Category Archives: Ilana Mercer

Update II: Bush & The Bailout Bandits

Affirmative Action, Classical Liberalism, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Ilana Mercer, Inflation, The State

Here’s an excerpt from my new WND column:

“A crisis that was created by cheap credit must be corrected by less of the same. … How does a bankrupt person become solvent? He ceases to borrow and spend, pays down what he owes and lives within his means. But Bush and the bailout bandits (here I include Obama and McCain, who’re down with destroying the economy too) would like you to believe such eternal verities do not apply in macroeconomics.

Bush’s idea of a correction is thus to ‘free banks to resume the flow of credit to American families and businesses.’ In the man’s own crazed words!

Those who buy the Bush bailout are – to use the incomparable Paul Gottfried’s coinage – ‘at least as dumb as turkeys, the mouths of which have to be shut when it rains, lest they swallow too much water and drown.'”

An unlovely snapshot of candidates Obama and McCain. …”

The complete column, “Bush & The Bailout Bandits,” is now up on WND.

Update I (September 26): To Robert and all my readers: Surely you know by now that if my image is not on the WND masthead, my weekly column is still on the Commentary Page? If you don’t see my image up on the WND nameplate, please look for it on the Commentary Page. My image is more often than not up there, but, since there are more commentators than slots, there is a rotation. On my new website, ready to launch any day now, you will be able to sign up for the weekly newsletter.

Update II (September 27): I would not ordinarily publish a letter, such as Tom’s hereunder, urging—in the face of all that has been written by this writer—more counterfeiting of the currency, debasement of the coin, and inflation of the money supply. Fraud all. Criminal too. With respect, Tom and his idol “Mort” do not understand a thing about money and the economy. However, this might be an opportunity for Tom and others to study further. (Mort of the halls of power is a goner.) I count on our classical liberal readers to recommend a few classics by Rothbard, Mises, and others. But Tom may want to reread “Bush & the Bailout Bandits,” and move on to the following:

“Dubya the Devaluer”

“US In The Red And Getting Redder” (Note the Chinese’s response to the threat of inflation: exactly opposite to ours. They’ve hindered lending and made living high on the hog harder.)

“Politicians: Stop ‘Stimulating’ In Public”

“Inflation 101 for Women Pundits & Other Tyrants”

“The Central Bank’s Game is the Same, Whoever’s the Name”

“Canadian Finance Ministry Pulling Bank Strings as Election Looms“

Updated: Predicted Meltdown

Business, Communism, Economy, Government, Ilana Mercer, Inflation, Private Property, Socialism, The State

The brilliant Bob Higgs on the crumbling capital markets (read my comments following the “Snip”):

“The failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, setting in motion the biggest government bailout/takeover in U.S. history, brings a grim sense of fulfillment to competent economists. After all, what did people expect, that water would flow uphill forever?

This financial mega-mess is the same sort of event as the collapse of the USSR’s centrally planned economy, another economically unworkable Rube Goldberg apparatus that was kept going, more or less badly, for decades before it fell apart completely. Along the way, of course, famous (yet actually unsound) economists assured the world that everything was working out splendidly. As late as 1989, when the pillars were crumbling on all sides of the temple, Nobel Prize winner Paul A. Samuelson informed readers of his widely used textbook, “The Soviet economy is proof that . . . a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.”

In the future, we will see a similar breakdown of the U.S. government’s Social Security system, with its ill-fated pension system and its even more inauspicious Medicare system of financing health care for the elderly. These government schemes are fighting a losing battle against demographic realities, the laws of economics, and the rules of arithmetic. The question is not whether they will fail, but when—and then how the government that can no longer sustain them in their previous Ponzi-scheme form will alter them to salvage what little can be salvaged with minimal damage to the government itself.

Our political economy is rife with such catastrophes in waiting, yet the public always seems startled, and outraged, when the day of reckoning can no longer be deferred, and another apartment collapses in the state’s Hotel of Impossible Promises, loading onto the taxpayers more visibly the burden of sheltering the previous occupants.

Call it democracy in action or utterly corrupt governance; they are the same thing.

Each of these time bombs has at least one element in common: it promises current benefits, often seemingly without cost; but if it must acknowledge a substantial cost, it places that burden somewhere in the distant future, where it will be borne by somebody else. From the standpoint of society in general, every such scheme is a species of eating the seed corn. It satisfies the public’s appetite to consume something for nothing right now, with no thought for the morrow. It represents the height of irresponsibility by permitting people to live higher today than they can truly afford, financing this profligacy by borrowing recklessly and by taxing politically weak and ill-organized people in order to shower benefits on politically strong and well-organized special interests. …

The architecture of the Hotel of Impossible Promises is not arcane. All competent economists understand these things. Ludwig von Mises explained as early as 1920 why a centrally planned economy could not work as a rational system of allocating resources. The reasons why Social Security, especially its Medicare component, and many other such government programs contain the seeds of their own destruction have been explained time and again. Are the politicians who construct these structures really such idiots that they cannot understand the logic of what they are doing? Not at all. …”

[Snip]

The complete article is “Ticking Time Bomb Explodes, Public Is Shocked.” Read it. I disagree with the sentiment expressed in the last paragraph. Bob Higgs would find it hard to comprehend how stupid the corporate, political and academic elites truly are. This is the age of the idiot. Obama is an ass with ears. Ditto McCain. Take them at face value, Bob. Believe their idiocy. As hard as it may be for a man of your intelligence to grasp, they truly do not understand Mises and Hayek and Rothbard or even Friedman. The idea that misallocation of capital is inevitable in socialized systems is anathema to the incontinent legislators and the other cognoscenti. Psychologizing about their motives gives these intellectual tabula rasa more credit than they deserve. (Michael Rebmann of “North Buffalo Journal and Review” liked this rant.)

Update: I just saw CNN’s Campbell Brown, who, as I already noted, is not working with much, and her panel, laud the massive bailouts. Why? Because, as all agreed, the returns on this “investment” will be many times the investment. This is beyond rank utilitarianism. The concept of private property eludes Campbell and her commies. The risks in a bailout are socialized and the profits privatized. Theft is what this is all about–unconstitutional, criminal taking.

Multiculturalist Malaise—From South Africa To The Pacific Northwest

Ilana Mercer, IMMIGRATION, Multiculturalism, South-Africa

I can’t tell you how pleased I am to have joined the daring writers of VDARE.Com, and the “class act” who runs it all, Peter Brimelow.

My new, monthly VDARE.COM column, “Multiculturalists Malaise—From South Africa To The Pacific Northwest,” is up. Here’s an excerpt:

“I call them English niceties. They are those mannerisms the English-speaking people share—idiosyncrasies that make life so very pleasant. You notice them not at all when they pervade the culture, and pine for them when they’re gone.
And they are slowly disappearing in America, by and large due to the twin evils of multiculturalism and mass immigration.
Ordinary Americans outside the halls of power will appreciate the fellow-feelings that are stirred in me by my miraculously preserved, distinctly American neighborhood here in the Pacific Northwest.
It’s a place where people still greet one another in English and engage in distinct chit-chat: ‘Lovely day, isn’t it? Oh, it sure is fabulous.’ Or, ‘You go girl,’ when I’m jogging up the mountain.
It’s a haven where certain conventions of civility and decorum are observed; and where the same decorations go up around Halloween and Christmas time.
As an immigrant many times over—from South Africa to Israel back to South Africa to Canada to the US—I’ve become excruciatingly aware of what may seem petty, but is far from it…”

Read the complete column, “Multiculturalist Malaise—From South Africa To The Pacific Northwest,” on VDARE.COM, the foremost authority on immigration.