If only we had a President who actually participated in private enterprise before being elected as President of the world’s largest economy.

By MAYA JACKSON RANDALL

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama, in his weekly radio address, took time out to highlight the importance of small businesses, saying too many small companies are still finding it difficult to obtain the loans they need to keep their businesses running.

“While credit may be more available for large businesses, too many small-business owners are still struggling to get the credit they need,” the president said in his prepared remarks. “These are the very taxpayers who stood by America’s banks in a crisis–and now it’s time for our banks to stand by creditworthy small businesses, and make the loans they need to open their doors, grow their operations, and create new jobs.”

Mr. Obama said it is time that large banks, who have already received substantial aid from the government, take the necessary steps to enable the recovery to take hold.

“Our economy as a whole can’t move ahead if small businesses and the middle class continue to fall behind,” he said, noting that small businesses have been hit hard by the recession. Many entrepreneurs can’t get the financing they need to start up their own companies and small firms have lost hundreds of thousands of jobs, he noted.

via Obama Seeks Support For Small Business – WSJ.com.

No amount of prodding by our socialist-in-chief is going to help small business as long as he continues his anti-free market policies. You cannot ask businesses to borrow money and banks to lend money when the environment for entrepreneurship is under attack. Costs will skyrocket on small businesses with Obama’s so called taxes on the rich, socialized medicine, cap and trade, card check, and…… We are only nine months in. If you are a small business or a bank, do you feel comfortable that you can accurately assess what the future economy will look like. Banks and companies make investment decisions based on risk and reward. If they cannot accurately assess risk, they will not invest.

While chatting on twitter, one of my tweeps posted this blog. Because his name has Federalist in it, @Federalist84, I decided I should check it out. To my surprise, the blog is from @SoccerSeal, a 17yr old girl, and she has one of the most straight forward criticisms of President Obama that I’ve heard. Here’s the argument.

The role of a President is not to “Transform” the nation. The role of the president is clearly stated in the Presidential Oath, “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. So help me God.” Nowhere in that oath do I see change or transform. Your job is to protect, preserve and defend. Not change, dismantle, and control. And right now I get the feeling that you are doing the latter.

via Red, White & Conservative.

The Constitution was setup for a reason. It was setup to ensure human freedom. It was not setup for continual transformation. Nowhere does it say the government should give you any rewards. It is only there to protect your earned rewards and your liberties from force. Until we all realize what this 17yr old has already realized, we will continue our steady decline, and we will always have the least of us governing.

For some reason, Americans have been sold on what I’ll now term “the free ride theory”, in which we think we can live our collective lives like we’ve lived our lives over the past decade by racking up our collective debt for today’s keep up with the Jones. Under the Bush administration we racked up debt for a prescription drug program, pork projects and wars. Not to be shown up, Obama has increased our yearly deficits four fold. Is there any end in sight?

No, of course not.

Why stop spending when you can buy votes with so called free goodies. We need to nationalize health care, because we don’t want to pay Wal-Mart for our $4 prescriptions. We need to bail out banks, because supposedly we’ll all lose our jobs if we don’t. We have to take over GM, so that a company, which none of us wants their products, can stay in business. We have to bribe granny with a $250 check, because we don’t want to lose her vote. We have to spend billions to create so called “Green Jobs” because there is no market for them. We’re talking about bailing out newspapers; although most of us get news on the internet. We pay farmers to destroy crops, because we think prices need to be high enough for them to keep producing. With all this frivilous spending, how do you think it is going to be paid for? It is going to be paid by the enslavement of your children, my children and our grandchildren.

This is not just colorful language. It is grounded in the reality we will soon bare witness to.

What is debt? Debt is you promising tomorrows labor for today’s expenditures. When you buy that new car with a loan, you are saying I am going to work X number of hours in the future to get you the money for this plus interest, so that you can give me the car now. If you don’t work those hours, you don’t make the money. If you don’t make the money and pay them, they take the car back. Personal debt is bad enough, but at least you are only enslaving yourself.

What is the most dispicable aspect of what we (yes that includes me) are doing is we are not just enslaving ourselves. We are not saying, I will pay for this. We are building up so much debt that my two year old daughter, my nine year old son, your children, our children’s children and who knows how many generations to come will be enslaved. We are not pledging our future labor for today’s useless expenditures. We are pledging ours and future generations. We aren’t even giving them the chance to say NO. We are saying, “Sorry future Americans, but we want ‘free health car’. We don’t want any job losses (they haven’t stopped have they). We want bridges to nowhere. We want research how to manage the smell of manure! And we want you to pay for it.”

Now, economists would argue that deficits cancel themselves out. They explain this by saying that while we borrow the money, the future generation will hold the Treasury Bonds (an asset) and receive the interest plus principle of those bonds. This basically negates the theory that debt robs one generation by the previous. While this may be true, I emailed the economist that had this in his book. I asked “that may be true if all the debt was held by Americans, but what if China is holding a large portion of that debt. Would that not mean, that A) China is holding the Treasury bond as an asset, and B) won’t they be receiving the interest.?” He responded Yes, that is correct. The book would only apply if future generations means all people regardless of borders. So, not only are we enslaving our future generations, we are enslaving them to China, Japan and other nations. We are saying we want all this stuff, and we are willing to make the next generation work for it in order to transfer the value of their production out of the country. Does this sound like a recipe for a brighter future for our children? While our children are working, the rewards of their work is not bettering their lives. It’s being transferred out to better the lives of foreign nations.

Does this sound like it’s just theory? As of right this  second (it goes up constantly), each citizen owes $343,785. If you have a family of four as I do, multiply that by four, and you get your household debt. Just this week, Moody’s rating agency said the US is a few years away from losing our AAA credit rating. This has never happened. It would be catastrophic to our country and economy. It would mean higher interest on the debt, which would mean even more future labor pledged to today’s expenses.

What does it say that our Secretary of State is begging China to buy more of our debt? We are begging our children’s masters to enslave them. How moral are we?

The financial crisis, we are still in the midst of, undoubtedly woke a lot of people up to the evils of excessive debt. Unfortunately, it has not awoken our politicians. While many families have cut back spending to bring their lives under control, they have at the same time asked the government to continue and even ramp up the very actions that caused them harm in the first place.

While this post is a little depressing, hopefully it will serve as a call to action. A call to stop asking for free handouts from the government that your children will be enslaved for. Stop electing politicians who promise the world and buy votes with pork. Vote for politicians who are going to address the debt problem and speak the truth. With every government policy you hear about ask “How is that going to lower the debt?” Lastly, realize that nothing from the government is free. Everything you ask for from the government comes at the lost liberty of you and your children.

While I haven’t read this book yet, it will be on my list as soon as I finish Robert’s book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide To Capitalism”, which helps provide a lot of the fire power behind this blog. Although, Robert is a highly regarded economist, he brings the dismal science down to a level that even an average Joe like myself can understand. In this interview, Robert discusses his book on the Great Depression. It highlights the fallacies you’ve been sold by the liberal establishment. Want to know why Obama’s policies are not working? All you have to do is see why FDR’s did not work.  You can also check out Robert’s blog, Free Advice out at http://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/

“The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the Great Depression and the New Deal”

June 6, 2009

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Everything they say about the Great Depression and the New Deal is wrong.

No economic myth these days is more pernicious than the myth that the free market caused the Great Depression and the New Deal got us out of it. That, as economist Robert P. Murphy points out is flat-out false. In The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal he provides irrefutable evidence that not only did government interference with the market cause the Great Depression (and our current economic collapse), but Herbert Hoover’s and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s big government policies afterwards made it much longer and much worse (just as President Barack Obama’s extraordinary expansion of government promises to do today). Perhaps even more compelling, Murphy exposes the untold story behind the New Deal—how it operated by force, and why what’s really at stake is not only our economy but our liberty. The real “lessons of the Great Depression” are not what you’ve been taught.

via Financial Sense Newshour Expert ~ Robert P. Murphy 06.06.2009.

Republicans wonder why they are losing support? Carly Fiorina is a perfect example of why. Apparently, the freedom we have on the internet is just too much to bare.

Asked what she thought about regulation of the web, she said it was inevitable that there would be more regulation of it. Why, for instance, is there no protection of women and children on the Internet, when there is plenty in real life. She said this duality — where anything goes on the wild wild west of the Internet — would have to end.

via Web 2.0: Carly Fiorina talks potential Senate run, breast cancer battle, and government tech policy | VentureBeat.

I must have missed all the news stories of women being abused on the internet. Also, Carly talks like our non-internet laws don’t apply on the internet. Laws apply to life in general despite the medium used to break them. If someone commits fraud on the internet, breaks laws that we have to protect children from predators, or runs a website infringing on a woman’s rights, our current laws would be applied and convictions would be handed out.

We do not need the government wasting resources policing millions of pages on the internet. Are we going to have internet police monitoring my Facebook account to see if I said something abusive? Are we going to have twitter filters to target users who use derogatory statements? Even worse, are we going to be like China and filter all traffic coming in and out of the country so we can ensure that no citizen is reading something the government doesn’t want that is published by a foreign nation?

Just like other crimes, if someone commits a crime on the internet, the victim needs to press charges and prosecution will proceed. We do not need more government regulation, or in other words more freedom taken away.

Republican’s better decide whether they stand for freedom or not. If we want our freedoms taken away, we might as well just have vote Democrat.

During this health care debate, I’ve argued many times that any government program comes at the price of your freedom. While the government supposedly can’t take away your rights as they are re-established in our Constitution, they can suppress those rights through coercing you to voluntarily give them up. They already do this with large portions of the population that rely on the government dole for their daily sustenance. How do you get the rest of society? Slowly you work toward one large government program that can be used as a carrot against the citizenry. What is that carrot? It would obviously be health care, the one program that can decide life and death matters.

“So what are you getting at here Mr. Profiteer?” By holding the carrot, the government can make you voluntarily give up your rights. If you tried saying that taking away your freedom of speech or your right to bare arms is unconstitutional, the government’s retort would be that it’s optional. You do not have to take government health care. You can forgo it. How do you forgo it when the private insurance has been decimated by trying to compete with the government’s ability to print its own money? On top of that, how do you pay for your own health care out of pocket when eventually physicians will be highly regulated and costs will be driven up so dramatically because of regulation and rationing?

Think this is a crazy scenario? How about you Mr. Frank with The Wall Street Journal? One simply need to read about what the CDC is looking into to see how quickly we may be chasing after carrots.

Take the Obama administration’s justification for its new gun research. “Gun-related violence is a public health problem – it diverts considerable health care resources away from other problems and, therefore, is of interest to NIH,” wrote the agency spokesman in an e-mail responding to questions from Republican members of Congress about new grants the CDC is giving out. The statement assumes the conclusion of the research before the first study is done.

The research on right-to-carry laws illustrates the problem with the CDC. Dozens of refereed academic studies by economists and criminologists using national data have been published in journals. While the vast majority of those studies find that right-to-carry laws save lives and reduce harm to victims, some studies claim that the laws have no statistically significant effect. But most tellingly, there is not a single published refereed academic study by a criminologist or economist showing a bad effect from these laws.

via EDITORIAL: The feds take a shot at guns – Washington Times.

Scary stuff? Public health can be played against any issue. Your speech could be a public health problem if the government claimed you were inciting violence. Hmm, how would they do that?

Mr. Frank can call me paranoid all he wants. Paranoia has kept us free for as long as we have been.

While reading the Federalist Paper No. 6, I came across another great Hamilton quote that we should keep in mind.

In No. 6, Hamilton was arguing that in order to prevent unnecessary wars both internally between the colonies and externally between the colonies and foreign nations, they should ratify the Constitution to form the Union. With the Union, there would be rationality in calming the fervor for war with other nations, because one area of the country may be hurt by the war that another part of the country was calling for. With seperate colonies or three or four confederacies, one confederacy or colony could start a war without regard to the others. This would lead to more wars.

Internally, he was arguing with separate colonies or confederacies, there would more than likely be wars between them. He used examples of Britian’s wars with Scotland.

After laying out the historical proof, Hamilton was calling for the dismissal of the arguments to remain separated. He started by asking what would make us think that despite the history of similar nations’ experiences with inter-quarreling we would be able to have peace with separate confederations or colonies.

To shut down the claims from the anti-federalist, Hamilton wrote the following quote to ask why we think that we are different.

“Have we not already seen enough of the fallacy and extravagance of those idle theories which have amused us with promises of an exemption from the imperfections, the weaknesses, and the evils incident to society of every shape? Is it not time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age and to adopt as a practical maxim for the direction of our political conduct that we, as well as the other inhabitants of the globe, are yet remote from the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virture?”

Hamilton is basically saying. We aren’t  different. These human traits that have led to war for other nations will not forgo us simply because those who want to maintain the separate colonies say so.

While, Hamilton was talking about war, I think the quote fits perfectly into our modern context. It fits in respect to the our further slide towards socializing as much as possible in our country. Surely, history has laid out the disaster of socialism whether it be the famine in China that killed countless millions, the never ending impoverishment of Cuba, or the horror stories of health care in Britain and Canada. If Hamilton was writing about our governments taking over banks, car companies, possibly newspapers and health care, I am guessing he would say what makes us think we are different? Why do we think we can ignore history?

Today, the columnist Thomas Frank of the Wall Street Journal wrote a column in which he basically says modern day conservatives are bizarrely paranoid. From reading his article, he’s talking about those conservatives who believe in capitalism, are against government propaganda, and are against government social engineering. Here’s a snippet of his piece.

Back in Hofstadter’s day this sort of thinking at least had something supremely rational going for it: The existence of the Soviet Union and its desire to bring the West to its knees.

But take that away and the theories become something far more remarkable. Consider, by contrast, the widespread belief that President Barack Obama’s birth certificate was forged. What could have been his parents’ motives for committing such a bizarre deed, or his home state’s motive for colluding in it, or the courts’ motives for overlooking it?

Or consider the widespread conservative conviction that we are being marched secretly into communism or fascism. Why would someone bother? It seems equally likely, given today’s circumstances, that conspirators would trick us into becoming a colony of Belgium or the imperial seat of the Bonaparte family.

The paranoid pattern persists regardless. It is impervious to world events; a blurting of the American subconscious that has not changed since Hofstadter analyzed it 45 years ago. Consider the recent wave of fear that the hypnotic Mr. Obama was planning to indoctrinate schoolchildren. In “The Paranoid Style,” Hofstadter wrote, “Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; . . . he has a new secret for influencing the mind; . . . he is gaining a stranglehold on the educational system.”

via Thomas Frank: From John Birchers to Birthers – WSJ.com.

Let me start off by saying, I agree to some extent on the birth certificate issue. I don’t know whether the issue is valid or not, so I don’t claim that it is. It’s a distraction, and it let’s people like Mr. Frank lump all conservatives together and say they are nuts.

With that said, I do have a problem with the remaining arguments in Mr. Frank’s article. To say that conservatives are claiming we are marching secretly to communism or fascism, and that somehow that is nuts, should highlight how the intellectuals among us are so blinded by their supposed brilliance. Apparently, the government take over of our largest financial, automotive, and soon to be newspaper institutions is of no concern to Mr. Frank. That is just silly talk. So what if the government controls them, and they say what is going to happen in the market place. How is that communism or fascism?

In addition, I think Mr. Frank doesn’t realize that this isn’t a new march. Surely the government permanently impoverishing a large population with welfare and using Medicare and Social Security to induce fear when needed on another large segment of our population could be considered something other than just crazy, paranoia.

I guess, Alexander Hamilton was paranoid when he wrote in the Federalist Papers, “.. that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of goverment. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants” What kind of crazy is Alexander Hamilton warning us about those tenderhearted politicians?

We all know Jefferson was a loony, paranoid, nut case when he said, “A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned – this is the sum of good government.” What a weirdo.

Don’t worry about the government trying to take over the 1/6th of our economy via health care. They would never use your health care to make you behave in a certain way. They would never hold it up at election time to scare people into voting for them. Why would you think that?

Surely, this “paranoia” that Mr. Frank so arrogantly puts down is nothing new. What most people would call skepticism has been with us since our founding. It is what led our country to revolution and then to form our union under a constitution.

As far as the school children, the media may have blew it out of proportion, but that was before the post speech exercise assignment was revised to not make it sound like the student had to do something that the President asked. I think it also went hand and hand with the video from Hollywood asking students to pledge allegiance to the President.  Surely, that’s just a little disturbing is it not? Surely, if this video and this homework assignment was from Bush, Democrats and the left would have rightfully went nuts. Oh wait, but that’s not paranoia. When Bush was in, he only purposefully let a couple thousand  New Orleanians die. Maybe I should go back and read Mr. Frank’s article on those crazy lefties.

Lastly, in part of the article that I don’t have sited here, you can read it at the Journal, Mr. Franks poo-poohs Glenn Beck as the master conspirator. Glenn Beck must be a lunatic questioning the Federal Reserve, oh along with all Austrian economists. Surely, the Federal Reserve had nothing to do with the tech bubble, followed by the housing bubble and who knows what bubble they are creating now.

Mr. Frank’s complete lack of historic and conceptional perspective is an embarrassment for my paper of choice. While, he’s entitled to his opinion, maybe he can keep his head in ground. We’ll pull him back out once we take our country back.

Found this youtube video on the blog EconomicPolicyJournal.com. Don’t worry though. I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding.

http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2009/10/7-lies-in-2-minutes.html

How do you get health care reform, which will harm doctors, patients, health related companies and all tax payers? Simple. You lie, cheat, steal, and if need be, you bang some heads. That is exactly what the Obama administration and congressional democrats are doing. Today’s Wall Street Journal highlights just one such scam being employed to get the support of the American Medical Association.

President Obama has made serial promises that he will not sign a health-care bill that “adds one dime to our deficits, either now or in the future, period.” This was never plausible, but now we can begin to understand what he meant: Democrats plan to make ObamaCare “deficit-neutral” by moving nearly a quarter-trillion dollars off the books, in the fiscal deception of the century.

Later this week, or maybe next, Senate Democrats plan to vote on a stand-alone bill that strips a formula that automatically cuts Medicare physician payments out of “comprehensive” health reform. Rather than include the pricey $247 billion plan known on Capitol Hill as the “doc fix” as part of ObamaCare, they’ll instead make this a separate contribution to the deficit, without compensating tax increases or spending cuts. Majority Leader Harry Reid explained at a press conference last week that “All we’re doing is wiping the slate clean by adjusting the baseline to what is current policy. This is not new policy.”

Wiping the slate is right.

It’s true that Congress likes to pretend that the “sustainable growth rate,” or SGR, is real. Created in 1997, the SGR slashes Medicare reimbursements if costs rise too steeply, as they always do. In January, doctors fees are scheduled to fall by 21.5%, and 40% over the next five years. That would force many doctors to stop seeing Medicare patients, so Congress intervenes every year and temporarily overrides the cuts.

The American Medical Association’s asking price for supporting ObamaCare is scrapping the SGR. House Democrats did just that, but it pushed the total cost of their bill above $1 trillion, a political red line. The Senate Finance Committee chose the subterfuge of fixing the problem for only one year, which is how Chairman Max Baucus could claim he had done the miracle-work of designing an entitlement that reduces the deficit over 10 years. The AMA wasn’t pacified.

So now Democrats are simply going to “untether” this spending on doctors from ObamaCare, hiding even more of its true costs. At a meeting on the Hill last week, Mr. Reid and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel made the quid pro quo explicit, telling the AMA and about a dozen specialty societies that in return for this dispensation they expect them to back ObamaCare, no questions asked.

via Democrats Plan to Strip Sustainable Growth Rate Formula from Health-Care Reform – WSJ.com.

Already the Democrats are gathering support from horrible Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and now they are twisting arms to get Big Docs. We all know how evil these groups are, while the government is so virtuous and compassionate. Why would these groups that are going to be harmed by health care reform decide to back it? Is it because it’s what’s best for America? We are told that Big Pharma and Insurance are so evil and too many doctors would cut off  your left leg just to make a buck, but then when they back Obama all the sudden we are supposed to say, “Oh, well if they are backing it, it must be a fabulous idea.” Either they are evil, or they are not, Obama.

So to see who is evil, let’s just see who is pulling the fast one. In the article above, the government currently has a policy of slashing medicare payments to doctors if medicare costs rise too quickly. As we’ve discussed in previous posts, costs always rise “too quickly”, because government money floods the market driving up demand and third party payer hides price signals from the consumer. Also, “too quickly” is an arbitrary measure based on medicare budgeting. It has nothing to do with a what is really happening economically.

Anyways, in the end doctors are going to have their reimbursements cut yearly as costs exceed bureaucratic expectations. If you are a doctor, how many times are you going to let the government put the screws to you before you stop treating medicare patients? Then what happens when doctors begin dropping medicare patients? Well, we’ve already discussed that cost or price is effected by supply and demand. Even if demand stayed the same, which it won’t because this is a new expansion of medicare, supply is going to be cut. Doctors will be dropping out, leaving less doctors and choices for patients on the government’s dole. Oh, and guess what. With the decrease in supply, guess what happens. You guessed it, costs increase. Hmm, what did the government say they would do if costs increase above expectations? Oh yeah, they would cut reimbursement rates, leading to a circular decline of medical care.

“Hold up buddy. The article above says they are scrapping that.” Oh, that’s right. In a bargain with the devil, the AMA is going to support this if congress drops the SGR. Does dropping it fix the budgetary problems? No it doesn’t, and as soon as the budget ceiling explodes, you will hear how evil the doctors are again. Congress, like the decievers they are, will undoubtedly renege on their agreement with the AMA and re-instate the SGR.

There is nothing good about the government involvement in health care. It’s making a deal with the devil expecting him to uphold his end of the bargain. The problem is once the devil has gained control of your life, it takes an act of God to get him out.