Howard Stern: Democratic Party Is Communist

In 2008 Howard Stern was right (also see discussion on Bizpac Review): The Democratic Party is communist.  As Americans confront the failure of their political system, many are unable to assess that this is a gangster-ruled land.  Stern had the imagination, but only when the government directly affected his own dealings concerning the merger of Sirius Communications and XM Radio.  The Cato Institute subsequently pointed out that the FCC's authority over mergers should be ended; the communists in Washington lack the competence or honesty to regulate economic behavior.  The merger that the FCC later permitted had so many requirements that the new technology will likely be impeded for years.

Like the Germans under Hitler, Americans are not yet suffering from tyranny that they have put in power.  The Germans changed their minds about totalitarianism when they lost the war, and their own lives and futures were sharply reduced. It is when their own interests are directly threatened that Americans may decide that liberty is preferable to communism. Until then expect declines in the American economy and standard of living.  Stern states that he had voted for Hillary Clinton and Al Gore; it wasn't until his own interests were harmed that he questioned his pattern of voting for totalitarians.

Because of the might of the once-free American economy, the ill effects of American communism have taken the form of stagnation rather than decline.  Over time, though, stagnation will become decline.

The dollar may strengthen in the coming weeks, and there may be a decline in the stock market, but I don't think that the stock market will fall sharply in the near future.  The reason is that due to monetary expansion interest rates may take years to increase, and inflation awaits a shift in global support for the dollar. That also may take years.  Eventually, there will be dollar depreciation--inflation--and real wages will decline rather than stagnate. The massive stimulus that nourishes the current anemic American economy will ultimately turn into monetary inflation.  The increasing population will not be able to proportionately expand its output.

At that point I see either more extreme totalitarian steps or a call for more freedom.   There is little reason for optimism.  Ultimately, ownership of hard assets may protect Americans, but there is no reason to feel safe becaue the future America will likely be one where private property is not safe.  Franklin Roosevelt used government violence to take possession of privately held gold; there is no reason to think that private property, especially outside the private property of government cronies, is safe in the United States.

Andrew Cuomo Makes Sure That You Are Poor

This piece is forthcoming in The Lincoln Eagle.

 Andrew Cuomo is the reason you're poor and going to get poorer.  In fact, if you voted for a Democrat or a Republican for president, then you voted for a candidate who makes you poor and will make you and your children poorer.  The reason is that both parties favor the current monetary system and Federal Reserve notes, worthless, green slips of paper that say: "This note is legal tender for all debts public and private."  Federal Reserve notes sport pictures of dead presidents, several of whom, like Andrew Jackson ($20 bill) and Thomas Jefferson ($2 bill), opposed the money we now have because it hurts people like you. 

The greenback dollar is counterfeit, and as the Fed prints more at your expense, it lends them to big banks, which in turn lend them to Wall Street. When Lehman Brothers collapsed, it was in debt for over half a trillion dollars, more than 60 percent of the total money supply at that time. (The money supply is the sum of cash plus checking accounts; in 2008 it was $1.5 trillion; now, four yearslater, it is over $2.5 trillion). 

Of all the politicians in America who have harmed you economically, and virtually everyone you've voted for has, among the worst is Andrew Cuomo.  As the head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Clinton, Cuomo pushed for a policy whereby FANNIE MAE and FREDDIE MAC, the spearheads of the 2008 real estate collapse, had to invest one half of their loan portfolios in subprime (low-income) real estate.  FANNIE MAE, FREDDIE MAC, and the Housing Authority (FHA) hold 90 percent of mortgages in the country. 

If you were lied to and believe that free markets caused the housing collapse, consider that none of the three agencies, FANNIE, FREDDIE, and FHA, is a free market institution; FANNIE and FREDDIE are public-private partnerships.  The banks that generated the low-income mortgages are among the most heavily regulated businesses, and they responded to regulation. 

Why do the media and universities say that free markets and deregulation caused the millennial housing bubble and collapse?  Because the big banks that lend to big media benefit from government.  They also contribute to the dominant universities.  Princeton's endowment is $26 billion. Small wonder that Princeton professor Paul Krugman favored the Wall Street bailout:  Princeton was a chief, albeit indirect, beneficiary. The building that houses Harvard Business School is Morgan Hall; the modern medical school would not exist without donations from Maryland merchant Johns Hopkins, JP Morgan, and one of the first major investment bankers and Johns Hopkins's and JS and JP Morgan's mentor, Baltimore-and-London-based George Peabody.  

Wall Street would not exist in its current form without the Federal Reserve Bank and without government regulation, and that is why, since the days of Alexander Hamilton, big government and regulation have been policies that favor the super-rich.  Jefferson, who favored the productive class, paid off the federal debt; Hamilton, who favored speculators (as did Franklin Roosevelt), favored a national debt.   Have Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg, and the late David Rockefeller advocated regulation because they are altruists?  Most billionaires favor regulation, but the public has been duped into thinking that regulation helps it. There are virtually no libertarian billionaires; the exceptions, Charles and David Koch, are discussed endlessly. Left-wing and Progressive Republican billionaires like Gates, Soros, Buffett, Bloomberg, and Rockefeller, are ignored.

In his book The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure, John A. Allison, president of the Cato Institute and former president of BB&T bank, describes how Andrew Cuomo was the inspiration of the housing collapse of 2008.  In 1993, when Cuomo was head of HUD, he mandated that the two public-private partnerships, FANNIE MAE and FREDDIE MAC, invest half their portfolios in sub-prime mortgages.   At first FANNIE, FREDDIE, and the FHA, ignored Cuomo's mandate, but in 1999 President Clinton began to enforce Cuomo's 50 percent requirement.  Even the pro-Wall Street New York Times recognized that the Cuomo policy was self-destructive, and on September 30, 1999 The Times ran an article criticizing the policy; the article predicted that Cuomo's policy would generate a housing collapse.  Proving that it is the newspaper of economic decline, The Times backed Cuomo in the last election despite the path of economic destruction that Cuomo has left.

In his book Allison shows that HUD, FREDDIE, FANNIE, and FHA were incompetently run, that the latter three had taken on risky mortgage portfolios in order to make results seem good before 1999, and that the three took on a suicidal degree of risk after 1999. This was in part because FANNIE chief Franklin Raines, Bill Clinton's crony, did not understand how financial institutions work. 

Allison suggests that the only Democrat who was smart enough to understand that the policies he was advocating would lead to economic chaos was Barney Frank; the rest, including Andrew Cuomo, were and are too uninformed to assess the policies that they advocate. Cuomo helped make you poorer because he is an incompetent who has been put in jobs over his head. Because of his father, Cuomo was born on third base, and New York voters have pushed him toward home plate even though he is dumb enough to persist in running toward the dugout.

It is not surprising that Cuomo would now set his sights on taking away your right to defend yourself. Through the wanton use of drones, the Obama administration has murdered nearly 200 children; since 1960 the Democratic Party has murdered in excess of 250,000 children in Vietnam and elsewhere.   The Democrats and Republicans, like Republican Dean Skelos, are eager to take away your right to bear arms so that after they impoverish you some Democratic Party renegade dictator can murder you with impunity.  Incompetents like Cuomo don't worry about the long term effects of the policies that they advocate. 

Mitchell Langbert is political editor of The Lincoln Eagle.

David Boaz in Camelot

I just returned from David Boaz's talk at the Foundation for Economic Education. Mr. Boaz is co-founder and Executive Vice President of the Cato Institute in Washington. I drove down to Irvington-on-Hudson, which is a two hour drive, and I thought it was very much worth it. Mr. Boaz is an excellent speaker, brilliant and wise. He is surprisingly optimistic. He noted that the long term trend has been toward greater freedom. He noted that there is more freedom for blacks and Jews today than there was in the era of laissez-faire. Also, the degree of government intervention is less now than it was in the past. For instance, he noted that while 75% of the nation favored nationalization of banking in the 1930s, only 35% favors it today.

I enjoyed the talk but experienced a bit of cognitive dissonance with respect to all the optimism. While we are better off than we might have been had it not been for people like David Boaz, today we pay 50% of our incomes in taxes, when you include property, sales, state income tax and social security tax. If we do not have the freedom to dispose of half of our earnings I don't see how we can consider ourselves to be free. In the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s Pennsylvanians were ready to overthrow Washington over a small tax on whiskey.

I suppose optimism is psychologically preferable to pessimism. Nevertheless, Mr. Boaz reminded me of the black knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. King Arthur cuts off one of his arms, and the black knight says "'tis but a scratch." He cuts off the other arm and the black knight says "just a flesh wound". King Arthur proceeds to cut off both of the black knight's legs and he says "I'm invincible!" (see below).