Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Uncounted chickens come home to roost - again

Gary North's Tea Party Economist posted these pictures.  Madam President and her cronies miscalculated.  We were spared the Hillary Horror Show and went for an unknown quantity instead.





"Near-great" Harry S. Truman was already a nightmare:
- atomic bombing of Japan*
- creation of the national security state
- Orwellian renaming of War Department to Defense Department
- forced repatriation of former Soviet subjects and non-subjects (Operation Keelhaul)
- Marshall Plan
- Inauguration of the Cold War against a war-devastated Soviet Union
- Employment Act of 1946

The 1948 election continued the Truman Horror Show
- NATO
- "police action" in Korea
- sinkholes such as the foreign aid program and promoting Zionist cause
- seizing nation's steel mills in response to a strike

* Twelve Navy fliers who were incarcerated in a Hiroshima jail were also killed in the attack















Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Keynes on destroying capitalism through inflation

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers,", who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.
Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

-- The Economic Consequences of the Peace, by John Maynard Keynes, 1919

An early George Gershwin song from the musical "Miss 1917"

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