BRILLIANT! Can’t have an inflation induced business cycle if the market is too regulated to function and the people too taxed to invest.
http://www.investmentnews.com/…
The financial services industry yesterday called on Congress to enact sweeping regulatory reforms, including creating a “stability regulator” to oversee systemic risk in all financial services firms.
Among those calling for a “financial markets stability regulator” was Timothy Ryan, president and chief executive of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association of New York and Washington.
The U.S. financial markets regulatory structure dates back to the Great Depression, he noted.
In contrast to that time, “financial institutions no longer operate in single product, or business silo, or in purely domestic or local markets,” Mr. Ryan told the House Financial Services Committee, which held a hearing on revamping the financial regulatory structure. “Instead, they compete across many lines of business and in many markets that are largely global,” he said.
However, the U.S. financial regulatory structure “remains ‘siloed’ at both the state and federal levels. No single regulator currently has access to sufficient information or the practical and legal tools and authority necessary to protect the financial system as a whole against systemic risk,” Mr. Ryan said.
Spoken like a true believer in centralized economic planning. Good luck with that. Perhaps you should check with the USSR and Mises to see how well that works out.
Last night, October 21st, 2008, the Greater NYC Campaign for Liberty, some members of the Manhattan Libertarian Party and other liberty activists demonstrated in Grand Central Station. A bit of theater. A breadline containing a decent amount of individuals with others as satellites handing out literature, discussing the bailout with passer bys and filming the event. I was in the latter group. Not 10 minutes into the demonstration officers started speaking with Russ, requesting our reasons for being their, what exactly we were doing and I’d imagine if we had a permit.
I was at one point, not caught on video, threatened by the officer seen walking away from Russ at approximately 48 seconds into the video. A very loud and angry, similar to: “Back up! Get away from me!” I was merely walking up to inquire to what the problem was and why Russ was being engaged. After talking with Russ briefly I went around to the other side to get a different angle and hand out more literature. I soon noticed another officer appear (about 1 minute in) and start approaching the breadline. You can see at about 1:04 the first officer points me out to the new cop.
At 1:45 I’m approached by the first officer and told to stop filming the officers. The officer in particular was 5 or more feet from me and I was attempting to pick up the dialog in the rather loud station. I was not at any point noticed by the officer as I was completely behind him so there was no possibility of my existence being an interference. There were others standing closer who were not filming who were not harassed. I was left alone only because he become distracted by another officer or his radio. As Russ was being handcuffed I believe it’s the original officer who threatens to lock me up too if I don’t “take a walk.” So I took a walk. Following closely Russ and the two officers who were bringing him to the holding cell. I unfortunately stopped recording while in the police office talking with the officer at the main desk though I got some of it.
It one point an officer threatens to bring out the K-9 unit to sniff all our bags. A short time one happens to just walk right by all of us and our belongings and does not react.
At 6:30 the officer who was talking with Andrew asked if he could help me. I inform him I’m a member of the group there implying my reason for being next to him… though I think obviously the problem was my filming. When you see the camera go from facing the floor to the side is when the officer grabbed my arm motioning to either take my camera or start to place cuffs on me. He too was distracted by what appeared to be a superior officer calling on the radio. I hand the camera off to Andrew in case he came back to detain me. Listen to the radio. “You were told what to do. THAT’S ENOUGH. OK?! Do what you got to do!”
I kept the camera going while trying to act as it wasn’t. We were told the office was not a waiting room even though there had been people in there waiting and instructed to leave. Shortly after Russ is released.
Once we left the station after a couple minutes we noticed most of the officers involved in the incendent standing just inside the doorway staring and talking among themselves. I wasn’t quick enough, nor would it had gone over well, to record them watching us but I was able to get them walking away. A rather good ending to the video I think.
Take aways:
We plan on doing this again in the next couple weeks. We’ll see how it goes.
Not that we very much care but if someone is familiar with the laws regarding the actions we took please post the relevant statutes in the comments. Thank you.
For a while now I’ve noticed one of the biggest issues with liberty activism is lack of communication and ignorance.
How does a liberty activist deal with the courts? What’s the best method for dealing with a traffic ticket. Where can one go to learn about monetary theory? What’s a good arguing technique to use against an American liberal? How can I make a Pierre-Joseph Proudhon t-shirt?
I found that many activists have their hearts in the right place they don’t always have a good grasp of the topics they are debating or they use arguments which aren’t as potent as some others. I understand that not everyone is going to be able to go out and read Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action to better understand why monetary inflation is bad or read through Murray N. Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty to learn that Pennsylvania was nearly a working example of anarchy.
The purpose of the Liberty Activism Repository is to be an open wiki for all things related to liberty activism. Political and apolitical. Capitalist, socialist, communist. Personal experiences, debating techniques and examples, particular topics, media outlets… everything.
At the moment it’s been just me and given my busy schedule not much is present and that which is isn’t well organized. Some of the material was provided by bosco but added by myself.
Please, if you’ve got the time, create an account and add some information. Should you find the need for a particular MediaWiki extension, use the contact page to let me know what you need.
I’m still constructing the site. I’ll be adding advertisements soon. Perhaps a better logo at some point.
I’ve been in contact with Sam Dodson of Texas on a liberty activist education fund of sorts. Part of his plan is an information repository. At this point we’ve agreed it will be http://libertyactivism.info. Once that project is off the ground I will post more about it here.
Not too surprising given Ludwig von Drake was supposedly named after Ludwig von Mises.
Perhaps some at Disney are Austrians.
I remember that episode when I was a kid.
Americans inherit from our ancestors a glorious tradition of freedom and resistance to oppression. Our country has long been admired by the rest of the world for her great example of liberty and prosperity—a light shining in the darkness of tyranny.
But many Americans today are frustrated. The political choices they are offered give them no real choice at all. For all their talk of “change,” neither major political party as presently constituted challenges the status quo in any serious way. Neither treats the Constitution with anything but contempt. Neither offers any kind of change in monetary policy. Neither wants to make the reductions in government that our crushing debt burden demands. Neither talks about bringing American troops home not just from Iraq but from around the world. Our country is going bankrupt, and none of these sensible proposals are even on the table.
This destructive bipartisan consensus has suffocated American political life for many years. Anyone who tries to ask fundamental questions instead of cosmetic ones is ridiculed or ignored.
That is why the Campaign for Liberty was established: to highlight the neglected but common-sense principles we champion and reinsert them into the American political conversation.
The U.S. Constitution is at the heart of what the Campaign for Liberty stands for, since the very least we can demand of our government is fidelity to its own governing document. Claims that our Constitution was meant to be a “living document” that judges may interpret as they please are fraudulent, incompatible with republican government, and without foundation in the constitutional text or the thinking of the Framers. Thomas Jefferson spoke of binding our rulers down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution, and we are proud to follow in his distinguished lineage.
With our Founding Fathers, we also believe in a noninterventionist foreign policy. Inspired by the old Robert Taft wing of the Republican Party, we are convinced that the American people cannot remain free and prosperous with 700 military bases around the world, troops in 130 countries, and a steady diet of war propaganda. Our military overstretch is undermining our national defense and bankrupting our country.
We believe that the free market, reviled by people who do not understand it, is the most just and humane economic system and the greatest engine of prosperity the world has ever known.
We believe with Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, and F.A. Hayek that central banking distorts economic decisionmaking and misleads entrepreneurs into making unsound investments. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks’ interference with interest rates sets the stage for economic downturns. And the central bank’s ability to create money out of thin air transfers wealth from the most vulnerable to those with political pull, since it is the latter who receive the new money before the price increases it brings in its wake have yet occurred. For economic and moral reasons, therefore, we join the great twentieth-century economists in opposing the Federal Reserve System, which has reduced the value of the dollar by 95 percent since it began in 1913.
We oppose the dehumanizing assumption that all issues that divide us must be settled at the federal level and forced on every American community, whether by activist judges, a power-hungry executive, or a meddling Congress. We believe in the humane alternative of local self-government, as called for in our Constitution.
We oppose the transfer of American sovereignty to supranational organizations in which the American people possess no elected representatives. Such compromises of our country’s independence run counter to the principles of the American Revolution, which was fought on behalf of self-government and local control. Most of these organizations have a terrible track record even on their own terms: how much poverty have the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund actually alleviated, for example? The peoples of the world can interact with each other just fine in the absence of bureaucratic intermediaries that undermine their sovereignty.
We believe that freedom is an indivisible whole, and that it includes not only economic liberty but civil liberties and privacy rights as well, all of which are historic rights that our civilization has cherished from time immemorial.
Our stances on other issues can be deduced from these general principles.
Our country is ailing. That is the bad news. The good news is that the remedy is so simple and attractive: a return to the principles our Founders taught us. Respect for the Constitution, the rule of law, individual liberty, sound money, and a noninterventionist foreign policy constitute the foundation of the Campaign for Liberty.
Will you join us?
I’m not one for spending much effort attempting to change the system from the top down. It’s mostly a waste of time. The Campaign for Liberty seems to me to be both top down and down up. You need to spend a little effort on those at the top but mostly at the bottom. Coordination and access to information are the most important aspects besides the drive to change things. It appears to me that Paul’s Campaign for Liberty is or will provide that. Even if it’s just to get the updates I recommend joining. The Ron Paul campaign for president helped spark this new movement for peace, prosperity and freedom and I think it’s an opportune time to get on board. The potential is there for real change. Even if only used as an educational tool.
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