See You Me and Julio and Obama Down by the Schoolyard

With a popular socialist President in office, it is now politically acceptable to ask for things the free market cannot support.

When Julio Osegueda asked President Obama about better McDonald's benefits, he demonstrated two important aspects to the new era we have entered having a far leftist President in office.

(Just because Obama judiciously chose centrists and even Republicans to serve on his cabinet does not mean his left-wing goals are diminished. It simply means he is astute at knowing how to get what he wants, and that is to go at it seemingly more slowly than it would appear--when it appears at all.

(I will explain what I mean about that below. For now, let's get back to Julio, and what his presence and his question means in this political schoolyard, where we are all learning what it means to be in a new world.)

"I've been at the same job, McDonald's, for four and a half years," Julio told the President, "because of the fact that I can't find another job. Now, with the fact that I've been there as long as I've been there, do you have any plan or any idea of making one that has been [sic] there for so long receive any better benefits than they have already received?"

The first important aspect posed by this man's question is the rising tide of popular socialism. What I mean is this: with a popular socialist President in office, it is now politically acceptable to ask for things the free market cannot support, while believing it is your right to have the things that market will not support. The left has always asked for such things; sometimes they have tried to demand them, and sometimes they have gotten what they asked for. Social Security, WIC, income taxes, and a strict limit of one conservative professor at any liberal college are just some of the things the left has been granted.

The price of being the leader in fast-food, where dollar menus are necessary to attract the poorest of customers, does not leave enough in the corporate treasury to raise benefits.

Ahh, but the corporate treasury has billions in it, you say! Look at the latest profit statements by Exon Mobil and WalMart and other leaders in their industry, including McDonalds.

Well, General Motors, Ford, and even Chrysler used to be able to report the same sort of record profits. Most pharmacuticals still do. What were most of these profits used for? Research and development. It now takes hundreds of millions of dollars and many years to get a new drug to market.

But the unions demanded more and more of those profits in wages increases and benefits; the auto makers thought they had to give in, which they did because of government interference through legislation and Federal oversight of union/company negotiations.

Now look at those companies. No, it isn't right when corporate CEOs and COOs and other executives take multi-million dollar payouts after record losses and after taking government bail-out money.

But the fact is, if the government had not screwed up in the first place by interering in the free market place, the economy would be that much freer to grow. With economic growth, new jobs are created. That means that people like Julio can move up the ladder, whether it's the corporate ladder of their present employer, or whether it means moving on to greener pastures. Sam Walton started out at the bottom, too.

Julio is paying the price that Michelle Obama explained: "The truth is, [ ] someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more."

Julio is a small piece of the pie in an economy where millions are out of work and quickly eating every crumb of government pie crust the Feds can find to give them.

As I explained yesterday, the Depression of 1920/21 was tougher than this one, but America bounced back by the end of 1921 because the government kept their hands off the economy, and left the people in their wisdom to find the means of getting themselves back to work.

The second aspect of living under the "guidance" of a popular leftist President is that all those people who believe they deserve and all those who merely hope for more than their employers are giving them, are now free to stand up and ask if the President will help them--without risking the social backlash of appearing to want a bigger piece of the pie when others don't have any pie at all.

In Europe, that lack of risk has been to the advantage of the left for decades. Anytime they don't get what they want, they take to the streets. Often, they had leftist leaders who supported their demands, more or less, which were met in one form or another, leaving the protesters free to go home and wait for the next thing on their list of demands.

America has entered the European world that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher led them out of, with the support of President Ronald Reagan. But as soon as Mrs. Thatcher left office, the socialist democrats (note the lower case descriptions) won power again. The current Prime Minister of Great Britain, which includes Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, is Gordon Blair who hosted The Socialist International (SI) worldwide organisation of social democratic, labour and socialist political parties and its first meeting of its Commission for a Sustainable World Society, November 2008.

Obama is all about "sustainability." [1] Objective observers and conservatives say sustainability is unsubstainable, writing, "sustainability is a means to justify policies pushed by some interest group" or another [2]; and "Additional policies to promote sustainability are unnecessary as resources have become abundant." [3]

Though the new President has judiciously chosen centrists and conservatives for his cabinet, it was for two obvious reasons: 1) he wanted to get his cabinet up and running faster than any previous administration; and 2) this was because he knew his priorities would have to be slipped quietly into place, like Tom Daschele's health plan, outlined in his book Critical: What We Can Do About the Health Care Crisis, in which he wrote, " Health care system should be run by a board like the Fed," and that it was so important that it should be "slipped" into a spending bill at the last minute so that no debate would be possible.

We are now living in a new "old" world of Marxist ideas that Americans have rejected for decades--except when they were slipped into the national debate like the necessity for "social security" in retirement, or when we were railroaded into things like "income taxes", and now the very un-transparent act of slipping into the "stimulus bill" in the dark of Friday night a plan to put the government in control of all American health services.

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008-2009 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/

1920-21 Was Worse; Obama Ignores History

The left is talking directly past the free-market economists because the left isn't willing to admit those economists have anything to offer.

President Obama's epistemology is the reverse of the average American.

In simple terms, this means he thinks backward from the way most Americans think. Most Americans right now are thinking something like, "We can't depend on business alone to get us out of this mess; the mess is too big. We need some government help. How much help, and where to put it, is the trillion dollar question."

Mr. Obama, on the other hand, does not think that the government is the economic savior of last resort. He thinks it is the first resort.

"It is absolutely true that we can't depend on government alone to create jobs or economic growth," he said Monday in his first press briefing. In other words, he thinks of private enterprise as the back-up to what ever the government thinks it can or ought to do, because "we can't count on government alone." But he would like to; it is the only way to redistribute wealth according to a process that is not free enterprise, which does not "redistribute." It pays wages, instead.

While most people who don't have a full grasp of the power of free enterprise to pull us out of this mess are of the opinion that it takes at least some government help, Obama is saying it is going to take at least some help from private enterprise!

"...the federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back into life," said the President. "It is only government that can break the vicious cycle where lost jobs lead to people spending less money which leads to even more layoffs." [emphasis added]

Really?

"Despite its brevity, this depression [of 1920-21] was extraordinarily sharp: the U.S. price level declined by over 40% in a single year (Friedman-Schwartz, 1963), and output and employment likewise fell considerably.

"In one crucial respect, [it] was actually more severe than the Great Depression itself: there was a rapid decline in the price level of between forty and fifty percent within the course of a single year. As Friedman and Schwartz (1963) explain, “From their peak in May [1920], wholesale prices declined moderately for a couple of months, and then collapsed. By June 1921, they had fallen to 56 per cent of their level in May 1920. More than three-quarters of the decline took place in the six months from August 1920 to February 1921. This is, by all odds, the sharpest price decline covered by our money series, either before or since that date and perhaps also in the whole history of the United States.” (1963, pp.232-233.) The wholesale price index during the Great Depression took about three years to fall by the same amount." [emphasis added] The Depression of 1920-21

And from another source:

"Prices began to rise [in 1920], and rumors of a buyers' strike spread. After commodity prices peaked in May, they declined rapidly, precipitating an unprecedented cancelation of orders. Money was extremely tight, although the stringency did not become acute until autumn. A noticeable flight of gold from the country caused a marked advance in money rates, and the end of the year saw a 30 percent decline in industrial stocks. Depression—characterized by inactive industries, business failures, and a severe decline in foreign trade—continued throughout 1921. Answers.Com

If this brief depression was perhaps the worst "in the whole history of the United States", how did we get out of it before the end of 1921?

By doing nothing, as far as government intervention was concerned. There were no tax breaks, no stimulus, no lending of money. The government was strictly laissez-fairre about it. Free enterprise and the will of the people to return to work was the saving grace.

President Obama is ignoring not only history, but also ignoring naturalist economics that protect the rights of people to operate in a free market place.

"The second unusual feature of the depression of 1920-21 was the rapid recovery in employment and output, in sync with a swift adjustment of the real wage to its new equilibrium position. Although this is a short time span, there were simply extraordinary movements in macroeconomic variables during this period..."

Using what is called the Bernanke-Carey Model--(yes, Ben Bernanke, who along with Professor Kevin Carey of American University devised a model used by most economists--Google it)--it has been discovered that one of the most striking differences between that brief yet severe depression, the Great Depression, and the economic difficulties of today, is the swift response by needy employees to lower their wage expectations dramatically.

The United Auto Workers had to be put in the position of making concessions which for the UAW were awkward and that could hardly be called "dramatic," before any bail-out money was given to General Motors and to Chrysler.

But something Bernanke wrote in 2000 in a book called Essays on the Great Depression stands out strikingly as a comparison to the crisis of today:

"For many years, economic research on the origins and persistence of the Great Depression bore a striking resemblance to historical research on the causes of the American Civil War. Both sides to the respective debates talked past one another, and little, if any, intellectual progress was made."

Today, the 200+ economists who took out a full page ad in several newpapers a week ago are not being heard by the left who, led by Obama (or perhaps who is leading Obama, who is not an economist but a Constitutional professor and attorney) are going out full force for the idea that "only government" can bring the country out of recession.

The left is talking directly past the free-market economists because the left isn't willing to admit those economists have anything to offer. Instead, they are hell-bent on painting those with philosophical differences as:

• people who wish to do "little or nothing at all" and as people who "still [don't] believe this constitutes a full-blown crisis". It implies the left is the only hope for salvation by saying "we have come together around a plan" when in fact the free-market economists do not "come together" on it and would have proposed vastly different plans; and because "as long as I hold this office," said the President, "I will do whatever it takes to put this economy back on track," except by listening to those voices who say that the billions of dollars in what are traditionally labeled "appropriations" belong in appropriation bills, not in a stimulus package.

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008-2009 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/

How Many Capitalists Does It Take?

Obama, the Democrats, and the Republicans have the entire idea of how a capitalist economy works backward. The mortgage melt-down was because government promoted unethical and unhealthy capitalist processes.

Q: How many people does it take to "stimulate" the economy?

A: Only as many capitalists as have the money to do it.

I ask and answer this question, because of several things that have come to the attention of the public:

• 200+ economists publicly declared the President is wrong;
• President Obama goads legislators on both sides of the isle to forget that wealth is created by capital investments, and to forget that
• [A]spending money without
• [B] thinking about where it is going,
• [C] where it is coming from,
• [D] how long this spending spree will take to work,
• [E] how long it will take to pay itself off, or even
• [F] whether our grandchildren will be illegally indentured servants to the spending whimsies of Obama and the 111th United States Congress--is not capitalism;
• In order to spend more money on projects than would be necessary under a fair-bidding policy, President Obama signed an Executive Order that stating that "it is the policy of the Federal Government to encourage executive agencies to consider requiring the use of project labor agreements in connection with large-scale construction projects in order to promote economy and efficiency in Federal procurement," where "project labor agreements" mean the exclusive use of union labor, as described elsewhere in the Order. A "large-scale" project is one over $25 million;
• The spending of public monies by Wall Street capitalists and others on projects that put people to work is strictly forbidden, as in the example of the corporate jets that are no longer acceptable to purchase or use, and the junkets that are no longer acceptable that would have put hundreds of hotel and restaurant workers to work, which puts hotel and restaurant suppliers to work, which puts the manufacturers to the suppliers to work, which puts farmers, textile workers, commercial laundries, garbage removal companies, cab drivers, truck drivers, and gasoline suppliers, and others to work.

In other words, Obama and the Democrats and the Republicans who agree we must spend, have the entire idea of how a capitalist economy works backward. The mortgage melt-down was not because of capitalism; it was because government promoted unethical and unhealthy capitalist processes.

It has been argued by many that if the government wants to put people to work and create or save jobs, it should give the money directly to those who will spend it immediately. Brookings senior fellow in governance studies Pietro Nivola suggested that Congress "proceed in two tranches. The first would pump money directly into the hands of consumers and businesses through a combination of judicious tax relief and quick-hitting expenditures (including, as one example, ramping up military equipment procurement and recruitment of personnel). Subsequent legislation could take up the long-term infrastructure spending and more exotic projects..."

But it would seem President Obama would rather injudiciously scold Congress for their attempt at being responsible with the people's money. "I’ve heard criticisms of this plan that echo the very same failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis," he said.

Would these be the theories of Congressman Barney Frank, who encouraged the sub-prime lending that got us into this crisis? "These two entities—Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—" said Frank, "are not facing any kind of financial crisis." Frank was (and remains) the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. "The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing."

Would these be the theories of President Bush who as early as 2003 sent out the distress calls that the mortage crisis was on the way? Would these be the theories--[1][2][3]--never listened to, that statistically demonstrated how government spending, when used as stimulus, never works?

No. Instead, the President said, "Let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the essential. Let’s show people all over our country who are looking for leadership in this difficult time that we are equal to the task."

What he means is that what is "essential" is the profligate spending that Vice President Joe Biden publicly declared had only a 70% chance of success. "If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, there's still a 30 percent chance we're going to get it wrong," Biden said.

"Some critics, said the President, contend the bill 'is full of pet projects. When was the last time that we saw a bill of this magnitude move out with no earmarks in it? Not one.'
"Ratcheting up the sarcasm, the president said: 'So then you get the argument, "well, this is not a stimulus bill, this is a spending bill." What do you think a stimulus is?'
"'That's the whole point,' he said, as the audience hooted and applauded."

From Wall Street to Main Street, every business owner and capitalist knows you don't throw money at debt hoping for a 70% success rate at getting out of debt.

The Democrats and Republicans both should leave it to the free market to solve the problems. Their success will come faster than anything government can do, but 21st century government doesn't want to ever have to admit that capitalism is better than socialism. Biden warned that the consequences of failing were too great for the country, to allow it to allow politics to prevent action.

What Washington can't see is how greatly they have prevented the free market from acting, by promising free money that generations of Americans will discover is not free at all.

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.

The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008-2009 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/

Bye, Bye, American Pie, As It Grinds to a Halt

Natural law as it applies to Mankind requires that men respect the boundaries of freedom that do not make economic or social slaves of others.

"Barack Obama made fifteen references to 'pie' in 100 seconds of a speech -- all about dividing up the pie of the American economy [while] his audience laughed and chanted, 'Pie! Pie!' to show how hungry they were. In one fell swoop Obama gave away the rapacity of socialism.

"Or as Michelle O explained, "The truth is, [ ] someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more." James Lewis American Thinker

Lewis makes a compelling case about how, while "The Left likes to preen itself with the word ‘progressive,' [ ] it is actually the most regressive political strategy in history."

As I wrote in Monday's Academy Blogger, numerous states are currently declaring sovereignty from the Federal government.

For those not familiar with this concept, it has nothing to do with secession from the Union. It has everything to do with the Tenth Amendment, which states:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people"...

This means specifically and categorically that the Constitution was, as we know from history, created by the States to unite them under a Federalist system. What we have had for more than a hundred years is not Federalism, but Nationalism as inadvertantly conceived, in great part, from the creation of the "citizen of the United States" by the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment.

This means the roles were reversed, whereby the States became agents of the national government. The States did not accept this during the debates over the design of the Union, did not write the Constitution to be National rather than Federal, and would not have signed it that way because the States intended to keep power from being centralized in D.C., which is the definition of a national government: centralization of power.

What in the Federal Constitution gives the President, the Congress, the Courts when they side with nationalism, Michelle O. and all others who think like her, to accept the Marxist decree, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need?"

That is precisely what our First Lady said, and precisely what she meant. She meant what she said. So did the President when he made his "pie" speech; so did the crowd chanting, "Pie! Pie!"

"Socialism is rapaciously greedy -- that's what endless envy warfare comes down to. [ ] That is why everything is grist for the mill of Obama Marxism. Old-time Marxism just pitted the poor against the rich--[but] Odacity is voracious because there's never enough free pie. It's the pie supply that grinds to a halt," says Lewis in the Thinker.

The Obamas are not asking people to altruistically give up a portion of their own pies so that government may decide who it wishes to give it to; it is economically much worse and morally more evil than that. The Obamas are telling people that the government will take as much of the pie as they deem necessary in order to redistribute it to those they deem worthy or needy enough of receiving our stolen goods.

The States are tired of being "demonstrably treated as agents of the federal government...[ ] many federal mandates are directly in violation of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States; and the United States Supreme Court has ruled in New York v. United States, 112 S. Ct. 2408 (1992), that Congress may not simply commandeer the legislative and regulatory processes of the states; yet a number of proposals from previous administrations and some now pending from the present administration and from Congress may further violate the Constitution of the United States..." [condensed from the Michigan "Journal of the House of Representatives]

And yet, States are clamoring right now for the $40 billion removed (as of this writing) from the $815 billion (as of this writing) "stimulus" bill, which 200+ economists disagree will properly "stimulate".

To solve the problem of there never being enough pie, we must begin to recognize, as historically we used to do, at least two truths:
1) the pie belongs to those who made it, but they must voluntarily, capitalistically, re-distribute some of it--to those who can help them make the pie larger. When they capitalistically redistribute, the pie gets larger, and no one must altrusitically give some away, nor be forced at the point of the government's gun to have it taken from his/her politically dead, cold fingers. And
2) nature's evolution of man did not create him to be a rapacious beast toward the fellows of his own species. Natural rights are not to be compromised for the purposes of nationalism.

Natural law as it applies to Mankind requires that men respect the boundaries of freedom that do not make economic or social slaves of others. Everything the Left, and much of the Right, stands for anymore is a breach of that boundary.

That is why the Obama administration understands that a populist uprising will fill the streets of America will protests against these invasions of our Constitutional liberties--just as the streets of other nations are beginning to fill with protests.

"Seems to me that in tough economic times you can expect to see civil unrest, rioting and even armed resistance. The Federal government saw fit to recall soldiers from Iraq to post them on American soil waiting to be deployed to quell disorder..." Circle of 13

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008-2009 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/

Looters, Strikers, and Economic Systems

The strikers will be only those with ethics because they are the ones with the most to lose. They are at the top of the economic food chain.

In an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Robert P. Murphy, Ph.D., PRI senior fellow in Business and Economic Studies, argues [in a report] that vast government spending is not a cure for the U.S. recession. Dr. Murphy explains that the true purpose of an economic system isn’t to “create jobs” or channel a particular number of green pieces of paper into everyone’s wallet on payday, but that workers are employed productively, so that they take scarce resources and transform them into goods and services that consumers value.

“The price of limiting economic freedom is real, but not always apparent or easily understood by [ ] by lawmakers,” said Lawrence J. McQuillan, Ph.D., co-author of the report and director of Business and Economic Studies at PRI." PRI

It is not easily understood by business itself, apparently. After taking government money that essentially made government an invested stockholder, the bonus-paying, romper-room, jet-buying antics of those businesses have forced government to cap the pay of future recipients.

"Many of us who know [Ayn] Rand's work," wrote Stephen Moore in an op-ed, "have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that Atlas Shrugged parodied in 1957, when this 1,000+ page novel was first published and became an instant hit." [emphasis added]

"For the uninitiated," Moore continues, "the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises -- that in most cases they themselves created -- by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism."

Not only did the politicians, using the code phrases "for the public good," "the redistribution of wealth," and others, create a downward spiral, the very spiral we are on now, but they created two new classes of Americans: the looters and the strikers.

The looters were those who, like the corporations who are now taking government money, took government money. Looters were also people as individuals who fed off this constant stream of government handouts to the needy. The government itself was the prime looter, because it took from those who produced the wealth in order to give to those who sucked the life out the productive workers.

The strikers were those who refused to play the game any longer. At first they were only the top executives of major companies, and only those who had ethics. Those who had no ethics, like the bank execs we have now who take multi-million dollar bonuses after wrecking their companys, had no reason to go on strike. If they played the game right, they would still eventually get their money.

In Atlas Shrugged, the main visable protaganist is a woman who runs the nation's major railroad, at a time in our history when railroads played a much larger role in the economy. The train could be said to be a metaphor for what happens in the plot, because the looters' train is out of control running downhill with no breaks.

The strikers are only those with ethics because they are the ones with the most to lose. The are at the top of the economic food chain. Everyone below them feeds off them. When they begin to strike, disappearing apparently from the face of the earth, untraceable, unreachable, then the execs without ethics are stuck at the top of the economic food chain.

No one has yet become a striker that I know of. But its going to happen. It happened in the great "Brain Drain"* from England in the 1960's, when the brains moved to freer nations. "The term was coined by the Royal Society to describe the emigration of "scientists and technologists" to North America from post-war Europe." [* see [1] [2] [3]]

But in Atlas Shrugged, some of the "brains" the keep the economy afloat are literally invited to strike, and are given a safe haven. Some, who don't know of this safe haven, strike on their own by retiring without explanation.

The moral of this blog is to point out that what is about to happen to this country and to the world, as long and as far as this bail-out is continued, will cause everything in the novel to come to fruition.

The only means of rescuing the world from the abomination of spending-stimulus packages, especially those filled with "social" programs, is to take the advice of the 200+ economists who disagree with President Obama and with the force behind the strike in the novel: "Get Out Of Our Way!"

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
© 2008-2009 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/

Al Gore and Coercion in the Free Market

Al Gore co-authored this with David Blood in The Wall Street Journal

"When greeting old friends after a period of absence, Ralph Waldo Emerson used to ask: 'What has become clear to you since we last met?'

"What is clear to us and many others is that market capitalism has arrived at a critical juncture. Even beyond the bailouts and recent volatility, the challenges of the climate crisis, water scarcity, income disparity, extreme poverty and disease must command our urgent attention.

"The financial crisis has reinforced our view that sustainable development will be the primary driver of economic and industrial change over the next 25 years. As a result, old patterns and assumptions are now being re-examined in an effort to find new ways to use the strengths of capitalism to address this reality. Indeed, at the Harvard Business School Centennial Global Business Summit held earlier this month, the future of market capitalism was one of the principal themes discussed."

What is very clear in Al Gore's mind is that market capitalism is engineered capitalism and has nothing to do with profit capitalists providing what the market--consumers--want. Rather, it has to do with what political engineers want. It is also very clear that the political engineering comes from the economic engineers who don't know laissez faire from socialism, men such as Henry Paulson and Allen Greenspan.

What form of oligarchy is this? It isn't the form of a democratic-republic, as our Founders invisioned, not when the majority of Americans demand that no bailout be contrived for the mortage industry yet our republic ignores the democratic wishes of free people who wish to remain free and contrive the bailout, anyway.

What form of psychological spin is Gore putting into our heads? Since when did capitalism need to be called market capitalism, and what other form is there, except the managed, mixed-economy we are now prisoners of?

Well, if by market capitalism Gore mean a market economy, he is way off base. A market economy cannot be politically engineered. It is "engineered" by the offerings of the producers in a relationship with consumers, who decide which produced offerings they will give their money to.

"A socialist economy, in contrast [to a market economy], is characterized by [ ] central planning. [G]overnment often is asked to intervene in the economy to correct situations in which the price system does not work. It regulates 'natural monopolies,' for example, and it uses antitrust laws to control or break up other business combinations..." [emphasis added] About.Com

"A 'natural monopoly' is defined in economics as an industry where the fixed cost of the capital goods is so high that it is not profitable for a second firm to enter and compete. There is a 'natural' reason for this industry being a monopoly, namely that the economies of scale require one, rather than several, firms. Small-scale ownership would be less efficient." http://www.progress.org/fold74.htm

"The great evil in economics is not communism, not socialism, not capitalism, not landlords or bosses, not unions, not feudalism or industrialization or automation, not progress or lack of it, and not any scarcity of natural resources. No, the great evil in economics is coercive monopoly." Fred E. Foldvary

But natural monopolies are not coercive. Communism and socialism and feudalism are coercive, and Gore's "market" capitalism is not capitalism because capitalism demands the admission that capital is property of its owner, not of the state. Only capitalists can create capital; government cannot. Gore and Obama treat capital as if it was a coercive monopoly, when in fact anyone can be a capitalist, and three quarters of all the business in this country is conducted by small business, not by natural monopolies nor by coercive monopolies such as first class mail deliverable only by the United States Postal Service.

Once again Gore gets it wrong when he may have valuable contributions to make. He does make people think, and that is a contribution; but he makes them think using the wrong terminology.

On National Public Radio International, I heard an "environmental artist" say--correctly--that we don't have global warming, that, instead, some places are warming, some are getting colder. Some places are getting hotter, and some are becoming wetter, some dryer. The Arctic may be melting, but Antarctica has 17 inches more ice than at any time since that continent's discovery, and from China to Colorado the winter of '07-'08 was the hardest on record. Lower temperatures had never been recorded in China; snow was still on the mountain peaks of Colorado in June. Fires in California, at an all-time high, are fanned by hurricane-strength Santa Anna winds.

The weather is changing, but you wouldn't get that simple message from Gore. And from his lips, and Obama's, to yours ears, you will never get the message that government intervention creates coercive markets, weighting down one part of it so that another must be offset by "redistributive" taxes, which then creates another anomoly in what ought to be a self-correcting market economy, but which has instead become a government-managed capitalism, masked by the word "market."

Government-managed capitalism is a contradiction of terms of the highest order; but to the degree that Marxists and other collectivists can get away with it, they can convince the economically illiterate that government controls are necessary.

And keeping people economically--and politically--illiterate is what the Fairness doctrine is all about, limiting free speech made by opponents of the left. Every Rush Limbaugh would necessarily, by law, be required to be followed by a Gore or an Allen Colmes.

And that would not be natural.

The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:

© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®
mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/