The Market Fundamentalist

Republican National Chairman Michael Steele has stirred up a controversy with his newly minted anti war Republican rhetoric:

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Keep in mind, again, our federal candidates, this was a war of Obama’s choosing. This is not, this is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in….[I]f he’s such a student of history, has he not understood that, you know, that’s the one thing you don’t do is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? All right? Because everyone who has tried over a thousand years of history has failed. And there are reasons for that. There are other ways that we can engage in Afghanistan without committing more troops.

While this is not exactly a coherent critique of the Afghan mess, it does seem to come from his heart.

And he has been attacked from the usual NEOCON sources: Bill Krystal, Sen Lindsay Graham, and the Armchair Amazon, Liz Cheney.

Did Steele simply insert foot in mouth? He must represent something that is brewing in the Republican leadership, not matter how small its following is. Congressman Ron Paul has supported his statement. Now YOU should too.

Phone the RNC at 1-202-863 8500. Option 1 is general comment, that should do. They apparently have the day off, so leave a voice mail.

Support his statement on Afghanistan. If you are a Republican, say so.

Contrast his statement with this one from the Democrat Party National committee

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RNC CHAIRMAN MICHAEL STEELE BETS AGAINST OUR TROOPS, ROOTS FOR FAILURE
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> Here goes Michael Steele setting policy for the GOP again. The likes of John McCain and Lindsey Graham will be interested to hear that the Republican Party position is that we should walk away from the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban without finishing the job. They’d also be interested to hear that the Chairman of the Republican Party thinks we have no business in Afghanistan notwithstanding the fact that we are there because we were attacked by terrorists on 9-11.
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> And, the American people will be interested to hear that the leader of the Republican Party thinks recent events related to the war are ‘comical’ and that he is betting against our troops and rooting for failure in Afghanistan. It’s simply unconscionable that Michael Steele would undermine the morale of our troops when what they need is our support and encouragement. Michael Steele would do well to remember that we are not in Afghanistan by our own choosing, that we were attacked and that his words have consequences.”

AS H L Mencken wrote back in the day:

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Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed, and are right.

So, if you are a DEMOCRAT, why not call the DNC and complain about THEIR statement bashing Steele?

that Number is 1-202-863 8000.

Brendan

Even those who claim to be strict Constitutionalists like sadly, Ron Paul or the Independent American Party do not seem to have actually read the Constitution when it comes to immigration. Certainly, Congressman Paul wants to end birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment, and that is worth considering. However, what about the main body of the Constitution, ie Art 1 sec 8? That is the part of the Constitution that is most important ( far more important than the Preamble, or the Bill of Rights), but how many actually read it?

The Federal Government is ONLY given authority over naturalization (ie the process of becoming a citizen) in Art 1 sec 8 of the US Constitution. The Supreme Ct tried to rationalize the first federal law on immigration, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1875 (in those days Congress didn’t bother with PC Titles to laws) under the power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations” but eventually gave up. That dog didn’t hunt because immigration is NOT commerce, in the sense of manufacturing or agriculture. It is people, people seeking a better life. The Supreme Ct had to admit there is no constitutional basis for federal regulation of immigration. It is an “incident of sovereignty”.

Sovereignty is a loophole large enough to drive an oil tanker through. It goes back to the Days of Monarchy, which we supposedly overthrew. Those who believe in limited government cannot have it both ways, a state that can do what it wants because it is sovereign, or a state that can only do what it is empowered by the Constitution to do.

There is a BIG DIFFERENCE between immigration for work and immigration to become a citizen. The Democrats want to see all immigrants as potential voters, while the Republicans want to see them as potential workers. The historical truth is that many people just come to America to work, and have no interest in being citizens, and it has always been so. Even in the days of the clipper ships, when it took weeks or months to travel between Europe and America, many if not most immigrants just came to the US to work and then went back to their own country. Until we can entangle that Gordian Knot, immigration reform will be impossible. We need a bracero style worker program, that admits as many to the country to work as the market will take, with supply and demand for labor being the main criteria. People who come here to work must be free to change jobs, since keeping them locked into a sponsor/worker drone legal trap was the main problem with the original bracero programs.

Speaking of Gordian Knots, the other major issues on immigration today relate to the Drug War and the Welfare State. It is useless to speak of immigration reform without ending the drug war and the welfare state. The violence on the Mexican Border has to do with the US attitude that it is better to have brown people killing each other than to have white middle class teenagers doing pot and cocaine. Until that American Exceptionalism ends, there will be no meaningful immigration reform.

Every welfare state tries (unsuccessfully) to limit both IMMIGRATION and EMIGRATION. The US is making it harder to emigrate, with draconian taxes on expatriation. This is similar to what we see in Europe. If we want to continue to be a free country, we have to end the welfare state, not expand it. And recognize that the welfare state includes public education.

Returning immigration policy to the states would also return it to the people. Some libertarians like Hans Herman Hoppe have reputations as anti immigration, but the main part of what they write indicates that the problem will be better solved by property rights solutions, rather than government based solutions. After all, the death of the Arizona rancher, and illegal immigration spillover that has caused destruction of private property on the border are the main causes for the immigration backlash. People respect property rights, because that is what they have invested their lives in. Property rights can help solve the problem, which is a government caused problem. More private property rights, not less, should be the goal of immigration reform.

Blaming the federal government for the immigration problem is counterproductive in the historical context of the states giving up their powers to the feds on this issue in the first place. The states should first blame themselves for not keeping their authority over immigration to themselves, and instead ceding their powers to the federal government, which as usual has made a monolithic mess.

CNN and the NY TIMES were awash with the carefully orchestrated government controlled propaganda this week, which was highlighted by the editorial written by, and interview with, former President Bill Clinton, which looked back at the Oklahoma City Bombing and tried to portray the Tea Party movement and other protests against the Obamacare and big government as potentially violent. Both talk radio and the internet were singled out as hotbeds of violent ideas that might result in actual violent acts.

If you study other instances of extremist right-wing violence in modern American history, most of it looks similar to McVeigh’s in the sense that it is motivated by racist, anti-Semitic, or authoritarian sentiments rather than a desire to limit the power of government. Think of the Ku Klux Klan (may of whom were economic populists, and favored a massive government role in enforcing segregation) or violence by various Neo-Nazi groups that, like McVeigh and Pierce, look to Nazi Germany as a model. The longtime Neo-Nazi activist who attacked the Holocaust Museum last year is a recent example of the latter. These people are “anti-government” only in the sense that they hate and fear the present government; by that definition communists are “anti-government” too. They have no general desire to constrain government power or to limit government control of the economy.

Well, what do you know!

It seems like the anti free market left who nevertheless wants pot legalized has just come up against an economic fact of life–producers who enjoy a special government monopoly (in this case a relatively benign black market) that boosts their profits don’t want economic liberty!

Who would have thunk it?

Only those crazy libertarians, who bothered to read books like Gabriel Kolko’s seminal work, the Triumph of Conservatism! or happened to study that libertarian school of economics called Public Choice!

It seems that pot growers in California are just like any government protected industry. Busts and violence? Not so much of it in hippy Mendocino valley. Arrests? That’s for the hispanics and blacks in LA.

So, the cries of DONT LEGALIZE IT are coming not just from the PURITANICAL RIGHT, who are still watching “Reefer Madness”, but from the lefty pot growers themselves.

Remember when I talked about “Baptists and Bootleggers” in other contexts when it comes to fighting against free markets and consumer choice! Well, here is another gold plated example.

The Baptists–Those who sincerely believe that government has to protect us from ourselves, provide a stern one size fits all morality, protect “the children”, etc.

The Bootleggers–Those who profit now from government privileges, or who would profit from government subsidies (T Bone Pickens) or who would lose privileges if economic and personal liberty is expanded and/or reinstated (the pot growers and the police, DA, etc.)

Often seemingly political opposites jump into bed together to gain access to political power. The religious right and the feminazi left calling for government censorship of pornography, for example.

If one of the new bedmates stands to gain financially, or looks to protect what it already has financially, then you have the baptists and bootleggers scenario.

Like what is happening in California now with the Initiative to legalize pot.

Keep in mind the State of California has not put this on the ballot out of altruistic classical liberal desires to protect individual liberty.

They are doing it because they have shamelessly spent themselves into oblivion, and are looking for a new revenue stream.

Which was the main reason why Franklin Delano Roosevelt worked to overturn Alcohol Prohibition.

Money always talks. Only libertarians understand that the best way to promote social justice is to let it have its say.

The gap between Israeli Interests and US Interests is becoming wider. More important, it is becoming more visible to American citizens.

At the Washoe Co Republican Convention in Reno, I threw down the libertarian/paleocon gauntlet to the neocons and evangelicals who dominated the convention.

It started with the preamble, which declared the belief in US “exceptionalism” and praised the US for “spreading freedom around the world”.

To a libertarian, American exceptionalism is based on the idea that we were the first nation (after Switzerland) that proclaimed a belief in individual liberty and unalienable rights. It encompasses the radical notions of property rights, limited government, federalism, free trade and non interventionism. We are still the most famous nation that believes in these principles, but as we become more “Europeanized” or in other words more soft shoe fascist, we are being rapidly overtaken by the Asian Tigers. IF we do not reverse this trend, the 21 Century will truly be the Asian Century.

To a neocon and an evangelical Republican, the idea of American Exceptionalism includes the wrong headed idea that we have a “duty” to spread our “freedom” at the point of a gun. In other words, perpetual wars fought for perpetual peace.

I began my objection by at least congratulating the platform committee for NOT using the word Democracy, which is a complete surrender to Wilsonism. That the US should remake the Middle East in the name of Democracy, closely supervised by America of course, was justification for the IRAQ War used by George Bush and the neocons after they admitted that Saddam Hussein had no “weapons of mass destruction.”

To paraphrase Harry Truman, the “US wants to help all those who think like us, be themselves”.

I moved that the word “peacefully” be inserted into the phrase as “The US should PEACEFULLY extend freedom throughout the world.”

All hell of course broke loose.

One delegate even snickered that if my idea was passed it was equal to saying that the American Revolution should have been “peaceful”.

Later I encouraged him to read George Washington’s Farewell Address. See http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp

Washington, Jefferson and John Q Adams among many others understood that the American Revolution was NOT about spreading liberty around the world. It was about creating a new nation, one that would look to ITS OWN VITAL INTERESTS first, and NEVER play favorites or make needless enemies with other nations.

It was James Madison who declared that the quickest way to lose our liberty was to be in a series of wars. War, as Randolph Bourne pointed out more than a century later, is the health of the state. And when the state is healthy, the liberties of the people are weak.

Now only a few days after the Washoe County Convention, the world was startled by the confrontation between Vice President Biden and Bibi Netanyahu over the new West Bank Settlements.

Then another news bombshell-this one not so heavily commented on by Fox News. Biden was heavily motivated to confront Bibi because of GENERAL PETRAEUS, who has filed a report (perhaps with the White House itself) that says that Israeli policy is directly against US interests, and is costing American lives.

During the debate at the WCR convention over my motion to amend the Preamble, comments were made by delegates that Israel is “our greatest ally in the war on terror.”

Whoa, Kemo Sabe. Not so fast. Also in the news is the story of the assassination er the murder of Mahmud al-Mabhuh in Dubai on 19 January 2010 by the Mossad . It has come to light that the murder was facilitated by Israeli officials who cloned the passports of unsuspecting tourists in order to provide cover for its black ops overseas.

Identity theft is NOT cooperation with the US in the war on terror. It is endangering our efforts to provide security, not helping it.

The fact is that Israel is a nation, as even one delegate to the WCRC admitted, that was itself founded in terror, like many nations, and it is no better or worse than other nations. It is looking after its own self interests first. Its interests DO NOT ALWAYS COINCIDE with the vital interests of the US.

Those Americans who claim to be patriots and at the same time pledge undying fealty to the interests of a small nation that presents no VITAL INTEREST to the US should rethink their patriotism, instead of pointing fingers at the libertarians and paleocons who object to the SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP of the US and Israel.

Let’s face it. Israel has no oil. If the US has any vital interest in the Middle East, it is about protecting the free flow of oil. Our vital interests lay more with the Arab and Persian nations, not with Israel.

Our “special relationship” with Israel has more to do with SPECIAL INTERESTS who have powerful lobbies and can bring out the vote than with our national security or government’s basic duties under the Constitution of protecting Individual Liberty.

The Democrats used to be the most beholden to Israel. After the rise of the neocons and the Evangelicals in the Republican Party, both parties are locked into the “special relationship.”

But if the politicians are locked into it, the American People are not. The events in the news of the last few weeks are bound to cause many of them to rethink how the Israeli tail seems to always wag the American Dog.

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/breaking-anti-lobbyist-obama-administration-recruited-left-wing-lobbyists-to-sell-bogus-green-jobs/?singlepage=true

I have reported several times regarding studies done in Europe (Spain, Denmark, Germany) that have concluded that government subsidized “green jobs” actually destroy more productive jobs than they create.

Now unlike Bob, who has dismissed all three studies as somehow the product of big oil, the Obama administration has taken them quite seriously. Seriously enough that the anti lobbyist Obama administration has asked George Soros to help fund a rebuttal study backed by (not big oil of course) but by BIG WIND. BIG WIND is an entity known as the American Wind Energy Association which has as its funders not just corporate welfare seekers like GE but numerous EUROPEAN wind and solar power companies who are panicked that the European studies criticizing their domestic subsidies might not only hurt that welfare stream, but also that they could damage the potential huge new export market known as the USA. In fact, Germany, France and Italy have made some efforts to reduce feed in tariffs and other subsidies as their consumers suffer under high energy costs in a deep recession.

Which just goes to show that it is not lobbyists in general that the left doesn’t like, but only those lobbyists that pitch facts and figures that they don’t approve of.

So,

Big Oil lobbyists BAD. Big Wind lobbyists, GOOD.

The Freedom of Information Act has been used to ferret out the cozy ties between the Administration and BIG WIND. Some of the requests have been denied, and are on appeal. But the very reason for the denial is alarming. The administration has claimed it denied the requests because the email correspondence between the administration , ie

National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Boulder, Colorado.

NREL is an extension of the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). EERE is run by Assistant Secretary of Energy Cathy Zoi, who, until assuming this post, served as CEO to Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection. Zoi is responsible for many millions of the “green jobs” stimulus dollars pushed for and designed by Van Jones (this according to Jones himself).

and the Soros foundations is “inter agency correspondence”. In other words, between GOVERNMENT AGENCIES. Are we then to make of this that George Soros and his foundations ( especially the Center for American Progress ) are in fact government agencies? Very interesting.

Now there is a spat between the administration and NREL about who asked who to generate the rebuttal report, which was not written by economists, but by two activists in NREL. EERE says NREL took it upon themselves to write the rebuttal. NREL says EERE told them to.

Aside from the battle of the acronyms over who spilt the milk, the milk itself is curdling rapidly. The substance of the rebuttal report is not about the conclusions of the European studies trashing welfare for green energy, but about the methodology.

The Spanish paper suffered from a “lack of rigor.”

– The Spanish paper applied “consensus economics.”
What pray tell is “consensus economics”? Why, nothing more than the same economics that are applied in the real world to solve real problems about how to allocate resources. What would the Obama lefties prefer that the European studies used? Why it would be: input-output (or Leontief) methodology designed for central planning, in which all is assumed to be knowable, controllable, and static. This method has been discredited outside of social democratic government agencies and select associations

The problem with Leontief modeling is ( as I have posted a while ago) that it is similar to GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE modeling–that it is garbage in, garbage out. You have to have massive amounts of data input into a funnel that spews out predictions but, what if the data is incomplete? In global warming modeling, it is becoming more and more apparent that the data on water vapor was always woefully incomplete. For economic modeling, how can any central planner have enough knowledge in his mind when knowledge is dispersed throughout society in millions of minds ? What if real people in the real world do not react to the data as you assume they should?

All central planners believe they know enough to play God with real people. But, as ADAM SMITH said in the eighteenth century, people are not pieces on a chess board. There are all sorts of unintended consequences that cannot be modeled as real people react to real life incentives and barriers that they are confronted with by agencies backed by the guns of the state.

So, in real life government subsidies to industry, whether it is old established industry like big oil, or new industry like wind and solar, will produce unintended consequences that will lead to inefficiencies and waste.

Better to let the real people in the real world make their own decisions based on market choices than have technocrats try to decide what is best for them, and for some big abstraction, like “the planet”.

Brendan

http://www.scotusblog.com/2010/02/the-neglected-case-of-buchanan-v-warley/

Many folks I know scoff at the importance of property rights as the main pillar of justice in our world.

They believe in HUMAN RIGHTS, or so they claim, not mere property rights.

Property rights are for big corporations, or so they think, not the “little guy”.

Can the homeless have property rights? (Yes, because YOUR BODY IS YOUR PROPERTY.)

Property rights implies protection for those awful Rich White folks who live in gated communities and hire illegals to clean them.

In the movie smash Avatar, we saw the natives rise up to defend their PROPERTY RIGHTS in the Tree of Life AGAINST the big corporation. OK, it was just a movie, but wouldn’t native populations the world over benefit from property rights against crony capitalist development?

The article above lists the importance of the Supreme Ct decision in Buchanan v Warley, (1917)

Starting in 1910, many cities in the South, border states, and lower Midwest, responded to a wave of African-American in-migration from rural areas by passing laws mandating residential segregation in housing. More cities were ready to follow suit if the laws survived constitutional challenges. Several southern state supreme courts upheld the laws against constitutional challenges. In 1917, however, the Buchanan Court unanimously invalidated a Louisville residential segregation law as a deprivation of liberty and property without due process of law.

Yes, the Supreme Ct itself erred earlier in PLESSY VS FERGUSON (1896) , when it ruled that SEPARATE BUT EQUAL was constitutional.

IN Buchanan,

The Court for the first time held thait discrminatory animus, even when supported by popular opinion and expert opinion backed by contemporary social science evidence, and justified by fear of miscegenation and racial violence, was not a proper police power justification for laws violating recognized individual rights. This was hardly a foregone conclusion.

The article shows that Buchanan, panned by most legal commentators, did not completely overturn Plessy. The right of a black man to sit in a whites only railroad car was a mere “social right”. Plessy did not have a PROPERTY RIGHT to sit where he chose to, based on his railroad ticket, according to this doctrine.

But Buchanon marked a turning point in US jurisprudence regarding the rights of minorities. The Supreme Ct became much more deferential to minority rights after Buchanan.

And it did stop De Jure racial segregation in housing, even when the Ct (again mistakenly, IMHO) ruled that ZONING was constitutional. Zoning never became a major tool of segregationists.

Buchanan was argued by the FIRST PRESIDENT of the NAACP, Moorfield Storey. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moorfield_Storey

Storey was a Cleveland Democrat, descended from the Jefferson/Jackson tradition, and was anti war. In other words, a CLASSICAL LIBERAL.

Unfortunately, the NAACP later became infused with anti property sentiments, and abandoned the property rights arguments in its post WW II victories such as Brown vs Board of Education(1954). Famously, classical liberal blacks like author Zora Neale Hurston criticized Brown for its anti property, paternalistic views toward race relations.

This abandonment of a principled property rights argument against racial segregation had, IMHO, unfortunate consequences, as it threatened the legitimate rights of ALL property owners, white and black together, and has facilitated the rise of the welfare and nanny state. And it led to the famous WHITE BACKLASH over state imposed anti property regulations, most famously FORCED BUSING.

This is why Barry Goldwater did not vote for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. NOT because he favored segregation, but because he correctly foresaw that the ACT would open the door to all kinds of federal encroachments on legitimate property rights.

Brendan

What a suprise ! Even more than seeing Drew Brees outplay Peyton Manning, or hearing the whole stadium chant “We won’t be fooled again!” like a 60,000 strong Tea Party chorus during the Who’s halftime show, was this little gem of a commercial by Audi to announce its new diesel engine car during Super Bowl XLIV yesterday .

Ludwig von Mises must be smiling in libertarian heaven seeing the market produce in one minute a video set to popular music that perfectly illustrates his famous quote:

“It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. . . . Taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience or resistance is hopeless. As long as this is the state of affairs, the government is able to collect the money that it wants to spend. Government is in the last resort the employer of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.”

Grocery clerk:Paper or plastic?
Consumer : Plastic.
Cop( slaming his face onto the grocery checkout counter): That’s the magic word. Green Police!

Leading him off in cuffs: You picked the wrong day to mess with the ecosystem, plastic boy!

What a great minute of rebellion , and from a car manufacturer whose product I would never buy!

But that is how the market works, as spontaneous improvements in our lives can come, not from a heavily regulated political system, but from anyone with the brains and pluck to make something new where nothing existed before!

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig11/wargas1.1.1.html

As one of my sisters might remember, I used to say nice things about Judge Richard Posner. Of course, that was in the early 1990’s when I visited her in Chicago during the LP convention (the one attended by both the late Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson).

I still have a copy of his excellent book, SEX and REASON in my library.

But lately the good judge has been demonstrating feet of clay. Neocon Clay, the worst kind.

Even though Judge Posner should be condemned for his screeds on how to make federal warrant- less wiretapping “accountable”
(http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2006_hr/071906posner.pdf), his worst crime may be to embrace Keynesian Economics.

After all, Judge Posner did not earn his reputation as a civil liberties judge, but as a jurist who applied economic reasonings to the law. That is rare in itself, but now the libertarian/neocon confused judge is veering off into exercises of illogic that would make a freshman blush.

Posner’s reasoning is wrong :

Posner reasons that economists did not see the bubble meltdown coming. The Chicago School of economics, Monetarism, is the primary school since 1980. Therefore, he must abandon Monetarism and return to Keynes theories.

First of all, the primary premise itself is wrong. While it is true that Monetarists did not see the bubble coming (see the statements of Ben Bernanke and the Maestro himself, Alan Greenspan), it is also true that Keynesians missed it also.

But, Posner overlooks the one school of economics that DID see the Meltdown coming, the Austrian School. Ron Paul has been predicting a major crisis for years. More recently, Peter Schiff can be seen on numerous YOU TUBES debating snarking “everything is rosy” types in 2007 and before.

The Austrian School is reluctantly being recognized as the only economic school that has a logical, coherent explanation for the BOOM AND BUST cycle in modern mixed economy capitalism. Only, not by statists like Judge Posner.

The Austrian School was poised to become the primary school of economics based on its theory of subjective value and its explanation of why socialism cannot work in the 1920’s. Not to mention its monetary policy prescriptions that saved Austria from the hyperinflation that Germany endured during the Weimer Republic.

But, then along came Keynes, and the Great Depression (which the Austrians also predicted). Keynes theories became established because the political class wanted it to be established, NOT because it had better ideas. Fascism and Communism were all the rage in the thirties, and common sense took a beating. Classical economists abandoned their long held ideas and embraces Keynes, largely because that was where the government grant money was. Austrians like the great Ludwig von Mises struggled to find work. Only FA Hayek lucked out, landing a good job at, of all places, the University of Chicago.

But then Keynes theory fell apart in the 1970’s, the days of STAGFLATION. You see, Keynes built his house of cards on the idea that government should inflate the money supply to lower unemployment. (the Phillips Curve). More inflation, less unemployment, less inflation, more unemployment. But the 1970’s produced a new paradigm that Keynes’s theory could not explain: High Unemployment, High Inflation, AND High Interest Rates. Keynes was dead, as a practical matter, and his theories are hardly studied since 1980.

Except for those who use them to justify TARP and all the other Keynesian reflexive actions that occurred in the present Meltdown.

No one turned to the Austrian School in the late 1970’s either, although it did make some inroads. People turned to Milton Friedman’s Monetarism, and it did in fact prove effective -for a good while, in fact. By concentrating on restricting the money supply under new Fed Chairman Paul Volker, and letting interest rates “float”, the Fed did end STAGFLATION and generated a BOOM that lasted until the recent Meltdown, albeit with several crises and Bailouts along the way.

What about the Austrians? Well, Ron Paul got his Commission on the role of Gold, and the opportunity to write his own magnificent MONETARY HISTORY OF THE US, that makes Friedman’s Nobel Prize winning History pale in comparison. Gold was once more legalized for personal possession, but NOT as legal tender.

Monetarism failed because it’s major flaw is that a CENTRAL BANK can, in fact, control the money supply. The money supply is created from the bottom up, in commerce, and is not easily controlled by central planners. We quickly saw the invention of M1, M2, M3 etc as the Fed tried to get a handle on just WHAT money really was out there. Then, we got Petro Dollars, and eventually the EURO and other creatures of market forces and government interventions battling over money and all its myriad substitutes in a regime of “floating ” currencies, central banks and FIAT MONEY.

Now, the MELTDOWN is displacing Monetarism, but folks like Judge Posner, instead of looking to the Austrian School, are
returning in desperation to a Vulgar, Paul Krugman version of the failed policies of JM Keynes.

For shame, Judge Posner. Open your eyes to real freedom, and sound reasoning. Learn to love Austrian Economics, and do not turn to the Siren of Keynes, because you are abandoned by your love, Milton.

Brendan