"If he hits that ball out, that probably would've killed us." —- Aubrey Huff on Braves C Brian McCann's at-bat in the ninth. With a runner aboard, a home run would have tied the game after the Giants took a 7-1 lead into the ninth.
treach·er·ousAdjective/ˈtreCHərəs/
1. Guilty of or involving betrayal or deception.
SECTION 19. And be it further enacted, That if any of the gold or silver coins which shall be struck or coined at the said mint shall be debased or made worse as to the proportion of fine gold or fine silver therein contained, or shall be of less weight or value than the same ought to be pursuant to the directions of this act, through the default or with the connivance of any of the officers or persons who shall be employed at the said mint, for the purpose of profit or gain, or otherwise with a fraudulent intent, * * * every such officer or person who shall be guilty of any * * * of the said offenses, shall be deemed guilty of felony, and shall suffer death.
"I have two great enemies," Lincoln once said, "the southern army in front of me and the financial institutions in the rear. Of the two, the one in the rear is the greatest enemy." --(quoted from This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound, by Eustace Mullins)
Politicians did not get much time to pat themselves on the back for supposedly rescuing the economy with the debt limit deal last week. The ink was barely dry when Standard & Poor's downgraded the US debt ratings anyway, roiling world financial markets. Anyone who has taken an honest look at the government's fiscal situation, taken into account how Washington works and the direction it is going would have a very difficult time arguing with S&P's decision, although a strong case can be made that this was too incremental a downgrade and that it took far too long for S&P to admit the obvious.
Nonetheless, the administration nitpicked over a $2 trillion "mistake." S&P rejoined with the fact that $2 trillion here or there hardly makes a difference in the time frame under discussion. That, if nothing else, should tell you the magnitude of the problem. $2 trillion has become a drop in the bucket.
S&P cited Congress's inability to act like grownups and make necessary, meaningful cuts, which is true. I must take issue however, with their suggestion that tax increases are part of the answer. Taking capital out of the private sector, where it can create real value in the form of new jobs and products, and instead giving it to Washington to waste and squander is not the solution. Tax increases may seem penny-wise to some, but in reality they would be very pound-foolish. The government currently takes in $2.2 trillion in taxes per year, which is far too much already. It spends $3.7 trillion, which is ridiculous and criminal. The problem is runaway government spending, not the American people having too much money.
And yet we can't even have a serious discussion about bringing our troops home and ending our expensive occupations around the world – things the president used to claim to favor!
Even without this downgrade, major investors are waking up to what lies down the road for the United States in fiscal terms. China is showing more signs of losing its taste for our debt. Others are following suit. What we are about to see is the end of the dollar as the reserve currency of the world. When that happens, we will no longer be in a position to have pretend debates about things we probably should spend a little bit less on – we will be forced to implement serious spending cuts as our sources of credit dry up. Of course, we can try to postpone the day of reckoning by printing more money but the resulting "inflation tax" will be far worse than a reduction in government benefits.
Hyperinflation devastates the middle class. After Weimar Germany hyper-inflated their currency in the 1920s, an entire life savings couldn't buy a postage stamp. The bank wouldn't even send customers a check for all the money they had saved their whole lives. It wasn't worth the paper it was printed on or the stamp to send it. This is what is meant when it is said that the middle class gets wiped out. The pieces for this to happen here are all falling into place, and have been since 1971. The only way to avoid that sort of chaos now is for Congress to immediately reduce federal spending and take the Constitution seriously again. The welfare/warfare state will end either way, but winding it down responsibly is a far better way to do it.
'Hell yeah, I recruited a lot of kids for Miami,' Shapiro told Yahoo! Sports. 'With access to the clubs, access to the strip joints. My house. My boat. We're talking about high school football players. Not anybody can just get into the clubs or strip joints. Who is going to pay for it and make it happen? That was me.'
"The Giants put two players on the disabled list before the game, then lost starting pitcher Jonathan Sanchez(notes) to a sprained ankle in the third. Four relievers combined to allow only six hits and one earned run in eight innings."
The Giants, mired in a skid that knocked them out of first place in the NL West, began the day putting outfielder Carlos Beltran(notes) and reliever Sergio Romo(notes) on the 15-day disabled list. Three other players were nursing less-serious ailments that kept them out of the lineup.
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| Indecision 2012 - Corn Polled Edition - Ron Paul & the Top Tier | ||||
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"Is this just not the Giants' year?
They lost 5-4 in Atlanta on Monday when Brian Wilson gave up three ninth-inning runs, capped by Freddie Freeman's game-ending two-run single, but they've got more worries than that.
Manager Bruce Bochy hinted that both Carlos Beltran and Sergio Romo could be added to the disabled list Tuesday, and Pablo Sandoval's foot injury -- sustained in Monday's game -- could make it even more imperative that Beltran go on the DL.
Beltran missed his seventh straight game, and Bochy said it wasn't a major problem playing one man short.
But two men? That's a problem.
So, Bruce, any temptation to think this just isn't the Giants' year?
'I refuse to,' he said. 'I better not hear any players say that, whether it's personally or as a club. We're in the thick of things. There's a lot of baseball left. This is a tough loss, sure. We're in August. There's lot of time to make this up.'
Bochy said Sandoval could miss a couple of days."
"In the short term, the closing of the gold window precipitated what Lewis Lehrman, writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, describes as “a decade of one of the worst inflations of American history and the most stagnant economy since the Great Depression.” The situation was righted by the combination of President Reagan’s supply-side fiscal policies and the tight money regime of Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve. Yet there was no permanent repair of the world monetary system, no restoration of the legal checks of government over-reach.
The absence of any legal connection between the dollar and gold permitted the combination of fiscal and monetary over-reach that has, today, delivered us a dollar with a value of barely more than a 1,800th of an ounce of gold, less than a percent of the value of the constitutional dollar. It is noteworthy that the top contenders for the Republican nomination for president, Michele Bachmann, has said she’s prepared to look at a gold standard and that the close runner up, Ron Paul, has made sound money his central issue throughout his entire long career in the Congress."
Nixon goes on the air and he interrupts Bonanza, again it would be like the President coming on with a special announcement nobody was prepared for in the middle of American Idol, he’s (Nixon is) sitting at his desk and there is an American flag in the background and he says three things:
He said first of all I am imposing national price controls because there was an inflation problem in the United States at the time. The second thing he said was I am putting a 10% surtax of imports on all imported goods coming into the United States. Then about 10 minutes into the speech, very much en passant, he said, ‘Oh by the way we are suspending the convertibility of dollars into gold’ and he immediately went into this Nixonian rant about speculators.
He acted like the wounded party, he said, ‘I refuse to let the American dollar be held hostage by speculators and we are going to make sure these speculators never do our economy harm. So we are going to make it impossible for the speculators to profit by shutting the gold window’. He made it sound like he was doing everyone a big favor.
So it was very interesting, there were three earth-shaking announcements. Can you imagine any one of those three things going on today? President Obama or any President saying he was going to impose nationwide price controls, or all Chinese goods would have a 10% surcharge. It would be cataclysmic, yet Nixon did both of those things. Plus (Nixon) took us off the gold standard, so it was quite a dramatic speech.
In a strange way he did us all a favor by making sure we (the US) held on to the gold. So I do think the United States is in a position to revalue the currency using gold to that $7,000 level. That will obviously be a huge benefit to all of the people who invested in gold because they are going to be along for the ride, along with the United States when that gold goes to $7,000.”
“Guys get carried away,” McKeon said. “Vogel … Volkswagen … whatever his name is—he’s lucky he didn’t have to face Drysdale or Gibson or one of those guys. You would get a shave and a haircut real quick.”
Even if you're a confirmed libertarian, you'll enjoy this simple yet attractive and intelligent introduction to libertarian ideas. Tell your non-libertarian friends about it! It is currently available in 20 languages. To view. . .
In this, the first of the "ISIL Solutions" series, we examine the "Swiss model" of government – a highly-decentralized system which Swiss economist Robert Nef more accurately describes as an "ongoing experiment" than a "model."
The concepts of devolution of power, local autonomy, and participatory democracy have produced the world's most peaceful and prosperous country. Of course, Switzerland, with its compulsory military service, state controlled monetary system, railroad and telephone services, and taxation, is not a pure libertarian society – but for those interested in reining in out-of-control governments in other parts of the world, there are large parts of the Swiss cantonal system that are worthy of emulation.
The word "democracy" is derived from the Greek words for people (demos) and power (kratos). Inherent in the concept is the idea that ordinary people should keep control of the decisions that effect their lives. In an ideal democracy, the power of those who govern is limited by safeguards that ensure that citizens can prevent their elected leaders from abusing their powers.
The key to Swiss success is not to be found in natural resources (which are in extremely short supply); nor does it lie in the temperament of its 6.4 million people, who are essentially no different from the Germans, Italians and French in the remainder of Europe. It lies rather in Switzerland's political institutions, which ensure that ordinary citizens are involved in political decision-making, and that no one interest group is able to benefit unduly at the expense of another.
– Advantages Of Decentralization –
Embraces Diversity. One important reason for this de-centralization of power in Switzerland is that, unlike most European countries, Switzerland is made up of several different major ethnic groups – Germans, French, Italians, and Rhaeto-Romansch. Over the centuries, whenever conflicts have arisen between these language groups, and between Catholics and Protestants, the Swiss have resolved the conflict by allowing each of the warring groups to govern themselves. Thus single cantons have divided into half-cantons, new cantons have been formed and border communes have opted to leave one canton to join another. In this way the Swiss have developed a system which permits people of different languages, cultures, religions and traditions to live together in peace and harmony. This makes the Swiss system particularly well suited to ethnically-divided countries.
Maximizes Competition Among Policies. Because so many decisions are made at the local level, the Swiss are closely involved with the laws and regulations which affect their lives – and because each canton is different, they are also able to see for themselves which policies work best. For example, one canton might have high taxes and expensive welfare programs, while another might opt for low taxes and private charity. Each Swiss citizen can then decide which policy suits him best and "vote with his feet" by moving to the canton which he finds the most attractive. The result is that good policies tend to drive out bad.
– Advantages Of Decentralization –
Embraces Diversity. One important reason for this de-centralization of power in Switzerland is that, unlike most European countries, Switzerland is made up of several different major ethnic groups – Germans, French, Italians, and Rhaeto-Romansch. Over the centuries, whenever conflicts have arisen between these language groups, and between Catholics and Protestants, the Swiss have resolved the conflict by allowing each of the warring groups to govern themselves. Thus single cantons have divided into half-cantons, new cantons have been formed and border communes have opted to leave one canton to join another. In this way the Swiss have developed a system which permits people of different languages, cultures, religions and traditions to live together in peace and harmony. This makes the Swiss system particularly well suited to ethnically-divided countries.
Maximizes Competition Among Policies. Because so many decisions are made at the local level, the Swiss are closely involved with the laws and regulations which affect their lives – and because each canton is different, they are also able to see for themselves which policies work best. For example, one canton might have high taxes and expensive welfare programs, while another might opt for low taxes and private charity. Each Swiss citizen can then decide which policy suits him best and "vote with his feet" by moving to the canton which he finds the most attractive. The result is that good policies tend to drive out bad.
“Government has NOT grown monstrous by taking our rights, but has grown monstrous by assuming our responsibilities. The politicians didn’t say, ‘Vote for me, I will take away your rights.’ They said, ‘Vote for me, I will take away your responsibilities. I will raise and teach your kids. I will save for your retirement. I will be charitable on your behalf.’ Personal responsibility is being liable, accountable, to the consequences of our actions. Consequences teach us. Wisdom and virtue reward us. Recklessness and vice punish us. At gain, we are moral. At peril, we are immoral. Democracy allowed the majority to cheat the natural law of ’cause and effect’, by giving our personal responsibilities to the government, disconnecting our actions from their consequences. Government responsibility has taken from the productive to reward bad behavior and laziness, which over time has made us passive, weak, dependent, and finally obedient because we think we have NO choice.” – Michael Cloud, Massachusetts Libertarian Activist"----
“The danger to America is not Barack Obama, but a citizenry capable of entrusting an inexperienced man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America . Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Barack Obama. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president.” -Anonymous"
