Showing posts with label Regulation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Regulation. Show all posts

Thursday, February 17, 2022

Freedom Index©

 Freedom Index©


The Freedom Index© is the inverse ratio of the percentage of GDP spent on government annually. Currently the reading is somewhere between 45-70% of your God-given freedoms, depending on where you live in the United States. No wonder Elon Musk is fighting the SEC.

It is a sad state of affairs when the Thomas Edison of our generation has to SUE his own government for chilling his basic civil rights. Instead of unleashing innovation, the Biden Administration has made a point of trying to crush it. How did we get here?

There has been a steady decline in basic civil rights for over a century, and it can be tied directly to the rise of the Income Tax and IRS. Once the government gained the power to tax it never stopped, because your tax dollars are its nutrients for growth. Hence we have witnessed a stunning growth in the size and scope of the government. Consider the historical chart below:



The Federal Government spend now is over 30% of our GDP. Combine that with State and Local spend and we're easily approaching 50%+. Why does that matter? Well as government grows, your freedoms erode. Sadly, the Founders knew this would happen. That is why they kept government small, knowing that it is inherently corrupt. Consider, since 1930 when Fed Spend was about 5%, you had essentially 95% of your freedom. Now it is less than half. And in many states like California it is worse. "The State" has become all.

Can this be fixed? That is a difficult question. President Reagan famously once said: "The closest thing to eternal life on earth is a Government Program." How true it is. Much of the problem lies with our elected representatives who do not represent us. They represent themselves and their lust for power. Change begins with voting them out, demanding term limits, and creating a task force to reduce regulations and simplify taxation. Yes, a task force to REDUCE government. We should not be the best country for political corruption and accountants, but rather for engineers, scientists, and poets.
 

Thursday, January 27, 2022

Getting Breyer'd

 Getting Breyer'd


The Biden Administration added another term to the popular lexicon yesterday when they leaked Justice Stephen Breyer's intention to retire to the media PRIOR to his actual announcement that he was indeed retiring, thus a Supreme Court Justice was effectively FIRED before he RETIRED. He was Breyer'd.

It is troubling in a Democracy that an elderly sitting Justice can be pushed aside with little recourse. Where was the President last night either apologizing or denying what happened? And to add further insult to the "retirement," Biden then vowed to break Federal Law by announcing both the RACE and GENDER of the new appointee...no need to discuss qualifications for sitting on the bench of the highest court fellow Americans, those are just needless distractions.

Politics determine policy and policy determine economic outcomes. Financial farmers should pay very close attention to the vetting "process" of highly appointed administration officials, bureaucrats, and judges as they will have significant impact on the future of this country's destiny. Gaffes add up, and lifetime appointments sometimes last a lifetime.
 

 




Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Killing Them Softly

 Killing Them Softly


Executive Order 6102 signed by FDR made U.S. Citizen ownership of gold illegal in 1933. This act of tyranny went unchallenged for almost as long as his cousin Teddy Roosevelt's statue stood in front of the American Museum of Natural History. The two men could not have been more diametrically opposite in their policies, yet they were both men of their times. Sadly, it seems like we're reliving the early 20th Century all over again, both politically and socially with a pandemic which follows the Spanish Flu almost cough for cough,  an exit (entry?) into global conflict, and socialism rearing its Medusa head.

Change the dates and change the names and the resemblance is uncanny. Word War I raged in the midst of the Spanish Flu, and the "war to end all wars" finally ended on November 11th, 1918. The Spanish Flu swept around the world from February 1918 until April 1920 (give or take some months, of both sides of that figure.) The mortality rate of the two accounted for some 70 million deaths, of a population of 1.9 billion. Equivalent deaths today would be on the order of 300,000,000. That is a staggering figure. But what happened next in the early 1920s and what is happening today should scare the bejesus out of you.

When there is a vacuum in power, wealth, influence, leadership, ability, morality, etc., etc. it is usually quickly filled; indeed the adage "nature abhors a vacuum" is poignant and precise. Who or what fills that vacuum now is troubling for both financial farmers and more so to the citizens of this country. Just like Executive Order 6102, which made owning God's money, gold, illegal we are seeing a game plan right out of 1933.

If a government wants to fundamentally change the fabric of a society, it kills them softly. A two-pronged approach of utilizing acts of omission and commission works best. The players are on the field and the game has begun, with the first salvo being the most destructive, which of course is an act of omission. Getting something done in Washington is actually pretty hard, even if you are the ruling party. You often don't have the majority and then there is the pesky voting to worry about...but acts of omission? Oh boy, such opportunity!

National sovereignty is probably the most binary political issue there is...either a country has sovereignty or it doesn't, and all natural law flows from that fact. If a country does not have sovereignty, then it is not a nation by definition. It is a group of people who live in a certain geography. There is no border, there is no law inside that border, and there is no enforcement of said law(s). There is no shared value system, there is no language, there is no culture, there is simply of place residence. 

So if you want to dilute or negate the rights of citizens presumably in a nation, you simply ignore the presumption of a nation with borders. That's an easy act of omission that has a massive impact and can be accomplished by doing nothing, yet advances your political goals immensely. But that's just one variable to the final solution of a central government. 

The two other pieces to the "triumvirate" are Regulation and Taxation. Those two can pretty much steer a country to prosperity and freedom or doom and tyranny; although some voting might be involved by elected "representatives," a LOT of damage can be done with a regime fixated on changing the fabric of society via executive order.

Consider, FDR essentially made illegal a basic human right of the pursuit of happiness by outlawing gold as a store of value. This ring especially true today, where the first item on the IRS Form 1040 is a question about "crypto." Another way to regulate freedom is to require disclosure of something, and naturally then to tax it. And was we well know, the more you tax something the less of it you get. Let me say that again; the more you tax something, the less you get.

So less energy production, fewer side hustles, less crypto, less innovation, etc. etc. Ad nauseam. The end result of these polices inevitably less freedom for citizens and more control by the central government. Side effects naturally are the breakdown of society; more crime, more corruption, less enforcement, less good medical care, less good education, less good services in general.

When everything is free, nothing has value. Socialism's grip is tight. It provides government with tremendous control over its population. Just take a look at Australia and New Zealand, which have become de facto police states controlled by bureaucrats who have thoroughly embraced the strategy of "Killing Them Softly."