haha, no problem. I actually laughed aloud when I saw the dude on the boat because all I could think was "Bully!"

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
LOL! Thanks bro.

In reply to this comment by JAPR:
*promote the truth on how Teddy Roosevelt died.

LOL! Thanks bro.

In reply to this comment by JAPR:
*promote the truth on how Teddy Roosevelt died.

*promote the truth on how Teddy Roosevelt died.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'roosevelt, president, united states, great depression, old timey' to '30s, roosevelt, president, united states, great depression, old timey' - edited by swampgirl

Actually Schiff is very critical of Hoover because he started the government interventionism that Roosevelt accelerated. Hoover and Roosevelt both are responsible for the severe market distortion of the Great Depression but Hoover gets all the blame.

We seem to be going down the same path with Bush and Obama. I know Obama hasn't even been sworn in yet but he is promising to do whatever is necessary, the stimulus packages he's talking about are going to cause at least high inflation, at worst hyperinflation. These economists want to scare people into thinking deflation is worse than inflation because they don't want to realize losses.

Peter Schiff is a real conservative like Ron Paul, not a socialist like Bush and Co.

>> ^jwray:
The United States federal government is not paying for its deficit spending by printing excessive amounts of money. It is borrowing instead. Inflation is at 3.66% and falling. It peaked at 5.6% in July, before the economic upheaval.


Oh really, is that why it takes 3x as many dollars to buy an ounce of gold today than it did ten years ago? Of course the government is printing obscene amounts of money. Stop picking and choosing little short term windows of time where the trend is not apparent, nothing goes in a straight line. Do you even know what monetization of debt means? If foreigners are no longer interested in buying our government debt (bonds) that the treasury issues every year, the Fed has to raise interest rates to lure them in, because that's the yield on their loan to us. But they're LOWERING THEM. Yields are NEGATIVE. You loan money to us, you will be paid back in depreciated dollars that buy less than what you had before you loaned. So now that foreigners aren't doing that, guess who has to step in and buy those bonds? The Federal Reserve. Except that money isn't someone's savings, it isn't backed by a product in the world. It's pure inflation, pure funny money. That's what's coming, their balance sheet is going into the TRILLIONS.

This is the symbiosis that enabled government excess. A tax is an honest appropriation, people see it and are far more likely to resist it. Inflation is arbitrary money creation in a back room that siphons value from existing dollars. You can pull a curtain over that, lie about how much you're doing it, and watch as people see prices go up 10% in health care, food, per annum with absolutely no idea what hit them. After all, the government weatherman says that prices only went up 3%.

http://www.financialsense.com/stormwatch/2005/0624.html

The calculations are a joke, after we left the gold standard in the 70s, they kept changing them to understate real inflation and welfare obligations so they could spend more and more without it being easily noticed. They no longer include homes, energy, or food. Also, they introduced a subjective concept called hedonics adjustment, which negates price increases as inflation by discounting an assumed increase in quality.

The most galling result of this Keynesian nonsense is it blinds people to where inflation is going. Keynesian economics is the equivalent of teaching astrology instead of astronomy. First, they change the definition of inflation to mean prices instead of money supply. The correct definition of inflation is an increase of the money supply with the common RESULT being higher prices. After doing this, they then categorize inflation (to them: prices) into "asset-based" and "goods-based," and tell us that they don't fight asset-based. But asset-based inflation is what causes bubbles in assets like homes and stocks. We want things we own to go up and things we consume to go down, of course, but we don't want our assets to go up from artificial demand created by inflation. That's an illusion. So when inflation goes into tech stocks or homes, nobody sees it as inflation. Not the Keynesian Fed Chairmen, not the Keynesian financial managers, almost anyone with a degree in economics was less reliable than A COIN FLIP. That's when you know when your "science" has a problem. And then boom, when it starts going into commodities futures after the implosion, it exposes the inflation at all once that people were previously blind to.

And then here's a guy like Schiff, Ron Paul's economic advisor and Austrian economist, who was warning the whole god damned time since 2000, telling people to get into gold when it was $275 and getting laughed at by every confused Keynesian educated retard on television.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucDkoqwflF4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw

>> ^dtmike07:
Austrian economics has about as much credibility as scientology. They don't even believe in empirical evidence, for crissakes. Mainstream economics does't have a much better theory - essentially its an extended and mathematized version of Austrian economics. But at least mainstream economists know what the data says and use statistical techniques to analyze it. You know, like real scientists. And regarding the Austrian "theory" of the Great Depression - they pretty much pulled it out of their asses. Its just an attempt to blame the whole thing on the government, and exempt the free market. Austrian economics is a religion - the free market is God and government is the Devil.

You are 100% dead wrong on this. Keynesian "empirical data" is bogus, I've only scratched the surface on how they try to complicate simple concepts into a symbiotic swindle by redefining inflation, making up new terms, and it keeps blowing up in their face no matter who's in charge because that's the whole point. For you or Stukafox to even compare this problem to the firecrackers of banking panics (from fractional reserve lending, a legalized form of fraud that persists to this day with government backstops, an entirely different debate) is unbelievable, there's no proportion to a decade long depression and a bunch of shitty banks going under to remind people not to carelessly deposit all their money in banks.

Second of all, economics is a study of human behavior. Keynes was an idiot whose theories arose from a complete misunderstanding of what caused the great depression. He basically threw classical knowledge out the window and decided that economies needed central direction and stimulation by government. See, like the dumbfucks in this video, most people thought letting the banks fail was what caused the depression. It wasn't. It was what came before and after it. The inflation of the 20s was what caused the crash in the first place, you don't have a crash without a Fed-created bubble. You don't have withdrawal without being high on drugs.

But while withdrawal symptoms suck, they're actually the solution to the disease of the high. Hoover and Roosevelt saw the hangover as the disease, and began administering shock therapy. Over the course of many years, they raised tariffs, raised taxrates, and nationalized industry. The economy would have recovered, capital and jobs would have reallocated on its own. Instead, anyone who had any money after that crash had no incentive to invest or employ anyone, because now government was promising to take 90% of your profits if you made any. So unemployment got worse. The tax revenue the government did manage to appropriate, it used to pay for new government jobs that were extremely inefficient (being immune to bankruptcy, financed by theft, and having no competition tends to be an unproductive business model, ask the soviets). FDR also ordered livestock slaughtered and fields plowed under because he believed falling food prices were bad for farmers. No, I'm not making this up. Deflation being bad is another Keynesian myth, they think more efficient production lowering prices makes people sit on their money rather than invest it. Which is totally untrue if you look at the computer sector where prices fall IN SPITE of inflation and have never had problems raising capital or selling well despite falling prices and obsolescence. FDR is the same asshole who allowed Pearl Harbor to be a massacre and issued unconstitutional orders to confiscate gold from the poor, hungry citizens who had just seen the banks absolved for destroying their savings. The man was a fucking monster, it took four terms to get rid of him.

What got us out of the depression was a just war and FDR's death. WWII had the entire country up in arms because we were attacked by another country. People were willing to sacrifice their wants and contribute to the war effort, this was no pushover on a third world country, it took everything we had. People were buying warbonds based on patriotic fervor alone. Massive amounts of infrastructure was built to produce wartime materials. That manufacturing base remained after the war for private industry, taxes came down, trade resumed, and we emerged as a leading producer of wealth in the world. By default. Because the rest of world was in shambles, only the Soviets were left to compete and their socialist economy eventually crumbled. We didn't plan it that way, it just happened. We were also still on a semi-gold standard, we still had a savings rate, and we became the largest creditor nation. We've lost ALL OF THAT. It's all gone, we're the direct opposite now. No gold standard, negative savings rate, largest debtor nation in the WORLD.

Keynes main problem is, politicians have no precise idea what all needs to be produced and created to please everyone in a PEACETIME economy, it's impossible. The free market is millions of individuals with diverse wants and needs, there's no way in hell you can centrally manage that. But they think they can and want to spend, that's why they picked Keynes as a replacement for old models, because his theories completely justified what socialist academics had been wanting to do all along. They honestly believed they could spend money more efficiently than its earner. That's impossible, the earner has a stake in the money. If he throws it away, he loses the labor he spent to obtain it, so he has a natural incentive to be thrifty. A politician spending it loses nothing, they have no incentive to be thrifty. They're people motivated by self-interest, just like you and me, their only legitimate job in the economy was to make sure force and deception is not used when we are out here transacting with one another. That's what graphs and "empirical data" doesn't explain, and it's why history will show Keynes to be a failure.

Far from our free market roots, we centrally fix interest rates, we declare lending standards discriminatory with goofy programs like the community reinvestment act, we redistribute capital from good businesses to failed ones, savers to speculators, and pass all kinds of anti-competitive laws. That's what Ron Paul understood and was going to put a stop to. He was going to end the monopoly on currency that forced us all into accepting the bill for government excess. He was going to end the useless military expenditures overseas. He was going to eliminate the income tax and cripple the ability of politicians to engage in collusive campaign dealings, or "engineer" society by issuing special credits to certain types of marriages, incomes, families, or investments. He knew the enablements, he understood how seemingly innocuous program could change human behavior. Politicians are just lawyers spending and accepting millions of dollars to get a low-paying position of controlling other people's money. That's it. And if you think they should be controlling 50% of our money in life, you deserve everything that's coming to you. Your employers are all going to close up shop to avoid the tax, your education is going to suck, your welfare dollars' value is going to be pissed away on foreign entanglements and overpaid execs, your gold is going to get confiscated (again). It's all coming, comrades.

Anyone who resorts to merely laughing at their opponents ought to have their advice treated with great skepticism.

For the record, i've read some of what Hoover and Roosevelt did and i promise you that it was anything but laissez-faire conservatism. They most definitely interfered big time. It's a myth that Hoover sat on his hands, trusting the market. He did a lot to interfere, and Roosevelt did even more. And frankly, i don't think it was wartime spending so much as wartime *production* that really pulled us out. I don't need a gold backed currency, but i do need currency to be backed by something besides printing presses. If we do not produce things of worth, then printing more money simply devalues the existing money. Contrary to popular belief, the overarching shape of these economic systems aren't rocket science that only some erudite experts can fathom. More money chasing the same or fewer goods means the money is worth less. The government should be encouraging a ramp up in production to lower prices. Of course, the out-sourcing and globalization of much commodity production puts a lot of this out of any one government's hands. Which is also why they should be encouraging us to buy local as much as possible, regional next, national next, and global last. Our local and regional multipliers have been shrinking badly with corporate merging and globalizing. If it weren't for that, we wouldn't be worried about the effect of large, failing companies. Anyway, i could go on, but here's the bottom lines:

Currency must be backed by something to have/gain/maintain value.
We need to boost production (of anything and everything), primarily starting local, then regional, then national. The best way you can do that yourself is to shop with that order of preference in mind; if you run a business, work harder to produce more; if you have a business idea, start it up!

HEY! Fuck you and your pussy Teddy "Nancyboy" Roosevelt -- Andrew fucking JACKSON, muthaFUCKA! How many men did mincing Teddy kill? What, 30 - 40 in that whole San Juan Hill Rick-Roll? What a wuss! 20 years after he died, Andrew Jackson crawled out of his grave, killed the entire population of Cincinnati, Ohio, and WIPED HIS BABY-ARM-SIZED DICK RIGHT ACROSS THEIR FACES!

But you don't have to worry about that from Obama -- that cat's got class!

Even though it was two years ago, that STILL makes him the coolest motherfucker to ever get elected. Well, except for maybe TEDDY THE BULLY FUCKING AWESOME ROOSEVELT.

That was my point of putting it there.

>> ^NetRunner:
>> Fair and Balanced would've meant realizing that William Ayers barely knew Obama, or realizing that Gordon Liddy had both committed worse crimes, and had a closer relationship to John McCain than Ayers had to Obama.
Fair and Balanced would've meant admitting that a progressive tax system was implemented by Theodore Roosevelt (Republican), and the Earned Income Tax Credit was implemented by Ronald Reagan (the Republican "Messiah"), and that if either are socialism, then it was the Republicans who made us socialist a long time ago.

>> ^Duckman33:
Um, if I remember correctly. It was Fox News (Fair and Balanced) that started breaking all the negative news on Sara Palin after the election. Now all of a sudden it's a bad thing?


Fair and Balanced would've meant reporting it before the election, not after.

Fair and Balanced would've meant realizing that William Ayers barely knew Obama, or realizing that Gordon Liddy had both committed worse crimes, and had a closer relationship to John McCain than Ayers had to Obama.

Fair and Balanced would've meant admitting that a progressive tax system was implemented by Theodore Roosevelt (Republican), and the Earned Income Tax Credit was implemented by Ronald Reagan (the Republican "Messiah"), and that if either are socialism, then it was the Republicans who made us socialist a long time ago.

I would like to title this comment: FDR and the Great Depression VS Barack Obama and the Current Recession

^1. those who do not study history repeat it

Charles is WRONG about the Great Depression and it sounds like he's proposing that we repeat it.

FDR enacted a few good programs to provide immediate relief. That's all good and well except for the fact that those programs also served to lengthen the depression by a number of years.

"..The government from Hoover to Roosevelt made it worse by intervening too much and too arbitrarily."
ABC Finds FDR Partly to Blame for 10-Year Great Depression

Is that what we want to happen again thanks to the Democrats in congress along with Obama?


"Some economists in retrospect have argued that the National Labor Relations Act and Agricultural Adjustment Administration were ineffective policies because they relied on price fixing."

"Unemployment fell dramatically in Roosevelt's first term, from 25% when he took office to 14.3% in 1937. Afterward, however, it increased to 19.0% in 1938 ('a depression within a depression'), 17.2% in 1939 because of various added taxation (Undistributed profits tax in Mar. 1936, and the Social Security Payroll Tax 1937, plus the effects of the Wagner Act; the Fair Labor Standards Act and a blizzard of other federal regulations), and stayed high until it almost vanished during World War II when the previously unemployed were conscripted, taking them out of the potential labor supply number."

"The U.S. economy grew rapidly during Roosevelt's term.[54] However, coming out of the depression, this growth was accompanied by continuing high levels of unemployment; as the median joblessness rate during the New Deal was 17.2%. Throughout his entire term, including the war years, average unemployment was 13%."

Wikipedia.com

See also:

UCLA Economist say FDR Lengthened the Great Depression by several years

FDR Lengthened The Great Depression

A brief history of the Great Depression

FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years

ABC Finds FDR Partly to Blame for 10-Year Great Depression

Yes, FDR Made Depression Worse and Longer

Don't Trust the Depression Brain Trust

...and I could go on.

Neocons, which is what the Republican base is now, are interventionists just like Woodrow Wilson, FDR and Clinton. And I'm not making it up when I say they are left.

[addendum] From wikipedia:
Left-wing past of neoconservatives
Author Michael Lind argues that "the organization as well as the ideology of the neoconservative movement has left-liberal origins".
The neoconservative desire to spread democracy abroad has been likened to the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution. Lind argues that the neoconservatives are influenced by the thought of former Trotskyists such as James Burnham and Max Shachtman, who argued that "the United States and similar societies are dominated by a decadent, postbourgeois 'new class.'" He sees the neoconservative concept of "global democratic revolution" as deriving from the Trotskyist Fourth International's "vision of permanent revolution." He also points to what he sees as the Marxist origin of "the economic determinist idea that liberal democracy is an epiphenomenon of capitalism," which he describes as "Marxism with entrepreneurs substituted for proletarians as the heroic subjects of history."



From Liberal Hawk on Wikipedia:
The term liberal hawk refers to an individual generally described as politically liberal who supports a hawkish foreign policy, as opposed to a foreign policy of not using force to intervene with conflicts around the world. Past U.S. presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson have been described as liberal hawks for their roles in bringing about America's status as the world's premier military power. The Clinton Doctrine can also be considered as consistent with this vision. Modernly the term is most frequently used to describe liberals and leftists who supported or still support the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, which was authorized by the United States Congress and ordered by a conservative president, George W. Bush.

Rottenseed, there is a difference between being turned off by the nasty political habits of those on the left and right, and changing your mind about what's behind that nastiness. Politics is what it is in the country, and to win you've got to get dirty. It sucks. We all know it, and yet politicians keep on winning with the mudslinging. Surprised? I hope not. I'm encouraged that while you may be turned off by the win-at-all-costs mentality, you don't seem to have given up on the ideas on the left.

Some of the comments on this thread make me wonder, though, just how young are you people? Look at the last two elections for dirty politics? Try the last 53 elections. They've all had their share of nastiness. Read some of the stuff written about Adams, or Jackson, or Cleveland, etc. There's absolutely nothing new about dirty politics. If anything, the phrase is somewhat redundant.

The economy is going to take 6 years to rebuild??? How long did it take Clinton to get the economy turned around after the mess left by Bush I. How about Roosevelt during the Great depression - within 3 years nearly every economic indicator was back to 1929 levels, the notable exception being unemployment. And unemployment dropped from 25% to 9% during his first term. There is so much panic in financial markets right now that people have suspended good judgement. My personal take on it is that the stock markets are in the process of bottoming out right now. Valuations on so many companies are so low that it won't take much more before some folks notice some of the bargain stocks out there. No, that won't do too much to unfreeze the credit markets - that will have to work itself out. But it's not going to take 6 years. Lenders can't wait that long. They need to start lending at some point so they can make a living.

And as for voting for a third party candidate - well, at the national level right now, it is a waste. I may be wrong, but I think the best way to foster a truly viable third party is from the ground up. Start getting Progressives or Libertarians elected into local and state offices, then get a few in Congress, maybe a Senator or two. Then they will have enough of a base to mount a viable national campaign. Until then, I can't see how a national campaign for a party that has no members in Congress is going to work.

I knew Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Teddy Roosevelt.