A new article by Liberty Hero Thomas DiLorenzo over at LRC entitled “Tales From an Academic Looney Bin” discusses the frightening reality that so-called ‘Cultural Marxists’ have infiltrated and taken over many higher-learning institutions. We’ve heard this type of thing for years, and DiLorenzo’s examples at Baltimore’s Loyola College are no exception.
…[Cultural Marxists] took over and began acting, well, like lunatics. I learned from the local media that the former academic vice president had rejected an applicant for a top job because the applicant “wasn’t black enough.” The job was academic vice president for diversity and the interviewee was an African-American man with very impressive credentials. According to news reports, this man was told that he was well qualified, but that the College preferred an African-American with somewhat darker skin.
So here was a man who had probably been discriminated against in employment during his lifetime who had reached the peak of his professional career, and was interviewing for what was probably his dream job. And he is told he wasn’t getting the job, once again, because of his skin color. And you probably thought “lunatic” was too strong a word.
This is a very entertaining article. Highly recommended. Read it here.
For once it seems that when it comes to the auto industry bailout Ron Paul agrees with Mitt Romney, or is it the other way around? Romney said the following about the bailouts in a New York Times op-ed.
“If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.”
“Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.”
I couldn’t agree with Romney more. Paul and Romney’s reasoning may come from different sources, but the result is the same, at least on this particular bailout. I’m happy to see Romney not taking the same line of Bush Republicans, saying that the bailout is required but must not come from the $700 billion bailout money.
Ron Paul has been rightly critical of Barack Obama’s interventionist desires. It certainly seems the only foreign policy difference between our outgoing meddling President and our incoming one is the venue of destruction. Bush’s crusade was Iraq. It looks like Obama’s will be Afghanistan. Three or four years from now will Obama have plummeting approval ratings due to mismanagement of his coming interventionist crusade in Afghanistan?
The real answer depends on the level of the crusade. By level, I could mean blood level. The most morbid yet accurate indicator of failure in such an effort is the number of body bags on planes bound for home. Will the American people give Barack Obama more breathing room than Bush on this horrific statistic? I certainly hope not.
Ron Paul appeared today on CNN in the time slot usually reserved for Glenn Beck, but Beck is off to FOX News now. His replacement Jane Velez-Mitchell is mostly right with her views, but after listening to her you may need a few ibuprofen.
They discuss the auto bailout and bailouts in general. Neither Velez-Mitchell nor Paul think this auto bailout is necessary, of course. Paul seems to hint around that he doesn’t necessarily believe the auto bailout bill is as “dead” as many are making it out to be.
The U.S. companies say they need $25 billion in taxpayer money to help convert to building smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles.
Many are afraid that if Detroit does not somehow obtain it’s $25 Billion from the taxpayers that consumers won’t get vehicles they need, such as the Chevy Volt. Well, who needs the Chevy Volt, and who needs Detroit?
Ron Paul appeared on FOX Business News today following his grilling of Ben Bernanke on Capitol Hill. He accuses Bernanke and Paulson of price fixing among some other choice words. Paul’s contention is that they are fighting against what the market wants and their efforts to subvert the market will fail because the “market is more powerful than the central bankers”.
A favorite Paul comment:
“No I didn’t get answers, and I didn’t expect any.”
Ron Paul questioned Ben Bernanke this morning regarding the entire financial system as it relates to the bailouts. Again, Paul says the words that no one wants to hear, but truly needs to hear. A few choice quotes from Paul:
“Something has to give, or we are going to waste more time trying to patch this system together.”
“Does this thought come up… about a new world reserve currency?”
“The dollar system has essentially been declared dead.”
Quote of the Day: “The practice of combining into one Bill Subjects diverse in their nature and having no necessary connection, thereby to secure the passage of several measures, no one of which could succeed on its own merits, both corrupts Congress and endangers the American constitutional republic.” — One Subject At A Time Act, Section 2(f)
Subject: OSTA would prevent monstrosities like the Big Bailout bill
What does that have to do with “rescuing the economy?” Nothing.
The bailout bill was stuffed with unrelated provisions to win the votes of pork-minded Congresspeople, and passed quickly before anyone could read it. This made it easy to add provisions that couldn’t have passed by themselves in the full light of day.
The original bailout bill was bad. The final bill was worse. This wouldn’t have happened had the “One Subject At A Time Act” (OSTA) been in force. Here are three examples of how OSTA would have stopped the Big Bailout bill . . .
OSTA says: “No Bill or Joint Resolution shall embrace more than one subject at a time, and that shall be clearly and descriptively expressed in the Title.”
The Big Bailout bill had at least 5 “subjects,” and not all of them were mentioned in the bill’s title.
OSTA says: “An Appropriations Bill shall not contain any general legislation or change of existing law provision, the subject of which is not germane to the subject matter of each such Appropriations Bill…”
A step-by-step explanation of how the Federal Reserve, America’s Central Bank, can manipulate monetary policy.
by Jake, the Champion of the Constitution Originally published November 17, 2008 at http://www.nolanchart.com/article5489.html
Part 5 covered the origins of fractional reserve banking. In this article I will formally define fractional reserve banking and describe how it works. Next I will share how the Federal Reserve controls monetary policy and supply with its three major tools – “printing” or “de-printing” money (technically referred to as “open market operations” by the FED), bank reserve requirement ratios, and the infamous “Fed-rate.”
Fractional Reserve Banking – a banking system in which banks are supposed to maintain a quantity of reserves from its depositors that is a fixed fraction of the amount of new money the bank is then allowed to create. This newly created money, or credit, is then loaned to the bank’s borrowers.
Fractional reserve banking has two major flaws in practice. The first is that it is an arguably criminal act, which is a topic more suited for Part 7. (See Rothbard’s “The Case Against the Fed” below, pages 40-45.)
The second flaw is insolvency. This is generally known as a “bank run” and is easy enough to understand. If the system’s depositors demand in excess of the reserve amount within a short enough time span, the entire system theoretically just runs out of printed cash and goes broke. Realistically in today’s world this would cause the government to begina a massive physical printing of dollars, resulting in massive currency devaluation and eventual worthlessless and death of the currency via hyperinflation.
For example, let’s suppose the entire banking system consisted of $100 at a 10% reserve ratio. This means the banks would loan out $90 and keep $10 as its reserves to satisfy depositors. However, if the depositors of $10.01 ask for their money back, the bank will NOT be able to satisfy the request and will need to close down all redemptions of deposits until it receives cash flow from its loan investments. This is similar to the dilemna faced by those devious medieval goldsmiths from Part 5, except we are dealing with paper money instead of commodity money.
Next up is Austrian economist Thomas J. DiLorenzo. Born 1954, DiLorenzo teaches American Economics at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland, a senior faculty member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and author/co-author of several books, most notably:
Well known for shunning the typical politically-correct line of thinking, his well-researched and masterfully eloquent works are eye opening to many whose only knowledge of political and economic topics resulted from the revisionist history often taught in government schools.
DiLorenzo is steadfast in his claim that the interventions of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt exacerbated the economic problems of the 1930s and prolonged the Great Depression. As he wrote in the opening paragraph of The New Deal Debunked (again) (a followup to his earlier article A New, New Deal):
Liberty Maven
Fractional Reserve Banking – a banking system in which banks are supposed to maintain a quantity of reserves from its depositors that is a fixed fraction of the amount of new money the bank is then allowed to create. This newly created money, or credit, is then loaned to the bank’s borrowers.
far, in Liberty Maven’s ongoing series 
Loading ...
