So Mubarak has finally resigned.

In a somber one-minute announcement on state television, Vice President Omar Suleiman said Mubarak had resigned and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces will run the affairs of the country.

I have to ask, what goddamn "affairs" need to be "run" by government? What "affairs" are so special that only government can be relied on to "run" them?

This ridiculous concept needs to be smashed.

Paper bugs are in denial

Some people just refuse to accept reality.

Why is the price of gold increasing? “Because everyone is buying it,” some will say. Okay, but that still begs the question.

Why are they buying it? “Um, um, dunno. It must be a bubble, people are entering into the market under speculative intentions.” First of all, this mainstream regurgitation completely ignores the fundamental facts surrounding metal stocks. They are very undervalued. Nothing about the gold surge says “bubble.” The price of gold will inevitably be subject to corrections in the next ten-plus years of this gold bull market. Smart savers will see these corrections not as a time to run scared, but as an indication to buy more of the stuff at a discount.

Paper bugs are simply denying what gold bugs have known all along.

Gold is real money. It is rare, it is valuable in and of itself, it is easily divisible and it has been the most constant store of value throughout all of human economic history.

What fiat currency can claim to have lasted more than a mere few decades, let alone for thousands of years? Fiat currencies are a joke. Paper bugs refuse to admit what a joke they are. They think fiat currencies are “the next best thing,” the inevitable result of civilization advancement. “Modern economies can only function on a fiat currency of paper money,” they regurgitate. What a laugh. Do they offer any economic justification for this? Or do they just assume that you will take those phony words as gospel just as they have?

How real money works

Fiat currency is paper. Paper is paper. What kind of value is that? Paper is made from trees in abundance with no regard to the price level of the currency being produced. See, with a real money, the more valuable it becomes the more incentive there is to produce it. That leads to increased production, and an increase in supply. Econ 101 students can surely understand what an increase in supply leads to. That’s right! Increased supply leads to a decrease in price. This decrease in price leads to a decrease in production, and on and on.

This whole process establishes an equilibrium between money production and its value. Hence, the value of gold remains constant.

If you saved an ounce of gold in the year 1750 then it will be just as valuable in 1800–and 2010 for that matter. In fact, increased efficiency over those 50 years would lower production costs and ultimately your ounce of gold will buy more after those 50 years than it would when you had saved it (as it happens, those efficiencies are brought about by investment which was made possible through your saving that ounce of gold).

This equilibrium is maintained solely by the marketplace, meaning it happens naturally. It leads to a stable price level and incentivizes saving, which leads to economic growth.

Fiat currency

But what happens when money is dictated by fiat? That is, what happens when government passes legal tender laws declaring that you must use the money they want you to use, which happens to be the money that they–and only they–can produce? Well, first they are going to want to produce lots of it so that they can spend it on programs that will keep their constituents happy. These are things like retirement benefits, paving roads, keeping us safe from terrorists and providing low-interest loans for education, homes, cars, etc.

These services keep politicians in office. They want to stay in office because it’s easier to provide services when you are forcing your financiers to give you their dough. The other option for politicians is to quit office and get a job where they can only be compensated through the free will of the other party in an exchange (this is known as the private sector). They don’t want to do this. They are incapable of dealing with such a challenge. They must stay in office as long as possible.

The plethora of programs is the key for receiving votes and ultimately remaining in office. But they can only provide programs through tax revenue as the political class doesn’t actually generate wealth of its own.

Remember, though, the primary goal for the politician is to keep his ass in office and out of honest work. Raising taxes, even if it is to administer cozy programs, will not sit well with constituents. The politician is faced with a dilemma: how can you provide programs while keeping taxes low? Finding the answer to this question would be like finding the holy grail for the politician.

It turns out that the holy grail is money itself. If the politician holds a monopoly on money production, while forcing everyone to use that money, then they can spend as much as they can produce without burdening their unsuspecting voters with high taxes. In order to produce more they will surely want that money to be made of paper. Brilliant!

This is called fiat currency.

Fiat currency does not last. When Roman bureaucrats needed more money they simply debased metal coins by mixing more valuable metal with less and calling it the same coin.

American political money-producers have done the same with the penny, converting it from a copper coin to a much cheaper nickel coin coated in copper to give it that color. They then claim it is the same coin and holds the same value. But a penny in 2010 does not buy what a penny could buy in 1900.

So who are they fooling? Answer: plenty of people. Enough anyway to keep the party going until it all collapses around us and we one day realize that the “money” we have been using actually has no value. American politicians have done this with pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters (which used to contain silver).

More recently, currency production has forged ahead with the development of our financial digital network. This allows politicians to produce currency by simply typing a few keys on a keyboard. Market forces leading to monetary-price-equilibrium and price stability are completely disconnected from this process.

Disaster is inevitable all because politicians seize the power they need in order keep their jobs. They force compliance to their money rules and are allowed to kick the can and while neglecting the economically absurd policies that will end in disaster only once they are safely out of office living in their vacation home in the Caribbean.

What’s more, we further empower them through our ignorance–nay, our willingness–to support their crackpot ideas.

Paper bugs are everywhere

The paper bugs that I have run into of late happen to be New Zealanders. I live in New Zealand. These paper bugs echo the rallying cry of the New Zealand government and believe the same half-truths that socialists and statists the world over have succumbed to.

This proves the point that most people are easily seduced by the State, not matter where they are from. It also suits my purpose well because many of us have already seen the various charts and read the data showing the drop in the value of the U.S. dollar since the inception of the Federal Reserve System. It’s time for something new.

Paper bugs in New Zealand, like all paper bugs, are in denial. They refuse to accept the reality that paper currency will constantly–if not always consistently–be debased so long as a centralized authority, answerable to nobody, controls the production of money.

It doesn’t just occur in during a gold bubble (not that we are experiencing this now). Rather, debasement is a constant theme over the course of the short lifespan of a fiat currency. It simply cannot hold up to the time-tested value of real money.

The value of NZD has consistently diminished over the course of the last 40 years. The recent acceleration is not a bubble phenomenon. It is not a craze. It is a direct result of an accelerated inflation of the money supply by New Zealand's central bank. This is the same thing that has driven the decline in the value of the NZD for the last 40 years. It is only more pronounced today because the root cause is more intense.

A survey says that American workers work the first three hours every day just to pay their taxes. So that’s why we can’t get anything done in the morning: We’re government workers!–Jay Leno

Nevermind that federal employees, especially lawmakers and the paper-pushing peons who occupy their office-space can’t cut it in the private sector.

Nevermind that federal bureaucracies are a complete drain on resources.

Nevermind that it takes no real ability to write tax laws and no real ability to drive an economy off a cliff.

Yeah, I can let all that go for now; They are topics for another day. What concerns me right now is the revelation from The Washington Post that these losers–who make double what private sector workers make–are writing tax laws that they think don’t apply to them.

Capitol Hill employees owed $9.3 million in overdue taxes at the end of last year…The debt among Hill employees has risen at a faster rate than the overall tax debt on the government’s books.

The average unpaid tax bill is $12,787 among the Senate’s delinquent taxpayers and $15,498 among those working in the House.

Only those who are arrogant enough to think that they can manage such a complex society would also be arrogant enough to think that they do not need to abide by their own immoral code that they force the rest of us to accept.

Back in 2007, Ron Paul supporters organized a tax protest “tea party” that immediately picked up momentum among libertarians. The demonstrations were geared around small government, sound money, humble foreign policy and individual liberty.

I began to notice some time in 2009 that neo-conservative constituencies were trickling into the tea-party. I didn’t think much of it in a negative light at all. Because I assumed that the entire world took it as a given that the neo-cons ruined America in so many ways during the presidency of George W. Bush, I figured that these individuals who were now claiming allegiance to the Ron Paul movement were simple reevaluating their principles and realizing how wrong they were. I thought it was great that these people were understanding how foolish they had been and were returning to the true Republican roots of small government and liberty. I naively assumed that their ranks in the liberty movement represented an apology for their unyielding support all those years for lies, theft, corruption, monetary inflation, bloated government, attacking of sovereign nations, the trampling on liberty and all the rest that made the Bush presidency the most disastrous eight years in America’s history. I was, more or less, willing to accept this implicit apology.

It didn’t take long for me to see that this was all a farce, and an implicit apology is no longer enough, although I won’t be holding my breath for that apology as America is made up of some seriously hypocritical dumbasses.

I suppose the realization started with the infiltration of the Ron Paul movement by the neo-conservative leadership personalities. In classic political-opportunistic-scumbag fashion, they hijacked the movement for themselves and replaced the libertarian Ron Paul with the likes of Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck.

Now it is 2010. The Ron Paul movement has been supplanted by the Tea Party: Sarah Palin professes her commitment to liberty while she campaigns for and endorses John McCain, the warmongering socialist. Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh cling onto the liberty movement like pathetic little homeless barnacles. They have since perverted the movement into one which supports the harebrained neo-con policies of preemptive war, torturing, invasion of private lives, socialist dribble that got us into this mess and that is currently being carried out by the current administration which they claim to oppose.

Lew Rockwell describes the Tea Party and what we should expect from it to a tee,

You might as well know right now, however, that the Tea Party, no matter how successful it is at the polls in November, will certainly betray the party of liberty. There are several reasons for this, but the fundamental one is intellectual. The Tea Party does not have a coherent view of liberty. Its activists tend to be good on specific economic issues like taxes, spending, stimulus, and health care. They worry about government intervention in these areas and can talk a good game.

But just as with old-time conservatives, there are many issues on which the Tea Party tends toward inconsistency. The military and the issue of war is a major one. Many have bought into the line that the greatest threat this country faces domestically is the influx of adherents of Islam; in international politics, they tend to favor belligerence toward any regime that is not a captive of U.S. political control.

On immigration, the Tea Party ethos favors national IDs and draconian impositions on businesses rather than market solutions like cutting welfare. On social and cultural issues, they can be as confused as the Christian right, believing that it is the job of government to right all wrongs and punish sin.

The talking heads that hijacked the party are after television ratings and journalistic cash perks. They have no principles and know nothing about liberty. The real problem in my eyes, though, is not that these pitiful book-salesmen have infiltrated the tea party, it is that they have proven in the past that their rhetoric can pervert the notion of liberty in the minds of millions of Americans.

These Americans are easy to spot; As I said, there are millions of them. They call themselves conservative and claim allegiance to liberty. Then the bright lights of Fox News come on and they easily dismiss the torturing of human beings by our government.

These Americans have no real principle. Their assertions are subject to their own whim on any particular day, depending on the weather and on who exactly is involved, what religion they belong to, or what party affiliation check-box they tick. They talk a big game about property rights, but when a man purchases land with his money and decides to build a religious center there, Sean Hannity can easily talk these Americans down from their stance.

They claim allegiance to sound money and limited government, but an ever-expansive empire does not bother them and any reason we can find for attacking and killing people is okay.

Their track record on liberty is also pathetic: It is only Obama and Democrats who can offend them with warrant-less wiretapping. If a Republican did the same–as they have–they wouldn’t make a peep. The violation of our liberties by the TSA is only offensive when Democrats are in office. The TSA’s service is only incompetent when Obama is giving the orders. When the land is ruled by Emperor Bush, or what ever other Republican puppet is installed the TSA is a godsend and any society who is without it is foolish and primitive (including our own, for hundreds of years of our incomparably successful history).

The only thing that is reassuring in all of this is that the true believers in liberty were fighting against the neo-cons all along; It is nothing new for libertarians to battle the warmongering, socialist Republicans and at the same time the warmongering, socialist Democrats.

I guess I am just once again discovering how much more I hate the neo-cons than the Democrats. See, at least with the Democrats you get an honest angle. Obama and Pelosi will come right out and say “we are oligarchists, that’s us. We are the elite, we know what’s best for you, we will rule your lives and organize society the way we see fit.” The lie that they tell is hidden in the ideology of socialism/oligarchism/fascism/statism itself–whatever you wanna call it. That is, statism just simply does not work. It can hardly be called a lie, it is just a fundamental failure of the system they tout; Statism’s promises of utopia can never be realized because the system is fundamentally flawed. But at least the American socialists don’t dress up as capitalists. They call themselves Democrats and they run on a platform of socialism, there is simply no deception going on.

Republicans, on the other hand, bear sole responsibility for the fact that the free market is blamed for our current economic crisis. Anyone who knows anything about economics knows that the American economic system of the past few decades has been getting progressively less capitalistic to the point where it bore way more resemblance to socialism than capitalism quite long ago. If you don’t realize this then you don’t know what capitalism is.

Alan Greenspan operated the Fed like a statist but his rhetoric made everyone think he was a capitalist. George W. Bush claimed that he was a believer in the free market, but he barreled ahead down the road of statism more quickly than any other president before him.

Even the Sean Hannitys, Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks of the world talk about liberty until they are blue in the face. But if we believe these clowns then we are believing that “liberty” means attacking sovereign nations who have done nothing to us. “Liberty” to them is maintaining a worldwide empire. “Liberty” to them is torturing people, allowing an ever-expansive state to disregard the constitution, to bail out failing private enterprises, and all the rest. They know nothing of liberty, but they are more dangerous than the Democrats because they tell all the suckers who listen to them that their way is the way of liberty.

In this situation is it any surprise that half of the suckers tout a desecrated form of liberty while the other half of the suckers think that liberty stinks? These neo-con morons caused the gravitation of Americans towards Obama and the anti-liberty socialists because they fooled everyone into thinking that the George W. Bush dynasty was what they get when liberty reigns supreme.

As for the Tea Party. It stinks so bad of neo-con that there were even Tea Party candidates running against Ron Paul when he was up for reelection in Texas!

“I believe that one of the most important things that you can do as president is to take concrete steps to restore the rule of law in this country. I am sure that as a constitutional scholar you can appreciate that we must ensure that the Bush administration’s views of executive supremacy do not become so ingrained in our system of government that they become the ‘new normal’.” –Barack Obama, 2008 Presidential campaign trail

Happy Anniversary!

This week the American Empire enters its tenth year in a State of Emergency following the September 11th attacks in 2001.

September 10, 2010

Dear Madam Speaker: (Dear Mr. President:)

Section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. 1622(d), provides for the automatic termination of a national emergency unless, prior to the anniversary date of its declaration, the President publishes in the Federal Register and transmits to the Congress a notice stating that the emergency is to continue in effect beyond the anniversary date. Consistent with this provision, I have sent to the Federal Register the enclosed notice, stating that the emergency declared with respect to the terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, is to continue in effect for an additional year.

The terrorist threat that led to the declaration on September 14, 2001, of a national emergency continues. For this reason, I have determined that it is necessary to continue in effect after September 14, 2010, the national emergency with respect to the terrorist threat.

Sincerely,

BARACK OBAMA