Wilt Alston on Lily Ledbetter

Wilt Alston wrote a piece titled "What Does "Equal Pay for Equal Work" Mean?" for the Campaign For Liberty. In it he explains the fallacy of government regulating pay. I recommend reading it. Here's a quote:

What is an "equivalent job" and who gets to decide? If the owner of the job, the employer, doesn't know what is equivalent -- and the fact that a law is needed illustrates that he ostensibly does not -- how can a third party like the government, itself not subject to any oversight, do any better? How different must a job be before a different wage may be paid for it?

In any trade -- of which the employee/employer relationship is but an example -- there are generally two actors. One actor, the employer, has a job that he wants done, at a wage he thinks is appropriate. (More generally, he has an upper limit above which he will make another decision versus pay that price for that job. This relates directly to the fallacy of the minimum wage.) The second actor, a prospective employee, has time that he is willing to offer in exchange for those wages. (He too has a lower limit, below which he would rather do something other than the prospective job.)

These two actors must agree before the trade can take place. At the completion of that trade, both of these actors are certain that they have received more value than they traded, or they would not have done it. This concept, subjective value, is the very basis of free market exchange in the Austrian method of economics.

Alan Keyes On Obama

I determined that this man was certifiably crazy (certified by my own determination) during the presidential debates; however I thought every candidate was crazy except Ron Paul.

Like Jim Boehner before him, he is a conservative that would surely be singing a different tune had John McCain become president (McCain wasn't born in America either), however Keyes' points are still valid.

Malcolm Gladwell On The Diversity Of Spaghetti Sauce

NH State Rep. Dan Itse

Ron Paul On The Stimulus

Not that he wouldn't be singing a different tune. . .

. . .if John McCain was in office pushing through this bill, but Senator Boehner makes a valid point:

"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

J.D. Tuccille of the Civil Liberties Examiner wrote a piece on defending the civil liberties of others. You can read it here.

The sort of people who make up the political class -- the control freaks of the world -- are experts at divide and conquer. They have all sorts of reasons why you should be glad that somebody else is being hemmed in by laws and threatened with prison. Those people are bad -- until it's you who's so bad. What the control freaks will never tell you is that they'd be entirely unable to impose those draconian laws and threats if you'd ally yourselves with those different folks and their peculiar interests to protect their liberty and your own at the same time.

Lincoln

Thomas DiLorenzo wrote a piece on historian William Marvel's 2006 book "Mr. Lincoln Goes To War".

If you're interested in historical truth, as opposed to rhetoric, this piece is worth reading. DiLorenzo has written two books on Lincoln, Lincoln Unmasked and The Real Lincoln.

Here's a little bit of historical truth in respect to why the Civil War began, from Dilorenzo's piece:

Marvel does not hide the fact, as most other Lincoln "scholars" do, that Seward, on Lincoln’s instructions, orchestrated the passing through the U.S. Senate of a "constitutional amendment specifically prohibiting congressional interference with slavery" in the South. The Amendment, known as the Corwin Amendment, did pass the House and Senate before Lincoln’s inauguration. In his first inaugural address Lincoln explicitly pledged his support for the amendment. In that speech Lincoln also said that there need be "no bloodshed" unless a state refused to pay the tariff tax, which had just been doubled (the Morrill Tariff) two days before Lincoln’s inauguration. Since the Southern states that had seceded had no intention of paying taxes to the U.S. government any more than they intended to pay them to the British government, this was an explicit threat of war over tax collection.

Judy Shelton Of The Wall Street Journal

Judy Shelton recently wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal calling for the movement towards a gold standard currency. If it wasn't for a few word choices, the piece almost read as if Ron Paul or Peter Schiff wrote the article.

She has joined my list of heroes.

You can read her article "Capitalism Needs a Sound-Money Foundation" here.

Here are a few of my more favourite quotes:

On the use of inflation:

Inflation is the enemy of capitalism, chiseling away at the foundation of free markets and the laws of supply and demand. It distorts price signals, making retailers look like profiteers and deceiving workers into thinking their wages have gone up. It pushes families into higher income tax brackets without increasing their real consumption opportunities.

. . .

In short, inflation undermines capitalism by destroying the rationale for dedicating a portion of today's earnings to savings. Accumulated savings provide the capital that finances projects that generate higher future returns; it's how an economy grows, how a society reaches higher levels of prosperity. But inflation makes suckers out of savers.

On the use of a resource backed currency:

A study by two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Arthur Rolnick and Warren Weber, concluded that gold and silver standards consistently outperform fiat standards. Analyzing data over many decades for a large sample of countries, they found that "every country in our sample experienced a higher rate of inflation in the period during which it was operating under a fiat standard than in the period during which it was operating under a commodity standard."

On the use of gold as money:

Private gold currencies have served as the medium of exchange throughout history -- long before kings and governments took over the franchise. The initial justification for government involvement in money was to certify the weight and fineness of private gold coins. That rulers found it all too tempting to debase the money and defraud its users testifies more to the corruptive aspects of sovereign authority than to the viability of gold-based money.

Which is why government officials should not now have the last word in determining the monetary measure, especially when they have abused the privilege.

On Keynes:

Economists who promote the government-knows-best approach of Keynesian economics fail to comprehend the damaging consequences of spurring economic activity through a money illusion. Fiscal "stimulus" at the expense of monetary stability may accommodate the principles of the childless British economist who famously quipped, "In the long run, we're all dead." But it shortchanges future generations by saddling them with undeserved debt obligations.

On gold as a deflationary currency:

There is also the argument that gold-linked money deprives the government of needed "flexibility" and could lead to falling prices. But contrary to fears of harmful deflation, the big problem is not that nominal prices might go down as production declines, but rather that dollar prices artificially pumped up by government deficit spending merely paper over the real economic situation. When the output of goods grows faster than the stock of money, benign deflation can occur -- it happened from 1880 to 1900 while the U.S. was on a gold standard. But the total price-level decline was 10% stretched over 20 years. Meanwhile, the gross domestic product more than doubled.

On the future:

The fiasco of the G-20 meeting in Washington last November -- it was supposed to usher in "the next Bretton Woods" -- suggests that any move toward a new international monetary system based on gold will more likely take place through the grass-roots efforts of Americans. It may already be happening at the state level. Last month, Indiana state Sen. Greg Walker introduced a bill -- "The Indiana Honest Money Act" -- which would, if enacted, allow citizens the option of paying in or receiving back gold, silver or the equivalent electronic receipt as an alternative to Federal Reserve notes for all transactions conducted with the state of Indiana.

H L Menken Quote

The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it.

H. L. Menken

Peter Schiff In Saudi Arabia

Please note the applause from the Saudi audience when Schiff disses the Federal Reserve at 3:42.

Thomas Woods on Glenn Beck

Thomas Woods is a friend of the Austrian school of economics and is out with a new book, Meltdown.

Gov. Sanford On The Stimulus

Governor Sanford of South Carolina explains why government stimulus is dangerous and will not work.

The Founding Father of Economic Statism In The United States

Thomas DiLorenzo on Alexander Hamilton.


Economic Liberty Lecture Series: Thomas J. DiLorenzo from The Future of Freedom Foundation on Vimeo.

Buy Gold

This guy slams Peter Schiff, but that's ok, they agree where it counts.

Jim Rogers Making Sense

Small Toy-Makers Get Screwed Continued

Timothy Carney of dcexaminer.com has written the latest article on the "unintended consequences" of government regulation over the toy industry. You can read the article here.

The Consumer Products Safety Improvement Act was written in an effort to counter the problems Hasbro and Mattel had with lead contaminated paint being used to manufacture their toys. However, given the following information from Carney, just as the big bankers wrote the Federal Reserve Act to implement a cartel over the banking industry, these big toy makers, who provided the need for this act, have written it to create a cartel over the toy industry:

Mattel—whose leaded toys kicked off this whole scare—beefed up its lobbying effort when the legislation appeared. The company’s lobbying budget, which had been steady at $120,000 per year from 2002 through 2006 ballooned to $540,000 in 2007 and $650,000 in 2008—a 442% increase from two years earlier.

In late August 2007, Mattel, the largest toymaker in the world, hired a new lobbying firm, Johnson, Madigan, Peck, Boland & Stewart, to lobby on the bill. One of their lobbyists on this issue was Sheila Murphy, recently the legislative director for Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic member of the Commerce Committee’s Consumer Affairs subcommittee. Klobuchar became a cosponsor of the bill in late September 2007.

Hasbro, the world’s No. 2 toymaker, had never had a Washington lobbyist, according to federal lobbying filings, before October 2007, when the company hired the Duberstein Group, headed by Ken Dubertstein, the former White House Chief of Staff under Ronald Reagan. Since then, Hasbro has spent $500,000 on lobbying.

But these industry giants weren’t resisting regulation—they were embracing it.

London Mayor Warns of Protectionism

Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, recently published an article with the Telegraph.co.uk arguing against the protectionist tendencies our leaders are likely to take during the oncoming economic collapse. I would recommend it to you to read here. One of his better points:

Let us imagine that the boot were on the other foot. How would we feel if some of the hundreds of superb British engineering consultancies were suddenly told that they were not welcome in China, or Italy, or any other market in which they have flourished over the past century?

It would be a disaster for those companies, and for their workers, and for Britain's ability to earn foreign exchange. Imagine if the world were convulsed by nationalistic and chauvinistic strikes along the lines we are seeing in Britain today. There would be a catastrophic collapse in world trade, and a fall in global economic activity. The overall pie of wealth would shrink, and so would our national slice.

What kind of British industry do the protectionists think would emerge? Some sort of crazy autarkic system in which we tried to substitute imports with home-made PlayStations and home-made shoes and brassieres once again produced in the cotton mills of Lancashire? We would not only be forcing British consumers to accept second-rate goods; we would be impoverishing them by obliging them to pay more.

Harper Sells Out

I didn't say it first. I thought it though. I hoped someone in the Canadian press would talk about it. I don't subscribe to Maclean's, but on my daily reading of LewRockwell.com, I came across a link to this article in Maclean's titled "The end of Canadian conservatism: How Harper sold out to save himself".

While Andrew Coyne, the author, is directing his criticism solely at the Canadian stimulus plan and the Conservative Party of Canada, he does a fantastic job pointing out the extraordinary gamble the stimulus packages being offered all around the world are taking:

A $34-billion deficit next year, after all, is barely two per cent of GDP, and even four years and $85 billion worth of deficits, if the budget’s projections hold, would barely budge our debt-to-GDP ratio. But if they do not—if the economy fails to recover on cue; if inflation spikes when it does, and interest rates soon after; if all those billions in new spending, once in place, do not prove so easy to trim back; if the assets the government acquires with all of its borrowed money do not turn out to be worth what they cost—then we will head into the approaching demographic storm loaded down to the gunwales. It’s a monumental, even reckless gamble.

Timing the market for even the brightest investor is near impossible, let alone government bureaucrats.

I remember watching Harper in the debate during the election last fall. He said flatly that there would be no budget deficits. Either he lied, or he's ignorant. Either way, it has triggered regret for voting Conservative last fall. The significance of these deficits is even larger than simply Harper's selling out though, he's changing the political playing field and pushing it to the left and towards the increasing power of the state. Coyne did well to point this out a number of times in his article:

When the “right” is defined as $34-billion deficits, record spending, and bailouts for everything in sight—when every other party is to the left of that—people lose the ability to think in any other way. They forget there was ever a contrary view.

He continues the point:

Conservatives, then, should think hard about whether they can afford to support this government any longer. Its sole contribution at this point is to limit debate, to rule out of bounds any serious discussion of alternatives, since “even” a Conservative government now believes in an all-pervasive, ever-expanding state.

With this new budget, how could any fiscally conservative individual ever support the Conservative Party of Canada and simultaneously lament about Trudeau?

Coyne continues to do his lamenting on the giant increase in the size and scope of government:

These temporary hardship cases turn out to include such perennial wards of the state as farming, forestry, mining, and . . . shipbuilding. “In recent years,” the budget notes laconically, “the industry has experienced declining demand,” the remedy for which is apparently to increase supply (“Budget 2009 provides a catalyst to increase activity in the sector”). Then it’s off to automotive bailouts, support for the cultural industries, permanent increases in equalization (inequality among the provinces may go down, but equalization always goes up), tax credits for home renovations (you thought it was hard to get a contractor on the phone now?), “an improved rail system,” slaughterhouses, hockey rinks, broadband, the Manege Militaire drill hall in Quebec City . . . The government will be everywhere, and everything.

He concludes his piece by essentially defining the essence of what is the budget and where it will take us:

More broadly, how in good conscience could the Liberals, or the NDP for that matter, vote against a budget they might have written? Every line of it seems to have been composed in a kind of haze of Keynesian nostalgia. We are back to the bad old days of the 1960s and ’70s, when savings were a dirty word and consumption was thought to “drive” the economy, when economies were “pumps” to be “primed” by wise and far-seeing policy-makers pulling levers on the wall. And in another 20 years or so, when we are drowning in debt and the new-old wisdom has been discredited again, perhaps a new political philosophy will arise, and a new party to give voice to it. We might call it conservatism.

Its refreshing to see an honest conservative voice speak up out of and above the collective drone of the mob.

Bizarro World: Putin Lectures US On Free Markets

I stole the Superman reference from Justin Raimondo at AntiWar.com. He has written a piece describing Vladimir Putin's speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland as our entrance into the Bizarro World. After all, who would have thought the Russians would be lecturing the United States on free markets? I would absolutely recommend reading this article

A few of my more favorite Putin quotes from the speach (all used by Raimondo in his piece):

I just want to remind you that, just a year ago, American delegates speaking from this rostrum emphasized the U.S. economy's fundamental stability and its cloudless prospects. Today, investment banks, the pride of Wall Street, have virtually ceased to exist. In just 12 months, they have posted losses exceeding the profits they made in the last 25 years. This example alone reflects the real situation better than any criticism.

. . .

The entire economic growth system, where one regional center prints money without respite and consumes material wealth, while another regional center manufactures inexpensive goods and saves money printed by other governments, has suffered a major setback.

. . .

This means we must assess the real situation and write off all hopeless debts and 'bad' assets. True, this will be an extremely painful and unpleasant process. Far from everyone can accept such measures, fearing for their capitalization, bonuses, or reputation. However, we would 'conserve' and prolong the crisis, unless we clean up our balance sheets.

. . .

In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state's role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated.

. . .

Nor should we turn a blind eye to the fact that the spirit of free enterprise, including the principle of personal responsibility of businesspeople, investors, and shareholders for their decisions, is being eroded in the last few months. There is no reason to believe that we can achieve better results by shifting responsibility onto the state

. . .

Unfortunately, we are increasingly hearing the argument that the buildup of military spending could solve today's social and economic problems. The logic is simple enough. Additional military allocations create new jobs.

At a glance, this sounds like a good way of fighting the crisis and unemployment. This policy might even be quite effective in the short term. But in the longer run, militarization won't solve the problem but will rather quell it temporarily. What it will do is squeeze huge financial and other resources from the economy instead of finding better and wiser uses for them.

We Just Love Wars

War on terrorism, war on drugs, war on hunger, war on poverty. . . you'd think people would recognize that the targets of these wars have been a part of our society throughout our entire history and that no amount of money, lives, bullets, laws and regulations the government throws at them will resolve the issue; its just a waste. The fear created by these wars are typically used by the government as well to gain more power from the people and invade on our individual freedoms.

In fact, only a society which promotes free markets, individual liberty, personal responsibility, and self reliance has ever proven to decrease any of these problems. Governments simply get in the way. When looking at the US, the entire decade before LBJ announced his war on poverty, the economy experienced an substantial drop in poverty. Since the war on poverty was announced, it has remained stagnant and simply swinging with the FED induced bubbles in the economy. If you accept the conclusion that hunger and the overall use of drugs stem from poverty, it's hard to argue these wars have provided anything of any value to society.

The war on terrorism is an even larger farce. Terrorists are simply people pissed off because they're oppressed by their own, or foreign, governments. I'd probably hate the west too if I grew up in Palestine, Iran, or Iraq. Terrorism around the world has increased substantially since the beginning of the war on terrorism. It's simply another war that has brought absolutely nothing of value to society while succeeding in enlarging government and instilling fear in people to take away their rights and their wealth.

Czech President on Global Warming

Recently, as reported by the Agence France-Presse, the president of the Czech Republic (the current sitting president of the EU), Vaclav Klaus, came out and bashed Al Gore on global warming saying the following:

"I don't think that there is any global warming. I don't see the statistical data for that. I'm very sorry that some people like Al Gore are not ready to listen to the competing theories. I do listen to them. Environmentalism and the global warming alarmism is challenging our freedom. Al Gore is an important person in this movement."

Also, on the current economic disaster:

"I'm afraid that the current crisis will be misused for radically constraining the functioning of the markets and market economy all around the world. I'm more afraid of the consequences of the crisis than the crisis itself.

And this guy is considered a liberal.

Klaus is an awarded economist and has a libertarian streak as he has been published in the Cato Journal. He has often criticized the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as one-sided and as a "smug monopoly". Klaus believes there should be a second IPCC set up to produce competing reports and has often referred to environmentalism as a religion or modern counter-part to communism.

"Environmentalism, not preservation of nature (and of environment), is a leftist ideology... Environmentalism is indeed a vehicle for bringing us socialist government at the global level. Again, my life in communism makes me oversensitive in this respect."