It is hard for those who believe in liberty to find anything wrong with adults choosing to do what they want so long as they are not violating the liberty of others. Michael Phelps was recently “caught” smoking marijuana. I expected nothing less than a complete backlash against the star athlete after I had heard about that. I am happy to hear that a good number of his major sponsors have stood by him including Visa, Speedo, and Omega.

However, Kellogs decided to drop Phelps. This is understandable considering their demographic. I am sure a majority of parents in America were appalled by his behavior. The irony is that smoking pot is an American pastime. It isn’t “officially” recognized as such and no one is going to compare it to baseball but, at least 42% of Americans have tried marijuana at some point in their lives.

What is even more absurd is the ban for three months from USA Swimming. The official line from USA Swimming was, “This is not a situation where any anti-doping rule was violated, but we decided to send a strong message to Michael because he disappointed so many people”. No rules were violated but, a harsh punishment will be levied anyway because he disappointed “so many people”–way to give into vague peer pressure!

I am against the war on drugs and the destruction that it has caused. There is nothing more dangerous about smoking marijuana than there is smoking tobacco–cigarettes might even be worse. The government’s justification for this ridiculous war on drugs has no substance yet, they have been throwing taxpayer money into this sinkhole for decades.

The American populous has become so conditioned to believe that anything deemed “illegal” is bad. I don’t personally smoke marijuana but, I happen to know people who do. There is nothing wrong with them and they certainly are not wasting their lives away in a state of stupor. There are much worse synthetic drugs promoted by Big Pharma than naturally growing marijuana plants. Yet, we feel safer with those drugs because the FDA or the government has not deemed them “bad”.

Karen DeCoster does a great job of explaining the absurdity of all this at the LewRockwell Blog.

In an attempt to bring about “change” to America, President Obama signed an executive order to expand faith-based programs and initiatives started by the Bush administration. The principle behind the idea sounds good: ensure people get social services regardless of their religious beliefs. Attacking such things always make the attacker sound like a heartless monster.

The question is, why do we need a law–and one by executive order of all things–to mandate that religious institutions provide social services to everyone. I’m pretty sure the churches are doing a lot of good helping the local community already without a need for mandates from Washington.

I used to live in a predominantly black neighborhood in Brooklyn and the local church gave to everyone who would line up to get it. Preferred faith, color of skin, nationality, etc. played no part. The church helped people because it wanted to.

The common theme amongst all pieces of legislation is that they make things more difficult than it used to be. It is more likely that this executive order–which is not allowed by the Constitution–will make things worse.

I am a member of no religion but, I support the social services the churches provide. They are doing it based on their own free will and that is good. No one likes being told what to do and no body knows what “strings” are attached to this executive order. Why could this not be presented in the Congress and voted on?

This “change” and new respect for the Constitution is starting to look a lot more like the old way.

The United States government’s attempts at fixing the current financial crisis has been a complete failure. Nothing has worked. We have spent or allocated trillions of dollars–$7.36 trillion–to “fix” the problem. The irony, of course, is not only will more spending not solve the problem but, it will make things worse.

It is important to remember that government has no money. The only way for government to pay for anything is to take it from citizens through taxes or inflation. Knowing that, the only way for the government to pay for the bailouts and stimulus packages is to take money from one group and give it to another. It is no more useful than taking blood from the left arm to give it to the right arm.

In the case of bailouts, money is taken from productive members of society and then given to nonproductive members of society.

This is called rewarding poor performance. If no one is buying GM’s cars, that means GM is making cars that nobody wants. To bail them out is to force taxpayers to “buy” GM. This only reinforces their current behavior and they will continue to make cars that nobody wants. The result is the same as throwing money into a black hole–nothing will come out of it.

We hear politicians telling us how hard they are working to solve this financial crisis. More bailouts and stimulus packages and tax cuts need to be passed, immediately! They have already stolen trillions of dollars from us and no positives have come from it. No one cares how hard you are trying. We want to see results.

If these politicians really want to solve the financial crisis and keep the pain to a minimum, they would try something else. I propose repealing the 16th Amendment and the abolition of the Internal Revenue Service–most lovably known as the IRS. This would eliminate the income tax. The amount of extra real money available to the people will be a stimulus that no amount of government spending can emulate.

The usual resistance to this idea is the question of how government will function without taxes? First, we aren’t eliminating every tax; just the income tax. Second, the income tax has been around for less than a century–we managed to run this country for over a century without it. Thirdly, individual income tax will only amount to $1.25 trillion in 2008. Compared to all the bailout spending, this is a drop in the bucket! And it will actually do some good.

Without income tax revenue, the government will have to cut spending by–at least–an equal amount. If the government is just going to make up the difference by printing money, it will be no better.

If we give the people $1.25 trillion dollars to do with as they please, the economy will turn around so fast that the history books will not have to rename the Great Depression. What we don’t want is a repeat of the Great Depression where Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt spent the nation into oblivion and turned a recession into a 16 year depression.

Increased government spending is a tax increase no matter how you cut it. Whether the government borrows it and we have to pay it through taxes later or it prints the money and we find ourselves buying a loaf of bread for $5 at the supermarket.

The average American almost spends half the year working to pay taxes. Imagine if we were able to use that money to pay our mortgages, student loans, credit cards, etc. We would be able to dig ourselves out of debt quickly and then have the extra income to spend. However, we cannot simultaneously spend and have a mountain of debt. At some point, the debt will catch up to us and the party will have to end–happening right before our eyes.

The real magic of the removal of the income tax is not just the extra money Americans will have, it is the means by which that money was obtained. If it was just about the absolute number of dollars every citizen had, the government could just print each of us $1 million dollars and everything will be roses and lollipops.

There is little difference between giving everyone $1 million dollars and what all these bailouts and stimulus packages are doing. The common theme is that none of the money was derived by production and therefore does not add to our wealth but, subtracts from it.

The removal of the income tax would provide Americans with “stimulus” money that was derived from production–we had to work for it. This will have the opposite effect of money created out of thin air and we will truly be wealthier.

Few members of Congress are talking about ending the income tax and most of the talk about abolishing the IRS relate to the Fair Tax Act. Although the Fair Tax is better than the current system, we are just moving the burden of taxation from one group to another. The best solution is to abolish the IRS and replace it with nothing.

There are movements across the web to repeal the 16th Amendment, abolish the IRS, and the Federal Reserve System that is most responsible for the financial mess we find ourselves. You can check out the End the Fed website to find the latest on the movement.

The only means of economic relief the politicians can come up with are ones where they spend more and more money while real relief is to stop spending. It is time to tell our representatives in Washington that they need to change course–not just talking about “change” but, actually do it. Tell them to abolish the IRS and the income tax if they are really on the side of the people.

I submit a lot of what I write to Associated Content. They are a more sure-fire means for my content to be read by more people. I have not created that strong of delivery system but, I am creating the content. So, I will borrow the delivery system of AC–makes sense to me.

While I was looking through what other content producers on AC have written, I came across an article about helping the US economy recover. The article‘s title is How You Too Can Help the US Economy Get Better: Really, It’s Not that Difficult. The title alone was rather intriguing–mostly because of its length and use of mostly single syllable words. I’m a big fan of using as few and as low syllable words as possible when I am seriously editing my writing. There is something elegant about sentences being short, simple, and to the point.

The title didn’t give away the author’s prescription for saving the ailing US economy so I had to read the article. I consider myself a student of the Austrian School of Economics. I read articles on Mises.org and LewRockwell.com daily. I have a few books on the subject as well but, most of what I’ve learned have come from the articles, videos, and podcasts on Mises.org.

The author’s prescription to the illness is this: spend more. I had to laugh as the idea of spending the economy into prosperity is a misguided Keynesian pipe-dream. The mainstream media is also advocating that we should spend more and that a decrease in consumer spending is bad news.

It was recently reported the consumer borrowing dropped by $7.94 billion dollars in November. That was really good news as this means Americans are saving and paying down debt. The media reported it as bad news and a bad sign for the economy. The truth is, this is good for the economy.

The idea that we can have a sustainable economy by spending like drunken sailors is wishful thinking. The reason for our economic problems is because we were spending too much. The average savings rate was effectively below zero when debt was calculated. It is not possible to have growth without capital and capital can only be obtained through savings. Printing money through various stimulus packages or bailouts is only going to make the problem worse.

All of the businesses or business investments–also known as risks–that are not able to stay afloat should be allowed to disappear. If consumers–you and me–are not willing to spend money on an item then maybe we don’t need it. The idea that everyone is doing stop spending money is absurd. We still need to buy food, clothes, groceries, and other necessities.

Money will be spent. It is just a matter of whether or not businesses are selling things of value. We are no longer going to waste money on things we don’t need or don’t value enough to trade money for. By not saving, and spending as the author of the AC article suggests, we are only going to dig ourselves into a deeper hole. The first step in getting out of a hole is to stop digging.

Economics tells us that the sooner we can free up capital being used in non-productive areas, the quicker it can be used by more productive and creative people to create products and industries that never existed before. The way to do this is not by spending money with companies who are not offering things we find valuable. That is only going to reinforce the false idea that we value what they are selling.

There is no good reason to just randomly spend money on things in the name of “improving the economy”. I have often joked with friends that I or they are propping up the US economy when we go on a spending spree–this was when things weren’t as bad.

The most atrocious part of the AC article was about investing. The author suggests we put money into the stock market because the panic and fear as caused everyone to leave and therefore stocks are undervalued. This may or may not be the case but, there is no clear or even half-vague indication that the stock market has hit a bottom. The Austrian theory of the business cycle will tell you that we far from a bottom with all the recent government intervention.

With the amount of inflation that we will be experiencing, the safest “investment” to make is in commodities–look up Jim Rogers for his interviews on the topic. If there is one thing that the US economy and the world economy is going to be short on, it will be things of real value like agriculture and metals.

If you really want to make an investment, invest in your future by paying down your loans–student loans, car loans, mortgages, credit cards, etc. The stock market is not the best place for just anyone to jump in right now.

The author points out that what goes down must come up eventually. That may be true but, it is the time it takes for the market to come back up that is the problem. It could take years or decades. What are the opportunity costs of that?

The real means of helping the US economy recover is to stop spending and start saving and paying down debt. If the secret to global prosperity was to simply spend every dollar we made, poverty would have been eliminated a long time ago.

I’ve been refraining from writing anything on this particular topic for a variety of reasons but, Israel is getting ridiculously out of control. I’ve stayed relatively up to date on the status of the invasion and occupation of Gaza and things are not getting better. I had made comments about it on some of my friends’ statuses on Facebook throughout the week and posted a video from Russia Today about it.

My position on this is easy. Israel is the aggressor and should remove its military forces from Gaza immediately. There is not a dime’s worth of valid justification for what they have done. It is ridiculous to say that it is okay to kill a few hundred people in an attempt to eliminate a handful of terrorists. Gaza is not a nation; they have no army or navy. There is no means of defense against the bullying force of Israel. The people of Gaza are in fact fish in a barrel–there is no where for them to go and they are innocent.

Israel has now bombed a UN school. Does no one else find this rather insane? The UN is even reporting that there were no militants in the school! So, seriously, what the hell? You can’t just say there was gunfire coming from the direction where a school is and then bomb it knowing that there are innocent children inside.

The world is protesting against Israel’s actions. Opposition is heating up throughout Latin America. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is receiving protests from the German people against her support of Israel. The Canadians are in protest. And my hometown of NY had a 25,000-strong protest against Israel’s murderous actions. This is not death by forest fires or famine or drought or anything else natural. This is a completely preventable disaster: stop dropping bombs.

To justify Israel’s actions is about as logical as blaming a bystander who gets killed in a sudden gun fight. The fault is not of the bystander but, of the morons who are shooting at each other. Except in this case, one side has firecrackers while the other has bazookas.

Washington D.C. is–to no surprise–defending Israel. And why wouldn’t they? Where do you think Israel got the bombs from? Without the United States government providing Israel with the greatest firepower in the region, this kind of destruction would not even be possible. Israel would have to think twice before launching a completely one-sided attack.

When an individual with a bomb strapped to his body kills 30 people. We call him a terrorist. When a government drops a bomb and kills 30 people, we have the audacity to say it was just or understandable or okay. After all, this is what happens in war! That kind of logic is asinine. Governments are not above the law. Israel is a terrorist. Are we going to see Israel on the no-fly list now?

Israel: get out of Gaza now. If you want to prevent the “rockets” from entering, borrow one our missile defense systems. If you already have one–which I’m pretty sure you do–you might want to press the “on” button. Stop killing the innocent.