We arrived at the hotel around 11am, checked in and headed to the C4L booth to pick up our “credentials”. We then wandered around aimlessly for a bit looking for the “XPAC Lounge” to get good seats for the live Freedom Watch show set for 12:30pm.

Here are a few pics of the Judge preparing for the show. Click on them to see the larger versions.

Notice the backs of the Judge’s first guests, Tom DiLorenzo, Jacob Hornberger, and Tom Woods. The show began…

And at the end of the great show I met the producer George Szucs and the Judge. He thanked us for our work on FreedomWatchonFox.com and agreed to a picture.

We took a break for lunch and dinner then went to the Liberty Forum where Ron Paul and Judge Napolitano gave inspiring speeches. The Judge’s speech was amazing. They then took questions with Tom Woods moderating, going over the allotted time, of course. Interestingly, there were many questions on foreign policy from some that did not necessarily agree with Paul’s non-interventionism. He handled the questions well, but I’m not sure any minds were changed.

Following the forum, we headed down to the Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) after party. While there we met Michael Maresco, aka the Ron Paul Rider, the man who rode a bike across America twice, spreading the liberty message. I use one of his pictures from his ride as my computer background. He thanked us for helping him spread the message about his ride from the beginning. What a nice guy. He was the one that did all the work and he was thanking us.

The Campaign for Liberty is everywhere here at CPAC. While we are definitely making a mark I still get the feeling we are the radical subversives of the conference. I’m really excited for the panel on Saturday at 2pm, “You’ve Been Lied To: Why Real Conservatives are Against the War on Terror”. The only problem is that it is scheduled for the same time as the speech by Newt Gingrich. Is it too much to hope that they mix up the rooms so the Gingrich-loving interventionists get a dose of the Old Right philosophy of non-intervention?

The first day/night of CPAC is now complete. Look for the 2nd day update sometime tomorrow night or early Saturday morning.

]]> http://libertymaven.com/2010/02/19/cpac-day-1-liberty-maven-judge-napolitano-and-the-ron-paul-rider/8984/feed/ 8 http://libertymaven.com/2009/11/29/escaping-the-current-depression-%e2%80%93-causes-and-cures/8170/ http://libertymaven.com/2009/11/29/escaping-the-current-depression-%e2%80%93-causes-and-cures/8170/#comments Sun, 29 Nov 2009 14:02:37 +0000 Jake Towne http://libertymaven.com/?p=8170

Originally published November 28, 2009 at http://towneforcongress.com/economy/escaping-the-current-depression-ndash-causes-and-cures-1

Why should you care?  Why, for that matter, am I spending time during Thanksgiving weekend writing this and running for U.S. Congress to serve the public as an independent private citizen, when that institution is so corrupted that it would be akin to working in a disease-ridden sewer for someone like me?   In the words of Ludwig von Mises in his critique Socialism in 1922:

“Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore, everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us.”

On November 14, 2009, the Mises Circle met in Newport Beach, California, and gave several lectures relevant to the current depression and how to solve it entitled “The Economic Downturn – Cause and Cure.” Below you will find the videos that will shed a lot of light on what is occurring. All of the speakers are from the Austrian school of economics, otherwise known as REALITY economics, which is completely unlike the half-witted analysis of most “respected” Keynesian economists, such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. Two of the speakers, Thomas DiLorenzo and Robert Murphy were my professors this summer at Mises University. If you like these talks, I highly recommend ordering (for free) a mailing of the Mises Institute’s Free Market newsletter.  Below are a couple slides (46-47)  I created highlighting key differences between Keynesian and Austrian economics.  

In the first video, Dr. DiLorenzo relates how the US government is continuing to create and extend the current economic depression by following the disastrous path of FDR during the Great Depression of the 1930s. He lists one-by-one the lessons that should be avoided – but are instead being followed. California may have seen kerosene poured over orange crops and slain pigs left to rot while the country starved, but our modern-day actions are literally destroying cars by pouring salt into pumping engines and wrecking them.

Next, George Reisman, author of Capitalism, reviews an economic recovery plan to remove us from this depression. He has an interesting idea to make deposits in the banking system secure by increasing required reserves and then transition to a gold-backing, although I am unaware if he is aware of the breakdown of fractional reserve banking as I referred to in my talk “End the FED… Then What? – The Transition to Sound Money.”

Lastly, Bob Murphy relates how FED interventions in the economy are not just solely creating future risks, but also causing wanton havoc and damage in the present. Feel free to ask any questions below, I will do my best to answer although the speakers are quite obviously a lot more eloquent than I am.

“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as A, B, C, hold up truth to your eyes… I fear not. I see no real cause for fear. I know our situation well, and can see the way out of it.” – Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, 1776

November 28, 2009

…Hamilton looks pleasant enough in his portrait on our $10 bill, but he was an arrogant egomaniac.

Hamilton was a determined opponent of Jefferson’s laissez-faire philosophy at every turn. When it came to trade, he demanded high protective tariffs because he thought, in the mercantilistic tradition, that if a nation produced “its own” goods rather than purchasing them from “other countries” it would become stronger. Mercantilism was inseparable from economic nationalism — the foolish and destructive idea that political boundaries have great economic significance. (We still suffer grievously from this idiocy, of course.) Individual American consumers would be harmed by artificially high prices for items they might have bought less expensively from producers in other countries, but Hamilton was not concerned about the problems of individuals. His obsession was with “strengthening” the nation.

In the early years of the United States, Hamilton battled against Jefferson’s reading of the Constitution as placing severe limits on federal authority. To Hamilton and his Federalist allies, the wording of the Constitution, especially the enumerated powers of Congress, meant nothing more than an intellectual game of trying to invent interpretations that gave the government “inherent” powers that it was not specifically given. Contrary to the sensible, restrictive reading of the Constitution defended by Jefferson, Hamilton insisted that the General Welfare and Commerce Clauses were meant to give the federal government almost limitless powers.

Leef then goes on to discuss the traitorous presidencies of Lincoln, Roosevelt, and disasters in the form of the 17th Amendment, the income tax, and the Federal Reserve Act.  I highly recommend reading the entire article.

President Obama can be forgiven for celebrating the hypocrisy of Abraham Lincoln because the victors of wars write their history and glorify the winners. The recognition that slavery is a despicable institution does not require hero worship of a president who made the largest contribution to the unraveling of our Constitution. After all when it is settled by brute force that states cannot secede, as they thought they had the right to in 1787, then the federal government can ride roughshod over states and their people’s right — in a word make meaningless the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.

Read the whole thing.

The United States of America was founded as a group of sovereign states. In this video by LibertyPen.com, Thomas DiLorenzo explains why this concept is crucial to the preservation of individual liberty.

…[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.

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:

• Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe
• Abraham Lincoln: Friend or Foe of Freedom?
• How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present
• Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Arch Enemy Betrayed the American Revolution–and What It Means for Americans Today

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):

FDR’s New Deal made the Great Depression longer and deeper. It is a myth that Franklin D. Roosevelt “got us out of the Depression” and “saved capitalism from itself,” as generations of Americans have been taught by the state’s educational establishment.

In addition to his discussion on economics, DiLorenzo’s scathing reviews of often-revered Abraham Lincoln and Alexander Hamilton are noteworthy.  In his books as well as in essays such as Speaking Truth to the Lincoln Cult he points out that the popular “history” of Lincoln is more mythology than fact.

The gigantic collection of myths, lies, and distortions that comprise The Legend of Abraham Lincoln is the ideological cornerstone of the American warfare/welfare state.

DiLorenzo cites a litany of sources to paint a picture of Lincoln as a masterful politician who spent his entire political career to convert our republican form of government (one that was very limited in scope and highly decentralized, as the Founding Fathers intended) to a highly centralized, controlling state.  And despite the fact that our fifth grade schoolteachers told us that Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation to “free the slaves”, DiLorenzo shows us (often in Lincoln’s own words) that he was basically ambivalent on the subject of slavery.  Instead of taking one side or the other, he used it as a political football to achieve his real political goals, such as denying states the right to secede from the union and implementing the mercantilist policies of his hero, Henry Clay.  DiLorenzo details how Lincoln trampled on the Constitution, subverted state’s rights, and pushed our nation into a civil war that has changed us forever.

On Hamilton, DiLorenzo says:

Hamilton was a compulsive statist who wanted to bring the corrupt British mercantilist system – the very system the American Revolution was fought to escape from – to America. He fought fiercely for his program of corporate welfare, protectionist tariffs, public debt, pervasive taxation, and a central bank run by politicians and their appointees out of the nation’s capital.

Building on Hamilton’s statement that our national debt is a “public blessing” and his overt disdain for “an excessive concern for liberty in public men” such as Thomas Jefferson, DiLorenzo unravels the romantic mythology surrounding this founding father, detailing how his policies are now revered by many a big-government politician.  Read his recent article highlighting his new book on this subject.

If you missed the most recent interview with Thomas DiLorenzo as reported on Liberty Maven, be sure to check it out.

Also recommended are his various writings available on LewRockwell.com.

Obama is a slick politician, so I expect him to continue to administer the neo-mercantilist, Hamiltonian empire that has been built up by both parties over the decades, with all of its schemes for corporate welfare for defense contractors, investment bankers and myriad other politically active businesses which, in turn, provide financial support for the regime. But Obama is also a hardcore leftist who spent his earlier career working with some of the craziest socialists in America, groups like ACORN, who advocated such things as kicking doctors off the boards of hospitals and replacing them with “the poor,” and Soviet-style nationalization of the energy and health care industries.

As for McCain, DiLorenzo says, in part:

John McCain is virtually a poster boy for Hamiltonian mercantilism: He favored a dictatorial executive branch, foreign policy adventurism and he supported the Wall Street Plutocrats’ bailout bill, which of course was pure Hamiltonianism.
…
Hamilton was also obsessed with using the powers of the state to pursue “imperial glory” in war, and itched for a war with France, just as McCain itched for a war with Iran (for starters). That also makes him quite the Hamiltonian.

DiLorenzo goes on to describe how Hamilton worked feverishly after the ratification of the Constitution to “read between the lines” to attempt to create a National Bank and “expand the dictatorial powers of the executive branch…far beyond what the Constitution called for.” Ever since he Civil war, at least, the Hamiltonian school of thought has taken over, and has, in fact, served to “rewrite” American history as taught by educational systems today.  Obama is a prodigy of such a system.

I recently received an e-mail from a young conservative law student at New York University Law School who thanked me for writing critically of Hamilton. He was sick and tired of being lectured to by his law professors (such as Nadine Strossen of the ACLU) about the glories of the “Hamiltonian” interpretation of the Constitution, which essentially is a roadmap for ignoring constitutional constraints on government. Obama is a Harvard-trained lawyer who also embraces this subversive legal philosophy. Before the election, a tape emerged of a speech he made just a few years ago where he complained that the Constitution had not yet been sufficiently “reinterpreted” by leftist judicial activists to allow a really radical redistribution of income. I expect him to appoint dangerous socialists like himself to the federal judiciary.

Read Part 1 of the DiLorezo interview here.  Part 2 is here.

Central banking has been a corrupt, mercantilist scheme and an engine of corporate welfare from its very beginning in the late 18th century. The first central bank, the Bank of North America, was “driven through the Continental Congress by [congressman and financier] Robert Morris in the Spring of 1781,” wrote Murray Rothbard in The Mystery of Banking (p. 191). The Philadelphia businessman Morris had been a defense contractor during the Revolutionary War who “siphoned off millions from the public treasury into contracts to his own … firm and to those of his associates.” He was also “leader of the powerful Nationalist forces” in the new country.

The main objective of the Nationalists, who were also known as Federalists, was essentially to establish an American version of the British mercantilist system, the very system that the Revolution had been fought against. Indeed, it was this system that the ancestors of the Revolutionaries had fled from when they came to America.

Continue reading the article at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Ask yourself this question: was the housing price bubble, which has burst, caused by (a) a Fed policy of too much liquidity, which caused artificially low interest rates, which in turn caused a great deal of malinvestment, or (b) a Fed policy of too little liquidity which caused high interest rates and a credit-starved economy? If you chose answer b, congratulations, you may have a future as a celebrated author, historian, and Wall Street Journal commentator.

Answer b is a theme of a truly ridiculous article by John Steele Gordon in the October 10 issue of the Wall Street Journal online entitled “A Short Banking History of the United States.” The article is an attempt to defend the Fed, its founding father, Alexander Hamilton, and the regime that it finances. (Gordon is the author of a book entitled Hamilton’s Blessing which sings the praises of a large public debt, something that Hamilton himself called a “public blessing.”)

Enjoy the rest of the article here.