[free enterprise] and living within our means

This post is about human behaviour. Bearwatch opens with:

Karl Denninger explains why he believes we are now in dire crisis. If the insolvent continue to be bailed out with money that the government itself must borrow from elsewhere, the American government's own credit will be destroyed.

This article, about gold, states that there are zero one ounce gold bars in North America at wholesale [at this time] but that every Central Bank on the planet lists gold bullion on their balance sheet as an “official reserve asset”.

There is apparently trading in gold going on between big players at prices way over the odds and it is being held by CBs as a hedge but none is available to Jo Public. Worse are the lies created by people who should know better than to explain this away.

Alan Greenspan said:

But the opposition to the gold standard in any form-from a growing number of welfare-state advocates-was prompted by a much subtler insight: the realization that the gold standard is incompatible with chronic deficit spending (the hallmark of the welfare state).

Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth [but gold] stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism towards the gold standard.

Stop and draw breath.

The government and the big finance have thrown paper money, whose only value is the government's word, into the economy at vastly greater book value than the solid assets in the country. In other words, the country is living almost entirely on credit.

Anyone knows that the way to act is to severely curtail such rash action and yet what are the people who have engineered this doing? They have their snouts in the trough, quangos being but one manifestation of it, completely at odds with how the rest of the society is suffering and what's more - not giving a damn.

The excesses are obscene.

This is the third great crime against humanity, along with making obscene profits from this collusion and corruption, the first crime being the knowledge that this was coming, the complicity, together with the feigned incompetence and the second crime - that these people, who should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, are in fact increasing their wealth and personal security as we read.

The fourth crime is the whole panoply of anti-people legislation which not only criminalizes the citizen but prevents him from trading his way out of trouble and leaves the whole family at severe personal risk of losing all it has built up over time.

The difference between this time round and 1929-1945 is that this time there is a collective consciousness, thank goodness, a slow dawning of understanding, of who is actually to blame.

I think it is a measure of how worried the criminals are that they are surrounding themselves with these defences so vehemently. This time round, the people know and that is a very frightening prospect.

Waiting to pounce on the new Weimar Republic are the state socialists who would use strongarm tactics and messianic solutions to what is actually very simple - cut a swathe through over-regulation to free up enterprise for the small businessman, let him trade his way out and allow prices to once again find a true market value.

That's the way out, not the artificial solution to the artificial crisis which will be propounded in 2009-11.