Jeremy Scahill Exposes Blackwater and Obama Administration

Did You Hear the One About…

by Floy Lilley

Did you hear the one about bobbing heads on Sunday agreeing that the cause of the Great Depression was the absence of government guidance? “The Great Depression would never have happened if there had been any economic regulations,” agreed the policy wonks.

Oh, really?

So you think a free society generated that monstrosity?

It is accurate to say that in 1900 a free society did exist. The government still approximated a minimal state, exerting minimal guidance, and commanding minimal economic regulation. But, after 1900, virtually all public policy proposals called for more extensive governmental guidance.

Perhaps the television talksters could benefit from a bit of homeschooling. An excellent source of data is Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episode in the Growth of American Government by Robert Higgs (1987). The time frame of the period up to and into the 1920s, in other words those years before the Great Depression, included WWI. That dramatic episode birthed government expansion and intervention, much of which remained in regulatory force after the generating crisis had past.

A partial list of interventions – those government economic regulations – would include:

* Bureau of Corporations (1903)
* Interstate Commerce Act major amendments (1903, 1906, 1910)
* Meat Inspection Act (1906)
* Pure Food and Drug Act (1906)
* Corporation Tax (1911)
* Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1913) (Income Tax)
* Federal Reserve System (1913)
* Clayton Antitrust Act (1914)
* Federal Trade Commission (1914)
* U.S. Immigration (cut to a trickle during 1915–1920)
* Adamson Act (1916) (railroad labor wage rates)
* Shipping Act (1916)
* National Defense Act (1916)
* Army Appropriations Act (1916) (later took over railroads)
* Selective Service Act (1917)
* Espionage Act (1917)
* Lever Act (1917) (food and fuel) (prohibited alcohol)
* Overman Act (1918) (executive powers)
* War Finance Corporation Act (1918)
* President’s Mediation Commission (1917) (labor relations)
* Federal Control Act (1918)
* Sedition Act (1918)

Does this look like a laissez-faire list?

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Invisible Empire: A New World Order, Official Trailer

9/11 Blueprint for Truth

If you watch one video about 9/11 today, watch this one.

Gerald Celente’s Predictions – 2012 Fascism Continues

What Soviet Medicine Teaches Us

by Yuri N. Maltsev

In 1918, the Soviet Union became the first country to promise universal “cradle-to-grave” healthcare coverage, to be accomplished through the complete socialization of medicine. The “right to health” became a “constitutional right” of Soviet citizens.

The proclaimed advantages of this system were that it would “reduce costs” and eliminate the “waste” that stemmed from “unnecessary duplication and parallelism” — i.e., competition.

These goals were similar to the ones declared by Mr. Obama and Ms. Pelosi — attractive and humane goals of universal coverage and low costs. What’s not to like?

The system had many decades to work, but widespread apathy and low quality of work paralyzed the healthcare system. In the depths of the socialist experiment, healthcare institutions in Russia were at least a hundred years behind the average US level. Moreover, the filth, odors, cats roaming the halls, drunken medical personnel, and absence of soap and cleaning supplies added to an overall impression of hopelessness and frustration that paralyzed the system. According to official Russian estimates, 78 percent of all AIDS victims in Russia contracted the virus through dirty needles or HIV-tainted blood in the state-run hospitals.

Irresponsibility, expressed by the popular Russian saying “They pretend they are paying us and we pretend we are working,” resulted in appalling quality of service, widespread corruption, and extensive loss of life. My friend, a famous neurosurgeon in today’s Russia, received a monthly salary of 150 rubles — one third of the average bus driver’s salary.

In order to receive minimal attention by doctors and nursing personnel, patients had to pay bribes. I even witnessed a case of a “nonpaying” patient who died trying to reach a lavatory at the end of the long corridor after brain surgery. Anesthesia was usually “not available” for abortions or minor ear, nose, throat, and skin surgeries. This was used as a means of extortion by unscrupulous medical bureaucrats.
“Slavery certainly ‘reduced costs’ of labor, ‘eliminated the waste’ of bargaining for wages, and avoided ‘unnecessary duplication and parallelism’.”

To improve the statistics concerning the numbers of people dying within the system, patients were routinely shoved out the door before taking their last breath.

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The Health Care Bill: What HR 3200, ‘‘America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009,” Says

by John David Lewis

What does the bill, HR 3200, short-titled ‘‘America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009,” actually say about major health care issues? I here pose a few questions in no particular order, citing relevant passages and offering a brief evaluation after each set of passages.

This bill is 1017 pages long. It is knee-deep in legalese and references to other federal regulations and laws. I have only touched pieces of the bill here. For instance, I have not considered the establishment of (1) “Health Choices Commissio0ner” (Section 141); (2) a “Health Insurance Exchange,” (Section 201), basically a government run insurance scheme to coordinate all insurance activity; (3) a Public Health Insurance Option (Section 221); and similar provisions.

Although I am an associate professor in the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program at Duke University, this document is neither an academic nor a professional analysis. This is the evaluation of someone who is neither a physician nor a legal professional. I asked some simple questions about the bill, considered them in context with the overall structure, definitions, and procedures in the bill, and quoted only the immediate passages involved. I am citizen, concerned about this bill’s effects on my freedom as an American. I would rather have used my time in other ways—but this is too important to ignore.

We may answer one question up front: How will the government will pay for all this? Higher taxes, more borrowing, printing money, cutting payments, or rationing services—there are no other options.  We will all pay for this, enrolled in the government “option” or not.

(All bold type within the text of the bill is added for emphasis.)

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The Free Market as Regulator

by Ron Paul

Since the bailouts last fall, lawmakers have been behaving as quasi-owners of the bailed-out banks and businesses, leading to calls for increased regulation of executive compensation and other wasteful expenditures. We have heard much about bonuses and executive pay packages that sound more like lottery winnings than an honest salary.

Many lawmakers voted in favor of these unconstitutional bailouts, believing that these corporations were too big to fail, and allowing them to go under would precipitate widespread economic disaster. This second wave of citizen outrage at the bailouts has left these lawmakers with a bit of egg on their face, and once again, they feel the need to “do something” to “fix” it. Shouldn’t there be a regulatory structure in place governing executive compensation? Politically, it seems quite feasible. People are outraged that the system has once again gutted the many to make a few at the top fantastically wealthy. But they are incorrectly demonizing the free market.

What we need to realize is that there WAS a regulatory structure in place that was attempting to stop bad management, including overpaying executives. That regulatory structure is the free market, and when poor management brought these companies to the point of bankruptcy, Congress circumvented the wisdom of the free market, and inserted its own judgment at our expense. And now because of that intervention, we will be burdened with massive new regulations. We can be certain this effort will fail.

The free market is a naturally occurring phenomenon that can’t be eliminated by governments, not even totalitarian ones like the former Soviet Union. It can be regulated, over-taxed and manipulated until it is driven underground. Lately it has been wrongly accused of doing so many things it just doesn’t do, that are really the fault of crony corporatism and convoluted government policies that brought on the crisis. Too many people equate the free market with big business doing whatever it wants, but that is not the free market. Unconstitutional taxpayer-funded bailouts are what allow giant corporations to run roughshod over the economy. The free market is what puts them out of business when they misbehave.

The free market is you and your neighbors working hard to produce what you produce, and exchanging goods and services voluntarily, in mutually agreeable arrangements. The free market is about respecting property rights and contracts. It is not about building up oligarchs and monopolies and confiscatory tax theft – these are creatures of government.

We must watch out when government comes up with interventionist solutions to interventionist problems. The root of our problems lies in interventionism. Trusting the free market is the solution.

Original Article & Audio

What This Country Needs Is a ‘Cash for Clunkers’ Program for the Housing Sector

by Mark R. Crovelli

Over the past six months, one of the most amazing and miraculous events has occurred in the history of economics. Few Americans appear to have grasped how truly remarkable and miraculous the event truly was, even though it occurred right under their noses. The miraculous event to which I refer is our far-seeing leader’s program designed to 1) trick Americans into buying new cars they can’t afford, and 2) melt down their old cars, intentionally destroying them. Or, as the program has been termed by its brilliant originators, it’s a “Cash for Clunkers” program.

You might be thinking to yourself, “I already know that this was a successful, and indeed almost miraculous, program. It not only saved the moribund American auto industry, but it put Americans to work, ‘stimulated’ lagging demand for cars people still can’t afford, and will help to make the American fleet cleaner and more efficient.” If this is the reason you think Mr. Obama’s program was amazing and miraculous, however, you would be failing to appreciate its true brilliance and grandeur. The greatness of Mr. Obama’s program lies not in its superficial stimulation of a bloated industrial sector of our economy that should have died decades ago; rather, its greatness lies in the fact that it accomplishes something that it actually impossible in our world. It is able to defy the known laws of the world.

In order to see why this is the case, it is important to first note that the world in which we live is characterized by scarcity. That is to say, all of the things that men desire to fulfill their infinite wants and needs are in limited supply in our world. There is a limited supply of televisions, radios, cars, trees, water, gold – and, yes, (as the green people never tire of blathering about), there is even a limited supply of air in our world. This means that men are situated in this world in such a way that a great number of their wants and desires cannot be currently fulfilled. This is precisely why men work – to create things and situations that each subjectively thinks will make him better off. And, with the passage of time and the expenditure of more and more human productive energy, men are able to create more and more goods and services that fulfill more and more of their wants and needs.

It is precisely these obvious natural laws that Mr. Obama has managed to circumvent. He has managed to enact (or, at least take credit for) a bill that purports to make men better off, not through increasing the supply of the goods men actually want and need, but by tricking them into buying something they otherwise would not, and then destroying part of that same supply of goods. He has managed, in other words, to make us richer by destroying goods and diverting a part of the labor supply (yes, that’s limited too) into recreating those very same goods. The program manages to increase scarcity on the one hand by destroying goods and then remaking them, and yet supposedly makes us better off. It is a truly miraculous and historic undertaking if it is indeed working to make us better off – and who can doubt that it is doing just that, when every loudmouth politician and commentator tells us so.

When one comes to realize just how amazing and miraculous Mr. Obama’s program really is, an obvious question comes to mind: If Mr. Obama’s program can really make us richer by destroying cars and tricking people into buying new cars, then why don’t we give this miracle program a try in the housing sector? Indeed, since the financial crisis struck most severely against the housing sector, then is that not precisely the sector where Mr. Obama’s miracle program is most direly needed? The program is easily adaptable to housing, after all. All that is needed is to give people an incentive to buy a brand new house that they can scarcely turn down (or afford), and, once they move into their new home, simply burn the old house to the ground.

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Big Government

by David M. Woods

The following is a fictitious, but predictable conversation:

Me: I have a problem.

Other guy: Well, I have a solution!

Me: You have a solution?

Other guy: You bet!

Me: But I haven’t even told you what the problem is yet.

Other guy: Doesn’t matter. I already have a solution for it.

Me: [sigh] Ok, smart guy, what is my solution?

Other guy: Why, it’s obvious – the solution to your problem is: Big Government!

On any day of the year, one can find editorials, blogs, opinion pieces, and conversations anywhere and discover that the attitude exhibited by the other guy above is very prolific. There is this unwritten assumption that, given any problem or bad news of any kind, that government politicians and bureaucrats know what’s best for all of us; that anyone who works for the government is, by definition, smarter, wiser, and has more honesty and integrity. And so, every time something bad happens, they all respond with that all-too-predictable knee-jerk response that, by golly, the government needs to DO SOMETHING about it! And inevitably, the government DOES indeed do something: it gets bigger and more powerful, and spends more money.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the silliness of that mindset, and to try to get people to think twice before responding with the automatic knee-jerk reaction described above – in short, to try and think “out of the box” of trying to fix every conceivable problem known to man with that same old worn-out response: that the solution is more laws, more regulation, more spending, more bureaucracy, more governmental power and control over our lives and private affairs, less freedom, and yet another “War On [fill in the blank].”

The knee-jerkers in our society come from all walks of life. White, black, rich, poor, conservative, liberal, it doesn’t matter. They see a need, and they assume bigger government will fill it. Never mind that on any day of the year, boundless examples of governmental waste, fraud, abuse, and just plain stupidity can be found everywhere.

Here’s some classic examples: The government subsidizes tobacco companies, yet requires warning labels on cigarette packages. Another: the government must invade Iraq because they masterminded the 9/11 attacks and had enough WMDs to defeat the USA. Another: the federal government’s inability to balance its budget now adds to over a $trillion. Each year. I could go on.

The truth is that government is not the source of all prosperity, the answer to all questions, the solver of all problems, the boundless fount of wisdom and honesty. Government employees are not gods! They are but imperfect humans subject to the same faults as the rest of us. A better description would be that they are a pack of blundering fools, hell-bent on accumulating power and control at our expense. The song-writer was talking about government in that famous line: “He can’t even run his own life, I’ll be damned if he’ll run mine!”

The Evidence

So how can one PROVE that big government does not work? The first evidence is the following observation: If big government is what you want, you got it! Look around you! The U.S. federal budget is way up in the multi-$trillions now. The federal registry contains so many laws and regulations that it takes an entire building to house all the hard paper copies. If you plotted government growth over the last 50 years on a graph, it would draw an upward-curving line that is now vertical.

And it’s not just the federal government. Out-of-control government growth is happening everywhere – it’s happening in all 50 states, in every county, every city. And it’s not just the U.S. either – it’s a global phenomena.

So clearly: if you are an advocate for Big Government, you won. Hands down, with flying colors. Those of us who tried to resist it never had a chance. You left us in your dust.

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