Most of us who look around at the economic conditions in the country woke up scratching our heads at the outcome of the election. Under these economic conditions, how could voters fail to reject the party that has created the catastrophe of inflation, skyrocketing energy prices, and mounting food prices? This question seems vexing at first, but it’s really not so difficult to understand. Democrats are professionals at stealing elections, but they’re also professionals when it comes to setting a legislative agenda that will later backstop their political aims. Democrats knew what they were going to do, as far back as the beginning of the pandemic, and what they’ve been doing since was designed to carry it into effect. They’re diabolical, and with respect to inflation, they knew full well what they were going to do. Inflation didn’t matter in this election to their voters. Why? The reason your red wave became a trickle is because Democrat’s constituencies scarcely feel it, at least to the scale working Americans have been feeling it. Democrats undertook a plan to drive inflation while insulating the bulk of their own voters from it.
Borrowing new money into existence is how one goes about making inflation. As Milton Friedman taught us, systemic “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” If one wants to create inflation, one need only increase the money supply without a corresponding increase to the value of the whole system. Democrats knew this. They printed more money into existence in the period of the so-called “pandemic” than any other period in our history. To add to this, what they did was focus the end-point for much of this cash into the pockets of their voters. Starting in the Fall of 2020, they increased payments in programs such as SNAP(our modernized food-stamps program) by percentages in no way justified by market conditions at the time. A twenty-five percent increase in SNAP before the onset of significant inflation helped create that inflation, but more than this, what it did was to indemnify Democrats’ key demographics against the policies that Blue States and the Democrat Congress were imposing on the rest of us.
To get a red wave, in this environment of constant Democrat chicanery, you cannot possibly win when all of their key constituencies are being made whole by COLA increases and so on. Democrats rely on the dependent folks to swell to the polls in election after election, and they’re quick to remind them who got them the loot. Think of it. We know that roughly half of Americans get a government check directly. Still more are on the government teat somewhat indirectly. The entire education establishment from college to kindergarten is heavily latched-onto the government teat. This isn’t rocket science. If you want to know why Democrats could manage to win in this catastrophic economic condition, you need only realize that to a large degree, their voters aren’t feeling it.
“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” – Mark Twain
If you have a degree in the hard sciences, you already know what I’m about to discuss. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and there’s no such thing as perpetual motion machines. If you want to do work of any kind, it requires energy. One must create that energy, or at least convert it from another form, in order to do that work. Most forms of energy production we do are chemical transformations of some sort. When you eat food, your body chemically decomposes the meal into a form it can use to drive your muscles, and keep circulating your blood, and so on. When you pour gasoline into your fuel tank, and it goes forward into your engine, where it’s ignited and turned into a forceful combustion, to push pistons that reciprocate, turning your crankshaft and so on, you’re also doing a chemical transformation. When you store energy in a battery cell, then retrieving it to drive your electric motor(s), you’re again doing a chemical transformation, in reverse of the sort of chemical transformation that occurred when you charged the batteries. Before you could charge the battery, however, the current with which you charged it had to be generated somewhere, and in a few cases, that was accomplished by nuclear reactions, or thermal, wind, solar and hydroelectric power generation, but throughout the world, the main source is through the burning of some sort of fuel in another chemical transformation into power to generate electricity. This is reality, and even(and especially) Elon Musk knows it. This poses a serious problem for the scam artists. They can fool you on the front end, but in the long run, you’ll eventually convince yourself that you’ve been fooled. Electric vehicles, as they’re being proposed to consumers, are a complete, utter scam, and every serious scientist knows it, and every engineer understands it.
I want you to watch the video below. It’s just less than sixteen minutes, but it’s worth it. I don’t know whether he’s exposing insanity or possibly suffering from it. There are important lessons to be garnered here, but most importantly, you can finally put to rest the insanity of the electric vehicle scam.
The gentleman who made this video seems earnest enough. My point here is not to criticize him, personally, but to confront what this video lays bare about electric vehicles. His chief complaint with his Tesla EV seems to be that he doesn’t like the lengthy charging sessions, or the lack of availability of charging stations, but he also mentions his dislike of stopping to refuel a gasoline car. i suppose he wants a forever-mobile, a kind of perpetual motion machine, that requires no charging, no refueling, and presumably, no maintenance or much of anything else. He wants to be able to get in and drive until he’s ready to stop, to re-commence his travels at any time he pleases. Who wouldn’t like that?
Obviously, he’s noticed that his Tesla requires recharging ‒ lots and lots of recharging. If he only drove a few miles per day, he might well be able to subsist with his Tesla, at least until the very large, very expensive battery inevitably dies permanently, no longer able to be re-charged. His solution here is to take a generator, driven by a 13HP gasoline engine, install it under the hatch of his car, in the area usually called “the trunk.” Along with this, he’s also installed a gasoline tank, and all the plumbing and wiring to make this work. He removed his rear window, created a weather-exposed zone in his trunk, hooking it all up so that the generator will charge his Tesla’s batteries, even while riding down the road, thereby extending his range, and giving himself a built-in charger. I’ve seen others try similar approaches by simply pulling a small trailer with a generator bolted-down, accomplishing the same thing, but adding the problems associated with a trailer. I’ve seen others put a portable generator in the trunk that they can simply pull out and run to re-charge the car if they completely discharge between charging stations, but that cannot be run going down the road.
In the video, he takes this contraption on an 1800 mile journey of several days, the goal being never to stop for a charge. Along the way, he stopped by a friend’s house, a friend who has a jet engine mounted on a pontoon boat(and I’d urge his friend to rethink the simple flat screen guard on that engine,) but a couple of things become apparent through the course of the video:
His generator is insufficient to keep up with his Tesla’s power consumption at highway speeds.
He is forced to refuel his “Cordless Tesla” several times, probably daily.
He has this noisy contraption running everywhere he goes, and must leave it running overnight while he sleeps in hotels.
It’s so noisy that people call the police.
The police stop him once because he’s driving too slowly on the highway as he attempted to match consumption to his insufficient generation.
While he was considerate enough to park it well away from the hotels so that it probably wasn’t too annoying to guests, he stopped at one restaurant, and I’m pretty certain that if I had been the owner of said eatery, I’d have asked him to shut it down while he dined. At the end, he summarized his experience, and also displayed the mileage his “Cordless Tesla” was getting:
This is not MPGE, but actual mileage at the speeds listed
With all of this said and done, at the completion of his trip, he notes the shortcomings, and since along the way, he visited a Kohler Engines facility, I can only imagine that he intends to install an even larger generator in an attempt to improve his results. What he may achieve is to extend his duration, but what he will not change is the left-hand column on the chart above, except perhaps to worsen it with a larger, heavier generator installed. A larger generator will likely necessitate a larger fuel tank or severely reduced expectations, but what I must say is that I truly want to congratulate him.
He’s built an undisguised fossil-fuel-powered Tesla EV.
He undertook this project apparently to address the shortcomings of his Tesla, and all EVs in general. What he succeeding in doing is to prove that only larger internal combustion engines can actually accomplish his desired outcome. He still has the fuel stops. He still has the noise(much more, actually.) He has a doubling of the expense. He still has a giant battery pack that when it dies, will cost more than his eventual final generator, fuel tank, plumbing, and wiring, and he’s still burning so-called fossil fuels for the pleasure. I don’t think his rig would be legal in California, either for the noise, or for the fact that they’re banning all outdoor gas-powered equipment like chainsaws and lawn-mowers and generators, so not much use there. And then there’s this:
My last long trip in our 2013 Ford F350 Crew-cab, diesel 4WD truck was around 1250 miles each way. On the highway, I averaged 70-75mph, depending on the speed limits, of course, but on that trip, the diesel truck managed to get 19.3 MPG. I stopped twice for fuel, each way, topping-off a little before hitting the road for the return trip. At roughly the half-way point on the way home, after topping off, my range said 647 miles. Of course, it also sips diesel exhaust fluid. That’s a truck that likely weighs well beyond double what the diminutive Tesla weighs. I made the same trip a couple years before in my Mustang GT, which is probably closer to the same weight. I averaged, well, let’s say “the same speed.” In that car, I managed 23.7 MPG, though in honesty, if I’d made more judicious use of my accelerator pedal, I might have done somewhat better. The point is, neither of the vehicles I mention are “fuel misers.”
The truth of all of this is that you can’t hide from reality in the end. Physics is. Chemistry is. Math is. Some people need to spend a good deal more time at all three. The truth, however, is more plain when it’s undisguised. That’s the one thing this gentleman, the owner of the Youtube channel Warped Perception has fully exposed. I’m not sure if that had been his motive, but if so, he’s succeeded. His other Youtube channel is called Matt’s Lab, where he describes himself this way: “I’m an Engineer, lover of Science and Mechanics and also a Filmmaker.” If he’s an actual engineer, he surely knows all of this, but again, that may have been his point: All EVs are at least in part powered by fossil fuels. That’s because the electricity being generated elsewhere to charge the EV is probably burning fossil fuels. You can’t escape it. The idea that we can replace internal combustion engines in any practical sense with EVs is simply madness. In his attempt to make his Tesla EV more practical, what he’s done is to simply unmask the whole EV scam.
The one thing that actually is more efficient about his mobile power-generation, at least theoretically, lies in the fact that there aren’t many miles of cabling between the source of the energy and its destination in the Tesla’s batteries. You see, much energy is lost in the transportation of energy because of a little thing called “resistance.” Measured in Ohms, it’s a measure of how much impedance a given current encounters while traversing a given conductor or device. Rubber is a very poor conductor, which is why it’s often used as an insulator on cabling, while copper and gold are excellent conductors, as are most metals. Aluminum is common in transmission lines, but one of the problems with aluminum is that it has higher resistance to current than copper, but because it’s lighter and much cheaper, it’s used there. Chances are, the power cable that runs from the transformer on the pole near your home is aluminum. In any event, for every mile and foot of cable between the power plant and your home, energy is being bled-out by this resistance in the form of heat and electromagnetic radiation. It’s one of the costs of an extensive, lengthy distribution grid. You’re bleeding energy all the way from the source to its point of use. In this sense, his “Cordless Tesla” exposes another problem people don’t understand in this discussion generally: In most instances, it is far more efficient to generate power where it’s being used, rather than to generate it at a distance, transmit it over miles of cable, through transformers, and ultimately into a chemical storage device(battery) from which it will be again transformed back into current on demand. At each transformation along its path, and in the process of storing it and then pulling it from storage, there is a certain amount of loss built into each step.
He could make his generation more efficient by getting an even larger generator, and just driving the electric motors directly from the generator. To get the acceleration he sees now, however, he’d need a really large generator to produce the bursts of current he’d need, and transformers, as well as more weight and more fuel. At that point, he’d be better off simply getting rid of the generator, keeping the motor, and hooking it directly to his transmission, and then do you know what he’d have? A standard gasoline-powered car. In the end, you have a vehicle just like the ones we’ve been driving for generations. Problem solved. Genius!
The most efficient solution that would also be as practical as gasoline or diesel engine is something else entirely, assuming you’re dead-set on getting rid of fossil fuels: Hydrogen. You can even keep the internal combustion engines. All you need is hydrogen, which is in every molecule of water on Earth. The problem is storing it. You can derive hydrogen by simply using an electrical process to split the water molecule into its constituents, using electrical current. The tricky part is that hydrogen in any quantity is quite combustible, and explosive. There are methods for storing hydrogen that would be completely safe, or at least as safe as gasoline. If the society used primarily nuclear power, augmented by wind, solar, geothermal, and hydroelectric, the problem becomes much easier to address. You could have a hydrogen station anywhere you have a supply of water and electricity, which means they could be as widely distributed as gasoline, diesel, and other fossil-fuels. Gas stations would be replaced/upgraded to hydro-electrolysis stations. The best news is that the exhaust from your car would be heat and water vapor. Quick fill-ups, back on the road in minutes, with the convenience and range to which you’re accustomed, with the added benefit of a mostly clean exhaust stream, all of which could be yours without the EV scam, and reliance on China for rare Earth minerals and the ecological catastrophe of battery disposal for the cells used by EVs. You’d still need your common lead-acid batteries, just like the ones you use now, but that’s not an obstacle.
People buying into the Electric Vehicles are being scammed. There are many hidden costs people don’t yet see, although the impracticability of these EVs becomes pretty plain to most folks who buy them. Early indicators are that many people who buy one EV are unlikely to buy a second. This is a bit like Biden voters: Having chosen him once, many aren’t apt to do so again. Obviously then, while it’s harder to convince people they’ve been fooled than it had been to fool them in the first instance, it’s clear that one’s wallet is a powerful persuader.
Ladies and gentlemen, the evidence is everywhere you care to look. We’re sliding off an economic cliff, and today’s jobs report is more evidence. Contrary to what the puppet Obiden Regime is telling you about the performance of the economy, the truth is dramatically worse. Their continued reliance on printing money, and sending out support checks/benefits, is driving us into a ditch, and that ditch looks like the Grand Canyon. We’re told the pittance of 199,000 new jobs created last month is good news. Folks, at that rate, the workforce size is shrinking, or at best, flat. Hidden beneath all of the nonsense being spewed by the labor department is a contraction in the size of the workforce, or “labor/workforce participation.” This tells the truth, and it’s the thing they can’t hide. Workforce participation is falling off a cliff. If this government wanted to change the dynamic, they’d immediately halt all hand-outs and drive people into the workforce. Instead, they’re supporting people to remain unemployed, and this is leading to the supply chain problems you’re experiencing, but it’s going to get worse.
The simple fact is that the people now running the United States are intentionally driving us further into crisis. Soon, we’re going to see inflation at levels none of us have experienced before. The longer they drive this false COVID crisis, the worse it will be. There’s no way this is accidental, and anybody telling you that in the future is either a dupe or a liar. It’s now so late in the game, preparations may no longer be possible. I’ve always advocated preparedness here on this site. Time may be short. While I was writing this up, Sundance over at TheConservativeTreehouse has posted a dire warning. I’d urge you to heed it.
Our economy stopped recovering the moment Joe Biden stole his way to the Presidency. I can’t say this strongly enough: It’s not accidental. It’s the plan.
The whole thing is a put-on. I don’t mean there isn’t a virus, but the whole over-hyped panic is just that. On Thursday, this past week, I saw that there were real signs that the fog was lifting. People were beginning to question the whole thing. It’s not that anybody thinks Coronavirus 2019 isn’t real, but that the statistics were being questioned, and the models were being questioned, and finally, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx were being questioned. More, the reality of the unemployment numbers was coming to light, as an additional 6.6 million Americans added to the unemployment rolls that had already surged by 3.3 million the week before. That’s basically 10 million Americans, whose jobs are gone. More, businesses are now going belly-up, unable to sustain themselves in a shutdown or even skeleton-crew condition. Real people, with real businesses are losing their businesses, not because they did anything wrong, but because of some order by a government official. Those officials will all claim sovereign immunity to any lawsuits, but no matter what anybody claims, it is a real “taking” as the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Fifth Amendment defines it. They’re being wrecked, and their employees will have no jobs to which they can return. This must end. On Thursday, the American people finally realized it, and began to say so. Now, finally, two days later, it seems our President, already inclined to think along these lines, seemed to have gotten the message. In a lengthy briefing on Saturday, he said “We have to open…” He said it more than once.
After the debacle of the Fauci/Birx reliance on the statistical models, some of which were provided purportedly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, people were beginning to question not only the obvious distance between projected death rates and reality, but also some of the underlying stories used to sell the panic. One YouTuber, channel name: AmazingPolly, who is an excellent researcher found some interesting problems with the video package prepared by the NYTimes about the catastrophe happening at the Elmhurst, Queens NY hospital. What’s interesting is that the video is now all in question. CBS famously aired footage that looked like a serious situation, allegedly in NYC, but actually from Italy. Other footage and stills showed lines of coffins that were actually from a movie. The media is a pure propaganda arm of the Democrat Party. At this point, it truly is the Democrat-Media Complex. The idea is to sell panic. The idea is to push the country as far down into the ditch as is humanly possible, because there’s really no other way for them to defeat President Trump. They’re willing to wreck America to get rid of him, and to cause the death of additional Americans if necessary. There’s really no bottom to their black hole of hatred for this country. They see Trump and his supporters as the last obstacle to vanquishing America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, forever. This is not hyperbole. They hate us that much.
I will tell you that the longer I observe the whole of our national polity, I am continually amazed at how absolutely disgusting is our so-called “Mainstream Media.” Sarah Palin had them pegged when she called them “Lamestream,” but lately, they seem to be more diabolical than that.
Back to the hospital in Elmhurst, Queens, why would they choose that hospital to target for their big scare story? On whom would this have the greatest effect? Amazing Polly figures that out for us, if we hadn’t guessed who might be from Queens, NY, who might be the target of a media disinformation campaign:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAnSkQojE_4
Every time I get the chance, I thank Polly for her work via Twitter. This video deserves a thorough watching. She admits up front that she can’t necessarily prove all of her conclusions, but she is always careful to provide documentation for the material she presents, in the information attached to her videos on YouTube. You can follow her on Twitter @99freemind. I don’t necessarily agree with her on everything, or subscribe to all the theories she presents, but I can tell you that she works very hard at her research, and she is very thorough, and also that she provides an alternative view of events and history that can offer a perspective that reveals new things the Lamestream Media will never, ever tell us. Give her a view if you haven’t already, and take the time to Like the videos of content creators like her and Dan Bongino.
Another person with whom you will cross paths if you research this overall CoronaVirus2019 shutdown is Candace Owens. Some of you will be familiar with her from FoxNews, or from other platforms, and on Twitter, she’s @RealCandaceO. She has real courage in many respects, and one of them is her willingness to take on the #FakeNews, particularly with respect to issues of race, and also with the pigeon-holing of black Americans as Democrats. She’s exposing those myths, and she has a new book coming out. Now, she’s exposing the governor of Connecticut who actually blamed the death of an infant on CoronaVirus when in fact, the death was due to being suffocated:
Since word is getting out— I can now confirm that the infant in CT was accidentally suffocated by its caretaker, who then called the police. @GovNedLamont KNEW this, & then lied to the world by linking it to the #coronavirus because he wants more Federal money.
He should RESIGN. https://t.co/q6L5V55DWh
This sort of displacement of blame onto CoronaVirus is rampant in states run by Democrats. It’s being done to grab more of the federal relief money from the $2Trillion package that Congress passed last week. It’s despicable, and it accounts for at least some of the mounting death toll being reported all over the news. It’s fraud. They’re mostly going to get away with it, since they compile the statistics, and they control the medical examiners, although these will mostly be considered “natural causes” and will never undergo autopsies. I’m not suggesting that there are no CoronaVirus deaths, as I’m sure there are, but as I covered in my previous article, this is all being blown way out of proportion. Now, we have even more evidence that this whole panic is contrived, and we also know the motive: This is all about elections, money, and power. What else? The idea here was to trap President Trump so that he would have to shut down the country. Instead, he left it to governors, as he should. He focused on the Federal response as is the job of the President. In short, he took the steps appropriate to the President under our constitution, but this is also why the Democrat-Media Complex kept pressing the President to take more steps, and force a state quarantine in New York.
Today, at the press briefing by the President’s CoronaVirus Response Team, he made it plain: “We have to get back to work.”
Remember, if it’s bad for America, Democrats approve. If it’s bad for Trump, Democrats insist. The media is now so utterly broken that the smarmy reporters in the room can’t help but become snotty in their questioning of the President. If I were the President, I’d throw at least half of them off the White House grounds and tell their networks or papers to try again with somebody else. There was never this kind of conduct toward President Obama. Not once. Not even during his most miserable and provocative failures, when actual reporters would be expected to be more insistent in their questioning. Here, the way these reporters talk to the President of the United States is an utter disgrace. Even were I given the opportunity to question Barack Obama in the White House in the aftermath of Benghazi, I’d never have been so basically rude and disrespectful. I certainly would have asked a couple seriously difficult questions. The problem here is that the media doesn’t really want any information. They’re not really asking questions designed to reveal any news, but merely questions aimed at catching the President in some inconsistency, or in some sort of disagreement with one or more members of his team. In some cases, they’re plainly argumentative. Just once, in the eight years of the incompetent and corrupt Obama administration, they should have gone after that President with such fervent zeal. Instead, they blithely pitched softballs that even the increasingly confused Joe Biden could hit out of the park.
Over the last few weeks, as the nation has attempted to deal with the WuFlu pandemic, one of the things that’s gotten short shrift is the economy. We had an economy in pretty good condition by the middle of February, and as you’ll remember, unlike during the Obama administration when the jobs numbers were “unexpectedly poor,” instead our Department of Labor found itself having to upgrade the numbers in weeks following original reports that understated the economy’s performance. Now, we’re losing jobs at a phenomenal rate, and President Trump has to do something to bring the economy back online soon, or the country will be wrecked. Most of the small businesses shutting down are highly leveraged, and with a halt in revenues, they’re facing serious, perhaps catastrophic, consequences. The typical situation looks like a Mom-and-Pop shop of some sort, opened up a business on tight margins, perhaps by re-mortgaging a recently paid-off home. Now, shut down by order of some public official, usually a governor, county judge, city manager or mayor. they find themselves without revenue. They have to lay off their employees, as a matter of pure financial survival, and then, within a month, they’re staring down the barrel of that debt service, and if they can’t service it, not only will they lose their business, but they might just lose everything. They’ll never be able to reopen. They’ll never be able to call up employees and offer them their old jobs back. Instead, the avalanche will gather momentum and mass, with a mounting depression at the bottom of the hill.
I am reminded of a line by Bruce Willis in one of the many Die Hard sequels. The young guy he’s escorting to the FBI makes an off-hand remark about crashing the “system.” Willis’ character stops, and lets the kid have it a bit: “It’s not a system. It’s people!” Or something to that effect. His point was to say it is very easy to imagine shutting down a system like shutting down a computer or an assembly line. For some reason, when people eliminate the myriad complications implied by specific, concrete human beings, it become easy to be cavalier about their disposition. The point Detective McClane was making is that “the system” is really people, and what you’re really talking about wrecking is the lives and dreams and aspirations and plans of real live people, just like you.
Democrats suffer from the same childish misunderstanding and unfocused view of the world around them. It’s easier to imagine an amorphous system that just gets “shut down.” The same is true of the economy. They see it like turning off an engine. Instead, it’s like putting a country’s worth of people into suspended animation, only without the preservative aspect. The decay, the atrophy, the heart failures and the deaths begin to mount immediately. In short order, it’s much worse than any disease. Our country is much more complex than most people imagine, but the fundamentals of the situation are simple. We’re wrecking the economy, which means we’re wrecking businesses and that means we are wrecking people. Each minute this goes on, more businesses are lost, and with them, jobs die. Most of them won’t be back, and this is where people who don’t understand the entrepreneurial cycle fail to see the real danger: Small business creates a sizable majority of jobs in the United States. If you’ve just gone out and created a business, and had it wrecked by a government-ordered closure, and probably lost substantial money, or worse, had your entire life’s work demolished, assuming you find yourself in the position to launch another business some day, would you? Why? The next time a virus comes along, the government might just shut you down again.
It isn’t simply that this response to this virus was overblown and entirely unnecessary, but that the entire methodology is bankrupt, unfeasible, and wrong. We must never permit this kind of shutdown again. Ever. Under any circumstance. We have created a situation that will take years to repair, if it can be fully repaired at all. Your individual rights are not and must not be subjected to the vagaries of virologists’ models. Your liberties must never be placed in the hands of governors, mayors, county judges, and other elected numb-skulls whose motives and decisions will always be dominated by politics, their public declarations to the contrary notwithstanding.
Ladies and gentlemen, the worst aspect of the great WuFlu shutdown of 2020 is the precedent set by permitting government to behave this way in the first place. The very idea that the government can order the shutdown of the country is a preposterous notion. This is tyranny, whether you’ve recognized it or not. For the business owners whose concerns are now in serious jeopardy, if not already wrecked, this much is obvious. They’re carrying the largest burden in this entire fiasco, and those of us who do not bear their burdens should be thoughtful about the losses they face as a result. It is their lives and liberties, along with the properties of these entrepreneurs that have been cast onto the pyre of sacrifices created by this exercise of government authority.
I believe President Trump has been played, and the economy laid waste as a result of his desire to safeguard the lives of Americans. I believe the people upon whose guidance he relied are not all good people with innocent or virtuous motives. I also believe that certain elements opportunistically joined into this attack on our country. I know the President was trapped between doing what he believed at the time to be the best path for saving lives and what he knew would be catastrophic for the long-term economic and financial health of the country. I can forgive him for his motive of protecting and saving lives, but I’m less forgiving in another aspect: He should have recognized that the people around him were simply another brand of deep-state players, equally corrupt and equally apt to carry out a different form of a coup d’etat. If you don’t see that this has been the motive, I’d urge you to look more closely.
From: Cheryl MillsTo: Hillary Clinton Date: 2013-01-23 11:21Subject: TODAY’S PERFORMANCE
UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05797268 Date: 12/31/2015 RELEASE IN FULL
From: Mills, Cheryl D <MillsCD@state.gov>
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2013 6:21 PM
To:
Subject: FW: Today’s performance From your doctor admirer From: Fauci, Anthony (NIH/NIAID) [E] [mailto:AFAUCI@niaid.nih.gov]
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2013 6:10 PM
To: Mills, Cheryl D
Subject: Today’s performance
Cheryl: Anyone who had any doubts about the Secretary’s stamina and capability following her illness had those doubts washed away by today’s performance before the Senate and the House. She faced extremely difficult circumstances at the Hearings and still she hit it right out of the park. Please tell her that we all love her and are very proud to know her.
Warm regards,
Tony Anthony S. Fauci, MD
Director National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
Building 31, Room 7A-03 31 Center Drive, MSC 2520
National Institutes of Health Bethesda, MD 20892-2520 Phone: (301) 496-2263 FAX: (301) 47-4409
E-mail: afauci
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I live in Texas. I spent the weekend hunkering down in the deluge of the Northern-most outer bands of Hurricane Harvey. Though not nearly as bad off as those under the hurricane and subsequent tropical storm away to our South and Southeast, we will have our share of drenching rains and attendant flash-flooding. Watching television, I am struck by how Texas elected officials are spending so much time in front of cameras, including even Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. During several weekend appearances on FoxNews, Paxton reassured the audience that Texas has some of the strongest “anti-gouging” statutes anywhere in the country, with additional or enhanced penalties for those who “take advantage of the elderly.” I’ve seen enough of this in my lifetime to know that these laws are abominable. Not only do they violate the property rights of traders, but they also cause an irrational element to rush into our economics. Politicians of any party who support these laws do so in opposition to all the laws of the universe, and further degrade our social fabric by institutionalizing vast immorality. I urge the immediate repeal of such laws, and constitutional amendments at both the state and federal levels that would implement severe punishments on any public official who would attempt to intercede in this fashion dress in the free market. These laws result in the misallocation of resources, the violation of individual liberties on a massive scale, and in some instances, additional death and mayhem. Perhaps worst of all, it encourages complacency and sloth, rewarding both with unjustifiably low prices, while punishing those who had the foresight and self-discipline to plan ahead.
If you purchase a large stock of some commodity, let’s use bottled water as our example, well in advance of some localized or regional emergency, with the notion of selling it at some future date for a profit, you’re simply doing business. If there comes to be some shortage of bottled water, you would be in a good position relative to the market, and would be able to increase your price to whatever level the market would bear. The equilibrium price for bottled water would shift dramatically upward, and you would make a tidy profit, in a free market. In Texas, as in many other states and localities, there are laws that prohibit the raising of prices for commodities for various items and commodities when an emergency is declared. This extends to items like generators, pumps, flashlights, and other items frequently needed in the aftermath of some calamity, natural or otherwise. The idea is that those who sell such items should not be left in a position to “take advantage of an emergency.”
This is a ridiculous notion. Every trade in any market under every condition is a situation of either the buyer or seller (and most frequently, both,) believing they are in the more advantageous position in the trade. What politicians call “price-gouging” is merely the natural result of a free market in the face of scarcity. What politicians cynically do is to take advantage of the consumers’ sentiments in this situation. If there are any profiteers in an emergency, people who are abusing their positions to make undue gains on the basis of tragedies, it is the politicians who make political hay off of disasters. These laws, all of them, are immoral and fly in the face of all rational economic theories. Let’s examine the consequences:
The owner of the commodity, in this case the seller/reseller is prohibited from getting the greatest possible value from his/her foresight, investment, and simple commercial activities. Why would anybody go through the trouble of stock-piling any commodity of any description, dealing with transportation and storage, as well as distribution, if merely the act of maximizing one’s profits is an activity to be punished? This means if you merely prepare, following the model of the ant rather than the grasshopper, you can be seen as profiting from a disaster. Obviously, the net effect of this will be to discourage the stockpiling of commodities in the private market, and that can have yet another unintended consequence: Increased human suffering.
Human suffering will be increased under these laws because it doesn’t matter how cheaply a commodity may be priced if it’s unavailable in the place it’s needed at the time it’s needed, for customers willing and able to pay. Imagine if this same mindset was applied to other aspects of life. Take for example the “convenience store.” Nobody would buy anything at the prices charged for common items in your average convenience store except for the fact that why you’re paying the premium price is for the convenience of getting the goods when you need them, where you happen to be when that need arises. Naturally, if you apply the same notions manifest in these immoral “anti-gouging” statutes, then all convenience stores should go out of existence. In fact, so should all big-box stores. All grocery stores should likewise go out of existence. In fact, anybody between the producer and consumer should be forced out of business if you are to take this idea to its logical conclusion, because what they all do is to profit by providing a convenience and efficiency in distribution.
Naturally, the things these statist villains ignore is their unremitting violence against individual liberty. Some of these people claim to be motivated by justice and freedom, but an examination of their advocacy in this context unmasks the truth: They don’t give a rip about your private property rights, or your life, or anything else. Instead, they care deeply about maintaining power and the politically-obtained positions they enjoy because people don’t think these things through before making emotionally-based demands of their government(s.) If I own a warehouse full of bottle water, having taken the time, having invested the money and effort to build it, maintain it, stock it, and then protect it, why shouldn’t I be able to sell it for whatever price I can obtain? What moral principles are in question? Obviously, this is another example of collectivism versus the individual. More, if I need a bottle of water, who is Ken Paxton or any other politician to insert himself or the force of government if I am willing to pay even one million dollars for a bottle? Does Attorney General Paxton have the right to stop me from drinking? Naturally, because he’s a politician, he would argue that he’s merely forbidding somebody from taking advantage of my thirst, but what if the seller simply says: “Never mind, I’m not interested in selling.” Will Mr. Paxton put a gun to his head and force him to sell at a price Mr. Paxton permits? You bet he will. You can be assured that Mr. Paxton and all the other statist thugs are more than willing to do precisely that for their own political advantage, or to suit their own broken, irrational, and inconsistent moral exigencies.
The other problem with all of this is that it discourages rational behavior and planning. Why worry about keeping a relatively small but nevertheless potentially critical household stock of important commodities? I have many things in excess of my immediate consumption needs, all on the basis of the idea that I don’t have perfect knowledge of all circumstances that may suddenly arise. I have food storage, not a ton, but enough that we could subsist a few weeks, and we have enough water, and in a pinch, we have generators, and if things get really bad, I suppose that horses could come back as a means of transportation. The point is that we all make choices, and some of us make better choices than others. Those who make poor choices or simply act irresponsibly find themselves facing higher costs than those who make better choices and/or choose to prepare. The anti-gouging law favors the irresponsible and those who make poor choices.
On Saturday, during the news coverage, a number of people were shown walking out along a rock out-cropping among the white-capped waves at the coast, taking selfies, and otherwise acting foolishly in what can easily devolve into a life-threatening situation. The newscaster remarked that they were not only risking their lives but also the lives of first responders who would be called upon to save them if they happened to get blown or washed into the bay and caught in the strong current. I am not a first-responder, but were I, I would refuse to risk my life for such people, and the mere fact that we ask first-responders to rescue such irresponsible people is the main reason we have so many irresponsible people. Start letting such fools pay the full cost of their foolishness without any extraordinary measures to rescue them from their own choices, and suddenly, as if by magic, people will begin to make better choices.
Subsidizing sloth and stupidity never profits any society; neither does punishing ambition or foresight. Law should never demand the irrational, and must never impose the immoral, yet that is precisely what these laws manage to do. For the sake of full disclosure, let me state that I am not now nor do I expect at any time in the future to be among those who could profit from the repeal of these laws, inasmuch as I don’t possess any substantial stocks of any commodities beyond those for my own uses. On the other hand, should the day dawn in which I find myself in need of a commodity that has otherwise become scarce, I will be willing to pay such price as may be necessary to obtain it, should I have managed to fail to foresee and prepare.
Scarcity of an item at a particular time and place when combined with the quantity demanded by the market should always be the driver of the equilibrium price. When government intercedes in economics, it always, always has [allegedly]unintended negative results, even though governments and their cohorts in media do their level best to hide this fact from you. A more recent example of this is the debate over the repeal of Obama-care. Government stooges claim that were Obama-care to be repealed, some millions of people would lose their coverage. What government stooges and their cohorts in media do not track, and desperately do not want you to track, is the number of people who lost coverage or saw the value of their coverage destroyed by the institution of Obama-care. Government stooges do not want you to see the people who, in order to avoid the government fine, pay for insurance their health and risk levels would not justify. Nobody tracks the opportunity cost of where all those dollars might have been spent or saved in other ways, that might have made marked improvements in the present or future standards of living of the people in question. No, such numbers are harder to derive, and it’s much easier to claim some ridiculous numbers on the basis of who is in the government program at present as some measure of the program’s alleged successes.
I am certain that on some future date, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will claim that some number of Texans were spared from price-gouging by the immoral law he now so adamantly enforces, but there will never be a day when there will be a count of the people who were deprived of commodities because there was no seller selling it, due to the lack of potential profit. Paxton, like every other statist thug on the planet, will claim a victory. It is no different from Venezuela, where their dictators, current and previous, proclaimed victory over the free market by the compulsory lowering of prices, but not one word will be uttered about the extreme shortages of all the basic commodities, even toilet paper. None but the politically-connected elites can find food or toilet paper, no matter the price.
One of the more frustrating things I encounter daily is the absolutely thorough economic ignorance of most people. Clearly, our public schools don’t teach economics, or to the degree they do, it is only of the fraudulent Marxist derivatives. One person I spoke with this morning complained bitterly of the twenty cent jump in the cost of gasoline we’ve seen since Friday, and actually applied the term “price-gouging” to describe it. This is the prevailing nonsense among most of our people, and it is the reason cynical politicians like Mr. Paxton are able to make so much mileage on such immoral, irrational laws.
The truth is that at the moment, roughly one-fourth of the refining capacity of the United States is shut down in the wake of Harvey, and only some fraction of that will come back on-line soon. The distribution chain is broken, with all of the flooding and so on, such that fuel tankers that routinely transport truckloads of fuel through the remainder of the state are not able to maintain their normal delivery schedules. This leads first to spot shortages, as some gas stations run out of the commodity. Depending upon how long this goes on, it will spread in broader and broader bands of localized shortages. This drives prices. Gas stations do not keep a large inventory of fuel. They get daily deliveries, sometime multiple daily deliveries, and the price is adjusted based on the expected quantity demanded. In any such environment, prices go up, and they can ratchet up quickly. Much of it will depend on how quickly the refining and distribution channels are restored. Still, most Americans do not understand economics, and don’t really care to. Instead, like the throngs of the economically ignorant in Caracas, Venezuela, they only demand, but do not know anything about how the commodities they take for granted are delivered to them at the time and place they need them, or how that production and distribution chain is at the mercy of all sorts of factors. No, like the multitude of nitwits who AG Paxton is racing to reassure, they only demand. They give no thought to supply, or to its scarcity.
This is the direct byproduct of a people now too accustomed to governmental intervention in all facets of the free market. Rather than a people who understand economics, and who understand the concepts of supply and demand, we have instead a country of people who expect the government to solve all their problems, and they believe that prices higher than they will happily pay are a problem to be addressed by government. If you consider the absurdity of a people who will happily queue-up for the latest iPhone, shelling out hundreds of dollars for a device that can be made useless at any moment by a strong wind in their vicinity, who will not happily pay one hundred dollars for a case of bottled water in the place they find themselves in a time of scarcity, you begin to recognize the problem. These are the same people who believe Internet should just “exist,” and bandwidth should just “be there,” without payment, and without cost to them, the consumers. This economic irrationality is exceeded in scale only by the immorality of those who accept it.
We will become a country like Venezuela. Some will say that we will have deserved it. Those who say that will not have been wrong.
Analysts will study this election for years to come. Donald Trump overcame a media and political establishment that had dismissed him from the outset of his campaign. There’s no doubt that they believed Trump would become a footnote in political history books, and that much like they were able to politically defame and largely demolish the Tea Party, they expected to put his supporters out of their minds and simply dismiss them in the same way. IF you remember back in 2009, and 2010, Barack Obama was dismissive of the Tea Party movement that was just erupting, and he wouldn’t even acknowledge them, instead leaving DC when they arranged for their huge march. The left thought they would apply the same tactics to Donald Trump and his supporters, and that would do the trick for them again. Marginalized, defamed, and categorized as “racist, sexist nut-jobs,” they expected to run right over the army of Trump supporters with equal indifference. Donald Trump was of another mind, and that certainly played a remarkable role, but having examined the election returns, I’m prepared to say what I think made the difference. Analysts will study and fret, trying to discover some secret key to what made them lose, or miss the analysis, but they’re all missing the point. It’s really much simpler than all of the nuance and rationalization that’s been going on in the last twelve hours. It really isn’t rocket science, and a cursory examination of the results will bear this out: Donald Trump won the election in 2016 because too many Americans have been desperate for change for much too long, and because the current president and his administration(but also much of the Congress) have been entirely indifferent to the suffering they’ve inflicted.
Leftists never consider the impact of their policies on individuals. Their rationalizations are always constructed under the skewed microscope of the collectivized “good” as they conceive it. If imposing a healthcare program on the entirety of the nation results in a driving-up of costs for average Americans, while only covering a small number of additional Americans, they don’t care. If they evaluate their program at all, their conclusion will inevitably be that they must tax more and impose larger penalties for those who refuse to participate. Never do they hesitate to consider that for most Americans, even those not formally a part of the Obama-care program, the net effect for most Americans of the mere existence of this law has been to drive up out-of-pocket costs for every person who is a net payer, and by some dramatic proportions in many instances. The statists simply do not care about these impacts, and won’t even consider them in their political calculus. It is this baked-in tone-deafness of the left that makes for the sort of shock they experienced in the wee hours of this morning when they realized Donald Trump would become president.
Leftists only talk to one another. The entire media establishment is so thoroughly rife with leftists that they cannot see any point of view but their own. Disagreement is not tolerated, and other points of view are summarily dismissed, mocked, and otherwise defamed. Worst of all, perhaps, they seem to exist within a sort of echo-chamber that leads them to believe things that simply aren’t so, and this blinds them to reality, again, setting them up for the sort of massive failure they experienced on Election Day 2016.
In this election, what they failed to perceive is something rather simple, and it’s been right there before them since 2009, but they’ve stubbornly ignored it, as if by ignoring it, it would simply not exist. This ostrich-like behavior meant they would not hear the desperation in the voices of average Americans, with whom they have very little contact, and who are, in their view, simply the insignificant people of “flyover country.”
This is where Donald Trump won, but let’s be more explicit about who it was that dragged him across the finish line to victory: In the last week of the campaign, in horror over the looming possibility of a Clinton presidency, Republicans began to “come home” as Vice Presidential nominee Mike Pence had implored, but with them, a broad range of people who are largely middle, middle-class, white, and of lower educational credentials. Contrary to the beliefs of the fools in Washington DC, and in the media generally, credentials do not alone describe one’s intelligence or lack thereof. Credentials make no difference whatsoever to people who are starving in sight of a bounty, denied access to it only by the aggression of government.
The knot-heads in colleges and universities who believe their credentials give them some special insight, and are of the sort who have attached too much importance to their own stations in life, and too little of the situations of their fellow Americans. This is magnified by those in the media, and those in Washington DC, all of whom have seemed to believe they are the smartest people in any room, perpetually. Donald Trump is to be credited for recognizing it. The challenge for Donald Trump is to avoid “blowing it” by forgetting this lesson. The people who elected Donald Trump are largely those who have been demolished by the giant regulatory and welfare state. They’ve lost homes and businesses, or simply now work a ridiculous number of hours simply to keep the lights on, and they’ve seen their personal aspirations and their hopes for their children squandered by government that does not care for the dreams of individual people. This is the lesson the left would learn, if they were not so tone-deaf, and if they did not wear blinders in the presence of “inconvenient truths.” It’s also the lesson Donald Trump must not forget, lest he squander the very awesome opportunity he’s been granted by the American people, albeit with some significant skepticism.
In simplest terms, what won this election for Donald Trump is the absolute desperation of the American people. What put him over the top is simply a desperate appeal to the fates by those who realized, even entering the polling places, that Hillary Clinton’s America would offer them no hope, and no chance at recovery, and perhaps worst of all, no sympathy even from those who imposed this decline. It was a last, plaintive act of self-defense for a people who have watched their lives diminished, their very liberties under constant threat of summary debasement, and their hopes for their children and grandchildren’s future foreclosed. These are the people who have funded the welfare state, under the ever more punishing blows of government’s whips, while they’ve gone without meals and fell behind on bills and been unable to fund their kids’ education while they’ve paid for the educations of others. These are the folk who eat Macaroni and Cheese or Ramen noodles three or four times weekly, while in line at the grocery store, they stand in fuming and smoldering, in ever more indignant anger behind the throngs of EBT card users who enjoy surf-and-turf paid for by the folk eating bare subsistence rations. These are the people who struggle to make mortgage payments, only to find the value of their homes in steep decline as the statists in Washington DC use public housing benefits to place entitled peoples into their formerly nice neighborhoods, new but unappreciative residents who frequently make a wreckage of the nice dwellings they’ve been provided.
Imagine the veteran, who has done his duty and wishes merely to make a living and enjoy his life, but finds his rights are under constant assault by the statists. He might have a gun or two, and he might like to hunt, or simply shoot at paper targets, only to find that he’s been lumped-together with terrorists by the likes of Hillary Clinton, who live under a shield of heavily-armed security forces, but who do not trust law-abiding citizens who arm themselves for sport, for hunting, and for self-defense. To know that at any moment, under the auspices of some arbitrary law, one may find his guns outlawed, and his rights turned into the claim of a criminal is to know the terror of too many Americans who have become too accustomed to being ruled by a President who boast of having “a pen and a phone.”
For too long, too many Americans have watched their standard of living in sharp decline, while working harder, and taking on more difficult but also more poorly-compensated jobs, knowing that the society around them is filled with people who don’t work at all, ever, but who also manage to live at least as well as the poor slobs who work sixty, seventy, and eighty hours per week. These are people interested in justice, who want to see hard work rewarded, and slothfulness and incompetence punished, as nature would dictate. These are people who follow the law, no matter how much it may be to their detriment, never willing to give an excuse to those who govern them to further deprive them of liberty. They look around and see that the system of law and justice serves only the corrupt and the criminal, while they must live in perpetual fear of the next new law in violation of which they might act, in simple ignorance. It has been long-declared and well-established that “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” except that there are now so many laws that none can possibly know all that apply to their lives and endeavors. Government bureaucrats have no sympathy for that reality, and the statists care not for the plights of individual men and women.
It is the mother who works many hours, who may or may not have a husband to help pull that wagon, and who have finally discovered that their lives and labors and their love of their children is under unflagging attack. They live in terror of the next electric bill, an inflated grocery bill, and they don’t understand why they must pay not only for themselves and their families but the families of others whose exertions are minimal.
It is a family who sees their values and moral standards under continuous attack. They find that they must de-propagandize their children daily upon their arrival from the public schools, that teach no values except as collectivized notions, and who most often stand at odds with the interests of the family, its children, and its parents.
All of these people and many more like them are the reasons Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. They were desperate. They need relief. They need a respite from the never-ending assaults on their lives, liberties, and wallets. They need somebody, somewhere, to finally understand that the grand ideas conceived in Washington DC most often result in disasters for the people who live in “flyover country.” In a final desperate act of self-defense, they decided to take a chance on Donald Trump, knowing that Hillary Clinton offered only more of the same, and perhaps represented the final nail in their individual coffins.
Donald Trump has a fantastic opportunity, and I for one wish him well, and I sincerely hope he will not squander it. Too many politicians make a mockery of the people who’ve elected them, forgetting their promises, or remembering them while conveniently finding ways to avoid carrying them out. Donald Trump can win re-election easily in four years if he will only do the following:
Secure the nation, build the wall and enforce the nation’s existing immigration law. Mexico needn’t pay for it, but it must be built
Re-institute justice for all, including particularly the rich and powerful
Cut taxes on those who work for a living – and if he reallywants the favor of the working stiff, make only the firstforty hours of labor taxable
Repeal Obamacare (but don’treplace it with some other mandatory, equally tyrannical program)
Get control of the exploding welfare state, from the cost side, but also from the point of view of sheer extravagance and enticement to dependency
Make America a place great for business again, so that people can work and prosper by their own efforts
Rescind Obama’s lengthy list of Executive Orders
Take care of our veterans and make sparing use of a rebuilt and revitalized military relieve of silly but dangerous social engineering
Appoint judges who will follow the explicit mandates of the US Constitution
Never forget the individual aspirations and dreams of individual Americans in signing(or vetoing) laws and issuing executive orders
If Donald Trump will merely do these things, I suspect he will get a forty-state(or better) win for re-election in four years, if he wants it. This is the truth of how Donald Trump won. He won because for too many Americans, the situation has become far too dire. I expect that he will have a short honeymoon period with the vast bulk of the American people. If he can make strides to substantially carry out the important parts of the agenda he’s outlined, and can merely make a credible stab at fulfilling the short but difficult list above, he will succeed like no President since at least Ronald Reagan. He has that chance. He has every reason to do it. The question now remains: Will he?
Like a large number of Americans who closed the gap and pushed him over the top, I have nothing but well-wishes and the best hopes for Donald Trump’s presidency. It was a last, desperate act of self-defense for so many Americans who determined that he was an imperfect vessel, but at least there’s a chance he won’t be nearly so foul and depraved as Hillary Clinton, whatever he may have done in the past. We voted for Donald Trump because we knew Hillary would only worsen things, and at least with Donald Trump, there’s some inkling that he might drag the country in the correct direction for a change. It’s become as desperate as that for too many Americans. I hope he will recognize this, if he hasn’t already, and act accordingly to secure their continuing support. He has referred to them as the “forgotten Americans.” In his remarks after Hillary Clinton’s concession phone call, he offered a glimmer that their hope is justified.
Congratulations and good luck to Donald Trump and Mike Pence, along with all those who supported him from the beginning. May their fortunes rise and fall in accordance with their fidelity to the people and to the Constitution of the United States. Therein lies the cause of Hillary’s defeat and the repudiation of Obama’s legacy.
Watching the 2016 election season unfold, I’ve become a bit tired of two things in particular about the media, and Donald Trump. In the first instance, Trump is wholly unwilling to discuss details of his plans, and the media dutifully accepts his empty rhetoric in an unquestioning manner almost as thorough as some of his supporters. In the second instance, Mr. Trump is lying, and it’s a big lie that we conservatives must debunk. It could be that Trump is just ignorant, so that when he spews his lie, he’s simply the parroting of talking points emanating from the rabid left and the DC establishment. Either way, a lie is a lie, whether it originated from Trump’s own mind, or he’s merely passing it along unthinkingly. So what’s this big lie? On Thursday, Trump tweeted that conservatives are to blame and that conservatives have failed the country. This couldn’t be further from the truth, but once again, debunking it requires the examination of a few salient details. His throngs of supporters won’t be moved by this, just as they won’t be moved by any other rational argument. By and large, they’re proving immune to facts, reason, and details. It should come as no surprise to conservatives that in one respect, I think there’s a nugget of truth that makes Trump’s lie seem superficially plausible, but it’s just a nugget. It’s time to deconstruct Trump’s lie.
The first thing one must consider in answer to Trump’s assertion is: “Who are the conservatives?” The truth in answer to this question is that actual, thinking, breathing, ideological conservatives constitute a minority of the Republican party. The truth is that there are almost no actual conservatives in Washington DC, and to have been the party to blame for the state of the country, that is where one would have needed to be, not simply in a geographical sense, but in the sense of political efficacy. Actual conservatives haven’t had any power to speak of in Washington DC for nearly two generations. From the time of the middle of Reagan’s second term, there has been little one could properly label as “conservative” in our nation’s capital. Where one can find any justification of Trump’s lie, despite the reality, is that for too long, we conservatives have let people who had no real attachment to conservatism pose as our representatives.
George H.W. Bush was no conservative. Bob Dole was no conservative. George W. Bush was no conservative. John McCain is no conservative. Mitt Romney is no conservative. I can extend this list to include current candidates like Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Marco Rubio to an extent, and any number of other conventional Republican politicians. Paul Ryan is certainly no conservative, but neither were his immediate predecessors, John Boehner and Dennis Hastert. Mitch McConnell and his caucus of establishment Republican cronies aren’t conservatives either, but the problem is that we have permitted them to claim conservatism, and we’ve allowed them to thereby define conservatism by the association with us. Most Americans simply don’t pay much attention to politics, and in their barely-informed state of political ignorance, they’ve accepted the following basic formula: Republican = Conservative. They may have accepted also: Democrat = Liberal. Both of these are tragically wrong, and I will suggest to my conservative brethren that we are at least somewhat collectively guilty for letting this stick.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve permitted this to happen. We’ve been so busy trying to expand the “big tent” of conservatism that we’ve permitted the party-crashers of the establishment to redefine what conservatism is, at least in the popular culture, by their constant association with us. It’s been going on since Teddy Roosevelt, who was a progressive in Republican clothing. For my part, here on this website, I’ve always endeavored to make clear the distinctions. One cannot go through the columns of these pages and make any mistake about the fact that the form of conservatism advocated and advanced here has no relation whatsoever to the Republican party, never mind its establishment.
Of course, the truth is far removed from Trump’s nonsensical allegation. Most actual conservatives, I’d nearly assert all, do not support the actions of the establishment, moderate, “center-right” wing of the Republican party. Most conservatives actually detest those people, and would replace them with actual conservatives if it was in their power to do. Every time conservatives have gone along with the GOP establishment in order to try to move things in the right direction, two things have been true almost without exception: The GOP establishment betrays us, and we wind up moving backward. A case in point is immigration: Those who call themselves “conservative” but are aligning themselves with Rubio in this election cycle have a very “YUGE” problem: Their guy is an amnesty-monger, having proposed the most exasperatingly un-conservative bill proposed by a Republican in quite a long time. The so-called “Gang-of-8” bill was a nation-destroying monstrosity, and it would never have attained launch, much less threatened passage, without the efforts of people who claim to be “conservative.”
This is the problem exposed by Trump’s lie: It’s only plausible because we conservatives permit others to define what is conservatism. We permit the misapplication of the term to people who may on occasion, for their own political expedience(and too frequently, ours) to associate with us and our body of political philosophy. Since the greatest number of Americans don’t really pay that much attention, and use generic labels in order to short-cut thinking, we have a responsibility as conservatives to define what that means, and to take great pains to differentiate conservatives from anything else.
The facts supporting Trump’s assertion dissolve the moment one asks: “What is a conservative?” The laundry list of non-conservatives mentioned above is just a sample, but it should serve as a decent basis for understanding the problem in its proper context. When Donald Trump talks about “the conservatives failed,” what he’s actually saying is that “Republicans have failed.” That’s demonstrably true. The problem is that conservatives haven’t failed, largely since they’ve never really held power in Washington, except for the briefest few years immediately after the ’94 “revolution” in the House of Representatives. Even its leader, Newt Gingrich, isn’t really a conservative, but some of the people around him were, and a few of the people who led early efforts in those environs were, but they were short-lived as was the influence of conservatism. To find substantial, muscular conservatism, one must return to the first term of Reagan’s presidency, which is why conservatives so thoroughly long for a Reagan-like leader. It’s also why the fakers, the so-called moderates in the GOP, can’t wait to bury Ronald Reagan in long-forgotten history of the Republic.
We conservatives must separate ourselves from the GOP establishment in a political and cultural sense. We must create clear separation from the party’s moderates because by failing to do so, we permit the broadest brush to be used in defining our cause, our philosophy, and our values. It won’t be easy to do, but I believe it must be done. The most promising of the current crop of GOP candidates, who may be able to draw this distinction, is probably Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX,) simply because on so many issues near and dear to the hearts and minds of conservatives, he bucked the political trends in Washington DC, abandoning even his own party at times, apparently on the basis of principle. It may be that for him to fully set conservatism apart from the muck of establishment GOP politics, he will find himself required to loudly and forcefully make the distinction clear, not merely in his words, but in the clear-thinking actions of his office, so long as he may be in it. Otherwise, Trump will succeed in painting him, and conservatism, as just more representative of the whole of the Republican party, and with such a faulty attribution of blame, conservatism label will continue to be the generic container into which the wider voting public will file all Republicans. I suspect Trump knows all of this, but his campaign isn’t one of nuance or detail. Quite to the contrary, his campaign is one of generic sloganeering, with thinly-veiled emotional appeals substituted in place of syllogisms.
It’s because I do believe that Trump knows the difference that I consider this attack on conservatism to be a lie on his part. There is some small chance that he is so thoroughly ignorant that he doesn’t understand the distinction, but I suspect that’s not the problem. I believe that Trump is gambling on and playing to the electorate in a disingenuous fashion, knowing that his prospective voters don’t understand the distinctions anyway, and won’t be motivated to discover them. Thus far, he’s been largely correct in this assumption, although it remains to be seen whether it will hold up through the entire campaign season.
The problem for conservatives is “Yuge” because they’re stuck in the same sort of problem, in almost exactly the same fashion, as is the basic reputation of “capitalism.” This is not coincidental. Capitalism continues to be blamed for all the evils of statism, in its various manifestations, because few are interested in learning the distinctions between what America’s actual economic system is, and why capitalism bears no actual resemblance. In much the same fashion that we haven’t even had approximately conservative governance in more than a generation, so too is it the case that capitalism was vanquished in America by the enactment of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The Sherman Act is wholly antithetical to capitalism, and whatever economic system we may have had since, it is not and cannot be labeled as “capitalism.” Of course, once again, the propagandists for statism have managed to re-cast the meaning of the term in precisely the same way that “conservatism” has been redefined so as to include all “Republicans.” It’s nonsense, of course, but that fact does not stop them from doing it. One must be attentive to details, in a disciplined way. It’s an article of faith among those same propagandists that our system of government be referred to as “democracy,” but that bears little resemblance to the actual form of government our Constitution’s framers designed and ratified. The United States is, by definition of its organizing document, a “constitutional representative republic,” but too often, as a matter of ease and propaganda, folks drop that longer, much narrower description, and it is to the detriment of the body politic, unless you happen to be a propagandist or advocate for statism.
The truth Trump won’t tell you is that had conservatives had their way over the last three decades, we would never have approached the state of desperate gloom under which we now suffer. What he won’t tell you is that statism is the responsible political philosophy, in large measure because he has been among its practitioners and advocates. When he proposes solving the “student loan problem” with another government program, he’s advancing statism. When he proposes replacing Obamacare with what seems to be a Canadian or British-styled single-payer healthcare system, he’s proposing more statism. He’s doubling down. When he states that eminent domain is an important tool in private initiatives, he is declaring statism in big, broad terms, while he is defiling the good name of capitalism to do it. Donald Trump isn’t a capitalist, but instead a cronyist. He has greased palms and bought favors with campaign contributions as much as any person who has ever sought the office of President, and maybe more. His well-documented use of government officials and offices in the name of his private concerns is evidence neither of capitalism, nor conservatism, and that to date, he has gotten away with this mislabeling and slander is at least in part the fault of we conservatives.
After all, it’s the same thing: Jeb Bush calls himself a “conservative” and most of us won’t bother to debunk his claim. His brother called himself a “compassionate conservative,” but too few of us challenged his claim though it was obvious in most notable respects that his presidency was rife with the growth of statism, and the advancement of anti-capitalist measures.
Yes, Donald Trump is probably going to succeed in blaming conservatism for the sins of GOP establishment, moderate actions. His lie will stand mostly unchallenged because most of us will not even stand for our claimed political philosophy. While I can’t do a thing about that, I can and will continue to speak out about the lies of Trump in this regard: Conservatism is not to blame for the ills of this country, any more than one can blame capitalism, and for the same exact reason: We haven’t practiced either in so long that the terms have lost their true meaning. Trump knows this, and he’s gambling that his supporters won’t discover it either. It’s our job, the job of actual conservatives, to educate the electorate on the differences.
Editor’s Note: The Tweet image was added again after the fact because either I didn’t save the article with that image in it, or it dropped it, or something or other. Anyway, that is what I am referencing. Conservatives didn’t HELP the GOP betray its voters.
Saturday afternoon, I took a little bit of time to watch some news. I flipped over to FoxNews, and there I witnessed Mickey Cargile explaining to openly supportive host Eric Shawn and his audience that drug prices are a moral issue, and a quality of life issue, more than economic issue. I couldn’t agree more. His conclusion, however, was based on the moral system of collectivism. I realize that the anchors and stories on FoxNews on weekends tend to be the “B-Team” or even the “C-Team,” but this is despicable. Watch for yourself:
Apparently, Cargile believes this is a moral issue, but unfortunately, his moral standard is collectivism. He ignores entirely the morality of a civilized country inasmuch as he openly attacks private property rights, private wealth, and the freedom to choose. Reading between the lines, he’s advocating some sort of government-enforced price control at the very least, and perhaps even complete expropriation at the worst. This implies violence. In order to enforce such a thing, what one is saying is that one is ready to kill people in order to take their things if they do not otherwise consent.
The host, for his part, is no better. He smears the owners of the rights to the Hepatitis C treatment under discussion as people who are merely out to profit, first, as if profit is somehow an evil, and second in that they might use that profit to “buy a new Ferrari.” This shameful broadcast merely confirms my contention that FoxNews is all about co-opting conservatism. There’s nothing remotely conservative in this, Cargile’s protests about his continuing devotion to the free market notwithstanding.
For those who don’t understand the principles involved, let us be clear: If you invent a thing, and I purchase the rights to that thing from you, my moral claim to the thing in question is every bit as legitimate as yours when you had invented the thing. More, since it’s now my thing, I have the absolute right to buy it and sell it as I see fit, and the only moral method by which to obtain it is to pay the price at which we arrive by mutual consent. Any government interference in that exchange, either to my benefit or to a purchaser’s, is tyranny.
What Cargile advocates in this clip is tyranny. What the hapless Mr. Shawn approvingly supports is no different from what Hugo Chavez had imposed in that poor, enslaved, collapsing communist state that is Venezuela: Communism. The closer we get to complete collapse, and the more people begin to shrug their shoulders over the concepts and moral standing of individual rights, the more rapidly our collapse will accelerate.
One might argue, as the communists at FoxNews seem to insist, that there is some maximum amount that ought to be charged for some life-saving, or quality-of-life-preserving drug or treatment. My question for you is: Had I Hepatitis C, how much of my earnings would I forego for how long a period to finance a cure? Is there any amount of money I would not pay? One might argue, as the dolts on FoxNews have done here, that such a burden is unaffordable, and use this as a justification to steal. Theft via government action is still theft, even though done under color of law. The fact that the government was placed in office by vote does not reduce the significance of the crime, but merely multiplies the number of criminals and broadens the expanse of the guilt(though its concentration is not diluted.)
With this sort of thing becoming the norm on FoxNews, as further evidence of the spread of collectivist ethics throughout the culture, we cannot and will not last.
I hear and read endless speculation about this one and that one, and who’s in and who’s out, always superseded by the next day’s news, and always bereft of any measurable facts. All of this can be both entertaining and frustrating. All of it may be altogether pointless. You see, the country is dying now. By the time a new president is inaugurated in January of 2017, on our present course, it may not make any difference. The country may be closing in on that tipping point, if we haven’t passed it already, at which nothing will be done to save us, irrespective of party, principles, or propaganda. Our nation is deathly ill, if not terminal, and yet the politicians continue to chatter on as though there’s no end in sight. Ignoring the stock market, which is many thousands of points over-valued due to cheap money practices at the Federal Reserve, this economy is a wreck. As always, I urge my readers exercise care in what they believe or are willing to consider plausible. In this post, I intend to revisit a topic I haven’t covered in a long while, because I think you ought to consider it. The subject is the very real possibility of a hyperinflationary great depression that will make the 1930s look like a day at the beach.
As a reference to what hyperinflation looks like, here’s a graph of the infamous hyperinflation in the German Weimar Republic:
German Hyperinflation 1918-1924 (Wikipedia)
Long-time readers will remember I have used John Williams’ ShadowStats website as a reference in the past. The nature of Mr. Williams’ warning hasn’t change, except to become substantially more strident inasmuch as such a calamity now seems to be possible at any moment. For those of you who don’t remember, here was his Hyperinflation forecast of 2012:
In these reports, Mr. Williams goes to extraordinary lengths to describe to you what I’ve told you right along, since the birth of this website: Any alleged “economic recovery” was a fraud, and the nation is in deepening financial and economic trouble. Naturally, it’s not as though you hadn’t suspected it on your own, the obvious signs being what they are, but with the drumbeat of media, many people are soothed into complacency over a long enough time such that they begin to doubt what their own eyes and wallets are telling them. In these most recent installments, Williams goes into great detail, putting numbers to the assumptions, providing actual data to support his conclusions. In this sense, it is time for another reality check, because while the bulk of the people you know may well be ignoring hard reporting, in favor of popular media garbage, somebody ought to be warning them. Chances are that being the good citizens most readers here tend to be, and being the sort of people who are trying to save their nation from disaster, you’ve been warning them right along. Now, when they dismiss your warnings, you can dare them to read these reports.
If you’re among that number of people who are desirous of dismissing all of this as “Chicken Little” talk, I’d dare you directly. Read these reports and if you aren’t at least a bit concerned, concerned enough to learn more, there’s no reaching you anyway. In 2011, Sarah Palin and others were sounding the alarm. She was ridiculed and mocked, but the hard data supported her warnings. All along, I’ve been warning you of the dangers of the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve, and the grotesque expenditures of the Federal Government. In the years since 2008, when this latest crisis began, the Fed has borrowed into existence a sum approaching(if not exceeding) fifty trillion dollars.
All of this money-printing or “digitizing” will necessarily lead to a calamity of unprecedented scale. There can be no escape from the laws of economics, any more than there can be an escape from the law of gravity. The only question is: When? As Mr. Williams points out in his report, the conditions are already in place. It’s simply a matter of triggers. With that in mind, I’d ask my readers to prepare to the extent they are able.
Some will argue that all of this is tantamount to alarmist fear-mongering. but Williams does offer this, in his second installment for 2014:
“Conceivably, immediate massive and fiscally painful action by the federal government to restore and maintain long-range U.S. government solvency still could avoid the looming dollar collapse, but the related political issues appear now to have been pushed off until after the 2014 midterm election, again, as those controlling the government continue to push politically-difficult choices and actions as far into the future as possible. That has been explicitly demonstrated in actions by both the White House and Congress in the last several years. Nonetheless, despite political efforts to dodge the issues, the U.S. dollar and the deficit do matter, and the looming financial storm likely will break before the election.”
In other words, getting our financial and fiscal house in order could still serve to avoid this calamity, but as he notes, and as we are all too aware, the probability of that being done is low. The question isn’t “Will there be pain?” The real question is whether it will be pain we choose while we maintain the ability to moderate it, or an uncontrolled and apocalyptic pain from which there will be no recovery. We’re very much like a stage four cancer patient in that only the most radical treatments have any chance of saving us, and the chemotherapy and radiation will be so severe and thorough as to inflict more pain than we might want to endure, but failing to choose this, the results are known and unavoidable.
I have significant doubts as to whether there exists the political will to induce pain via the radical treatments necessary. The politicians in Washington DC are hoping to stave-off this calamity through the current election cycle. I believe this is folly, but I also know they’re banking on the notion that they will be able to deal with this after the election, but you and I know the truth: There’s always another election. The dust will still be settling from the 2014 election when the first real moves for 2016 begin. They will already begin to make the political calculi about how to survive through the next election, or how to save the next election for their respective parties, but none of them will be thinking about any of this. The truth is that saving the nation will be furthest from their minds.
We have a president who is a functional economic illiterate, driven by dogma of a failed ideology. We have a Congress driven by short-run notions of self-preservation of their power. We have a people who possess a low tolerance for bad news in good times, and a complete intolerance for self-imposed discipline particularly where it implies any sort of pain. It’s time to consider what all of this will combine to create in the coming years, if you haven’t done the math already. People are talking about 2016 like that represents some sort of panacea, but ladies and gentlemen, our nation may not make it until 2016.
Editor’s note: I realize that the linked reports from John Williams’ site constitute a fair bit of reading, but like most issues, the devils lie in the details. Understanding the roots of our impending calamity, and the historical precedents as well as the actual manipulations of statistics by the current regime are critical in understanding what is afoot. While it’s a lot of reading, it’s entirely worthwhile.
Note 2: There was an error in the links to the two 2014 reports. These have been fixed.
Walmart has denied that it is changing its policy, even temporarily, on the re-stocking of ammunition. This is according to a WND report. From that article:
“That information is inaccurate,” said Ashley Hardie, a spokeswoman located at Walmart’s corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.
WND then asked whether the retail chain is cutting back on orders of ammunition.
“No,” Hardie said. “We’re continuing to serve our customers as we have in the past.”
She said Walmart’s ammunition sales policy has not changed, even amid talk of gun-control legislation in Washington, D.C.
WND is also reporting that CNSNews, the source of yesterday’s viral story, has in fact pulled the article at this hour. On the other hand, as WND further reports, they had the following information from people not connected with the original story on which Monday’s CNSNews article had been based:
Meanwhile, WND reader Sam Singleton said his local Walmart in Myrtle Beach, S.C., has a very short supply of ammunition. According to Singleton, the store claimed it had received a letter from corporate headquarters on the issue.
“The clerk said they only had what was left on the shelf and that there was a ‘hard lock’ on the reorders. She said they hadn’t been getting any replenishment and that just today the store had received a letter from the corporate office stating that they would not be able to order any replenishment of ammunition, other than some for shotguns.
“She said they were not stocking anything that could be used in an ‘assault-type rifle.’ I said, ‘This is ammunition I use for practice,’ and she said they were just told there was a ‘hard lock’ on ammo sales.”
Another WND reader, Patrick Clemons, reported a similar experience today after he visited the Walmart in Folsom, Calif.
This is all very curious. If we are to believe Walmart’s denials, then it’s hard to square with the reports from various people independently reporting very similar things. Either there is a massive conspiracy to “get Walmart” or there’s a cover-up under way. At any rate, as of this update, Walmart says it’s not true.
In the immediate aftermath of the election, I suggested to readers that the key driver in Barack Obama’s re-election was one particular sub-group of the electorate in which Romney got creamed. I pointed to single mothers as the key group that killed any chance of a Romney victory, and the reason I suggested was simple enough to understand: “Free stuff.” In short, this particular segment of the populace views big government as a “sugar daddy,” and by extension, it’s chief advocate, Barack Obama was the chief beneficiary of this view. I had known that the number of programs and benefits available to women who fit that description was quite amazing, but I had no idea the extent to which this is true. The simple truth of the matter is that unless and until conservatives devise a method by which to change this formula, they are going to lose national elections. The problem they will face in so doing is the screed of the left about a “war on women,” but apart from weak-kneed leadership, afraid of such attacks, if something doesn’t change, the country is already lost.
The first thing that should strike you is that a single mother of two earning only $29K is subsidized to the extent that she has the same effective lifestyle as a similar woman, unsubsidized, earning $69K, because net, the two have around $57K in income and benefits. Effectively doubling her meager gross by virtue of the welfare state’s programs, the woman earning $29K is in pretty good shape. People have lamented to me over the years about people who use foodstamps, but who also load their groceries into awfully nice cars, and the question had been: How can this be? Here’s part of the answer, inasmuch as relieved of the costs of food, medical care, and a tax burden, among other welfare-state benefits, what income is present is freed-up for the purchase of that nicer car. It’s no wonder she has an iPhone 5, because under this construct, she can afford it, since taxpayers are subsidizing to some degree virtually everything else.
Leftists and those of the moderate middle wonder why we conservatives claim that such programs are a disincentive to work, but the facts make it clear. What is the point in bettering oneself if it actually can be a detriment to income, as the chart above makes perfectly clear. At certain thresholds, by earning the next marginal amount, benefits available drop off to the extent that it’s punitive to earn more. This explains well why in certain lines of work, we have the phenomenon of women roughly matching the description, who quit or get themselves fired once they’ve been there a certain period of time, and it’s because they need to keep earning, but they also need to prevent themselves from crossing these thresholds, or “welfare cliffs.”
The challenge to conservatives is to reverse this without being accused of waging a “war on women.” The first thing we need to admit is that such a situation is a travesty, both to the women trapped by this process, and to those who are working outside the blanket of this lavish welfare state. It should never be the case that our people are faced with the choice of placing reason in adversity to morality. Let me try to explain it this way: If you’re that woman earning $29K, you’d be nuts to earn enough money to push you over the cliff. It would diminish and damage your lifestyle, and the lives of your children. At the same time, you would [hopefully] know that to continue to languish on these programs is wrong, but when you look around, you notice everybody around you is doing it, so how wrong can it really be?
This dichotomy is the difficulty we face. We have provided this system, and it is entirely socialistic. Viewed from a big-picture perspective, it’s constructed precisely to create a very socialistic outcome: The net wages and benefits are flat from wage or salary levels of $29K to nearly $70K. The woman who earns $29K is the economic equal of the woman who grosses $40K more. This is an astonishing revelation to many people, who had no idea how thoroughly perverse with socialism this system had really become. Is there any wonder that welfare-to-work initiatives have failed in recent years, to the largest extent? Is there any wonder that job training programs seem to have been largely fruitless?
It’s easy enough to identify the problem once you have the facts before you, but then the question becomes: Whatever shall we do about it? If Congress simply slashes these benefits, they fear they won’t be re-elected, but if they don’t do something soon, they won’t be re-elected anyway because this will have become the daily reality for far too many people to ever reverse it. The problem is that if we don’t reverse it, it’s going to bankrupt us, and that day is coming all too soon. All of this subsidization is being accomplished with borrowed money, and it simply is not sustainable. It’s always difficult to convince people that their best long-run interests are better served by giving up a little in the shorter run, and the evidence is quite obvious when one examines how few people ever put money away for retirement or savings in any form. Part of the reason they’re unable is because the money they’re earning today is being taxed to subsidize others, so that the total effect of this problem is much worse and much more widespread than the superficial conclusions one might draw.
We need a real, thorough examination of our welfare state, but under the current administration, we’ll be lucky if we can merely restrict its growth. This administration knows where its bread is buttered, and it’s not going to yield any ground on this without a brutal fight. The truth may be that this has already doomed us to a financial and monetary collapse of epic proportions. When that happens, it won’t matter any longer because this will come to a screeching halt, and both the single mothers in this scenario will pay a terrible price along with every other American. The left has worked very hard to dissociate any stigma previously attached to such subsidies, so we’re going to need to make more than a financial argument, because this is a problem in largest measure of desperate moral concern. We need adults in the room, but right now, Congress is acting as the elves in Obama’s portrayal of Santa Claus, and the states have become the sleigh, Rudolph, and his eight four-legged friends. It must stop, but in truth, one way or the other, it will stop. The question is whether it stops in a sudden crash, or instead because we decide wisely to apply the brakes. The choice is still yours.
Long time readers will know that I am a fan of Ayn Rand’s greatest work of fiction, Atlas Shrugged, first published in 1957. The famed novel has developed a following over the years because it describes a frighteningly similar world in which the global economy has collapsed, while America remains as the last enclave of a free market, also on its way to collapse under the dogmatic application of the statist doctrine of mass sacrifice. Through the novel, readers are transported to a world in which the news media has become a lapdog for the statists, economic news is contrived and rigged to hide the onrushing collapse, while most people go about their lives with self-constructed blinders by which they are able to permit themselves not to know or even notice the facts of their increasingly dire situation. Rand never intended the book to be prophetic, and yet with each passing day, the global economy and the financial markets provide daily reminders of her fictional work. Economic conditions have grown steadily more awful, and yet we find the media is unwilling to show the American people more than a glimpse of the truth confronting them. It’s as though Rand’s fifty-five year-old novel is being acted out in real life, in a modern setting wherein the technology has changed, but acts merely as another shady disguise behind which to conceal the operative laws of nature. It now appears that Atlas is finally Shrugging.
Government has become an enormous bully, not concerned with improving the economic conditions, but instead with concealing them, and companies across the nation have been forced to collaborate in the deceit. Consider the case of Comcast. The company announced on Tuesday that it would be closing all of its California-based call centers, reducing their number nationwide from thirteen to ten. The original announcement mentioned that the reason the California centers were being closed was due to the extraordinarily high cost of doing business in that state. According to the Mercury News, Comcast spokesman Andrew Johnson said:
“We have concluded that the cost of doing business makes operations in California expensive and very difficult”
Scott Anderson, the chief economist with Bank of the West is quoted in the same article:
“The cost of doing business in California is a well-known problem across the country and among business owners in the United States. With the fiscal problems in California, these expenses will likely get higher. Tax rates may rise in California.”
As bad as that may be on its surface, the truth is far worse. After pressure from the state’s Senate President Pro Tempore, Darrell Steinberg(D-Sacramento,) Comcast withdrew its earlier announcement, backing away from a statement that made clear the cause of the decision for the California closures. From the Belleville News Democrat:
“Instead, it said the California closures were needed for cost efficiencies and to consolidate its Western call centers from 13 to 10, based on customer needs, “rather than geography.” It noted that many customers rely on self-help and online tools to handle their service questions, which meant it doesn’t need as many call centers as in the past.”
I would direct my readers to consider what follows in the same article:
That turnaround was greeted warmly by the Governor’s Office.
“It is unfortunate that Comcast’s announcement to eliminate jobs in California inaccurately placed blame on the state, but I am pleased to see the executives at Comcast taking responsibility and correcting the statement,” said Mike Rossi, the governor’s senior adviser for jobs and business development, in a statement.
The governor’s involvement came after Steinberg issued a personal invitation to Comcast executives to meet “to outline their issues and discuss what my office and the Legislature might do to resolve their concerns.” Pending a meeting, he urged Comcast executives “to reconsider their actions.”
Steinberg said he was “puzzled and extremely disappointed” that Comcast representatives had not contacted his office, which represents the Natomas area, until after making its public announcement.
This is what the beleaguered people of California have as a state government: A Governor who is more concerned with appearances and blame than with the facts. Notice that Comcast is still going to close the centers, and more than 1,000 California workers are still going to lose their jobs, but the company’s official statements now reflect a more politically acceptable cause for the closures. This is the sort of crime-boss mentality that now pervades government, from the Federal Government all the way down to State and local institutions of government. They are no longer concerned with stopping the bleeding, but instead merely concealing it from your eyes, or in this case, merely causing you to believe they hadn’t been the cause.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is precisely the sort of thing that Rand described in her famous novel, and indeed, she even described a breakdown particularly in California, but she was no prophet, much as some might by now be convinced to the contrary. Rand unflinchingly described the world as it is, and what happens when a people come to believe they have no further need to adhere to the laws of Nature, and that the technologies invented and built by others somehow insulate them the necessity to know the truth, or to somehow evade the objective reality that has been established by the laws of Nature.
As bad as the government and media collusion in this deception may be, what may be more frightening is that as economic conditions worsen, ordinary Americans will become more polarized, divided into two general groups on either side of the gulf described by the bold line of truth: Those who see what is and are no longer willing to conceal it for any cause or contrivance, and those who will avert their eyes lest they be forced to grasp the nature of the horrors their continuing silence will have enabled. It is questionable whether disaster may be averted, but it is certain that if the American people fail to recognize the danger, there can be no avoiding it. It is therefore fitting that as we approach the release date of the second installment of Atlas Shrugged, the movie, and as we watch politicians scramble to avoid blame all while continuing their unrepentant war against us, it’s more important than ever that we refuse to accept the comforting lies they tell. Their attempt to conceal their responsibility in the impending collapse should not serve as our excuse to conceal our own as Rand’s unintended prophecy continues to manifest around us.
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. Note: For those interested, here’s the trailer for the upcoming release of Part II of the movie Atlas Shrugged
I’ve written and re-written this piece a number of times, in part because I don’t wish to cause undo angst, but also in part because I don’t wish to cause too little. You can blame Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Congresses past and present, or Ben Bernanke and his predecessors for all it matters, because in the context and scope of your life, it won’t make much difference. We are headed for a complete collapse, and the collapse is no longer some vague notion in some nebulous, faraway universe of remote possibilities. At least one analyst has concluded that by 2014, at the latest, this country is going to enter a period of economic turmoil that will make the Great Depression of the 1930s look like a garden party. The media won’t tell you this, whether CNN or the New York Times; neither FoxNews nor the Wall Street Journal. We are staring directly at the muzzle of a colossal gun, and it’s aimed at the heads of every American, but neither the current President nor the current Congress will tell you how bad it has become. For two generations or more, the hand-writing has been on the wall, but unlike ordinary ink that will fade with the passage of time, this bit of script has become bolder, heavier and finally, indelible. There will be no avoiding it. There will be no escape. This time, we will go down, and we may well never stage a comeback. The gun is aimed at our heads, and we loaded it.
To understand this will take a little time, although regular readers of this site will know most if not all of the gory details. For a brief primer on what will soon confront us, please take a look at this report on Hyperinflation at John Williams’ Shadow Government Statistics website. It’s lengthy, but it is information every American should learn and know, because while it is a bit of a reading chore, particularly for those whose eyes glaze over at the first hint of economic and financial terminology, it is nevertheless important information, and Williams does a remarkable job of not allowing the material to become overly dry. His report really doesn’t need any dressing-up or embellishment to be terrifying.
If you’ve been paying attention to the news beyond the international developments of the last few days, you will not have missed the fact that today, the US credit rating was again down-graded again by Egan Jones. You should expect this trend to continue for some time, but this downgrade, like the last round of them a little more than one year ago, really doesn’t tell us anything we should not have known: Our currency is on the verge of collapse, and our ability to repay debt is becoming more challenged, but the fools in Washington DC don’t tell you about it because they’re afraid if you knew how bad it really is, you might react badly. In the movies Armageddon and Deep Impact, the governments portrayed did their best to keep their respective impending disasters secret for as long as possible. The thinking was: If it’s inevitable, such that all we can do is make things worse between now and the impact(s) by disclosing it in advance, we should say nothing until the last possible moment. Another way of looking at this is the question I once posited:
“The government is spending like there’s no tomorrow. What if there isn’t?”
The fact is that we don’t need Hollywood or the Mayans to provide apocalyptic scenarios to fulfill this role in our immediate future. Our Federal Reserve(hereafter, simply “the Fed”) in concert with our Federal government have created something nearly as disastrous, and potentially, every bit as deadly. As Ben Bernanke uses his powers as Chairman of the Fed to undertake another round of quantitative easing. As you’ll remember from previous rounds of this same tactic, this amounts to money printing, a way to inject more cash into the market in the attempt to stimulate lending and business activity. The problem is that each time this is done, what actually happens is that the value of the dollar falls versus commodities such as oil, or other energy sources, and the cost of everything increases. When this happens, it makes it harder for business to operate, harder for consumers to spend such cash as they may have, and otherwise has precisely the exact opposite effect, all while driving us closer to the brink. Bernanke is trying to drive us away from a deflationary cycle that could result if the economy stalls too steeply, but the problem is that he’s going to cause what will be infinitely worse.
At the same time, our Congress and our President have added to the problem, because each time they borrow money, the Fed is printing it into existence. In short, both our fiscal and monetary policies are rigged in favor of inflation, and with all the money-printing, it is only a matter of time before the dollar becomes completely worthless in the world market. Any small displacement in the market could lead to our economic demise. Williams’ report for 2012 goes so far as to suggest that you concentrate on bare survival strategies, and defending yourself in the face of complete political and social disintegration.
I know that you’ve been reading about a “financial cliff” somewhere in the distant and murky future, but what I’m telling you to do at this point is that the veil of fog is beginning to lift because that future is no longer distant. Williams’ report explains thoroughly the main causes of our impending doom, and this isn’t some conspiracy nut. When he published this update earlier this year, his warnings sounded eerily like my own, and also those of a few other people who have been sounding the alarm, including some in talk radio, in conservative media, and notably, Governor Palin. At the time of the announcement of QE2, Gov. Palin did a rather bold thing: She announced to the world the dangers and the certain results. Naturally, since her evaluation was based on sound economic understanding, her conclusions might well have seemed prophetic in light of all that has happened since. The truth is that she was merely telling you what must be based on the immutable laws of the universe: There are no free lunches…or anything.
I believe this is one of the reasons the Republican leadership in Congress has done nothing to substantially obstruct President Obama’s agenda. It is true that they would have faced some political consequences, but what’s more the case is that they are every bit as aware of the impending collapse as anybody in the executive branch. One might view Congress cynically, and suppose they are “getting while the getting’s good,” and there’s no doubt that some of that goes on, but it’s also true that the problem is so gargantuan that they do not see how they can correct it without throwing the country into complete chaos, and since that’s what’s coming anyway, they see no point in hurrying the matter.
Some have concluded that Bernanke is taking this up now in order to try to help Obama’s re-election, and while there may be some truth to it, the fact is that the situation has been and remains much worse than you’re being told by the media. We have been in a bottom-bouncing depression since at least 2009, and nothing has animated us very far from the floor. As I have written many times, they stimulate via the printing press and the deficit, and we get a brief improvement, but then the increased costs in the market come home to roost, and we’re set back to a place no better than before as the costs, driven in large measure by the inflationary effects of the stimulus that quickly act as a brake upon the alleged “recovery” that never materializes.
Elsewhere on Williams’ site, you can find a detailed examination of his treatment of unemployment, and the numbers will shock you. Add to this the tidbits about the deficit and inflation, and you will begin to understand how you’ve been misled, not only by the media and the administration, but also by decades of shoulder-shrugging politicians in both parties. By Williams’ assessment, it may be impossible to rescue our nation any longer.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have been urging you since the inception of this blog to make preparations to the best of your abilities. I hope you’ve been diligent. Check out Williams’ Hyperinflation report, and think it through carefully. The evidence of your own daily lives has been telling you all of the happy-talk about “economic recovery” had been a farce. Like the approach of a colossal asteroid, the government’s ability to hide the impending disaster or disguise the seriousness of our worsening situation has begun to fail. That is really the only significant meaning of the latest downgrade. They can’t hide it much longer. The Piper will be paid.
Some are choosing to ignore all of this in the hope that a change of administration might give us one last chance at a way out, but irrespective of the outcome in November, the chances that our currency survives three more years in its current form is probably fewer than one in ten. The possibility that we will survive as a nation may be somewhat less. Fixing this problem will require the institution of spending cuts on a scale that may cause complete social collapse. Do we expect John Boehner to take on such a monumental chore? Even if the Republicans take the Senate, Mitch McConnell isn’t exactly the picture of courageous and vigorous leadership.
Saving our nation is no longer simply a political problem in the sense of replacing certain politicians. It’s a cultural and economic crisis as well, and with all that is going on abroad, it may come down to a matter of literal survival. It’s time that we begin to face up to this, because our politicians aren’t going to address the problem until it no longer matters, at which point, they’ll do nothing, but we’ll pay the price. We always do. People have asked me what we could do to remedy the problem, but when I tell them, they look away, because they don’t want to face the implications that attend the proposed actions.
At present, we have an annual published deficit of around $1.3 Trillion. As Mr. Williams’ report makes plain, if the government were forced to use GAAP(Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) in their accounting, the actual annual deficit is in the neighborhood of $5 Trillion. The added $3.7 Trillion consists of new future obligations that the government does not pay, but has promised at some future date. Many refer to these as the “unfunded liabilities” of our government, but they add up to a staggering amount, in the range of $80 to $120 Trillion dollars in promises. When one makes promises on this scale, it is sure to affect one’s creditworthiness, never mind one’s credit rating.
Consider the fact that our government collects approximately $2.5 Trillion in taxes, fees, and the like throughout the year, but that this is still well short of the $3.8 Trillion it spends, and then propose cuts in response. Here’s a dirty, ugly secret the DC crowd won’t point out to you: If you cut everything that is not an entitlement program or debt service, you would still have a deficit. That’s right, if you eliminated every bureaucrat, soldier, judge, roads project, education expenditure, and all of the other things that government does apart from pay interest on its debt or send payments to individuals through entitlement programs, you could not balance the budget.
What this makes clear is that the problem exists not on the “discretionary” line of the ledger, but entirely on the “non-discretionary” lines in the book. Leftists will argue that the problem is the lack of revenues, but that’s an absurd hoax. Anything done to increase revenues at this point will actually cause them to decline. Increased tax rates? People will earn less to avoid the taxes. Even those who want to earn more won’t be able to because there will be insufficient demand in the marketplace to provide the commerce needed to generate the revenues we have now.
The only answer to this problem is sharp cuts in government spending, combined with a cessation of Quantitative Easing. The entitlement programs have become such a massive anchor on our economy that it cannot recover, and they have squeezed out all other spending. This is why people look away when you explain to them the problem. They know what it implies about all of our sacred cows in the entitlement sector of government. As with the old lament, everybody is in favor of massive government cuts until we arrive at their favorite Federal program. At that point, you are given a stack of excuses, complaints, and ultimately: “Never mind.”
I have news for you, and it’s not pleasant: These programs will end. Virtually all of them. None of them will survive in their current form, if at all. We are like Greece, only worse, and much larger. The question our elected leaders have not faced is whether to break the news to us now, while there is some small hope of recovery, or whether they shall just “get while the getting’s good,” and make off in the dark of night after the collapse, leaving us to figure it out. The fact is that I can’t blame them for opting toward the latter, because we will be worse than Greece in every dimension and measure, both in size, but also in degree, and I believe when a responsible politician ever tells this truth, he will be pilloried, at first in media, and then later by mobs. Paul Ryan has had just the first taste of this. Sarah Palin was mocked for such warnings to an extent I’ve never seen for simply stating the dangers of QE2 and all the money-printing. She was right, naturally, as is Paul Ryan on the matter of entitlements.
The problem is now that it may be too late for any sort of remediation. The problem has become too vast, and it is as late as that. What we can do as individuals is to grasp the reality laid out before us. We can prepare ourselves and our families. We can vote accordingly. We can make noise about it. In the end, we may be forced to watch our nation slide back into the pre-industrial, pre-republican muck from which it emerged. It’s been a long decline, and we’ve mostly done little but to urge it on as a people. We’re peering down the loaded barrel, and it’s been our finger’s twitch upon which we are waiting.
Over the life of this blog, one of the subjects that has arisen repeatedly is our energy problem, and the effects Obama’s policies are having on our nation’s economic condition. I have offered you charts, graphs, economic theory, and an understanding of why we remain in the economic trouble we’re in, and much of our troubles originate with energy concerns. Again validating what I’ve previously reported, global oil prices are now falling in response to the economic outlook in the US and in Europe. The reason I again bring this to your attention is not to thump my chest, since there’s nothing revolutionary in what I’ve argued, but instead to reinforce the point, because in the broader media, there are too many sources interested in obfuscating and otherwise muddling the matter. To have a growing, vital economy, the US has relied historically on inexpensive energy.
The American economy is a vehicle of vast capacity for growth, and the American people remain its vital engine, both as consumers and producers. What the Obama policies have done is to choke down this engine, and the result is an economy that is bottom-bouncing at an idle, struggling for air that a reckless government policy forbids it to consume. Every time the American people start to accelerate, the market effects of the regressive policies of our government govern the capacity of our economy like a vast engine choke. You could rightly call the policies of Barack Obama the “stuck choke” of American economics.
An engine makes a great analog for the state of our economy, because an engine must both consume energy, and convert it into motive power. In a healthy state, that’s what the US economy does, and it’s why we must not ignore the grave costs of the current Obama policies. Consider what happens when you step on the gas in your car: The throttle opens up, allowing the engine to draw more of the air-fuel mixture, permitting the engine to accelerate, reciprocating more rapidly, and those converting the energy to the horsepower needed to make the vehicle go. This is how our economy functions: It’s demand for consumption increases, and we have traditionally answered it by permitting more air-fuel mix(energy and capital) into the engine, and it accelerates(grows) providing output some of which is reintroduced back into the stream going in. It’s a marvelous thing, and the prosperity of every American increases on average.
The situation we’ve been placed in by the Obama policies, combined with the inflationary policies of the Federal Reserve is that the air-fuel mix becomes prohibitively expensive. Imagine driving down the road at 30mph in order to conserve fuel. You could come up to speed, but because fuel is so expensive, you really can’t afford to put your foot in it, so instead, you patiently move along at a snail’s pace because you’re trying to do the minimum consumption you can manage and still get to your destination. This is what happens each and every time the economic engine gets going these last several years: The price of fuel begins to tick rapidly upward, we get a price spike, and everybody goes into conservation mode, and as a result, the economy slows down. Naturally, as soon as the economy slows, the prices for fuel begin to fall again, and one can expect that at around the time they hit the bottom of the trough, people will begin to feel safe accelerating their cars back up to highway speeds, and the process begins once more.
The slippage in oil prices this week constitute a warning, because what it implies is that you’ve already hit that point of conservation. Of course, it’s not merely consumers, but businesses and every form of productive endeavor that uses energy, which is of course all of them. In that environment of rationing, what occurs is that people necessarily become more frugal, but so do businesses. It’s unavoidable. You can only afford to spend so much of your capital on energy, because you must still pay for all of the other necessities of living, and the United States has been operating very close to this line for several years. A rational Federal policy would realize that this is a supply-side problem, and that to alleviate the problem, what we must do is increase the supply of energy available to the market, but our government has instead answered with tepid notions about conservation, and highly speculative and fanciful programs for “green energy” while it chokes off the supply of real energy to the market.
This is our situation, and the current drop in oil prices is a result of the fact that our economy is again on the downside, and that is further substantiated by the poor numbers of jobs being created. At this point, it should be so obvious to every living person with two brain cells remaining to clack together that there ought to be a national movement to remove any politician who isn’t focused on this problem. Instead, we have an administration that is dithering, and is actually making things substantially worse through its regulatory paradigm that insists America simply do more with less. This insane, nearly maniacal policy is impossible to sustain, because it is driving us to the poor-house, and yet the radical left is fine with that outcome. They want to make us poorer, and the reason is clear: Poor people who must choose between groceries and gasoline are easily managed by a central authority, and they are only too willing to do the “managing.”
Let us place this in context: Imagine that you have a home that is all electric. Many Americans do. Imagine that the power grid that supplies electricity to your home generates that power with coal, oil, and nuclear processes. You might also have a little hydroelectric power, or a little wind and solar, but on average, those supply only a small fraction of our power generation. Remembering that oil derivatives are one of the primary fuels used in power generation, what happens if we take away one of the others, like coal? Coal currently provides half of our electric generation, nationwide. What happens to the price of oil and all its derivatives, including the gasoline or diesel for your vehicle when coal is taken away from power generation? The answer is obvious, and so is the result, because we’re living it.
Understanding the relationship between energy and our economic prospects is key to understanding our current economic malaise, and the impending disaster we face if our policy is not soon changed to promote more energy production, and to unshackle energy producers from the chains that prevent them from providing to the market the energy that a growing economy requires in order to sustain itself in that state. This is why Newt Gingrich’s idea of $2.50/gallon gasoline was important, and it’s also one more reason so many of us had hoped that we would see a Sarah Palin candidacy, because she understands, perhaps better than any other politician in the country, how thorough is our reliance upon energy, but also how to best develop the resources we already have at our disposal. We desperately need an “energy President,” who understands that growth and prosperity are only possible with abundant and inexpensive energy, permitting the American people to do what they already know how to do, and want to do: Build, grow, and prosper.
The proof of this thesis is contained in our cycle of boom-spike-conserve-bottom. When energy prices fall, the economy (and the American people who drive it) respond with jobs, growth, and productivity. The problem is that in our current environment of government regulation and governmentally-induced inflation, when the growth begins, the price of energy begins to immediately climb upward, eventually spiking to unsustainable costs. This places the entire economy into conservation mode, and very rapidly, we slide to the bottom again. It’s no longer a matter of proving the theory. It’s proven, and the evidence is all around us, but until we make the conscious decision to end the misery, we’re stuck.
I had this video passed along to me, and I must say that it’s very much in line with what I’ve been saying on this blog since its inception. Those who want America to fail are indeed following this model, and while the Obama administration fiddles, America is burning. This video was published by www.freemarketamerica.org, an organization that says it exists to fight for free markets and against the environmental extremists. Take a look. It’s well done:
I recommend my readers check out this piece over the UK Telegraphon what is going on with our friends across the pond. They’re experiencing a fuels shortage to the extent that the government is being urged to begin an emergency program of rationing. The issue began when a union of truck drivers who deliver fuels threatened to go on strike, and a government official, Francis Maude, a Cabinet Officer advised people to fill up their tanks and store fuel in storage containers. Quite naturally, the people responded by doing just that, emptying filling stations everywhere. While telling the people not to panic, the British government incited a panic, and the resultant run on fuels, in a shortage so severe that first responders there are having difficulty finding fuel to run their ambulances. What we should learn from all of this are at least two important lessons, and I hope my readers will take note: Governments cause panics by their actions, but more importantly, our fuel supply is more vulnerable than most people think, because of the structure of the supply chain.
If you drive to your favorite filling station, most days there will be no problem. You’ll simply dispense the fuel, pay and depart, and there’s no fuss about any of it. What most people don’t realize is that the amount of fuel out at filling stations is based on the expected, ordinary quantity demanded, and while there may be some small amount in surplus, it’s really not much more than a day or two extra under ordinary conditions. Fuels are dangerous to store in large quantities, and EPA regulations have made the job harder, but most important is the notion of just-in-time inventory management which means retailers don’t keep more on hand than they will immediately sell under normal conditions.
The reason this matters to consumers is that it means that any small fluctuation upward in quantity demanded can quickly lead to a shortage. As we should have learned in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, anything that causes a shortage at the margins in one locale can quickly spread to others. If there’s a run on fuels in just a few key locations locally, it can spread like a wildfire as displaced customers shift their demand to other locations, driving those to shortage, and thus pushing the shortage around. As the shortages spread, panic takes hold, so that people descend on every location for fuel they can find.
This tells us a little bit about the psychology of the market and why such shortages can materialize for no apparent good reason, looking at the matter on a macro scale: Is there enough fuel for immediate demands? Had people simply gone on with their ordinary purchasing patterns, would there have been a serious market-wide shortage? No. The problem lies in the fact that people can be moved by fear and uncertainty regarding the immediate future. The notion that some days in the future, tanker drivers in the UK might be on strike, and might cause a shortage, was enough to cause a government official to make remarks that started a panic. Even if the strike never materializes, it will take days or even weeks for the UK to restore things to the normal flow.
What this also should remind us is that on-hand supplies at retail outlets is never nearly what the whole market might demand at once. At any one time, the capacity of every filling station is just a small fraction of the total capacity of every vehicle’s tank. When everybody goes to fill up at the same time, the situation is made evident, because the on-hand retail supply can in no way match the condensed time frame of such a move by consumers to tank-up. In the UK, they’re openly talking about rationing now as a way to restore the normal flow.
The more interesting part about this problem is the human psychology implied: When faced with potential shortages, we tend to horde in response, and this can clearly add to the problems.In the US, where we are much more dependent on fuels to maintain the course of our daily lives, commute and travel distances being so much greater, we’re especially vulnerable to panics generated by short-run, geographically-limited marginal shortages. For this reason, the US can be subject to very small-scale shortages turning into regional or even nationwide problems. It doesn’t take much. If a few gas stations over a metropolitan area run short, it can ripple outward and spread like a virus. People begin panic-buying almost as soon as they hear that there is a shortage somewhere nearby.
This is why our current situation is actually so precarious. It doesn’t take much but a day or two of delayed replenishing in distribution to cause a serious problem. This is also another reason we should seek to increase not only the amount of oil we produce domestically, but also to increase our refining capacity. The situation underway in the UK is small compared to the impact such a panic could cause here, primarily because the geographical expanse of our country means that public mass transit isn’t economically viable in most areas. In short, we need our fuel, and our lives have evolved to depend upon it. It’s bad enough when governments do idiotic things like start a panic, but what’s worse is when they’re so utterly unprepared when they happen without government prompting.
The American people should be made aware that panic hoarding only worsens the problem and increases the span of time before a situation driven by natural disasters is resolved. The goal in such a situation should be to delay purchase as long as possible, but that’s so counter to our nature that I don’t expect many people to react in perfectly rational ways. The other problem we face is political, in that too few Americans understand just how fragile this system has become, and with it, all the dependencies upon which it relies. If more Americans understood just how reliant they really are on an energy supply to maintain their standard of living, they might bring more pressure on politicians to get out of the way.
This story is creating a bit of an uproar, and while I understand why, I think it outlines an important question in American culture: If you have an accident, a fire, or other emergency requiring the assistance of first responders, should you get a bill? In Passaic, NJ, they’re answering that question in the affirmative, but with a twist: Rather than going to the people who use the service directly, they’re going to “go after insurance companies” for payment. They say from the outset that they’re not going to go after people who don’t have insurance, leading me to wonder what kind of free-riding they are now encouraging. Mayor Alex Blanco seems to think this shouldn’t affect insurance policy rates, but I wonder if that’s very honest. Asked about the effect on rates, and whether the measure would drive them up, Blanco said “I feel that it would be unethical on their part.” There are certainly ethical questions involved, but the worst of them are not with the insurance companies.
Blanco’s claim is that coverage for such fees is built into most insurances, and whether that’s true, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect people to pay when their activities result in a call to emergency services. The bothersome part from my point of view is that it will not be uniformly applied. Leaving an exception for those without insurance seems to me to be an inducement to forgo coverage, but of course, how much is involved? In this case, fees from $600 to $1000 are involved, and that’s a large expense to anybody who’s just suffered a loss of some sort. The idea of exempting some people on the basis of a lack of coverage is the problem.
The fact that one person insures his or her assets, while another refuses to do so shouldn’t be a determining factor in whether to charge. This puts the city in the position of acting as another re-distributor of wealth. If the city determines that a charge of $600 to $1000 is appropriate, there should not be differentiation in this manner. What the city is doing in this case is to go after the easy targets, and I think that’s fundamentally unfair. They’re going after insurance companies of those who are insured, because the insurance company is stuck, and the invoices will be paid, but it would not be so easy to collect from those without insurance, so they’re essentially saying they won’t even bother to attempt collection.
I understand that we can feel compassion in various situations for people who have had a run of bad luck, or had bad things happen to them, but the problem here is that the compassion is too selective, and looks like discrimination. If they went after everybody, irrespective of insurance status, perhaps the amount they charged per incident could be lower, meaning they would be hitting insurance companies for less, and therefore reducing the impact on policy owners via their rates.
Instead, what the city of Passaic has done is cause a cost-shifting to occur, and I believe that’s fundamentally wrong. It happens in two ways: First, they will likely bill insurance companies more than an incident actually costs in many cases, and this means the insured are paying for the uninsured. Second, even if the fees here are representative of the actual costs, and there’s no padding in them to cover the uninsured calls for service, then the residents who pay taxes are basically gifting the amount to the uninsured. Either way, and it’s probably a little of both, what is happening is to shift the burden in what becomes a redistributive scheme.
I don’t mind the idea of charging, because in point of fact, to do otherwise is to impose the whole cost of every instance on tax-payers. Some will argue they pay for that already through their taxes, but that’s not always the case. Very often, what revenues come in through the taxes is enough to cover the expense of maintaining a fire department’s existence, but not nearly enough to cover the costs of all the calls to which they respond. As more cities around the country find themselves in budgetary difficulties, I expect this to spread, and I’m not opposed to it, but I would argue that there should be no free-riders, and that those who have insurance or pay taxes shouldn’t be forced to eat the costs for the uninsured.
I think we do far too much of that sort of redistribution as it is. Let’s not add another layer to this problem. One would think we’d learn something from our health-care funding problems, but it appears we have not. Redistribution of costs from the irresponsible to the responsible doesn’t improve the situation because it merely encourages more irresponsibility. Isn’t it high time were learned that lesson?
Our Republic is suffering a slow death at the hands of statists of the left, but also the moderate Republicans. We have a fiscal situation that most would label a crisis by any definition, in which the Federal government expends money fifty percent faster than it collects it, and it collects plenty. Three years of Barack Obama’s reckless spending, and the willingness of Republican leadership to make deals has left us in a situation in which we are accruing debt faster than at any time in history. Even if Barack Obama is defeated and sent packing in 2012, as he surely should be, we may not make it that far before the consequences explode in our faces. The House of Representatives should not pass another bill that appropriates one dollar. Yes, we need a government shutdown, but Barack Obama has other plans. He intends to take over, and to ignore the Congress, and he intends to do so well in advance of the elections. Obama is a man who has planned all his life for overthrowing the United States Constitution, and now, armed with the power of the executive branch, and with a supporting Senate, he is likely to make his play now while he still can.
Barack Obama isn’t a garden variety socialist. He’s steeped in the tactics of Saul Alinsky, but more, he has an abiding desire to see the United States become a slave state. People have wondered why he’s doing the things he is, but for many, the answer is clear: We may be on the verge of a second bloody revolution, and the proponents of this one are already in charge, and already using the levers of power to make ready for their moment. I know this sounds so thoroughly outlandish to some people, that it’s difficult to say it seriously, except for the fact that it’s happening.
Consider Occupy Wall Street. Here is an organization that exists to create unrest and violence in the streets, and in typical leftist fashion, it will be used to give government and excuse to step in. Of course, it’s being directed by Obama friends and co-conspirators, including a healthy dose of funding from George Soros and his various affiliate pass-through organizations, but what make it more stunning than this is that Obama is putting in place the foundations for declaring vast new emergencies and taking on new Federal powers under the aegis of just such an emergency. On Thursday, he signed a new executive order, that while updating older statutes, effectively gives the government the power to seize whatever it wants under whatever conditions it wants in response to a vague national emergency. The Executive Order, titled: NATIONAL DEFENSE RESOURCES PREPAREDNESS, provides for adjustments to procedures to be carried out under 50 USC.
This order provides for the organization of the executive branch under such an emergency, and likewise provides directions on what may be delegated, to whom, and for what purposes. It references a number of other executives orders, along with various sections of 50 USC. The Obama administration will claim it is merely updating policies, but this is a bit more than that. We mustn’t be fooled into thinking this is all business-as-usual. Nothing about the Obama administration is business-as-usual except for the outward appearance they wish to project.
Consider the implications of a President being tied to a civil unrest movement the likes of OWS, and then also setting up the legal basis for a government response to the sort of crisis OWS could be expected to generate, particularly if there is substantial financial difficulty arising out of the reckless policies of this administration. On the one hand, he has OWS to terrorize you, and on the other, he is preparing to deal with them in response to your demands. The truly stunning part is that the Occupiers don’t quite seem to grasp the danger, or that they’re being set up to take a mighty fall.
Now comes news that Obama has been groomed for this role for a long time, perhaps as far back as the mid-1980s, when it seems that Bill Ayers’ parents may have sponsored Obama or otherwise helped him through school, as WND reports. A former mail carrier explained his contacts with the Ayers family and young black man he met who he now believes was Barack Obama. WND interviewed him, and here is that video:
Whatever you may make of this, what’s certain is that Obama certainly had ties to some very radical people, and the problem with this man’s testimony is that he remembers Mrs. Ayers(Bill Ayers’ mother) saying that this was a foreign student. What is certain is that the postal carrier remembers Obama’s features, his voice and manner of speaking. He also had an interesting discussion with Ayers’ father, Tom, who seems to have been an ardent Marxist too.
I bring this to your attention because it’s an interesting aside to the general conversation about who Barack Obama really is, and what his intentions for this country really are. I don’t believe he’s anything but a radical leftist, and as many now contend, he is not undertaking these policies lightly. As Mark Levin mentioned on Monday evening, the Executive Order issued by Obama last week is bad in any president’s hands, but in the hands of this President particularly, that offers a potential prescription for the end of America as we have known it.
It reminds me of a famous piece of literature, Atlas Shrugged, wherein Ayn Rand constructs the devolution of the United States, and one of the instruments the statists use is an analog to this latest executive order, called “Directive 10-289.” It basically offered a takeover under the guise of an emergency in much the same form as this latest executive order would do: Take over the means of production,distribution, transportation, and any and every other critical part of the American economy. The longer the Obama administration goes on, the more I get the impression that we are living out the last chapters of Atlas Shrugged.
I think Obama is a good deal more malevolent than the shrinking coward who was the head of the country in that book. I don’t believe any of this is or can be accidental. He’s clearly intent upon changing America to his vision, whether or not Americans consent. Any president who can so easily disregard the opinion of more than sixty percent of Americans in enacting a health-care reform bill isn’t acting in the best interests of the country. Slowly but surely, he’s picking our constitution apart, and if he gets his way, it will be altogether meaningless as a restraint upon government. 2012 may be our last chance to stop the overthrow of our Republic by peaceful means. The fox is in the hen-house, and establishment Republicans still look at him expectantly, as though he ought to lay an egg. If we do oust him, our next job will be to clean out that sorry gaggle of spur-less roosters who have been so ineffective at keeping the fox in check, in part because they golf with him and see him as one of their own. He’s not, and the sooner our Republican leadership learns that, the sooner we can take back this country.
Listening to Mark Levin on the radio on Thursday, he was discussing the Obama administration’s predations upon our country, and all of the policies Obama has established that intentionally undermine the United States. He wanted a new word to describe what Obama is doing, but he settled on an old one, and it’s close, but it isn’t quite right: De-Industrialization. Far be it from me to quibble over terminology with the brilliant and accomplished Mark Levin, who has an audience that spans the nation, and with the Internet, really the entire English-speaking world. He’s so frequently right, and so unfailingly prescient that I hesitate to offer him a ‘correction,’ but in this case, it’s so important that I believe I must, because as Sarah Palin pointed out Thursday in a Facebook note, Dr. Levin has done more to enlighten more people on the roots of our national disorder than any other person in our culture at present.
I feel it is important enough to risk his ire, and those of his many fans, and followers, some of whom also read this blog. What Barack Obama is doing is much more fundamental to our national survival than “de-Industrialization” might indicate. If it were that, we could recover in a generation, but what Obama is doing threatens to undermine our nation for all times, and as Dr. Levin suspected, the word he seeks already exists, and it’s much more dire than you might imagine: Barack Obama is De-Capitalizing the United States. It’s been the solitary goal of the left for a long time, and it’s Barack Obama’s method of culturally, financially, and materially destroying America.
How important is capital to a capitalist country? It is everything we need, not merely to recover our economy, but to fuel it for generations, perhaps in perpetuity. Capital helps establish even our moral basis, and undermining that basis leaves us to lie in supine servitude to whatever demagogue happens along. Stealing America’s capital will crush the country, and remove from it the ability to recover, not only in the next decade or generation, but possibly ever. Most people think of capital as money, and money is capital, but it’s not the only form, and not all money is capital in the most important sense. Depending on how money is used, it can be capital, and that is surely an important part of the story you must understand to see not only why my term is the correct one, but also in order to see why Barack Obama is far worse, and far more dangerous than any of you may have imagined.
While others have been focused almost solely on the Republican horse-race, I have been covering the twists and turns of our dire national financial circumstances, and I have done so for a reason: You must know what is being done, and how, if you’re to understand the threat we now face. Our capital is being strip-mined from this nation in systematic fashion, and that which remains is being systematically devalued. Let me explain how this is being done, starting with how our cash is being devalued.
First, you must understand our monetary system, and you must know that in order to devalue our money, all you need to do is create more of it than growth in our Gross Domestic Product(GDP) justifies. Ben Bernanke has been complying with that plan, by creating more money out of nothing in order to lend it to many institutions, including primarily the US Treasury, but also to all of those banks that were “too big to fail” as well as Europe’s ailing financial sector in order to temporarily prop them up. Governor Palin warned us about this in late 2010, as the Federal Reserve instituted QE2(Quantitative Easing round 2) that is really just a fancy title for more old-fashioned money-printing, now carried out primarily in digital form.
The more the Federal Reserve lends out of thin air, the less all previous dollars are worth, provided there’s no corresponding growth in production and wealth in the total system. If production and wealth grows by some minor amount, but the printing(or digitizing) of money exceeds that amount, each additional dollar devalues all the rest. Put another way, if you imagine the wealth of the nation as a giant pie, each time we print more money without growing the pie, what happens is the same as re-dividing the pie by the additional number of dollars. What this means is that each slice shrinks, but since we’re talking about money, the medium by which we exchange goods and services, what it means is that each slice – each dollar – falls in value versus those goods and services. You can buy less with the same number of dollars, or put another way, it takes more of your dollars to buy the same goods. As Sarah Palin predicted nearly eighteen months ago, we have seen the prices of energy and food skyrocket.
You might say that this is all well and good, but Ben Bernanke – not Barack Obama – runs the Federal Reserve. I agree, but let me tell you that Obama’s fiscal policies are the impetus for much of the money-printing. Put another way, Barack Obama’s outrageous spending has accounted for four trillion dollars or more of all this money-printing madness. This is because money isn’t printed and set on a shelf. Instead, it is loaned into existence. Once you realize this, you understand that without corresponding economic growth, this is merely funny money that is tantamount to counterfeiting. Each time they devalue our currency by this procedure, your existing wealth is being stolen by some incremental amount. That’s the real picture, but sadly, it doesn’t stop there.
Are you paying more for fuel? To quote my favorite politician, “You betcha!” Food? “Ditto!” In fact, prices of almost everything is creeping slowly upward. Part of this is due to the re-division of the pie, as described above, but it’s also a result of something else: The United States Federal government is spending more on redistributive programs than ever in history, and it now spends monies equivalent to 25% of the GDP. Those dollars, poured into these redistributive programs, are now competing with your hard-earned dollars in the marketplace for goods and services. When more people arrive in the market with dollars with which to demand more of a thing, but you’re not producing substantially more of it, either the prices will rise in response to the quantity demanded, or somebody else will need to supply the goods from some other place.
This results in an out-flow of cash. It’s devalued cash, but it’s still landing in China and India, and anywhere else with which we do substantial commerce. Some of that cash comes back in trade, but some of it does not. While in ordinary times, I am not so concerned about the balance of trade, under this system at present, we are bleeding wealth and redistributing it globally. For what? The latest cellphone? Produced where? The latest television? Produced where? The simple fact is that while I support free trade, what I don’t support is free trade augmented by redistributive domestic programs. What this means is that when you go to work, you’re going to produce wealth, some of which will be stolen in the next round of money-printing, and redistributed to some who do not work, to be spent on merchandise you would not buy, and without which the purchasers could easily live, all while pouring your wealth in a chain from your pocket to government to your government-supported neighbor to some state venture in the Republic of China, mostly for transient, non-durable merchandise that only detracts from available capital.
At the same time all of this goes on, productive enterprises have less money from which to draw. Are you thinking of putting an addition on your home? First, you might have to borrow the money, and if you do, you’ll find you’re in tougher competition for those dollars, and since fewer contractors are now in existence, you’ll pay a premium for any work you hire out. Your money won’t go as far, because in construction, fuel is an important component from the production and transportation of raw materials, to the paychecks of workers who will now need more cash to make it to the job-site. As all of this happens, you may have found that you needed a home equity loan to pay for the new construction, but alas, this too will be more difficult, since the value of your home and property has likely fallen.
Add to this the insane policy of permitting JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America, among others, to move risky European derivatives into coverage by the FDIC. When the Euro-zone goes belly up, and don’t kid yourself, it will, you will be stuck with that bill too, and it may even collapse your currency altogether. You might have heard that Wall Street is doing well, but that’s an illusion too. Much of the growth on Wall Street has been financed with more loans from the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, you’re struggling to fill your fuel-tank, and while you do, the foreign powers who control much of the globe’s oil supply are getting wealthy while Barack Obama denies pipelines and drilling all over the United States. He’s closing down coal-fired plants. He’s using the EPA to regulate energy producers out of existence. Slowly, we are being starved of the capital equipment with which we might hope to someday extract ourselves from this condition. When he closed down Gulf drilling in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon incident, and refused to reopen it despite a federal court ruling, those drilling rigs and platforms left American waters on their way to places they can drill, like Brazil, where he sent billions of dollars to fund their oil industry, including Petrobras, in which his pal George Soros was a big investor. Those platforms and rigs won’t be back. You’ll need to raise the capital to build new ones.
Is your paycheck growing? A few may be, but most are not. In fact, with skyrocketing costs as your money is devalued, even those who’ve managed to scratch out minimal raises are finding their increases are in no way covering their expenses. With all this newly digitized and printed money, you’re not seeing anything but diminished value in your purchasing power. You have little money to save or invest, because it’s all going up in smoke to support your basic energy and food expenses. Any margin of error you may have had is now gone, and to do anything constructive, you’re having to borrow in some form. You might sooth yourself with the idea that at least you’re contributing to a 401K, or other retirement program at work, but how much of the value of those investments is based on the bubble-building all on the back of these borrowed bucks. They have the use of your slim capital at present, all on the promise that it’s a shelter. It could also be a trap.
What all of this does, taken together as a vast picture of our national despair, is to deprive the country of capital from the most fundamental level to the top of the financial food-chain. When, I repeat, when the Euro crashes, your dollar will follow along behind in short order. Your financial institutions will be wrecked, and you will find out that there is no such thing as “too big to fail.” When we are naked, starving, and unable to raise enough capital to fund the production of a pack of bubble-gum, you will see why this is more than mere de-industrialization. Barack Obama is hard about the chore of de-capitalizing America, undercutting its wealth, and its ability to produce more wealth, on which our lives all depend. The old saying is that “it takes money to make money,” and Barack Obama and his band of anti-capitalists know that this is true. To destroy America, and to destroy the capitalism that has powered it through generations of ever-growing government, one must take away that seed that lays its foundations anew in each successive generation: Capital.
Of course, not all capital is about money. Some economists count “human capital,” and here too, Obama is squandering a generation. Our schools have become mosh-pits of leftist indoctrination, and our colleges and universities are populated by students many of whom believe it is proper to lobby for free contraception. You see, capitalism requires a respect for what capital is in its naked essence: It is the motive power of all new wealth, but what they now teach the nation’s children is that “stuff” is just material that is owned as a matter of legalized oppression of those with less money. This undercuts the moral basis too, so that your human capital, your financial capital, and your moral capital are all being destroyed.
Barack Obama is literally an anti-capitalist, all the way to his core, and what he and his friends like George Soros do and have done in previous instances is to de-capitalize nations, and reduce them to stagnant, increasingly destitute corpses. America had been the greatest and freest nation on the planet, because for a long time, it came closest to the capitalist ideal. Slowly, for a century or more, we have been bleeding it dry. Republicans and Democrats have participated, and all of them under the label of “progressivism.” Mitt Romney would do little different, except perhaps to better manage the collapse. That won’t save us, and it can’t restore our country to its exceptional promise of years past. We now stand on a societal precipice and Barack Obama has arrived at just the right time in our history to oversee the commencement of the final de-capitalization of America, shoving us over into an abyss from which the nation may not emerge.
Dr. Levin, respectfully, that is the word you were seeking. The Left has known it and is practicing it with ardent fervor.
I seldom watch Bill O’Reilly, because if I want to listen to somebody pontificate on subjects about which s/he knows little, I can simply re-run Joe Biden’s most recent speech…in any time-frame. Thursday evening, O’Reilly was on when I came through the door, but since he seemed to be talking sensibly about the Fluke Fiasco, I listened briefly with interest, but in the very next segment, he went on to discuss the price of oil, demonstrating he’s at least as ignorant as Barack Obama pretends to be on the subject. Part of it is driven by the fact that O’Reilly is a panderer who tries to placate ‘the folks’ while serving his masters in the establishment. His oft-mentioned Harvard degree clearly isn’t in economics. As usual, O’Reilly failed to identify the actual causes of the high energy prices accurately.
Naturally, being a panderer, he talked about “speculators,” but he failed to mention even one valid reason that makes up the bulk of the increased prices we’re experiencing at the pumps. Since O’Reilly did such a masterfully incompetent job of explaining the issue, I feel duty-bound to correct the record, or at least explain it. There are really five major factors controlling the prices you pay at the pump, and while speculation might be a distant sixth in importance, it really has little to do with what you pay most of the time. Rather than lead you in circles of pompous pandering, let me try to make it a good deal more clear.
By far, the biggest factor in the price of the fuel you buy at the pumps is the price of crude oil itself. As the amount of oil being supplied to the market contracts, or the quantity of oil being demanded increases, you can expect a corresponding movement in the price you pay. When producers get together as a cartel(OPEC) in an attempt to restrict production, this will necessarily constrain the supply, and you will generally see higher prices, unless you have some manner by which to throw a significant monkey-wrench in the mechanism, for instance being able to increase your own domestic production, or by augmenting the supply to the market from a reserve. This should seem simple enough to most people who studied basic economics in High School, never mind earning a degree from that institution of fame we might call “Hahvaad.” The available supply versus the quantity demanded will always dominate the basic calculation.
Another factor that is nearly as important to consumers in a given country is the relative value of their currency in the world oil markets. The US has enjoyed the distinction of possessing what had been (and still remains, barely) the world’s reserve currency and the currency in which oil trades are made. Unfortunately, as our Federal Reserve has printed more dollars out of thin air in order to bail out the banks, and Europe, but also loan to our Federal Government to feed it’s insatiable hunger for dollars, we have seen the value of our dollar fall dramatically in the last few years. This means that no matter what commodity you buy, it will take more dollars to buy one unit as compared to before. In late 2010, when the Federal Reserve announced QE2(Quantitative Easing, Round2 – a.k.a printing vast sums of cash,) Sarah Palin, the former Alaska Governor, took to the podium to warn Americans that all of this money-printing by the Fed would result in higher food and energy prices.
Some people, mostly jerks like Paul Krugman of the New York Times actually mocked the Governor for that prediction, and even Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke got in on the act. After all, what would a former governor of Alaska know about it? As you probably know by now, she was right on every count. Everything she said came to pass with respect to the inflationary effects of “Quantitative Easing.” Score another one for the lady who knows how to take down an elk, but also a pompous commentator. She understands the energy markets, meaning she knew how the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve and the unrestrained borrowing of the Federal government would wind up effecting the general economy, but particularly the energy sector.
The next thing that affects the price of oil is the availability of substitutes. For instance, a fair amount of the electricity generated in the US comes from petroleum distillates and residual products from the refining process. There are just a few commercial alternatives, and apart from nuclear power, the vast bulk are fossil fuels, including oil, but also natural gas and coal. The grand total of wind and solar energy production nationwide doesn’t provide what one nuclear plant does, so let’s call that source negligible in any commercial sense. Coal accounted for more than half of all electric generation in the US prior to Obama’s arrival in Washington, but due to regulations being slapped on the energy producers, coal-fired plants are rapidly going extinct. As this happens, plants that use other fuels are necessarily being forced to pick up the slack, running at closer to 100% capability, and some of those plants use…oil and its byproducts. So you see, as you reduce the use of substitutes, it necessarily will cause an increase in the price of oil. Like in any market where substitutes are available, the reduction of the availability(or use) of one will cause a corresponding increase in reliance upon another. If beef prices go up, before long, people will shift to pork and chicken, and then the prices of these substitutes will move up also.
The fourth big factor affecting the price of fuel at the pumps is government taxation. If you live in a state like mine, where we pay a federal and state excise tax by the gallon, it’s bad enough when the Feds increase the taxes, but if you live in a state where the tax is a percentage, you really get blistered by any upward movement in fuel prices, because not only do you pay more in fuel, but you also pay a good deal more in taxes on it.
There is another factor that comes to mind, and it has to do with the distribution of the product, and how temporary displacements and shortages like we saw in 2005 with Hurricans Katrina and Rita caused trouble depending upon where you were and what the distribution chain that feeds it looks like, but those sorts of problems are a result of what happens when Just In Time inventory management tries to contend with the unexpected that Mother Nature throws our way.
We currently do not find ourselves under that sort of instability in the distribution chain, and this only goes somewhat further in explaining why the fuel price spikes we saw under George W. Bush bear little resemblance to the structural causes of the high prices we face today. Four dollars for a gallon of gasoline may not be entirely new, but resulting from something other than an ongoing distribution chain problem as a result of natural disaster, it is most certainly unprecedented in the 21st century. Today’s closest analog occurred under the administration of Jimmy Carter, if that tells you anything.
Together, these five factors have much more to do with the price of fuels than anything Bill O’Reilly mentioned. Speculators play a role, but by the time you add up the five factors I’ve mentioned, what you discover is that while speculators can drive things a little in one direction or the other, most who trade in commodity futures wind up losing, at least according to the statistics. Besides, they are an important part of the market too, and to pretend they have no other function but to somehow cheat consumers is a laughable bit of Marxist theory often pushed by panderers in both parties. Realize that listening to economic analysis from Bill O’Reilly is roughly analogous to getting investment advice from a fortune cookie: It contains only meaningless platitudes that will gain you little more than a moment’s amusement, but will reveal no cosmic truths.
Barack Obama has been on the campaign trail mocking Republicans, particularly Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin(although not by name,) who advocate an energy policy of increasing domestic energy production. This is a bit odd, because while Obama mocks “Drill Baby, Drill,” he has already undertaken policies with the same effect in mind. If increasing the supply can have no effect on prices, as the President claims, why did he order a release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve late last summer? It’s now rumored that he will soon do so again in response to rising pump prices. Does Barack Obama think we’re idiots? Releasing oil from the SPR merely accomplishes the same thing as producing more oil domestically: It provides more crude oil to the market, and that bump in supply tends to bring prices down over time.
Either Barack Obama doesn’t understand basic economics, or he thinks we’re too stupid to notice the contradiction implicit in the difference between his words and his actions. Here’s what he’s saying:
Notice that he continues the lie about the so-called “hand-outs” to “Big Oil.” You may hear his thesis that “there’s no silver bullet,” but what you must understand is that he fully understands that the silver bullet is supply, and when he has order releases from the SPR, it’s an acknowledgement of the fact that an increase in the supply available to the market is a downward pressure on prices. This is pretty basic, and I assume even President Obama understands that concept, despite frequently demonstrating a a general ignorance of economics. If he knows better, then there must be a reason he’s misstating the facts in this case, and there is: He’s in political hot water over the issue, and he knows it.
This is his attempt to stave off criticisms over escalating fuel prices, but it’s not going to work when the electorate realizes that in other ways, Obama is working to constrict the supply of oil available to the United States. On Thursday, even Mitch McConnell seemed to get it, and from the well of the Senate, he pointed out that Barack Obama is still obstructing the Keystone XL pipeline, and all of the jobs it would create, and the effect it would have on pump prices domestically:
This is a plain debunking of Barack Obama’s thesis, and Obama knows it. You can’t expect fuel prices to come down so long as you’re restricting the growth of exploration and development of new productive fields. Why does Saudi Arabia, in particular, but OPEC in particular regulate its production? The answer is obvious: To prop up the prices oil brings in the market. They intentionally restrict supply, and what increased production of domestic oil resources will do is to take away the ability of Saudi Arabia and other OPEC nations to effectively dominate the question of global supply delivered to the market. Doing so will begin to have an immediate effect, as the oil market, like any other sees dramatic moves on the basis of even small marginal changes in the quantity supplied relative to demand.
Obama can’t talk his way out of this one, and worse, he’s been caught lying. You can’t legitimately claim that to increase supply won’t effect prices while having undertaken measures to artificially prop up supply in order to drive down prices. This is the nature of Barack Obama’s dishonesty, and it’s all political. I leave you with this:
The Hill is reporting that GM is putting a temporary halt to its production of its Chevy Volt, an electric car promising wonders, but failing to convince customers. Volt sales are already heavily subsidized by the Federal government, but the problem with the car isn’t merely its price. It has a short range, it’s impractical, and its design can lead to fires stemming from its batteries even after relatively minor collision damage. Of course GM and the Obama administration promise this will help reduce our dependence on foreign oil, but I don’t see how that’s possible. GM complains that the Volt has gotten a black eye from the politics, but the truth is that the Volt suffers another problem: Consumers don’t want it. For most Americans, the prospect of buying an expensive Volt with all the associated hassles is roughly as inviting as a root canal. They have good reason to balk.
The electric current to re-charge the volt comes from power plants using a variety of sources including coal, natural gas, petroleum products, and nuclear energy. Transmitting power over a network of lines to your charging station is inefficient, because the longer the lines, the more energy is wasted along the way. I blame much of the hype surrounding the Chevy Volt on people who understand only buzzwords, but do not understand science, or engineering. One of the other concerns is what happens when one experiences a power outage at home. You’re stuck if your car is not fully charged prior to the outage. More, having to leave the car plugged in means time. Filling a gasoline tank takes a few minutes. Charging a Volt? Plan on hours. Up to ten. That means that when I leave for work at 6am, if I had arrived home at 9pm the evening before(and that’s not uncommon,) the silly thing may not be fully charged. Most Americans can’t afford that kind of inflexibility.
In total “carbon footprint,” including its manufacture, its batteries, and its use of electrical energy from some source, an electric car is no more friendly to the environment. The simple truth behind all of these green schemes is that until we come up with an entirely different energy source, you still have all the same basic problems. Sure, you can burn residual fuel oils at electric generating stations, and therefore centralize the pollution, but by the time you calculate all the inefficiencies of generating electricity in one location, transmitting it many miles to another location, losing some energy every inch of the way, only to be placed in a storage cell where some is lost both charging and discharging, never mind the cost of providing outlets all over the place, and the reduced range of most of these vehicles compared to fossil-fuel powered vehicles, what you may find out is that the total impact on the environment is even greater with electric vehicles.
The only way electric vehicles become substantially better is for their source of energy to become substantially better. At present, the best hope of so doing is to perfect nuclear fusion. No worries about radiation or waste(or only a tiny, tiny fraction.) No worry about meltdowns. No worries about finding new sources of radioactive materials. Nuclear fusion promises the power of the sun, but the real obstacles are in how to technically do it. Many programs, mostly funded by government, are carrying out designs studies and experiments. If ever the technical difficulties are overcome, cheap and abundant electricity will be a reality, making electric cars much more practical.
Meanwhile, as GM spins its wheels chasing a technology that is not much more than a nifty science fair project in terms of its practical application in the lives of most Americans, we’re missing the big picture. The answer lies not in how to move cars electrically, but instead how to create electric energy more cheaply. That is what our economy fundamentally needs, and it’s a goal that may be achievable if we want it. The problem is that at the end of the day, the environmentalists don’t want it. What they want is a contraction in the amount of energy available to humanity, so as to suppress humanity. What that means for you is what you have seen under Barack Obama: A reduction in your standard of living and an escalating cost for every form of energy.
If you wish to make the Volt or its successors a reality, the best answer is to find the way to make electricity more cheaply. We’ll always need the highly portable energy source that are fossil fuels, because electrics really aren’t feasible in some applications, but if we can convert most of our energy uses to electric in a environment of inexpensive electric generation, we can make that supply of fossil fuels stretch many millennia. Chasing electric cars in the near term is as frivolous as opening a baseball factory when there are no bats or ball-players. That’s why the Volt is so heavily subsidized. That’s why it will remain No Sale with the American people.
In the immortal words of officer John McClane, played by Bruce Willis in Die Hard, all I can say to Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is “Welcome to the party, Pal.” Bernanke is now warning legislators about the fiscal cliff over which Washington is shoving the United States. I must say that I have a few problems with this primarily because Bernanke has been leading us over a monetary cliff all his own. At the same time, I have a few other pointed question for Chairman Ben as he chides Congress on its lack of budgetary restraint. Why, at this late date, when we’ve all known this has been coming, is it only now that the Federal Reserve Chairman feels the need to show concern?
He certainly didn’t say any of this, or not loudly, when Nancy Pelosi was running the House. I also notice that he didn’t chide the President, who hasn’t taken any substantive steps to curtail the problem, and could be said to have arguably multiplied them with his stimulus bill(a.k.a. Porkulus) that unlike previous stimulus programs, wasn’t a single budget year project, but has been copied in each successive year. Bernanke can complain to Congress all he wants, but when this whole mess got started, he was nowhere in sight. For the first three years of Obama’s administration, he said nothing much to the executive branch on the matter, at least not publicly, and he said nothing of the sort to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid when they controlled Congress in one-party dictatorial fashion.
Worse than that, however, he has administered the greatest printing of money in Federal Reserve history, and it has all been largely inflationary as I have reported. Mr. “Fiscal Cliff” should have thought about all of this as he was digitizing more currency into existence, through QE1 and QE2, and more recently, a quiet QE3(by another name.) All of this quantitative easing really amounts to is printing more money, (or digitizing it.) That policy leads to the same cliff, because it is by his printing of it that it exists for the government to borrow and spend in the first place.
For Bernanke to come along now, conveniently after the House is in Republican control and to then waggle his finger is a bit of a sideshow act. Some will take him seriously, and the markets may react badly, but the truth is that he has been leading us into an even greater danger, and I think he knows it. This may be his way of making a preemptive strike for later this year, if the dollar crashes. He can point at Congress and claim: “See, I told you so.” The problem is that if tries that, I will be right here waggling a finger at him, to assure him that others, like Sarah Palin, have told him so. I have made this clear repeatedly, and yet Bernanke now comes along to warn Congress? Congress? He had better heed some warnings over at the Federal Reserve himself.
Don’t get me wrong: Congress is being as irresponsible as ever, but some in the majority party are at least trying to do something about it. For Ben Bernanke to come along and say this now suggests that he’s either seeking political favor with President Obama, who re-nominated him for his current second term, that ends in Janurary 2014, or he’s setting us up because he knows something bad is coming, and he now wants to disassociate himself from any blame. It may well be both. The sharp fall in gold prices on Wednesday may signal the beginning of a deflationary cycle. That could lead to a complete economic collapse, and Bernanke’s actions over the past four years have done nothing to remove the possibility. He can point a finger at Congress if he likes, but that means there are at least three pointing back at him.
Mitt Romney doesn’t seem able to help himself. Every time he’s given an opportunity to distance himself from his progressive politics, he sidesteps it and goes on to reinforce the view of him as a liberal Republican. Let’s stop kidding ourselves about all of these claims that he’s really a conservative. He’s not. He wasn’t a conservative when he ran to the left of Teddy Kennedy in his attempt to capture the US Senate seat in 1994, and he wasn’t a conservative when he ran center-left in his gubernatorial campaign in Massachusetts in 2002, and he wasn’t a conservative in his governance there. There is no evidence by which to conclude this cat has changed his stripes, and I have lost patience with all of the excuse-makers who pretend that Mitt Romney is a conservative.
Watch the video here(Note-the recording volume was very low):
Whether it’s Romneycare, or his willingness to pander to leftists on the question of the “progressivity” of the income tax, Mitt Romney is no conservative, and he isn’t fit to serve as a Republican president. Perhaps he should reconsider and run on the Democrat side, and challenge Obama for that party’s nomination, because he certainly seems better suited to it. I don’t think we should send another big-government liberal to replace the one we have. Rather than just changing teams, it’s as though it’s the same old team: The party of Big Government.
It’s true that he wants to cut taxes, but his plan entails all the usual gimmicks that phase in entitlement reforms long after it will matter. Talk about cutting the rate of growth in benefits, or delaying benefit eligibility by raising the Social Security retirement age is simply more pie-in-the-sky nonsense to which we will never be witness, because by the time it will go into effect, even if Romney won and served eight years, few of those changes will have been implemented, and in the mean time, we will see our country continue to slide into the pit of indebtedness.
We can’t afford any more big-government liberals, whether they have a “D” or an “R” next to their names, and what Romney is offering here is more tinkering around the edges that will do just a little to stimulate economic growth, but will continue to borrow at an unabridged rate, and what we will get as a result is another lost decade, and perhaps the death of the Republic. At best, Romney promises to undertake actions and implement policies that will act to slow our decline, but that’s all he’s really offering. I remain unimpressed, and the fact that he’s neck-and-neck with Santorum in his home state of Michigan demonstrates that many conservatives agree. Mitt Romney is no conservative, and his unwillingness to make even the moral argument for eliminating progressivity in the income tax system says all I need to know about what sort of president he will be.
Romney’s good for only one thing, and that’s “minding the store,” but what he won’t do is to improve its efficiency, or do anything to stave off bankruptcy. He’ll keep things going because that’s all he knows how to do, but he lacks the passion and vision, and frankly, the philosophical clarity to lead the country away from the brink of disaster.
Most of us who look around at the economic conditions in the country woke up scratching our heads at the outcome of the election. Under these economic conditions, how could voters fail to reject the party that has created the catastrophe of inflation, skyrocketing energy prices, and mounting food prices? This question seems vexing at first, but it’s really not so difficult to understand. Democrats are professionals at stealing elections, but they’re also professionals when it comes to setting a legislative agenda that will later backstop their political aims. Democrats knew what they were going to do, as far back as the beginning of the pandemic, and what they’ve been doing since was designed to carry it into effect. They’re diabolical, and with respect to inflation, they knew full well what they were going to do. Inflation didn’t matter in this election to their voters. Why? The reason your red wave became a trickle is because Democrat’s constituencies scarcely feel it, at least to the scale working Americans have been feeling it. Democrats undertook a plan to drive inflation while insulating the bulk of their own voters from it.
