Pragmatic economics is bleeding the life out of America. Collectivist politicians have virtually free-reign to unlimited investment backed by our future productivity.

The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the longest recession since the 1930s.

New pledges from the Fed, the Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. include $1 trillion for the Public-Private Investment Program, designed to help investors buy distressed loans and other assets from U.S. banks. The money works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. and 14 times the $899.8 billion of currency in circulation. The nation’s gross domestic product was $14.2 trillion in 2008.

In their minds, there is no amount of looted wealth that is off the table. There is no political or economic effort for which they lack confidence in the American serf to cover by productive effort. If force is required, so be it.

Man’s nature requires him to think, act and maintain the results of doing so. Our tyrannical government knows too well that we only need a certain range of freedom to act within, and only to keep above a certain threshold of the productive results to ensure our likely compliance to their meddling.

As long as our leash is just long enough and they tactfully throttle or camouflage their looting, the majority of marching ants won’t revolt. So long as the majority complies, their party remains funded. Theirs is a game of control. Control the variables that influence man’s actions so that he’ll either fail to notice the attached IV, or he’ll be too busy gasping for air to remove it. The only thing that matters is that he stays alive and the blood keeps flowing.

The debt that the American government is flagrantly piling on our backs will most definitely require them to push the thresholds of statist regulations and taxation to the point where the rational segment of the population, the segment they need the most, will take reproachful offense.

When that revolt does take place, their only option will be to tighten the screws. The more they tighten, the more their house of cards will crumble. The final scene, as so brilliantly portrayed in the climax of Atlas Shrugged, will place them in a most precarious position. Their only remaining recourse to inspire productivity will be threat of death - with the ironic quagmire being obvious. Either way, the productivity fueling their existence will cease.

In yet another inevitable attempt to regulate existence, thermal imaging cameras can now be used to detect any citizens who insist on using more energy than nanny-state environmentalist deem appropriate.

Thermal imaging cameras are being used to create colour-coded maps which will enable council officers to identify offenders and pay them a visit to educate them about the harm to the environment and measures they can take.

Perhaps council officers could benefit from certain education as well - namely the concepts of man’s rights to life, liberty and property, private property.

‘We do a lot on domestic energy conservation already and realised it would be useful to see if any of the homes which were particularly hot were properties where people had not insulated their lofts.

‘We were also able to look at very cold properties and think we might have picked up people on low incomes who are not heating their homes because they cannot afford to.’

This new statist weapon is not only useful in cracking down on subjective-law criminals, but also for identifying wealth redistribution targets - an egalitarian swiss-army knife, if you will.

Lib Dem group leader Stuart Beadle added: ‘Cameras are in place all over today and we have to accept them. So long as the right guidelines are in place and it will bring benefits, I think the scheme is a good thing.’

Of course, we must remind ourselves that these planes, cameras and all the logistics involved are metaphysical facts and must be conformed to as such. And, according to Beadle this is a good scheme, although he neglects to mention whose standard of value his assessment is based on. I doubt the individual who rightfully produced the wealth to pay for such technical luxuries as heat and electricity will appreciate the pestilence of government enviro-thugs offering their “friendly advice”.

Altruist-collectivist-environmentalist-nanny-statism - such is the manner by which a society implodes into stagnant misery. Hatred of life, hatred of man, hatred of wealth, and hatred of reality is the moral of this story.

Our pop-culture president recently went through the dog-and-pony show experience of Leno. We’re now beginning to see that given the opportunity (predicament) to improvise outside of a teleprompter’s demands, this man will reveal his true character.

It began with the president joking about how bad a bowler he is.

Toward the end of his approximately 40-minute taping on the “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” Obama talked about how he’d gotten better at bowling and had been practicing in the White House bowling alley.

“I bowled a 129,” he told Leno.

“That’s very good, Mr. President,” Leno said sarcastically.

But then came the foot-in-mouth moment: “It’s like the Special Olympics or something,” the president said. [emphasis mine]

< sacrastic-response >
Um, like… yea Barack… that shit’s funny yo.
< / sarcastic-response >

Are you kidding me?

Should we consider this notion as enlightened, compassionate or progressive? Does it represent his earnest respect for hope or change? What caliber of intellect carries around such a childish insensitive notion? This ignorant and tasteless blurt is just one candid snippet of the mind that will likely lead America to a much darker time.

Loosen your belt America, we’re just getting started.

A friend sent me this impressive visualization of a very large sum of money - roughly the amount of which the Government has written IOU’s backed by our future productivity. So generous of them to loan such a stupendous amount of money on my behalf.

One Dollar

Ten Thousand Dollars

One Million Dollars

One Hundred Million

One Billion Dollars

One Trillion Dollars

Pretty impressive huh? This is only the beginning…

To accrue reckless debt on behalf of others, and where the only means of payment is the current wealth or future production of one man or a million, be it one cent or one trillion, is a contemptible feat of human evil.

Funny, but infuriating considering the underlying truth.

Ken Pool is making good money. On weekdays, he shows up at 7 a.m. at Ford Motor Co.’s Michigan Truck Plant in Wayne, signs in, and then starts working — on a crossword puzzle. Pool hates the monotony, but the pay is good: more than $31 an hour, plus benefits.

“We just go in and play crossword puzzles, watch videos that someone brings in or read the newspaper,” he says. “Otherwise, I’ve just sat.”

Pool is one of more than 12,000 American autoworkers who, instead of installing windshields or bending sheet metal, spend their days counting the hours in a jobs bank set up by Detroit automakers and Delphi Corp. as part of an extraordinary job security agreement with the United Auto Workers union.

The jobs bank programs were the price the industry paid in the 1980s to win UAW support for controversial efforts to boost productivity through increased automation and more flexible manufacturing.

As part of its restructuring under bankruptcy, Delphi is actively pressing the union to give up the program.

With Wall Street wondering how automakers can afford to pay thousands of workers to do nothing as their market share withers, the union is likely to hear a similar message from the Big Three when their contracts with the UAW expire in 2007 — if not sooner. [emphasis mine]

We know at least one way they can afford it. If a company wants to waste money by paying someone for idleness, that’s their choice, but to do so and then beg to be bailed with looted wealth is a tremendous feat of evil.

Through confiscation at gunpoint is the only way these companies will ever receive a penny from me.

And, apparently Ben Stein has tricked people into considering his economic perspectives, which are as flimsy as his “scientific” ones.

Why not be smart about it and NOT LET AMERICANS GET UNEMPLOYED IN THE FIRST PLACE? (Please pardon the shouting.) There are millions of Americans already hard at work making great American made cars and trucks. Why not keep them on the job? Wouldn’t that be smarter than allowing the whole upper Midwest to fall into oblivion and then rescue it over a fifty year period?

And what’s his moral justification?

Let’s stop the Depression before it starts. Let’s show some fairness and good faith to our own. Let’s bail out the Big Three, help them slim down, shape up, and keep making great cars and trucks. The Big Three are us and if we cannot help ourselves, who can we help?

Until this passage, I dismissed him as a pragmatist willing to compromise his principles for the sake of the moment, but here he reveals the opposite. These are his principles.

Ben is an altruist, his morality is vested (at least partially) in sacrificing himself for others. He is a collectivist, he has no issues with extending and enforcing his altruism (by force) on others, condoning their sacrifice on behalf of the collective. Therefore, Ben thinks it’s fair, by his altruistic-collectivist standards, for government to tax me at gunpoint and handout the loot to a crumbing company rank with incompetence and infested with professional moochers, or to a lazy, freeloading vagrant, or to an elderly person with no savings to live off of because they evaded financial planning for a lifetime. As long as someone’s needs, any needs, are nurtured, the ends justify the means for Ben.

Something is very wrong here.

Indeed.

Stumbled across this image on wikipedia with the accompanying caption:

“Without a gold standard, governments can print as much money as they want, destroying wealth through inflation. A German woman in 1924 feeding a stove with currency notes, which burn longer than the amount of firewood they can buy.”

Is this where the US is heading? The markets aren’t safe, being subject to the immeasurable economic destruction wreaked by the planners. Savings accounts can be sucked dry by wreckless money printing.

Is there a safe investment for wealth? Land maybe?

It’s about time.

Their accusations are examples of the type of corruption that blurs all party lines, but what a joy seeing this looter squirm.