I haven’t updated this blog for a long time and I only do it sparsely. Having too many blogs is just hard. So, until I decide it is a good idea to split up what I like to write about, please refer to SuperTommy.me for my ramblings.

I am leaving everything that is published here to be found. There are some good ideas here even if they aren’t well described.

As the Eurozone continues to crumble, it would be wise not to forget that we are not any better off here in the United States. We have the benefit of being the reserve currency of the world. This let’s us print money until a $1,000,000 won’t buy you a cup of coffee. Certainly, if you think the act of printing money is going to solve economic problems, you’d also find no problem with a million dollar cup of coffee. For the rest of us–sane individuals–we know this is no good.

There is no historical evidence to suggest that money printing has ever done anything except destroy economies. Just ask the people of Zimbabwe.

We’ve already enacted bailouts in the tune of trillions with no upturn in the economy. Unemployment remains high. There is no recovery without employment. The idea that unemployment is a “lagging indicator” is ridiculous. It isn’t a lagging indicator, it’s the only indicator. The stock market can go as high as it wants. A high nominal value is meaningless. As much as the stock market has “recovered”, how stable is it? When the Dow Jones can drop 1000 points in a matter of minutes, we know we aren’t standing on solid ground.

This is volatility like we’ve never seen.

Bye Bye EU

There is an excellent chance the Euro won’t be around for much longer. It was an idiot’s idea to begin with. Who has it actually helped? No offense to any of the member nations of the EU but, the only really productive nation is Germany. The rest of you are–more or less–freeloaders. Ultimately, the EU has been great for the rest of you who do very little while Germany carries your asses.

That might be okay with you but, let’s not forget how the Euro has killed tourism. It is just too damn expensive for people to travel to Europe. Especially the big spenders from America. It’s lovely that you have a “stronger” currency–for now. But, what good has it done for your economy? Imposing a strong currency on a weak economy is economically unnatural. You become dependent on the entity that imposed this currency. Example: Greece.

The Greeks are rioting. They are burning buildings. Killing people. I do not support any of it but, the Greeks will do what they do. I am glad we haven’t resorted to that here in the United States. Force isn’t the answer. We can still accomplish what we need with peace.

But, can you blame the Greeks for rioting? The EU wants to impose austerity on Greece. Sounds like a nice word. But, what does it mean? It means the Greek people are going to suffer a drastically reduced standard of living. How happy would you be if some foreign entity forcefully made you poorer? I do mean foreign. The EU is not Greece.

None of this were the fault of the Greek people. It was the European Central Bank that kept interest rates too low for too long that allowed the bubble in the Eurozone to grow. This bubble is most devastating to weaker economies like Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland. This should be to no one’s surprise but, those same nations are all in trouble. At this point, it’s just a matter of time.

The EuroBubble

Anyone with any sense could have seen that this arrangement with the EU was only going to end terribly. With the ECB, the Greek government no longer had to raise taxes on the people to fund their idiotic projects. They just had to create bonds, sell it to the ECB, and voila! brand new spanking Euros! This is the same arrangement the US Treasury has with the Federal Reserve.

Low and behold, Greek never had the capacity to pay all the bonds they created! And now Greece is where they are now: about to default. But we can’t have that! Those holding Greek bonds would lose a boatload of money. And apparently, those holders have friends in high places. I have no idea who owns Greek bonds but, I would not be surprised if some of our financial wizards on Wall St owned some. These are the same geniuses that bet on mortgage-backed derivatives so, it isn’t a far stretch.

On Mother’s Day, May 9th, 2010, the Federal Reserve agreed to be one of the handful of central banks to provide for the almost $1 trillion EU bailout. Great. American taxpayers are going to be on the hook for economic crises in Europe too. We really must be rich!

But, no. We aren’t. Our economy is still in the toilet. There are now a record number of Americans on food stamps. Yea, shit hasn’t gotten better.

The Last Straw

Our involvement in the EU bailout isn’t going to implode what remains of our economy. In the bigger picture, our involvement in the EU is negligible. This doesn’t mean we should be involved. We surely should not be.

The implosion of our economy was ensured as we enacted our own bailouts and increased the national debt to over 90% of GDP. It is going to go over 100% of GDP in no time with the gigantic budget deficits–bigger than the GDP of Canada. But even that wouldn’t necessarily result in armageddon. Japan’s debt is 200% of GDP and they’re still around. Granted, they have a zombie economy. But even a zombie is still “alive”–reanimated, whatever.

The last straw is going to be when interest rates go up. They have to. Either interest rates stay low and we suffer from massive inflation or we raise interest rates, the interest payments on the national debt becomes sky high, so we print money to pay it, and suffer from massive inflation anyway. No matter what, inflation is coming. And it’s going to destroy what remains of the US economy.

I won’t even include the $60 trillion of unfunded liabilities from Social Security and Medicare. No matter how slowly those unfunded liabilities become funded, inflation is unavoidable. It would take some magical free market ingenuity to create a bunch of Apple’s and Google’s for the economy to “grow” its way out of this.

This is highly unlikely. It would be more likely that you win the lottery tomorrow than it would be for a crippled and handicapped free market to create an army of companies like Apple and Google within the next decade. But, this is what the people in government are hoping for! Cross your fingers!

A Ray of Sunlight

This is a terribly dark future. But, there is some good to all of this. Granted, it would be much better if we never bailed out Wall St and we didn’t grow government to the size it has become but, too late for that. We have what we have and there’s no sign that we can change course in time.

If we can cut the size of government drastically and alleviate the tax burden drastically, there is some hope that the worse won’t happen. But again, this is about as likely as “growing” our way out of the problem.

The only likely ray of sunlight is the fresh start we all get when the US Dollar collapses. It won’t be fun to get there but, at least the end of the rainbow will be a pot of gold.

In February of 2009, there was only one country without any national debt: Zimbabwe. They had a fresh start. Super markets with empty shelves as price controls were enacted by the government are once again plentiful.

Ultimately, this is not going to be fun. The other bright side is that all the technology we have are still going to be here. Economic destruction doesn’t just make these leaps in civilization disappear. It will never be as bad as the Great Depression or the Dark Ages. We have better technology. Humanity has improved virtually everything we do. Even Kings never had air conditioners or computers.

No matter the shit storm, it could always be–and has been–worse.

It’s been August of 2009 since I made a blog entry and even longer since I wrote something substantial on the topic of Liberty. Life is busy and putting current events and debates in a light of Liberty often feels like talking to a wall. I am just one person on the internet. Those with the megaphones are going to frame the issues in the light they want.

However, this just means I’ve been making my case in shorter messages on social networks that I frequent. I’m convinced some people have blocked my updates on their Facebook feeds. I have been unfriended and blocked on Twitter for bashing the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration.

But, I will not give into terrorists! The message of Liberty is too important. Besides, those who block and unfriend me are obviously not real friends. So there is the unintended benefit of weeding out the fakes.

Of the five latest blog posts that show up here, one of them is about the right to be naked. It is entirely coincidental that I am again writing about that six months later. This time, I am prompted by a tweet from one of my favorite–and real–friends. The NY Times ran a story about a nude window display in Greenwich Village, NYC.

Reading Right to be Naked will explain why laws disallowing nudity violate Liberty so I won’t go into that.

The question that we need to answer is not which opinion we have is the right one. They are both right. Whether you believe people should be allowed to walk around naked or not is not the issue. We cannot make laws for an entire population based on the whims of a majority or minority in any given time period. The question to answer is whether or not we are a free people.

I will quote a paragraph from the article and then smash it to pieces:

“If you’re walking down a street in New York City and someone is naked in the window — and so children and whoever can see it — you’re depriving people of their choice,” said Daniel S. Connolly, a managing partner at the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani, and a former lawyer for the city who handled public nudity cases. “That’s where you butt up against other people’s rights.”

This sounds good and reasonable. We obviously shouldn’t deprive people of their right to free choice. Afterall, if we do that, we are violating another’s rights and that is a problem. I have no qualms with that idea: it is the fundamental principle of Liberty. The problem is the way this is framed.

It is completely rubbish.

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I am currently debating a friend of mine about the theory of natural monopolies. He has an economics degree from NYU. I have a degree in marketing but, I also study the works of the Austrian School of Economics. Clearly, his credentials are greater than mine on this topic but, in this case, natural monopolies is a myth taught at schools across the country.

In this video, Thomas DiLorenzo debunks the myth of the natural monopoly. You can find his written research paper here provided by the Mises Institute. The theory of natural monopoly does not logically fit with fundamental laws of economics.

The most popular topic in the political world lately has been health care. I have tried to refrain from writing about it because of its charged nature.  However, I haven’t been completely quiet about the issue. I have my opinions and Facebook has seen quite a bit of it!

First off, I am competely against the bill and the idea of universal health care. There is no such thing as a good bill that is thousand pages long and there is no such thing as a well run government system. Those are both fairytales.

It is entirely ineffective that those on the side of the bill resort to name calling in the form of the Bush Administration’s tactic of calling critics unpatriotic and the Obama Administration’s tactic of calling critics racists. Both are unproductive and not what a debate is about.

As expected, those who want the bill passed don’t want a debate; they just pay lip service to the idea. The real debate is not whether we should have reform or not. No one disagrees that the current system is imperfect and needs to be reformed. However, reform is a vague term.

There is no guarantee that any old reform will make things better. Things aren’t so bad that there is no way the government can make it worse. We aren’t at rock bottom.

The real debate should be what kind of reform we should have. The only way we can have an intelligent debate on is if we understand what the problems are and not how to solve the symtoms.

The problem is not that we have an estimated 45 million uninsured people in the United States. Having health insurance and having health care is not the same thing. For whatever reasons, we have become conditioned to believing that the two terms are interchangeable. It is how the media talks about it and it is how the politicians talk about it.

The underlying problem with health insurance is that we are insuring every medical procedure under the sun. It doesn’t matter if its a check up, a cold, cancer, or broken bones. The system insures it all. This is not the case in any other insurance industry. No one buys car insurance to cover oil changes and tune-ups. We don’t buy house insurance for carpet stains.

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