Will We Have Leaders Like Our Founding Fathers Again? (Not Career Politicians) | Thomas Sowell

The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy.

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Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie Receives Strong Support for Bill to Abolish the Federal Reserve

The Federal Reserve is the root of all evil.

Abolishing the thing that enables the war machine and finances the MIC and it’s election contributions is a tough sell.

José Alberto Niño

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On May 15, 2024, Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie posted on X a poll on whether he should put forward a bill to abolish the United States Federal Reserve. The poll was able to pick up 115,000 votes when it concluded on May 16. 

The poll featured three options: “end the Fed,” “keep the Fed,” and “just show poll results.” 

Of those votes, an overwhelming 86% majority chose to “end the Fed.”

This eventually prompted Massie to introduce, H.R. 8421, the Federal Reserve Board Abolition Act, which abolishes the Board of Governors of the Fed and its network of banks. On top of that, it repeals the Federal Reserve Act, the 1913 law that established the Federal Reserve System

“Americans are suffering under crippling inflation and the Federal Reserve is to blame,” Massie declared in a May 16 statement announcing the introduction of the bill. 

“During COVID, the Federal Reserve created trillions of dollars out of thin air and loaned it to the Treasury Department to enable unprecedented deficit spending. By monetizing the debt, the Federal Reserve devalued the dollar and enabled free money policies that caused the high inflation we see today, “ Massie observed. 

Massie is following in the footsteps of the legendary Congressman Ron Paul, who introduced the “Audit the Fed” bill (H.R. 1207) during the 111th Congress, which placed the microscope on the Fed’s monetary policy moves. For his part, Massie introduced his own“Audit the Fed” bill during the 114th Congress.

Through its control of the monetary supply and its ability to expand it, the Fed is one of the entities most responsible for generating inflation. This entire process results in the devaluation of the dollar, destruction of the purchasing power of money individuals hold, and the imposition of a hidden tax on working class individuals’ income and savings. 

The Fed’s interventions when it comes to fixing interest rates and tinkering with the money supply, generates the dreaded economic boom and bust cycle. It also fosters bad incentives through the creation of a “moral hazard” in how it enables banks to execute speculative and high-risk lending practices based on the assumption that the Fed will bail out embattled banks for their irrational decisions. 

The Fed is not only an economic cancer but also a great enabler of economic growth. It’s not a coincidence that after the creation of the Fed in 1913 it has facilitated the largest expansion of government in American history in the last 100 years.

Thankfully, Massie recognizes this and has introduced this legislation to correct over a century’s worth of bad economic decision-making. Let’s hope that other Republicans follow suit in backing Massie’s legislation.

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Public Schools Have No Respect for the Students or Their Parents

In a final display of disrespect, I and others in the school system trade in lies nearly every day. We lie because, ultimately, our interest is in following orders, keeping our jobs, and preserving the system. Take standardized testing as an example. Although many of my colleagues and I saw little value in the tests or the massive bureaucracy around them, we dutifully completed test-preparation exercises with our students and lied to them about the importance of the tests for them and “their” school system.

https://mises.org/mises-wire/public-schools-have-no-respect-students-or-their-parents

Mises Wire • Karl Streitel

Some of us may remember the Helen Lovejoy character in The Simpsons, who would appear any time some catastrophe befell the town and plaintively wail, “Won’t someone please think of the children?!” The joke here, of course, is that as long as you do something in the name of helping children, it must be right, and you must be virtuous.

Such sentiments are easily ridiculed in cartoons, but unfortunately, they take root in reality like Russian knapweed despite copious evidence undermining their veracity. Consider your own government-school experiences, whether as a student, parent, or interested observer:

• How often did you or your children feel that school was something being done for you and not to you?
• How often did you or your children, especially in middle and high school, leave excited for school in the morning? (If you think that question is unfair, consider what that says about the traditional school system.)
• How often did you or your children feel respected by the school system and those who ran it?

It is that latter question I want to address herein because the concept of respect is one that I have violated time and again during my work as a teacher, and it is one that is foundational to what is rotten in the government school system.

We’ll Control Your Time

Perhaps the most obvious yet overlooked way I and others in the school system disrespected students was by controlling their time. The bell system, a relic of concern over the efficient use of buildings and punctuality, ensures that students know when it is time to learn a subject and when it is time to stop learning a subject, thus guaranteeing that learning becomes relegated to specific time frames determined by others.

Working on your math homework in social studies class? Why, that is forbidden and worthy of punishment. That time is for social studies only. Please wait for the dulcet tone of the bell to signal to you when you are permitted to learn something else. Of course, if you do want to continue learning said subject, that is also not permitted because the bell has told you that it is time to move on to a new subject.

Imagine if anything outside of school worked in the same manner: Cutting your grass? You have forty-five minutes. When you hear the bell, stop and then begin vacuuming your living room. Coding a new piece of software? You have forty-five minutes. When you hear the bell, stop and then return to your assigned small group from the day before to continue working on a marketing campaign for a completely different product.

Is it likely that such processes would yield anything but fragmentation, frustration, and subsistence-level productivity? However, those outcomes are exactly what government schools produce time and again.

This control of time also lends itself naturally to the gradual destruction of students’ innate love of learning. We need look no further than young children to see this inborn quality, but over time, the traditional school system erodes this natural love through control. This erosion is evident each day in the desultory walks of middle school and high school students to their bus stops and through their days at public schools.

We’ll Aggress against You

See the rest here

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California and New York Are Even Shaking Down Fleeing Residents

“We are incredibly reliant on New York’s high earners for our income tax revenue,” Amanda Hiller, New York’s acting tax commissioner, told an audience of civic leaders. Ms. Hiller claims the state doesn’t know whether millionaires are leaving because of the state’s high tax rates. Are they studying the matter closely?

New York and California have become the dark dystopia Orwell described in 1984. Why does anyone stay?

https://mises.org/mises-wire/california-and-new-york-are-even-shaking-down-fleeing-residents

Mises Wire • Douglas French

Those who have declared residency in another state cannot spend even a minute beyond the allowed time in either high tax New York or California. And, Big Brother is watching. George Orwell could not conjure up a more diabolical tale than the Bloomberg story penned by Laura Nahmias and Eliyahu Kamisher.

“The minute you file a partial return you’re going to hear from New York state,” said Jonathan Mariner, who created TaxDay, an app that tracks users’ locations so they don’t overstay the threshold of days that would trigger residency status, which is typically 184 (for irony, slip a nine in after the one).

So for the really rich, a misplaced day in New York (or on the other coast, California) can mean millions lost to the tax authority. How serious is this? Nahmias and Kamisher write, “State officials are stepping up already-intense scrutiny to make sure former residents have actually moved. It’s a complex operation that involves cutting-edge artificial intelligence and tracking everything from travel to the location of people’s pets.”

Those who earn a million dollars a year or more have been fleeing New York (top state tax rate 10.9 percent) in droves since 2019, and the state can’t do without the income tax these high earners paid. Residency audits have been instituted. “New York’s auditors closely watch travel and apply a standard known as ‘the teddy bear test,’ looking to see where individuals keep their most cherished possessions to determine whether a home is their primary residence,” write the pair from Bloomberg.

“I’ve had cases that have hinged on a single dog,” Mark Klein, a tax attorney at Hodgson Russ told Bloomberg. “And I had a case once that was based on the fact that the person moved their Peloton bicycle to Florida.”

Klein compares a New York tax audit to a colonoscopy. Except taxpayers remain awake, one supposes.

The state of New York collected roughly $1 billion between 2013 and 2017 from fifteen thousand audits. The Bloomberg scribes say the Golden State is not as draconian as New York. Or in their words, “the scale and complexity of its residency audit operation” is not on a level with New York. But California collected $85 million in residency audit income last year through November, the largest single-year tally in at least a decade.

As in Orwell’s totalitarian superstate Oceania, time and history are manipulated in New York to create chaos and allow state manipulation. You’ve heard the expression “New York minute.” Well, now state tax bureaucrats define a few hours as a New York day. If you stop for lunch while driving through the state, the taxing authority considers that a day. A quick visit to a doctor in New York City is counted as a day by the state taxing authority.

See the rest here

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The West Has an Illiterate Financial Press

As the fools ruling the US continue their destruction of the country, the dollar and living standards will die with the country. America is likely living her last years. Perhaps this is why Putin and Xi don’t bother to dispose of us.

No argument there. I remember back in the 70’s or 80’s watching national network news (likely NBC). This day the network’s lead financial correspondent said “No one really knows what will happen but experts say it may get worse before it gets better.”

Back then I was dumber than I am now and I figured out this “news” was worthless.

The West Has an Illiterate Financial Press

Paul Craig Roberts

The entire the financial press has zero understanding of basic economics. The financial “journalists” just print press releases.

The US debt has never mattered, because the US dollar is the world reserve currency. That means US debt is the reserves of the world’s central banks. If US debt rises, so does the reserves of the world banking system. All central banks were delighted to accumulate more US Treasury debt as it meant the reserves of their banking system went up.

The Federal Reserve can always redeem US Treasury debt by creating money with which to buy it. The debt is always redeemable because it is denominated in dollars.

The problem arrives when the dollar is deserted as world reserve currency. The morons who comprise the Biden regime are scaring central banks away from the dollar as their reserves because of sanctions against Russia, Iran, China, Venezuela, and others. The slow mental processes of central banks are beginning to understand that having your reserves in US Treasury dollar debt means they can be frozen, seized, denied to your use if you cross Washington.

The threat to Washington is, whereas the Fed can print dollars to redeem the debt, the Fed cannot print foreign currencies to redeem the US dollar. So, if central banks shift their reserves out of dollars into gold, as Russia and China are doing, or into other currencies, the supply of dollars in foreign exchange markets have fewer and fewer takers. Consequently the dollar loses its value relative to gold, silver, and rising currencies, and the dollar’s value falls in foreign exchange markets. As America’s manufacturing is offshored and as America relies on imports of food, US inflation rises. Historically, the Fed’s response to inflation has been unemployment.

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Christian Worship of the False God of Politics

What exactly are evangelical Christians worshipping when they so slavishly worship the government of Israel? They are not worshipping God or Godliness – just the opposite. They are worshipping the kind of people described by George Washington in his Farewell Address as “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men.” Ordinary politicians, in other words.

https://mises.org/mises-wire/christian-worship-false-god-politics

Mises Wire • Thomas J. DiLorenzo

Millions of American “evangelical” Christians have been indoctrinated in the idea that they must be worshipful of Israeli politicians and bureaucrats. This is so because they are taught by preachers like John Hagee that the Bible says that God will bless those who bless the nation of Abraham. The absurdity of it all is that pop religionists like Hagee falsely conflate the Israel of the Bible with today’s politicians and bureaucrats of the seventy-six-year-old government of the country of Israel. The two have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. Israel’s politicians can be just as sleazy, immoral, corrupt, criminal, and murderous as any politicians anywhere. Hence the spectacle of American evangelical Christians cheerleading the killing of fellow Christians in Gaza by the Israeli military (and of the killing of even more fellow Christians from Russia by supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia).

What exactly are evangelical Christians worshipping when they so slavishly worship the government of Israel? They are not worshipping God or Godliness – just the opposite. They are worshipping the kind of people described by George Washington in his Farewell Address as “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men.” Ordinary politicians, in other words.

When politicians of any country use the coercive powers of the state to confiscate one person’s property, give some of it to political supporters, and keep some for themselves they are engaging in theft. Calling it “democracy,” “majority rule,” or “the only democracy in the Middle East” does not make it any less sinful. 

In order to get elected all politicians everywhere must promise to steal money from those who have earned it and give it to others (and themselves) who have no moral right to it. Calling it “progressive taxation” does not make it any less sinful.

All politicians make promises to allocate other people’s stolen property to their political supporters, most of which they know they cannot keep. They lie, in other words. As Murray Rothbard once wrote, a master politician is a masterful liar, conniver, and manipulator. That is why so few moral people are ever elected to political office. And if they are they are usually quickly beaten down by harsh criticisms and condemnations, or ignored and marginalized. 

When F.A. Hayek titled one of the chapters of The Road to Serfdom “Why the Worst Get on Top” he was referring to totalitarian socialist societies, but the same thing is true of any democracy anywhere. Just look at the current makeup of the U.S. House and Senate “leadership.” 

To a large extent politicians become politicians because they can enrich themselves by soliciting and taking bribes. The late Yuri Maltsev, who defected from the Soviet Union to the United States after working for Mikhail Gorbachev, once remarked about how similar the U.S. government was to the Soviet government because, in his words, “government is all about taking bribes.”

It is a common practice of politicians in Washington to propose onerous taxes or regulations on an industry, then sit back and collect millions of dollars in bribes, euphemistically called “campaign donations,” and then once sufficient loot is collected, call the whole thing off. They call such proposed legislation “milking bills” because they milk “campaign donations.” Legal scholar Fred McChesney even wrote a whole Harvard University Press book about this phenomenon entitled Money for Nothing. 

All politicians everywhere, including Israel, are showcases of the Seven Deadly Sins. Self-pride trumps humility for starters. What member of Congress is not an egomaniac? Envy poisons the heart of every proponent of “income redistribution” schemes, the cornerstone of welfarism everywhere. 

See the rest here

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The sad farce of German “democracy”

In summary: A constitutional protector who owes his office to a Minister President who was appointed to a second term via the anti-constitutional interventions of outsiders is now vowing to use his office to forestall political developments that may deprive his Minister President of power in the future. It is almost like “democracy” in Thüringen is synonymous with left-wing government.

https://www.eugyppius.com/p/the-sad-farce-of-german-democracy?publication_id=268621&post_id=144620549&isFreemail=false&r=9atnc&triedRedirect=true

eugyppius

To make all of this even harder, we are told that the upcoming September elections in Thüringen, Brandenburg and Saxony present a grave threat to democracy. To counteract this threat we have things like the Thüringen Project, where our greatest legal minds are at this very moment brainstorming ways to defend Thuringian democracy from the political preferences of actual voters. Crucially, the very existence of the Thüringen Project means that democracy must still reign supreme in Thüringen. Otherwise, there would be nothing for the democratic police of the Thüringen Project to defend. We therefore need only study Thuringian politics in their present state to gain a better idea of what this mysterious, shape-shifting, elusive phenomenon we call German democracy might be.

We will start at the top. The current Minister President (i.e., governor) of Thüringen is a highly democratic man named Bodo Ramelow:

Ramelow is a member of Die Linke, or the Left Party, which is the direct successor of the Socialist Unity Party (or SED) that used to govern the DDR. That might seem baffling, as the SED and the DDR were anything but democratic. Still more baffling is the fact that the constitutional protectors suspected Ramelow of antidemocratic tendencies and even surveilled him for many years. But democracy as we have learned is extremely complicated, and whatever antidemocratic essence Ramelow may have harboured in the past, he is a stalwart democratic politician today. He is also a huge fan of the mobile game Candy Crush, which he enjoys playing during government meetings. That at least seems unambiguously democratic, and perhaps it is even enough to overcome Ramelow’s political unreliability in other respects.

Ramelow first became Minister President in 2014, in a coalition government formed by Die Linke, the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens. Ramelow then appointed a man named Stephan Kramer to head the State Office of Constitutional Protection in Thüringen:

Kramer, who will become important later, is a member of the leftist Amadeu Antonio Foundation, which was founded by an old Stasi informant named Anetta Kahane and which is active in extremely innovative democratic pursuits like internet censorship. Democracy, we have seen, just gets more and more complicateder.

To live in Germany in 2024 is to be lectured constantly about democracy. An endless parade of doubtful personalities – pundits, experts and a lot of very shrill women – appear on the television every night to tell you which parties are democratic, which people are democratic and therefore who enjoys democratic legitimacy. As we have seen, however, the whole concept of democracy is very confusing. Those people and organisations who want to mute free expression and ban political parties are all held to be extremely democratic, while those parties that demand more direct democracy and talk constantly about respecting the popular will are the direct modern equivalent of illiberal antidemocratic fascists.

See the rest here

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Thomas Massie Isn’t “Hostile To Israel” – He’s Loyal To Americans By Voting Against ALL Foreign Aid

The Ron Paul Liberty Report

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Duke Protesters Smeared As Antisemitic After Jerry Seinfeld Speech Walk Out

Glenn Greenwald

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Thomas Sowell: The Government Doesn’t Give You Something For Nothing – The Case of Social Security

There is nothing that politicians like better than handing out benefits to be paid for by someone else.

“Money with strings is worth less than money without strings.”

Thomas Sowell

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