Tag Archives: Federal Reserve

Biden, Economics, Elections, Representation, Responsibility, Taxation

TRASH-TALKING INFLATION

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Most of what we hear on TV or radio about the big enemy: INFLATION, is only partially true, at best.  Defeating that enemy, which politicians claim to be doing for their constituents, is impossible if we fail, sometimes on purpose, to understand the nature of it.  Let’s examine the primary aspect, or feature, of Inflation: it is a tool of government, by which we mean, the federal government. 

This is not to say that government intends to raise prices on commodities and goods and labor, but then, prices rising is not the definition of inflation, which is why much of what is spewed about “inflation”… is disinformation.  Inflation represents only an increase in the money supply; along with the federal government’s sneaky mechanisms, there are only a couple of ways to expand the money supply, primarily banks, and banks can do so only because of federal regulations.  Oddly, foreign banks and governments can ALSO expand the money supply, increasing inflation of the supply of dollars, not of wealth.   When prices rise there are temporary bumps in wealth due to increased receipts and, often, fixed rates of interest on loans.  So, there is a spotty increase in prosperity, but not for everyone.  Inflation increases dollars, but each represents less wealth than it did even a few months, if not weeks earlier.

Only the federal government can “create” money.  The Constitution charges the Congress to “…coin money, (and) regulate the value thereof…”  In 1913 Congress shed that Constitutional responsibility – and authority – when it created the Federal Reserve Bank, which is a consortium of private banks with federally appointed “governors.”  Legally, “The Fed” can loan money it does not have, to the government – it’s a neat trick.  Of course, the Congress must approve expenditures and, when the government has no cash, it must approve borrowing  “… on the full faith and credit of the United States …” to enable those expenditures.  To LIMIT the degree of overspending, Congress created the ”Debt Ceiling” in 1917, streamlining the emission of bonds by the Treasury as World War I expenses mounted.  With various changes and accommodations since, Congress has largely permitted the federal government to borrow whatever it can justify politically.

Since the Johnson Administration and the federalization of welfare and healthcare, the “Debt Ceiling” has proven to be not much of a ceiling, or limit, at all.  As we approach $33 Trillion in federal debt, the debt ceiling has become merely a tool of negotiation, with the ultimate “threat” of “government shutdown.”  With millions of people now dependent upon government handouts, it’s possible for those on the left to raise huge public, political outcry against a “shutdown.”  All that conservatives can garner is some compromise on unrelated policies or spending changes, but never is there a reduction in spending or overall cut to the federal budget.  It’s always an increase.  The $33 Trillion is documented inflation.  It’s not static, and it is expensive.  When the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, the concept of interest costs to federal borrowing was supposed to keep borrowings small and temporary – that is, “paid back” to stop the interest costs.  Today, the cost of interest on the national debt is well over $800 Billion – approaching the defense budget(!).  The concept of limitation through interest obligations is out the window with the debt ‘ceiling.’  Our “representatives” have shown over many decades that they cannot be trusted with OUR money.  How does inflating the money supply serve the interests of government?

On any given morning the value of all the dollars in the world is whatever it is.  Let’s call it ONE (1).  “Da Gummint” comes up with some cockamami plan to save the planet or forgive student loans or flood the country with 7 Million new welfare recipients… just saying.  With the federal budget already overspent by 30% or so (financed by earlier borrowing) the president’s party dutifully files legislation to make everyone’s life better while enrichening donors to their party.  It requires a new loan to enable the new magnanimity and, since all the loaned money (and tax receipts) authorized so far has been allocated, the “debt ceiling” must be raised.  Eventually it is and a new $500 Billion or so is authorized and the loan made.  The government spends the new dollars at a value of “1,” and target recipients do as well.  Congress-people brag to their constituents about the wonderful benefits and bacon they’ve delivered.

Some of the money is used to pay current federal expenses of various kinds, including entitlements, and some goes to pay interest on this and earlier debts, now approaching THIRTY-THREE TRILLION DOLLARS, with an “F.” But, you ask, how does that cause the price of eggs to go up?  Simply put, increased “prosperity” in consumers’ / buyers’ hands and bank accounts, puts stress on the marketplace: supply and demand.  At first, sellers are happy – more people want more of what they sell, and… every seller is also a buyer.

Demand for eggs goes up as more people feel they can afford eggs, but, more significantly, large baking companies demand more eggs than a month ago because stores are selling more of their higher-priced goods.  Egg producers need to expand production but it takes a while to do so.  Large buyers bid up the price of eggs because they are determined to produce more crème-filled pastries to meet demand, and producers will accommodate their largest customers.  Eggs go up in price for domestic buyers, too.  Soon, a new equilibrium is attained and eggs stop rising in price from their new baseline, market price, but buyers of all kinds of things are spending dollars at a value of, say, .93, not 1.

Two hundred-million buying decisions, or more, are made every day based on relative values to buyer and seller.  Prices are “driven” up as if every seller wants to be a more expensive supplier, but, in fact, most don’t: most want their value to appear higher to attract the next buyers’ ‘buy’ decision.  But the seller’s “cost of eggs” has increased and he must pay the rent from his sales; he raises his prices, usually reluctantly.  Everywhere you turn some “news” outlet is decrying “rising inflation,” when what they are talking about is “rising prices,” usually the CPI or Consumer Price Index.  If there weren’t simultaneous DE-flationary forces at work, we’d be in real trouble.

Okay, then, what is a deflationary force?  First and foremost, rising prices!  It’s a sloppy, effective and painful way to absorb the extra cash created by inflation (of the money supply.)  Government-generated inflation is done so without any connection to increased production or wealth; worse, it has no mechanism for debt destruction.  Private, or economic inflation is tied to improved production, greater efficiency and, usually LOWER prices overall, another, positive, deflationary force: increased productivity and wealth.  When “The Fed” sets ever-higher interest rates to “combat inflation,” it doesn’t put any meaningful brakes on government-generated inflation, but it does screw up economic inflation.

“Real” companies borrow money from banks when they are certain that a bigger plant, new production equipment, new delivery vehicles or better computerization, for examples, will enable the company to produce more for less, or at higher quality, or with such marked improvement that it opens new markets, or with such improved efficiency that waste is reduced and costs per unit are lowered.  The loans involved come from banks that operate, by federal regulation, on the basis of fractional reserves.  This, essentially, allows banks to lend out about SIX TIMES more than what they hold in reserves.  That is, about 86% of outstanding loans are comprised of… wait for it: AIR.  Every commercial or real-estate loan is mostly air.  But!  It’s generally fine.  Why?

“Real” loans are made to people or businesses that have the credit-worthiness that predicts the “destruction” of that new debt.  Those are what banks call “performing loans.”  Depending on the nature of the loans and the financial standing of the bank, itself, “performing loans” are counted among “assets” of the bank and fractional reserve rules can apply to them, too!  Simply stated, bank loans inflate the money supply.  But it’s not like government / Federal Reserve inflation; “real” loans include mechanisms for 1)debt destruction; 2)increased WEALTH; 3)increased productivity and economic activity; 4)rewards for smart economic risk and honest, legal, work and growth.  Smart, conservative banking is essential to healthy inflation.

The federal “system” of over-spending, over-borrowing and aversion to intelligent economics, is essential to economic weakness and political mendacity.  See the difference?

It is necessary to introduce capital – and cash – into the economy.  It’s called “liquidity.”  There has to be enough money to borrow and enough to spend, but how much?  Is there some federal agency or department that would ever add new liquidity in the right amounts and the right places?  Absolutely not!  Neither now or ever.  Free enterprise capitalism pretty-much automatically introduces enough liquidity to enable growth, PROVIDED that the government isn’t competing with its citizens to do ever-larger fractions of the spending – and borrowing – in the economy, AND that conditions are not made politically acceptable for monopolies to form and distort markets, which is where we are, now.

The FED sets rules for banks, including what the fractional reserve rate is, and what the overnight interbank lending rate of interest is.  They can chill a “too active” economy almost overnight.  Income-Tax policies can interfere with even small investment decisions.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can skew the quality of the mortgage market whenever politicians decide it’s time to buy votes from certain “underserved” demographics.  That is, the government can skew normal buy-sell decision-making, hurting most while “helping” some.

Capitalism needs regulation; it’s human nature to get the most for the least if possible.  Honesty should be enforced; integrity should be enforced; quality and purity should be enforced; contracts should be clear and honest, particularly in employment, one of the areas where politicians (most of whom are economic idiots) like to meddle for votes.  Our public servants are failing to act as partners in the success, safety and comfort of citizens, which means conditions of honesty across all contracts, short and long, and across all elected and appointed offices.  Otherwise, they act as the least trustworthy manipulators of the lives of citizens for the gain of… politicians and government.

Our economy – the actions of daily life, growth and advancement – has been turned into a competition with government to survive.  We haven’t even discussed the credit-card “vig” we all must pay, now, to banking consortiums, nor the legalization of drugs.  Surely ours is a form of “Democratcy” that we should export to other countries… God forbid.

Economics, Elections, Governance, Obama, Politics 2023, Representation

BEING A LONG SHORTLY – 3

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Progress toward exposing problems we face has been impPrudently slow… and there are so many.  They are interrelated, but it is far too complex to discuss them all at once.  Let’s move forward.

UNIONIZATION

There are valid reasons for otherwise independent, sovereign individuals to put their futures and ability be productive into he hands of others who may or may not share their best interests.  Usually those reasons are related to bad management decisions, but unionism has devolved into monopoly labor, and it’s just as flawed as monopoly capitalism.  The private sector has largely rejected unionism; monopoly labor primarily exists in the “public” sector – government financed and managed work.  The reason for this phenomenon, the dirtiest possible, is the value of rewarding an army of political, re-election workers, be they in construction, policing, firefighting, plumbing, paving or bus-driving.

Most are good people.  It’s never a question of individual people, it’s the power held by a relative few of them who purport to “represent” their membership in obtaining more “fairness” in pay and work rules.  The process of keeping power for union leaders lies in politicians having voted for legal status for unions; it lies in “public” contracting and public employment being required to be unionized.  The unions, as a result these legal requirements, also are obligated to “negotiate” with the same politicians who granted them power and for whom they work at election times.  It is a game in which the politicians always lose when representing “the public” – taxpayers – in determining how much to pay the members of the unions.  On the other hand, the politicians, left mostly, but also many on the right, who “fight” for “working families” usually win on the re-election side of the board.  “Working families” are always union families, and the “fight” is always to pay them more.

It didn’t take long for what union members were paid became the “prevailing wage” and the rate that anyone doing business with town, state or federal governments had to pay in order to bid on “public” contracts.  Unlike business and labor and expenditures in the (dreaded) private sector where all the productive surplus that pays for every public expenditure is earned, virtually no one who negotiates for the “public” represents the interests of the public… not really.  Elected officials who win election and re-election by promising to “fight for working families and the ‘middle class’” only fight to keep things as they are, reliably in favor of government, always at higher pay.

If a single change could be made that was “fair” for every American, it would be for every state to be a right-to-work state with no favoritism in public contracting for unionized companies.  For contractors who could show superior results from their unionized workforce, they would rightly win their share of “public” projects.  Non-union contractors who could show the same, would win theirs.  Until that day, the slope will remain downward, always at higher pay.

 A sad example of the downside of legally sanctioned unionization is the death and destruction that followed the death of George Floyd in 2020.  “Oh, come now Prudence… you’re off the rails with that one,” you might be thinking.  But, you’re looking at the wrong end of the whole sequence.  The man who was convicted for the manslaughter of Floyd before his body was cold, Officer Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department, was a dues-paying member of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis.  That union had no role in his trial relative to George Floyd, but it had protected Chauvin multiple times relative to complaints about his use of force while an active officer, of which there were many – more than 15.  Chances are that Chauvin ought to have been separated from the police department long before he restrained George Floyd.  He had demonstrated a tendency to use force to restrain detainees past the point when force was needed.  The Federation had argued for him in every case, saving his job.  That’s what unions do and a large part of why members pay union dues.

EDUCATION

One of the worst examples of public employee unionization is teachers’ unions – not teachers… teachers’ unions.  Their stranglehold on public policy and purse strings was made clear during the 3 years’ of COVID-19 fear-mongering.  The damage to children and to actual education itself, is nearly immeasurable, the money wasted to appease teacher unions during COVID, is outrageous.  Even the supposed scientists at the CDC were taking orders from the Federation of Teachers as to whether schools could open again or kids stop wearing masks – science be damned.  Teachers pretended to “teach” remotely while students pretended to “learn” from their computer screens.  But, no one learned from the “science” everyone claimed to be following, including the CDC and the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases: guardians of “the science,” every one.  And that’s another post.

Observers of things educational estimate that kids were set back one to two years of development and learning under the COVID regime.  Despite the uselessness of face masks and the increasing understanding of the damage they do to development of the youngest school-children, including socialization and speech and comprehension skills, some school systems, largely pushed by unions, still wanted to mask children at the beginning of the 2022-23 school year!  Because of fear of catching COVID?  Ridiculous.  These are the people we trust to impart knowledge to our children – knowledge that is supposed to prepare them to think on their own, resolve problems and conflicts and to prepare for adulthood.  Yet many school teachers and school committees seem Hell-bent on denying the children with whom they are entrusted for five days a week, a fair chance at growing up intact.  What are we doing?  What are they doing?  What in every matter of education should educators consider their mission and success to be?  Confuse kids about their sexual outlook or fantasy?  Convince kids that their skin color is more important than their abilities to apply themselves?

People who don’t lie to themselves and others about human nature – like socialists and Communists do – will say “No” to those last two questions.

BANKS & ECONOMICS

People whom we pay excessively to “manage” our finances, the money supply and economic growth, appear to not have as deep an understanding as we assume when justifying their exalted pay and position.  They are evidently even more ignorant of the majesty of freedom and individual sovereignty; money and freedom are inextricable, after all.  The foolhardy actions of the “Biden” administration, following on the heels of the largely mendacious “COVID Pandemic,” and the deadly inflation that results, illustrate all too clearly the lack of intelligence being applied to economics… and to governance, itself.

Amidst the jungle of banking, finance and investment regulations that have grown up since the Great Depression, a basic truth has been lost within government, itself – including Congress – and among the people of the United States.  Now, with communistic theories being applied thither and yon, we are approaching the cliff’s edge of economic collapse while a crowd of chowderheads is enthralled with its legislative “victories” in the first two years of the Biden regime, basic truth be damned.  And, what truth is this?  Inflation is the result of government actions.  It is not a virus that attacks without warning, or the result of too much exuberance by free people and enterprise.  It refers only to the money (actually, “currency”), supply, something for which the unholy alliance between government and the Federal Reserve are entirely responsible.  Rising prices are not inflation, although inflation results in prices rising.  Inflation (and this is why it is often employed as a matter of policy) reduces the value of currency, both in tangible form and in electronic accounts.  In the short term, it enables government to pay its debts more cheaply, but it also steals from every private person and family, savings and retirement account.  Inflation is a thief unleashed upon the population by government.

Lately, the secretive, highly regulated, yet poorly regulated banking industry, has been shaken to its boots by the severe inflation ignited by the pandemic and the wild, unneeded deficit spending of the Biden administration.  The Federal Reserve Board assumes as part of its role, that it must regulate the money supply, ostensibly to limit inflation.  Contra-indicated is its other assumed role: controlling (limiting) unemployment.  Controlling inflation comes first, always, since the health of the financial/banking system relies on stable rates of inflation and of interest.  In the world of mortgages and large-asset financing and leasing, interest rates – the cost of money over time – needs to be stable or growing very slowly.  Abrupt acceleration in the rate of inflation disturbs both long and short-term financing and, ironically, the availability of cash for daily economic function.  Banks have failed in the past two weeks and other banks are scrambling to save weakened banks.  Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen has repeatedly assured the public and Congress that “the banks” are safe and that depositors will be able to obtain their money when needed.  America’s Gramma Yellen looks so friendly.  She expects to bring our total debt to 50,000,000,000,000 dollars.  That is a difficult number to grasp – maybe FIFTY FRIGGIN’ TRILLION is easier to conceive of.  Her calming words consist of the possibility that the total cost of INTEREST(!) will be a certain relatively small percentage of GROSS FRIGGIN’ DOMESTIC PRODUCT!

Yellen is a committed Keynesian economist, which is to say that she believes in deficit spending as a matter of policy and appropriate government action/response to financial OR social anomalies.  This belief blends in with the socialist view that any problem brought to government’s attention, must be resolved by government action.  “Deficit” spending also fits the modus operandi of the Federal Reserve, itself, since it is enabled by law to lend money to the government that it – the Fed – does not have!  What could go wrong?

Deficit spending, itself, is premised on the vast majority of the population being ignorant of the possible effects of it.  That is, so long as “people” (voters) don’t understand what government is doing to them (“for them” in theory), and it is primarily economic “doing,” the government can do what is good for government and keep voters occupied with a host of social issues, angers, unfairness-es, and fundamentally local grievances.  With enough words in favor of this or that response to these non-federal (non-Constitutional) issues, Congressmen and women and Senators, many of whom don’t understand economics much, either, can keep getting re-elected.  The permanent government and the “experts,” like Yellen, who slide into and out of powerful federal positions, can maintain the direction they want government to go, regardless of the wishes of the citizenry whose power they actually exercise.  Janet Yellen has been influential or powerful in the economic direction of the federal government for three decades – first as one of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors in the mid ‘90’s, then as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors for Bill Clinton for two years.  Barack Obama named her Chair of the Federal Reserve – technically a private consortium of banks, not Federal, in fact.  Joe Biden chose her for Treasury Secretary, likely as he chose many of the key people from the Obama Administration: at Obama’s direction.

Despite supposedly favoring low unemployment over inflation control, Yellen has argued for continued “stimulus” during the pandemic, and for higher taxes and lower “retirement” spending to deal with the national debt.  Republicans are routinely lied-about at any suggestion of reducing Social Security or Medicare expenditures like what Janet Yellen suggested.  Doesn’t matter, so long as she is happy to enable and promote Keynesian deficits in the face of “crises,” socialists will be happy to take her advice.

We are in trouble.  Stay tuned for more ways to Prudently analyze or resolve the problems we face.

Culture, Economics, Governance, Politics 2021, Taxation

American virus

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For the children… their children… their children… their children…

The general malaise that has infected the United States far more significantly than the Wuhan, China virus, has many markers for human-engineered mutations in its DNA.  COVID-19 seems to have just ONE insertion of non-natural protein into its DNA, and look at all the trouble that has caused!  It was inserted to make COVID a human-transferrable pathogen not for a good reason, but an evil one. 

America, on the other hand, began by the insertion of several new ideas, all for good reason, designed to spread amongst mankind for the betterment of all.  The greatest of these was “We the People…” forming a government to protect our liberties and our God-given rights, and to adjudicate injustice among the citizens and between citizens and governments when the latter lose their way.  Sadly, dangerously – if one agrees that the loss of the American ideal is a danger to mankind – many, many mutations have been inserted into America’s DNA over the decades, some for good reasons, many for vilely bad ones.  The resulting disease, socialist tyranny, is now eating our muscles and brains.  There are treatments and ways to build up our immunity against these foul mutations, but they’ll be bitter pills for some.

The most pernicious mutation in our genes was slavery.  We were born with it and have fought, quite literally, to remove it and its errors since the very beginning.  Even those who depended upon slavery knew it was wrong and out of place, needing a cure.  Various forms of compromise, as if we might be happy with a little sickness if it didn’t spread, were tried and failed: too much prosperity was involved.  Even those abolitionists who railed against it from the North, happily processed the cotton slaves picked, in their humming mills along rivers large and small.  When the bitter pill of secession and civil war was finally swallowed the young nation gave up hundreds of thousands of lives and casualties and nearly all of its treasure to effect a cure.  It worked on the grand scale but not the tiny one.  Thousands, perhaps millions of Americans still clung to the false premise that inferiority could be discerned by skin color, and fears and hatreds remained for another century, now mostly gone.

Originally, slavery interfered with politics, bringing distrust upon those who lived where it was practiced, and upon their representatives.  But the bad gene of organized hatred gained strength under Reconstruction and into the 20th century, and politics learned how to GAIN power with hatred.  That gene has not been excised, and indeed has become dominant, now.  We have so far refused the bitter pill that could reverse its spread.  Indeed, for POLITICAL purposes, we have undermined full equality for blacks, in particular, by wrecking their family structure and making large fractions of their numbers dependent through welfare, always, publicly, for the most compassionate reasons. 

We have inserted the unionization gene into public employment, including education, for wonderful POLITICAL and not educational reasons.  Once unleashed it metastasized throughout local and state governments and infected the federal behemoth, sapping education itself while cementing incumbents into power they have not earned.  There is a cure, but insufficient courage to take its bitter pill.  We’ll run out of money and taxpayers before we gulp this one down.  Power will remain in the same hands that have prevented a cure for 60 years, however.  The pill requires voters to elect those willing to change the laws that cement unions in place, and who will then de-certify those unions.  Unfortunately those organizations have successfully changed the definition of “education” and voters think “teachers” and education are synonymous, to the detriment of generations and the future of our nation.

The debt-ignorance gene was inserted in 1913, right after the income tax gene – a bad year for our DNA, 1913.  Once the Federal Reserve got its “sea legs,” debt became our friend and the ticket needed to buy votes and to confuse our voters and taxpayers.  The “Fed” has become a $28 TRILLION ride… mostly downhill.  The pill to reverse the damage this gene has done is so distasteful that its name is almost never mentioned: cutting the budget and ending the borrowing.  [Did you know the Fed was created with legislation that makes it legal for it/them to loan “money” to the United States that it/they, the Fed, does not have?  Yet we pay interest on it, anyway?  It’s wicked cool.]

The debt gene mostly finances bad ideas, like 20 years in Afghanistan, and the dissolution of our national borders.  It finances economic shutdown in the face of a communicable disease, instead of analgesic treatments that slow the progress of the disease in individuals, allowing the human body to fight it off without lengthy – or any – hospitalization.  It finances incredibly corrupted federal programs like Medicare, Medicaid and the ACA.  It finances public transportation that people don’t use.  Debt is one of the most debilitating diseases a free people could ever suffer, since it will steadily make them not free.  We have to take the pill that fixes it else we’ll have it shoved down our throats in the disappearance of American sovereignty.

We think we’re so smart because we are the only people on Earth who have figured out that our unique nation is the first and only one that will never have to pay its debts – at least the “intelligentsia” of the Democrat party have figured this out, which makes them much smarter than stick-in-the-mud traditionalist Republicans – these are not all Republicans, who tend to be liberal, but the Conservative ones who tend to be the most honest and patriotic.  The actual debt gene is paired with another, the dependency gene, which were both inserted into America’s DNA sometime in the 1930’s.  They were tickled a few times by the Roosevelt “Brain Trust,” but lay mostly dormant until the U. S. went off the Gold Standard under Richard Nixon.  They’ve blossomed since then and would normally have obliterated the debt-ignorance gene, but that pesky ignorance has hung on after the gold window closed and we started borrowing our own currency from the nearly empty vaults at “The Fed,” who pays the U. S. Mint to now print Federal Reserve Notes instead of U. S. Dollars.  The debt-ignorance gene enables us to call those notes “money.”  Very bitter pill to cure that gene.

The combined actual-debt and dependency gene pair causes a mental disorder that we call liberalism or progressivism.  Liberals are convinced, genetically, that their malady actually is a cure, although here and there some sufferers do “snap” out of it and become conservatives.  Soon after that they become patriots as well.

The main symptom of the liberalism disease is a belief that people are not individuals and have no individual rights and that, further, a government can make groups of people into better humans by giving them free stuff.  Naturally, as any progressive liberal will partially explain in just a few words, certain groups respond better to those free gifts than others, and that is why the others are left on the outs when all the free giving is going on.  Makes sense to liberals, anyway, so it is taught in public schools, especially the out-group part, whose attempts to stop the free gifting exposes them as racists, who should be on the outs, everyone agrees.  Don’t join THAT group, children.

Ultimately the only cure for liberalism is knowledge of history and a change of beliefs, making the liberalism “symptom” of genetic weakness, the hardest to undo.  There is a pill for it, however, containing the essence of Judeo-Christian philosophy and tiny bits of hemoglobin from the Revolution, Civil War and other righteous conflicts men have died to win.  Unfortunately, a large fraction of the body politic refuses to consider taking it or even acknowledging it, mainly those who exhibit the disorder known as progressivism or liberalism.  Sadly, we may have reached a point of liberal virulence when not enough of the out-groups are praying for the survival of the United States of America and its unique Constitutional Republic, based upon individual independence, responsibility, structural honesty, prosperity and charity.  We still have faith, however.

I hope inspired people are working on a real vaccine against our progressive disease – a vaccine that trains the body politic to recognize infection and remove it before it gains strength, again.  That pill will taste sweet or, if it takes a shot or more, they won’t sting a bit.  America’s health and longevity are worth it.

Biden, Economics, Elections, Governance, Politics 2021, Responsibility, Taxation

Biden’s Billingsgate

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Who was that masked man? Why, he’s grown stranger…

President Biden is proposing to exceed the THIRTY TRILLION dollar debt level.  What he suggests is not only partisan and disingenuous, but includes multiple effects that restrict and undercut capitalism.  If he ever understood the relationship between debt, productive surplus and growth, he has forgotten it… along with Constitutional provisions and any semblance of American exceptionalism: down the memory hole.

Under his and other socialists’ direction, American will be exceptional again:  among all industrialized nations we will lead the world in our concerted, legislated efforts to destroy our hard-won success and relinquish our sovereignty.  Biden wants to “go big” – biggest fool, perhaps.

The only system that can both destroy debt and increase freedom, is free-enterprise capitalism.  That is, NOT monopoly capitalism OR globalism, both of which concentrate money and power OUT of the hands of free citizens and OUT of the hands of their elected representatives – although not out of their pockets in many cases.  Those must be stopped before it’s too late.  Some serious trust-busting is essential to restoring America.

Practically, a clear course-correction would be to limit the level of corporate net-worths or levels of gross revenues that may donate ANY money to candidates or PAC’s – ANY money.  Perhaps companies with $50 millions in assets or $25 millions in revenue or LESS, may donate, not larger.  Also, companies that have government or military contracts may not donate.  Then trust-busting could proceed.

Already we’ve experienced reduction in job and business growth – returning to pre-Covid levels – because excessive, socialist, “rescue” or “stimulous” payments are keeping people from returning to work!  Work… where guided labor produces things, including taxes.  We know where idiots… umm, ignore that… “progressives” think economic growth comes from: unemployment checks.  Nancy Pelosi said so.  Only as employment increases will freedom, independence and tax revenues increase.

People earning their own livings strengthen both responsibility and financial freedom.  Having more taxpayers increases political freedom.  2020 has shown that weakening election laws weakens political freedom, and it disenfranchises citizens from our most fundamental and hard-won civil rights.  Adding greater responsibility to the exercise of the franchise will clarify honesty in elections – a fundament of the American promise.

Back to what Biden has forgotten… if he ever knew it.  Debt is a superb tool for growth, but not for maintenance – period.

Imagine a factory producing, say, refrigerators.  Its lines are operating, workers are working and every unit that comes off the line is sold within days.  In fact, there is a shortage of refrigerators; people are forced to devise meals for their families without foods that need refrigeration.  People are denied good nutrition for lack of a high-enough rate of refrigerator production.  Even if the government passed a law requiring more refrigerators to be made, only so many can be.

To upgrade the factory and machinery to produce a third more – a 33% increase – will cost $100 Million.  Because the refrigerator company has made a profit over the past 15 years, of $30 Million after all expenses, cost of goods sold and payroll… and taxes, it is able to borrow, or gain a debt of $70 Million.  They’ll be able to make a productive surplus of not $3 million, but $4 million per year at 133% of current production, since all costs won’t increase proportionately.  Each refrigerator will cost a little less to produce with the new machinery and facility improvements.  The $70 Million loan, combined with investment out of increased operating profits, will be paid back with interest to the lender, in less than 20 years.

The earning of profits – creation of productive surplus – enables “Refrigerators, Inc.” to become more productive and efficient, able to modernize, hire trainees who can become highly paid refrigerator builders, and pay taxes to support our civic institutions and even donate money to charitable causes.  Productive surplus also enables the company to destroy debt – make it disappear – while increasing production, the only purpose of investment.  That’s it.  It’s NOT an investment to provide living expenses for people who do not work enough to support themselves or their families; it’s an emergency… it’s charity, not a way of life.

Meanwhile, everyone who wants a refrigerator can buy one – or, contrary to socialist dogma – go to work to earn enough to buy one.

Capitalism is the only process that can destroy debt or, in fact, make investments at all.  All other bills incurred by a society that is complex, are paid, or financed, by the productive surplus of profitable, capitalist enterprises.  All of government: schools, police fire departments, hospitals, military, public works… everything, is paid for from tax revenues that derive only from productive surplus in a profit-making economy.

The growing tragedy – growing weakness – is our habit of borrowing for current expenses from generations into the future, now to the tune of $28 Trillion.  About one-third of our annual federal “budget” is borrowed, not paid from current revenues.  This part of economics Joe Biden has not forgotten, even embraced: the lie of modern politics.

For a long time the U. S. borrowed real money… from banks, individuals and even other countries.  The Treasury sold bonds: saving bonds, Treasury notes (“Treasuries”) of different maturities and yields.  Investors used real money to “invest” in U. S. debt – one step removed from investing in future productive surplus, itself.  This was bad enough; we lived beyond our means but we could afford the interest on those debts, not so much affording repayment of the loan principals.

Unfortunately we have worn out our welcome among real investors.  Now we “borrow” from the Federal Reserve. 

(See: http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2020/09/27/knife-edge-election/)

The “FED” is a private bank consortium that can legally “lend” us money they do not have – $Trillions of it.  So, they lend us “air” and we pretend it’s money and pay interest on it.  Oddly, the Federal Reserve is also granted power to set interest rates, which for a long time have been near 1%, God bless their charitable hearts.  What will we do when they decide the rate should be 3%?  On $10 Trillion?  That’s $300 Billion in real money.  That’s a lot of Meals on Wheels.

Wait a minute… wait a minute.  Did I say, “$10 Trillion?”  I meant $30 Trillion, if we fulfill Biden’s plans.  Why, that would be $900 Billion… a YEAR… close to a $Trillion, itself – just interest!  That’s a lot of everything, including our own defense.  We literally cannot afford more multi-$Trillion spending plans; they are actually taxing plans. 

Many in government believe these “air-debts” never have to be paid back!  “We owe them to ourselves,” they think.  Ooookaaaay… aren’t the UFO people going to usher in a new era of no worries?  Oh, absolutely.  And, Joe Biden is going to unite the country, end racism and borrow us into prosperity.  And equity.

Economics, Politics 2020, Taxation

KNIFE EDGE ELECTION

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Aside from violent politics and anti-Americanism, there are even larger forces at work, and psychologies behind or in front of them, that are shaping the World.   Politics, which has caused these forces to build strength, can barely affect them, now.  Every four years we become hotly exercised over “who will lead the free world,” but the crucial differences we perceive between candidates, are rarely so significant that they will materially impact the inexorable forces already underway.  “It’s the economy, stupid.”  Even James Carville had little understanding of what he had actually said in 1992.  It is the economy… of the world.

Even the mighty United States is barely able, now, to chart its own course, economically.

It is an interesting game, for some, to dredge up what a nickel used to buy compared to today, or what used to be a “damn good weeks pay” for 60 hours of labor.  We created the mis-named “Federal” Reserve System in 1913 to supposedly prevent the excesses and crashes of the banking system, and populated the member banks with the same thieves who had helped crash the economy more than once, but who also finally came up with the right price to purchase Congress’ acquiescence to the Federal Reserve act.  Supposedly the penalties of interest costs would keep Congress from spending beyond its means.

That worked wonders. 

The flaw was and is that there’s no profit to be made without a loan being lent.  Lending to business isn’t profitable enough; big profit comes from lending to countries – especially this one.  There simply needs to be enough crises to justify deficit spending.  That works, too.

An ounce of gold sells lately for nearly $2,000.  In 1932, before FDR stole Americans’ gold by law for $20.50 an ounce, it sold for 1/100th as much.  In other words, in fewer than 90 years the purchasing power vis a’ vis gold declined by 99%.  FDR adjusted that ratio by declaring that gold cost $35 an ounce now that the government owned it, and picked up a few billion dollars with which to “fix” the depressed economy.  Controlling the price of commodities is a useful tool in controlling people.  Many commodities define the whole economies of nations.  Oil, for example, finances several, like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Iran, Russia and many others.  How belligerent they are towards their “enemies” is often tied to the market price of that single commodity.

Kings and Emperors are bought and sold on some continents for oil, gold or diamonds.  The companies that own or control those commodities, or their banks, are international these days, and tied to any nation only for tax advantage rather than for any sense of tradition or patriotism.  Indeed, the money system is virtually global, not national.  That’s our money, as well.  It’s the economy, stupid.

But the problems that will swamp virtually every nation are global and non-national.  So-called “national” banks form a web of global management – financial management, financing governments.  Our own “Federal” Reserve sits at that table, not at ours.

Global financiers are not like other people.  Their outlook on life is divorced from money worries, mortgages, keeping tight schedules or shopping.  Tailors or dressmakers come to them, employees / servants obtain food and prepare it and clean up after meals.  “Average” people are nearly an alien species to them, useful only for work and taxes.  Morally they are not bound by our concepts of right and wrong: actions are either profitable or not profitable, which is to say, good or bad, including wars… the sides don’t really matter.

For pastimes, nothing is out of reach… or bounds.  Tales of extraordinary sexual pleasures and the worst imaginable, even orgiastic parties, gatherings, have surfaced.  Who can stop them when they practically own everything?  Politicians like to join them.  There is an animal attraction to “forbidden” pleasures in a non-judgmental arena, one that only religious and honest people will resist or avoid.  The “lords” of money have a lot more to say about how and how well the population of this planet will live than any elected official, much as we’d like to believe otherwise.

Of financial national powers, only the United States has the potential to constrain or reverse the utter control by shadowy international oligarchs.  That brings us tremendous opposition from sometimes unexpected quarters.  For oligarchs, socialism is an easier system of governance to deal with.  Both abject fealty to money and socialism / communism are anti-religious, “satanic” forces.  Western civilization became dominant thanks to Judeo-Christianity, no matter how many fools passionately deny it.

Our economics are based on money as a form of barter: value for value.  This is ultimate fairness and helped form the fundaments of our legal contracts in all areas of interaction, not just financial.  Honest, enforceable agreements – contracts – have been crucial for the growth of economies and for the creation of a middle class and upward mobility for those willing to work hard enough or intelligently enough.  The United States was made strong by virtue of fundamental honesty in our economy and in our business AND social “contracts.”  The Bible requires those ethics.

Yet we need look no further than our astronomical debt to see that our own nation is not nearly as “independent” as we’d like to think.  Every dollar of debt is a measure of slavery; every dollar of tax is a loss of freedom.

The alert observer can see how most countries are in alignment financially.  Those that are not are outliers and not likely to create substantial profits for bankers.  The moment they are so likely, loans start flowing in for development of various kinds, never least of which is of natural resources.  Lately the largest source of such loan-debt-control actions is China.  Are they independently seeking hegemony, or acting in concert with the global banking oligarchy?  We’ll never find out by asking them: they are communists and dis-information is an automatic defense of their utterly secular “infallibility.”

A small example of the control of governments and people by banks, can be seen here in Washington.  When the Federal Reserve was created – by bankers – the legislation allowed it to “lend” money that did not exist, to the government.  What a terrible tool to hand to bankers; what a far more terrible tool to hand to politicians.  In a single Act politicians created both a choke-collar on the American people and a PRIVATE bank that owns the levers of economic power just relinquished by Congress through the same Act.  When the Chairman of the “Fed” testifies to Congress, he or she doesn’t come to learn what financial policy should be, but to partially inform our elected representatives how things financial are going to be.

Covid-19 and recent actions of the “Fed” should make this clear to those with eyes to see.  Following a questionable lockdown of most businesses the Congress was impelled to provide expanded “unemployment” funds and various bailouts, small and large, including forgivable loans to small businesses… TRILLIONS of dollars worth.  Where did the Federal Reserve obtain that money, an American taxpaying citizen might ask?  Where?

Thin air is where.  Sitting behind desks the 17 governors of the Federal Reserve agreed to write the world’s largest fraudulent, un-backed check, drawn on an account with barely 5% of the funds on deposit for which the check is written.  Well, that’s OK, it’s legal.  Orwell was right: debt is prosperity.  That same “Board of Governors” just voted to keep interest rates close to zero for at least another year.  While we might celebrate this good news, it exposes its own threat to the nation: these same private bankers can later vote to raise interest rates, obligating the elected Federal government and its elected representatives, to pay those higher rates.

Wait just a minute, baab-a-loo, baab-a-loo, it says in the Constitution that only the Congress can initiate “bills” of “Appropriation” including, as stated in Section 9 of Article I, “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account….”  Yet here is the so-called Federal Reserve Bank able to impose financial obligation upon the country by agreement among 17 largely unknown private bankers, and not by the Congress.

If the “Treasury Notes” that the Federal Reserve “buys” with thin air are good instruments of obligation, why can’t the Congress simply authorize the printing of “money” without paying interest to anyone?  It’s the same “full faith and credit of the United States.”  What an awful position for an earlier Congress to put itself and the nation into.  What a dramatic reform and sanitization of government for an imminent Congress to perform: nationalize the Federal Reserve, a creation of the Congress in the first place.  It’s all a matter of the value of United States dollars – the U. S. should control it.  Indeed, we should no longer be beholden to international financiers.  The fact that Americans still have sufficient power to restore our true independence is why international socialism keeps attacking our system, processes and the Constitution, itself.

Can we see where this is happening?  Well, the federal Reserve was created; the dollar was separated from gold or silver backing; the dollar was shifted from U. S. currency to Federal Reserve Notes; the act of voting has been made looser and looser, with barely managed voting lists despite Federal law to the contrary; vote harvesting has been allowed; vote-by-mail has been suddenly instituted due to questionable fears of Covid-19, promising severe electoral confusion on election night; our own census has been prevented from asking about citizenship status, confusing further the apportionment of representation in Congress; and, not to overlook, leftists, communists (BLM and others) are rioting, vandalizing and burning and promising more if their candidate doesn’t win or the wrong person is confirmed to the Supreme Court.  The Left never rests.

This election year there is a knife-edge election.  The virulent left has read some marijuana leaves and discerns that the time to strike is 2020.  Thanks to President Obama the concept of compromise is gone from politics, and the freedom to actually display socialist beliefs is absolute.  The left judges that there are enough ignorant, mis-educated young fools to swing the direction of history toward socialism and communism.  Electing a virtually socialist government (anyone who is counting on Joe Biden to maintain a “centrist” direction is in immediate need of deep therapy) will effectively dissolve the United States as an independent, freedom-based, democratic republic.  The consequences will touch every one of us.

The concept of value for value, mentioned earlier, is vital to our commerce and contracts and a constant restatement of honesty in our dealings with one another.  But it also underlies our basic justice system, and requires that punishments should fit the crimes invoking them.  In both commerce and individual transactions we have slipped far away from value for value.  Our currency is backed only by our confidence and an international finance system that is willing to accept dollars in trade for commodities, a system under great international pressure for replacement.  Trust in the fundamental honesty of the United States’ government is what supports dollars as measures of value for the rest of the World.  That and the taxing power of Congress.

We are also slipping, precipitously, far down from the pinnacle of even-handed justice that guarantees our survival as a republic.  Laws governing “hate crimes” for example, shift investigations and charges from wholly evidentiary to semi-subjective, politically correct charges.  Laws that are passed under duress to satisfy threats of violence, to suggest a year 2020 example, also indicate how far we are willing to diverge from actual justice to “justice” as defined by seditious insurrectionists.  What can the future of “blind” justice possibly be?

If we are prepared, because of an onslaught of Marxist-inspired lies about crime events, and in thrall of weak politicians who have come to believe in the foggy utopianism of socialism, to relinquish truth-based, evidence-based justice, and to relinquish complete control of our weakened finances, then we deserve to lose America.  Loss of an independent United States will lead to the end of Western civilization and the demise of Judeo-Christian ethics-based culture.

Vote.

Economics, Education, Family, Governance, Politics 2018, Sex

The Potters of Socialism

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During a recent conversation, Prudence opined on the new trends of “body art” and unusual piercings, increasingly involving the bodies of young women. It has something to do with both feminism and socialism, Prudence suggests, and this view has caused demands for substantial clarification. Indeed. This line of reasoning could lead to a unified theory of wrong directions and unnecessary complexity.

Life is a test… a series of tests: momentary, hourly, daily, situationally – from birth to death. Humans, LIKE ALL LIVING THINGS, become stronger, more honest, more independent, by facing tests and “passing” them. What is the greatest dis-honesty, therefore?

It is denial of the test. It is humans’ penchant for convincing themselves that they might avoid the testing (which is the spiritual aspect of life) coupled with the denial of spirituality, itself. These fundamentals lead to lifetimes of failure, unfulfillment and even to widening circles of tragedy for other humans, particularly people the unfulfilled try to “love.” On the other hand, those tragedies are also tests that may be passed, leading to strength and growth.

Stated more simply, the worst lie is that which one tells to him or herself. We are in an odd time where such lies are celebrated, promulgated, codified and made, legally, into community-wide lies that form the new bases for anti-discrimination criminality. The hot one is trans-genderism. We call it an “ism” because it derives from belief and not from reality. Under it males tell themselves that they are females, in the preponderance of instances, and females tell themselves that they are males. It is the penultimate denial of human testing there could be.

It isn’t the absolute worst, any longer, because here and there are humans who tell themselves that they are not human, and who seek “rights” as this or that animal… often a dog: humans like dogs.

But, declaring oneself to not be what one is requires holding two conflicting ideas at once, ultimately leading, for most, to mental breakdown. This is not to say that some are not “happy” to be living outwardly as the opposite gender, but they are the minority. Still, they deserve their own happiness and other humans should not disrupt it. But the truth is that gender cannot be changed, only masked. Individuals who are emotionally secure may be happier adopting the mask. It is their mask, and by its artifice the individual attempts to avoid or deny the testing that his or her gender would otherwise face.

So, some would ask, what’s wrong with that? Lots of people avoid tests. We have an entire welfare system that purports to “help” them do so. And this shows the intersection of socialism as a construct of lies and the increasing lies of sexuality that some fight for as forms of “progress.” Both are means of test-avoidance, test denial, and both tend to leave the denier weaker spiritually.

What has this to do with tattoos and piercings? Both are forms of masks, are they not? Even homosexuality is a mask. It doesn’t mean individuals are not “happy” living as not being tested as a man or as not being tested as a woman, but it does mean they have made a choice to not face tests of emotion and feelings of one sort, and the growth their passing would provide. Because of anti-discrimination rules, declaring oneself homosexual means avoiding tests as either one’s gender or as one’s new identity.

In the 1950’s and 1960’s a big form of masking was hair. Girls would shave their heads or apply odd colors to their hair, for example, daring others to react to the change. In that way, at least temporarily, they could step out of the role of “woman” and be tested on the most ephemeral aspects of being rather than facing the tests of female growth and honesty. Boys at the same time would grow their hair to great lengths or shagginess, altering their “aura” as it were, too. Any troubles that came their way over rebellious hairstyling were deemed preferable to those that were associated with maturing in the role of “man.” Test denial. It’s what socialism promises to whole populations, inherently including a denial of spirituality.

In the midst of the “sexual revolution” last century, society, institutions and families fairly consistently encouraged the reality of acceptance of one’s role as man or woman. Most youngsters “grew out of” their odd experiments. Not all, though. By the mid-seventies several large trends were underway:

1. Welfare was federalized and entrenched under the “Great Society.”
2. Feminism was aggressively undoing traditional roles and family structures.
3. Leftist media were celebrating their successful castration of the Vietnam War
and all efforts against Communism that it represented.
4. Leftist media were celebrating the destruction of Richard Nixon, a flawed
conservative at best, over relatively minor crimes.
5. Attacks against organized religion were becoming normalized even as churches
themselves were corroding innocence within their ranks.
6. The Federal Reserve was prosecuting economic policies without regard to
elections or even office holders like presidents in the exercise of new powers
elected representatives could not grasp or counter.
7. Homosexuality was exploding in Western societies.
8. Black families were disintegrating with the help of federalized welfare.
9. Faith in the American idea was fading as quickly as American History curricula.

America is reaping the corrupt crops, now, from mutated seeds sown for fifty years. Youth are in favor of socialism, politicians are proud of it while other politicians flail about in their quest for proper rebuttals to socialist mendacity. Just like homosexuality and its ragged cousin, transgenderism, socialism requires believers to hold, and defend, two diametrically conflicting ideas at once.

Socialism intends two conflicting outcomes: 1) People will become better humans by virtue of changes in their physical surroundings and LACK OF RESPONSIBILITY; 2) If people fail to become higher-quality people thanks to socialism, socialists-in-charge will happily control them until they do.

Prudence’s correspondent had recently visited the waiting room of a plastic surgery and facial reconstruction practice and was struck by the number of quite young people, mostly females, who were there for recuperative follow-ups for various procedures. This, too, is a trend: Young people are having one or multiple procedures done to, they, hope, cause fulfillment of a physical image that is more pleasing, more acceptable, more attractive to society. That is to say, they are living out a dream of comparison to others rather than living on purpose.

Just like body arts or fanatical workouts, plastic surgery provides a mask that the wearer believes is more ”beautiful” than the innate self; this work, often painful, is endured in lieu of making ones inner, true self more attractive or charitable or loving. It is a personal dose of socialism whereby the physical or worldly appearance forms its own replacement spirituality and belief structure. There is no surprise that such shallow, literal children are unable to discern the corrosiveness of socialism. It is no wonder that socialists, and most progressives, are not nearly as happy as conservatives whose belief structures are based in spirituality that leads them to accept and pass tests in reality.

Changing ones physique or physiognomy to fulfill the expectations of society is a means of sidestepping true tests in life. Like the long hairs of the ‘60’s, others will deal with the mask rather than the real person and, it is hoped, the tests associated with the original person will never need passing. Growth is avoided.

Perhaps the most anti-spiritual, test-denial of all is abortion. Despite playing a role in conception of new human life, women have been convinced that the tests of motherhood may be avoided and that they will be more happy and fulfilled as a result. Indeed, not only have they the right to avoid those tests, but all of society, through government theft of others’ earnings, ought to support that avoidance. Perhaps there is less stress temporarily, but little happiness obtains.

Instead of accepting the tests of womanhood and motherhood and the concurrent civilizing of more animalistic males, females are encouraged to exist untested and to a degree, unfulfilled and incomplete. Obviously many of these women will see a logic to socialism and to government “nannyism” throughout their lives. Who needs men in that future? Socialism destroys humanity and abject feminism is socialism’s handmaid. How bleak.

The constant undermining and outright attacking of Christianity feeds socialism’s ascension to acceptability. Not the old testament, but the new, defines man’s relationship to God as personal and an individual responsibility – not as one of God’s chosen people, but as God’s chosen person, responsible to him or her self and to God to take the energy of life provided, and to multiply it by learning and following the rules laid out in dozens of religious traditions.

There is no room for the spiritual in socialism. Socialism is based on groups and denies individual greatness. The infection of education by socialism is obvious in the moves to eliminate valedictorians and salutatorians, or to have multiples of each. Another is to avoid “F’s” or other negative marking, to give everyone a trophy, to (claim to) not keep score in youth sports. One can also observe the same rot supplanting historical knowledge resulting in America’s being no more exceptional than literally every other nation. Rampant egalitarianism provides another patine of legitimacy: no one can earn more, be more worthy, honorable or valuable than the rest. Apparently, only government officials are permitted to be smarter than others, or more morally pure.

Ultimately, Socialism is the avoidance of human tests and, essentially, the avoidance of personal growth. Humans become stronger by overcoming adversity – everything from discomfort, to hunger, to tyranny and lack of freedom. We call the triumph over adversity, “freedom,” not the avoidance of it.

Avoiding adversity is a form of self-subjugation, leaving the subject/practitioner in a jail of his or her own making: less and less likely to ever overcome adverse circumstances. Dependence is the only result. Dependents are the most malleable of clays for the potters of socialism who are more than willing to offer ever more complete avoidance of tests, gaining perpetual power for themselves. Perhaps this little essay is testing the reader, right now.

Culture, Education, Politics 2017, Trump

An American Prescription

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We are at a crossroad in history.  One might say that we are always at a crossroad, but from time to time there is a confluence of forces that literally force decisions on nations and people that will significantly change their paths – and the paths of other nations – into the future.  And here we are.  What are the forces that have come, or are coming together to force big change, none of which is good?

First is militant Islam.  Islam and everyone else have been in conflict since Muhammad was marrying a 9-year-old.  Without parsing every conflicting and convenient verse of the Q’uran, the message of Islam is that everyone must be Muslim, one way or the other – the “other” being force.  This has become twisted, especially since the influence of Nazism, into honoring those who kill themselves to defeat the “enemies of Allah.”  This includes even children and grandchildren.  Muslim political leaders arrange for pensions to be paid to the parents of suicidal “heroes,” often from monies received from the United States(!), as tribute for their “martyrdom.”

There is no possibility of negotiation or compromise with people who believe such things, except that Westerners – Christians in particular – relinquish part of their own beliefs and sense of abhorrence.

The history of relations with strictly Muslim countries is one of slow, steady loss for their opponents, which is to say, us.  The question is whether we have lost enough to be at a point of unrecoverability.  The second condition that forms this point of historic crossroad is nuclear proliferation.

For the only nation to actually kill a few hundred thousand people (both quickly and slowly) with nuclear ordnance, the United States has been just about the worst player in the field of preventing the spread of nukes.  The recent “agreement” with Iranian mullahs, negotiated by the great statesman, John Forbes Kerry, at the behest of international genius, Barack Hussein Obama (the only person who really knows, who ever stated that he, B. H. Obama, was born in Kenya) was a colossal retreat on every front the mullahs thought of, and then an even larger retreat on some fronts they hadn’t thought of but which were conveniently placed before them by the aforementioned duet of American foreign relations braniacs.  The result is the acceleration of Iran’s terrorism operations, deeper involvement in Syria’s civil war, alliance with Russia and, just to add some fun to the world’s troubles, guaranteed development of nuclear-tipped ICBMs.  A legacy of accomplishment.

The rush by North Korea to also field nuclear ICBMs is not a coincidence to the Iranian effort, they are joined at the rectum, passing their crap between them – another legacy of accomplishment for American anti-proliferationists, going back decades.

And so we have two key forces: militant Islam and nuclear weapons.  What’s the third?

The third force is China.  Whether the 21st will be a Chinese century is the immediate result of choosing wrongly which way to turn at the crossroad we are facing.  China has its problems, including potentially severe economic ones, but it does not hesitate to expand its military influence in dramatic ways, including creating islands that it now claims are its territory because it has placed military installations on them.  And, China is the best thief in the world in terms of intellectual property, keeping itself abreast of nearly every U. S. military innovation by stealing every secret we haven’t had the courtesy to hand to them.

China perceives itself as the natural next world hegemon, and simply waits as the U. S. self-destructs in the face of militant Islam and the internal forces we have arrayed against ourselves.

We, ourselves, the nation of the United States of America, representing the decline and fall of Western, Judeo-Christian civilization, comprise the multi-faceted FOURTH force.  It will not please liberals and their lefty, anti-freedom, anti-capitalism friends to hear the prescription for keeping America on top in the global pecking order.

America is destroying itself and its ability to lead the world.  There are many symptoms of this self-destruction, but we do not heed their warnings.  Here are some examples:

  • $20 Trillion in current debt and a hundred $Trillion or so in impossible obligations;
  • 40+% of budgets committed to welfare;
  • Dysfunctional education that has effectively separated Americans from their own history;
  • Dissolution of the social order, distrust of civil authority, fomented racial tensions and breakdown of urban cores;
  • Secularization and separation from, even embarrassment towards Christian religious faith and morals;
  • Rampant drug assault on young people with inconsistent actions to prevent their entry and production;
  • Legalization of a hundred strains of potent marijuana on the premise of tax revenue and official lies about “medical” and “recreational” marijuana;
  • Pollution of electronic media with unbridled pornography and destructive, dishonest “entertainment” contributing to the breakdown of moral institutional influence;
  • Legalized and subsidized abortion;
  • Nearly complete reversal of the role and place of the U. S. Constitution and the ideas of America;
  • Dissolution of marriage, the meaning of marriage and the basic responsibilities of family commitment and child-rearing.

We could talk for hours about all the cultural declines we can see all around us, so many of which weaken our people in terms of mental and physical toughness in the face of potential hardships we will inevitably face.  Science notwithstanding, Americans in great numbers believe there will never be another depression, or even severe inflation; they believe that the weather they like can be guaranteed politically, believe it or not; they believe they can matriculate with barely a glimpse of history, study of founding documents and philosophies, or of the reasons behind major events; they believe there are pills that will a) make them smart, 2)keep them fit with rock-hard abs, 3) make them attractive to beautiful partners, 4) change their birth gender.  These are they who think that criminal illegal entrants strengthen the economy and the nation, that drugs can be legalized to the benefit of government without damaging users, that single-payer health-care will improve quality and lower costs without fascist death panels.  Talk about Dreamers.

What is/are the prescription(s)?  There isn’t room or time to list the hundreds needed, but Prudence indicates that these 4 will make the fastest, surest differences:

  1. Facilitate church-run schools.
  2. Qualification of voters prior to elections.
  3. Charterization – non-union – of public schools.
  4. Nationalizing the Federal Reserve.

America is worth saving; the world depends upon it.  Perhaps the worst thing we could do is pursue removal of a legally elected president no matter how much you may hate him.