UPDATED: Gold Is Bad For Government Health (Remember Executive Order 6102)

Business, Debt, Economy, History, Individual Rights, Inflation, John McCain, Regulation, Rights, Socialism, The State

The health scare bill is the gift that just keeps giving—giving-up individual freedoms to government. From a “TAX ON INDIVIDUALS WITHOUT ACCEPTABLE HEALTH CARE COVERAGE” to a “SURCHARGE ON HIGH INCOME INDIVIDUALS” to “STUDENT LOAN REFORM”; it’s all there, designed to leave little room for voluntary, peaceful exchanges. But we missed another provision among the thousands of sections the H.R.4872 Reconciliation Act of 2010 sports:

A “tack-on provision to the law that puts gold coin buyers and sellers under closer government scrutiny.”

Gold is a necessary financial hedge in the survival on the road to serfdom.

UPDATE (July 24): Gold Confiscation coming? FDR, idolized by BHO and McMussolini alike—by almost all offshoots of the duopoly, in fact—forbade “the Hoarding of Gold Coin, Gold Bullion and Gold Certificates” at pains of punishment: a fine of “not more than $10,000, or “imprisoned for not more than ten years or both.”

The Making Of An American Saint

Affirmative Action, Glenn Beck, Government, Journalism, Media, Race, Racism

ROSA PARKS REDUX. Glenn Beck was in tears (just about). Shepard Smith is being as solemn and pious as I’ve ever seen him; the White House press corps is in a collective conniption—all over the great injustice done, and corrected forthwith, to a black Agriculture Department employee who turned out to be less of a racist than was alleged.

Andrew Breitbart is alleged to have created the confusion with a misleading, incomplete report of this allegedly decades-old incident. Breitbart’s “Big this; big that,” ever-mutating websites exemplify what Lawrence Auster has termed “low-grade conservative media.” “Tease journalism,” I wrote.

Shirley Sherrod, state director for rural development (Great Journalism doesn’t say which “rurality”), said this (16 minutes into the tape), paraphrased: she began her work intending it to be for black people. G-d put things in her path that made her realize she was there for poor people. A white farmer came to her for assistance with a superior attitude. (I guess if it were a Brother, she might have described him as a proud man in humiliating circumstances.) So many black people had lost their land, and here she was faced with having to help a white man save his property. [Hallelujah; what a pure heart] “So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do,” Sherrod said. “I did enough. I took him to a white lawyer; one of Them; to his own kind.”

Paradiddle, please: (verbatim): “That’s when it was revealed to me that this was about poor vs. those who have. And not so much about white—it is about white and black—but it opened my eyes …”

A nice enough lady, Ms. Sherrod goes on to reveal how she did her job even when it came to a desperate, downtrodden white man. She may be a charming woman, but she does not deserve to be beatified, as she is, by the BHO admin and the press. She came to work preparing to work for her Race. Arguably, this is not uncommon among blacks and Hispanics who have a sense of cohesion and unity in opposition to mainstream whites.

Here Andrew Breitbart makes excuses for his shoddy excerpting:

Americans: Needy, Coddled Statists

America, Europe, Government, The State, The Zeitgeist

Americans Say They Hate Government Yet Expect More From Government Than Anyone Else.

For once, a mainstream columnist goes beyond the partisan staked-out positions to look at Americans as they truly are. As an outsider myself, I agree with “American Hypocrites” by Anne Applebaum:

“If you don’t live here all the time, and I don’t, here is what you notice when you come home: Americans—with their lawsuit culture, their safety obsession, and above all their addiction to government spending programs—demand more from their government than just about anybody else in the world. They don’t just want the government to keep the peace and create a level playing field. They want the government to ensure that every accident and every piece of bad luck is either prevented or fully compensated. And if the price of their house drops, they will hold the government responsible for that, too.

To put it bluntly, middle-class Americans of the right, left, and center have now come to expect a level of personal financial security that—despite the stereotypes—most people would never demand from their governments. In a review he wrote earlier this month, Brink Lindsey, the vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute—a man who knows what he is up against—pulled up some extraordinary statistics. Most Americans, it turns out, are suspicious of the free market. And most American also approve of high government spending. The majority of Americans are wary of global trade, don’t trust free markets, and also think ‘the benefits from … Social Security or Medicare are worth the costs of those programs.’ And when the sample is restricted to people who support the Tea Party movement? The number is still 62 percent.

…in Washington, these expenditures are known as ‘third rails’: If you touch them, you’re dead. President George W. Bush talked a little bit about making individuals more responsible for their retirement, and then he gave up. The ‘privatization’ of Social Security, as it was sneeringly described, was just too unpopular, particularly among his own supporters.

Read “American Hypocrites.”

Bureaucrats To The Border

Federalism, IMMIGRATION, Individual Rights, Law, Nationhood

POLITICAL PARTICLES IN MOTION, SUSPENDED IN GAS. With the midterm elections looming, politicians have accelerated their Brownian motion—that is “the random movement of microscopic particles suspended in gas or liquid.” BHO is sending the promised bureaucrats to the border, to act in a “command-and-control’ and other support positions.” Presumably, to supervise local troopers and make sure they do not use force against aggressors:

FoxNews:

Administration officials on Monday announced that the 1,200 National Guard troops pledged weeks ago by President Obama will deploy to the southwest border starting on Aug. 1 as part of an effort to bring the region “under control.”
Alan Bersin, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said the troops would “support” the work of Department of Homeland Security personnel already operating on the border.
“The Guard has been a tried and tested support to law enforcement … and I’m confident they’ll prove it again in this instance,” Bersin said.
He said the deployment will coincide with a boost in surveillance technology in the region.

The rights of life, liberty and property are meaningless—rights in name only—unless defended vigorously and forcefully against aggressors.