Last month I warned that European “politicians had better beware: Ordinary Germans have come to realize that adding an overarching tier of tyrants—the EU—to their own government has benefited them as a second hangman enhances the health of a condemned man.”
Mainstream media is catching on:
“…there has been a colossal misunderstanding,” writes Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of The Telegraph, “around the world of what has just has happened in Germany. The significance of yesterday’s vote by the Bundestag to make the EU’s €440bn rescue fund (EFSF) more flexible is not that the outcome was a ‘Yes'”.
This assent was a foregone conclusion, given the backing of the opposition Social Democrats and Greens. In any case, the vote merely ratifies the EU deal reached more than two months ago – itself too little, too late, rendered largely worthless by very fast-moving events.
The significance is entirely the opposite. The furious debate over the erosion of German fiscal sovereignty and democracy – as well as the escalating costs of the EU rescue machinery – has made it absolutely clear that the Bundestag will not prop up the ruins of monetary union for much longer.
Left and right, American statists want to believe that work-horse Europeans (Germans, for instance) support the Eurozone and the wider European Union (EU). As I ventured in “Euro-Bondage & the Next Tier of Tyrants,” it is but a matter of time before patriotic Euroskeptics, to whom our press makes only veiled mention, reject the absurd claim that the EU colossus would or could advance their interests.
Fans of freedom, and hence of nullification and secession, should watch the developments in Germany with great interest. That country’s government and high court have flouted the people’s sovereignty for too long. A change is a coming…
“New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie may be planning to join the Republican presidential thrust and ‘Perry.’ … references to Ronald Reagan do not make a speech Reaganesque. To be Reaganesque, Christie will have to expose the spirit of socialism—envy, entitlement, aggression—and juxtapose it with the morality of capitalism: commerce, creativity, comity.
Gov. Christie boasted that his ‘Executive Branch’ showed the requisite leadership, not least in educating the public before enacting solutions to New Jersey’s problems.
If Christie wishes to ‘educate’ the rest of the country, as he claims to have done for New Jersey, he would have to first strike at the assorted zero-sum, socialist notions, whereby one person’s plenty is portrayed as another’s poverty. Chief among these is the concept of ‘the American economic pie.’ This pie-in-the-sky is perverse in the extreme because it feeds the idea of a preexisting income pie from which the greedy appropriate an unfair share.
Wealth, earned or ‘unearned,’ as egalitarians term inheritance, doesn’t exist outside the individuals who create it. Wealth is a return for desirable services, skills and resources rendered to others. Labor productivity is the main determinant of wages—and wealth. Most wealthy Americans produce what they consume—and much more; they don’t remove or steal it from poorer Americans.”
Few expect him to run, but New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is essentially even with President Barack Obama in an early look at a hypothetical Election 2012 matchup. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely U.S. Voters shows that Obama earns 44% support in the matchup, while Christie attracts 43%. Six percent (6%) prefer a third option, and eight percent (8%) are undecided.
For real, clear economics, it’s hard to beat financier Peter Schiff. Here is some of the text of his testimony to the gathering of crooks known as Congress. Pearls before swine, if you ask me:
“We stimulated our way into this problem [“the housing bubble and the financial crisis of 2008”]. We are not going to stimulate our way out. In fact the stimulus is actually a sedative. The stimulus is preventing the free market from unraveling the problems of years of bad monetary and fiscal policy have created. We don’t need more spending. We need the opposite of spending. We need under consumption, what the economy lacks is savings, investment, production and if we try to preserve the jobs of the bubble economy with more reckless money printing and borrowing and government spending all we are going to succeed in doing is preventing the restructuring that we need and preventing more productive jobs from coming into existence.”
“And I wanna talk specifically about jobs, I’m an employer, I employ about 150 people. I would probably employ a 1000 more if it were not for government regulations that inhibited my ability to hire and grow my business and forced me to move portions of my business overseas in order to escape the regulatory burden here. But the question is why do I hire people where are these jobs coming from, you know, jobs in a free market, ah, they come from two things, they come from profits, or the profit motive or they come from capital. You need both to create jobs. And in a free market there’s gonna be jobs and if they’re aren’t enough jobs, Congress has to ask: ‘What are we doing to inhibit this process? How are we preventing jobs that would normally be here from coming into existence?'”
“Now, in order for me to hire somebody, I have to be able to make a profit. That means that the person I hire has to deliver to me more value than the cost of the employing them. And the cost of employing them is not just the wages I’m paying them but it’s all the mandatory benefits, the taxes, and more importantly the legal liability that I incur when I hire somebody. Source: LYBIO.net In fact, one of the riskiest things you can do in America is to hire somebody. And because of that reason, because of all the liability from Government, from lawsuits, that you have put on employers, most small businesses their main concern is how not to hire people. How can I grow my business and hire as few people as possible. That is not something that happens in the market. That is something that happens as a consequence of Government…”
“…Demand doesn’t come form government spending; inflation comes from government spending. Demand comes from supply. You can’t consume something that isn’t produced. You have to make things first. …”
“There are millions of employed Americans. How do you increase the demand for labor? You decrease the cost of labor. Regulations substantially increase the costs of employing people and as a result fewer people are employed.”
Schiff recommended that no more regulations be added and that congress begins to repeal existing regulations. Minimum-wage laws for example.
“You can’t lose your rights because you hire somebody; you can’t give workers some kind of special privily and then call it a worker’s right. Everybody has individual rights and you shouldn’t lose them because you hire somebody.”
“Bad regulation did not start under Obama. The problem with well meaning regulation is that the consequences are the exact opposite of the intent. Infrastructure spending doesn’t stimulate the economy; it drains the economy of resources. Infrastructure only helps in the long run if it raises the productivity of the nation. China can afford to put in roads. We are broke. We need to start making stuff before we can consider how to make our roads prettier.”
“99% of a [small/medium-size business’ income] is taxed at the marginal rate, so that the marginal rate is my rate. Feds take 35% of my income, another 3% for Medicare, local tax in the state of Connecticut (7%), and this is before I pay any property or sales taxes. I am already moving business to Singapore, the Caribbean. We are a high tax country, not a low tax country.”
“You can only borrow if someone is saving. There is a lender. The has to be something in it for the lender has to have something in it. Currently the banks are getting money from the government and buying treasuries, monetary policy that is stifling the savings that we need to grow the economy. You can always see the jobs that government creates, you can never see the jobs it destroys. All government can do is re-arrange the resources; it cannot create resources.”
“A sales tax should replace income tax. It would be much more conducive to tax people when they spend their wealth, not when they accumulate it.”
“Deficit spending is more damaging than taxation….”
“Interest rates [as we know] are being kept low. When they rise to approximate market rate, what effect till this have on business? banks which are kept afloat by the cheap money from the Fed will go insolvent. Their portfolios are loaded with low-yielding, long-term government bonds … keeping interest low creates inflation…”
“Henry Ford paid his workers $5 a day. Highest in the world at the time; an ounce and a quarter of gold. $2500 a week. They were paying no federal incomes taxes and no payroll taxes; there were no minimum wages and no unions. We paid the highest wages in the world but produces the best least expensive products. that was possible b/c we had the smallest government. Minimal regulations and no taxes. …”
[SNIP]
Notice how silent Dr. Heather Boushey, to Schiff’s right, has fallen—she is a popular panelist on the panel parade that infests cable, PBS, and the other networks.
Another thought: Ron Paul, who does not argue nearly as crisply and clearly as Schiff does, will need to make common cause with Mr. Schiff. Peter Schiff: United States Secretary of the Treasury in a future Paul cabinet.
Is Princess Ameerah Al-Taweel the most beautiful woman in the world? Indisputably. Her face is simply exquisite. Poise and manners are perfect too. Mrs. Al-Taweel’s simple, rich-girl solutions to endemic unemployment sound more left-liberal than classically liberal, but her heart is pure and she is bright. Married to “Buffett of Arabia,” Ameerah Al-Taweel is also terrifically wealthy. I hope she does not pick up any ho-like mannerisms while in America.
Ameerah Al-Taweel’s Interview With CNN’s Piers Morgan
UPDATE (Sept. 25): It would seem that Princess Al-Taweel is a “micro-credit cultist.” The role of the NGO, as she see it, is to encourage economic growth by doling out loans to plucky people who want to start a business. Her belief in the “Micro-Credit Cult” is understandable. Saudi Arabia is a rentier state, where an aristocratic, authoritarian upper-class manages the country’s vast natural resource of oil. In the Saudi situation, this custodian class is probably more benevolent than a democratic despotism would be.
