"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority ... the Constitution was made to guard against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters." - Noah Webster


"There is no worse tyranny than forcing a man to pay for what he does not want just because you think it would be good for him."
-- Robert A. Heinlein

Thursday, November 4, 2010

To Celebrate or Not To Celebrate

I have to make up my mind that I need to be positive today.  I will need to do it tomorrow as well.  Yes, I'm happy that 60 seats were lost to the Socialist Democrats on Tuesday.  I'm not happy that Reid and Boxer and several others who should have been soundly defeated are still going to be in the Swamp of Maryland.

You see, there is no guarantee that those 60 seats in the House are going to translate into a rollback of the socialist agenda that has been tearing our freedom away and crapping on the constitution for so long.  I'd like to think that it will, but I'm old enough to be very familiar with the Republican takeover of the House in 1994 and what happened for the next four years after that.

Put all that aside.  The real thing troubling me is that the Federal Reserve has announced that they are going to start printing enormous amounts of paper notes (some call it cash), in order to monetize the debt.  Now I know that the vast percentage of the populace has never tried to learn about economics, just like they don't want to have to think about politics.  Of course, this is what causes the catastrophic mess that we are heading toward and what causes the disaster in Greece and France, with riots and breakdowns in society.  It's because too much of the populace has buried it's head in the sand when it comes to understanding politics and economics, that we are heading for a major meltdown. It is going to happen, it's just a matter of when.

What does it mean that the Fed is going to print about $600 billion in fiat currency?  Some of you probably understand that when a commodity gets scarcer, the price of that commodity goes up.  You could call that inflation, but that would be wrong, since only that one commodity has an effect on that price.  Inflation is caused when a government creates more currency which then chases after goods.  When there is suddenly a lot more "cash" available to purchase things, prices go up across the board.  What then happens to the cash you already have?  The value of it goes down.  History is full of examples to show that such laws of economics are irrefutable.

If you don't truly understand what money is and how it works, it will eventually bite you.  If you don't understand money and politics and how they work together, it will be your total undoing.

This is why I think the people who have been trading all their stocks, bonds, and other debt instruments for gold are pretty silly, especially in the face of a real economic meltdown. Why?  Because when the proverbial fecal matter strikes the pneumatic impeller, gold won't matter.

Let's say you are John Doe in the suburbs.  The U.S. has reached the point of default and finally has to announce such.  The riots in Greece and France will pretty much look like a Boy Scout Jamboree in comparison to what will be happening in the major metro areas here.  Oh, but you were smart and cashed in your 401k before the lame duck 111th Congress seized it, and you bought gold.

What you gonna buy with it?  Who is going to want it?  Let's say I'm Farmer Brown a few miles out in the country.  I don't have any cash, I don't have any gold.  However, I do have a lot of grain stored up.  I'm sitting on 20 acres of arable land. My wife has been keeping a root cellar stocked up with more than a year's supply of food.  I've got a few cows and goats and chickens and hogs.  There's a creek that runs between me and my neighbor.

If you could even hike from there to here, because all fuel has been commandeered by the military, or martial law is in effect and movement is restricted, why would I want your gold in trade for my food?  What would I do with it?  What could I buy?

In a total breakdown of society, all forms of money become meaningless. In every war that has ever occurred in history, survival is all about basic necessities.  Food and water are the only things that mean anything.

Benjamin Franklin replied to the question, "What government have you given us?"  To which he replied, "A republic, if you can keep it."   Ronald Reagan was right when he said that we are ever only one generation away from slavery.  We were never designed to be a democracy.  The founders had nothing but contempt for such a form of government, and rightly so.  I leave you today, with this quote from Alexander Tyler:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage."

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