JoshWilson.org

The guys over at Market Ticker have a nice piece on why we’re experiencing this economic crunch. Here’s some excerpts:

 People blame “Cheney” for the high price of oil and invading Iraq to “boost his buddies” but in point of fact the remaining reason we have high oil prices that are squeezing you like a turnip is that our nation’s accounting is fraudulent, corporately and nationally, and other nations have had enough of it, driving down the value of our currency. The consequence is served up upon you as a consumer in the form of higher costs for food and energy as the price of everything we import translates directly into your wallet.

Oh, and a little bit on the second ammendment

And don’t start with “the army has more guns than I do, therefore it doesn’t matter.” Of course the military and police have more guns than you do! They’re also better trained. So what? The purpose of the Second Amendment isn’t to allow you to “go postal” against the government, it is so that you and all 299,999,999 if your neighbors in this great nation can do so all at once if it ever becomes necessary.

I say, power to the people, not the government (which is not the people, but of the people and for the people).

via Mises.org - George Reisman makes a pretty compelling case for the reinstitution of the gold standard:

Needless to say, such a system would not only end the threat of deflation, but, equally important, it could end the threat of inflation as well. For if it were actually followed, the increase in the quantity of money would be limited to the increase in the supply of gold, which is extremely modest compared with increases in the supply of irredeemable paper money. This is because gold is rare in nature and costly to extract. Irredeemable paper money in contrast is virtually costless to produce and is potentially as abundant as the supply of currency-sized sheets of paper, indeed, as abundant as the size of the largest number that can be printed on all such sheets of paper.

This is an issue that is very much on my mind these days. I think that the majority of our country’s problems are rooted in the stealing of the poor’s wealth through the invisible force of inflation. The popular solution is to redistribute money through taxation via free social programs. The problem is that redistribution doesn’t actually encourage individual financial responsibility, but rather individual entitlement (which I’m sure we can all agree is a very bad thing).I could go on and on about this, but that’s for another post when I’m not running late to work. In the meantime, go read George Reisman’s article.