By Dr. Jack Wheeler

It’s time to choose. There’s only one thing that can extricate the world from the calamity descending upon it.

Jefferson is warning us right now about “the impious presumption of legislators and rulers…setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others.” Because Jefferson’s and Madison’s solution to preventing religious wars – Religious Liberty – is the solution to preventing the economic wars about to descend upon us.

That solution is Economic Liberty. That solution is the Separation of Economy and State – for precisely the same reasons for the Separation of Church and State. Such a separation – capitalism for real – is the only thing that will save the world from plunging into economic darkness. Violently.

With Obama’s Osawatomie Speech, we have reached the fork in the road of America’s future. The critical moment has arrived. If you can stomach it, read the whole thing. It is diabolically dishonest. He is actually claiming his Marxist-Fascist values are those of America’s. He has the mind-boggling demagogic chutzpah to claim that free market capitalism “doesn’t work – it has never worked.”

Free market capitalism – economic liberty – is the only thing that ever has worked to create widespread prosperity. What has never worked in history is what Obama advocates: socialism, fascism, and the destruction of economic liberty by government rules, hamstrings, restrictions, taxes, and subsidies.

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By Dr. Jack Wheeler

On Thanksgiving Day, Americans gather with their family and friends to celebrate the blessings that Providence has bestowed on their beloved country.

A deep appreciation of these blessings involves understanding that they were earned. It is to understand the awesome truth of how “God helps those who help themselves” applies to the Mayflower Pilgrims and their First Thanksgiving at America’s birth.

This is an appreciation and understanding of which those on the Left are incapable – for it would mean celebrating the capitalist freedom that made that original Thanksgiving possible. This no liberal, no Democrat, no leftie can do. Thus they must distort history instead.

The distortion starts in Kindergarten, with the childish make-believe of your kid’s school play portraying the noble Squanto teaching the helpless Pilgrims how to feed themselves. So let’s drop the curtain on the distortion and watch the real thing. Here it is.

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By Jack Kelly

In most countries for most of history, people were pretty much locked into the social class into which they were born. But in America men and women of modest means could become rich — if they had an idea for making life better, and worked tirelessly to make their vision real.

Entrepreneurs such as Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs became very, very rich. The rest of us were enriched, too, by the fruits of their genius and their labor — the electric light, the automobile and the computer, and tens of thousands of other inventions and new, better ways of organizing things.

People who don’t have good ideas and who don’t want to work hard want to be rich, too. Some have found a way.

In the last two years, while middle class Americans have been struggling, the net worth of Members of Congress increased 25 percent.

“How do politicians who arrive in Washington D.C. as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires?” Sarah Palin asked. “How do they miraculously accumulate wealth at a rate faster than the rest of us?”

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By Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI)

We must address the clear and present threat to our economy.

Our prosperity stands on the precipice. Concerned Americans demand an explanation of how this happened and leadership that will walk us back from the cliff. But in the White House and along the campaign trail, the purported leaders fail to recognize or refuse to acknowledge the clear and present threat to our economy: the Great Deflation.

The failure to differentiate between an economic recession and this Great Deflation will cause an economically doomed generation.

But this need not happen. The strength of our economy — its capacity to generate employment, opportunity, and growth — is determined by the quality of its factories and its technology and innovation; by the depth and freedom of its marketplace; and by the ingenuity and efforts of its people. By these measures, we Americans should continue to have the strongest economy in history, and one which continues to grow.

So while our economic challenges are daunting, they can be surmounted. It is only a question of our will to take action.

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By Robert Agostinelli

The sad tale of profligate spending is clear. With an abandon and reckless disregard for common-sense economics, we have mortgaged our future. This has been the fault of both sides of the political aisle. Seemingly benign acts of largesse and the application of pork-barrel spending have numbed our national sense of responsibility and left us detached from the full implications.

This has been greatly exacerbated by the equally cowardly seduction of “entitlement.” This term embodies the height of all false utopian ideals that socialism has used to seduce its wards.

Long before our current president embarked on his course of ruin, his intellectual compatriots, Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, charted the course of our demise. They were the forerunners who, in the name of good intentions, sowed the seeds of ruin whose harvest we are reaping.

The expectation that the government has a duty and an obligation to provide entitlements is and always has been a flawed proposition. Simply put, it is a grand illusion with a vengeful ending if not corrected.

Enter President Obama, the supreme narcissistic leader of the realm, never one to “let a crisis go to waste.” His is an artful blend of Keynesian voodoo economics, increased imposition of government control, and the largest expansion of the entitlement state in our history.

The financing of Mr. Obama’s spending and expansion of government can only be sustained by way of subterfuge.

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By Anthony Gregory

As Obama demonizes the wealthy and pitches a dozen plans to restructure the economy, opponents of this program need a reminder of what exactly we’re fighting for. We are resisting bureaucracy, central planning, and encroachments on our freedom and communities. Yet this does not get to the heart of the matter. We are not only an opposition movement, countering the president and his partisans’ agenda. More fundamentally, we stand in defense of the greatest engine of material prosperity in human history, the fount of civilization, peace, and modernity: Capitalism.

Many regard it a dirty word and it is tarnished most of all by its supposed guardians. Wall Street giants fancy themselves capitalists even as they live off the taxpayer and thrive on the state’s gifts of privilege, inflation, and barriers to entry. In the military-industrial complex they champion it by name as they produce devices of murder for the state. In the Republican Party and every conservative institution they talk it up while making such vast exceptions to the principle as to swallow it whole. When many think of capitalism, they think of the corporatist status quo, leading even some who favor economic freedom to abandon the term.

But we should not abandon it.

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By Dr. Jack Wheeler

Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), one of Victorian England’s most prominent Prime Ministers (1868/1874-1880), once commented to a friend: “There are two things that the public should never be allowed to see how they are made: sausage and the law.”

We are witnesses today of just how immortally trenchant Disraeli was back in the 19th century. For in truth, observing our politicians handling the current “debt crisis” is a far more repulsive sight than the inside of a sausage factory.

Yet if Disraeli were here now, he’d smile sardonically and remind us that (he was fluent in French) plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – the more things change, the more they stay the same.

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By David MacGregor

One of the major problems one has, in challenging the status quo, is that people are wedded to the way things are, and have great difficulty in seeing past accepted norms to “what could be”. Taxation is one of these accepted norms.

We were all born into a world where people pay tax. No one fundamentally challenges the system because that’s the way it has always been. Sometimes people put forward various reforms, but no one seriously puts the whole taxation issue under a clear spotlight.

Let me first make my own position crystal clear. I consider taxation to be immoral. Taxation is the forced appropriation of another’s rightful property – as money earned is a result of one’s personal effort.

Taxation cannot be likened to payment for goods and services, which is the result of a voluntary transaction. No, taxation is compulsory and you have no say as to how your money is to be used.

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By Col. Ralph Peters

No one who broke our laws to enter this country should ever decide who becomes our president, a member of Congress, a governor or mayor, or a member of the local school board. This is the non-negotiable “die line” those who love our country must defend: We cannot permit a huge criminal voting block to determine our future.

And every person who entered this country without our government’s formal permission is a criminal. Period.

Democrat Party operatives embed their public arguments for amnesty for eleven-million illegals in terms of human dignity and decency (they never mention votes).

Our laws are never mentioned. Nor is the multitude of illegal immigrant criminals who continue to violate those laws after breaking into our national home.

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By Rob Rojas

Nobody really likes paying their taxes. But, as the old adage about “death and taxes” conveys, there is a sense that taxes are as legitimate and as inevitable as death itself. In their acceptance of taxation, many well-meaning people forget that taxation violates our most basic moral principles.

If you have ever been to a kindergarten or a playground where very young children play, you might have realized that, although the kids are too young to understand many things, they already have a surprising sense of justice.

Take a toy away from a toddler who cannot yet speak a word, and you will often be met with a very clear protest. As far as the toddler is concerned, you have stolen her toy, you have initiated violence, and therefore it’s time to cry. The toddler’s reasoning probably isn’t this sophisticated, but the understanding is there.

Slightly older children are even more amazing. They understand that there is illegitimate violence (when a toy gets stolen), but they also understand that there is such a thing as legitimate violence as well, which is when the victimized child goes to the thieving child and takes her toy back. The astonishing thing is that the usual focus is on getting the toy back rather than punishing the aggressor. Punishment is a concept that they learn later, probably from us.

The initiation of violence is the act of an aggressor against you or against your property. This can be done through actual violence or through intimidation, because the mere threat of violence is an act of violence in itself. A good example would be a thief that points a gun at you to get your wallet without actually pulling the trigger. Another less obvious example is the way the government takes our money. To say that taxes are a form of theft may seem a bit over the top, but refuse to pay your taxes and you will be thrown in jail. Refuse to pay your property taxes and you will see who really owns your house.

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By J. Patrick Rhamey, Jr.

“Atlas Shrugged” is compelling, not for its heroes, but for its villains. Published in 1957, Rand’s description of politicians and lobbyists in a time of economic crisis is almost prophetic. These Washington insiders scheme behind closed doors to retain and expand their power. In elaborate press conferences, they attempt to convince the unsuspecting populace of their legislation’s necessity by vilifying productive companies and portraying their own destructive, self-serving designs as being in the interests of the advancement of equality, stability, and progress.

For instance, in Atlas Shrugged, the lobbyist Wesley Mouch decries the capitalist Hank Rearden’s invention of a wonderful alloy that is stronger than steel. And last week, in the real world, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. took to the house floor to declare that Steve Jobs’s iPad was killing jobs. Congress must, according to Jackson, recognize that Apple is driving companies such as Barnes & Noble and Borders out of business, and the company should be stopped in the interests of fairness.

Jackson decried Congress for failing to foster “protection for jobs here in America to ensure that the American people are being put to work.” It’s as if he wanted us to believe the printing press was harmful to the economy because it decreased the demand for scribes. Such a condemnation of a successful business and a demand for protection of failing industries could easily have been lifted directly from Rand’s novel.

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By Rep. Steve King

As the government edged closer and closer to a shutdown last week, administrators in congressional offices and federal agencies were tasked with determining whether they and their employees provided “essential” or “nonessential” services.

Those employees deemed to be essential are allowed to continue working during a shutdown; those deemed to be nonessential are sent home.

This determination of essential versus nonessential probably sent a ripple of fear through employees of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). In my opinion, the IRS is one of the least essential agencies in the federal government. If I had my way, we would shut down the non-essential IRS forever.

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By Charles Kadlec

Sometimes, the methods to produce results are counter-intuitive. For example, skillful pruning of grape vines is essential to the production of vineyards, and cutting back a rose bush promotes its growth. Based on experience, we can learn where cutting can lead to growth.

The following statement is at first just as counter-intuitive: A reduction in government spending will not slow job growth. In fact, the experience of the last two years provides compelling evidence that a reduction in government spending will lead to increased employment and output in the US economy.

Since 2008, annual federal spending less net interest has increased by $530 billion or 19%. Yet, even with February’s welcome gain of 192,000 jobs, there are 2.3 million fewer people employed today than in February 2009, the month before the Obama Administration turned on the spending spigots with the passage of its economic recovery plan. Over those 24 months, private sector employment has declined by 2.0 million. In spite of the rapid expansion of the Federal bureaucracy, government sector employment has fallen by 360,000.

Moreover, a comparison of these results to the recovery from the economic crisis of the early 1980s casts doubt on the Obama Administration’s claim that without the unprecedented increase in government spending, the recession would have been even worse and the recovery slower.

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By Ulster Man

None other than Franklin D Roosevelt warned against public employees having the right to collective bargaining, warning that such a condition could put at risk the essential functions of government. Now decades following Roosevelt’s advice, America is now witness to the ever growing and increasingly dangerous folly and fantasy that so permeates labor union America.

With mad-dog protesters packing the Wisconsin capitol, attacking Republican state legislators as they enter, Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan declared the revolutionary mood of Cairo Egypt had come to Wisconsin. Certainly many in the pro-labor union crowds embraced the comparison, declaring Wisconsin governor Scott Walker as being akin to recently removed Egyptian dictator Hasni Mubarak. (as well as Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, etc…)

Ah, but such comparisons are incorrect if but for the simple fact that in Egypt, protests were enaged under the guise of fighting for democracy, whereas in Wisconsin, the labor unions are attempting to destroy democracy in the name of continued and high cost salary and benefit packages that now threaten to sink local and state budgets. The freely elected officials of the Wisconsin legislator are currently unable to vote on a state budget because a number of Democrats have fled the state, refusing to vote, abdicating their duty, and thus subverting the very principle of representative government. It is a tactic that exposes labor unions and their Democratic Party cohorts for the centralized government pay to play thugs they truly are.

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By Richard Rahn

The Obama administration’s policies are causing Americans to pay far more for gasoline and other fuels than necessary. America is awash in fossil-fuel energy sources with almost 30 percent of the world’s coal and 80 percent of the world’s oil shale – which contains an estimated three times the recoverable oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. Canada, with its oil sands, has the world’s third-highest oil reserves, after the United States and Saudi Arabia. New technologies that enable low-cost natural gas production from shale mean that many countries, including the United States, will have gas for centuries at current production rates.

Fossil fuels at some prices are interchangeable. Coal, gas and oil can all fuel electric power plants. Liquid motor fuels can be made easily from natural gas, and, in fact, many auto, truck and bus fleets already use natural gas. For more than 70 years, the technology has been available to turn coal into liquid motor fuel.

Natural gas now sells in the United States for a British thermal unit (BTU) equivalent of $30 a barrel of oil, and coal sells at roughly half that price. Much of the Canadian oil sands, U.S. domestic oil shale and offshore oil in the Gulf of Mexico can be produced at prices well below $75 per barrel. The United States should be an energy exporter; Canada already is and is the single biggest source of oil for the U.S.

Most countries try to produce oil, gas and coal and sell it on the global market as a way of increasing the real incomes of their citizens, but not the United States. The Obama administration has a hatred of fossil fuels and is determined to reduce their use despite the economic damage.

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By Thomas DiLorenzo

The main reason so many state and local governments are bankrupt, or on the verge of bankruptcy, is the combination of government-run monopolies and government-employee unions. Government-employee unions have vastly more power than do private-sector unions because the entities they work for are typically monopolies.

When the employees of a grocery store, for example, go on strike and shut down the store, consumers can simply shop elsewhere, and the grocery-store management is perfectly free to hire replacement workers. In contrast, when a city teachers’ or garbage-truck drivers’ union goes on strike, there is no school and no garbage collection as long as the strike goes on. In addition, teachers’ tenure (typically after two or three years in government schools) and civil service regulations make it extremely costly if not virtually impossible to hire replacement workers.

Thus, when government bureaucrats go on strike they have the ability to completely shut down the entire “industry” they “work” in indefinitely. The taxpayers will complain bitterly about the absence of schools and garbage collection, forcing the mayor, governor, or city councilors to quickly cave in to the union’s demands to avoid risking the loss of their own jobs due to voter dissatisfaction. This process is the primary reason why, in general, the expenses of state and local governments have skyrocketed year in and year out, while the “production” of government employees declines.

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By Conn Carroll

The Washington Post reports today that “the daunting tower of national, state and local debt in the United States will reach a level this year unmatched just after World War II and already exceeds the size of the entire economy, according to government estimates.” But there are a number of big differences between our national debt now and the debt in 1946. The Post reports: “State and municipal governments from Sacramento to Madison to Harrisburg have racked up about $2.4 trillion in debt, or more than 15 percent of GDP.”

And even this total is understating the problem. Recent studies show that state and local governments are severely underestimating their pension and benefit promises, including a $574 billion shortfall for the nation’s top major cities and a possible $3.4 trillion shortfall for the states. The cause of these crippling pension and benefit obligations is no secret. The Post explains: “Public employees often enjoy more generous pension and health-care benefits, and these are at the root of the long-term budget problems confronting many states.”

How did this happen? Why did so many state and local governments not only spend too much today but promise future spending far beyond the means of taxpayers to pay for it? Government unions. And across the country, legislators and governors are beginning to fight back.

The professional left (including the AFL-CIO, the SEIU, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the NEA, AFSCME and President Barack Obama) is trying to portray these budget battles as an assault against all unions. But as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R), who is pushing legislation to curtail government union bargaining power, explained last night, this is just plain false:

The bill I put forward isn’t aimed at state workers, and it certainly isn’t a battle with unions. If it was, we would have eliminated collective bargaining entirely or we would have gone after the private-sector unions. But, we did not because they are our partners in economic development. We need them to help us put 250,000 people to work in the private sector over the next four years.

Walker is right: Government unions are inherently different from private-sector unions. The purpose of private-sector unions is to get workers a larger share of the profits they helped create. But government is a monopoly and earns no profits. All government unions do is redistribute more tax dollars from taxpayers to unions.

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By Robin Bravender

The House voted Thursday to dethrone nine White House “czars.”

Republicans successfully added an amendment to the continuing resolution that would leave President Barack Obama’s senior advisers on policy issues including health care, energy and others out of a job.

The vote was 249-179.

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) offered the amendment that blocks funding for various policy advisers to combat what he called “a very disturbing proliferation of czars” under Obama.

“These unappointed, unaccountable people who are literally running a shadow government, heading up these little fiefdoms that nobody can really seem to identify where they are or what they’re doing,” Scalise said Thursday. “But we do know that they’re wielding vast amounts of power.”

The jobs on the chopping block: White House-appointed advisers on health care, energy and climate, green jobs, urban affairs, the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention center, oversight of TARP executive compensation, diversity at the Federal Communications Commission and the auto industry manufacturing policy.

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By Juliana Gruenwald

The House passed an amendment Thursday that would bar the Federal Communications Commission from using any funding to implement the network-neutrality order it approved in December.

The amendment, approved on a 244-181 vote, was offered by Energy and Commerce Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., to legislation that would fund government agencies for the rest of fiscal year 2011.

Walden and other critics of the FCC’s net-neutrality order argue it will stifle innovation and investment in broadband. The order aims to bar broadband providers from discriminating against Internet content, services, or applications.

“If left unchallenged, this claim of authority would allow the FCC to regulate any matter it discussed in the national broadband plan,” Walden said.

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By Moses Kim

Regular readers of this blog know that I love delving into psychology to understand how we end up in crisis after crisis. The normalcy bias explains why people don’t buy gold since they can’t see major crises coming. The bandwagon effect explains why people believed homes were viable investments even in a no doc, adjustable rate, negative amortizing loan environment. Cognitive dissonance explains why people can’t recognize the government bond bubble. It’s time to face the truth that we as humans have some serious biases that need to be recognized- otherwise we are doomed to suffer the full consequences of the oncoming debt crisis.

I am an American citizen, so trust me, it’s hard for me to believe what our government is doing. But my natural disbelief does not change the fact that our government is acting irresponsibly. Allow me to make a quick analogy between the U.S. government and Bernie Madoff.

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