Just Say "No" to Another "Stimulus"

Just Say “No” to Another “Stimulus”

WASHINGTON, October 9, 2009–On the heels of a failed $700 billion “stimulus” package, Congress is mulling over yet another round of “stimulus” spending.

Britain Should Start "Easing" Government Stranglehold on the Economy

By Alex Epstein (Sunday Telegraph, March 8, 2009)

Responding to a crisis caused by the inflationary policies of central banks, the Bank of England has decided to generate still more inflation, just in a different form: “quantitative easing.” And so Britain, along with the rest of the world, continues to fight fire with petrol.

If Britain really wants to solve its financial crisis, why doesn’t it start “easing” the government stranglehold on the economy that caused this mess? What about stripping away housing restrictions that prevented supply from keeping up with demand? What about slashing the massive government spending that crowds out private ventures? What about ending the policy of propping up insolvent financial institutions, a policy that only freezes taxpayers’ capital?

And what about calling for an international free banking system and gold standard that would make a credit crisis like today’s impossible?

Roubini: US Banks Already Toast

By Dan Weil
Moneynews.com

NYU economist Nouriel Roubini, widely credited for predicting the current crisis, says government aid to banks isn’t enough to hide the fact that they’ve failed.

“Even with the $2 trillion of government support, most of these financial institutions are insolvent,” he writes on Forbes.com.

“Delinquency and charge-off rates are now rising at a rate – given the macro outlook – that means expected losses for U.S. financial firms will peak at $3.6 trillion.”
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Court of Law Gone Awry as Court of Feeling

Brevard County is following the lead of certain other Counties in the State of Florida in ordering mediation between the parties in a foreclosure. Normally mediation is ordered when one has parties in a DISPUTE. In the foreclosure, there is no dispute, it is a fact the house payments have not been made. Since there is no dispute of fact, we can only have a court ordered mediation out of a FEELING it is a ‘good thing’ to allow those who owe to stay in their house even if they are not paying.
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Stand and Deliver, Business Geniuses

For years Space Coast businesses and taxpayers have poured millions of dollars into the Economic Development Commission and four Chambers of Commerce, largely on the assumption that these organizations can attract new businesses, create new jobs and raise the prosperity of our community. Now it’s time for these organizations to deliver on that promise.

Our current recession, painful as it is, is just an annoyance compared to the jarring economic dislocation we will suffer if we have no replacements for the jobs and business activity that will disappear with the Space Shuttle. Today we’re suffering with only about 8% unemployment. Titusville is facing the prospect of 50% unemployment, and the rest of the county is facing unbearable declines in employment, home values, business revenues, tax revenues and everything else that depends upon a sustained strong economy.
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Brevard foreclosures continue at record pace

The numbers may change by a few as we get finals next month, but not much. 864 and rising. I still believe the defaults are racing ahead of the filings and the bank’s legal staffs are trying to catch up.Numerous foreclosures are running better than 12 months from filing to sale, so the urge to default may be getting stronger when one can scrap the payments on a house $100,000 or so upside down and live rent-free for 12 to 18 months while the legal wheels slowly grind.
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The Right’s Pathetic Opposition to the Auto Bailout

Washington, D.C. – Republican opponents of the auto bailout are being accused of putting ideology ahead of the economy’s well-being. They are accused of having an ideological animus against bailouts.

“That criticism pays Republicans a compliment they don’t deserve,” said Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. “The Republican opposition to the auto bailout was not a matter of principle, but of pragmatic nit-picking.

“A principled opposition to the auto bailout would have denounced as immoral any attempt to use taxpayer money to prop up failing companies. It would have insisted that such attempts at central planning are destructive and un-American. It would have said that the government’s proper function is not to engineer the economy, but to protect individual rights and otherwise leave the economy free. That is not what the Republicans claimed.

“In his floor statement opposing the bill, leading Republican senator Mitch McConnell’s ‘stinging’ criticism consisted of finding that the bill ‘does not’ lay out ‘an effective strategy for securing the long-term viability of these companies,’ that it did not give the proposed ‘Car Czar’ enough power, and–the ultimate deal-killer for Republicans–the bill would have adjusted auto worker wage rates at ‘too slow’ a pace.

“The tragic fact is that Republicans do not regard central planning as objectionable–they merely disagree with the Democrats’ central plan.”

Stop Blaming Capitalism for Government Failures

By Yaron Brook and Don Watkins

Speaking of the financial crisis, French president Nicolas Sarkozy recently said, “Laissez-faire is finished. The all-powerful market that always knows best is finished.”

Sarkozy was echoing the views of many, including president-elect Obama, who assume that the financial crisis was caused by free markets–by “unbridled greed” unleashed by decades of deregulation and a “hands off” approach to the economy. And given this premise, the solution, they say, is obvious. To solve this crisis and prevent another one, we need a heavy dose of Uncle Sam’s elixir: government intervention. Whether it’s more bailouts, stricter regulation, a new round of nationalizations, or some other scheme, the only question since day one has been how, not whether, government is going to intervene.
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Let Them Fail

By Amit Ghate

Everywhere today politicians are blaring that they must save America’s financial institutions, alleging catastrophic risk to the economy were any to fail. Paulson and the entire Bush administration, in a discernible panic, are now pouring $700 billion into the big banks, having already bailed out AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Bear Stearns to the tune of $300 billion.

Capitalism doesn’t work, they declare, but fortunately the government is here to rescue us.

Sadly, they have it all backwards. The credit crisis is just more evidence that whenever the government supplants the free market and attempts to “manage,” i.e., control, the economy–disaster ensues.
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Greenspan Has No Free Market Philosophy

Washington, D.C. – Opponents of the free market are giddy at Alan Greenspan’s declaration that the financial crisis has exposed a “flaw” in his “free market ideology.” Greenspan says he is “in a state of shocked disbelief” because he “looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity”–and it didn’t.

But according to Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, “any belief Greenspan ever had in truly free markets was abandoned long ago. While Greenspan long ago wrote in favor of a truly free market in banking, including the gold standard that such markets always adopt, he then proceeded to work for two decades as leader and chief advocate of the Federal Reserve, which continually inflates the money supply and manipulates interest rates. Advocates of free banking understand that when the government inflates the currency, it artificially increases prices and causes booms in certain sectors of the economy, followed by inevitable busts.

But not only did Greenspan lead the inflation behind the  dot-com bubble and the real estate boom, he blamed the market for their treacherous collapses. Greenspan should have recognized that what he wrote in 1966 of the boom preceding the 1929 crash applied here: ‘The excess credit which the Fed pumped into the economy spilled over into the stock market–triggering a fantastic speculative boom.’ Instead, he superficially blamed ‘infectious greed.’

“Should it be any shock that Greenspan now blames the free market for today’s meltdown–rather than the Fed’s policies, which fueled an inflationary housing boom, which rewarded reckless lenders and borrowers from Wall Street to Main Street? Greenspan didn’t mention the word ‘inflation’ once in his testimony.
Whatever Greenspan’s economic philosophy is, it is not anything resembling a free market.”

Yaron Brook is executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. He is a regular contributor to Forbes.com and a contributing editor of The Objective Standard. His articles have been featured in major newspapers such as USA Today the Houston Chronicle, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Providence Journal and the Orange County Register. Dr. Brook is often interviewed on radio and is a frequent guest on a variety of national TV shows, having appeared on the new Fox Business Network, FOX News Channel, CNN, CNBC, and C-SPAN. Dr. Brook, a former finance professor, lectures on Objectivism, capitalism, business and foreign policy at college campuses, community groups and corporations across America and throughout the world.

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