Yeah and he also claims that RomneyCare is a “conservative solution” and that “quite frankly,” all of his positions have been conservative, and also has the audacity to claim that he’s “always been pro-life.” The man lies like a rug.
We have a world class liar in the Whitehouse. Does it take one to beat one?
All kidding aside, what I am about to say is serious business.
The following quote comes from Ludwig von Mises's "Human Action","The wavelike movement affecting the economic system, the recurrence of periods of boom which are followed by periods of depression, is the unavoidable outcome of the attempts, repeated again and again, to lower the gross market rate of interest by means of credit expansion. There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved."
It describes both the business cycle and the so-called "long wave" or Kwave, aka the Kondratiff wave. Fractional reserve banking introduces errors into the economy creating the illusion of more demand than is actually present. Over time, fractional reserve banking compounds these errors to a point at which the economic dynamics can no longer support the debt pyramid and the bust phase or depression follows.
Prior to the invention of the printing press, capitalism was not possible. No, it is not related to the ability to print money or bonds. The printing press made it possible and feasible for ordinary men to learn to read and write, the tools needed to be able to share knowledge horizontally over large numbers and vertically through time. Knowledge and ingenuity are the essential ingredients that drive capitalism. Add freedom and anybody can get rich. And everybody who can read has the means to increase their standard of living and level of wealth.
It took a couple of centuries to accumulate enough intellectual and financial capital to make the birth of capitalism possible around 1700. The birth of the United States in 1776 corresponds to a Kwave winter, just as the Great Depression corresponds to a Kwave winter. For roughly three centuries the economic upheavels of Kwave winter resulting from the booms and busts of fractional reserve banking have spawned revolutions with the accompanying births and deaths of nations. Gresham's Law of Politicians is the underlying foundation for Gresham's Law of Money. Thomas Jefferson understood, "I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them...If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them [around the banks], will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
Charles Koch and his brother David are well-schooled in Austrian economic theory. They understand freedom and free market capitalism. Now that the United States is about to enter another Kwave winter, one that Jefferson, de Tocqueville, von Mises and Ronald Reagan have all predicted could co-incide with the end of the United States, maybe it would behoove everybody to take a step back, review history, and stop repeating the mistakes of the past.
Doing nothing is exactly what Reagan tried to warn Americans about with this quote from his 1964 speech in behalf of Barry Goldwater, "We have come to a time for choosing; we will preserve for our children this the last best hope for man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.....history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening."
Thomas Paine said, "Lead, follow or get out of the way." Whether by choice or by chance, for you Jim, there is really no choice at this point. If the United States is to survive, fate seems to be positioning you to lead. I for one, do not believe you are going to let FreeRepublic or America down.
What was true in 1776 depended on leadership. And Jim, it is still true in 2012, just GO FOR IT.