I finished reading Tom Wood Jr.’s book, Meltdown, a while ago and I loved it. Tom does a fantastic job of explaining sound economics in layman’s terms. Anyone can understand what he is saying and his explanations of what is going on in the current economic crisis and previous depressions.

Tom is entertaining and informative in this 50 minute speech. You need to watch this!

Politicians love comparing the Great Depression to what is going on today. The reality is that it will never be as bad as it was in the 1930′s. Not because we have such great government institutions in place to make sure something so devastating never occurs again–in fact, we have the opposite in place–but, technology and the free market has improved everyone’s lives so greatly that it would be very difficult to literally relive the 1930′s.

There may be comparable numbers in terms of relative stock market losses, unemployment, etc. but, we still have the technology that we didn’t have back then. No matter what happens, unless we go back to the stone age, we are going to live through this depression in a much more comfortable state.

Now that we have put things into perspective, the heads of state attending the G20 Summit in London are using the threat of a world wide Greater Depression to further undermine people’s Liberties and make the situation worse for the masses. Obama is pitching his monkey-devised economic rescue plan to the world in hopes that everyone will adopt it.

I plea to the rest of the world to ignore what Obama has to say. He is either intentionally trying to feed poison to a weakened world economy or he has no economic understanding–either one is bad for all of us.

“We cannot afford half-measures and we cannot go back to the kind of risk-taking that leads to bubbles that inevitably burst,” he (Obama) said Wednesday.

This line is mostly meaningless. Who is taking risks? What the hell are half-measures? Obama has never said anything meaningful so this is certainly not something new. He is all about vague ideas of hope and change. Obama’s economic stimulus plan is an economic disaster.

The stock markets have rallied in the past week. Some people may call this the beginning of the new bull and that we’ve hit a bottom. It could be possible but, that is highly unlikely. The more likely scenario is that this is a bear market rally.

The sad reality is that ever nation at the G20 has the same plan. They want to argue over how much regulation here and there but, the ideas are all the same. They want to pump in enormous amounts of money into the economy. It doesn’t take an economic genius to understand that you cannot solve the problem of too much spending and credit with even more spending and credit.

However, it is the economic geniuses who will tell you we need to spend more and go deeper into debt to solve the problem of being in too much debt! There is no financial wizardry that makes this a workable solution. Natural laws cannot be defied by government!

The entire G20 hocus-pocus is to make it look like world leaders are doing something to save the world economy from ruin. There is nothing they can do that they also like to solve or mitigate the problem. The real solution is to shrink the size of government all over the world. Politicians don’t like to do that. Why would they want to take power away from themselves?

The real point of the G20 Summit is about how governments around the world can make this economic crisis worse.

This isn’t really a versus, it is more a verbal beat down from Daniel Hannan, Conservative MEP for South East England, to Britian’s Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. The man speaks truth to power and tells it like it is.

The war on drugs has never and will never reach its objective to fixing the drug problem. It only creates new problems while making the existing drug problem worse. In a CNN editorial, Jeffrey A. Miron, a senior lecturer in economics at Harvard University, says that we should legalize drugs to stop the violence.

“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.

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