out

i’m out for awhile.

violent stomach virus

fever

got two iv’s yesterday

and two anti-nausea meds thru iv

and four scripts

girls were at dad’s for weekend

he’s kept them (with some resistance)

don’t want them to get it

fiance is working from home at my home to take care of me

good thing

i’m very sick

recon – keep your dad in line till i can get back

ame

Vox Hits Another Out of the Park

Sadly, as one who admires Thomas Sowell’s writing–he gets it right most of the time–I opposed his position on our bailout, from day one. The most vocal opponents of the bailout–Ron Paul, Peter Schiff, and Vox Day, Austrian-school economists all–were the voices in the wilderness at the time. I’m not in their category of greatness, but I agreed with their assessment.

To me, it was a no-brainer because the Austrian explanation is monetarily sound. At the end of the day, the Keynesian and Monetarist positions are mere variations of Central Planning, with the latter being tantamount to a “we believe in free markets, while letting government centrally control the money to prevent and stop recessions” whereas the former is tantamount to “we believe in free markets, but we believe the government needs to control them to prevent recessions.”

The Austrian school, on the other hand, promotes free markets and a need to keep government out of the business of controlling them. This is because inflation of the money supply–a cause of just about every recession–is made easy when markets accept the practices of (a) central banking and (b) fractional reserve banking. Central banking is just a euphemism for socialist monetary policy.

And we have paid dearly. The solution to this will not be pretty, as it will require us to fundamentally rethink the role of government in our lives, and also in the role of regulator of business, banking, and commerce.

Anyone who calls this a “credit crisis” is missing by a mile.

This is a “value crisis”: our government–in collusion with Big Banking–has been creating money faster than our economy has been creating value, for decades.

Sadly, the proof is in the bailouts: if the solution were merely about throwing $700 billion at the problem, giving the former CEO of Goldman Sachs the authority to fix it–we would now be on our way to prosperity. Greenspan, in his testimony before Congress, stated that the $700 billion was sufficient to fix the problem. He was wrong.

As for the auto industry, the “bailout” merely guaranteed that the impending bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler would not happen on Bush’s watch. But make no mistake: they will happen.

The bailouts will not fix this problem; they will only defer it, at compound interest. Sadly, as Vox Day points out, even the Republicans failed badly on this issue.

No-Brainer

As a libertarian, I oppose State-run welfare programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. On the other hand, if one chooses to receive benefits from either, then they are obligated to play by the rules set by those programs.

Why do I say this?

A man in Michigan is being forced to either pay for the medical costs of his girlfriend’s delivery of their child, unless he marries her.

In this case, the woman does not want to marry according to the command of the State.

While I understand her sentiments, she should have thought about that before she chose to accept State monies.

While the pro-family crowd–and even many liberals–probably support the Michigan laws, and that support is not without merit, there are some other takeaways in this:

  1. When you let the State regulate marriage, then the State can mandate that you marry.
  2. If you accept State benefits, then you are accepting all the rules that accompany the receipt of those benefits, some of which could be very unpleasant.

Personally, I think the couple should shut up and get married. If he’s man enough to have sex with her–conceiving a child–then he ought to man up, marry her, and give that baby a daddy in the house. That the State wishes to curb the practice of irresponsibility is laudable.

Still, as one accepts the premise of government meddling in social engineering, we’d better be ready for a whole laundry list of unintended consequences.