Rather than try to explain myself, this time around I will post a link and a video to explain what is going on. And maybe I'll quote an important part of the article as well:
"US states have spent nearly half a trillion dollars more than they have collected in taxes, and face a $1tn hole in their pension funds, said the CBS programme, apocalyptically titled The Day of Reckoning."
The Cato Institute just tweeted this link to a video they made back in early 2009. I remember it well. I was a young Constitutionalist and officially a card-carrying member of the Constitution Party. I don't consider myself a constitutionalist any more, but that doesn't mean I don't respect the Constitution or the Constitution Party. I do. But my political views are much more in line with anarcho-capitalism nowadays.
"If something isn't done about it, they will become totally dependent on the State, at precisely the point in history when the state is about to go bankrupt because everyone is demanding more than it, or the taxpayers, can fulfill." Gary North, Inherit the Earth
Thomas Sowell recently debunked the current rhetoric of the Bush Tax cut debate. I always knew there was something fishy going on.
Here are the key points:
1)
Let's face it, politics is largely the art of deception, and political rhetoric is largely the art of misstating issues. A classic example is the current debate over whether to give money to the unemployed by extending how long unemployment benefits will be provided, or instead to give "tax cuts to the rich."
2)
Not only are the so-called "tax cuts" not really tax cuts, most of the people called "rich" are not really rich. Rich means having a lot of wealth. But income taxes don't touch wealth. No wonder some billionaires are saying it's OK to raise income taxes. They would still be billionaires if taxes took 100 percent of their current income.
3)
It also takes a lot of brass to talk about taxing "millionaires and billionaires" when most of the people whose taxes the liberals want to raise are neither. Why is so much deception necessary, if your case is good?
4)
Another fashionable political and media deception is making a parallel between giving money to the unemployed versus giving money to "the rich."
When you refrain from raising someone's taxes, you are not "giving" them anything. Even if you were actually cutting their tax rate – which is out of the question today – you would still not be "giving" them anything, but only allowing them to keep more of what they have earned.
Recently the Feds decided to ban Four Loko. But what does science have to say about this drink? Is it any different from, say, any other mix like Red Bull & Vodka? I'm no drinker, so I'll leave it to the guys at ReasonTV to give you the 411. (411..Man. That term is ancient!)
Simon Black, a man whom I have never heard of until I saw his recent post on LewRockwell.com, gives some interesting, and agreeable advice for the 30-and-under-club.
One:
Go explore the world and get an education based on experience, not expensive academic theory.
Two:
Find people whose lifestyles you want to emulate and make yourself indispensable to them as an apprentice… this will be the only time in your life that you can afford to work for nothing in exchange for a valuable, first-hand education.
Third:
Most of all, stop playing by everyone else’s rules. Refuse to be enslaved by the idea that it’s your civic and moral responsibility to pay off the debts of your government’s failures.
The second one I absolutely agree with. In fact, I have drafted a few cover letters to journalists who I hope will allow me to apprentice under them for free. Not only will this benefit me short-term (via the added skill) but it will also benefit me long-term (I can now ask for a hefty letter of recommendation from an established person in the field).
Think about the possibilities in your area of interest.
Dr. Doom and Gloom, while very entertaining, informing, and insightful, has become somewhat formulaic in his prescriptions to cure the crisis. And yet, I can't seem to get enough of reading his columns.
What's his solution to the crisis this time around? The same one he's been giving before:
What we really need are massive cuts in government spending so we can have true tax relief. In addition, we need to remove the government-imposed barriers which make our economy uncompetitive, and which are preventing market forces from correcting the imbalances.
He concludes with a clear message, "by expanding government and increasing debt, the plan puts us farther than we have ever been from a real recovery."
Of course this is not to say that we do not need tax cuts. When the people get their money back or are allowed to keep their money this is always a good thing. The problem is the spending.
While Federal Grants are at 26 percent and state/local grants are at 40 percent, the amount of freshmen holding student loans is a staggering 80 percent at this college.
What bothers me so much about this statistic is that colleges can keep the price of tuition higher than what it would have possibly been if the student loans weren't there in the first place.
University planners, knowing that financial aid is guaranteed, plan expansion based on somewhat false signals in the markets (federal grants, student loans). It does not matter how big or small the false signal. They can be lilliputian or large. As long as their is some sort of intervention, there is always going to be some level of malinvestment on behalf of the university because the distortions give a false signal that savings for colleges are there even when they are not. Eventually, the number of students able to pay for college will shrink once the price of tuition becomes too high and the true number of adequate savers will be revealed.
Even the adequate savers get punished because they, too, pay an artificially high tuition price. Budget cuts, department cuts, tuition hikes, and major cuts will ensue as a result of decreased revenues. However, they would not have to happen, or at least be as severe, I think, if the distortion were absent and university accountants were allowed to plan growth within budget and naturally.
Gary North wrote an interesting piece this week on Ben Bernanke. It is surprisingly more narrative than his usual stuff:
The juggler I most remember was a young man who was juggling a bunch of hoops. He was really good . . . until he dropped all of them in his grand finale. They came down in disarray. He picked them up and walked out of the ring. What else could he do? The finale was not so grand.
What if he had been juggling the world 's interconnected banking system?
"It is not enough, after all, to be clear and brief; one must also have a pretty good idea of what one is saying." Murray Rothbard, Boom! Crack! Crash!
But one thing I never understood, and I haven't understood this since I was sixteen and one month, was why I have to purchase state-mandated car insurance.
What if I can't afford to drive and pay for insurance and pay for gas that is continually going up in price? How does one save when a teenager?
Having a car assumes someone has saved enough for car payments and gas to use the contraption. That is understood. But this law has the potential to kill savings, if it has not already done so, and is a way to force young people, even the responsible ones, to quit driving all together. At least that's what I think.
Can someone please tell me the difference between state-mandated health insurance and state-mandated car insurance? Somebody? Anybody?
I must look deeper into the history and reasoning behind state-mandated car insurance.
That spells "b-a-d-n-e-w-s" for Americans, because the Chinese will have to stop expanding their money supply and start contracting it to stifle inflation in their own country.
This means reducing exports to the United States and keeping more of their own goods.
As Peter Schiff notes, that's when U.S. inflation will speed up because they may stop hoarding our dollars - and lots of em - and may stop sending us their goods.
Gary North was right: Ben Bernanke is a juggler of digits. But China is juggling, too. It has a decision it has to make about its currency: The RMB.
It has to let its currency rise. The purchasing power of the RMB must go up in order for the 5.1 percent inflation to drop.
Ding! Ding! Ding! It may be time to invest in the RMB, while its still low.
What does a society that experienced hyperinflation and now is in its post-hyperinflation stages look like? Well, a lot like Argentina in the video below.
Watch and see how they survive.
Barter is one among other things. Seeing that they are still living and breathing and didn't kill each other off actually gives me hope among all the "societal collapse" prognosticators that the U.S. can bounce back, slowly and somehow.
In January 1988, a writer at The Freeman visited various South American countries and described the experience:
How would you like to live in an economy without memory, where you don’t know the price of anything day to day or the value of the wage you are paid? That’s what it’s like under hyperinflation, in Argentina, supermarket prices are increased twice daily. During the two weeks we were in Brazil recently, interest rates rose 100% from 330% to 430%. Bolivia’s demand for money is so great that its third largest import is currency.
Because of decades of exporting our inflation to other countries, we have merely pushed off a total decline in the value of our currency. So what is keeping confidence in our dollar now?
Dr. Sander O. Boon explains:
The dollar reserves retain their value as long as the American economy keeps on performing well enough. But when confidence in the American economy crumbles, so does the value of dollar denominated assets, once investors start selling some of them off. The world fears losing its confidence in the dollar, as it would be a very costly affair for the holders of these assets. You could also try to describe the situation as follows: as long as your neighbour keeps his job, the value of your own house remains intact. This is the very fragile basis on which our entire monetary system has been built.
In higher education, government-enforced accreditation restricts the spread of new ideas, new methodologies, and above all, new technologies that enable producers to lower prices. This is how higher education has become uniformly secular, liberal, and mediocre: raising the cost of entry.
In Spring 2009, as a junior at a private Catholic university, I took a class called Language & Prejudice. As our final assignment we had to choose one person whose writings we admired - or something like that - and give a presentation on this person's writing style and so forth. I chose Ron Paul's "Imagine" transcript written in his Texas Straight Talk column. I only read the first few paragraphs..and my classmates loved it; including this part:
Imagine if some Americans were so angry about them being in Texas that they actually joined together to fight them off, in defense of our soil and sovereignty, because leadership in government refused or were unable to do so. Imagine that those Americans were labeled terrorists or insurgents for their defensive actions, and routinely killed or captured and tortured by the foreign troops on our land.
One of my peers said, "I never thought of it that way." In other words, he realized that the golden rule isn't not being applied in our foreign policy - or that we fail to take into account what it would feel like if the "opposition" was doing it to us.
Without ever having studied foreign policy in-depth, this one piece of writing convinced me that foreign policy should take into account the golden rule. But then again, as a Christian, shouldn't this have been taking into account a priori?
It was written with the reader (read "Non-economist") in mind; and as I said in the column the goal of studying my book recommendations is not:
to become a bonafide economist or a constitutional scholar; the goal is to become an informed citizen.
For this reason I have narrowed down the number of books that could be read to understand the crisis to a digestable four books. If you want to read more on economics, then go right ahead. Every book except The Alpha Strategy has a book recommendation list at the end, usually broken into beginning, intermediate, and advanced lists.
I think this child abuse campaign is by far the best activism campaign on Facebook by far. It's trendy. It's meaningful (more meaningful than the last trend Q&A) and it gives people a chance to think about their childhood.
I personally believe it is working in two ways: (1) People are learning about what is making people change their profile pictures to cartoons. My evidence: 50% of Google Searches (10 out of the top 20 searches of today) are cartoon related -- and there is no good reason to believe that Road Runner or 90's cartoons would make a resurgence like this in a day absent of this facebook phenomena; and (2) There has been a sharp uptick of child abuse related searches. One of the rising searches is "Child Abuse Facebook" as evidenced by the chart below.
These searches have primarily been in the United States and part of the U.K., although not so much there.
There's a really hot tweet out bashing the campaign. It goes like this: "Changing your profile picture to a cartoon to prevent child abuse is like changing your avatar to a treadmill to prevent obesity."
This is only half true if you do nothing about it.
Another goes like this: "I don't see how changing my profile picture will end child abuse by December 6."
You know, I never really thought that was the point.
And no, I don't believe child abuse will end on Monday when everyone switches their profile pictures back to normal. That's unreasonable, Utopian, and far-fetched. I don't think anyone in their right mind believes this.
But there are people who believe that they have solutions that will help reduce child abuse.
Forbes Magazine had an article called "The Economics of Child Abuse" and gives insights on what could be done to reduce child abuse. It was written by an economist from the Ludwig Von Mises Institute (the same institute I am a part of); as an Assistant Professor at Rhodes College he holds stronger Austrian economics views than I do. His article will prove to be challenging to those with conservative and liberal views.
Here's another one from a different author. It may be more challenging than the first article.
Hmmm....now if an activism campaign like this is so successful, when will an activism campaign exposing Federal Reserve mischief be as successful?
