Southern Bread Blog

I read this lengthy story about how hard the town of Greenwood, SC has been hit by the recession. It’s a sad tale, and by the end I’m really not sure what the point was, other than to highlight these people’s misery. What struck me as I read it though, was how locked into the bureaucracy these people are. They are serving the enormous, impersonal machine that is big government (leviathan). Councilwoman Childs needs to re-think the whole concept of what she’s doing. If she really wants to help these poor people then the first thing she needs to do is quit her job, of which her salary comes directly out of the pockets of local businesses. I guarantee you that if the government of Greenwood, SC abolished itself, local business would boom overnight. Just the lack of municipal taxes alone would create hundreds of new jobs. But alas, this won’t happen. What will happen is that people like Ms. Hackett will keep going down to the unemployment building and looking up serial numbers while standing in a line to get to the computer terminal. It’s 1984 but worse. It’s real.

This is what 70 years of liberalism has done to our country. It’s created slaves to Leviathan. They can’t think outside the box. They can only queue up and wait for Kafka’s worst nightmare to call their number. Did Hackett contemplate moving to another town? I guarantee you that there are thousands of jobs in South Carolina to be had. You have to go to where they are. That’s always been the case, since the dawn of time. That’s why big cities are so big and small towns are so small. All the jobs are in the big city and people flock there to get them. Finding work sometimes means moving away from your hometown. Millions of people do it every year. Leaving messages on some councilwomans voicemail and filling out your serial number at the unemployment office is the absolute worst way to find a job. Why? Because they don’t care. They don’t care because there is another person in line right behind you with the same story. It’s human nature. And it’s human nature on the employer’s part too. Also, the fact that Hackett thinks dreadlocks and pink high-heels are “classy” is part of the problem. I guarantee you that if I walk in for a job interview with a pony tail and flip-flops I’ll walk out empty handed.

Look, we’ve all been there. You find yourself out of work and you really need to find a job. That requires getting out and beating the bushes. Filling out applications is for the birds. You go door to door in the town and tell people that you will work in whatever role they can use you. You tell them you are a hard worker and if they can’t afford to pay you in full that you will work for cash under the table to avoid all the taxes. Yes, you screw Leviathan, because it doesn’t care about you and sometimes you just have to eat. In short, you do what you have to do. This brings us all back to the beginning doesn’t it. Minimum wage(read this and this). If the minimum rate is $9, then an employer is naturally going to pick the person who has enough skills to produce $10 worth of value per hour, and most of the time that isn’t going to be you or me. What we have to do is change the game. We have to say, well, I know I don’t have the skills that guy does, but I’ll work for half what he will and won’t charge you overtime. Now that gives the employer a value proposition. But, here again, Leviathan says no. You can’t control your own life. You must adhere to it’s rules.

As I said, the saddest thing about this story is how enslaved these people are to the state machine. This is especially true in minority-dominated areas. The welfare society has destroyed the black family from the inside out. Walter Williams lays it out plain as day:

and yes, he is black. Mrs. Childs sneared at the tea party protesters as “probably a bunch of rich, white guys.” The longer she deceives herself with this class and race warfare rhetoric, the longer her life is going to be miserable and hopeless. The only “rich, white guys” standing in the way of her and Hackett are the ones you vote for in November. But, these days, Leviathan is less white, and less masculine. But it’s still Leviathan. And it still wants nothing less than total control of your life. The problem isn’t your neighbor Mrs. Childs, it’s your leaders.

Another day, another “change”. Obama is rapidly becoming a civil rights nightmare. Not only has he gone way beyond Bush’s justification of warantless wiretapping and been hiring RIAA lawyers like mad. He would now like to take away your right to a lawyer while in police custody if you are arrested. Hey liberals, thanks for inviting us to your hope and change hellhole:

If you don’t know Thomas Woood’s works, you don’t know what you’re missing. This is a recent talk he gave at the Mises Institute on the little-remembered depression of 1920-21. This is a very important topic for right now. The 1920 depression was astounding in it’s brevity, and even more astounding in the fact that the government did absolutely nothing to stop it. Therefore it was over within a year and a half, versus the Great depression that lasted for over a decade because of all the government interference. Do yourself a favor and watch this whole thing.

I’ve really enjoyed doing the Conservatism 101 series of posts over the last few months, so I think I’d like to start an Economics 101 series now. If you are a rational human being, you should be asking yourself right now, why you would ever want to learn economics from a network administrator with no college degree. Well, I don’t blame you one bit. You probably shouldn’t. But, I can promise you that there will actually be very little of me in these posts, except for examples and commentary. All the actual economics content and theory will be straight from much brighter folks than I. If you read this blog on a regular basis you will know that I like to quote heavily, and it will be the same here. I’m just gonna try to boil it down and make it easier to understand in bite size chunks. But, first I need to lay a little ground work so you know where I’m going to be coming from.

My economic philosophy comes almost entirely from the “Austrian school” of economics. This so-called “school” of economic thought has nothing to do with the country of Austria, other than a few of it’s creators were from that region. The two principle founders of the Austrian school are Ludwig Von Mises and Carl Menger. These two men made enormous contributions to the understanding of economics from the viewpoint of “human action”, or praxeology. They looked at economics as less of a mathematical science and more of a philosophy of human behavior. Why do people prefer to spend their money in such and such way? When thus and so happens to the economy, what is a person’s reasonable reaction to that information? These were the types of questions that they looked into. They shunned mathematics as useless in formulating any type of overall theory of economics.

So, what did they come up with? Let me give you the highlights of their most important ideas, as well as later Austrians:

These are some of the major things that Austrianism discovered, although there are tons more. It’s a full economic system of thought, so there are lots of smaller issues that are less important, perhaps, but no less necessary. For many years, the publications of these men couldn’t be found in English, so it’s only been in the last 50 or so years that their genius has surfaced in full. One of the most prominent Austrians, from an American point of view, is Friedrich Von Hayek. His book Road to Serfdom became required reading in Western capitalist circles during the Cold War. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974 for his work on the economic calculation problem and the business cycle. Hayek did much to bring Austrianism to the masses, even if it was a little watered down at times.

So, that’s where I’ll be coming from in this series. I’ll start the first post with the Austrian Business Cycle. I should, perhaps, chronologically, start with monetary theory, but I think the Business Cycle is kind of a cornerstone for understanding our current situation. It should be easier to follow the strands of thought back into what money is, after understanding what we think it is in our screwed up system.

Oh, how time reveals absurdity. In this New Deal propaganda film, the supreme leader, Franklin D. Roosevelt, explains to us why the best thing to do for the Great Depression is inflation. I especially love the graph where they show how prices have come down, and the value of the dollar has gone up. Then they draw some kind of silly wage chart on top of it and that’s supposed to make some sort of sense I guess. I’ve got an idea, let’s also draw a census chart on it and show how low prices are leading to more people being born. That would make about as much sense. In reality world, low prices and a more valuable dollar is the perfect situation that we all would want. But in freako, corrupt, idiotic government world, low prices and a more valuable dollar is bad. What a joke. No wonder the Great Depression lasted over a decade. The country was being run by morons with Disney-type graphs in place of real economics.

In the modern era of media, polls are big news. Any time a new poll comes out that shows some seemingly here-to-fore conclusion to be wrong, it makes headlines. But, we must remember how misleading polls can be. I’ve been struck by this recently as I’ve seen some real wierdo poll results touted in the MSM. The achilles heal of all polling is that the stats only indicate answers to a certain question. The trick is finding the right question that will give you an accurate representation of what you want to know. Simply asking a question that seems logical to you might turn out to be woefully inadequate for general extrapolation. To prove my point, I want to take three polls from recent news and use them as examples. In each case, the headline grabbing stat was based on a question that made sense to the headline’s target audience, but to the public as a whole it was inaccurate. It didn’t take into account the informational disconnect between two things in the minds of the respondants.

The first one is the stat that Rasmussen gave about a week or so ago with the headline Just 53% Say Capitalism Better Than Socialism. This, of course, caused a huge stir and gnashing of teeth on the conservative side, with some claiming that we’ve reached the end of the line and others saddened at how “stupid” American’s are these days. But one little nugget in the poll explains the whole situation perfectly:

This section clearly shows that people had no idea what the terms socialism and capitalism actually mean. The fact that a single poll will show that only 53% of people say capitalism is better than socialism, then turn around and show that only 15% prefer a government-managed economy(which is the definition of socialism) shows clearly that the definitions of the two terms are the weak link in this poll. He also mentions his previous poll where 70% of people say they prefer a “free-market economy” (which capitalism is). This is another nail in the coffin. The 15% and 70% numbers are the more reliable stats. The 53% number in the headline is meaningless.

The next example is a Gallup poll that claimed that “over two-thirds of Americans — 71% — have a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in President Obama to do or recommend the right thing for the economy”. This stat just seemed way out of wack since he didn’t get anywhere near that much of the popular vote, and his approval rating has dropped quite a bit since he took office. Those facts should lead to skepticism straight away. Well, it turns out that in a later Gallup poll, again, the more detailed and specific questions reveal fundemental bias’s or misunderstanding on the part of the respondents to the earlier questions:

So, here again, we have one poll that claims tons of support for Obama’s economic policies as a generally stated question, but then, when asked about those specific policies on their own, apart from the Obama tie-in, respondents were reversed the other way. This shows a clear misunderstaning that Obama’s economic policies are based on an expansionist ideology – the very thing they say they are worried about.

The last example is perhaps the oddest one. I’m talking about the Rasmussen poll that claimed, late in the Easter week, that “79% Believe Jesus Christ Rose from the Dead”. Here are the initial findings:

So Christians should be jumping for joy right? Well, perhaps. My point with this poll isn’t the same as the other two. In contrast, I think it’s a solid poll. Comparing it year over year and with Gallup’s results show very consistent results. It also dove-tails nicely with the percentages of people who claim to be Christians(79%, exactly the same as the Rasmussen resurrection question). The reason I brought up this poll was that, while it’s very consistent in it’s statistics, it doesn’t jive with what I see in real life. I don’t see 8 out of every 10 people I meet acting or talking in a Christian manner. I’d say it’s more like 2 out of 10 on that count. So that leads me to my last point. Even consistent polls don’t give a complete picture of reality. Sometimes the very nature of the question at hand will influence the answers given. Sort of like an anthropological version of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. The moral of the story? When you see a poll that looks odd, just remember to dig deep and give it the reality test.

I don’t think I’ll be shocking anyone by saying this, but these raging liberal websites like Huffington Post, Daily Kos, etc. have a long habit of going off on lunatic rants that don’t actually have any content. I’ve read a few of the articles and posts on these sites by linking from other places over the last couple of years and they just all fit the same mold. Hate, hate, hate and not a single shred of actual content. What I mean by content is something along the lines of “Mr. Smith said last week that _______ will happen, and then turned around this week and said…” with links and such included as reference to the claim. That’s not at all what you get with their material. I want to prove my point with an aboslute gem of an article by Steven Weber(thanks to NB for the link), the guy from that old television show Wings. I’m going to warn you in advance. This will be painful so strap in.

I don’t link to Huffington as a matter of principle so you’ll have to get there some other way if you want to, but what you see above is the entire text. Not one single reference. Not one single fact. Just a hate-filled fuming rant with no reality to back it up. Honestly, I could care less about the Republican party. I’ve said it dozens of times on this blog that the leadership of both major parties is ideologically bankrupt. But, this type of journalistic debris is what passes for honest debate on sites like that. It’s just a big pee’ing contest to see who can use the most over-the-top verbage and win the hate contest. Contrast that with sites like Hot Air and you’ll see the stark contrast. Actual debate about news, with links and references to actual events and statements. Man, liberals are never as nasty as when they actually win. Sore loser is the understatement of the year.

So now, according to Obama we are a secular nation, not Christian, and we also can’t tolerate Christian symbolism at a speech:

Anybody still want to debate this man’s “Christian Faith?” I think it’s pretty obvious from my last post that he actually doesn’t have a faith. His faith is in himself and public policy. In his heart Jesus was probably just a really good community organizer. But, I wonder now, how much these Catholic groups are going to sell out their beliefs to accomadate this man. Notre Dame is going against the wishes of it’s founding Bishops to let Obama speak at their commencement. Are they going to cover up Touchdown Jesus with a tarp? Actually I hope they do. I’d prefer Him not to see the most pro-death president in our history standing at the lecturn. Catholics ask yourself: how much of your faith are you willing to give up for the sake of one man’s fame and fortune? And the more important question. Why?

At least we are finally seeing it for what it is. This is what mainstream media elitists think of average Americans. They are the highly intelligent Obama worshipping snobs and we are the rednecks and idiots that they need to set straight. Maybe people will finally see this and wake up to just how manipulative and dishonest the media is and has been for so long. We don’t mind when reporters go after politicians and famous people that live in the spotlight, but when they start berating average working Americans they show their true colors. And I don’t think many people are going to take to kindly to it.

Rick Perry has me starry eyed. Preach on brother. Thank goodness that somebody is standing up for this crucial issue. Let’s not forget about the other states that are also passing sovereignty bills. This is a very important movement that is long overdue as I’ve said before. Check this website to keep up with the resurgance of 10th amendment bills.