Here’s a great piece by Ron Paul.

This past week we celebrated the end of what most people agree was a decade best forgotten. New York Times columnist and leading Keynesian economist Paul Krugman called it the Big Zero in a recent column. He wrote that “there was a whole lot of nothing going on in measures of economic progress or success” which is true. However, Krugman continues to misleadingly blame the free market and supposed lack of regulation for the economic chaos.

It was encouraging that he admitted that blowing economic bubbles is a mistake, especially considering he himself advocated creating a housing bubble as a way to alleviate the hangover from the dotcom bust. But we can no longer afford to give prominent economists like Krugman a pass when they completely ignore the burden of taxation, monetary policy, and excessive regulation.

After all, Krugman is still scratching his head as to why “no” economists saw the housing bust coming. How in the world did they miss it? Actually many economists saw it coming a mile away, understood it perfectly, and explained it many times. Policy makers would have been wise to heed the warnings of the Austrian economists, and must start listening to their teachings if they want solid progress in the future. If not, the necessary correction is going to take a very long time.

The Austrian free-market economists use common sense principles. You cannot spend your way out of a recession. You cannot regulate the economy into oblivion and expect it to function. You cannot tax people and businesses to the point of near slavery and expect them to keep producing. You cannot create an abundance of money out of thin air without making all that paper worthless. The government cannot make up for rising unemployment by just hiring all the out-of-work people to be bureaucrats or send them unemployment checks forever. You cannot live beyond your means indefinitely. The economy must actually produce something others are willing to buy. Government growth is the opposite of all these things.

In this last paragraph, Ron Paul pretty much captures everything that is wrong with government.

Bureaucrats are loathe to face these unpleasant, but obvious realities. It is much more appealing to wave their magic wand of regulation and public spending and divert blame elsewhere. It is time to be honest about our problems.

The tragic reality is that this fatally flawed, but widely accepted, economic school of thought called Keynesianism has made our country more socialist than capitalist. While the private sector in the last ten years has experienced a roller coaster of booms and busts and ended up, nominally, about where we started in 2000, government has been steadily growing, because Keynesians told politicians they could get away with a tax, spend and inflate policy. They even encouraged it! But we cannot survive much longer if government is our only growth industry.

As for a lack of regulation, the last decade saw the enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the largest piece of financial regulatory legislation in years. This act failed to prevent abuses like those perpetrated by Bernie Madoff, and it is widely acknowledged that the new regulations contributed heavily not only to the lack of real growth, but also to many businesses going overseas.

Americans have been working hard, and Krugman rightly points out that they are getting nowhere. Government is expanding steadily and keeping us at less than zero growth when inflation is factored in. Krugman seems pretty disappointed with zero, but if we continue to listen to Keynesians in the next decade instead of those who tell us the truth, zero will start to look pretty good. The end result of destroying the currency is the wiping out of the middle class. Preventing that from happening should be our top economic priority.

via Keynesianism Delivers a Decade of Zero by Ron Paul.

Here’s a great op-ed from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

So Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab got within an inch of having hundreds of airline passengers fall from the sky over Detroit on Christmas day, thanks to the ongoing holes in government-run security — some eight years after the attacks of 9/11.

And then we discovered that taxpayers paid almost $2 million to caulk and seal just seven leaky houses in Texas, i.e., $286,000 per house, under the federal government’s go-green weatherization program.

And we're still supposed to believe that these amateurish and occasionally corrupt half-wits in government are up to the task of fixing something as complex and multifaceted as America’s health care system?

I thought cash for clunkers was nuts, but cash for caulkers might well have it topped on the craziness meter.

With the clunkers fiasco, promoted as a way to prop up the U.S. car industry, we ended up borrowing money from China to buy cars from Japan and South Korea.

By the time the cash ran out, we were an additional $3 billion in the hole, more than half a million turned-in trucks and cars had been unnecessarily smashed, and eight of the 10 top-selling new vehicles in the program were purchased from foreign manufacturers, thereby subsidizing Detroit’s key competitors.

At $286,000 per house, the cash-for-caulkers deal looks like it’ll have no trouble racking up even higher levels of irrationality, fraud and tax waste.

Texas got millions in federal tax dollars via the stimulus package to fix up the caulk-ready houses of the poor. Over the first four months, the state spent $1.8 million, and only the aforementioned seven houses had been weather-treated. A tube of the best caulking at Home Depot, enough to caulk approximately 50 feet, sells for about $7.

Rather than paying for caulking or putting jobless caulkers to work, nearly all of the $1.8 million ended up in the pockets of state employees, i.e., the planners, the green team.

President Obama, nonetheless, praised the caulking program as a triple delight: “You’re getting a three-fer. Not only are you immediately putting people back to work, but you’re also saving families on (their) energy bills and you’re laying the groundwork for long-term energy independence.”

Actually, he should have called it a four-fer. It also redistributes income by taking money from the top half of income earners (the top half of income earners pay 97 percent of total federal income taxes) to provide free weather-stripping to those at the bottom who disproportionately vote for Democrats. It’s like sticking up “the rich” with a caulking gun.

Read the full article here Costly caulkers & crackpots – Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Many blogs had a year in review type of posting on New Year’s Day.  LewRockwell.com had one with this Glenn Beck video where he discusses the how auto dealers’ computers became federal property when they logged into the cash for clunkers computer system.

While I remember this story, it got me to thinking. Many people assume this is no big deal. This is just car dealers. It doesn’t effect them. Well, that is very short sighted. Number one, even if it went no further than the dealer’s computers, how do you know the government isn’t gather information on you via the dealer. After all, you probably filled out a loan application. Did your earnings on your application match what was reported to the IRS? Any way, that is a fairly minor issue compared to what could happen.

As you know, many computers are infected daily because most users don’t pay attention to what they are clicking on. Some window on the internet pops up, and the user clicks yes, no, close, etc. When they do that, their computer becomes infected with spyware. This sounds very similar to what the federal government did to the auto dealers. So, how would they do this to regular people? Well, we’ve all heard about the new market place where we can all shop and compare insurance plans that meet federal standards. Is it that far fetched to think, when you login to this “insurance marketplace” that the government couldn’t have a similar warning? Do you think most citizens would even pay attention?

Happy New Year to all that happen to dwell upon these pages.

Hopefully, 2010 will go down in history as the year American’s began taking back their liberty. There are some good, liberty loving folks running for office like Rand Paul in Kentucky and Peter Schiff in Connecticut. With a big win by these guys, we can send a signal to Washington that the people are taking their liberty back.

Hopefully, we can all keep up the momentum this year. Have a great year everyone!