United Liberty

Continuing our “Liberty Candidate Series” of interviews, Jason and Brett talk with John Dennis, discussing his opponent, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, liberty in San Francisco, and his candidacy.  Dennis is a “Pro-Liberty” Republican candidate for U.S. Congress in California’s 8th Congressional District.

This special edition podcast is the fifth in a series devoted to showcasing liberty candidates nationwide.  Dennis talks about his liberty-focused campaign against the Speaker of the House in California.

You can download the podcast here. The introduction music is “Silence is Violence” by the always lovely Aimee Allen.

You can subscribe to the RSS of JUST our podcasts here, or you can find our podcasts on iTunes here.

Continuing the Liberty Candidate Series, Brett interviews Jake Towne, discussing his campaign, positions on issues, and his candidacy.  Towne is running for U.S. Congress in Pennsylvania’s 15th Congressional District as an unaffiliated candidate.

This special edition podcast is the fourth in a series devoted to showcasing liberty candidates nationwide.  Towne talks about his fiscal economics-driven campaign against an incumbent Republican in Pennsylvania (in a seat previously held by Pat Toomey).

You can download the podcast here. The introduction music is “Silence is Violence” by the always lovely Aimee Allen.

You can subscribe to the RSS of JUST our podcasts here, or you can find our podcasts on iTunes here.

****Warning: Spoiler Alert! Part of this post may give away more information than you want to know if you have not yet seen Avatar****

Yesterday, I saw the new blockbuster movie Avatar. Already grossing over $1 billion in ticket sales globally (one of only four movies to do so), the massive investment of around $400 million seems to have paid off. What I want to talk about it the clear political themes that play out in the film, and how conservatives who attack the film are making fools of themselves.

The major concerns that conservatives have brought up about the film is that it attacks capitalism, the military, and pushes the environmental agenda. These claims are unfounded and show the folly in the thought process of such “conservatives.”

First of all this movie does not attack capitalism. In the movie the RDA corporation has set up a mining operation on the planet Pandora. They employ former marines for “protection.” The head of the mining operation has made it clear that he will stop at nothing to gain access to a rich mineral reserve directly under the home of the Na’vi people. They end up sending an all-out military assault which ends in the destruction of the “home tree.” This is hardly an attack on capitalism, if you understand what capitalism truly is.

Note: I intended to merely comment on this chart when sharing it via my Posterous. During the 5 or so minutes I was commenting, it grew to be something more substantial, and at the urging of others, it has been cross-posted here.

Since the 1960s, the percentage of total healthcare cost paid directly by the end consumer, aka patient, has dropped drastically, but out of pocket costs have risen and the cost of healthcare has risen drastically over that same period.

What has happened between then and now? The intervention of government into the marketplace. Insurance regulations, government mandates about what MUST be covered, Medicare/caid, and inflation make costs skyrocket, but the opacity of the prices keeps patients from seeing what each visit, prescription, and procedure actually costs. With that opacity, there is no competitive pricing, because the prices paid by patients are merely co-pays and the withholding from their paycheck for employer-sponsored health plans, insurance companies, and government programs that pay negotiated rates. Without competition and price transparency, prices will continue to rise.

In addition, patients largest out of pocket expense is their insurance coverage, which does not fluctuate to accommodate the amount of healthcare services consumed. The patient knows they only pay $10-$50 for each office visit, but the overall costs of those visits can be thousands of dollars. The patient rarely, if ever, sees the actual cost… Usually only if their insurance claim is denied.

I would like to know where the bleeding-heart outcry is over the Cash for Clunkers program. Aside from the centuries of economic theory that show why it may be, as economist Chris Edwards suggests, the dumbest program ever, where’s the outrage over destroying materials that could be of so much value to our nation’s poor?

There are thousands of poor people in this country, and even more in Mexico, who are struggling to get by. Many of them drive old, beat-up jalopies that break down regularly, and many can’t afford cars at all.

And then the government introduces a program that results in the destruction of millions of dollars worth of perfectly good vehicles. Now, I understand that the whole point of the program was to get those cars off the road to lower carbon emissions and nudge a culture into purchasing smaller cars.  But do the planners in Washington really think that a program that lasts a couple of weeks will result in an overall worldwide decline in carbon emmissions? Is there that much hubris floating around in the Potomac?

So was it worth the publicity stunt to revoke vehicles from the hands of the poor?

Go ahead and watch this perfectly good trunk get demolished, and you decide if it could have served a better purpose in the hands of a struggling American.

I can’t claim to be the origin of the Fed Credit Bubble idea, because it occurred to me as I read a fantastic piece by one of my favorite analysts, Doug Noland of Prudent Bear.

We’ve just come out of a huge bubble that consisted of inflated real estate investment and speculative finance credit. The bubble burst and the market began to correct itself, menacing to take a lot of nations’ economies with it.

For my first post at United Liberty, I offer a cartoon about the government’s grand new ideas- I think it’s self-explanatory.

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

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.

Today the Federal Reserve invoked “Emergency Powers” in order to further expand its reach into the economy. There are many inherent problems with central banking. There are even more problems with central management of the day to day workings of the economy. Seeing the recent devastation in the credit markets - which was mostly created by the FED - the FED has been trying desperately to contain the situation, but its traditional policies are just showing little to no results.