Should Government Intervene?

I have a few questions for anyone concerned. I continue to hear the line that people who accept government assistance are lazy. Apparently, all these lazy people happen to be democrats. I don't know how this is known, but it seems to be common knowledge among republicans. If such is not the case, let me know, and I will correct this assumption.

That aside, my question is the following: when pressed on the $700 billion bailout bill, nationalizing banks to a degree, Senator John McCain responded that this is a serious financial crisis, and it is government's responsibility to intervene on behalf of the people.

My first question is: do you agree with him?

My second question is: if it is the government's job to intervene in a financial crisis, what is the difference when an individual, or a family, who are often prone to fall into financial crisis, go to the government for intervention? Why is it assumed that the person or persons are lazy?

Is it government's job to intervene in a widespread crisis, or an individual one?

You don't have to answer this next part, but just something to think about.....if McCain becomes president, and is able to implement his program to buy up bad mortgages, will he only buy up democrats' bad mortgages? Will people who are republicans refuse the bailout money? If not, are they lazy republicans? Just food for thought.

SNL gets 'Mavericky;' Daily Show Gold

Watch this SNL clip with your conservative friends. Watch them get all indignant over the biased comedy show writers. Nevermind that Tina Fey might even sound more intelligent as Sarah Palin than Palin herself.

Take this excerpt from a recent column written by the conservative Kathleen Parker:

When Couric pointed to polls showing that the financial crisis had boosted Obama's numbers, Palin blustered wordily: "I'm not looking at poll numbers. What I think Americans at the end of the day are going to be able to go back and look at track records and see who's more apt to be talking about solutions and wishing for and hoping for solutions for some opportunity to change, and who's actually done it?" If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.



McCain has nothing left. So he's going to start the "swift-boat" attacks. I suggest you look up McCain-Liddy, or McCain-Keating on google, so you can be "fair and balanced."
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Jon Stewart takes Congress to task for taking two weeks to pass an emergency bill, and congratulating themselves for it. Gosh, he's good.

We Are All Seduced (Conclusion)

I sat at my computer watching the vote on the floor of the House of Representatives this afternoon, sick to my stomach. The bailout bill, which failed to pass the House on Monday, was passed in the Senate Wednesday night, and then by the House today.

What was it that made the difference between Monday and Friday? Surely there are a variety of explanations, but I'm sure none are more useful than the fact that the Senate happened to tack on about $150 billion more in tax breaks for special interests. That's right. "We have no money, the economy is broken, we don't like this bill one bit, but as long as we're signing a bill we dislike, we might as well reward ourselves $150 billion for it."

The American People were opposed to the bill on Monday, and I am sure they are not much less opposed to it today. Yet the representatives of the people went ahead and passed the bill anyway. That's how democracy works today.

How did we get to this point? How have we let secret combinations get above us, even among the highest seats of our country's government? It's an easy answer, except no one wants to admit - we are all seduced. We have been deceived for too long.

I just finished reading a short book by Rick Shengkman called, "Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter." It is nothing spectacular, but it does point out a few very true observations. For one, the founding fathers and other great leaders of our country feared that our democracy, our republic, could not stand, if the people were too much concerned with consumerism.

Here, I would say almost all of us, are guilty. And we have been seduced to a degree that we scarcely comprehend. The computers, the cars, the homes, the video games, the satellite dishes, the cell phones, the clothes, fast food, Starbucks, and on and on.

We have been seduced to believe that possessing more and more of these things will make us more and more happy. We have been seduced into believing we should have every convenience we should ever desire. We want to drive our car, anywhere, anytime, and we want gas prices low. We want to buy a home that is bigger than we can afford, and when we can't make the payments, we want government to come to the rescue.

We have been seduced to believe that our appearance, especially what we wear, gives us our status, our position in the world. We have been seduced to believe we don't have time to worry about politics, or other matters of utmost importance, but we do have time to watch every episode of "American Idol," or "The Office," or seven football games a week, or fantasy football. We have been deceived to believe we must be entertained as much as humanly possible.

But the most damning fact of all, is we have been seduced to believe we have NOT been seduced. We look over at Joe Blow down the street, and say, "Hey, I'm living a lot more modest life than him, I'm doing pretty good. I KNOW material things won't make me a happier person."

Then we get in our car, and work and work, to pay for those things, many of which we have been seduced into buying on credit, because we do not even have the means to buy them outright.

We have been told that the only way to have normal children is to put them in public schools. We have been told that if the government doesn't take care of us, we will not be able to survive.

We have been deceived to believe that we have two distinct, fundamentally different political parties, who are both concerned for Mr. and Mrs. so-and-so on main street. Yet, the parties are hardly different, and when the elections are over, the policies will continue to support rich, corrupt, Wall Street plunderers. With the presidential election, it is not the lesser of two evils. It is a lose-lose for all of us.

We look around the world, and we assume that no one is as free, or as fortunate as us. So, we think "yeah, our leaders are corrupt and sleazy, but it could be worse." What a contemptable statement. We have responsibility to change the situation, to fight the evil that has gotten above us. But we excuse our inaction, so we won't feel guilty for not doing our part.

The Prophet Moroni spoke of our time: Ether 8: 24-25
24 "Wherefore, the Lord commandeth you, when ye shall see these things come among you that ye shall awake to a sense of your awful situation, because of this secret combination which shall be among you; or wo be unto it, because of the blood of them who have been slain; for they cry from the dust for vengeance upon it, and also upon those who built it up.
25 For it cometh to pass that whoso buildeth it up seeketh to overthrow the freedom of all lands, nations, and countries; and it bringeth to pass the destruction of all people, for it is built up by the devil, who is the father of all lies; even that same liar who beguiled our first parents, yea, even that same liar who hath caused man to commit murder from the beginning; who hath hardened the hearts of men that they have murdered the prophets, and stoned them, and cast them out from the beginning.

We have been grossly irresponsible, because we, for the most part, have been lulled to sleep, again and again. We have had people among us who have tried to warn us of these evils in our time. If we haven't stoned them literally, we have stoned them with our indifference, and with our self-satisfaction. We have often cast them out, insomuch as we have ignored what they have tried to tell us.

The bailout bill is only one of the many examples that have come over the years. It is emblematic of the greed, the deception, and the evil, that goes on in our own goverment. While we fight wars abroad, spending billions of dollars, our leaders lead us to believe we are motivated by God-given democracy.

Meanwhile, every day they usurp more and more power; they take away more and more freedoms, and they demolish our democracy at home. It is time to heed Moroni's counsel, and wake up. We have been asleep - and deceived - for far too long.

We Are All Seduced (part 3)

First of all, I want you to watch Jon Stewart from last night. It continues to baffle me that we get the most reasonable news coverage from Comedy Central, but what are you gonna do?






I have had a thousand questions going through my head. If anyone would like to answer any of them, feel free?

1. How much do we have to lose before we stop trusting our politicians? How long before we stop saying, "Well...er, um...I think they have our best interests at heart."? How much do they have to screw up before we say that maybe it's more by design that just simple "incompetence?"

2. Why, why would you trust those who are responsible for the mess to then take your money and do something logical to clean up the mess? [No, it is not "big business" or "Wall Street" that are the only ones responsible. Yes, there are a lot of crooks. But what can we say for our representatives that knew it was going on for years - decades - and looked the other way?]

3. Why are you so afraid of Barack Obama, worried about what he can do with the economy? Aren't you more concerned about President Bush, the man you probably voted for, who has screwed up the economy more than anyone since the GREAT DEPRESSION? Why do you think this man is so much more virtuous than Obama?

4. Why will you vote for John McCain, not to vote for him, but to vote against Obama?
Why do I even have to bring Obama up? As someone in a forum I frequent said, "Would you like Amahlakiah, or Gadianton?"

5. Why do you support the war on terror? Another worthwhile quote, which I am unsure to whom I should attribute it: President Bush, and our Congress have done what 19 terrorists could not do, completely bring the U.S. economy to its knees. How much more damage do they have to do before you wake up and realize we are being destroyed from within, not by Osama bin Laden or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

6. How long will you support troops in Iraq? How many trillions of dollars are you willing to spend while our economy is sputtering to a hault? How many more wars will the U.S. have to declare preemptively? How many more lives are you willing to see die for lies?

7. How do you not see the parallels? The Patriot Act was passed behind closed doors, in a time of unprecedented fear among everyone in this country. It is unconstitutional, and is an attack on the people. But how could you be against it? After all, it's called the "Patriot Act!" How long will you be seduced? Why do you think they are changing the name of their plan from "bailout" to "rescue?"

Just a few things to think about. Again, I iterate, and reiterate, we are all seduced at one level or another. It will be a long journey to wake up and stand up against the forces that have taken over so much of our government, and country. But choosing to be seduced when one knows better, is, in my estimation, a great sin. I cannot stay silent any longer. You may choose to go to sleep. You may choose to listen to what the mainstream-in-the-pockets-of-Washington-politicians-media are telling you.

I am going to do what it takes to start throwing off the chains.

We Are All Seduced (part 2)

I have never been more angry at President Bush than I am right now. There. I said it. I have thought some awful things about him, have tried to hold those opinions at bay, and have had all of them reinforced and confirmed to me through the current crisis.

What an arrogant fool. What a loser. This man, who up until a week ago, only had things to say about the economy like, "our economy is healthy," and baloney like, "we only have five percent unemployment," and "people are just focusing on the negative." What an idiot. And now he expects me to trust him with 700 billion dollars more, after he's lied, and lied, and lied, about the state of the nation, for seven and a half years.

If you can vote republican again after having this man as president, you are a special person. I don't want to touch a republican with a 100-foot pole.

Except for one: here's what he has to say about Mr. President's bailout plan.

- Expletives were self-deleted -
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Dear Friends:

The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.

We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market's attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.

Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I'd only be repeating what I've been saying over and over - not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.

Still, at least a few observations are necessary. The president assures us that his administration "is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets." Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?

We are told that "low interest rates" led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.

Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or "wildcat capitalism" (as if we actually have a pure free market!).
Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: "Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk."

Doesn't that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn't that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn't the federal government shown that the "many" who "believed they were guaranteed by the federal government" were in fact correct?

Then come the scare tactics. If we don't give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary "the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet." Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.

It's the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.

The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.

F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks' manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:

Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end... It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.

The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.

The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question? Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a "rescue plan"? I guess "bailout" wasn't sitting too well with the American people.

The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you're supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.

I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.

H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

In liberty, Ron Paul

We Are All Seduced (part 1)

The other day I got an email forward with a picture of a pick-up truck that had the words, "I'm a REPUBLICAN, because EVERYONE can't be on WELFARE," on the back. I don't know why, but terse bloviations like that just really make my blood boil a smidgen. Once I got over it, and turned on the news for the day, I just had to laugh. Bailouts, bailouts, bailouts.

Here's the short of the story: if you are a democrat or a republican, you are part of the problem. Grant it, we all are seduced to various degrees, but if you are a democrat or a republican, you are likely going to vote for Barack Obama or John McCain. So, you're supposedly not for welfare, but your candidate is for the biggest bailout ever in the history of the United States, since the Great Depression.

Here's what Ron Paul has to say about it. He's telling the truth, something you aren't getting from the media, from Obama, or from McCain or President Bush. If you support them, you may say you oppose welfare; welfare for the poor "lazy" people. But you are voting for corporate welfare, make no doubt about it. It's lamentable, and it's the truth. ___________________________________________________________________

Dear Friends,

Whenever a Great Bipartisan Consensus is announced, and a compliant media assures everyone that the wondrous actions of our wise leaders are being taken for our own good, you can know with absolute certainty that disaster is about to strike.

The events of the past week are no exception. The bailout package that is about to be rammed down Congress' throat is not just economically foolish. It is downright sinister. It makes a mockery of our Constitution, which our leaders should never again bother pretending is still in effect. It promises the American people a never-ending nightmare of ever-greater debt liabilities they will have to shoulder.

Two weeks ago, financial analyst Jim Rogers said the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made America more communist than China! "This is welfare for the rich," he said. "This is socialism for the rich. It's bailing out the financiers, the banks, the Wall Streeters." That describes the current bailout package to a T. And we're being told it's unavoidable.

The claim that the market caused all this is so staggeringly foolish that only politicians and the media could pretend to believe it. But that has become the conventional wisdom, with the desired result that those responsible for the credit bubble and its predictable consequences - predictable, that is, to those who understand sound, Austrian economics - are being let off the hook.

The Federal Reserve System is actually positioning itself as the savior, rather than the culprit, in this mess!

• The Treasury Secretary is authorized to purchase up to $700 billion in mortgage-related assets at any one time. That means $700 billion is only the very beginning of what will hit us.• Financial institutions are "designated as financial agents of the Government." This is the New Deal to end all New Deals.

• Then there's this: "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." Translation: the Secretary can buy up whatever junk debt he wants to, burden the American people with it, and be subject to no one in the process.There goes your country.

Even some so-called free-market economists are calling all this "sadly necessary." Sad, yes. Necessary? Don't make me laugh. Our one-party system is complicit in yet another crime against the American people.

The two major party candidates for president themselves initially indicated their strong support for bailouts of this kind - another example of the big choice we're supposedly presented with this November: yes or yes. Now, with a backlash brewing, they're not quite sure what their views are. A sad display, really.

Although the present bailout package is almost certainly not the end of the political atrocities we'll witness in connection with the crisis, time is short. Congress may vote as soon as tomorrow. With a Rasmussen poll finding support for the bailout at an anemic seven percent, some members of Congress are afraid to vote for it. Call them! Let them hear from you! Tell them you will never vote for anyone who supports this atrocity.

The issue boils down to this: do we care about freedom? Do we care about responsibility and accountability? Do we care that our government and media have been bought and paid for? Do we care that average Americans are about to be looted in order to subsidize the fattest of cats on Wall Street and in government? Do we care? When the chips are down, will we stand up and fight, even if it means standing up against every stripe of fashionable opinion in politics and the media? Times like these have a way of telling us what kind of a people we are, and what kind of country we shall be.

In liberty, Ron Paul