March 12, 1947 (September 11th), marked a turning point in American history. It is not a Greek (Egyptian) crisis that we face, it is an American crisis. It is a crisis in the American spirit. Only the American people fully aroused and promptly acting can prevent disaster.President Truman (Obama/Bush/Clinton/Bush/Reagan/Carter/Ford/Nixon/LBJ), in the name of democracy and humanitarianism, proposed a military lend-lease program. He proposed a loan of $400,000,000 to Greece and Turkey as a down payment on an unlimited expenditure aimed at opposing Communist (terrorist) expansion. He proposed, in effect, that America police Russia’s (Al Queda) every border. There is no regime too reactionary for us provided it stands in Russia’s (Al Queda) expansionist path. There is no country too remote to serve as the scene of a contest which may widen until it becomes a world war.President Truman calls for action to combat a crisis. What is this crisis that necessitates Truman going to Capitol Hill as though a Pearl Harbor (September 11th) has suddenly hit us? How many more of these Pearl Harbors (September 11th) will there be? How can they be foreseen? What will they cost?

Now I highlighted, underlined and reread this paragraph three times:

I say that this policy is utterly futile. No people can be bought. America cannot afford to spend billions and billions of dollars for unproductive purposes. The world is hungry and insecure, and the peoples of all lands demand change. President Truman (Bush/Obama) cannot prevent change in the world any more than he can prevent the tide from coming in or the sun from setting. But once America stands for opposition to change, we are lost. America will become the most-hated nation in the world.

Two road diverged…And so it goes.

Mr. Market is sending signals to us. He is shouting the crony capitalism induced spending needs to stop!

Almost every page of every bill passed is a small fee on many that lines the pockets of a few. It is pure crap. It is pure crony capitalism (not to be confused with actual capitalism).Take the body scanners in the airports for instance.

openmarket.org: “The TSA full-body scanners are a particularly egregious case of this. George W. Bush’s former Homeland Security Secretary, Michael Chertoff has a personal financial stake in the production of full body scanners produced by Rapiscan Systems (a subsidiary of OSI Systems). Notably, the CEO of OSI Systems recently joined President Barack Obama on the recent trip to India. No doubt it was a great opportunity to convince Obama of the “necessity” of full-body scanners in the ironic battle to protect freedom.”

Ah yes, this is a change! A change from covert crony capitalism to overt crony capitalism.

I thought perhaps this is what the tea party was suppose to be about, but sadly I believe the message sent in November has been lost in the shuffle. Ron Paul seems to thinks so as well, as illustrated by his reluctance to join the tea party coalition.

Why not just bring the troops home instead of fighting illegal foreign wars? Why not empower our citizens to let them decide for themselves how to save money? Don’t we have the classic ant working all summer while grasshopper lounges issue here? Watch this story play out in Europe and next in the U.S.

The EU has empowered a few, at the expense of many, and has, ironically enough, done so in the name of freedom. Well that sham of an experiment is coming to an end, and trust me, it will end badly! Sadly, I must contend, that we will not get any real change until Mr. Market forces change upon us. Now we are seeing the slow death of freedom and democracy in front of our very eyes in the EU. Perhaps Mr. Market intends to deal a quick death blow that will allow an expedient restructuring, however I don’t see that as a likely outcome. There too many pockets being lined with cash. There are too many, with too much at stake, to allow real reform to occur.

Maybe we can avoid the type of pissed off nationalism that inevitably is channeled toward the “others” by governments and consequently avoid the outbreak of the ultimate destruction of liberty… aka wars.

Nullification was successfully used BY THE NORTH, to avoid enforcing the Jefferson’s embargo and (ughh Jefferson….one of your two bad decisions) the Fugitive Slave Acts. As per normal however, society focuses on what the state taught us in its textbooks.

What most people don’t know about nullification is that the states believed they had this power under the Constitution. This fact was used by the Federalists to the opposing anti federalists to enter into a COMPACT, thus creating the United States of America. Kentucky specifically reiterated this view point before Marbury v. Madison (establishing judicial review) with the Kentucky Resolutions which rejected the odious Alien and Sedition Acts (The Pricipals of ’98, audio of history lecture by Tom Woods).

Say the Federal government instituted something like Arizona’s new law that, in my opinion, allows for an unlawful search and seizure on national scale. Nullification would provide the states with recourse.

The classic argument from those in the legal world is that that this is why we have the judicial branch. Really, so what they are telling me is that the states agreed to a binding agreement in which the federal government would be the referee for federal laws? That’s like letting Joe Montana be the booth review official for all Super Bowls. Wait a minute, what if the 49ers are playing in the Super Bowl? Well, what if the legal issue is a states interpretation of the Constitution versus a federal interpretation of the Constitution. Can we really expect a federal branch to relinquish its power and defer to the states?

History shows that the states absolutely believed Nullification was constitutional. In fact Hamilton used this as a point of encouragement to get the states to sign.

I believe that Nullification can be used as a peaceful means to put a true check on Washington.

Please, before jumping to conclusions to about Nullification, read Tom Wood’s book or at least read this article. Perhaps you’ll shed your preconceived notions that were dumped into your head year after year in grade school.

A 50 year long expansion in credit, which was helped along by securitization, has led the master builder dilemma on grand scale. The master builder dilemma occurs when entrepreneurs and consumers alike (metaphorically) think they have enough bricks to build a house. At some point they realize they don’t have enough bricks (pull back in lending) and have to  make some difficult decisions as to how they should not proceed. The builder thinks to himself, man if I had only known, I would have build my home a little smaller.

Currently master builders are confused. Do I expand my business? Do I build a home or do I rent? Do go back to school/get retrained or is my housing construction job going to come back? Do (corporations) buy back shares our build up cash? 

Some of the decisions will ultimately end in malinvestment due to the utter confusion that manipulated time preferences for money have caused (interest rates).

The US has not been a free market since the late 1800′s when the railroads went bust and the US was forced off its prior attempt fiat currency’s (the Greenback). I am a believer that we need quick forest fire (1920 recession) and not an ice age (the Great Depression). Monetarist’s and Keynesians prefer the ice age therefore Austrians are still out numbered. The Fed’s recency bias has falsely led them to believe they can manage us out of this crisis. Essentially the monetary authorities are saying they can manipulate us like puppets and control how we allocate our capital. Decades of false conclusions by the Fed have now culminated into another DEPRESSION. Now the bill is coming due. The question is how much of our liberty will used to pay the bill? Probably more than meets the eye…at first.

David Adolf Axelrod

Senior White House advisor David Axelrod apparently thinks that some manifestations of the first amendment are healthy and others are not.  On the recent Tea Party Protests Axelrod said, “I think any time you have severe economic conditions there is always an element of disaffection that can mutate into something that’s unhealthy.”

Wow, this sounds incredibly familiar.  In 1919, Attorney General A. Michell Palmer, using J Edgar Hoover as a proxy, employed similar sentiments to enact a series of raids on political dissidents.  “There could be no nice distinctions drawn between the theoretical ideals of the radicals and their actual violations of our national laws,” Palmer claimed in 1920.

In the ‘Palmer Raids’, Hoover targeted mostly communists and anarchists.  In 1919, they rounded up 249 citizens, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, and sent them ‘home’ (to Russia) aboard the Soviet Arc. The next year over 6,000 were arrested in a raid against the radical IWW workers union.

Now in all fairness, some of these raids were in response to a series of bombings (not simply ‘severe economic conditions’ – though government inflation was causing a severe recession after World War I).  Perhaps Axelrod does not believe in instituting the Holder Raids, but his statement does indicate a generally dismissive and arrogant tone toward dissenting voices.

High ranking government officials, simply through veiled statements, can influence how ordinary Americans interact.  Axelrod’s ‘unhealthy’ could be translated by some boob into shunning the tea party protester.  Get a few boobs together, all fearful of ‘unhealthy’ dissent, and you have a de facto suppression of speech.