About This Blog

Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the greatest economist of my time. His greatest works can be accessed here at no charge.

Mises believed that property, freedom and peace are and should be the hallmarks of a satisfying and prosperous society. I agree. Mises proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the prospect for general and individual prosperity is maximized, indeed, is only possible, if the principle of private property reigns supreme. What's yours is yours. What's mine is mine. When the line between yours and mine is smudged, the door to conflict opens. Without freedom (individual liberty of action) the principle of private property is neutered and the free market, which is the child of property and freedom and the mother of prosperity and satisfaction, cannot exist. Peace is the goal of a prosperous and satisfying society of free individuals, not peace which is purchased by submission to the enemies of property and freedom, but peace which results from the unyielding defense of these principles against all who challenge them.

In this blog I measure American society against the metrics of property, freedom and peace.

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Monday, October 8, 2012

TIMELINE: Obama's "Romney Is A Liar" Routine

8/9/11 - POLITICO: Obama plan: Destroy Romney
“Unless things change and Obama can run on accomplishments, he will have to kill Romney,” said a prominent Democratic strategist aligned with the White House.
9/6/12 - POLITICO: Verdict is in: Obama levels more personal attacks
— Obama’s campaign has suggested Romney is deceitful or corrupt. Deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter, highlighting inconsistencies in Romney’s explanation of his departure from Bain Capital, suggested that Romney is “misrepresenting his position at Bain to the SEC, which is a felony.” The alternative, she said, is Romney was lying to the American people. Last weekend, Cutter said that Romney and Paul Ryan think “lying is a virtue,” judging from the factual misrepresentations of the GOP convention.
10/4/12 - HUFFINGTON POST: Obama Campaign: Romney Won Debate Because He Lied
Democratic surrogates in the cable TV spin rooms Wednesday night seemed to have trouble explaining President Barack Obama's weak debate performance. By Thursday morning, however, the Obama campaign had settled on a explanation for why their guy lost: Mitt Romney lied. ...

... The campaign has a good point: Romney's policy explanations, particularly about how he was going to pay for $5 trillion in tax cuts, were vague, misleading and riddled with falsehoods. But he delivered them with conviction. Obama supporters will probably be asking themselves how their candidate failed to rebut Romney during the debate, rather than after, until the next meeting between the two on Oct. 16.
10/8/12 - DAILY CALLER: Obama’s staffers changed election strategy during Denver debate
According to the Times’ account, Obama did not participate in the top-level call because he was still on the stage.

The call included his top campaign advisors, David Axelrod and David Plouffe, as well as Jim Messina and Stephanie Cutter, his campaign manger and deputy deputy manager.

However, the Politico account says the new anti-Romney strategy was developed by Obama and his aides the day after the debate.

“He huddled with his inner circle — David Axelrod, David Plouffe, Valerie Jarrett, Anita Dunn, Ron Klain and Jim Messina — and settled on the theme they hammered all of Thursday [Oct. 4] — a direct attack on Romney that accused him of out-and-out lying on his tax-cut claims and portrayed the former Massachusetts governor as a two-faced imposter willing to say anything to win.”
 
OOPS!

In the meantime, how about these REAL Obama lies:
 
ON LIBYA --

 
ON AFGHANISTAN --
Her ominous and frightening message was gleaned from years of covering our wars in the Middle East. She arrived in Chicago on the heels of her Sept. 30 report, “The Longest War.” It examined the Afghanistan conflict and exposed the perils that still confront America, 11 years after 9/11.

Eleven years later, “they” still hate us, now more than ever, Logan told the crowd. The Taliban and al-Qaida have not been vanquished, she added. They’re coming back.

“I chose this subject because, one, I can’t stand, that there is a major lie being propagated . . .” Logan declared in her native South African accent.

The lie is that America’s military might has tamed the Taliban.

“There is this narrative coming out of Washington for the last two years,” Logan said. It is driven in part by “Taliban apologists,” who claim “they are just the poor moderate, gentler, kinder Taliban,” she added sarcastically. “It’s such nonsense!”

Logan stepped way out of the “objective,” journalistic role. The audience was riveted as she told of plowing through reams of documents, and interviewing John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan; Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and a Taliban commander trained by al-Qaida. The Taliban and al-Qaida are teaming up and recruiting new terrorists to do us deadly harm, she reports.

She made a passionate case that our government is downplaying the strength of our enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a rationale of getting us out of the longest war. We have been lulled into believing that the perils are in the past: “You’re not listening to what the people who are fighting you say about this fight. In your arrogance, you think you write the script.”
ON ROMNEY'S ECONOMIC PLAN --
Via The Weekly Standard: Princeton Economist: Obama Campaign Is Misrepresenting My Study on Romney's Tax Plan
Last night, the Obama campaign blasted out another email claiming that Mitt Romney's tax plan would either require raising taxes on the middle class or blowing a hole in the deficit. "Even the studies that Romney has cited to claim his plan adds up still show he would need to raise middle-class taxes," said the Obama campaign press release. "In fact, Harvard economist Martin Feldstein and Princeton economist Harvey Rosen both concede that paying for Romney’s tax cuts would require large tax increases on families making between $100,000 and $200,000."

But that's not true. Princeton professor Harvey Rosen tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD in an email that the Obama campaign is misrepresenting his paper on Romney's tax plan:
I can’t tell exactly how the Obama campaign reached that characterization of my work.  It might be that they assume that Governor Romney wants to keep the taxes from the Affordable Care Act in place, despite the fact that the Governor has called for its complete repeal.  The main conclusion of my study is that  under plausible assumptions, a proposal along the lines suggested by Governor Romney can both be revenue neutral and keep the net tax burden on taxpayers with incomes above $200,000 about the same.  That is, an increase in the tax burden on lower and middle income individuals is not required in order to make the overall plan revenue neutral. 
You can check the math that shows Romney's plan is mathematically possible here.

 'Nuff said.
 

Sunday, October 7, 2012

Why Obama Lost The Last Debate And Will Lose The Next One, And the Next One, And The Next....

Listen carefully to this YouTube video of young Mr. Obama and see if you can make sense of it. A transcript below is provided by "edricle," the person who uploaded the video.


BEGIN TRANSCRIPT -
OBAMA: I think the trick is figuring out how do we structure government systems that pool resources and hence facilitate some redistribution because I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level to make sure that everybody's got a shot. How do we pool resources at the same time as we decentralize delivery systems in ways that both foster competition, can work in the marketplace, and can foster innovation at the local level and can be tailored to particular communities.
- END TRANSCRIPT


Mr. Obama seems to be searching for some kind of "trick" which would make the concepts of "private property" and "public property" have exactly the same meaning.

When an individual's mind is incapable of comprehending the principle "A is A," then no intellectual "trick" seems impossible. Then, literally, anything goes.

The problem is, when such a mind is confronted by reality, for example, by a clear-thinking opponent in debate...blank out!!

John Galt, Atlas Shrugged:
Whatever you choose to consider, be it an object, an attribute or an action, the law of identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.

Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders’ attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man.



Friday, October 5, 2012

Don't Allow Yourself To Be Caught Up In The Thick Of Thin Things

There is a talk show host where I come from that likes to warn his listeners not to get caught up in the thick of thin things. By this, he means, don't get sucked into a debate about insignificant but sexy issues and then lose sight of the really important ones.

This is especially good advice in the political campaign season because politicians and their handlers love to find a sexy molehill and then spin it into a mountain. A case in point is Mitt Romney's wealth (Breaking: Mitt Romney Still Filthy Rich) or Ann Romney's horseback riding (MS and Romney's Horse). These are "thin" issues meant to attract you and then distract you from the critically important issues in this race: Barack Obama's progressive policies and his economic obsolescence.

In Wednesday night's debate President Obama tried to suck the country into a debate about Romney's economic plan which, according to the President, lowers taxes on the wealthy, raises taxes on the middle class, blows up the deficit and cuts "critical" investments in education and biofuels. 

This is from a man who has no economic plan at all, who couldn't pass a budget in Congress, who presided over trillion dollar deficits each year of his Presidency and engineered the greatest total increase in public debt in American history.

Moreover, although he keeps reminding us that he inherited "the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression" from George W. Bush, Obama eagerly re-appointed the man who presided over that financial crisis, Bush's Federal Reserve Chairman, "Helicopter" Ben Bernanke.

All this noisy speculation about the arithmetic of Romney's economic plan is a sideshow meant to distract us from the really important issues of this campaign: Barack Obama's failed Keynesian economic policies and progressive ideology.

This is not to say that Mitt Romney is an Ayn Rand-like advocate of the free market. His comment that free economies need to be regulated is oxymoronic. Still, Romney doesn't hitch his wagon of economic recovery to a retread promise of hiring 100,000 new government workers, or creating two million more "slots" in government schools, or converting pond scum into diesel fuel.

The thrust of Romney's rhetoric is economic growth in the private sector. The thrust of Obama's rhetoric is government growth, following the pattern he set in his first term.
 
In 2009 Obama signed a near trillion dollar Stimulus package that stimulated the pockets of Democratic Party special interests but little else.   

In 2010 Obama signed the monstrous ObamaCare act that will serve as a prelude to a single payer, government-run health care system unless it is repealed.

In 2011 Obama proposed a second Stimulus package of $447-billion, this time labeling his effort to expand the size of government a "Jobs" package.

In late December, 2011 Obama told 60 Minutes that his first Stimulus package should have been "even larger."

In an interview with the Daily Caller Congressional Democrat Mike Honda of California and the Congressional Progressive Caucus summed up the Keynesian economic ideology that drives him and, no doubt, the President and his administration:
“We know that if we invest money into this economy and get cash into people’s hands, they’ll spend it and once they start spending the money, it starts to circulate through our economy and it’ll stimulate the economy and we’ve done this other times before. It [The 99 Percent Act] will increase our deficit but we need to increase our deficit right now to make that investment and make that place so that we can get this thing started.”
This is the kind of obsolete and addled economic reasoning that over the last hundred years has gotten us into the mess we're in. This is the kind of economic policy we've had for the last four years. This is the economic policy that Barack Obama promises to continue the next four years.

Don't allow yourself to get caught up in the thick of thin things and lose sight of this simple but critically important truth.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

MUST READ! Debbie Schlussel: "Study Shows Female Economists Exceptionally Stupid (& Very Far-Left)"

Debbie Schlussel is not a shrinking violet.

I've been reading her blog for years and, frankly, I'm a fan. She says what she thinks and usually her thinking is sound. Yeah, every now and then she posts something sorta off the wall. She's always controversial.

[By the way, she is also the most reliable, informative and honest movie critic around. Her timely and prodigious movie reviews have saved me the price of admission many times over.] 

Her latest post: Study Shows Female Economists Exceptionally Stupid (& Very Far-Left) is no exception.

She begins with this paragraph:
If women were not allowed to vote, the better candidate would usually win the Presidential race. That’s because women are more liberal, more likely to be Democrats, and in poll after poll, more clueless and unlikely to know what they are talking about with regard to Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates, the candidates’ backgrounds, and their positions on issues. And so it goes with female economists, where the gender gap is a gender chasm. A University of Nebraska-Lincoln study shows that female economists are stupid (which probably has a lot to do with affirmative action for chicks in math and sciences, every step of the way from education to career) and far to the left.
Whoa! I told ya, she's no shrinking violet. But does she know what she's talking about?

The meat of her article is in this graph:









The data is from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln study she refers to above.

According to the source article in USA Today:
"As a group, we are pro-market," says Ann Mari May, co-author of the study and a University of Nebraska economist. "But women are more likely to accept government regulation and involvement in economic activity than our male colleagues."
This acceptance of government regulation blows my mind, as do the results in the table above regarding both genders. Since when is it the job of an economist to speak in terms of "should?" And the "minimum wage hikes" item is completely unanswerable by any economist without knowing if the "hike" is above, at, or below the market wage rate which would otherwise obtain.

The USA article also states:
The biggest disagreement: 76% of women say faculty opportunities in economics favor men. Male economists point the opposite way: 80% say women are favored or the process is neutral.

To which Ms. Schlussel declares:
The few male economists who said the process favors men are the ones who surrendered their testicles a long time ago.
Fair warning. Schlussel has a pair. If you're going to use any of the material in her blog, you had better give her credit, as I have done. If you don't, she'll let you know about it. She's a lawyer by trade.

Obama From Last Night's Debate: "It's -- it's math. It's arithmetic."


Monday, October 1, 2012

Pat Caddell: Media Have Become An "Enemy Of The American People"

I've always liked Pat Caddell. I believe he was a pollster for Bill Clinton. But even then when I saw him on TV interviews I was impressed by his willingness to tell it like it is regardless of whose ox is gored.

The headline above is from a story in Real Clear Politics. Watch the video.

Do you think Pat Caddell is exaggerating? Take a look at the headlines below. You and I know about them because they appeared on either the Drudge Report or Weasel Zippers. Little or no mention in the mainstream media.

Now ask yourself: If these headlines were about a Republican incumbent or a Republican administration, would they appear in the mainstream press, or not?

Obama Admin Offers To Reimburse Defense Contractors For Severance Costs If They Wait Until After Election To Send Layoff Notices…

Shocking Video Of Joe Biden In 2007: America “Reaping What We Have Sown” On Katrina, Virginia Tech Massacre, Darfur Because Of The GOP…

Report: Eric Holder Participated In Radical Black Group’s “Armed” Takeover Of Columbia University ROTC Office While A Student…

Univision report connects Operation Fast and Furious scandal to murders of Mexican teenagers

WaPo Poll: OMG! Obama Up 11 Points In Swing States! Race Is Over! – Reality: 160 People Surveyed, 8-Point Margin Of Error…


Now, giving credit where credit is due. The following headlines DID appear in the MSM:

Huge tax increase looms at year-end 'fiscal cliff'

Obama Supporters' Dirty Tricks to Win the Catholic Vote

WaPo Fact Checker Destroys Obama’s Claim That The Bush Tax Cuts Led To The Economic Crisis…


That's commendable. But you can be sure these stories won't be discussed on MSNBC.