Fantastic video based on Ron Paul’s speech to congress asking “what if” questions. Great speech made better by fitting music and creative art.

Sears Chairman, Eddie Lampert, suggests that stockholders should read Hayek in these troubling economic times. He specifically suggests Road to Serfdom and The Fatal Conceit.

Sadly, I have not actually read these two works by Hayek–I really should. It is nice to see that Lampert is suggesting stockholders to read about the Austrian viewpoint of the situation we are in. It is good to see that not every head of big corporations are capitalists in good times and socialists in bad times.

“As a country, we need to rebuild confidence and trust and to understand what happened. Whether by business or by government, the misdiagnosis of situations leads to poor prescriptions for rehabilitation and recovery. When the misdiagnosis is done at the federal government level and involves large parts of a national economy, the consequences can be swift and significant.”

We absolutely need to understand what happened. The mainstream media has misdiagnosed the problem and is applying the wrong treatment. The swift and significant consequences of a poor prescription will be a long and extended depression.

Great questioning from Ron Paul. Barney Frank interrupted Paul in the beginning there and then failed to realize what Paul was talking about in the end–foolish.

Bernanke said at one point that the Fed cannot create capital and that lending should come from private hands and thats why we need the stimulus. The problem with that view is that the stimulus is just creating money and giving it to “private” banks. No capital was created.

I really wanted to hear what Bernanke would have said about Paul’s last question regarding World War II.

It seems like every time I see a Russia Today video with Ron Paul on LRC, it is an interview conducted by my friend, Dina Gusovsky. I am jealous every time.

I did not see Obama’s address to Congress on TV but, I did catch some of it on YouTube. I read about most of the address from news articles. As was expected, this address was about the economic crisis and how the recent stimulus bill would fix things. If you’ve ready anything I’ve written about the bill, you’ll know that it will not work–Obama is just blowing smoke.

I wasn’t sure that I was going to blog about this at almost 3AM on the East coast but, then I heard this statement from his address:

“Tonight I want every American to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before.”

Of course he did not go on to explain how this will happen. He just says it will. As if he can command the forces of economics to do his bidding if he just signs it into law. Let’s not be ridiculous. You can no more change the laws of economics as you can change the law of gravity.

“Because we cannot consign our nation to an open-ended recession,” Obama had urged Congress to do whatever proves necessary. What does that even mean? Completely vague and useless as is most of Obama’s fantasticly spoken speeches. It all sounds great, it just doesn’t mean anything.

The recession was never “open-ended”. It would end as soon as the bad debt was liquidated from the system. A lot of pain and suffering would have occured but, the recession would not turn into a depression. The almost $800 billion stimulus bill will make a recession that would have lasted a couple of years in the worse case scenario to something that is now open-ended.

No one knows how long this will last. You cannot solve the problem of too much credit and spending with more credit and spending. The idea that you need to fill the “gap” left behind by a decrease in consumer spending with government spending is idiotic.

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