In older monarchical systems, only a tiny elite was privileged to steal from everyone else, and if they stole too much, people would get angry and overthrow them.
Democracy solved the problem by granting everyone the privilege once reserved to elites. Now we can all steal from each other, and even from ourselves. This way, it is no longer clear who the enemy is. We don’t know whom to blame when things get bad. There is no one to overthrow but ourselves.
Jeffrey Tucker
Even in the best of circumstances, the Federal Reserve Chairman is a professional price-fixer and market-rigger. The private sector manipulated prices opportunistically. The public sector rigs them on principal.
James Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, on Ben Bernanke's admission that he knew as early as 2008 that large banks were posting fraudulent LIBOR postings.
Economists cannot know what is ‘better.’ They can only know what is ‘more.’ They have numbers. They can count. They can add up ‘more’. As for ‘better,’ they have no idea. So, in their little minds, more is better.
That is the thinking that has driven the profession...and much of the world economy...to absurdity. Throughout the last 50 years, more looked so much like better, no one worried too much about the difference. More cars. More houses. More food. More gadgets. What was not to like?
But the cost was more debt. And by the 21st century the burden of debt had become so great that the system could no longer move forward.
Bill Bonner on Too Much of a Good Thing.
By the late 20th century, economists — especially leading economists — had ceased being useful. They had become a nuisance. They closed their eyes to what an economy actually is…and to how it works…and focused on their own world — a make-believe world of numbers and theories, with little connection to the world that most people lived in. And now in the 21st century, they are up to mischief. And part of the mischief involves not noticing things that are right in front of their noses.
Bill Bonner on Economists
The collapse of the Soviet Union in December of 1991 was the best news of my lifetime. The monster died. It was not just that the USSR went down. The entire mythology of revolutionary violence as the method of social regeneration, promoted since the French Revolution, went down with it.
Gary North is Dancing on the Grave of the Keynesian. Every Christian should read this article.
The heart of economic growth is the availability of the means of sustenance to support the maintenance and the improvement of an economy’s infrastructure.
Frank Shostak on the Economic growth and the Pool of Funding
The modern social welfare state was invented by Otto von Bismarck in the mid-19th century. The idea was simple. Governments required the consent and support of the masses. That was the lesson that Republican France had taught the world and that Bismarck had learned. You could get a lot more out of “citizens” than you could out of “subjects.” The subjects of Frederick the Great might reluctantly pay their taxes...and might join his armies. But they would always keep a distance — emotional and physical — between themselves and their masters. War and government were Frederick’s business, not theirs. Monarchs might retain the loyalty of their subjects. They could claim some of their money, too. But even the Sun King, Louis XIV, the man for whom the term “absolute monarch” was coined, was lucky if he collected 10% of the kingdom’s GDP in taxes. As for his soldiers, every one of them wanted payment. In real money.....
In the course of the 19th century, monarchy was gradually replaced by some form of representative democracy or republicanism..... The main reason was probably because it is easier to squeeze and bamboozle a citizen than it is a subject. The real genius of modern democracy is that it makes the citizen feel that the government and its workings are somehow the product of his own aspirations.
Bill Bonner on Too Much of a Good Thing
In the early-mid 20th century, economists stopped listening and began commanding. Instead of trying to understand how economies worked, they started to tell them what to do.
And now, economists are almost all mountebanks and scamsters. They pretend to know what they don’t know at all. And they pretend to be able to do what they can’t do. They meddle. They interfere. They make precise estimates and forecasts. They make pompous judgments. They almost sound like they know what they are doing.
Bill Bonner on Incompetent Economists.
Why so many unemployed? Because economics professors have taught 3 generations of economists that a command and control economy will work. It won’t. But a command and control economy is good for economists and do-gooders, who get jobs commanding.
Bill Bonner pretending to give a commencement address to the class of 2012 at the University of Virginia.
In light of this, we must shift our strategy from trying to call a once Christian nation back to God and refocus our efforts to thinking of ourselves and our ministries as the early Christians did under Roman domination. The former leads to shrill cries of prophetic judgment against a people who once knew God and should still. The latter acknowledges that the culture has long since ceased to be Christian and determines to win the hearts of those under its influence through love, grace, demonstrations of miracle power and service. Fail to make this shift and we will find ourselves ever more marginalized and ineffective in the days to come.
Loren Sanford calling for a change of strategy.
The popular media stirs group feelings and mob emotions. The crowds at the arena...the thousands at the coliseum and those in the stalls at the theatre — they need heroes and villains, not complex ideas and ambiguity.
Of course, ideas can be made accessible by the masses. But only by stripping out the complexity and nuance, making them so barren and so remote from the whole story that they are rarely more than collective fantasies, shared as feelings...
The masses don’t want to think. They just feel. Every flack...and hack politician knows that feelings sell. Not ideas.
That’s why Ron Paul...an idea guy...is trailing Mitt Romney at such a distance.
The masses form their opinions...choose their candidates...and spend their money on the basis of feelings. Real thoughts are banished.
The presidential race is really little more than a contest to which line of guff most voters will take...that is, how they will feel about the candidates and their themes.
Bill Bonner on Economic Recovery Education.
The primary clash is between God and the satan, and that means where the satan is most at work — in Caesar, Rome, the powers — and where God is most at work — in Jesus and in Jesus’ people.
Scot McKnight on Kingdom Temptations.
The biggest canard out there is that the digital age has reduced human contact. It has vastly expanded it. We can keep up with anyone anywhere. We make new friends in a fraction of the time. That sense of isolation that so many feel is evaporating by the day. Just think of it: We can move to a new region or country and find ourselves surrounded by communities of interest in a tiny fraction of the time it used to take us.
As a result, digital media have made the world more social, more engaging, more connected with anything and everything than ever before. This isn’t a scary science fiction world in which the machines are running us; instead, the machines are serving us and permitting us to live better lives than were never before possible. Through technology, millions and billions have been liberated from a static state of existence and been granted a bright outlook and hope.
Jeffrey Tucker
What if you are only allowed to vote because it doesn't make a difference? What if no matter how you vote, the elites get to have it their way?
Andrew Napolitano in What if Democracy is Bunk?
Back in the time of the Great Depression, millions of Americans were still not completely caught up in the money economy. Many still lived on the land. They kept pigs and chickens. They tended their own gardens and “put up” their own canned goods. They cut their own wood to heat their houses. They pumped water from their own wells. Many still made their own clothes. When the Depression came, they could hunker down and wait it out.
Today, the average household can’t wait 10 years for de-leveraging to do its work. Heck, it can’t even wait 2 months. Both parents work. They’ve got two cars. And two mortgages. Money in; money out. 24/7... No garden. No firewood. No chickens. No time to wait. No time to sit still. Just bills...bills...bills... They’ve got to work...they’ve got to earn money...they’ve got to spend...
Bill Bonner on Where to Wait.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.
CS Lewis
The greatest task a person of conscience is called to is to rise to the occasion in his own times.
Alan Stevo at the Cobden Centre
Wall Street sells dreams...hopes...and pies in the sky.
Sure, its labor force tends to dress well. They often go to the best schools. They are smart. They are presentable. But get close enough, and you will see they struggle to mask the moral strain of flogging hopeless investments to people who they believe were “born yesterday.”
Wall Streeters are not bad people. They are not dumb people. Neither saints nor sinners, they are just like the rest of us. But their industry encourages a huge fraud: that they are there to help you make money.
They are not. They are there to help themselves make money.
How?
By taking it from YOU.
The financial industry is very large and very profitable. The service it pretends to provide is helping to match worthwhile investment projects with the capital they need. The service it actually provides is separating fools from their money.
Bill Bonner on Wall Street.
