By Norm Singleton
Campaign for Liberty Chairman Ron Paul recently penned an article for Town Hall explaining why legislation banning Internet gambling not only violates the Constitution but threatens all of our liberties. You can read Dr. Paul's op-ed here and below. And remember to call your Representative and Senators and tell them to oppose any attempts to make online gaming a federal crime. Internet Gambling Ban a Losing Bet For Liberty by Ron Paul
This article was originally published at The Campaign For Liberty.
By Ron Paul
The Federal Reserve claims it can continue "tightening" -- even though it is still leaving interest rates at historically low levels -- and begin unwinding its balance sheet, because the economy is "improving" and "will continue to improve." But that is only true if one believes the government-manipulated unemployment and inflation statistics which, for example, do not count the record number of Americans who have withdrawn from the labor force. Eight years after the market meltdown, the US economy remains on the brink of another major meltdown. Student loans, automobiles, and even housing are just a few of the bubbles whose bursting could send the fragile economy into another major recession. Of course, the largest bubble is the government bubble, which will dramatically increase thanks to the administration’s planned spending increases on militarism abroad and make-work infrastructure projects at home. Instead of just winding down the Feds balance sheet, Janet Yellen should be working with Congress and the administration to unwind the system of fiat currency. A good place to start is with passage of the Audit the Fed bill. This statement was originally published at The Campaign For Liberty.
Yesterday's 97-2 Senate vote for more sanctions on Russia shows that even a Republican-controlled legislative branch will abandon President Trump if he veers from the Deep State's interest in a new Cold War. Where can Trump turn?
By Liberty Report Staff
This has to be one of the president's quickest flips yet. On June 9, President Trump gave a speech excoriating Qatar's funding of terror:
On June 15, we see this news:
Neocon Paul Wolfowitz created the eponymous "Wolfowitz Doctrine" that our government follows in its quest to dominate the world militarily.
Wolfowitz said the following about Trump back in 2016: “The only way you can be comfortable about Trump's foreign policy is to think he doesn't really mean anything he says."
Seems to be spot on.
Trump says whatever....It doesn't seem to matter. But the neocon foreign policy powered by the military-industrial-complex marches on.
By Chris Rossini
Think about the real world...the one that just about everyone outside of Washington DC lives in. When something succeeds, you look to do more of it. If what you're doing is failing and producing harm, you stop doing it. In the marketplace, when people want iPhones instead of flip-phones, a lot of productive action takes place. Money, labor, capital and time are devoted producing iPhones. Meanwhile, resources are concomitantly removed from producing flip-phones. This isn't The Garden of Eden. We have to make choices on how to best deal with unlimited wants and limited resources. More than enough trial-and-error has led us to a formula that works: Stick with your winners, and ditch your losers. Well, government operates on a philosophy that is completely opposite to this.
With government, it's all about feeding and perpetuating losses. The recent news that (after 15 years of failure) the U.S. federal government is going to continue to pour blood and treasure into Afghanistan only re-enforces this maxim.
But Afghanistan is only one example. Let's look at how government creates many other Afghanistans that are hidden in plain sight. When a politically-connected company (think Wall Street firms) get into trouble financially, they would rightly go out of business in a free market. What does government do? It feeds them taxpayer money and keeps these failed companies in business. When a person or business can't get a loan in the free market, because it's deemed by one creditor after another that the risk is much too high, they rightly don't get the loan. What does government do? It gives these high-risk individuals and businesses loans! Even worse, the government will write laws to force private creditors to grant loans that everyone knows won't be paid back. See how government works in a perverted manner? In the real world, you must convince people to buy from you. You can't force them to buy anything. The consumer is sovereign and always has the right and ability to say "No" to any exchange. What does government do? It forces you to buy Obamacare "insurance". It forces you to finance the destruction of a foreign country so that Halliburton and Bechtel can rebuild it. It forces you to get that pharma company's vaccination. See how it works? All of these examples (and we can talk about many more) are just Afghanistans with a different wrapper. It's all the same concept. Government is a loss generator like no other on Earth. This is why libertarians and limited-government types want a state that is extremely weak, and that (at most) is tasked with protected liberty. That's why Americans, until about 1900, produced wealth on a scale that the world had never witnessed. Government was weak and it didn't meddle in every aspect of people's lives. Americans, at one time, really did breathe the air of freedom. Now, we're seeing the opposite. Americans have come to believe that not only does government "run the country," it's even capable of "running the world." Nothing could be further from the truth. The idea that a few people in suits are capable of "running" something as infinitely complex as life itself is comical. They're not "running," but destroying. The U.S. government is a giant wealth-destroying machine. Think of Afghanistan and apply it to everything that the state does. That's not a formula for success.
Defense Secretary James Mattis told Congress yesterday that "we are not winning" in Afghanistan and promised a new strategy by as early as next month. President Trump has given the Pentagon wide leeway on how many troops to send in. Will a "new strategy" finally work? And what does victory look like?
By Simon Black
The Federal Reserve in the United States just released a new report showing that “Total Household Wealth” in the United States has reached a record $94.8 trillion. That’s an impressive figure. Even more impressive is that Total Household Wealth has increased by $40 trillion since the lows of the Great Recession in 2009. No doubt there’s probably a multitude of central bankers and bureaucrats toasting their success in having engineered such magnificent prosperity. And it’s certainly an achievement worth celebrating. As long as you don’t look too closely at the data.
Total Household Wealth is exactly what it sounds like– the total net worth of every person in the United States, from Bill Gates down to the youngest newborn baby.
So when you add up all the 330+ million folks in the Land of the Free and tally up their combined net worth, the total is $94 trillion. The thing is that the VAST majority of that wealth, especially the incredible growth over the last 8 years, has been from increases in just two asset classes: real estate and the stock market. In fact, stocks and real estate alone account for roughly 2/3 of the wealth increase since 2009. I’ll come back to that in a moment. Now, simultaneously, we see plenty of other interesting data, also published by the Federal Reserve and US federal government. Both the Fed and Census Bureau, for example, tell us that over 80% of businesses in the US are “nonemployer” companies, i.e. businesses which only employ one person (the owner), and often provide his/her primary source of income. Yet according to the Federal Reserve, only 35% of these small businesses are profitable. Most are operating at a loss. In other words, only 35% of the companies which make up 80% of American businesses are profitable. You’re probably already doing the arithmetic– this means that a whopping 72% of all US businesses are NOT profitable. That hardly sounds like record wealth to me. Shifting gears, there’s the little factoid that an astounding 40% of young Americans are living with their parents– the highest percentage in the last 75 years. And who can blame them considering student debt in the Land of the Free also hit a record $1.4 trillion three months ago, more than double the amount since the Great Recession. Speaking of record debt, US credit card debt passed a record $1 trillion, and total US consumer credit hit a record $3.8 trillion last month. Again, all of this hardly seems like ‘wealth’ to me. Then there’s the issue of wages, which have remained essentially flat since the 2009 Great Recession if you adjust for inflation. According to the US Department of Labor, inflation-adjusted wages, aka “real hourly compensation” in the US fell an annualized 0.9% last quarter, and fell a dismal 5.6% in the previous quarter. Adjusted for inflation, the average American isn’t making any more money. Once again, this is a pitiful excuse for ‘wealth.’ American businesses aren’t more productive either. The same Labor Department report shows that productivity in the Land of the Free was flat in the first quarter of this year. And productivity actually declined in 2016– something that hasn’t happened in at least the last 50 years. Not to mention total economic growth in the Land of the Free has been pretty pitiful, logging a pathetic 1.6% last year. And GDP growth in the first quarter of 2017 was just 1.2% on an annualized basis. The US economy has exceed hasn’t surpassed 3% growth in more than 10-years, and it’s only happen two times so far in this millennium. Seriously? This is “wealth”? Read the rest at Sovereign Man
This year's Global Peace Index has just been released and the results are surprising. What are the world's least peaceful countries? What do they have in common? And where does the US rank?
By Liberty Report Staff
There's a lot of confusion, finger pointing and blame passed around as to what started the global terrorism mess. Obviously this is a new phenomenon. For a good 50+ years, Americans were told to fear "commies" not terrorists. Well, U.S. intelligence agencies gave their first appraisal of the new terrorism threat back in 2006. On Sept. 24, 2006 the New York Times reported (emphasis added): “A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks. […]
Please take note of the date.
This was in 2006. Barack Obama wasn't in the picture yet. A foreign policy of peace, non-intervention, and no entangling alliances is far superior to this mess.
By Liberty Report Staff
Ron Paul was on Fox Business this morning to discuss Trump's infrastructure boondoggle and the debt addiction that has subsumed the American federal government and American citizens: |
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