posted June 25, 2009 11:11 AM         

Still, O'Bomber plans to press on with his policies of utter failure until he's totally destroyed the US economy...and put government in total control of Americans lives.

That's the Marxist Socialist model of governments and economies.

Economics is not the deep murky pool most economists screech about...to elevate their own standings. Economics is pretty transparent and straightforward. There are causes and effects and these are known and have been known and followed since the US was opened for business. There are rules of the road. Violate those rules and the nation is in for a rough ride.

Everything that has happened in the US economy was predictable and was in fact predicted. The future of the economy is also predictable...given O'Bomber's utter disregard of economic principles.

Grab another glass of O'Bomber Kool-Aid and buckle up. It's going to be a rough ride as the rest of the economic shoes drop one by one.

In a free market economy there is a fix for every malady. O'Bomber has taken the exact opposite fix than the one called for.

June 25, 2009
Recovery When? How About If?
By C. Edmund Wright

Shhh. Don't let this get around, but Warren Buffet just let the cat out of the bag -- no economic recovery in sight.

Well no kidding. I have long tired of the economists and investment gurus debating "when our economy recovers" and how to position your investments for "when America bounces back" and so on, as if it's a foregone conclusion.

Haven't they heard? The America that always recovers is not in anymore. Any assumption of a recovery fails to consider the idea that we now have a government run by people who ignore American history and who are hell bent on changing America's future.

Obama has done more than apologize for America's greatness and generosity while abroad. He is wreaking havoc on the economy that paid for that greatness and generosity at home. Don't you remember? He is "the one" we've been waiting for to finally do something right around here.

Thus the conviction that Americans always bounce back and bring their economy with them is not necessarily relevant anymore. The rules for business have changed and continue to do so daily. Incentive has been devastated. The reliable motivations of the past do not matter, because most of those dynamics have been targeted as what is wrong with this country and they are systematically being removed at a stunning pace.

In reaction, Atlas is shrugging. And who can blame him (and her).

We cannot be on the verge of any meaningful recovery because we are in a downward swirl of liberal policy consequences -- and we have a government determined to correct this by getting more and more liberal.

Yes, I know the stock market has bounced off the March lows. I admit that history indicates recession is always followed by recovery at some point. There are still a lot of accomplished, respected and even conservative leaning commentators (such as Larry Kudlow) who speak in terms of "when" and not "if."

And yes, some of the trillions that the Obama administration is printing will eventually circulate through the economy to some degree..**(along with raging inflation followed by another economic downturn)**and there will be some stimulative effect at some point. A few auto sales will result from the Cash for Clunkers bill, for instance.

And there is some sort of self fulfilling factor to a macro economy related to the optimism or pessimism of the consumer population, and an all out effort by the MSM to proclaim Obama-nomics a success will spur some activity in the short run.

Nonetheless I see more compelling reasons for discussing this in terms of "if" instead of "when." Obamanomics simply will not work. It is based on a total misdiagnosis of our problems and prescribes precisely the wrong cures.

Consider the following series of events that have led us to our economy today:

1: Energy. While it is conventional wisdom that our economic woes stem from the bursting bubble in the housing market, few consider the needle that did the bursting.

When gas more than doubled in what was just a period of months, household budgets got devastated as trips to the grocery store and the pump took more and more of the limited dollars of the sub prime borrowers' budgets. This led to the next domino:

2: Housing Crisis: People needed to eat and get to work more than they needed to pay a mortgage they had not invested a down payment in, so they quit paying those mortgages in huge numbers.

So the gas domino nudged the sub prime mortgage domino -- which then toppled dominos in both the mortgage market in general and in housing prices. More and more mortgages were in trouble making more and more houses available making those houses worth less which in turn motivated more and more people to default on these mortgages.

It makes sense. If you have a 250 thousand dollar mortgage with no down payment, and that house is suddenly only worth 175 thousand dollars, why in the world would you worry about paying the mortgage since your gas and groceries are suddenly taking all your money to begin with? Well, many did not and still are not bothering to pay those mortgages. This led to another domino that very few saw coming:

3: Wall Street and Banking Meltdown: The massive mortgage defaults literally crashed the value of so much investment wealth thanks to the leveraging effect of credit default swaps and all manner of derivative investment instruments. Entire books will be written on this, but suffice it to repeat the little analogy that "my neighbor defaulted on his doublewide and the next thing I know the government of Iceland is broke." That's not as far off from the truth of how leveraged investments are inter-related as you might think. Bottom line, the next couple of dominos were nudged:

4. Consumer spending: with the crash of investment instruments, many Americans saw their 401 K and other investments lose something like 50% of their value. The nest eggs were cracked. To make matters worse, the other big nest egg -- the value of their homes -- was also diluted by something in the 20 to 40% range depending on location.

Millions of average families saw net worth losses of several hundred thousand dollars in a matter of months. Naturally -- and wisely -- those families stopped spending money. This of course pushed the dominos of all of those companies they normally spend money with:

5: Retail: Obviously when consumers stop spending, retailers are hurt. Actually, most businesses of any kind are hurt. Some big retailers like Linens N Things and Circuit City disappeared into bankruptcy. When business is hurting, they quit paying rent and they start laying people off.

5B: Autos: Consumers stopped buying autos as well of course. This pushed an industry, already bruised from unsustainable union labor costs, over the abyss.

5C: SUVs: Naturally, the SUV sales almost ground to a halt with the four dollar gas issue. The SUV was responsible for most of the profit margin the union dominated auto industry did generate.

6: Commercial Property and Mortgages: this is easy to understand and works a lot like the housing and mortgage bubble, but on a much larger scale. (See the bankruptcy filing of mall giant General Growth Properties.) Why would a bank that is likely already in trouble re finance billions of dollars of General Growth mortgages when General Growth's customers -- retailers -- are not paying rent and going out of business? Well, they would not. Prepare for this bubble to continue to burst.

7: Un-employment: all of the above have led in part to the massive unemployment figures. Of course, this includes union autoworkers. And of course, massive un-employment will just start the cycle of mortgage defaults and cascading housing values all over again as a new wave of folks quit paying their mortgages.

7B: Energy AGAIN: And now, to make matters worse, energy prices are creeping back up. Many on Wall Street and in the financial punditry welcome this as a sign that things are bouncing back. This is the Metro and limousine academic set from the DC-New York corridor that still misses the fact that oil was the first domino to begin with.

So we start this all over again and ‘round and ‘round we go.

All of which in my equation all but guarantees we are not on the verge of any meaningful recovery. Quite the opposite perhaps. The downward swirl of liberal policies continues to build on itself.

It is beyond debate that liberal policies have led to most of these dominos that are now toppled. Liberalism in power has prevented this country from using much of our own energy. It has prevented the building of any refineries since before the days of Microsoft. It has prevented us from building nuclear power plants. It has dominated most production and labor policy for the Big Three automakers. It dictated that people who could not qualify for home mortgages should have access to them anyway.

Liberal cronies were in charge of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were liberal enterprises to begin with. Liberal government has run Michigan for decades.

In fact, liberals have been PROUD of all of these beliefs as they have fought these battles one by one. In the childlike mind of a liberal utopian, the dots just never connect. In reality, those dots always connect - and they connect long before most people can visualize the lines. Thus an economic meltdown that hit us with breathtaking speed.

And the Obama cure? More of the same. More quashing of America's energy complex. More government interference into labor. More government interference into lending. More government interference into healthcare. More changing of contract law. More taxes on business. More incentives not to work or pay your mortgage or invest. More and more and more government - all because we need to solve things that government screwed up to begin with.

Recovery? Maybe. Maybe not. But no time soon.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/recovery_when_how_about_if_1.html

posted June 28, 2009 12:49 PM         

So why is Socialism tried over and over?

It puts unproductive theorists at the top of government. Those who don't know much about anything at all wind up in power.

Socialism is a fraud and always was a fraud. In any honest discussion, Socialism is theft. It's theft by government against those who are productive and it's theft BY those who elect Socialists to secure something they didn't earn from those who did.

Socialism ASSUMES everyone will work equally as hard as the next person for their one share of the common collective. In reality that's not true now and it's never been true.

Socialism is as fatally flawed in this age as it was in ages past.

That's the reason O'Bomber's Socialist Revolution is going to fail in America...except, it's going to fail even faster than in times past.

June 28, 2009
America's Socialist Past
By Ryan Siefert

There seems to be a need in American society to have to relearn the same hard lessons over and over again, regardless of whether the results were seen on the other side of the planet or suffered through by our own people.

We're living in a country that elected a President that believes in redistributing wealth. He's mentioned this himself, from the "Joe the Plumber" incident[i] to his critique[ii] of the failures of the civil rights movement. Whether you call it Socialism, Communism, Marxism, or by its simpler name, theft, they are all part of the same economic system that destroys private property and puts everything in central control of the state.

The lesson we, and the rest of the world, seems to fail to learn is how socially and economically destructive this sort of system is. The problem is, these lessons don't have to be learned from studying the histories of far off lands, for we have numerous examples of collectivist/socialist experiments here at home.

In Jamestown, there was no welfare state. Originally meant to be a trading colony, too many of the original inhabitants were adventurers or people seeking to gain wealth through the export of things they could find in the new world. Preoccupied with their own ideas of fortune, they found that in the wilderness of what was North America their habit of avoiding physical labor meant life or death. It was here that John Smith proclaimed, "He who will not work will not eat."[iii] It worked...sort of. While success still eluded the colony, the mortality rate did go from 60 percent to 15 percent.

Imagine a politician on any level making Smith's proclamation today. Cities would burn. Of course, when Sir Thomas Dale arrived there in 1611, he saw "where the most company were, and the daily and usual workers, bowling in the streets."[iv] Apparently Smith's proclamation had only motivated the people enough to do the minimum. Sir Dale had to motivate the people to fix up their houses, plant corn, and secure the defenses of the fort.

Lord De La Warr, the first official governor of Jamestown, continued with the communal storehouse practice. This meant that no matter how hard one worked; everyone was entitled to food so nobody would (in theory) starve. It only prolonged the hardship. Seeking a way around this, the administrators began using the incentive approach (as opposed to Smith's harsh approach) and privatized land ownership. With tobacco finding a market back in Europe, the private property incentives mixed with trading allowed Jamestown to finally get over the hump and begin to prosper.[v]

The Pilgrims sought to live in a society that promoted "just and equal laws." Their first year saw the death of half of their population through disease, starvation, and malnutrition (again, thanks to communal farming). In a story that's getting more and more circulation in today's internet age (and thanks to Rush's yearly reading of the story of Thanksgiving), we learn that only when William Bradford instituted private property that people began to work harder and innovate more.[vi] Even women and children went out to the fields with their husbands, which meant more crops were planted and ultimately harvested. This led to more trade with the local tribes, earlier repayment of debt to the English sponsors, and overall prosperity of the colony.

Let's fast forward a bit.

The date is January 1, 1816, and a man named Robert Owen proposed a new type of model society. In his plans, each of these communities of 2,500 individuals would "be self-governing and hold its property in the common."[vii] So popular was Owen that when he reached America from Britain, President John Quincy Adams displayed one of Owen's architectural models for this ideal community. He established his community in Indiana, christening it New Haven in 1825. In New Haven, "not only work, but also recreation and meditation were communal and regimented."[viii] Everything was collectivized, including "cooking, child care, and other domestic work."[ix] Ironically, at least by today's "Liberal" standards, it was women that were relegated to these chores. The community lasted two years.

The term "socialism" was actually coined by Owen's followers around the time New Haven failed.

Eighteen other communities were established on the Owen collectivized model across the United States. Modern Times, the name of the community established on Long Island, was the last to fail. This was in 1863.

Charles Fourier, a French social theorist, came up with the solution to the problems associated with collectivized living: It should be done on a smaller scale. He calculated that 1,620 was the ideal population and that they should live on 6,000 acres. These were called phalanxes. In the 1840's, a man named Charles Brisbane decided to implement this idea, ultimately establishing 28 of them. All failed within 12 years.[x]

In 1804, George Rapp and six hundred of his followers came to America. They set up a community in Pennsylvania called Harmony where communal farming was practiced, but they were expecting the second coming and left for Indiana in 1814 before it could be deemed a success or failure. While in Indiana, they established another community and named it (again) Harmony, but sold it ten years later to Robert Owen (who set up New Harmony there) and moved back to Pennsylvania. These people began the petroleum industry in Pennsylvania (a move to capitalism), but eventually died out due to their celibacy and lack of recruits.[xi]

In 1841, Humphrey Noyes started the "Perfectionists", and wrote a book on his theories titled Bible Communism in 1848. Noyes took collectivism to the next level; not only was all property communal, but so were spouses. The term for this was "complex marriage" and in practice it meant, "all the men in the Perfectionist community considered themselves husbands to all the women, and each woman the wife of every man."[xii] Before coitus, and even conception, people had to have consent granted by the whole community. Economically, and with a hint of irony, they flourished by building and marketing animal traps. However, this particular communist experiment ended when they established a joint-stock company called Oneida Community, Ltd.

In showing what a great social and economic model Communism is, Harrison Berry likened it to slavery by stating (in a) that "a Southern farm is the beau ideal of Communism; it is a joint concern, in which the slave consumes more than the master...and is far happier, because although the concern may fail, he is always sure of support."[xiii]

George Fitzhugh, an influence on Berry, actually argued that slave labor was preferable because the slaves were ultimately free. It was property owners and free laborers that were the slaves. He advocated that taking decision-making out of the hands of individuals made the African slaves better off than free whites and claimed that not only all blacks, but most whites too, should be slaves.[xiv] His theory was ultimately squashed with the support and ratification of the 13th and 14th Amendments, which not only freed the slaves but also established they had constitutionally protected private property rights.