Category Archives: Business

UPDATED: Gold Is Bad For Government Health (Remember Executive Order 6102)

Business, Debt, Economy, History, Individual Rights, Inflation, John McCain, Regulation, Rights, Socialism, The State

The health scare bill is the gift that just keeps giving—giving-up individual freedoms to government. From a “TAX ON INDIVIDUALS WITHOUT ACCEPTABLE HEALTH CARE COVERAGE” to a “SURCHARGE ON HIGH INCOME INDIVIDUALS” to “STUDENT LOAN REFORM”; it’s all there, designed to leave little room for voluntary, peaceful exchanges. But we missed another provision among the thousands of sections the H.R.4872 Reconciliation Act of 2010 sports:

A “tack-on provision to the law that puts gold coin buyers and sellers under closer government scrutiny.”

Gold is a necessary financial hedge in the survival on the road to serfdom.

UPDATE (July 24): Gold Confiscation coming? FDR, idolized by BHO and McMussolini alike—by almost all offshoots of the duopoly, in fact—forbade “the Hoarding of Gold Coin, Gold Bullion and Gold Certificates” at pains of punishment: a fine of “not more than $10,000, or “imprisoned for not more than ten years or both.”

Libertarian (Trade) Deficits

Business, Debt, Economy, Free Markets, libertarianism

The following is from my new, WND.Com column, “Libertarian (Trade) Deficits”:

“… I am confident the legendary Lou Dobbs understands that voluntary exchanges are by definition advantageous to their participants. Costco, my hair stylist, and the GTI dealer—all have products or skills I want. Within this voluntary, mutually beneficial relationship, I give up an item I value less, for something I value more: a fee for the desired product or service. My trading partners, whose valuations are in complementary opposition to mine, reciprocate in kind. Silhouetted by the force of the state, this synchronized, magic market starts to splutter, and people suffer. That’s a no-brainer.

However, when it comes to the glories of an aggregate, negative balance of trade, allow me to respond to the typical libertarian post-graduate cleverness, as evinced by Dr. Boudreaux. In one respect libertarians are right: there is nothing wrong with my running a trade deficit with Costco, my hair stylist, or my GTI dealer, as I do—just so long as I pay for my purchases. The data demonstrate that Americans, in general, don’t.

All in all, by Vox Day’s account, ‘U.S. households, corporations and various levels of government’ owe fifty three trillion dollars! The consumption being lauded by libertarians is debt-driven consumption. In this context, a trade deficit is significant, inasmuch as it reflects not an increase in wealth but an increase in indebtedness.

To dismiss the gap between U.S. exports and U.S. imports as an insignificant economic indicator—now that’s silly. ” …

The complete column is “Libertarian (Trade) Deficits”

Read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

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‘Law Remakes U.S. Financial Landscape’

Business, Economy, Fascism, Political Economy, Regulation, Republicans

Among the 500 odd new regulations it imposes, the financial bill, all 2,300 pristine, unread pages of it, has just been passed by the Senate. As we surmised in April, and Bloomberg now confirms, the thing will,

” … create a mechanism for liquidating failing financial firms whose collapse could roil markets, a council of regulators to police firms for threats to the economic system and a consumer bureau at the Federal Reserve to monitor banks for credit-card and mortgage lending abuses. It also expands oversight of executive compensation and derivatives, contracts whose value is derived from stocks, bonds, loans, currencies and commodities.”

“Nowhere in the final bill will you see even a pretense of rolling back the endless federal incentives and mandates to extend credit, particularly mortgages, to those who cannot afford to pay their loans back,” notes Mark A. Calabria of the Cato Institute. “After all, the popular narrative insists that Wall Street fat cats must be to blame for the credit crisis. Despite the recognition that mortgages were offered to unqualified individuals and families, banks will still be required under the Dodd-Frank bill to meet government-imposed lending quotas.”

The title of this post is borrowed from the aptly titled article in the WSJ, which warns that “the legislation hands off to 10 regulatory agencies the discretion to write hundreds of new rules governing finance. Rather than the bill itself, it will be this process—accompanied by a lobbying blitz from banks—that will determine the precise contours of this new landscape … ”

The Managerial State in full force.

There were 60 YEAs and 39 NAYs.

The Republicans that must be thrown into the brier patch are Susan Collins, slow Olympia Snowe, and beefcake Scott Brown.

UPDATED: 'Brace For Impact!' (Breaking: BHO EXPERT AGREES)

America, Business, Capitalism, Debt

“[A] very successful entrepreneur now living abroad” wrote to John Derbyshire, in response to an article Derb wrote detailing what a “terrible country the US is” if you want “to start an imaginative new enterprise”:

“Capitalism is dead in the US . . . The US was not destroyed by the Russians, the Chinese or even the militant Islamists. They did it to themselves . . . The $104 trillion debt is beyond any possible means of repayment. The only way out will be to monetize the debt by hyperinflation . . . I’m now watching the final days from 8,000 miles away . . . In November 2008, half of the US electorate put a loaded ballot in their mouth and pulled the trigger . . .”

Derb: “There’s a 40-foot tsunami in plain sight on the horizon, and we’re playing beach volleyball. Can Petraeus turn Afghanistan around? How unpopular is the healthcare bill? Will the feds sue the state of Arizona? (What’s that distant rumbling sound?) Is Turkey a friend or an enemy? Should Rahm Emanuel go? Is Elena Kagan gay?” [Or should Bill Kristol resign … Pat Buchanan said something to the effect that Americans are a deeply silly people in serious times.]

Vox Day writes: “The car has already hit the tree and the bumper is already in the process of buckling inward, so there is no time to turn the wheel or fasten seat belts. It is too late to do anything but scream.”

Derb “favor[s] aerodynamic analogies over Vox Day’s merely automotive ones. So: Heads between knees, arms over heads, hold that position. Pray if you’re inclined to. Brace for impact!”

UPDATE (July 12): I’ve searched the Net high-and-low, news outlets, Reuters too, are not reporting what Bill O’Reilly has just announced. A member of BHO’s commission-to-investigate-and-approve-the-levels-of-debt-the-USA-is-carrying has said we are on the road to ruin. Isn’t it curious how left-liberal mainstream media doesn’t even break vital stories any longer? If Bill is right, and I have no reason to believe otherwise, the man is a former Clinton official.

Talker Juan Williams, a simple sort who has long championed Keynesian deficit spending, denying that huge debt is in any way economically deleterious, suddenly got religion on austerity. It is as I said in the post asking the Punditocracy to quit, truth comes into existence in America as soon as someone in the establishment pronounces it, usually a decade or so after we’ve been screaming it from the rooftops.