But in order to deal with our current struggles, we must recognize that they are symptoms.  The cure to these symptoms lies in dealing with their root causes.  However, even before dealing with our struggles and their root causes, we must ask, what is our vision for America, and what is the role of government in helping to ensure it rather than dooming us to never reach it?

My view of America is a country in which people are free to pursue their greatest good as they see it, or as the founders put it to create a land in which people can pursue their happiness.  This system presupposes that the people are protected.  Before people can partake in mutually beneficial trade and activity, they must be reasonably secure in their persons and their property.  As such, free markets and the free people that create these markets require strong national defense.

So the vision should be clear — government’s role is to lay the foundation for people to be free, furnishing and preserving prosperity by providing defense for it, both against external aggressors and internal ones by providing a set of stable laws protecting private property and contracts specifically and the individual generally.

Where we stand today is that the government, created to ensure these things is instead imperiling them.  Rather than securing private property it consumes and redistributes it.  Further, at every avenue government creates barriers to the free voluntary exchange of goods and services that heretofore have provided such unparalleled levels of comfort for us all.  Rather than defending us from foreign enemies it cuts deals with them, concedes to them and generally submits to them out of political correctness, moral relativism and an inane commitment to multiculturalism.

As such, in my view we are headed for catastrophe, with the only question being whether it is our economy that completely collapses through the insolvency of our government which will bring down much of the real economy through crippling interest rates and the chaos caused by the collapse of the welfare state, a currency collapse whose effects will be the same or a terrorist attack or attacks that lead to either of these scenarios.  Regardless, business will plod along lethargically as the growth of the state continues to suffocate it.  That the economy has continued to function at all is a testament to the will of people who continue to produce in the face of looters trying to play G-d and centrally plan the lives of the masses for their own good.

On defense, we are at war with enemies that we are unable to identify, even though they clearly spell out their doctrines and telegraph their plays for us.  Islam is at war with us, and perpetually throughout history has been at war with all who refuse to submit to it.  The allies of those Muslims who overtly work to destroy western civilization through the murder of innocents and those who covertly do so through cultural and legal means are the leftists both abroad and in the US who either find in the Muslim world a common enemy in the west, or who are Lenin’s useful idiots.  Islam lays out its battle plan in the Koran, the Hadith and the rest of its canon, and Marx, Lenin, Gramsci and Alinsky lay out very clearly in effect the jihad of the Communists in their own tomes and letters, a vision which includes using subterfuge and other means to allow the west to kill itself from within.

A document on the strategy of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America contained the following:

The Ikhwan [the Muslim Brotherhood's name for itself] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

Lenin is said to have remarked:

The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.

Strategic deception, the equivalent of taqiyya in Islam is key to socialist strategy and helps to explain much in the world — it explains why Communist countries have opened their markets to capital from free countries to allow us to build them up, and why these trade partners continue to ally with and fund various outwardly hostile nations, oftentimes Muslim ones.  It gives us a basis for understanding the moves and motives of the Chinese, Russians, North Koreans, Venezuelans and their proxies.  Its success is reflected in the incrementalist move towards socialism in the US as opposed the the failed sudden revolutions of the past, which has been occurring as we have built in part or in full the 10 planks of the Communist Manifesto.

George W. Bush was correct when he identified an Axis of Evil, but he painted an incomplete picture; it includes far more countries than he knew or would have cared to admit.  If we were to study the doctrines of our enemies, we would see that amongst both adherents to Islam and socialism, not only are the tactics the same — in letting your enemy commit suicide by deceiving him on fronts both cultural to change the perceptions of society and legal to slowly but surely whittle away his foundational institutions, but so too are the goals.  Both devout Muslims and leftists seek to create all-encompassing totalitarian governments worldwide, under Shariah law in the case of the Muslims and under the rule of omnipotent elites in the case of the leftists.  The systems are based on man being a slave to a deity or to his fellow man, from the annoying regulation to the forced labor camp.

While “progressives” have been on the march however, leading to policies that weaken both our economy and our defenses, our failure has been that we have not proposed an alternative vision.  We have not argued the moral case for capitalism, and we have not articulated what a prudent military policy should consist in.

I would argue that the Austrian school of economics, long forgotten amongst the elite is the only school that has consistently explained why economies grow and why they collapse, and how it is government intervention, primarily through the central planning of money and credit in a bank like the Federal Reserve that sows the seeds of ultimate collapse; and secondarily through intervention in confiscatory taxation, subsidization, protectionism, incessant regulation and redistribution of wealth that ends up bankrupting nations and has done so historically, with the central bank as the trusty aid of the politicians who perpetuate this system by helping pay off chosen constituents.

Until we have studied the works of Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, F.A. Hayek, Frederic Bastiat and countless others, we will not be armed with the weaponry to begin fighting the disinformation and sophistry of the Keynesians and all others who argue that intervention is not only economically beneficial but moral, contrary to all reason and experience in the history of mankind.  Perhaps this immorality is shown most in the fact that anywhere and everywhere socialism has been tried, ultimately the result has been poverty, misery and in some cases widespread death.  More importantly, the crux of the split between socialists and capitalists again rests on the notion that while socialists believe that man should control his fellow man, capitalists believe that every man is a sovereign king.

History also leads us to understand the proper object of defense.  Defense is not about spreading one’s ideologies or building nations in our image.  Defense is about annihilating those who threaten the blessings of liberty and/or threatening to exact such a punishment on our enemies for their cowardly acts that they will never dare attack us.  In order to properly defend ourselves, we must recognize our enemies without fear of political correctness or hurt feelings.  Evil must be identified as evil and dealt with swiftly and forcefully.

What are the implications on economics and defense?  On the former, that the welfare state is collapsing as less people pay into the system while more people become its recipients, and that central planning in all its forms is further causing the economy to fail, and on the latter that Islam and socialism are united against us and that their doctrines which contain their visions and stratagem are written out for us and have revealed themselves through countless acts — they reveal themselves in the things we are afraid to say even in close company and in the workings and machinations that we see daily overseas and at home, including of course outright attacks.

I feel much more confident that Americans will wake up to the forces of evil in the world as they see more images of a Europe that has allowed Muslim immigration en masse and because of a natural distrust of socialist countries, than in Americans ever begging their politicians to abolish the welfare state, and shudder the countless Washington bureaucracies that plague us (including the Federal Reserve that lies at the heart of the expansion of the state).  Rather, men will argue against the unjust redistribution of wealth or position that the government confers when it is in their own self-interest to do so, but so far as government favoritism towards themselves they will seek to hold it as closely as possible, not realizing that they are contributing to an unjust, economically infeasible system that will collapse, to the detriment of all.

These problems are age old.  Too, their solutions have always laid in understanding their causes.  If our government has run up insurmountable debts, look at the programs causing the debts and eradicate them.  If the economy is sputtering, look at all of the things that are impeding it, including a sound currency, barriers to trade and innovation and the prevention of the price system from functioning, which allows for coordination and the spontaneous order of markets and do away with them.  If we are unsafe, recognize who it is that is making us unsafe, study the enemy and devise a plan to eradicate him or show him that his truculence will lead to his demise.

This can only be effectuated through policy however, which requires all of us to arm ourselves with the right ideas and then to devise a political strategy to propagate them; on this front we can learn much from our opponents.  For the government reflects its people, and as such will require a populace imbued with such views as we have discussed herein.  We have yet to truly begin an ideological fight directed by a clear vision, one which is based on protecting the natural rights of the individual and which represents the Judeo-Christian morals on which our country is based, while our enemies have been doing so for over a century.  We must do so in earnest if we are to have any chance at reclaiming our country.

In a June 14th editorial entitled “Politicizing the Fed,” the Wall Street Journal sheds light on one of the dubious regulations of the upcoming financial reform bill.  The Journal states:

The biggest underreported threat comes from Subtitle I, Section 1801 of the House financial reform bill titled “Inclusion of Minorities and Women; Diversity in Agency Workforce.” Sponsored by California Democrat Maxine Waters, the provision requires each federal financial agency, the Fed Board of Governors and the 12 regional Fed banks to “establish an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion.”

So what else is new, you say? Don’t the feds already dictate racial and gender hiring? Yes, they do, through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and assorted other federal laws. As a matter of racial and gender diversity, the Waters provision is at best redundant.

But Ms. Waters and the House are hunting bigger game—to wit, the political allocation of credit.

[...]

The House provision makes that very clear by making each diversity officer a Presidential appointee who must be confirmed by the Senate.The post, says the bill, will be “comparable to that of other senior level staff.”  The post, says the bill, will be “comparable to that of other senior level staff.”

The law says this diversity czar will “ensure equal employment opportunity and the racial, ethnic and gender diversity” of the work force and senior management of these institutions. More ominously, this creature of Congress and the White House will also be charged with “increas[ing] the participation of minority-owned and women-owned businesses in the programs and contracts” of each agency and conducting “an assessment” of stated inclusion goals.

Mull over that one for a minute. Having recently lived through a financial mania and panic caused in part by political pressure for “affordable housing,” Congress will now order regulators to allocate credit by race and gender.

In an article I wrote on February 28th entitled “Fiscal Death by Welfare,” I argued: “I believe that as the downturn goes on the government will blame the banks for the lack of economic growth and force them to allocate credit to chosen political entrepreneurs and other bad credit risks…”  I truly wish I had been wrong in my assessment.

Note that this is not to say that minorities or women are bad credit risks, but that based upon prior social engineering experiments in which government has intervened to force lending, we have seen that the worst credit risks are the ones who most benefited at the outset, to the detriment of themselves and all taxpayers at the day of reckoning.

Too, any government forcing of credit necessarily reflects a bad credit risk, because in lieu of government intervention, market actors would already properly allocate credit to anyone, regardless of their race, gender or ethnicity, at an interest rate reflective of their risk profile.  If lenders were to discriminate on the basis of non-economic reasons, than other competitors would see this void and fill it.  This principle is reflected for example in the old days when in response to the so-called WASP investment banks, Jews built their own ones to fill the vacuum of talent being ignored by white-shoe firms.  Private self-interest works in the face of discrimination.  Public self-interest creates discrimination.

Why is forced allocation of credit to certain sectors of society harmful?  Forced allocation of credit means mispricing of credit which leads to market distortions that manifest into bubbles and crashes.

Interest rates are supposed to reflect the risk profile of the borrower.  Lenders assess the ability of a borrower to pay back a loan and determine a proper compensatory rate based upon the opportunity cost and risk involved with leaving the cash with such a borrower over a period of time.  The government by forcing the allocation of credit will not only distort the market mechanism which best coordinates lending and borrowing activity in all sectors of the economy, largely to the detriment of the most creditworthy debtors, but also artificially cheapen the cost of credit for the least creditworthy of debtors by increasing the supply of available credit to them.

In effect, the government will seek to deny the truth reflected in higher interest rates for more risky borrowers by dropping their rates by fiat.  Since better credit risks will have to pay higher interest rates due to such diversion of capital, this will have a doubly negative effect on the worse credit risks who would benefit from the likely more successful economic activity of the more creditworthy borrowers.

The notion that interest rates must be kept low — that we should lie by suppressing the price of credit because it reflects truths we do not want to acknowledge is not limited to the central planning writers of the financial reform bill.

In Ben Bernanke, the chief financial central planner’s most recent performance in front of the House Budget Committee, he echoed this argument, noting that we must keep interest rates low — that we must stop the price of interest from reflecting reality or we will risk facing the consequences of reality.  This of course is how he arrives at the supposed panacea of an interest rate of 0-.25%.

We have government at every level that is bankrupt, hundreds of under-capitalized banks with toxic assets on their books and an economy that is being hyper-regulated to death and facing increasing onerous taxes direct and indirect, and yet the benchmark cost of borrowing money, to which all other interest rates are connected is 0%.  Utter insanity.  Almost as insane as giving a body like the Fed the ability to fix such a price, as if a single human being or board of human beings could pick the price of anything, be it credit or bananas.  Obama, Bernanke & Co. would rather wage a war on truth and centrally plan than go home and let prices reflect reality.

Another aspect to the denial of truth in the economy deals with the abandonment of “mark-to-market” pricing.  If banks were to have to price assets on their books based upon what they could reasonably expect to obtain in the market for those assets, many of them would be in serious trouble.  Yet instead, because we have suspended mark-to-market pricing, and forced taxpayers to pump capital into our banks, their balance sheets appear to be healthy.  Hence the new normal in our economy of “extend and pretend,” where we throw lifelines at banks and failing enterprises by providing them with cheap capital, and pray that their now hidden underlying problems will go away, knowing that they will not only not go away but grow larger until some unknown dark point in the future when the cancer kills the host.

When it comes to unemployment too, we see an administration not only denying truth but flat out lying, laughably arguing that we are creating jobs.  Leave aside the fact that the more honest measure of unemployment, U6 shows unemployment at much closer to Depression levels.  The bottom line is that a government job, the only kind we are creating, is not an economically beneficial job, the caveat being the jobs of those who defend us and keep us safe who are necessary to maintain the peace that allows our economy to function.  Even there, I doubt anyone would argue that in a world without foreign enemies, maintaining a military would be anything more than a diversion of funds.

In any event, the private sector creates jobs in response to the demand of consumers.  Sovereign individuals dictate what sectors should grow and what sectors should contract based upon their needs.  Government does not meet any such demand.  It can only take resources away from the private sector and allocate land, labor and capital based upon political, not economic factors that in a capitalist economy, individuals would make to drive economic activity.  The government in depriving individuals and enterprises of such economic resources will only stifle recovery, immorally attempting to play the role of the omnipotent master of consumers and producers.  The government will destroy jobs by “creating jobs.”

Note too that the underlying argument that people are not consuming enough, and that thus we need such boondoggles as cash-for-clunkers and HAMP further denies truth.  How is a government to know what is the proper amount of consumption?  Why is the government to stop individuals from choosing to consume less?  Why is government to take resources from people and consume more if individuals choose to consume less?

We overconsumed (as reflected in the unjustified rise and subsequent crash in asset prices) precisely because we were misled by gobs of artificially cheap credit, so now we need to force people to consume even more and make credit even cheaper?  NO!  Now we need to contract — consume less and save and invest more.  Saving and investment means foregoing consumption today to consume more tomorrow.  But if interest rates are artificially suppressed, disincentivizing saving, all we will do is perpetuate existing stagnancy.

Most recently, with regard to BP, President Obama is trying to use the disaster to argue that drilling for oil is bad, and that thus we need to use public money to push all sorts of green initiatives like windmills and solar energy.  Forget that BP was forced to drill so deep underwater because of all of the environmental regulations we have in place that prevent us from tapping much more easily usable sources of oil.  Forget that the baby-killers at BP are losing billions of dollars, again as a result of this policy, while you demonize them as if they intentionally caused this disaster.  Forget that alternative sources of energy are nowhere near being perfected, nor are they yet economical, which is why the private sector is not pushing all of its resources toward such development.

When you are the central-planner-in-chief you know better than your serfs.  You can deny all truth and continue to push your intentionally destructive policies, claiming that existing notions of individual liberty, property rights and true equality before the law are antiquated and immoral.

But in reality, President Obama’s economic policy of denying truth merely divides and favors certain classes of people over others and compounds and prolongs our problems.  Obama seeks to supplant with the decisions of divine bureaucrats the decisions of millions of individuals partaking in mutually beneficial actions to the good of the whole world.

This administration completely perverts truth, justice and morality in their grab for greater control over you and I.  Most importantly, this administration forgets the fundamental truth that man is flawed and thus cannot be G-d.  What could be more dangerous and immoral than a policy which stems from such a hubristic and fallacious principle?

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Read the full transcript and listen to the audio here.

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The scenario we posed the ACORN Housing employees in Baltimore is due to the application of similar power tactics. We gave ACORN a taste of its own medicine.  ACORN was alleged to be thug-like, criminal, and nefarious.  This criminal behavior was evidenced by a video of Baltimore ACORN community organizers breaking the locks on foreclosed homes.  Instead of railing against their radicalism, it is best to bring out this type of radicalism. Hannah Giles and I took advantage of ACORN’s regard for thug criminality by posing the most ridiculous criminal scenario we could think of and seeing if they would comply–which they did without hesitation.

Additionally, instead of focusing on foreclosure itself, which has become seemingly as politicized as abortion, we focused on crimes more difficult for the left to defend: trafficking of young helpless girls and tax evasion. The first group represents the severely disadvantaged, the second a threat to the distribution of wealth.

While manipulation or entrapment occurs when people are encouraged to do things they otherwise wouldn’t, the pre-set trap is their own.  These tactics allow the viewer to see ACORN’s soul; their playing field and their morality, out in the open.  Their system is based on conflict and change for its own sake.  This system is based on totalitarian principles and class war techniques. These people understand pressure, power and self-interest.  When the Baltimore employees saw we were shady dealers, their instincts clicked in, as we were prime recruits.

ACORN has ascended.  They elect our politicians and receive billions in tax money. Their world is a revolutionary, socialistic, atheistic world, where all means are justifiable.  And they create chaos, again, for it’s own sake.  It is time for us to be studying and applying their tactics, many of which are ideologically neutral.  It is time, as Hannah said as we walked out of the ACORN facility, for conservative activists to “create chaos for glory.”

Listen to the complete audio here.

View the complete transcript here.