Banking

"When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain."

Napoleon Bonaparte

Libertarians mourn death of David F. Nolan

WASHINGTON - David F. Nolan, one of the founders of the Libertarian Party (LP), died unexpectedly on November 21 in Tucson, Arizona at the age of 66.

Mr. Nolan was also a member of the Libertarian National Committee (LNC). He is survived by his wife Elizabeth.

Mr. Nolan founded the Libertarian Party with a group of colleagues in his home in Denver, Colorado on December 11, 1971.

Mark Hinkle, Chairman of the LP, said, "I am saddened by the news of David Nolan's death. He not only helped found the Libertarian Party, but remained active and helped to guide our party for the last forty years. We are now the third-largest political party in America, and one of the most persistent and successful third parties in American history, thanks in large part to David Nolan. We will feel this loss."

Mr. Nolan ran this year as a Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senator in Arizona, against incumbent John McCain. In 2006, Mr. Nolan ran for U.S. Representative in Arizona's 8th District, against incumbent Gabrielle Giffords.

Mr. Nolan was also well known for his invention of the "Nolan chart," a two-dimensional chart of political opinion that was designed to get past the more familiar but deficient liberal-conservative paradigm. Marshall Fritz, founder of the Advocates for Self-Government, refined the Nolan chart into the popular World's Smallest Political Quiz with its diamond-shaped chart.

The Advocates for Self-Government provides more information about David Nolan's contributions here:
Visit site.

Comments from friends and colleagues:

Sharon Harris, President of the Advocates for Self-Government: "I am so shocked and saddened by Dave's death -- what a loss for the cause of liberty!"

Wes Benedict, Executive Director of the LP: "While I've admired David Nolan for years, this year I finally had the pleasure of working directly with him. He was an enthusiastic and principled activist doing the hard work right alongside newer members."

Jack Dean, longtime friend and political associate: "David was the conscience of the Libertarian Party. He was always there to remind us what the party was about."

Mr. Nolan had submitted a resolution for consideration at the November 20-21 LNC meeting in New Orleans. Unaware of Mr. Nolan's death, the LNC adopted the resolution, which reads as follows:

"WHEREAS the Libertarian Party can grow only by attracting new members and supporters, and

"WHEREAS libertarianism is a unique political philosophy, distinct from both contemporary liberalism and contemporary conservatism, and

"WHEREAS we need the support of both former liberals and former conservatives who have come to realize that libertarianism and the Libertarian Party offer a better path to achieving a just, humane and prosperous society,

"The Libertarian National Committee hereby reaffirms that the Libertarian Party welcomes individuals from across the political spectrum who now accept the libertarian principles of self-ownership and non-aggression."

View a biographical article about Mr. Nolan here.
==========

Sincerely,

Wes Benedict
Executive Director
Libertarian National Committee

Libertarian Party founder, David Nolan dies

Former Mission Viejo resident David F. Nolan, who helped found the Libertarian Party in his Denver living room on Dec. 11, 1971, died Sunday, two days before his 67th birthday.

Nolan opposed government intrusion in daily life, and believed in personal freedom, according to an obituary in Sentinel of Tucson, where he lived most recently. He opposed the war in Iraq, called for an end to personal income taxes, and wanted to legalize drugs. He supported a guest-worker program over building a border wall, wanted to close the Federal Reserve System, and end the Patriot Act.

"He was sort of a guiding light," Fullerton's Jack Dean, past chairman of the California Libertarian Party, told the Arizona Daily Star. "He was kind of our conscience. Dave was a presence at every national convention; everyone respected him. He kept reminding everybody what the goal was.

"He was a low-key and extremely reasonable radical. "And he could make Libertarian positions sound reasonable and logical to anyone."

Nolan also developed the "Nolan Chart," which plots a participant's answers to a questionnaire on a political grid which an axis for social issues and one for fiscal issues, and shows the relationship between the political parties. The Libertarian Party is now the third largest political party in the country.
In 2002, while living in Mission Viejo, Nolan unsuccessfully ran for the House of Representatives against incumbent Christopher Cox, R-Newport Beach. He moved to Arizona in 2005.

In 2006, Nolan unsuccessfully ran against Gabrielle Giffords for a seat in Arizona's 8th Congressional District.

This year, he challenged John McCain for his Senate seat and racked up 63,000 votes – in a state with only 24,000 registered Libertarians, according to the Arizona Daily Star.

Nolan's cause of death was unclear late Sunday, and no information was immediately available on memorial services, according to the Arizona Daily Star.

He is survived by his wife, Elizabeth.

Posted on the Orange County Register

Barney Frank continuing his public service

Debt Delenda Est

By Bill Bonner

The subject is debt; it needs to go away.

Debt was the market’s bête noire, this week and last. In Europe, it snatched up the Irish and carried them off. Then it attacked the Portuguese. Everyone knew the periphery states were going broke. Their cost of borrowing soared. Then, when the search parties reached them, the Irish turned them away. Debt has it usefulness, the Irish figured. They held out until Wednesday, apparently negotiating terms of their own rescue.

In America, municipal debt collapsed by nearly 10% over the last two weeks. It became more and more obvious that state and local governments were headed for default too. California might get a bailout…but California, like Ireland, is a sovereign state. It could refuse. Borrowers worried that Californians and the Irish might prefer to default like honest incompetents rather than submit to the rescuers’ demands.

Debt is underrated. For one thing, it is more reliable than asset values. The crisis of ’07–’09 wiped out about a third of the world’s equity and property wealth. And it disappeared 7 million jobs in America alone. But debt survived intact. In terms of the cash flow needed to support it, debt actually grew larger.

Central planners can make a recession appear to go away. With enough hot money, they might warm up asset prices or soothe the swelling unemployment rate. But debt doesn’t cooperate. Neither monetary policy nor fiscal policy will make it go away. Debt demands honesty. The debtor has to fess up, admitting that he is a fool or a knave. Either he owns up to his mistake and defaults…or he cheats.

“With all due respect, US policy is clueless,” said German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble. “It’s not that the Americans haven’t pumped enough liquidity into the market. Now to say let’s pump more into the market is not going to solve their problem.”

Read the rest at Lew Rockwell

What can Rand Paul do

The Tea Party libertarian will likely prove a more effective figurehead than senator.

For all the furor the Tea Party movement generated this year, when it came to the mightiest deliberative body in human history, the U.S. Senate, the Tea Party won only one real prize: Rand Paul's election as Kentucky’s junior senator. On the surface he's a Republican, but Paul frames himself as a representative of a supposedly trans-partisan Tea Party, burning with an urge to cut spending and curb debt that he admits his GOP comrades have not shown.

In terms of passing laws or shifting the Senate in his direction, Paul is not going to get much done by trying to operate as a one-man Tea Party in a minority party. Though he may become a filibuster machine, which given his outlier status means the Senate will have lots of cloture votes to shut him up. (He is not likely to succeed in using the filibuster to cap the debt limit and thereby destroy the entire world economy, as has been wildly speculated in some quarters.)

While those frightened by Paul see in him the power and will to wreck the planet, his fans are unduly thrilled just to hear a senator-elect talking about raising the retirement age and means testing for Social Security; cutting federal employment and pay; plotting a two-year path to a balanced budget; pushing term limits and a balanced budget constitutional amendment; insisting that bills should point to their constitutional justification and that senators should have read them before signing on; and even, to the surprise of some who found him avoiding his father’s non-interventionism on the campaign trail, talking up military cuts and questioning the value of our Afghanistan mission.

Read more at Reason

The Attack on Human Dignity

by Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy




The human being is made in the image and likeness of God. He or she has the Spark of the Divine "within" him or her. He or she is the primal and primary Temple of God on earth. Each person therefore deserves from the other and gives to the other not just respect, but reverence. The destruction of a fellow human — whether it be in mind, soul, body or spirit — is therefore the desecration of the Great Temple on earth, the place in time and space where the Living God chose foremost to reside.

The sublimity, dignity and transcendental value of each human being make it a grave violation of the Presence of God and of God-given human dignity to treat a person as a thing, a widget in some one's grand illusion, a means to be used, manipulated, abused, lied to, and/or crushed to serve another's agenda. Violate is derived from the same Latin word as violence, violare. To violate a reality is to do violence to that reality. To violate a reality is to treat it in a way that is not in accordance with its nature, e.g., to treat a sentient human being as if he or she were a non-sentient rock violates the reality of the human being. To treat a human being who is the living Temple of God on earth and who is infinitely loved and valued by this same God, as a tool, as a thing, as a person of no real significance beyond my utilitarian need for him or her in some grandiose plan I have concocted, rather than with the reverence, love and value that he or she intrinsically and forever possesses, as a son or daughter of my God and his or her God, of my Father and his or her Father, of the One God, is to violate him or her, to do violence to them. And, a violation of a person's intrinsic, God bestowed human dignity and transcendent value is evil regardless of how normalized it has become, how culturally acceptable it has become, how "holy" it has become or how legal it has become.

Read the rest at Lew Rockwell

Quotes from the Sons of Liberty

"Liberty without virtue would be no blessing to us."

Benjamin Rush

WWJD

Going broke by fractions of a percent

Ben Bernanke should stop paying interest on reserves

By Tim Cavanaugh




Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s rollout of $600 billion in quantitative easing was a public relations disaster that deserves to be studied in college communications classes. And he could have avoided it by giving up a shiny monetary tool he got in 2008—one that may be at the root of the extended recession.

The Federal Reserve Bank’s shopping spree of distressed debt will, Bernanke claims, create 700,000 jobs over the next two years. But if one of its immediate goals was to inspire market confidence, Quantitative Easing II (QE2) could hardly have gone worse.

In the three months since Bernanke floated the idea of a second round of large-scale asset purchases, the U.S. dollar index has declined by about 5 percent. With household net worth at $54.6 trillion, according to the Fed’s most recent Flow of Funds data, this means about $2.73 trillion of domestic wealth may have vanished in three months.

While much of that fall took place during the period between Bernanke’s QE2 trial balloon in late August and the rollout of the actual program two weeks ago, events since QE2 actually hit the streets have not been encouraging. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble called the move “clueless,” and China’s Dagong Global Credit Rating Co. downgraded long-term U.S. debt. The Anglophone financial press tends to dismiss such criticisms as nationalist trash talk, but QE2 cast a glare over President Barack Obama’s Asia junket and made what would ordinarily be considered an average performance—the president failed to close a trade agreement with South Korea and came home with few solid results—into a demonstration of U.S. powerlessness.

Read more Reason

Zombie Keynesianism

by Michael S. Rozeff




The Keynesians are having a highly public quarrel on a deep and divisive issue – a fundamental issue. They are wrangling over exchange rates.

Obama and Bernanke and the U.S. Congress want the Chinese to raise the value of the Chinese currency. The Chinese don’t want to.

Both sides to this quarrel are Keynesians. Both states use the powers of the state to manage their economies through fiscal and monetary policies. This happens throughout most of the world.

Keynesianism has brought the world to grief. State-controlled economies fail, as in the Soviet Union and Red China before 1978. The higher the degree of state control, the higher the degree of failure. The U.S. is experiencing the results of state control now. Its central bank has controlled the nation’s money for years. The government has controlled the mortgage and housing markets for decades. Lately, it has run huge deficits in a futile attempt to end the recession created by its earlier mismanagement.

The Keynesian quarrels actually show that the Keynesians don’t know what they are talking about. Their politics and economics are both hopeless. Keynesianism is hopelessly flawed, wrong, inadequate, and unsuited to what is needed so that the planet’s people can progress. Freedom and free markets are the prescription. The Red Chinese seem somehow to have found this out while the so-called bastion of so-called free enterprise remains mired down in Keynesianism.

National Opt-Out Day

Travelling this Holiday Season?  Join the resistance on National Opt-Out Day.

Quotes from the Sons of Liberty

"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined."

Patrick Henry

Groping for Answers

by Mike Calpino



Mike Calpino

 The news of the week are the new procedures implemented at airports around the country in the name of security. Once again we are closing the barn door after the horses are gone and refusing to consider the fact that it is a broken latch that keeps letting them out. First there was 9/11 so the list of prohibited objects in an airport grew immensely. Then there was the shoe bomber so we all have to take off our shoes. Then there was the underwear bomber so now we have to endure the hands of TSA employees in places only our wives or husbands should see. There have already been terrorists who placed explosives in various body cavities, and drug smugglers have been doing that for years. Are we going to have to endure full body cavity searches next?

Our security procedures are a strange mix of political correctness and a total disregard for our rights to be secure in our persons. Political correctness because we are afraid of offending the terrorists who want to kill us, the overwhelming majority of whom are young, middle eastern men from specific countries. They are not toddlers, senior citizens or nuns. Disregard for our rights because no one should be subject to such intimate and invasive procedures just because they want to travel. 99.99% of airline travellers are not terrorists and those 99.99% should not be treated as potential terrorists or criminals just because they want to fly to see grandma over the holidays. Certainly we have the choice as to whether or not we want to fly but it should be our free choice to enter into a private contract with an airline to provide us a service and the government should not require we check our rights or our dignity at the door when we enter into that contract.

Thoughts from Washington

"Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness."

George Washington

Quotes from the Sons of Liberty

"There, I guess King George will be able to read that."

John Hancock remarking on his signature on the Declaration of Independence.

Quotes from the Sons of Liberty

"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds."

Samuel Adams

Andy Harris and the sense of entitlement

Representative Elect Andy Harris had an embarrassing moment at Freshman orientation when, according to a Politico.com report which quoted and an unnamed staffer "He stood up and asked the two ladies who were answering questions why it had to take so long, what he would do without 28 days of health care."

Harris, according to the unnamed staffer, asked if government healthcare could be purchased in the interim.

Now Harris portrayed himself as knowledgeable of Health Care during the campaign, would he not know he could continue COBRA coverage from his previous employer?

Bill Clinton's New Job

I saw this on Julie Brewington's site. Certainly we are all upset and concerned about the new body scanners and getting a pat down that goes above and beyond the call of duty. We have qualified individuals stepping up to help ensure the process goes smoothly.

A General's View on Banking

“I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for.One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights.War for any other reason is simply a racket."

Quote by: Major General Smedley Darlington Butler(1881-1940) Major General USMC, "Old Gimlet Eye'' and "Hell Devil Darling", most highly decorated military man from the pre-World War II era.
Source: from a speech in 1933