GOP destroys economy, wants Libertarian vote

Google Paddypower and you’ll find that Irish bookies are betting 2 to 1 that the pro-choice party wins and the pro-life-after-death prohibitionist party loses. Naturally the losers are screaming to the libertarians for help as their hulk flounders. The same thing happened in 1844.

The high-tariff Whigs claimed to be against slavery in speeches to abolitionists. But nobody believed anything a tax-and-spend looter politician swore. Back then, before teevee, any fool knew that the dishonest–them that believed in thievery and robbery–had no problem with lying either. Here is one such rebuke from the Hartford Times in October of 1844:

The Liberty Party and Cassius M Clay–Since the speech of the Pilgrim nephew of the great embodiment in the city, the Liberty Party has held three public meetings to take into consideration his proposal to them to abandon their separate organization and go over in a body to the support of Henry Clay; and they have met this proposition in just the manner that every rational man supposed they would. The consummate folly and impudence of the Whigs in trying to make it appear that their candidate is worthy of the votes of the abolitionists, is the best of evidence that they consider that the success of their causes depends upon those votes. But they cannot get one of them. Abolitionists know, as well as the Whigs themselves, that the system of slavery never had a bolder and more uncompromising advocate than Henry Clay. They know that he declared in his place in the Senate, not six years ago, that he should continue to oppose “Any scheme whatever of the emancipation, gradual or immediate;” and that the liberty of the black man could only be established by “subverting the union,” thus echoing back the unholy sentiment of a distinguished southerner, that “slavery is the corner-stone of our republic.”

So the Republicans completely destroyed the economy in 2007, yet vow to continue to support civil asset-forfeiture looting. Their platform vows never to repeal such looting, or the press gangs of military conscription–to say nothing of the communist manifesto income tax plank of 1848 which became the 16th Amendment. But they have the gall to whine to libertarians that as comrades-in-arms “we” ought to support their murderous and destructive policies because Creation Science prophesies that the other looters will, in the future, do worse than send federal killers after us for prohibition and cause crashes as in 1929, 1998, 2007, with a flash crash in 2010. With friends like God’s Own Prohibitionists, who needs enemies?

Farfetched? The exact same thing happened in 1929. Prohibition and The Crash details the mechanism whereby Republicans handed Herbert Hoover the Jones Five & Ten Law and Willebrandt’s Tax and asset-forfeiture strategies. By September 2, investors could see what was coming… LIVE on Amazon Kindle, with a free app that makes a cellphone into a history book.

Prohibition and The Crash, on Amazon Kindle

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GOP & Dem platforms: continue asset forfeiture

2011 DemoGOP forfeitures

Asset forfeiture is armed robbery by police and federal agents. This program was the primary cause of the Crash of 2007 because such looting invariably causes economic depression. These takings were the primary cause of the 1929 Crash and Banking Panics of the Great Depression, as well as the 1987 crash and ensuing Depression. Here are the 2016 asset-forfeiture planks of main political parties.

Republican Platform on Asset Forfeiture: Civil asset forfeiture was originally intended as a way to cripple organized crime through the seizure of property used in a criminal enterprise. Regrettably, it has become a tool for unscrupulous law enforcement officials, acting without due process, to profit by destroying the livelihood of innocent individuals, many of whom never recover the lawful assets taken from them. When the rights of the innocent can be so easily violated, no one’s rights are safe. We call on Congress and state legislatures to enact reforms to protect law-abiding citizens against abusive asset forfeiture tactics.

Democratic Platform on Asset Forfeiture: And we will reform the civil asset forfeiture system to protect people and remove perverse incentives for law enforcement to “police for a profit.”

Libertarian Platform on Asset Forfeiture: Eminent domain, civil asset forfeiture, governmental limits on profits, governmental production mandates, and governmental controls on prices of goods and services (including wages, rents, and interest) are abridgements of such fundamental rights.

BOTH looter parties clearly intend to keep allowing the armed robbery of individuals by police under color of law. They merely cluck their intentions to rob less brutally in the future. Neither party admits the crucial role of such confiscations and takings in precipitating major financial disasters costing trillions of dollars. Only the Libertarian Party of Principle seeks to stop police from acting in the capacity of burglars, robbers and highwaymen–and destroying the national economy in their misguided zeal.

Ayn Rand witnessed the Crash and Depression and later wrote: “But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law—-men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims—-then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.” Milton Friedman also witnessed the disaster and in Free To Choose noted that the Socialist platform of 1928 became law, despite their getting almost no votes.

Just today an elderly Brazilian couple in their seventies unable to speak English wrote to ask for bank statement translations, why? Because US Customs agents stole their life savings under civil asset forfeiture and they must now prove themselves innocent by deadline after deadline, for the looters allow no appeal rights. If they miss a deadline they lose their life savings. I referred them to the Institute for Justice.

By voting libertarian I am proudly multiplying the power of my vote to repeal bad laws and protect individual rights. Why not join me for a change?

Translation services, and my Brazilian blog.

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Golpe e Embaixada

Pouca gente reparou no que Roberto Requião do Paraná disse sobre os motivos do golpe que derrubou Dilma. Ele perguntou:

Por que cargas d’água estão pedindo o impedimento da Presidente? Será que é para atender às embaixadas dos grandes países, o interesse da banca e a miserável fisiologia que domina o Congresso Nacional?

Vejamos o cronograma:

1. Em 2005 a agente americana Liliana Ayalde foi expulsa da Bolívia por espionagem.
2. Em maio de 2010 Bradley Manning vaza no Wikileaks informações sobre como os americanos usam a ONU para exportar o mesmo proibicionismo saqueador de ativos que demoliu a economia americana em 2007.
3. Em 31 de outubro de 2010 a presidenta Dilma foi eleita, com posse em 2011.
4. Em junho de 2012 o presidente Fernando Lugo do Paraguai foi deposto por impeachment.
5. Em 20 de maio de 2013 Edward Snowden revela que espiões americanos escutam as chamadas telefônicas dos cartolas e políticos brasileiros, entre outros.
6. Em junho de 2013 eclodiram as manifestações americanizadas no Brasil.
7. Em 1º de agosto de 2013, Dilma assinou a Lei 12485 que inclui profilaxia contra gravidez e perícia de DNA para identificar estupradores ou pais biológicos–mesmo se importantes e abastados–donos de trustes ou contas bancárias na Suíça.
8. Nesse mesmo dia 1º de agosto de 2013 o senado do grande país americano, dominado pelo partido republicano evangélico e antiaborto, confirmou Liliana Ayalde como embaixadora dos EUA para o Brasil!
9. Ayalde chegou ao Brasil no dia 16 de setembro de 2013, mas apesar dessa Exterminadora, a presidenta derrotou o Aécio Helipóptero, amiguinho do ex-diretor da CIA, George Bush pai, e foi reeleita.
10. A Portaria 415 implementando as proteções tipo profilaxia contra gravidez e perícia de DNA foi aprovada 21 de maio de 2014. Como nos EUA, os fanáticos enlouqueceram…
11. A Portaria 415 foi revogada a mando do Eduardo Cunha em 28 maio de 2014! Em 4 dias o Bispo do Nacional Socialismo arrastou o Brasil de volta à Idade das Trevas, para acompanhar as ditaduras maometanas–antes de ser expulso do Congresso.
12. Consta que Ayalde foi embora com o golpe em andamento, mas voltou, quiçá para tentar salvar o Cunha.
13. Em 29 de agosto Roberto requião discursa: “Esta crise que nós vivemos não é uma crise só do Brasil. Ela começa na Europa, com a reação do Estado social que surge contra o nazismo. Estado social do direito das mulheres, dos trabalhadores.”
14. A presidenta eleita por maioria em 3 eleições foi golpeada em 30 de agosto de 2016 pelos aliados do Cunha.

Pois é… Vai que foi tudo coincidência.

Y2k Global Warming Spoiler Vote

Thanks to RealClimateScience.com

Ralph Nader’s Green spoiler votes in the 2000 election added up to 5 times the difference between winner and loser in the popular vote count. Victorious, George Waffen Bush dedicated his entire second term to ramping up federal-state asset forfeiture “sharing” in the proceeds of prohibitionist armed robbery. Green Party ideologues meanwhile ramped up the DEMs’ approach to climate data forgery. The result is shown in the graph.
This illustrates the effect of two main drivers: parasitical greed coupled with social pressure affecting opinions among the gullible majority, and the impressive power of small-party spoiler votes.

The Solomon Asch experiment proved that 3/4 of educated Americans will lie simply to follow the crowd. Indeed 2 out of 3 people will lie consistently out of simple simian mimicry. To start the ball rolling the DEMs had only to point to the Creation Scientists shaping Republican ideology. Anyone can observe in that the dangers of mindless mysticism exercising social pressure. Such pressure invariably justifies sending men with guns to brand citizens as felons–and shoot a few for good measure–over something as banal as hemp. With the GOP clearly dominated by violent superstition, the fakes and ex-scientists, by comparison, look like champions of scientific methodology.

This was precisely what happened from 1919 through 1933. Back then it was beer (a felony) that justified shootings, asset forfeiture and mass-jailing of the population. The losing party pushed the Kyoto protocol as a mechanism to transfer money from industrial nations to communist dictatorships, and from private enterprise to academic parasites.

In 1892 a Populist vote 6 times the gap between the winning and losing party vote tallies enabled three looter Congressmen to enact Communist Manifesto plank 2 into federal law and use the that tax to exacerbate financial collapse into a lengthy depression. This was how the 2000 election results allowed fanatical prohibitionist mystics to again destroy the economy, while environmental totalitarians impressed grants and subsidies parasites into an army of data-falsifying political operators. This sort of thing always happens in any contest between two factions, both of which lie, steal and coerce as a matter of preference. Both the Dem and GOP believe in taking by force what does not belong to them. THIS is honesty?

Your Libertarian vote can either free the Republican party from the thrall of religious national socialists or pave the way for its replacement by the LP.org

Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian blog…

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God’s Own Prohibitionists

See original newspapers on Google News Archive Search

Here is a sample of Prohibition Party rhetoric from 1892, before their complete takeover of the Republican Party 40 years later. Note the resemblance to Mohammedan Sharia Law.
The Youngstown Vindicator, July 5, 1892 1… GRAVE CHARGES–Made by the Prohibs in their Convention–THEY DENOUNCE THE SPOILSMEN–… Following are the resolutions as adopted by the convention: The Prohibitionists of Mahoning county, in convention assembled, acknowledge Almighty God as the source of all true government, and his law as the standard to which all civil laws should conform.

We adopt the principles set forth in the national convention at Cincinatti June 29–recognizing that prohibition of the liquor traffic is the dominant issue before the American people, and we invite to full party fellowship all those who are with us agreed that the Prohibition party can and will destroy the traffic if in power. (more…)

This religious government party achieved a record 2.2% of the popular vote in an election the Democrats won by a mere 3.3%. This made the T-totalitarian Sharia Law vote a force to reckon with in that election. The People’s Party, pressing for the Communist Manifesto income tax, won 8.51% of the vote. That amounts to 2.5 times the difference between winning party and losing party. To give you an idea of the power of these third-party votes, within two years that looter party’s income tax was the law of the land, though no such tax was in the platform of either Kleptocracy party in 1892. In another 27 years Prohibitionist Sharia Law would be enshrined in the US Constitution alongside Communist Manifesto plank 2–much to the detriment of the Bill of Rights. These two usurpations, the communist 16th and the protestant 18th Amendments  directly caused the complete collapse of the national economy into a Great Depression of Hoovervilles.

Compare the 1892 Prohibitionists with this language from the 2016 GOP platform:

Every time we sing, “God Bless America,” we are asking for help. Strong families, depending upon God and one another… A young person’s ability to succeed in school must be based on his or her God-given talent and motivation… the best stewards of our country’s God-given natural resources. The progress made over the last three decades against drug abuse is eroding, whether for cultural reasons or for lack of national leadership. Mandatory minimum sentencing became an important tool for keeping them off the streets. Their (puppet juntas’) sacrifice and suffering must not be betrayed by the accession to power of murderers and drug lords. …our southwestern border at the hands of drug cartels and other gangs…

Just as in the 1920s and 30s, when fanatical mystics used the violence of law to make light beer a felony, dry killers murdered children and adults, their impunity guaranteed by mock trial just like today. The glucose and yeast trust funded prohibition to eliminate distillers, vintners and brewers as middlemen. Today the booze trust, organized fanaticism and corrupt political soft machines inflate and recycle confiscated drugs and other assets into campaign coffers. Your Libertarian vote–worth five to forty regular votes in law-changing clout–can stop the berserkers and restore peace and freedom.

Which will it be? Actual change or another wasted vote?  

Why not delve into the failure of Prohibitionism that caused the 1929 Crash? Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 does exactly that, matching newspaper accounts against stock market reactions and competing theories. It is live on Amazon Kindle for the price of a pint.

My other-language blog is amigra.us

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The 25% v: Social Pressure

Scientific American NOV 1955

The Solomon Asch Experiment proved with the finality of a physics lab that 3/4 of educated Americans will lie about the length of a line just to go along with a crowd. That makes them easy prey for Republicans, Democrats and other coercive demagogues. This measured aspect of ordinary human nature makes it all the more crucial that those able to reason by reality exercise integrity and judgment in voting and discussing platform planks. Only one in four individuals is resistant to the influence of social pressure in overriding objective individual judgment. 

The experiment asked an individual to say which of three lines matched an original line off to the side. With no prompting, booing or hissing, three out of four ordinary college students lied rather than tell the truth to make their answer like everyone else’s. Two out of three do this consistently on average.  The same experiment also proved that a lone dissenter was enough to improve objectivity of choice by a solid 25% (p. 6).

Every time I vote libertarian I am mathematically certain that I am changing bad laws 6 to 36 (or 10,000 as in 1972) times as effectively as the same-old-kleptocracy alternative. When others puzzle at my bumper sticker or see my previous LP votes recorded in history, they will shed 75% of the cowardice that keeps them from passing independent judgment.

“Subjects conformed to group pressure only one-fourth as often
in the presence of a supporting partner.” Remember that on election day!

This spoiler vote effect is a win-win situation for me, just as opposing the libertarian platform planks is a lose-lose proposition for prohibitionist kleptocracy candidates. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson (just one among the hundreds of LP candidates running in this election) is now polling HIGHER than the entire US Congress!

The Prohibition Party sets the agenda for the GOP, and the Communist Party USA sets the agenda for the Democratic Party. Visit their websites and see. There is but one nonviolent way to counteract their social pressure guiding application of the force of law as deadly coercion. That option is to support the political party that defends individual rights rather than drink the cyanide Kool-Aid altruism pushed by stale ideologies of Left and Right. Are these the people you want making decisions about government use of force on YOU?

More on second-hand opinions: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/second-handers.html
More on The Few, The Independent, The Libertarian Party: http://www.jhenryphillips.com/caseforlp07.html
O mesmo argumento em português: https://libertariantranslator.wordpress.com/2015/10/13/em-defesa-do-voto-libertario/
Isso de decidir com mente alheia em português chamamos de “efeito manada”.

If this helped you understand how bad policy decisions are made, remember that next time you need a translator.

Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian blog…

 

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Patriot Enabling Acts

Enabling Act in 1927 America meant legislation allowing a municipality to choose the jurisdiction of a neighboring county. The following year, the Republican Party adopted a War on Drinks plank.

President Herbert Hoover used tax laws as a bludgeon to enforce religious sumptuary laws under the 18th Amendment, changed Enabling into Looting–and destroyed the economy in the process. Hoover also sought to curb German heroin exports, a disputed market that lay at the root of WWI. But Germany owed war reparations to everyone, so Hoover declared a Moratorium on payments, which allowed the Reich to skip payments and build up armaments instead of throttling the traffic. Germany’s Christian Nationalists chose Adolf Hitler after Hoover’s defeat, and the Reichstag was soon ablaze with fire and patriotic sentiment. The Enabling Act was the NSDAP’s license to violate individual rights. Here are some highlights of the speech:

By its decision to carry out the political and moral cleansing of our public life, the Government is creating and securing the conditions for a really deep and inner religious life. The advantages for the individual which may be derived from compromises with atheistic organizations do not compare in any way with the consequences which are visible in the destruction of our common religious and ethical values.

The Government will treat all other denominations with objective and impartial justice. It cannot, however, tolerate allowing membership of a certain denomination or of a certain race being used as a release from all common legal obligations, or as a blank cheque for unpunishable behavior, or for the toleration of crimes. [The national Government will allow and confirm to the Christian denominations the enjoyment of their due influence in schools and education.] And it will be concerned for the sincere cooperation between Church and State.

The struggle against the materialistic ideology and for the erection of a true people’s community (Volksgemeinschaft) serves as much the interests of the German nation as of our Christian faith. …The national Government, seeing in Christianity the unshakable foundation of the moral and ethical life of our people, attaches utmost importance to the cultivation and maintenance of the friendliest relations with the Holy See. …The rights of the churches will not be curtailed; their position in relation to the State will not be changed.

After Christian Nationalists in America began violently meddling in the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, religiously devout persons no less fanatical attacked The Pentagon and civilian buildings. The result of U.S. voting by people who rejected libertarian non-aggression was the same as in Germany, where voters preferred folksy Bible-quoting politicians to non-violent “liberals.”** Buildings were soon ablaze with jet fuel and fiery patriotic sentiment, and the Enabling Act was enlarged and recycled into the Patriot Act.. The Bush Jr. Administration even threw in a 1929-style Asset-Forfeiture Crash and Depression, to round out the picture. This was the result of expanded search-and-seizure powers becoming a license to loot under law as interpreted by the Kleptocracy and its courts. Mass wiretaps and surveillance, star chambers, kidnapping pens in Communist Cuba–all or these things are the result of fanatical mysticism grabbing the helm of government. American voters will, in November, have the opportunity to vote for freedom and against isolationist policing of foreign sovereignties. The rest of the world is waiting for our example.

** Liberal in German parlance at the time meant a watered-down form of mixed-economy libertarianism, as in dictionaries today. Hitler’s party made the word an epithet which the defeated GOP picked up and began hurling in 1932. To this, communists and socialists responded with whoops of joy!

Why not delve into what sort of voting caused the 1929 Crash? Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 does exactly that, matching newspaper accounts against stock market reactions and competing theories. It is live on Amazon Kindle for the price of a pint.

My other-language blog, Expatriotas.blogspot is amigra.us

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For intelligible translation or fluent interpreting in many subject areas in Spanish, Portuguese and English, get in touch.

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Faraway Targets

 

Irish bookies are betting 2.2 to 1 the Republican Party loses this election, as it has lost all other elections since the Bush Asset-Forfeiture Crash and Depression. This is one of the two parties that bombed civilians in places like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, including Aleppo.

The Libertarian Party is proud to our support for peace and non-aggression, and we do not hang stuffed trophy heads of Semitic or Asian victims on the walls or carve celebratory notches into weapons. The USA was not a Christian National Socialist nation until the Eisenhower-Nixon Administration and Congress violated the First Amendment to mystify our currency, postal monopoly stamps, the Bellamy Pledge of Allegiance and government buildings, imitating the example set by Germany’s Third Reich.

This reversed 1797 treaty assurances given to Mohammedan nations that the US was NOT a religious State. That transformation also frightened the Soviet communist religious dictatorship (yes, communism is a religion) with the notion that Christian National Socialism had again taken over These States as during the Herbert Hoover Administration, which subsidized the rise of the NSDAP in Germany through the Moratorium on war debts and reparations in 1931.

Today we see daily reminders that that religious dictatorships on the other side of the planet, much like what is proposed in the GOP platform despite Supreme Court rulings and the urgings of nonfanatical clergy and lay associations, are museums of medieval superstition, torture, assassination, genocide, prohibitionism, financial collapse and war.

We want no part of the Crusades versus Jihad mentality that motivates God’s Own Prohibitionists and the Islamic State alike, and we are happy to recommend innocuous desuetude and avoid all entanglements there.

Need a translator?

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Gary and Willie, Terry and Frankie

The New Galahad, by HL Mencken, 1924

My agents in attendance upon the so-called moving pictures tell me that persons who frequent such shows begin to tire of Western films … It can’t be that movie censorship is to blame, for the same thing is visible in the field of belles lettres…. What is needed, obviously, is a new hero for the infantry of the land, for if one is not quickly supplied there is some danger that the boys will begin admiring Y.M.C.A. secretaries, crooked members of the Cabinet and lecturers on sex hygiene. In this emergency I nominate the bootlegger not, of course, the abject scoundrel who peddles bogus Scotch in clubs and office buildings, but the dashing, romantic, defiant fellow who brings the stuff up from Bimini. He is the true heir, not only of the old-time Indian fighters and train-robbers, but also of the tough and barnacled deep-water sailors, now no more. He faces the perils of the high seas in a puny shallop, and navigates the worst coast in the world in contempt of the wind and storm. Think of him lying out there on wild nights in winter, with the waves piling mountain-high and the gale standing his crazy little craft on her beam! Think of him creeping in in his motorboat on Christmas Eve, risking his life that the greatest of Christian festivals may be celebrated in a Christian and respectable manner! Think of him soaked and freezing, facing his exile and its hardships uncomplainingly, saving his money that his old mother may escape the poor-farm, that his wife may have her operation for gall-stones, that his little children may be decently fed and clad, and go to school regularly, and learn the principles of Americanism!

This brave lad is not only the heir of Jesse James and Ned Buntline; he is also the heir of John Hancock and all of the other heroes who throttled the accursed Hun in 1776. All the most gallant among them were smugglers, and in their fragile craft they brought in not only rum but also liberty. The Revolution was not only against the person of the Potsdam tyrant, George III; it was also, and especially, against harsh and intolerable laws the worst of them the abhorrent Stamp Act. But was the Stamp Act worse than Prohibition? I leave it to any fair man. Prohibition, in fact, is a hundred times as foul, false, oppressive and tyrannical. If the Stamp Act was worth a Revolution, then Prohibition is worth a massacre and an earthquake. Well it has already bred its Hancocks, and soon or late, no doubt, it will breed its Molly Pitchers, Paul Reveres and Mad Anthony Waynes. Liberty, driven from the land by the Methodist White Terror, has been given a refuge by the hardy boys of the Rum Fleet. In their bleak and lonely exile they cherish her and keep her alive. Some day, let us hope, they will storm the coast, slit the gullets of her enemies, and restore her to her dominion. The lubbers of the land have limber necks; their blood runs pale and yellow. But on the roaring deep there are still men who are colossally he, and when the bugle calls they will not fail.

Here are the heroes gallant, lawless, picturesque, adventurous, noble. Let the youth of the land be taught to venerate them. They make the cowboys who linger in the movies look like puny Christian Endeavorers; they are the only Olympians left in a decayed and flabby land, or in the seas that hedge it ’round. Who will be the first poet to sing them?

—With apologies to Terence Druggan and Frankie Lake, whose March, 1928 indictments by income tax looters caused a major stock market flash crash. Follow their exploits in the Chicago Tribune online.

Read pro-American compulsory racial-eugenics appeals touting prohibition and collectivism in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)

Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian blog…

Clarity isn’t oversimplification

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Income tax depression 1893-98

Republican Senator Justin Smith Morrill of Vermont was the same congressman who wrote the protective tariff act passed in May of 1860–five months before Abraham Lincoln was elected. To States that had nullified the “Tariff of Abominations” in 1828, the Morrill tariff was casus belli for secession and Civil War.

Fast-forward 33 years into the major monetary crisis caused by excessive coinage of silver. In 1892, fully 8.5% of the popular vote went Populist, and elected 3 congressmen who were in effect communists. Elder statesman Morrill, surrounded by economic collapse tried in 1893-4 to stave off the advancing “British income tax” phalanx while repealing the accursed Silver Purchase Act and assuaging Chinese fears of mass deportation. Yellow fever at the Panama Canal works had France in a panic; Italy was shaken by stock fraud, and an armed revolt, complete with naval warship shellings, rocked Brazil. Morrill first warned against the income tax–passed in England to make up for insufficiency of revenue under “free trade”–as an example of “desperate schemes of taxation, which here under a republican form of government are odious and endurable only in an overmastering exigency of a great national war.” But President Cleveland had in 1888 shocked global mixed economies by mentioning the “communism of combined wealth and capital… which insidiously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions.” Populist tax advocates snarled.

Morrill snarled back at the revenue-only tariff and pointed out that in warlike Europe, following the French Terror:

“Pitt introduced the British income tax during the Napoleonic war. After the peace it was repealed on the ground that it ought to be exclusively reserved for times of war; and when re-imposed in 1842 it was promised that it should be only temporary.”**

He made apologies for the 1862 Civil War income tax, but called it “the most of obnoxious of all the war taxes.” Morrill pointed out that of the $347 million it raised, only $11 million were collected in the Confederate States. This, of course, only amplified Southern appreciation of an income tax they themselves had never felt.

Morrill remarked

 “The income tax bill will first levy 2% on all dividends of railroads, and second will levy the same amount of tax upon their indebtedness, that is, upon the interest due to be paid on their mortgage bonds. (…) The income tax bill, by its proposed seizure of so many important objects of taxation upon which the several state governments have hitherto been largely dependent for a considerable part, in some states for the whole of their annual support, will prove a serious invasion of the sources upon which they now largely base their taxation. Nearly every state imposes a tax upon the real estate and personal property of its citizens, especially upon their stock in railroads and banks, mills and factories, and their coal, iron, copper, gold, and silver mines, their stone, slate and marble companies, their debts and bonds due and collectible. All these sources and all corporations which yield dividends or interest are now to be squeezed and stripped first by the national government, and then be subjected to a second stripping by the states.”

By his analysis,

“The small fish are to be caught in an income net from which the big fish can leap out. The widow’s mite as well as the sole income of the orphan is to be diminished by the government of 66 million people heretofore claimed to be the most prosperous of the world.”

Alas, the President in 1894 allowed the communist income tax to become law without his signature rather than invite the “communism of pelf” likely to result from a protective tariff. Nowadays we call all such things a “mixed economy,” shaken, not stirred.

The depression worsened, and the Supreme court was in desperation summoned to toss it out despite its mesmerizing influence on ignorant voters. The lesson in all of this for thoughtful libertarians is that “free trade” was Morrill’s epithet for a “revenue-only tariff.” No problems existed then that could not have been resolved by cutting spending, letting unproductive hands shift for themselves, and–in the case of England–forbearing from attacking China or Egypt. The individual income tax brings predatory and collectivized government coercion to bear on that smallest of all minorities–the human being.

To wean governments of the communist income tax it would perhaps be best to recognize that the revenue tariff is the familiar equivalent of a toll or user fee. A tariff makes possible Coast Guard inspection and quarantine of berserker terrorists plus naval exclusion of hostile nuclear and biological weapons. There ain’t no such thing as a free trade.  The exclusion of coercion from the marketplace is its necessary logical antecedent, and, like energy, involves a cost.

The tariff is a handy fallback position for repeal of income taxes until a less coercive solution can be fashioned. What history has taught us is that importing income taxes out of The Terror, the Opium Wars and The Communist Manifesto has not been a happy or noble experiment. It has led to panics, crashes and depressions, all of them harbingers of the ruin of nations caused by the visible and unproductive hands Adam Smith warned us against in 1776.

** The reader will carefully note the value of promises made by looter politicians, and kindly remember that in November. 

Get the complete story in Prohibition and The Crash on Amazon Kindle in two languages

I also produce books and articles in Portuguese, using Brazilian historical sources at http://www.expatriotas.blogspot.com or amigra.us

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