Economics and government are connected at the hip. If your economic model is screwed up then your government will end up being screwed up as well. The Bible talks about this several times, including in Leviticus, Proverbs, and Micah. However, the first time it shows up plainly is in Deuteronomy 25: 15-16 -
You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the God is giving you. God detests anyone who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly.
Why is this important? Read the rest of this entry »
(it’ll be worse. Sorry.)
Here’s what bothers me – if (when) Eric deCarbonnel’s and the rest of the contrarian economists are proven right, they will continue to be ignored. How bad does it really need to get before people start to believe that we are in big trouble, that Obama will not be able to save us, that the worth of our money isn’t important, and that government isn’t the answer (but freedom, the market, and personal responsibility are)?
During the Senate discussions about the impending bailout of the banking system, Ron Paul questioned Bernanke’s authority to create money to purchase bad debt and take a gamble that they can get rid of it later. Bernanke’s response was that the Congress “is given the authority to coin money, and to regulate its value, and they delgated that to us [the Federal Reserve].” (in this video, at the 6:20 mark) Bernanke’s right, but he’s also very, very wrong. Here’s why. Read the rest of this entry »
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.