United Liberty

You’ve probably heard about the “Miss Me Yet?” billboard in Minnesota, featuring a picture of George W. Bush. According to Fox News, a “group of small business owners and individuals,” obviously not fans of Barack Obama, paid for it.

That’s all well and good, and while I’m no fan of Barack Obama, I don’t long for the presidency of George W. Bush.

From a fiscal perspective, the Bush Administration was a disaster. Before you repeat the Dick Cheney talking point that most of the spending was for defense and two wars. Let me go ahead and tell you, that’s not true. Bush was the biggest spender since Lyndon B. Johnson, dramatically increasing non-defense discretionary spending. Remember, he is a “compassionate conservative,” which is apparently a nice term for “statist.”

Bush signed a new entitlement into law, his administration enacted the most regulations since Nixon (“we’re all Keynesians now”) and he backed the Wall Street bailout while telling us that he “abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.” This is only the tip of the iceberg on his fiscal policies.

In an essay for Newsweek, writer Joel Kotkin contemplates the significance of Americans moving at the lowest rate since the 1940s. Deeming this phenomenon “new localism,” Kotkin argues that communities are growing stronger, with a new focus on families and local businesses as a result of economic crunches.

Kotkin describes the thriving local businesses in Long Island, where customers are “spilling into the streets.” The described scene reminds me of Alameda, California, where hordes of very young families are seen taking their children to ice cream, Mexican food and the movies at the recently renovated Alameda Theatre. A similar scene is present in Oakland’s Lake Merrit district, where I saw myriad families lined up at the Grand Lake Theatre to see Where the Wild Things Are.

These sort of family-centric towncentres are vastly preferable to the bohemian anarchy of major cities like San Francisco or the soulless industrialization of suburbia. However, some of the causes Kotkin attributes are very undesirable:

Family, as one Pew researcher notes, “trumps money when people make decisions about where to live.” Interdependence is replacing independence. More parents are helping their children financially well into their 30s and 40s; the numbers of “boomerang kids” moving back home with their parents, has also been growing as job options and the ability to buy houses has decreased for the young. Recent surveys of the emerging millennial generation suggest this family-centric focus will last well into the coming decades.

In reading the daily commentary of the American Institute for Economic Research for April 29, 2009, my speculative little crystal ball began to light up.  AIER is the only serious business cycle analyst group that points out reality, and reality is that contraction is everywhere in the stats, in spite of the recent “good news” in the stock market.  (Desperate exuberance, anyone?)

So let’s think it over.

Even if it’s too late, it’s good to know that the US Treasury, other Government agencies, and the Federal Reserve are able to do what they were supposed to do all along, i.e. monitor the health of the US banking system. This Federal Reserve white paper amply demonstrates their know-how by detailing the accounting verification procedures they applied in their infamous “stress test” of 19 major US banks, the results of which they now hesitate to divulge to the public for fear of instigating another wave of panic.

Just a random thought today…

I may be betraying my ignorance of history, but I’m willing to take that risk.

I am trying to find a situation in all of recorded history analogous to the present U.S. economic crisis, where a government has spent $ TRILLIONS of fiat money within a few months to “solve a problem” and hyper-inflation (or massive taxation) DID NOT occur as a result.

If anyone out there in cyberspace knows of an example, please post a comment.

So contends Lev Nazrozov. He writes:

Out-of-control predatory capitalists have perpetrated a worldwide economic depression. Capitalism’s degenerate character is now extraordinarily visible during this time of multiple crises.

On each side of the page there is a picture of a miserable emaciated proletarian who carries on his back a huge pack of money, with a bourgeois seated atop of the pack and smoking a cigar.

By simply allowing the government to dominate every sector of the polity, by embracing totalitarianism, we might be able to avoid the woes of economic recession? Historical study makes such a conclusion seem ridiculous. While totalitarian economies did not suffer from “depressions”, per se, one could argue that consumers and citizens lived under a system which continuously mimicked the effects of depression.

These tense times need comic relief.

An editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal brings home a fact that I’ve known for a long time: Economists tend to be schizophrenic.

The article mentions Larry Summers’s double talk. Summers commented on Obama’s latest budget by saying, “There are no, no tax increases….” The article points out that there are tax increases, namely the death tax that will be returning to its 2009 parameters, instead of disappearing as it was scheduled to do in 2011. That wouldn’t be more than a fib, but the story gets worse.

In 1980, Summers co-authored a study at the National Bureau of Economic Research supporting the elimination of the estate tax.

Go figure. Schizophrenia, anyone?

When President Obama arrives in London this week he will meet with the leader of Germany, a nation where his election has brought newfound goodwill towards America; but will the goodwill be enough to force the hands of Germany to conform to Washington’s desires for additional stimulus and bailouts? If the latest media reports, which point towards an Administration attempting to dial down expectations, are any indication, then the answer is most likely a soft no.

The NYT is reporting that little ground is expected to be made in regards to additional German stimulus, with Chancellor Angela Merkel expected to cite fiscal discipline as a reason for German non-cooperation with President Obama’s Administration on the issue-

Every year the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, AL hosts a conference for scholars of the Austrian tradition to come together and share essays and ideas.  This year’s conference was loaded with big names and reputable authors among the Libertarian and generally liberty-minded.