The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Debt Slavery Is THE Issue

Posted on | August 6, 2010 | 25 Comments

by Smitty (via Uncoverage)

Uncoverage posts a startling article by ChuckDeVore.com that shows:

According to Moody’s, the average state per capita debt of the 28 Obama states is $1,728 while the average debt in the 22 McCain states is less than half, at $749. This information alone says a lot about voters and their attitude towards government and debt. Voters with a propensity to elect politicians who burden future generations who can’t yet vote with huge debts voted for Obama while fiscally responsible voters generally voted for McCain.

Fiscal security is the only thing more important than border security. Social issues? What are they but distractors?

Hot Air comes at this point from the CA Prop 8 vantage, quoting a CA Republican Party chair:

“This election needs to revolve around five issues: taxes, spending, the economy, jobs and debt,” said Ron Nehring, chairman of the California Republican Party. “That doesn’t mean that other issues aren’t important — they are important — but the first issue on the minds of people is the economy.”

Things are so bad, that even the Queen of Cluelessness is starting to catch on that there may be some trouble a-brewin’:

The country I was born into was a country that had existed steadily, for almost two centuries, as a nation in which everyone thought—wherever they were from, whatever their circumstances—that their children would have better lives than they did. That was what kept people pulling their boots on in the morning after the first weary pause: My kids will have it better. They’ll be richer or more educated, they’ll have a better job or a better house, they’ll take a step up in terms of rank, class or status. America always claimed to be, and meant to be, a nation that made little of class. But America is human. “The richest family in town,” they said, admiringly. Read Booth Tarkington on turn-of-the-last-century Indiana. It’s all about trying to rise.

Parents now fear something has stopped. They think they lived through the great abundance, a time of historic growth in wealth and material enjoyment. They got it, and they enjoyed it, and their kids did, too: a lot of toys in that age, a lot of Xboxes and iPhones. (Who is the most self-punishing person in America right now? The person who didn’t do well during the abundance.) But they look around, follow the political stories and debates, and deep down they think their children will live in a more limited country, that jobs won’t be made at a great enough pace, that taxes—too many people in the cart, not enough pulling it—will dishearten them, that the effects of 30 years of a low, sad culture will leave the whole country messed up. And then there is the world: nuts with nukes, etc.

Keep thinking, Peggy–you may beat Paul Krugman (h/t Insty) in the race to enlightenment. Past the finish line sit the Founding Fathers, who, in their pre-Industrial Revolution wisdom, saw that liberty was the goal.

Here is a great straight-to-YouTube Trifecta:

This Trifecta episode is a great tactical point, but, for all that, we have to understand that this November is a mere down-payment. Stand by. The new blood will get sworn into office, and discover just How Completely Frobnicated the whole situation is. If the leadership feels We The People have their back, there may, potentially, be some whacking of the Federal hydra in the 112th Congress. Historically, the professionals get accepted into the Ruling Class, and get their Sith Lord makeover.

If we merely light up a maduro and congratulate ourselves on the successful group blogger-bation, by 2012, the Tea Party energy will be the political equivalent of Springsteen’s Glory Days, and the Lindsey Graham and John McCain clones will continue to make patriotic noises while treating the Constitution with the affection afforded a urinal cake.

Remember, this hairball has been a century in the making, and will, at bare minimum, require a decade of your best effort just to get that hydra chopped down to something reasonably un-lethal. Incumbency is the enemy. We The People can either rule, or enjoy slavery.

Right on time, courtesy of the excellent No Sheeples Here, we have I Want Your Money:

Set against the backdrop of today’s headline – 67% of Americans don’t approve of Obama’s economic policies, the film takes a provocative look at our deeply depressed economy using the words and actions of Presidents Reagan and Obama and shows the marked contrast between Reaganomics and Obamanomics. The film contrasts two views of the role that the federal government should play in our daily lives using the words and actions of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. Two versions of the American dream now stand in sharp contrast. One views the money you earned as yours and best allocated by you; the other believes that the elite in Washington know how to best allocate your wealth. One champions the traditional American dream, which has played out millions of times through generations of Americans, of improving one’s lot in life and even daring to dream and build big. The other holds that there is no end to the “good” the government can do by taking and spending other peoples’ money in an ever-burgeoning list of programs. The documentary film I Want Your Money exposes the high cost in lost freedom and in lost opportunity to support a Leviathan-like bureaucratic state.

This could be good. I hope the film exposes the fact that the Federal Reserve is close to, if not the root of, all this evil. While it may be a stretch to End the Fed outright, and perhaps savvy politics for the GOP to be keeping a low profile about Paul Ryan, the GOP needs to quit being coy and step up to the Federalist plate now, now, now.

Category: Weimar America

Comments

25 Responses to “Debt Slavery Is THE Issue”

  1. Joe
    August 7th, 2010 @ 1:56 am

    Those state numbers are chump change compared to the federal debt per capita.

  2. Joe
    August 6th, 2010 @ 9:56 pm

    Those state numbers are chump change compared to the federal debt per capita.

  3. smitty
    August 7th, 2010 @ 1:58 am

    @joe,
    Fair enough, but the point isn’t so much the magnitude as the distribution.

  4. smitty
    August 6th, 2010 @ 9:58 pm

    @joe,
    Fair enough, but the point isn’t so much the magnitude as the distribution.

  5. Joe
    August 7th, 2010 @ 2:07 am

    good point.

  6. Joe
    August 6th, 2010 @ 10:07 pm

    good point.

  7. Adobe Walls
    August 7th, 2010 @ 2:37 am

    My biggest fear is that most Americans will never quite grasp how dangerously left we’ve let our government drift.

  8. Adobe Walls
    August 6th, 2010 @ 10:37 pm

    My biggest fear is that most Americans will never quite grasp how dangerously left we’ve let our government drift.

  9. Estragon
    August 7th, 2010 @ 5:10 am

    If you take away the states Obama won that Bush won in 2004 – like Indiana, Virginia, and North Carolina – the debt difference is even more stark.

    ~~~~~~~

    How the Fed is responsible for Congress and the President or the several states running up debt is unclear.

    How it might be replaced is another question. The reason, of course, for the Fed’s quasi-independence in the first place is to try to remove the power over the money supply as far from the political institutions as possible in recognition of the havoc self-serving politicians would certainly wreak upon the currency.

    So, then, the oft-bellowed cry of “Make Congress do their job” is a call to economic suicide in very short order. Or if some other quasi-independent agency were to replace it, however reformed the rules and structure might be, it raises the question why not just reform the Fed directly instead of playing some semantic game?

    Those who declare the Fed and/or its functions “unconstitutional” are simply ignorant, or else do not really support the Constitution (no matter how many times they pat themselves on the back as being “true Constitutionalists”). For in the specified powers are included the sole power to judge Constitutional disputes, reserved to SCOTUS.

    Now, SCOTUS has repeatedly ruled on this matter over the nearly a century since the FRB was formed. The constitutionality of the FR system has been repeatedly upheld to the point where most such challenges are dismissed at the District level under the controlling authority, and the Court has pointedly refused to consider the delegation of authority as “unconstitutional.”

    So HOW can someone claim to “support the Constitution” when they deny the authority of the very body granted the power to decide what it means? These people are not “constitutionalists” at all – they only want THEIR OWN interpretations to rule, irrespective of the rule of law and the supremacy of the Constitution. They are despots, totalitarians, pretenders, but not patriots.

  10. Estragon
    August 7th, 2010 @ 1:10 am

    If you take away the states Obama won that Bush won in 2004 – like Indiana, Virginia, and North Carolina – the debt difference is even more stark.

    ~~~~~~~

    How the Fed is responsible for Congress and the President or the several states running up debt is unclear.

    How it might be replaced is another question. The reason, of course, for the Fed’s quasi-independence in the first place is to try to remove the power over the money supply as far from the political institutions as possible in recognition of the havoc self-serving politicians would certainly wreak upon the currency.

    So, then, the oft-bellowed cry of “Make Congress do their job” is a call to economic suicide in very short order. Or if some other quasi-independent agency were to replace it, however reformed the rules and structure might be, it raises the question why not just reform the Fed directly instead of playing some semantic game?

    Those who declare the Fed and/or its functions “unconstitutional” are simply ignorant, or else do not really support the Constitution (no matter how many times they pat themselves on the back as being “true Constitutionalists”). For in the specified powers are included the sole power to judge Constitutional disputes, reserved to SCOTUS.

    Now, SCOTUS has repeatedly ruled on this matter over the nearly a century since the FRB was formed. The constitutionality of the FR system has been repeatedly upheld to the point where most such challenges are dismissed at the District level under the controlling authority, and the Court has pointedly refused to consider the delegation of authority as “unconstitutional.”

    So HOW can someone claim to “support the Constitution” when they deny the authority of the very body granted the power to decide what it means? These people are not “constitutionalists” at all – they only want THEIR OWN interpretations to rule, irrespective of the rule of law and the supremacy of the Constitution. They are despots, totalitarians, pretenders, but not patriots.

  11. Adobe Walls
    August 7th, 2010 @ 6:23 am

    The notion that it’s unpatriotic to take issue with the criminal misinterpretation of the constitution is itself unpatriotic. As for the SCOTUS and the deification thereof I’ve no more reverence for it than for the congress. The rational for starting completely from scratch with our Central Bank is the same as for abolishing the EPA etc. Most of our Federal Depts. and Agencies have some at least theoretical value that would be worthy of reconstituting. The problem is that the entire federal system is so thoroughly infested with Bolsheviks that reform is impossible. It will be necessary to begin again from scratch.

  12. Adobe Walls
    August 7th, 2010 @ 2:23 am

    The notion that it’s unpatriotic to take issue with the criminal misinterpretation of the constitution is itself unpatriotic. As for the SCOTUS and the deification thereof I’ve no more reverence for it than for the congress. The rational for starting completely from scratch with our Central Bank is the same as for abolishing the EPA etc. Most of our Federal Depts. and Agencies have some at least theoretical value that would be worthy of reconstituting. The problem is that the entire federal system is so thoroughly infested with Bolsheviks that reform is impossible. It will be necessary to begin again from scratch.

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  14. Rae
    August 7th, 2010 @ 7:53 pm

    Estragon ? central planning and fiat funny money, because the Federal Reserve Act was passed into law by a Progressive CONgress, signed into law by the leader of the glorious Progressive Era, Woodrow Wilson, and has been repeatedly upheld by the Imperial Judiciary.

    Money, Banking and the Federal Reserve
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYZM58dulPE

    These people are not “constitutionalists” at all – they only want THEIR OWN interpretations to rule, irrespective of the rule of law and the supremacy of the Constitution. They are despots, totalitarians, pretenders, but not patriots.

    Now that is funny! And the Federal Reserve is federal and has reserves, and debt is wealth, war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.

    “Paper is poverty… It is not money, but the ghost of money.”
    — Thomas Jefferson

    And for the Christians among us:

    “Dishonest scales are an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is His delight.”
    — Proverbs 11:1

    God created the gold standard, and He is the original hard money advocate.

    Ron Paul: Doing God’s work.

    Not that (so-called) Christians care about His laws anymore. They’ve abandoned honest money, ignore His usury laws and His warnings about debt, long ago surrendered marriage and charity to the filthy state, and have jettisoned Just War and now embraced preemptive, perpetual war and torture.

  15. Rae
    August 7th, 2010 @ 3:53 pm

    Estragon ? central planning and fiat funny money, because the Federal Reserve Act was passed into law by a Progressive CONgress, signed into law by the leader of the glorious Progressive Era, Woodrow Wilson, and has been repeatedly upheld by the Imperial Judiciary.

    Money, Banking and the Federal Reserve
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYZM58dulPE

    These people are not “constitutionalists” at all – they only want THEIR OWN interpretations to rule, irrespective of the rule of law and the supremacy of the Constitution. They are despots, totalitarians, pretenders, but not patriots.

    Now that is funny! And the Federal Reserve is federal and has reserves, and debt is wealth, war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.

    “Paper is poverty… It is not money, but the ghost of money.”
    — Thomas Jefferson

    And for the Christians among us:

    “Dishonest scales are an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is His delight.”
    — Proverbs 11:1

    God created the gold standard, and He is the original hard money advocate.

    Ron Paul: Doing God’s work.

    Not that (so-called) Christians care about His laws anymore. They’ve abandoned honest money, ignore His usury laws and His warnings about debt, long ago surrendered marriage and charity to the filthy state, and have jettisoned Just War and now embraced preemptive, perpetual war and torture.

  16. Rae
    August 7th, 2010 @ 7:55 pm

    Estragon ?…

    That “?” should have been a heart symbol.

  17. Rae
    August 7th, 2010 @ 3:55 pm

    Estragon ?…

    That “?” should have been a heart symbol.

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  20. DutchPatriot
    August 9th, 2010 @ 12:10 pm

    Government should create money without borrowing, see “The Secret of Oz”.

  21. DutchPatriot
    August 9th, 2010 @ 8:10 am

    Government should create money without borrowing, see “The Secret of Oz”.

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  23. Kojocaro
    August 11th, 2010 @ 2:45 pm

    And when the rubes who voted for him into office see the price of bread raise to $18737 they will rue voting for him i agree with rae BTW

  24. Kojocaro
    August 11th, 2010 @ 10:45 am

    And when the rubes who voted for him into office see the price of bread raise to $18737 they will rue voting for him i agree with rae BTW

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