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Mises Institute president and former Rep. Ron Paul chief-of-staff Jeff Deist joins today's Liberty Report to discuss the prospects for libertarianism and a non-violent approach to seemingly intractable disputes over land, control, and government coercion. Is the post-Covid US ripe or barren for the ideas of liberty to take hold?
By Ron Paul
President Joe Biden has ordered the Financial Stability Oversight Council to prepare a report on how the financial system can mitigate the risks related to climate change. The Financial Stability Oversight Council was created through the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform act and is supposed to identify and monitor excessive risk to the financial system. The council is composed of the heads of the major federal financial regulatory agencies, including the Federal Reserve. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is no doubt pleased with Biden's order. Powell has been pushing for the Fed to join other central banks in fighting climate change. Among the ways the Fed could try to mitigate the risks related to climate change is by using its regulatory authority to “encourage” banks to lend to “green” businesses and deny capital to “polluters.” The Fed could also use “quantitative easing” to give green industries an advantage over their non-green competitors. Another way the Fed could “fight climate change” is by committing to monetizing all federal debt created by legislation implementing the Green New Deal. Climate change is not the only area where the Fed is embracing the agenda of the “woke.” Some Federal Reserve Banks have taken the lead in a series of events called “Racism and the Economy” that are concerned with dismantling “systemic racism.” The Fed’s commitment to ending systemic racism could lead the central bank to requiring that banks and other financial institutions further relax their lending standards for minorities. The role the Community Reinvestment Act played in the 2008 housing meltdown shows that when government forces financial institutions to give loans to otherwise unqualified applicants, the recipients of those loans often are unable to make their payments, lending to foreclosures and bankruptcies. Racial justice arguments could also justify an easy money, low interest rate policy on the grounds that curtailing money creation slows economic growth, disproportionately harming minorities. The Fed may court favor with the Biden administration and its congressional allies by going woke. However, it will face a backlash from those who oppose expanding government power to address nonexistent threats of climate change and to promote the lie that free markets are causing systemic racism. This backlash will be fueled by rising anger over widespread price increases. This will increase the already strong public support for the Audit the Fed legislation. A complete Federal Reserve audit will provide to Congress and the American people the truth about the Fed’s conduct of monetary policy, including how politics affects the Fed’s actions. The use of the woke agenda as an excuse to further politicize the allocation of capital and continue to expand the Fed’s easy money, low interest rate policy will hasten and deepen the next economic crisis. This crisis will either be precipitated by or result in the rejection of the dollar's world reserve currency status. It will also likely result in the collapse of the entire Keynesian welfare-warfare system. Unfortunately, there is a likelihood that the current system will be replaced with a government even more authoritarian than the current one. But, if those of us who know the truth can educate enough people about liberty, we can make sure the next economic crisis leads to a rebirth of limited government, free markets, and individual liberty.
It looks like Fauci may have found his golden parachute. As criticism mounts over his incessant flip-flopping and his ties to gain-of-function research in a Chinese lab, Fauci has signed a big book deal. Is this to be his swan song? Also today, another case against a January 6th "insurrectionist" falls apart...
 By Chris Rossini Billions of one-of-a-kind human individuals ... never-ending decentralized change ... and natural imperfection. Or.... One conforming mass ... centralized permanence ... and human-created perfection. The former is truth and reality. The latter is a deadly fantasy. Throughout human history, there have always been those who refuse to accept what is, and foolishly try to create what isn't and what cannot be. In their eyes, Nature messed up and did it wrong. These human beings set out to "fix" where Nature made the mistakes and will do it right for the very first time. Being a human being means being perpetually ignorant. There is no way around it. One can never know it all. You can't put a border around 'all knowledge' and say "That's it. That's all of it!" One can be great at some things, and even an "expert" in a certain field. But the Universe is a lot bigger than your field. For every thing that you understand, there's always a super-abundance of that which you do not understand, and will never understand. With ignorance comes error, and with error there sometimes comes pain and suffering. It's unpleasant. We don't like it. It's Nature's way of saying "you messed up" or "you're going the wrong way," or "learn from this and look for the truth." From cradle to coffin, we are constantly responsible with having to learn from our errors. It is here that the "human perfecters" have a problem. They don't like error (just like everyone else). But the "perfecters" refuse to accept it as part of human nature. They believe that this is where Nature messed up. The "perfecters" see pain and suffering and think that the goal is to alleviate all of it. Furthermore, they're the ones that are going to alleviate all of it. Now, of course, every single one of us would be wise to continuously weed out the errors in our own individual lives. It's also wise to share the truth with others whenever one understands something, and another can be helped by it. The key word here is "share" the truth; not "impose" the truth. So errors can (and are) continuously eliminated by individuals as it is. Errors are also continuously repeated throughout history by those who are seduced by the words "this time is different." No matter how many errors you eliminate, you can never eliminate them all. You can never be all knowing. Correct one error and another will arrive in your experience at some point. Again, this cradle to coffin setup applies to each and every one of us. But this is not good enough for the "perfecters." It's a "bug" in the "system." So the perfecters decide to ignore the truth altogether. They decide to scrap the reality of free and unique individuals that are endlessly making their own choices. Instead, the perfecters imagine all of humanity as if it is a mechanical machine. This broken machine needs "engineers" to fix it. The perfecters promote themselves to be the engineers of this imaginary machine. As engineers, these perfecters will screw a bolt in here, tighten a few screws there, maybe push a few buttons in another area....All with the goal of creating a fine-tuned, error-free and pain-free human machinery. Just look at what has been done with industrialization over the last few centuries. Look at the unprecedented prosperity it has created. Look at how the planet is able to sustain many billions of people now. Why not pretend that human beings are mechanical machines too, right? NO! WRONG! Human beings are NOT machines. And all human beings are not abstractly and collectively ONE machine either! But this is how the perfecter engineers see it. They themselves are apparently machines (they're humans, so what else can they be in this fantasy?) who have tasked themselves with running the ONE machine called humanity. In this imaginary world, the perfecter engineer dictates what the individual must do, and the individual's job is not to question, but do it. The individual is told that he's doing it for "the greater good" of the whole mechanical machine, of course. The perfecter engineers cannot deal with Nature and free thinking individuals. So a standardization and conformity blitz commences. Wherever the individual looks, he is to see the same "official" message. All individuals must hold the same opinions. All must think, act, and choose as the perfecting engineers say. No questions. When individuals think, act, and choose differently than what the officially chosen "experts" say, the questioning individuals are looked at as defective parts in the machine. Uniqueness is defective in this imaginary world. Of course, all of this is contrary to the truth. It has been repeated throughout history and has produced only one extremely predictable result: Mass suffering and death. Throughout the centuries, the "perfecters" have created more death and suffering than has ever existed in human history before. The ironic thing is that the "perfecters" claim that they have a problem with human suffering and that's why they're trying to fix the errors Nature in the first place! Nature, of course, will have none of it. The truth is absolute. Nature keeps telling those humans who are willing to listen: "You're going the wrong way." "You're not a machine." "Perfection is not the purpose of being human." Nature did not "mess up." It can't. We're each one-of-a-kind, unique and free-choosing individuals. There are no standardized machines. Our job is to deal with this reality. We didn't create this truth, nor can we change it. 
This has not been a very good week for President Biden's chief Covid advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci. After ridiculing the theory for months that the virus may have escaped from a Chinese lab, Fauci admitted it was possible. After adamantly denying funding "gain-of-function" experiments in China, he was forced to admit that he funded them indirectly, through a cut-out. As his possible culpability looms large, is Fauci about to exit the stage? Also today, a new study confirms antibodies generated by a Covid infection may last a lifetime.
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