Tag Archives: fascism

A pledge against the state

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The production here is a little cheesy, but the principles expressed make for a refreshing contrast to that creepy video of Hollywood airheads for Obama.

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If it weren’t for the internet, this whole constitution movement would never have formed. The demographics in the US are unsupportive of it, to say the least, but it is a very healthy thing. The entirety of the landmass south of Canada and north of Mexico won’t always be ruled by the gang of thieves in DC, and these principles can be put to use on a smaller scale or in another place and time altogether.

Despite the sentiments of its current rulers and the booboisie, I don’t know of any other place that has such a well-defined culture of liberty as the US. Certainly not the UK anymore, nor anywhere else in the Commonwealth. Europe never really had one, aside from Switzerland, nor did Asia. The US carries the flame — its constitution may now be ignored, but it does serve as a rallying point and touchstone.

How many people are there, like that girl, who don’t trust the facts as presented by the big news companies? There is such a divide now between those who are thinking for themselves and those, however intelligent they may be, who think within the sphere of discourse as acceptable in the newspapers. There is the BS in USA Today and the BS on Slate.com – different BS for different IQs, but all from the same animal.

Huxley vs. Orwell

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Thanks to Tim Knight for finding this.

There is lots more, so click here for the full version.

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The cartoonist and Neil Postman think that Huxley got it right, and he certainly saw a lot that Orwell missed. However, I would argue that those who look at today’s society and only see Huxley (sex, drugs and entertainment) and not Orwell (censorship, secret police, torture, perpetual war for the health of the state) have themselves chosen the comforting version of reality.

Also, Huxley’s opiates work wonders so long as times are easy, but when the predations of the state run their course and cold and hunger are again issues, those in government become more open about their use of guns to hold onto power. In the last decade, the west has made great leaps in the direction of Orwell, with omnipresent reminders of who has the guns and who must obey.

File under Western Civilization, Decline of: Krugman wins Nobel

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The market has been severely hamstrung for decades, and now that it is fainting from loss of blood, its vampire captors point to it and say, “see, markets need to be restrained or else they fail.”

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I won’t actually comment on Krugman, other than to say that he is a socialist, and like many of his breed who do not actually implement collectivist scams (as opposed to Raines, Paulson, Mozillo, Congress, et al.) but provide intellectual support for them, he seems to have a soul, albeit a lost one.

Anyone who understands the principles of the market and defends them in public these days must feel the way I do: that we are simply narrating the decline. You can’t argue with history. You can just put it down as you see it, now in the hope of carrying a few embers of common sense through or out of the West as it enters some kind of dark age.

It is astounding that after recently observing Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, Peron, Castro, Chavez and a hundred other tin-pot dictators destroy or hobble their nations through various forms of collectivism, the entire West is now leaping headlong in that same direction, with hardly a second thought. No credit is given to the principles of individualism, private property and freedom of contract, nor the great market economy that created the prosperity these societies are so eager to squander. The market has been hamstrung for years, and now that it is fainting from loss of blood, its vampire captors point to it and say, “see, markets need to be restrained or else they fail.”

This episode will play out over generations, and it will end with tens of millions dead and the end of the very civilization that codified respect for the individual.

The end of the Enlightenment means the end of freedom and the end of freedom means the end of centuries of increasing living standards, from food and health care, to travel and communication, to privacy and personal security.

The West is simply finished. It’s best hope is balkanization, in case any regional pockets of common sense remain, though I can’t think of any that are physically and culturally strong enough to withstand the violence to come. Perhaps Switzerland, for a while.

Will the commercial paper facility work? Just google “pushing on a string.”

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You can’t (shouldn’t) fight gravity.

The damage to the economy was done in the boom. The bust is simply the market’s way of taking account of what was wasted. This process cannot be stopped, but it can be twisted from something healthy into something perverse, and Bernanke and Paulson are wringing the guts out of what is left of the US economy. What is even more perverse is that everyone except the Austrian School, who saw this coming (Rogers, Prechter, Mish, Schiff, Tice, Faber, Grant, Bonner, and Ron Paul, take a bow), keep crying out “More! Harder!”

Nobody who is worthy of debt wants a loan in this environment. Where can you invest the money to generate a positive return? The commercial paper market will continue to shrink as corporations scale down with layoffs and asset sales. The Fed can’t print up a renewed appetite for debt and risk.

“To believe, to obey, to combat”

So how will we eventually reflate? Government will spend the money into circulation, not lend it, as it takes over enormous sections of the economy, more on the scale of Mussolini’s programs than FDR’s. What little wealth and savings are left will be taxed and inflated away to support the Great Common Effort, until the Effort and War have hollowed out the nation unto utter collapse.

Poor America. It is clamoring for change, and as Mencken put it: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

SEC intends to ban short selling. Government boxcars reported in Greenwich.

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Hedge fund managers said to pack dirt under fingernails, roughen hands on bricks to avoid suspicion and possible shipment to North Dakota re-education camps.

These days it seems like we are living in an Onion article (1 , 2). It would be funny if it were not the end of the world as we know it.

I’ve been a bear since spring of 2006, preparing for a depression since early 2007, and have had no illusions about the death of the idea that was America. I saw these events coming a mile away, but the speed with which they have arrived is shocking.

By edict of the Duma…

I figured that the shorting ban (WSJ article) would pop up somewhere near the midpoint of the bear market, maybe Dow 8000, but this train to Animal Farm is an express. When will they ban international money transfers? Unapproved foreign travel? Gold?

The speed with which our leaders are dropping any pretense of respect for markets just makes me that much more bearish. 8000 could be next month, not next year as I had figured. And I have to rethink my bottom target of 3500. Really, that would not be the end of the world — this market started at 800 back in 1982, and you have to remember that equity values go POOF after an economy gets as leveraged as ours is. 75% stock market drops are not black swans. They follow credit bubbles like day follows night.

Markets are so bourgeois, anyway.

The possibility of Dow zero just ticked up a standard deviation or two. What happened to the Moscow stock exchange after 1917 anyway?

The end of the stock market? Impossible, right? Well, if our Bolsheviks enact their desires to use government funds to buy all manner of securities (as the Russians are now doing), they could eventually own everything, not just the mortgage market and a huge insurer.

Buyout mania, with a twist.

If a security’s market price is $10 and the government offers $20, that is not ‘market support’, that is a buyout. Of course, there are limits to this sort of nationalization, namely the difference in scale between the Fed’s $900 billion balance sheet and the many tens of trillions of dollars in US private equity and debt instruments, so at first they will be very selective (ahem), but they do have two tools to help them work around those limits: printing presses and guns. In a few short years, when the former lose their potency, the latter can be brought to the fore.

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PS — Of course, my opinion is that this rally (futures are up 2% on top of today’s dramatic close) is just a short squeeze and dead cat bounce. The air pocket under stocks just got a whole lot bigger. 90-day T-bills last traded at 0.07%. The stall warning light is still on.