Libertarians in Cahoots with Obama Admin and Call Mosque Opponents "Bigots" and "Racists"

and "Warmongers" and "Demagogues".

I have to say I'm disappointed.

This mosque/Muslim community center was pretty much a non-issue for people outside New York, until President Obama for some reason decided to step in and throw his support behind the project, citing, of all things, the Constitution.

It's most cynical of this president to base his support on the Constitution, when just about everything he has done since he became the president has been to further restrict citizens' rights under the Constitution and further expand the power of the government which was already huge under Bush and Clinton.

Now, people whose views and opinions I have respected, people like Lew Rockwell, Eric Magolis at Lewrockwell.com, Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com are almost gleefully calling the mosque opponents "bigots" and "racists" and "warmongers". Raimondo goes to ask the same question that George W. Bush asked ("Are you with us or against us?") by starting the article "Liberty against the lynch mob: which side are you on?" Ron Paul basically states we have to accept the mosque even if that's insensitive and objectionable to some people because of the grave injuries the US has caused over the years in Muslim countries, and calls the opponents "demagogue". (Ron Paul, as the result, is suddenly popular with liberal bloggers.) The American Conservative magazine had the article in the similar vein as Ron Paul.

I rarely have a serious objection to the opinions expressed at Lewrockwell.com or Antiwar.com, but this is one of the rare cases.

Extremely rare for them, they are in agreement with President Obama and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and tell us that if we oppose the Muslim center and mosque within two blocks from the Ground Zero, we are bigots and racists and warmongers and demagogues.

Haven't we heard these words somewhere else?

Yes we have, and many times in the past year and a half. Anyone who dare oppose the Obama government policies have been called "racists" by the administration and its Democratic leadership and supporters. If you oppose Obamacare, you are racist; if you oppose climate change bill, you are racist; if you oppose stimulus spending, you are racist; if you oppose financial regulation bill, you are racist and dirty capitalist on top of it. And if you mention the president's middle name (Hussein), you are "bigot". That's how they've been calling the majority of Americans who oppose anything that the current government does: "racist" and "bigots".

According to a Rasmussen Poll, these bigots and racists and warmongers and demagogues make up 77% of mainstream Americans, in contrast to 68% of the political class in favor of the mosque.

Just like 56% of American voters want Obamacare repealed, 75% of them want the Federal Reserve audited. Majority support Arizona's immigration law, 72% oppose increase in government spending. And they oppose this particular mosque.

I am not ready nor prepared to call the majority who oppose this mosque "racists", "bigots", "warmongers", "demagogues" and to shame them into accepting what clearly doesn't sit well with them, if not downright repulsive.

What's different this time around is that people who throw these words at Americans who oppose include libertarians. Suddenly, in their eyes, President Obama seems to have morphed into a paragon of Constitutional virtue.

Muslim Americans have constitutional right to worship wherever they want. Sure. That's not even an issue for most Americans who oppose this mosque. They are opposing this particular one within two blocks of the Ground Zero as "insensitive".

Americans who smoke have constitutional right to smoke wherever and whenever they want. But many businesses ask them not to, or ban them from exercising their right when there are others whose well-being would be injured by having the smokers nearby. Sensitive and sensible, many smokers do not smoke in the presence of small children, without being asked not to.

There's a city in Europe which still is my favorite city. But a certain section of the city I stopped going after the character and ambiance of the place had changed so much after the newly arrived Muslim immigrants exercised their right to live wherever they wanted and did so in such a great number that you wouldn't recognize it was the same place. You'd hardly see a white person, other than tourists accidentally wandering into the area, and you would hardly see a woman either. I remember a very uncomfortable stare I'd get passing through the section. There was a porn movie shop open during the day, right next to the game arcade; streets were strewn with trash.

People who want to build so-called "MacMansions" have every right to build whatever atrocity they want, as long as they follow the local regulations and laws. They almost always do build their "dream homes", thus totally destroying the neighborhood character that the long-term residents have appreciated for a long time. More and more neighborhood communities have a review board of some sort to somehow curb this architectural pollution that harms the well-being of other residents, but usually to little avail.

This particular mosque is no exception. Sure, they may have all the rights under the law to do whatever they want, but the question is, is it sensible thing for them to do, particularly when the supposed purpose of this mosque/center is "a platform for multi-faith dialogue"? Dialogue? It's not happening.

It is sad to see even the libertarians joining the autocratic Dems and GOP in telling the entire country what to think and feel over what should have been a non-issue other than for New Yorkers and 9/11 victim families.

Tweet

Lew Rockwell: Why Not Feel Sorry for BP?

Since just about everybody is piling on and dissing BP over the oil spill, I went looking for a contrarian opinion and found one at Lewrockwell.com. Crowded trade is almost always a wrong trade. Thank you, Lew. Here's his article in its entirety:

Why Not Feel Sorry for BP? (Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., 5/5/2010 Lewrockwell.com)

It was 21 years ago that the Exxon-Valdez leaked oil and unleashed torrents of environmental hysteria. Rothbard got it right in his piece "Why Not Feel Sorry for Exxon?"

After the BP-hired drilling rig exploded last week, the environmentalists went nuts yet again, using the occasion to flail a private corporation and wail about the plight of the "ecosystem," which somehow managed to survive and thrive after the Exxon debacle.

The comparison is complicated by how much worse this event is. Eleven people died. BP market shares have been pummeled. So long as the leak persists, the company loses 5,000–10,000 barrels a day.

BP will be responsible for cleanup costs far exceeding the federal limit of $75 million. The public relations nightmare will last for a decade or more. In the end, the costs could reach $100 billion, perhaps wrecking the company and many other businesses.

It should be obvious that BP is by far the leading victim, but I've yet to see a single expression of sadness for the company and its losses. Indeed, the words of disgust for BP are beyond belief. The DailyKos sums it up: "BP: Go f*** yourselves." Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said that the government intended to keep "its boot on BP’s neck."

How about reality? The incident is a tragedy for BP and all the subcontractors involved. It will probably wreck the company, a company that has long helped provide the fuel that runs everything from our cars to our industries, and keeps alive the very body of modern life. The idea that BP should be hated and denounced is preposterous; there is every reason to express great sadness for what has happened.

It is not as if BP profits by oil leaks, or that anyone reveled in the chance to dump its precious oil all over the ocean. Its own CEO has worked for years to try to prevent precisely this kind of accident, and did so not out of the desire to comply with regulations, but because it is good business practice.

In contrast to the families and others who are weeping, we might ask who is happy about the disaster: the environmentalists, with their fear mongering and hatred of modern life, and the government, which treats every capitalist producer as a bird to be oiled and plucked. The environmentalists are thrilled because they get yet another chance to wail and moan about the plight of their beloved swamps and other supposedly sensitive land. The loss of fish is sad, but it is not as if they will not come back: after the Exxon-Valdez trouble, the fishing was better than ever in just one year.

The main advantage to the environmentalists is their propaganda victory in having yet another chance to rail against the evils of oil producers and ocean drilling. If they have their way, oil prices would be vastly higher, there would never be another refinery built, and all development of the oceans would stop in the name of "protecting" things irrelevant to human life.

The core economic issue concerning such a spill is liability. In a world of private property, if you soil someone else's property, you bear the liability. But what about a world in which government owns vast swaths, and the oceans are considered the commons of everyone? It becomes extremely difficult to assess damages.

There is also a problem with federal limits on liability. The liability for damaging people or property should be 100%. Such a system would match a company's policies to the actual risk of doing damage. Lower limits would inspire companies to be less concerned about damage to others than they should be, in the same way that a company with a bailout guarantee will be more reckless than in a free market.

But such a liability rule presumes ownership, so that owners themselves are in a position to enter into fair bargaining and there can be some objective test. There is no objective test when the oceans are collectively owned, and where the coasts are government owned.

"Every American affected by this spill should know this: your government will do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to stop this crisis," Obama says. Are we really supposed to believe that government is better able to deal with this disaster than private industry? The government and its army of bureaucrats is only a hindrance. And meanwhile, the Obama administration must be thrilled to have an old-fashioned change of subject, so that we don't have to notice every single day that its economic stimulus has been an incredible flop, with unemployment higher today than a year ago, and the depression still persisting.

Why, by the way, when every natural disaster is hailed by the Keynesian media for at least having the stimulative effect of rebuilding, is nothing like this said about the oil spill? At least in this case, losses seem to be recognized as losses.

The abstraction called the "ecosystem" – which never seems to include humans or their civilization – has done far less for us than the oil industry. So let us not forget that the greatest tragedy here is BP’s and its subsidiaries’ and subcontractors’, and the private enterprises affected by the losses that no one intended. If the result is a shutdown of drilling and further regulation of private enterprise, people will lose. And that is what counts.

Copyright © 2010 by LewRockwell.com.

Tweet

Merry Free-Market, Hard-Money, Libertarian Christmas!

and don't trust the government.

There are lessons to be learned from Christmas some two thousand-plus years ago, according to a merry (and heart-warming) piece written by Lew Rockwell eight years ago.

The Economic Lessons of Bethlehem (or Who Was the Inn Keeper?)
(Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., 12/22/01 Lewrockwell.com) [emphasis is mine]

There's no room at the inn so they had to stay in a stable. (Cruel inn keeper!)

Far from being cruel, the inn keeper offered what he could to satisfy a customer. As a money-making private businessman, he would have no reason to turn away "this man of royal lineage and his beautiful, expecting bride."

"In any case, the second chapter of St. Luke doesn’t say that they were continually rejected at place after place. It tells of the charity of a single inn owner, perhaps the first person they encountered, who, after all, was a businessman. His inn was full, but he offered them what he had: the stable. There is no mention that the innkeeper charged the couple even one copper coin, though given his rights as a property owner, he certainly could have.

"It’s remarkable, then, to think that when the Word was made flesh with the birth of Jesus, it was through the intercessory work of a private businessman. Without his assistance, the story would have been very different indeed. People complain about the "commercialization" of Christmas, but clearly commerce was there from the beginning, playing an essential and laudable role."

Why were they in Bethlehem to begin with?

Because of the Roman emperor's decree that everyone be counted and taxed.

"It was because of a government decree that Mary and Joseph, and so many others like them, were traveling in the first place. They had to be uprooted for fear of the emperor’s census workers and tax collectors. And consider the costs of slogging all the way "from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David," not to speak of the opportunity costs Joseph endured having to leave his own business. Thus we have another lesson: government’s use of coercive dictates distort the market."

What did Three Kings (or Three Wise Men, and Lew points out they are usually mutually exclusive) give?

Did they give the new parents some debased Roman coins? No. They gave them frankincense, gold, and myrrh. They give them hard assets of high value.

"These were the most rare items obtainable in that world in those times, and they must have commanded a very high market price.

"Far from rejecting them as extravagant, the Holy Family accepted them as gifts worthy of the Divine Messiah. Neither is there a record that suggests that the Holy Family paid any capital gains tax on them, though such gifts vastly increased their net wealth. Hence, another lesson: there is nothing immoral about wealth; wealth is something to be valued, owned privately, given and exchanged."

Herod wanted to know where Jesus was so that he could come and adore him.

Was that true? Not really. He wanted to kill him.

"...Roman Emperor's local enforcer, Herod. Not only did he order people to leave their homes and foot the bill for travel so that they could be taxed. Herod was also a liar: he told the Wise Men that he wanted to find Jesus so that he could "come and adore Him." In fact, Herod wanted to kill Him. Hence, another lesson: you can’t trust a political hack to tell the truth."

When they learned of Herod's plan to kill the newborn, what did Wise Men and the Holy Family do?

Were they resigned to the reality that the government did whatever it wanted anyway and there was no point in resisting? Hell no. Three Wise Men went home without telling Herod, and the Family fled.

"The Wise Men, being wise, snubbed Herod and "went back another way" – taking their lives in their hands (Herod conducted a furious search for them later). As for Mary and Joseph, an angel advised Joseph to "take the child and his mother, and fly into Egypt." In short, they resisted. Lesson number four: the angels are on the side of those who resist government."

"In the Gospel narratives, the role of private enterprise, and the evil of government power, only begin there. Jesus used commercial examples in his parables (e.g., laborers in the vineyard, the parable of the talents) and made it clear that he had come to save even such reviled sinners as tax collectors.

"And just as His birth was facilitated by the owner of an "inn," the same Greek word "kataluma" is employed to describe the location of the Last Supper before Jesus was crucified by the government. Thus, private enterprise was there from birth, through life, and to death, providing a refuge of safety and productivity, just as it has in ours."

Amen.

Tweet

Lew Rockwell: 30-Day Total Makerover Plan for the U.S.

Lew Rockwell has a plan (actually two plans) for transitioning into a true free market, which I stumbled upon late last night, and it is strangely exhilarating. The plans were written and published almost 18 years ago, but as you can clearly see, they are even more relevant today.

(It could happen if "Dr. No" should become the president...)

Rockwell's Thirty-Day Plan (Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., originally appeared in March 1991, The Free Market newsletter of Ludwig von Mises Institute)

When Eastern Europe broke free in 1989, we all realized just how little thought had been given to the transition from socialism to capitalism. Mises had told us the collapse was coming, and we should have been prepared.

As America comes to resemble a command economy, we need a transition plan here too. Yuri Maltsev proposed a "One-Year Plan" for the U.S.S.R. We're not in that bad a shape (yet), so we could do it in 30 days.

DAY ONE: The federal income tax is abolished and April 15th is declared a national holiday. The 40% reduction in federal revenues is matched by a 40% cut in spending. The budget is still almost twice as big as Jimmy Carter's.

DAY TWO: All other federal taxes are abolished, including the corporate income tax, the capital gains tax, the gasoline tax, "sin" taxes, excise taxes, etc. Businesses boom, and the few legitimate federal functions are funded with an inexpensive head tax. People who choose not to vote need not pay it. (Note: this was a mainstream view in the 19th century.)

DAY THREE: The federal government sells all its land, freeing up tens of millions of acres for development, mining, farming, forestry, oil drilling, private parks, etc. The government uses the revenue to pay off the national debt and other liabilities.

DAY FOUR: The minimum wage is reduced to zero, creating jobs for ex-federal bureaucrats at their market wage. All pro-union laws and regulations are scrapped. The jobless rate falls dramatically.

DAY FIVE: The Bureau of Labor Statistics, like the rest of the Labor Department, is sent to that big hiring hall in the sky. Without detailed economic statistics, future economic planners will be blind and deaf.

DAY SIX: The Department of Commerce is abolished. Big business has to make its own way in the world, without subsidies and privileges at the expense of its competitors and customers.

DAY SEVEN: The plug is pulled on the Department of Energy. Oil and gas prices plummet.

DAY EIGHT: All regulatory agencies, from the Interstate Commerce Commission to the Federal Trade Commission, are deep-sixed. Competition is legalized.

DAY NINE: HUD is squashed like a bug. There's a building boom in cheap, private, apartments.

DAY TEN: The interstate highways reopen as private businesses. Road entrepreneurs price travel according to consumer demand. Using modern technology, drivers get bills once a month. Credit risks – and drunks and dangerous drivers – aren't allowed on the road. Non-drivers no longer subsidize car owners.

DAY ELEVEN: Government welfare is wiped out. Bums work or starve. The deserving poor find a cornucopia of private services designed to make them independent. Private charity explodes, as the American people, already the most generous in the world, find their incomes almost doubled, thanks to the tax cuts.

DAY TWELVE: The Federal Reserve closes its open-market operations and stops protecting the banking industry from competition. But banks can now engage in all the non-bank financial activities previously forbidden to them. The business cycle, which is caused by monetary expansion through the credit markets, is liquidated.

DAY THIRTEEN: Federal deposit insurance is scrapped. All insured deposits are redeemed from federal assets, which include the personal assets of high-level government employees. The threat of bank runs forces banks to keep 100% reserves for their demand deposits, and prudent reserves on all other accounts. There are no more inherently bankrupt banks propped up by the government, at taxpayer expense, and no more bail-outs.

DAY FOURTEEN: The shaky fiat dollar is defined in terms of gold, with the ratio determined by dividing the government's gold stock by all existing dollars on that day.

DAY FIFTEEN: The federal government sells National and Dulles airports to the highest bidder, and stops all subsidies to other socialist airports around the country. All constraints on airline prices and service cease. It costs more to fly during peak hours than off-peak, but overall, air travel drops in price.

DAY SIXTEEN: All government regulations that create and sustain cartels are abolished, including those for the post office, telephones, television, radio, and cable TV. Prices plummet, and a host of new and unforeseen services becomes available.

DAY SEVENTEEN: Centrally planned agriculture, as imposed by Hoover and Roosevelt, is repealed: there are no more subsidies, payments-in-kind, marketing orders, low-interest loans, etc. Farm prices drop. Entrepreneurial farmers get rich. Welfare farmers go into another line of work. The poor eat like kings.

DAY EIGHTEEN: The Justice Department shutters its anti-trust division. Companies, big and small, are free to merge – up, down, or sideways. Stockholders can buy any other company, or sell their stock to anyone else. Marginal producers can no longer battle their competitors with bureaucratic weapons.

DAY NINETEEN: The Department of Education flunks the constitutionality test, and is kicked out. Private charities set up remedial reading and writing programs for the former bureaucrats. Federally subsidized sex education and other anti-family programs go out of business. Local school districts become responsive to parents or close, pressured by a fast-growing private school sector (which many more parents can now afford).

DAY TWENTY: All federal monuments are sold, in some cases to non-profit groups based on the Mt. Vernon Ladies Association, which owns and runs George Washington's home. The VFW buys the Vietnam memorial. There is much bidding for the Jefferson and Washington monuments. Nobody wants FDR's, so it's torn down and the land sold to a farmer. (With the federal government cut back to its constitutional size, much of Washington reverts to productive uses like agriculture, as in late 18th century.)

DAY TWENTY-ONE: The computerized financial and political dossier maintained by the government on every American is erased. The public wanders through the federal offices to make sure, in a reprise of the East Berliners' visits to Stasi headquarters.

DAY TWENTY-TWO: Equal rights are granted to all Americans, even members of non-victim groups. There is no affirmative action, no quotas, no set-asides, no public accommodations laws. Private property and freedom of association are fully restored.

DAY TWENTY-THREE: The EPA is cleaned out, with all "clean air" and similar big-government laws repealed. Ten thousand lawyers leap from their balconies. Private property is established in air and water. Americans harmed by pollution are free to sue the polluters, who are no longer protected by the federal government.

DAY TWENTY-FOUR: Americans are given complete freedom of contract, restoring rationality to malpractice and product liability law.

DAY TWENTY-FIVE: Government scrambles for more assets to sell (i.e., the National Zoo, also known as Washington, D.C.) to pay off the liabilities of the privatized Social Security system.

DAY TWENTY-SIX: Porno artists have to earn their own livings, as the National Endowment for the Arts tries to raise its budget through sidewalk painting sales.

DAY TWENTY-SEVEN: Foreign aid is outlawed as unconstitutional, unjust, and un-economic. Foreign politicians have to steal their own money. The World Bank, IMF, and United Nations close their super-luxurious doors.

DAY TWENTY-EIGHT: The American people are given the unrestricted right to keep and bear arms.

DAY TWENTY-NINE: The Defense Department is reoriented towards defense. American troops come home from all around the world. We adopt a policy of armed neutrality, remembering the Founding Fathers' teaching that we could not have an empire abroad and a constitutional republic at home.

DAY THIRTY: All tariffs, quotas, and trade agreements are put through the shredder. Americans can trade with anyone in the world, without barriers or subsidies. Japanese car prices drop an immediate 25%.

In just 30 exhilarating days, we have established the outlines of free market. Radical? Maybe so. Me, I can't wait until Month Two.

----------------------------------------------------------
If you like what you see, he has the plan for Month Two:

Rockwell's Next Thirty Days

Tweet

Obama and His Media on the Economy

Obama and the Economy [emphasis is mine]
(Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., 8/6/09 Lewrockwell.com)

Travel with me back to yesterday, the early days of the Reagan administration, when taxes were being cut and spending increases were being curbed (the actual cuts were few), and when journalists were losing their heads about the supposedly catastrophic state of the economy.

The prevailing ethos in those days in the White House was somewhat sensible. The idea was that the recession had to be permitted to run its course. The late 1970s inflation coupled with recession had wrought dollar depreciation plus high unemployment and high interest rates. These were part of the adjustment process. No one doubted it.

Now, there was a time, only a few years earlier, when the Keynesian orthodoxy claimed the power to control the economy the way we control our cars. One could adjust the inflation up to drive unemployment down, and adjust the inflation down and pay the price in higher unemployment. It was a trade off, and the wise economists would decide what was socially optimal.

One can only marvel at the naïveté, but it all came crashing down with the advent of the simultaneous appearance of both inflation and unemployment, and Keynesian confidence was shaken to its core. The better members of the Reagan team were more realistic. They believed that the goal of government policy was to create the conditions for economic growth, and if that meant letting bad policies wash themselves away during the transition, so be it.

The journalistic establishment at the time hated them and their free-enterprise ideas. So, of course, all bad news was treated as not only worse than it really was, it was also blamed on the Reagan administration, as if it had the control over events that Keynesians imputed to government. So, if times were bad, who were to blame but the people in control?

Every day the headlines blasted away, as if the media establishment were trying to whip the public up into a hysterical frenzy against tax cuts. People were encouraged to blame That Man in the White House for all existing evil, and the nightly newscasts were filled with furrow-browed anchors doing stories on the poor suffering masses and their desperate plight. Their political agenda was aggressively on display, brazen beyond belief.

And then something amazing happened. The economy began to recover. Unemployment fell, inflation crashed, interest rates came down, and growth returned. The criticism later changed: the Reagan administration was accused of being too pro-growth and unleashing greed and "cowboy capitalism." But it fell on deaf ears, and Reagan won a landslide reelection in 1984.

Now, I'm not saying that Reagan was laissez-faire or that the economic recovery didn't owe something to a newly fashioned form of military Keynesianism. Rather, my focus here is on the spin: the press hated him, and exaggerated the failings of the economic structure in order to destroy policies it hated.

The contrast with the Obama administration can't be more stark. No one in these ranks said that malinvestments have to be washed out of the system and bankruptcies and unemployment must be tolerated for a time in order to get back on a growth. Nay, nay, they pulled out the old bag of tricks and claim that they only needed to loot the public of hundreds of billions and spend it on building up government, and then, wow, like magic, the entire economy would come back to life.

But it hasn't. The stock markets survive, but that's no indication. Stock markets are never better performing than during a hyperinflation. Interest rates are rock bottom, but only through artificial means. Gross Private Domestic Investment is still falling off a cliff, having already completely erased ten years of investment from the record of history. Here is a fundamental factor that suggests that terrible things are still to come our way. And I guess I'll have to put this in italics because the point seems to be lost in the shuffle: unemployment is still rising, even soaring straight to double digits!

The sociology of this intrigues me to no end. Unemployment is one of the human elements that journalists are supposed to glom onto. Oh, look at poor Bob and Jane and how they lost their jobs and have nowhere to go, etc., etc. Talk about human interest! Where are the weepy stories about the plight of people wandering around with no work? Instead, we get happy clappy stories about how things are not nearly as bad as they might be had the great and powerful Obama of Oz not appeared to save the day. There is also the remarkable spin that things are getting worse, yes, but at a slower pace than before – an observation that might be most commonly heard in Hell.

Obama himself has other lines.

"In the last few months, the economy has done measurably better than expected."

Well, that depends on your expectations, doesn't it? It is irrefutable. But the press is glad to be the echo chamber. "Figures released last week showed that the economy contracted more slowly in the second quarter than many economists had expected."

And then there are the benchmarks, and that might be the scariest part of all. The Obama administration is convinced that we can have no real and lasting recovery until homes go up in price. A top adviser said: "until we see a robust recovery in housing markets, housing prices, in jobs and family income, we’re not anywhere near out of the woods."

This is precisely the same inanity that afflicted the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations. They saw falling prices as the problem to be remedied rather than the saving grace of an otherwise abysmal economic environment. So they kept trying to stamp out good things thinking that they were bad things, effectively burning the crops instead of killing the rats that were poisoning the wheat following harvest.

We can fully expect the mainline press not to understand economics. I can deal with that. But not even to draw attention to the awful reality of the current economic situation, simply because many members of the mainstream press are sympathetic to the idea that the government should be stealing ever more money from us for the state? Here is where ideology leads to blindness, which leads to the worst form of propaganda.

I suspect that they will no more get away with this now than they did in the 1980s.

Tweet

Peter Schiff on Our Economic Future

Podcast on The Lew Rockwell Show. It's about 10 minutes long. Following is my quick summary.

About the current stock market rally:
It's not a new bull market. We've been in an on-going bear market since 2000. During the bear market we do have sharp rallies creating opportunities to make money [going long]. But corporate earnings will continue to go down, as interest rate will eventually go up which will bring the present value down. It is like the 70's, only worse.

Effect of increase in money supply:
Prices would have fallen much further, but the government prevented the downward adjustment. It is more likely a wishful thinking on Bernanke's part that he can absorb liquidity later, even though he is a smart guy.

World market:
US is more dependent on consumer spending, borrowing, and asset price than any other large, developed economy in the world. EU and Japan are still creditor nations [with the exception of Great Britain], so they have more fear of inflation and they want to be responsible.

Gold:
Gold will go up. How high depends on US$ devaluation. US$ is the same as Zimbabwe $; neither has any intrinsic value.

Austrian economics:
Macro-economics Schiff was made to learn at Berkeley is Keynesian nonsense, a brainwash that teach people how free market does not work and how government can fix things.

If the government invites Schiff to Washington D.C., what would he tell them?:
There is no easy, quick fix. What can government do? - Answer, "Nothing". We got into this mess by borrowing and spending. And we can't get out by borrowing and spending more. We have to spend less, save more, produce more, export more, and allow the market to work. The problem is the government wants to do "something" because elections are coming all the time..

Tweet