More On Ron Paul

If Ron Paul’s libertarian handlers and support base could escape their ideology, Ron Paul could be much better positioned to win the Republican nomination.

Here are some suggestions.

Ron Paul should be making the point that Social Security and Medicare are threatened by multi-trillion dollar wars that are funded by debt, by bailouts of a deregulated banking system, and by money creation to keep the banks afloat. Libertarians support deregulation, but their position has always been that deregulated industries must not be bailed out with public subsidies, much less subsidies that are so extensive that they threaten government solvency and the value of the currency.

Instead of hitting hard on the serious threat to Social Security and Medicare posed by Obama and Republican candidates for the nomination, all of whom serve Wall Street, the military/security complex, and the Israel Lobby, Ron Paul has been positioned both by his supporters and his opponents as the danger to Social Security and Medicare. This is an amazing strategic mistake by the Ron Paul campaign.

The mistake is somewhat understandable. Ron Paul’s supporters are mainly among the young. The importance to them of Social Security and Medicare will not register for many years, but for the vast majority of the population Social Security and Medicare are essential for survival. A candidate who is positioned as the destroyer of what scant economic protection the American elderly have is not positioned to win an election for president.

Many libertarians regard Social Security and Medicare as welfare handouts and as Ponzi schemes, when in fact these programs are a form of private property. People pay for these programs all their working lives, just as they pay premiums for private medical policies and make their deposits into private pension plans. Libertarians are great defenders of private property, so why don’t they defend the elderly’s private property rights in Social Security and Medicare benefits? Social Security and Medicare are contracts that government made with citizens. These contracts are as valid and enforceable as any other contracts. If Social Security and Medicare are in dire trouble, why is the government wasting trillions of dollars in behalf of private armaments industries, a neocon ideology, and Israel’s territorial ambitions? Why isn’t this question the most important issue in the campaign?

Instead, in a decade that has seen two massive stock market crashes and an amazing amount of financial fraud, libertarians prattle on about privatizing Social Security and about how much larger the retirement pensions would be. They speak about delaying the Social Security retirement age to 70 without any thought to what a person does who is retired by his employer at 65. People who suggest making Social Security and Medicare off limits until people reach 70 need to have a look at the cost of private medical plans for older people. A group plan with Blue Cross Blue Shield Florida for a 64-year old woman has a $18,000 premium, large deductibles per medical issue, and a 20% co-pay. Even a person with private insurance faces potentially ruinous health care expenses.

Libertarians will not wait to think before they inform me that private savings are funded but Social Security and Medicare are not. They are incorrect on both accounts.

Social Security and Medicare are funded with a payroll tax. It is true that the government has stolen the funds, spent them, and left non-marketable IOU’s in their place. But in our deregulated casino financial system with street registration of “securities,” the same thing happens to private holdings. Where is the money that individuals had in MF Global? What happened to people’s savings invested with Madoff? What happened to Enron’s investors? Can AIG make good on its promises to pay the benefits that people have purchased? Can banks whose balance sheets are loaded with subprime derivatives make good on their depositors’ accounts? US government debt is a component of many private pension plans. How secure are the values of Treasury bonds?

The notion that free unregulated markets are totally trustworthy is the enormous mistake that former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan made, for which American and European peoples continue to pay. Libertarians endorse this fantastic mistake to the hilt.

This is not meant to be an attack on libertarians. Rather, it is an explanation of some of their mistakes. There is much to admire about libertarians. They believe in civil liberty, that is, in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. They understand that government cannot substitute for the market. I know a lot about libertarians. I was associated with them for years, serving for several years as Distinguished Scholar at the Cato Institute until I was run off for independent thinking.

Libertarians are sectarian, and their tolerance does not extend beyond their ideology.

The biggest mistake that libertarians make is the way they view government and private sectors. Government is the root of all evil, and the private sector is the source of all good. Libertarians have never figured out that people are the same whether in the government or in the private sector. They will abuse their power regardless of where they perch. That is why government needs to be tied down by the Constitution and the private sector by regulation. Yes, regulation can go too far. Certainly, deregulation has gone too far.

The ongoing financial crisis from deregulation and ongoing jobs crisis from offshoring constitute empirical evidence that the belief is false that an unfettered private sector is the source of all good.

Some readers misunderstood the point of my previous column, “America’s Last Chance.” I am endorsing the U.S. Constitution and making the point that Ron Paul is the only candidate for president in either party who is committed to resurrecting the Constitution. Without the Constitution we cease to be American citizens and become subjects of a tyrannical police state. My complaint is that the only candidate who could bring back the Constitution cannot be elected because of the inflexibility and sectarianism of his base. Possibly there are more worthy third party candidates, but they have no prospect of visibility. Ron Paul is visible, and the opportunity is going to waste.

I hope readers will spare me their comments about how important their various single issues are. There are many important things. The question is: what is the over-riding important thing?

Civil Liberty, essentially the accountability of government to law that serves to protect the innocent, is the historic achievement of the English over many centuries from its beginnings with the foundation for common law established by Alfred the Great in the 9th century through Magna Carta in the 13th century to the Glorious Revolution in the 17th century. If this human achievement is lost, it is unlikely to be resurrected. If the Constitution that Bush and Obama have murdered stays in its grave one more presidential term, no one will be able to re-establish the Constitution’s authority.

And please, no prattle from libertarians about “natural rights.” The only rights we have
are rights achieved by centuries of human struggle that we have the wits and strength to retain.

And no prattle from left-wingers who denounce the Constitution for not protecting slaves and native Indians. The Constitution did not establish universal justice. The Constitution protected the people covered by it. Over time rights were extended. During the past decade the Constitution lost its power. Today rights depend on the subjective opinion of the executive branch. This is tyranny. We should be unified in our opposition to tyranny.

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About Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is now available.

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  1. Mr. Roberts? Could a newbie please ask your help with some questions I think important and very much related to all this?

    Isn’t it true that the Original American Dream was the Great Dream of Freedom FROM the tyranny of the European moneypowers? Was it not the tyranny of the overpaid-overpowered European wealthpower giants that our founders fled? Can somebody please tell me just when that original Great Dream of Freedom FROM TYRANNY of wealthpower giants became the diabolically perverted dream of having the freedom to grow limitlessly rich at the expense of your neighbors and country?

    Why are there no limits on personal fortunes in America, when limitless personal fortunes are exactly what our founders fled?
    We have a billions-to-one wealthpower inequality factor in America today. Money is power. We speak of Democracy as if it still exists when Democracy is by definition rendered impossible by that billions-to-one wealthpower inequity factor.

    Gee whiz, America – Whatever happened to equality? Don’t we like equality anymore?
    And whatever happened to justice? Don’t we like justice anymore?
    Have we all forgotten that only work creates wealth and only demand creates jobs?
    Have we forgotten that reward was married to sacrifice until we embarked upon that community project we call division of labor?

    Will Ron Paul temper his libertarianism with justice? I mean come on – it’s physically impossible for anyone to work a million times harder than anybody else, so isn’t it obvious the superrich are in possession of not self-earned but of other-earned wealth? Have we really come so far only to see so little that we fail to want to eradicate the myriad legal thefts by which a fraction few wealthpower giants have gained the power to make human history be what they say it will be?

    Do libertarians actually believe the race was fair competition when the greyhound beats the dachsund by a mile?
    You know…we don’t get to choose whether we’re born a greyhound or a dachsund. It seems to me all the world’s problems are rooted in the illogical idea to use the fact that we humans get greater or lesser gifts at birth as an excuse to pay the better-gifted more for having won gifts they sacrificed nothing to get and to punish the dachsund for having been born a dachsund, no matter if he is working every bit as hard as he can.

    Is the goat to be punished for only being able to pull the goat-sized cart and not being able to pull the horsecart?

    Is it true that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer means exactly this: that the rich are getting more and more for a unit of work while the poor are getting less and less for the same unit of work?

    As for government and the size of it – just where is this minimalist-government-paradise libertarians are always going on about? Do you think we constitute governments as a necessary evil for the benefits we wouldn’t have without them? Won’t people always be getting together to try to increase their safety and happiness by organizing their affairs, and isn’t that what government is? Don’t we need government and need to watch the governors like hawks…in equal measure? Is there any way around that reality?

    Isn’t “vigilence about what” the real question and vigilence about injustice in wealthpower the answer?

    If Ron Paul believed in the freedom to have equal pay for equal sacrifice to working, I would vote for him. But from what I can glean it appears that he too believes in the anti-American-values, tyranny-causing freedom to have unlimited personal fortunes and he does not grok that overpay has nowhere to come from but from underpay and he seems impervious to the fact that overpay is overpower.

    Seriously, America – why do we tell ourselves we must go on forever fighting wealthpower giants for our natural right to the fruit of our own labor when we could easily just be rid of wealthpower giants once and for all by ridding ourselves and each other of the madly unjust and self-harming idea to allow unlimited personal fortunes??

    Why do we kid ourselves that we can continue to hang that carrot of unlimited personal fortunes in front of the whole species and yet expect those we condemn as having the least scruples to resist the biggest temptation?

    Who ARE the crazy ones? The wealthpower giants – or us?

    I don’t think Ron Paul understands this: The human species is either going to rid ourselves of the illogical and anti-natural idea to allow limitless personal fortunes or we WILL succumb to the results of having the next and the next and the next wealthpower giants ad infinitum until the global bombs go off.

    Are we really going to take our genosadistic love of overpay-underpay past the point of no return, Humanity??

    By: Fairpay . January 24, 2012 . 9:09 am |

    • Envy seems to have won the day with you.

      By: Art Thomas . January 24, 2012 . 11:07 am |

      • I’m envious? That’s absurd. What is there to be envious of? Overpay is necessarily miserable. With everyone believing that limitless overpay is good, with everyone wanting overpay, the overpaid are under attack from everyone. Relentless attack. Why would I want to be under relentless attack from everyone? Sounds like a perfectly bad happiness plan to me. Plundering is just the beginning of troubles – ask the whites in South Africa.

        Overpay is necessarily very insecure, as history unanimously shows, because every underpay and every other overpay is after it. The rich rob the poor and the poor rob each other and the poor rob the rich (every plutocracy and empire has fallen) and the rich rob the rich (‘kings’ against ‘kings’). For every up there is a down. Time spent at the top is necessarily brief, dangerous and arduous. The costs of defending an overfortune continue until the overfortune is eroded away. If one person has the property of 1000, he has merely 1000 more pots than he can cook in, and he has 1000 enemies instead of 1000 friends. A very negative benefit. And history unanimously confirms this logically necessary conclusion. (History doesn’t record the falls with the same vigour it records the rises, so we never learn the lesson of history.)
        It’s obvious that the defense costs for the higher paid per hour are proportional to the ratio between the higher paid and lower paid. The greater the overpay, the more people are more underpaid. And thus, the more that the overpaid are under attack.

        Fairpay satisfies all major, and 99+% of minor, desires – therefore overpay must experience rapidly diminishing returns in pleasure per dollar added. Twice as much as fairpay will add less than 10% extra pleasure and double the danger. Four times as much as fairpay will add another 1% to pleasure and quadruple the danger, and so on.

        So the proportionally growing downside of overpay will very quickly greatly exceed the rapidly diminishing upside of overpay.

        Thousands of years of history demonstrating this commonsense law has not impressed itself on human intelligence. Thousands of years of people falling from the heights of overpay has made no impression on the human mind.

        It would be impressive to see a list of all the overpaid who have fallen by assassination, by defeat in battle with other kings, by betrayal, even by family. The list of overpaid fallen even for just one year would be very long indeed. The number of 1930s Chicago gang members who bathed the dust with buckets of their own blood. The bigger the treasure, the bigger the fighting over it. Danger is proportional to overpay. People should teach this in schools.
        So both overpaid and underpaid win from pay justice. And because we have super-extreme pay injustice, both overpaid and underpaid win super-extremely. This is very hard for us to realise.

        By: Fairpay . January 24, 2012 . 4:50 pm |

        • Do you distinguish between people who earn large sums of money by providing people with products they are willing to buy with the fruits of their own labor, people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates; and people who earn large sums because they have political privilege and access to taxpayer money, like goldman sachs, AIG, etc.

          By: ART THOMAS . January 24, 2012 . 9:35 pm |

          • I’ll be happy to answer your question, ART – after I catch a bit of necessary rest.

            By: Fairpay . January 25, 2012 . 4:03 am |

    • Wonderful. Bravo!

      A very audacious and much welcomed thrust here from “FAIRPLAY” !

      d morrisseau w pawlet, VT 802 645 9727 dmorso1@netzero.net

      By: Dennis Morrisseau . January 24, 2012 . 2:24 pm |

    • Ron Paul is against the Fed and it’s inflationary and inefficient monopoly which is a big cause of the underpay/overpay you are talking about. For instance a dollar earned in the 70′s is worth 15 cents today. The effect of that is that in order to keep pace with inflation a person that was making $3/hr in the 70′s would have had to fight with his bosses for raises over the intervening years in order to get his wage up to $20/hr today. That would just give that person the same spending power he had in the 70′s but it would not give him a slice of the productivity gains made in the mean time. Also someone that saves the money they earned from the 70′s to today has to fight to keep it from losing value by investing it in investments, ones that occasionally collapse such as what happened in 08, which leaves the “trustees” of the “investment” enriched with everyone else left holding the bag. In direct opposition to your statements Ron Paul is one of the very few people addressing the issue you bring up and everyone else is actually ignoring the root cause.

      By: John Williams . January 25, 2012 . 12:52 am |

      • Hi, John

        Yes – I’ve written (elsewhere) about that sneaky tax called inflation that the wealthpowerful use to rob the people with. It’s so sad the general public hasn’t the first clue about the legal thefts including inflation… that they’re paying probably about twice what costs-price would be for a lot of what they buy and they’re unaware they’ve been underpaid for generations now while all the gains went to the top. Exactly the opposite of what the industrial revolution finally made perfectly possible: equality, peace, and plenty for all on this pretty, bountiful bluegreen orb.

        I was watching the debate when Dr. Paul dared make the outrageous suggestion we ought follow the golden rule in foreign policy, and Brother let me tell you I literally lit UP and was right in the middle of my unbelievably happy cheerleap from my seat yelling “YEAH! WOW! TOO COOL, RON PAUL!” – - when I heard what I can still hardly believe I heard – people actually booing the golden rule – and booing him for wanting it to guide us against foreign military invasions – and I just broke down and wept – (and I suspect Jesus must have wept, too), at having just witnessed one of my country’s very greatest moments – followed immediately by the worst – the sorriest moment – and ya know I wish Dr. Paul had just walked right off the stage and walked away from that sheer, ugly, disgraceful hypocrisy – and, and, well I wonder shouldn’t we really be busy building a large, secure brick institution surrounded by a high fence with the barbed-wire slanting inward around those people in South Carolina who – I just still can hardly believe they did this – actually BOOED the Golden Rule??? Are people that utterly divorced from their humanity really safe to have out walking around in the general public??

        AHEM

        It’s Ron Paul’s stance on both the Fed and our insane militarism that makes me wish I could vote for him – but how am I supposed to go pull that lever in favor of libertarian “I got mine now you get yours” economics – when that is the very reason we humans currently have no future?

        Look, I understand all too clearly that the nation’s credit belongs to the working people who built the country – not to private banksters – and that the only reason our country has credit is because we all get up and go do our various jobs every day – and I’m well aware that money – paper, gold, stocks, etc. – is just symbolic wealth, symbol of the work people do – I understand very clearly that allowing a private consortium to issue money as debt is indeed boneheaded and a major legal theft and that there’s no logic or soundly reasoned argument whatsoever behind that idiotic custom. We good?

        BUT, returning the power to create our own money to public hands will not keep that money from ceaselessly returning to a fraction few private hands. BECAUSE – there are myriad other legal thefts that stay at work 24 hours a day serving to shift wealth from earners to non-earners. Monetary reform cannot by itself prevent the world’s great wealth from perpetually concentrating in the bank accounts of the fraction few.

        Certainly the system overpays and underpays partly because of banks, as monetary reformers say, but also because of myriad other legal thefts in the system. Like the capital gains legal theft that Henry George points out (buy land, value of land increases due to infrastructure increase (everybody works to build city around land), landowner scores millions or billions for others’ contributions). And legal theft like payment for scarcity, which is not payment for work, which is payment for no work. And like the monopoly of land which Mark Twain (do not miss seeing his excellent short essay “Archimedes”!) and Tawney and other economists point out, which strips off everyone’s birthright to a place to put their feet – sans compensation. These, and all the other legal thefts, are payments for no work, ie overpay, ie injustice. These myriad other legal thefts are not stopped by monetary reform, so they’ll go on ceaselessly shifting wealth from earners to non-earners, and market forces will still be doing what market forces do; shifting work in one direction and wealth in the other direction.

        To make a difference, you have to go back to the root: the extreme range of wealthpower. You need justice for happiness, peace, safety. You need freedom from individuals having superpower compared to others. Were the founding fathers wrong when they thought that wealth concentration would mean the end of democracy and freedom? “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer” means that the rich are literally getting more and more per unit of work and the poor are getting less and less per unit of work. Do the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? – ie, does money [power] ceaselessly, automatically drift from earners to nonearners or not? Are there very rich and very poor? Is the amount of work people do proportional to their wealth or poverty? Obviously not – so there is injustice, inequality in money and power. As long as a few have most money they are going to have most power, and history is going to be what they decide will happen, and the people will be pawns and cannonfodder in that game. No one does more than twice as much work per hour as the least-hard working person [assuming real slackers get noticed and fired] – and yet pay per hour ranges from 1 to 1,000,000,000 – someone gets paid a billion times as much per hour as the least paid.

        Our purpose is to stop people getting killed…is to maximize human happiness – and that means to maximize human freedom – and that requires as little as possible overpay and underpay – ie, as little as possible theft of earnings, which confers overpower on the thief [power to control and manipulate others] whoever he is, and confers underpower on the robbed. There is theft, there is legal theft, there is hyper-extreme overpay and underpay. Market forces do not distribute money and power in proportion to work – market forces do the opposite: work drifts one way and money drifts the other. We can retain all the advantages of market forces, of private property, of free market AND correct for the ceaseless automatic unjust thieving drift of money and power. We leave all the capitalist mechanisms alone and we merely establish a figure for the most one person can deserve to be paid by warrant of their contribution to society by their own work – and spread the overfortune among the underpaid…like taking water that has pooled and re-spraying it over the crop…and thus provide a counterbalance to the ceaseless automatic drift of wealth and power away from the people to a tiny few. If we DON’T do this, there will always be a very few somebody’s who are going to continue to make happen what they want to happen, which involves the sacrifice of any and all who stand in the way of their monomania for money and power.

        By: Fairpay . January 25, 2012 . 2:19 am |

      • The Fed is not the cause of the problem, but a symptom. The actual cause of the problem is the fraudulent system of fractional reserve banking. Banks fraudulently loan out far more “dollars” than they have specie. It’s called leverage. However, the public at large does not understand the “dollars” being loaned are not real dollars. So this is an inflationary expansion of the “money” supply. This creates false demand and an expansion of economic activity, otherwise known as an inflationary “bubble”. As the bubble expands and the economy overheats, competitive pressure for investment dollars etc force financial institutions into greater and greater leverage in order to maximize profits. However, leverage increases the exposure to risk because a 1% drop in the value of an asset that’s purchased with 99% leverage wipes out net worth and forces a margin call, or an additional capital requirement, or whatever you want to call it. The bank or other investor is forced to sell assets to raise cash backing. This decreases the value of assets held by others. The situation snowballs. Soon everybody is scrambling to “de-leverage.” The publicly perceived “money” supply shrinks and the economy enters a “panic” or “depression.” This happened frequently during the 1800s in the absence of a national bank.

        Rather stopping the fraudulent activity, banks lobbied the government for a national bank that could, in deflationary times, print extra dollars to make up for the “dollars” lost in de-leveraging. This softens the pain of the deflationary period, but the printing of more specie during panics or depressions also adds to the supply of real money, causing chronic inflation. It also tends to increase the concentration of wealth in the financial sector, because they are allowed to profit from their fraudulent practices without suffering any ultimate consequences. They are the source of the “money” fueling the inflation, the counterfeitors. More and more “capital” becomes concentrated in the accounts of these financiers, the 1/10 of 1%. The concentration of money results in a concentration of political power and even more concentration of wealth. This is where we are today, and soon Bernanke will be announcing QE3.

        The real solution is not just abolition of the Federal Reserve and restoring the power of the Treasury (and the people) to print or mint money instead of the private banks that own the Fed. That’s a first step, and part of the solution. However, there also needs to be strict regulation of private banking and a prohibition of fractional reserve banking, to insure private bankers are not defrauding their customers.

        By: Bill Rood . January 25, 2012 . 9:37 pm |

        • ah yes .. fractional reserve banking .. isn’t that the monetary equivalent illegally copying and distributing copyrighted media?

          i can’t help but notice there isn’t an establishment righteous foaming-at-the-mouth hounding of these particular copy artists.

          By: mijj . January 26, 2012 . 4:51 am |

        • But everybody wants to own that magical money machine that spins straw into gold,
          one into ten…..one in hand into ten you then lend out at interest! wooooweee!

          Even socialists want to own that thing! Ellen Brown and some folks up here in Vermont
          are hot to own one……liked the Bank of N Dakota….Of course they say it will be “the people” who own and contol it.

          d morrisseau pob177 w pawlet,vt 05775 dmorso1@netzero.net

          By: Dennis Morrisseau . January 26, 2012 . 7:39 am |

    • Dear Fairpay,

      Please do not take any offense, but I must ask: Are you joking?

      Have you ever taken an American History class? I cannot imagine that you have, after all it is common knowledge that our Founder fled the tyranny of religious persecution and the THEFT of taxation!

      The Founders deliberately wrote the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution to PROTECT US from the tyranny of any government who would tell us what to believe or who would steal our hard-earned money and property via either taxation or forceful actions such as eminent domain.

      America was created so that ALL people have an EQUAL OPPORTUNITY to pursue success without government interference. In fact, the government’s ONLY ROLE is to protect us from those who would try to steal our property (land, money etc), prevent us from worshipping as we want, prevent us from expressing political beliefs, and to defend us from foreign invasion.

      Equal opportunity does not guarantee equal success because the government cannot FORCE one person to work harder than another person, therefore it is up to the INDIVIDUAL to work as hard as he or she is able to attain the success that he or she wants to achieve.

      To be sure, your idea of “justice,” of everyone receiving equal reward regardless of the amount of work they contributed, was indeed attempted by the earliest settlers to this Land. The Pilgrims did try a collective system where everyone shared the fruits of labor equally. Unfortunately, that meant that the few who worked the hardest and succeeded in growing food had to give it away to those who were not successful, in the name of “fairness,” so the next year, feeling used, those Pilgrims decided to not put in as much effort, just like all the others. What happened? They ALL STARVED!

      And, the next year it was determined that the only way to succeed was to divy up the land, each family getting their own parcel to do with as they wished, and they each got to keep the fruits of their own labor. The result? Everyone worked hard for their own success and that autumn they had a bountiful harvest, and so they all got together to celebrate with all their individually produced food items, and that is the day we now call Thanksgiving!

      It was giving thanks for the freedom to have the opportunity to learn that individual incentive, the equal opportunity to work hard and not have their success stolen from them in the name of “fairness” that allowed the Pilgrims to benefit from the contribution of each individual, on their own private land, that ultimately enabled the settlement as a whole to thrive!

      By: Natschultz . January 25, 2012 . 3:04 am |

      • I absolutely did not say that my idea of justice is everyone receiving equal reward regardless of the amount of work they contributed. I am saying the polar opposite. I do not understand how you could have got it so perfectly wrong. Thank you in advance for never ever mis-representing my writing and thinking again.

        By: Fairpay . January 25, 2012 . 3:16 am |

      • The Founders did not object to taxation per se. They objected to being taxed without being represented in Parliament, and they objected to taxes that were specifically meant to benefit a limited liability corporation, the East India Company.

        By: Bill Rood . January 25, 2012 . 9:42 pm |

    • Re: Fairpay,
      “Can somebody please tell me just when that original Great Dream of Freedom FROM TYRANNY of wealthpower giants became the diabolically perverted dream of having the freedom to grow limitlessly rich at the expense of your neighbors and country?”

      Unless you’re talking about thieves (either private or the government), in this country nobody grows limitlessly rich by stealing from others. You have a very naive and limited view of how wealth is created, in this country or anywhere else.

      “Why are there no limits on personal fortunes in America, when limitless personal fortunes are exactly what our founders fled?”

      This is a lie. You don’t even know your own history. The founders did not fled limitless personal fortunes; what they did was to fight a governemnt that intruded in their lives through force.

      By: Old Mexican . January 25, 2012 . 5:01 pm |

  2. Bravo and well said, Dan and Fairpay. !!!

    You both have perfectly diagnosed the problems with liberatraianism and Ron Paul.

    Unfortunately we have no candidates who have a clue about the dignity of each individual, justice and fair pay and a living wage.

    All this phony talk of civil liberties and rights does not have much meaning to people whose companies/employers are being destroyed, who are losing their homes and being forced to live out on the streets, and are wondering where their next meal is going to come from.

    The capitalists that founded the USA are the socialists kind of capitalists – all parties. Capitalism is state sponsored usury.

    And libertarian / Austrian economics SUCKS!

    By: DachsieLady . January 24, 2012 . 9:46 am |

    • Try understanding the business cycle, the boom and bust, as explained by Austrian economics. You might get a better understanding as to why companies are being destroyed and people are out on the street. It makes a lot of sense.

      By: Art Thomas . January 24, 2012 . 11:40 am |

      • I would like to read more about Austrian economics take on the boom and bust cycle. If you can point me to an article onlien, I would appreciate it. Am I understanding that you, Art Thomas, support Austrian economics’ theories?

        By: DachsieLady . January 24, 2012 . 11:47 am |

        • I’m not Art, but I would check out www.mises.org if you wanted to find out about Austrian economics and the business cycle. There is a lot of material at that website – video, audio, and written articles. All of it free.
          Here is a link to a pdf publication that is an introduction to Austrian economics that you can download: http://library.mises.org/books/Gene-Callahan/Economics-for-Real-People-9780945466413.pdf

          I would warn you to please investigate Austrian economics for yourself, rather than accept the declarations of others. It takes a bit of effort to do this, of course. Since you asked, I imagine that youre willing to put in that effort. – - In addition, people often make attacks on ‘capitalism’ without recognizing that the terrible system we exist under isn’t true free market capitalism at all, but crony capitalism controlled by a small group of special interests. Unfortunately, during difficult economic & political times, people are more vulnerable to all sorts of unsound ideas including Marxism. (But again, don’t accept my last statement. Investigate this for yourself and decide.)

          By: Jed Smith . January 24, 2012 . 12:09 pm |

          • Here’s another link. This pdf publication deals specifically with the business cyle:

            http://library.mises.org/books/Murray-N-Rothbard/Economic-Depressions-Their-Cause-and-Cure-9781933550503.pdf

            By: Jed Smith . January 24, 2012 . 12:16 pm |

        • I hope these articles/talk will pique your interest. Mises.org has so much knowledge to offer: scholarly, practical, debates. Yes, as a ordinary lay person Austrian economics made sense to me from the beginning when I first read Mises’ opus Human Action, which was difficult reading, but nevertheless, what I could understand of it moved me to plow through it and try to understand it as best I could. That was 30 years ago before the Mises Institute existed. I was in search of an economic theory that made sense of the real world as I understood it.

          http://mises.org/daily/672
          http://mises.org/tradcycl.asp
          http://mises.org/media/5916/A-Reformulation-of-Austrian-Business-Cycle-Theory-in-Light-of-the-Financial-Crisis

          By: ART THOMAS . January 24, 2012 . 1:15 pm |

          • Thank you both for the links. I have read quite a bit but have never gotten deep in to their theory.

            I still perceive many problems with Austrian Economics.

            It seems to present itself as a pure hard science and the “free market” rules and determines everything and will make everything all right, sort of like the laws of physics or chemistry. Economics is a social science. It involves the action of man and therefore the will, the free will of man, and that is where morality comes into play. Pure hard science has nothing to do with the action or will of man or choice and morality.

            There seems to be this overarching FAITH, truly regligious type FAITH, in the free market. I have faith in knowing the nature of man, how we are fallen and how we can be deceived and tempted and our wills weakened and how we can make bad choices. I have faith in observing the actions of the rich, the rich whom we will always have with us just as we will always have the poor with us, and I perceive that the actions of the rich do not care about human beings, human souls and their eternal destiny nor their temporal well being. The rich oligarchs were much involved in the founding of the USA. The world is their domain and their concern for national sovereinty and Consitutional republic protections for individuals is not their concern. They care only to indulge their lower nature of avarice, GREED, and owning and controlling all. Human beings are useless eaters.

            Usury is very much a part of the Austrian economics version of “capitalism”. That means that the 99 percent, not sure I like that term, will foreever be buried in huge unrepayable debt.

            There is a strong internationalist globalist flavor to Austrian economics. I think sending the manufacturing companies over to a country where the owner can pay the workers 50 cents a day is perfectly OK with them, while killing USA industry and jobs and peoples livelihoods.

            Lastly, Austrian economics is so pie-in-the-sky utopian. What they invision to work as sure and precise as gravity, free markets, have never ever been shown to work in past history. But we are to trust them that it will work. Oh, there be a little “collateral damage” along the way to this utopia, like hundreds of thousands of people dumped into destitution, but that’s OK, all will end well some day.

            By: DachsieLady . January 24, 2012 . 1:35 pm |

        • In Reply to DaschieLady comments made at 1:35pm – - For some reason there wasn’t a ‘Reply’ button after your last post so I needed to reply here. Pardon me if this might confuse the flow a bit.
          Actually Austrian economics says quite the opposite – - that economics is Not like ‘hard’ physical sciences and cannot be approached that way. This is a basic tenant of Austrian economics which makes it quite a bit different than mainstream graduate course level economics today. The latter oftens gets bogged down in esoteric & complex calculations of limited value. Austrian economics is based on human action, – which is quite abit different than the certaintly of gravity, etc. – - “Usury’ is not part of Austrian economic thought. It does help explain the nature of interest (investigate “time preference”). – - – This is not a criticism; I think its great that you asked about sources for more information. But, I think its best to approach any topic with (as was said in an old Asian parable) an ‘empty cup’, without preconceptions. – - – I am not an “Austrian’. I am Jed :) I think it limits our ability to see or to create when we identify with a particular way of thought. The human tendency is to then defend our identifications, rather than be open to new ideas. – - That does not mean that we accept all ideas as equally valid. They must stand up to investigation and logic. But this does better enable us to judge IMO. Regards, – - -

          By: Jed Smith . January 24, 2012 . 2:36 pm |

    • Thank-you, DachsieLady – and you, too, Dennis

      Correct: We don’t have fairpay justice capitalism, we have unlimited personal fortunes capitalism. It’s the unlimited personal fortunes part that has to go. Justice – and plain sound sense – says the wealth belongs in the hands of the person who sacrificed their time and energies to producing goods and providing services – in proportion to their sacrifice. The wealth doesn’t belong in the hands of a fraction few and it doesn’t belong to the state (as if giving it to the state were not giving it to human beings, ahem).

      Extreme wealth and poverty has been brought about by libertarianism. Basically everyone has been a libertarian for 1000s of years. Libertarians believe in perfect freedom. They believe in the game of everyone on the starting line, unrestricted by rules, unhobbled by hobbles, so that the race is (apparently) fair. And then everyone runs and whatever you get is yours by right. That is all they see, all they understand. The complexities elude them, and they don’t want to know about them. They cannot see them, and they cannot hear them when they are explained, and they have no will to strive to hear. Just let me race, without hobbles, and what I get is mine, and let’s keep it as simple as my mind. As Jay Gould said: everything I can grab is mine, and if it isn’t nailed down, I can grab it. For instance, Americans got freedom after revolution, and they interpreted it in a libertarian way: Whoopee, now I am free to get as rich as I can, and no one interfering. And it was the same everywhere in the world. People never saw that it was more complicated than that, that that perfect simple freedom produces tyranny rapidly. A hundred years after the American revolution, pay per hour ranged by a factor of one million, from 1cent to $10,000. The public rhetoric was still strong on prevention of wealth concentration, and would continue to be present, fading to nothing, for many decades, and yet democracy had been utterly overturned, without most people noticing. Money is power, so great inequality of pay per hour is great inequality of social power, which is tyranny-slavery.

      How did this happen? How does perfect simple freedom rapidly produce extreme inequality of wealth and power? It is because of the successful illegal thefts, and the legal thefts. Not just the legalised thefts, the thefts produced by government action, but the legal thefts that exist naturally, and continue to exist by government inaction. In general, the existence of legal thefts is unknown and unsuspected. The race of perfect freedom is more like a series of running races, in which the losers of each race get handicaps for the next race, so that inequality of wealth and power grows and accelerates. It is extraordinary that in general no one has seen what has happened and sought to discover the cause, and stop it. Even the Henry George movement faded away. It seems that people have said: Oh well, never mind, let’s just keep going. The bull-headed will of the wealthy and powerful, in control of government, has pushed its way over sanity and community, and everyone else has been dragged along behind, confused by rhetoric of freedom, unclear about what is going on. Of course, there was the pull-back of the New Deal, but this has been eroded. Ironically, this egalitarian move was exported to Japan, and it made Japan very strong, so strong that it was able to rise from the ashes of Hiroshima and 87 firebombed cities to top nation in 50 years. With safe streets.

      Every empire has been strong, though small, with equality, and every empire has been weak, and fallen, though large, with inequality. The state built on injustice cannot stand. For 1000s of years, people have not been clear enough to control galloping inequality. It is the issue of humanity. It is at the root of all our sufferings and disorder. It is at the root of war and crime. The wealthy warmonger and cannon-fodder the rest of us because they can and because profits are greatest where the work-products are quickly destroyed and often wasted (eg, Harry Truman’s discovery of $14 billion of military waste and budget padding; see Plain Speaking).

      Freedom as a virtue, a cause of happiness, is limited to every freedom short of injuring others. The legal thefts are injustices, which are injuries. Injury produces violence, which gets to everyone, from richest to poorest. It is injury which drives the growth of weaponry. We have bombs capable of destroying the planet. Violence is localised at any one time, but global in that it can appear anywhere at any time. Understanding and countering the legal thefts are essential to survival and happiness. People think billionaires are great, doing us good, creating jobs! They don’t create jobs, demand creates jobs. A billion is far more than an individual can earn in a lifetime. It is overpay, caused by the many, wide-open legal thefts. The most an individual can earn (create wealth by his own work) is less than $10 million. It ought to be obvious that people are working about equally hard. The average person works about 50 hours a week (housewives work an average of 92 hours a week) and no one can work more than 100 hours a week, so no one can justly have more than double the average. Provided you pay students for studying, there are no rationally sound reasons for higher-than-average pay per hour.
      But common sense is uncommon. People think that justice is a sacrifice, a limitation of freedom, and they (99%) go on getting poorer, more underpaid, and more angry, till revolution, when the 1% overpaid get pulled down, and then they grow inequality and violence all over again. Like 100 children with 1000 sweets, and a game-rule: grab as much as you can and grab from each other as well, which results in mayhem, ever-growing violence. The fever of climbing the ladder, the competitive race, totally absorbs them, and they do not learn the lesson of history, that perfectly simple-minded freedom is hell, is chaos, is war, crime, riot and revolution, is destruction for all.

      Community is limiting freedom short of injury to others. We never learn that injuring others is injuring ourselves. Yet whenever did you spit on someone and not get a broken nose? We always expect that others will take injury lying down, although no one has ever taken injury lying down. If we loved ourselves with intelligence, we would be very careful not to injure. We would be keen to understand the unconscious injury in the legal thefts. We would see that the understanding and countering of the legal thefts is the way out of war and crime and crises, out of global annihilation coming to our house soon. We would see that overpay is hell for the overpaid, for everyone is climbing up on them, making overpay a constant wearing fight with all. Every heap of wealth, national or individual, is always weaker than the rest of the world. The Sicilian mafia are naturally attracted to America, and they conquer their way to the top, from where they have to fight everyone climbing the ladder. With the top level intensely engaged in maintaining their position against all comers, there is little time for governance, let alone good governance. The people at the top are the most vigorous, least imaginative, least aware people. They know only fighting, besting others by all means, like Jay Gould, and Hitler. They are the ones who most underestimate the power of the injured, the ones with least sense to get along with others, the ones who most ignore the virtue, the happiness-potential, of justice. But all people are weak in understanding the vast benefits of justice, of avoiding injury. And so weaponry has grown for 1000s of years. To 60 times PDC (planet death capability). And still we are not anxious to understand less simplistically. Still we are gung-ho for the old way, the simple freedom race of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.

      But the devil takes all, even before annihilation. Each working person, including housewives and students, earns and creates around $100,000 of wealth, of work-products, a year. Plenty and peace. Non-injury. Abundance of order and democracy. 100 times faster technology progress. And look around at what we have made, with our simple minds. Devastation, chaos, dis-information, confusion, terrors, horrors, waste, destruction. Rulers have been falling from the heights for 1000s of years. The overpaid, over-powerful are few, and everyone has been climbing for 1000s of years. That ought to tell people that as many have fallen as risen. And we still have one-idea libertarians, able to ignore the legal thefts. And they are still in a majority, drowning out objective, dispassionate discussion. The libertarians are doers, energetic people who just want to get doing. But even the thinkers are not yet aware of the legal thefts that cause all the mayhem. Many of them have been bought. It is only with a gigantic, heroic, unprecedented, fiercely honest mental endeavour by many individuals that humanity will rescue itself.

      By: Fairpay . January 25, 2012 . 12:47 am |

      • “Error” for forgetting the contact info I always include in message just blew my response to hell or somewhere irritrievable.

        Thanks for your thanks.

        So plain and yet so nicely done I have printed it out. [“Devil take the hindmost” being my all-time favorite ironic saying in use everyday…..}

        I invite direct contact, in addition to the teaching exercise here. And helping this new forum.

        What say you PCR? And DachsieLady? Will Libertarians tolerate ANY talk of limits…..or course,
        AUTHORITY is a problem….are we just nut gatherers and hoarders, forever?

        d morrisseau pob 177 w pawlet,vt 05775 dmorso1@netzero.net

        By: Dennis Morrisseau . January 25, 2012 . 6:59 am |

      • “Extreme wealth and poverty has been brought about by libertarianism…. Libertarians believe in perfect freedom. They believe in the game of everyone on the starting line, unrestricted by rules, unhobbled by hobbles, so that the race is (apparently) fair. And then everyone runs and whatever you get is yours by right. That is all they see, all they understand. The complexities elude them, and they don’t want to know about them. They cannot see them, and they cannot hear them when they are explained, and they have no will to strive to hear.”

        True libertarians do not believe in unrestricted (perfect?) freedom. The libertarian philosophy is based on the nonaggression principle which I interpret as being free to live the way you want as long as you do not aggress, or use violence or the threat of it against other persons or their property, i.e. in order to get what you want from them. You allude to this when you say that “freedom as a virtue…. is limited to every freedom short of injuring others.” The libertarian philosophy begins with the idea that a person owns himself and therefore human relationships should be voluntary, that violence or it’s threat should be absent in the creation of those relationships. Since it is almost impossible not to injure people even when your motto is do no harm, under this philosophy you must accept responsibility for the harm you do others and the consequences that accrue to you.

        Libertarians that I know and have read including myself do not fit this description. You have mistakenly labeled people like Jay Gould libertarian when in fact they are state capitalists, people who use the police power of the state to further their ends. The big bank bailout of 2009 is an example of state capitalism, (some would call it American fascism), in action. Legal thefts as you would call them. A true libertarian would have accepted his mistakes/poor judgements and taken his losses rather than pawning them off on innocent (taxpayers) people. You might enjoy reading “For a New Liberty” by Murray Rothbard; very readable and down to earth primer of Libertarianism.

        What about the person, for example, Steve Jobs, who makes a fortune creating and selling products that millions of people want and buy. In the process he creates a company that employs thousands of people in good paying jobs. His success was dependent on intelligence, hard work, vision, and a willingness to take risks. Not from bedding down with the state. His own board of directors fires him. He starts NeXT and eventually sells it to Apple for $429 million. He buys Pulsar for $10 million, partners with Disney on several highly successful films, and 20 years later sells Pulsar to Disney for $7billion of Disney stock. Apple asks him to return as CEO. Att the time of his death he was worth around $8 billion, while Apple had become the largest publicly traded company in the world by market capitalization, and the largest technology company in the world by revenue and profit according to Wikipedia.

        You would assert contrary to fact that “a billion is far more than an individual can earn in a lifetime”. You would assert again, without evidence, that if they do, “it is overpay, caused by the many wide-open legal thefts.” What thefts? Give me evidence that Steve Jobs stole the property of other people to amass $8 billion. You say that demand creates jobs not entrepreneurs. I would amend that to: demand creates the need for more jobs and the entrepreneur must perceive or anticipate that need and then create the right number and kinds of jobs and hire the right people who are willing to work at an agreed upon wage. Jobs became a billionaire because he created something of value for which others were willing to pay him.

        How do you have it in your power to know that less than $10 million is the most a person can earn? Sounds like hubris to me. And for the sake of argument let’s say that people work equally hard (which the experience of any ordinary person would disprove) the work of the professional baseball player or famous rock musician will be worth more than your local custom furniture maker if only because the former have a larger customer base than the latter. Value is in the eye of the beholder.

        If we follow the gist of your argument someone or some group will have to decide how to implement this fair pay theory of yours. Let me guess. You! Just kidding. 535 of YOU in Congress and then a whole bunch of crusading YOU bureaucrats armed with the violent power of the police. And if that happens the entrepreneur the people who bring these creations in to existence, who bring all these highly skilled and unskilled people together to make it happen will disappear.

        Maybe you have figured a way to reach your vision such as it is without putting a gun to people’s head.

        By: ART THOMAS . January 25, 2012 . 12:12 pm |

        • fine. one sum of money paid one time for one time period. a piglet if you wish. a fee.

          NOT compound interest.

          By: Dennis Morrisseau . January 25, 2012 . 7:23 pm |

          • Compound interest works to your advantage if you are saving, and to your disadvantage if you are a debtor, say in credit cards.

            In any case that’s the business of the particular lender and borrower. As a borrower I wouldn’t be too concerned about compound or simple interest, but what the periodic payment would be.

            By: Art THOMAS . January 26, 2012 . 9:18 am |

        • It’s true Steve Job was definitely creative and created many well-paying jobs. Some of those jobs still exist in Cupertino.

          However, like everyone else, Apple sent its manufacturing and most of its jobs overseas. And it’s not a pretty picture. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Foxconn_suicides

          Oh, don’t worry, Apple has lots of apologists for this. See this article. Oh, the poor U.S. just can’t do what the Chinese can do:

          http://www.tuaw.com/2012/01/22/why-apples-products-are-designed-in-california-but-assembled/

          The U.S. just doesn’t have enough engineers. Paul Craig Roberts has written about how this is total claptrap. And he’s written about it again and again. As Dr. Roberts wrote in 2006:

          “When employers allege a shortage of engineers, they mean that there is a shortage of American graduates who will work for the low salaries that foreigners will accept. Americans are simply being forced out of the engineering professions by jobs outsourcing and the importation of foreigners on work visas. Corporate lobbyists and their hired economists are destroying the American engineering professions”

          That’s from this PCR column:

          http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/06/06/the-death-of-us-engineering/

          Here are others in PCR’s chronicle of American jobs destroyed:

          http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/07/15/what-kind-of-country-destroys-the-job-market-for-its-own-citizens/

          http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/08/25/the-american-economy-is-destroying-itself/

          Read this lie from the Apple apologist article above:

          “Those are just a couple examples of how the scale, speed, and efficiency of Chinese manufacturing outstrips anything the US is currently capable of. But the Times’ report is full of more evidence, and it’s damning. Even though the 200,000 assembly-line workers putting part A into slot B could potentially be classified as unskilled labor, the 8700 industrial engineers overseeing the process can’t be — and according to the Times, finding that many qualified engineers in the States would take nine months. Chinese manufacturers found them all in 15 days.”

          Now read what Dr. Roberts had to say in 2005:

          “Where are the jobs for the 65,000 engineers the US graduates each year?”
          http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/08/09/watching-the-economy-crumble/

          Coincidentally, the U.S. gives out 65,000 H-1B visas every year:
          “But this fate cannot be very pleasant , with declining employment in the manufacturing sectors that employ engineers and a minimum of 65,000 H-1B work visas annually for foreigners plus an indeterminate number of L-1 work visas.”
          http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/10/01/the-new-face-of-class-war/

          As Dr. Roberts sums up:

          “US executives, with an eye to quarterly earnings and their bonuses, continue to spend considerable resources lobbying for increases in work visas that enable them to replace their American engineers, scientists, and technical people with lower cost foreigners. These executives lie through their teeth when they assert the lack of qualified Americans for the jobs. The fact of the matter is, the executives force their American employees to train their foreign replacements and then fire their American workers.”

          U.S. tech companies were and are among the most aggressive pursuers of allowing ever more H-1B visas and of replacing their native U.S. engineers.

          As Mark said “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

          There was a time when American business leaders had their heart and soul in America. There was a time when American business leaders HAD a heart and soul.

          And it is totally incorrect to say that Jobs and Apple did it without government subsidy.

          The Apple products are built in the City of Shenzhen:

          “In 1979, Chinese authorities designated the city a “Special Economic Zone,” which Daisey characterizes as a space in which foreign corporations can treat their workers and their environs however they see fit.”
          http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/05/20/blood-on-the-trackpads/

          It was no “free market” that Apple and the other tech companies moved their jobs to. The Chinese government created a huge city where virtual slave labor and unaccountable pollution is allowed.

          “One employee mangled his hand in a factory accident and was fired instead of compensated. Several workers speak of an employee who died after working a 32-hour shift. And one woman says that she was fired and blacklisted after reporting unpaid overtime to the local labor board. Many of the workers are children 11, 12, 13 years old.”

          This is the power of the state used to allow Apple to exploit workers for profit. This is the power of the police state used to keep workers from demanding what is right. This is the ultimate in government subsidy.

          Over 10 years ago the U.S. government lobbied to have China receive Permanent Normal Trade Relations status followed by WTO membership (which it did received). Is it not a government subsidy to have our paid elected & unelected government representatives pursuing permission for major human rights violator China to be opened up as a place where American companies can move jobs and abuse workers?
          http://chrissmith.house.gov/UploadedFiles/2011_12_13_CCEC_WTO_Hearing.pdf

          Combine H-1B visas and China’s virtual prison labor camp cities and one can see that Apple and Jobs earned their biggest billions in the most amoral, government-subsidized way possible.

          Perhaps Jobs is finally reflecting on this right now.

          By: Erik . January 26, 2012 . 3:58 am |

          • Hi Erik,

            You should listen to This American Life interview with Mike Daisey who went to China, and the other people they interview in Act Two. Here’s the link.
            http://www.thisamericanlife.org/play_full.php?play=454&act=1

            “Combine H-1B visas and China’s virtual prison labor camp cities and one can see that Apple and Jobs earned their biggest billions in the most amoral, government-subsidized way possible.”

            As the CEO of Apple in intense competition with other companies what would you have done? Assuming that Apple has no control over the Chinese government.

            As a result of intense criticism of these factories Apple has increased its audits of these factories by some 80% and has terminated contracts with a factory that failed to meet Apples’ standards. You can go to their web site and read these annual supplier reports.

            At the same time workers in one factory went on strike, threatened to commit mass suicide and eventually settled with the factory; all people returning to work except 45 who quit. In addition to outside support people have to stand up for themselves as best they can. This is the most effective means of improving your life: take action on your own behalf and organize with others who are in the same boat. As long as these folks have the freedom to quit and look for better working conditions (and they are organizing despite the fact that unions are illegal, as I understand it); as long as these factories are freely competing with each other, the factories that improve their working conditions will be the ones to attract the best workers . According to one of the interviewees the avg monthly turnover rate is between 10%-20%! So in addition to organizing and striking, People are voting with their feet and only a stupid business person would ignore all this.

            By: Art THOMAS . January 26, 2012 . 10:04 am |

    • Re: DachsieLady,

      All this phony talk of civil liberties and rights does not have much meaning to people whose companies/employers are being destroyed, who are losing their homes and being forced to live out on the streets, and are wondering where their next meal is going to come from.

      How exactly do rights and liberties cease to exist when a person’s company is “being destroyed”?

      Capitalism is state sponsored usury.

      A statement that tells me you have no idea of what capitalism, or usury for that matter, mean.

      By: Old Mexican . January 25, 2012 . 5:04 pm |

      • “How exactly do rights and liberties cease to exist when a person’s company is “being destroyed”?

        Who said “rights and liberties cease to exist when a person’s company is “being destrioyed.”?

        When a person’s livelihood is removed by a corporate raider, whom Ron Paul says we should not criticize because the corportate raider is only demonstrating “conservative free market principles.”, the person still has “rights and liberties” but they become overshadowed by the need to survive, in which case I thinking stealing food for yourself and your family is a Creator endowed right.

        I do not think anyone has a right to corporate raid, asset strip, a perfectly fine thriving company, and toss the collateral damage employees in the gutter. That is where I suspect I have a foundational difference with you regarding the rights of the likes of Mitt Romney.

        I think I have a real good idea of what capitalism is. Usury is loading money at compounding interest and that is the bottom line common denominator characteristic of capitalism.

        Howz about you tell us your definition of capitalism and what you think of usury. Even Ron Paul realizes that the Federal Reserve loaning their created out of thin air money to the U.S. government and then charging interest on that fake money is why we have a national debt that is ever growing and can never be paid. That interest money goes straight to the private offshore bank accounts of the banksters who run the Federal Reserve.

        By: DachsieLady . January 25, 2012 . 5:22 pm |

        • Thoughts on interest or usury:

          When you do not consume all the fruits of your labor you by definition have capital savings. You can do many different things with it. You can hide it under your mattress, lend it to a bank in the form of a certificate of deposit which bank will pay you a fee (interest) for doing so. You could make a personal loan say to someone who’s starting a business where they agree to pay back the loan with interest. Why charge this fee? This fee that you the lender charge is the price the borrower pays for consuming your savings right now, which means it is property that cannot be used/consumed by you right now. The interest is what the borrower trades you for the use of your savings. You and he may agree to some other commodity beside money. He may be a farmer wanting to a slew of piglets to raise and agrees to give you a butchered pig for the loan of your savings to buy the piglets.

          By: Art Thomas . January 25, 2012 . 7:07 pm |

        • Re: DachsieLady,

          the person still has “rights and liberties” but they become overshadowed by the need to survive,

          You have no grasp of the subject you talk about. Even if a person is starving, he or she does not lose any of his or her liberties. You still own your body, you still own your mind, and you’re still free to act. Your liberty is something you have regardless. What you do not have (and others don’t either) is ownership of another person and his or her property, and that includes that “corporate” raider you talk about with such disdain.

          I think I have a real good idea of what capitalism is.

          No, you don’t.

          Usury is loading money at compounding interest and that is the bottom line common denominator characteristic of capitalism.

          See? What did I tell you, you do NOT know what capitalism is.

          Usury means lending money at presumably exorbitant interest rates. That’s it. It is NOT a characteristic of capitalism, as capitalism is simply the use of capital goods and savings for the purpose of producing goods of higher value.

          Even Ron Paul realizes that the Federal Reserve loaning their created out of thin air money to the U.S. government and then charging interest on that fake money is why we have a national debt that is ever growing and can never be paid.

          That has nothing to do with usury,or even Capitalism. What the Federal Reserve does is to turn someone else’s debt into new money. This can be better described as simply fraud, which it is, but not capitalism. The fact that the Federal reserve loans money to the government does not constitute in itself usury.

          By: Old Mexican . January 25, 2012 . 8:55 pm |

        • Re: DachsieLady,

          I do not think anyone has a right to corporate raid, asset strip, a perfectly fine thriving company,

          What you believe is inconsequential. A company is property, and like any other property, subject to exchange by the owner or owners just like you would your porcelain china in a swap meet. What I see is that you have a very limited view of what corporate “raid” means or “hostile takeover.” These idiotic names were invented by unintelligent people that had no clue of what was really happening, i.e. journalists. A “corporate raid” is nothing more that a purchase. That’s it, nothing more and nothing less. A company or inventing organization makes an offer to purchase another company in order to either restructure it or sell the assets in the open market. While it is true that a company that is purchased may end up being closed and the workers fired, in the end this is much better for the economy than having the company bleed money and the workers laid off without their paychecks. You don’t see this because you only see what is obvious, no further than your nose. But a person looking at the economic picture has to see everything that is not so obvious, that which is not seen as Frederic Bastiat said.

          and toss the collateral damage employees in the gutter. That is where I suspect I have a foundational difference with you regarding the rights of the likes of Mitt Romney.

          By: Old Mexican . January 25, 2012 . 9:07 pm |

          • What often happens is that some “vulture capitalist” identifies a publicly owned company that’s healthy and making a profit but not quite as much profit as Wall Street in general (investors, often pension funds etc like CALPERS) deem sufficient. As a result, the stock is undervalued compared to its book value. The “vulture capitalist” makes a tender offer and purchases a majority of stock in the corporation, thus obtaining absolute control. The “vulture capitalist” now has the corporation (which it now controls absolutely) take on a large amount of debt and uses the cash assembled from that debt to increase dividends or better yet repurchase shares (especially their own shares obtained through the tender offer) at an inflated price, taking the company “private” in a so-called “leveraged buyout.”

            The company now weighted down with debt finds it impossible to turn any sort of profit at all and ends up declaring filing bankruptcy. As part of bankruptcy proceedings, the courts allow bondholders to take precedence over what the company owes its pension funds, which become the burden of PBGC and ultimately the healthy companies that must pay premiums to PBGC. After all, we wouldn’t want bondholders to take a haircut, now would we? The hard assets of the company (industrial equipment and the like) can be crated up and shipped to China in order to pay off a portion of the debt. The “vulture capitalist,” investment banks that underwrote the bonds make out like bandits. The ratings agencies don’t do too bad, as the investment bank will see to their needs. The junk bond holders may or may not break even, depending on how far inside they are or maybe whether they sell before TSHTF. The employees are out of a job and a big chunk of the pension they were promised for 30 years, and the public is left holding the rest of the bag.

            Now, note that I put “vulture capitalist” in quotes because there are those who would honestly disagree with their value to society. Some would say they took an under-performing company and liberated its capital to be used more “efficiently,” and who am I to argue with that viewpoint?

            By: Bill Rood . January 25, 2012 . 11:08 pm |

          • Old Mexican, definitely read Bill Rood’s comment and explanation of what corporate raiders and take-over “artists” do. This is the standard model now. These people producer absolutely nothing. They only destroy companies and people’s lives.

            And Bill is right to mention the pension funds. It is ironic that pension funds representing retired American workers are so immorally involved in destroying American jobs.

            By: Erk . January 26, 2012 . 4:05 am |

  3. Reports of the Constitution’s demise, as promoted by Dr. Roberts, Glenn Greenwald, Fabius Maximus, etc., have been greatly exaggerated. Yesterday, the US Supreme Court, in a rebuke to unchecked executive power, disproved the Constitution-is-dead theory by unanimously ruling to uphold 4th Amendment privacy rights in the GPS tracking case. Note that none of the above commentators has as yet bothered to mention this important decision, presumably because it does not fit the narrative. Things are not as dreary as some would have us believe.

    By: Paul Mallery . January 24, 2012 . 12:07 pm |

    • Token. Throw them a bone when it don’t matter. Old story. They take the bait.

      But what matters the constitution as the economy slides into the abyss.

      By: Ken Ashley . January 24, 2012 . 1:23 pm |

      • Ignore the inconvenient facts if you like. Dr. Roberts is a highly entertaining, thought-provoking writer, but he builds his case through selective use of facts and omission of others, which is what propagandists do. Consider the possibility you are being propagandized.

        By: Paul Mallery . January 24, 2012 . 4:56 pm |

        • It’s not an “inconvenient” fact; in the scheme of things, it’s an almost meaningless fact. And as far as the propaganda remark: LOL! You should be looking at your monitor, not your mirror, as you type your hapless statist drivel.

          By: Nelson_2008 . January 25, 2012 . 1:05 pm |

    • Dear Mr. Mallery:

      In you comments posted on this site on January 24, you gratuitously and rudely accuse me of being a propagandist. The basis for your charge is that I did not report on a Supreme Court decision “yesterday” (January 23) about GPS tracking.
      You posted your comment on my column about Ron Paul and Social Security. What would GPS tracking have to do with Ron Paul and Social Security? How would the information have arrived to me in time to include an unrelated event that happened a day after the column was posted?

      The current column, which I was working on during January 22, 23, and 24 is about Washington’s hypocrisy. What does this subject have to do with GPS tracking?

      Moreover, you report yesterday’s Supreme Court decision incorrectly. According to news reports, the SC did not uphold 4th Amendment rights in an unanimous decision. Wired reports that “The majority declined to say whether that search was unreasonable and required a warrant.” The court was deciding the case of a drug dealer. All that happened is that the court ruled 5-4 that attaching a GPS device to a vehicle constitutes a search. The only unanimous decision was to toss out the life sentence that the drug dealer had received.

      I might add that this was merely a case about a drug crime. If the drug dealer had instead been charged with terrorism or with contributing in some nebulous way to terrorism, he would have found himself shorn of constitutional rights.

      Here is a description of the case from Wired:

      The Supreme Court said Monday that law enforcement authorities might need a probable-cause warrant from a judge to affix a GPS device to a vehicle and monitor its every move — but the justices did not say that a warrant was needed in all cases.
      The convoluted decision (.pdf) in what is arguably the biggest Fourth Amendment case in the computer age, rejected the Obama administration’s position that attaching a GPS device to a vehicle was not a search. The government had told the high court that it could even affix GPS devices on the vehicles of all members of the Supreme Court, without a warrant.
      “We hold that the government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search,’” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the five-justice majority. The majority declined to say whether that search was unreasonable and required a warrant.
      All nine justices, however, agreed to toss out the life sentence of a District of Columbia drug dealer who was the subject of a warrantless, 28-day surveillance via GPS.
      Four justices in a minority opinion said that the prolonged GPS surveillance in this case amounted to a search needing a warrant. But the minority opinion was silent on whether GPS monitoring for shorter periods would require one.

      You then attempt to discredit my truthful and documented accounts of the loss of our civil liberties to the war on terror by writing that “he builds his case through selective use of facts and omission of others, which is what propagandists do.” No, that is not what propagandists do. It is what all writers have to do. Columns cannot become books and encyclopedias. If the facts are the main facts, not subsidiary ones, and they support the argument based upon them, there is no propaganda.
      What a propagandist would do is what you did. A propagandist would take an inconclusive ruling about a drug dealer and use that as evidence that privacy rights are safe.
      When the executive branch can assassinate citizens without due process of law, confine them to lifelong prison terms without due process and presentation of evidence, and spy without warrants on citizens that it suspects are in any way associated with terrorism, the Constitution is dead.
      I would also point out to you that I will always report on some things and not others. People are not gods who see all and know all. Even large newspapers and TV stations with scores of editors, producers, reporters and pundits cannot cover everything that happens or exhaustively cover every aspect of a story that is reported. This site will not be able to do so either.
      Paul Craig Roberts

      By: pcr3 . January 24, 2012 . 9:58 pm |

      • Dr. Roberts:

        Please accept my sincerest apologies for my poor choice of words. In your column, you wrote that Bush and Obama “murdered” the Constitution and concluded that our civil rights today “depend on the subjective opinion of the executive branch.” This is what stimulated my initial comment. It was not my intention to denigrate you, but only to suggest that this important issue may not be black and white. I enjoy your columns immensely and hope there is room here for an occasional dissenting viewpoint. Again, please accept my apologies.

        Respectfully,
        Paul Mallery

        By: Paul Mallery . January 24, 2012 . 11:35 pm |

        • Just as an aside. – - – Even if what you asserted about the GPS case was correct, this would not be a valid logical argument for your conclusion about the Constitution. (There are many issues of concern – - Patriot Act , NDAA, operations against Libya without Congressional prior approval, etc.) One can take 1 step forward & 5 steps back, but it doesnt mean the general direction is forward.

          Among others, Professor Michael La Bossiere has written and spoken extensively on the subject of ‘Logical Fallacies’ and is a good source on this very useful subject. Regards, –

          By: Jed Smith . January 25, 2012 . 8:05 am |

  4. Is this a contest of who can be the most rude and disrespectful to PCR? You sir are in the running for first place. Prattle on.

    By: Dan . January 24, 2012 . 5:27 pm |

    • In a case decided on January 20, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling requiring a lower court to show more “deference” to a congressional redistricting plan developed by the state of Texas, notwithstanding the fact that the plan is plainly in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

      The ruling in that case, Perry v. Perez, as well as a ruling putting off a decision in a related West Virginia case, casts a shadow over the continued viability of the Voting Rights Act and the principle of “one-person, one-vote.”

      Supreme Court commentator Lyle Denniston observed in an article last Friday on SCOTUSblog.com entitled “New View on One-Person, One-Vote?” that a lower federal court order blocked by the Supreme Court in the West Virginia case had declared that the principle of “one-person, one-vote” required “zero variance” in population between congressional districts as the norm. Accordingly, he wrote, the Supreme Court’s actions have “raised doubts about the authority of federal District Courts to require states to achieve absolute equality of population in drafting new voting boundaries.”

      Under the challenged West Virginia plan, certain districts have thousands more members than the others, with the ultimate result that Republican votes count more than Democratic ones.

      My bad, you might be a propagandist since you used “selective facts” to make your vague allegation instead of just rude. How many more cases would you like me to cite? (Hint, I have vast experience )

      By: Dan . January 24, 2012 . 6:10 pm |

      • Can you cite any examples of Supreme Court rulings that check executive power, or was the GPS case a one-time event?

        By: Paul Mallery . January 24, 2012 . 7:53 pm |

        • I can’t believe you are actually focusing on Executive powers and abuse.

          Congress can check any of it whenever it wants to. have you read Article 1 of the US
          Constitution?

          But they DON’T. because they are all bought by others who like the actions being taken.
          And all of them LOVE to have a useless mouth piece around like a President that they can blame it all on…….the only thing any President is good for.

          d morrisseau w pawlet, vt dmorso1@netzero.net

          By: Dennis Morrisseau . January 24, 2012 . 8:11 pm |

          • I focus on executive power because Dr. Roberts wrote that Bush and Obama “murdered” the Constitution and that our civil rights today “depend on the subjective opinion of the executive branch.” While Dr. Roberts and others have presented evidence to support this conclusion, there is also contrary evidence that leads to a different conclusion. Sure, Congress can check the executive, ultimately through impeachment, but we can’t depend on them. The Supreme Court is the final firewall between liberty and tyranny, and yesterday, they stood up for liberty.

            By: Paul Mallery . January 24, 2012 . 10:44 pm |

  5. Dr. Roberts, I am a huge fan of yours!

    From what I have read and listened to, Ron Paul has talked about, not touching or cutting those types of programs, but using the money saved from ending the wars and bringing the troops home, to make sure that there is enough money for SS, Medicare, Medicaid, etc…and Dr. Paul has said eventually he would want those programs cut, because from 1776 to 1935, there was no SS, Medicare or Medicaid…

    And as long as the Federal Reserve exists as it currently is, then USA will never even get a chance to at least try and get those programs working correctly. I completely understand what those programs were made for and I do not want them cut/touched/tickled, until we get fractional reserve banking eliminated, bring back Glass–Steagall Act and then arrest all the owners of the Fed Reserve, 100% audit of the fed and some sort of hard currencies, whoever sits in the throne will never get it fixed.

    Thank You for all you do, I have learned so much from you, Keep up the great work!

    By: Derek Roman . January 24, 2012 . 11:01 pm |

  6. Thank you Dr. Roberts, for the great website, I just discovered it. Wow, thanks again!

    By: Ted Troupis . January 24, 2012 . 11:28 pm |

  7. Nice read. I just passed this onto a friend who was doing a little research on that. He actually bought me lunch since I found it for him! Thus let me rephrase: Thank you for lunch!

    By: Quifyiniulout . January 25, 2012 . 3:34 am |

  8. You’re right, Mr. Roberts, I desperately hope, the good Doc reads this great piece of Yours! Independant Thinking not strictness in ideological dogma is the most important maxime. Sectarianism and Extremism hinder folks to think free, overlook and doubt their standpoiont again and again. Thesis:Antithesis=Synthesis has to go on and on and on. Stagnation is no option, and being progressive doesn’t mean Progressivism, “anything goes”, socialism or multiculturalism, but it can and SHOULD mean FLEXIBILITY and PRAGMATISM.

    Free-Thinkers like You are desperately needed in the Libertarian Movement, Ron Paul should read this and consider some tactical as well as philosophical adjustment!!! Other way, there will be no Ron Paul Presidency in 2012, Mr. Roberts is right on this as well.

    By: kit_fisto . January 25, 2012 . 11:46 am |

  9. “Steve Jobs, who makes a fortune creating and selling products that millions of people want and buy. In the process he creates a company that employs thousands of people in good paying jobs.”

    Surely you jest!

    Very telling that your examples of wealthy do-gooders are one-worlder China slavers like Gates and Jobs. Jobs’ Apple product factory in China just had the entire workforce threaten suicide if their pay and working conditions were not made livable immediately.

    Gates is probably among the world’s lowest living forms of humanity.

    By: DachsieLady . January 25, 2012 . 12:27 pm |

    • Surely I don’t. I was thinking of the high-tech people in this country who are employed by Apple.

      Your right, one of Apple’s key factory partners in China, Foxconn, has come under criticism for poor working conditions. According to the news link below dated 1/12/12 the workers settled with Foxconn and with the exception of 45 workers who resigned the others agreed to return to work.
      http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-57358025-17/foxconn-settles-with-workers-who-threatened-mass-suicide/?tag=contentMain;contentBody

      Have you listened to This American Life show “Mr Daisey Goes to China”? He loves Apple products but wanted to get a better idea of what goes on in these factories in CHINA, so he goes there. Both act one and act two are provocative and worth listening to.
      http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/454/mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory

      Apparently these high tech factories have a turnover rate between 10%-20%/ month, and according to
      one long time observer interviewed in this program, has resulted in improved working and living conditions.
      He thinks that this bottom up pressure for improvements is the most effective. I agree with him. If workers can improve their lives by their own cooperative actions it empowers them with self respect. I would think.
      Apple’s reputation is on the line so the pressure is on them to do their part to see that these factories meet their standards. You can go to Apple’s web site to see their latest results of audits of their suppliers and
      what Apple is doing about the infractions they find. http://www.apple.com/supplierresponsibility/reports.html

      By: Art Thomas . January 25, 2012 . 9:13 pm |

      • “If workers can improve their lives by their own cooperative actions it empowers them with self respect. I would think.”

        And I would add: workers might be less inclined to commit suicide.

        By: ART THOMAS . January 25, 2012 . 9:22 pm |

      • Sure, it’s always easy to fight for workers rights in a dictatorship that’s created a special city just for Apple and the other tech firms—a city where the workers have no rights at all, no protection by the government and in a country where their organizing efforts are watched over on the internet and wherever they are by the police state. If Apple were worried about its reputation they never would have built factories there. Whatever they do is just damage-control to get out of the headlines.

        And BTW, in the 70s when the tech companies were still producing things in Silicon Valley my sister worked in these domestic U.S. plants and would come home and tell horror stories of the dangerous chemicals they had to use and the minimal procedures and protections they had on the job. She finally quit because she didn’t want to end up having horrid chemical burns on her skin for life. If that’s the sort of conditions the tech firms had for non-union workers in California I’m sure the Apple audit will come out A-OK.

        By: Erik . January 26, 2012 . 8:22 am |

        • Where is God when we need him! Bring back the Garden of Eden, dear Lord! where there is no scarcity and all our wants are satisfied, and no difficult choices need be made. Put us there, heavenly Father. Take away our minds, our self-consciousness, and make us as mindless and innocent as the beasts of forests and the seas. Human life is just too stressful and other people won’t live the way we want them to. And they always want more and better and easier. And they always rise up against us when we try and make them live the right way.

          The Garden of Eden, Lord. I’ll do whatever you command.

          By: ART THOMAS . January 26, 2012 . 10:36 am |

          • Nice try but no cigar. Man was created in the image and likeness of God and therefore had free will and “difficult choices” to make from the beginning. The existence of the Evil One was also present from the beginning.

            By: DachsieLady . January 26, 2012 . 11:24 am |

          • Dachsielady,

            Oh yeah, baby, I got my cigar and I’m smoking’ it!!

            My point precisely. I was making fun of all you armchair moralist (I do my share)
            who seem not to want to apply that to someone like Steve Jobs. Or maybe he’s the Evil One personified. But since we and Steve Jobs were created in the likeness of God as you put it, then the Evil One lurks in each of us, and God too. And to paraphrase the loving Jesus who understood this, “who amongst you will throw the first stone?”.
            The Apple -China problems calls for critical debate among us Armchair people; trying to understand a very complex situation rather than looking for the Devil.
            It’s up to the factory workers to kick ass on their own behalf and they are beginning
            to do that.

            ps

            By: ART THOMAS . January 27, 2012 . 9:35 am |

  10. Let’s examine the case for contract rights and private property, Ron Paul maybe hasn’t explained himself as well as he could. Your article makes a good case for that because what you say is partially true. If you do listen to Paul he has said he wants to preserve SS and Medicare/Medicaid for people dependent on them. Then allow the contract to be altered for young people to opt out if they want to. And many may not. But it would of course have to be done legally and therefore the contractual option to get out would need adding in. So there is tolerance, maybe not with some very hard core libertarians – but Ron Paul himself (which you are lumping him unfairly into the most strict libertarians) definitely isn’t out to instantly end those things as many like this article writer fear. Here’s a video where you can get Pauls opinion direct from him, he says if we cut spending over seas we can continue with those programs but otherwise the destruction of the dollar will be an abrupt end to those programs which is much worse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qojv1bR-S0 Another thing to keep in mind is that the rest of government would have to agree with and write new laws to alter those programs. With over 75% of the people (and politicians pandering to the elderly) against that idea, Paul really doesn’t have the power to do those things anyway. So the fear is way over-blown. I do agree that if people think it is possible for him to do those things (thanks to articles like these) Paul needs to explain himself in a more easy to understand way so people don’t get confused.

    By: Marc . January 25, 2012 . 3:15 pm |

  11. S.S. and Medicare work nothing like insurance. They are transfer programs from the working (often young) to those who meet the minimum requirements. Insurance measures risk. Premiums vary based on that risk. Premiums are then invested in supposedly safe assets. S.S. and Medicare work nothing like that.

    The U.S. government’s position is that they are not insurance program. There was a Supreme Court case in the 1960′s where the government’s lawyer claimed they are not entitlements.

    Paul has been making the point that S.S. and Medicare are not solvent. He has repeatedly said that those programs are threated by spending elsewhere. We can means test while providing for those who have been made dependent. But we have to allow a slow transition away from these programs. They are not “private property.” That is absurd. The young should be able to opt-out.

    By: Joe Peeler . January 25, 2012 . 3:17 pm |

    • Joe, just what is it that bugs people like you about Social Security which is probably the most successful and well-managed government program ever?

      Seriously, what is up? Please tell me. The supposed short-fall in Social Security is $1,000,000,000,000 over 20 years. That’s $1 Trillion over 20 years. The budget deficit currently is running at over $1 Trillion PER YEAR. The wars are costing $1 Trillion PER YEAR. The Fed has pixelled up and distributed at least $26 Trillion over the past 4 years.

      $1 Trillion over 20 years is….drum roll please….$50 Billion a year.

      Let’s see:
      –“U.S. Annual Air-Conditioning Cost in Iraq and Afghanistan – $20.2 billion”
      –“In fiscal 2011, Afghanistan is projected to cost $117 billion, Iraq $46 billion”
      –Dept of Homeland Security 2012 proposed budget: $43.2 billion
      –“proposed defense budget of $671 billion for fiscal 2012”
      –“Annual Federal Deficit $1 Trillion”

      Now, as Dr. Roberts has pointed out, $2 Trillion has been stolen from Social Security’s income over the past 20 years. Is there any reason that Social Security should not be ENTITLED to have paid back to them what was stolen? Most of it was stolen to pay for war, war, war. Would it be too much to ask that we squeeeeze just a tiny bit out of the $671 Billion war budget each year? Certainly the military can find that $50 Billion somewhere in there.

      The $1 Trillion dollars is only 3.8% of what the Fed has pixelated into existence. If they just pixelled in the $50 Billion it would represent 2/10th of 1% of what the Fed created. Not much chance of that having a big effect on inflation.

      The concept of insurance is spread of risk. There are thousands of insurance programs where the members pay a flat rate based on sales, units, locations etc regardless of the individual losses at one location. Those programs work because of the large number of members paying in compared to the payout.

      For the retirement component of the Social Security system all retirees are equal. If they made bad health choices and die early that’s a benefit, not a detriment, to the financial security of the system.

      Lots of us have monthly insurance deductions for our home, life and auto insurance. No one calls our future insurance payments “unfunded liabilities”. How would you like your insurance company asking you to give to them now your next 40 years insurance payments so that you are “fully-funded”?

      Pay-as-you-go insurance makes more sense: yes, money paid in goes up and down with the economy. BUT there is no investment risk at all. Income is relatively easy to adjust as it was in the 1980s by raising the tax…but, of course, there is no need for that now because Social Security is SOLVENT. Maybe the Federal Government is not solvent, maybe the Feds have stolen the money from Social Security—but Social Security is solvent.

      There isn’t a chance in hell that private and/or so-called free markets could run an insurance program like this as well as the government. Private insurance companies have horrendous built-in costs even with outsourcing. And, of course, Wall Street would commission and fee the money away until it was nothing.

      So, just what is wrong with a system that works? What’s wrong with a government program that works? What’s wrong with a program where the people who pay into it benefit? What’s wrong if that benefit comes later rather than now? That’s how insurance works: Everyone complains about their insurance premium payments…until they have a car wreck or a burglary!

      Just what is wrong with you that you think that people shouldn’t mutually agree to work together to take care of their own? Isn’t that the definition of a family, a community?

      Just what sticks in your throat about something that is good and works?
      Why do you have to just listen to propaganda and negativity about a program that is solvent and works?

      What is it? PLEASE tell me!

      By: Erik . January 26, 2012 . 9:27 am |

      • Just a minor observation: F.I.C.A. = Federal INSURANCE Contributions Act. But I guess the success of the insurance program and clearly stated legislative intent are irelevent?

        By: Dan . January 26, 2012 . 10:15 am |

      • Not much wrong with it except that YOUR congressmen stole/embezzelled all the money, from day one. left you an I.O.U. that is now approaching fully WORTHLESS status.

        dm

        By: Dennis Morrisseau . January 26, 2012 . 10:45 am |

      • A couple other observations:

        Insurance, especially of big ticket items like medical insurance and life insurance, is a natural monopoly. There are several reasons for this. First, the risk that the insurer will suffer losses as a result of total claims exceeding total premiums becomes smaller as the insured pool becomes larger. This is the major advantage a gambling house has over its customers. It has a larger pool of bets, so is less likely to go broke. Thus, there’s pressure for insurers to merge to decrease their total aggregate risk. Monopoly is, of course, the ultimate merger/acquisition.

        Second, there is little penalty for size or merger activity in the insurance industry. There is not much difference in the products that are sold or customer service. The way claims are serviced at one health insurer are pretty much the way they’re serviced at another, so buying out a smaller company need not result in a clash of corporate cultures or the need to reconcile diverse product lines. Interpersonal communications remain relatively simple, so management structures need not grow appreciably and can remain a fairly low component of cost or even decline on a percentage basis. Contrast that with the headaches that have often ensued when one high tech company acquires another. Often, the whole is worth less than the sum of its parts.

        That insurance is a natural monopoly is a major argument for a single payer medical insurance system. Even F. A. Hayek in “The Road to Serfdom” argued that natural monopolies should be either be tightly regulated by government or owned outright by government. While he leaned toward the former, he expressed doubt as to which solution was better.

        Another observation I would make is that retirement is always, always funded by intergenerational transfers. It really doesn’t matter if you have a pay as you go system as Social Security was before the 1980s, or if you have a “fully funded” system based on actuarial tables and investments sufficient to cover the total expected cost etc. The investments can not produce a return unless there are younger workers to mix the labor with the capital investment. So it’s not just Social Security that might have a problem with baby boom retirement and boomers’ need to consume more than they produce after retirement.

        Intergenerational funding of retirement is the oldest retirement system in the world. It may even predate homo sapiens. It is not a ponzi scheme, and there truly is no alternative.

        By: Bill Rood . January 27, 2012 . 12:46 am |

  12. You’re right about both true human quality & courage as well as forms of greedy socio (Psycho) pathic vice being present in most sections of the government AND the private sector at all levels… To that end in the immediate future whoever America thinks it has eventually elected the USA can not & will not survive as a Constitutional Democracy unless a 100% Congressional Amnesty for ANY act of treason over the last 5 decades or any associated crimes over the last 7 decades which led to political blackmail itself leading to treason is enacted with haste & with great hates reall soon… (sic) The only qualification should be the person seeking the Amnesty should tell 100% of the truth regarding exactly what happened & exactly what led to it…

    Obviously not everything should be or could be published will-nilly…
    Again obviously EVERY reason for NOT publishing should always be published…
    At the moment the future you’re all accepting is not one I-want people I-love to be in…

    By: ROBBY (Ben-Astor) (Nee-Eichmann) DANIEL... . January 25, 2012 . 7:10 pm |

  13. Damn I-need a new keyboard… Or a secretary…? (Tee-Hee) And I-forgot to tell you that the reason you need a 100% Congressional Amnesty is that without the willing sometimes secret support of some of the very same people who’ve committed acts of outright treason you haven’t got a snowball’s chance in Hades of successfully avoiding a progressive slide into outright total fascism & the writer who’s comment on hypocrisy above motivated me would probably agree at least in private…

    That’s a 100% fully legislated Congressional Amnesty for anyone telling the whole truth…
    Not easy but for the sake of sanity certainly far easier than the hypocritical crap done now…

    By: ROBBY (Ben-Astor) (Nee-Eichmann) DANIEL... . January 25, 2012 . 7:23 pm |

  14. that wouldlikely unelect them all–same as term limits would–so i don’t see it happeneing that way ever.
    —if you mean amnesty for congressmen too.
    it would get them clear of any blackmail leading to legal consequences but that would not satisfy the voters, whose wrath will be large if and when they ever learn the truth.

    i do think we should/must unelect them all….and can in 2012 btw. there is a way to get that done.

    By: Dennis Morrisseau . January 25, 2012 . 7:33 pm |

  15. Thanks, Mr. Rood, for the description of “vulture capitalism” that our establishment politicians and economists prefer to call “venture capitalism.”
    I would like to provide a couple of other descriptions of corporate raiding just to highlight the criminality of it all. (Good thing the SEC’s bosses blew up World Trade Center Building 7 where their reccords were located.)

    Of course, while vulture capitalism does destroy many companies and put many people into destitution and does rake in billions for a few elites. there are many other law breaking scams done every day by the Wall Strete corporate bankster gangster filth – inside tading, front running algorithymic trading where 100 mill is stolen by certain companies every trading day, misselling of securities, predatory lending, CDOs, derivatives, yadda yadda — you know all those laudable “conservative free trade principles of capitalism.)

    per Paul Drockton – MoneyTeachers.org articles

    “Once again, “Mitt the Pirate” follows the same old pattern used by the Robber Barons of old.

    1. Invest a minimum amount of cash ($5 million).

    2. Leverage the purchase by borrowing against company assets and future revenues.

    3. Massive job cuts to boost profits and swell the balance sheet before taking the company public.

    4. Pump and then dump the stock on investors that actually believe the ratings agencies that, in my opinion, are in Bain and Romney’s pocket.

    Here is the history of Ampad Stock:

    July 2, 1996: $15.13 – IPO Price

    Jan. 27, 1997: $26.00 – Peak

    Sep 16, 1997: $13.13 – Stock loses 42% of its value

    Nov 1, 1999: 35 cents – Ampad looks to sell assets to reduce debt

    Jan 14, 2000: 15 cents – Ampad forced into bankruptcy (Ibid)

    In other words, after Bain and Romney sold their stock holdings, making an estimated 45 million dollars, The stock plummets and, more than likely, Romney’s Hedge Funds make millions more by shorting the stock (buying Put Options) on the collapsing stock.

    The make millions when the stock goes up, and they make millions as the stock plummets. Hedge Funds can also purchase Call Options on a stock. This means that they can realize hundreds of millions, and even billions, trading on inside information. I am sure that the SEC is investigating.”

    ___________

    “The film (When Mitt Romney Comes to Town) also demonstrates how Romney bankrupted 4 relatively large companies for fun and personal profit. It seems that he really does enjoy firing people. Romney is accused of running “pump and dump” schemes whereby:

    1. Bain Capital takes over a company

    2. Romney drastically cuts payroll (fires employees) to raise company profits and starves production.

    3. Lehman rates the company as a “strong buy” and the stock surges.

    4. Romney heavily leverages the company with debt to sell his and Bain’s stock in the company at a ridiculous profit.

    5. Once Romney and Bain milk the company for all its worth, the stock price collapses.

    6. Since Romney ran a Hedge Fund, it is more than likely that he and Bain also made a fortune in Put Options on the company’s declining stock.

    In one example:

    “KB Toys was purchased and taken private in 2000 by the leveraged buyout firm of Bain Capital for $305 million, Bain announced the purchase on Dec. 8th, 2000. Only $18 million of the purchase money was cash, the rest was borrowed against the assets of the company. Sixteen months after the buyout, Bain Capital paid itself $85 million in dividends in early 2002. Two years later, due to… its enormous debt, on January 14, 2004, K•B Toys filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and closed 365 stores.

    K•B closed 156 stores on November 8, 2007. The Gordon Brothers Group handled the liquidation of these stores. On February 9, 2009, K•B closed the remaining stores following the second bankruptcy filing in four years. In addition, K•B Toys’ website was closed down.

    The K•B Toys brand and related intangible assets were sold by Streambank LLC to Toys R Us on September 4, 2009 for a reported $2.1 Million.” (Source)

    Romney and Bain cost America 16,000 jobs when they took down KB Toys. (Source)

    I will be playing and discussing the video on my radio show this afternoon. You can also watch it HERE

    Romney claims to have a net worth of $250,000,000. That figure does not include all of his offshore holdings. The man likely made billions off of the pain and suffering of his fellow Americans. Not a good image during the 2nd “Great Depression’s” election year.
    ”

    __________________

    and this description of slash and burn corporate raiding from a poster on MaxKeiser.com

    “ZOMBINOMICS 101: LBO Job Creation
    STEP 1: Find underpriced and under leveraged public companies that are generating tons of excess cashflow. Borrow tons of money to purchase them and take them “private.” Pay yourself tons of closing and management fees.
    STEP 2: Strip and sell off non-core assets. Maximize operating efficiencies (a euphemism for restructuring the workforce, i.e., you’re fired!) in order to service tons of new debt, pay yourself ongoing management fees and special dividends.
    STEP 3A: Wait for the right opportunity to exit via a strategic sale or IPO. Collect more fees. Fire some more employees for good measure.
    STEP 3B: Blow the company up and liquidate everything. Collect more fees. Fire all the employees.
    STEP 3C: Bankruptcy– pass the whole piece of junk your distressed asset team. Collect more fees. Somebody’s going to get fired.
    Job Creation: Hire more associates and analysts to look for more LBO deals.
    Q: Hey Banzai, private equity doesn’t work that way anymore, right? There’s just too much competition for too few deals.
    A: Perhaps, but this is how it worked when Swamney was the…LBO LOVE GURU!
    ”

    ________
    The City of London money interests took over the USA back in the days of Andrew Jackson – and that’s the truth.

    By: DachsieLady . January 26, 2012 . 6:25 am |

  16. Paul is also vulnerable on the issue of immigration. His ludicrous assertion that a border fence might be used “to keep us in” is just the sort of statement that gets Paul branded as a nutter. Many libertarians apparently share the open borders perspective with Paul, which is a staggering indictment of their entire movement. Certainly one of that movement’s icons and the namesake of Paul’s own son, Ayn Rand, would have heaped scorn upon such subversive views. How can you establish a state based on “natural rights” when everyone in the world has a natural right to violate its own territorial integrity? Absurd! Merchants have no country, said Jefferson, and neither, apparently, do their lackeys, the libertarians.

    By: G tryon . January 26, 2012 . 11:48 am |

    • A local public access TV show of Libertarians and libertarians years ago had one of their leaders snickering how intellectually weak it was for some to want to enforce our borders. He said some illegal immigrant may have some great innovative entrepreneurial idea and start a new business here and employ many people here and these immigrants are a wonderful economic stimulus for the “free markets.”

      By: DachsieLady . January 26, 2012 . 12:05 pm |

      • Not all libertarians believe in open borders. I don’t.

        I view our homeland the same way I view an individual home. We expect strangers to Ask Permission before they enter into our house, not just barge in and sneak around. Same at the national level.

        By: Dave Head . January 27, 2012 . 11:50 pm |

  17. Paul Roberts entire article can be negated with two sentences:

    Ron Paul : “We made a promise to our elderly citizens to provide medicare and social security, and we must honor that promise, so I have no plans to dismantle either program.”

    2 – The number of regulations increased by 60,000 pages from Cltinon’s last year (2000) to the end of Bush’s time in office (January 2009), so to say the market was deregulated is an error because there were MORE regulations not less.

    By: Dave Head . January 27, 2012 . 11:47 pm |

  18. Sweet, …thanks very much Paul

    By: Grateful Child . January 31, 2012 . 12:08 pm |

  19. The American political landscape has deteriorated in the past 5-6 years massivly mostly from rhetoric and partisanship. We push other countries to be like ours, but we all know, our system is quite broken. Until we can start being civil and respect eachother, then maybe once, democracy will finally be as good as we say it is.

    By: Numbers . February 27, 2012 . 7:58 am |

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