Tag: Money Management Mishaps

Privatization

Ladies and gentlemen brace yourselves I’m actually going to link to a post written by a syndicalist. OK I’m joking, I don’t care what somebody’s political orientation is when I like to it on this site. On a serious note though I found an excellent writeup dealing with a topic of privatization that has always bothered me, who gets the money from the sale of “public” works:

Taxes entail coercion; this is why they’re not called donations. Accordingly, one might think self-styled advocates of free markets and smaller government, Ayn Rand aficionados especially, would be cognizant of the fact that, when it comes to a moral claim over the things that said taxes go to — from telecommunications to transit systems — the coerced taxpayer would have the strongest case for ownership.

You’d be wrong, of course. When it comes to downsizing the state, most conservatives and libertarians have a raging hard-on for privatization, by which they mean the government auctioning off taxpayer property to the highest private bidder. The problem with this approach, from a Freedom! and individual rights perspective, is that those who were forced to invest in the state entity to be auctioned off are left with next to nothing to show for it, usually some multinational corporation instead swooping in to pick it up at pennies on the dollar.

This has always been an issue to me. I’m all for privatization (gee could you have guessed that one) but I’m against the government getting the money from sales of “public” works. The fact of the matter is “public” works are funded through stolen… I mean taxpayer money. Throughout the list of any “public” work taxpayers are the ones who foot the bill for building and maintaining the work. Yet when the government decides it’s time to privatize the system (a good thing) they auction off the work and keep all the money for themselves (a bad thing). Were the government honest that money would be equally divided amongst the taxpayers in the form of either shares or money. If we payed for the damned thing we should get our money back when it’s sold off. Obviously this will never happen as government is none to keen on the whole idea of returning stolen money.

Anti-Gunners are Getting Cheap

Gun “buy back” programs (which are ill named as you can’t buy something back unless you previously owned it) are one of the dumbest ideas that government agencies have ever conjured up to fight crime. Anybody with working cognitive capabilities could tell you that criminals aren’t the ones who will turn in their firearms for the measly offering made by the state. Well it appears as though one police department has figured out that many guns that have been turned in are actually non-functional shit. That’s their claimed reason for offering less money at least although I’d say it’s likely they are just getting cheap:

Instead of offering $50 per gun, the city will pay $50 per person.

This is being done to discourage people who might misuse the program as a way to unload defective weapons, said Martha Earnhardt, a spokeswoman for the Montgomery Department of Public Safety. A news release about the buyback program states that the city specifically forbids gun dealers from participating in the buyback.

If you have a firearm you wish to rid yourself of be smart and sell it to somebody who will give you fair market value for it. Most firearms are worth more than $50.00 and frankly I find the actions being performed by departments doing these gun “buy back” programs to be fraudulent. They are taking advantage of people who haven’t a clue what firearms are worth which is something the state often decries when private individuals do it.

Personally I find handing over completely broken and non-fixable firearms to the state a great idea. It’s kind of like getting stolen money back, you dump a broken gun and receive $50.00 of your taxpayer money back. On top of that no functional firearm is needlessly destroyed.

A tip of the hat goes to The Truth About Guns for bringing this article to light.

Inflation is Theft

I briefly covered the how government initiated inflation is in fact a form of theft. Well I ran into a good article that does a good job of explaining this and showing why the Keynesian theory that inflation is good because it spurs spending is stupid.

There isn’t much comment I can offer on this article besides urging you to head over and read it.

The Reason for a Commodity Based Monetary Standard

One of the reasons I know Ron Paul is a pretty stand up guys is because he’s up front and honest:

I’ve described the rationale behind the idea of taxation being theft but taxation isn’t the only type of theft the government partakes in. Another type of theft they perform is inflation. As the Federal Reserve prints money each monetary unit (dollar) becomes worth less.

If you have $10,000 in a bank account at the government prints off $100,000 inflation ensures the value of each dollar goes down meaning that the purchasing power in your bank account becomes less. Inflation takes some time to kick in and thus those who first receive the money are unaffected while those of us at the bottom of the receiving pole get the feel the full force of it.

During this whole bailout fiasco the government has been printing trillions of dollars and handing those bills out to companies that are “too big to fail” and foreign banks. This is a nice little double dip of theft as the government first stole money from the citizens in the form of taxes and then they stole purchasing power from us in the form of inflation.

This is where the advocacy of hard money comes into play. People often hear libertarians speak about a “gold standard” and scoff. When you understand the reasoning behind the gold standard is makes a bit more sense though. First saying gold standard is a bit of a misnomer as any commodity can be used in place of gold (gold has traditionally been used because it was the commodity chosen by the market).

What a commodity standard does is prevent government theft in the form of inflation. One of the benefits of gold is that mining it is a fairly intensive process and much of the mined gold is used for industrial uses. This means the amount of monetary gold remains mostly fixed and thus the purchasing power of each ounce o gold remains mostly constant. As gold can’t just be printed up the amount can’t be increased on a whim so the government is restricted from “printing money.”

The reason libertarians say we need to return to the gold standard is because there is no better way to protect each person’s purchasing power from government initiated inflation.

White House Tried to Stop S&P from Downgrading the Country’s Credit Rating

Standard and Poor’s (S&P) recently downgraded the United State’s long term credit rating to “negative.” This isn’t surprising really as the United States government keeps spending more and more money which only leads us to spiral into deeper debt. It’s kind of like a person who has a maxed out credit card, makes the minimum interest payments, but their credit limit keeps getting extended and they keep increasing the amount on the card.

Well the White House wasn’t too happy with the downgrade and it seems they tried to stop S&P from downgrading the country’s credit rating:

Even though the White House has publicly downplayed the credit warning issued Monday from a leading agency, Obama administration officials were privately trying in recent weeks to convince Standard & Poor’s not to lower its outlook for U.S. debt from “stable” to “negative,” Fox News has confirmed.

I guess the White House found out that they can’t make secret deals with everybody.

So That’s the Problem

I think Linoge found the problem with the United State’s tax code, in a chart no less. Also I’m going to drop this is a the quote of the day:

Our government has gotten greedier, our civil “servants” have gotten more interested in catching average citizens in arcane and byzantine laws and arbitrarily-changed rules, and every time we try to hold on to a little more of our hard-earned money – money that is literally a physical manifestation of our lives’ work – the government gets more creative in stealing it away from us.

How dare us stupid peasants try to keep some of our hard earned money!

In Lieu of Doing Something

The economy is in the toilet, the government has fucked the market so hard through laws and regulations that the chances of it recovering grow slimmer with each passing day, and unemployment keeps rising due to businesses failing. If you’re an unemployment agency what can you do? Obviously you can’t make jobs, only private industry can do that (I’m referring to actual jobs that create wealth). What would be the next best thing? How about giving $14,000 worth of capes to the unemployed:

Workforce Central Florida spent more than $14,000 on the red capes as part of its “Cape-A-Bility Challenge” public relations campaign. The campaign featured a cartoon character, “Dr. Evil Unemployment,” who needs to be vanquished.

That’s much easier than actually doing something.

Tax Day

Oh before I forget today is that day of the year where you have to submit the government’s paperwork for them so they know how much of your money they need to take by force. I already have my tax returns in and cashed (cash those checks immediately, you never know when the government is going to go all California and not be able to cash sent checks).

If you’re one to wait until the last minute to mail the paperwork I give you some credit for withholding your money from the government’s greedy hands as long as you can. On the other hand if you haven’t had the paperwork itself filled out… well congratulations you win the procrastination award.

Coincidence, I Think Not

Tell me if you think my line of thought is correct on this. JP Morgan just reported $5.6 billion which they attributed to their credit card business. Unemployment has been up with the recent depression forcing people on government wealth-redistribution programs such as food stamps. Food stamps in the United States are no longer stamps but Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards which are actually just standard credit cards. JP Morgan is the company that issues and controls these EBT cards.

Anybody else getting a good idea where their record profits came from?

Fixing Our Budget

It appears as through we face the happy situation of our federal government shutting down for a while because they can’t agree if we should have a $1.23 trillion deficit or only a $1.21 trillion deficit:

US President Barack Obama has said it would be “inexcusable” for lawmakers to fail to reach a budget that would fund the government to September.

Mr Obama spoke after he and Congressional leaders were unable to reach a budget deal on Tuesday.

Without a new budget, the US government will shut down on Friday.

Ironically if our federal government were to shutdown they couldn’t spend any money and the deficit problem would be a non-issue. I think it would be smart to lobby the “representatives” to support shutting down the government as a means to fix the deficit problem this country is facing.