Paul on CNN after signing of the bill

Paul’s speech on the House floor [Other speech]

Paul on Fox Business

Given the recent passage and signing of H.R. 1424, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, I think it’s appropriate to give Murray Rothbard’s take on what they are doing.

From America’s Great Depression, page 19 and 20:

If government wishes to see a depression ended as quickly as possible, and the economy returned to normal prosperity, what course should it adopt? The first and clearest injunction is: don’t interfere with the market’s adjustment process. The more the government intervenes to delay the market’s adjustment, the longer and more grueling the depression will be, and the more difficult will be the road to complete recovery. Government hampering aggravates and perpetuates the depression. Yet, government depression policy has always (and would have even more today) aggravated the very evils it has loudly tried to cure. If, in fact, we list logically the various ways that government could hamper market adjustment, we will find that we have precisely listed the favorite “anti-depression” arsenal of government policy. Thus, here are the ways the adjustment process can be hobbled:

1. Prevent or delay liquidation. Lend money to shaky businesses, call on banks to lend further, etc.
2. Inflate further. Further inflation blocks the necessary fall in prices, thus delaying adjustment and prolonging depression. Furthercredit expansion creates more malinvestments, which, in their turn, will have to be liquidated in some later depression. A government “easy money” policy prevents the market’s return to the necessary higher interest rates.
3. Keep wage rates up. Artificial maintenance of wage rates in a depression insures permanent mass unemployment. Furthermore, in a deflation, when prices are falling, keeping the same rate of money wages means that real wage rates have been pushed higher. In the face of falling business demand, this greatly aggravates the unemployment problem.
4. Keep prices up. Keeping prices above their free-market levels will create unsalable surpluses, and prevent a return to prosperity.
5. Stimulate consumption and discourage saving. We have seen that more saving and less consumption would speed recovery; more consumption and less saving aggravate the shortage of saved capital even further. Government can encourage consumption by “food stamp plans” and relief payments. It can discourage savings and investment by higher taxes, particularly on the wealthy and on corporations and estates. As a matter of fact, any increase of taxes and government spending will discourage saving and investment and stimulate consumption, since government spending is all consumption. Some of the private funds would have been saved and invested; all of the government funds are consumed.¹⁵ Any increase in the relative size of government in the economy, therefore, shifts the societal consumption–investment ratio in favor of consumption, and prolongs the depression.
6. Subsidize unemployment. Any subsidization of unemployment (via unemployment “insurance,” relief, etc.) will prolong unemployment indefinitely, and delay the shift of workers to the fields where jobs are available.

These, then, are the measures which will delay the recovery process and aggravate the depression. Yet, they are the time-honored favorites of government policy, and, as we shall see, they were the policies adopted in the 1929–1933 depression, by a government known to many historians as a “laissez-faire” administration.

Since deflation also speeds recovery, the government should encourage, rather than interfere with, a credit contraction.

¹⁵In recent years, particularly in the literature on the “under-developed countries,” there has been a great deal of discussion of government “investment.” There can be no such investment, however. “Investment” is defined as expenditures made not for the direct satisfaction of those who make it, but for other, ultimate consumers. Machines are produced not to serve the entrepreneur, but to serve the ultimate consumers, who in turn remunerate the entrepreneurs. But government acquires its funds by seizing them from private individuals; the spending of the funds, therefore, gratifies the desires of government officials. Government officials have forcibly shifted production from satisfying private consumers to satisfying themselves; their spending is therefore pure consumption and can by no stretch of the term be called “investment.” (Of course, to the extent that government officials do not realize this, their “consumption” is really wastespending.)

Sound familiar?

http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2008/roll681.xml

Glad to see Rothman kept his Nea.

H.R. 1424

H.R. 1424 Section by section summary

When enough votes were counted to confirm passage they cheered and clapped. “Hooray for fascism!”

Roll call found here.

The stock market has dropped about 2% 3% after the vote.

Barney Frank:

We can’t stop here. We need to do more. It’ll be like FDR’s New Deal. I don’t see how giving the Fed the ability to buy up assets are infringing on individual freedoms. Those who in the recent past advocated no regulation were the most successful.

We do not have adequate constraints on risk taking. Those who were regulated survived. We see a flight to regulation.

We don’t know how this [the bailout] will work.

GAH!!!! Out and out fascists. Those who supposedly were free market, deregulators he speaks of and he himself and his buddies. YES… some know how it will work. You just don’t listen.

Nancy Pelosi:

This is a big thick bill! Ha ha ha. Wow, it’s ready already. It normally takes longer to get to sign.

Given the current state of the laws and the powers given to the President… I don’t doubt it.

H.R. 1424 [PDF][HTML], page 300:

SEC. 503. EXEMPTION FROM EXCISE TAX FOR CERTAIN WOODEN ARROWS DESIGNED FOR USE BY CHILDREN.

(a) In General- Paragraph (2) of section 4161(b) is amended by redesignating subparagraph (B) as subparagraph (C) and by inserting after subparagraph (A) the following new subparagraph:

• • `(B) EXEMPTION FOR CERTAIN WOODEN ARROW SHAFTS- Subparagraph (A) shall not apply to any shaft consisting of all natural wood with no laminations or artificial means of enhancing the spine of such shaft (whether sold separately or incorporated as part of a finished or unfinished product) of a type used in the manufacture of any arrow which after its assembly–

• • • `(i) measures 5/16 of an inch or less in diameter, and

• • • `(ii) is not suitable for use with a bow described in paragraph (1)(A).’.

(b) Effective Date- The amendments made by this section shall apply to shafts first sold after the date of enactment of this Act.

That’s not all… just perhaps the most ludicrous. The New York Post gives us more:

WASHINGTON - Here, little piggies!

Congressional deal-brookers yesterday slopped a mess of pork into the $700 billion financial rescue bill passed by the Senate last night - including a tax break for makers of kids’ wooden arrows - in a bid to lure reluctant lawmakers into voting for the package

Stuffed into the 451- page bill are more than $1.7 billion worth of targeted tax breaks to be doled out for a sty full of eyebrow-raising purposes over the next decade.

“This is how Washington works,” said Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington research group. “A big pot of pork is their recipe for final passage.”

The special provisions include tax breaks for:

• Manufacturers of kids’ wooden arrows - $6 million.
• Puerto Rican and Virgin Is- lands rum producers - $192 million.
• Wool research.
• Auto-racing tracks - $128 million.
• Corporations operating in American Samoa - $33 million.
• Small- to medium-budget film and television productions - $10 million.

Another measure inserted into the bill appears to be a bald-faced bid aimed at winning the support of Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), who voted against the original version when it went down in flames in the House on Monday.

That provision - a $223 million package of tax benefits for fishermen and others whose livelihoods suffered as a result of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill - has been the subject of fervent lobbying by Alaska’s congressional delegation.

I’ve got nothing…