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The Powerless Producer

As a capitalist I believe there are many kinds of producers – honest producers. I have been asking people a lot of questions to develop a train of thought on this issue. I’ve been spending a lot of time with nurses. Some of them think they should own the world, but these producers themselves usually realize that they don’t pull as much weight in society as an engineer who designs medical equipment and helps a million people at once.

Yet, in a nationalized health system ruled by the state we must realize there are public servants who are producers. Their importance is often undervalued and I am sure there are many Government paid workers who are quite productive who have been ejected from the price system by the evil wishes of voters.

The good thing about psychiatric wards and being sexually abused is that whenever I rant about socialism and some poor fool claims that money is the root of all evil, I have an argument as fit as Francisco D’Anconnia from Atlas Shrugged. Money did not molest me.

Yet, worthless catchphrases like “Money is the root of all evil,” among many others are allowing the hidden producers, nationalized by a culture that believes that nurses are not like other people but are obligated to be nurses. The only way they can get a payrise is a strike, the only way they can get recognition is limited. Overvalued or undervalued – that is not my question.

There is a bigger loss than personal income in a socialist state. There is a loss of the dreams of the person who had to work at a welfare office, for the Government created that job, backed by the devaluation of the money of others.

We lose income, we lose freedoms, but most of all there are people on the public payroll who are no longer valued honestly and lose the respect of other people. I write this because there are far too many conservatives today who hate public workers, and not their neighbours who demand that these medical professionals be slaves.

To some an Australia without a public health system would be cruel. Yet, you end up paying for the following.

  • Any idiot who falls off a ladder because they didn’t make three points of contact at all times.
  • Every teenager taking risks with skateboards and such, become a cost.
  • Many drug related illnesses.
  • The costs of smokers.

Yet instead of blaming the socialist system of non-accountability they blame the idiots, the risktakers, the junkies, and the smokers.

This bothers me a lot because it appears a lack of seperation of the medical system and the state is the fastest road to serfdom possible. Within my lifetime I can imagine and even bet (if I were a betting man) that these and many more freedoms will be lost in the attainment of a false freedom and materialistic liberty (confiscation) – just to make a public health system fair.

Yet realistically the only fair system is capitalism. The Australian Commonwealth Government and all her states must sell these hospitals for freedom to exist. People must pay for their own mistakes, and their own misfortunes.

I can smile however as at least I have met public health system nurses, who are virtually slaves in how their labours are priced who agree with all of this. Socialism has to end, its been roughly one hundred years, and it needs to stop before we are all slaves and not just our nurses and doctors.

What makes a Government good?

Recently someone on a forum asked a rather typical question but it interested me nonetheless, it was “What makes a Government good?” The following is my answer to that question…

To me a good Government is one that remains within its bounds. Governments have to execute power by the use of force in some form or another. The Government should be restricted to protecting its citizens rights via a court system that can overrule any democratic body through a Bill of Rights. I think this is obvious to anyone, that we need a self-limiting Government, even socialists realize this.

Yet what is the nature of a Mans rights? I prefer to think that the nature of mans rights has to be derived from reality. As human beings we are born only with volitional consciousness – to live we have to act. To survive we must act as individuals and this is something with which we are born equally – we all have this ability to act except in the rare case of a birth defect or whatnot. Yet, even a mentally challenged individual has and requires the ability to act and to think freely to attain happiness.

To act individuals need to be free from the interference of other individuals and this requires objective law and police. This also requires some form of taxes. My preferred taxation would be to treat civil law and contracts as a service requiring a fee of the individuals using it to uphold agreements in advance of dispute. Also, land taxes to protect the general population. Not paying taxes for that technically puts others at risk – so as such if the money is used honestly to fund basic policing and the military it isn’t a violation of rights but the cost of having them at all.

Also to act individuals require property rights for the obvious reason that for a person to act in the physical world they need tools and other material possessions. Without property rights a man is not free to act at all as his hands are forbidden to hold anything without permission – and any system that requires that form of permission essentially makes property of people. A system focused to the needs of a human being is one that allows an individual to gain a value through trade and keep it. We are all born with a value and that is our minds, our arms, and our legs.

The only thing socialism does is divert the effort of millions of individuals through a central body with a far more limited span of intelligence and a far slimmer view of the citizens. This is why central planners are blind and the basis of the socialist calculation problem. Whenever the Government acts it is at the expense of the people so when socialists try to reallocate wealth it diverts individuals into being taxmen rather than accountants, social workers instead of psychologists, and so on. Anyone who thinks that socialism can work is avoiding the fact that it all operates on brute force. Oh the irony when the left bitch about the Iraq War.

As Ayn Rand so eloquently and simply put it: ‘Foggy metaphors, sloppy images, unfocused poetry, and equivocations—such as “A hungry man is not free”—do not alter the fact that only political power is the power of physical coercion.’

Economic Stupidity and Journalism

I made a startling discovery today that on its own speaks for itself. In the article Dollar rout ‘stemmed by Reserve Bank the author made the following statement:

The Aussie has fallen about 11 per cent against the US dollar since the end of April and some currency strategists believe it has further to fall.

And this contradictory statement:

While forecasting currency movements is a tough task, strategists believe the Aussie’s decline is either close to or at the bottom.

I often comment that journalists seem to completely devoid of economic knowledge. This journalist however has gone to the extent of avoiding representing any position by subtly separating statements that support two contradictory outcomes by a few paragraphs.

Not just is this journalist economically illiterate but logically inept as well.

A Real Crackdown on Crime

In Australia currently there is a rise in violent crime, organized crime, theft, drug trafficking, and more. Prisons are overcrowded and so the Magistrates and Justices deal out weak punishments and fines, and people commit even more crime. Meanwhile, our police are kept busy violating people’s property rights, making the roads more dangerous because of over-policing and poor road rules that create bad driving instead of doing what they are meant to do: protect the citizens of the Commonwealth of Australia.

As a result of this drug prices are higher and so people commit theft to obtain them. The victims of these crimes often never receive any justice because instead of dealing with things like theft the police are ordered to make the drug prices higher by committing theft and property destruction (in a moral not legal sense obviously) of peoples drugs and other property in the process. Families are ripped apart and people are literally terrorized by law enforcement in the quest to stop illicit substances.

Drug users addicted to substances tend to find after police raids that prices are suddenly obscenely high while they have the same level of addiction. Crazed users of heroin and ice commit burglaries and even assaults and murders against ordinary people as a result of the state meddling with supply and demand in an area of great moral hazard.

With more resources policing drugs the value of them increasing means that crime becomes more organized and well funded.  Carl Williams certainly wouldn’t have had the means to fund the killing of competitors and rivals with ecstasy sold on the open market with all participants protected by the law. Instead, the money drug users buy their drugs with end up in the hands of a miniature feudal empire of warring dealers who then start to buy things like weapons to protect their domain.

Simply, the attitude behind the war on drugs is that to stop drugs we must use brute force and devote law enforcement resources to stealing drug dealers property and roughing them up rather than a civilized route. The legalization of substances leaves only one terrain left with which to fight: reason. The fact is that drug use is damaging to people’s health and livelihood. Cigarettes are legal and far more addictive than most other drugs yet most people manage to quit smoking entirely on their own with only the motivation of good health. I believe that most people avoid drugs regardless of their legality for the same reasons the majority of us don’t smoke and drink responsibly.

Whether people realize it or not being rational and responsible is beneficial to their own existence. Not everyone is an alcoholic because they require self-control to go about their daily business. Not everyone is a drug-addict because a drug induced state makes their other goals impossible. All of the literature regarding substance addiction from the mental health community documents substance abuse in stages of which the final stage is when a person realizes they cannot function on the substance and being without it long term is desirable. Like most smokers quit smoking despite it having immediate effects of finance and a small sacrifice in fitness, quit because they realize it’s better to live longer than be stimulated.

A real crackdown on crime would involve restoring police to protect people directly from property theft, violence, murder, rape, and fraud rather than these current misguided attempts to “prevent suffering” with a brutal campaign against drugs. Instead of protecting people from domestic crime, the police commit domestic terrorism and destruction of property. People have their homes raided and trashed while having absolutely nothing illegal in their possession. People are robbed and murdered during the attempt because the price of a substance has been raised due to police terrorizing the merchants of drugs, and people have their futures destroyed because they are dragged into crime because of the prospect of wealth provided once again by the ban on drugs.

How do we persecute someone selling a drug that routinely and randomly kills people like heroin? Murder, attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder. There are a lot of complexities but I am not a lawyer. Ecstasy is actually one of the safest substances around, if it weren’t for the bullshit additives put in them by the drug dealers – this is fraud, because drugs are illegal, it cannot be punished. Rather than providing the inventive for people to be honest, the ban on drugs provides people with the incentive to kill people for profit.

Remove the laws forbidding the sale and possession of drugs and that entire market shall be removed from the darkness and into the sunshine. That way the real criminals from the fraudsters selling lethal ecstasy to the murderers selling heroin are punished and not the people of the Commonwealth of Australia.

2010: A Rudd Oddesy

Before I start discussing the budget I thought I might highlight some things about it.

  • In Early 2008 Rudd created an inflation scare and pressured the RBA to raise rates which got to a high of 7.25% in March 2008. Inflation for Q3 of 2007 was 2.1%, Q4 was 3.0% (which is outside of the RBA’s target of 2%). By Q3 2008  inflation was at 5.0%, despite the rate increases.
  • In the 2008 budget the Government had one centerpiece on the treasury website, a 20 billion dollar surplus. This surplus was generated by the party that apparently left all the evils Rudd is compelled to fight. Between May and June 2008 the amount of money on loan to the Government by non-financial intermediaries jumped an amazing 54%. Between June 2008 and the present it jumped 43.5%. I think I’ve unraveled the “mystery” behind Q3 2008 inflation – that Wayne Swan went absolutely mental with the countries credit card.
  • Before 2009 even began this surplus was handed out to pensioners. $1400 per pensioner in the name of stimulus. Keven Rudd made a crusading article against ‘extreme capitalism’ which led to the title of this blog.
  • The 2009 budget left the Government with the task of announcing a $57.4 billion dollar deficit. At the same time they announced the shit they had gotten into, they decided to spend even more money and attacked the upper middle class with insane tax hikes. Most of these guys that I meet aren’t even really the ‘sacred job producers’ that the conservatives in America cry for. They are engineers, pilots including those putting out the bushfires, and the scientists tasked with solving climate change. Around this time the Government said we would start reducing debt by 2010-2011 and have a surplus by 2014.
  • Before the 2010 budget the Government has 70.4 billion on loan to them according to the Reserve Bank of Australia. To try and curb the debt (we shall see when the next credit aggregates are put out) the lovely crew in parliament have decided to chain mining companies from nose to feet with a 40% tax and cash grab, while pissing off everyone that smokes (including myself) with a 25% tax on cigarettes.

Kevin Rudd got to where he is today with a mixture of brown-nosing and fancy talk about being a ‘fiscal conservative’ while previously claiming to be a socialist, and then claiming to be a socialist again later. I will give him one thing, he was so funny on Good News Week this year that I think he should quit his day job. He shows less integrity than the shell of a man that was his opponent Malcolm Turnbull.

This year Rudd, Swan and their Gang have said that the Henry Tax Review is essential and touches on ‘core issues’ while completely butchering it of any substance. On top of that they have restrained the growth of one of our most essential industries in the name of spreading the wealth around.

The icing on the top is that Rudd is avoiding one of the most simple reforms: welfare. There is well over $100 billion spent on welfare. With roughly 1.2 million unemployed that amounts to $75,000 a year for them. Go ask your local unemployed if they are the ones getting $75k a year. The people getting this money are pointless brown-nosing bureaucrats, some which might be fine people, but this is entirely at a loss for the economy of which they are removed from. These people could be working elsewhere or developing skills yet instead they are in unproductive forms of labor.

Populist fools whine about the unemployed getting too much from the Government and too easily. Their misguided and uninformed solution is always more pen pushers for more means tests that any sociopath with a high school diploma can crack. Mr Rudd, I don’t get it, I think anyone would be able to cut the amount of spending and return this budget to surplus.

Anyone who still thinks that Labor is the party that stands for the ‘little guy’ is a fool. This parties actions can be explained by only one motive: the Labor party believe you are too stupid to run your own life. They think that it is right to push people around with coercive measures because for them the ends always justify the means. They know best – you don’t, is the simple bottom line behind all of it.

People in frustration with all of it after discovering with wide open eyes that we live in a tyrannical state that believes censorship is necessary, only they they know how to spend your money, and that you are not capable of running your own life or planning your own retirement get angry. I have been furious about it all, and as a young man I looked for answers. They exist and merit many more articles.

Yet in the short term the best action I can suggest for anyone who believes that children deserve to be born free of the debt of their fathers mistakes, anyone who believes that people are not all innately stupid, and that people are capable of running their own lives are posed with a simple choice: vote the Liberal party – or vote that you are a worthless serf who is unable to run his own life.

The Liberal Party has a fine and simple principle: small Government. Ayn Rand wrote that ‘all Government power is physical coercion.’ I know they are not perfect but for the moment they are the best we have. Until people make their voices heard, that they are the true sovereign and purpose of Government: they will keep trying to run our lives for us, with the blind sightedness of any bureaucratic organization. Because of this all they will do is wipe-out what could have been made by ordinary honest people.

Racism in Australia and Big Government in Australia

I live in a country with retardedly morally-relativist progressive socialist politics. Essentially I am noticing that through the attempts at the Government endorsement of Sharia law and reconciliation with aboriginals for the crimes committed against their ancestors, along with ‘start work’ Keynesian programs to try and keep them employed by forcing producers to hire quotas of them, it wouldn’t surprise me if the World Government conspiracy nuts thought there was an orchestrated effort to make us hate one-another beyond simple culture shock.

Simply, this country cannot afford the economic stagnation that protectionism would create, nor the fact that our current runaway money supply problem only prevents being translated into inflation at the moment because we depend on imports, that import money being used to buy Government debt actually means the money printed to originally fund the debt is deleted. Our countries current rosy economic figures rest on the tyranny that is the Government Bond market (the tax rights to unborn children) and the tyranny of the rightless slaves who build our stuff overseas.

Every year Aboriginals in the northern territory get roughly $90,000 worth of benefits per head, which, being a rather barren place, have little to buy with. Most of it comes at one time, and usually its spent on a car that kills the uneducated owner or wounds them badly enough to cost even more in medical bills. The money that comes regularly can be spent usually on food and a fine wide ranging variety of entertainment goods: DVD players, TVs, pornography, alcohol, drugs, and petrol to sniff… This makes people think aboriginals are pretty stupid, yet what about the brave faced fools in Parliament? They are the ones who insist that without this money, they are bereft of any kind of luxury at all.

Yet who is stupider than the people in Parliament? Nobody other than the fools who chose to accept a creed of racism as a result of their own wrongs. John Howard tried to turn the money into basic food stamps, to at least clean the Treasuries hands of certain substance related problems, however he doubled the police state.

This is the same with Muslim hatred over the supply of Halal meat to all Children just because the socialist progressives in the Department of Education can’t handle the hate mail from a bunch of parents. Has anybody realized that even if every seat in Parliament is taken by some hard line racist like Paulene Hanson, that she has to end the tyranny that is a centrally planned education system? See, there is this other side of Big Government which is unelected: the government employees. They make all of the little decisions, voting Family First won’t save you.

I’d love to see what the progressives come up with to combat racism, probably censorship, which will just incite even more racism.

Another good question, and mind the French, why are you all so fucking stupid in the first place for me to need to write this blog? Think about this. Because you really are fucking stupid Australia, incredibly.

Simply if we had a bill of wrongs, as Steven Spadijer calls it, or a negative bill of rights as it is called – little of this would even be possible. Nobody could force you to provide for someone you don’t want to, except the only people on earth who need positive rights: children. They are the only people you are obliged to support. This is pretty simple to do though, if parents can’t afford to send their own kids to school, and for only about 4% of them would this be this poor, and I am sure charity can provide the difference.

The simple fact is school being available does not mean a one-sized fits all school system is required. Some call it religious segregation, however I call it freedom of expression and freedom of speech, along with property rights. Simply, if people want schools to cater specifically to their needs, they should just build their bloody own schools. I don’t care why they are built, only that kids learn to read, write, and use a calculator. If I were MP in this perfect world, I’d inspect them myself to see if they uphold that simple standard.

Stop this Us & Them rubbish, it could literally be the death of us.

John Tate.

The Creditor and the Duck Junkie

This was a blogworthy youtube, courtesy of someone on Facebook…

I won’t say anything nice about Tony Abbott.

… I’ve been fooled once.

We at Extreme Capitalists have been pretty busy. Dan is currently deep in study and I am simply a lazy git. A lot has happened over time and more will happen in due season. Australia’s grand hostage negotiator Malcolm Turnbull has finally been disposed of for compromising and letting the terrorists bring down our industry.

One thing I have learned in 2009 is that people capable of having principles guide their concepts and integrity guide their actions are not capable of being elected. From memory the people who did like Malcolm Turnbull was that he had principles. However, it turns out, he does not. I will not be fooled so easily again.

So now we have Mr Abbot leading the opposition. He seems alright, but after Turnbull, anyone will seem brilliant. Malcolm Turnbull was a pragmatist, to him the truth did not matter, objectivity did not matter, all that matters to pragmatist like Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull is that what they do is practical enough to be reelected. This neat system means that minorities get stepped all over by majorities.

That Mal and Rudd had a large part in the attempt at making this country a republic, makes me glad it didn’t happen. We wouldn’t get a republic that supports individual rights, we would get a socialist republic directly via the constitution.

The fact remains however: Australia has become a fascist state over the past 100 years. When the left call a country fascist, they mean a lack of democracy. What I call a fascist state, is when the Government democratic or autocratic, meddles in the simple affairs of our lives. The Australian Government might be democratic but things as simple as building on your own property are at the whims of your neighbors.

Funnily enough, the majority of Australian’s are happy here and the majority of Australian people are leftists by default. They don’t really have a political ideal, they just believe that they are the battlers and it is all far too hard for them and they need some help. What they don’t seem to realize is that help is just taxed out of them and handed back to them.

Politicians solution to taxation  lately has been in the form of just giving the money back rather than just taking less. Though only giving back to some of us.  This is far more pragmatic than tax cuts, because then people like Kevin Rudd don’t upset their friends in the Government who would lose their jobs collecting and distributing taxes.

The fact is, compromise sucks, and pragmatism sucks. A lot of people think Tony Abbot is great. I won’t make up my mind until he actually does something. The fact that Abbott only won over Turnbull by so few votes shows that the Liberal party still has a massive problem.

Marriage law as an affront to true freedom of contract

In European history marriage originally was little more than a legal agreement between two families who arranged their children’s marriages. In the past this combined with celibacy essentially meant that your family arranged your sexual habits. Although we are long past that point, and have far more freedom marriage these days in even the civilized country is wrapped up in red tape and laws.

A marriage country today in the civilized world piles on a lot of regulations and rules. Many people today seek external prenuptial agreements to save them from the ridiculous requirements for divorce. Because of the bindings of a marriage contract, in divorce, the highest earner has to sacrifice their private property. This is no secret, yet I am surprised so many get married under these conditions. Personally, I think it is very backward for one party of a divorce to get a gigantic handout. This usually being a woman, maybe women should raise the question: “Are we really that worthless that we need this kind of help?”

The other kind of regulation on marriage is explicitly not allowing gay marriage. For some reason, the Government, and a large portion of the public are actually stupid enough to believe that marriage is a building block of society, and they have the right to interfere with the lives of others. Personally, I don’t think it is just the freedom of gays that these people are against. These people are against freedom in general, but specifically: freedom of contract.

I know I am not alone when I say: “Hey! How about we put anything we darn well want on a contract!” If me and my wife to be want to put a clause in that demands a commitment, say a specific monetary commitment when one of us is out of work, we should be allowed. Likewise, if a homosexual wishes his contract to be with another homosexual, it is not the business of anyone else to interfere.

Under a system where freedom is protected, it is always a good measure to make sure contracts can’t be invalidated by the whims of the public. Freedom itself is an idea that started with the idea that the individual was sovereign – not the Government or the Church.

It is a really bad idea to allow the Government to meddle with contracts on principle. Let’s say you have a contract with a telephone company (and you probably do), and the executive of that telephone company does a favor for a friend in the Government, and his friend has to do something for him. So he gets the Government to meddle with your contact, binding you to the phone plan for the rest of your life. It would really suck wouldn’t it?

Interestingly, a lot of the conservative morons say that heterosexual marriage itself is a principle that is part of society. However, freedom is the principle of any society that is just. Conservatives know this, just listen to them babble on like they do in America. When the principle of heterosexual marriage involves violating the principle of voluntary contracts in a free society, the Law of Non Contradiction, courtesy of my good friend Aristotle comes in.

Clearly, Government intervention violates voluntary contracts and association in any case. The conservatives will back be me all the way if I’m opposing cash for clunkers, the healthcare debate, and more. However when it comes to marriage, suddenly they are all shouting to be pragmatic, and to put principles on hold for a while. Suddenly, they are the group who believe the constitution is nothing more than a list of suggestions, and that freedom is subservient to their whims.

For many years Ayn Rand complained that the creature destroying capitalism was the Christian conservatives defending it, weakly, as they clearly do. However we live in an age of Wikipedia experts on her philosophy (and everything else), who don’t really understand what she really meant by this. What she meant I have left well expressed and clear. The morality of Christianity is altruistic, oppressive, and backward. Evil can’t be used to defend anything that is good: self-interest and capitalism. Any moral code that demands a certain level of positive rights is antithetical to negative rights.

I think that is the other interesting point that can be said about Objectivist ethics compared to all others. The Objectivist ethics bare no contradiction with the laws of a free and individualistic society. I mention this because I meet many libertarians who say that Objectivist’s are too moralizing. However I can’t blame the Nihilists for being Nihilists when most of the field of ethics is a pile of patronizing rubbish. I can blame the Conservatives though, they made a choice to contradict their own rhetoric about freedom and refuse to correct it.

In fact, maybe we should question the title of these so called Conservatives against gay marriage. Their arguments are all based around it being a building block of society. Despite that they may hate socialists, they themselves want to impose their grand design on society by ‘protecting it’ through a ban on gay marriage. Clearly if you want to fight the socialists, you don’t want to join the conservatives, as they are clearly socialists as well. There is nowhere to run, now.

The Stock Market and Me

I just want to state that despite last week being quite terrible on the market that I actually think there will be an upsurge any time now that might shock people. I’m thinking along the lines of 2.5% gains in major indexes of the US market in a single day to come.

I usually refrain from crystal balling the stock markets, however this time I am willing to take the risk of sounding stupid, if things don’t play out. Lately I see the current declines of the market to be related to an onslaught of bad news.

Despite all the bad news, Vectorvest, my source of wisdom in the market tells me interesting information. It does an analysis of stocks on the basis of their assets, future inflation, along with a growth rate prediction. This source of information tells me that, from the time the Dow Jones hit that glorious 10,000 that the valuation of all the companies in the Dow hit 12,000+ and that now it has hit 13,000+.

I am an Austrian myself with economics, but founded on a lower dollar and high oil or not the Dow Jones still has a long way to go before a serious underlying bear market trend kicks in. This also tells me that the US dollar has a lot of room to move lower, and that the price of oil is moving up.

In the short term, as in three months, stocks with strong fundamentals and P/E ratios are going to be on the upswing. I urge people to stay the hell away from stocks that have a weak or speculative outlook.

If you are completely new to the market or too scared to start I advise looking at Updown, a simple virtualized trading platform that allows you to see how good you can be in the US market.

I want to talk more about Vectorvest, which has a great history. Four months before the september crash in 1987, its valuation of the Dow Jones shifted below its price showing the market was overvalued. There is a similar story behind 1990′s bear market and the October 2008 crash. Great men have said the timing is the hardest part, yet Vectorvest gets it closer than anyone.

I think more than anything people need to understand the relative value of money. With the US dollar going down, and beyond what foreign exchange will say about it, that the money supply has increased vastly means that there will be new highs seen on major indexes that surprise people.

However, the sooner the market climbs the faster it is going to get to that 13000, 15000 mark on the Dow Jones which is probably where it will start going down again, and down fast.