Mitt Romney: In Your Heart, You Know He’s A Loser by Justin Raimondo

Are the Republicans deliberately throwing the presidential election?

Before taking that historical note too far, however, I  have to admit the idea of the Republican high mucka-mucks getting together and deciding it would be better for them to throw the election to Obama by putting up a loser like Romney does seem a bit far-fetched. Perhaps  they’ve convinced themselves, on one level, that Romney can actually win, while – on quite another level – they don’t believe it for a minute. People usually have no trouble holding mutually exclusive beliefs in other areas, and politics is certainly no exception.

In your heart, you know he’s a loser – now there’s a campaign slogan tailor-made for the politics of Bizarro World. Which is all the more reason to believe there’s some truth to it.

If voters are in the mood to punish the Democrats somehow, and if they can’t in good conscience do it on the presidential level, then isn’t it more likely they’ll take it out on the rest of the ticket? If Republicans can retain control of the House, that may be enough to keep them from regretting their loss at the top of the ticket. Another wave of victories on the state and local level will perhaps be enough to satiate them, at least for the moment, until they get another crack at the White House. Then they can sit back and blame the President for everything, as the crisis unfolds, while cat-calling from the sidelines: a perfect set-up for career politicians who have no principles, no sense of duty to the country, and no compunctions about defrauding their supporters. With Congress in their hot little hands, they can obstruct the President’s domestic agenda and heckle him into getting more aggressive on the overseas front – a perfect vantage point from which to observe the rapidly accelerating decline of the American empire.

So What Inspired You To Write Your Book? by Charles Goyette on Red and Blue and Broke All Over.

So What Inspired Charles Goyette To Write His Book "Red and Blue and Broke All Over"?

The book is really about how freedom creates prosperity. It’s something so axiomatic that it should be among the Truths that Americans hold to be Self-Evident: Freedom creates Prosperity. 

Restoring the American Dream requires more than just singing about the "land of the free" at baseball games. It requires an understanding of freedom. The book lays out in clear terms, in terms that you can even use to explain it to your brother-in-law, why freedom works. In doing so, it helps answer these questions:

• Why does government interference in the economy makes us poorer?

• Why does the government’s central economic planning fail?

• Why is the government’s constant price meddling a disaster?

• Why is the government’s constant price meddling a disaster?

• How are the governing classes and the crony capitalists able to get away with robbing us to enrich themselves?

• What is the dollar endgame and what can we do about it?

Once you learn why freedom creates prosperity and why the state creates poverty, it becomes clear that only a renewed appreciation for freedom can lead us out. No new governmental initiative, charismatic candidate, bipartisan commission, or mechanical solution can help. 

At the time of our founding, the people were aflame in their love for liberty. They talked about it in their taverns, town squares and churches. Only if we reignite that flame can we be rid of politicians’ endless mandates, their central economic planning, and their wealth destroying crony capitalism, bailout schemes, and monetary deceit. 

I wrote the book to make clear that it is not the choice between the Red party and the Blue party that matters…It is the choice between statism and Freedom.It is the choice between poverty and prosperity.If we chose Freedom, we can restore the American Dream.We can have a future of opportunity, peace, and prosperity.If we choose Freedom.

What Do We Owe the State? by Joe Sobran

Joe Sobran on Hans Hoppe's Democracy, the God That Failed.

A surprising number of citizens of this democracy have lost faith in the state, democratic or otherwise.

It’s amazing how seldom we ask the most basic questions. What is a state, anyway? Where does it get its authority? Might we be better off without it?

What is a state? It is the ruling body in a territory, which claims a monopoly of the legal right to command obedience. It may demand anything – our earnings, our services, our lives. Once the right to command is conceded, there are no limits on its power.

Many people think a state is a natural necessity of social life. They can hardly conceive of society without the state.

This would be plausible if the state confined itself to enforcing natural moral obligations – that is, if it protected us from robbery, murder, and the like, otherwise leaving us alone. But what if the state itself robs and murders, claiming the authority to do so?

But the state pretends that all its demands, however arbitrary, are moral obligations, even though those demands rest on force. If it were confined to demanding only what decent people do anyway – refraining from murder, robbery, et cetera – it might be bearable. But it never stops with reasonable moral demands; at a minimum, even the most “humane” and “democratic” states use the taxing power to extort staggering amounts of money from their subjects. The predatory tendency of the state is inherent and expansive, and nobody has found a way to control it. No control can long withstand the monopolistic “right” to demand obedience in every area of human activity the state may choose to invade. Systematized force – which is all the state really is – follows its own logic.

How Quickly Can Price Inflation Explode to the Upside? by Robert Wenzel

The thing about inflation is that it comes out of nowhere and hits you.   

Monetary policy is like sailing. You're gliding along, passing the peninsula, and you come about. Nothing. Then the wind fills the sail so fast it knocks you into the sea. Right now, the U.S. is a sailboat that has just made open water, and has already come about. That wind is coming. The sailor just doesn't know it.

Biography: Niccolo Machiavelli

Who was he? Niccolo Machiavelli was an Italian philosopher, writer, humanist and historian who lived in Florence during the Renaissance. He is best known as one of the founders of modern political science.

Sociopaths R Us

Doug Casey on the US government.

Friedrich Hayek on our "Dictatorship of the Proletariat"

Simon Black of Sovereign Man writes and believes that...

One of the greatest thinkers of all time was Austrian economic Friedrich Hayek, and his work The Road to Serfdom is an absolute must-read. Hayek's writings are incredibly powerful in these times. In light of the countless recent examples of governments changing the rules whenever/wherever it suits them (from the Troika nonsense in Europe to the Fraudclosure settlement in the US), I'd like to share a few key passages with you today. On the sanctity of the Rule of Law in a free society, Hayek says: "Nothing distinguishes more clearly conditions in a free country from those in a country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former of the great principles known as the Rule of Law." "[U]nder the Rule of Law the government is prevented from stultifying individual efforts by ad hoc action. Within the known rules of the game the individual is free to pursue his personal ends and desires, certain that the powers of government will not be used to deliberately frustrate his efforts." "The important question is whether the individual can foresee the action of the state [based on the government following its own rules] and make use of this knowledge as a datum in forming his own plans..." On the nature of legislative or judicial favoritism, Hayek says: "It is the Rule of Law... the absence of legal privileges [or favoritism] of particular people designated by authority, which safeguards that equality before the law which is the opposite of arbitrary government." "[A]ny policy aiming directly at a substantive ideal of distributive justice must lead to the destruction of the Rule of Law." There is a "belief that, so long as all actions of the state are duly authorized by legislation, the Rule of Law will be preserved... [But just because] someone has full legal authority to act in the way he does gives no answer to the question whether the law gives him power to act arbitrarily." "It may well be that Hitler has obtained unlimited powers in a strictly constitutional manner and that whatever he does is therefore legal in the juridical sense. But who would suggest for that reason that the Rule of Law still prevails in Germany?" "The Rule of Law thus implies limits to the scope of legislation: it restricts it to the kind of general rules known as formal law and excludes legislation either directly aimed at particular people or at enabling anybody to use the coercive power of the state for the purpose of such discrimination." On the consequences of the decline in the Rule of Law in a free society, Hayek says: "By giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can be made legal; and in this way a democracy may set up the most complete despotism imaginable." "It is important to point out once more in this connection that this process of the decline of the Rule of Law had been going on steadily in Germany for some time before Hitler came into power and that a policy well advanced toward totalitarian planning had already done a great deal of the work with Hitler completed." We unfortunately live in an era where the Rule of Law means nothing; where contracts are irrelevant and people can no longer make plans based on rules and agreements; where the government exists above the law; where the benefits of one group are quickly sacrificed for the benefit of another. Writing during World War II during the fight against Nazi Germany, Hayek describes this system as a 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. Any thinking, rational person should look around at the world today and see: - Hundreds of thousands of mortgage contracts abrogated by the federal government;- Suspension of gun rights by several local governments;- The continued criminalization of protest and free assembly;- Increased surveillance and police state tactics;- Authorization of military force and detention against the citizens;- Seizing and/or voiding pension systems into which workers have paid lifelong contributions;- Rejection of long-standing senior debt positions in favor of labor unions;- Executive and police agencies ruling by regulation and policy, not by legislative process; It's hard to argue that Hayek's vision hasn't come true.