Glenda R. McGee asked me for a pictorial depiction of how the Federal Reserve Bank and world monetary system work. Fortuitously, Dennis Sevakis sent me this Rube Goldberg music video that captures the essence of current American economic and monetary policy.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Vote Libertarian in 2012
The Obama presidency has worsened the Bush administration's mismanagement of government and the economy. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that President Obama aims to extend the profligate spending that he and the Democratic Congress budgeted in 2008 and 2009 with only slight reductions. Although the Republicans have pushed for modestly greater reductions in spending, even the most conservative budget this year will exceed the Bush administration's bloated budget by ten percent. Moreover, contrary to his campaign claims, Obama has extended military involvement overseas and has continued the Patriot Act.
Today, The Wall Street Journal reports that the GOP's 2012 presidential playing field is blurry. That is, no candidate can command much support. Astonishingly, 16% of Republicans support Donald Trump, a dishonest, eminent domain socialist who was born on third base and cannot figure out how to reach home plate without government subsidies, looting of private property, cheating contractors and repeated bankruptcy. Someone needs to investigate whether Trump has received financing from organized crime in connection with his Atlantic City investments. Trump exemplifies the failure of the American economy under Progressivism, and he is a product of the stupid Federal Reserve Bank policies that led to the 2008 financial meltdown, have stopped the growth of the real hourly wage and guarantee that future generations of Americans will be much worse off than previous ones.
With 16% of Republicans supporting Trump, an additional 13% support Governor Mitt Romney. Romney implemented a failed socialist health plan in Massachusetts, and his policies are largely the same as Barack Obama's. As a presidential candidate for 2012, his first impulse was to aim to attempt to win financial backing from the same socialist Wall Street slime that finances Trump, that supported Obama in 2008, that received trillions in welfare payments in 2009, and that would not exist without ongoing welfare subsidies from the Federal Reserve Bank.
Now, Americans are loyal to the two party system for a good reason. If a third party were to be elected they might do some bizarre, radical things. They might:
-Start three wars at a time
-Quintuple the nation's money supply and hand the printed money to cronies, commercial banks and incompetently run Wall Street stock jobbers.
-Encourage the Fed to hand between $12 and $25 trillion to the same incompetently run financial firms at the expense of taxpayers
-Repeal Americans' sacred liberties by legalizing unconstitutional searches and seizures under pretext
-Borrow nearly a trillion dollars and give it out to politically connected friends, claiming that it is a "stimulus," ignoring that the only justification for "stimulus" is that private savings rates are high so that government spending is needed to stimulate the economy.
-Declare that a firm like Boeing doesn't have the freedom to open a plant in a new state because it has labor troubles in the state in which it currently does business
-Replace the education system with an ideologically driven, politically correct indoctrination system that does not teach reading, writing and arithmetic
-Pass a cap and trade law that would condemn and loot a large portion of Americans' private homes
-Declare morality to be dead and then claim that on moral grounds they have the right to tell Americans what to eat, what kind of light bulbs to use, and that they should be servile to a United Nations dominated by tyrants.
Wait, that's what the Democrats and Republicans have done. I really don't see how a third party could be worse. So why don't Americans want to vote for third parties? It's because they're bloody morons who cannot think for themselves and do what the even bigger morons in the legacy media tell them to do.
Therefore, libertarians have to engage in damage control. The best way to limit both parties' ability to do harm is to split the government into a Republican-dominated Congress and a Democratic Party-dominated presidency.
The six percent of Republicans who are Ron Paul supporters can and might consider doing just that by voting for the Libertarian Party should Ron Paul fail to win the GOP nomination.
Today, The Wall Street Journal reports that the GOP's 2012 presidential playing field is blurry. That is, no candidate can command much support. Astonishingly, 16% of Republicans support Donald Trump, a dishonest, eminent domain socialist who was born on third base and cannot figure out how to reach home plate without government subsidies, looting of private property, cheating contractors and repeated bankruptcy. Someone needs to investigate whether Trump has received financing from organized crime in connection with his Atlantic City investments. Trump exemplifies the failure of the American economy under Progressivism, and he is a product of the stupid Federal Reserve Bank policies that led to the 2008 financial meltdown, have stopped the growth of the real hourly wage and guarantee that future generations of Americans will be much worse off than previous ones.
With 16% of Republicans supporting Trump, an additional 13% support Governor Mitt Romney. Romney implemented a failed socialist health plan in Massachusetts, and his policies are largely the same as Barack Obama's. As a presidential candidate for 2012, his first impulse was to aim to attempt to win financial backing from the same socialist Wall Street slime that finances Trump, that supported Obama in 2008, that received trillions in welfare payments in 2009, and that would not exist without ongoing welfare subsidies from the Federal Reserve Bank.
Now, Americans are loyal to the two party system for a good reason. If a third party were to be elected they might do some bizarre, radical things. They might:
-Start three wars at a time
-Quintuple the nation's money supply and hand the printed money to cronies, commercial banks and incompetently run Wall Street stock jobbers.
-Encourage the Fed to hand between $12 and $25 trillion to the same incompetently run financial firms at the expense of taxpayers
-Repeal Americans' sacred liberties by legalizing unconstitutional searches and seizures under pretext
-Borrow nearly a trillion dollars and give it out to politically connected friends, claiming that it is a "stimulus," ignoring that the only justification for "stimulus" is that private savings rates are high so that government spending is needed to stimulate the economy.
-Declare that a firm like Boeing doesn't have the freedom to open a plant in a new state because it has labor troubles in the state in which it currently does business
-Replace the education system with an ideologically driven, politically correct indoctrination system that does not teach reading, writing and arithmetic
-Pass a cap and trade law that would condemn and loot a large portion of Americans' private homes
-Declare morality to be dead and then claim that on moral grounds they have the right to tell Americans what to eat, what kind of light bulbs to use, and that they should be servile to a United Nations dominated by tyrants.
Wait, that's what the Democrats and Republicans have done. I really don't see how a third party could be worse. So why don't Americans want to vote for third parties? It's because they're bloody morons who cannot think for themselves and do what the even bigger morons in the legacy media tell them to do.
Therefore, libertarians have to engage in damage control. The best way to limit both parties' ability to do harm is to split the government into a Republican-dominated Congress and a Democratic Party-dominated presidency.
The six percent of Republicans who are Ron Paul supporters can and might consider doing just that by voting for the Libertarian Party should Ron Paul fail to win the GOP nomination.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Donald Trump's Eminent Domain Empire
Michelle Malkin hits a home run with this blog (H/T Dennis Sevakis). If you have any doubt that Trump is a big government con man, take a look. Malkin's observations skim the surface. The corruption and looting in which Trump has engaged over a lifetime are a public disgrace.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Progressivism, Narcissism and Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte was the founder of sociology. At least, he coined the terms sociology and social physics. Comte's life's work began in his adolescence and ended with his death at age 59. It is remarkable that Comte envisioned his life's work at age 13 or so and then pursued it for over 45 years. His work was divided into two parts. In the first, he created the notion of positivism, that science is based on laws, that there is a hierarchy of sciences, and, most importantly, that there have been three stages of human development. The three stages are the theological, the metaphysical and the positivist.
Comte believed that society must be united around a single vision and aimed to re-institute the theological order of the Middle Ages based on scientific grounds. It was possible to unite society in a theological setting, but the metaphysical period, which began with Aquinas and carried forward through the Enlightenment and into Comte's day (he died in 1857), was conflictual and so ought to be brought to an end by Positivism. That is, Comte argued that a new religion was necessary to unite all of society in a single faith: Positivism. In other words, he claimed that science ought to be the universal religion. He devoted the second part of his career to arguing in favor of his new Positivist religion.
One of the important points in Lucien Levy Bruhl's Philosophy of Auguste Comte is Levy Bruhl's remark that Comte did not see scientific laws as absolute. Rather, Comte had a modern view of science, which sees its laws as local and subject to reinvention. I was interested to learn how far Thomas Kuhn's ideas in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions rely on Comte's insights. Kuhn sees science as occurring under a paradigm, but the paradigms inevitably reach dead ends and self-contradictions, which lead to scientific revolutions.
If Comte wishes Positivism to be a religion, and science is ultimately based on the limits of human understanding, then Comte's Positivist religion is narcissistic. It is a religion devoted to worshiping scientists' impermanent insights. Dictionary.com defines narcissism simply as "inordinate fascination with oneself; excessive self-love; vanity" or, in psychoanalysis, the "erotic gratification derived from admiration of one's own physical or mental attributes, being a normal condition at the infantile level of personality development."
The worship of the scientific insights of humanity, advocated by a social scientist, constitutes this infantile pattern. Carried forward a few decades, there is a link between the ideas of Progressivism and positivism. Positivism argues that sociology can apply the methods of science to morality. Comte believed that scientific methods could be so applied, so that society could be re-engineered along a line that unites all of society in the faith in optimal, scientific approaches to re-engineering society. This is the essence of the message of Progressivism advocated by Herbert Croly and Theodore Roosevelt.
This sheds light on the refusal of Progressives to be pragmatic, and to insist on government solutions even when they repeatedly fail. Although Progressives never went so far to claim that Progressivism ought to be a religion, the same aim was adopted by several strains of Protestantism in the form of the Social Gospel, and has been carried forward in Liberation Theology and Reformed Judaism. It is only a short step from saying that religion ought to be concerned with the well being of society to saying that the well being of society is religion's ultimate end, and given that the ultimate end is found through science, that the insights of sociology are Gospel. Thus, Progressives react to questioning of the claims of The New York Times much as a fundamentalist preacher reacts to disputing the claims of the Bible.
The narcissistic fanaticism with which left wingers, Progressive liberals, and Obama supporters have resented all dissent derives from Comte's Positivism. The debate between Progressivism and libertarianism is a debate about the limits of human reason. In turn, faith in God depends in part on the recognition that our own capacities are limited. Faith in God is logically inconsistent with the unlimited Positivism to which the mainstream of American liberals adhere.
Comte's philosophy can be viewed as a prototype of today's Progressivism, and Comte can be viewed as a prophet of Progressivism. He saw that the worship of scientific insight can replace traditional religion. Although it was too jarring to be achieved in his lifetime, religion itself has served to supply the moral justification for Comte's narcissism.
Progressives believe in science; they consider the pretense of science and Gospel of the New York Times to be sacred. Even when scientists are accused of fraud, as occurred with respect to the climate change researchers last year, Progressives retain their faith in the revealed positivist scripture and defend the sacred from the profane accusation that science is subject to the same cognitive and moral limitations as all other human endeavors.
Comte believed that society must be united around a single vision and aimed to re-institute the theological order of the Middle Ages based on scientific grounds. It was possible to unite society in a theological setting, but the metaphysical period, which began with Aquinas and carried forward through the Enlightenment and into Comte's day (he died in 1857), was conflictual and so ought to be brought to an end by Positivism. That is, Comte argued that a new religion was necessary to unite all of society in a single faith: Positivism. In other words, he claimed that science ought to be the universal religion. He devoted the second part of his career to arguing in favor of his new Positivist religion.
One of the important points in Lucien Levy Bruhl's Philosophy of Auguste Comte is Levy Bruhl's remark that Comte did not see scientific laws as absolute. Rather, Comte had a modern view of science, which sees its laws as local and subject to reinvention. I was interested to learn how far Thomas Kuhn's ideas in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions rely on Comte's insights. Kuhn sees science as occurring under a paradigm, but the paradigms inevitably reach dead ends and self-contradictions, which lead to scientific revolutions.
If Comte wishes Positivism to be a religion, and science is ultimately based on the limits of human understanding, then Comte's Positivist religion is narcissistic. It is a religion devoted to worshiping scientists' impermanent insights. Dictionary.com defines narcissism simply as "inordinate fascination with oneself; excessive self-love; vanity" or, in psychoanalysis, the "erotic gratification derived from admiration of one's own physical or mental attributes, being a normal condition at the infantile level of personality development."
The worship of the scientific insights of humanity, advocated by a social scientist, constitutes this infantile pattern. Carried forward a few decades, there is a link between the ideas of Progressivism and positivism. Positivism argues that sociology can apply the methods of science to morality. Comte believed that scientific methods could be so applied, so that society could be re-engineered along a line that unites all of society in the faith in optimal, scientific approaches to re-engineering society. This is the essence of the message of Progressivism advocated by Herbert Croly and Theodore Roosevelt.
This sheds light on the refusal of Progressives to be pragmatic, and to insist on government solutions even when they repeatedly fail. Although Progressives never went so far to claim that Progressivism ought to be a religion, the same aim was adopted by several strains of Protestantism in the form of the Social Gospel, and has been carried forward in Liberation Theology and Reformed Judaism. It is only a short step from saying that religion ought to be concerned with the well being of society to saying that the well being of society is religion's ultimate end, and given that the ultimate end is found through science, that the insights of sociology are Gospel. Thus, Progressives react to questioning of the claims of The New York Times much as a fundamentalist preacher reacts to disputing the claims of the Bible.
The narcissistic fanaticism with which left wingers, Progressive liberals, and Obama supporters have resented all dissent derives from Comte's Positivism. The debate between Progressivism and libertarianism is a debate about the limits of human reason. In turn, faith in God depends in part on the recognition that our own capacities are limited. Faith in God is logically inconsistent with the unlimited Positivism to which the mainstream of American liberals adhere.
Comte's philosophy can be viewed as a prototype of today's Progressivism, and Comte can be viewed as a prophet of Progressivism. He saw that the worship of scientific insight can replace traditional religion. Although it was too jarring to be achieved in his lifetime, religion itself has served to supply the moral justification for Comte's narcissism.
Progressives believe in science; they consider the pretense of science and Gospel of the New York Times to be sacred. Even when scientists are accused of fraud, as occurred with respect to the climate change researchers last year, Progressives retain their faith in the revealed positivist scripture and defend the sacred from the profane accusation that science is subject to the same cognitive and moral limitations as all other human endeavors.
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