Before you watch it you should read this short article and this longer article if you have time.  Here and here are two more.

(I don’t why anyone takes a Fed Bank President like Herman Cain seriously or that his views are those of a political outsider but here we go.)

Herman Cain wants a third party. But not a Ron Paul third party of course!  HAHA really Herman?  Who exactly is going to start this third party?  The only motivated grass roots people are those in the liberty movement and aparently you have already written off Ron Paul so who exactly is going to the extensive amount of foot work to get this thing going?  Third parties are hard to get off ground and the Republican Party’s demographics, except for the Ron Paul people of course, is getting older and older (old like the average Rush Limbaugh listener is 67). Besides, they all sit at home and watch Fox News. By and large they do not actually get up and get involved in the political system. Third parties take work, more than passive attention to TV and complaining to your wife how the president is “ruining America”.

 Herman simply does not get it.  He lives in a fantasy world where he can simply invoke the name of Reagan over and over again in the vain hope that people will come around to his brand of conservatism.  When they don’t he blames the media and media bias.  Well, the media does not have the choke hold that it used too.  The Internet and alternative media are informing a much greater amount of people.  I would even say that it is arguable that Mitt Romney lost because people are more informed.  I personally don’t mind that Obama won, after all, if I am going to drink collectivist poison, I at least want it be labeled correctly. Many voters might have felt the same way, or at least felt that their was no major difference between the two candidates.  The turnout was historically low this election, maybe it was precisely because they were educated and knew there was not a bit of difference between the candidates.

Anyway, I would really hope that Herman Cain does jump ship and start a third party.  If the warfare state wing and culture war wing of the Republican Party went with him all the better. Then maybe the Republican party really could “re-brand” itself without the neocon baggage.  At least the establishment Republicans are the kind of political stooges that can be pushed over by strong political pressure.  Without the Neoconservatives, that political pressure would come purely from the liberty movement.  This would obviously mean much more influence by us.   So good luck Herman, I hope it works out.

On a side not, unlike mainstream republicanism, those of the Liberty Movement did very well this election cycle.  So hold out hope ye lovers of Freedom

The Republicans lost because they not only failed to embrace the liberty movement in general but actively sought to diminish it and mock it at the same time.  The Republican Party has not had such a large infusion of young blood by motivated young people since the days of Barry Goldwater.  Not only that, Ron Paul appeals to minorities, women and LBGT community in a way that the Republican Party can only dream of.  It is mind boggling that the Republican Party would reject such a strong political ally.

There are number of articles that explain in a convincing way how the loss of the Ron Paul wing of the Republican party brought Mitt Romney down.  To me this is fairly obvious.  Almost all the people that I knew that were for Ron Paul either wrote his name in, voted for Gary Johnson, or stayed home on election day. With millions of Ron Paul supporters in the primary, even if half of them stayed home would have brought Mitt down.   Don’t get me wrong.  Mitt was a really bad candidate and would have likely lost on his own. He stood for nothing and was a pure politician in all the worst ways. The only thing that might have saved him was if he actively brought the Liberty Movement and the Ron Paul crowd on board. 

So ignore the spin by the right and the left on why the empty suit lost and the other empty suit.  This is why the Republican establishment went down.  The grass roots activists are fed up with this kind of behavior from their leaders.

 In the long run, the reelection of Obama will be a major victory for the liberty movement and the country as a whole.  Today we are in a war of ideas.  The philosophical underpinnings of the warfare/welfare state have existed since World War II.  Both parties have been complicit. Actually, the republicans have been in many ways worse. There was almost no difference between Obama and Romney.  Anyone who believed that Romney would have made any significant changes was deluding themselves and simply does not understand history.  Republicans have always increased the size of the state faster than Democrats, their rhetoric is merely cover.  Nixon created OSHA, the EPA and set price controls for the whole country, an act that a Democrat might have been impeached for.  Reagan vastly increased the Federal deficit, raised corporate taxes, increased foreign aid to bunch third world dictatorships and vastly increased the number of federal employees.  I am not even going to to start about the Bushes.  The point of course is that electing a Republican in the hopes that he will respect the constitution and reduce the size of government is a pure illusion.  This is not only the fault of Republican politicians either (many who have overtly emraced the New Deal) but most main street Republicans in general like small government rhetoric but in reality love the large government programs (for example, when polled self identified Tea Party members actually look favorably upon programs like social security and Medicare while at the same time say that they are for “small government” ). However, I am not writing this to explain how Republicans are big government parasites just like the Democrats, this should be obvious. I am writing this to explain where do we go from here and how will the re-election of Obama will be good for liberty in America in general.

The recession will get worse under Obama and will likely turn into a inflationary depression.  This has already been set into motion because of Federal Reserve policies and there would have been no way for Romney to change it.  Luckily, with Obama in office, there will no way this could be blamed on capitalism because the President is so overtly a welfare statist.  If Romney was elected on the other hand, the coming depression would have been very likely have been blamed on capitalism and the free-market, even though no such free market has existed for a hundred years.  After the impression by many that the “free-market” president Bush caused the 2008 crisis, an other crisis under Romney would have been a huge blow against capitalism.  Thank goodness Obama will be there to take all the blame this time!  I am sure that some worry that the media will try to put some of it on the Republican congress but history always seems to remember the President, not who controls congress.  Do you remember who controlled the house and senate under FDR, Kennedy, or Johnson?  If you do good job but most people sure don’t.  When this thing goes down, people will remember President Obama and his welfare state policies and hopefully the warfare state as well.

There is another reason this election is good for the liberty movement as well. A Romney Presidency would have led to all kinds of new regulations and government actions that the right would have completely capitulated to.  Just like how Bush passed massive new entitlements with little Republican opposition, Romney would have likely done the same thing. It can easily be imagined that Republican sweep would have been much worse than gridlock.

Currently, the political side of the liberty movement is largely in the Republican Party.  With the Republican Party out of power, it will allow the liberty minded republicans to gain influence.  It is obvious that the Republican Party needs to make some massive readjustments.  If they can not win against such an easily defeatable president, what will happen in the future?  Right now, it looks like the Republican Party might be destined to be unable to win national elections unless big changes are made.  Unlike the media pundits that who talk about the republicans need to soften their message, the true answer lies in the libertarian or liberty wing of the Republican Party.  It was only Ron Paul that motivated the youth in the Republican primaries.  The average age of Fox News viewers was 65 and the average age of rush Limbaugh listener is 67.  These demographics are not encouraging for the Republican Party.  They desperately need fresh blood and the Freedom agenda that was put forward by Ron Paul is the only path that could possibly offer them that.  The party is in a time of ideological and demographic crisis but this is also a time of opportunity for those who believe in liberty. Such a major loss should encourage many Republicans that are unsympathetic to liberty to do some soul searching about what went wrong for them in this last election.  Hopefully, many will be led to a better understanding the Constitution, what America truly stands for and the liberty movement in general.  Such a soul searching would have never happened under a Romney presidency.

The future has never been brighter for us.  Communism was permanently discredited when the soviet system collapsed.  The welfare/warfare state has been destined to collapse since the New Deal.  It may not be pretty but from a moral point of view it is necessary because it relies on force and violence to extract wealth from one group of people to be handed out to another. I look forward to the day when Americacan once again embrace its founding vision of liberty.  When that day comes nobody will remember who Mitt Romney was but Ron Paul on the other hand will look like one of the most prophetic men of the 20th century.

It is hard to believe that this stuff can go on in the Untied States but it does.  Here is a Reason article about it.  I hope this couple wins their case against the Feds.

This is just another way of saying price controls.  The theory goes that if someone is hiking up prices that they are taking advantage of people.  In actual real life, not the strange world of politics, prices rise because of demand.  When prices increase, this sends a valuable signal to the rest of the market that more goods of that type are required.  So if water increases to three or four dollars a bottle in areas affected by a natural disaster, entrepreneurs will start driving in with cases of water to sell them to the people that are need of such an essential life sustaining good.  This means more water for the people that need it and potentially lives could be saved when prices are allowed to rise.  Instead, price controls prevent this process and lead to shortages.  The reason is pretty simple, in a natural disaster; people will all start buying water because it is relatively cheap (same price as a non-crisis).  If it becomes expensive, only the people that need the water will buy it.  For example, if I have two weeks of water stocked up, I might not go out and buy any water at all if it costs four dollars a bottle.  If the cost is cheap, under a dollar a bottle for example, I might stock up anyway, even though I am well prepared.  This means that the person who has not stocked up will not have any water to buy because I bought it all up even though I have reserves stored already.  Even more, this person might have bought water for ten dollars a bottle but if there is no water to buy, this need can not possibly be met. The market was not allowed to sort out who needs the water most and who does not.

 The market allocates resources to the areas of the economy and to the people that need it most severely. Even those who cannot afford water still depend on charities that can acquire water on the market, if the water is all gone, charities can not relieve this need either. Price controls can only interfere with the market process of allocating resources most effectively.  Unfortunately, politicians from both the right and the left will enact price controls to stop the “gougers” but inadvertently (I hope) harm the people that are most in need.  The fact the price controls result in very negative effects is understood by economists from both the right and the left and everywhere in between.  Even the writers from Slate magazine understand this but politicians will never pass up the opportunity to become “strong leaders” in a crisis and scapegoat innocent market actors that have done nothing wrong.

End the price controls, let people have the liberty to buy and sell water so that the neediest among us can have water they require!

Of course not.  This is pretty easy to understand when a little bit of time is taken to look at it.  Unfortunately, this Keynesian nonsense that war is somehow good for the economy has so permeated the culture that most people likely believe it.  I would ask people to just think a little bit, if all those factories that were producing planes and bombs were instead used to make consumer good like cars and washer machines, Americans would have a much higher standard of living.  Instead, valuable resources were put into the “war industry” and that capital was completely lost.  The Keynesians would counter and say that these resources were idol and were not being used.  This may be true to a certain extent but this is because FDR‘s New Deal policies did not let the market clear because wage and price controls that he put in place.  Any economy will always move towards equilibrium if the state keeps it hands off.  Moreover, how could the economy being doing well if people did not have access to the goods that they needed.  After all, throughout the war, there were massive shortages in all kinds of consumer good from meat to rubber.  If people could not buy the goods they wanted, how was the economy doing well?  I might have a million bucks but if I have nothing to buy I would be pretty poor.  A large problem with this “war time boom” idea is the way that the government calculates GDP.  GDP includes both government and private sector spending but government spending does not in anyway represent an increase in economic value and is usually just the opposite as discussed before.  When a government produces bombs, it does not increase a population’s standard of living but instead decreases it because valuable resources are diverted into a sector that in no way adding value to the lives of the people.  Anyway, here is Robert Higgs discussing the topic.