Thomas Brewton

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Pyromania and the Fires of Inflation

August 17, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The Fed attempts to stamp out the forest fires it keeps starting.

Panic in world financial markets has dominated the business news of the past week. The Dow Jones Industrials are down almost 400 points below their July high. Mortgage bankers and hedge funds have lost heavily or been forced out of business. Lenders have sharply increased credit standards, delaying or canceling some corporate takeovers and IPOs.

Since the end of last week, to restore market confidence and to ease the overall credit squeeze, the Federal Reserve has purchased an extra $40 billion or so of Treasury securities in the open market to provide liquidity to financial institutions.

Ironically, the Fed itself created the conditions that produced the financial meltdown. Over the past decade it has all but drowned the world in excess creation of dollars to fund ever-growing Federal deficit spending and to satisfy consumers’ demands for instant gratification without the bother of working and saving money.
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Major Rehab

August 16, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

We who make up the church are God’s temple. We need an extreme makeover.

Rev. Ron Tyler, who heads the Bridgeport Rescue Mission, preached Sunday’s sermon at the Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church in North Stamford, Connecticut. His theme was surrendering ourselves to the Holy Spirit to make the body of Christ, the Christian church, into a congregation of purity, power, and praise.

Our model is Jesus’s actions when he visited the temple, corrupted by worldly commerce.

Jesus entered the temple area and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. “It is written,” he said to them, ” ‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it a ‘den of robbers.’ ”

The blind and the lame came to him at the temple, and he healed them.

But when the chief priests and the teachers of the law saw the wonderful things he did and the children shouting in the temple area, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” they were indignant.
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The Land of Must-Have-Been

August 15, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Breaking news about the religion of Darwinian evolution.

Recent news stories about the inconvenient truth of fossil discoveries in Africa illustrate the hypothetical guesswork in Darwinian evolution that passes for science. Extracts from coverage by the New York Times, hardly an unfriendly voice for atheistic materialism, are representative:

Fossils in Kenya Challenge Linear Evolution
By John Noble Wilford

August 9, 2007

New York Times

Two fossils found in Kenya have shaken the human family tree, possibly rearranging major branches thought to be in a straight ancestral line to Homo sapiens. Scientists who dated and analyzed the specimens — a 1.44-million-year-old Homo habilis and a 1.55-million-year-old Homo erectus found in 2000 — said their findings challenged the conventional view that these species evolved one after the other. Instead, they apparently lived side by side in eastern Africa for almost half a million years…

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Implausible Plot

August 12, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Today’s audiences accept the assertion that capitalist businessmen are evil in whatever they do, even when alleged actions make no sense.

The motivation for the lawsuit in the new TV series Damages is nonsensical.

The opening episodes have revolved around a clash of two titans: Glen Close as Patty Hewes, a ruthless and hard-boiled plaintiff lawyer, and Ted Danson as Arthur Frobisher, an apparently equally ruthless and highly successful entrepreneur. The implausible plot brings them into a head-to-head clash.

The audience see brief scenes suggesting that Frobisher talked his employees into investing much of their life savings in his company’s stock, shortly before he sold his own stock in the company to an outside buyer. Somehow or other, this bankrupted his employees.

Think about it for a moment, however. Clearly Frobisher had a very successful company, successful enough for an outside investor to buy Frobisher’s presumably controlling interest in the company. How did change of stock ownership bankrupt the employees? In most takeover situations, the stock price is pushed up, at least initially.
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The Handwriting is on the Wall!

August 10, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

But too many of us can’t understand it.

The sermon at Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut) was delivered by Pastor Larry Fullerton. His text was Daniel, chapter 5, the famous account of the fateful writing that mysteriously appeared on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast.

Neither Belshazzar, nor his sorcerers and magicians could understand the message. But Daniel, a righteous man of God, understood and delivered God’s message of doom, a message that unhappily applies to our modern-day, largely Godless society.
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New York Times Inadvertently Damns Democrats

August 5, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The problem is that the Times can’t recognize economic cause and effect.

Today’s New York Times editorial page opines, in A Factory Farm Near You:

Once upon a time, only a decade or so, it wasn’t hard to know where factory hog farms were because they were nearly all in North Carolina. But since those days, the practice of crowding together huge concentrations of animals — hogs, poultry, dairy cows, beef cattle — in the interests of supposed efficiency has spread around the country.

Wherever it appears, factory farming has two notable effects. It threatens the environment, because of huge concentrations of animal manure and lax regulation. And it threatens local political control. Residents who want a say over whether and where factory farms, whose stench can be overwhelming, can be built find their voices drowned out by the industry’s cash and lobbying clout.

Ironically, the ill complained of by the Times is the creation of their very own liberal-Progressive-socialist confreres, dating back to 1933. A considerable element in what the Times calls “supposed efficiency” is the large-scale production subsidized by Federal hand-outs.
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Liberals Ratchet Up the Violence Meter

August 4, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Christopher Hitchins and Richard Dawkins, in their violent attacks on spiritual religion, sound very much like Adolph Hitler and Joseph Goebbels.

Herr Hitler and his propaganda minister needed a scape goat to explain the collapse of German militarism in World War I and the German Empire’s wallowing into fecklessness under the socialist Weimar Republic. As the world knows to its sorrow, they found the scape goat.

Messrs. Hitchins and Dawkins see a terribly disordered world that they blame upon religion. Mr. Hitchins, in god is not Great, repeats every few pages: “Religion poisons everything.” Mr. Dawkins, in The Blind Watchmaker, wrote:

It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet someone who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).

Rather than accepting that the evils they recount are products of inherently sinful human nature, they choose to blame spiritual religion for human nature. Rather than recognizing that Judeo-Christianity strives to turn human nature toward moral conduct, they blame spiritual religion for failing to do so in all cases.
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Signs and Assignments

August 1, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

For those with ears to hear, God gives intuitions of what we should do to help others.

Captain Brian Thomas, leader of the Stamford Salvation Army unit, preached Sunday’s sermon at the Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church in North Stamford, Connecticut. His subject was Signs and Assignments.

In the Old Testament God frequently provided signs to the Israelites to confirm his commands. One such is recorded in the Book of Judges, which chronicles the period between gaining the Promised Land under Joshua’s leadership and the Israelites’ first king, Saul.

As all too frequently happened, the Israelites periodically became too wealthy and contented, shifting their worship from God to pursuit of worldly goods and pagan gods.
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Free Enterprise and Government Regulation

July 31, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Lawmakers can dismount from their soak-the-rich hobby horses. Reality curtails business excesses; no need for help from Congressman Barney Frank.

The free marketplace has chastised hedge fund managers more effectively than any taxes or regulations Congressional socialists might have concocted.

The Wall Street Journal in its July, 27, 2007, edition reports:

As flagging debt markets bring the private-equity boom to a halt, the likelihood that Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. will have to postpone its initial public offering is increasing.

Jeff Arricale, who runs a financial-stock mutual fund for T. Rowe Price Group Inc., said he doubts KKR will be able to find enough investors to pull off an IPO if current market conditions continue. “Sure, at some price it is possible to do it, but I’d be shocked if they end up doing this IPO.”
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Stalin Lives – In England

July 29, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

British PC education follows American lead, wipes out Western history.

Read Lisa Fabrizio’s article, Not Their Finest Hour, on the Intellectual Conservative website.

The pull-quote summarizes the thrust of PC education in Britain:

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in Britain has dropped Winston Churchill from its list of key historical figures, in order to make room for “modern” issues.

This is straight out of the Soviet Union, where those out of favor with Stalin were liquidated and all records of their existence were expunged. Documents were destroyed or altered and photographs were retouched to remove individuals who had became non-persons.

Stalin took his cue from V. I. Lenin, who, in 1923, instructed the Commissars of Education:

We must hate — hatred is the basis of Communism. Children must be taught to hate their parents if they are not Communists.

More or less the same sort of thing has happened in the United States.
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Taking Risks

July 27, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

To become messengers of the Gospel, we have to move outside our comfort zones.

Eric Lubbert, one of our church’s Elders, preached the sermon Sunday at the Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church, in North Stamford, Connecticut.

Speaking of his own experience, Mr. Lubbert noted that it’s too easy in our Christian lives to become comfortable, to settle into a routine of going to church on Sunday, and going little farther than that. If, however, we are to heed Jesus’s command, we must break out of those comfort zones and take risks to bring the Good News to our family, friends, and co-workers.
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Injudicious Religious Activism

July 25, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Left wing churches ignore the law, engage in the equivalent of judicial activism.

The Wall Street Journal, in its July 20, 2007, edition printed an article based on a Time Magazine story in the July 30 edition. The first two paragraphs are the following:

Sanctuary Drive Could Bolster Religious Left
TIME — JULY 30

A movement to give sanctuary in churches to illegal immigrants threatened with deportation might bring new firepower to the long-quiescent religious left, writes David Van Biema in Time.

Inspired by churches who offered sanctuary to Central Americans fleeing civil wars in the 1980s, members of a range of religious faiths have launched the New Sanctuary Movement in cities around the U.S. The effort has been small-scale, housing eight undocumented immigrants in churches in five U.S. cities. (While immigration authorities legally can raid a church, they rarely do.) NSM activists say four more congregations will house immigrants in August, and the mainline Protestant United Church of Christ has resolved to work with it.

A few observations:
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The Poverty Campaign

July 23, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

John Edwards’s campaign mantra should be, James Carville-style, “It’s the capitalists, stupid!”

Today’s Wall Street Journal says that John Edwards may be trailing Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but his Johnnie-One-Note hammering on poverty and “the two Americas” is forcing all of the Democratic Party hopefuls to include it in their own campaign promises.

We should remind ourselves about two aspects of Mr. Edwards’s program.

First, it comes out of the fundamentals of socialism. Second, it has been tried many times, both at the state and national levels, always with very bad results. The poor wind up in worse shape than before they started.

Look at the pathetically helpless people in New Orleans, still unable to deal with the results of Katrina, because their society has been victimized by the welfare-state mentality started by Huey Long in the 1920s and institutionalized by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s.
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Making a Difference

July 20, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

If Christianity hasn’t made a positive difference in your life, you haven’t fully embraced it.

The question posed by Sunday’s sermon at Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut) was “How Can I Be a New Creation?”

Rev. Josh Feay’s main text was:

Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade men. What we are is plain to God, and I hope it is also plain to your conscience. We are not trying to commend ourselves to you again, but are giving you an opportunity to take pride in us, so that you can answer those who take pride in what is seen rather than in what is in the heart. If we are out of our mind, it is for the sake of God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you. For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.

So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! (2 Corinthians 5:11-17)
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Krugman and Friedman – Part Five

July 17, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Krugman’s conception of economic man is a caricature of reality.

Previous postings (Part One; Part Two; Part Three; and Part Four) discussed aspects of Paul Krugman’s essay Who Was Milton Friedman? in the New York Review of Books.

In that essay, Professor Krugman, the New York Times’s propagandist for socialistic economics, contrasts the conceptual approaches of Nobel-Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes, who remains one of Professor Krugman’s heroes.

Keynes, a British economist, propounded a rationale for massive Federal deficit spending and continuous inflation, along with tight regulation of private economic decisions. His 1936 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money was regarded by liberal-Progressive-socialists in the Roosevelt New Deal as the ultimate revelation of economic wisdom.

Professor Krugman, who is grouped among the neo-Keynesian economists, writes:
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School Discipline

July 9, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Enforcing proper behavior is anathema to liberals, but essential to learning.

The recent Supreme Court decision in the MORSE ET AL. v. FREDERICK case, better known as the “BONG HiTS 4 JESUS” case, has generated controversy, both because of the Court’s decision, and because of the concurring opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas.

Facts of the case were the following:

At a school-sanctioned and school-supervised event, petitioner Morse, the high school principal, saw students unfurl a banner stating “BONG HiTS 4 JESUS,” which she regarded as promoting illegal drug use. Consistent with established school policy prohibiting such messages at school events, Morse directed the students to take down the banner. When one of the students who had brought the banner to the event—respondent Frederick—refused, Morse confiscated the banner and later suspended him.

The Court’s ruling, expressed in the opinion of Chief Justice John Roberts, was:

Because schools may take steps to safeguard those entrusted to their care from speech that can reasonably be regarded as encouraging illegal drug use, the school officials in this case did not violate the First Amendment by confiscating the pro-drug banner and suspending Frederick…. Our cases make clear that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., 393 U. S. 503, 506 (1969). At the same time, we have held that “the constitutional rights of students in public school are not automatically coextensive with the rights of adults in other settings,” Bethel School Dist. No. 403 v. Fraser, 478 U. S. 675, 682 (1986), and that the rights of students “must be ‘applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment.’
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Stay the Race to the Finish Line

July 7, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The Apostle Paul defines the goal of the Christian life.

Sunday’s sermon at Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut) was delivered by Rev. Ted Fiorito. His text was taken from Philippians, chapter 3.

In his letter to the church at Philippi, Paul describes the goal, the bull’s eye that is the aim of Christian life:

But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.
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Privileged Private Equity?

July 6, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Free markets do a far better job of policing than socialistic lawmakers.

Liberal-Progressives’ politics of envy and class warfare, recently aimed at hedge funds and private equity groups, exemplifies the fairy tale nature of socialism.

As noted in Economic Class Warfare, hedge funds and private equity groups are not the product of privilege. Paradoxically they result from excessive Federal spending authorized by liberal-Progressives themselves. The financial world is flooded with excess liquidity, because the Federal Reserve, to fund Congressional spending, keeps pumping out phony money that fuels inflation.

Liberals in Congress have been pompously posturing, purportedly seeking regulations to protect the public, but in reality hoping to extort new taxes and open new avenues for class action suits by their money pals, the tort bar.
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July 4th – Independence or Security?

July 5, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

We have forgotten why the Declaration of Independence was signed.

In 1776, American colonists were willing to risk their lives, fortunes, and their sacred honor to maintain the self-government that they had laboriously established over the preceding century and a half.

Chief among their motivations, and the most common complaint from Georgia in the south to Massachusetts in the northeast, was protection of their private property rights. Hence the most famous of the War of Independence slogans: “No taxation without representation!”

In the succeeding two and a quarter centuries, liberal-Progressive-socialists have led our nation 180 degrees away from that orientation.
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Keynesian Predictions

July 2, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

A cornerstone of liberal-Progressive economic theory turns out to be fatally flawed, bringing the whole structure crashing to the ground.

As noted in Krugman and Friedman – Part Four, Keynesian economic theory, now refurbished as neo-Keynesianism, dominates liberal-Progressive-socialist thinking in the United States. Mr. Krugman is one of its fiercest proponents.

Like Keynes, he has been consistently wrong in his predictions, most notably in proclaiming that tax cuts in the first term of the present Bush administration would not revive the economy and, in any event, would not lead to creation of new jobs. Only government spending can revive the economy, according to liberal-Progressive orthodoxy.
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Seeing God

June 30, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Atheists, agnostics, and those simply unchurched perceive God in a very different way from Christians.

Sunday’s sermon at the Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut) was delivered by Rev. Dan McCandless. His text was Matthew, Chapter 6.

The picture Jesus gives us of God and His relationship with us is far removed from the impression held by too many people.

Some people imagine God as a sort of accountant who spends His time keeping a ledger of our good deeds and our misdeeds. Others see Him as an iron-fisted lawgiver who vents His anger to force us to submit. Still others see Him as a detached Creator who is no longer interested in us as individuals.

Others envision Him as a genial, white haired grandfatherly type, who is just a nice fellow who no longer has any real power to affect our lives. A sort of agnostic, scientific view has God as an impersonal force whom we can’t explain and can’t understand, but who is obviously there because of the orderly nature of the universe.

That is not what Jesus had to say in the Sermon on the Mount, in which God is depicted sixteen times as a father who cares deeply about each of us.

God sees us:
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Krugman and Friedman – Part Four

June 27, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Paul Krugman confesses his love for Big Brother.

Previous postings (Part One; Part Two; Part Three) discussed aspects of Paul Krugman’s essay “Who Was Milton Friedman?” in the New York Review of Books.

Mr. Krugman is a political propaganda columnist for the New York Times, where predictably he is a strident critic of individuals’ economic and political liberties when they conflict with Federal collectivism. As an advocate of Neo-Keynesian economic theory, he believes that only intervention by the Federal government can effectively deal with changing economic conditions to insure full employment.

Neo-Keynesian doctrine is a reaction to the massive failure of Keynesian economics in the 1970s stagflation, a prolonged period of high unemployment combined with the highest peacetime rates of inflation ever suffered in the United States. It is a defensive effort to salvage as much as possible of New Deal Keynesian economics.
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The Great Depression Revisited

June 25, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Big Three auto makers are offering labor unions an opportunity to step back into the real world, out of the Alice-in-Wonderland world of New Deal socialism.

Labor unions are icons of the liberal-Progressives, who apotheosized them in the New Deal during the Great Depression. In addition to the primary status of unions in the Marxian labor theory of value, labor unions have been unfailing vote-getting allies of the Democratic Party.

The 1935 Wagner Labor Act, together with subsequent administrative rules and judicial decisions, made unions immune to anti-trust prosecution and enabled them to engage in criminal intimidation of employers and non-union employees with little fear of retaliation. As a consequence, union labor costs remained at levels too high for profitable production at full-employment levels.

Today, as the reality of market competition intrudes into this labor-liberal symbiotic affair, we have yet another opportunity to repair a union-made wreck.
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Socialistic Fairness

June 18, 2007 by 1 Comment

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Proposals to tax globalization’s big winners reflect the yawning abyss between reality and the fairy tales of liberal-Progressive-socialism.

David Wessel’s June 14, 2007, column in the Wall Street Journal is titled “The Case for Taxing Globalization’s Big Winners.” Online Journal subscribers can access it here.

Mr. Wessel describes the growing unrest among voters, from blue collar to white collar workers, arising from the sense that globalization has unfavorably affected them. China’s relentlessly growing trade surplus with us, coupled with headlines about jobs outsourcing and the billions of dollars collected by private equity fund partners, have created a pervasive belief that things are not fair, that the greedy rich have grabbed too much for themselves.

One proposal to satisfy that perception is raising taxes on the upper income brackets and eliminating social security taxes on people earning less than $33,000 a year.

Mr. Wessel observes that, while such measures may be economically counter-productive, politicians pandering to public opinion are likely to enact them.
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Dr. Death

June 15, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s recent release from prison prompts a couple of thoughts.

Dr. Kervorkian became known as “Dr. Death” by assisting suicides of more than 100 people. In all such cases, we are given to understand, the suicides were at the request of the people committing suicide, people who may have been in pain from incurable cancer and similar maladies.

Nonetheless, under the law of the state of Michigan, Dr. Kevorkian was convicted and imprisoned in 1999 on the charge of second-degree murder for the crime of assisting suicide.

The first and most obvious aspect of Dr. Kevorkian’s case is its contrast with the so-called Constitutional “right” to abortion (found by the Supreme Court in the shadows of the penumbras of the Constitution, which is to say, in the personal ideas of the Supreme Court majority about what the law ought to be).
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For Such a Time as This

June 8, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Each of us must take individual responsibility for answering God’s call to help others, even at mortal peril to ourselves.

Our liberal, socialistic welfare state impels us to selfish indifference toward the needs of individuals in our midst. Benefits entitlements paid for by high taxes foster an attitude of “I gave at the office.” We shrug and walk on when we are asked to help needy individuals in our own backyards.

We become concerned only when a problem affects us directly. Our instinctive response then is to demand that the government do something about it.

There is nothing new about this. It became evident in the earliest days of socialism. Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1856 The Old Regime and the French Revolution observed that the French, after several decades of socialism, were concerned with one thing only — socialistic equality of status. Each person focused greedily upon what he demanded as his share of public largesse and was indifferent even to his own neighbors.

Under the secularity of socialism, only material things are regarded as valuable. And only the state, liberals presume, can provide the requisite material things. Spiritual matters are dismissed as unscientific ignorance.
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Diktat vs Liberty

June 7, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

New greenhouse-gas regulations will impinge upon personal freedom and distort the economy.

Rising hysteria about the alleged greenhouse-gas role in global warming will predictably bring about a new miasma of self-contradictory and harmful regulations.

Socialism, the secular religion of liberals and Progressives, preaches that only intellectual councils, led by Al Gore, are smart enough to see clearly how everyone else must behave and to impose the necessary regulations. Universal, bitter experience demonstrates, however, that regulatory agencies cannot possibly foresee all the effects of their actions.
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Unexpected Benefits of Adversity

May 30, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

What seems to be a disaster may be God’s way of prodding us into action to accomplish larger goals.

Sunday’s sermon at the Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut) was delivered by Rev. Kevin Butterfield. His message was the need to let go, to move out of our comfort zones and become witnesses to the unchurched, secular members of society.

It is not enough to hear and understand the Gospel; we must act upon it. We must lead kind, respectful, loving lives, and we must seek opportunities to serve those in need. People, particularly the young, must see us walk the talk. Hypocritical lip service will poison evangelical progress.

After the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, Christianity made rapid gains in Jerusalem. Then disaster struck. Stephen was stoned to death. Christians were scattered to Judea and Samaria. Rather than the end of the church, however, this proved to be its great beginning.
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Exporting Inflation to China

May 29, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Our failure to maintain a sound currency guarantees a trade imbalance with China and threatens a repetition of the stagflation of the 1970s.

Republican and Democratic politicians, through ignorance of economics or sheer perversity, have for three quarters of a century pursued Federal spending programs that foment inflation, which makes domestic goods uncompetitive with foreign products. As long as foreign goods are cheaper than domestic manufactures, imports will continue to take a big share of the market.

Reacting to job losses, rising costs of living, and other economic dislocations, liberals (and too many conservatives) hypocritically blame China and other countries for exporting too much to us.

Liberal socialist Senator Charles Schumer and RINO Senator Lindsay Graham have led the growing parade of protectionists who cudgel Treasury Secretary Paulson for his failure to impose more trade restrictions on China and to obtain Beijing’s agreement to allow the yuan to float against the dollar.

The culprit, however, is not China, but our failure to maintain a sound dollar.
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00Publius Contributor - Budget - Congress - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton - Uncategorized

Liberal Pyromaniacs

May 24, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Liberals behave like a pyromaniac who sets fire to his own house, then is angered because the rest of the family try to salvage their possessions and escape from the blaze.

Like the pyromaniac, liberals feed the destructive flames of inflation with deficit spending on new welfare programs and the mandated monsters, Social Security and Medicare. Then they become indignant when rational investors take steps to hedge against liberal-created inflation.

A example of this irrationality is Representative Barney Frank’s current committee hearings. In the May 20th edition of the New York Times (Sound and Fury Over Private Equity) reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin observes, Despite all the recent hand-wringing over the perils of the boom in private equity, the hearing, titled “Private Equity’s Effects on Workers and Firms,” demonstrated just how little lawmakers understand the buyout business.

The worldwide wave of corporate takeovers and consolidations would not be possible without the massive and continuous debasement of the dollar. It is driven, not by greed, but by fear of catastrophic loss of dollar purchasing power.

Unending Federal deficit spending, funded by the Fed’s creation of dollars to purchase Treasury debt, has left the world awash in excess dollars and created an expectation of major dollar devaluation.
Continue reading “Liberal Pyromaniacs”