Down With the Rich, Again?

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Maybe you saw the headlines blasting the rich (again!) for failing to spend money in order to enable us to get out of this everlasting recession. It turns out that in boom times, the rich spent $145 per day. Now they are only spending $119. So, there we go: a new scapegoat! Those greedy rich people are failing to do their duty.

The press reports that the rich are not booking at the Four Seasons, not putting on the Ritz, and not filling their closets with furs and jewels from Saks. It gets worse. The women who shop for goodies by Dries van Noten and John Galliano told the New York Times that their husbands are telling them to cool it on designer bags, shoes, and dresses. Yet another reason for the recession: patriarchy!

But still, I’m not entirely sure I can follow this. In normal times, we are told that the rich are rich only at the expense of everyone else. One man’s wealth is another man’s poverty. It’s a fixed pie, and one reason for human suffering is precisely the tendency of the rich to spend their filthy lucre on fripperies. They engage in conspicuous consumption that does nothing but feed their egos even as the world’s poor suffer.

Suddenly, the line has changed. Now it is the moral obligation of the rich to cough up in order to help the rest of us. Especially now that government stimulus has proven to be ineffective, the rich should make it their patriotic obligation to spend, spend, spend! To be sure, the left-leaning commentariat is not willing to go so far as to favor tax cuts for the rich. For that would put us "in an Alice in Wonderland world," says Sam Pizzigati of the Institute for Policy Studies, in which we help the people we are supposed to hate.

Tea Party Activists Just 'Tip of the Iceberg'? - John Boehner

The Tyranny-Liberty Cycle of Government

By Ann Miller

Many frustrated conservatives and constitutionalists, when discussing what is needed to reform our government, will reply, “We need a revolution.” I’ve heard that often from citizens I speak to whom I am trying to get involved in the political process on a grassroots level.

Their response to a call for action on a local level, is to dismiss the slow, arduous grassroots process in favor of sweeping, dramatic action. All this while never leaving their chairs.

The alarmist call for revolution serves the purpose of placing the responsibility out of reach of the average American. Revolution takes organization, militia, leadership, a plan for governmental overthrow and replacement, and a tremendous level of dedication to the cause to the point of a willingness to pay the ultimate sacrifice. Not exactly the stuff of local party volunteers. It’s a put-off by those who want to see reform occur, but are not willing to do the work themselves.

One must first understand the Tyranny-Liberty Cycle of Government to understand what revolutionists are actually calling for. The cycle looks like this, and is said to take about 200 years to complete:

Race Card Fraud

by Thomas Sowell

Credit card fraud is a serious problem. But race card fraud is an even bigger problem.

Playing the race card takes many forms. Judge Charles Pickering, a federal judge in Mississippi who defended the civil rights of blacks for years and defied the Ku Klux Klan back when that was dangerous, was depicted as a racist when he was nominated for a federal appellate judgeship.

No one even mistakenly thought he was a racist. The point was simply to discredit him for political reasons -- and it worked.

This year's target is the Tea Party. When leading Democrats, led by a smirking Nancy Pelosi, made their triumphant walk on Capitol Hill, celebrating their passage of a bill in defiance of public opinion, Tea Party members on the scene protested.

All this was captured on camera and the scene was played on television. What was not captured on any of the cameras and other recording devices on the scene was anybody using racist language, as has been charged by those playing the race card.

When There is No Rule of Law

Last week ended with some promising news on finally stopping the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  Unfortunately, the administration still seems to believe that shutting down working oil wells is a higher priority than effectively dealing with the broken one.   They are again issuing a moratorium on off-shore drilling, while maintaining a de facto ban on new permits even for shallow water drilling, which they previously stated would be unaffected.  The courts have twice declared this unconstitutional, over 70 percent of the people see this as unreasonable, yet the administration seems determined to simply end off-shore drilling, at least for those producers that cannot afford to sit idle for an unknown period of time until the ban is lifted.

Whether or not this latest effort will hold up in court is yet to be seen.  Sadly, many smaller oil producers in the Gulf see the writing on the wall, and instead of waiting around and risking their livelihoods on the whims of American politicians and judges, they are leaving for friendlier business climates.  What is happening to this country when the Republic of Congo is better for business than the United States?  One big factor is regime uncertainty.

Regime uncertainty is the opposite of the rule of law.  It is the rule of the whims of the people in charge and what mood they are in on any particular day.  It is usually associated with third world dictatorships and plays a major role in why some countries remain poor.  When a business cannot predict whether a government will issue a permit, confiscate or nationalize their capital investments, tax them into bankruptcy, or arbitrarily stall their operations, they tend to do business elsewhere.   This type of government hostility is not conducive to wealth creation and it is tragic to see it chasing away businesses here when we need the jobs and productivity more than ever.