the federal reserve

The global economy is starting to remind me of Atlas Shrugged

rafifarber Economics, The Jewish Libertarian Blog

“What more can the Federal Reserve do?” is a question that keeps cropping up, especially in the last few days. They’ve already purchased so many bonds that their balance sheet is now heavier than the entire mass of the solar system, and there are no more bonds to “twist”, meaning, they cannot exchange any more short term bonds for long term bonds, because they have no more short term bonds to exchange.

The only thing the Fed has a mandate from Congress to actually do is buy or sell bonds. If they buy bonds, they buy them with money they conjure out of nothing (read money they steal from you and me) and if they sell bonds, the obliterate the money they earn from those bonds out of existence. They are like a giant monstrous liquidity black hole that magically spits out and sucks in cash, in and out of existence.

But as many dollars as the Fed can vomit forth into the economy, there seems to be no stopping the recession. What you have here is a world that doesn’t know how to produce anymore because everyone is stealing money from everyone else. When money is stolen, wealth is not produced. Only transferred, and each country is trying to steal more and more money from every other country by borrowing without any intention of paying back, and inflating GDP numbers by printing currency. It’s like a bankrupt college kid trying to show his parents that he’s making more money because he’s borrowing more from his friends and having his powerful bully go around beating people up for their lunch money and calling it “stimulus”. Except, in our case presently, we the people are the parents, the powerful bully is the Fed, and the bankrupt kid is the global economy.

Atlas Shrugged is not a very well written book. Fun to read, but way too long, droned on forever. Ayn Rand was never known for her writing skill, but for her ideas. What happened in the book was this: as the government lost more and more control, they started issuing stricter and stricter economic edicts (regulations) to keep things from dying. At one point, the government issued an edict that no company or person was allowed to produce any more or less than he is now, so GDP would stay exactly the same and nothing would change. This is pretty much what Constantine did when he took over the Roman Empire when he forbade sons from pursuing any occupation different from their fathers. So there is precedent for governments to do such things.

The danger now is that while Keynesians are crying that the Fed can’t do anything more, they may just be tempted to tell the government to give the Fed more power, and, say, buy stocks straight up and inflate the stock market directly instead of indirectly by buying bonds and forcing money into equities by saturating the bond market as they are doing now with QE.

If God forbid that happens and the Fed gets even more power than it has now, then we are all going to suffer excruciatingly. A monetary black hole entering the stock market can do untold damage to everyone involved, and the entire capitalistic system as we know it will be in danger. I’m pretty gloomy on this blog, but the thought of the Fed being allowed to enter the market directly, quite frankly scares the daylights out of me.

After that, the government may, a la Atlas Shrugged, just issue an edict that no one is allowed to sell stocks at a loss anymore, thereby keeping prices inflated.

Regulations are already making it so unbelievably difficult for a company to go public and issue an IPO that only gargantuan companies can do so, at the point where they already have $100 billion market caps and there’s no point in buying them because they are already at their highs. (FACEBOOK FACEBOOK FACEBOOK) What stops the government from issuing a mandatory hiatus on selling stocks? They already issue bans on short-selling. The point of a company going public is not for a colossus to raise $100 billion for God’s sake. It’s so a small company can raise a few million to expand by offering shares to the public and hopefully grow and share the profits. But what do any of us know from real capitalism anymore. We’ve become the world of $100 billion IPO abortions and failed startups who can no longer attract capital because JPMorgan is sucking it all out of the economy.

Watch out for the cries for the Fed to be able to do more. These are the most dangerous of cries. The world is falling apart and people are terrified of any semblance of freedom. Very soon this planet is going to look like something out of an Ayn Rand horror story.

Who is Ron Paul?

I mean John Galt.

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Fiat Money or a gold standard – either way it’s backed by work

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , ,

Thinking about paper currency lately, money backed by nothing so to speak. This is in contrast to money backed by gold. Meaning, first people passed around gold or silver, then they got tired of carrying it so they started passing around paper that could be redeemed for a certain amount of gold or silver.

It hit me today. There really isn’t such a thing as money backed by gold either. Gold only represents something. That something is called work. Gold doesn’t and cannot create prosperity in itself. All it can do is sit somewhere and look shiny. Gold only represents the prosperity achieved by people who do work.

Gold represents work better than paper because no self respecting person will give you his gold without you giving something for it in return that he wants. So when you are paid in money that is backed by gold, that gold is definitely backed by work done by somebody somewhere.

Can paper represent prosperity? Sure it can, in theory. But just like gold, it only represents prosperity that already exists.  One dollar not redeemable for gold can theoretically represent the same amount of work that a dollar redeemable for gold can represent. But the problem is, one dollar not redeemable for anything can be printed really really easily. And when someone, say the fed, puts another dollar into circulation, that dollar still represents something.

It represents work that someone else did. There’s no other way to see it. When the Federal Reserve puts money into circulation at the push of a button, and people take that money and use it, that money is work stolen from someone else by the government.

So what is “stimulus”? What is government “spending”? Stimulus is when the government collects all the work done by the population of the United States, steals a part of that work, and uses whatever it stole to give it to a sector they like or deem important.

What is government “spending”? Well, it should be what a population gives to a government by social contract in order to protect the individuals of that population from other individuals who would try to hurt them. This should NOT cost all that much money, and therefore shouldn’t take much of the population’s work. But in the US, government spending is treated as if it creates prosperity instead of represents prosperity that already exists. So governmnet spending under Obama and Keynes is when the government decides it knows exactly where your work should be invested, and does it for you against your will by pushing the print button.

Screw that. This is insane.

Is Ron Paul Anti Semitic?

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , ,
When the Fed is finally audited and the US finds out how much money was stolen, it won't look good that Greenspan and Bernanke are both Jewish.

Before I get into the question in depth and why it is even asked, the quick answer is no. The question itself is almost meaningless, since the term “Anti Semitic” has lost almost all of its meaning in the decades since Europe tried to exterminate the Jewish people in the 40’s. At this point, calling someone anti Semitic is the equivalent of calling that person a doodoo head. It really lacks any serious definition, means a million things to a million different people, and is about as useful as Jenine Garofallo calling you a racist if you don’t like Obama. It ends any serious debate.

So let’s narrow the question down to something definable. Does Ron Paul dislike Jews? No. Does he think that Jews are trying to take over the world? No. Does he think Israel is responsible for the Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lybian Wars? No.

The reason Jews think twice when they think of Ron Paul is that so many of his followers fit a more broad definition of “anti Semitic”. Let’s not even call it that. Let’s just say many of Ron Paul’s followers hate Israel.

The reason is fairly obvious why Israel haters would join up with Ron Paul. Paul is the only candidate who wants to end all foreign aid, to Israel as well as everyone else in the world. So pretend you hate Israel for a second or pretend you are actually a bona fide neo Nazi or something similar. Who would you vote for? Obviously Ron Paul.

Taking a quick look at Ron Paul’s friends, you can see fairly quickly that many of them genuinely hate Israel, or at least give platforms to those who really detest the Jewish State.

Take Lew Rockwell for example, Paul’s former campaign chief of staff. Does Rockwell hate Jews? No. In fact, he founded the Ludwig von Mises institute, named for the Jewish Austrian economist. The guy is his hero, and he is Jewish. And no, Mises was not some self-hating Jew like Torquemada or Karl Marx (both Jews).

What Lew Rockwell is, is very dubious and mistrusting of Israel. This is clear through the people he invites to contribute to his website, LewRockwell.com, such as Eric Margolis, who has mentioned the possibility that the Mossad was behind 9/11 and that Israel instigated the Iraq War for its own benefit and other such wacky nonsense. There’s also Michael Scheuer, a former CIA agent who really hates Israel in a very clear sense of hate. If you’ve ever heard Scheuer speak about Israel and you’re Jewish, it can make your skin crawl. I mean the guy really sounds creepy with the power he attributes to the Jewish people and their purported ability to lead the White House around on a leash using the all powerful AIPAC.

On everything else, Scheuer’s good. But he is unquestionably in the Ron Paul crowd, and regarding Israel and Jews as a nation, he is a “doodoo head”, to stick to prior terminology.

Hunt around the major Ron Paul hubs like DailyPaul.com or ronpaulforums.com, and you’ll find plenty of hatred for Israel especially. Around the time of flotilla, Paulian hubs were abuzz with Israel bashing hatred.

This is all perfectly fine by me. One of the good things about finally having your own country back is that you no longer have to deal with people hating you by crying to the local bishop, pope, or political leader. You can take matters into your own hands. By that I mean, ignore it, or try to figure out why it’s happening and stop it. What you should NOT do as a Jew, is whine to another country about it (like America). That just makes it worse.

The reason many Ron Paul supporters hate Israel is that we’re always whining to America for one reason or other because we think America is our father. And Ron Paul supporters really want to be left alone rather than be caught up in entangling alliances with anyone. And what is more entangling than to be caught up in the Jewish state with the oldest nation in the world that never seems to go away and always pisses everyone off for never ever GOING AWAY and always being the center of attention? It’s very unnerving, and you get caught up with the arabs who have the oil and weapons and this and that and they just want out of it.

So then they start wondering why Israel always gets so much attention and instead of looking through history and seeing that the Jews are, have always been, and always will be at the very center of the West as the founders of Christianity, that the West actually worships a Jew as its God and has the Jewish bible as its bible and facing up to the implications of these facts (namely that the Jews are the epicenter of Western culture itself), they just brush it all off and say the Jews are trying to control everything, because why else would they be getting all this attention all the time? And their hatred focuses on Israel because that is the organizing force behind the People. It makes sense superficially.

The fact that Israel does indeed want America to take care of Iran for her infuriates them, and I understand why. They’re approaching fiscal Armageddon and they have to defend a bunch of Jews from some Persians and spend another half trillion dollars they don’t have?

To all the Paulites reading this – we can take care of Iran ourselves. Unlike what the politicians say in Israel, Iran is not a global problem. It is a Jewish problem only, Iran threatened Israel with annihilation, not America, and we’ll have to deal with them ourselves. I don’t want anyone defending me except my family. America is my friend, but Iran is my fight, not America’s.

As for Ron Paul himself, he has every reason to actually be anti Semitic, yet he is not. He hates the Fed, especially Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, both Jews. You think Madoff was bad in ripping the country off for $50 billion? Just wait till we get the Fed audited and we see how much we got ripped off by the Greenspan and Bernanke administrations!

There is a serious danger that when America finds out about its missing trillions, a real crusade like wave of “doodoo headedness” could break out accusing the Jews of ripping America off for all it was worth.

I don’t think it will happen, but what you should know about Paul himself on these issues is that he does not blame Greenspan, Bernanke, or any other individual. He blames the system, a system that believes you can artificially set the value of money and interest rates to whatever you want and pretend to have a stable economy.

It doesn’t take much to trigger a wave of Jew hatred in the mind of a society whose bible blames Jews for murdering God. We saw that already in the Dreyfus Affair of the 19th century where France went from liberal to rabid in a matter of days.

What I’m saying is that when the Fed does get exposed finally, the only person I’d trust to be in office and be able to stem a tide of Jew hatred that I can only hope will not be unleashed, is Ron Paul.

Everyone else seems to be yaking about Mitt Romney’s lawn and insisting that Israel needs more money from a bankrupt country. Dangerous indeed.