Ron Paul on the "Bailout"

Ron Paul on the coming meltdown that I and others have predicted for years.

The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.

We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market’s attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.

Read more: http://www.ronpaul.com/2008-09-25/ron-paul-my-answer-to-the-president/

Let the House of Cards Tumble!

Question: What should you do when your good friend parties too hard one night, downs more alcohol than is thought humanly possible, generally makes a reckless ass of himself in his inebriation, and wakes up the following morning with a hellish hangover and confused guilt over what transpired before?
Solution: you let them sit it out and suffer.
That’s right; you let them face the consequences of their actions. Assuming your friend is (or should be) a mature adult, he cannot expect a savior on a white horse to deliver him from his foolishness. Your friend would be doing you a disservice by having you make excuses for him, and certainly it’d be cruel to expect you to foot the bill for the damage he’s done. Enabling your friend’s behavior wouldn’t spur him to learn from his mistakes and prevent another fiasco in the future.
So when the question arises of what to do about the credit crisis and the failing banks and subprime mortgage-holders, et cetera, there’s only one sane answer: “let ’em fail.”

Read more: http://www.strike-the-root.com/82/votlucka/votlucka3.html

Fannie, Freddie, Fascist

Ludwig von Mises had a theory about interventionism. It doesn't accomplish its stated ends. Instead it distorts the market. That distortion cries out for a fix. The fix can consist in pulling back and freeing the market or taking further steps toward intervention. The State nearly always chooses the latter course, unless forced to do otherwise. The result is more distortion, leading eventually, by small steps, toward ever more nationalization and its attendant stagnation and bankruptcy.

Read more: http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/fascist-creations-fdr.html

The Specter of Speculators

Chance is a word devoid of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.~ Voltaire

Whenever regulatory schemes of the state go awry, urgent campaigns are undertaken to find scapegoats upon whom to unload explanations for the ensuing failures. We saw this in the so-called "savings and loan scandals," when governmental restrictions on the industry combined with rapidly growing inflation that raised interest rates into double-digit numbers, produced disastrous consequences. Because the state knew that the regulatory system had to be protected at all costs, a number of S & L executives were singled out for the blame. This practice continues today, with managers of hedge funds facing criminal prosecutions for the investment decisions they made during periods of economic tumult. Someone other than government regulators must be held to account for such dislocations, and the prosecution of those who failed to respond adequately to the state-generated confusion will be used to convince Boobus that state regulation does work to instill order and protect his interests!

Read more: http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Find-Freedom.htm?At=035027

Taking Money Back

If taxation is permanently short of the style of expenditures desired by the State, how can it make up the difference? By getting control of the money supply, or, to put it bluntly, by counterfeiting. On the market economy, we can only obtain good money by selling a good or service in exchange for gold, or by receiving a gift; the only other way to get money is to engage in the costly process of digging gold out of the ground. The counterfeiter, on the other hand, is a thief who attempts to profit by forgery, e.g., by painting a piece of brass to look like a gold coin. If his counterfeit is detected immediately, he does no real harm, but to the extent his counterfeit goes undetected, the counterfeiter is able to steal not only from the producers whose goods he buys. For the counterfeiter, by introducing fake money into the economy, is able to steal from everyone by robbing every person of the value of his currency. By diluting the value of each ounce or dollar of genuine money, the counterfeiter's theft is more sinister and more truly subversive than that of the highwayman; for he robs everyone in society, and the robbery is stealthy and hidden, so that the cause-and-effect relation is camouflaged.
Read more: http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard181.html

The Federal Reserve’s Pile of Skulls

Scott Horton interviews Lew Rockwell on war and inflation. (audio)

Read More: http://antiwar.com/radio/2008/06/15/lew-rockwell-4/

Creature of Jekyll Island

I think the best place to begin is with the formation of the "creature from Jekyll Island"; the creation of the Federal Reserve. It takes me back to the title of the book "The Creature from Jekyll Island" and anybody that's here thinking that we're going to show a movie which is a sequel to Jurassic Park, you're in the wrong place. The title was designed, of course, to attract attention but it does have a great deal of significance to it. For those of you who have not yet had a chance to delve into this, I should explain to you that Jekyll Island is a real island that's off the coast of Georgia. It was on that island back in 1910 that the Federal Reserve System was created at a highly secret meeting that took place there. What I'd like to do is illustrate to you that the meeting did in fact take place and I'll show some of the documentation that is available for that to prove that the secrecy was extreme and then we'll come face-to-face with the question "why the secrecy"? When things are done in secret quite often there's something to hide and we'll explore what it was that they wanted to hide. Once we've come to an understanding of that, then we'll finally understand a very important aspect of the Federal Reserve System which is not generally understood.

Read More: http://philologos.org/bpr/files/Misc_Studies/ms060.htm

Our Enemy, the Fed

This talk was delivered at the Future of Freedom Foundation’s conference on "Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties," on June 6, 2008, in Reston, Virginia.

The U.S. central bank, called the Federal Reserve, was created in 1913. No one promoted this institution with the slogan that it would make wars more likely and guarantee that nearly half a million Americans would die in battle in foreign lands, along with millions of foreign soldiers and civilians. No one pointed out that this institution would permit Americans to fund, without taxes, the destruction of cities abroad and overthrow governments at will. No one said that the central bank would make it possible for the U.S. to be at large-scale war in one of every four years for a full century. It was never pointed out that this institution would make it possible for the U.S. government to establish a global empire that would make Imperial Rome and Britain look benign by comparison.

Read more: http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/war-and-inflation.html