America divided

Over the weekend, one of the hot media stories was that Obama's popularity is rising in the midst of scandals. See, there's no problem. America has been effectively politicized and divided, and this is good news to media and the political class. Progressive  have criticized those who promote limited government and a free market because they are focused on economics. The political class accuses the Austrian types of assigning economic motives to everyone.

Mises, the main Austrian economist, never made this claim. What Mises claimed is in stark contrast to what his critics say he claimed. Mises said economics is the study of human action. In a free market, individuals interact in many diverse ways, with cooperation being the main link that makes it all work. Like the human body with all its diverse parts, it's the cooperation between the parts that makes the body work as it does. When there is no meddling, a free society whose rights are protected by the rule of law works together, makes progress and solves problems which cause friction. I'm simplifying for the purpose of a blog post to make a point. Read Mises' Human Action.

In our statist system, government meddling breaks society apart, dividing the country in two politically. Government interventions are creating high unemployment, but the State is satisfied giving food stamps and unemployment checks, or giving disability benefits. Unemployment harms those who want to be a part of, want to produce and be active. Those working below their abilities feel demeaned. Those who work part time are worried about their jobs, especially as government interventions in healthcare cause small business layoffs or closings.

Government is meddling in energy production and the money supply, causing high gas prices. The artificial suppression of interest rates hurts those who wish to save. Government meddling hurts Americans in thousands of different ways, but mainly through interference in cooperation between individuals. This is not a new problem. Government interference in the economy has been going on for close to a hundred years, but now the accumulated consequences are threatening the existence of the nation. America's people were so good at cooperating and producing, it took a long time to finally break enough bonds to cripple the nation.  Another empire is about to collapse.

But what does media and the political class discuss? They discuss popularity polls, and they look to a stock market manipulated by the Federal Reserve to the benefit of government cronies and say that all is well. Yes, as long Obama is popular and the stock market is rising, who cares about Americans out of work, the lack of cooperative production/innovation/creativity or all broken ties in society?

Political class in disarray

The administration has turned on a MSM icon, Bob Woodward, as the President desperately campaigns across the country trying to scare Americans into supporting a tax hike.  The conscientious Left is   troubled by Obama's drone policy, and the more the public understands how discombobulated our statist system has become, the more they rail against both parties.

What will it take to achieve private sector unity strong enough to limit government power and liberate our economy? When will the public finally demand our government stop abusing our troops and end the interventions in the mideast? Recently there have been reports that the US is expanding its role in Syria, and there's still bluster regarding bombing Iran. Enough is enough.

Hopefully, the American people are waking up, looking at the clown show in DC, understanding that in the 21st century it's absolute insanity to submit to incompetents who have no idea what it takes to produce, create new wealth and innovatively solve problems in a peace seeking environment. Albert Jay Nock, decades ago, called the State anti-social, and it is. Those Americans who've sought inspiration in an interventionist government run by technocrats are lost. The State machine seeks power, and it will continue to seek power until the people place limits on government power and diligently insist the limits are not violated.

We can deal with most social problems in the private realm among ourselves, innovatively and with far more compassion, rationality and human dignity. It's time to throw off the shackles of the State and realize that the Power of the Few is no longer viable. We've evolved beyond statism. We can't recover as a nation until we free ourselves and take responsibility for individuality as it relates to other individuals in our communities, states, nation and our place in the world. The collective leads to destruction, but free individuals with protected rights will cooperate and achieve and produce and prosper and grow culturally from diverse influences. We've lost sight of what real diversity is and means. The political class cannot be allowed to engineer, plan, manipulate and destroy America.

The lack of widespread price inflation

http://mises.org/daily/6340/Where-Is-the-Inflation

I wrote about this subject a week or so ago. I'm not an economist, so I was a tad unsure of my conclusions, but I felt I was on track. It feels good to be vindicated.

The final push for complete State control

We've survived violations to our rights in the past. J. Edgar Hoover pushed power past the Constitution, as did FDR and many Presidents and powerful political actors before and after them. America has been able to survive our statist encroachments. Statism was actually built into Constitutional loopholes that Hamilton insisted upon to create a Merchant State, and, since the beginning, we've had a mixture of free market, most prevalent in the 18th century, Merchant State, State Capitalism and Socialism. Our economy has been called a mixed economy since the 20th century statist encroachments began in earnest.

As a nation our leaders have never addressed interventionist advancements directly, as in announcing that government will start developing a command and control economy and intervening at will in the affairs of other countries, but they have succeeded in doing so due to a general trust of government for decades, which was inspired by Americans' committment to the USA. Once government started showing cracks, after the Big Depression, then Nixon, and then Carter, so forth and so on, Americans made a calculation as they started losing freedom and government intervened more and more. In International Relations' discussions there are three Cs when a One World Order is contemplated. The experts talk about committment, calculation and coercion when considering the ways in which such a global order can come about.

Of course, it's preferable to have committment from the people who will be subjects of the ruling order. If there's not full committment, and there would not likely be such ever, then calculation is used by the subjects to determine what they receive in return when they give up their autonomy to the those who wish to rule. If there's determination among the power elite, and if there's no widespread committment and the people don't believe they're receiving sufficient benefits to give up the freedoms the rulers are requiring they surrender, then coercion is used -- coercion is, of course, the weakest of the three, because rulers are constantly attempting to maintain control and order.

The same is basically true at the level of a single nation such as America. Once Americans began acknowledging their freedoms were being violated in various ways, they made calculations to determine if it's worth the loss of some freedoms if we get superior military protection in return or cleaner air or safer products or a stronger safety net, social security and the like, etc. It appears that Americans have made the calculation that they're willing to sacrifice freedom for security, stability, safety, equality, fairness and all the other promises made by a powerful State to justify expansion of power in a command and control economy managed by an interventionist government, plus justification of foreign military interventions in the name of national security, protection from terrorism, etc.

Freedom movements have popped up periodically, such as the Old Right, made up of freedom proponents like Roy Childs, Murray Rothbard, Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov and others. They've proposed limited government a more responsbile private sector that provides solutions to social problems and a non-interventionist policy when it comes to foreign affairs -- no entanglement in the affairs of foreign countries. Although much of it was misguided, the 60s' protests were reactions to expansion and abuse of State power. The Reagan Revolution was ostensibly a freedom reaction against an interventionist government that was steadily expanding State power, although the DC establishment won out in the end, and the march of statism continued practically unabated except for the remaining resistance among the public to giant, sudden power-grabs by government -- small and steady power-grabs have been accepted as part of the calculation of received benefits as freedoms erode. Now, privacy violations are common. The military/industrial complex is not audited and does pretty much what it wants to do, as Presidents run the military like a Prince's private army, and regulations pour forth from a central plan developed in DC and dumped on the rest of the country. Government spends $110 billion on food programs alone, so the last election lets us know that at least the majority of those who voted are still okay with their calculations.

There was a nascent freedom movement that broke out clumsily and confused around 2009, lacking a strong philosophical foundation to give it consistency and clarity -- there's hope that the movement can mature and evolve into a thoughtful opposition force to statism, which has answers to why statism is destructive, and how the private sector can do many things that people think only government can handle. If this movement does grow, we'll see if Americans choose limited government and a free market in the 21st century or whether we'll settle for the shaky promises of government to take care of our most pressing problems. There's much evidence that even though many Americans have calculated that government interventions are worth the loss in freedom, government is unable to deliver on many of it's promises, especially the saftey net promises (study the problems with SS, Medicare, Medicaid). Then we'll see if government opts for the weakness of the Cs, coercion. This is the historical turn of events in countries which evolve toward statist control, even if in the beginning the controllers are benevolent and compassionate -- unlimited power changes everything, and not in a good way.  

Avoiding reality?

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/12/07/november-jobs-report-146000-jobs-added-jobless-rate-drops-to-7-7/

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/business/economy/us-creates-146000-new-jobs-as-unemployment-rate-falls-to-7-7.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

Two reports above. Although Hotair is clearer that this report is not good, both lead with what appears to be good news. The NYT starts off praising the report, then way down at the end of the article it reports that "some" economists warn the report is not so good. Reality: the report is not good.

To paraphrase Ayn Rand -- you can attempt to avoid the consequences of reality but you can't avoid the consequences of attempting to avoid the consequences of reality. In reality many workers are dropping out of the labor force because they're giving up looking for a job, and that should have been the headline. Media can mislead the American people, and they can soften the reality of the economy, but they can't change the reality of unemployment or the reality of the economy.