The Most Important Veto In U.S. History

When Andrew Jackson dissolved the central bank

By Chris Rossini

President Andrew Jackson (despite his faults) did deliver the most important veto in U.S. history when he squashed the central bank at the time, the Second Bank of The United States.

For those who are new to learning about the evils of central banking, it’s important to understand that The Federal Reserve was not the first central bank in the U.S. It’s just the one that stuck and was not weeded out early enough. The Fed was able to dig its roots in at a ripest moment imaginable (i.e., the early 1900′s, when American public opinion tipped into the desire for statism).

We are now 100 years later, and the weed has grown into a full-fledged monster.The early attempts at central banking in the U.S. were stopped:

The First Bank of The United States was ended by Thomas Jefferson.

The Second Bank of The United States was ended by Andrew Jackson.

Lincoln’s National Banking System during the War to Prevent Southern Independence was also put to an end.

In this article, we’ll focus on Andrew Jackson’s veto of the charter renewal of The Second Bank.

At the time, there were hard money voices that provided opposition to the central bank. Take Sen. Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, who said:

“I object to the renewal of the charter of the Bank of the United States because I look upon the bank as an institution too great and powerful to be tolerated in a Government of free and equal laws. Its power is that of a purse; a power more potent than the sword.”

The understanding was there amongst enough of the elites, and as can be expected, the propaganda from the Bankers was reminiscent of the garbage that we hear today.

Here is Andrew Jackson standing up to the sob stories about how closing the Second Bank would ruin the economy:

“You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the eternal God, I will rout you out.”

Our Brave New World of Malthusian madmen

From 'Wanting Seed' to 'Brave New World', the wacky Malthusian ideas of dystopian literature are now everyday beliefs

by Brendan O’Neill

Reading an op-ed in an American newspaper last month, which argued that gay marriage should be legalised because it will help reduce overpopulation (homosexuals don’t breed, you see), I knew I had heard a similar sentiment somewhere before.

‘Given the social hardships of our era, the benefits of homosexual marriage could be immeasurable’, the op-ed said. ‘Even America, though its population pales in comparison to that of other nations, is considered overpopulated because the amount of energy each of its citizens expends in a lifetime is enormous. Obviously homosexuals cannot, within the confines of a monogamous relationship, conceive offspring.’ So, legalising gay marriage would ‘indirectly limit population growth’.

Gays celebrated because they don’t have children… homosexual relationships culturally affirmed on the basis that their childlessness could help solve a planetary crisis… gay monogamy bigged up because it doesn’t involve conceiving offspring. Where had I heard such ideas before? Why did this promotion of homosexual relationships as a possible solution to the alleged problem of fertile, fecund heteros cramming the world with too many ankle-nippers sound familiar?

Then it struck me. It’s the storyline of Anthony Burgess’s Malthusian comedy-cum-nightmare,The Wanting Seed. In that 1962 dystopian novel, which I devoured during a Burgess phase in my teens, Burgess imagines a future England in which overpopulation is rife. There’s a Ministry of Infertility that tries desperately to keep a check on the gibbering masses squeezed into skyscraper after skyscraper, and it does so by demonising heterosexuality - it’s too fertile, too full of ‘childbearing lust’ - and actively promoting homosexuality.

It’s a world where straights are discriminated against because there’s nothing more disgusting and destructive than potential fertility, than a ‘full womanly figure’ or a man with ‘paternity lust’; straights are passed over for jobs and promotion in favour of homos, giving rise to a situation where some straights go so far as to pretend they are gay, adopting the ‘public skin of dandified epicene’, as Burgess describes it, in a desperate bid to make it in the world. There’s even a Homosex Institute, which runs night classes that turn people gay, all with the aim of reducing the ‘aura of fertility’ that hangs about society like a rank smell, as one official says. ‘It’s Sapiens to be Homo’ is the slogan of Burgess’s imagined world.

Now, nearly 50 years after Burgess’s novel outraged literary critics (one said it was ‘too offensive to finish’) as well as campaigners for the decriminalisation of homosexual sex (who were disgusted that Burgess could write of a homosexual tyranny while it was still illegal in Britain for one man to have sex with another), some of the sentiments of that weird invented world, of that fertility-demonising futuristic nightmare, are leaking into mainstream public debate - to the extent that a writer can claim, without igniting controversy, that ‘the benefits of homosexual marriage could be immeasurable’ in terms of dealing with the ‘social hardships’ of overpopulation. No, heteros are not discriminated against in favour of gays; there’s no Homosex Institute. But there is a creeping cultural validation of homosexuality in Malthusian terms, where the gay lifestyle is held up by some thinkers and activists as morally superior because it is less likely to produce offspring than the heterosexual lifestyle, in which every sexual encounter involves recklessly pointing a loaded gun of sperm at a willing and waiting target.

American Apocalypse

Eventually Nemesis overtakes Hubris

By Justin Raimondo

I don’t believe in God. However, I do believe in divine retribution. Without going into the specifics of this somewhat counterintuitive theology, suffice to say here that its central axiom is the idea that actions have consequences. One cannot go on committing evil without reaping a whirlwind or two. Eventually Nemesis overtakes Hubris, and the results aren’t pretty.

This is our future. Or, at least, one hopes it is – otherwise, there is no justice in this world, or perhaps even in the next.

This struck me as I was reading a column by Steve Chapman, a mildly conservative journalist with vaguely libertarian leanings: according to him, people on the right (of which I count myself one) are "addicted to apocalypse." He takes us through decades of conservative apocalyptic rhetoric, from Ronald Reagan predicting the end of freedom in America due to the depredations of Medicare to Ted Cruz – the liberal media’s villain of the moment – who recently said:

“The challenges facing this country are unlike any we have ever seen. … (T)his is an administration that seems bound and determined to violate every single one of our Bill of Rights. We’re nearing the edge of a cliff. … We have a couple of years to turn this country around, or we go off the cliff to oblivion.” Citing Reagan, Cruz declared: “One day we will find ourselves answering questions from our children and our children’s children, ‘What was it like when America was free?’”

According to Chapman, whose likeness accompanying his column shows him smiling the smile of the self-satisfied bourgeois, this is all so much balderdash, because, you see, Reagan was wrong: Medicare wasn’t that bad (it’s cheaper than Obamacare!), the counterculture receded (not where I live, but whatever), and the Soviet Union faded away (well, yes, just as the apocalyptic Ludwig von Mises predicted). See? Nothing to fear! Good times are ahead! The world is our oyster!

The problem with those grumpy old conservatives, says Chapman, is that "when their dire predictions fail to come true, they keep forecasting the worst possible outcome if they don’t get their way. They seem to need the perpetual excitement of impending doom."

The Selfish Gene

Social Darwinism and Human Cooperation

by Toby Baxendale

It took me until my 43rd year to read The Selfish Gene, written in 1976 by Richard Dawkins. In many respects, it is a testament to its success that I felt no compelling desire to read it. What I perceived to be its central message had been absorbed into the very fabric of our culture. I thought the message was simply put. To summarize: we are driven to survive by our genes and via competitive and selfish natural selection; we follow our own self-interest in order to survive and procreate; genes that adapt more quickly and better to the competitive world survive at the expense of the others, and so forth. The state of nature is a Hobbesian nightmare of there being “no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It is survival of the fittest for most, but armed with this knowledge, we could overcome some of these rough edges of life.

This message became his new self-christened “meme” that has seeped into our own cultural way of thinking. Also, armed with this knowledge, Dawkins concludes we should restrain our biological drive and build a more cooperative world.

Needless to say, the book is rich with information on Darwinian evolution and easily communicated to the intelligent layperson. However, I think that he has at least one thing the wrong way around: we should not restrain our genes to build a more cooperative world, but embrace them and their phenotypic effects. As I will suggest, successful phenotypic effects are not as he assumes them to be when it comes to the catallactics of the market place.

The view of Dawkins — that we need to put restraint on our genes to effect a more cooperative outcome for all — would imply that if we do not, we get what is called social Darwinism which is as natural as the selfish gene itself. In the closing lines of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins urges us to rebel against this natural disposition.

“It is possible that yet another unique quality of man is a capacity for genuine, disinterested, true altruism,” Dawkins writes. “We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth. ... We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism.”

Dawkins then concludes that this ability to force ourselves to work well with others is “something that has no place in nature.”

Being new to biology, I thought I should read some Darwin to see if it really does follow that if you accept natural selection you must move, as night moves toward day, to the whole of human society running itself as a group of individualistic selfish replicators.

Social Darwinism has nothing, seemingly, to do with Darwin himself. He never advocated a social policy of promotion of the natural tendency to the survival of the fittest. He thought that appropriation by others was the key in advancing man in society.

The Descent of Man is his book that touches most on these issues. Darwin himself imagines that primeval man was “influenced by the praise and blame of his fellows,” and that for individuals, there were many social rewards in avoiding purely selfish behavior since the “tribe would approve of conduct which appeared to them to be for the general good, and would reprobate that which appeared evil.” Primeval individuals knew that the acceptance of the group was important to survival, so, Darwin concludes, “[i]t is, therefore, hardly possible to exaggerate the importance during rude times of the love of praise and the dread of blame.”

Protecting Everyone From Themselves

Everyone claims to care deeply for everything except that which concerns him most 

by Theodore Dalrymple

Of recent years I have noticed something rather peculiar about hotels. Nowadays they treat their guests as if they were all potential suicides: that is to say, as if their first thought on arrival in their rooms was to jump out of the window. To protect against this mass suicidal mania of hotel guests, the hotels have installed windows that cannot be opened more than a few inches, which means that the rooms are stuffy and airless. 

This mania for protecting guests from themselves reaches its apogee in England, where I once stayed in a ground-floor hotel room that overlooked the parking lot. The drop from the window to the ground was about two and a half feet, so the worst injury that anyone who jumped from it would likely sustain was a twisted ankle. Moreover, just beyond the parking lot was a railway line and a canal, both handy for intending suicides. Next the window that would not open wide enough to let any air in was a notice:

For your comfort and safety, this window has been provided with a limiting catch. Please do not force it.

For my comfort? I am one of those persons who finds airless rooms uncomfortable. Unlike Dr. Chasuble, who was peculiarly susceptible to drafts, I detest a stagnant and temperature-controlled indoor atmosphere. I find such atmospheres not only uncomfortable but discomfiting. They always bring to my mind thoughts of totalitarianism, of higher authority imposing its will upon me, allegedly for my own good but mainly for the sheer pleasure of exercising an inescapable power over me. And what could be more authoritarian than not allowing me to have a little draft in my room? 

The little lie contained in the words “for your comfort” irritated me, though I admit that my propensity to irritation (not entirely unpleasurable, for it gives me a sense of moral superiority) increases with age. I see these little lies everywhere I go, for example in a rather grand hotel in which I happened to stay the day before yesterday—at someone else’s expense, of course.

The receptionist gave me my key with a leaflet that detailed instructions of what to do in case of fire. I wanted to ask, “Do you have many fires here, then?” but I didn’t. Three other questions occurred to me: Would anyone read these instructions? If anyone read them, would anyone remember them in the event of a fire? If anyone remembered them, would anyone obey them who would have behaved differently if he had not read them? If the answer to any of these questions is “No,” the corollary question is, “What is the purpose, then, of the leaflet?”

The Secular Religions of Progress

The central theme of our future civil religion should be the maintenance of human freedom

By Robert H. Nelson

Economics has never been, nor could it ever be, free of value judgments. The economy is not isolated from the rest of society, cordoned off from the lively world of competing beliefs. Rather, questions of the organization of the economy, and of the economic policies to be pursued, are interwoven with other social concerns and public policy in general. Economists often lose sight of the altogether interconnected nature of the economic and the non-economic. The illusion of neutrality is reinforced by the radical simplification that often characterizes economic methods; in striving to make economic problems tractable for mathematical representation, inherent ethical considerations are obscured.

Some of the greatest economists of earlier eras, like Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, regarded themselves as moral philosophers, as analysts of the moral foundations of society. Few contemporary economists see themselves in such a light. If they do take moral considerations into account, it is typically as parameters for subsequent economic analysis.

As a result, the powerful normative elements of economics tend to be driven underground. Economists today become implicit moral philosophers, a point the University of Illinois economist Deirdre McCloskey often emphasizes. Most economists, for example, regard economic growth as a main goal of the economic system, and seek to assess the desirability of public policies by the extent to which they are efficient or inefficient toward that end. Whether growth should itself be a paramount objective, and whether efficiency should therefore play such a critical role in distinguishing between good and bad policy, typically receives little sustained attention among mainstream economists, with few exceptions (such as Herman Daly in his 1996 book Beyond Growth).

Economic growth is actually a relatively recent term for a phenomenon that was once called “progress.” The creation of the American economics profession began with the founding of the American Economic Association in 1885 and was a product of the Progressive Era. Progressives believed that scientific experts, including professional economists, should engineer society toward a better future. But moral and economic crises in the 1930s and 1940s called into question the Progressives’ basic methods and aspirations, giving reason to leave behind the morally freighted language of “progress.” By the second half of the twentieth century, historians increasingly characterized the thought of the Progressive Era in such terms as “the gospel of efficiency.” A new greater emphasis on technical economic efficiency, along with the closely related concept of growth, recast progress in more scientific and mathematical, and less emotionally and ideologically weighted, language. But the terminological substitution of “growth” for “progress” makes little difference. The case for economic growth is largely indistinguishable from the case for economic progress; both are ultimately deeply normative.

But why is progress, or growth, desirable? Progress means improvement, and so its desirability is in a sense tautological, but economic growth is thought of specifically as the increase in material outputs — the maximization of the production and consumption of goods and services. To understand why this goal is considered desirable today, we must look back over the major economic theories of modernity. Although the survey that follows will sometimes paint in very broad strokes, it will show just how strongly these economic theories draw on moral philosophy and especially on religious thought. Some theories could even be said to constitute secular religions in their own right, implying “theologies” of evil and of the human condition, of redemption, and ultimately of a final paradise, which we achieve through economic growth.

The Economist as a Moral Philosopher

Adam Smith was a pivotal figure in the transition from traditional Christianity to secular religion. In Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), there is, as University of Chicago economist Jacob Viner keenly observed, “an unqualified doctrine of a harmonious order of nature, under divine guidance, which promotes the welfare of man through the operation of his individual propensities.” In Smith’s later work The Wealth of Nations (1776), he was less forthcoming about the divine ordering of nature, but the underlying moral philosophy was fundamentally similar.

The term “natural” recurs throughout The Wealth of Nations as a normative basis for judgments on economic processes and outcomes. “Natural” means the natural order of the world, as established by God, which we fallen human beings can only imperfectly understand but to which we should strive to conform as best we can. Smith could express his conception of economic processes as a divine natural harmony largely in secular terms, drawing on the Newtonian understanding of the universe as a complex mechanism put in motion by God. Much as gravity was the force that maintained order for Newton in the physical universe, self-interest holds up both moral and economic order for Smith.

The Deadly Safety Net Illusion

Things That Make You Go Hmmm...

by Johm Mauldin

ca·tas·tro·phe

n.

1. A great, often sudden calamity.

2. A complete failure; a fiasco.

3. The concluding action of a drama, especially a classical tragedy, following the climax and containing a resolution of the plot.

In 1710, philosopher George Berkeley formulated a proposition in his work "A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge," which would inspire a philosophical discussion that continues to this day — three centuries later.

Berkeley wrote:

But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine trees, for instance, in a park ... and nobody by to perceive them.... The objects of sense exist only when they are perceived; the trees therefore are in the garden ... no longer than while there is somebody by to perceive them.

Twenty years later, William Fossett took Berkeley's baton and ran with it:

Tease apart the threads [of the natural world] and the pattern vanishes. The design is in how the cloth-maker arranges the threads: this way and that, as fashion dictates.... To say something is meaningful is to say that that is how we arrange it so; how we comprehend it to be, and what is comprehended by you or I may not be by a cat, for example. If a tree falls in a park and there is no-one to hand, it is silent and invisible and nameless. And if we were to vanish, there would be no tree at all; any meaning would vanish along with us. Other than what the cats make of it all, of course.

But it wasn't until June 1883 that the magazine The Chautauquan posed the question more or less in the familiar form we know today:

If a tree were to fall on an island where there were no human beings would there be any sound?

The Chautauqaun answered — rather too emphatically, I thought — "No. Sound is the sensation excited in the ear when the air or other medium is set in motion." But that implies a more scientific perception of the question than the philosophical one which has intrigued thinkers through the centuries.

It was from that example that the modern-day form of the question was finally settled upon:

"If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?"

Now, rather than take the path followed by a million tortured souls and try to answer the question, I am going to pose my own question of a similar nature and see if I can stimulate a philosophical debate that will endure through the centuries, as George Berkeley did way back in the 18th century.

If "through the centuries" is reaching a little, would you all mind doing me a favour and just pretending to discuss it until I've left the room?

Much obliged.

OK... so all that remains is for you to click here for some appropriate mood music, and off we jolly well go...

"If something bad happens but nobody reacts badly to it, did nothing bad happen?"

Deep, huh? Not what you come here for, I know, but bear with me for a moment.

I recently read an article that bemoaned the level of volatility that besets the modern world, and the piece got me thinking: how volatile is the investment world, really?

Talking About Greed

Quote of the Day

Politicians never accuse you of ‘greed’ for wanting other people’s money, only for wanting to keep your own money

                                                          - Joseph Sobran

Frexit fever reaches heart of French establishment

Attempts to create a "European demos" have obviously failed

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Calls for EMU break-up are spreading into the upper echelons of the French foreign policy establishment, and the pro-European core.

An astonishing new book by François Heisbourg – La Fin du Rêve Européen (The end of the European dream) – argues that the "euro cancer" must be cut out to save the rest of the EU Project before it is too late.

"The dream has given way to nightmare. We must face the reality that the EU itself is now threatened by the euro. The current efforts to save it are endangering the Union yet further," he writes:

There is nothing worse than having to confront the sunless mornings (matins blêmes) of an endless crisis, but we are not going to avoid it by denying the reality, and God knows denial has been for a long time, by default, the operating mode of those in charge of EU institutions.

At some time in the future, he insists, Europe's leaders should relaunch the euro, but only after they have established the necessary federalist foundations, and only among a vanguard willing to accept the full implications of a federal currency.

The call to "put the euro to sleep" for Europe's own good is a new twist. We heard a little of this from Germany's AfD anti-euro party, but they had other baggage. The Heisbourg book is a head-on challenge to the Merkel Doctrine (largely rhetorical, contradicted by Germany's actions) that a collapse of EMU would stir up all the old demons of the 20th century.

Yes, a disintegration of the euro might indeed lead to such a calamitous outcome if events are allowed spin out of control after years of festering crisis – the current course – but what kind of an argument is that? It happens only if they let it happen. It is high time somebody from within the EU elites exposed this sentimental Quatsch and misuse of history for what it is.

Prof Heisbourg is certainly an insider, a different kettle of fish from the Front National's Marine Le Pen, now leading French opinion polls with vows to kill off EMU and restore the French franc.

A product of the Quai d'Orsay, he is an ardent European federalist and long-time champion of EMU, and currently chairman of the very blue-chip International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

He says Europe's leaders have lost sight of priorities, seeming to think that the European system must be convulsed and refashioned for the needs of the euro, as if – pre-Copernican – the sun rotates around earth. "You cannot create a federation to save a currency. Money has to be at the service of the political structure, not the other way around," he says.

While he would dearly love to see the great leap forward to an EU federal superstate – which he deems necessary to render monetary union workable over time – this dream is now "pure fantasy".

Attempts to create a "European demos" have obviously failed. The nations are drifting further apart. A referendum on any such concentration of power in the EU institutions would fail almost everywhere. "Integration has reached the limits of legitimacy", he writes. The EU intrusions once tolerated as "disagreeable" have now become "insupportable".

The End of the American Dream

What if the United States now offers the worst of both worlds: high inequality with low social mobility?

by Niall Ferguson

“The United States is where great things are possible.” Those are the words of Elon Musk, whose astonishing career illustrates that the American dream can still come true.

Musk was born in South Africa but emigrated to the United States via Canada in the 1990s. After completing degrees in economics and physics at the University of Pennsylvania, he moved to Silicon Valley, intent on addressing three of the most “important problems that would most affect the future of humanity”: the Internet, clean energy, and space. Having founded PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX, he has pulled off an astonishing trifecta. At the age of 42, he is worth an estimated $2.4 billion. Way to go!

But for every Musk, how many talented young people are out there who never get those crucial lucky breaks? Everyone knows that the United States has become more unequal in recent decades. Indeed, the last presidential election campaign was dominated by what turned out to be an unequal contest between “the 1 percent” and the “47 percent” whose votes Mitt Romney notoriously wrote off.

But the real problem may be more insidious than the figures about income and wealth distribution imply. Even more disturbing is the growing evidence that social mobility is also declining in America.

The distinction is an important one. For many years, surveys have revealed a fundamental difference between Americans and Europeans. Americans have a much higher toleration for inequality. But that toleration is implicitly conditional on there being more social mobility in the United States than in Europe.

But what if that tradeoff no longer exists? What if the United States now offers the worst of both worlds: high inequality with low social mobility? And what if this is one of the hidden structural obstacles to economic recovery? Indeed, what if current monetary policy is making the problem of social immobility even worse?

This ought to be grist for the mill for American conservatives. But Republicans have flunked the challenge. By failing to distinguish between inequality and mobility, they have allowed Democrats, in effect, to equate the two, leaving the GOP looking like the party of the 1 percent—hardly an election-winning strategy.

To their cost, American conservatives have forgotten Winston Churchill’s famous distinction between left and right—that the left favors the line, the right the ladder. Democrats do indeed support policies that encourage voters to line up for entitlements—policies that often have the unintended consequence of trapping recipients in dependency on the state. Republicans need to start reminding people that conservatism is about more than just cutting benefits. It’s supposed to be about getting people to climb the ladder of opportunity.

Inequality and social immobility are, of course, related. But they’re not the same, as liberals often claim.

Let’s start with inequality. It’s now well known that in the mid-2000s the share of income going to the top 1 percent of the population returned to where it was in the days of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. The average income of the 1 percent was roughly 30 times higher than the average income of everyone else. The financial crisis reduced the gap, but only slightly—and temporarily. That is because the primary (and avowed) aim of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy since 2008 has been to push up the price of assets. Guess what? The rich own most of these. To be precise, the top 1 percent owns around 35 percent of the total net worth of the United States—and 42 percent of the financial wealth. (Note that in only one other developed economy does the 1 percent own such a large share of wealth: Switzerland.)

By restoring the stock market to where it was back before the crisis, the Fed has not achieved much of an economic recovery. But it has brilliantly succeeded in making the rich richer. And their kids.

According to Credit Suisse, around a third of the world’s thousand or so billionaires in 2012 were American. But of these, just under 30 percent were not self-made—a significantly higher proportion than for Australia and the United Kingdom. In other words, today an American billionaire is more likely to have inherited his or her wealth than a British one is.

This is just one of many indications of falling social mobility in the U.S. According to research published by the German Institute for the Study of Labor, 42 percent of American men born and raised in the bottom fifth of the income distribution end up staying there as adults, compared with just 30 percent in Britain and 28 percent in Finland. An American’s chance of getting from the bottom fifth to the top fifth is 1 in 13. For a British or Finnish boy, the odds are better: more like 1 in 8.

Romanian Gypsy Gangs and Child Slavery

Europe needs to step up and address this. The question is how.

In Europe’s capitals the site of beggars and homeless children has become all too familiar in the last few years. As European economies constrict more and more people have been reduced to scavenging for a meagre life on increasingly tough streets. With increased competition for hand-outs and people prepared to give less and less to the less fortunate the underworld that controls street crime has begun to stoop to new lows. We are all used to being approached at bars and restaurants by people selling roses for a Euro or a dollar. As annoying as it is to be interrupted multiple times during the course of a night out by an adult selling innocuous flowers or asking for spare change the apparition of a small child who should be in bed approaching your table is disturbing to say the least.

The BBC has recently screened a documentary on Britain’s Child Beggars (see below). The documentary exposes the tawdry web of child slavery that some Romanian gypsy gangs have instituted all over the continent. Their criminal activities earn millions for the gangsters that control these children and have largely built the hundreds of sumptuous palaces at the seat of the gangsters in Tanderei Romania – the Gypsy Beverly Hills. The documentary shows how young children trafficked to the UK and are trained from an early age to beg and steal and grow up thinking that this is just how things are. They have no chance of getting a proper education or ever aspiring to anything other than a thief.

 Britain’s Child Beggars

 Following the fall of communism millions of Eastern Europeans went west in search of better lives in rich Western Europe. Along with those who genuinely wanted to work honestly for better lives came the gangsters who run the sex, drug and slave industries in Europe’s capital cities. It is estimated that a child can earn up to £120,000 annually beggaring and stealing on London’s streets. The children are sometimes kidnapped from other families or are the children of the gangsters. They are sent out on the streets using threats and force to swindle, steal and beg for whatever they can get. It’s tragic but so far authorities seem reluctant or incapable to counteract it.

The response to the influx of Romanian Gypsies in Western Europe has largely been criticised for being misguided and racist.France’s Sarkozy government offered money to the Gypsies to go home to Romania. Italy’s Northern League demolished their make shift camps. Spanish police are left impotent by their child protection laws which prevent them from arresting or detaining the child thieves.

 A lot has been made of the Romanian Gypsies in the Tabloid press. Frequently they are compared to a plague and it’s not unheard of for commentators to infer that Gypsies are innately thieves. This unfair characterisation of Europe’s largest minority group ignores the reality that Gypsies come from all over Europe and not just Romania. Gypsy rights groups frequently defend their community by pointing out that Slovak, Czech and Polish gypsies are usually not involved in this sort of crime in Western Europe - largely because they are entitled to work in Western Europe under European law, without a special visa, whereas Romanian Gypsies are not. On the other hand millions of Czech, Polish and Slovak Gypsies were murdered by the Nazis during WW2 so their numbers are a lot smaller than in Romania which has the largest population of Gypsies in the world (estimated to be 2 million). Whatever the case there is no denying that Europe’s Gypsies have been tortured and discriminated against since they first arrived in the continent form Northern India 1500 years ago. The level of poverty and abuse inflicted on Gypsies clearly plays a part in their association with the criminal world.

As mentioned earlier, competition is getting tougher on the streets of Europe. The gangsters place inordinate amounts of pressure on the children to bring back more and more money to finance their extravagant lives in Tanderei and elsewhere. As a result new methods of stealing are being noticed around the continent. The following clip shows Gypsy children stealing form ATM machines and boldly pilfering from people walking down the street.  

 Gypsy Child Thieves

Human trafficking is a huge problem in our modern world. Trafficking of young children and dragging them into the dark world of organised crime is abhorrent in the extreme. It’s Dickensian and a huge problem that needs to be addressed. While it is important not to label an entire ethnic group as being involved in this murky world, the issue of large numbers of Gypsies making a living in the underworld is unavoidable. Europe needs to step up and address this. The question is how.

Down and out: the French flee a nation in despair

The failing economy and harsh taxes of François Hollande's beleaguered nation are sending thousands packing - to Britain's friendlier shores

By By Anne-Elisabeth

A poll on the front page of last Tuesday’s Le Monde, that bible of the French Left-leaning Establishment (think a simultaneously boring and hectoring Guardian), translated into stark figures the winter of François Hollande’s discontent.

More than 70 per cent of the French feel taxes are “excessive”, and 80 per cent believe the president’s economic policy is “misguided” and “inefficient”. This goes far beyond the tax exiles such as Gérard Depardieu, members of the Peugeot family or Chanel’s owners.

Worse, after decades of living in one of the most redistributive systems in western Europe, 54 per cent of the French believe that taxes — of which there have been 84 new ones in the past two years, rising from 42 per cent of GDP in 2009 to 46.3 per cent this year — now widen social inequalities instead of reducing them.

This is a noteworthy departure, in a country where the much-vaunted value of “equality” has historically been tinged with envy and resentment of the more fortunate. Less than two years ago, the most toxic accusation levied at Nicolas Sarkozy was of being “le président des riches”, favouring his yacht-sailing CEO buddies with tax breaks and sweet deals. By contrast, Hollande, the bling-free candidate, was elected on a platform of increasing state spending by promising to create 60,000 teachers’ jobs, as well as 150,000 subsidised entry-level public-service jobs for the long-time unemployed and the young — without providing for significant savings elsewhere.

By 2014, France’s public expenditure will overtake Denmark’s to become the world’s highest: 57 per cent of GDP. In effect, just to keep in the same place, like a hamster on a wheel, and ensure that the European Central Bank in Frankfurt isn’t too unhappy with us, Hollande now needs cash. Technocrats, MPs and ministers have been instructed to find every euro they can rake in — in deferred benefits, cancelled tax credits, extra levies. As they ignore the notion of making some serious cuts (mooted at regular intervals by the IMF, the OECD and even France’s own Cour des Comptes), the result can be messy.

High Debt, Low Integrity

The state has grown into a cancer – a leveling monster that cannot be restrained

BY JR NYQUIST

The government shutdown is over. It is back to business as usual – that is, the usual business of out-of-control government spending. As of this writing, the U.S. national debt is over $17 trillion which amounts to $53,764 per citizen, $148,756 per taxpayer (according to USDebtClock.org). The six largest federal budget items are, in order: (1) Medicare/Medicaid ($860 billion); (2) Social Security ($812 billion); (3) Defense/Wars ($607 billion); (4) income security ($349 billion); (5) net interest on the debt ($261 billion); and (6) federal pensions ($229 billion). These sums are astronomical, and signal financial crisis or national degeneracy or both. 

The gross government debt (federal, state and local) to GDP ratio is currently 106.9 percent. The government spending to GDP ratio is nearly 39 percent. It is a level of spending which cannot be sustained indefinitely. It would appear that our course is set to break the dollar as the world’s reserve currency or accomplish something that is, in political terms, practically impossible; for government spending is set to rise dramatically in the coming months and years. In this regard, please note the two largest budgetary items are Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security. We have good reason to expect entitlement cost increases because of the vast number of citizens approaching retirement age.

Economic historian Niall Ferguson has written a piece touching on this subject, titled, On Knowing What I and the CBO Know, in which he states that “spending on entitlements has continued to rise – and will rise inexorably in the coming years.” Ferguson has explained the reasons for this in previous books and publications. The baby boomer generation is now entering retirement. The percentage of persons over 65-years-of-age is growing steadily. This is creating an enormous entitlement crush. As Ferguson explained, “The question that matters is whether the CBO now thinks the fiscal position is going to improve or deteriorate in the future, relative to where we are today. And the answer … is that it is almost certainly going to deteriorate unless there is a significant increase in revenues or reduction in entitlement spending.”

Raising revenues is unattractive because it signifies the strangulation of the economy. Cutting entitlements is unattractive because large segments of the population now depend on those entitlements to live. The grim alternatives are plainly set before us. Ferguson concludes that “entitlement spending is indeed the main reason for the projected increase in the federal debt….” And for all that, there is no easy way out. Even the best institutions, Ferguson noted in an interview, tend to deteriorate over time – including those based on the U.S. Constitution.

With regard to the roots of this crisis Ferguson has written a book titled The Great Degeneration: How Institutions and Economies Die which George Melloan praised in The Wall Street Journal as “A Jeremiad to Heed.” The prophet Jeremiah was right, after all, and so is Ferguson, says Melloan. Previously an optimist about the United States and its economy, Ferguson was sobered by the events of 2008. “The West is stagnating,” his book admits, “and not only in economic terms.” Ferguson asks why this is happening and who is doing it.

This question touches on a key that opens many doors, where the erosion of integrity long ago prefigured a series of intellectual and moral indecencies. It is not simply a matter of repairing our indebtedness; for this indebtedness merely serves as an outward symptom of failed vigilance, of deeply ingrained reckless tendencies. “Certainly there are few precedents for the scale of debt in the West today,” says Ferguson. “This is only the second time in American history that combined public and private debt has exceeded 250 percent of GDP.”

Why has this happened? In brief, the state has grown into a cancer – a leveling monster that cannot be restrained. It cannot be restrained because it is the product of our own making. We are the authors of this profligacy; and I fear that in our present state of degeneracy we are more likely to join the party of plunder than rally to fiscal sanity. Who is bold enough to propose austerity at the present time? How many baby boomers, now retiring, would readily forego their Medicare and Social Security in order to save the federal budget?

The answer must be a very low number indeed.

What Do We Expect To Happen?

What we can expect to happen generally happens, as the causal chain cannot be disrupted by wishful thinking

by Charles Hugh-Smith

If I go to Las Vegas and gamble with abandon, what do I expect to happen? If I wander alone through a tough part of town waving my iPhone around, what do I expect to happen? If I insist on hiking up a muddy rain forest trail in street clothes in the pouring rain, what do I expect to happen?

We all know what is likely to happen: In Las Vegas, we will lose our stake; in the tough part of town, our iPhone will be stolen, and on the tropical trail, we will get soaking wet.

These consequences are easily predictable. What we can expect to happen generally happens, as the causal chain cannot be disrupted by wishful thinking.

Yet when we re-elect the same politicos who have failed miserably for years, we somehow expect they will magically succeed in providing leadership the next time around. When we eat visibly unhealthy packaged junk food that is engineered to trigger our reward centers with massive doses of fat, salt and sugar, we somehow expect there will be no consequences of eating this "food."

We sit in front of digital devices all day and eliminate physical fitness from our schools, yet we expect there will be no consequences from this inactivity.

We create trillions of dollars from thin air and borrow trillions of additional dollars into existence, yet we expect there will be no consequences from this unprecedented monetary and credit expansion.

We borrow a third of all government expenditures, yet we expect there will be no consequences from this monumental dependence on public debt to maintain the Status Quo.

We buy the cheapest quality goods, yet complain about the poor quality.

We pursue a plan of borrowing our way to prosperity, yet we are flummoxed that prosperity is elusive.

We push everyone with any assets into risky asset bubbles with zero-interest rates, yet we are surprised when asset bubbles pop.

What do you expect to happen? The causal chain cannot be disrupted by wishful thinking. Bubbles will pop, and increasingly leveraged, fragile systems will crash. Hoping causal consequences will magically vanish is a strategy doomed to catastrophe.