If you just ate lunch, do not look at this link. It will probably make you sick.
The Stimulus Tracker on CNNMoney.com – Track the economic stimulus package in detail.
This is a must read. Click the link at the end to read the entire article. It is definitely worth the time.
I’m finding it ever more difficult to describe to people the kind of world that the Mises Institute would like to see, with the type of political order that Mises and the entire classical-liberal tradition believed would be most beneficial for mankind.
It would appear that the more liberty we lose, the less people are able to imagine how liberty might work. It is a fascinating thing to behold.
* People can no longer imagine a world in which we could be secure without massive invasions of our privacy at every step, and even being strip-searched before boarding airplanes, even though private institutions manage much greater security without any invasions of human rights;
* People can no longer remember how a true free market in medical care would work, even though all the problems of the current system were created by government interventions in the first place;
* People imagine that we need 700 military bases around the world, and endless wars in the Middle East, for “security,” though safe Switzerland doesn’t;
* People think it is insane to think of life without central banks, even though they are modern inventions that have destroyed currency after currency;
* Even meddlesome agencies like the Consumer Products Safety Commission or the Federal Trade Commission strike most people as absolutely essential, even though it is not they who catch the thieves and frauds, but private institutions;
* The idea of privatizing roads or water supplies sounds outlandish, even though we have a long history of both;
* People even wonder how anyone would be educated in the absence of public schools, as if markets themselves didn’t create in America the world’s most literate society in the 18th and 19th centuries.
This list could go on and on. But the problem is that the capacity to imagine freedom – the very source of life for civilization and humanity itself – is being eroded in our society and culture. The less freedom we have, the less people are able to imagine what freedom feels like, and therefore the less they are willing to fight for its restoration.
This has profoundly affected the political culture. We’ve lived through regime after regime, since at least the 1930s, in which the word freedom has been a rhetorical principle only, even as each new regime has taken away ever more freedom.
Now we have a president who doesn’t even bother to pay lip service to the idea of freedom. In fact, I don’t think that the idea has occurred to Obama at all. If the idea of freedom has occurred to him, he must have rejected it as dangerous, or unfair, or unequal, or irresponsible, or something along those lines.
To him, and to many Americans, the goal of government is to be an extension of the personal values of those in charge. I saw a speech in which Obama was making a pitch for national service, the ghastly idea that government should steal 2 years of every young person's life for slave labor and to inculcate loyalty to leviathan, with no concerns about setting back a young person’s professional and personal life.
How did Obama justify his support of this idea? He said that when he was a young man, he learned important values from his period of community service. It helped form him and shape him. It helped him understand the troubles of others and think outside his own narrow experience.
Well, I’m happy for him. But he chose this path voluntarily. It is a gigantic leap to go from personal experience to forcing a vicious national plan on the entire country. His presumption here is really taken from the playbook of the totalitarian state: the father-leader will guide his children-citizens in the paths of righteousness, so that they all will become god like the leader himself.
To me, this comment illustrates one of two things. It could show that Obama is a potential dictator in the mold of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, for the presumptions he puts on exhibit here are just as frightening as any imagined by the worst tyrants in human history. Or, more plausibly, it may be an illustration of Hannah Arendt’s view that totalitarianism is merely an application of the principle of the “banality of evil.”
With this phrase, Arendt meant to draw attention to how people misunderstand the origin and nature of evil regimes. Evil regimes are not always the product of fanatics, paranoids, and sociopaths, though, of course, power breeds fanaticism, paranoia, and sociopathology. Instead, the total state can be built by ordinary people who accept a wrong premise concerning the role of the state in society.
If the role of the state is to ferret out evil thoughts and bad ideas, it must necessarily become totalitarian. If the goal of the state is that all citizens must come to hold the same values as the great leader, whether economic, moral, or cultural, the state must necessarily become totalitarian. If the people are led to believe that scarce resources are best channeled in a direction that producers and consumers would not choose on their own, the result must necessarily be central planning.
Don’t we wish? That’s not quite what he said. He wants to close them down and create a new housing system from scratch. Can you imagine if every time you completely screwed up at work, you just went to your boss and said “We should just abolish the disaster I created and start from scratch. I know exactly how to do it. Oh, don’t worry that I completely destroyed the company with my last attempt and kept telling you to pour more money into that disaster all the while telling you it was going great.” Here an article from the Wall Street Journal about Frank’s comments.
A top House Democrat on Friday said his committee was preparing to recommend “abolishing” mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and rebuilding the U.S. housing-finance system from scratch.
“The remedy here is…as I believe this committee will be recommending, abolishing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in their current form and coming up with a whole new system of housing finance,” said Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.
His comments initially rippled through bond markets on concerns that the government might pull away from the mortgage market. Many believe that’s unlikely and that any revamp would include continued government involvement. The government took over the companies in September 2008 as loan losses mounted.
Please. The government would never pull away from the mortgage market. It’s just another way for them to buy votes and redistribute wealth. There is only one reason that the government needs to be involved in the house financing system. That is to force the cost of buying homes for a select group of people onto the population as a whole. When I go to a local bank and get a mortgage, the bank will charge a high enough interest rate to make it worth it for them to lend me the money. If the rate is too high, I’ll pass. If I think it is just right, I’ll borrow and buy a home. We both win. No one else is forced to pay for my home.
Now, how does the government change this? Well, they artificially lower interest rates and standards to allow otherwise unqualified buyers to buy homes. The cost of money has not changed just because the government wants it to. Someone has to pay the difference between what it normally would cost to borrow at the buyers interest rate and the artificial rate the government sets. That someone is the tax payer. As with all government handouts, they spread the cost of a select few over the entire populace.
Some Republicans have argued that the companies should ultimately be reduced in size and privatized, while at other end of the spectrum, some analysts have recommended turning the companies into government agencies. But several industry groups and academics have suggested that the government is likely to continue playing at least some role in the future of the companies.
One such report came from analysts at Standard & Poor’s this past week. “It’s hard for us to imagine” how enough capital could be attracted to replace Fannie and Freddie with stand-alone private companies that would be able to offer low-cost funding for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, the analysts wrote.
Thanks Standard & Poor’s! It’s hard to imagine because you are trapped in our currently reality. Capital will be attracted if it is rewarded properly by the market. If interest rates are allowed to be set by the market instead of being set by our economic emperors, capital will come. Of course they stipulate “low-cost funding”, which goes right back to forcing the cost on all tax payers.
Some analysts have argued that starting from scratch could create more problems than they would solve, in part because Fannie and Freddie own or guarantee around half of the nation’s $11 trillion in home mortgages. “Blue sky ideas are great, but they take a long time to happen,” said Mahesh Swaminathan, senior mortgage strategist at Credit Suisse, at a conference last month. “When you have $5 trillion of agency mortgages, you can't really orphan them.”
Here’s an idea. Don’t start from scratch. We are in a hole, so stop digging. Discontinue all future operations, and either let the current mortgages pan out (foreclose, payoff, etc) or sell off the mortgages to the highest bidder. We’ve already been screwed by the government here, so get it over with and quit dragging it out. At least then we’d be on a path to the free market. By the way, did anyone find the clause in the Constitution that says the Federal government can even be involved in housing finance. Yes Mrs. Pelosi, I’m serious.
Mr. Frank, who didn’t elaborate on forthcoming recommendations, said last month that one possible revamp could merge some functions of Fannie and Freddie that overlap with the Federal Housing Administration into the government mortgage-insurance agency.
The Obama administration said it will weigh in on how to revamp the companies—and the entire housing-finance system—when it releases its budget next month. Republicans have increasingly criticized the administration for moving to overhaul the financial sector without spelling out plans for Fannie and Freddie.
In a PBS interview on Thursday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the legislative process to overhaul Fannie, Freddie and the housing-finance system was unlikely to begin this year. “It’s just a complicated thing to get right,” he said. “But we are completely supportive and agree completely with the need to make sure that we take a cold, hard look at what the future of those institutions should be in our country.”
via Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac Should Be Eliminated, Barney Frank Says – WSJ.com.
Thank God Geithner and Obama will weigh in on this soon. They have just been so great up to this point on economic matters. I am sure our socialist President will come up with a great market based system, right? Be ready for a new welfare program, created from scratch by the most socialist government we’ve had in my life time.
I know this is going to come as a complete shock, but a government panel said that the private companies cannot ferry astronauts into space as safely as government. Geewiz! I cannot believe a government panel would say that government is best.
A key federal aerospace panel warned that NASA could run into serious safety challenges if it relies on private companies to ferry astronauts into space in the near future.
The Obama administration has been devising a plan to outsource a chunk of its manned space program to private companies in order to speed up rocket development, save money and focus federal dollars on longer-term expeditions. But a report released last week by the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, an outside safety watchdog for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, cautioned that the private space companies rely on “unsubstantiated claims” and need to overcome major technical hurdles before they can safely carry astronauts into orbit. It urged NASA to stick with its current government-run manned space ventures, and said that switching to private alternatives now would be “unwise and probably not cost-effective.”
Did I just read that right? Obama, Mr. Socialism himself, planned on outsourcing a chunk of the space program to private companies? Surely, there has to be a payoff in here somewhere?
So the advisory panel said the private sector would rely on “unsubstantiated claims”. Are they telling me government doesn’t do this? You mean like the claim we are going to pay for health care reform by cutting waste out of medicare? How about health care reform will only cost $800 billion? Or maybe we have to bail out our friends on Wall Street to save Main Street?
You have to love the gull this panel has saying that private companies would be “unwise and probably not cost-effective”. Seriously? How many government programs come in under budget? The only thing I don’t like about this is it creates a partnership between government and the private sector. You know what that means. It will be used for political payoffs. No doubt, Jack Murtha already has some favors to return.
But the findings released last week are likely to provide a boost to NASA officials who support keeping nearly all manned space programs in house. In addition, NASA’s largest and longstanding contractors, such as Boeing Corp. and Lockheed Martin Corp., are stepping up efforts to generate White House support against outsourcing more programs. As part of that campaign, they have challenged the safety of the start-up ventures, which are proposing to use rockets that haven’t been fully tested and in some cases, haven’t yet flown.
Shocking that NASA officials would want to keep it all in house, and then the real culprits come out. Boeing and Lockheed Martin are pushing to keep it in house. Go figure. Who wants to have to compete? It’s so much easier to rip off the government. It’s definitely easier to grease the palms of a slimeball politician than it is to grease an executive’s palms who’s accountable to the bottom line. Behind almost every government regulation, you find some big business trying to stifle competition.
Did you read that last sentence? It’s a bad thing to propose rockets that haven’t been fully tested and in some cases, haven’t yet flown? Isn’t this how innovation is done? If you only propose things that already exist, you would never move forward. Can you image this panel talking about phone service? Apple is proposing this so-called iPhone that hasn’t been fully tested and hasn’t even made phone calls yet! What a waste. Let me stick with my rotary phone. It’s made tons of phone calls. This is exactly why private businesses should be involved in space. They will innovate!
I watched a documentary this weekend called The Listening Project, and it made me think about my post Public Education – A View From Outside The Matrix. The documentary has a group of people traveling around the world asking people what they think about these United States (notices these instead of the!).
The one thing that I noticed is most of the people knew a lot more about history than most Americans do. They were talking about Rome, Julius Ceasar, etc. While many Americans may have heard of both, they probably aren’t able to explain either and how they relate to modern times. To tell you the truth, I don’t even remember being taught about Rome in school. What I know of Rome has been self taught as an adult. I guess that wasn’t part of what the government mandates us to learn. Study hall was no doubt more important to society.
What the people recognized was we are no doubt the last empire of the world. Now conservatives will argue that we don’t want to conquer lands, so there for we aren’t an empire. We cannot have bases in well over 100 countries, claim we use our bases to look out for our national interests, and then say we aren’t an empire. We use our military and economic power to push countries in the direction we want. Anyways, this is all besides the point. The point is the rest of the world recognizes that we are an empire, and that we are no different than the Roman Empire. Countless people said we are the Rome of today, and that like Rome our empire will perish. They didn’t say this in a way that they want it to happen. They were stating the obvious. It’s too bad most Americans don’t recognize this, because all it would take to avoid it is getting back to what we were founded on.
The other thing that was noticeable in the documentary was that most of the people love the idea of America. They love the people and the spirit that is America. They love the idea that someone can pursue their dreams and make it. What they didn’t like was our government. This goes back to our foreign policy and how we try to force the world to be more like us. It was a bit shocking to see how many of them specifically stated there is a difference between the people and the government. Considering we elect these bums, that was pretty charitable. So here we are socializing everything under the sun, but it isn’t the social programs other nations love. It wasn’t our stimulus bills or our banking system. It’s our liberty. It’s what they believe we have. They don’t realize that we have lost so much liberty, but then again most Americans don’t recognize how much liberty we have lost.
Anyway, it was a pretty good documentary. It’s definitely worth watching. I’m guessing it was made to bash Bush, but I’m sure the people that were interviewed would probably still have the same opinions with Obama in the White House. He has only been a change for the worst. It’s just a shame that public education in this country is leading us down a path of ignorance compared to other parts of he world. When people in South Africa are explaining how Rome fell and how that relates to the US, yet most Americans wouldn’t know what they are talking about, you know it won’t be long before the new Rome is no more.
During the election, not only did Obama promise to air the health care negotiations on C-SPAN, but he also promised he would pass drug re-importation. As of right now, the health care reform bill explicitly prohibits drug importation as a bribe to the drug companies.
Do you really think the government cares about your health care and how much it costs? Of course they don’t. They only care about control. Drug importation is just another example. Why do you think the drug companies are running to the rescue of the Democrat in Massachusetts?
In a free market, goods and services are not restricted by where they can be purchased or sold, but with government force, drugs cannot be purchased from outside our borders. Why is that? Is it really because the government wants to protect us? Aren’t the Democrats always telling us we need to be more like Europe and Canada? Then they say we can’t trust importing drugs from those nations. The truth is they are closing the market off to us. They want us trapped in this government backed market. This is not the free market.
If we were allowed to import drugs, drug companies would not be able to pillage the American people. The only reason they are able to is because of the gun in the room. The gun is the government, and it is there to threaten you if you don’t buy the more expensive drugs. After all, they promised the drug companies if they do what they’re told, they would protect them. Don Corleone would be so proud.
Yet, we are told the free market can’t provide affordable medical care. This same thing takes place on the state level with health insurance. So, what would the free market really look like without government coercion again the people? Well, Americans would import the cheaper drugs. Drug companies would see the that game is up via lost profits in the US. They would then start stabilizing prices around the world, which would lower the US prices. Drugs are a good, and a good should cost no different in one part of the world as another except for distribution and currency exchange costs.
Can you imagine if Americans were told you can’t import your oil. You have to buy oil from within the US, and the oil company can charge a different price in the US than it charges elsewhere? How much do you think gas would cost?
Isn’t it time everyone starts waking up that we don’t live in a free market. We live under a fascist government. There is no part of our economy where the government isn’t using is monopoly on force to pick winners and losers, to force citizens into giving their money to corporations, or where inefficient companies have to compete to survive against the up and coming little guy.
Another one bites the dust…..
The Venezuelan government, already facing power and water problems and a shaky economy, is including scheduled power outages nationwide as part of its ongoing electricity rationing efforts, the state-run news agency reported.
Electricity Minister Angel Rodriguez said the latest energy-saving measures are meant to prevent a power collapse that could occur if water levels in the Guri dam system continue to drop, the Bolivarian News Agency reported. Oil-rich Venezuela relies heavily on hydroelectric power, which has been hurt by drought.
Officials with the state electric utilities in Caracas, the capital, and two other western states today announced plans for four-hour outages every other day, the Associated Press reported.
Venezuela started the year with new government restrictions on power consumption, including a limit on the hours commercial centers may use the electricity grid.
Gotta love socialism! Seriously, why did we elected a socialist again? And why do these idiots think we can make socialism work? Oh, that’s right, “Because we are Americans”. Even though we are all humans, the adjective American apparently means we can defy all historical evidence, economic science, and who knows maybe gravity.
This is what happens every time government is the decider of any economic matter. It does not matter what it is. In the US we are only prosperous to the point of which government isn’t involved in the economy. Our prosperity would be so much more if the government wasn’t involved at all, and it’s going to be so much less now that they have involved themselves so much more.
While I don’t have to say this for my regular readers, for all the new folks, the free market always allocates resources to their highest and best use. That is why you do not have shortages in something that your country has in abundance like you do in oil rich Venezuela. Anytime, and I mean anytime without exception, the government changes the way the free market functions, you get resources being allocated in a less useful way. The bottom line is that means the standard of living is decreased. Venezuela is a perfect example of standards of living being decreased by the government’s misallocation of resources. Now something as simple as energy is going to be rationed. If food rationing has started yet, it will be as will many other things. Producing and distributing of goods requires energy, so what do you think is going to happen now that energy is being rationed?
Considering how stupid governments are, I would not be surprised to see Venezuela reallocate resources to energy, and then have an abundance of energy. The only problem is because it will be centrally planned by an idiotic government (and they are all idiotic), they will have over allocated energy resources and some other resource(s) will be under allocated. This is what happens when a few people, far away from the actual transaction decide what transactions should be taking place months if not years in advance. Think about how inefficient that is. The free market on the other hand adjusts resource allocations by the second based on the constant tweaking of millions of individual transactions.
There is no doubt that America will be facing the same issues soon. Our government is centrally planning the cost of money, the housing market, the auto manufacturers, the banking industry, schooling, energy, the food supply, travel, health care and the list goes on and on. Instead of resources being steered by the end consumer and producer, Washington thinks they know who need what and how much of it they need. While we have been the frog in the increasingly hot water for probably the past 100 years, it seems Obama increasing rate of socialization has caused us to realize the waters boiling. Hopefully, we can stop it before we become Venezuela. Hopefully, the people of Venezuela realize their folly and revolt against their dictorial government. It’s their only hope, and not to far it the future it may be our only hope as well.
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.
Merry Christmas America. How do you like being raped and pillaged for Christmas? Our government, once this is signed into law, has cut the final string to it’s founding principle of protecting individual rights. No longer are we individuals. We are now part of the “public”. Anything thing that can be construed as harmful to the “public health” will used against the individual. We are all only one NIH study away from losing any right the government chooses to take away. Guns are first.
The Senate approved sweeping health-overhaul legislation on Thursday, a landmark moment for White House-led efforts to expand insurance coverage to more than 30 million Americans.
Just as a reminder this bill does nothing to fix the problems as I explained in my post on root causes.
Might be good to re-read my posts on real free market solutions.
This is breaking news on the Wall Street Journal. Hillary Clinton pledges $100 billion per year out of American tax payers’ pockets to hand over to the Mugabes of the world via the “Climate-Aid Fund”.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has announced that the U.S. is prepared to join other rich countries in raising $100 billion in yearly climate financing for poor countries by 2020.
The announcement could give a boost to deadlocked climate talks which have faltered over disputes between rich and poor countries over emissions cuts and climate financing.
Mrs. Clinton said the financing is contingent on world leaders reaching a broader climate pact at the U.N. talks in Copenhagen.
She said the deal must include all major economies, meaningful actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions and a system to ensure all parties’ actions are transparent.
Mrs. Clinton says “$100 billion is a lot. It can have tangible effects.”
So, let’s get this straight so I can get back to reading how to survive the coming collapse. We are already borrowing over $1 trillion a year. On top of that, we are going to borrow another $100 billion for this climate change scam. We are going to ask China to lend us money to hand it over to Mugabe. In other words, we are slaves to Mugabe. We are pledging our future and our children’s future labor to give $100 billion now and every year in the future to the Mugabes of the world. Did any of these political pigs want to ask us if we wanted to be enslaved so they could feel good about themselves?
Next time Obama goes back over to China to tell them how bad their leaders are and how they aren’t free, can he take the gun away from our heads first? Without the government gun to our heads, Americans would never fork over $100 billion to hand to tin pot despots. I believe there was once a revolution over taxation without representation. Maybe it’s time for another one.
