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Are you excited? I am thrilled because it's about time!

More terible news from the Fed

FRB: Press Release-- Federal Reserve Announces Purchases of Direct Oblications from GSEs - November 25th, 2008

The Federal Reserve announced on Tuesday that it will initiate a program to purchase the direct obligations of housing-related government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs)--Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Home Loan Banks--and mortgage-backed securities (MBS) backed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae. Spreads of rates on GSE debt and on GSE-guaranteed mortgages have widened appreciably of late. This action is being taken to reduce the cost and increase the availability of credit for the purchase of houses, which in turn should support housing markets and foster improved conditions in financial markets more generally. Purchases of up to $100 billion in GSE direct obligations under the program will be conducted with the Federal Reserve's primary dealers through a series of competitive auctions and will begin next week. Purchases of up to $500 billion in MBS will be conducted by asset managers selected via a competitive process with a goal of beginning these purchases before year-end. Purchases of both direct obligations and MBS are expected to take place over several quarters. Further information regarding the operational details of this program will be provided after consultation with market participants.

Whoo hoo!!! My mortgage is being paid for by EVERYBODY now! Ok not really, I was thrifty and didn't buy what I couldn't afford, so I'm in the clear. Nevertheless, once again the Fed proves they need to be eliminated. I just don't see how monetarists can think that their ideas work.

My new blog...

i have begun a second blog for spreading ideas about political and economic liberty from a Christian point of view. I have been compiling ideas for posts, and I'll begin rolling them out in the near future. I'll be posting essays I have written, things to ponder, exegeses on Scripture, movie and book reviews, article links, and musings on current events. So far, I have been collecting some of my own writings and getting them ready to be posted here. Some of them can be rather long for a typical blog post, and I anticipate dividing them into multiple sections.

It will be quite different from what I normally write on this blog, but some of what I would you see here will henceforth be on the other blog. So take a look, read a little, and add it to your RSS feed reader!

Link: The Christian Libertarian.

Is this the end of the American economy?

Bloomberg: Fed Pledges 7.4 Trillion in New Money.

This is it. The Fed has declared war on the economy and thereby every market participant, and they have prepped their weapons of mass destruction.

Quoting the article: “The U.S. government is prepared to lend more than $7.4 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers, or half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, to rescue the financial system since the credit markets seized up 15 months ago. The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $2.8 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The commitment dwarfs the only plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Federal Reserve lending last week was 1,900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis.”

I already knew that 3 trillion in monetary expansion was in the works. I heard it live from the President of the Dallas Fed about a month ago when he came to Austin and talked about this “off the record”. I personally challenged him the about the wisdom of such a decision. I asked him how he could expect the same monetary policies that created this crisis could be used to solve it, and even if it did temporarily how he could expect that even in the mid-term horizon that the same problems would not occur all over again. He said in response, and I quote: “You just gotta have faith – faith in the Federal Reserve, faith in Congress that they will make the right decision, and faith in the Executive, whoever is elected, that he will make the right decision.”

I should have asked him how other faith-based initiatives have been working out for the government lately, or that I thought matters of faith should be reserved only for God, quantum mechanics, and the quality of frozen pizzas. Too bad I’m not THAT quick. Too bad I was too shocked to say anything at the time. Three trillion is disaster, seven trillion is… unspeakable.

They should have listened – to Mises, to Hayek, to Rothbard, to Ron Paul. Heck, even Milton Friedman more or less repudiated monetarism later in life. Instead, they chose Keynes, Stiglitz, Krugman, Greenspan, Bernanke, Paulson, McCain, and Obama. You reap what you sow.

Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?

In The Know: Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?

I'm giving a lecture on business cycle theory today. This seems relevant... Note: there is a smidgen of language...

LHC more likely to find a black hole for cash than a higgs boson

The Great Beyond: LHC repairs get pricier

More bad news from the Large Hadron Collider.

Repairing the damage from the electrical failure earlier this year will run to $21 million, according to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (AP). The original cost estimate for the repair was around $80,000, not including labour and the spares.

In addition, the particle collider will not be up and running before June. Previously it was suggested the particles could be whizzing round the ring by April (AFP).

“There is still a lot of work to do and we want to be sure that everything is in order before starting up,” says spokesman James Gillies (AFP / AP). “If we can do it sooner, all well and good. But I think we can do it realistically (in) early summer.”

Can you believe this garbage? This project originally cost the world economy about 10 billion dollars, an astronomical sum to say the least, and it isn't even getting close to accomplishing its mission. What a waste! This illustrates perfectly the problems of socialism -- that the central planners will tend not to choose projects that actually produce new goods and services efficiently because there is no adequate way to count the costs.

Need a laptop battery?

I own an IBM Thinkpad X31 laptop, and I use it to do most of my work for UT, AGST, and the church. It has functioned as an excellent tool for a long time, save for one issue: battery life. From the start, it lasted only about an hour, and it continually declined in quality over time. Now, the battery only holds up for about 15 minutes. Pretty bad, eh?

So I started looking around the net for new batteries. They ain't cheap, lemme tell ya. But I found some nice sites that specialized in replacement batteries for electronics of all sorts. Enter AtBatt.com. Not only did they have some an excellent selection, but they also have a student discount program. I thought, "what the hey, maybe they're serious..." and filled out the app. Within a day, I got an email saying they were more than happy to give me a discounted new battery. I called their phone, and had a great conversation with one of their head guys (Steve). He's a Christian interested in doing more than good business - he's also looking to help the environment through free market means by promoting eco-friendly rechargeable batteries.

I think these guys are pretty smart. They bought me as a customer AND they're working to spread some good around. That's some swell business right there. This is one of the easiest and best online shopping experiences I've had. Maybe if you're looking for a new battery for your laptop, camera, cell phone, or pretty much any electronic device you can imagine, you can check them out too.

So yeah, this is kind of like a sales pitch, but so what? Why not commend these folks who are doing good, honest business and talk about how they helped me out? That's the stuff the free market is made of!

Best of luck to you, Steve and the crew...

Let the scorn begin, huzzah!

I've seen a few very interesting articles in the last couple of days.

Restoring Reaganism by Deroy Murdock on National Review Online

Comrade George W. Bush has spearheaded the most aggressive federal expansion since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As a delivery system for socialism, he has been the most effective Trojan Horse since that pine steed rolled into Troy.When Bush arrived, Washington consumed 18.4 percent of Gross Domestic Product. Uncle Sam now devours 22.5 percent of the economy, reported Jon Ward in the October 19 Washington Times. “The country has gone from a $128 billion budget surplus when Mr. Bush took office to a deficit of at least $732 billion in fiscal 2009,” Ward writes. “No president since FDR — who offered a New Deal to pull the nation out of the Great Depression and then fought World War II — has presided over as rapid a growth in government when measured as a percentage of the total economy.” While much of Bush’s spending has funded defense and the War on Terror, most of it vanished into the furnaces of No Child Left Behind, the 2002 Farm Bill, the 2003 Medicare drug entitlement, the 2005 highway bill, the 2006 ethanol mandate, at least 69,341 earmarks, and much, much more. In 2001, Bush launched federal embryonic stem-cell research. By 2008, he added the word “nationalization” to the American vocabulary, and underscored it with nearly $1 trillion in bailouts and Third World—-style government ownership stakes in banks and financial houses.

Wow! Somebody in National Review calling Bush a socialist? Are we that close to Armageddon? Perhaps over the next few years the big NR will start actually calling for small government and being serious. But don't hold your breath. Those of us with a brain know that even Reagan wasn't that good on spending. His administration accounts for two of the top-5 latest in the year "Freedom from Government" days, the day when the GDP effectively stops paying for government action.

American Thinker: Barack Obama, Legal Scholar

Nobody can deny that Barack Obama has an impressive list of titles to his name as a lawyer. But when it comes to actual substance as a lawyer and a scholar, very few accomplishments can be pointed to. The pattern of leaving no footprints when it comes to ideas should raise questions in the eyes of voters still trying to understand the man behind the public persona of Barack Obama.

So basically, Obama being a legal demi-god is a myth. LOL.

Peter Hitchens: The night we waved goodbye to America...our last best hope on Earth | Mail Online

The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something... Just look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan. He really did talk about a ‘new dawn’, and a ‘timeless creed’ (which was ‘yes, we can’). He proclaimed that ‘change has come’. He revealed that, despite having edited the Harvard Law Review, he doesn’t know what ‘enormity’ means. He reached depths of oratorical drivel never even plumbed by our own Mr Blair, burbling about putting our hands on the arc of history (or was it the ark of history?) and bending it once more toward the hope of a better day (Don’t try this at home).I am not making this up. No wonder that awful old hack Jesse Jackson sobbed as he watched. How he must wish he, too, could get away with this sort of stuff.

This article comes from my dear friend Grant. The writing is excellent!

V for Vendetta as Orwellian Victory

In honor of the recent passing of November the Fifth and the recent passing of power from one tyrant to the next, I just finished watching the movie V for Vendetta, one of my personal favorite films. V is excellent on so many levels, but only if you have the eyes to see.

"So if you see nothing, if the crimes of this government remain unknown to you, then I would suggest you allow the Fifth of November to pass unmarked. But if you see what i see; if you feel as i feel; and if you would seek as i seek, then I ask you to stand beside me."

This time, I was struck by how closely V resembles Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four. There is one critical difference, though. In Orwell, the bad guys win. Orwell missed something fundamental about human existence: the indefatigable human pursuit of liberty. In the end, tyranny cannot survive. In the end, truth wins. The Remnant will remind the world of what we were meant to be.

This is what excites us about V. The face under the mask doesn't matter, it is truth that stirs our passion.

"Beneath this mask is more than flesh. Beneath this mask is an idea, and ideas are bulletproof!"

Orwell's world ends with the protagonist's death and no hope in sight. It is nothing but a warning against a compelling and frightening future. That image has served us well, but it is not enough. V picks up the pieces and correctly constructs the philosophy that takes us forward.

"His hope was to remind the world that fairness, justice, and freedom are more than words - they are perspectives."

Do you get it yet? If you understand, you are one of the few. Freedom forever!

***
Edit 11/10:
Interested in the original graphic novel of V for Vendetta? Buy it on Amazon.com.

Who is to blame for Obamunism?

In a few hours, America -- even "real America" -- will have elected one of the worst conceivable presidents ever. That's saying something considering the criticism I've laid against presidents in general for some time now. Well, some so-called conservatives, many of whom I interact with regularly, will ask themselves: How did this happen? The answer is simple, my friends.

You did it.

Conservatism died under Bush and the Republican controlled house and Senate from 2000 to 2006. And all the while, conservatives, you kept capitulating to the demands of a tyrant. November 4th, 2008 is the burial.

I know why you did it, too. You were afraid. V knew it too.

"Truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look in to a mirror. I know why you did it, I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease, there were a myriad of problems that conspired to corrupt your reason and cut off your common sense. Fear got the best of you."

I hope you wake up someday. Maybe November 5th?

"Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the annunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country."

V for Vendetta Televised Speech