The First Foot Drops

To pay for his expansive social engineering, President Obama is planning a $1,000,000,000,000 (that's 1 trillion) worth of tax increases.

Now, I'm not an economist, but it strikes me as an appallingly bad idea. If taxes increase, people have less money. Thus, people spend less money. Thus, the economy shrinks more. Call me crazy, but in order to stimulate an economy to grow I think you need money to be changing hands. No matter how much imaginary money the government tosses at infrastructure changes and those pork projects that don't exist in the stimulus bill will make people spend money.

One thing that this economic theory ignores is the simple fact that people with money hire people. If the people who have the money stop wanting to pay for such services, they will not hire people. The government does not have a method of creating wealth and cannot pay for services unless money is taken from people. By taking excess amounts from the "rich," the government harms everyone who works for the "rich." The engine for wealth generation will stall just like it did in the 1930s.

Taking Stock

In which Rick Santelli says what we all have been wanting to say.



So, I suppose I'll see y'all in Chicago in July then? Heheh.

UPDATE: CNBC has posted a poll about whether or not you'd join the Chicago Tea Party.
Go vote yes!

UPDATE 2: CNBC is now spinning this like crazy. The link above that used to lead to the poll, now leads to desperate attempts to contain the message. The poll seems to have been removed, after a quarter of a million Americans responded, 94% saying yes.

UPDATE 3: Now the White House has responded with a curt dismissal of Santelli.

The White House on Friday dismissed a cable television reporter's criticism of President Barack Obama's housing bailout plan as the ranting of an individual who "doesn't know what he's talking about."

This is a foolish decision on their part. Santelli's remarks are resonating because many people agree with him, not because he's a marginal ranter. Look for these "rants" to become increasingly frequent in the days ahead.



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Sometimes you get what you ask for

"The burning heavens reflected in a mud puddle."

This is a little-known, seldom-quoted, and less-than-complimentary description applied to a well-known leader. In a turbulent time, having entered a deep economic depression, a great nation turned to one man who seemed to have a plan to change it all and give them hope. Leaning socialist, he promised to take money away from those who had selfishly hoarded it and give it to the people who deserved it, to restore justice and economic stability. While he himself was not very experienced in politics, he began to gather an intensely loyal following, largely due to his fluent and persuasive speeches, and soon despite opposition from the political establishment he was brought to power by a massive public movement.
Naturally, I think we all know who I am referring to.

This past November, millions of Americans poured into voting booths, some for the first time in their lives, to elect an ideal. With boundless enthusiasm, even tears, they affirmed the rise of the man who would accomplish all their dreams.

Well, change has come. As our economy plummets, some of the most unqualified (financially speaking) leaders in American history have thrown together a massive, bloated piece of legislation. Containing everything from abortion incentives and the establishment of state-sponsored and mandated euthanasia to billions of dollars wasted on meaningless trivialities, this bill ushers in an entirely new era in American history. Avowed economic socialists confidently state that the free market has failed, and push more and more government intervention as the only reasonable way to keep the markets in check.

Of course, this is bald-faced hypocrisy, considering government legislation required loans to be given to unqualified applicants as a sort of proxy welfare. Congressional hearings lambasted the greedy corporations that caused this crisis, while blithely ignoring the fact that they themselves were largely responsible.

To paraphrase a famous quote, our government is like someone who breaks your legs, then offers to sell you crutches and says "See? If it weren't for us, you wouldn't be able to walk."

And of course, all this is using your money. The money you have worked to earn.
But as we have previously shown [Nov 20, 2008 "Ownership"], some liberals outrightly deny that it is your money. It's rather like a married man feeling himself generous for offering to sell his wife a piece of the pie she made for him. Absurdity, to say the least, but that is what they feed us, and expect us to like it.

But millions and millions of Americans have shown a remarkable ability to stomach that, provided that they are able to continue in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed.

The problem is that falsehood is always eventually self-destructive. That which opposes reality, economically or otherwise, will eventually show its true colors by seeking to remove itself from reality. One can easily make the next logical step: socialism leads to nihilism.

If you are inclined to immediately dismiss this, go look at Europe. The nations that have most fully embraced socialism are those whose cultures are in the most severe jeopardy.
In fact, some of those cultures may never recover.

The West is facing an identity crisis, which the financial crisis is now bringing to a head.

But those European nations which are now struggling to maintain any shred of their traditional identities in the face of a changing world are finding that sounding the depths of post-modern pluralism, humanism, and socialism has been not progress, but poison.

Liberals in America for generations have held up these exact values as the continuation of the Enlightenment principles (i.e., Secular Humanism) that they claim legitimacy based upon.
Now, they have finally attained critical mass. The experiment already shown to be failed is still touted by them as the final solution.

Every time liberal principles, economic or otherwise, have been attemped in America, they have failed. This is a matter of public record. However, those who continue to push them would have us believe that the problem has always been that we have not gone far enough.
(a little cyanide will hurt you, but downing it all will cure you)

Now, millions of Americans have spoken. We will drain the cup to the dregs.

If anything of America remains after that draught, maybe they will have learned the bitter lesson. Or maybe not.

And in case you didn't catch on, the individual I described at the beginning was Adolph Hitler.

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Blood-Letting

There was an old practice of medicine that called for the draining of blood in case of an illness, known as blood-letting. Of course, this had varying degrees of efficacy, but it was a stand-by for doctors for thousands of years. Even barber poles reflect the practice of letting blood, as barbers used to also carry out the procedure, often slitting arteries or using leeches to drain the blood from their vict-er, patients.

Now, of course, we recognize the importance of healthy blood to overall health, and rarely indeed engage in taking away life-sustaining blood from someone already weakened by disease.

Or do we?

In an unprecedented act of largess, the new 9.7 Trillion dollar financial stimulus package (aka, the fiat-slaying apocalypse) is casting forth enough money to give every man, woman and child IN THE WORLD $1,430. That also translates to over $32,000 for every legal citizen of the United States.

This, of course, reduces money to a mere fantasy. The US is deeply mired in debt, so much so that our sovereignty has been all but out-sourced as well. (China or Japan could easily send us plummeting into a depression by shedding their dollar reserves) And now we are summoning forth nearly 10 Trillion dollars to resurrect our economy? Forth from where, may I ask?

From the aether, evidently. Or, more specifically, from that magical world called the Federal Reserve, where more dollars are printed when we need them. As a result, the value of a dollar is based less and less on anything real. Of course, this is the price you pay for going with fiat currency, and has been going on for some time.

But all that debt we kept borrowing time with has caught up with us, and now the glass house is collapsing upon itself. Again according to Bloomberg:

"The worst financial crisis in two generations has erased $14.5 trillion, or 33 percent, of the value of the world’s companies since Sept. 15..."

This does sound like a time for desperate measures, no?

So desperate that we debase our dollar, the currency upon which our economy runs, (the blood of our economy, you might say) to be worth practically nothing but the value of the US Government's promises? (And I'll take a Yen over one of those any day)

Have we really come to the point that we will try to save ourselves from dehydration by drinking blood sucked from our own arteries?

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In order to form a more dubious union

The unionization of the world continues...

You know about the European Union, how about the African Union? As a concept, it has been around a while, but some of the more practical details are still being worked out. For example, whether the organization will be more than symbolic:

"The chairmanship of the African Union is a rotating position held by heads of state for one year and gives the holder some influence over the continent's politics but
carries no real power."

Understandably, since many of the individual nations on the African continent do not have control over what happens inside their borders. (One thinks of Somalia, for example)

Now, who will be given leadership over such a tenuous, developing union in its vulnerable years?
How about Al-Qaddafi! Wait, you will say, isn't he a terrorist? Ah, but he renounced terror in 2003. Since then, he has apparently been busy.

"Qaddafi, once ostracized by the West for sponsoring terrorism, has been trying to increase both Libya's global stature and its regional influence — mediating African
conflicts, sponsoring efforts to spread Islam on the continent and pushing for the creation of a single African government."

Oh dear. Those jingoistic Western bullies, holding a little thing like state-sponsored terror against him. Let's see what else he has been up to.

"The Libyan government continues to imprison people for criticizing Qaddafi," said Reed Brody, a Brussels-based lawyer with Human Rights Watch who watched Qaddafi take the helm of the AU. "Hundreds more have been 'disappeared.' Libya
has no independent NGOs and the government tightly controls all forms of public expression."

Ahem. And when the Belgians get you on human rights, after their little incidents in the Congo, it means something. It will be interesting to see how an African union progresses under his leadership. Apparently Sub-Saharan Africa, which has resisted the spread of Islam for decades, is up against a stacked deck.

One can only wonder what will happen when the Crescent rises over Europe as well, as the irreversible demographic shift ensures that it will. When Islam stretches from Indonesia to Britain to South Africa, we may indeed have an interesting situation in the world on our hands. Meanwhile, men like Qaddafi continue to hold positions of influence within the African Union, and the UN.

Having elected our first Arabic president, who held his first Presidential interview with a Dubai-based TV channel, the US is apparently trying to play catch-up in this new emerging world.

Liberals were nearly dying of embarrassment and chagrin at the fact that we were a superpower leading the world. Their projections of guilt made this the most uncomfortable position imaginable for them.
Now, they have a chance to kill off that excellence which propelled us ahead of everyone else, drop us back down into the crowd (and after all, haven't we all learned in school that no one is any better than anyone else?) and establish us in a comfortably compromised position with those who would take advantage of us. We can only pray that their culture of failure will come back to bite them on this attempt too.

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