In a recent article at the Huffington Post, Lynn Parramore assembled a team of economists to refute nine “myths” about the deficit. On the one hand, it was refreshing to see these economists discuss with such candor the fact that our financial system is backed up by nothing but green pieces of paper. On the other hand, it was shocking to see these economists laud the fact.

Believe it or not, the theme of the article is that all the handwringing over the federal budget deficit is misplaced, because Uncle Sam can print all the money he needs.

. . . .

HuffPo Myth #1: The Federal Government Should Balance Its Books
HuffPo Myth #2: Social Security Is in Crisis
HuffPo Myth #3: Government Deficits Burden Our Children
HuffPo Myth #6: Government Deficits Deplete Savings
(Read more from mises.org)

Can’t decide if this is funny or sad or deliberate propaganda.

By every measure, the U N ‘s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change raises the level of alarm. The fact of global warming is “unequivocal.” The certainty of the human role is now somewhere over 90 percent. Which is about as certain as scientists ever get.

I would like to say we’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future. (Read more from boston.com)

See also:
Ron Paul: No More Blank Checks for the Military-Industrial Complex!

The top American commander in the Middle East has ordered a broad expansion of clandestine military activity in an effort to disrupt militant groups or counter threats in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and other countries in the region, according to defense officials and military documents. (Read more from nytimes.com)

I became aware of this story when I listened to this Tom Woods interview:

(he mentions it @ 2:50)

At the Bakersfield airport in California, TSA authorities recently shut down the entire airport after finding what they thought was a container of liquid explosives.

Luggage screeners discovered five Gatorade bottles full of an “amber” liquid. TSA agents then opened the bottles and complained they smelled “a strong chemical odor.” They then complained of nausea and were taken to the local hospital for treatment.

According to Reuters, “Kern County Sheriffs deputies, fire crews, FBI agents and members of a joint terrorism task force responded to the scene and spent the day questioning Ramirez before further tests showed that the liquid was honey.”

In other words, Ramirez was interrogated by the FBI for hours while being presumed to be a terrorist. . . .

And then they engage in all sorts of theater by acting like they’re experiencing nausea so that they can be carted off to the hospital and take the rest of the work day off. . . .

What the TSA hasn’t yet acknowledged is that their chemical detection tests are complete quackery.

As we’ve reported before, a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap will test positive for illegal narcotics. A bar of home-made chocolate got Ron and Nadine from Living Libations arrested (and their child stolen from them by authorities) and accused of trafficking illegal drugs (http://www.naturalnews.com/024304.html).

Honey now apparently tests positive for explosives. Is there any food or liquid substance that truly safe from being declared a bomb by incompetent TSA employees? (Read more from naturalnews.com)

In the framework of proximity peace talks now being mediated by the United States’ special Middle East envoy George Mitchell, Palestinian negotiators have reportedly offered to match and even double the amount of West Bank land that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas offered to former prime minister Ehud Olmert during their one-on-one talks in 2008.

During those talks, Abbas offered Olmert to exchange 1.9% of West Bank land for an equal amount of Israeli territory. Olmert countered with a much higher demand of his own, which the current reported offer would still not come close to matching.

Palestinian officials told The Wall Street Journal that the unexpected proposal was being made due to their assumption that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not serious about reaching a final-status deal within the indirect negotiations. (Read more from haaretz.com)

​​Washington drug agents have illegally seized signed petitions for marijuana legalization, according to organizers of ballot initiative I-1068.

Marijuana advocacy group Sensible Washington says it has learned that a dozen signed copies of the marijuana legalization initiative for Washington State of which it is the sponsor, were seized last week by the federally-funded WestNET drug task force.

Advocates say that the drug agents who seized the petitions are interfering with a constitutionally-protected legislative procedure. (Read more from tokeofthetown.com)

A friend recently posted on my Facebook wall Robert Locke’s misguided criticism of Libertarianism in The American Conservative magazine:

Libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society.

My rebuttal:

The difference between libertarianism and statism is the difference between peace and war. As Ludwig Von Mises wrote “A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.”

Let me now back up this statement by picking apart Robert Locke’s:

libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function

Selfishness does not go away when you replace economic power with political power. Bureaucrats are just as selfish as entrepreneurs. The important difference is that to the extent which we have a free market, people must act on their selfishness by providing goods an services which society VOLUNTARILY consumes. We are all slaves to the consumer. No such pressure exists on bureaucrats. To whatever extent economic activity is run by the state, people act upon their selfishness by bending the coercive hand of government to force people to buy their product, get direct subsidies, outlaw competition, etc.

Secondly, Locke seem to find a contradiction between altruism and libertarianism. You do not need to hold a gun to my head (taxes are collected under threat of violence), and filter my money through a den of theives for me to be altruistic. Were we allowed to keep more of our money, society would be MORE, not less, altruistic.

Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation.

False. The empirical evidence is overwhelming. The correlation between economic freedom and economic prosperity should have long ago put to rest all these collectivist ideas that keep rising from the grave. We have yet to see a society which is too free.

My favorite examples are the ones in which similar cultures adopted different economic policies: Estonia vs. Latvia & Lithuania, West Germany vs. East Germany, Hong Kong in the 80s vs. the rest of China in the 80s, Botswana vs. the rest of Africa. I also hesitate to mention Chile vs. the rest of S. America, because their relatively free economy was put into place by a murderous dictator and often deemed guilty by association.

You can also look at all former Soviet states and see an almost exact correlation between economic freedom and economic prosperity.

Secondly, I disagree completely with Locke’s criticism of priori theory. You need theory. Without theory, economics is just endless data that tells you nothing. The world is too big to isolate experiments the way a physicist does.

An example often cited by Murray Rothbard are prices in the 1920s. Without theory all you see are stable prices. Just data attributable to almost anything. Theory tells you that the incorporation of the electric grid into production increased efficiency which should have lowered prices, but at the same time, massively inflationary monetary policies put upward pressure on the dollar, weakening its purchasing power. Hence, prices were stable.

@5:30 – Federal Reserve is really, really scared about the audit movement.
@8:30 – Government involvement in drug trade.

Aiyana Jones, the 7-year-old girl shot to death early Sunday (May 17) during a SWAT raid on her Detroit home, was almost certainly a victim of the “COPS Effect.”

Troops from the Detroit Police Department’s Special Reaction Team (“troops” is a more appropriate description than “officers”) seeking a murder suspect executed a no-knock warrant on the home where Aiyana was sleeping on the couch.

Despite warnings from neighbors that there were children present in the home – a fact attested by the toys scattered in the front yard – the SRT paramilitaries chose a Fallujah-style “dynamic entry,” hurling a flash-bang grenade through a closed window and storming through the front door with guns drawn.

The incendiary grenade landed on the couch where Aiyana was sleeping. Her father claims that the child suffered burns as a result. Seconds later, she was dead.

One of the SRT troopers engaged in what was called a “tussle” with Mertilla Jones, Aiyana’s grandmother. In the antiseptic and completely dishonest language favored by the state-aligned media, the officer’s gun “went off.” (Read more from lewrockwell.com)

Here is evidence of our fetish for brute government force

Philip Weiss of mondoweiss.net published two powerful pictures here, comparing racism in the old American South to racism in Israel.

EK: You think the danger posed by the long-term deficit is overstated by most economists and economic commentators.

JG: No, I think the danger is zero. It’s not overstated. It’s completely misstated.

EK: Why?

JG: What is the nature of the danger? The only possible answer is that this larger deficit would cause a rise in the interest rate. Well, if the markets thought that was a serious risk, the rate on 20-year treasury bonds wouldn’t be 4 percent and change now. If the markets thought that the interest rate would be forced up by funding difficulties 10 year from now, it would show up in the 20-year rate. That rate has actually been coming down in the wake of the European crisis. (Read more from voices.washingtonpost.com)

Here, he goes toe to toe with Peter Schiff:

Ludwig Von Mises wrote about several categories of professional economists in Human Action:
“The development of a profession of economists is an offshoot of interventionism. The professional economist is the specialist who is instrumental in designing various measures of government interference with business. He is an expert in the filed of economic legislation.”

and

“Tax-supported universities are under the sway of the party in power. The authorities try to appoint only professors who are ready to advance ideas of which they themselves approve.”

In a New York Times opinion piece last Friday, Nobel Prize economist, Paul Krugman took a shot at libertarianism and free markets.

He points to an interview with the late Milton Friedman where he said that product safety regulation is not truly necessary because of the fear of law suits that could put companies found negligent out of business.

I agree with Friedman that the answer for issues like product liability and the oil spill is the courts.

Let me go on.

Krugman then goes on to point out the bill blocked by Sen. Lisa Murkowski that would have raised the maximum liability for oil companies after a spill from a paltry $75 million to $10 billion.

Mr. Krugman, what exactly does that have to do with libertarianism? So you are saying that liability caps like the example you used, which is very un-libertarian, as an example of the failures of libertarianism? (Read more from deskofbrian.com)