Blame the Federal Reserve, the central banking system, and crypto-Keynesians such as Bernake who think that *inflation* somehow creates wealth rather than the obvious: diluting the value of money (i.e. people’s savings, aka “stealth tax”).

The Fed sets interest rates by (blind) mandate, as opposed to the natural interest rate of distributed time-preference. To encourage aimless spending (aka “misinvestment”), they set the interest rate as low as they can get away with. As a result, the interest banks can afford to pay people for their *savings* is extremely minimal. Whereas the return on investment for banks using fractional reserve for extremely low interest loans is very high. The result? An entire national economy based on deficit finance!!!

The *opportunity cost* unfolds like this: Why should you save money with virtually *no* return on investment from the bank, when you could spend that same money on something (anything!) else which would yield a greater return.

As a result of inflation, you are in fact bringing home more dollars, but it’s a Red Queens Race against the larger doom of hyperinflation. You’re working twice as hard to hold on to *less* wealth than you began with.

-z

p.s. Cheers for mentioning Hayek’s Road to Serfdom! I’d also recommend his Use of Knowledge in Society.

If these people think they’re going to find a warm reception by older conservatives, they’re in for a big surprise. You can call them South Park Republicans, but they’re just one disapproving conservative glare from being South Park Democrats.

I mean, seriously – how welcoming is the conservative movement going to be to a crop of young people who drink, smoke, have premarital sex, are tolerant of homosexuality, support gay marriage, the relaxation of the war on drugs, and the right of women to make their own reproductive decisions?

Very much so, as I know from personal experience.

Actually, you could also argue that both conservatism in America (but not necessarily elsewhere) and liberalism are descendents of the classical liberal tradition. Indeed, America has never had a tradition of either socialism or fascism as Europe has, for reasons that I’ll go into later…

If you wish to have your own personal forum, get your own blog. These kind of ad hominem rants will not be tolerated here. You know nothing of my background yet you think you have the right to denigrate me as well as an entire group of people because they don’t agree with your narrow ideology.

No wonder I hate politics.

So, if conservatives are liberals, why are they supporting Bush, whose policies are statist?

It’s a matter of degree. There’s no such thing as pefect ideological consistancy, nor would you really want such a thing. Bush has engaged in some statist policies, like steel tariffs, but he’s not committed to an agenda that would have the government virtually taking control of large sectors of the economy. Read Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom for more of this principle in action.

All things being equal, I’d rather have the Republicans which is a party of limited government that occasionally doesn’t hold to that ideal in power than the Democrats, the party of stifling government that is virtually guaranteed to erode economic and political rights in this country.

His attacks on dissent in this country are deplorable. It boggles my mind that conservatives are still rallying to this guy, and yet indicting Democrats for being “statist” from the other side of their mouths. I guess as long as they don’t have to vote for a Democrat, though, they’ll be happy.

Pulling the current robots.txt from the White House server comes up with a series of entries like these:

Disallow: /kids/spotty/iraq
Disallow: /kids/eggroll/iraq
Disallow: /kids/barney/iraq
Disallow: /easter/iraq
Disallow: /mrscheney/iraq
Disallow: /national-anthem/iraq

So, unless there’s some secret scheme to deny access to information about Barney the dog being an Iraqi secret agent, I doubt there’s any real conspiracy here.

The reason why you’d do this is to make searches more effective by ensuring that you weren’t getting spurious links. The White House webmaster probably did something like this:

find . -type d|perl -e ‘while(>){print “${_}/iraq\n”; print “${_}/text\n”;}’ > robots.txt

Furthermore, there’s nothing on the White House web site that’s actually been moved. You could theoretically create a web crawler that ignores the robots.txt entry and searches the entire site and get all the same data you would had the changes not been made. (You’d be violating several RFCs by doing this, but there’s nothing stopping you from doing so anyway.)

As for your other conspiracy tales, care to cite a single reputable source that says that the White House is altering statements on Iraq (which would be pointless as that information is cached at archive.org and elsewhere anyway). Exactly what groups are being audited?

If you don’t have the facts, then don’t make the accusations.

Furthermore, there’s nothing wrong with confining demonstrations to areas away from where the President is staying. Considering that we’re in the midst of the war on terrorism, exactly how smart would it be to allow somoene who could very well be carrying a bomb within blast range of the President? The protestors still have the right to speak, they just don’t have the right to do so in an area that would put them in assassination range of the President.

Furthermore, the Democrats did the very same thing all during the Clinton Administration and during the 2000 convention in Los Angeles without hardly a word being raised about it.

As for the “revisionism” of the White House web site… IT’S ONE BLOODY WORD! Furthermore, the original headline was misleading as Bush specifically said in the speech on the Lincoln he was talking about the end of “major combat operations” and not the end of the war. (The original speech is available here – and no it’s not been edited in any way…)

And considering that the media goes to the anti-Bush protestors like moths to a flame, if the goal is to somehow keep the protestors out of the media they’re sure doing a piss-poor job of it.

Again, it’s clear that the rabid anti-Bush crowd is too busy making mountains out of molehills to lead the country. Considering we’re in the middle of a major war these kind of childish partisan games are simply beyond the pale.

On the other hand… do you drive to work? Do the police protect your house? Did you go to public school? Do public utilities and infrastructure provide your heat, electricity, and water? I thought so. Is it really so unreasonable, therefore, to ask you to pay for those things? Surely “paying for what you use” is as reasonable as “take the IRS off my paycheck”? Since I’m sure you would spare no effort to excoriate welfare freeloaders, there’s no way you would freeload off of public services and infrastructures without paying your fair share of taxes, right?

I assume you like the 40-hour workweek and the ability to earn overtime? Thank a liberal.

Like the fact that even though your employees want to work more than 40 hours a week but can’t because you can’t afford to pay them despite the fact that they need the money? Thank a liberal. If you like the idea you’re just to stupid to manage your own life and need the paternalistic hand of government to make your choices for you? Then you don’t need to thank a liberal – you are a liberal.