Category Archives: Economy

Seeking Honorable Hondurans For Hire

Barack Obama, Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation, Political Economy, Ron Paul

In my latest column, now on Taki’s Magazine, I look high-and-low for “Honorable Hondurans for Hire,” to depose of the D.C. bloodsuckers before they do more harm:

“Vice President Joe Biden has been slightly more candid than his boss, confessing of late that he ‘and everyone else misread the economy.’ For his ‘everyone else’ refrain, or plain fib, Joe can be forgiven. Drawing comfort from ‘the warm smell of the herd’ he surrounds himself with is slightly better than Obama’s way out. Beloved of the herd, Obama opts for sophistic statements—the kind that cannot be proved or disproved. To wit: sans stimulus, more jobs would have been lost.

Yes, jobs. Although Obama’s chief economic advisers promised that their ‘stim’ would hold the unemployment rate below 8 percent, it has risen to 9.5 percent and is expected to exceed ten. This is the highest unemployment has been in almost 26 years, with employers cutting 467,000 jobs in June alone.

A few months back, when Obama passed his $787 billion of stimulus—consisting of politically directed projects that ballooned government at all levels—there was not a scintilla of uncertainly in the minds of his gurus and the patsy pundits who service them. This infusion of borrowed and counterfeited funds, they asserted, would pick up the slack in the languishing economy, to use one crazy Keynesian concept. (Keynes was to economics as Katrina was to New Orleans.) …

… Laura Tyson, eminent adviser to the president … managed to make front-page news—vying with Jackson and the carrion beetles consuming his remains—by asserting that the February stimulus was ‘a bit too small.’

Not a great deal too small, mind you, just a wee bit small.

When issued, the lion’s share of this oh-so carefully calibrated loot ought to go toward hiring a few honorable Hondurans to depose of the bloodsuckers before they do more harm. …”

The complete column, “Seeking Honorable Hondurans For Hire,” is now on Taki’s.

Miss the weekly column on WND.COM? Catch it on Taki’s Magazine every Saturday.

Dick Armey Not Such a Tool

Classical Liberalism, Economy, Free Markets, Regulation, Republicans, Socialism

Dick Armey took on a Clinton lackey named, deceptively, David Goodfriend on the CNBC program Kudlow Reports. Armey, whom I think has a PhD in economics—as is its wont, Wikipedia won’t say—mentioned von Mises winning the great calculation debate. I believe he mumbled about von Mises whipping Lange or Lerner, but I can’t be sure. In any event, it made my day to hear someone mention von Mises, the greatest economist to live. Small pleasures.

The Debt Keeps Obamby Up At Night

Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation

The same economists who’ve insisted on billions in bailout and stimulus monies now say the country’s debt is unsustainable.

The same president who ballooned Bush’s bailouts, authorized astronomical outlays, deepened the socialization of the economy, and now carps about the need for more of the same—trillions in healthcare expenditure and crippling cap-and-trade costs—the same sod complains that the debt “keeps me awake at night.”

The same Counterfeiter-in-Chief, Ben Bernanke, who turned his snout up when Rep. Ron Paul questioned his sanity and the source of his authority, is now lecturing the numskulls in Congress that “Unless we demonstrate a strong commitment to fiscal sustainability in the longer term, we will have neither financial stability nor healthy economic growth.”

Only a few weeks back all these government gurus, and the pundits in their peanut gallery, insisted that digging America out of the financial grave is a long-term goal. For the short term, it’s stimulus time, baby. “Show me the fake money, shower me with cheap credit; and send me sailing on a ship of fools.”
(See “I.O.U.S.A.”)

Amidst reports that, at $11.5 trillion, “the overall debt is now slightly over 80% of the annual output of the entire U.S. economy, as measured by the gross domestic product,” that “this year’s deficit is now estimated at about $1.85 trillion,” that the nation’s full (unfunded) obligations stand at around $60 trillion, and that each one of us has been saddled with roughly $184,000 of state debt—Paul Krugmanites and their acolytes now tell us that, “We are on an utterly unsustainable fiscal course.”

Of course, we on BAB, and all fellow adherents of the Austrian school of economics, have been sounding the alarm for years and with the following caveat: we have only ever advocated allowing the economy to contract and purge the malinvestment poisons.

Do I need to remind you that the aforementioned criminals have refused to concede that a contraction was a good and necessary thing; that the same creeps are in the habit of pathologizing an economic downturn by using terms such as “deflation,” and calling for government to step in and pick up the slack by spending—measures that have resulted in what is a depression by any other name.

That’s called Voodoo economics (also Keynesianism.)

Throw these bums out, and that includes the “Republikeynesians”.

…Like A Housewarming For The Homeless

Debt, Economy, Government, Inflation, Labor, The State

A JOBLESS RECOVERY is the equivalent of a housewarming for the homeless. You have got to know that this sophistic term is a political construct, not an economic one. The term is meant to coat the entrenched, systemic effects of endemic, employment-killing government policies with a patina of scholarly respectability.

Typically, establishment economists will waffle about “structural changes—permanent shifts in the distribution of workers throughout the economy”—causing job losses, but will gleefully tout GDP growth, or some or other highly manipulable indicator, as evidence that the the jobless are fussing needlessly.

And here we return to square one: I am not sure that a vigorous recovery is even possible given government funded and unfunded debt amounting to upwards of $60 trillion, and counting. I don’t know that a country can surface from under all that. At the very least, a natural shift must take place—and be evident—from a credit-fueled, consumption-based economy, to one founded on savings, investment and production.

But, what do you know, the GDP statistic is consumption-driven: it measures the kind of economic Brownian motion of which less is required. “This statistic is constructed in accordance with the view that what drives an economy is not the production of wealth but rather its consumption,” confirms (Austrian) economist Frank Shostak. “What matters here is demand for final goods and services. Since consumer outlays are the largest part of overall demand, it is commonly held that consumer demand sets in motion economic growth.”

The prevailing “theory” of John Maynard Keynes “is not economics, but a statist political theory. Keynes’s political creed guaranteed a hand-in-glove relationship between the state and its stooge economists. Most of what Keynes advocated entails giving the state enormous … powers.”

Essential in this scheme of things is semantic obscurantism. “A Jobless Recovery” is exactly that.

So when you hear that “employers cut 467,000 jobs in June, far more than expected, and the jobless rate hit a 26-year high of 9.5 percent”; and that “wages shrank to their lowest in nearly a year,” consider these vital indicators of a moribund economy.