Liberty Maven

D o w n s i z e r – D i s p a t c h

The latest example is the 1,900 page healthcare monstrosity the House leadership unveiled last week. They want a vote on it this week!

I believe they’re overreaching, and helping to build our movement.

Please send Congress a letter demanding that they introduce and pass DownsizeDC.org’s Read the Bills Act.

This is what I wrote in my personal comments . . .

Congress passed the Patriot renewal bill in 2006, only to discover later that someone had inserted a provision allowing the President to appoint U.S. Attorneys without Senate approval. This year, Congress passed the stimulus bill with the AIG bonuses.

Nearly everyone in Congress was shocked when they learned what they had passed. This happened because Congress didn’t read these bills before they voted on them. This is irresponsible.

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D o w n s i z e r – D i s p a t c h

Sever the strings-turned-chains between the free market puppet and it’s government master and this heartwarming yet bittersweet story could happen many times over. It could become the norm rather than the exception.

Because of caring people and a caring company, a terminally ill little Green Forest girl was flown home Friday by air ambulance from M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, so she can spend her last days surrounded by the people who love her most.

Jada Harper, who turned seven on Sept. 1, has an inoperable malignant tumor in her brain and is in a coma with a ventilator doing her breathing for her. She has been at the famous cancer center in Houston since July, but her situation is now at the point not much else can be done to help her.

I emphasized the first phrase above to emphasize what is absent: government. It doesn’t say because of some government program. No company was forced to help this poor child and her family. A company made up of individuals with the ability to make a decision to do what is right was responsible for this “random act of kindness”. Perhaps what makes this story more interesting is the company that helped is a direct competitor to a government entity.

Friday afternoon, Jada was flown home to the Ozarks — on a gurney, attached to the machine that breathes for her. FedEx Freight paid the $11,000 bill for the special medical flight her family was unable to afford.

FedEx who competes with the government sponsored United States Postal Service (USPS) acted when others failed. Sure, they may have been acting in their own self-interest to garner “free” advertising and customer goodwill, but how can they be criticized for performing this mutually beneficial act?

$11,000 is chump change for a company like FedEx, but apparently this isn’t an isolated occurrence.

“One thing that impresses me about this company is that the company has a heart,” Reeves said. “Our company does a lot of things like this. It’s been recognized as one of the most admired companies in the world, and this is why.”

It is this phenomenon that represents the best argument for a true free market. If companies weren’t over-regulated and over-taxed perhaps these random acts of kindness would multiply until they become the general rule rather than the exception. Imagine a world where companies all realize that helping people also helps the bottom line. Anyone can make a buck, but not everyone can make a devoted customer.

In a free market the customer acts as regulator. Companies would be trampling over themselves and each other to find the next person (potential customer) to help. When a third party, in this case the government, forces companies (and individuals) to fork over 40-50% of their profit (or income) and then uses it on projects that rarely achieve their intended purpose the result is widespread resentment. In this case companies and individuals become less charitable. The tax and regulatory burden hinders their ability to participate in benevolent actions like FedEx.

Imagine companies that have 50% more profit competing to be number one on the list of most charitable companies. There is no doubt that the result would be a monumental increase in assistance for people and organizations who need it.

We don’t need government to lead, nor follow. We just need government to get out of the way. It’s time to break the government chains of taxes and regulation. This would not only foster economic prosperity but it would also spawn a renaissance of benevolence. This benevolence would come voluntarily and resentment-free from private companies and individuals. It’s good for business, good for the poor, and good for America.

Each of Walter E. Williams’ weekly syndicated columns are fantastic, but the most recent one (entitled Lying Propaganda) is particularly worth your time.  He refers to Michael Moore’s upcoming movie (”Capitalism: A Love Story”) and decides it’s a good idea to put out a bit of “defensive mental preparation“, as it puts it, in order nip in the bud the simple lie that we have a system of [pure] capitalism in this country and that such a system is the source of the world’s troubles.

There has never been a pure free market capitalistic system just as there has never been a pure communist or socialist system, where there is government ownership of the means of production and each individual has equal access to society’s resources. However, we can rank economies as to whether they are closer to capitalism or closer to communism or socialism. If one ranked countries according to whether they were closer to the capitalistic end of the spectrum or the socialistic or communistic end, then ranked countries according to per capita GDP and finally rank countries according to Freedom House’s “Map of Freedom in the World,” he would find a pattern that is by no means a coincidence. The people in those countries closer to the capitalist end of the economic spectrum have far greater income and enjoy greater human rights protections than those toward the socialist and communist end.

According to the London Telegraph article, Moore’s film features priests who say capitalism is anti-Christian by failing to protect the poor. This is pure nonsense and revealed as such by asking, “If you’re an unborn spirit, condemned by God to a life of poverty but allowed to choose the country in which to be poor, would you choose a country near the communist end of the economic spectrum or the capitalist end?” If you chose the United States, you’d find that according to the government surveys, the typical “poor” American has cable or satellite TV, two color TVs, and a DVD player or VCR. He has air conditioning, a car, a microwave, a refrigerator, a stove, and a clothes washer and dryer, and whether he has health insurance or not, he is able to obtain medical care when needed. Try to find that in Cuba, Russia, China or North Korea. If we buy into the nonsense of Moore’s priests, the world’s poor people are incredibly stupid. Whether fleeing legally or illegally, their destination country is likely to be closer to capitalism than their departure country.

Go read the whole article here.

D o w n s i z e r – D i s p a t c h

Quote of the Day: “There are two kinds of people, those who want to be left alone and those who won’t leave them alone.” Doreen Hannes

But the most effective way to Downsize DC is to inspire more and more people to just say no. It can work. It has worked.

Consider the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). It was envisioned as early as the 1990’s, and plans were put in place in the years 2002-2005. And yet . . .

* the vast majority of farmers rejected “voluntarily” signing up for the system
* a humiliating “listening tour” last spring by the USDA on NAIS found opposition exceeding 90%
* the program is well behind schedule and has not yet been made mandatory
* NAIS funding has been slashed in half in the Senate version and eliminated in the House version of the Ag spending bill
* The state of Wyoming has even turned down $140,000 in NAIS grant money

NAIS has failed because of public opposition.

This has happened in spite of the fact that NAIS has rarely been discussed in the mainstream media. Instead a large, growing, but loose and unorganized coalition of individuals and groups, including DownsizeDC.org, have been relentless in spreading the word and expressing disapproval.

This decentralized coalition might not agree on many other issues.

We didn’t have to. We each expressed our opposition in our own way. And it has worked, tremendously, thus far.

The NAIS victory is not final. It never is, because Washington, DC is relentless. But every year, we’ve stalled progress on NAIS. Each year, we won. And we’re all better off because of this on-going victory. It has saved the majority of America’s independent farmers from being burdened with (or bankrupted by) this costly and ineffective program.

What we’ve done to NAIS, we can do to any government program. We can defeat any bill. We can pass any bill.

DownsizeDC.org provides the information. We also provide a quick and easy tool to contact Congress.

But we need your help to spread the word.

That, too, can be quick and easy.

We’ve encouraged the forwarding of our Dispatch emails to your friends. We’ve encouraged posting them on your blogs. We continue to do so.

But increasingly, people are using emails less. They are using social networking tools more. We need to do the same.

To make it easier to spread the word to your social networking friends we encourage you to:

* Follow us on Twitter
* Become a fan of DownsizeDC.org on Facebook

We will provide frequent updates to both of these services that you can then share with your friends.

The more people who are informed, the sooner we can Downsize DC. So, in the coming weeks and months, we may ask you to do more. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, the NAIS fight isn’t over.

* NAIS has not yet been completely eliminated.
* A bill before the Senate, H.R. 2749, is potentially as invasive and more extensive than NAIS.
* The Agriculture spending bill is in conference committee, where the fate of NAIS for 2010 will be determined.

Please send a letter to Congress asking them to de-fund NAIS once and for all. In your personal comments, tell them you oppose all tracking and surveillance systems on farms, and will be watching their votes. You can send your message here.

And don’t forget to . . .

* Follow us on Twitter
* Become a fan of DownsizeDC.org on Facebook

Thank you for being a part of the growing Downsize DC Army. To see how fast your Army is growing, please check out our Keeping Score signature below my signature.

Jim Babka, President
DownsizeDC.org

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by John Browne – Senior Market Strategist, Euro Pacific Capital

Politicians often find scapegoats for America’s economic woes. It is rare – if ever – that they point the finger at themselves. Yet, the basic cause of the current severe economic problem lies in the machinations of government.

It is clear to even a casual observer that Congress has abused its power to tax and spend. It has taxed success to subsidize failure. It has purchased votes by enacting an unending stream of entitlement programs, financed by taxation, foreign debt and a progressive degradation of the U.S. paper dollar.

This cynical boosting of consumption at the expense of production has resulted in the American consumer now accounting for some 70 percent of United States GDP. By consuming three times what it produces, America has become the largest debtor in history. The Administration now forecasts annual deficits of trillions of dollars for the next decade. This is all the direct responsibility of Congress.

The executive branch is also to blame. Under President Bush II, the United States entered a Global War on Terror, with a mission so ambiguous it was almost sure to bankrupt its executor. To this day, and despite campaign pledges to the contrary, President Obama continues to waste massive amounts of blood and treasure on two fatally flawed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and on maintaining over 1,000 military installations in 135 countries abroad. No one should forget that the assumption of an international military role depleted the wealth of Rome, Great Britain and the former Soviet Union.

But at least the Republican president slashed domestic spending to compensate, right? Actually, Bush II passed cherry-picked tax cuts for special interests and spearheaded a new prescription drug program for Medicare recipients, at a cost of some $40 billion per year. This was a capstone of sorts to a century-long experiment in entitlement and intervention.

This federal spending went from a drag on the economy to a true albatross by the 1970s. After former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker and Ronald Reagan courageously bought our currency a new lease on life, Alan Greenspan was given the helm at the central bank. Colluding with Presidents Clinton and Bush II to simulate economic growth for political gain, Greenspan, and his chosen successor Ben Bernanke, unleashed a torrent of new dollars into the banking system, where they were leveraged to finance the largest asset boom in history.

We are now in the process of deleveraging from this boom. It is painful, but it represents an opportunity. A government genuinely interested in economic restructuring could be focusing on cutting spending, lowering taxes, and reducing corruption, instead of playing ‘pin the blame on the capitalists.’

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A professor teaching a computer security class I had in college stood up in front of the class one day and said, “Today we are going to discuss the salami attack or salami slicing. Does anyone know what a salami attack is?” I laughed at the juvenile thoughts that entered my mind. In my college-aged stupor little did I know it was the perfect term for what the United States has been experiencing since the early 20th century.

From Wikipedia:

Salami slicing is a series of many minor actions, often performed by clandestine means, that together results in a larger action that would be difficult or illegal to perform at once.

Today Obama is taking it to new levels. He’s acting like the proverbial kid in a candy store or perhaps saying he’s like a fat man at a deli counter is more appropriate. Our government has been salami slicing it’s way toward a socialist and fascist hybrid I call socio-fascism for the last 100 years or so. Certain administrations were worse than others, but it’s not too hard to believe that the Obama Presidency will go down in history as the one that signaled the final slice in the socio-fascist incrementalism pie.

For America to turn the corner and get “better” things are going to have to get a lot worse. People are still dreaming of government-sponsored comfort and Obama is doing his best to deliver. Government words and statistics are attempting to mask the hard economic pain reverberating through America. We need to see beyond this feel-good facade and find the truth.

We are a spoiled-rotten coddled nation of eternal victims with a codependency on government. Government is an abusive spouse who promises unicorns but only ever delivers blunt trauma to the head.

Perhaps the turn-around will come when the “green shoots” become nothing more than “green shits”, when everyone realizes the government is the source of the problem rather than the solution.

It’s time to refuse the government’s salami.

D o w n s i z e r – D i s p a t c h

Quotes of the Day:

“You could theoretically design a co-op plan that had the same attributes as a public plan.” — Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services

“Well, I think in theory you can imagine a co-operative meeting that definition.” — President Barack Obama

The President and Congressional leaders have responded by appearing to surrender.

President Obama claims the so-called “public option” (tax funded health insurance) isn’t crucial. They would settle for something called a co-op instead.

Beware of politicians appearing to surrender. They’re almost always “Greeks bearing gifts.” The co-op alternative to the “public option” is a Trojan Horse.

Michael F. Cannon sums it up perfectly:

“On a practical level, it makes no difference whether a new program adopts a “co-operative” model or any other. The government possesses so many tools for subsidizing its own program and increasing costs for private insurers, and has such a long history of subsidizing and protecting favored enterprises, that unfair advantages are inevitable.”

So let’s update the formula we’ve been using to describe where all this will lead . . .

Co-op = public option = single-payer, tax-funded health care = health care decisions made by bureaucrats = no consumer choice or free market competition = declining health care.

We also want to repeat our warning . . .

It will take years for the public option/co-op to bring about a politically controlled single payer system, but it will happen, as surely as night follows day.

It’s also crucial to understand that . . .

* The small amount of consumer choice and free market competition that still exists in America is what drives improved health care not only for YOU, but for the whole world.

* The more socialist systems that exist elsewhere are fundamentally dependent on the INNOVATIONS created by the small remaining sliver of American free market health care.

American health care is the proverbial goose that lays the golden egg. Kill that goose and the whole world will suffer.

We must not be fooled by the politicians’ Trojan Horse surrender. We must only accept unconditional surrender. We must demand that . . .

* Every aspect of the Big Government health care bill be defeated
* Concrete steps must be taken to restore consumer choice and free market competition (including, but not limited to, an expansion of Health Savings Accounts and an end to government mandates that drive up the price of health insurance).

Please use DownsizeDC.org’s Educate the Powerful System (sm) to tell your Congressional employees what you want.

Use your personal comments to say that the co-op plan is just as bad as the public option, and must be rejected.

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In Sheldon Richman’s commentary at The Future of Freedom Foundation today, titled “When Will the Health-Care Debate Start?” he discusses that fact that, while there’ s been a lot of noise on the subject of “Health Care Reform” lately, there’s really been no debate.

To be of value a real debate requires fundamental disagreement. But this pseudo-debate is between one side, led by President Obama, that wants more government control than the large amount we already have, and another, the Republicans, that thinks we already have the right amount.

And in fact, Obama isn’t calling for “change” — he really wants the status quo.  Quoting Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post:

One of the bewildering ironies of the health-care debate is that President Obama claims to be attacking the status quo when he’s actually embracing it. Ever since Congress created Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, health politics has followed a simple logic: Expand benefits and talk about controlling costs. That’s the status quo, and Obama faithfully adheres to it.

Of course virtually nobody is arguing for a free-market solution, because, while patently false, the general consensus is that the free market as already failed.  And given that insurance companies are really just state-run (in typical Fascist style) government monopolies, they, along with pharmaceutical companies, are salivating over the prospect of having the government compelling everyone to buy their products.

Read Sheldon Richman’s commentary here.

D o w n s i z e r – D i s p a t c h

Quote of the Day: “Even in the best economic times, you won’t find an investment with a greater payoff than what these companies have been getting.” — Sheila Krumholz, Executive Director of The Center for Responsive politics

In case you’ve forgotten . . .

* T.A.R.P. stands for Toxic Asset Relief Program
* The T.A.R.P. was supposed to spend $700 billion buying so-called toxic assets from institutions that were supposedly too big to fail, but . . .
* After Congress said yes to this proposal the Treasury Department instead used the funds to buy stock in major banks
* In other words, The Toxic Asset Relief Program ended up having nothing to do with toxic assets

It get’s worse. According to Wikipedia . . . .

“On February 5, 2009, Elizabeth Warren, chairperson of the Congressional Oversight Panel, told the Senate Banking Committee that during 2008, the federal government paid $254 billion for assets that were worth only $176 billion.”

And even worse . . .

“During 2008, the companies that received bailout money had spent $114 million on lobbying and campaign contributions. These companies received $295 billion in bailout money.”

Thus, our quote of the day. Spending $114 million on lobbying to gain $295 billion dollars from the taxpayers is a hell of a deal. Many thoughts flow from this . . .

* Those who told us that strong campaign finance laws would curtail corruption were wrong
* Those who tell us we need Big Government to control evil corporations overlook the fact that big corporations want big government, because they benefit from it, and largely control it
* The same kind of lobbying and corporate control is behind the scheme for increased government involvement in health care
* And the $800 billion stimulus bill was another heaping helping of corporate welfare too

Sadly, this isn’t a new development. President Obama and the Democratic Congress are just continuing the policies of President Bush and the Republican Congress . . .

* Go back and scratch beneath the surface of Bush’s prescription drug program and you’ll find that it was mostly a corporate welfare scheme for Big Pharma.
* In addition, T.A.R.P. was passed under Bush and the Republican Congress.

As long as partisan loyalists continue to believe that their particular political party, and their particular political savior (be it Obama, Bush, whoever) is somehow different, we’ll continue to be victims of the same insanity. And at some point we might as well change the country’s name to . . .

The United States of Corporate Welfare

Here’s the bottom line . . .

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