While surrounded by a persistent,
angry mob of old age liabilities ....
Common Sense Commentary: A reader asked me if I was not afraid of what this tyrannical government might do to me for taking them to task on this blog. At 85, Dec.24, I do not relish the inconvenience of an IRS audit or some other intrusion of the feds into my life. However, at 85, how much of my life can it cost an old coot like me if they drain out my last few months or years like burned out old motor oil? My viscosity effectiveness is down to about 3% and my sand content up to 97%. So I don't stand to lose much if I lost it all.... except my sand.
Anyway, at 85, I really don't give two West Texas hoots in hades what the jackal Liberals and hyena sociopaths in Washington think of me if they think of me at all. But, then, Politically Correct human bureaucrats don't have to think anything of their enemies, anymore; they can keep track of them with computers, like digital dollars. A computer program can filter out any particular group they choose to deal with, be it Christians and Patriots for punishment or Muslims and Perverts for support. It is obvious our government is doing something similar to the way they keep up with terrorists, which means my name and maybe yours is being sequestered in an enemies file somewhere for future action. Any "future" I have left to give, in this world, is minuscule, and that is an "old age advantage". I can say anything I wish without fear of long-term retribution from Eric Holder type Attorneys General. I don't even care much, at this age, what anybody thinks of me except God. Not that He approves of everything I do or say. But my most important ministry, at this point in life, is to do my best to please my Lord, take care of Bettie, and try to say what needs to be said to whoever will hear it or read it.
What would really grieve me is, if the Left Wing Socialists and Political Correctness muggers thought of me as one of them.
Someone put my wife on the Democrat's fundraising mail outs list. When she gets something from Hillary or the DNC, she is insulted they think she is one of them. I count their reproach an honor to be treasured. It could be that who a person chooses as enemies tells as much about their character as who they choose as friends. RB
‘Crazy’?
“We dare to talk about the gold standard and its relative merits, knowing that the merest whisper of a gold standard is enough to elicit the guffaws of the central bankers down the road. Because they say ‘that’s just crazy.’ And I think, really? Crazier than negative interest rates? Crazier than paying banks to keep loanable funds in sterile depository accounts at the Fed? Crazier than having the Fed buy up trillions in government debt, remit the interest payments back to treasury, and then count that as revenue to the federal budget?
Amazon
WHO'S CRAZY NOW? That's the question economist Judy Shelton of the Atlas Network pressed at the conference convened at Jackson Hole by the American Principles Project — is it the advocates of a classical gold standard favored by the American Founders or the partisans of fiat money that has handed the monetary powers to a runaway central bank?
Those are the words with which the economist Judy Shelton wrapped up her remarks at Jackson Hole, and let us just say, Patsy Cline herself couldn’t have put it better. Ms. Shelton’s remarks were, our sources report, one, if only one, highlight of the counter-conference that the American Principles Project convened to put into sharp relief the question of whether the Federal Reserve and America’s regime of fiat money are the cause of our national travail during what has come to be called the Great Recession.
What happened at Jackson Hole marks an important moment. For more than 30 years, the Fed has been meeting there annually for a symposium that routinely took place with hardly a peep from the public. This year its arriving delegates were met by representatives of two counter-conferences. One, called Fed Up, was a gathering of Marxists and other left-of-center figures who want to make money (even) easier than it’s been. They reckon that the failure of zero interest rates to create jobs will be rectified by even more easy fiat money...... (But).... the group asking the new and hard questions was the American Principles Project. It mounted a counter-conference that viewed the monetary question through free-market, constitutionalist principles, like those Ms. Shelton sketched above....
Both the Senate and House committees that oversee the Fed are now taking an look at strategic monetary questions. Their review includes what kind of oversight to give our central bank, what kind of mandates it should have, what rules ought to govern its formation of monetary policy. The House has already twice passed Audit the Fed, the second time but a year ago and by a vote of 333 to 92. This effort has been resisted by the Federal Reserve, and public counter-conferences are inevitable.
Call it a case of the public offering its own forward guidance. Both sides of the debate see a Federal Reserve that has lost touch not only with Congress but with the public. They see a Federal Reserve that is guiding the economy through the exercise of the judgment of Ph.D.s, as James Grant of the Interest Rate Observer often notes. The American Founders would have understood the error of the Ph.D. standard. They gave us a Constitution that granted to Congress monetary powers that our Revolution had wrested from George III, who really was — not to put too fine a point on it — crazy.
