities in a number of states. This is more corruption - pure and simple. Definitely it is an infringement of your right to free speech. Tax money extracted from you by force and given to an organization that may not express your views is a whopping injustice. By what Right? This is "Taxation without Representation!!"

!! N O P A S S !! N O P A S S !!

The CRISIS IN CONFIDENCE in the US Government worsens!

The New Slavery

Obama Reveals What Change Means



The video was produced by http://www.nakedemperor.com/,
a media organization dedicated to unmasking the shibboleths
and platitudes of our culture.

The race is on and the task of critically thinking people is to learn about our candidates and what they hold as dear, in their character and in reality, that will affect our lives. It requires sorting through the information and identifying the fundamental values important to you for producing a political climate in which it is possible for any human being to surive and thrive to the extent that he is rational.

In my opinion, Obama is a divider when it comes to "all people." He advocates programs which take from one and give to another, not because of a justice based on the right of every individual human being to his life, but based on the facts of particular human beings which are not primary to human beings as a species. This error produces division and fighting among men.

Of what importance is one's economic status at the moment? For many being poor is the spur to make something of themselves and acquire wealth through honest trade with others. Of what importance is one's skin color? Many of all the skin colors of humanity have made something of themselves and reached the pinnacles of their chosen fields. Of what importance is one's gender, one's sexuality or one's handicap given that women, gays and the blind have become supremely successful at what they have chosen to do in life. None of these are essentials.

Politically, the law should be blind to all of these non-essential aspects of individual human beings otherwise it is not a just law. Law is not a primary based on any old ethics whether it be from a philospher, the Bible or some concensus of society. A just law is grounded in the metaphysically eternal nature of human being and cannot violate that nature.

McCain is also a divider (in the basic sense I refer to above and not in the sense that people are going to have differing and often opposite opinions on a particular issue) in some issues of his campaign. No national leader at this time is able to express the principles on which this nation was founded. Some on the Right try to say that we are Christian nation. Some on the Left say that freedom is about equal opportunity and circumstances. Baloney. That's NOT the essence of the Constitution, as it so ably clarified. It's about one's individual right to Life, Liberty, Property and the freedom to pursue that which has him Happy.

At best our political leaders have been able to express that underground sense of life that most of us share as American. I look forward to the day when these values find public expression and exist in full sunlight.

The culture of this nation is playing out the errors of the past. There is a philosophy which lays out the basis of a rational and just foundation for living a human life, a life possible for human being in his noblest sense. It is Objectivism.

Wall Street Got Drunk?

The hell they did. Bush's statement is absurd, not from the standpoint that Wall Street didn't run with the openings they saw because of Washington's regulation, but because he places the cause as Wall Street.

A legitimate authentic businessman doesn't get "drunk" about these matters and he does not allow himself to be thrown off track by eating the manna dropped from Washington.

Suppose I have decided to be a bank. I offer safe-keeping for people's money. In an unregulated market, the value I'm offering is safety and liquidity. People want to know that their money is secure from theft and they want to know that they can go get it when they need it.

The issue of lending money becomes a potential threat to those values unless I know what I am doing. Loans of all kinds have to be set up first with the depositors such that they are compensated for the risks they incur with their deposits that can be used for making loans. I, the banker in this case, have to know how much reserve I must have to protect the basic values I offer lest people come to the bank and find that they cannot get their money. If that happens, I'm bankrupt and my business is over.

The government has told the banks that they can lend more than they otherwise would and they have told them to loan to risky would-be borrowers. The government, they said, will ultimately back their depositors via the FDIC and other institutions. They have refocussed the concerns of the bank by removing the urgent reality of their accountability to their customers. The government will cover it.

The fact that the government isn't a bank dealing with people nor an insurance company who sets up reserves for the risks it takes is another story. The government is FORCE and has to take everything out of the hide of the population. It does it by taxation or inflation, i.e., the printing press.

All of the shenanigans of the banks and mortgage companies in the current fiasco result from the government's removing the principles of sound banking from the concern of the banks and mortgage companies. Hence a bubble which, when the piper plays his tune better known as when profligate ways hit the wall of reality, has to burst. Bush's fingerpointing is ludicrous and ignorant of what is going on. He should know better. Until we make sure the government stops inserting their FORCE via regulations into the situation this will not change.

The moral of this story? Force obviates the seeking of authentic values and the responsiblity for achieving those values.