…for The Record

Just in case you felt left out of the normal May Day/May 1st celebrations as a peaceful neighborhood pagan or member of the Bavarian Illuminati or Socialist or Communist Worker or as someone just plain living out the good old Nazi days, our ever inclusive Dear Leader has proclaimed May 1st to be “Loyalty Day“.

As Amerikans, we are all now encouraged to display the flag of the United States or pledging allegiance since – let’s see here – a Flag Day was not already in existence?

Hmmm.

Of course, as good public school students we all know the socialist origins of the Pledge of Allegiance with it’s Bellamy Salute, as popularized by Hitler and Mussolini.  Ah, nothing says freedom and limited Constitutional government like super-patriotic nationalism! Undoubtedly we will soon be re-instituting that snappy raised arm as we all say, “to the flag”?

If none of this makes sense to you, it’s ok.

As you take down the Maypole and shine up your hammer and sickle for next year, relax and listen to a good talk on how we got here, to The Fascist American State.

Isn’t it ironic that the purportedly racist Republican Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is the only person currently able to prevent the deaths of millions of Iranians at the hands of America’s first black President?

Check out this article in The Atlantic, which is normally a pro-war, pro-state rag – but gets it right this time. Expect the author of the honest article to be out of a job shortly.

What if Republican primary voters actually consider actual electoral history rather than listening to Fox News talking heads, toe-sucking Clinton consultants like Dick Morris, and all-day commentators on Mitt Romney’s own Bain Capital-owned Clear Channel/810?

Let’s have a look:

Last three non-incumbent winners all talked the same “peace” game to win:

1996 Bill Clinton was the peace candidate beat GHW Bush, very successful pro-war, pro-nation building candidate, lost due to a bad economy to peace candidate who talked peace and focused on the economy.

2000 George Bush – said we shouldn’t be nation building and should have a humble foreign policy (he lied about all that, but he got elected).

2008 Barack Obama – said he would end wars, another anti-war candidate like Bush was in 2000 (he lied about that, but he got elected).

2012 so you think another pro-war, another “bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran” candidate can win a general election?????

That’s just unreality.

I guess if I brainwashed myself (or should I say ‘Bain-washed’ myself?) with multiple hours of Multiple Mitts employees: Rush, Hannity, Levin, Savage and then went home and Foxed my thoughts up with some O’Reilly and some more Hannity, I would be pretty confused myself.

The way this happens and will happen more over the next few months, of course, is to eliminate all other options, leaving the listener or viewer with only one logical choice: Mittens. This tactic is not unlike when Roger Ailes juxtaposed Hannity with Colmes, leading unthinking viewers to the conclusion that the opposite of Hannity is Colmes, rather than the opposite of Hannity being – sanity?

While the media and local politicos wax ecstatic about the redistribution of $785 million of taxpayer dollars for local projects with the right political connections, another sobering figure and potential source of economic development monies for redistribution by the regional planning soviets councils should be considered.

In just FY2011 we will have spent $122 billion dollars on the war in Afghanistan.

That is $334,246,575.34 per day.

Divided by the 50 states, because we are all about fairness, that is $2,440,000,000.00 per state.

This would mean Governor Cuomo, Maria Bartiromo, and all their well-connected friends could get together 3 times per year at The Egg, hand off $785 million in public money to private interests and take new pictures and credit for using your tax dollars to spend your state into improvement.

More people and programs could beg for their good graces, compromise their values, and make the campaign donations necessary to get their place at the pig trough or open the money sluice for their pet project.

There’s only one catch.

We need to have a President with the political will to end the disastrous war in Afghanistan.

The war on Afghanistan has been a boondoggle and money pit since 2001, with $459.8 billion going largely as war profits to defense contractors, successfully keeping their blood-soaked books in the black, with the real cost in terms of dead Afghanis and Americans and their shattered families being incalculable.

How many more traumatized veterans will our policies drive to suicide at home, and how many more suicide bombers have our 900 military bases in 140 countries – and inclination towards collateral murder – created overseas? Are these policies making us safer and more prosperous at home?

Indeed, a victory of sorts can be declared at least for the Afghani warlords and drug traffickers. In 2001 the repressive Taliban regime reduced opium production by 91%.  After American occupation, this has now been successfully reversed, with Afghanistan returning in 2007 to producing 92% of the world’s non-pharmaceutical-grade opiates. American intervention has also returned Afghanistan to its status as the world’s number one producer of hashish. Is this a policy that is making us safer and more prosperous at home?

Among the current crop of power-addicted presidential candidates with their war-filled rhetoric and support for policies of bombing bridges overseas while our own bridges collapse at home, there is only one that stands and speaks up for policies of sanity and a return to peace and the Constitution.

That candidate, of course, is not the Nobel Peace Prize winner in the White House, regarded by many during the 2008 election as the second coming of the Prince of Peace. His policies of the last three years have shown where he stands, with more war in Afghanistan and Libya and Uganda and Pakistan and special operations raids in over 100 other countries, continued policies of torture and rendition, and new policies of assassination of citizens without the benefit of due process or trial.

The only candidate who can be trusted to end the crumbling American Empire before our total collapse into a totalitarian police state and restore it to our Constitutional roots as a Republic, is the same candidate that receives more donations from active duty military members that all other candidates of both parties combined – Ron Paul.

You’re not going to become a Ron Paul supporter if you just rely on mainstream television and talk radio to decide on how to view our place in the world and what solutions he can offer to put America back on the right track – a recent CBS moderated debate allowed him to speak for 90 seconds out of the entire first hour that was broadcast on TV.

You’re going to have to go online and google Ron Paul, or get together with your kids or grandkids to listen to a man who isn’t the most charismatic or glib, for whom words and explanations don’t necessarily come easy in the age of the soundbite, but who speaks the truth with more consistency and honesty than any other politician in recent memory.

To make an informed decision in the next election, you’re going to have to learn about the Constitution and the proper role of government, the private Federal Reserve and the evil process of inflation, what corporatism is, and about a foreign policy of peace rarely followed since both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson cautioned us to have peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations and entangling alliances with none.

While you may not agree with or understand everything you hear from Ron Paul initially, and while he ironically would ultimately oppose policies of redistribution of tax monies to benefit special interests, he is the only candidate who can be counted on to end the unnecessary wars and overseas spending – this will allow us to redirect our money and focus where it belongs, at home.

Open your mind and learn more about Ron Paul, it could benefit us all at least $334,246,575.34 per day.

Everyone’s favorite local congressman, Representative Chris Gibson, was on Capital Tonight with Liz Benjamin talking about “tax reform.”

Everyone should be nervous when they hear the phrase “tax reform.”

Think of it this way:

Tax Reform = Higher Taxes.

If we want more revenue for infrastructure – or anything else reasonable – it should come at the expense of other unnecessary and unconstitutional programs.

You need $150 billion for highways?

Close some bases, return some federal duties to the states, or take a day off from war.

Tax reform = more government and less money in your pocket.

Always.

Don’t be fooled.

So, Spicoli, here’s some additional homework from Lew Rockwell on the dangers of tax reform.

Learn It. Know It. Live It.

Lew Rockwell: The Tax-Reform Racket

A return to the ideas of Liberty, personal responsibility, limited Constitutional government, nonintervention, and sound money are taking the country by storm.

This interview illustrates why Ron Paul is the greatest Congressman in American history and perhaps the last, best hope to stop our slide into becoming a third world fascist totalitarian police state.

Will America heed his call?

As people feel the pain more and more at the pump and at the grocery store, they will continue looking for answers.

Ron Paul has been giving the same answers for a long time.

Here’s a good clip from 1983.

Paul speaks about the same issues in almost the same manner almost three decades later.

Paul has the right ideas because he has read the right books.

You can, too, at www.mises.org.

The unfortunate vandalism suffered by our friend Neil Grabowsky affords us all a “teachable moment” in sound economics.

Neil’s paying, so keep reading.

The “Broken Window Fallacy” is one of the most persistent myths in any popular discussion of economic issues. Simply put, it is the notion that a broken window such as Neil’s is good because it gives the window guy a.k.a. glazier money who in turn can afford to buy shirts from a guy like me and take his family out to dinner, etc.  See, we all win.

So why not just break all the windows downtown and we will all be better off? This of course, is absurd, but this fallacy persists in popular discussions, in all manner of subtle ways and not so subtle ways in current government policies.

The least subtle example of the broken window fallacy is the case of war. How often have we heard that “war is good for the economy”? Or that “war ended the depression.”

War is never good for the economy, but rather, it is good for narrow special interests like Halliburton or General Electric. War destroys lives and property, but yet the myth persists. We always have to consider what would have been done with citizens’ lives, liberty, and property in lieu of squandering it on foreign intervention and murder.

The $5 phrase that economists use to describe this phenomenon and cause student’s eyes to glaze over is  “opportunity cost.” Frederic Bastiat originally wrote about the parable of the broken window in his 1850 essay, “That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen” and Henry Hazlitt expanded on it in his 1946 book Economics In One Lesson, both are worth making the time to read.

Once you get a good understanding of the fallacy of the broken window and how special interests benefit from government at the expense of everyone else, it is much easier to be on the alert for it in current discussions and to counter it in debates.  Every dollar spent by the government is necessarily taken from other productive uses in the economy. There are very few services that the government should be providing outside of defending the lives, liberty, and property of citizens.

Private initiative, the free market and the profit motive are responsible for much of the progress of civilization, like it or not. Government by comparison, is responsible for over 260 million civilian deaths in the 20th Century alone. Somehow, the risks associated with an unregulated toaster pales in comparison.

All of the hidden costs associated with government spending and legislation need to be considered and rarely are when discussing public works and hiring more government employees, government subsidies, minimum wages, rent control, building codes, green jobs, government imposed efficiency standards, tariffs and the Federal Reserve’s inflationary policies, just to name a few.

Well, there you go Neil, we have made lemonade out of your shattered glass.

Enjoy!

It was about a year ago in the NY-20 Republican Congressional primary process that the so-called Tea Party candidate was quoted as saying something along the lines of Chris Gibson is a Constitutionalist and he will be a fine candidate if the committees chose him as the nominee.

Since “our guy” dropped out and actually went to work for Gibson, the grassroots were justifiably skeptical, especially since Gibson had recently parachuted in from the unconstitutional humanitarian aid effort in Haiti as the pick of the same establishment Republicans responsible for the election of Scott Murphy and Kirsten Gillibrand.

Gibson the candidate talked the talk on the Constitution during his campaign, has written on a Madisonian approach to civil-military relations, and came out in his first editorial calling for a constitutional declaration of war (of course it also – understandably – praised the efforts he helped lead in Haiti).

Since you can never believe or put too much stock in what any politician says but rather you should always look at how he votes, it is with guarded optimism that we can call Gibson pretty much a Constitutionalist,  with the unfair metric being, of course, that my perspective from the “extreme radical right” on the Constitution is the correct one. Oh well.

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Looks like Count Cuomo has taken a page from Warren Redlich’s campaign with his proposed school superintendent salary cap legislation.

Of course, Redlich proposed a cap for all state bureaucrats at $100,000 and a pension cap at $75,000, not just superintendents.

Presumably, Cuomo is taking on the superintendents first because they are not protected by the unions.

This sort of mess and conflict over public salaries and public schools could be minimized if the role of government in people’s lives was reduced to protecting private property rather than forcefully redistributing it.

Wouldn’t a more just society be one in which the users of a service were the ones to actually pay for the service?

Here’s a thought: what if public schools were abolished?

Is it too much for pro-government elitist control freaks to trust a free people to determine what education is necessary and proper on their own and to let the market provide it?

Of course it is.