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.

Which right is being deprived when there is a naked person on the street? Is it the right to see people naked or clothed? That is not a right. We don’t have a right to see people clothed or naked. If we did, that would mean we can demand someone take off their clothes at any time. This is ridiculous and no one would agree to it.

For argument’s sake, let’s replace naked people with clowns. Some people have a fear of clowns or, for whatever reason, do not like clowns. So a clown walks down the street and there are people around who do not want to see a clown. By the logic of Connolly at Bracewell & Giuliani, we should disallow clowns from walking down the street because it deprives people of their choice. How ludicrous is this?

Replace clowns with anything you want and it is all equally insane. No one is harmed, has their property stolen, or forced to do anything against their will. The choice we have is to walk away or look away. To demand that every clown or naked person be removed from the street because you have a problem with it is depriving people of their choice; not the other way around.

On a side note, the article continuously framed the right to be nude as something that is or is not protected by the first amendment. This is not a first amendment issue. This is an issue of property rights. Without property rights, every other right is moot. The right to free speech only makes sense if you have a right to yourself. You are the property of yourself.

Trying to make the case that the right to have your own body nude is not protected under the first amendment is meaningless. It is protected under property rights which underlies all other rights.

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.

Insurance is to insure us from large, catastrophic events. If you break a bone, you could use insurance. If you want to insure against getting cancer, you should get insurance. If you have a cold, you should not be using insurance.

The only thing that happens when we insure everything is we increase costs with paperwork and allow doctors to charge the absolute maximum price because the consumer doesn’t pay for it out of pocket. When was the last time you went to the doctor and cared how much your visit cost? You only cared about the deductible because it comes directly out of your pocket at the time of the visit.

When you don’t know the price and don’t care what the price is, there is no reason for you to shop around for the best value. The system itself perpetuates higher prices indefinitely with no end in sight. Even while technological improvements should be reducing the price of medicine, costs are still increasing.

This doesn’t make any sense.

In every other field, technology brings prices down. How can it be that technology increases prices in medicine? How can streamlining the process cause prices to increase? If it weren’t for technological advances, prices would be even higher!

Now, why is it that health insurance companies don’t operate more like auto and home insurance companies? It is certainly not because the consumer is demanding that health care operate this way. Once upon a time, people did go visit doctors and knew what they were paying per visit.

Insurance didn’t always cover everything under the sun. The culprit is the government. They have created an environment where it is better for the insurance companies to cover everything. They have made it so that it is more expensive for individuals to buy insuranace and given companies tax breaks for providing employees with insurance. So, if you lose or switch your job, you lose your insurance. What sense does that make?

If there was no cost benefit for getting our health insurance from our jobs, we wouldn’t do it that way! It isn’t more convenient and doesn’t provide us with more freedom.

They have disallowed us from buying insurance across State lines. If an insurance company two States over offers a better plan for you and they are willing to serve you, why shouldn’t they be allowed to do so? I’m not saying it will be cheaper or better but, why don’t we have the option? The only ones who knows what’s best for us, is us.

It is economic law that competition drives down prices and creates greater value for consumers. Politically creating monopolies for local insurance companies do not benefit us.

While a group of people have decided to boycott Whole Foods‘ for John Mackey’s OpEd in the WSJ, he brings up very good points as to what the real health care debate should be. Not all of his recommendations may be right. His system at Whole Foods might not work everywhere–which should tell you that any national system would also fail–but, at least he is presenting real debate points.

Instead of just towing party lines.

There is no doubt we need health care reform. I don’t believe we need Obama’s reform. I would go as far as to say that it will make things worse. Until we are willing to have a real debate on the issue, we will never have reform that doesn’t need to be forced down the throats of Americans.

The disconnect is that while the government says they want to do all those good things, they will end up accomplishing the opposite.

I’ve talked plenty about how the government’s attempts at rescuing the economy is the equivalent of giving a drug addict more drugs, how man-made climate change is a load of crap, and how the problem with healthcare is the excessive amount of government involvement. So, I won’t beat a dead horse. I will instead tackle another unpopular topic: the minimum wage.

If it was up to me, the minimum wage would be $0. The minimum wage is promoted as a means to create wealth equality and provide all Americans with a livable income but, the reality is nothing that is promoted. A minimum wage keeps more workers out of work.

The government is essentially saying that if you do not have the skills to warrant whatever the minimum wage is, you should not work. Sound backwards? It’s not. There is no reason for a company to hire you for $7.25 to do a job that is worth much less. So where there was a chance for people without skills to take a lower wage to learn the skills so that they can get ahead in life, the government takes it away.

If you made some wrong decisions or life just threw you a bad hand, you no longer have the means to work your way up. The government eliminated the steps at the bottom of the ladder and if you can’t jump high enough to reach the new bottom, you are screwed. To fix this unemployment problem, the government puts a band-aid over it by offering welfare for the people the government put out of work! How grand.

To compound the problem, the government via the Federal Reserve inflates the money supply to fund all their welfare/warfare projects and our cost of living goes up. To solve this problem, the government raises the minimum wage because it is now more expensive to live. The increased minimum wage puts more workers out of work and the government needs to offer more welfare by printing, borrowing, or taxing and the cost of living goes up more! This is the vicious cycle created by government and further made worse by more government intervention.

No one in Congress is going to vote no to the increase in the minimum wage because it is politically unpopular–except Ron Paul and a few others who understand economics and unintended consequences.

No one wants to see the actual picture of what the minimum wage does. When people criticize the minimum wage and call for its abolition–like myself–we are labeled as monsters who do not care about the poor. I am not multi-millionaire and I don’t make that much money. I just understand economics. I don’t care about the poor as much as I care about myself–I won’t lie about it.

I find little wrong with putting yourself, family, and friends first before random strangers. It is terrible that people are living in poverty but I am not so far away that the policies I support will benefit me at the expense of the poor. It will benefit everyone.

It is an economic lie that the minimum wage is good for the economy. If the minimum wage can solve our poverty problems, why not just make it $100/hr and everyone would be rich! Obviously, we can see that it would be disastrous and practically everyone will be out of a job or prices will be sky high for everything.

So as usual, the government is kicking the economy while it is down with this minimum wage increase.

Why do wine and liquor stores get a monopoly? We know that monopolies are bad. The more competition there is in the market, the better it will be for the end consumer–us.

I’ve seen little flyers at my local supermarket in support of this and I’ve heard the arguments against it. Those against the freeing of wine sales have a weak case at best.

“In addition to charging grocery stores franchise fees of varying amounts for the right to sell wine, it would nearly triple the excise tax on wine sales and eliminate financing for the New York Wine and Grape Foundation, a trade group.”

An increase in excise taxes is a bad thing but the elimination or reduction of government financing for the New York Wine and Grape Foundation is perfectly fine. Why do they need subsidies in the first place? If the foundation cannot exist without government aid then it shouldn’t exist at all. The active participants in the wine industry can maintain their own foundation.

As a consumer, I would love it if I could buy wine at my local supermarket. However, I wouldn’t expect any specialty wines at a supermarket. There will always be a market for specialty wine and liquor stores. It will likely be a smaller market and their business models may have to change but, that is how business is. There is never a guarantee that your market will stay the same forever nor a guarantee that you will stay in business forever.

The mere fact that the government grants wine stores a monopoly on the sale of wine makes consumers worse off. The availability of wine will increase and the price will decrease. This is better for the wine industry as a whole as the market will expand.

“A coalition known as the Last Store on Main Street, representing 2,742 New York wine sellers and liquor store owners, says the move would force more than 1,000 such stores out of business and lead to a loss of more than 4,000 jobs.”

Those who lose their jobs due to this can find jobs elsewhere. There is no reason why millions should suffer just because thousands will lose their jobs. The benefit to society is greater than the loss.

“I’m a parent,” he said. “For the 25 years I’ve been in business, I’ve been extremely conscious of people who try to buy liquor when they’re not legally entitled to it. So I’m concerned kids might be able to get alcohol more easily. I don’t want those kids on the road.”

The argument of an increased sale of alcohol to minors is asinine. Supermarkets already sell beer and card their patrons. The process of the sale of beer can just as easily be applied to the sale wine. This is clearly a moot point. Ideally, there would be no age restriction on the purchase of alcohol but, this is the society we live in.

“And are more people going to drink more wine just because it’s in a grocery store? I don’t think so,” Mr. Massoud said. “I think the demand is finite.”

That is just a gross misunderstanding of economics. Demand is always infinite. It is supply and price that keeps demand in check. We always want more things. If prices are lowered, demand will go up. It is an absolute certainty that more people will drink wine if it was more widely available and cheaper.

It is about time NY got rid of the wine monopoly. It will be better for all of us.

“Prohibition creates violence because it drives the drug market underground. This means buyers and sellers cannot resolve their disputes with lawsuits, arbitration or advertising, so they resort to violence instead.

Violence was common in the alcohol industry when it was banned during Prohibition, but not before or after.”

It is almost second nature for people to want government to enact laws forbidding behaviors, substances, or activities that they won’t agree with. This has mostly to do with the “government is the solution” mentality. In reality, government is not the solution. This is why prohibition of alcohol failed so miserably in the 1920′s.

“The right policy, therefore, is to legalize drugs while using regulation and taxation to dampen irresponsible behavior related to drug use, such as driving under the influence. This makes more sense than prohibition because it avoids creation of a black market. This approach also allows those who believe they benefit from drug use to do so, as long as they do not harm others.”

This is the sensible policy because the war on drugs is never going to eliminate the use of drugs. Those who want to use drugs are still going to use drugs. The only outcome of the war on drugs is death as black markets are created.

“The U.S. repealed Prohibition of alcohol at the height of the Great Depression, in part because of increasing violence and in part because of diminishing tax revenues.”

Although I would rather see sensible policies enacted and a respect for Liberty displayed when we aren’t in an economic sinkhole, I’ll accept it anyway. Perhaps the government will be forced to legalize drugs in an attempt to generate more revenue in a quickly shrinking economy.

I was going to go to bed and perhaps have an early rise in the morning but, I decided to surf Facebook and found myself tagged to a note on someone’s thoughts about capitalism. I had debated this person on the topic of Obama’s economic policies in the recent past. What was obvious from the debate is that I am in support of Liberty and freedom and he is in support of central planning and big government.

It is certainly not rare to have big government supporters in the State or city of New York. Since Obama has become President, I have become more and more a fish out of water when it comes to political debates. Where everyone was against Bush’s idiotic policies, no one dares criticize the Messiah’s idiotic policies. The scariest thing is that they don’t see the similarities.

I consider myself a student of Mises and have learned a great deal from economists, philosophers, and statesman–not statists–who are knowledgeable of his work. While Mises has long ago refuted Marx, it has not stopped the boneheaded Marxian ideas from spreading.

So, while every centrally planned form of government has failed since Marx and before Marx, we are still debating whether a free society is the best one to live in. It was Einstein who defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. In that sense, all Marxists are insane–and so are their policies.

My motivation to write this instead of sleep was from a Facebook note. This note came about because of a quote I posted by Henry Hazlitt:

“The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are.”

The author of the Facebook note was outraged. Before I had read this note, I did not know the author was a Marxist. I knew he supported big government and believed it to be a good idea to steal from one group to give to another–in this case it was stealing from the poor to give to the rich or what is known as bailouts.

That is the great irony of all centrally planned societies. They promise prosperity for all and that no man shall be better off than another. In practice, it is true, the masses are all equal–equally poor–and the elite few running the show live like royalty.

“The average person becomes wealthy in the United States through one of a limited amount of things. The most common: Luck. People with the set of skills necessary to profit in the system are actually a dime a dozen. The only difference is that some of them were at the right time and place. I think there’s a book out that recently addressed the subject in great detail, actually.”

I will not disagree that it has become more difficult to make it in the United States. The government has gotten bigger and people have become less free. The only result of that is a lower standard of living for everyone. The problem is not freedom–the only way one can blame freedom that is to ignore all of history.

Of course, when people criticize systems and name them the United States, they are really talking about free markets. Sadly, the free market has been on life support for a long time now in the United States and all the criticisms of how this system is not working is really a criticism of how big government doesn’t work.

In an actual free market, hard work and savings is what makes people wealthy. Creating products and services that benefit the masses is how one is rewarded. There is always luck but, to credit all good things to luck is underestimating yourself and giving yourself a free pass when you fail.

The culture of laziness and not taking responsibility for oneself seems to be greatest draw to Marx. We want to feel that we are “safe” at the expense of being free. We don’t want to do any real work, we just want to complain about how hard we are working and how the “man” is keeping us down!

The book that the above quote refers to is Fooled by Randomness. I have not read the book but, I am aware of it. From what I understand, the book talks about economic success in stocks and financials as being random. Anyone who actually understands economics would know that there is nothing “random” about what happens.

When governments create bubbles, everyone is going to look smart. When the bubble pops, all those previously “smart” people are going to look real dumb. The reasoning is that they weren’t that smart–it was just too hard to fail in the bubble. It isn’t random. The “business cycle” isn’t random–it is created by government and it is predictable.

The better title for that book would be Fooled by Ignorance and Misinformation.

“[W]e have every right to hate the wealthy man- he has no right to that wealth.”

Any free person would find that appalling. Apparently people have a “right” to a house and a “right” to health care but, a person who works hard and saves has no “right” to his own money! Classically Orwellian and also classically Marx.

Those who believe one has no right to his money–his property–but, believes in a right to own a home or a right to health care has zero understanding of Liberty at best. I recently wrote a large piece about Liberty and so I won’t repeat it but, do read it.

“Freedom is not a thought that is readily adaptable to the masses.”

That is even more appalling to free people. It is certainly not unexpected for a Marxist to want to enslave everyone. That is the only way the Marxian utopia can be founded: by force.

“Of course, you are free to stab yourself in the leg. The adrenalin would give you a high, even. What would you do when you started bleeding to death?”

Then you die. If you freely choose to kill yourself–you can do it. I can’t kill you and you can’t kill me but, you can kill you. i don’t recommend it but, it is your choice. Every choice has its consequences and it is our responsibility to deal with them. We have no right to forcibly spread the pain to other people. Other people are free to burden some of our pain if they choose to.

“In this society we have people lacking intelligence, wisdom, or even common sense, running around with the idea that they can do whatever they want with their capital because it is a ‘free’ country. They have no idea what that even means, the true beauty of that concept. Ignorance is indeed bliss.”

They can do whatever they want with the capital outside of hiring someone to kill someone else. Liberty is not a complicated idea–it is a natural one. The irony in stating the people don’t understand what it means to be free is that people understand even less about the effects of government legislation on their lives.

The choice here is to let people live peacefully in “ignorance” or allow one group to enslave another without the other knowing it or consenting to it. To criticize Liberty and then offer an alternative that is even worse is hardly a good argument.

“In considering this, I remembered why I loved Marxist writing. He recognized that in order for wealth to exist, someone must put in the effort needed to create it. This he called labour power. Marx was extremely naive, in that he assumed the human race would be able to put aside greed and selfishness and testosterone in order to assure each person would receive the appropriate result of his labour power. He assumed that we all cared for our fellow man.”

This quote contradicts itself before it is finished. Marx didn’t have all this economic understanding wrong, he just came to wrong conclusions with some of the right concepts. Wealth can only be created through production and savings–absolutely correct.

The author claims Marx is wrong in assuming men are good yet, believes that there should be a big government to regulate everyone else. The classic argument to this is: where do you find these angels? If men are greedy and selfish and you give men great power to regulate and tell others what to do, how are they not going to act in their best interest? If men are evil, the last thing we need is a big government.

History is witness to the fact that big governments only rape and pillage those it governs. Never has a big government done something in the best interest of its citizens over doing what is in the best interest of those in government. This being the greatest fallacy of Marx and all central planners.

“I believe in the America that John Locke and Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin believed in. I don’t believe in democracy, because they never believed in it and they were right not to. Seriously, does it make sense to any of you? A person with no college education and no background in politics has the same vote as a doctor, a lawyer, the President! Talk about unqualified for the job. I don’t believe in capitalism, but the free trade system has its uses.”

Everything above contradicts this last paragraph. This final paragraph is the case for Liberty and free markets. There is no system where you can avoid having someone unqualified to rule everyone else. The reality is that we are all unqualified to tell others what to do. We never know what is best for an individual–only they do.

Democracies are garbage and I, like Jefferson and Franklin, do not believe in rule by the majority. I am for Republics as our Founding Fathers were. So while our politicians keep trying to confuse us and tell us that we are a Democracy, we are not. Recite the Pledge of Allegiance and you will note that we pledge allegiance to the Republic. And no where in our founding documents is the word Democracy present.

Ultimately, that last paragraph is hopeful. Hopeful that Americans still understand freedom. It is just a matter of exposing the truth behind financial meltdowns like the one we are experiencing.

They want us to believe it is a “defect” of the free market when the reality is that this was a government creation. They want us to believe this is due to a lack of regulation when the government has never had a heavier arm in the market. They want us to believe that government can protect us from another collapse when they have engineered every major economic collapse since the Great Depression.

There is a reason why the depression in the 30′s is called “Great”. All other depressions didn’t last so long because the government never intervened. Depressions have gotten worse since the creation of the Federal Reserve and the rise of ever greater government–this is not a coincidence. If there is one thing we don’t need, it is more government.

So much for Obama’s plan to cut the budget deficit in half by 2013! The more likely scenario is that we are going to double the budget deficit or if the estimates are correct, continue them.

“Worst of all, CBO says the deficit under Obama’s policies would never go below 4 percent of the size of the economy, figures that economists agree are unsustainable. By the end of the decade, the deficit would exceed 5 percent of gross domestic product, a dangerously high level.”

These deficits are obviously unsustainable and dangerously high! How can we add $9.3 trillion dollars in deficits to the national debt? This is not a time to be spending frivilously. We need to save and underconsume. There are no means to pay off the debt we already have if we keep spending.

Of course, Obama refuses to cut back on any of his pet projects “investments”.

“What we will not cut are investments that will lead to real growth and prosperity over the long term,” Obama said. “That’s why our budget makes a historic commitment to comprehensive health care reform. That’s why it enhances America’s competitiveness by reducing our dependence on foreign oil and building a clean energy economy.”

“It doesn’t change what the president’s focus is, in terms of his objectives in making critical investments, and doesn’t change his ability to halve the deficit in four years,” said White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.

Right. This won’t change his ability to halve the deficit in four years? What funny math is he using? In Obamaland, reducing the deficit means adding to it!

Obama is going to spend the United States dollar and economy into an early grave.

Ron Paul laid the smackdown on Baldwin. The argument for drug laws have never been good and Baldwin hasn’t improved upon it. It ends with Baldwin running out of intelligent things to say and taking a jab at Paul supporters.

For the record, I support Paul and I don’t smoke pot. I am also not against those who do smoke it. People are free to make their own life choices.

The article wastes time by going into what defines a depression. I don’t see how the terminology is going affect the real situation that people are facing. So while the article tries to define what a depression is, it makes many economic fallacies.

“Morici says a depression is a recession that “does not self-correct” because of fundamental structural problems in the economy, such as broken banks or a huge trade deficit.”

There are no such things as recessions or depressions that do not self-correct. They always self-correct. The depression or recession can also be called a correction. It is a correction on a massive scale due to the massive boom created by artificial means–eg: arbitrary interest rates set by a central bank.

When stock prices go up to astronomical levels in respect to the company’s earning potential, then there is a bubble. When that bubble bursts and the stock price pulls back, we call it a correction. It is exactly the same when entire industries or economies are in a bubble and that bubble bursts. A correction is taking place. To try and stop the correction is trying to maintain an illusion.

The free market is always looking to reach equilibrium. It is when governments intervene and disrupt the market’s natural movement of capital that lead to booms and the eventual busts. The only time a recession or depression does not self-correct is when the government tries to stop it. The government may be successful in the short-term to stop the correction and create another artificial boom but, that will only lead to a bigger bust later.

“Policymakers and economists note there are safeguards in place that weren’t there in the 1930s: deposit insurance, unemployment insurance and an ability by the government to hurl trillions of dollars at the problem, even if it means printing money.”

It is true that these programs are in place. Whether they are safeguarding anything is open to debate. Deposit insurance may sound nice but, it just means banks can be more reckless with depositor funds. It also means depositors can care less about the soundness of a bank because their money is “safe”.

Unemployment insurance also sounds nice but, it just keeps people unemployed longer. There is less incentive to find a job with any urgency if you are going to paid to do nothing.

The last “safeguard” is perhaps the worse. As the dollar is no longer tied to gold–or anything of value, massive inflation is very possible. This is where every safeguard is meaningless. If the government can just print the money, they are debasing the value of every dollar in existence and newly created. So it wouldn’t matter if you got the $250,000 from a failed bank because it won’t buy $250,000 worth of goods and services.

In the worse case scenario, you might only be able to buy a cup of coffee with it. What good is that?

“Most postwar U.S. recessions have come after the Fed has increased interest rates to cool down rapid economic growth and inflation. Later, the Fed lowers rates and helps restart the economy, with the housing and auto sectors — both sensitive to interest rates — leading the way.”

Does nobody ask why this is necessary? Why does any entity need to stimulate or cool down an economy? Why do we give such powers to a central authority? From that fact alone, we can see that the culprit in creating economic crises is the Federal Reserve!

At its whim, it can create booms and busts. Unfortunately, the Federal Reserve only has the illusion of control over an economy. Market forces are always more powerful than the manipulations of a central bank. We are currently witnessing a time when the Federal Reserve’s tools are all useless.

And there are no guarantees the massive economic stimulus package and series of bank bailouts will stave off a nightmare recession, or worse.

Sadly, all the bailouts and stimulus packages are going to make things worse. Barack Obama is likely going to be regarded as a worse President than Bush when it comes to economic prosperity. There was no way he could have avoided it. All the spending and policies of years past had already decided his fate.

He had a chance to at least start the economic recovery by cutting spending and shrinking the size of the parasite known as government. Instead, he chose to to do the opposite and make a bad situation worse. Everyday that the government continues this suicidal policy of bailouts and spending, the deeper the economy will sink into depression.