United Liberty

An interesting commentary entitled “And now for a world government” appears on Gideon Rachman’s blog on the web site of the Financial Times in London. He begins by saying:

“I have never believed that there is a secret United Nations plot to take over the U.S. I have never seen black helicopters hovering in the sky above Montana. But, for the first time in my life, I think the formation of some sort of world government is plausible.”

Displaying both passion and courage, GOP Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama has been leading the charge against a taxpayer bailout of the automobile industry.  With pressure from both corporate interests and the White House, Senator Shelby is standing firm and leading the opposition to this big-government bailout.

Shelby won his seat in the US Senate in 1986 as a Democrat, defeating Republican incumbent Jeremiah Denton. In his initial Senate campaign, Shelby had maximum support from organized labor, groups now clamoring for attention in the bailout legislation. Shelby’s home state of Alabama is home to major Toyota, Honda, and Mercedes plants. Yet, this Senator has chosen to face the special interests and stand for principle in opposing a giant step toward socialism.

On Tuesday, December 2, Georgia voters will determine what could be a definitive vote in the US Senate. Former Democratic US Senator Zell Miller is crossing party lines to endorse incumbent Saxby Chambliss, Georgia Republican and US Senator. Georgia is the one state in the Union that requires a majority vote to seat a US Senator. Senator Zell Miller said, of the importance of this election, this is the big one. In this case, Chambliss won 49.6% of the vote, just short of a majority. The Democrat, Jim Martin is a liberal State Representative who’s vote was bolstered by a large black turnout for Barack Obama. However, the wild card that forced the runoff was the 5%+ of the vote garnered by Libertarian candidate Alan Buckley.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel yesterday criticized the presence of “cheap money” in the United States in recent years, blaming it for the current financial crisis.

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, turned the tables on her international critics on Wednesday by accusing the US and other governments of making “cheap money” a central tool of their economic management, thus planting the seeds of a similar crisis in five years.

As Henry Paulson recently stated, an economic crisis of this magnitude only comes around once or twice a century. I’m not exactly sure what the basis for such an argument might be other than looking at a sample size of… about one century. Whether there is merit in this assumption or not, we certainly are facing an economic crisis. In times like these, our government leaders look to policy experts and lessons of history - and possibly listen to them more than usual. This doesn’t mean they stop looking to lobbyists and the next election.

I think the U.S. is headed for some really tough times and for a sharp decline, economically and geopolitically. But I’m not sure I’d go this far.

Meet my new parents: the U.S. Government. The parallels are astonishing when you think about it. (Forgive my generalities… they are for illustration!)

1. Parents want their kids to be the best: Just like proud moms and dads show up at little league games and fight with other parents, help (or take over) fundraising activities so their kids will “win” by raising the most money, or argue with teachers about grades… we see the U.S. Government assert its authority all over the world - both economically and militarily - so that we can be the “greatest nation on earth”.

Last week, President-elect Obama held a press conference, flanked by members of his economic advisory team, to discuss the federal government’s response to recent economic weakening.

The item that appeared highest on the new administraton’s agenda was the proposed bailout package for Detroit’s “Big 3” automakers.

As this Bloomberg article explains,

In Vanity Fair last month, Christopher Hitchens made the case that the United States has become not a frightening idelogical state as some have said, but a banana republic of the sort we usually associate with Latin America and Africa. One paragraph was the most striking:

The other night I was perusing the national exit poll results. One statistic scared me more than anything. 51% of voters participating in the exit poll answered that the government “should do more” than it is doing today. Wow.