Saturday, April 9, 2011

Marc Faber's Gloom Boom and Doom: The Wealthy Benefit from Paper Money Inflation

My late friend Howard S. Katz was the first one I ever heard to describe the Fed and the inflationary process as one that benefits the wealthy at the expense of the poor. Howard's book The Paper Aristocracy is out of print. Marc Faber of GloomBoomDoom.com is performing a major public service by taking his argument public on CNBC. Faber makes great points in this interview (h/t Dennis Sevakis). The female CNBC announcer suggests that what Faber is saying is a conspiracy theory. Because of her poor education, she is unaware of the issues surrounding Andrew Jackson's election in the 1820s and 1830s. As well, her suggestion that Faber's argument is one in favor of a well funded public education system is foolish. The public education system is well funded now, but it propagates propaganda in favor of the Fed and socialism because the people who shape the education system share the pro-Fed, pro-socialist Progressive ideology.

Superbugs, the Federal Reserve Bank and the Grim Reaper

Friday's Wall Street Journal carries an article on page A7 that is more important than the averted government shutdown. The article concerns the spread of superbug bacteria in New Delhi, Britain and Pakistan. The superbug, called New Delhi metallobetalactamease, or NDM-1, destroys antibiotics. It is circulating in the sewage of New Delhi and may spread globally. In a sidebar the Journal points out that there are currently 63,000 deaths each year in American hospitals due to bacterial resistant infections. Until recently, those deaths would not have occurred.

The article also points out that innovation in the antibiotic field has slowed to a halt. It seems to me that the slowing of innovation is directly linked to the Wall Street bailout. Following the growth of government since the 1960s, especially the advent of Medicaid, Medicare and Obamacare, and the Fed's never ending orgy of money printing, the secular reductions in mortality that occurred during the 19th century and through the days when Jonas Salk invented the polio vaccine, may be reversed in the coming years.

Now that trillions of dollars have been diverted to the support of incompetently run investment companies, where will funding for entrepreneurial innovation, specifically including drugs, come from? Does Goldman Sachs and Citigroup aim to stop superbug bacteria? Are the advocates of 50% marginal income taxes certain that a lower tax rate would not have stimulated innovation in new drugs?

The result of the kind of economics that the nation's universities advocate is the absence of new antibiotics; university economists assume that the Federal Reserve Bank can print money and transfer wealth through high taxes, but innovation will be unaffected. You may die as a result. Keynesian economics seems to have been successful in stimulating one kind of activity: the Grim Reaper's.

Sustainable Development Is Code for Authoritarianism

Watch the Conservative Caucus/Conservative Roundtable interview of Tom DeWeese below (h/t patriot 246). Sustainable development is a movement that aims to eliminate property rights and representative government. UN Agenda 21 is a policy that expresses the environmental movement's authoritarian aims. Sustainable development has little to do with conservation in its traditional meaning. Solution: (1) Close UNESCO and end all United Nations involvement with environmental issues. (2) Illegalize UN presence on American soil for any reason other than diplomacy. (3) Boycott firms that advocate sustainability.