Posts Tagged ‘mobile’
September 25th, 2008 | 
Author:
Oh, how I wish Dr. Paul was still on the Presidential ticket, rather than Sen. McCain…!
Why do our leaders insist on over-complicating matters? (Of course, that’s a rhetorical question; we all know that obfuscation is their means of job security!)
From: Congresman Ron Paul [mailto:updates08@ronpaulforcongress.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2008 3:53 PM
To: kenneth@lefebvre.us
Subject: My Answer to the President
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
Political Advertisement paid for by Committee to Re-Elect Ron Paul
Posted in Uncategorized | 
Tags: 
I can’t stand clutter… of course, that’s not to say I’m disciplined enough to actually keep it away from my workspaces! Generally, I’m pretty lazy, and I end up with stacks of papers on my desk, or icons all over my computer desktop.
Every once in a while, I get annoyed enough to do something about it. This evening was one of those times, so I’ve cleared off the desktop of my Tablet PC, with a little help from Stardock’s great utility called Object Dock Plus.
That little dock at the top of my screen is my taskbar, believe it or not! The “Start” button is that little circle on the left, and my running applications are on the right. Since I’m on Vista, of course, the icons for each application are alive: they show the current contents of the application window.
The long dock at the bottom of my screen is my taskbar notification area (commonly known as the “system tray”). On the very left of that dock (see the little separator line?) is essentially a “Quick Launch” type of bar. It contains a handful of my most commonly launched programs.
Finally, you’ll see there’s a short, but wider dock along the right edge. That contains a few important “docklets” which display the current date, time, battery status, wifi strength, and even the weather.
Here’s why I will not vote for McCain… even with Palin on the ticket. It is more important to me, that I can sleep at night with my vote cast, than that I voted for someone with a legitimate chance at winning the game.
The Big Lie About Change
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
7:54 AM
by Jim Quinn
by Jim Quinn
The big lie about change is that neither party wants to change anything. The Democrats and Republicans love their power, influence, and wealth. The two parties always agree when it involves tax rebates and pork projects for their constituents. They have no problem spending our grandchildren’s money to get re-elected in November. No politician is willing to tell the American people the blunt truth that we have an epic financial crisis that must be addressed in the next 10 years. The media spends weeks discussing lipstick, bulldogs, pigs, and hockey moms. We are wasting precious time. Our society is dominated by present self-interest to the detriment of the best interests of our future generations. We need leaders who are willing to speak the truth and convince the country to change course before it is too late.
Our fiscal crisis is complex, multi-faceted and dangerous to our long-term future. The major issues that we need to confront include the current fiscal situation, the colossal amount of unfunded liabilities that our politicians have obligated us to pay, our dependence on foreign oil, our failing education system, and a dearth of leadership and political courage. To successfully solve these issues we need to ignore political affiliations and choose the best solutions. Both candidates promise tax cuts, when the United States has no money. We are broke. The money that our politician leaders will use for tax cuts or new government programs will be borrowed from China and Saudi Arabia, with the bill being passed on to future generations.
By far, the greatest challenge that we must overcome is the entrenched ruling elite that run this country. The ruling elite includes the crooked politicians in Washington, the lifetime bureaucrats who run the various governmental agencies, the paid lobbyists who write the laws for Congress, obscenely overpaid short-term profit-driven corporate CEOs, media conglomerates, and the privileged Wall Street aristocracy. These privileged few are surrounded by leeches and parasites (media consultants, pollsters, spin artists, and PR agencies) that attack anyone who threatens their position of power. The only way to overturn their comfortable world is an uprising among the masses.
Ron Paul, the only candidate during the Presidential primaries to tell the American people the truth, has articulated the 1st step in taking this country back from the entrenched political establishment:
"Pretending that a true difference exists between the two major candidates is a charade of great proportion. Many who help to perpetuate this myth are frequently unaware of what they are doing and believe that significant differences actually do exist. Indeed, on small points there is the appearance of a difference. The real issues, however, are buried in a barrage of miscellaneous nonsense and endless pontifications by robotic pundits hired to perpetuate the myth of a campaign of substance. The truth is that our two-party system offers no real choice. The real goal of the campaign is to distract people from considering the real issues. Those candidates who represent actual change or disagreement with the status quo are held in check by the two major parties in power, making it very difficult to compete in the pretend democratic process. This is done by making it difficult for third-party candidates to get on the ballots, enter into the debates, raise money, avoid being marginalized, or get fair or actual coverage."
The message that needs to be sent is a rejection of the two-party system. On November 4, 2008 vote for the 3rd-party candidate of your choice. Send a message to the ruling elite.
September 16, 2008
Jim Quinn [send him mail] is Senior Director of Strategic Planning, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. This article reflects the personal views of Jim Quinn. It does not necessarily represent the views of his employer, and is not sponsored or endorsed by them.
Copyright © 2008 LewRockwell.com
Pasted from <http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/quinn7.html>
We tend to "have a feeling" that the cops are out to get us, but here’s a good explanation for one of the reasons why…. the very system encourages them to harrass us.
Officer Kanapsky, is it?
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
8:09 AM
Daily Article by Jeffrey A. Tucker | Posted on 9/9/2008
It’s a suburban neighborhood, on Sunday morning. There is a three-way stop at which hardly anyone ever goes the other direction than the main one. But you often see a police car in the nearby parking lot, keeping his sharp eye out for evil lawbreakers. These are the dangerous criminals who slow down almost to a full stop that causes the car to shift back the other direction, but don’t quite do this. Instead they do what is sometimes called a "rolling stop" which stops short of full immobilization. The policeman in the car regards this as "running a stop sign," as if you paid no attention to it at all, and he’ll give you a ticket whenever he catches you doing it.
From the policeman’s point of view, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. One recent empirical accounting at this intersection (I dragooned some neighborhood kids into keeping count) observed that more than 9 in 10 people do not come to what the law regards as a "full stop."
I should know about this because, try as I might to be a law-abiding citizen, I have now received my fifth ticket this year at this very intersection one block from my house. That’s not a typo. Five! I know it sounds crazy — why the heck can’t I obey those who are ordained to keep me safe? — but when you consider that I go through this intersection several times per day, I’m actually doing rather well.
It goes without saying that this is a racket. The city is many hundreds of dollars richer because of my penchant for law breaking alone, and probably hundreds of thousands richer if you include everyone else’s.
But it wasn’t until someone drew my attention to this link that I understood the full extent of what this whole racket is about. Yes, it’s about money. But there is more to it than that. You see, it turns out that I’m an archetype, a person who rolls through stop signs in my safe neighborhood and then gets outraged when the ticket is issued and attempts to "fight authority" rather than pay up. So, fool that I am, I actually believe in "challenging the system." I take seriously the claim that I’m innocent until proven guilty. Can you believe the naïveté?
It’s typical of suburbanites. We challenge tickets, especially frivolous ones. And this, it turns out, is precisely what the police want us to do, for reasons explained below.
So on the appointed court day, I leave the office to go to the courthouse to fight this ridiculous ticket. I sit for hours and hours until I’m given a chance to declare my innocence. All the while, the cop who stopped me stands at the back of the courtroom with his arms folded over his bulletproof chest. He is heavily armed. I, on the other hand, was searched before I even walked in.
If at this point I declare my innocence, I am given the opportunity for a trial with my own attorney, whom I must pay because I’m not poor enough to have the court appoint a lawyer even if I wanted it to. This trial is scheduled for sometime in the future, which means another trip to the courthouse, and another opportunity for the cop to enjoy the air-conditioned surroundings of the courtroom he rules. What chance is there for me? In the end, I would probably have to declare myself guilty of something or other, and pay a lesser fine; meanwhile I will have missed at least two days of work.
What’s going on here turns out to do with the way policemen are paid. According to federal labor law, they are only allowed to be scheduled for patrolling up to 40 hours per week, just as the rest of us can only be scheduled to work up to a certain number of hours. Courtroom time — and by subpoena, they have to be there — often counts as overtime, meaning 50% more than they are paid for patrolling during regular hours.
In the case examined by John Stossel on 20/20, a policeman named Officer Kanapsky made an additional $21,562 over his regular pay just by standing around in court. The more tickets he issued, especially for minor issues that outraged people are likely to challenge in court, the more money he made. This is a result of labor law. As the Department of Labor says, "An employer who requires or permits an employee to work overtime is generally required to pay the employee premium pay for such overtime work."
Now, it starts to make sense. You and I — his employers, so to speak — are paying a premium for his court time, which is why he spends his patrolling time trying to goad people into going to court. The policeman is being paid time and a half to waste our time and to cause our insurance rates to rise.
In the private sector, the permission to work more than 40 hours per week is a real benefit to the employee and the employer, though the terms ought to be left to the contracting parties. But in the police work, this overtime permission results in a scam that causes police to engage in low-risk, high-revenue earning activities that exploit the population.
It occurs to everyone who is given a frivolous ticket: surely the cop’s time would be better spent stopping real crimes, not harassing nonthreatening citizens. Now we can better see why they do this. It may be a product of federal overtime rules, another case in which the ghost of FDR haunts us every day.
But what to do about it? Denounce the cop on the spot? That’s not a good idea. It strikes you immediately when you are stopped by a policeman that there is a huge disparity of power at work here. You are effectively captured by them. You must comply no matter what. They have the legal right to use any method to keep you quiet and docile and to punish you to the point of death if you resist.
YouTube is filled with clips showing people being subjected to the latest weapon of choice: the taser gun. The police love the taser gun. It leaves no trace of physical injury. You are shot through with electricity, which causes frightening physical and mental convulsions, but there is nothing you can take a picture of. No bruises. No wounds. No broken bones. This is all the better for them — and all the worse for you.
Never forget what happens to you if you decide to run instead. That’s a death sentence. Forget that the instinct to evade your captors is universal and deeply embedded in our mental/biological equipment. The state operates on the assumption that you are its slave when it wants you to be, and otherwise free in name only. This is especially true in the age of Bush, in which all police at all levels have morphed into militarized "security personnel." The friendly, helpful policeman of old civics texts seems to be a thing of the past.
In any case, the phenomenon of Officer Kanapsky raises fundamental questions not only about federal labor law but also about the role of the police in any community. Do they really stop crime? Sure, they arrive after a crime has been committed; they take fingerprints (those only seem to work in the movies) and file reports. In real life, however, crime prevention is due to the private sector: locks, alarm systems, and the like. This is what prevents crimes from taking place.
The police aren’t so hot at prosecuting crime either, but for people who commit crimes like slowing down at three-way stops. Yet we are all somehow under the illusion that the police are the reason we are safe. It is the core mythology of our civic religion.
If you do believe that they do more good than harm, consider the unseen costs. What kind of private alternatives are being crowded out by the very presence of the police?
It is also deeply troubling that most people believe there aren’t too many police but too few. How many are too many? What if one in three people were a cop? One in two? Maybe we should have two cops for every one civilian. How safe we would be! Really, there is an ethos in this country that you can never have too many cops on the street, and the idea of hiring more nearly always garners public support.
And yet, when it comes right down to it on the particulars, we can’t stand the police. We keep a constant lookout for them when we drive. We dread being pulled over. We know in our hearts that they are out to get us, and represent more of a threat than a security for our freedoms.
In the end, we need to realize that the police are like all other government employees: self-interested, living off tax dollars, parasitical on our liberties. The case of Officer Kanapsky shows precisely how and why.
Jeffrey Tucker is the editor of Mises.org. Send him mail. Comment on the blog.
You can receive the Mises Daily Article in your inbox. Go here to subscribe or unsubscribe.
Pasted from <http://mises.org/story/3092>
