Re: The New York Times’ With First Share Offering, Tesla Bets on Electric Car’s Future

Patrick Barron wrote:

Dear Sirs:
Your article about the upcoming Tesla Motors IPO illustrates beautifully how our government gambles with the peoples’ money. The government has “loaned” Tesla $465 million. I put the word “loan” in parentheses, because this is not a real loan. Undoubtedly the rate is below market, but there is no way of knowing, because there is no loan market for Tesla Motors. No bank board of directors would ever approve such a loan of its depositors’ money. The article speaks for itself–Tesla has lost $290.2 million since it was founded in 2003. It has produced a grand total of one thousand cars, priced at over $100,000 a piece. Its current car has minimal range and few places where it can be recharged. By the time Tesla rolls out its next model, the big players such as Nissan will be offering all-electric cars at a fraction of Tesla’s price. But how can there be a significant market for an all-electric car when nowhere can one find out its electricity cost per mile? And where will America get the power? The government, via the EPA, is making it almost impossible for America’s utility companies to add electricity production. In fact, some current coal-fired power plants are threatened with closure. Nevertheless, the government is pushing this technology and trying to lure buyers by granting tax credits to purchasers of all-electric cars. But, there’s a sucker born every minute. So, if you loved the DeLorean, you’ll probably buy a Tesla.

@ 1:00 this video suggests that the police car lit on fire at Toronto’s G 20 protests were burned by agents to discredit protesters. It discusses provocateurs at this and other protests.

@ 3:00 this video discusses police agent provocateurs infiltrating peaceful protests.

WATCH AT 0:45…..all the plainclothes people running in that pack, and being let behind the line, are cops–including the black-clad ‘anarchist’ !!!! BTW, watch out for the old white-bearded flannel shirt cop and the famous ‘scary lady’ cop:

Large peaceful protests allegedly ignored by Big Media:

Woman discusses her detention by police, their threats of rape, strip searches:

. . . not that I sympathize with the message of most of these protesters.

“the ‘substitution of political for economic power’ now so ofted demanded means necessarily the substitution of power from which there is no escape for a power which is always limited.” ~F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

@ 5:30, the Chairman of BB&T talks about how they refused to participate in eminent domain endeavors, and “pick-a-payment” mortgages, even though such mortgages were sellable on secondary markets. He then offers a fantastic, insider look at TARP. Because the Fed didn’t want to let the public know which banks had gotten into trouble, they forced ALL big banks to accept TARP.

@ 24:30, A libertarian asks a question which points to the divide between Randian Objectivists and libertarians. The guy’s defence of Rand’s war on altruism is rather feeble.

FYI, I favor 95% of Rand’s Objectivism.

@ 27:00, there is a great discussion of fish pedicures, and a psychopathic, parasitic legislator who wants to outlaw the practice (unless you can sterilize the fish).

@ 36:30, I think there’s a good question about the state’s role in preventive legislation, like laws which regulate distracted driving, which poses threats to other people’s liberty. I guy from Reason Magazine who took the question answered well — as well as you can answer if you believe in the state. However, I think the correct response is the anarcho-capitalist line, that roads should be privatized, and regulated by their private owners.

@ 41:30, there is a wonderful chart correlating sales of Atlas Shrugged with expansions of the U.S. government.

Today’s G-20 meeting has been advertised as a showdown between the U.S. and Europe over more spending “stimulus,” and so it is. But the larger story is the end of the neo-Keynesian economic moment, and perhaps the start of a healthier policy turn.

For going on three years, the developed world’s economic policy has been dominated by the revival of the old idea that vast amounts of public spending could prevent deflation, cure a recession, and ignite a new era of government-led prosperity. It hasn’t turned out that way. (Read more from online.wsj.com)

@ 4:15 Peter discusses the lack of attention he’s gotten from Fox news.

I think this speaks to the divide between the actual tea party movement, and the neo-con establishment hijacking of the tea parties.

The State Department has awarded a part of what was formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide a contract worth more than $120 million for providing security services in Afghanistan. . . .

The Justice Department’s case or Blackwater’s expulsion from Iraq didn’t block U.S. Training Center from bidding on the multi-million dollar contract, the State Department spokeswoman said. (Read more from cbsnews.com)

Crime & usage has fallen dramatically in the eight years since de-criminalization.

People who tell me about the big deflation in Japan, why don’t they spend a day in Tokyo? It’s still the most expensive city in the world. At this level I’m not particularly interested in buying anything. I buy gold, I don’t know what else to buy.” Faber expects another worse crisis to happen in five to ten years, “when the whole financial system collapses” – the reason: the debt problem has been kicked down the road without actually being [solved]. (Read more from zerohedge.com)

From the moment Mises’s 1912 book, The Theory of Money and Credit, made its appearance, and warned about the grave danger to free enterprise represented by paper money and central banking, the Austrians have been right.

That’s 100 years of “we told you so.”

Right in the middle of these years, there is a forgotten episode in monetary history that teaches us lessons today. It concerns the controversial role that Henry Hazlitt played in battling the Bretton Woods monetary system enacted after the Second World War.

Under Mises’s influence, Hazlitt used his editorial position at the New York Times to warn against the plan, predicting correctly that it would lead to world inflation. For saying what he said, he was pushed out of his position at the Times.

. . . .

They met from July 1 to July 22, 1944, at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and drafted the Articles of Agreement. It was nearly a year and a half later, in December 1945, that the agreement was ratified. On March 1947, one of the monstrosities created during event, the International Monetary Fund, began operations.

What was the goal of the plan? It was the same goal as at the founding of the Federal Reserve and the same goal that has guided every monetary plan in modern history. The stated idea was to promote economic growth, encourage macroeconomic stability, and, most absurdly, tame inflation. Of course, it did none of these things.

There are other analogies to the Fed. In the same way that the Fed was to serve as a lender of last resort, a provider of liquidity in times of instability, so too the Bretton Woods Agreement obligated all member nations to make their currencies available to be loaned to other countries to prevent temporary balance of payment problems.

. . . .

Keynes’s message at Bretton Woods, in Mises’s summary, was that the world elites could turn stones into bread. And so under the influence of Keynes, the target at the Bretton Woods meeting was liberalism itself, which was widely assumed to have failed during the Great Depression. The elites also came out of World War II with a more profound appreciation for the role of central planning. They had reveled in it.

The Bretton Woods plan for monetary reconstruction did not go as far as Keynes would have liked. He proposed a full-scale world central bank and a single paper currency for all nations, which he wanted to be called the “bancor,” so there could be no escaping inflation. That plan is still awaiting implementation. As it was, the Bretton Woods conferees, under pressure from the United States — which wanted the dollar to be the bancor — took a compromise position.

. . . .

The Bretton Woods system established a gold dollar that was fixed at $35 per ounce. But it was the only currency so fixed. Every other currency could be a fiat currency based on the dollar.

. . . .

The breakdown really began soon after the plan was implemented. But most of the effects were disguised through currency controls. Once the 1960s came, and the expenses of LBJ’s welfare-warfare state mounted, the Fed played its traditional role as the financier of big government. Pressure on the dollar mounted, foreign governments became more interested in the gold than the paper, and the whole cockamamie scheme unraveled under Nixon’s welfare-warfare state. When the world entered the all-paper money regime, most economists said than the price of gold would fall from $35. The Austrians predicted the opposite.

. . . .

Hazlitt wrote, “it would be difficult to think of a more serious threat to world stability and full production than the continual prospect of a uniform world inflation to which the politicians of every country would be so easily tempted.”

. . . .

On July 1, 1944, when the representatives [of an international monetary council] first gathered, he [Hazlitt] greeted them with a punch in the nose.

it would be impossible to imagine a more difficult time for individual nations to decide at what level they can fix and stabilize their national currency unit. How could the representatives of France, of Holland, of Greece, of China, make any but the wildest guess at this moment of the point at which they could hope to stabilize?

. . . .

The whole project, wrote Hazlitt, “rests on the assumption that nothing will be done right unless a grandiose formal intergovernmental institution is set up to do it. It assumes that nothing will be run well unless Governments run it.”

. . . .

In 1967, Hazliltt also had a last laugh, if it is a laughing matter to see your worst predictions come true. Hazlitt was now a syndicated columnist with the Los Angeles Times. He wrote about the unraveling of the system, which finally happened in 1969. By 1971, the entire world was on a fiat-money paper standard and the result has been nothing short of catastrophic for societies and economies, which have been thrown into unrelenting chaos.

To be sure, Hazlitt was not, as he said, the “seventh son of the seventh son.” He wasn’t born with some amazing prophetic power. What Hazlitt did was read Mises and come to understand monetary economics. It sounds easy until you realize just how rare these talents were in his day and in ours. (Read more from mises.org)

Edit — more on China and the Yuan:

The Federal Communications Commission is set to begin a move to regulate the Internet.

According to CNSNews.com, by a “3-2 party-line vote on Thursday at the FCC,” the agency “began the formal process of reclassifying the Internet as a telecommunications service instead of an information service — it’s current classification.”

Currently, as an information service, the FCC can exercise only “ancillary” authority, which does not allow it to regulate the Internet directly. If the Internet is reclassified, the agency would gain greater regulatory control.
(Read more from thenewamerican.com)