When Ronald Reagan said that big government undermined the economy, some people dismissed his comments because of his philosophical belief in liberty.

And when I discuss my work on the economic impact of government spending, I often get the same reaction.

This is why it’s important that a growing number of establishment outfits are slowly but surely coming around to the same point of view.

• The European Central Bank published a study showing “…a significant negative effect of the size of government on growth.”
• A study by two Harvard economists found that “large adjustments in fiscal policy, if based on well-targeted spending cuts, have often led to expansions.”
• The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development noted in recent research that welfare programs are economically destructive because they lure people into dependency because “net disposable income would increase despite putting in fewer hours.”
• A study from the International Monetary Fund concluded that “Cuts to pension and health entitlements had the most beneficial effect on economic growth.”

This is remarkable. It’s beginning to look like the entire world has figured out that there’s an inverse relationship between big government and economic performance. (more…)

The INET Bretton Woods summit, summoned by George Soros and those who alternatively hide behind, or gather around him, has now happened.

But before trying to analyze whatever we may discover of what occurred there, it is critical to discern how it fits an overall picture.  For context, one must also see what the IMF and World Bank “communitarian” elitists are up to.

We find that before the Bretton Woods affair, focusing upon “new solutions,” there was a similar IMF meeting, called “New Ideas for a New World.”  It was centered upon “Post-Crisis Policy Making” and occurred March 7-14.  That gave some of them a lot of time to communicate and plan in quiet (the traditional word for that is conspire) when they were not attending official sessions, or making videos.

Then, we see that Soros’ April 8-11 conference ended just as the IMF and World Bank took up their April 11-17 Spring Meetings, just a limo ride away.  “Blossom of Spring, won’t you bloom and grow?”  Let us see what is budding in this intensive series of conferences, by the first one’s own promotional vid.

Here is a collection of pitches for “New Ideas for a New World.”  Hey, they left out the last word, “Order.”  Could it be that some of them know their version of order requires fomenting massive disorder first, the crises not to be wasted?  They also left out the word “Brave,” before “New World.”  Maybe that is because some of them like Huxley, have qualms.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nsst1U8jidA

This video puts their dexterous foot forward about that March 2011 conference, while their sinister footfalls go on.  So who are these dudes, getting together and yukking it up (well, three out of four globalist manipulators seem to approve) and just how spooky are they?  What are the messages of the Big Money priests, to the unwashed, PITI-ful masses of principal, interest, taxes, and insurance payers?

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What would you think if George Soros were organizing his fellow anti-American, globalist, neo-Marxist “thought leaders,” in pursuit of globally governed banking and finance, in a second Bretton Woods conference?

Would you consider that their goals include dragging American influence and incomes down, while confiscating much of our personal finances and giving them to other nations (and yes, the age-old financier network behind them) in the name of “communitarianism?”

Would you find their goal is to replace the bad influences of the IMF and the World Bank, with a much worse, more powerfully controlling, post-American global apparatus?

What would you think, if that meeting were being held this April 8th through 11th?

I got an email, last week; it was Tuesday the 22nd.  It was from George Soros.  To hear as straight from the dragon’s mouth as feasible, I had subscribed.  In this emailed article, he lamented the inequities of wealth among the nation-states of Europe, under the strains of their continuing insolvency crisis.  He warned of the dangers of national interest.  Rather, he proposed, not surprisingly, a further blowing of the global insolvency bubble, so the more indebted European nations may get along owing, while their lending nations get along being owed — all the while, blending and worsening the  financial and monetary crises and spreading this yeasty recipe further throughout the world, especially to America.

That was quite provocative.

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Buried beneath the avalanche of press coverage about the lame-duck Congress, I found a story about President Obama’s mid-December meeting with twenty corporate CEOs. The purpose of this Blair House get-together was to discuss how to jump-start our still-ailing economy. Among other aims, Mr. Obama reiterated his goals to increase employment, end the recession, and double U.S. exports over the next five years.

These are lofty and laudable ambitions. But it seems that Mr. Obama’s regulatory bureaucrats haven’t gotten the memo. For example, consider the counter-productive impact of their efforts on agriculture.

As any shopper knows, food prices this past year have been rising faster than the overall rate of inflation. “Fears of a global food crisis swept the world’s commodity markets as prices for staples such as corn, rice and wheat spiraled after the U.S. government warned of ‘dramatically’ lower supplies,” the Financial Times reported in early October. “There is growing concern among countries about continuing volatility and uncertainty in food markets,” said World Bank president Robert Zoellick later that month. “These concerns have been compounded by recent increases in grain prices.”

Confronting this looming food-supply crisis is the American farmer. His productivity is such that the United States is the world’s largest agricultural exporter, with $108.7 billion in farm products shipped abroad in 2010. Helping him increase the supply of agricultural products is the key to addressing both rising food prices and global shortages. His productivity is also critical to our country’s broader economic recovery.

So, you would think that the administration’s apparatchiks would be doing whatever they can to remove the regulatory impediments that farmers face. But you would be wrong. Consider several ways in which federal regulators are threatening agricultural productivity, both directly and indirectly.

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The great Bernanke QE2 debate continues to heat up. In the run-up to the G-20 meetings, China, Russia, Germany, and others are all coming out against the Federal Reserve’s quantitative-easing agenda. They don’t want hot-money excess dollars to flow into their higher-yielding currencies.

The assault against Bernanke’s easy money has reached such fever that President Obama felt it necessary to defend the $600 billion in new-money printing in a news conference in India.

Meanwhile, World Bank president Robert Zoellick has actually called for putting gold back into global money, in order to use it as an international reference point to measure market expectations over inflation or deflation. The former Treasury and State Department official wants a successor to Bretton Woods. To my way of thinking, Zoellick is dead-on right.

And then there’s Kevin Warsh’s opus op-ed in Monday’s Wall Street Journal. I have written about Warsh in the past, and his sound-thinking views. Taking a bit of a shot at Bernanke’s QE2, the Fed board member basically says: Look, you want better growth, reform the tax code and stop regulating. “The Federal Reserve is not a repair shop for broken fiscal, trade, or regulatory policies,” he writes.

But in the key part of his op-ed, Warsh calls for a strictly limited QE2, not an open-ended commitment. He describes it as “necessarily limited, circumscribed, and subject to regular review.” And he goes on to say that if the dollar decline and run-up of commodity prices continues, these inflation signals should stop QE2, regardless of the unemployment rate.

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The Democrats are trying to cram through another special-interest piece of legislation, which they are calling (depending on the audience) either a tax-extenders bill or a stimulus bill. But they’ve been having trouble getting enough votes for this motley collection of welfare-state provisions and special-interest tax breaks, in part because of the public’s growing hostility to wasteful and corrupt Washington spending. The proposal finally has been approved by the House, but only after the leadership made some (mostly cosmetic) changes to  get the votes of a sufficient number of gullible “Blue Dog” Democrats.

The Blue Dogs claim to be fans of fiscal responsibility, but they look at the issue through a very distorted lens. As the Obamacare vote demonstrated, they will vote for big and bloated government so long as the new spending is “offset” – at least on paper – by big tax hikes. This is one of the reasons why Pelosi & Co included billions of dollars in corporate tax hikes in the tax-extenders/stimulus legislation.

What the Democrats (either the blue or pink variety) apparently don’t understand, though, is that corporations don’t pay taxes. Yes, companies often write checks to the IRS, but all corporate taxes are really a burden on workers, consumers, and shareholders. Moreover, in a world where jobs and investment can cross borders looking for better tax policy, a high corporate tax rate is a huge competitive liability for a nation. These are some of the main points in this video on corporate taxation.

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Today, in 1945, the World Bank was created.

Here’s something to consider for those who wondered why the usual suspects flew up in arms earlier this week over reports that ‘Circle of Commitment’, countries including the U.S., were seeking to wrest control of the Kyoto revenue mechanism to the World Bank (there’s no such move afoot, incidentally; that was merely an overwrought reaction to said suspects finding something that they hadn’t been allowed to write).

That of course would have implications for the “global carbon offset market” if Kyoto II ropes us in and finally begins chugging down the tracks, next stop “Oil for Food on Steroids”.

Today’s Open Europe press briefing includes the following item (in bold in original):

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