*Written by Rob Rimes.

I had a long weekend but it is now over. My time in Gainesville with my cousin and friends was a blast, as I haven’t actually been partying too hard over the last month. This trip was a good way for me to drown in bourbon, Irish whiskey, tequila, Long Islands, Guinness, ginger beer and Pabst. I’ve been trying to be healthier in an attempt to lose weight and potentially live a somewhat longer life but even with my more health conscious attitude, my inner party monster still needs to be entertained and unleashed every now and again. What better time than with other party monsters that I genuinely cherish in a wild college town during graduation weekend? There was no point in taking any prisoners, as we ran roughshod over downtown Gainesville leaving no bottle unturned. A few days later, my stomach still hurts and my head is still swimming in a sea of 86 proof delirium – a special shout out goes to 1.75 liters of Old Crow Reserve.

To those who might find my more health conscious behavior a bit unsettling, there is no need to worry. It’s not called selling out when you do it because your liver hurts and you’ve been pissing blood. The blood part was not related to the booze but it was still a wake up call to straighten my shit out some what. Have no fear though, I will not go soft and become a shell of my former self like so many writers and artists who went clean only for their work to suffer and lose its appeal. Trent Reznor immediately comes to mind, although his Academy Award for a very boring and minimalist film score probably proves me wrong but only if you take the Academy seriously and turn a blind eye to their petty politics.

Anyway, my first night in Gainesville on this latest trip was intense. It started almost immediately with two Guinness Draughts and four Long Island iced teas while I watched my friends play pool. I didn’t participate in the contest because I was enjoying my own game of drown the writer in the dark and dingy corner of smoke and neon light. It is a one-player game but the odds are always steep and the challenge is never dull. Needless to say, I won the bout and went on to fight in other bouts in other venues for the remainder of the 48 hour tournament.

The weekend wasn’t all about completely succumbing to vices however. I mean, I never came across any other substances to entertain myself with and that’s fine, the booze was enough. I did get to spend a lot of the time talking politics and economics with the college kids, some of them a part of the Occupy Gainesville movement. Now while we didn’t see eye-to-eye on solutions, we did agree on the vast majority of the problems. My job, from my standpoint, was to try and get them to understand that you can’t just blame the banks for the madness. The government is just as responsible as is the Federal Reserve. Truth is, they were really receptive to a lot of the things I was saying. Now I had half a dozen conversations with a dozen or more people but for the most part, other than two or three close-minded joiners, they got what I was saying and left the conversations with the intent to look into their new perspective on these matters themselves. One of them even promised to pick up some of the books I wrote down for him on a napkin (titles by Ron Paul, Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Milton Friedman and more modern authors Jeffrey Tucker and Stefan Molyneux – who has a ton of free e-books).

One interesting thing I discovered among talking to multiple college kids, is that their only real beef with Ron Paul is his pro-life stance. I told them that it is an issue I also disagree with Dr. Paul on. However, I told them that if you look at the rest of his platform and like it, writing him off over one issue is a bit careless. Especially since Dr. Paul thinks that it should be an issue left up to states and not the federal government regardless of his personal opinion on it. Most of these kids understood that but had a hard time envisioning a country were states’ rights were protected, at least on this issue. I explained that you cannot pick and choose issues and that the rule had to apply with everything. If you make one exception, you will make plenty more. They got and respected it but still had a bug in their ass about it and I get that. I then spoke to them about Gary Johnson who is basically a clone of Ron Paul policy-wise but is pro-choice instead of pro-life. Most of the people I talked to had not heard of Johnson and were actually pretty excited upon finding out his stance on the abortion issue. They also liked that Gary Johnson was not a Democrat or a Republican. I didn’t bring up all the issues they said they had with Obama however, as there were a lot more than what they had with Paul. Regardless of this, they will probably vote for Obama again even though they claim they are opposed to war, Gitmo and a plethora of other issues he has failed them on.

Now don’t get me wrong, not everyone was cordial. There were those few dumb bastards in the mix and fucking with them and sending them off in a self-conlficted rage was quite amusing. One kid was calling for anarchy and at the same time was calling for government to step in and regulate the banks more. Point is, this kid’s whole world-view was completely hypocritical. On one hand, this kid (and those like him) want to scream “Fuck the man!” and “Fuck the police!” while on the other hand want the government (the man and the police) to step in and regulate everything even more than they do now. I don’t understand how so many young people can’t seem to make a correlation between these two things? You want the government who is bought and paid for by the banks to regulate the banks? You can’t see how this is completely asinine, let alone how this is what has caused all these problems to begin with? Your solution to the problem is more of the problem itself? Does the meth addict break the cycle by taking more meth? No, the meth addict dies! Common sense is like a disease in the hipster socialist-anarchist psyche.

The ones who are so passionate in their ignorance don’t even care about the real crux of the problem. They want to continue to buy into their conflicted and hypocritical indoctrination and smash anyone who doesn’t swim in their sea of shit. On top of that, they don’t want to better themselves, they want to stay at the bottom so they can continue to bitch as they wallow in dirt and filth because if they were to try and actually get out of it, they’d be outed as a “sell out” or even worse a “hard-working capitalist pig consumer”. Yep, keep pointing your Djarum-clutching fingers as you slur your PBR-soaked words kiddies.

Not all is lost on the generation after mine however. Amongst the sea of those I dealt with, only a few were bad apples and completely hopeless. I remember myself at that age, as I had a similar view of the world. It was someone challenging me on my preconceived notions that got me to pay attention and learn how this whole game really works. If at least one of those kids breaks free from the mold and is affected by our encounter, my debt is repaid. I enjoyed the friendly and civil debates and even had fun with the assholes. In the end, it is about standing your ground and living by your own code not the code of some undefined group whose ideology is lesser than the sum of its parts.

I got home, feeling pretty good about how most of the weekend went down. I also felt great for ignoring my responsibilities for a few days while not even paying attention to what was going on in the news. I didn’t really miss anything, other than Rick Santorum finally wiping away his bitch tears to endorse Mitt Romney, which just gave me flashbacks to 2008 when he was riding that Romney train hard. Something tells me that if I had the same debates with Santorum supporters that I had with the college youth of Gainesville, it wouldn’t have been as civil. I hope that all of those sweater-vests the Santorumites bought up like quaaludes at a disco are constructed of Iranian dog hair and Chinese asbestos. It would be the perfect ending to such a vile group of people.

When a presidential candidate declares, as Ron Paul has, “We’re all Austrians now,”  it’s inevitable that his critics would try to discredit him—whether they understand what he’s talking about or not. That’s what Matthew Yglesias does in his Slate piece “What Is ‘Austrian Economics’?”

I recommend the piece because it’s highly informative—about what Austrian economics is not.

We’re off to a rocky start with this: “The Austrian school originally referred to a set of classical liberal thinkers with diverse interests who came out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.”

The earliest Austrian economists did not make their mark by advocating free markets and other classical-liberal ideas. They did so by proffering a revolutionary positive (not normative) theoretical approach to understanding how markets work, focusing on value, price, and capital, theory. What Wikipedia says is consistent with my understanding of the matter: “When Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, and [Friedrich von] Wieser began their careers in science, they were not focused on economic policy issues, much less in the rejection of intervention promoted by classical liberalism. Their common vocation was to develop an economic theory on a firm basis.”

Economics vs. Politics

Yglesias thus conflates Austrian economic theory with libertarian political theory. In fairness, he is not alone in committing this error. Many libertarians do the same, which is unfortunate. Austrian economic theory describes how purposive action by fallible human beings unintentionally generates a grand, complex, and orderly market process. An additional ethical step is required to pronounce the market process good. Economic theory per se cannot recommend but only explain markets. This is what Ludwig von Mises meant when he insisted that Austrian economics is value-free. Anyone of any persuasion ought to be able to acknowledge that economic logic indicates that imposing a price ceiling on milk will, other things equal, create a shortage of milk. But that in itself is not an argument against the policy. Mises assumed the policymaker would have thought that result bad, but the economist qua economist cannot declare it such. As Israel Kirzner likes to say, the economist’s job in the policy realm is merely to point out that you cannot catch a northbound train from the southbound platform.

Yglesias writes: “Austrians reject the idea that there is anything at all the government can do to stabilize macroeconomic fluctuations.” It’s odd to say this without also pointing out that Austrians believe that government causes the instability of inflationary booms, recessions, and depressions. In light of that point, the suggestion that government is capable of stabilizing the economy may be seen in its proper light.

That said, Yglesias’s statement is not quite right. Some prominent Austrian macroeconomists think that in a second-best world, the central bank (which of course wouldn’t exist in a first-best world) should counteract a sudden and substantial monetary contraction. In other words, deflation is not necessarily a cure for inflation. Mises made the point metaphorically in 1938: “If a man has been hurt by being run over by an automobile, it is no remedy to let the car go back over him in the [opposite] direction.” (See Steven Horwitz’s “Deflation: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” )

Distorts Markets

“In the view of the Austrians,” Yglesias goes on, “practically every economic policy pursued by the federal government and Federal Reserve is a mistake that distorts markets. Rather than curing recessions, claim Austrians, stimulative policies cause them by producing unsustainable bubbles.” Well, yeah, and it’s amply demonstrated by George Selgin, William D. Lastrapes, and Lawrence H. White in“Has the Fed Been a Failure?” (See my summary, “‘F’ as in Fed.” ) As they put it:

Drawing on a wide range of recent empirical research, we find the following: (1) The Fed’s full history (1914 to present) has been characterized by more rather than fewer symptoms of monetary and macroeconomic instability than the decades leading to the Fed’s establishment. (2) While the Fed’s performance has undoubtedly improved since World War II, even its postwar performance has not clearly surpassed that of its undoubtedly flawed predecessor, the National Banking system, before World War I. (3) Some proposed alternative arrangements might plausibly do better than the Fed as presently constituted. We conclude that the need for a systematic exploration of alternatives to the established monetary system is as pressing today as it was a century ago.

Yglesias understands that the Austrian theory of the business cycle has something to do with artificially low interest rates breeding malinvestment, but he thinks it can’t be right because “it’s hard to understand why business people would be so easily duped in this way. If Ron Paul and Ludwig von Mises know that cheap money can’t last forever, why don’t private investors? Why wouldn’t firms avoid making the supposedly dumb investments?”

Gerald P. O’Driscoll and Mario Rizzo addressed this long ago in The Economics of Time and Ignorance:

[T]here are profits to be made from exploiting temporary situations. . . . Though entrepreneurs understand [the macro-aspects of a cycle] they cannot predict the exact features of the next cyclical expansion and contraction. . . . They lack the ability to make micro-predictions, even though they can predict the general sequence of events that will occur. These entrepreneurs have no reason to foreswear the temporary profits to be garnered in an inflationary episode. . . . From an individual perspective, then, an entrepreneur fully informed of the Austrian theory of economic cycles will face essentially the same uncertain world he always faced. Not theoretical or abstract knowledge, but knowledge of the circumstances of time and place is the source of profits.

Spending Shifts

Puzzlingly, Yglesias also thinks he can refute the Austrian theory by noting that “[s]pending patterns shift all the time without sparking a recession.” To which, Peter Klein replies, “Of course, Yglesias’s breezy summary of the theory skips over the time structure of production, the difference between consumption and investment, the role of interest rates in securing intertemporal coordination, the problem of expectations, and the other basic elements of the theory, which ten minutes of Wikipedia browsing could have explained.”

Yglesias reveals his unfamiliarity with the Austrian literature when he writes, “Many of the original Austrians found their business cycle ideas discredited by the Great Depression, in which the bust was clearly not self-correcting.” Considering that Herbert Hoover’s and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Dealimpeded the market’s correction process, one wonders how the 1930s could possibly have discredited the Austrian theory of the origin of recessions.

Finally, Yglesias contends that “the Austrian school . . . preaches despair and demands no action at all.”

Balderdash. Since it explains that busts are central-bank-caused and hence avoidable through market-based money and banking, its implicit message is one of hope and optimism. And as for demanding no action, on the contrary, it puts forth a long list of actions for those who want stable economic growth—all of them designed to dismantle the interventionist state.

Sheldon Richman is editor of The Freeman, where this article originally appeared.

Source: Reason.

You should probably read this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this to understand where my economic philosophy is coming from. Anyway, apart from reading those, you should probably already see what is wrong with this movement.

*Written by Rob Rimes.

*This is directed at those who wrote these silly demands and anyone who has adopted them as their own personal demands. I know there are good people protesting that get what’s going on. I tip my hat to the few of you.

Over the last few weeks a new movement has risen from the ashes here in America. I guess when the right has the Tea Party, it should be expected that the left would have to answer with their own grassroots movement. And like the Tea Party, this new movement known as Occupy Wall Street isn’t just comprised of one specific group of people. It is full of people from all different walks of life. There is a melting pot of several different political ideologies and I’m sure many of these people, just like the Tea Party, are convinced that they are doing the right thing to help better our country and save us all from economic peril. Unfortunately, like with many movements in this country, there seems to be some confusion between capitalism and corporatism.

Here are some of these OWS idiots that are really confused by their own maroonish doublespeak.

These people, despite their idiocy, are probably good people they are just unable to allow their view of the world to be challenged, even by logic and reason. I guess protesting blindly is easier than dealing with reality and owning up to your own responsibilities and life decisions.

As far as the OWS organization goes, I know that the “demands” of this group, as posted on their website (here) don’t necessarily fit with everyone who is out protesting against Wall Street, however this group is the driving force of this movement. They have organized this thing from the very beginning. This list of demands should scare anyone with their economic wits about them. It should really frighten anyone with a bit of common sense but I understand why these ideas are attractive to the lazy entitled fucks who chose to go to college but now can’t afford it because they are too busy sitting at rallies to go and apply for a damn job. Sitting on their asses smoking hookahs and strumming guitars with their other underachieving buddies while not even being sure what they are protesting can’t be the cause of their undoing. Nope.. it has to be Wall Street’s fault. But at least they feel good about themselves today!

Anyway, this list of demands from Occupy Wall Street is complete bullshit and doesn’t really make a lick of sense, well to a normal hardworking person that has some basic knowledge in economics anyway. So let me break it down for you line by line and explain to the unenlightened why their strategy isn’t just foolhardy, it is laughable and borderline ridiculous. The problem with it is that it reads like a series of random tweets strung together as a blog. I’ll do my best.

Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending “Freetrade” by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr.

M’kay.. if you can’t see all the things that are wrong with this demand I’m not sure I can help you but I’ll try.

You see, in a nutshell a “living wage” is, according to Wikipedia, “the minimum hourly income necessary for a worker to meet basic needs (for an extended period of time or for a lifetime).” The needs included in this are shelter, food, utilities, transport, health care and even recreation. Essentially, a person working forty hours a week should be able to afford these things without having to get a second job.

A living wage is incredibly problematic. First of all, it doesn’t actually help the impoverished and long-term it will cause more harm than good for everyone. One of the reasons is due to the high-cost of implementing and managing this sort of legislation. Like with everything the government does, where does the money come from? It comes from the taxpayers (that’s you). However, I understand that this movement thinks that there are seemingly unlimited funds that can be ganked from evil corporations.

Truth is, even though you OWS peeps believe that corporations should be contributing to this stupid idea, they don’t have bottomless pits for pockets. To be forced to pay up in an effort to give fair living wages to those who may be less-skilled prevents a corporation from giving more money to incentivize the highly-skilled workers. Eventually, the highly- skilled workers will stop giving a fuck and no one will benefit. You can’t ride on coattails forever and without consequence.

Another problem with living wages is that if you give someone an inch (especially a lazy entitled fucksack) they are going to take seventy miles. How long would it be before lobbying groups start demanding that their products or services are essential for man’s survival. If these lobbyists succeed, which some will, how much will the living wage have to increase? It is a never-ending cycle of shit that we would never be able to shake off. Besides, all this whining about corporations and lobbyists corrupting politicians and empowering Wall Street would become pretty damn hypocritical if this is the route this takes. Just a little bit of common sense should reveal that this IS the route it would take and therefore this is completely counter-productive to what the Occupy Wall Street organizers truly want. And is that inflation that I smell? How else are you going to sustain an unsustainable economic policy?

The first demand also calls for an end to free trade and for the government to re-impose tariffs on ALL foreign goods. This is completely asinine and it is obvious that the author of these demands has never read Friedman, Mises, Rothbard, Hayek or Hazlitt. Tariffs are bad for business, as is an elimination of free trade. Not only is it bad for business but it is bad for foreign policy. It divides us from the rest of the world and builds barriers instead of bridges. When we all cooperate and have the freedom to choose who we do business with, we all win.

Tariffs do not benefit family farming and manufacturing as the above demand states. Keeping it as simple as I can, tariffs make products that reach our shores from foreign lands cost more. Who pays for that cost? You do! So does this force you to buy American? Does that really matter? Either way you are forced to pay more. This fallacy that foreign companies delivering cheap goods is somehow immoral and destructive to our economy is ridiculous. This fear of jobs being shipped overseas has become a regurgitated talking point that represents a lack of understanding of how we all benefit from free trade.

The last thing this enormous first demand calls for is a twenty dollar an hour minimum wage! What the fuck? So do you want the living wage or the minimum wage? A living wage is typically higher than a minimum wage but a twenty dollar an hour wage is insane and well beyond the amount it would take for someone to live. This calls for everyone to make a MINIMUM of $41,600 per year! There are 312,000,000 people in the United States. When you multiply the number of people by the demanded minimum yearly salary you get $12,979,200,000,000 dollars! That’s just under $13 trillion! Our entire national debt that is strangling us is $14.7 trillion! So essentially these idiots want us to somehow magically dish out almost the equivalent to our entire national debt on a yearly basis! Nope, these people are perfectly sane economic wizards.

Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to wall st. investors.

Do I even need to tap into this one? Have you paid attention to the criticism of Obamacare over the last few years? If after just these two demands you can’t see the socialist, if not communist, tendencies of this movement, you have to be completely ignorant to the fundamentals of either philosophy. In retrospect, this is just something else that these punk ass parasites want for free without having to really work for it. The people leading this movement are calling for the government to grow exponentially in a way that will take care of absolutely every aspect of their lives. Some people just refuse to be adults and make their own mark in the world. It’s easier to have everyone else wipe your ass apparently.

But I shouldn’t be so insensitive, I shouldn’t come across as so unkind. What I should do is be tolerant of this idiocy, right? I should explain why it is not a good idea to be a complete fucking loser and a burdensome leech.

Truth is, I’ve covered the health care issue already in my article “The Five Developmental Stages of the Progressive Beast, Part V: Barack H. Obama, Hope, Change & Health Care“. I don’t really need to rewrite what I covered there in a whopping 1,900 words. I think I, as well as several dozen other writers or pundits, have been outspoken against the tyranny of universal health care for quite some time. I’m tired of beating a dead horse. Unfortunately, you still unenlightened folks aren’t tired of asking for handouts and welfare that you have no intention of ever paying back because to do so, for you, would be immoral. However, for you, it is morally right to expect others to pick up the tab because you haven’t developed the skills to compete and survive in the real world.

The thing is, universal health care isn’t going to solve anyone’s problem. Medical care is expensive, no one denies that but eliminating competition and forcing people into a poorly-run government alternative is only going to make the problem much worse. Besides, it is government involvement that makes health care expensive right now! So how is more government involvement going to fix the problem? A question I always ask is, “What has the government ever done well?” Apparently to these dreamy OWS organizers the answer is “everything”. If you want to continue down the road of crony capitalism and corporatism, go for universal health care. For this group to not see the hypocrisy of this request boggles my mind.

Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.

Man oh man, this is really their third demand. Shouldn’t this be part of the first demand that calls for a living wage? It is like the author of these demands jotted down a quick thought and forgot to re-organize this list before publishing it. In any event, I guess we are revisiting the living wage issue.

So just when you thought the living wage demand was crazy, thy are now demanding it regardless of employment! So do they want minimum wage or a living wage? Which is it? Why isn’t this made clear. I assume that the minimum wage is for those working and the living wage is for those who are or aren’t working. Am I to assume that they are calling for a collection of both? Now a living wage is usually more than a minimum wage and I broke down how much it would cost to give out their proposed minimum wage of twenty bucks an hour. So imagine getting the equivalent to twenty bucks and hour (minimum wage) and then more than twice that (living wage)! Wow! There would be no more poverty! Everyone would at least be in the middle class. Too bad no one can afford this and in the end, this would make us all dead broke.

This demand is completely and utterly preposterous! To even entertain the idea that this is somehow possible is fucking ludicrous! They might as well ask for ten bars of gold to be handed to them by leprechauns every morning they wake up and grace us with their presence.

At the end of the day, who the hell is going to work to provide for those who do not want to work? Where is the incentive? How long would it be before everyone quit to milk the living wage regardless of employment status? When no one is working, then who is paying for it? The answer: no one.

Demand four: Free college education.

Oh Jesus, here we go. Yes education is expensive but there is also education that isn’t expensive. Almost anyone can go to community college and get a good education for next to nothing compared to big universities. At the same time, who is to say that we all need college?

College isn’t for everyone but we’re all programed to accept the fact that this is what someone is supposed to do after high school, just as we’re all programed to get married, have kids and buy a house. The reason I am even using this as an example is to point out that if college is free, everyone is probably going to go. Well, maybe not everyone but a lot more people will go to free college than go to college that they’d have to pay for. While it may seem good to encourage more people to expand their education beyond the high school level, it will be our tax dollars paying for all these half-assed students looking for a free lunch.

Apart from all that, why in the hell would you want the government to handle your continued education when they can’t even effectively run the current public education system? While test scores and student performances continue to plummet, you want to introduce this system into universities? Do you really want a surgeon to cut you open that was educated by a public university? Really? You do?

Like health care, part of the reason why education is so expensive is because of government meddling and their involvement. The crony capitalism and corporatism has infiltrated the colleges and driven costs up. Basically OWS calls for an end to these things by calling for more of these things. Why? Because they don’t have a clue how this all works and really, I doubt they care.

Demand five: Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand.

I had a huge article debunking all the bullshit surrounding alternative energy. Read my article “Recycled Myths & Renewable Scams” for an extensive analysis of every major alternative energy source. I’m not going to rehash all my talking points from that massive article but I will give you a brief rundown.

To start, the entire world is currently dependent on fossil fuels for everything. In fact, you can’t even create most of these other alternative energy sources without using fossil fuels in the process. Fast tracking a process to bring fossil fuels to an end makes absolutely no sense if you understand how this stuff works. OWS obviously doesn’t.

Now there is nothing wrong with trying to work towards getting away from fossil fuels but one has to be realistic about it. Every other energy source comes with its own big list of pros and cons. Just because a bag of goods is sold to you as something, doesn’t mean that the sales pitch was accurate. This is the case with most of these green energy alternatives. You have to keep in mind that the green movement has a pretty diabolical agenda but then again so does Occupy Wall Street based off of their list of demands.

Demand six: One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now.

The question I have is that if they want us to use an entire trillion for infrastructure, can we subtract it from their living wage and minimum wage demands? Nope, I doubt they’d go for that. At least they don’t have a problem forcing the rest of us to pay for it.

The fact that they are asking for this makes me realize that they have no idea how much a trillion dollars really is. Do they think that Wall Street or the government can just write a trillion dollar check? They’re aware that we are already trillions in debt right? Oh but the Federal Reserve can just print more money right? Yeah, the problem with this whole movement is they don’t even know who the enemy is, more on the Fed at the end of this article.

Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America’s nuclear power plants.

Awesome, these parasites want us to throw around another magic trillion that we can somehow manifest from thin air. This demand is equally ridiculous as the last one and virtually the same.

Sure we need to take care of our environment but lets be real about it. Where is this money going to come from? I mean the running tab for these demands is insane and we’re only about halfway through this list here! Again, these people just don’t know how the financial system works and their impression of economics is like something from a Narnia book. I guess shit just magically appears! Must be a cool dream.

As far as the nuclear power point, again alternative energy is nowhere where it needs to be to take over.  Nuclear power may seem scary when buying into all the hype but it is an efficient source of energy and pretty damn safe when managed properly and not struck by a combination of earthquakes and tsunamis. I already debunked many of the anti-nuclear arguments in my article “Recycled Myths & Renewable Scams“.

Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights amendment.

Actually, everyone should have equal rights if they follow the Constitution. If individual rights are applied to all we would all be able to live equally. However even in the days of the Founding Fathers individual rights were grossly violated as slavery still existed. Point is, if people would respect individual rights we would all be on a level playing field. We don’t need an amendment to legislate this we just need to follow what has already been written.

What OWS is calling for here however is actually a violation of individual rights. Once again doublethink and doublespeak take over and they try to fight against what they perceive as tyranny by employing the same method that they are fighting against. Let me explain their folly.

Essentially, these guys want the government to come in and regulate fairness. This never works, in fact to force people to comply to this “fairness” and “equality” creates an imbalance by having a negative impact on the forced party’s individual and property rights. You can’t force people to play nice and to do business with each other. I mean, you can but at the end of the day it is tyrannical and it violates their constitutional rights.

This is the same argument that Barry Goldwater used, which ultimately didn’t get him elected but just like then, the people today can’t see the forest for the trees. Civil rights laws were tyrannical and monstrous and only made the leviathan bigger. This is just another classic example of how bad consequences can occur as the result of good intentions. Although these OWS shitcocks don’t care, they just want as much free shit as they can get.

Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live.

I don’t oppose this demand in theory but I do have my two cents to add. If we were to allow open borders migration, we would have to end the welfare system as it is. In fact, I wrote about this in my article “Conservatives & Aliens“. However, following the track record of this group’s demands can only lead one to the conclusion that they want to implement this with the welfare system still intact. If that were the case, this would be a fiscal nightmare!

People would flock here and our population would explode all because everyone would be trying to get a living wage as well as a job with a minimum wage of twenty bucks an hour. I laid out how horrible this would work out with our current population numbers, well imagine how bad it would be with an explosion in immigration. Again, who would pay for this? These OWS kids haven’t really thought this shit through.

Besides, eventually we would run out of money. It would happen pretty fast mind you and then where would these people go, what would we do? We’d all be poor and trapped in an overpopulated mess with a shattered economy. Wall Street would certainly fall but so would America. There is absolutely no way we could ever sustain these idiotic policies. Even a kindergarten economist should see that!

Demand ten: Bring American elections up to international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in front of an independent and party observers system.

Here’s a demand from this group that I fully agree with. In all honesty, the electoral system in this country is corrupt and time and time again these ballot machines have failed. There have been tons of issues over the years, most notably the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore and the 2004 presidential election between George W. Bush and John Kerry. There were also some fishy outcomes during the 2010 midterm elections. Harry Reid’s sketchy victory over Sharron Angle comes to mind.

Essentially, the process we have now is pretty fucked and unreliable. It makes one think that this whole thing is rigged. Not to jump the gun or anything but what is one to think with these closed, secretive electoral processes? We need to control our votes and everything needs to be out in the open. To suggest otherwise is to accept and perpetuate electoral corruption. Why would they want it to be so shadowy if they weren’t tinkering with something? The ruling class is tricky and they will stop at nothing to dictate the direction of government.

Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the “Books.” World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the “Books.” And I don’t mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.

This is beyond idiotic! In fact, this may be the dumbest damn thing on this list of demands and that’s saying a lot! Did Tyler Durden write this? At least he took the bull by the horns and took out the credit card companies like a champ. However Hollywood heroes are typically just that, Hollywood heroes. These people have obviously watched ‘Fight Club’ too many times and are convinced that this is the morally right thing to do. Ah.. that youthful angst!

So OWS really wants to erase any trace of debt whatsoever? So essentially, what they are saying is that they are unwilling to man up to their responsibilities as human beings and they are unwilling to fulfill their contractual obligations with whomever because fuck it, who wants to be forced to pay for what they use. These people are so weak and deluded that it is disgusting. Don’t give me that evil corporations preying on innocent victims bullshit, you idiots just don’t feel that you are obligated to pay the price for the things you have benefitted from. Everything should be free! So again, who the fuck is going to pay for this? Someone has to pay the debt, you can’t just wipe it out unless you intend for EVERYTHING to collapse. Are these people really this fucking ignorant?

Here’s an example. If I am a bank and a customer comes to me for a loan, I should be able to look at his credit and determine if the person deserves a loan and if they do, what the terms should be based off of their own personal fiscal responsibility. Why would I give a loan to someone who has horrible credit and who obviously doesn’t intend to pay me back?

This whole thing is so ridiculous, trying to even argue against it is pointless because the person who would support such a demand is a helpless weakling whose word is worth dirt. Man the fuck up people you’re embarrassing yourselves!

Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies.

Are you shitting me? This really just goes with the last demand and my points are virtually the same with this one. Credit agencies exist for a reason and that reason is to inform us how others we do business with handle their money. Granted credit agencies are in the pocket of Wall Street and help contribute to the corruption of corporatism but to flat out outlaw them is just careless and brainless. The pure and utter stupidity of these demands is mind-boggling!

Man oh man do these fucktards want to absolve themselves of any responsibility whatsoever! Let’s fight for a new America where we can be free of tyranny, responsibility, obligation, tuition and our word! I’m surprised there isn’t a demand for weekly drop-offs of Slim Jims, Djarums, Sno Balls and Red Bull.

Demand thirteen: Allow all workers to sign a ballot at any time during a union organizing campaign or at any time that represents their yeah or nay to having a union represent them in collective bargaining or to form a union.

Damn it I’m spent. Do I need to rip this shit apart anymore? Unions are garbage and they stifle productivity, eliminate jobs and do way more harm than good. Not to mention that they are typically full of thugs ready to crack your skull open if you oppose them. Unions shut doors, they certainly don’t open them.

Final Statement: These demands will create so many jobs it will be completely impossible to fill them without an open borders policy.

These fuckers are so goddamned delusional that this whole laughable list has lost its charm and the funny is gone. Has a single person involved in organizing this movement and their demands ever read a real book on economics? Maybe they’re just recycling some indoctrinated bullshit that they got from some Marxist professor they don’t intend to pay. That final statement in reference to this list is so nonsensical it gave me a migraine and made me throw up a little bit.

These demands would destroy our economy, cripple our country and cost us countless jobs. We would be in one hell of a shitpickle if these totalitarian stooges had their way. It makes me wonder who is actually behind this movement because there is absolutely no mention of the Federal Reserve, who they should be fighting against instead of Wall Street. There is no mention of our involvement in all these wars: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the War on Drugs and the War on Poverty. There’s no calling for Obama to be held accountable for his crimes and his involvement in Wall Street-Washington cronyism.

The best place to start looking at is at the author of this list of demands. His name is Lloyd J. Hart. Apparently he intends to go to his own rally but he needs a ride. To me that is hilarious and says so much about the cockpuppets running this show. I’m surprised the list of demands doesn’t call for free Subaru Outbacks. See for yourself in the picture to the right, that was taken from his profile on the Occupy Wall Street website. I hope you found a fucking ride Lloyd. By the way, check out his Facebook (here), which he no longer uses after trolling and spamming people while only acquiring 16 likes.

It has also come out in the last few days that people like George Soros and Van Jones are supporting Occupy Wall Street. Why is this not surprising? While they publicly offer support, I wonder if they themselves are pulling any strings?

You see people, you have to know who and what you are dealing with. I know many of you involved in this movement don’t follow this bullshit philosophy or want these moronic demands, you just want to end the tyranny that exists between Washington and Wall Street. The people organizing this want so much more however. Realistically, they are calling for pure totalitarianism. These people believe that the more the government gets involved in these matters, the better off we’ll be. Yeah, that same government that is owned by Wall Street. Do you see the hypocrisy?

The problem is, for those of you who truly want to end the tyranny of the financial system, you are fighting the wrong battle. Yes Wall Street is corrupt but the real battle that needs to be fought is with the Federal Reserve. I implore all of you that haven’t to read G. Edward Griffin’s book “The Creature From Jekyll Island“. You need to educate yourself on the tyranny and unlimited power of the Federal Reserve. Until we address the real enemy, going after Wall Street is pointless.

To those of you going down there because it just “feels right” and it “feels good”, stop being fucking joiners and spend some of that time sitting around in the park by putting a book in your hands and educating yourself on what it is you think you know. This country breeds too many weak parasites trying to suck the blood of those of us who truly work hard and earn the fruits of our labor. Don’t be one of those vampires, they are the ones who create these problems that they are trying to solve.

Not everyone is a joiner though, there are guys like the dude in the video below that give me hope because not everyone down there can be classified as blind sheep acting on an impulse.

How refreshing. At least someone down there knows the enemy.

*Taken from the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Written by Jeffrey A. Tucker.

Did you ever have the feeling that we’ve been through this before?

Think of it. Those in charge have only recently sworn — yet again! — that if we keep interest rates at zero, keep battling the symptoms of recession and unemployment with spending and jobs programs, clobber the speculators with regulations, and otherwise keep trying to revive moribund industries, all will be well. Just don’t cut government spending or let interest rates rise!

So where have we heard it all before? It was the 1930s, when the battle between F.A. Hayek and J.M. Keynes raged in the English-speaking world, not only in the academic journals but in the newspapers in London and the United States.

Hayek gave a series of lectures based on his previous works in German that tried to explain that the ruling elite and their theoretical apparatus had it all wrong.

CONTINUED..

*Written by Rob Rimes.

1. Introduction:

Lucky for me, Colonel Allen West does not represent my district. I’m lucky enough to be within the boundaries of one of the very few GOP congressmen who is pretty much awesome. My congressman is Connie Mack, a guy who is actually trying to develop an effective plan to cut spending and get us out of this fiscal insanity (look up and read about his ‘Penny Plan’). Without getting off topic, this article isn’t about how dope my rep has been, it is a critique of the rep that borders my district. A rep that represents the core values and ideals of the Tea Party.. or so we thought.

Allen West is a Florida guy just like Marco Rubio, the last Tea Party hypocrite I wrote about in this ongoing series (here). Col. West is another one of the infamous Tea Party candidates that won an important election and now holds office. Obviously he is not living up to the hype of the Tea Party platform because I am writing about him. I did put him on blast already with the first installment of this series (here) but that obviously just scratched the surface and he’s done a few more questionable things since then in his short time as a congressman.

In my first article, I covered his support of the PATRIOT Act. Unfortunately for us, his non-Tea Party tendencies don’t end there. You see, Col. West is nothing more than an establishment cock who duped the voters into backing him. Apparently, just like with all these other two-faced fraudulent Tea Party fucksacks, West doesn’t understand that the public is paying attention like never before and there will be a time when the office he holds will be up for grabs again. He’s got time to turn this shit around but as far as I am concerned, this fucking turkey needs a serious chin check from his constituents.

2. The Issue of the Debt Ceiling:

When it comes to the issue of the debt ceiling, Allen West let us all down. Granted, most Republicans voted for the Boehner deal but as it was proven by the Cato Institute and many other sources for economic awesomeness the plan was complete bullshit. In fact, it was as useless as a rabbit without a dick. What the debt deal doesn’t do is it doesn’t cut spending, it doesn’t fix the deficit and in the long run it just gives the Beltway Suits more power to waste more of our hard-earned money. West obviously didn’t do his homework or he just went with the majority of the establishment and took the safer road.

Ron Paul, Michele Bachman, Justin Amash and my congressman Connie Mack all voted the right way, as did a dozen or more other Republicans. By aligning himself with the “politics as usual” crowd, West may have bought us some time but ultimately he just contributed to digging the hole a lot deeper. Eventually we will all have to face the music. But really, isn’t this what the Tea Party was trying to prevent? Isn’t the main purpose of the Tea Party to cut spending, balance the budget and get things to a place where they are fiscally stable? Well, if Allen West truly represents the Tea Party, I would have to say “no”.

Now I am perfectly aware that there are groups out there that are trying to push West into challenging Senator Bill Nelson for his seat and there are even some who are pushing for him to run for president in 2012 but c’mon people! This is just crazy as the guy has barely had a queef of a political career. These are like the “Rubio for President” people, they just don’t get it and they obviously don’t pay attention to a goddamned thing. Those people are the cancer that plagues the Republican Party and they are why it can’t move forward and change even with the Tea Party injection.

However, there are a lot of people who aren’t standing for this madness. In fact, one of the major Tea Party groups called out Col. Allen West and all the other “Tea Party” candidates that stood beside Boehner during this economic shit show. So how does West respond to being put on blast by the Tea party? Well, here’s something he said about it on the Laura Ingraham Show:

I think what we have to ask ourselves is, If you’re telling me that I need to vote ‘no’ against the Boehner plan, then what am I voting for? I’m going to stand with this Boehner plan and, once again, if the folks who one minute they’re saying that I’m their ‘Tea Party hero’ and what, three or four days later ‘I’m a Tea Party defector’ — that kind of schizophrenia I’m not going to get involved in.

That’s a pretty shitty statement as far as I am concerned. The Tea Party isn’t being schizophrenic on the issue, Col. West is being schizophrenic on what he supposedly represented before he was voted into office. I guess it’s easier to throw the shit right back and deflect it than to really explain yourself and to try and stand with those who put you in power, regardless of the challenging road ahead. But whatever, I’m sure he sleeps just fine at night.

3. The Issue of the Runaway Runway:

The debt ceiling issue isn’t the only area where Col. Allen West strays away from a Tea Party platform. Another issue that people need to be made aware of is that he is a big fan of pork, especially when it is a hearty helping of pork just for him! Massive feasts on pork should not be in any principled Tea Partiers diet but Allen West doesn’t seem to care. He’s like one of those people that says that they are vegetarian but they still eat chicken and fish. You’re not vegetarian people, just say you don’t eat beef and pork just like West should say that he is fiscally responsible except when it comes to a big ass plate of greasy fat bacon just for him!

You see, Allen West, who expresses that we have to stop all this spending and then points to all these other wasteful programs and projects, has just gotten $21 million dollars from the federal government to build a new runway at the Ft. Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport! West himself said:

This runway is long awaited and much anticipated. At this crucial time for our economy, it is imperative that we encourage this kind of development, which will bring thousands of jobs with it and boost tourism – South Florida’s number one economic engine.

M’kay.. that sounds like something a big government puppet would say from either party. If he truly represented the Tea Party he wouldn’t have taken the money. Instead, he would’ve understood that government meddling and involvement in such matters stifles capitalism and economic freedom. In the end, we all lose in this sort of scenario. However, because it is HIS project, he can justify such actions. He can try and explain it away as a job creator and a way to boost the Florida economy but at the end of the day he employed a big government solution to a practical problem that an unregulated free market could’ve straightened out real quick.

I guess it is too much to assume that this Tea Party monster hasn’t watched Milton Friedman’s ‘Free To Choose’ or read Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Henry Hazlitt or any of the other economic greats. Maybe instead of just taking these Tea Party candidates at their word when they express the rhetoric, the Tea Party members should hold them to a higher standard and check their credentials. Just a thought.

4. The Issues of Everything Else:

Now I don’t want to just bash Allen West here; I am barely being as harsh as I’ve been known to be with others. I did write about his support of the PATRIOT Act in the first part of this series of articles. I’ve also written about how it is a monstrous law that strips away our freedoms, costs us a shitload of money via taxation and is downright evil and tyrannical unlike anything else the American people have been forced to live with by their elected officials (except maybe Lincoln’s insane ego-driven power grabs). The reason I am revisiting it is because Col. Allen West voted against it recently. He spoke out about how he really studied it, looked into it and decided that he could no longer support it. That’s pretty awesome coming from an ex-military leader. For that, my hat goes off to him because there are still far too many politicians on the right and the left that are supporting this abhorrent violation of our constitutional rights. This also allows me to have some hope. Hope that as he moves on in his career he will learn from his mistakes, analyze the facts more carefully and reassess some of his decisions. Well, one can only hope. So far the outlook is still grim.

As far as his voting record goes, I wasn’t crazy with the fact that he voted for H.R. 2715 which “..provides the Consumer Product Safety Commission with greater authority and discretion in enforcing the consumer product safety laws, and for other purposes.” Again, dude needs to learn what Friedman, Rothbard and others have to say on the subject. Also, what’s with the “other purposes” part? That’s pretty goddamned vague isn’t it? This is nothing more than a bill that gives increased power to a government agency and power that isn’t even clearly defined for that matter. Do we need a product safety commission? I’m not against the idea but I am against the government handling it. The private sector is more capable of handling these things but big government stooges would rather you think differently and apparently this Tea Party “smaller government – less spending” freshman does. If only there were a way to quantify the fiscal waste here.

Another major thing that Allen West did, that is seemingly under the radar, is that he broke away from the GOP on their strategy to pull apart Obamacare. Essentially, West claims that it is pointless to fight the health care leviathan as he already voted to repeal it and the Democrat-led Senate immediately thwarted the efforts of the House Republicans. So instead of voting against Obamacare again and again, he has given up and accepted defeat essentially. I mean, the methods the House is using to combat this thing might not be the best per se but at least they aren’t easing up on it and their message is clear. Tea Partiers as well want this parasitic legislation defeated. It must not be that important to Col. Allen West or maybe the fact that he has two applicants for federally-funded school-based health centers in his district has him walking on eggshells. Point is, I understand that he feels that his votes are wasted. However, the choice is simple, you either check the ‘yes’ box or you check the ‘no’ box. There is a right decision and there is a wrong decision. To just check the ‘no’ box takes the same amount of energy and effort as checking the ‘yes’ box. The message he needs to send is to his constituents not his party. If he, as their leader, gives up on it, then what’s the point of him even being there. At this early into his career he’s pretty much turned his back on one of the key Tea Party issues. This may note bode well for his future plans.

5. Conclusion:

Allen West is still new, he’s still working through the kinks but as I have said in previous articles, we don’t have time for him to figure this all out. We need leaders who have a clear cut agenda and who stick to it. Guys like Ron Paul who have always voted the same way and who have been completely transparent and unfaltering in their decisions are the kind of leaders we need. Sadly, Ron Pauls are very far and few between. However, Dr. Paul’s son Rand Paul is also a freshman Tea Party candidate and he has spoken loud, made an impact and hasn’t backed down from the platforms and ideals he represented in his campaign. At this point, he is the measuring stick for all other Tea Party freshman. Maybe that’s not fair but is it really that hard to just go to Washington and do what you said you were going to do? It’s not for Rand Paul but apparently it is for guys like Allen West and Marco Rubio. So if they can’t handle it, maybe someone else needs to do the job?

I wish we had time for these guys to figure out their shit but we don’t. The problem is that most of these Tea Party Republicans were just pandering to the movement to get elected. Now that they are in they know that it is hard to remove an incumbent. Maybe these guys are banking on the possibility that the Tea Party was just a fad and that by the time the next election rolls around, they’ll be free and clear to just coast on through their career without any real GOP primary challengers to give them a run for their money. I really hope not.

*Taken from the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Written by Robert P. Murphy.

People often ask me, “How are the Austrians different from the Chicago School economists? Aren’t you all free-market guys who oppose big-government Keynesians?”

In the present article I’ll outline some of the main differences. Although it’s true that Austrians agree with Chicago economists on many policy issues, nevertheless their approach to economic science can be quite different. It’s important to occasionally explain these differences, if only to rebut the common complaint that Austrian economics is simply a religion serving to justify libertarian policy conclusions.

Before jumping in, let me give a few obvious disclaimers: I do not speak for all Austrian economists, and in this article I will be discussing modern Austrian followers in the tradition ofLudwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. (On methodology in particular, the Austrians in the Rothbardian camp differ somewhat from those who look more to Friedrich Hayek and Israel Kirzner for inspiration.) It’s also important to note that not every Chicago School economist thinks alike. Even so, I hope the following generalizations are representative.

CONTINUED..

*Written by Rob Rimes.

*This article is broken into five parts with each being released a few days apart. This is due to the size of the article. PART I can be found here.

3. Stage Two – Woodrow Wilson and the Rise of Wilsonian Tyranny:

“You are not here merely to prepare to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.” – Woodrow Wilson

After Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson is probably the worst president in history. Although FDR is pretty close. What makes Wilson so bad? Well, he was instrumental in creating the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission. He also kick-started the income tax system that we have today. Additionally, Wilson intervened in the first World War, which had absolutely nothing to do with the United States. His actions in that war created the snowball effect that eventually became World War II. Sure, Hitler was a sick and twisted fucksack but there is a huge chance that he would’ve never gained power in Germany if it weren’t for the heinous actions of Woodrow Wilson. Shit, the fact that Wilson could have inadvertently caused the Holocaust probably makes him worse than Lincoln.

Wilson’s first order of business was the creation of the Federal Reserve. Contrary to popular belief, the Federal Reserve is not a government entity. The Fed is a private central bank that has the power to print money. Instead of having currency with actual value, Woodrow Wilson birthed a non-governmental establishment that has the power to control, regulate and print paper money! This was a way for the government to control and meddle with the flow of currency. Instead of letting the free market and free trade dictate the cost of goods and the value of money, Wilson thought it best to have supreme control over the monetary system. Many historians, the world over, credit the Federal Reserve and it’s meddling with the American economy as being a major catalyst for the Great Depression as well as our nation’s current economic peril, inflation and the devaluation of the dollar. John Maynard Keynes didn’t see it this way and the progressives of Wilson’s era all the way up to today, still trust in Keynesian economic theory.

Looking past the issue of the Federal Reserve, which is a monstrous issue, I want to put some emphasis on Wilson’s lesser-known progressive follies. The next thing on the docket is the Underwood Tariff Act, also known as the Revenue Act of 1913. What this act did was it lowered basic tariff rates from 40% down to 25%. That may seem positive but tariffs in general are just bad economic policy. Read some Mises, Rothbard, Hayek or Friedman if you don’t believe me.

Apart from the reduction of tariffs, the Underwood Tariff Act created something much worse. In order to off set the loss of revenue from the decreased tariffs, the federal income tax was reinstated. What was once created to pay for the Civil War, was brought back fifty years later to help create a pot of money for the growing progressive agenda. The income tax was previously deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1894 but that obstacle was overcome by the creation of the 16th Amendment, which made a federal income tax constitutional. Wilson used the Underwood Tariff Act as a tool to justify the creation of the federal income tax, which was now within the government’s power to legally implement.

The next piece of shitty progressive legislation to look at is the Clayton Antitrust Act. In a nutshell, an antitrust law is a law that attempts to prohibit monopolies from forming while trying to eliminate unfair business practices. Just like everything pimped by progressives, it sounds like a good idea based off of good intentions but it is counterproductive to what it is trying to accomplish and it essentially creates that in which it is trying to regulate or destroy. It helps the federal government pick winners and losers and thus, kills true capitalism only to replace it with a crony clone wearing the same title.

The Clayton Antitrust Act was created to double up on the control of rogue capitalists that started with the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. These acts created a style of legislation that is still be used today. For whatever reason, lefties on the Hill can’t seem to wrap their heads around the fact that these practices hurt the economy. Maybe I am being unfair here, as the righties have adopted these practices as well. Because of that, we’re all fucked.

Anyway, the Clayton Antitrust Act was setup to restrict mergers between companies as well as controlling price competition. To restrict mergers is incredibly foolish and borderline chaotic. This punishes the end consumer because the product or service he would receive, may not be as good because of these restrictions. See, two companies merge when they feel that by combining their efforts they will improve their ability to create superior results with whatever good or service they offer. When companies see a greater value in merging, it is the end consumer that really reaps the benefits of that extra value. Often times, mergers happen because the company that is committing the “hostile takeover” of its competitor believes that the smaller company could be more efficient if better run. They believe that they can run it better and if they can, this benefits everyone involved. Well, except for maybe the shitty employees. Should we reward them with jobs in the new company for running the old company into the ground? Often times these “hostile takeovers” are an alternative to bankruptcy.

Like a typical progressive “Trustbuster”, Wilson didn’t just stop with the Clayton Antitrust Act. He also created the Federal Trade Commission or FTC. Today, the FTC is the “National Nanny”. For decades it has overseen and meddled with our economy. Now it is defining the rules and regulations of the Internet. The only truly free thing left in the world is being tyrannized by this archaic progressive institution that has done nothing apart from stifling the free market.

The next piece of legislation to come across Woodrow Wilson’s desk was the Smith-Lever Act of 1914. This act created subsidies for agricultural education and research. Is that a waste of tax dollars? I’ll let you decide.

Following that was another pro-agricultural law, the Federal Farm Loan Act. This established a system that would provide an increase in credit to rural, family farmers. This was achieved by the creation of a federal farm loan board, as well as twelve regional farm loan banks. Essentially, cooperative farm loan associations were able to get long-term loans at very low interest rates (under subsidized terms of course). This was to help smaller farmers “survive” against the harsh competition of larger farmers (or better farmers, depending upon your reality). Farmers were able to borrow up to 50% of the value of their land and 20% of the value of any improvements. This evolved into today’s monstrous Farm Credit System, which received a $4 billion bailout in 1987 that  created a new arm for the beast, the Farm Credit System Financial Assistance Corp.

Wilson then attacked child labor with the Keating-Owen Act of 1916. I know that the vast majority of the lefties and righties are all for child labor laws but in reality, they have very negative consequences. Luckily, at the time, the Supreme Court recognized this and deemed the Keating-Owen Act unconstitutional. Because of the child labor laws that did eventually pass, it is technically illegal for you to give a minor $20 for fixing your computer. However, the government decided that we had to save the children from a Charles Dickens nightmare. Never mind that many of the children of the 19th and early 20th centuries worked to help provide for their poor families. As time progressed, parents made more money and they were able to send their kids to school. The free market was working towards destroying child labor before the progressives created laws to completely eliminate it in all its forms.

In 1916, Woodrow Wilson was faced with a serious dilemma from the railroad unions. The railroad brotherhoods threatened to shut down the railroads. Wilson attempted to get the angry unions and the “evil exploitive” management to work together to find a solution to the labor issues. No compromise was made, so our progressive hero created the Adamson Act which forced railroad management to limit the work day to 8 hours and to pay overtime if the maximum hours were exceeded. Because of this, a strike was avoided but the railroad companies now had a gun to their head. There was no negotiation. The federal government, led by Woodrow Wilson, forced management to comply with these demands.

Wilson initially tried to keep us out of the first World War. However, his know-it-all meddling progressive attitude couldn’t be tamed. Because of that, he tried to mediate the conflict, just like he tried to do but failed with railroad unions and railroad management. The result here was no different and Mr. Fix-it had egg on his face again. That snotty yolk must have left a bad taste in his mouth because Wilson showed that he wasn’t really an objective party when it came to the War. In fact, he demanded the Germans quit their bullshit. As far as the British went, he slapped them on the hand and they called his bluff, continuing to do what they were doing because they knew Wilson didn’t really mean it.

With his first term coming to a close, Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection with the slogan “He kept us out of war.” Funny, because it wasn’t long before his anti-war message was replaced with a pro-war attitude. Kind of reminds me of what Barack Obama is doing now. Damn progressives.

After narrowly winning reelection against Republican Charles Evans Hughes, it wasn’t long before Woodrow Wilson brought us into a war that we had no business whatsoever being in. He built a massive military through conscription. What that means is that young men were forced to fight because Woodrow Wilson said so. The war was bloody and hard-fought. At one point, the life expectancy of a soldier on the front lines was 21 days! These men, just like the soldiers during Vietnam, were practically being shipped overseas with a death sentence. All it took was a gun to the head to force a gun in the palm.

Lives weren’t the only cost of war; the war was incredibly expensive monetarily and this strained the economic stability of America. So, not only were Americans now paying income tax, now those taxes were being raised to fund our idiotic involvement in the war. The progressive-led government also insisted that people eat less, this way more food could be sent to soldiers. The government also tried pimping out war bonds and manufactured a mass amount of pro-war propaganda that pretty much told people that they were traitors and assholes if they didn’t support the war effort. Apparently, you weren’t a patriot unless you were a drone to your progressive masters and their ever-growing collectivist society.

Apart from the war, Wilson had us involved in other foreign affairs. He proposed that U.S. vessels traveling through the Panama Canal would be exempt from paying tolls. This angered the British as well as many others.

Wilson also wanted to avoid trampling on Latin America, as he believed Teddy Roosevelt had done, so he apologized to Columbia for the United States’ role in the Panama Revolution during Teddy’s reign. That must’ve been an inspirational moment for Obama, the Great Apologizer.

Woody then meddled with Latin America, trying to “teach” the Latin American countries on how to “elect good men.” Wilson had troops stationed in Mexico, Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba and Panama.

Wilson’s soldiers in Nicaragua forced the country to pass the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty after they selected the nation’s president. Haiti was forced to choose the presidential candidate that Wilson hand-picked. They were also forced to adopt a constitution that Wilson wrote! Wilson had our troops go into the Dominican Republic after their president resigned. The American military aligned themselves with wealthy landowners and fought brutally against any resistance they encountered. Wilson’s foreign policy with our closest neighbors was abhorrent!

After World War I, Woodrow Wilson made his famous “Fourteen Points” speech that introduced the world to the idea of a “League of Nations”, his anti-American globalist dream and the precursor to the United Nations. The League of Nations was officially created with the Treaty of Versailles. That treaty also gave birth to the “Stab-in-the-back Legend” that the Nazis latched onto and spread like wildfire, as they rose to power in a Germany crumbled by war. There are many other factors associated with Wilson and his involvement in WWI that inadvertently helped the Nazi cause but that is an article for another day.

After all of this awesome foreign intervention, the Norwegian Nobel Committee showed that they were pranksters of the world when they gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Woodrow Wilson. Funny, that is another parallel to Obama. Maybe I should write an article about all their similarities.

Following the Treaty of Versailles and the formation of the League of Nations, Woodrow Wilson’s presidency was winding down. As soldiers were coming home, they were faced with harsh times due to the effects of Wilsonian policy. There was poor planning, very little money and next to no benefits for the four million soldiers who returned to the States. The economy was in serious trouble and the Wilsonian Era nearly caused a depression in 1920 (I wrote about it and how the problem was resolved in “The Forgotten Depression of 1920“).

Wilson’s wartime progressive politics caused the farmland prices bubble to burst, which left many farmers bankrupt or drowning in serious debt. His meddling with the unions and their bosses caused strikes in the coal, steel and meatpacking industries. Class warfare was at an all-time high as race riots broke out in dozens of cities throughout the U.S., most notably Chicago and Omaha. This was the legacy Woodrow Wilson left behind. Well, in reality. The left has deified him with the other ex-POTUSes in this article and for whatever reason, he is heralded as one of the greatest American leaders of all-time. That’s fucking hogwash!

Woodrow Wilson was shit. I don’t think that it can be any fucking clearer. He took the progressive ball and ran with it, completely disregarding what worked in this country, trading it in for a nation wrapped in chains. Wilson did have some second thoughts on his policies however, but it was too little too late.

He had this to say about the creation of the Federal Reserve, after he realized his mistake:

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”

If only he had listened to Andrew Jackson.

4. Stage Three – Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal:

“The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt

This article is continued in PART III

Parts 2-6 are linked at the end of the video.

*Taken from the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Written by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

We have heard the objection a thousand times: Why, before we had a Federal Reserve System the American economy endured a regular series of financial panics. Abolishing the Fed is an unthinkable, absurd suggestion, for without the wise custodianship of our central bankers we would be thrown back into a horrific financial maelstrom, deliverance from which should have made us grateful, not uppity.

The argument is superficially plausible, to be sure, but it is wrong in every particular. We heard it quite a bit in the financial press several months ago when it was learned that Congressman Ron Paul, a well-known opponent of the Fed, would chair the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy. Fed apologists were beside themselves — a man who rejects the cartoon version of the history of the Fed will hold such an influential position? He must be made into an object of derision and ridicule.

My favorite example comes from columnist Joseph N. DiStefano, whose article on the subject is so defiantly at odds with the historical record, so ludicrously at variance with easily verified facts, that I thought for pedagogical purposes we ought to make an example of him.

DiStefano spends most of his article on the current crisis, but, having written quite a bit about that already, I prefer to spend most of mine on the cartoonish version of American monetary and banking history that seems to inform every outraged pro-Fed reply to Fed critics, this one being no exception. They read like fourth-grade book reports. Except DiStefano didn’t even read the book.

The premise is familiar enough: Why, without a central bank or its lesser cousin, a national bank, we had nothing but boom, bust, and sorrow — but since the creation of the Federal Reserve System, it’s been nothing but sunshine and lollipops. It really is that simple. People who believe in a free market in banking, as opposed to these cartel arrangements, are evidently so uninformed or so blinded by ideology that they have never heard or internalized this one-sentence encapsulation of 19th- and 20th-century monetary history.

The 19th-century boom-bust cycles DiStefano mentions in drive-by fashion are consistently attributable to artificial credit expansion, a practice government either connived at or actually participated in, through the various privileges it granted to the banking industry.

First, let’s consider DiStefano’s 19th century. We are to believe that national banks were indispensable sources of stability, while their absence yielded terrible business cycles. How does DiStefano account for the Panic of 1819, which contemporaries attributed to the inflationary and then rapidly contractionary policies of the Second Bank of the United States, the great stabilizer? That’s easy — he leaves it out. (He likewise leaves out the Great Depression from his discussion of the 20th century, an episode one might think would count against the Fed, and which was likewise set in motion by central-bank inflation; Benjamin Strong, who headed the New York Fed, told other central bankers in 1927 that he planned to “give a coup de whiskey to the stock market.”) The standard account is Murray Rothbard’s The Panic of 1819: Reactions and Policies (Columbia University Press, 1962).

DiStefano does mention the Panic of 1837, and for that episode we are urged to blame President Andrew Jackson for having dissolved the Second Bank of the United States. DiStefano does not deign to reveal what the causal mechanism might have been. The strong implication, based on the rest of his article, is that we need institutions with monopoly privileges to oversee our money, and if they should ever be forced to close because the stupid rubes don’t understand how indispensable they are, the economy will crash. That’s not much of an explanation, but it’s all DiStefano chooses to share with us.

Funny, the economy hadn’t crashed when the First Bank of the United States was shut down more than two decades earlier. When the charter of the original Bank of the United States expired in 1811, and the institution set about calling in its loans and closing its doors, the DiStefanos of the world made wild predictions of bankruptcy and economic collapse. Nothing of the sort occurred. A contemporary noted in 1816,

Many persons viewed a dissolution of the late Bank of the United States as a national calamity; it was asserted that a general bankruptcy must follow that event. The fact was otherwise: every branch of industry continued uninterrupted — no failures in the mercantile community were attributable to that occurrence.

DiStefano fails to mention any causal link between the closing of the Second Bank and the Panic of 1837, so I’ll provide him with one. The most common argument is this: without a national bank to discipline the state banks, the state banks that received the federal deposits after the closure of the Second Bank went on an inflationary binge that culminated in the Panic of 1837 and another downturn in 1839. This standard diagnosis is partly Austrian, surprisingly, in that it blames artificial credit expansion for giving rise to unsustainable booms that end in busts. But the alleged solution to this problem, according to modern commentators, is a robust central bank with implicit regulatory powers over smaller institutions.

Senator William Wells, a hard-money Federalist from Delaware, had been unconvinced from the start that the best way to encourage sound practices among smaller unsound banks was to establish a giant unsound bank. “This bill,” he said in 1816,

came out of the hands of the administration ostensibly for the purpose of curtailing the over-issue of Bank paper: and yet it came prepared to inflict on us the same evil, being itself nothing more than a simple paper making machine; and constituting, in this respect, a scheme of policy about as wise, in point of precaution, as the contrivance of one of Rabelais’s heroes, who hid himself in the water for fear of the rain. The disease, it is said, is the Banking fever of the States; and this is to be cured by giving them the Banking fever of the United States.

Another hard-money US senator, New York’s Samuel Tilden, likewise wondered,

How could a large bank, constituted on essentially the same principles, be expected to regulate beneficially the lesser banks? Has enlarged power been found to be less liable to abuse than limited power? Has concentrated power been found less liable to abuse than distributed power?

A much better solution recommended by hard-money advocates at the time is what became known as the “Independent Treasury,” in which the federal deposits, instead of being distributed to privileged state banks and used as the basis for additional rounds of credit creation there, were retained by the Treasury and kept out of the banking system entirely. Hard-money supporters believed that the federal government was propping up (and lending artificial legitimacy to) an unsound system of fractional-reserve state banks by (1) distributing the federal deposits to them, (2) accepting their paper money in payment of taxes and (3) paying it back out again. As William Gouge put it,

If the operations of Government could be completelyseparated from those of the Banks, the system would be shorn of half its evils. If Government would neither deposit the public funds in the Banks, nor borrow money from the Banks; and if it would in no case either receive Bank notes or pay away Bank notes, the Banks would become mere commercial institutions, and their credit and their power be brought nearer to a level with those of private merchants.

DiStefano is convinced that the movement against the Bank was led by antimarket, antiproperty populists. “Last time we had a central bank,” he writes, “its advocates were conservative, hard-money businessmen, and its opponents were subprime borrowers and lenders who convinced President Jackson the bank was holding back the nation.” That is as wrong as wrong can be, as we’ll see in a moment. DiStefano proceeds from this error to the false conclusion that supporters of the market economy then as now should be supporters of the central bank.

To be sure, opponents of the Second Bank of the United States were no monolith, and even today the central bank is criticized both by those who condemn its money creation as well as by those who criticize its alleged stinginess. On balance, though, the fight against the Second Bank was a free-market, hard-money campaign against a government-privileged paper-money producer. “The attack on the Bank,” concluded Professor Jeff Hummel in his review of the literature, “was a fully rational and highly enlightened step toward the achievement of a laissez-faire metallic monetary system.”

We have already cited hard-money senators against the Bank. But for DiStefano to claim that the movement against the Second Bank was a movement of propertyless boobs who didn’t understand banking, he would also have to be unaware of the most important monetary theorist of the entire period, William Gouge (mentioned above). Gouge was a champion of hard money who opposed the Bank; he considered these two positions logically coordinate, indeed inseparable.

“Why should ingenuity exert itself in devising new modifications of paper Banking?” he asked. “The economy which prefers fictitious money to real, is, at best, like that which prefers a leaky ship to a sound one.” He assured Americans that “the sun would shine, the streams would flow, and the earth would yield her increase, if the Bank of the United States was not in existence.” The conservativeBankers’ Magazine, upon Gouge’s death, said that his hard-money book A Short History of Paper Money and Banking was “a very able and clear exposition of the principles of banking and of the mistakes made by our American banking institutions.”

DiStefano might also look into the work of William Leggett, the influential Jacksonian editorial writer in New York who memorably called for “separation of bank and state.”Economist Larry White, who compiled many of Leggett’s most important writings, calls him “the intellectual leader of the laissez-faire wing of Jacksonian democracy.” He denounced the Bank for its repeated expansions and contractions, and for the economic turmoil that such manipulation left in its wake.

The Panic of 1819 was likewise due to such behavior on the part of the Bank, said Leggett, with a repeat performance in the mid-1820s. “For the two or three years preceding the extensive and heavy calamities of 1819, the United States Bank, instead of regulating the currency, poured out its issues at such a lavish rate that trade and speculation were excited in a preternatural manner.” Leggett continues,

But not to dwell upon events the recollection of which time may have begun to efface from many minds, let us but cast a glance at the manner in which the United States Bankregulated the currency in 1830, when, in the short period of a twelve-month it extended its accommodations from forty to seventy millions of dollars. This enormous expansion, entirely uncalled for by any peculiar circumstance in the business condition of the country, was followed by the invariable consequences of an inflation of the currency. Goods and stocks rose, speculation was excited, a great number of extensive enterprises were undertaken, canals were laid out, rail-roads projected, and the whole business of the country was stimulated into unnatural and unsalutary activity.

But maybe the 19th century shows we need an institution capable of monetary “stimulus” to restore the economy to health following a crash. If so, the evidence isn’t obvious. President James Buchanan engaged in no vain effort to reflate the economy in the wake of the stock-market crisis and bank run that constituted the relatively mild, six-month Panic of 1857 — which DiStefano, who is in a bit over his head when it comes to 19th-century economic history, calls a “howling depression.” (That relatively mild downturn, incidentally, is attributable to the system of inflationary paper money, not the “gold standard”; as Buchanan said in his first annual message, “It is apparent that our existing misfortunes have proceeded solely from our extravagant and vicious system of paper currency and bank credits.”)

Fashionable modern advice did not exist in Buchanan’s day, and it showed. The economy recovered within six months, even though the money supply fell, interest rates rose, government spending was not increased, and businesses and banks were not bailed out. But Buchanan cautioned Americans that “the periodical revulsions which have existed in our past history must continue to return at intervals so long as our present unbounded system of bank credits shall prevail.”

Buchanan envisioned a federal bankruptcy law for banks that, instead of giving legal sanction to their suspension of specie payments (that is, their failure to honor their depositors’ demands for withdrawal), would in fact shut them down if they failed to make good on their promises. “The instinct of self-preservation might produce a wholesome restraint upon their banking business if they knew in advance that a suspension of specie payments would inevitably produce their civil death.”

DiStefano makes specific mention of the 1870s, which once again reveals the superficiality of his knowledge. Unknown to DiStefano, the modern consensus holds that there was no “Long Depression” of the 1870s after all. Even the New York Times, which admits nothing, admits this:

Recent detailed reconstructions of nineteenth-century data by economic historians show that there was no 1870s depression: aside from a short recession in 1873, in fact, the decade saw possibly the fastest sustained growth in American history. Employment grew strongly, faster than the rate of immigration; consumption of food and other goods rose across the board. On a per capita basis, almost all output measures were up spectacularly. By the end of the decade, people were better housed, better clothed and lived on bigger farms. Department stores were popping up even in medium-sized cities. America was transforming into the world’s first mass consumer society.

Perhaps DiStefano may concede in a candid moment that he unthinkingly accepted a caricature of the 19th century, but he’ll still have his strong feeling that at least the Fed did away with financial panics. Not quite. Andrew Jalil of the University of California, Berkeley, concluded in a 2009 study that “contrary to the conventional wisdom, there is no evidence of a decline in the frequency of panics during the first fifteen years of the existence of the Federal Reserve.” Elmus Wicker, inBanking Panics of the Gilded Age (2000), observes that

there were no more than three major banking panics between 1873 and 1907 [inclusive], and two incipient banking panics in 1884 and 1890. Twelve years elapsed between the panic of 1861 and the panic of 1873, twenty years between the panics of 1873 and 1893, and fourteen years between 1893 and 1907: three banking panics in half a century! And in only one of the three, 1893, did the number of bank suspensions match those of the Great Depression.

By contrast, there were five separate bank panics in the first three years of the Great Depression alone. (For these sources, see Selgin, Lastrapes, and White, “Has the Fed Been a Failure?”)

Even during the pre-Fed panics, from the Civil War to 1907, the bank failure rate was small, as were the losses depositors suffered. Depositor losses amounted to only 0.1 percent of GDP during thePanic of 1893, which was the worst of them all with respect to bank failures and depositor losses. By contrast, in just the past 30 years of the central-bank era, the world has seen 20 banking crises that led to depositor losses in excess of 10 percent of GDP. Half of those saw losses in excess of 20 percent of GDP.

Moreover, the post–Civil War panics in the United States were due in large part to the unit-banking regulations in many states that forbade branch banking of any sort. Confined to a single office, each bank was necessarily fragile and undiversified. Canada experienced none of these panics even though it did not establish a central bank, DiStefano’s trusted panacea, until 1934.

With regard to fluctuations both past and present, DiStefano implicitly gives us the classic pro-Fed position: business cycles occur spontaneously, and the Fed fixes them. We might call this the Fed as Innocent Bystander/Good Samaritan (IB/GS). DiStefano does not consider — not even to refute it, like an honest opponent — the Austrian argument that the Fed’s manipulation of money and interest rates is what gives rise to the cycle in the first place. The Fed’s palliative measures, in turn, amount to more of what caused the original problem. This was one of the points of my book Meltdown, the New York Timesbest seller that the New York Times pretended did not exist, which gave a free-market overview of the economic crisis as a counter to widespread DiStefanism.

(My reply is already longer than I’d prefer, so for the Austrian theory of the business cycle I refer readers to my Austrian resource page, and for the “TARP was a great idea” argument to economistRobert P. Murphy [PhD, New York University] and David Stockman.)

What would we do in such situations without the Fed? Under a more sound monetary system we would have far less violent fluctuations in the first place. And unsound firms would go bankrupt, as a former CEO of AIG later admitted would have been the best course of action after all. The world would not come to an end. If the market is freely allowed to reprice assets, which was the phenomenon we were terrified into not wanting to occur, that doesn’t change the amount of physical stuff in existence. The assets themselves may be redistributed to new owners in bankruptcy proceedings, but the world has just as much stuff as it did before. Ownership titles are transferred, and a leaner outfit with more competent leadership moves the economy forward. An important lesson is learned for the future. Or we could be satisfied with DiStefano’s solution, which is to keep Wall Street just as it is, without this salutary purge of leadership and capital, and without the corresponding change in entrepreneurial character that might yield a less debt-based and more equity-based business model and hence more stability in the future.

But the key problem with the DiStefano analysis is that it is no analysis at all. It takes the crisis as an irreducible given, and then launches into the IB/GS routine. The Austrian School argues that manipulation of interest rates causes discoordination across the structure of production, that this disfigured structure is unsustainable, and that the inevitable result is the bust. DiStefano gives us no reason to believe otherwise, or even to have confidence that he understands or even knows about the argument, an argument that won F.A. Hayek the Nobel Prize in 1974.

All these issues are covered in greater detail in the Fed chapter of my new book Rollback, which confronts the standard claims not just for the Fed but also for all the major areas of life we are told could not be managed without institutionalized coercion.

As with the Fed, so with these other things: critics of the status quo are reflexively condemned as cranks, and alternatives to the status quo are dismissed as unthinkable. But they are only unthinkable because we have allowed fashionable opinion to keep us from thinking them. We have been forced into a box that confines our choices to various forms of statism. The movement to end the Fed is an astonishing and most welcome first step toward clawing our way out.