The Jewish Libertarian Blog

Yanis Varoufakis and Economic Morality in the Eurozone

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , ,

I ran into a rather amazing find last week when I heard an Australian radio interview with a Greek economist named Yanis Varoufakis on the topic of the insanity in the Eurozone. Aside from having an awesome name, Dr. Varoufakis is sharp, articulate, and a contrarian. He was saying things I generally agree with but with an angle I hadn’t heard before, and what he said made a lot of sense.

You can listen to the interview here. It really is worth the time. The gist is this: Varoufakis holds that the entire structure of the bailout and so-called austerity is twisted. Greece’s debt keeps going up, so the austerity isn’t working obviously. The reason it isn’t working is that the bankrupt Greek state keeps borrowing money from the EFSF bailout fund to repay the ECB on bonds they bought from Greece to support Greek debt when no one else was buying those bonds. So in repaying the ECB via money from the EFSF, the ECB makes $800 million, and the Greek government goes deeper into debt.

Read that again, and you’ll see that the bailout fund is actually serving to drive Greece deeper into debt while letting the ECB profit off of it, and Greece is only “privileged” to continue this rape if it keeps it’s “austerity” which isn’t balancing its budget anyway.

That is why, says Dr. Varoufakis, the way things are going, the Eurozone will disintegrate entirely, as this domino effect will hit the rest of the PIIGS and the EU will self destruct along with the Eurozone.

Varoufakis’ solution is simple: Europeanize every bank in the Eurozone and have the ECB issue bonds in their name that people will buy. So you don’t have Spanish banks anymore – you have Eurobanks in Spain. The ECB issues bonds and becomes the switchboard, everything goes through the ECB, and now totally centralized, they can navigate forward. Wow does that sound Keynesian.

Varoufakis helped shed the light for me on the nature of this “bailout” and that’s why I like him, but he’s a Keynesian, and doesn’t realize that Keynesianism got us into this mess in the first place. Another example: I read another article he wrote about how Greece can’t be Argentina, which defaulted a decade ago, devalued its currency, and then rebounded. Greece, says Varoufakis, cannot be Argentina because Greece has no currency to devalue. He’s right, but the point is this:

Devaluing a currency, he says, is beneficial for any nation in debt, because it allows the nation to get out of debt. Well sure, a State can get out of debt by pillaging the value of its citizen’s savings and destroying its peoples’ wealth and paying debt back in garbage. They call that “devaluing a currency” in Orwellian language. What it really means is STEALING from citizenry. One day a government spends too much money so it decides to make your money worthless so it can pay back in worthless junk. Sounds great.

Varoufakis, for a Keynesian, is very smart, but he is a Keynesian nonetheless. He’s an economic tactician, recommending tactical moves to get out of a crisis without understanding the real, root cause of it all – a MORAL cause. Maybe Europeanizing everything and having the ECB issue bonds will technically get Europe out of debt in a mega Keynesian centralized way. But everyone will be dirt poor if it succeeds, because it means that the ECB will steal the value of every Euro in Europe by printing it into oblivion to pay the bonds it issues for the rest of Europe.

Why the circuitous Orwellian route of “ECB Bonds”? Just tell it like it is. Steal value from European savers. Just take it. Have the ECB issue bonds and then print the money to pay for them. Why not just do it more directly? Have the Eurozone completely centralized and pass a law that every Eurozone bank account has to give X% of their savings to pay the Euro debt. Just steal the money outright instead of printing it into oblivion.

So Varoufakis’ solution is basically: If European governments don’t get their act together and steal much more money much more quickly from the people, then the Eurozone will collapse.

Well OK. But the root cause of it all is the very fact that you allow a government to print money.

My solution? Get rid of the Eurozone and privatize money. Let people use what they want to use, and the best money will have the most value.

Never again will a government be able to simply steal your money by printing it.

Much like Leftists here in Israel who keep trying to find the perfect way to make peace, who do not realize that peace talks are inherently immoral if they give up Jewish land as a precondition, economic Leftists, or Keynesians, do not realize that the inherent structure of the system of currency backed by force is immoral and must be torn down. Israel leftists will never find peace beyond theft of Jewish land. Keynesians will never find economic solutions beyond theft either.

The trouble with Catholics and Atheists debating about God

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Saw an article in the Jerusalem Post about how the Australian Jewish Community was offended by what some Catholic guy said about the Holocaust or something while he was bickering with Richard Dawkins about whether God exists or not.

I don’t want to address the Holocaust sensitivity issue, though I believe that Jews should stop being sensitive about what people say about the Holocaust, or anything else, because every time they do they sound like little children and make things worse for us.

I’d like to address the very notion of an atheist and a Catholic religious leader arguing about God. The very notion is itself silly, and illustrates the world we live in that lacks Jewish leadership. In an ideal world, the Jew would be the defender of God, as we are the keepers of His law and we are His people. Catholics know very little about God, and most of what they think they know is silly.

Dawkins goes on about evolution, the Catholic guy goes on about Genesis, and the two go in circles as the audience gets dumber by the second. It’s like to kids fighting over a cookie. Invite a Jew who knows who he is on that stage and he’ll change they way these arguments flow.

You, Catholic, on the one hand, believe God actually died and that I killed Him. Then you thank me for killing Him because He died for your sins, but you blame me for killing Him and hate me for it. Then, depending on your mood and the century, you either thank me or kill me over it. And you expect Dawkins to flock to this “ideology”?

The Catholic guy is saying he has to believe in God. Dawkins is saying it doesn’t make sense to. The Jew would say I don’t care what you believe in, but can either of you explain my existence as a Jew? Judaism’s for me. You can both sit back and watch.

Put a Jewish leader on stage and neither of them would be able to explain why the Jew exists, why he’s back in Israel, and why none of the promises in the Bible have been broken. Once the Jew claims his mantel as spiritual leader of the globe, Dawkins and Catholic will fall in line behind us as disciples. And the Catholic guy will suddenly realize God never died in the first place.

The only way to get Jonathan Pollard out of prison

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There have been murmurings lately that Pollard is in serious health trouble and that our brave heroic President, Shimon Peres, exercising brave heroics as he always does, has sent a brave heroic letter to their President Obama asking meekly and sheepishly to have mercy and let the dying man go pretty please, oh American master of all things, ruler of Israel, we are your people and you are our Protector in the UN, teach us to follow, obey your rules about spying on you to save ourselves, hear O Israel, America our Friend, America is One, now can we have him back please?

Wow, is Shimon Peres brave. And Netanyahu too. I mean, he went so far as to actually ask for Pollard back! Publicly! On the Knesset Podium! Once! In thirty years! Saying he was sorry we spied on America! Meekly and sheepishly! Just like a proud Jew should!

What a hero.

If we really, actually, in real reality, want Pollard out of hell, we must stop playing games now, or he will die in a prison hospital. We must understand why he has been in prison in the first place for so long.

Anti Semitism, Jew-hatred, is not simply a disease that bad people have and good people don’t. Everyone has it. Even Jews. It’s universal. The reason for it is the dissonance between the Jewish mission and the Jewish reality. The Jewish mission is to be the spiritual leader of mankind. The Jewish reality is that, right now at least, we simply aren’t, but for some reason we’re still around and no one can tell exactly why.

It’s obvious to most people that we shouldn’t be here according to natural law. This includes everyone from the most murderous anti Semites to the most outwardly friendly of Israel’s allies. So everyone knows we’re being preserved for a reason, and the reason is for that moment when we wake up as a nation and lead the world to spiritual enlightenment. Every second we don’t do this we are hated and challenged. The murderers will try to kill us off in an attempt to prove we are no leaders. Our allies, on the other hand, will keep us in a state of mental slavery, help us out outwardly, but only when it serves their interests, while making sure we know THEY are in charge, NOT the Jews.

The minute the Jewish nation starts to stand up for itself and act like a leader, take its destiny in its own hands and be independent, it will trigger a very harsh reaction from our allies in an attempt to test if we are actually taking up our leadership role. When America found out that the Jews were spying on them – well, a Jew who takes our money and begs and acts nice and slave like – that’s fine. But a Jew who spies on us and steals secrets for his own safety without asking us first? THAT cannot be tolerated.

What we have to do is quite simple. We have to stop asking nicely as if we made a mistake and Pollard should never have spied for us. We have to stop apologizing. If America or any other non Jewish country wants to test us and see if we are actually the leaders we are supposed to be, let’s welcome it.

Instead of Netanyahu getting up on the Knesset and groveling, he should get up and burst with righteous anger that Pollard was even arrested in the first place. That yes, America, we spied on you because we needed the information for our own safety and you were not forthcoming. Next time, just tell us, or we’ll do it again. Why? Because you were founded in 1776 and we were founded 3,000 years earlier. We’re older, and we call the moral shots around here. We deserve some damn respect.

So for every day you do not release our man, we will arrest an American spy over here, starting today.

You don’t like being spied on? Neither do we. So let’s just be honest with each other and cut the bull.

Not only would that get Pollard released. It would give us America’s true respect as their spiritual leaders, and will end the anti Semitism that is keeping Pollard in prison.

The more we grovel, the more we are condemning him to die in North Carolina.

Need I even mention that the only person with the Jewish guts to do this…is Moshe Feiglin.

I REALLY Don’t Like Eli Yishai of Shas

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Every time Eli Yishai, the head of the Shas party, does something, he exhibits the perfect combination of cowardice, ignorance, pompousness, and something so way beyond chutzpah it’s hard to describe. He has done more to embarrass Judaism and God than any other Jew on the planet.

When anything bad happens, he blames it on gay people. Like the big Carmel fire last Chanukkah when 40 policemen were burned alive in a bus. Gay people did that. Well, thanks for making such a great name for the Jews, because you were the one in charge of the national fire department, which you neglected, probably worried about gay people, while we had to beg for equipment from abroad while the country burned. And you still don’t accept responsibility.

But he just keeps getting worse. The man just does not stop being an ass. Today, I was reading the Israel Hayom newspaper, quoting Yishai as saying we have to go into debt in order to “cheapen living costs” because as a “leader” he has to “take care” of the people by spending borrowed and/or printed money.

He added, “If we go a little off budget, it’s not a big deal.”

The reason living costs are so damn high is that the government taxes the crap out of everything that moves and Ehud Barak and Eli Yishai spend it on first class trips to France and Netanyahu spends it on elaborate anti-missile defense systems that shoot down $10 rockets with million dollar precision guided missiles and everyone cheers him on. Well, at least Netanyahu doesn’t want to put us in debt – he just wants to raise taxes some more. As much as that sucks, at least it’s honest.

But Yishai, ecchh, he wants to put us all into debt because he “cares” about “the people”.

The truth is he actually cares about buying some VOTES before elections next year. He’s a “leader”. He has to look out for the “little guy” by “bribing him with welfare” so he’ll “vote” for the guy that didn’t “take care of the fire department” and 40 people were “burned alive” and he blamed it on “gay people”.

Yishai – I’m sure that when non observant Jews look at you, they say, “Wow, Judaism is a great religion. Maybe I’ll take Tefillin today and strangle Eli Yishai with the shel yad.”

You want to endanger everyone’s shekels because you want to buy some votes? Have a happy Pesach. Thank God Netanyahu doesn’t have to listen to you. As bad as he is, at least he’s fiscally responsible, and when he wants to buy a vote, at least he keeps the budget balanced.

You know what? Maybe Yishai isn’t as bad as Bernanke. At least Yishai isn’t saying that breaking the budget will stimulate the economy and make us all rich.

 

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.

Stop hiring people to dig holes and refill them

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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.

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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

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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.

Government debt, the consumer promising production

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Government doesn’t produce anything. It always consumes more than it produces. When it attempts to produce something, it always has to consume more in tax revenue than it produces in order to produce whatever it is it’s trying to produce. So you always end up with a black hole. This is because if the government needs more money, they can ask the Fed or tax you for it. A constant source of revenue at the point of a gun or the flick of a switch.

We are all taught that money doesn’t grow on trees. But for the government it does.

What does it mean exactly that “the global economy is broken”? How can that actually be quantified? Well, we discussed previously that money is not wealth. Money is merely the means with which one can either produce or consume wealth. So theoretically, we could have a world with money everywhere but no wealth. This would be the world of maximum inflation and minimum prosperity.

A broken global economy means that too much money has been spent on consuming wealth and not enough has been spent producing it. An undrugged economy would be able to balance that out when investors spot a need for more production and supply it. But that can’t happen in this economy because the main consumer, the government, forbids market entrepreneurs from entering the market and rebalancing the production side of the equation with regulation, taxes, forms, and the like.

So the government, just like the Keynesians want, becomes the spender of last resort. Spreading money around and getting less efficient in every spending round. Whereas in the first round, say they had to spend $10 for every unit of wealth, now they have to spend $50. But the amount doesn’t matter to them because they can always print it.

And then you have “government debt”. Debt meaning money is owed. Money, again, can either represent newly produced wealth (in the best case) or preexisting wealth. The former is when a business succeeds. The latter is when you are taxed or your money inflated.

Any normal business pays back its debt by either producing or going bankrupt. The government though can just steal it from you and pay back its debts, making you poorer.

Solving the conundrum of posthumous Mormon baptism

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Ynet published an op ed by Rabbi Levi Brackman where he says that Jews should stop freaking out about the Mormon practice of baptizing long dead Jews so they can call them Mormon and they can pass the big Mormon gatekeeper at heaven after having waited at the Mormon gates of Heaven for 70 years or so.

Well, the Mormons are pretty damn late if it took them so long to finally think of us that maybe we need a little holy water sprinkled on something so we can get past the Mormon Heaven bouncer. But Rabbi Brackman is right, and I support any pundit who goes all out on Abe Foxman and the ADL, which is arguably the most useless and even damaging Jewish organization in existence today that actively encourages the very anti Semitism it is trying to quash by whining about everything and making every Jew on the planet look like a giant wuss.

The conundrum here though is that posthumous baptism on dead holocaust victims enrages us because it shows that not even death can stop the inquisition anymore. And Christian love can turn to hate at any moment as we all know. A hypocritical sick twist of love and hate, a passive-aggressive act of contempt of Judaism that  makes us nauseous. But then again, we don’t want to take it too seriously as if to imply that it actually works and all the Jewish Holocaust victims are all “Mormon” now, partying away with Brigham Young in the sky and doing ecstasy.

So the best thing to do, in my opinion, is make the ADL useful and have them publicly mock the practice by inventing a “special Jewish spell” taken right out of something like Harry Potter or whatever and announce that the Jews have made a special baptism repellent powder we had our best Rabbis sprinkle through all the Mormon air vents to prevent the baptism from working. Or something stupider. The more asinine the better.

The dumber you can make this thing, the more respect we’ll get rather than screaming that the Mormons are sprinkling water on our dead and Mormonizing them as if that actually had some metaphysical effect.

No amount of Jesus fairy dust is going to do squat, so my top childish idea is to pour some sewage in their baptism water. I suggested this to the friend who sent me the Rabbi Brackman article, and she responded with an ingenious line:

Quick! Last one to take a %#$^ in the baptism water’s a Mormon!