The Rules

These are the rules.  Learn them.  Follow them.  There will be a test.  It's called life.

You don’t create wealth by taxation.  Taxation just takes wealth away from some and gives it to others.  Redistribution is not creation.

You get more of what you subsidize and less of what you tax.   If you tax those who create wealth, you get less wealth creation.  If you subsidize illegitimacy and poverty (which go sadly and frequently together) you get more poverty and illegitimacy.  In other words, if you punish success, you get less success.  If you reward those who do not contribute their hard work, you get fewer folks willing to contribute hard work. 

Wealth creation happens more easily and more often in a stable economic environment.  Before folks lay their time, effort, and money on the line starting a new business and creating new jobs, they need to know that the rules of the game will be fairly and predictably applied and that the government won’t be tilting the playing field against them or doing magic tricks with currency, like flooding the marketplace with fiat dollars, thus making every dollar of every person worth less and less.

The condition of an apartment tends to follow its price.  If, by some legislative connivance, you put a price-ceiling on an apartment in order to keep down its rent, its condition will go down to that price point.  Virtually every rent-controlled housing project proves it.  Rent control is the parent of squalor and danger, not thrift or great neighborhoods.

The fundamental building block of a society is the family, not the allegedly autonomous individual.  Whatever undermines traditional families and traditional family roles tends to undermine the society as well.  Poverty tends to circle around broken homes.

The key to financial success is now what it always has been:  work harder than those above you; save your money; invest your money; and keep your family intact.

Whether you are a family or a government, don’t spend what you don’t have; make a budget; stick to it.  Good governments and good families are characterized by prudence and self-discipline.  Learn the important difference between a desire and a need.

To act wisely, you first must know wisely.  You must think with your head, not your heart.  Good intentions don’t mend the matter of foolishness at all.   

Legalizing Drugs: Arguments that Do Not Work

If you say to drug legalization advocates that you want to find a way to limit the loss of innocent life that results from drugs due to impairment, they often invoke the loss of innocent lives that results from alcohol.  That response is beyond irrational.  They seem to think that because we permit A, and as a result deaths follow, then we ought to permit B, even though deaths follow.  The argument is a foolish non sequitur.  The existence of one death-dealing evil is not a moral or rational justification for the existence of another.

They argue as if they have little or no regard for the loss of innocent life.  They are quite happy to expand the list of potential victims as long as they themselves get to injure and befuddle their own minds in a cloud of reality-banishing THCs, in a hedonistic orgy of cowardly self-indulgence.  Amazingly, they use the death of innocents from alcohol as a reason to legalize drug use.  Regarding alcohol, they rightly identify the loss of innocent life as an evil, but they don’t offer any ways to limit that loss of life; they offer it as a justification for legalizing additional drugs.  It seems never to occur to them to ask this question:  “How many drugs can a society legalize and still remain a society?”  Instead of asking that question, they say, “We legalize alcohol and people die, so let’s legalize pot and have even more people die.  Why should killing others be limited to the drinkers?  Give us the chance too.”  Death means nothing to them, and their arguments prove it.  What matters to them is another way to get high.

Despite the occasionally deadly consequences of impairment, which they invoke regarding the drug alcohol, they still argue that taking drugs is a victimless crime.  But their argument regarding alcohol-caused impairment overtly says it is not.  Alcohol is a drug.  Because it sometimes causes death-dealing impairment, it is not victimless.  It is a death-risk taking enterprise.  The death it risks is often someone else’s.  If you point this out to them, they say that lots of things risk injury and death to others, yet we permit them.  But that response simply invokes the same stupid argument invoked above.  The fact that life has lots of risks, some of them deadly, is not a justification for adding even more deadly risks to the list.  The fact that life has risks already is not a reason to multiply them. Tell us why we ought to risk MORE innocent lives just so you can get high.    

Drug usage and drug legalization are not all-or-nothing issues.  The question is not “Should we legalize all drugs or no drugs?”  Wisdom is not found in the false assertion that “If we legalize one drug then we ought to legalize them all.”  That’s just the all-or-nothing intellectual extremism of an irrational and imprudent mind.  The real question is, as noted above, “How many drugs can a society legalize and still remain a society?  The answer is neither “all of them” nor “none of them.”  We might have to draw a line somewhere other than at either extreme.  Drawing lines is sometimes quite difficult.  But difficulty is no reason for declining our obligation to make reasoned and nuanced choices.

If I were an advocate of drug legalization, then I’d make this offer:  Let’s do for drug use what we did for smoking.  We started large campaigns, both public and private, to warn folks of smoking’s awful dangers and risks.  We limited its usage to certain ages and certain places.  We made no smoking ages and no smoking zones.  We limited its advertising.  We issued graphic warning labels.  As a result, the percentage of smokers has declined over the years.  To date, I have never heard even one drug legalization proponent suggest we do the same for smoking pot that we did for smoking tobacco:  Keep it legal; educate folks incessantly and tirelessly against it; and limit its use to certain age groups and places.  Legalizing it ought to go closely together with speaking out against it.

But think carefully for a moment about the principle and practice of limiting drug usage to certain age groups.  We do that because we consider some folks too immature to handle drugs (and alcohol).  We limit usage to some persons, or groups of persons.  We aren’t talking here about children or teens indulging legally.  They are too immature to indulge.  That is too destructive and dangerous a practice to permit.  So, for those folks, we criminalize it.  But if immaturity disqualifies you from use, then remember that immaturity is not an age but a condition of mind and character, things not well identified by age.  Age tells how long you’ve been on the road, not how far you’ve travelled.  Age restrictions are maturity-based assumptions.  Regarding many folks, those assumptions are both arbitrary and mistaken.  Some folks in their 50s are too immature to use drugs.  (One thinks here of the mayor of Toronto.)  Some in their 20s are not too immature.  Age is no reliable indicator.

But almost all thinking people agree that drugs ought to be prohibited for at least some.  By so thinking, they are selective prohibitionists.  They are for prohibition, but only in selected cases.  The real issue then is not “prohibition or no prohibition,” but where, and how, to draw the prohibition line.  They tend to draw it at a younger age; I tend to draw it at a higher age. Because both sides agree on prohibition of some sort, then now all we have to haggle over is where to draw the prohibition line, not if to draw it.  If you are against drawing any line at all, if you wish to legalize drugs even for children, you are beyond the pale of common sense.  You cannot be trusted with drugs. 

Please notice that those who wish to draw the line at a certain age practice prohibition despite their argument that prohibition leads to a black market and to violence.  What they think ought to be a convincing argument to others against prohibition they themselves reject in this case.  Yet somehow they are surprised to see others reject an argument they themselves reject.                   

A Review of John Taylor's "Getting Off Track: How Government Actions . . . Worsened the Financial Crisis"

         In his small and incisive book Getting off Track:  How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis, John B. Taylor argues that, contrary to the period called “the Great Moderation,” which began in the early 1980s, monetary policy in the early 2000s became too loose, too easy.  This easiness led to the housing boom and, eventually, to the housing bust.  That policy, Taylor explains, was “essentially discretionary government interventions” (p. 3) and those interventions “deviated from the regular way of conducting policy” (p. 4).  “[B]y slashing interest rates . . . the Fed encouraged a housing price boom,” he says (p. 5).

         According to Taylor, other nations mimicked the Fed’s eccentric interest policies, which encouraged the problems we later faced to surface elsewhere also, in places like Spain and Greece.  Among the problems we eventually faced were falling house prices, delinquencies, and foreclosures, which had their expected deleterious effect on financial markets.   The bottom line, Taylor argues, is that a strong connection exists between monetary excesses and risk-taking excesses:  “the rapidly rising housing prices and the [initially] low delinquency rates likely threw the underwriting programs off track and misled many people” (p. 13).  But, as housing prices fell, folks began to wonder of it was worthwhile to continue making payments on houses not worth what was still owed on them.  Too many borrowers decided they were not, and simply stopped paying.  Government backed agencies like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae instituted policies that made balance sheets even worse.  Securitization, meant to be a source of financial strength and stability, served more to undermine the whole system.  As is often the case with government programs, they were more a part of the problem than of the solution.

         Taylor argues that three types of government intervention served only to prolong the crisis rather than to cure it: (1.) the term auction facility, introduced in December 2007, designed to increase the flow of credit; (2.) temporary cash infusion of 100 billion dollars to the American public in February 2008 intended to jump start consumption and spending, but which was hoarded instead; and (3.) cutting interest rates, which led to a decline in the value of the dollar (pp. 19-24).

         But, as Taylor tells it, the crisis not only got prolonged, by October 2008 it got worse.  To Taylor, it worsened “by a factor of four” and became “a serious credit crunch with large spillovers” (p. 25).  TARP’s $700 billion, Taylor says, were by no means adequately overseen, the entire bill reaching only to 2 ½ pages, thus lacking sufficient oversight, restrictions, and structure.  The result of this lack of foresight and structure was widespread public uncertainty and the reluctant and timid investment that normally follows it.

         After delineating what went wrong, and why, in the 2008 financial crisis, Taylor examines what went right in the two decades preceding it.  “Getting economic policy on track,” he says, “is never easy” (p. 31).  Accomplishing it included “changes in monetary policy,” (p. 35), crisis prevention, primarily by means of a flexible exchange rate and predictability of policy (p. 39), and preventing the forces of globalization from reversing previous local accomplishments (p. 43).

         To Taylor, because banks and government misdiagnosed the problem as one of liquidity rather than uncertainty, their policies not only proved ineffective but actually prolonged and deepened the crisis.  The Fed provided liquidity to ease the problem, yet the financial cancer grew.  Not all economists fell into the diagnostic trap.  Some saw the real problem early on; Taylor was one.  His colleague John Williams was another.  They focused on three things, Taylor says: (1) credit default swaps -- the probability of banks defaulting on their debts; (2) Libor-Tibor spreads -- roughly a counterparty risk measurement between yen and dollar based banks; and (3) Libor-Repo spreads -- a comparison of risk between secured and unsecured lending in the interbank market (p. 53-55).

         Taylor affirms strongly that we “should base our policy evaluations and conclusions on empirical analyses, not ideological personal, political, or partisan grounds” (p. 63), seeming not to recognize the ideological basis of believing that such data and analysis can ever constitute (or arise from) an ideology-free zone.

         Taylor rightly warns us against thinking that frequent and large government actions and interventions are the only answer to our current economic problems” (p. 62).  They are not.  By thus declaring himself, Taylor stands against both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Bush’s successor.  The former said that he abandoned free market principles in favor of government intervention in order to save the free market.  The latter said that only government can break the vicious cycles that cripple our economy.

         In opposition to them both, Taylor declares (and this quotation serves as a suitable summary of his book’s argument:  “Government actions and interventions caused, prolonged, and worsened the financial crisis.  They caused it by deviating from historical precedents and principles for setting interest rates that had worked well for twenty years.  They prolonged it by misdiagnosing the problems in the bank credit markets and thereby responding inappropriately, focusing on liquidity rather than risk.  They made it worse by supporting certain financial institutions and their creditors but not others in an ad hoc way, without a clear and understandable framework” (p. 61).

         Taylor’s quotation above obviously shows that he is not against all government involvement in such matters.  Perhaps he ought to be more so.  But at least he is not dazzled by the expertise of the reputed experts, whose track record says that they are better at getting things wrong than at getting them right. 
        One last point:  the question and answer session at the end of the book is so good that it alone is worth the price of entry.                 

Nice People and Obama Bashing

Some folks say that conservatives hate Obama.  They don’t.  They love America.  That’s very different.  Let me explain:

If a man is incompetent, misguided, inexperienced, and a liar, he will get bashed.  He ought to get bashed.  It's not hatred.  It's love for country.

I love my country.  I don't want to see happen to America what's been happening for almost 6 years.  Who would want to see the bad situation Obama inherited made worse on almost every count?  Hatred has nothing to do with it.

When you tell the truth about Obama, you must say things that are strongly critical.  He fails at almost everything.  Telling the truth about Obama might sound to you like hatred.  It's simply truth.  Why would anyone want the government to (1) threaten to ruin the coal industry, and (2) invest billions of dollars in green companies that go bankrupt almost immediately?

If candidate Obama was right to say that a 7 trillion dollar debt under Bush was unpatriotic, what would he say about the 18-20 trillion dollar debt we’re going to have under him?  By his own measure, he is unpatriotic.  If I say he is unpatriotic, I am called an Obama basher and a hater even though I am simply applying his own standards to him.  Is he an Obama hater and Obama basher?  No.  He’s just a feckless partisan.

In the face of high unemployment, why would we want to (1) raise the minimum wage, (2) open the borders to 11 million illegal immigrants without jobs, (3) threaten to destroy the coal industry, (4) nix the Keystone pipeline,  (5) ban fracking and reject for the nation the economic boom now sweeping North Dakota, and (6) impose higher health care costs on employers, giving them an incentive to shrink their work force and to reduce their remaining workers to less than 29 hours per week?

Why would I want us to sjrink our space program from the world's leader to hitching a ride with the Russians if ever we want to go to space?  Why would I turn NASA into an agency of Islamic relations and then stiff-arm Israel publically and privately at almost every point? 

Why would I want to assign health care enforcement to the IRS?  Is that monumental task something the IRS as an agency is well-poised to carry out and its workers well-trained to accomplish?  Is the IRS so under-worked and overstaffed that they can take on enforcement and penalization of an entire nation's health care?

Why would I want the Post Office to provide banking services, like checking accounts, small loans, and savings accounts?  Are letter carriers, letter sorters, and counter agents really the best folks to assess credit worthiness?

And I haven’t even mentioned flooding the marketplace with 800 billion dollars a year in paper money.  I haven’t mentioned shrinking the military to pre-WWII levels.  I haven’t mentioned the slaughter of millions of unborn children, or the fact that he supports and voted for killing born children who survived abortion.  I haven’t mentioned that average household income fell under Obama, that the income gap between rich and poor grew wider under Obama, or that he bungled the Arab spring.     

You see?

When you simply state the facts about Obama and his policies, it sounds very bad.  But I won't lie about him just to make folks think I'm nice.  I am nice.  That’s why I won't lie about Obama just to look good

The Human Recipe

         Here is the human recipe:  Body and soul; soul and body:  a psychosomatic unity.  Not body only, as the physicalists assert; and not spirit only, as the Gnostics and Platonists wish to assert, and would, if only reality permitted.

         We humans are body and spirit.  Any of us with even a modicum of self-awareness knows that whenever we look carefully at ourselves, we are not explained solely by flesh or without it.  In us, there is flesh and more.  We have both a physical and non-physical dimension to our lives, neither of which could be eliminated without eliminating us.  I do not have a body; I am a body.  I do not have a soul; I am a soul.  If you think you have a body or a soul, what exactly is the you that has it?  It’s not a question of having but of being.  Delete either body or soul and I am deleted.  That is why the creed affirms the resurrection of the body in opposition to the gnostic heresies, which despised the body.  I will not resurrect merely as a disembodied soul.  I will resurrect complete -- both body and soul -- as did Christ.  The resurrection brings life to me, and me to life, all of me, both what is physical and what is not.   From which I learn this:  body is not junk, not something merely to be tossed blithely aside as the Gnostics would do.  Nor is spirit; something to be tossed blithely aside as the physicalists would do, folks who assert that the spirit cannot be real because it leaves no physical footprint, no laboratory trace -- as if that were the sort evidence you looked for when you looked for soul.

         Consider this evidence:  the testimony of humanity, by their millions and billions, across the millennia, in a hundred ways and in a hundred languages and a hundred means-- by word, song, and painting -- testifying that soul is real, and is real whether you are ancient, medieval or modern, whether you are eastern or western, northern or southern, young or old, rich or poor, learned or ignorant, primitive or technological.  The testimony is not universal, but nearly so.  It is only nearly universal because some among us have so little self-knowledge and self-awareness that they do not recognize even their own spirit, even their own soul.  So they conclude, arrogantly enough, that the problem lies with nearly universal humanity at large, and not with them.  Because they are blind, they think all others delusional, seeing things that just aren’t there.

         If 99% of the witnesses testify that they saw X, witnesses from all across the human spectrum, and if 1% did not, I could not conclude that X is a delusion.  I’d more likely conclude that about non-X.  Quibble with the percentages if you like.  We don’t have exact numbers.  But the differences are so great that quibbling won’t help.  Even if it’s 98-2 or 93-7, the same result follows.         

Banking Goes Postal

         Let’s try to think up something new, something really stupid.  I mean REALLY stupid, so stupid that no one would believe it.

         Like this:  Because the poor don’t have much money, they can’t afford to use delivery services like Fedex and UPS.  Among the clientele of those two home delivery services, the poor are under-represented.  So, in order to even out the home delivery playing field, let’s mandate that failing banks go into package delivery for the poor.  That way the poor are helped and so are the failing banks, who can charge for their services.

         But what has package delivery got to do with banking, you ask?  Nothing much, that’s for sure.

         It doesn’t matter. 

         I know it sounds preposterous.  But don’t shut it down too quickly.  All I’ve done is reverse the latest Democrat brainstorm, this one from Elizabeth Warren, the native American white woman from Massachusetts.  In the wake of government interference that drove banks to impose fees on things like previously free checking accounts, fees that made it harder for the poor to enjoy basic banking services (government intrusions that she supported), Warren suggests now that we use the Post Office to supply banking services for the poor.

         Yes, the Post Office.

         Because the Post Office is about 5 billion dollars in the red, it needs more revenue.  It can get that revenue, Warren insists, by providing checking accounts, small loans, and other banking services for the poor.  What has package delivery got to do with banking, you ask?  Nothing, like I said.  But staggering disconnects don’t stop progressives.  They view non sequiturs not as obstacles but as challenges.   

         A moment’s reflection raises even more questions.  For example, if the Post Office makes small loans to the poor, and if the poor have, because of their poverty, little or no collateral by which to secure their loans, how can the Post Office make smart loans and avoid losses if they must loan to folks who are greater loan risks?   And which postal letter carriers are trained to assess loan risk and have the time to track down delinquent borrowers?  And if your mail isn’t delivered one or more days per week because postal service talent has been redirected into checking accounts and ATM cards, will you be OK with it?  And if, instead of redirecting letter carriers into banking, the Post Office has to recruit and then hire (1) trained and experienced loan officers, (2) checking and savings account counselors, and (3) ATM gurus, and if they need desks, chairs, phones, and electronic equipment to do the job well, how will the Post Office pay for it all and where will they house it?

         Don’t ask those questions because, after all, it’s for a good cause -- the poor.  You’re not against the poor are you?  You aren’t one of those hateful, selfish Republicans who’d rather get mail than help the poor with Christmas Club savings, are you?  You aren’t a shameless one percenter, are you?

         Here’s another question not to ask:  don’t ask a progressive for objective historical indicators that turning post offices into banks has actually raised the poor.  They’ll just look at you in quizzical disbelief.  Why are you asking questions, they’ll wonder.  Can’t you see that they care?

         I am compelled to state the obvious:  There is no idea so ridiculous and so disconnected from reality that some progressive somewhere won’t propose it as a legislative breakthrough and excoriate you as a heartless bigot for opposing it.  Progressives are so twisted and warped that prudence looks to them like hatred.  I haven't heard such nonsense since somebody suggested we task NASA with Islamic relations.  So we did, on the basis that if we could put a man on the moon in less than a decade, our astrophysicists can turn al Qaeda into pacifists.  

         I am not impressed by the bold and unembarrassed ignorance of the progressives.  I deride it.  My response to combining the Post Office with small banking is found by combining the two delivery services mentioned above:  FedUps.

MyRA: The Ugly Truth

        When I want to know what will happen in the wake of a particular piece of legislation, I don’t listen to those who proposed it or who voted for it.  That just tells me what they want me to think.  I don’t let them tell me what to think.  Neither should you.

         When I want to know what will happen with a particular piece of legislation, I don’t bother with the stated intentions of those who proposed it or who voted for it.  Good legislative analysis is not rooted in good intentions.  I don’t care a whit about their stated intentions; that’s just acting; that’s just a pose.  I care about results.  I look at what actually has been done in the past with legislation of this sort.  History, not histrionics, tells the tale.

         When I want to know what will happen with a particular piece of legislation, I don’t even read it.  The executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch do not think themselves constrained by mere words.  They are not led around by legislative language.  They lead legislative language around.  (Hint:  remember John Roberts.  He is the Chief Justice.  He can change laws by judicial fiat in order to make them Constitutional in ways he sees fit.  Remember Barack Obama.  He thinks the three branches of government are himself, his pen, and his phone.)  No, those folks aren’t constrained by language.  They make language do whatever they wish, and have done so for decades.   You remember:  “It all depends on what the meaning of “is” is."  So, why should I feel constrained by legislative words when no one else does?  I don’t care what it says.  I care what they’ve done with similar language and legislation in the past.  I read them, not the text.  We do not live under the rule of law but of law twisters.

         This is not cynicism; it’s realism.  Actually, it’s both.  Cynicism is where realism leads.

         So now, MyRA:          

         MyRA is the worst political idea I've heard in many years.  It's government applying the alleged pseudo-wisdom behind Obamacare to your retirement:
         "Like your IRA? You can keep it.  Like your investment counselor, you can keep him.  Period."

         Sounds familiar, right?  You already know the words and intonations by heart.  You can play them over and over at will in your head.  You already know the rule of thumb -- the government makes promises and does not keep them.  It works like this:  When you lie to Congress, it’s a crime.  When Congress (and the president) lies to you, it’s politics.  Get it?

         So, how did they talk and what did they do the last time they tried to manage our retirement, with Social Security?  They argued that everyone needed to be secure.  They would supply the security.  They said that folks couldn’t be trusted to save money for their own retirement.  They said that individuals and their families could not be trusted to make their own way through life.  They said we all needed government to do it for us.   They’d take money out of our paychecks and save it for us.  They’d keep it securely in a lockbox so that when we needed it, it would be there.  And we were comforted.

         Then somebody picked the lock.  Like crooks, like thieves in the night, somebody snuck into your lockbox, took all your money, and spent it on their favorite political items.  Shockingly, the “somebody” who stole and spent all your locked up retirement money turned out to be the same government folks who said they’d lock your money away.  They did.  They locked it away from you.  They spent it.  But they left you a chit, an IOU.  No, really, they did.  There really are paper chits promising to pay.   Really.  It’s guaranteed.  How do I know?  The government said so.  The crooks promised.  They left a chit.  You doubt a chit?

         The money they swiped went for all sorts of keen projects, like shovel ready jobs that either didn’t exist or were not needed; shovel ready jobs for which there were no shovels and no jobs.  We can only hope, even while we deeply doubt, that they got your money’s worth.

         But you’ve got a chit.  Be happy.         

         Do not ask yourself this troubling question:  If they are trying again to fix my retirement, then doesn’t it mean that they failed to fix it last time?

         Yes, that’s exactly what it means.

         And don’t ask yourself this question:  How well did the government do wiping out poverty when it declared a war on it?  If you do ask that question, here’s your answer:  They lost.  They’ll do as well wiping out your poverty in the future as they did wiping out poverty in the past.  Look at Detroit and see your retirement’s urban metaphor. 

         Regarding MyRA, I’m telling you this:  Pay no attention to what they say or write.  It’s all part of the ploy.  “We’re the government.  We’re here to help you.  We’ll take your money and we’ll manage it for you, or else we’ll pick someone to do it for us.  We’ll make sure that we reduce the risk of loss for you.  Trust us; don’t trust market volatility.  We’ll guarantee results.  We’re the government.”

         So, what sorts of companies does the government invest in?  To date, they’ve invested in at least 34 green energy companies, 17 of which have already gone bankrupt, despite the enormous influx of government, i.e. taxpayer, money:  Evergreen Solar (25 million dollar loss), Solyndra (535 million, or a million dollar loss for every Senator and Representative in Congress), Sun Power (1.2 billion), Fisker (529 million), and A123 Systems (279 million), just to name a few.  With genius investments of that sort, you can forget about Charles Schwab or Edward Jones.  You don’t need them.  You’ve got an ideologically deranged community organizer making your investment decisions.  You’ve got the government, and you’ve got those companies they will pick to handle investments.  Who will they pick?  Probably those companies like AIG, into which Washington already has its hands deeply plunged, companies so bad at investment and foresight that they had to be bailed out, and who owe their life to government.  They will play along.  I haven't seen hands that deeply involved since I witnessed a heat transplant.  The government's hand-picked lackeys will direct your money wherever the politicos desire.  Don’t worry.

         Even though government bureaucrats are human beings, and even though human beings are creatures of incentive, don’t bother yourself to think about the incentives this program entails.  Ignore this:  With private investment companies, the incentive is for you to stay alive and stay invested.  They get their money when you stay invested year after year.  When you die and your money is withdrawn, their profit dies.  With government-run programs, however, their incentive is for you to die sooner so they can keep your money.  They can’t give it back to you because it’s already spent.  If they give you money at all, it’ll come from one of two sources, both bad:  (1) higher taxes, which means you pay you to replace the money government confiscated and spent, or (2) inflated money, the value of which has been drained by fiat dollars, which they are printing 24/7.  Inflated money is also a tax.  It’s the unspoken tax that shrinks every one of your dollars every moment of every day.  And if the money itself doesn’t materialize, they will give you a chit.  But if they don’t really want to give you either money or a chit because you are a Tea Party constitutionalist, they won’t pay.  Either they’ll sick the IRS on you and make you pay, or (because they control health care) they have the means to their desired end, which is not paying you by removing you from the scene, once you get old and more expensive.  Even when you die, your beneficiaries will not get all your money, much of which will be eaten up in various taxes and fees.  Remember, there’s even a death tax.  Dying isn’t free.  Dying won’t free you from Uncle Sam’s long arms.

         Even after you die, they’ll have lots of pet projects to fund and an unsustainable debt to pay off or to service with your cash.  Even dead, you will do the paying and the servicing.  OK, forget about paying off the debt.  They don’t really intend to pay it off.  All they intend is for you to cash in your chips.  And if you think government doesn’t kill its own citizens by the hundreds of millions, you’ve got a reading assignment:  R. J. Rummel’s Death by Government.

         Government will sell this bill of goods to you by convincing you that the market is too volatile to be trusted.  But if your investments are doing really well without the government, they know you won’t believe them and won’t want to give them your money, which, to them, is a problem.  In a prosperous market place, what’s an Alinskyite like Obama and his ilk to do?

         Create a crisis, that’s what, a really big one, which they determine will not go to waste.  If you think government doesn’t create financial crises and make them worse, you have another reading assignment:  John Taylor’s Getting off Track:  How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis.   In the wake of the government’s manufactured crisis, they’ll promise to protect you against losses, against the evil wiles of the greedy fat cats on Wall Street, the notorious 1%, whom they will blame for what went wrong.  Once enough folks are sufficiently scared that they agree to participate in the government program, government will move forward.  “Forward” means that what was sold as voluntary will be managed as required.  You will participate because you must.  You will give your money over, one way or another.

         They’ll guarantee good results, even if they can’t guarantee to put up a working website.  They’ll protect you.  They’ll make so it’s always a bull market.  And if they fail, they’ll give you a chit.   Bull chit.