Category Archives: Political Economy

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: Scheuer: Big Bad Israel Vs. Poor Little Empire (The ‘Sir’ Thing)

America, Anti-Semitism, Education, Foreign Policy, Israel, Political Economy, Technology

Michael Scheuer is so predicable in his attempts to be unpredictable. I knew right away what Scheuer would say when Judge Napolitano, of Freedom Watch, brought up the matter of US spying on Israel. The Jewish State is no ally; it deserves what it gets, said Scheuer.

Oh the contradictions! The likes of Scheuer see the US as a bad actor everywhere around the world. Except when it comes to the Jewish State. When it concerns Israel, big bad America suddenly becomes poor little Empire.

Inconsistency in thinking is never a nice thing to behold.

Scheuer also claimed that Israel has been stealing America’s intellectual property, an assertion for which he offered no evidence.

Who do you think invented Microsoft’s “Kinect,” which is in the Guinness Book of Records as the “Fastest-Selling Consumer Electronics Device” ever? Scheuer would like to claim the invention for the US, but it belongs to an Israeli outfit called PrimeSense.

Jealously is as ugly as inconsistency. My sources in the high-tech industry confirm that Israel has been on the cutting edge for quite sometime. Significant is the trend. And it is unmistakable: “Emerging markets,” as Israel is, are becoming freer, whereas America is becoming less free. The devil is in that detail.

Moreover, there is the issue of education. Take Germany. It is socialistic like Israel, but has a splendid education system, which remains unburdened by political correctness. The Germans run the same sort of schools I attended growing up in Israel, where, because no pedagogue believes all kids are created equal, students are streamed into different tracks. Israel, I suspect, is unencumbered by the kind of education system that graduates retarded kids as America does.

UPDATE: THE “SIR” THING. Kerry, it’s uncanny. I was thinking the same. Scheuer’s habit of saying “Sir” constantly is his way of appearing like a straight arrow. You know; like man with military discipline. “Take what I say to the bank, Sir.” It’s so phony.

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.”