"Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim - when he defends himself - as a criminal." ~ Frederic Bastiat
So long as anti-government sentiment remained the over-riding tea party narrative, it remained healthy, and so long as the trivial remained such, it was tolerable, becoming not much more than irrelevant fodder for the left. So what in God’s name, quite literally, was the purpose of the Promise-Keepers-like even Beck held last weekend?
As I’ve mentioned before (here, http://www.lostrepublic.us/archives/2597), Glenn Beck is a saboteur raised by the establishment to derail the liberty movement.
This goes to show you what sort of boot-licking, power hungry cowards rise to positions of prominence in American academia. No surprise he was recently named deputy chair of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.
I almost choked when I read Lee Bollinger’s op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal advocating public financial support of the mainstream media. This is the Lee Bollinger who is the president of Columbia University and was recently named deputy chair of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The article says more about the writer and the mainstream media than it does its subject matter. It is unbelievable and irresponsible that anyone in his position should seriously advocate subsidies for the press.
What Bollinger is saying is that he wants us to pay for news from journalists he thinks we should read, not what we think we should read. As a law professor he is an expert in first-amendment issues. If he is an expert then he is the exemplar of the problem with scholarship and intellectualism in America today. He obviously distrusts our ability to make choices about the news we wish to read; he is eager to supplant our judgment with his. If he believes that forcing us to pay for news services we don’t want is the key to constitutional freedoms and freedom of the press, then we are in trouble because he is in a position to do something about it.
He frames the debate in these terms:
We have entered a momentous period in the history of the American press. The invention of new communications technologies — especially the Internet — is transforming the human capacity to speak, perhaps as monumentally as the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. This is facilitating the largest and fastest expansion of global economic growth in human history. Free speech and a free press are essential to a dynamic economy.
At the same time, however, the financial viability of the U.S. press has been shaken to its core. The proliferation of communications outlets has fractured the base of advertising and readers. Newsrooms have shrunk dramatically and foreign bureaus have been decimated. My best estimate is that there are presently only a few dozen full-time foreign correspondents from the U.S. covering all of China, despite the critical importance of that nation to our future.
Let me translate what he is saying — competition thrives because of new media, yet because newspapers and television journalism have failed to innovate and keep up we must subsidize them, because their reporting is (was) better. He cites NPR, PBS, and BBC as the ideals of journalism. The common theme is that these services are all supported by government. Further, he suggests, we need, as an instrument of foreign policy, to compete with China’s CCTV and Xinhua News, and Qatar’s Al Jazeera. If the BBC is the standard, then I urge you to actually listen to it as it drones on about what is happening in the UN or Mali today.
Bollinger believes that press freedoms and government support are compatible, not antithetical. If anything in history is obvious, it is the fragility of freedom of the press. Of course, this is something Jefferson and Madison fully understood when they thought they nailed down press freedom forever. (Read more from mises.org)
* Bond Fund manager and Freddie/Fannie-guaranteed mortgage holder Bill Gross advocated the Freddie/Fannie bailout. He has recently suggested government should 100% nationalize Freddie and Fannie, and allow everybody to refinance at a lower rate.
* Bill Gross argued this would stimulate consumer spending and thereby the economy. Of course, what our economy needs is more savings, not spending.
* Real Estate prices are still too high and should never have been propped up. They need to come down. Artificially high prices for homes deprive more productive endeavors of resources.
* Do not buy Government Motors IPO. Some profit might be made by those with good timing, but they will go bankrupt again. The bailout prevent the restructuring they needed. They company is not run to produce good cars at a profit. It is run to serve labor.
* Dollar strengthens despite bad news based on weakness in stocks. Old habits (like buying dollars on bad news) die hard.
* Congressional Budget Office increases deficit estimate, but the estimate remains complete bullshit. Nothing to do with reality.
* Big Media (Robert Reich) continues to sing the praises of debt, and demonize saving.
* Peter’s predictions about Freddie and Fannie come true.
* Refinancing homes at (artificially suppressed) lower rates is creating a ticking time bomb for banks who will be holding 30-year paper. Once the paper becomes worthless there will be rampant bank failures.
* NY Times publishes BS article about why we won’t have a recession. Sheer propaganda. The implicit argument is that a zero Fed rate will avoid a recession. This is nonsense.
* Bonds remain overpriced, as Americans who attempt to save decide to lend money to the government. Inflation will punish bond-buyers.
* A better scheme for unemployment benefits would be an initial lump sum. This would avoid the disincentive to work. Of course, we’d all be better off if people decided for themselves whether or not to buy unemployment benefits, creating a market for various flavors of unemployment insurance.
* Peter has bet against the advice he gives. If the government actually followed his advice, it would undermine his investments.
* The sooner the crash happens, the better, because the longer the malinvestment persists, the more effort it will take for the economy to restructure.
“Is the controversy over building a mosque near ground zero a grand distraction or a grand opportunity? Or is it, once again, grandiose demagoguery?
“It has been said, “Nero fiddled while Rome burned.” Are we not overly preoccupied with this controversy, now being used in various ways by grandstanding politicians? It looks to me like the politicians are “fiddling while the economy burns.”
“The debate should have provided the conservative defenders of property rights with a perfect example of how the right to own property also protects the 1st Amendment rights of assembly and religion by supporting the building of the mosque.
“Instead, we hear lip service given to the property rights position while demanding that the need to be “sensitive” requires an all-out assault on the building of a mosque, several blocks from “ground zero.”
“Just think of what might (not) have happened if the whole issue had been ignored and the national debate stuck with war, peace, and prosperity. There certainly would have been a lot less emotionalism on both sides. The fact that so much attention has been given the mosque debate, raises the question of just why and driven by whom?
“In my opinion it has come from the neo-conservatives who demand continual war in the Middle East and Central Asia and are compelled to constantly justify it. (Read more from caffeinatedthoughts.com)
The cover of the new issue of Time — with its photograph of a young woman whose nose and ears were cut off by the Taliban, accompanied by headline “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan” — is disgraceful on several levels. (The image is here, and no, it’s not pretty; the cover story is here.)
Atrios (here and here) and Greg Mitchell (here) have made the obvious point: um, this happened while we were in Afghanistan. So the proof of how necessary it is for us to protect young women from brutal attacks of this kind is the fact that we couldn’t protect this young woman?
And does anyone at Time know the story of Zahida Parveen? She suffered a similar attack, yet even more brutal: her husband, believing she was having an affair, not only cut off her nose and earlobes but blinded her and beat her while hanging her upside down. Oh, but that took place in Pakistan in 1998. Following Time’s logic, I suppose the U.S. should have invaded and occupied Pakistan to prevent this from happening. (Read more from blogs.alternet.org)
This is so fucking dishonest, and an example of why I find it hard to not hate the mainstream media. They would just as quickly sensationalize the Huge rise in birth defects in Falluja if they could blame it on terrorists.
In his review of Crisis Economics by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm, Mr. David M. Smick calls Mr. Roubini a “media superstar” for his 2006 claim that the U.S. was in a housing bubble. If one goes to Mises.com and searches on “housing bubble”, one will find over 1,200 entries, many of which go back to 2003. Austrian economists have been right about this crisis from the beginning, because they understand the true nature of the business cycle, so ably explained by Professor Gary Wolfram elsewhere in the same NR issue. (See “Your Money Back”)
According to Mr. Smick’s review, Mr. Roubini claims that “Crises–unsustainable booms…are hard-wired into the capitalist genome.” Wrong. The boom/bust business cycle is caused by an extension of bank credit not backed by real savings. Banks are tempted to extend credit in an unsustainable manner due to their right to engage in fractional reserve banking. This is the primary source of the boom.
This is a great talk by hedge fund manager Kevin Duffy about Austrian Economics and Investing. It included some great quotes which demonstrate interventionists in big business, government, media and academia being wrong about the economy, corrupting history, vilifying free markets. I transcribed some of them below.
“At the rate things are going, we are all going to end up working for the Japanese.” -Lester Thurow, MIT, economist, 1989
“The United States is rapidly become a colony of Japan.” -Congresswoman Helen Bentley (R-MD), 1990
“The Cold War is over, and Japan won.” -Senator Paul Tsongas (D-MA), 1992
Austrians were able to see the bubble.
As it pertains to the investor: “Entrepreneurial judgement cannot be bought on the market. The entrepreneurial idea that carries on and brings profit is precisely the idea which did not occur to the majority. It is not correct foresight as such that yields profits, but foresight better than that of the rest. The prize goes only to the dissenters, who do not let themselves be misled by the errors accepted by the multitude.” -Ludwig von Mises
Discussing the investing challenge resulting from that fact that Austrian Economics tells you what will happen but not when. (It is in fact impossible to time markets, as Mises discusses in chapter 38 of human action.)
Vilifying free markets:
“This was about the invisible hand having a party, a non-regulated drinking party, with rating agencies handing out the fake IDs!” -Paul McCully, PIMCO, on the financial meltdown
“This laissez faire really has killed us.” -Jim Cramer, interviewing Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), Jan 21, 2010
“No one likes to put the taxpayer into situations like this . . . Government intervention is not something I came down here wanting to espouse, but it sure is better than the alternative.” -Hentry Paulson, Treasury Secretary, on the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Sept 8, 2008
“Depression scholars – including Bernanke – tend to see the Hoover administration’s approach of balancing budgets and tightening belts during the downturn as a tragic mistake.” -Time 2009 Person of the Year article, Dec 28 2009
“Those who contended that during the period of my administration our economic system was one of laissez faire have little knowledge of the extent of government regulation.” -Herbert Hoover
“Nobody saw this coming” -Angelo Mozilo, CEO, Contrywide Financial, July 24 2007
When markets crash, instead of blaming interventionists and inflationists, there begins a witch hunt against private investors who saw it coming, often short sellers.
“It’s very natural for us all to overreact in times of stress, but I’m not a fan of unmitigated shorting. We have nearly $2 trillion in hedge funds that simply don’t have any reporting responsibilities.” -Charles Schwab, BusinessWeek, July 16, 2008
“I’m for markets. But when it felt like it had gotten abusive, when it was free money to short-sellers who were piling on, it felt less like the market and more like it was being manipulated, I corssed over.” -Lloyd Blankfein, CEO, Goldman Sachs, January 2010
Applauding regulation after Enron:
“Conviction on all 49 counts makes this unlikely in the future. This is good: it restores confidence… We were in the biggest bubble in history… I don’t think that’s going to happen for a long time… There were lessons I think that were learned.” -Jeremy Seigel, as appeared on CNBC, May 26, 2006
“Now we have a greater appreciate of the role of watchdogs. Sarbanes-Oxley was a good idea, is a good idea. Leave it alone. We need it to prevent the enrons of the future.” -Anthony M. Sabino, law professor, St. John’s University, Washington Post, May 26, 2006
Business Week Cover: It’s a low, low, low, low-rate world.
Time Cover: The New Sheriffs of Wall Street (Three women, because the problems were caused by too much testosterone, as opposed to intervention, subsidizing irresponsibility, artificially low interest)
Newsweek Cover: America’s Back! The remarkable tale of our economic turnaround (Celebrating the stimulus)
Business Week Cover: Obamanomics is working better than you think. Who Says? Wall Street. (Picture of Obama-look-alike shooting a giant nickle like a basketball)
“One trillion dollars is a big number. This is enough to buy all of Greece’s debt twice, with enough left over to buy all of Portugal’s debt. It was meant to remove any potential for contagion. Problem solved.” -Alan Skrainka, Chief Market Strategist, Edward Jones, Barron’s, May 15 2010
At the end of his talk, Kevin Duffy showed this cartoon. I’m not certain whether he was the creator:
Americans avoided television in historic levels over the past week.
CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox together had the smallest number of prime-time viewers last week in two decades of record-keeping, the Nielsen Co. said. Given the dominance of the big broadcasters before then, you’d probably have to go back to the early days of television to find such a collective shrug. (Read more from washingtontimes.com)
In a previous conversation, Graham told me: “The problem with the Tea Party, I think it’s just unsustainable because they can never come up with a coherent vision for governing the country. It will die out.” (Read more from nytimes.com)
My coherent vision for governing the country: let people keep more of their own money and solve more of their own problems.
As always, Southern Avenger’s analysis is excellent:
Harvard Study: From 1930s-2004,
NY Times called waterboarding torture in 81.5% of articles,
LA Times in 96.3%.
Yet from 2002‐2008,
NYT did so in only 1.4%
and LA Times in 4.8%.
The WSJ? 1.6% (1 of 63 articles)
and USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.
So long as anti-government sentiment remained the over-riding tea party narrative, it remained healthy, and so long as the trivial remained such, it was tolerable, becoming not much more than irrelevant fodder for the left. So what in God’s name, quite literally, was the purpose of the Promise-Keepers-like even Beck held last weekend?
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