Apparently, Texas has passed a law compelling computer repair technicians to be licensed private investigators in order to practice their tradecraft.

There is something fundamentally un-American about a measure like this. This is reflective of the police state culture that we now live in, where the state apparatus and its proxies are busy searching and snooping in order to find probable cause, rather than searching based upon probable cause.

This is just another example of government treating everybody like a suspect.

“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

The Second Amendment is actually very easy to understand, and there shouldn’t be any controversy about its meaning.

The first common error is to conflate the word regulated with government control.

Regulate
1. to control or direct by a rule, principle, method, etc.: to regulate household expenses.
2. to adjust to some standard or requirement, as amount, degree, etc.: to regulate the temperature.
3. to adjust so as to ensure accuracy of operation: to regulate a watch.
4. to put in good order: to regulate the digestion.

You can have a regulation-sized basketball, used for playing during regulation time in a basketball game.

It is clearly the right of the people to keep and bear arms, as it is private citizens who constitute the militia. Why would the government need to be reminded to not disarm itself?

Thus private citizens being armed is the regulation.

Will Bob Barr “take” votes away from John McCain?

No.

The question implies that John McCain and Barack Obama have a natural right to votes, and that any other party’s candidate that garners any votes “stole” or “took” those votes from the Repubocrats and Demlicans.

If Bob Barr gets a vote it is because Bob Barr got a vote. I know in my case, if the choice was only between Barack Obama and John McCain, I wouldn’t vote. The idea that a vote cast for Bob Barr is tantamount to theft is downright insulting to my intelligence.

I am voting for Bob Barr, and John Obama and Barack McCain can go screw off!

A picture of me from my Marine Corps days. This one was taken at White Beach, Okinawa, in 1998.

Asks Justin Raimondo in his latest commentary. But my question is: Why does Justin Raimondo hate Israel? Justin makes a few good points, but why doesn’t he try substituting Israel and himself for China and the protectionists?

I am pleased to report that Senator Mike Gravel is seeking the Libertarian Party’s nomination. I don’t know about his chances of getting onto some ballots since he has been running as a Democrat and some states have “sore loser” laws. I am thinking that Bob Barr could lead the ticket, with Mike Gravel as the VP. A Barr/Gravel ticket. Or, if Senator Gravel can get on enough ballots, then how about Gravel/Barr?

Here is the ONE way the government can actually do something that wouldn’t make the housing meltdown worse. If the government wants to impute some value into mortgages, cutting property taxes would help do that. Thus local governments could help the situation by dramatically cutting back on their municipal budgets and then cutting property taxes.

Know this: prices have not fallen due to deflation, i.e., a contraction of the money supply. Therefore, inflation won’t even help re-inflate the price bubble–not that it should be tried. Prices are falling because the value was never there to begin with. The buying was financed through inflationary credit expansion. Prices have been too high. Prices need to fall.

First and foremost: a human being. Like everybody else, I am flawed. I am imperfect. And I–like everybody else–need to do a better job at remembering that I am imperfect. It is a lot easier to see somebody else’s sins than it is to see your own. How would I feel if somebody reveled in my misery because of mistakes I have made? So why should I revel in somebody else’s misery, no matter how “just” it seems? I shouldn’t.

Given the kinds of things Americans have supported, it could be easy to say that Americans are getting what they deserve with the bad economic times and so forth–that Americans are reaping what they have sown. The danger in this attitude is that you go from promoting solutions to promoting punishment. It changes the focus.

What I want: people to educate themselves, pursue the truth, and then do the right thing.

My first nomination for departments to shut down: the Department of Veterans’ (Anti-Veterans’) Affairs. Shut it down. Defund it. Abolish it. Get rid of it. The sooner, the better. Then all of those employees at the VA will actually have to do something PRODUCTIVE–rather than satisfying the whims of politicians and bureaucrats–in order to sustain themselves.

My prediction is that the bailout will be by stealth–i.e., the Fed is going to buy more and more different kinds of paper junk. Of course, they won’t be able to hide inflation from the market forever. It will not be without serious consequences.

Ben Bernanke’s straightjacket

I wonder for what purpose exactly Bernanke wants the loan market to try to create more faux equity through accounting tricks. Would they be so sinister as to believe this will let them get away with re-inflating the housing price bubble with even more home equity loans?

I have discussed some of the problems in my previous posts and commentaries. To the arcane economist, or the novice, there seems to be no understanding of why the loan market can’t keep inflating and re-inflating to keep the price bubble intact–as though that is even desirable. The shortest way to explain it is like this: there is a limit to how far inflationary credit expansion can go, before the loan market itself falls apart at the seams. In the process of inflating, the loan market is helping to artificially suppress the real rate of interest, diminishing the real pool of funding, destroying itself, thus diminishing its capacity for future credit expansion.

While the loan market can fund inflationary credit for a little while, eventually the artificially suppressed interest rates catch up. There is no right way to have a real rate of interest below zero. The loan market is tapped, which brings an end to the housing price bubble. Either we now abandon the destructive policies of inflation and return to sound money and a free market, or else the government and its central bank must use more coercive means to inflate–viz., more government spending, “stimulus” checks, FDIC bailouts, and so forth. Even with the latter, there is still a ceiling–hyperinflation, which I don’t think we want.

The reason why Ron Paul was so ignored by the establishment and even ridiculed by beltway libertarians is because Ron Paul is a real advocate of free markets, which is what threatens the power structure.

The court-appointed “free-market” advocates that you see on television usually deviate so far from true free markets, that they are pseudo opponents of central planning. On any number of particular issues, I may agree with some of these people, but they invariably misdirect people into supporting various forms of central planning. Supply-siders and Monetarists are crossdressing Keynesians–they try to camouflage their statism with free market rhetoric. The only true free market school of economics is the Austrian School, and Ron Paul is an Austrian.

How sad that people so easily conflate more money in circulation with an expansion of real wealth. So much do people make that mistake, that people were able to take out home equity loans against completely faux equity. This was pyramiding inflation upon inflation. People really believed that houses were becoming more valuable, when it was that the dollar was becoming less valuable.

I must say that I despise real estate appraisers. You want to know who can appraise prices accurately? Buyers. A house is worth what a buyer is able and willing to pay for it. I used to remind my sister of this all the time. She seemed surprised that she couldn’t sell her house for what the appraiser said it was worth. If the appraiser isn’t going to buy the house, then the words mean nothing.

While this is largely insignificant when juxtaposed with the real crimes of the war, it is no less a manifestation of the callousness that government nurtures. It surprises me not in the least that the government would employ people who enjoy killing puppies–and people.

There is a faux form of moralism that the government promotes: i.e., allegience to itself. It is a legalistic pseudo-morality, which seeks to build cadres of citizens who are not limited by a conscience, but will dutifully obey orders. In this paradigm, telling the truth is tantamount to treason. Hoaxes are taken as reality, while reality is scoffed at.

Our values have been subverted and inverted. Morality is scoffed at, and is more likely to earn you the reputation as a “nut,” a “kook,” and “delusional.” Evil is afraid of morality. We have a government, a system, institutions, that persecutes and punishes the moral, while promoting the immoral.

I was just reading a little bit about the 8 goals of the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations, which is being funded with the tax-subsidized International Monetary Fund.

These goals represent a blueprint for communism/fascism. But I guess it will be communism/fascism ran by….women, which I guess is supposed to put a happy face on everything.

The Fed, through its proxy loan market, created a housing price bubble, leaving people stuck with upside-down mortgages that they can’t afford. The solution is simple, and it is a laissez-faire, hands-off approach.

Let people get out of their mortgages, let the foreclosures happen.

Let the banks repossess homes.

Do NOT, under ANY circumstances, bail out homeowners or the loan market.

The Fed must CEASE inflating the money supply and must CEASE injecting funds into the loan market. Let deflation run its course until previous inflation has been undone, and we will then be back to sound money. Prices will fall, which is a good thing.

The loan market will have a nice inventory of homes to sell.

Let the FREE MARKET set the prices of homes.

The loan market will not be able to price-gouge without the assistance of government interference in the marketplace, through subsidies, regulations, and more inflation. The unhampered free market can’t set a price above what people are able and willing to pay. Sellers can try “gouging” by raising prices, but this will curtail sales, thus diminishing profits.

If the loan market wishes to stay in business, it will have to sell homes–and at a deflated price, but with a stronger dollar.

I just got done reading Eric Englund’s latest commentary at LewRockwell.com. It was almost eerie to read this commentary of his that he just wrote, because just over the last few days I have been overwhelmed with the knowledge that inflation debauches not only the currency, but the moral fabric of society.

We all know that inflation diminishes the incentive to save, but that doesn’t go far enough. On the free market, the only way to obtain money–other than through voluntary charity–is to purchase it. When somebody sells goods and services in exchange for money, they are buying money. Inflation is a means for people to consume without producing, to obtain money without buying it. Thus inflation diminishes the incentive to produce and work.

When people no longer need to purchase money through productivity (and, too often, people confuse activity with productivity–i.e., government work), this begets decadence. In fact, inflation rewards people–viz., contractors, government employees, bureaucrats, entertainers–for their immorality.

I have just been so overwhelmed with this thought about the nexus between cultural decadence and inflation the last few days–even thinking that this might be what my doctoral dissertation will be on when I finally get into graduate school–that it was almost a sense of relief to read Eric Englund’s commentary from this morning.