Category Archives: Debt

UPDATED: Euro-Bondage & The Next Tier of Tyrants

Constitution, Debt, Democracy, Economy, EU, Europe, Federal Reserve Bank, Foreign Policy, Nationhood, Political Economy

The following is excerpted from “Euro-Bondage & The Next Tier of Tyrants,” my new WND.COM column:

“On Wednesday, Sept 7, patriotic Germans received bad news. A group of jurists and economists had petitioned the German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. Their case was that Germany’s ‘participation in the euro rescue fund packages’ undermined the democratic and property rights of German citizens, as elected officials had little say in these deals.

The high court rejected these arguments, although it did crack a Teutonic joke: Presiding judge Andreas Vosskuhle recommended that, in the future, the people’s representatives get more involved in deciding how the money of constituents is distributed.

The contagion of the sovereign debt crisis in Europe has been exacerbated by the financial collectivism imposed by the Eurozone and the wider European Union (EU), whereby the more productive member-states foot the bill for their profligate neighbors. The latter “PIGS” states are Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain.

And now Italy; it is teetering because of the Italian government’s liabilities—compounded, as in Greece, by the insatiable demands of an ever-accreting oinks sector.

A world perfected by global central planners is one in which wealth consumers live at the expense of wealth creators; where the rich are coerced into paying for the poor, the North for the South.

In this increasingly centralized dispensation, financier-cum-philanthropist George Soros holds sway. Soros has generally acted against the sovereign coin, and as a proxy for centralized power and bankers.

Just last year, Soros attempted to muscle Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel into printing and inflating her country’s currency—perhaps not to Weimar-Republic levels, but to Obama banana-republic standards …”

Read the complete column, “Euro-Bondage & The Next Tier of Tyrants,” now on WND.COM.

My new book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is available from Amazon.

A newly formatted, splendid Kindle copy is also on sale.

UPDATE: Americans have just heard their insufferable president propose $400 billion more in deficit-spending, to be paid for not by cuts to government but by a future, slowdown in the rate of the growth of government, over ten years.

How bad are American federal policy makers? Put it this way: The European Central Bank is more prudent than the Federal Reserve Bank, by far: It has raised interest rates over the last few years. Moreover, as bad as the Eurozone’s bailout culture has become, debtor countries have been forced to commit to austerity measures as a condition of bailout. Any parallels in the US?

Another point in favor of the Europeans: the EU is more likely to dissolve than these United States.

UPDATED: Mañana: Manna Will Fall From DC Heavens (Bunk Obama)

Barack Obama, Debt, Economy, EU, Europe, Federal Reserve Bank, Journalism, Media, Political Philosophy, Regulation

Streamed into American living rooms, almost hourly, is an ad with MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow. In the ad, Maddow, whose version of a tinfoil hat is the hardhat, has taken up a position at the foot of the Hoover Dam. Face turned upwards, with childlike faith, she seems to be expressing hope that money will fall like manna from the DC heavens, and that the government will build another such giant dam. Rumor has it that the Messiah will deliver. Mañana.

More to the point, the American cognoscenti, monetary movers-and shakers included, are agreed: The make-work projects of a bankrupt government can cure a country’s economy. Perhaps they don’t know that the money to make work is either stolen (taxed), printed (theft by stealth), or borrowed (fraud if you can’t pay it back).

Among these people a consensus exists: National bankruptcy could never befall the US, because it has a printing press—a paper Pantheon where magic money is manufactured. And we are all expected to believe, based on the divination of the animal spirits, that an abundance of paper, and not production, will produce prosperity.

No less a moocher than the Greek Finance Minister seems to understand that to fix his country’s finances he must privatize industries, cut public-sector wages, and implement a range of labor-market reforms.

He gets it, but not Rachel Maddow. She’s waiting for BHO to deliver. Tomorrow.

UPDATE (Sept. 8): BUNK OBAMA. Please don’t expect a run-down of Zero’s latest plan to spend more money without incurring any more debt. That’s the administration’s claim for its latest political shenanigans.

I’ll be bunking Barack’s speech.

“Illinois Republican Rep. Joe Walsh was the first to announce his intentional absence last week, saying he didn’t want to act as a ‘prop’ for Obama’s speech.” Others have followed, including Ron Paul, who had set the precedent for skipping presidential extravaganzas.

How low have we fallen: The White House is touting
an enhanced live stream with charts, graphs, and quick stats at WhiteHouse.gov/live.” Yippee. ONLY NEXT WEEK will the president divulge how he intends to pay for the purported $400 billion in deficit-spending he will be proposing, shortly.

If the guy meant business, he’d repeal ObamaCare and all the thousands of pages of other regulation he has signed into law since his pox-full presidency began. He’d adopt flat, very LOW, corporate and individual tax rates. And he’d stop stimulating his package in public. It’s obscene.

Leech-In-Chief Robs Job Market

Barack Obama, Business, Debt, Economy, Free Markets, Labor, Political Economy, Regulation

Robbing Peter to pay Paul impoverishes. Put differently: this month, the proverbial Peter was unable to create prosperity that would have redounded to all Americans. The leech-in-chief and the political parasites surrounding him have put in place policies which guarantee that the U.S. job market flat-lines, as it did this month. “The worst performance since last September, the Labor Department said.”

Heartbreaking are the images of “job seekers waiting to enter job fairs”—which in themselves often appear to be feel-good affairs organized by ruthless politicians eager to be perceived as doing something.

In the interim, when he’s not preparing to wow us with his words—a disappearing act would be more welcome—President Obama is hiring. He has just nominated a new bloodsucker to advise him on economics. Does Alan Krueger truly believe that fixing the price of labor via minimum wage laws is not such a bad idea? Apparently so.

Considered a form of price control, minimum wage laws create poverty by creating unemployment among the poor and unskilled. “Fixing the price of labor above the market rate or the productivity of the employee as the minimum wage does causes surpluses of labor. The jobs would exist had government not legislated them out of the reach of those who need them.”

They are the individuals in the images.

BHO is also poised to do some more taxing, printing, and borrowing.

A glimmer of good news can be gleaned from the WSJ report: “Cuts in the public sector entirely offset the private sector’s gain of 17,000 jobs.”

If only the poor people standing in line at these job fairs—often only to meet and greet a greasy politician—understood that every little slash at the “Oink Sector” helps to seed a job in the real sector.

‘I.O.U.S.A’ Forever After

Barack Obama, Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Political Economy

I am unable to locate the Bloomberg TV segment in which Robert Auerbach, Professor of Public Affairs at the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin, disputed the fiscal multiplier effect with reference to research he had undertaken with Milton Friedman. Crumbs, for sure …

Milton Friedman was no Austrian economist. Neither is Auerbach—but at least he has admitted that after he “transferred from the teachings of Abba Lerner [some frightful Neo-Keynesian] to the teachings of Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago,” he “became convinced that Abba had made a terrible mistake. ‘Heavy reliance’ on running the printing press to finance government spending is not immune to serious consequences. There are substantial immediate effects as well as expectations of inflation and higher interest rates that may well appear over time.”

[SNIP]

The state of political economy in the US being what it is, I can safely copy and paste from past articles a response to current, repeat-offender policies. The latest crazed impetus from Zero and his advisers is a “new” “jobs agenda.” “‘I.O.U.S.A'” was written in 2008 on the occasion of BHO’s first fake money infusion:

“Fresh off the printing press, the trillions in new spending Obama is planning will only make matters worse. Understand, government can’t create wealth; it only consumes it, or moves it about. Not even Magic Man Obama can make sustainable jobs materialize by borrowing and counterfeiting. Only the private sector can create sustainable jobs—-sustainable because driven by consumer preferences, as opposed to bureaucratic whim. The more taxing, printing, and borrowing the government does, in the vain name of job creation, the less capital will the private sector have with which to create long-lasting employment.”