Liberty Maven

Following up yesterday’s great interview on Rush Limbaugh with guest host Walter Williams, Rand Paul spoke with Sean Hannity today on Hannity’s radio show. Listen to it in two parts below.

The following is an educational service of the Downsize DC Foundation.

As we said yesterday, millions of Americans believe . . .

We need the government to regulate business people, otherwise they will run wild, laying waste to the environment, and selling us bad food, bad drugs, and harmful products.

One big reason people believe this is because they attended government schools and were taught about a famous book, “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair. Mr. Sinclair’s book supposedly demonstrated that . . .

* Once upon a time, before government regulation, meat packing plants were endangering Americans with poison food
* The motivation for this poisoning was profits.

But here’s what most people don’t know . . .

* “The Jungle” was a novel, not a factual report
* Most of what Sinclair wrote was pure fiction, un-connected to reality

This is your chance to learn the truth.

“The Jungle” was intended to dramatize working conditions, NOT food safety. In fact, Sinclair’s fictional claims about food safety were limited to a mere 12 pages, but these pages got all the attention, leading Sinclair to later write, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” (Source: Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967, p. 103.)

Sinclair’s novel caused a sensation, and led to Congressional investigations, even though many politicians were skeptical of Sinclair. For instance, here’s what President Theodore Roosevelt wrote about him in July 1906 (even though he shared Sinclair’s distrust of big business):

“I have an utter contempt for him. He is hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful. Three-fourths of the things he said were absolute falsehoods. For some of the remainder there was only a basis of truth.” (Source: letter to William Allen White, July 31, 1906, from “The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt,” 8 vols, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951-54, vol. 5, p. 340.)

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Ron Paul, in his Texas Straight Talk column, discusses the failure of Keynesianism and why the founding fathers insisted on only gold as silver as currency:

This past week several emerging and ongoing crises took attention away from the ongoing sovereign debt problems in Greece.  The bailouts are merely kicking the can down the road and making things worse for taxpaying citizens, here and abroad.   Greece is unfortunately not unique in its irresponsible spending habits.  Greek-style debt explosions are quickly spreading to other nations one by one, and yes, the United States is one of the dominoes on down the line.

Time and again it has been proven that the Keynesian system of big government and fiat paper money are abject failures in the long run.  However, the nature of government is to ignore reality when there is an avenue that allows growth in power and control. Thus, most politicians and economists will ignore the long-term damage of Keynesianism in the early stage of a bubble when there is the illusion of prosperity, suggesting that the basic laws of economics had been repealed.  In fact, one way to tell if a bubble is about to burst is if economists start talking about how the government and the Central Bank have repealed the business cycle.

The truth is the laws of economics are constant and real, no matter how inconvenient they might be to politicians and bankers.  This reality is setting in and the bills are coming due.  In the mean time, countries that have no money have bailed out other countries that have no money, except for the phony money created by politicians, bureaucrats, and their partners-in-crime at the central banks.  This may be preventing big well-connected banks from having to take on massive losses, but it is all at the expense of the taxpaying citizen.

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Below is the rough transcript of some remarks I made at the campaign’s successful fun-raiser at the American Sandwich Company in Coopersburg on June 6, the 66th anniversary of D-Day.  More details on the fundraiser in tomorrow’s post.  The event began with a moment of silence for veterans, especially the 5,490 soldiers who have died so far in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Today we face a D-Day of a different sort, and while there is still war, the causes are economic. At the last Towne Hall, I presented “The Economy in Pictures” where I demonstrated that unemployment is >>17%, 1 in every 8 Americans is on food stamps, the FDIC that “insures” bank accounts is hopelessly insolvent, and the true national debt is really $120 Trillion – when the $13 trillion in US treasury debt is added to the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare -  a vast sum that is best put into personal terms as $400,000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States.  At this point, even if the government were to tax 100% of each citizen’s dollars and properties, there still would not be enough to theoretically pay off this debt.

The plan the country should follow is very similar to an engineer solving a problem, or a doctor treating a bleeding patient. First we must contain the problem, then determine root cause, then take corrective actions. The steps are easy and simple enough, though this doesn’t mean Congress will follow them. Let me recap.

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Rand Paul was Walter Williams’ guest as he guest hosted the Rush Limbaugh radio show earlier today. They spoke for about 20 minutes. Listen to it below in two parts.

by Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital and author of the new bestselling economic fable, How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes

In recent months, GDP numbers have rebounded – primarily as a result of record low interest rates reliquifying the credit market and government stimulus jolting consumer spending. Although the “positive growth” has delighted Obama’s economic brain trust, it has done little to boost the fortunes of Main Street. As I have said many times, GDP largely measures spending, and spending is not growth.

Last Friday we received the latest indication that the real economy is not recovering in the slightest. The Labor Department reported that non-farm payrolls increased by 431,000 jobs in May. In a press statement, the President himself crowed at the news, noting that the official employment rate fell to 9.7% from 9.9%. However, just inches below the headline, red flags were everywhere. Only 41,000 of those jobs were generated in the private sector – far below the median forecast of 180,000. Even more troubling was the fact that the Census Bureau alone accounted for 411,000 new jobs, which were almost exclusively temporary positions.

Rather than a recovery, the jobs data seems to indicate that we are still mired in the first economic depression since the 1930s. Back in 1931, two full years after the Crash of 1929, there were still very few people who thought that the recession then underway would one day be called the Great Depression. (See my commentary from March 1st “Don’t Bet on a Recovery)

Increased spending, financed by unprecedented borrowing, will prove to be just as temporary as a US census job (unless, in the name of stimulus, Obama decides to make “people counting” a permanent function of the US government.). When the bills come due, the next leg down will be even more severe than the last.

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The following is an educational service of the Downsize DC Foundation.

Millions of people believe . . .

We need the government to regulate business people, otherwise they will run wild, laying waste to the environment, and selling us bad food, bad drugs, and harmful products.

It would be silly to claim that business people never do these things. After all . . .

* Not all people are good.
* Neither are people who are mostly good, consistently good.
* And sometimes goodness has nothing to do with it — sometimes people simply make mistakes, out of ignorance or carelessness.

But politicians and bureaucrats are people too, and subject to these same failings. Do we really solve the problem of human imperfection by giving one small group of imperfect people vast power over all the others?

That last sentence is so important that it bears constant repeating:

Do we really solve the problem of human imperfection by giving one small group of imperfect people vast power over all the others?

To this we might add, “Is there any form of human being more imperfect than the politician?”

To give this question its proper weight, do not think only about politicians you love (if there are any). Do not cherry-pick the evidence. Instead, think also of the politicians you hate. Should such people have great power over other people?

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Rand Paul has an opinion piece in Saturday’s Bowling Green Daily News where he attempts (and succeeds) to properly clarify his remarks on the Civil Rights Act that were mis-construed by so many following his landslide primary victory. He writes:

I am unlike many folks who run for office. I am an idealist. When I read history I side with abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglas who fought for 30 years to end slavery and to integrate public transportation in the free North in the 1840s. I see our failure to end slavery for decade after decade as a failure of weak-kneed politicians.

I cheer the abolitionist Lysander Spooner, who argued that slavery was unconstitutional 20 years before the Civil War. I cheer Lerone Bennet when he argues that the right of habeas corpus guaranteed in the Constitution should have derailed slavery long before the Civil War.

Only when the brave idealists, the abolitionists, finally provoked the weak-kneed politicians into action, did the emancipation proclamation come about. Our body politic has enough pragmatists, we need a few idealists.

Segregation ended only after a great and momentous uprising by idealists like Martin Luther King Jr., who provoked weak-kneed politicians to action.

In 2010, there are battles that need to be fought, and they have nothing to do with race or discrimination, but rather the rights of people to be free from a nanny state.

Read the entire piece here.

Wasn’t a major part of the housing bust due to the fact that too many loans were given to those who never really had the means to repay?

In a bid to stem taxpayer losses for bad loans guaranteed by federal housing agencies Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn) proposed that borrowers be required to make a 5% down payment in order to qualify. His proposal was rejected 57-42 on a party-line vote because, as Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn) explained, “passage of such a requirement would restrict home ownership to only those who can afford it.“

What’s wrong with these people?

Originally published June 5, 2010 at http://towneforcongress.com/economy/remarks-at-allentown-courthouse-rally/

Yesterday, June 4, I delivered some remarks at a protest and march organized by the Friends of George Donnelly.   The irony that June 4 is also the same day as the Tiananmen Square Massacre was not lost on me.  From my time spent abroad in China, those who know me are well aware my candidacy is also an attempt to ensure that liberty is not stripped from the American people as has been done in communist China.  Tyranny knows no boundaries.

Donnelly was arrested by federal marshals while videotaping their actions in front of the federal courthouse in Allentown in May.  While I did not comment directly on this tragic case – some details here – a rough transcript of my remarks are below.   A report by WFMZ-69 is linked below.

These days government intrusion into our lives never seems to stop. The government is like an out-of-control wild bull in a rodeo. You might be able to avoid getting gored most of the time, but one day that bull is going to be quick enough to gore you.

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