Wealth inequality is real, but is it fair? The distribution of wealth in America is lopsided in the favor of the 1% – a point made by the video “Wealth Inequality in America.” This inequality is intuitively and philosophically unfair to many people, but what happens when we examine the roots of our motivation? How can society BEST help the poorest? How can individuals BEST provide better lives for themselves – and their loves ones? Can our BEST laws also be our FAIREST? A fair society is a challenge to the status quo. Learn Liberty asked two professors — a libertarian (Professor Steve Horwitz), and an opposing philosopher (Professor Jeffrey Reiman) — to answer questions about wealth, fairness, inequality, and the United States. This is their debate.
We all want the safety and dependable quality that “regulation” is supposed to provide. Government can provide it to some extent, but markets can do it better, if we let them. Howard Baetjer of Towson University explains.
The city of Los Angeles agrees to pay $645,000 to settle a lawsuit that claimed L.A. sanitation workers stole or destroyed property of homeless people during periodic clean-up efforts in the city’s sprawling Skid Row area. Do homeless people have a Constitutional right to squat on public property, stockpile pallets, refrigerators and other scavenged items, and generally drag down property values and tourist appeal? Bill Whittle Now deals with the news of the day from a foundation of conservative principles five times each week. If you enjoyed this, you’re the kind of person who becomes a producer of this — and 47 other shows each month. Join us today at https://BillWhittle.com/register/
“Debate: What To Do About Poverty” by @LearnLiberty ► Get Learn Liberty updates in your inbox! http://LearnLiberty.org/subscribe This Learn Liberty debate presents arguments for and against more government assistance to help the poor in the United States. Prof. Steven Horwitz argues that the government has created too many problems and that lifting government-imposed barriers to the poor will go a long way toward solving the problems of inequality in the United States. Prof. Jeffrey Reiman takes the view that government, while not perfect, will have a key role to play in creating better programs to help the poor. What do you think? * This debate was filmed in front of a live audience at the 2013 International Students for Liberty Conference in Washington, DC
What if there were no prices? How would you use available resources? To appreciate why market prices are essential to human well-being, consider what a fix we would be in without them. Suppose you were the commissar of railroads in the old Soviet Union. Markets and prices have been banished. You and your comrades. Passionate communists all. Now, directly plan how to use available resources. You want a railroad from city A to city B, but between the cities is a mountain range. Suppose somehow you know that the railroad once built. Will serve the nation equally well. Whether it goes through the mountains or around. If you build through the mountains, you’ll use much less steel for the tracks. Because that route is shorter. But you’ll use a great deal of engineering to design the trestles and tunnels needed to cross the rough terrain. That matters because engineering is also needed to design irrigation systems, mines, harbor installations and other structures. And you don’t want to tie up engineering on your railroad if it would be more valuable designing those other structures instead. You can save engineering for other projects. If you build around the mountains on level ground. But that way you’ll use much more steel rail to go the longer distance and steel is also needed for other purposes. For vehicles, girders, ships, pots and pans and thousands of other things. Which route should you choose for the good of the nation? To answer, you would need to determine which bundle of resources is less urgently needed for other purposes. The large amount of engineering and small amount of steel for the route through the mountains, where the small amount of engineering and large amount of steel for the roundabout route. But how could you find out the urgency of need for engineering and steel in other uses? Find out more as Professor Howard Baetjer Jr. from Towson University explains market prices through the railroad thought experiment.
QUESTION: Good day Mr. Armstrong, I have been a student of yours since 2001 and am always amazed at your work. I am not one that can afford to go to your seminars, but would love to know all that you discuss there. Could you write a book about what all is discussed there?
My question is, I am in the process of moving from California, due to politics and their financial mismanagement. I am in escrow, but I am afraid of where to put my money from the sale of my home, it is my retirement, as I have put all of my savings into the home over the years. I plan on moving to a location with lower taxes and lower home prices and purchasing a home much less in price and save the rest of the money in case social security runs out. Are banks going to be a safe place to put money, or maybe a high paying dividend stock, or should I just bury it in my new homes backyard?? This is really quite frightening as I do not want to be forced out into the streets as a poor person after working hard for 65 years! We are very, very frugal so do not need a lot of income, just do not want to loose what we have. Thank you so much, and sorry to bother you, as I know you are very busy.
Bill
ANSWER: U.S. banks will probably be safe in general for the next two years. Just anything you put in a bank, do not lock it in long-term. Stay short-term — 2021 is where things start to go nuts.
As far as good equities, we will be in a position to look at that next year. As far as places, look at Texas or Florida. Florida has the better place for housing (homestead). Also, there is a high concentration of retired people in Florida. That provides greater resistance to dramatic changes
You keep stating that the center of Finance will move to China. However, the world distrusts China, rightly so. How can they become the Financial Center if no one trusts them?
RLK
ANSWER: That will come only after 2032. Keep in mind, the West will be tested and the failed system of continually borrowing is why the confidence in the West will break. After that, it will become the lesser of two evils. The financial capital of the world always migrates. The British never saw how America could take their crown. Throw in a world war, and capital moves. I have dealt with this issue in detail. That report is available (see the Store for “China on the Rise”). It is available in printed form or in digital forma
News we might have missed. Last week Catherine Engelbrecht announced a historic legal victory in her decade long battle against the IRS for targeting her group, True The Vote, as part of the Obama administration’s weaponization program against political opposition.
U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton issued a stunning ruling (full pdf below) in favor of True the Vote, and penalized the IRS. Judge Walton forced the IRS to pay maximum attorney’s fees due to discrimination against the conservative organization that stemmed from the Lois Lerner scandal. The financial award is likely to exceed $2 million.
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Ms. Engelbrecht gave Breitbart News an interview where she discussed the victory, SEE HERE.
.Ms. Engelbrecht’s case is actually connected to the political surveillance operation used against presidential candidate Donald Trump. Factually, the 2010 program to weaponize the IRS looks like the precursor to the 2012 program to weaponize the NSA database.
Political spying 1.0 was the weaponization of the IRS. This is where the term “Secret Research Project” originated as a description from the Obama team. It involved the U.S. Department of Justice under Eric Holder and the FBI under Robert Mueller. It never made sense why Eric Holder requested over 1 million tax records via CD ROM, until overlaying the timeline of the FISA abuse:
The IRS sent the FBI “21 disks constituting a 1.1 million page database of information from 501(c)(4) tax exempt organizations, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” The transaction occurred in October 2010 (link)
Why disks? Why send a stack of DISKS to the DOJ and FBI when there’s a pre-existing financial crimes unit within the IRS. All of the evidence within this sketchy operation came directly to the surface in early spring 2012.
The IRS scandal was never really about the IRS, it was always about the DOJ asking the IRS for the database of information. That is why it was transparently a conflict when the same DOJ was tasked with investigating the DOJ/IRS scandal. Additionally, Obama sent his chief-of-staff Jack Lew to become Treasury Secretary; effectively placing an ally to oversee/cover-up any issues. As Treasury Secretary Lew did just that.
Lesson Learned – It would appear the Obama administration learned a lesson from attempting to gather a large opposition research database operation inside a functioning organization large enough to have some good people that might blow the whistle.
The timeline reflects a few months after realizing the “Secret Research Project” was now worthless (June 2012), they focused more deliberately on a smaller network within the intelligence apparatus and began weaponizing the FBI/NSA database. If our hunch is correct, that is what will be visible in footnote #69:
Additionally, Matt Gaetz appears to have seen “a memo held in the Congressional Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) that contained previously-undisclosed information involving the Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI) and Department of Justice (DOJ).” [LINK] Which sounds like the MOU in the footnote, and the memo that Trey Gowdy and Jason Chaffetz inquired about.
Recently, the “Wall Street Journal” (WSJ) reported you granted the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) new powers to store dossiers on United States citizens, even if said citizens are not suspected of any criminal activity.
With these new powers, the NCTC would have the ability to copy entire government databases holding information on flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students, as well as other data.
The WSJ goes on to report the new rules allow the NCTC to keep data about innocent United States citizens for up to five years and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior. Previously, both were prohibited.
If the WSJ report is accurate, these new powers represent a sweeping departure from past practices, which barred the NCTC from storing information about ordinary Americans unless a person was a terror suspect or the information sought was related to an investigation.
If the WSJ report is accurate, it raises numerous concerns and questions. As elected Representatives and members of the House Judiciary Committee, we are concerned such sweeping, fundamental changes would be made to existing policy without public input and Congressional approval. Changes, which fundamentally alter the relationship between the government and the governed, should only be made with input from the people by and through their elected Representatives. (more)
Fusion GPS was not hired in April 2016 to research Donald Trump. As shown in the evidence provided by the FISC, the intelligence community was already doing surveillance and spy operations. The Obama administration already knew everything about the Trump campaign, and were monitoring everything by exploiting the FISA database.
However, after the NSA alerts in/around March 9th, 2016, and particularly after the April 18th shutdown of contractor access, the Obama intelligence community needed Fusion GPS to create a legal albeit ex post facto justification for the pre-existing surveillance and spy operations. Fusion GPS gave them that justification in the Steele Dossier.
That’s why the FBI small group, which later transitioned into the Mueller team, are so strongly committed to and defending the formation of the Steele Dossier and its dubious content. The Steele Dossier contains the cover-story and justification for the pre-existing surveillance operation.
During a rather innocuous podcast discussion panel April 12th, 2019, one of President Trump’s personal lawyers Jay Sekulow mentioned the FBI had three FISA applications denied by the FISA court in 2016. [Podcast Here – Note comment at 25:05] The denials were always suspected; however, until now no-one in/around the administration has ever confirmed.
If Sekulow is accurate, this adds additional context to the actions of the FBI in the aftermath of Admiral Mike Rogers and an increased urgency in gaining legal justification for surveillance and spy operation unlawfully taking place. A valid FISA warrant would help the FBI cover-up the surveillance. The likely targets were Manafort, Flynn and Papadopoulos…. but it appears the DOJ/FBI were rebuked.
These FISC denials would then initiate institutional panic dependent on the election outcome. An insurance policy would be needed. The Steele Dossier becomes the investigative virus the FBI wanted inside the system. To get the virus into official status, they used the FISA application as the delivery method and injected it into Carter Page. The FBI already knew Carter Page; essentially Carter Page was irrelevant, what they needed was the FISA warrant and the Dossier in the system {Go Deep}.
Fusion GPS was not hired to research Trump, the intelligence community was already doing surveillance and spy operations. The intelligence community needed Fusion GPS to give them a plausible justification for already existing surveillance and spy operations.
Fusion-GPS gave them the justification they needed for a FISA warrant with the Steele Dossier. Ultimately that’s why the Steele Dossier is so important; without it, the DOJ and FBI are naked with their FISA-702 abuse.
I am a huge fan of yours and have followed your blog for probably 8 years now, I watched your many predictions using the AI models and have been amazed by their accuracy. I am a very concerned small investor and with this big shift coming in the ECM in January 2020 am wondering where you think I should be invested… Gold, the DOW, real estate, cash? I have bought far out of the money Jan 2021 GLD options which are extremely cheap right now. How do you best recommend your fans to position themselves for the coming storm?
Hopefully I will be able to make your next conference.
All the best.
Sincerely
RW
ANSWER: It is still too early to make a reliable forecast just yet. But generally, the next wave of the ECM business cycle should be an inflationary one. It certainly appears that all of this Quantitative Easing has caused tremendous damage and has now trapped the central banks to the point that the biggest debtor is the government. They have tried to use interest rates under Keynesian economics to manipulate “demand,” which is used to force us to borrow or stop borrowing. But all of these manipulations have no impact on preventing government borrowing. The danger now is that after 10 years of QE, governments are addicted to low interest rates and raising them this time will blow up the government budgets. They will respond by raising taxes to try to keep the ball rolling, but that will result in civil unrest and deflation
I appreciate all you share. I watched a series on the Great Depression and they talk about how socialism saved capitalism. If true, is this part of a healthy cycle between the two? Could anything have been done to prevent the Great Depression?
Thank you!
LB
ANSWER: It was not socialism that saved capitalism, it was a shift in the understanding of money itself. George Warren convinced Roosevelt to devalue the dollar and end AUSTERITY, as Germany imposes on Europe today, which reversed the economy.
The Dust Bowl was the primary cause of the rise in unemployment to 25%. In 1900, 41% of the civil workforce was in agriculture. The invention of the combustion engine began to displace jobs as the internet has done recently. Tractors replaced workers in fields, so there was a huge transition in the labor force. Then the Dust Bowl took place and that created the hobos.
There was nothing the government could have done to prevent the Great Depression. The best that one can hope for is to understand the business cycle and prepare for the downturns. In that manner, it becomes more like Joseph warning the Pharaoh of 7 years of plenty to be followed by 7 years of drought. If we accept that the business cycle is complex and not a single source that can be controlled, then we will live with the cycle and understand it.
FDR’s programs came in 1935. The economy had already bottomed and turned up from July 1932. I find the argument that socialism saved capitalism as self-serving for the socialists, but the timeline does not agree
I have created this site to help people have fun in the kitchen. I write about enjoying life both in and out of my kitchen. Life is short! Make the most of it and enjoy!
This is a library of News Events not reported by the Main Stream Media documenting & connecting the dots on How the Obama Marxist Liberal agenda is destroying America
Centinel2012 