Posted by Jonathan Kovaciny on 01/23/10

My local paper recently published the following Letter to the Editor:

Your View: Republicans counting on forgetful electorate

Few political myths are more assiduously cultivated than the claim that Republicans are good for the economy. The lost decade of George W. Bush conclusively refutes that fiction, with its record bankruptcies, foreclosures, market collapse and towering under/unemployment.

It is the only decade in our history, reported The Washington Post, when not a single net new job was created. Because of Bush's "reverse Robin Hood," trickleup policies, middle income households had a lower net worth and made less at the end of the decade (inflation adjusted) than they did in 1999.

Over Bush's eight years, the Republicans financed three tax cuts, two wars and a $1 trillion prescription drug bill entirely through deficit spending, running up $5 trillion of debt. As Sen. Orrin Hatch recently declared, "It was standard practice not to pay for things."

Bush's presidency ended with an economic crisis and a $700 billion bank bailout that bequeathed Obama $1.2 trillion more debt.

House Republicans, proving that they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing since the Depression policies of Herbert Hoover, voted unanimously for a budget freeze as a solution.

Their other model is Ronald Reagan, who thought tax cuts were a miracle free lunch that, coupled with deregulation, paid for themselves. Republican orthodoxy repeats the free lunch myth but ignores the half-dozen tax increases Reagan passed, including TEFRA, the largest tax increase in history, and his $3 trillion in additional debt.

Despite the spectacular failure of their deregulatory and borrow-and-spend policies, Republicans hope that bafflegab and corporate money can sell their crony capitalism to the rubes again in 2010.

Their only hope is that voters have learned nothing and forgotten everything.

I replied to the editor with the following, which was published a few days ago:

Your View: Government interventions hurt economy

In his Your View, published Jan. 10, Tom Maertens asserts that Republicans, especially Bush, were bad for the economy. I agree with him on that point, but the problem is unprincipled Republicans, not Republican principles.

As such, both parties are to blame: Democrats tax and spend, Republicans borrow and spend, and, thanks to their sugar-daddy Federal Reserve, both parties print and spend. This is an unsustainable course.

At least the Democrats are candid about their desire to grow government; many Republican office-holders are duplicitous. I'd like Bush and our past Republican Congress to explain how exactly the prescription drug expansion and various bailouts and "stimulus" programs fit into the Republican Party platform and their lip service to free-market principles.

If Republican voters are smart enough to stop nominating, electing, and re-electing bad Republicans, we might actually get some good, principled Republicans, as well as enthusiastic volunteers, committed donors, and voters who aren't embarrassed to admit their party affiliation. In the long term, straight-ticket Republican voters have done more damage to the Republican Party than the Democrats.

Decades of market-distorting actions by Congress, along with the Fed's artificially low interest rates, inflated the dot-com and housing bubbles and culminated in a crash. Our current Congress and Administration are furiously attempting to re-inflate the bubble, but we're pretty well out of soap.

We are repeating the actions of Hoover and Roosevelt that turned the Crash of 1929 (itself a Fed-fueled bubble) into the Great Depression.

Left alone, the market will deal with problems and recover rapidly, as it did during the severe yet short-lived Depression of 1920-21. Instead, our government persists in reverse-Darwinist actions that prolong our suffering.

It turns out that Republicans don't think too much of public self-criticism by members of their own party. At my county's monthly GOP meeting (which fell the night my letter was published), I received a tongue-lashing from a local GOP state legislator for the letter, who was aghast that I dared to call George Bush an unprincipled man. The next day, I got a Facebook message from a local party member asking me to leave the GOP, and an email from the GOP District Chair asking to talk to me in person about the letter because he had gotten a number of calls of concern from party activists in the district.

How exactly does the GOP plan to hold on to its principles if it never actually tries to hold on to them?

 
Posted by Jonathan Kovaciny on 12/28/09

Government polices to blame for recession

By Marcus Piepho, Mankato

We find ourselves in a recession with high unemployment and massive debt. In order to understand how we got into this mess we need to look at the Austrian theory of the business cycle.

In a true free market, which America doesn't have, the interest rate is determined by the supply and demand for capital. Individuals choose to consume or invest, and this dictates the amount of loanable funds which businesses will use to undertake projects to bring goods to market for future consumption.

In this country we have a central bank, the Federal Reserve. The Fed prints money, artificially lowering the interest rate and expands the loanable pool of funds, leaves producers with a false price signal. The interest rate will tell producers that consumers want them to undertake long-term projects to bring goods to market. This artificially lowered rate will also induce consumers to save less and spend and borrow more.

The conflicting actions of consumers and producers in response to the government distorted price signal of the interest rate causes the mass misallocation of resources. This leads to the bust.

Logically, the government should stay out of the market and let the malinvestments liquidate, let the market correct the imbalances and distortions created during the artificial boom. Instead the government has undertaken programs to keep people in homes and cars that they cannot afford, bailed out failing enterprises, created make-work politically oriented, and wasteful public works projects, and increased the money supply at an alarming rate. These policies prevent any recovery.

History is repeating itself, with Bush and now Obama following Hoover and FDR's favorite anti-depression prescriptions.

 

 
Posted by Jonathan Kovaciny on 12/13/09
Last updated 12/13/09

I recently submitted a letter to the editor of my local paper about H.R.1207 and S.604 and it is published in today's paper:

I strongly urge our senators, Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar, to follow the lead of Rep. Tim Walz in co-sponsoring a bill requiring more transparency for the Federal Reserve, our nation's central bank.

The Fed, under chairman Ben Bernanke, played a significant role in engineering and executing the bailouts. Hundreds of billions of dollars were created and doled out to various banks, financial firms, and even foreign central banks, yet we have no legal way of seeing who or how much. The Fed also creates new money to secretly purchase assets on the open market.

This remarkable power is not something that one would expect to find in a representative government; indeed, the Federal Reserve is technically not part of government but rather a private banking cartel given special powers by Congress in 1913, under pressure from the banking industry. In its 96-year history, the Federal Reserve has never been subjected to a full audit of its operations.

Last May, Walz co-sponsored H.R. 1207, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009. Since that time, support for the bill has grown to include 73 percent of the House. A recent Rasmussen poll found that 79 percent of Americans support a full audit. It is time for Franken and Klobuchar to co-sponsor the Senate version of the bill, S. 604.

Among the Fed's stated goals are economic and monetary stability. Under the Fed, we've endured more than a dozen recessions and the Great Depression, and today's dollar has less than a 20th of a 1913 dollar's purchasing power. For an institution with so much unchecked power and such a dismal record, transparency is a must.

 
Posted by Jonathan Kovaciny on 10/10/09
Last updated 10/08/09

My comments on another forum on health care and the role government takes in protecting consumers. The text written by the other person I am indenting in the quote boxes.

You bet healthcare is a HUMAN right. I feel sorry for those who put enterprise /money before mankind. And in terms of the Declaration of Independence... Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness... hard to acheive when being exploited by insurance companies... or lack of funds prevent medical treatment...

Do we agree that a right is something to which one is entitled, something which is inherently possessed? You have a natural right to your own life (no one can legitimately kill you), your liberty (no one can enslave you), and your property (no one can steal what you have labored to produce or purchase). If we agree on this, then health care cannot be a right, because health care must be produced by someone.

If a doctor removes a tumor from your lung, his time and talents must be employed to perform the operation. If the patient has a right to that operation, then it is in violation of the doctor's right to liberty and property (his time and talents) and (s)he is essentially a slave to the patient. Health care is not a right. It is a need. How we as a society provide for that need is the question at hand.

"And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor. " - what happened there?

There is a difference between saying, 'we're all in the same boat so we all need to row together if we are to achieve independence from the Crown' and saying 'you are all entitled to the product of everyone else's labor, so start sharing'. Also, rights cannot be granted by any document; they are inherent: the fact that the Constitution and other founding documents refer to our natural rights does not mean that the Constitution, etc., are the granters of those rights.

If you so dearly heed the words of the Declaration of Independence, why not then stand with us in defiance of health insurance companies' tyranny over us! Was it not tyranny that inspired the D of I? Do you not see insurance and big pharma price gouging and claim denying and the majority of bankruptcies related to huge medical bills as tyranny? Or is it the corporations inalienable right to drain the good people of this country with high premiums and prices and low payout? What about the confirmed price gouging and rebranding the same drugs to prolong their marketability? How about denying domestic abuse victims for PRE EXISTING conditions? Health insurance ONLY cares about obscene profits - not you, not me, not your family, not mine, not anyone that costs them money! WAKE UP!

People on both sides of any divisive issue are always encouraging the other side to 'wake up', both believing that they themselves are fully 'awake'. Trust me, it's not like I haven't fully considered this issue. Either one of us is wrong or we both are, and its our job to civilly talk about the issue until we can come to an agreement. That's difficult since there's a lot of money being dumped in by those with a vested interest in the outcome, and that tends to muddy the waters of civil discourse. Facts are difficult to come by, sources are biased, and statistics are skewed. On all sides.

Health care in the U.S. is expensive because of massive government intervention - the regulations, mandates, etc., that have turned our health insurance industry into a byzantine third-party payment system rife with waste and lobbyists. The big players in the field have quashed competition by pushing through thousands of regulations designed to make it difficult and expensive for new health care providers and insurers to enter the field.

Health insurance is not insurance at all. If car insurance were run the same way as health insurance, we'd be crying for national car insurance reform right now, too. You'd need a full time job to get car insurance, and the govt would require all insurance plans to cover gasoline, oil changes, and repairs. All mechanics would have to be certified by a state board and attend 4 years of school before they could turn a screwdriver. You'd have no idea how much an oil change cost, but it wouldn't matter because someone else would be paying for it. Etc.

I challenge you to put yourself in someone else's shoes and imagine what someone without the good fortune you have might have to go through to get treatment. Perhaps you can ponder having to sell your home because you can't afford it with all your medical bills. Got a comfy car? Good because you may have to live in it. And I hope you never have a catastrophic medical crisis that may threaten your good fortune as it has for more than half of our countrymen that file bankruptcy every year.

This is a common accusation of those who want to force taxpayers to pay for other people's health care, food, housing, etc. If I oppose forcible taxation for the provision of services to the poor, then that makes me selfish and lacking compassion. To the contrary, I certainly am thinking of people less fortunate than me. My desire is definitely not to trample on the downtrodden, but to help them in a way that actually helps rather than to provide for their needs in a way that makes them dependent (and slaves to the state) and destroys real charitable giving. Believe me, I care for the poor just as much as you do.

The poor (and I myself probably qualify as 'poor') should seek support from their family, friends, churches, neighbors, charities, etc. When the government provides charity or a 'safety net' for people, it completely erodes these important community connections and depersonalizes the act of asking for support and the act of giving support. This depersonalization also makes it easy to ask for help when one doesn't genuinely need it, which leads to abuse and overuse.

Additionally, the government has no real incentive to get people off the dole and back on their own, while a personal donor does. The 'War on Poverty' has been running for decades, and we still have just as many poor people even though we've spent hundreds of billions of dollars. All of the tax money needed to pay for that has a tendency to drive more people toward government support, since they have less money of their own to begin with.

I find it ironic that in the name of freedom, some defend the freedom of corporations to oppress this country. UGH! Capitalism has become an ugly beast when we are so blind as to turn our backs on humanity.

We in the United States have corporatism, not capitalism. Over the years, companies have secured special privileges for themselves from government. The very concept of incorporation violates the rights of the consumers, because the people behind the corporations obtain, through government mandate, special protections from any damages that may result from their corporation's activities. This makes it much easier for companies to screw people over because the company, rather than the people that own it, bears most of the risk.

I absolutely oppose corporatism because it is NOT freedom. We do NOT have a free market or capitalism in the United States (nor really anywhere in the world). Capitalism is the scapegoat because we have what on the surface looks like capitalism but is actually a very mixed economy.

Companies only get as big and powerful as they are because government itself allows them to be. Without the protection of the government and the regulations that stifle true competition, these companies would be quickly replaced by other companies that provided what consumers actually wanted at a lower price and without screwing people over. Ask yourself: "If all health insurance companies are evil and constantly screwing the little guy and putting profit ahead of people, then why don't I get together with some friends and start my own insurance company that is actually nice to our customers and provides a good product at a fair price? People will come in droves to buy insurance from us and we'll rule the insurance market easily."

The answer to this hypothetical question is that you can't. Because the existing insurance companies have so heavily protected themselves with government that you cannot be nice to your customers and stay afloat. If we want to solve this problem, we need LESS government, not more. Government is and will always be the tool of Big Pharma, Big Banks, Big Everything. Government is NOT ON OUR SIDE because we only have votes and the Big Guys have the money. When you vote to put the government in charge of protecting us from the companies (through regulations, mandates, etc.), the companies themselves will, in short order, buy off the politicians and regulators and stack the deck in their favor. The companies can screw us over and be protected from retaliation by the system we voted into place.

I am tired of getting screwed over; we all are. We need to (gently and quickly) dismantle the system that is allowing this to take place.

 
Posted by BeTheWheel on 09/22/09

On September 22, 2009, Congressman Tim Walz was supposed to be at the county library in Fairmont, MN to meet with his constituents in our area.  Due to other obligations in Washington, Congressman Walz was unable to attend but sent two members of his staff in his stead, Mr. Rick Howden and Ms. Ann Spicer.  The following is the text of the statement I intended to make to Congressman Walz directly but instead made to his staff members and the others present:

Congressman Walz, thank you for coming today and welcome to Fairmont.  With all the talk about healthcare reform, I'd first like to applaud you for co-sponsoring what I feel is the most important legislation currently in the works in Washington, which is HR 1207, the bill to audit the Federal Reserve.

Mayer Rothschild, who was founder of the Rothschild family international banking dynasty, and was listed by Forbes magazine as one of the "Twenty Most Influential Businessmen of All Time", said "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws."  No truer words could have been spoken when you look at our current monetary system in the United States.  Our Constitution gave authority to regulate the value of our money to Congress, and demanded that the money in circulation be backed by things with value such as gold and silver.  The dollar bills you and I have in our pockets used to say "Gold Certificate" or "Silver Certificate" on them.  It was basically a receipt that said you owned a dollar's worth of gold or silver.  That is what gave the piece of paper in your hand value.   When the Congress printed more money, they paid no interest on it. 

Thanks to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, Congress has handed over this Constitutional obligation to a secretive board of private bankers and created an institution more powerful than any of our elected offices, including the Presidency.  Besides the fact that nowhere in the Constitution does it give Congress the authority to relinquish their Constitutional obligation to any other body such as the Federal Reserve,  we have allowed Congress a clever way to acquire funds for every government program under the sun without having the ask We The People for it first.  Whenever they spend too much money, they borrow money from foreign countries, and the Fed prints money out of thin air to cover the shortfall.  Then we are told as citizens, we must do our patriotic duty and pay our taxes.

Now, we're supposed to believe that the paper in our pocket is the actual money.  That paper now says "Federal Reserve Note".  It is exactly that, a note.  It is something that we owe, rather than own.  And now, I have read that every baby born in America today, before it even takes its first breath of air, owes somewhere in the ballpark of $30,000 of our national debt.  And that is only based on obligations we've already incurred.  I have also read, when you factor in future entitlements to which our government has obligated the taxpayers, the number reaches closer to $200,000.  When the government reaches its debt ceiling, they simply raise the debt ceiling. 

I am no economist, but even I know the more paper dollars we have in circulation, the less they are worth.  When the Fed prints more and more money out of thin air, meaning it is not backed by anything of real value, it makes every dollar that you or I carry in our pockets worth less than it was before.  This is inflation, and there is no one that is harmed more by inflation than those who already have a hard time making ends meet.  So, government programs intended to help the poor, inevitably harm the very people they are intended to help when the government has no money to pay for the program and inflationary monetary policy is employed.  It is a hidden tax that no one talks about.  It is irresponsible as well as immoral.  Even Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has admitted to Congress, under oath, that inflation is a hidden tax that primarily harms the poor.  We have evolved from an economy based on capitalism and free enterprise to a mostly fraudulent economy that is based on consumer spending and easy credit and would be more accurately described as corporatism or economic fascism than capitalism.  This is made possible by a central banking system that protects all of its Wall Street friends from the consequences of ineptitude and risky business practices and has indebted future generations of Americans by encouraging all of us to not live within our means.  Well, what happens when foreign countries no longer wish to loan us money because we continue to pay them back with increasingly worthless U.S. dollars, ultimately resulting in a collapse of the U.S. dollar? 

We have already heard rumblings coming out of the UN of a new international currency.  Well, let me revisit the words of Mr. Rothschild.  "Give me control of a nation's money, and I care not who makes the laws".  If those words are frightening as they apply to our current monetary system, imagine if we operated under an international monetary system controlled by private bankers.  It's no wonder that even though we hear the campaign slogan of "change" every four years regardless of which political party happens to be in opposition, we never see any change.  If continued government growth and intervention into our financial, medical, and personal lives is what we want, then I guess our government is operating to perfection.

If liberty is what we desire, then I feel it is time to start holding our representatives accountable to their oaths of office, which is simply to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.  If we do that, then many of the other debates we are currently having become irrelevant.  We as a people will only have the freedoms and liberties that we are willing to fight for.  History has proven that.  It is up to us, not just Congressman Walz and his colleagues. 

Once again, Congressman Walz, I applaud you for cosponsoring HR 1207 to audit the Federal Reserve, and I ask that you continue to fight to make sure that this bill passes the House and eventually is signed by President Obama so that we can finally find out where all of our money is going.  You no doubt will meet heavy opposition from outside special interests in this fight.  I also ask that you simply uphold your oath of office to defend and protect our Constitution.  It is the moral and honorable thing to do.  You certainly will never make everyone happy by doing this, but you will never need to defend yourself for doing what is moral and honorable, which is to honor your oath.  There are thousands who will support you in that effort. 

The Constitution, and in particular the Bill of Rights, was written to restrain the power and scope of government, not to grant powers to it.  We are a Constitutional Republic, not a pure democracy.  That means there are certain things the government may not do, regardless of how many votes they can muster in the House or the Senate or how much favor and goodwill they enjoy in the court of public opinion.  The power of the government is derived from the consent of the governed.  In order to expand the power of the government beyond its constitutional limitations, We The People must give our consent through our elected representatives by amending our Constitution.  We, the governed, have consented to too much unconstitutional intervention into our lives, and as government has grown out of control over the decades, we are now subjected, on a daily basis, to government interventions into our lives to which we never consented. 

There is one verbal commitment I would ask that you would make to all of us here today, Congressman Walz.  It is no secret anymore that Congress often passes legislation without even reading the bills prior to voting.  This is unacceptable and indefensible.  I would ask that you make a vow to personally not vote for any legislation that you have not personally read and of which you have not had sufficient opportunity to obtain a thorough understanding, and that you will fight to prevent a vote on any legislation if you have reason to believe that your colleagues have also not done so.  Other than an imminent threat to our national security, there is nothing that you will ever vote on that is so urgent as to require such irresponsible and hasty measures.

In times like these, I believe it to be proper to seek counsel from the wisdom of our founding fathers, and I'd like to close with a couple of quotes that I believe are relevant to the issues of today.

The first is from Thomas Jefferson, and I'm assuming this statement was made sometime after the creation of America's first central bank, which I believe was name the First Bank of the United States, and was later dismantled.  Jefferson said, "The Central Bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the principles and form of our Constitution. . . . I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a monied aristocracy that has set the Government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs. If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."

  In order to climb out of the hole we are in, we must first stop digging.  We often hear talk of reaching across party lines, and setting aside partisan politics in the name of "getting things done".  Unfortunately, "getting things done" usually means further shackling our kids and grandkids with the financial burdens of our generation's irresponsibility.  Rather than uniting to "get something done", it is time We The People set aside our partisan politics and unite in the name of Liberty.  We have created a huge mess because of our willingness to allow all of the governing to take place in Washington.  We must return to the guidance of the Constitution and the principles of self-government.  The concept of self-government means that we have the right to govern our own lives without government interference as long we do not interfere with the rights of others to do the same.  For those that believe the Constitution is outdated and no longer meets the needs of today, let us remember that autocratic rule and oppression are as old as history itself.  In the grand scope of history, liberty and self-government are still in their infancy, but are sadly on life support.  Our founders called our system of government the "Great Experiment" in a time when Thomas Paine said, "We have it in our power to begin the world over again."  Does it really only take 200 years for the concept of liberty to lose its luster?  What would those who sacrificed so much to create something never before seen in history say about what we have done to our country?  Our early patriots revolted over a 1 cent tax on tea, yet the tax burden that we now bear is staggering in comparison. 

Thomas Paine said, "If there be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace".  Well, we have trouble in our day.  I pray to God that we will choose to find a remedy that does not further burden the generations of those who do not yet have a voice.  Will posterity refer to us as the generation that reignited the torch of liberty, or will they look back on us with contempt for leaving behind a legacy of lost liberties, indebtedness, and corruption?  I believe the answer to that question lies not in Washington, D.C., but with We The People.  An understanding of true freedom and liberty requires an ability to respect the differences of others and a willingness to allow others to pursue happiness in any way they choose as long as it does not interfere with the rights of anyone else to do the same.  It requires a willingness to refrain from imposing your beliefs or your goodness on others.  I believe that message, if delivered properly, is a powerful one and one that needs to be delivered now more than ever. 

Troy Stenzel

Fairmont, MN