Thomas+Brewton

Budget - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Financial Reform - Free Trade - Government - Liberals - Republicans - Taxes - Thomas Brewton

Inflation At The Gate, The Fed Talks About Deflation

May 3, 2011 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

While flooding the banking system with excessive amounts of fiat dollars, Fed Chairman Bernanke has talked endlessly about the need to avert deflation. Unspoken was the real reason: promoting inflation – robbing retirees and working people who are saving to support their retirements – in order to fund mounting federal debt.

It’s now clear that government stimulus spending, under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and unending expansion of the money supply by the Fed, have prolonged our agonizingly slow economic revival. That is hardly surprising, since no previous resort to Keynesian macroeconomics has worked as advertised. At most they have promoted stock market bubbles, and all such essays, beginning in the 1930s Depression, have led to continual and ruinous inflation.

The New York Times, the nation’s premier voice of socialist propaganda, admits in a front page, lead article that Stimulus by Fed Is Disappointing, Economists Say.
Continue reading “

Inflation At The Gate, The Fed Talks About Deflation”

Budget - Business - Capitalism - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Government - Jobs - Liberals - Taxes - Thomas Brewton

More About Inflation

April 13, 2011 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Inflation that affects the entire economy originates with government action.

Price increases that arise from temporary imbalances between supply and demand in specific product markets are not examples of general inflation.

If bad weather or other factors reduce the yield of food crops like wheat or corn, the lowered supply (or anticipation of reduced supply) will cause prices to rise in world markets. Higher prices will deter some buyers, reducing demand until prices stabilize at some higher level. Higher prices will induce farmers to increase acreage planted for the next crop season, thereby moving anticipated supplies back up toward normal demand levels, until prices stabilize at reduced levels.
Continue reading “

More About Inflation”

Banks - Budget - Business - Capitalism - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Government - Jobs - Liberals - Taxes - Thomas Brewton

Don’t Blame Business For Our Inflation

April 10, 2011 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Politicians will always falsely blame inflation on businessmen’s “greed.” But only government deficit spending using fiat money can create inflation.

Inflation consists in increasing the money supply faster than the increase in production of goods that people want, the condition we endure today, in spades.

If it were true, as liberal-progressives and politicians of all stripes tell us, that greedy businessmen cause inflation by raising prices whenever it suits them, why should businessmen stop at increases of 2% or 3%? Why not raise prices 50%. The answer, of course, is that they can’t raise prices whenever it suits them without a consumer rebellion.

Note that the Keynesian concept of cost-push inflation is a myth. The phenomenon of raw materials and food cost increases leading to increased wages starts with over-expansion of the money supply. They are results, not causes, of general inflation.
Continue reading “

Don’t Blame Business For Our Inflation”

Democrats/Leftists - Liberals - Morals/Sex - PCism - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton - Western Civilization

Human Motivation

April 6, 2011 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Can human behavior be programed by social engineers and economic planners?

Keynesian macroeconomics reintroduced and popularized in the 1930s the presumption of the 19th century’s socialist philosophers who had expected to emulate in the social sciences the methodology of Newton’s physics and mathematics.

In their ideological vision, intellectuals were to derive laws of social action analogous to Newton’s laws of motion. Those sociological laws would then be applied by social engineers and economic planners to implement an entirely new social and economic structure that was to resurrect the primordial Garden of Eden, a society of socialized equality, with an abundance of goods and services equally available to all citizens.
Continue reading “

Human Motivation”

Christianity - Religion - Thomas Brewton

Love Thy Neighbor

April 3, 2011 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

It doesn’t mean wife-swapping, marital infidelity, or sexual promiscuity.

In today’s sermon at the Cohocton (NY) Assembly of God church, Pastor Dan Gardner’s text was Roman 13:8-10:

8 Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. 9 The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 10 Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

This, as expressed by the Apostle Paul, is central to Jesus’s message, but it’s also a much older fundamental tenet of Judaism:

4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. 5 Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. Deuteronomy 6:4

Continue reading “

Love Thy Neighbor”

Democrats/Leftists - Government - Liberals - Thomas Brewton

Human Motivation

March 31, 2011 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Can human behavior be programed by social engineers and economic planners?

Keynesian macroeconomics reintroduced and popularized in the 1930s the presumption of the 19th century’s socialist philosophers who had expected to emulate in the social sciences the methodology of Newton’s physics and mathematics.

In their ideological vision, intellectuals were to derive laws of social action analogous to Newton’s laws of motion. Those sociological laws would then be applied by social engineers and economic planners to implement an entirely new social and economic structure that was to resurrect the primordial Garden of Eden, a society of socialized equality, with an abundance of goods and services equally available to all citizens.
Continue reading “

Human Motivation”

Anti-Americanism - Budget - Business - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Government - Jobs - Liberals - Public Employees Unions - Scott Walker - Taxes - Teachers Unions - Thomas Brewton - Unions - Wisconsin

Greed Before Prudence

March 2, 2011 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Wisconsin syndicalists are prepared to destroy organized government, if necessary, to continue looting the public treasury.

The spectacle of concerted strikes by teachers, other public employee unions, and by Democrat/Socialist Party legislators in Wisconsin is a throwback to the syndicalist origin of mass industrial unions in the United States. Such actions aim at forcing the state into financial ruin, if necessary, to keep and to increase the hugely disproportionate and unmerited flow of public funds channeled to public employees’ unions.

Wisconsin historically is dead center in the American syndicalist history of industrial union violence and extortion. Milwaukee’s Victor Berger was a founder of the American Socialist Party and the first Socialist Party candidate to be elected to Congress. Berger’s co-founder, Eugene V. Debs, also was a founder of the IWW (see below).
Continue reading “

Greed Before Prudence”

Budget - Business - Capitalism - Democrats/Leftists - Government - Jobs - Keynesian - Liberals - Taxes - Thomas Brewton

Keynesian Philosophical Assumptions

February 19, 2011 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Keynesian macroeconomics is inconceivable without Darwinian evolution and secular socialism.

Keynesian macroeconomics is, at heart, a rationalization for collectivized state planning . Its progenitor was the 18th century quest to discover social science laws of behavior paralleling Newton’s mathematics and laws of motion that explained movements of the planets and of the earth around the sun. By the early 1800s French socialist intellectuals were confident that they had identified sociological laws that would enable them to create a secular paradise here on earth. A hundred years later, economist John Maynard Keynes propounded his ideas in the same tradition.

Along with Darwinism and socialism, Keynesianism sees humans as subject to manipulation by material factors such as government regulation. All three discount free will and what Austrian economists view as the basic fact in economic activity: purposeful, individual human action.
Continue reading “

Keynesian Philosophical Assumptions”

Budget - Business - Capitalism - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Federalism - Franklin Deleno Roosevelt - Government - History - Liberals - Money - Taxes - Thomas Brewton - WWII

Stop Obsessing About Japan And Deflation

November 24, 2010 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke apparently is misled by fictionalized versions of two economic models: Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal Keynesianism and Japan’s deflation and economic stagnation.

Mr. Bernanke reads New Deal economic history with blinders firmly affixed to narrow the breadth of his vision. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he holds to his philosophically materialistic, Keynesian economics faith that manipulation of monetary quantity alone is a mathematically certain, unfailing cure for any economic downturn or increase in unemployment.

Keynesian macroeconomics depends upon a simplistic faith that mathematical inerrancy can be applied to human conduct, that the behavior of hundreds of millions of people can be conformed to an academic spreadsheet model of an economy. Keynesian logic says that, if A = B, then reversing the equation, starting with B, will produce A. Implicitly for Keynesians, if A (expanding business activity) equals (produces) more bank credit and more money in circulation, then flipping the equation and starting with B (increasing the money supply) will create more bank lending and increase business activity.
Continue reading “

Stop Obsessing About Japan And Deflation”

Anti-Americanism - Budget - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Free Trade - Government - Health - Jobs - Liberals - Taxes - Thomas Brewton

A Liberal-Progressive Abstraction: Caring For The Little Guy

November 18, 2010 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Anthony Paletta’s book review describes urban renewal’s human costs.

Liberal-progressives are fond of grand, sweeping state-planning projects, conceived in abstraction by academic theorists. Their preference is for betting the house on one roll of the dice, for example, with Obamacare. No incremental, careful tests for them.

Still, so-called urban renewal projects, though on a smaller scale, command liberal-progressive planners’ attention. Why miss an opportunity to destroy a neighborhood and wipe out a few thousand local businesses?
Continue reading “

A Liberal-Progressive Abstraction: Caring For The Little Guy”

Banks - Budget - Business - Capitalism - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Financial Reform - Jobs - Money - Stimulus - Taxes - Thomas Brewton

The Deflation Bogeyman

November 13, 2010 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Declining prices are not necessarily bad.

The Fed plans to add massively to the supply of phony money by monetizing the Federal debt with QE2, its latest multi-trillion dollar intervention to manipulate the financial system and to control business production and employment decisions.

The effect, in the short run, is to inflate further the developing stock market bubble, preparing the way for our next inflation-induced recession. In the long run, we the people are to be robbed of the purchasing power of our salaries, wages, and retirement incomes by the disguised tax of inflation.

Fed chairman Bernanke’s Keynesian, socialist rationale for this crime against society is his fear of deflation, a fear belied by prices of commodities that are increasing at an accelerating rate.
Continue reading “

The Deflation Bogeyman”

Barack Obama - Budget - Capitalism - Communism - Congress - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Government - Jobs - Journalism - Keynesian - Liberals - Media - Media Bias - Regulation - Socialism - Stimulus - Taxes - The New York Times - Thomas Brewton

The Business Cycle: Krugman vs. Austrian Economic Theory

November 10, 2010 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The Keynesian black-box doesn’t work, because the reality of independent actions by millions of individuals is ignored in order to achieve a simplistic representation of the economy in computer models.

Keynesian economics, as expounded by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, is essentially a black box theory. Stand on the outside of the economic box and dump into it endless baskets of inflationary fiat money, and things supposedly just happen automatically inside the black box to produce permanent prosperity and near zero unemployment.

Read David Gordon’s commentary on THE HANGOVER THEORY by Paul Krugman.
Continue reading “

The Business Cycle: Krugman vs. Austrian Economic Theory”

Barack Obama - Congress - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Education - Government - History - House of Representatives - Liberals - President - Senate - Thomas Brewton

Academic Theorist In The White House

November 6, 2010 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

James T. Kloppenberg is Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University. His featured article in the November-December 2010 edition of the Harvard alumni magazine explains why academics find President Obama so attractive.

The article title – From Hull House to the White House – sets the tone.

Unfortunately the internet version of the article is only a short extract of the version in the magazine’s print edition. Some of the quotations below are not in the web version.

Hull House was the famous settlement house established in 1889 by Jane Addams, who was among the first generation of women to receive college educations. The content of those women’s education was much influenced by America’s burgeoning love affair with socialism, already well entrenched in France and Germany and rising to influence in England with the Fabian Society, led by George Bernard Shaw and by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.
Continue reading “

Academic Theorist In The White House”

Anti-Americanism - Budget - Business - Capitalism - Crime - Democrats/Leftists - Free Trade - Government - Liberals - Taxes - Thomas Brewton - Unions

Obama Backs Violent Labor Leader

September 6, 2010 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Obama, the self-styled man of peace, the reconciler, and the hope of mankind, is cozy with violence, from Islam to labor unions.

Labor Day should be a reminder that labor unions are quintessentially socialist organizations, taking their origin and character from the Marxian doctrine of class struggle. Employers are the enemy, to be hammered into submission without regard for the destructive effect on everyone else, on the theory that business profits are theft of money that really belongs to the workers.

Violence is inherent in labor unionism (see IWW – Organized Crime in the Labor Market and Labor Unions: Socialism’s Shock Troops).
Continue reading “

Obama Backs Violent Labor Leader”

Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Government - Judges - Law - Liberals - President - Supreme Court - Thomas Brewton

The 17th Amendment Revisited

July 7, 2010 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Original provisions of the Constitution intended to prevent Congress from enacting “dumb” laws were vitiated by ratification of the 17th Amendment.

Before ratification of the 17th Amendment it’s unlikely that a Senate committee would have needed to raise the sort of question posed by Senator Coburn during confirmation hearings on Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court. A Wall Street Journal editorial reports:
Continue reading “

The 17th Amendment Revisited”

Christianity - Religion - Thomas Brewton - Western Civilization

It’s Time To Wake Up To Reality

July 7, 2010 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Abandoning our western heritage of Judeo-Christian religious morality has pushed us toward social and economic disintegration.

Guy Sorman’s City Journal essay deals primarily with the European Union. But his assessment applies equally to the United States.

Our deficit spending and huge national debts, on both sides of the Atlantic, have their root cause in the secular religion of socialism. From the days of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in mid-18th century, believers in socialism have operated on the Utopian faith that, once income is taken from “the rich” and redistributed equally, there will automatically be more than enough goods and services to make everyone happy.
Continue reading “

It’s Time To Wake Up To Reality”

Declaration of Independence - History - Patriotism - Warner Todd Huston

July 4, 2010: Rededicate Ourselves To The Declaration

July 4, 2010 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton
The events triggered by the Declaration of Independence were not a revolution. They were a struggle to gain independence from arbitrary exercise of government power.

Few people ever read beyond the stirring opening sentences of the Declaration. The meat of the document is in the bottom part of the second paragraph:

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states.

This to a considerable extent the situation we the voters have fashioned for ourselves since Franklin Roosevelt’s imposition of welfare-state socialism in the 1930s. The Obama administration openly and proudly proclaims its intention to impose a New New Deal, the final socialist nails our coffin.
Continue reading “

July 4, 2010: Rededicate Ourselves To The Declaration”

Barack Obama - Business - Capitalism - Communism - Congress - Conservatives - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Elections - Free Trade - Government - House of Representatives - Jobs - Liberals - President - Taxes - Thomas Brewton

Why Democrat/Socialist Party Animosity Toward Private Enterprise

July 1, 2010 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Marxian economic dogma explains why liberal-progressives, the Obama administration in particular, push for restructuring our constitutional government to concentrate more power in the hands of labor unions and the Federal government.

Marxian economic dogma has been emphasized to an increasing degree in our colleges and universities, even in our high schools, since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal imposed state planning upon the United States in the 1930s. That emphasis became dominant in the late 1960s and 1970s. Today so many generations of teachers and students have been so thoroughly and subtly imbued with Marxian concepts that they are unaware of their ideological environment, assuming that such concepts represent exclusive truth.

Marxian doctrine leads to the assertion that private property is power and that such power is used by employers to exploit the workers. To end exploitation, government must restructure society, using progressive income taxes, high death taxes, and punitive regulation of private businesses, coupled with welfare-state entitlements.
Continue reading “

Why Democrat/Socialist Party Animosity Toward Private Enterprise”

Barack Obama - Budget - Business - Capitalism - Congress - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Government - House of Representatives - Liberals - President - Senate - Taxes - Thomas Brewton

Housing Slumps Despite Obama’s Stimulus Spending

June 28, 2010 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The housing market is the most recent of many examples of the failure of Obama’s stimulus plans to revive the economy by repealing principles of human economic behavior.

Predictably, the still vastly overbuilt and over-supplied housing market drops dead, as it should, when not artificially supported by socialistic government subsidies. The Wall Street Journal describes the deteriorating situation:

Quote:

Federal tax credits of as much as $8,000 for home buyers spurred sales in recent months…Since April 30, new purchase contracts have plunged as buyers no longer have the incentive of a federal tax break, builders and real estate agents say. Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the Realtors, estimated that contracts signed in May were 10% to 15% below the weak level of a year earlier.

Ronald Peltier, chief executive officer of HomeServices of America Inc., which owns real estate brokers in 21 states, said new home-purchase contracts in May and June so far are down about 20% from a year earlier. The tax credit accelerated sales that otherwise would have occurred later in the year, Mr. Peltier said…

“We’re seeing a loss of momentum” in housing demand since the expiration of the tax credit, [Scott Anderson of Wells Fargo] said, and that lull could last until next spring. The job market remains weak, he added, and foreclosed homes continue to weigh on the housing market.

Last week, the Commerce Department reported that May construction starts on single-family homes fell 17% to an annual rate of 468,000, the lowest level in a year.

Stimulus spending is robbing Peter to pay Paul. It doesn’t add to wealth. It distorts economic activity by channeling funds to favored interest groups at the expense of others, smothering the economic processes necessary to clear the decks for sound new growth.

In the Keynesian command economy, politicians presume to decide where consumer are to spend their money. Such is the inherent and inescapable nature of government stimulus spending programs. With incredible arrogance, politicians propose to control the economic activity of hundreds of millions of individuals, who will make their own decisions about whether to save or to spend money, and what to spend it on.

Remember, all government spending is done with other people’s money, acquired as tax revenues or borrowed to fund deficits. Either way, the government creates nothing. It just transfers that money to its favored economic and social classes or to Congress members’ home district pork-barrel projects. Transfer payments can’t return economic conditions to soundness, but they can in the short run divert business from the essential process of liquidating uneconomic inventory and production facilities. In the longer run, transfer payments permanently corrupt citizens by inducing dependence upon the welfare state.

The rationalization for the species of government transfer payments called stimulus plans is that it theoretically revives an economy in recession and creates perpetual economic booms. At least that was among the confused and often contradictory claims made by economist John Maynard Keynes.

The Democrat/Socialist Party, since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, has adopted Keynes’s estimate of private enterprise and “the rich” in general, making them targets of punitive regulation, higher taxes, and public condemnation. In line with socialism’s thrust to redistribute income and wealth, they pound the slogan that “the rich” are not paying their fair share, because of tax breaks enacted by Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush.

Counter-intuitively, however, tax revenues grew prodigiously under both tax-cutting presidents, as well as earlier under tax-cutting President John F. Kennedy. With respect to fairness, according to the IRS, the bottom half of all taxpayers pay less than 3% of income taxes, while the top 1% of taxpayers pay 36% of taxes and the top 20% pay 53% of taxes.

It is these top-bracket citizens whose savings and entrepreneurial spirit are essential to powering a revitalized economy that will create new jobs. Freighting them with the uncertainties of higher taxes and thousands of pages of new regulations, while figuratively flagellating them in the public square, will do nothing to speed our nation’s economic recovery.
____________
Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.

His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776 http://www.thomasbrewton.com/

Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Thomas E. Brewton

Children - Family - Thomas Brewton

No-Fathers Day

June 20, 2010 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

A central tenet in liberal-progressive-socialism is re-directing allegiance from the family as the primary social unit and elevation of the political state as the sole source of individual well-being. Ultimately fathers’ role in this social paradigm is relegated to anonymously furnishing sperm to donor banks.

Many liberal-progressives will strongly object that they do not share this view. But they cannot deny the history of their secular religion and the teachings of those who animated it, as well as the actions of the New Left baby-boomer, student-anarchist generation, who now are in positions of authority, ranging from government and education to media.

An article in the Wall Street Journal (available only to subscribers, unfortunately) drives this point home.

Quote:

In “The Switch,” coming later this summer, Jennifer Aniston plays an attractive 40-year-old professional who has given up on finding Mr. Right for marriage and decides instead to move straight on to motherhood with a donor father. The movie offers a largely celebratory treatment of donor insemination, as do two other movies out this year, “The Back-up Plan” and next month’s “The Kids Are All Right.” Indeed, one of the bottom-line conclusions these movies are pushing is that the children turn out “all right” with donor dads.

Hollywood is not the only industry peddling the story line that flesh-and-blood fathers are an optional accessory in today’s families. Plenty of academics—from New York University sociologist Judith Stacey to Cornell psychologist Peggy Drexler—also have been arguing that mothers can do just as well raising children with donor fathers as they can with real ones.

In her book, “Raising Boys Without Men,” for instance, Ms. Drexler claims that “maverick moms,” including single women who rely on donor insemination, are just as successful raising boys as mothers who opt for the older model of marriage and motherhood. All that is needed for parental success, according to Ms. Drexler, is a “caring and supportive” model of mothering.

This view, of course, is a product of liberal-progressivism’s feminist Women’s Liberation Movement that surfaced in the 1960s.
Continue reading “

No-Fathers Day”

Anti-Americanism - Barack Obama - Budget - Congress - Conservatives - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Freedom - GOP - Government - House of Representatives - Liberals - President - Republicans - Senate - Taxes - Thomas Brewton

The Danger Of A Government With Unlimited Power

June 15, 2010 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The Obama administration continues the nation’s travels, since Franklin Roosevelt’s socialist New Deal in the 1930s, along what Friedrich von Hayek called The Road To Serfdom.

The fundamental thrust of liberal-progressive-socialist governments such as that of President Obama is to abrogate the rights of private property, aiming at the holy grail of their secular religion: redistribution of income and wealth to reduce everyone to an equally low state of economic equality.

But people don’t readily abandon what they have labored to earn and save. As Lenin purportedly said, “Socialism emanates from the business end of a gun barrel.” Hence the relentless push of liberal-progressives to expand the power of collectivized government in Washington.
Continue reading “

The Danger Of A Government With Unlimited Power”

Banks - Budget - Capitalism - Chuck Schumer - Congress - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Free Trade - Senate - Stimulus - Taxes - Thomas Brewton

Wrong Again

June 8, 2010 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Senator Charles Schumer is either an economic ignoramus, or he is just performing the usual Democrat/Socialist Party obeisance to the welfare state and labor union extortion.

New York’s Senator Charles Schumer wants to impose a punitive tax on all American companies that employ overseas call centers for customer support.

“English speaking workers, whether they are in Indonesia, Canada, the Philippines, South Africa, are willing to work longer hours for lower wages and as a result Americans lose their jobs,” Schumer said.

How will job creation be improved in the United States by raising businesses’ costs? Will businesses be more able to compete in global markets and protect jobs in the United States? How will consumers be helped when businesses have to raise their prices to cover the new taxes and related costs?
Continue reading “

Wrong Again”

Banks - Barack Obama - Budget - Business - Capitalism - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Government - Liberals - Thomas Brewton

Fiduciary Responsibility and Judgment vs. Caveat Emptor

May 3, 2010 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Right or wrong, the charges against Goldman Sachs highlight divergent standards of banking.

There is every reason to suspect that the charges against Goldman Sachs are little more than a political ploy by the administration to shift attention away from its own financial improvidence and to add impetus to its proposed regulatory strangulation of the banking business.. Right or wrong, however, the SEC’s action questions Goldman Sachs’s reputation for probity.

In many respects the frothy nature of Wall Street securities dealings leading to the current crisis are reminiscent of the mid-19th century marketing of canal-building and railroad-building securities that financed the nation’s rapid industrial and agricultural growth from the 1820s until the 1880s.

During that period, far too many speculative financial deals were marketed by Wall Street banks, deals in which securities buyers often lost their money. It was a time when bank notes issued as currency by banks all over the nation were equally varying in soundness.
Continue reading “

Fiduciary Responsibility and Judgment vs. Caveat Emptor”

Christianity - Religion - Thomas Brewton

The Doctrine Of The Gospel

April 25, 2010 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Paul’s epistle to the Romans is historically the early church’s firmest single doctrinal statement of Christian faith.

Pastor Dan Gardner (Assembly of God Church, Cohocton, New York) opened a series of sermons exploring the Apostle Paul’s letter to the church in Rome. The epistle was written approximately 27 years after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, while elements of Jesus’s life and teaching were still fresh in the minds of those who lived around him and were eye witnesses to his ministry on earth.

Pastor Gardner’s text was Romans 1:1-17:
Continue reading “

The Doctrine Of The Gospel”

Anti-Americanism - Anti-Semitism - Democrats/Leftists - Government - History - Liberals - Media - Media Bias - Thomas Brewton - WWII

Ignorance On The Left

April 18, 2010 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Liberal-progressives, almost universally, misuse the terms Nazi and Nazism.

Liberal-progressives reflexively use the term Nazi to denigrate anyone or any point of view they dislike. Doing so is the equivalent of civil rights activists seeking to damn Ku Klux Klan members by calling them Abolitionists.

The name Nazi, apparently unknown to liberal-progressives, is a contraction of the full party name, National Socialist German Workers Party. Nazism, in short, is simply one of several varieties of socialism, the ideological faith of liberal-progressives.

Why this misuse of the words Nazi and Nazism?
Continue reading “

Ignorance On The Left”

Anti-Americanism - Barack Obama - Capitalism - Communism - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Liberals - President - Socialism - Thomas Brewton

Once Again: What Is Socialism?

April 6, 2010 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The commonly used definition is wrong.

News reporters, editorialists, academics, and liberal-progressive politicians generally deny that the Obama administration is socialistic. Socialism, they say, is a political state in which the government owns the means of production and distribution of goods and services. Because some businesses still are privately owned, ipso facto, ours is not a socialistic government.

That definition is confuted by the earliest theoretical writings on socialism. In France, Henri de Saint-Simon, in the first decades of the 1800s, and his pupil and colleague Auguste Comte, in the 1820s and 30s, along with Robert Owen contemporaneously in England, stated that the essential feature of what Owen called socialism is government regulation of the means of production and distribution.
Continue reading “

Once Again: What Is Socialism?”

Anti-Americanism - Barack Obama - Budget - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Government - Liberals - Media - Media Bias - Socialism - Taxes - Tea Party - Thomas Brewton

The Causes and Consequences of Liberal Superiority Complex

March 25, 2010 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Liberal-progressive-socialists, from Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte in the 1800s and Karl Marx in the mid-1800s, to present-day liberal-progressive members of the Democrat/Socialist Party, have believed as an article of secular religious faith that their superior intellects alone are capable of intuiting the inevitable course of history. Those who disagree with their reading are written off as cranks or imbeciles, unworthy of serious consideration.

For liberal-progressives, apparently, the inevitable triumph of socialism is “settled science” with which all the world’s important people agree.

Read Chris DeMuth’s post on the American Enterprise Institute website.
Continue reading “

The Causes and Consequences of Liberal Superiority Complex”

Barack Obama - Budget - Business - Capitalism - Chicago - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Government - Liberals - President - Regulation - Socialism - Taxes - The Law - Warner Todd Huston

What the Fed’s Mission Ought To Be

March 22, 2010 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Congress should revise its directives to the Fed and abandon liberal-progressives’ secular religious faith that ivory-tower intellectuals are capable of managing the entire economy.

Senator Christopher Dodd’s just released proposals for changing the regulatory role of the Federal Reserve and for reducing the eleven regional Fed banks outside New York City to small, relatively powerless statistical research units revives the question of what the Fed should be doing.

The import of the Senator’s proposals is to remove whatever independence the Fed enjoys and to make it just an office boy for any administration that happens to be in power. We already suffer too much inflation from the Fed’s profligate money expansion. Senator Dodd’s proposals will guarantee even more inflation by making resistance to presidential and Congressional political pressure impossible.
Continue reading “

What the Fed’s Mission Ought To Be”

Anti-Americanism - Budget - Campaign Finance - Communism - Congress - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Elections - GOP - Government - House of Representatives - Liberals - President - Republicans - Senate - Socialism - Taxes - Thomas Brewton

Barack Obama, An Also-Ran

March 15, 2010 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Obama does not compare favorably as a community organizer or as a party leader when matched against liberal-progressive party leaders in Nazi Germany.

A reader wrote to ask how Rush Limbaugh differs from Joseph Goebbels. Both, said the reader, are hate-mongers. There isn’t much similarity, of course. Limbaugh is not a great orator, as Goebbels was. Nor is he at all the superb organizer and administrator that Goebbels was.

The reader’s question, however, prompted a comparison of Barack Obama, whose announced intention is to revolutionize the United States, and Adolph Hitler, whose announced intention was to revolutionize German society. Both aimed at socialistic redistribution of wealth to improve the lot of working men and other lower-income groups. Both imposed control over major industrial groups.
Continue reading “

Barack Obama, An Also-Ran”

Anti-Americanism - Barack Obama - Congress - Constitution - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Elections - Government - Liberals - Socialism - The Law - Thomas Brewton

Today’s Revolutionary Aristocracy

March 12, 2010 by 1 Comment

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Liberal-progressives are a self-anointed aristocracy that presumes the right to impose its will upon our nation.

Since the last decades of the 19th century, the United States has suffered slowly escalating conflict between its founding ethos and the ideology of secular socialism, the latter represented by the liberal-progressive elite.

The aim of the conflict initiated by liberal-progressives has been nothing short of revolutionary overthrow, however gradually executed, of the original constitutional structure of the nation and its replacement by an all-powerful, collectivized national government. Such a government reduces the citizenry of the United States to servility under liberal-progressive bureaucrats in Washington, DC. Think, for example, of the Environmental Protection Agency’s unilateral move to usurp regulation of CO2 in the face of majority opposition in Congress, an action that will bureaucratically doom much of the nation’s manufacturing and mining industries.
Continue reading “

Today’s Revolutionary Aristocracy”