The liberty papers found an interesting Obama document. It seems that it is not those poor misunderstood adherents of the Religion of Peace that are a problem. It is any American who disagrees with the Obama agenda. Michael Malkin confirms the document is real, not a parody.
Veterans are also terrorists, no doubt it comes of persecuting those poor adherents of the Religion of Peace.
The New York Times almost gets it right:
Obama’s Ersatz Capitalism
What the Obama administration is doing is far worse than nationalization: it is ersatz capitalism, the privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a “partnership” in which one partner robs the other.
Close but no banana.
It is crony capitalism, which at its more socialist extreme is fascism, the corporate state, where business and the citizen are subjugated to the state, to the benefit of the rulers and favored businessmen. Not just any business is going to get is losses socialized and its gains privatized. Obama is coming down like a ton of bricks on certain businesses, but not, however, other businesses.
Good thing we did not elect McCain – then fascism would have had bipartisan support.
And talking of fascism, here is something where fascism is plainer to see.
Bloomberg reports that since November, the government has spent, loaned, or guaranteed 12.8 trillion, an amount very close to one year’s GDP – one year of everyone’s income, or $42,105 for every man, woman, and child in America.
I have been seeing a lot of references to “a speculative bubble”
Nope. They were not speculating.
The crisis consisted of people, mostly members of protected minorities with nothing to lose, buying houses they could not afford with borrowed money in the expectation that they would go up, and if they went down, it was the bank’s problem.
So the people who bought houses were taking no risk, since mostly they bought them with 100% loans, had no credit rating and no assets to lose.
So were the banks making the loans taking a risk?
No, because it was not the bank’s problem, because the loans were for the most part guaranteed by Freddy, or Fannie, or AIG – all of which had implicit government guarantees, and all of which had an AAA rating.
So why did AIG and the rest have an AAA rating?
AIG and the rest were issuing naked puts greatly exceeding their total capitalization, which pretty much guaranteed that sooner or later they would go broke in a big way. So why AAA?
Moody’s, who issued the ratings, was tweaked on this, and replied that it was unthinkable that the government would allow these institutions to fail. So it was not true that nobody knew what was happening. All the insiders knew what was happening, the regulators knew what was happening: they knew that businesses were taking big risks for big money in the expectation that if they won, they won, and if they lost, the government would take care of them. It was government policy. People have been complaining about this for years.
The fundamental cause of this crisis is government regulation: Governments cannot be trusted with money. They think only of short term political gain, so dispense money to the loudest pressure group, in this case those represented by ACORN, rather than to people who are likely to repay it with interest. In this case, the regulators decided that “traditional” standards of credit worthiness were racist and discriminatory, because too many Jews, and not enough Blacks, met “traditional” standards.
creditors came to believe that their loans to unsound financial institutions would be made good by the Fed — as long as the collapse of those institutions would threaten the global credit system. Bolstered by this sense of security, bad loans mushroomed.
Of course any crisis is multicausal. I have been blaming affirmative action loans. But instead of pushing back against government pressure to make bad loans to protected minorities, lenders eagerly embraced bad loans – because of an entirely correct expectation that they would be bailed out
.
Fred Thompson argues the solution is thrift – which exactly what the government is trying to prevent.
Obviously he is right – and yet wrong, for one person’s savings have to be another person’s obligations.
What we need is a financial system that mobilizes savings for sound investments – such as mortgages on reasonably priced houses secured by twenty percent down payments, mortgages on farmlands, mortgages on mines and oilfield with secure property rights, mortgages on commerical facilities such as gravel pits that generate secure and reliable income, mortgages on semi government enterprises such as toll roads, harbors, and airports that generate secure and reliable income, mortgages that are subject to proper scrutiny to ensure that the underlying enterprise supports the mortgage payments and valuation.
Without such a financial system, everyone attempting to save will merely throw more and more people out of jobs, and if on the other hand the government enables everyone to spend irresponsibly, it will set us up for bigger catastrophe down the road
.
Newt
tells it how it is: This crisis was caused by politicians. He tells how
to reduce fuel costs in the short run, and the long run. “you want
energy now” he tells us. And then he tells us how to get it.
How do we solve the energy crisis? Answer. Let businessmen extract oil. Drill here. Drill now. Pay less.
The energy crisis happened because of optimistic projections – that gas to liquid and coal to liquid would not be needed until the technology had been improved and the cost brought down, that the dramatic growth in China and India could be accommodated by rapidly expanding conventional oil production.
The political elite, unable to introduce a carbon tax because it would directly and visibly hurt people, proceeded to block coal and oil developments, thus invisibly and directly hurting people. The plan to develop America’s vast shale oil reserves was shot down a few weeks ago by the Democrats. At the same time, various oil states suffered partial, and in the case of Nigeria, near total collapse, making it difficult to extract oil without employing old fashioned imperial methods which are politically unthinkable in this day and age.
I wish I could end this by saying “so the solution is…”. But there just is not a solution. Energy is best produced in big, large scale projects. In a world of insecure property rights, where corporations are unpopular and disarmed, big projects are no longer feasible. The general world trend is any big project is going to be unworkable without a correspondingly big bunch of guys with guns who have the right, and feel they have the right, to do what it takes to protect that project. As I have said before, underground coal gasification followed by gas to liquids conversion is the technological solution, but that technological solution requires a political solution, and that political solution is nowhere on the horizon.
I wish I could end this by saying “so the solution is…”. But there just is not a solution. Energy is best produced in big, large scale projects. In a world of insecure property rights, where corporations are unpopular and disarmed, big projects are no longer feasible. The general world trend is any big project is going to be unworkable without a correspondingly big bunch of guys with guns who have the right, and feel they have the right, to do what it takes to protect that project. As I have said before, underground coal gasification followed by gas to liquids conversion is the technological solution, but that technological solution requires a political solution, and that political solution is nowhere on the horizon.
Demand for oil will continue to rise. The supply is not rising. The only solution is massive coal to liquid plants. Coal to liquid plants can produce substitutes for gasoline, such as methy isobutyl ether, at about a dollar a gallon at the refinery gate. So why is it not happening?
Coal to diesel is a more mature technology. Coal to gasoline substitute is still theory and experiment. Maybe it is not happening because they are still working on it. But even coal to diesel is only happening on a rather small scale, a fraction of a percent of the scale needed to keep the price of oil from rising even further.
We are seeing the much predicted resource crisis and associated hunger that the greens have long predicted. Capitalism and the free market should, in theory, remedy this, providing a smooth conversion from oil to coal. No smooth conversion is happening, which may well be part of the reason so many people are losing faith in capitalism. The subprime crisis is not a good advertisement for capitalism either. Of course capitalism, unlike socialism, manages to resolve such crises without murdering millions, but this does not mean that it is working satisfactorily. When capitalism screws up badly, as is happening right now, people are inclined to listen to demagogues who tell them that if only the demagogue got to make decisions, instead of those wicked capitalists, all would be well.
There is an oil crisis, and there is a food crisis. People in Haiti are eating dirt. Women are giving their babies away to random strangers. People who formerly were poor, and able to afford little more than enough to eat, now are unable to buy enough to eat.
I, of course, am more worried about the oil crisis, but the food crisis is probably more important.
Becker says that food prices are not going to be a problem
the second reason for optimism relates to the lower productivity of food production in the poorer parts of the world relative to the United States and other developed countries. Higher food prices will induce an increase in productivity in developing nations by encouraging greater use of machinery, fertilizers, and other forms of capital.
In fact of course, the problem with food is the same as the problem with oil. In most of the world if you apply machinery and so forth, your tractor is probably going to be stolen, and you yourself quite likely killed in the process, just as if you drill an oil well, your oil rig is probably going to be stolen, and you yourself quite likely killed in the process.
It would be hugely profitable to drill new oil wells in Iraq, and upgrade and maintain existing oil wells, but no one is doing it for obvious reasons. Similarly for drilling water wells and digging irrigation ditches in Iraq. Whenever you ask businessmen why they are investing gigantic sums in Alberta oil sands, and not investing elsewhere in the world in oil that is far easier to extract, they will tell you.
Tractors are just as attractive to tyrants, demagogues, and terrorists as pipelines are.
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