Sound Of Cannons

Presidential High

“It just goes to show you,” writes Lew Rockwell in today’s Mises Institute feature article, “that the presidency is something like a drug. It makes people lose all connection to reality. Part of the reality that Obama needs to recognize is that the New Deal was a calamity far worse than the initial market downturn that began it. He needs to stop basing his policies on dumbed-down civics texts versions of events and consider the economic logic.
“With his rhetoric and policies, he has decided to demonize private enterprise, just as FDR did, as a way to present government as the great savior…
“You cannot make a country rich by looting taxpayers and paying people to pound nails into siding at public schools. These activities amount to capital consumption. They are not sources of investment. You can say that they are stupid tasks or wonderful tasks, but it is not a matter of ideology as to whether such public projects will make us all wealthier. They will not. They drain the sources of wealth from society. They represent a cost, not a blessing.
“That was also true of Bush's dumb stimulus program. He was only bailing out his friends at our expense. The effect was to give a little longer life to institutions that were failing anyway. It's pathetic that the Republicans ever went along with it. You will notice that the scheme didn't actually work.
“Well, Obama is doing the same thing, though rewarding a different set of friends. This is not wealth production. This is wealth consumption. Do enough of this nonsense and you can destroy the livelihoods of an entire generation.”
Regardless, the Senate successfully voted to close debate on the stimulus bill yesterday, one of the last hurdles needed to bring this bill to fruition. In a tear-jerking display of bipartisan support, the vote passed 61-36. Three Republicans voted yes.
“Senators from both parties,” beamed Harry Reid, “met the seriousness of the economic crisis with an earnest approach to solving this emergency.”
Now, if they’d only crack a history book together, we might get somewhere.
The stimulus bill also magically gained $53 billion since you read The 5 yesterday. The tab now stands at $838 billion.
“Bad bets don’t get better,” Bill Bonner reminds us, “when you lend the bettor more money. They just become more expensive.”

Hey Barrie, We've Tried This Before!

“We have tried spending money,” begins our mystery politician today. “We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started…
“And an enormous debt to boot!"
The mystery man? Henry Morgenthau Jr., Treasury secretary to then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Morgenthau uttered these words in May 1939 before the House Ways and Means Committee. Despite being a chief architect of the New Deal, Morgenthau came to the House to repent… six years after the New Deal’s inception, the unemployment rate had climbed back to 20%. The New Deal failed.
Check this out on the left, from the Heritage Foundation:

Mogambo Sez:

Sound Money Falls on Deaf Paper Ears
By The Mogambo Guru
James Turk of GoldMoney.com has penned “Restoring Sound Money in America”, which makes me cry out in despair when one considers the fraud of the Federal Reserve’s constantly increasing amounts of fiat currency and credit, a corrupt and complicit Congress that condones it, a despicable Supreme Court which allows it all (by negating Article 1, Section 10 of the Constitution mandating that gold will be money), and the legions of people (Wall Street, Congress and the bankers) to whom a sound, non-inflating currency means the end of their loathsome, corrupt businesses and speculative excesses.
So, with that kind of firepower, the prospect of “restoring sound money” is (according to my calculations, charts, graphs and figures) zilch.
And what is “sound money”? It is money that maintains its purchasing power, so that a dollar can buy a dollar’s worth of crap today, and a dollar can buy the same load of crap in the future because prices did not change. Theoretically, prices went down, which would give everybody a higher standard of living, and which was the whole promise of “productivity”!
Instead, we have an “unsound” currency that continually goes down in purchasing power thanks to the filthy Federal Reserve constantly creating so much money and credit so that the federal government could borrow it. And it is all this new money that creates prices that always go up and up and causes everyone to suffer a constantly falling standard of living.
So, naturally, I yearn for “Restoring Sound Money in America” with a fervor that is incomprehensible to my wife and kids, family, neighbors, elected officials and random passersby that I accost on the street by demanding “Do you know that you are a moron for voting into office worthless socialist/communist/fascist trash like Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and Harry Reid, and then compound your stupidity by NOT buying gold, silver and oil to protect yourself from the inevitable inflation in prices?”
But this is not about me, or how I bizarrely accost people on the street, or how I crave a “sound money”, or even how everybody I meet is some kind of mental defective who can’t comprehend the inflationary horror of the damned Federal Reserve constantly creating money and credit so that the damned federal government can borrow it and spend us into, well, just look around you!
And they don’t have to listen to me run my fat, loud mouth about it when they could instead get the same message delivered in the dulcet tones of Howard Katz of The GoldBug.net, who, in commenting on the astonishing amounts of money being created, says, “To put these numbers in context, the U.S. money supply more than doubled during WWII between 1941 and 1945. It almost doubled during the Reagan Administration (1981-89). Here we are threatened with a doubling of the money supply in approximately 1-2 years time. This is the worst money infusion in American history.”
And what is the result of such monetary stupidity? Mr. Katz writes, “Such events have always caused a corresponding increase in prices.”
But this is not about any of that, and instead is about the movement to “restore sound money in America”, about which I am pessimistic, although the essay starts off with the remarkable statement “There is a determined grassroots movement in the United States seeking the restoration of sound money. There are many different groups comprising this movement, but all share the same aim. It is to restore gold and silver to its rightful role as the money of the United States, as mandated by the Constitution.”
Two places (4% of the states!) are New Hampshire and Indiana! Hooray for New Hampshire and Indiana!
And if it catches on, the demand for gold should soar! Whee! This investing stuff is easy!

Nicely Said.....................

Keynesian economics, and socialist central planning, have trapped the Western economies into a slow death. - Wayne N. Krautkramer

It Bears Repeating

Lawmakers in 20 states move to reclaim sovereignty

Obama's $1 trillion deficit-spending 'stimulus plan' seen as last straw

As the Obama administration attempts to push through Congress a nearly $1 trillion deficit spending plan that is weighted heavily toward advancing typically Democratic-supported social welfare programs, a rebellion against the growing dominance of federal control is beginning to spread at the state level.
So far, eight states have introduced resolutions declaring state sovereignty under the Ninth and Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, including Arizona, Hawaii, Montana, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington.
Analysts expect that in addition, another 20 states may see similar measures introduced this year, including Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Nevada, Maine and Pennsylvania.
"What we are trying to do is to get the U.S. Congress out of the state's business," Oklahoma Republican state Sen. Randy Brogdon told WND.

"Congress is completely out of line spending trillions of dollars over the last 10 years putting the nation into a debt crisis like we've never seen before," Brogdon said, arguing that the Obama stimulus plan is the last straw taxing state patience in the brewing sovereignty dispute.
"This particular 111th Congress is the biggest bunch of over-reachers and underachievers we've ever had in Congress," he said.
"A sixth-grader should realize you can't borrow money to pay off your debt, and that is the Obama administration's answer for a stimulus package," he added.
The Ninth Amendment reads, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
The Tenth Amendment specifically provides, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Brogdon, the lead sponsor of the Oklahoma state senate version of the sovereignty bill, has been a strong opponent of extending the plan to build a four-football-fields-wide Trans-Texas Corridor parallel to Interstate-35 to Oklahoma, as WND reported.
Rollback federal authority
The various sovereignty measures moving through state legislatures are designed to reassert state authority through a rollback of federal authority under the powers enumerated in the Constitution, with the states assuming the governance of the non-enumerated powers, as required by the Tenth Amendment.
The state sovereignty measures, aimed largely at the perceived fiscal irresponsibility of Congress in the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, have gained momentum with the $1 trillion deficit-spending economic stimulus package the Obama administration is currently pushing through Congress.
Particularly disturbing to many state legislators are the increasing number of "unfunded mandates" that have proliferated in social welfare programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, in which bills passed by Congress dictate policy to the states without providing funding.
In addition, the various state resolutions include discussion of a wide range of policy areas, including the regulation of firearms sales (Montana) and the demand to issue drivers licenses with technology to embed personal information under the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative and the Real ID Act (Michigan).
Hawaii's measure calls for a new state constitutional convention to return self-governance, a complaint that traces back to the days it was a U.S. territory, prior to achieving statehood in 1959.
"We are trying to send a message to the federal government that the states are trying to reclaim their sovereignty," Republican Rep. Matt Shea, the lead sponsor of Washington's sovereignty resolution told WND.
"State sovereignty has been eroded in so many areas, it's hard to know where to start," he said. "There are a ton of federal mandates imposed on states, for instance, on education spending and welfare spending."
Shea said the Obama administration's economic stimulus package moving through Congress is a "perfect example."
"In the state of Washington, we have increased state spending 33 percent in the last three years and hired 6,000 new state employees, often using federal mandates as an excuse to grow state government," he said. "We need to return government back down to the people, to keep government as close to the local people as possible."
Shea is a private attorney who serves with the Alliance Defense Fund, a nationwide network of about 1,000 attorneys who work pro-bono. As a counter to the ACLU, the alliance seeks to protect and defend religious liberty, the sanctity of life and traditional family values.
Republican state Rep. Judy Burges, the primary sponsor of the sovereignty resolution in the Arizona House, told WND the federal government "has been trouncing on our constitutional rights."
"The real turning point for me was the Real ID act, which involved both a violation of the Fourth Amendments rights against the illegal searches and seizures and the Tenth Amendment," she said.
Burges told WND she is concerned that the overreaching of federal powers could lead to new legislation aimed at confiscating weapons from citizens or encoding ammunition.
"The Real ID Act was so broadly written that we are afraid that it involves the potential for "mission-creep," that could easily involve confiscation of firearms and violations of the Second Amendment," she said.
Burges said she has been surprised at the number of e-mails she has received in support of the sovereignty measure.
"We are a sovereign state in Arizona, not a branch of the federal government, and we need to be treated as such, she insisted.