Weighing Michael Phelps Down With Weights

Quote of the week!

“If you bound the arms and legs of gold-medal swimmer Michael Phelps, weighed him down with chains, threw him in a pool and he sank, you wouldn't call it a ‘failure of swimming'. So, when markets have been weighted down by inept and excessive regulation, why call this a ‘failure of capitalism'?”

It's not Capitalism that has failed - it's government intervention and regulations that have ruined our economy. (Read Eamon Butler at Timesonline.com).

Are Americans Quietly Accepting Less Freedom?

Thomas Jefferson and Ayn Rand are arguably America's greatest defenders of freedom and they wrote much about government tyranny. Americans would be wise to read our Constitution and the writings of these two people to understand how we have deviated from freedom and are on a collision course with tyranny. Are we to continue to be the land of the free and the brave or are we going down the path of the majority of countries on this planet - the path of tyranny and subjugation by government. As Ayn Rand (author of Atlas Shrugged) wrote more than 40 years ago: We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force. What our government is doing today under Obama is a travesty of our wise Founding Fathers who gave of their lives and fortunes to fight tyranny and founded a nation of freedom. Obama is the last of a line of Presidents from both parties that have sold our nation's principles down the river to the highest bidder.

Thomas Jefferson, one of our Founding Fathers, promoted a "wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere. (Thomas Jefferson)

WHEN ARE AMERICANS GOING TO REBEL against this continuous loss of freedom to run our lives the way each of us sees fit. The following is just a partial list of all the ways government attacks our liberty.

• Taxing some to give to others and taxing and taxing
• bailing out losers in the economy with our money
• regulating industry and businesses which is unconstitutional and raises the cost of goods
• laws against ingesting things government deems harmful or wants to control (drug laws)
• meddling in our economy by creating things like Fannie Mae and her brother
• monopolizing our education system
• accusing Big Business or Wall Street (whatever is in fashion on that day) as the cause of all our problems instead of policing themselves
• zoning laws
• eminent domain

Rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).

Government "help" to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Ayn Rand

If we love this country and want to remain free we must stand up and be counted. Government is not the source of all that is good. It is the freedom loving productive individual. If we let go of the reins that holds government in then we let go of our freedom. This has been proven over and over again since man instituted government. America was a bastion of liberty...the question is - will she remain so. America the beautiful - she deserves to be saved.

DON'T FORGET THAT GOVERNMENT RUINED HOUSING!

If we learn nothing else with this "economic crisis", which by the way is a GOVERNMENT INDUCED ECONOMIC CRISIS, let it be that the housing market was ruined because of government intervention in the market place. Read the economist Thomas Sowell at Capitalism Magazine.

It was precisely government intervention which turned a thriving industry into a basket case.

An economist specializing in financial markets gave a glimpse of the history of housing markets when he said: "Lending money to American homebuyers had been one of the least risky and most profitable businesses a bank could engage in for nearly a century."
That was what the market was like before the government intervened. Like many government interventions, it began small and later grew.

The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 directed federal regulatory agencies to "encourage" banks and other lending institutions "to help meet the credit needs of the local communities in which they are chartered consistent with the safe and sound operation of such institutions."

That sounds pretty innocent and, in fact, it had little effect for more than a decade. However, its premise was that bureaucrats and politicians know where loans should go, better than people who are in the business of making loans.

The real potential of that premise became apparent in the 1990s, when the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) imposed a requirement that mortgage lenders demonstrate with hard data that they were meeting their responsibilities under the Community Reinvestment Act.

What HUD wanted were numbers showing that mortgage loans were being made to low-income and moderate-income people on a scale that HUD expected, even if this required "innovative or flexible" mortgage eligibility standards. (read)

Americans Must Demand a Gold Backed Dollar

Brian Simpson writing in Capitalism Magazine explains why we need our money to be backed by gold: to make politicians toe the line about spending. Our money right now is backed by nothing except the productivity of Americans but it allows politicians to spend money we don't have by creating it out of thin air.

Many blame capitalism for the current financial crisis. Even Alan Greenspan, who at one time was an advocate of the free market, blames capitalism. He recently testified in front of a congressional committee that "A critical pillar to . . . free markets did break down. I still do not fully understand why it happened." The first thing that Greenspan and most other commentators on the crisis must do to understand why the crisis occurred is to learn that the free market did not cause the crisis because the U.S. is not even close to being a free-market economy. Massive government interventions in the market in the form of myriad regulations and financial irresponsibility on the part of the government are really to blame. This makes the "solution" being imposed doubly absurd: more government controls, borrowing, and spending to solve the problems created by government controls, borrowing, and spending.

But this isn’t surprising. Ayn Rand observed decades ago that "one of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary."

The real solution to the financial crisis is not more financial irresponsibility and government controls, but forcing the government to be financially responsible and abolishing the controls. This means we need to establish a free market in our financial system. As a part of the move to a free market, we need to establish a full-fledged gold standard--one that the government must be prevented from breaching. This is something we have never had in this country...(READ)