Month: March 2012

When the new Federal Reserve money starts churning…

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

I’ve been pondering different scenarios as to how the whole house of cards will fall. I read an article recently that seems to be the simplest explanation yet. Here it is in a few paragraphs.

The Fed buys bonds so the government can borrow at low rates. This enables it to have multi trillion dollar deficits annually with no immediate consequences. In order to buy the bonds, the fed conjures up money out of nothing. The money ends up on the balance sheet of some big bank. That big bank doesn’t touch the money, because the economy is fragile and they want to keep the cash reserves for rainy days. So interest rates get low and inflation is delayed, since the money isn’t moving.

Then, the economy starts picking up a bit. GDP goes up. People start borrowing money and spending money. The big banks start to unlock some of those cash reserves. Problem is, there’s such a staggering amount of them that it overwhelms the system and prices start flying out of control. So the Fed has to suck some of that cash back in its black hole by selling bonds, taking the money and burying it.

The Fed is like the Big Bang of fiat money. The monetary universe expands and contracts and the fed is at the center of the universe.

So anyway, as the Fed tries to control the hyper inflation it itself created, interest rates go up. People finally stop buying bonds. Banks, who were relying on the Fed feeding them with money, are no longer fed. Their leverage – the amount of money they lend out over the amount they actually hold – is now about 33 to one and gets called in by people looking for their cash. Banks fall like dominoes, and the Fed either has to agree to hyperinflation, or a depression. It will pick one or the other. Those that own real assets will be fine.

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Stop hiring people to dig holes and refill them

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , ,

It was a few months ago when I heard some guy, I think it was Jessie Jackson’s son actually, say that he supported the “outright hiring of 10 million people” or however many unemployed there were at the time. Hiring them to do what, exactly? To all go dig holes and refill them? And then I heard this interview with Congresswoman Maxine Waters (or is it Senatress) that Obama has to be “bold” and “stimulate” the economy with “1 trillion dollars”.

So I suppose that with the magic trillion bucks he’s going to hire the 10 million unemployed to go dig him some holes and refill them thereby stimulating the economy and making us a fully employed country.

What’s a trillion divided by 10 million? 10 thousand bucks a hole-digger? That’s not enough. They’ll be poor. They won’t be able to buy enough food with the holes they dig and refill. Maybe we should make them dig twice as many holes and refill them so they’ll be more productive, and then we can double the “stimulus” to $2 trillion and they’ll be at minimum wage. (Which itself is a government mandate.)

This is obviously the more ludicrous side of the whole issue. The more mundane is that whenever people ask Ron Paul what will happen to the economy when all those government workers he wants to fire go unemployed and the jobless rate spikes and where does the trillion dollar spending cut go, they’re asking as if by the very act of spending one trillion dollars, the government is creating wealth. No, they’re not digging holes and refilling them. They’re just stamping forms and filing them. But that’s

PRETTY

DAMN

CLOSE.

When you cut them away, the trillion dollars used to pay them to stamp those forms gets freed for people who use the money to create things that people actually need.

But the journalists can’t stomach that fact. They think that if you shrink the government, unemployment goes up, and that’s all that matters.

The truth is, every overpaid and useless government employee is on welfare. He’s wasting his time and the country’s time, and eating up your money. So we may as well stop the nonsense, stop hiring them to dig their holes and just tell them they’re on welfare. Stop the Orwellian nonsense.

The point of a job is not to influence the unemployment rate. The point of a job is to produce wealth that people need – emotional wealth, psychological wealth, spiritual wealth, or physical wealth. If you’re not doing that, you’re on welfare.

The Philistines are bombing Ashdod. We’ll do nothing.

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog ,

See the video of Ashdod getting bombed 6 times in a minute.

I’ve long since given up on the Israeli government doing the only thing it’s actually supposed to do: Defend its citizens. Everything else it will do – force me to buy their healthcare, force me to buy their insurance, force me to educate my child in its institutions, but it won’t defend us from being bombed.

I don’t expect it to. There is no leadership, and I won’t protest, because it’s not that they CHOOSE to do nothing. They CAN’T actually do anything, so they can’t be blamed.

According to the Israeli government, we are occupiers. So they are justified in bombing us. We can only respond in self defense, since even an evil aggressor has the right to self defense, and as long as we have our Iron Dome, we will keep shooting multimillion dollar missiles at pieces of explosive junk as millions of Jews suffer shock and eventually leave the country.

The only solution is to install Jewish leadership that understands that Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Jerusalem, Shechem, and Hevron are ours, and get the ones that are bombing us out of here. Eventually we’ll do it. For now we’ll have to take the missiles.

 

Celebrate the Message of Purim by Bombing Iran without America’s Go Ahead

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog ,

The reason I want Ron Paul to be president is that I want to be left alone to develop independently and for Israel to make her own sovereign decisions and accept the consequences. One of those decisions is to take out our own garbage and get rid of the Iranian nuclear threat on our own. Now…

The essential problem of Purim is that the situation didn’t really change from beginning to end. At the beginning, Haman drew lots to determine which date the Persians were going to kill the Jews. On the day he drew lots, there were x Persians and y Jews. 11 months later when the day actually happened, there were still x Persians and there were still y Jews, give or take a few. The Persians still had the numerical advantage to slaughter us. The only thing that changed during those 11 months was that the King of Persia, Xerxes, or Achashverosh, decided to give us the right to fight back.

But what were we going to do if he didn’t? Just sit there and die? We were only going to defend ourselves with his permission? Apparently so. This is why Purim is not a holiday of full redemption. This is why the Megillah ends on such a sad note, with Esther still stuck as a sexual prisoner in Achashverosh’s disgusting hedonistic drunken palace of debauchery. Because we had no self confidence that we could fight on our own.

Back in Persia, this is what got us in trouble in the first place. We joined in the drunken feasts and Haman came to wake us up not to rely on our hosts so much.

The present day is not much different. We have Haman in Persia threatening to annihilate us. We have Achashverosh in the White House pigging out on debt, and we’re waiting for his decree that we are allowed to fight back.

But just as nothing really changed in the Purim story except our self confidence, nothing is going to change here when America says “OK” except our self confidence.

It’s not America we need, but self confidence. So let’s, sit down, fast and pray, just like Esther did, and then get up and get rid of this stupid little Iranian threat already without waiting for Achashverosh to do something.