Kris, thank you for not being offended by an opposing opinion, and for being open-minded. As you can tell by some of my prior entries (specifically my spat with Bill Conlin), I’m not much a fan of close-mindedness.

Spiro, yes, jmklein’s comment misses the point about economic prosperity. The U.N. Human Development Index measures, to quote Wikipedia, “[...]life expectancy, literacy, education, and standard of living for countries worldwide. It is a standard means of measuring well-being, especially child welfare. It is used to determine and indicate whether a country is a developed, developing, or underdeveloped country and also to measure the impact of economic policies on quality of life.”

If you’re simply using a count of “stuff,” well, yeah, the U.S. wins, simply because aside from China and India, the U.S. has the most people, and therefore the most stuff. But what a simple “stuff” count misses is that 1% of the U.S. population owns at least 40% of the total wealth.

There’s a few things I’d like to point out in regards to your comments. First, the overall idea and point of the letter is that there are now other viable sources for news out there. For example when I mentioned the force feeding of ‘news’, I was remembering how Britney Spears shaving her head got more airtime than, well, any other topic that has any importance. But with the rise of social news sites, Digg, Reddit, and others, people are able to look deeper, ignore the BS, or get other points of view than what you could using traditional news.

I’ll have to quote you quoting me here:

” “With the exception of the ones who look in to the only person who can not win, the rest will not give a damn at all … ever.”

This blogger essentially said that anyone who doesn’t support Ron Paul does not and will not ever give a damn. How close-minded can you get?”

This is about people who were largely felt how I did, and don’t kid yourself, there are a lot of them. If you hear how the decision is already made, If you feel like your say does not matter, then you won’t get out there and try to make a change. Call it a challenge if you want. I’d feel a lot better If more people woke up.

In regards to the Paul campaign and why it stikes a cord with me:

One thing I didn’t want to do is go off on a rant on why I felt like I did before in that article but it might help explain the reasons for it after the fact. In September 2001 I was one of thousands that took that oath to defend the constitution. Then over the next 6 years, I’ve watch it be dismantled piece by piece so when I did pick up on the Paul campaign I felt much like i did back in 2001… If that makes any sense to you.

Now I’m not saying some of the other so called fringe candidates wouldn’t support it, but they wouldn’t support it fully, maybe just a little more than what the front runners might, the main reason being the Illegal war, (plus their avoidance of taking a strong Zero tolerance on torture) now, please don’t get me wrong, I’m not Anti-war, I’m against illegal war, if congress passed a resolution tomorrow then I would support their decision. But that’s why I support him, he would follow the rule of the constitution. He may not be perfect but what everyone else running has forgotten is that the constitution is supposed to come before their individual politics.

Getting back to the letter, the final point of the letter is not about them ignoring his campaign, they ignore all the other campaigns equally as you point as, based on national polls but what they have done is go above and beyond just ignoring Paul by telling us he could never win. I have yet to see anyone tell one of the other candidates that. I had to ask myself why that was and now I’m one of his supporters.

with that out of the way…

I love the title of your blog and I browsed your site, while I’m not much of a baseball fan, I read your poker posts (ever play on fulltilt?) and a few others. I wish you the best and thanks again for deeming my blog post worthy to talk about.

-Kris.

In no place does the constitution give Congress the right to forfeit the power of money creation to a private institution. It has done so (the Federal Reserve), in 1913. I can state without fear of contradiction that this is an unconstitutional use of Congressional power, in need of an amendment to be anything less than criminal.

Nor, I would argue, is it allowed to authorize and enforce the use of fiat currency. Coining money is very specific. If it is reinterpreted as allowing the use of fiat currency, that should be an amendment.

There is nothing inherently wrong, or even necessarily unconstitutional, with fiat currency, but distributing it from a private organization (that charges interest!) and using fractional reserve banking to manage it is criminal mismanagement. It’s also much easier to inflate fiat currency, but that gets into realms of How Much We Trust Our Government To Not Do That. Right now, the answer is: not at all, since they are doing that. But it would be conceivably possible for a government not in love with itself to stop inflating.

In any event, when people talk about the failures of the gold standard, they often talk of runs on banks. But runs on banks are only possible under fractional reserve banking (the true culprit of much of our current and past economic woes), in which the bank pretends it has more money to lend than it actually does, so that it can collect interest on non-existent money.

Let me make this very clear: This is fraud.

Were it not for this fraudulent business practice, codified into law in 1913 with the creation of the Federal Reserve (the “reserve” in Federal Reserve and fractional reserve are the same thing), bank runs could not happen. All that would happen when panicked investors demanded their money would be that the bank would redeem their bank notes. Tough for the bank, sure, but not actually disastrous. Usually the investors, feeling silly, would simply hand their money right back when the bank failed to fail.

But banks don’t make much money when they can’t create it from the act of “lending.” (Banks do not lend money today. They create it and exchange it for signed notes of indebtedness, which are themselves a form of money. Under this system, money in fact represents debt.)

The problems of fractional reserve banking were made very clear in the Great Depression. If the banks fail to continually lend more money and inflate the money supply with this creation of imaginary money and its magical transformation into fiat currency, the rate of foreclosures skyrockets as people are unable to service their debts from the general money supply. Everyone ends up with no money, in massive debt… and the banks themselves fail, amazingly enough, because there’s no way to generate debts when nobody owns collateral, and that means the banks can’t magically create more money! Then, when the depositors want their money back, the bank has nothing to give. Oops!

The problem is that the servicing of debt becomes an exponentially growing byproduct of the economy. The economy must grow exponentially forever to keep up, and it can’t. That is why we’re in an economic crisis today, in fact… the interest is starting to surpass the growth, which will always happen, since the growth of the money supply automatically means a growth in the interest owed. Money, in the system we’ve set up, is debt. The only way to pay the debt is with more money. The only way to get that money is to go further into debt. Lurking around all of this is the constantly owed interest.

One of two things happens, inevitably, as a result of this exponential growth of interest as a byproduct of this vicious cycle. First, the banks may stop lending. Foreclosures, contraction of the money supply, Depression (as in Great Depression). This happened in 1929. Everyone’s in debt, nobody has any money anymore, and strangely enough the banks are dead too. Stranger still, there are still a few very, very rich people around…

The second possible result is hyperinflation, which happened in Germany during the Great Depression (which was a worldwide event… fractional reserve banking is worldwide, and interlocked, as well). Germany had additional debts to service from the outcome of World War 1. You can look to those accounts to see what happened there. The most obvious consequence was the rise of Hitler and the start of pre-emptive war. Sort of like what’s happening today: Oil? Going off the dollar? Why would that be a reason to invade? Oh, right, we want to still have an economy… better tell everyone it’s about the Islamofascists, though. That oughtta keep them in line.

So arguing against Paul thanks to the state of the economy today is a bit misleading. Yes, it will probably crash. But that’s going to happen anyway. Paul’s for a gentle letdown with an alternative money supply available as it happens… trying to minimize the damage. Everyone else in politics is for closing their eyes and pretending it’s not coming, hoping the music doesn’t stop while they’re holding the hot potato.

But when you measure by quantity of “stuff”, “stuff” being physical possessions such as cars, tv’s, homes, computers, clothes, cell phones and so on the capitalist countries reign supreme.

Sure you can make an index that makes socialist countries richer, but that does not detract from the reality of “stuff”, and that “stuff” is the goal of economic energy.

The Bush administration has desecrated the Constitution with the approval of Congress. Most of our Congresspeople barely even read (if they did at all) the stuff they were rubber-stamping for him, the USA PATRIOT Act a shining example (the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is another). While I have confidence that Paul would act quickly to repeal them (and Giuliani would not), I also think that most of the other candidates would, as well.

As I mentioned, Paul has quite a few things aligned correctly when it comes to social issues, but at a time like this with the U.S. economy in a state of disrepair, his economic ideals are, at the very least, dangerous. If we were in a state of economic prosperity, I would object a bit less and would be more willing to go with the flow with Paul.

On that third point, however, you get very much to the heart of a serious debate. What the founding fathers intended is certainly not a mystery, as they wrote many long and impassioned essays, letters, and even books on the subject. However, that is not the same thing as what they made the supreme law of the land, and that is no accident.

First, the founding fathers didn’t agree on everything, or even most things. Two of the biggest names from their number, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, were as diametrically opposed philosophically on the role of the state as it is possible to be. Hamilton wanted what we basically have today, a king-for-president who could tax at will. He was a Statist. Jefferson, on the other hand, was as die-hard a libertarian as you’ll ever find this side of a Montana bunker. Both of them became presidents of the nation, in time. Neither of them got precisely what they wanted out of the Constitution.

The Constitution was at its heart a compromise. It was imperfect… it permitted slavery, among other things. But it wasn’t just a compromise between the federalists and the anti-federalists, it was also a compromise among the states, who at that time were independent governments. And its composers realized it was a compromise, so they included the ability to amend it should the need to do so arise.

That’s the heart of my problem with our current government. They point out that the Constitution, since it can be amended, is a living document, which is absolutely true. It has problems, loopholes like you pointed out. Then they use that as an excuse to ignore its provisions and legislate around it! Why not just amend it? Our current money system is unconstitutional… why does it exist via law instead of constitutional amendment? Our president has violated the constitution numerous times with laws such as the USA PATRIOT Act… why not just amend it? The Iraq war is unconstitutional… why not pass an act of war, or amend away the need for one?

The answer? It’s too much responsibility, too limiting to power derived at least at the basic level from popular support. They all want the power, and they all hate the responsibility.

It needs to stop.

2. Stephanopoulos was being sarcastic, I think, just as the author of the blog I cited was.

3. Either way, he’s going against what the founding fathers intended, which was to keep church and government separate. If you recognize that the founding fathers didn’t want church and government to be mixed, and support Paul’s position to leave that up to the states, you essentially support a loophole (which the religious right would obviously have no problem exploiting).

Thanks for the comment.