Stimulus = Hair of the Dog (Peter Schiff)

That mean ol' Peter Schiff rains on mainstream economists' parade by insisting the economic downturn is FAR from over and that any "stimulus" will only worsen the situation:

The GDP numbers out yesterday, which showed economic growth at 3.5% in the third quarter, brought a deafening chorus from public and private economists who all agreed that the recession is officially over. With such a strong report, they are happy to tell us that not only has the Fat Lady finished her aria, but she has left the building and is sipping champagne in the bath. As usual, it falls on me to rain on the parade.

Even the giddiest commentators admit that the upside GDP surprise resulted almost entirely from government interventions. But, by pushing up public and private debt, expanding government, deepening trade deficits, and pushing down savings rates, these interventions have succeeded only in putting our economy back on an unsustainable path of borrowing and spending. Accordingly, they have prevented the rebalancing necessary for long-term health. Could there be a simpler illustration of trading long-term pain for short-term gain?

Rather than asking these pre-K economists to make such a three dimensional leap, it may be easier just to give them a brief history lesson.

During the decade that corresponds to the Great Depression, annual GNP expanded for six years and contracted for four. After nose-diving in the early years of the decade, GNP turned positive in 1934 and then logged three more years of solid growth (the four year average annual growth rate was 8.5%). But does anyone really believe the Great Depression ended in 1934, when the economy first stopped contracting? Unemployment reached 19% in 1938, nearly the peak of the entire Depression, almost a full decade after the stock market crashed! Why will we be so much luckier this time around?

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Ron Paul vs. Tim Geithner

At 10/29 Financial Services Committee hearing:

Ron Paul at Iran Hearing: Sanctions are an Act of War!

At a Foreign Affairs hearing today, Dr. Paul spoke out against a bill that aims to put sanctions on Iran:

The Economic World of the Late Scholastics (Lew Rockwell)

Lew Rockwell delivered this fantastic speech at the Mises Supporters Summit in Salamanca, Spain, in which he chronicles the free market contributions of the Late Scholastics:

The subject of the medieval period highlights the vast gulf that separates scholarly opinion from popular opinion. This is a grave frustration for scholars who have been working to change popular opinion for a hundred years. For most people, the medieval period brings to mind populations living by myths and crazy superstitions such as we might see in a Monty Python skit. Scholarly opinion, however, knows otherwise. The age between the 8th and 16th centuries was a time of amazing advance in every area of knowledge, such as architecture, music, biology, mathematics, astronomy, industry, and — yes — economics.

One might think it would be enough to look at the Burgos Cathedral of St. Mary, begun in 1221 and completed nine years later, to know there is something gravely wrong with the popular wisdom.

The popular wisdom comes through in the convention among nonspecialists to trace the origins of promarket thinking to Adam Smith (1723–1790). The tendency to see Smith as the fountainhead of economics is reinforced among Americans, because his famed book An Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published in the year America seceded from Britain.

There is much this view of intellectual history overlooks. The real founders of economic science actually wrote hundreds of years before Smith. They were not economists as such, but moral theologians, trained in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas, and they came to be known as the Late Scholastics. These men, most of whom taught in Spain, were at least as pro–free market as the much-later Scottish tradition. Plus, their theoretical foundation was even more solid: they anticipated the theories of value and price of the "marginalists" of late 19th-century Austria.

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Ron Paul on H1N1 "Emergency"

A great video update from Dr. Paul:

Ron Paul on Fed Audit: Anything Less Than Full Disclosure is Unacceptable

Dr. Paul's latest Texas Straight Talk:



Last week a new bill was introduced in the Senate to audit the Federal Reserve. Some backers of my bill HR1207 and the existing Senate companion bill S.604 were a little miffed at this, but depending on how you think about it, this new legislation poses no great threat to our efforts.

With the economy in shambles, people are looking for answers - not just because of lost savings on Wall Street, but because of lost houses on Main Street. Because of the many problems we face, the Federal Reserve and its powers over the economy have come under scrutiny. This translates into a lot of political pressure on Congress. With all the House Republicans signed on as co-sponsors and over half of the Democrats, HR 1207 has enormous bipartisan support. It would be disingenuous for Washington not to embrace the principles behind this bill after all the promises for transparency. How can one credibly argue for more transparency in government in one breath and defend the secrecy of the Federal Reserve in the next?

However, there is still very powerful resistance to the disclosures that HR 1207 would require and efforts to weaken it will continue to pop up before this issue is settled.

The good news is that Washington is responding and the Federal Reserve has become the issue. Concerned Americans need to keep the pressure on by continuing to define what we want, and what we do not want.

One major concern is that HR 1207 constitutes some kind of power grab for Congress. Congress would not do a better job dictating interest rates or managing money supply growth than the Federal Reserve does for exactly the same reasons: Congress is not the free market. Any select group of people, no matter how wise and educated, simply cannot replace the wisdom of the market. HR 1207 does not seek to replace the wisdom of the Fed with the wisdom of Congress. That would be a giant step backwards. HR 1207 simply asks for full disclosure, and I am agreeable to allowing for a reasonable lag time to calm the fears that Congress intends to dictate monetary policy.

What we do want, what we insist upon, is that no longer will decisions that carry so much economic weight be made in absolute secrecy. We want to know what arrangements the Fed makes with other governments and central banks. We want to know who is benefitting from the actions of the Fed and what deals are being made. The Fed is already reacting to pressure by scaling back its liquidity facilities and returning to more traditional monetary policy through direct asset purchases. With nearly $800 billion in mortgage-backed securities on its books already, $800 billion in Treasury securities, and no real limit to what the Fed can acquire, there is a tremendous opportunity for malfeasance. We need to know who the Fed deals with, what they buy, how much they spend, and who benefits. As good as any step towards Federal Reserve transparency is, anything less than full disclosure at this point is unacceptable.

Surprised by Disaster (Fred Reed, Son of Tzu)

Fred Reed on why the unnatural rigidity and discipline of military life does not equip soldiers for real world combat:

In re Afghanistan, why, you might ask, is the world’s hugest, expensivest, most begadgeted military unable to defeat a few thousand angry tribesmen armed with AKs and RPGs?

Easy: Character. The men running the war are mentally the wrong ones to do it.

Think about this for a moment. Suppose that your boss at the lab or law firm or newsroom demanded that, when he entered the room, you leapt spasmodically to your feet, stood rigidly erect with your feet at a forty-five degree angle like a congenitally deformed duck, and stared straight ahead until he gave you permission to relax. You would think, correctly, that he was crazy as a bedbug. If he then required reporters to stand in a square so he could inspect their belt buckles, you would either figure he was a gay blade or call for a struggle buggy and some big orderlies. This weird posturing is not normal, nor are those it appeals to.

Suppose you showed up for freshman orientation at Princeton and your professors bellowed at the tops of their voices, three inches from your face, “Your shoes ain’t shined good, puke. Get down and give me fifty.” (Pushups, that is, which in the military doesn’t mean the better sort of bra.) You would decide that the loon had lost whatever mind he had ever had, and call Domino’s for a cheese pizza, double Haldol.

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Ron Paul at Joint Economic Committee Hearing 10/22/09

As usual, another nice opening statement by Dr. Paul:

Ron Paul with Tavis Smiley

Check out Ron Paul's excellent interview with Tavis Smiley last night! I've been a fan of Tavis' interview style for some time, and am glad he gave Dr. Paul a chance to answer his questions.

Hey Lindsey! (Ron Paul)

Congressman Ron Paul
Dear Supporter,

The other day when Lindsey Graham went after me, and accused me of trying to take over the Republican party, I couldn't help but chuckle. Partisan politics is one thing, and about the only thing politicians understand. But ideas are something else. And our ideas--the ideas of liberty--are capturing the hearts and minds of millions of Americans, and that is what counts.

Ever since our presidential campaign ignited a prairie fire of freedom, especially among young people, I see our progress everywhere. The bureaucrats are right, for example, to be worried at the Federal Reserve. After putting us into this economic pickle, the Fed is under attack for the first time in all its years. The Fed has devalued our dollar by 95% since it was founded by the big banksters and one senator in 1913, but it took the recent boom-bust engineered by the Fed, and then our presidential campaign, to rattle the china at their marble palace on Constitution (!) Avenue.

To build on the momentum you and I started, I wrote a book that can change our country, End the Fed. We must audit the Fed, expose its secret doings, and then end it. We deserve sound money, not the fiat paper that can be manipulated for Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, and against the rest of us.

The book has done well--four weeks on the NY Times bestseller list, for example--but while it started out at #7, and #1 on Amazon, it has dropped. This book can change America, and undermine all the statists in DC, by explaining, in easy to understand terms, the history of the Fed and all the trouble it has caused, and why we can and must replace it with the Constitution.

Please buy a copy, and recommend it to your friends. It also makes a great gift for students and everyone who cares about freedom and prosperity. Those are our birthright. We must not let the Fed and all its gang take them away.

Please help me in anyway you can, and thank you!

Sincerely,



Ron Paul