You propose to strengthen our democracy by reducing the number of democratically-elected representatives, thereby consolidating more power in the hands of fewer people.

Why stop there? Why not just eliminate democratic representation altogether, after having one final election to choose an all-powerful Führer? SEIG HEIL! Extending your logic, just THINK how much money THAT would save! Of course we’d be abdicating our rights in exchange for a “more efficient” government. But by God, just like Germany in the 1930s, I bet the trains will run on time!

Merciful Lord, please save us from the ignorant who confuse the empowerment of a keyboard with the enlightenment of a classical education…

Bruce Arnold
LdrLongDistanceRider.com

“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government … except for all the others that have been tried.”–Sir Winston Churchill

Please do not ever hesitate to ask about ANYTHING that you may not understand. There are no bad questions.

That said, it is a process.

Thanks for the plug.

LD

Thanks for your interesting articles. I can’t say I get everything you are writing about, but I am working on it. I look forward to every article you post, keep them coming.

Not to worry about the sarcasm and cyncicism. I have a healthy bit of that in my blood as well. That said, it would consume me if I let it,so I don’t let it as best I can.

Thanks for the plug. I will continue to try to bring interesting material to the table and explain/expose what is truly going on in the markets and the economy.

Your last point for me is what it is all about. Economics is the ultimate inexact science. Healthy debate is not only good but vital for a healthy economy. If people become more educated then they can make more informed choices. That is my hope here at NQ.

Not looking to make converts. Definiteely looking to make more people informed.

Your joining the sharing of ideas is very much appreciated. Please keep coming back and bring friends.

In order to get there. The Chicago Machine is going graft the infrastructure stimulus packages into the ground just like the Rezko projects.

After the Obama Admin is over. Their civilian jobs will be at those same privatization companies. Which will also provide them company passes to drive on the same roads we’ve been taxed to death to rebuild.

In short order, they will raise the tolls because the roads have to be repaired. After all…the Chicago Machine built them.

So, I guess my question is…

How many times will we have to pay for the same stretch of road?

~~

Sorry…it is the cynic in me along with the Chicago corruption spilling out on the news. You don’t have to answer.

Thanks for the articles and describing the issue with Cerberus a few back.

What I see in Obama is a man who hasn’t lived in the real world — he’s always had others pay his way.

I’ve not seen any economic plans from Obama which are based on original thinking or a deep understanding of how the economy works.

Since the key to Japan’s current recovery is

force banks to acknowledge their bad debts,

It seems that full and complete transparency in acknowledging all bad debts — BOTH private banks and government — would be a good place to start.

LD — thanks for another educational article — I’ve read the links and copied them to my growing economics file.

Obanana had his daily speech after announcing his economic cast of characters.

So he said that he is for streamlining the regulating system and also for making it more explicit as to who’s going to regulate what. You see how he talks, like any old Bushes. Of course he has his own definition of streamlining and his own definition of diversifying the process. Both can co-exist in his press conference because both sound so flowery cute.

He also said that they will make mistakes but that what people want is that once mistakes are made they can change. Oh oh oh what an innovative concept. I guess that’s why you can pass a test with 70 because everyone knows you will make mistakes.

He also said that government cannot do it all. That private parties need to add to profit motive and greed the need to do the right thing – for the benefit of the common good. This is also a perfect example of Obambi talk. Greed and charity co-existing together in perfect harmony. I guess he means entrepreneurs and enterprises need to act like pastors and churches. Well, that means that nothing different may happen since is common practice at churches and the cloth to happily correlate greed and charity simultaneously.

Obambi = saying something by saying nothing; doing something by doing nothing.

… and force banks to acknowledge their bad debts, did the economy recover. Yet recent governments have rolled back Mr. Koizumi’s reforms and returned to their spending habits. But Japan does have better roads.

The scenario presented runs like a broken record in Japan over the decade. Stimulus packages followed by corruption and/or voter disaffection. The key point is that debt obligations need to openly accounted for; then other political and financial actions can take place. Sound governmental and financial institutions cannot be build on bad debt. This cleansing isn’t happening in this country and appearances are again, we have our priorities askance and find the easy answer of Japan’s failure our sole recourse.

“The Secrets of the Temple: how the Federal Reserve runs the country” by William Greider was written in 1989 and autopsies the last financial crisis. The people who brought it about benefited from the way it was managed and resolved, resulting in a massive transfer of wealth. This concentration of wealth and power is part of the problem, and to contest it is NOT to say that socialism or communism is the only alternative. Not true. One weapon the Federal Reserve used then and uses now is to say that regular people can’t understand finance and therefore have to abdicate to them. Well, the Federal Reserve is basically a banking lobby, so their solutions are not nonpartisan.

Finance is politics, as the populists well knew. Read up and take part in the debate, people. Your well-being depends on it, especially when the Reserve goes to “squeeze out” the inflation it is currently creating to bail out its constituency.

LD, obviously I’m not coming from the same place you are, but I appreciate your threads and the debate.

In a piece a few months back I mentioned that it would be foolhardy and naive to think that the economic turmil would not lead to political stress and potentially political change in certain countries.

We do not want to be alarmist but we also don’t want to be naive.

Thanks for sharing.

“Economic policies” are government policies. Government interventions in the free market have consequences. (What type, good or bad–you tell me from your observations.)

I invite you to visit my blog (at wordpress)–within the next week I’m going to start a chapter by chapter review of F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which may be the best comparison of free market vs. centrally planned economies ever written.

If you don’t have time for that, just think of the great human experiment we had back in the last century: East and West Germany. They both started out (after the war) with the same opportunities–in which one would you have rather lived?

Nothing “will cure all your ills”, but at least with a free market, there are relatively objective laws that must be obeyed. Government planners act on far less objective principles. They usually end up enacting policies based on what their voting blocks demand, not what the market needs. (That’s why we have lobbyists and corruption.) The uncertainties people and businesses encounter in this type of environment when they try to plan are what prevents the economy from growing as well as it could.

We do need a massive cultural change in how we manage our finances and how we view the value and use of money.

As the saying goes, “you can pay me now or you can pay me later”….with interest of course!!