Liberty Maven

Ron Paul appeared on Glenn Beck’s TV show yesterday to discuss the latest developments with the Federal Reserve audit effort.

During the segment Beck told his viewers to contact their lawmakers in support of the audit.

D o w n s i z e r – D i s p a t c h

We met at a coffee shop. I just arrived after four hours on the road, walked in, and before I could order anything they suggested turning on a camera to tape our discussion so they could put it on their website. I still had gum in my mouth, but off we went with the interview. IT WAS GREAT! WATCH IT!

* The Rand Paul website is here: http://www.randpaul2010.com/
* You can watch the video on his homepage, or if that doesn’t work for some reason, you can watch it here: http://www.randpaul2010.com/video-gallery/

There’s a very good chance Dr. Paul will be the new Senator from Kentucky, so it was very exciting and gratifying to hear him endorse and agree that he would introduce every single item of the Downsize DC Agenda! That means . . .

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D o w n s i z e r – D i s p a t c h

There’s new data you can use to make your case. Just borrow from (or copy and paste) the sample letter below . . .

I’m pleased to learn that Senator Baucus finally confessed, during a debate in the Senate on Wednesday, December 2, that the true ten-year cost of the healthcare bill will be closer to $2.5 trillion than the nearly $1 trillion cost he has sold to the public.

Increasing numbers of other Americans are following what you do very closely. We are well aware that Congressional leaders have rigged the CBO score. We know that this has been done by delaying the start point for much of the spending so that it falls beyond the 10-year window evaluated by the CBO. In addition to the unsupportable true cost, there are also these problems . . .

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by John Browne, Senior Market Strategist, Euro Pacific Capital

Last week, we witnessed Ben Bernanke’s Senate confirmation hearings for a second term as Fed Chairman. The air was thick with hypocrisy, as Senators vied with each other to cast blame on the Fed Chairman for the fiscal mistakes of the Congress.  As an overtly politicized figure who has looked to bolster the poll numbers of successive Administrations, Bernanke certainly should shoulder a large share of the blame for steering the United States towards the brink of bankruptcy; however, he did not act alone. Ironically, many of his co-conspirators are currently his harshest critics.

The truth is that if there were no debt from Congressional deficit spending, there would be nothing for the Fed to ‘monetize’ with the printing press. By behaving as the voters’ ‘best friend,’ delivering both low taxes and generous entitlements, Congress forced the Fed to play the disciplinarian. Except, not wanting to spoil the party, it didn’t. Ben Bernanke, like his predecessor Alan Greenspan, is an intelligent man who knows exactly where reckless spending will lead the country. Yet he refused to hit the brakes.

When former President Nixon broke the last ties between the U.S. dollar and gold, he opened the floodgates to Congressional abuse. Before the ‘gold window’ was closed, if the federal government ran up too much debt, other countries would start trading their reserves for our gold. Afterward, these creditors were left in something of a pickle: they held huge dollar reserves (built up on the belief that it was ‘as good as gold’) which now had a value dependent on being able to trade with Americans. This translated into a huge subsidy for America – quickly eaten up by a guns-and-butter spending philosophy directed by Congress.

Recently, under pressure from Wall Street, Congress repealed key provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act. Glass-Steagall created bank deposit insurance through the FDIC, while putting in place safeguards to prevent these now risk-free deposits from being used in speculative investments. Repealing Glass-Steagall without repealing deposit insurance created an environment of private gains and taxpayer losses.

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D o w n s i z e r – D i s p a t c h

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” — H.L. Mencken

“How do wars start? Diplomats lie to reporters and then believe what they read in the newspapers.” — Karl Krause

Sometimes I think the world is run by crazy people, and that perhaps the classic movie “Dr. Strangelove” was really a historical documentary.

Recall from the film this conversation between the Soviet Ambassador and the President, after the latter learned that the Soviets had a Doomsday Machine…

President Merkin Muffley: But this is absolute madness, Ambassador! Why should you build such a thing?

Ambassador de Sadesky: There were those of us who fought against it, but in the end we could not keep up with the expense involved in the arms race, the space race, and the peace race. At the same time our people grumbled for more nylons and washing machines. Our doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we had been spending on defense in a single year. The deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a doomsday gap.

President Merkin Muffley: This is preposterous. I’ve never approved of anything like that.

Ambassador de Sadesky: Our source was the New York Times.

Well, Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is practically the poster-child for crazy, announced his nation’s intention to build ten new, huge, uranium enrichment facilities. The ambulance-chasing media eagerly reported it.

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Bernie Sanders, U.S. Senator from Vermont, has a petition on his web site to indicate your opposition to the renomination of Ben Bernanke for Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Hop to it, sparky.

Just because you lost your job it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re unemployed, so sayeth the government.

Is it really possible to read a president’s mind from afar? Without sophisticated CIA equipment? Robert Silverberg wrote a story about a telepath who stands along a parade route so he can be close enough to read Richard Nixon’s mind. As the president rides by, the man is struck with highly disturbing visions (left unspecified by Silverberg) and rushes away, deeply upset. Does that story make a sort of sense to you, in that, if telepathy were possible, something like that might have gone down?

Then you’ll perhaps give credence to my proposition that I have successfully read President Obama’s mind, albeit from considerably farther away than Silverberg’s character read Nixon’s. Want to hear what I’ve gathered? Ok, here it is, starting with the more obvious, exterior stuff:

Obama has been engaged in a fantastic juggling act with pro and anti-war forces from the beginning. He needed the anti-war folk, MoveOn.org et al, to help him get elected, but he also needed the quiet support and sustenance of the military-industrial complex (you didn’t have to read Eisenhower’s mind) which any president who wants to last two seconds in office must obey. The m/i complex agreed to stand down and let Obama be elected in return for an understanding with him that he would give them what they want once he was safely in office.

Fast forward to Obama’s recent speech revealing his “decision,” after “months of deliberation,” to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. Here’s where the mind reading comes in.

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Recently, U.S. Senator Jim Bunning delivered a statement to the Senate Banking Committee regarding the renomination of Ben Bernanke for Chairman of the Federal Reserve. He doesn’t mince words when it comes to how he feels about this possibility:

From monetary policy to regulation, consumer protection, transparency and independence, your time as Fed Chairman has been a failure.

…you are the definition of a moral hazard.

…Your Fed has become the creature from Jekyll Island.

Bunning offers many examples illustrating how clueless Bernanke has been during the economic crisis, and is quite transparent about his intentions:

I will do everything I can to stop your nomination, and drag out this process as long as I can.

Watch the full video (about 13 minutes) here:

The War on Poverty… the War on Drugs… the War on Terror… now we have the government’s “War” on Main Street. How to improve the economy and why the government is taking the exact opposite actions to destroy Main Street as a bad case of the “Seen and the Unseen” strikes the Lehigh Valley

Originally published December 4, 2009 at http://towneforcongress.com/economy/the-governments-war-on-main-street-1

This talk was originally delivered to Campaign of Liberty chapter on December 3, 2009.  Video will be available shortly.

Today President Obama will tour Allentown, Pennsylvania, in my home congressional district as part of a “Main Street Tour” to show his concern for economic plight of the masses. Many of the people I have spoken with while campaigning innately realize that government is at fault – or at least complain a lot about how the government should “fix” the economy. Unfortunately, many do not have enough of a grasp of economics to understand exactly how the government is ruining their lives and their childrens’ lives. Speaking for myself, about 2 years ago I would have been included in this category. This is no surprise as most of the press and educational system has been hijacked by the disciples of Lord Keynes (the Keynesians) and the socialist Karl Marx for the past century.

The late economist from the Austrian school and NY Times columnist Henry Hazlitt wrote a series of easy-to-understand economic lessons in the 1940s in what was later published as Economics in One Lesson. Hazlitt warned of the dangers of what he termed the “seen and the unseen.” Let me give a rather harsh but true example.

Last week one local paper published a story about a local hardware store on Main Street in Nazareth going out of business. I grew up in Nazareth, and this store was there my whole life. The owners were not able to afford the rent, tried moving down the street for cheaper rent, but were not able to save the company.

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