On the May 6, 2011 edition of Freedom Watch, Judge Napolitano interviewed Ron Paul and followed that interview with Mike Huckabee. At 3:30 of the following video, the Judge tosses a question to Huckabee about Ron Paul’s stance on the de-federalization of drug laws.
In the first republican debate of the 2012 campaign season, Ron Paul had the following to say about “legalizing” drugs:
Another excellent video from our Keynes v. Hayek rappers:
In view of the following exchange between Ron Paul and Elliot Spitzer, we should revisit the meaning of the Constitution’s “general welfare” clause. Take a look:
Let’s say you are an account receivables worker in a small business. On your first day on the job, your boss walks up to you and says “Jimmy, as an accounts receivables manager at this company, you have the power to charge our clients and send them bills to provide the operating income of our widget factory, to pay our debts, and to provide for the general welfare of this company, but all bills you send out must be according to the the number and price of widgets that the client has purchased.”
Did your boss just give you permission to set up a retirement plan for all the company’s workers? Modern constitutional law scholars say yes, but Thomas Jefferson thinks they’re wrong.
For those of us who are aware that the Federal Government has run up an astounding $14.3 trillion dollar debt (http://www.usdebtclock.org/), it might come as somewhat of a surprise that there is such a thing as a “debt ceiling”–which is a maximum amount which the Treasury can borrow. Of course, this is a surprise only if you’ve been living under a proverbial rock for the last six months (or during any of the political wrangling over the last 79 changes to the debt ceiling). As a sum of all the hemming and hawing by political figures such as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, we are led to believe one thing: failure to raise the debt ceiling will lead to certain financial armageddon.
To address the problem with the Federal Budget and the debt ceiling, let us consider a few points.
I’ve noticed an increasing prevalence of the use of the word “slammed” in news articles. To illustrate, I did a quick Google news search for the use of the word “slammed” in the last 24 hours, with over 15,000 results. Below is a quick list of some of these headlines that use the word “slam” inappropriately, with some suggested corrections.
Decades ago, when discussing the causes of the Great Depression, Murray Rothbard unwittingly wrote an editorial piece fit for today’s newspapers.
Below is an excerpt from Murray Rothbard’s History of Money and Banking from the Colonial Era to World War II. The book itself was published posthumously by the Mises institute in 2002 after Rothbard’s death in 1995 and is a compilation of various of his available manuscripts. I have taken the liberty of updating some of the text in red parentheticals where appropriate.
I’ve made fun of bomb squad activities before, but this one takes the cake.
This thing is almost national news, with the following coverage:
There should be some sort of rule where you lose your job if you’re featured on national television in a full bomb suit destroying a kid’s toy.
From a New York Times article about how the social security system is running a deficit for the first time:
Mr. Goss, the actuary, emphasized that even the $29 billion shortfall projected for this year was small, relative to the roughly $700 billion that would flow in and out of the system. The system, he added, has a balance of about $2.5 trillion that will take decades to deplete. Mr. Goss said that large cushion could start to grow again if the economy recovers briskly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/business/economy/25social.html?hp
The thing that’s so shocking about this is the concept that Social Security “has a balance of about 2.5 trillion that will take decades to deplete.” Of course, what they don’t tell you is what the implications are for Social Security holding that balance in U.S. Treasuries. In other words, if a dollar goes in to the social security trust fund it is immediately used by the government to buy its own debt. Thank goodness the Social Security trust fund has 2.5 trillion dollars of IOUs it wrote to itself. I personally owe myself a full 3.7 trillion dollars, so that should likewise take quite a few decades to deplete–glad I saved up.
Elsewhere, the AP has this covered.
Very well done:
If this headline is not true, it is only because I cannot find data on the S&P index prior to the 1920s. Behold a scary chart:
A chart of of the S&P index divided by earnings from 1923 to the present. This chart seems to be a rather good indication that the recent rally in the stock market is the result of people buying a trend rather than anything of underlying value. Prudence seems to dictate that if you have recouped any losses holding index or Dow-performing equities, it’s time to bank those gains before the bottom drops out.
Perhaps even more obnoxious/comical is the forecasting done by Standard & Poors for the P/E ratio through 2011. Either earnings need to sextuple in the next two months or the S&P needs to tank for this to come true. You be the judge:
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