“An Inconvenient Book” by Glenn Beck in a lot of ways sums up what is wrong with the Conservative moment. It is filled with claims that use zero economics, when in fact economics should be their friend. Glenn Beck, who has become very popular among both Conservatives and Libertarians, has done a good job on his show in supporting the free-market and bashing Obama. But after reading this book I wonder what the Glenn Beck show would look like with a Republican held White House and/or Congress.

The book is written very well in that it reaches out to all types of readers and in a lot of ways makes you laugh. It has some of the best info graphics I have ever seen in a mass market book. So as far as the words and pictures, it is a great book. But the content fall short.

A few parts of Mr. Beck book has caused me to write two separate posts on tipping and on running out of oil. I will not dwell on these subjects but I urge you to read them if you think that this review fall short on criticizing content.

The very first chapter on Global Warming was very good and uses good non crazy arguments against the Global Warming advocates. But soon after that he goes into topics in which most people who buy his book. Chapters on Marriage, Porn, Body Image, Renting Movies (not kidding) and Blind Dating are pointless and useless. I know that often time we pretend that pundits are experts on politics, but that does not stretch into other areas that are more personal.

His chapters on the Minimum Wage, Opinion Polls, and Poverty are much more productive and provocative. But many of the time his solutions fell short. Take illegal immigration, which is the chapter he decides to end his book on. This probably means that he thinks very highly on the subject and that he wanted to leaving a lasting impression so it should be the best written.

First, he plays in this paranoia of a super corporate group has control over the United States government and keeps the border from being secure. And his solutions are to build two fences and hit the employers hard. Besides the fact that a Conservative is making an argument FOR government, the two ideas are just moronic.

The fence is very expensive as he wants “double layers of fencing with road in between for patrols, concrete vehicle barriers, surveillance cameras, and tunneling sensors.” He says it would be $20 billion. First, if this is a government estimate you can trust it is wrong. Also what about the maintainance of this. And really if people really want to get into America, is this going to be effective?

Sidenote: Glenn, when you want to compare figures for people do not use “how much 9/11 cost the City of New York.” First, it wasn’t on purpose. Second, it was a terrorist attack.

Next, he wants to hit the employers. I guess he is already assuming that his fences will not work and he is a Conservative against small businesses. All small business are trying to do one thing: survive. Glenn Beck must not think that there is going to be any red-tape involved on already small struggling business.

And let’s think about the reason why businesses hire illegals, part could be minimum wage but mainly it is because they are hard works and can outwork some of us “non-mexicans.” And consider the costs. The business owner is choosing someone who they have a hard time communicating with over “non-mexicans.” That means we Americans are very inefficient workers. So wake up, you cannot be pro-free trade and anti-illegal labor force.

So overall this book is not worth reading or buying. It was a huge let down and it made me think a lot less of Mr. Beck.

Rating: 1/5

The old saying goes “A man is only as good as his word.” Wrong, the correct saying is “A man is only as good as his actions.”

Words are simply signals for action. If someone acted like your mortal enemy but said I love you, which side would you err on?

If someone said they were sorry and they did it to you all over again, which side would you err on?

Think of this in a different context: Man asks cute girl on a date. Cute girl says that she will be at coffee shop ‘A’ at 11 am. Man shows up and hours upon hours tick away. The man can see the whole store, so when the girl says later “Oh, I was there. Where were you?” It would’t hold.

Saying that you are somewhere doesn’t make you there and the same goes for love and apologies.

When thinking about politics the key is to say the right things. “Hope, Change, Political Correctness, etc.” But this is completely backwards compared to the rest of society. The whole problem with everything else in the world is getting people to live up to what they say. Or in other words, make people follow their words through with action.

Why is it that human society has based their politics based upon what people said and not what they do? And do not go off yet, it is on both sides.

If someone stated that Congressman Joe Wilson who shouted “you lie” when President Barack Obama stated that his health care plan wouldn’t cover illegal immigrants had in fact supported a previous bill that did, would many of Wilson’s supporters know the real answer?

And I understand that people are rational ignorant when it comes to politics. But why is the equlibrium at what they say? Why isn’t it at zero? Could it be possible that no listening to a politician at all would give people a better chance at guessing what policies they promote? For example, if you ran the experiment, two citizens in 2001. George W. Bush is elected and now we are in 2002. By the end of his administration, who has a better chance of predicting if George W. Bush will support Medicare expansions? The guy who watched the news and listened to the speeches or someone who paid no attention at all?

The obvious answer here is the person who paid no attention at all. Why? Well, Bush expanded Medicare with part D while claiming to be a fiscal conservative.

There you have it, I support rational absolutely ignorance over rational speech listening only ignorance.

I mean how else are we going to stop the Barack Obamas and the Nancy Pelosis of the world from talking about a bill that hasn’t been finalized… I mean you wouldn’t trust a car salesman who had never seen the car, would you?

~PCCapitalist

Update: When looking back at the passage Mr. Beck calls it “an indisputable fact.” So now I do not feel so bad bashing him on this one. Consider it disputed.

Many pundits (including Glenn Beck which I bashed slightly in the past post) state that “face it, one day we are going to run out of oil.”

Wrong.

Maybe it is a semantic issue but I hear it a lot and the semantics over the words liberty, liberal, freedom, and even anarchy started off the same way.

Let me start with, we will never run out of oil.

Okay, so thanks to the modern media both conservative and liberal (uh, I mean Progressive), we have people in a frantic believe that one day the world will run out of oil.

The reason why we will never run out of oil is because there will always be at least one barrel left. Think of it in a different context. Copper.

It was once predicted that we were going to run out of Copper by the year 1993. Go down to Home Depot or Lowes and pick you out some Copper pipes for your house. Wait, that isn’t a good idea. First, it is really expensive. Second, it makes your water taste funny. But wait, it is 2009 and we still have copper.

Well when the original prediction was made, it was made with current production. That means it does not include innovation. Yes, the same innovation that brought us iPods, Computers, the Internet, Planes, and well everything. How could they forget?

Now it could be argued that we could innovate but then we would still run out. Except one thing: supply and demand.

It is time for a lesson on a commodity say diamonds (you can insert gold, copper, iron, zinc, anything that had value). Let’s say there is 1,000 diamonds in the world now. If the number doubles, what happens to the price? If you guessed goes down, you were correct. If the number goes down, what happens to the price? If you guessed goes up, you were correct.

So then what happened when the supply of oil shrinks: people innovate away from it because it becomes too expensive. Then at some point the oil will not be worth as much because it is no longer needed. How much does a gallon of whale oil for a 19th century lamp go for these days?

Oh, you do not care? Yeah, exactly. At one point, we thought we were going to run out of whales to get oil just like we think we are going to run out of reserves to pull oil out of. We innovated so that whale oil was no longer needed in such vast quantities. Now, yes I know, whales are currently being hunted today.

But let’s remember if the people at the time were right, there would be no whales to hunt today.

So it is semantics? Kind of. Is someone like Glenn Beck and I saying the same thing? Kind of. We both understand that the only way out of this problem is innovation. Is he saying we will run out so we better find something else and I am saying the price will rise so we better find someone out? Yes.

But accepting the doomsday rhetoric brought to you by the left is not the way to do it.

World, do not panic, we will innovate.

~PCCapitalist

Disclaimer: Glenn Beck  has done a lot for the right wing and has done even more at making sure Mr. Barack Obama is in check everyday. But when someone makes a stupid claim you must keep them in check even if they are your friends. I am currently reading his “Inconvenient Book” and a few things have upset me.

Chapter 13 Gratuities: I’ve Reached My Tipping Point is the title of the chapter and rightfully so. This chapter is full of what is a short rant on tipping in America. Mr. Beck is stressed that tipping has now become apart of a social stigma and that it is a must do. This must do then, supposedly, requires those who receive the tips to slack off. Mr. Beck wants to pay for what he gets: the food.

This is why he is wrong…

Tipping is Capitalism and making a statement like “Business owners, let’s make a deal: You pay your staff, and I’ll pay for the food,” shows a complete misunderstanding of Mr. Beck’s views of a) business and b) economics.

Now tell me, why is it that one works for a service in where they make less than minimum wage? It is simple, because of tips.

What happens if you remove tipping from the equation? Well, believe it or not Glenn, the business owners will have to raise their prices in order to get employees.  In other words, customers will now be paying an automatic 18% more whether they want to or not. Just like businessmen cannot just throw some imaginary windfall profits to the exploited worker as Marx would say, businessmen cannot remove tipping and charge the same prices.

So what does tipping do? Tipping not only allows the customer to have a say on whether service is good or bad but it also signals to the business owner who should be fired and who should be kept with accurate counting. Without tipping, how could you tell? By the number of complaints maybe but the right to tip does not remove the right to complain also.

So where has Mr. Beck’s idea(s) on this been employed? Europe.

When visiting Italy, most will find that a 18% service charge will be included along with sometimes another fee all the way at the bottom of the menu. And believe it or not but the service was both slow and horrible.

Now tell me, if you are out with friends and everyone leaves a nice tip for a nice waiter then what is the problem? If you are out with friends and everyone leaves a nice tip for a bad waiter then the problem is not the “tipping mechanism,” the problem is your friends.

It sounds like Glenn Beck has been having dinner with socialists too long and needs to find a way to stand up and say he is not tipping because the service was bad. It seems odd that he can stand up to Obama and many other politicians on every issue under the sun, but  he can not stand up to his friends when it was clear the service was bad?

~PCCapitalist

By Justin Williams

With Barack Obama’s new appointment of former Iowa Congressman Jim Leach to chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), new attention is being brought onto a program called We the People. This program is funded with the purpose for furthering the study of civics and bringing Americans together through their history.

And, perhaps not surprisingly, for Obama’s fiscal budget for 2010, it is the only NEH program that is receiving a cut.

We the People won widespread laud for doing a television documentary on the life and writings of Thomas Paine who said “Government even in its best state, is but a necessary evil, in its worst state, an intolerable one”—which may explain at least in part why the Obama Administration has cut this and increased all other NEH programs.

As with most government proposals, under the fairytale-sounding narrative, there is a paragraph that tells exactly why the Obama NEH intends to expand its own select menu of programming. And just like all the other latest proposals of the Obama administration, once you begin to scratch the surface, all the deep dark matter shows.

The NEH claims that its programs will “Strengthen humanities teaching and learning in the nation’s schools and colleges.” Under that sweet-sounding tripe, it reads that they will fund “outreach programs of Humanities Initiatives for Faculty at Historically Black, Hispanic Serving, and Tribal colleges and universities.”

And there you have it: the Obama administration believes that it can bring Americans closer together by funding only colleges and universities that historically have had only minority students. Obama has chosen to increase this while reducing a program, We the People, which “support(s) enrichment workshops for K-12 school teachers at important historical and cultural sites around the nation.” So much for “cultural sites” where the “wrong” cultures may have lived.

The NEH also believes that it could “Preserve and increase access to cultural and intellectual resources essential for the American people” by supporting programs that “preserve and provide access” to “information relating to the estimated 3,000 of the world’s 6,000-7,000 current spoken languages that are on the verge of extinction.”

In other words, the program in We the People that worked at preserving “U.S. newspapers from 1836 to 1922” was not apt at doing this. And neither apparently did providing “free sets of classic works of literature” to libraries.

Americans for Limited Government has always been a supporter of rolling back government and, of course, the budget increases for the NEH continue to add more and more to the already deep hole of U.S. national debt. But the move by the Obama administration to shift policies away from these that seem to achieve goals that bring Americans together to those that seem to discriminately fund small groups is not only wrongful; it’s shameful.

And then, of course, there is the overt attack on Thomas Paine. It begs the question, why is it that the Obama administration is not showing signs of slowing down government spending on various issues (i.e. bailouts, “stimuli,” health care, etc.) but the one program cut in the NEH is the one that supported freedom fighters—and not so coincidently—treasured “that government which governs least.”

One would have hoped that the Obama Administration after inheriting a trillion-dollar deficit would have pursued a limited government budget, in order to prevent the U.S. from going deeper and deeper in debt. No matter what the cost.

Instead, the policies seem to be more of a ploy to divide the country and skew American history. All the while, of course, Obama creates new voting blocs for the Democratic Party—while making certain that those victimized by such reckless, ruthless political chicanery remain are nary once reminded that, indeed, “These are times that try men’s souls.”

Justin Williams is a Contributing Editor of ALG News Bureau.

In every major United States presidential election until the early 1990’s, monetary policy was a major hot button issue. And believe it or not it even captured the popular fancy. For example, The Wizard of Oz written by L. Frank Baum, a populist sympathizer, portrayed the struggles of the movement to add silver to the American currency in his book with metaphors and symbols.

But what most people do not know is that this movement was actually fomented by a group of people who simply owed a lot of money and decided to lobby for a policy of inflation.

As a result, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 actually began a new era of monetary policy in the United States with one primary motivation in mind: controlling inflation. The politicians, conniving as usual, had figured out an easy way to finance their debt… the printing press.

So those who wanted to rein in the recklessness decided that by making the Federal Reserve independent from Congress, they could prevent skyrocketing inflation. But, as so often occur with “the best laid plans of mice and men,” what actually happened was an inflationary credit boom that created the “roaring twenties” and a bust which the world coined “the Great Depression.”

Now if you think this sounds familiar to the current financial crisis with the housing boom and bust, you are not alone. Nor are you observing an exception to the rule.

The Federal Reserve, since it’s founding, has fostered a constant uncontrollable policy of inflation. But since they claim that they are independent, they insist that the inflation is not due to political pressures.

This, of course, is completely false.

Economist Thomas DiLorenzo finds that the Federal Reserve board has been little more than the President’s handmaiden time and time again. For example, when President Jimmy Carter wanted a strong growth in the money supply to further social welfare programs, Americans saw a jump in inflation to 8.5 per cent. Later, Ronald Reagan, wanted to stop Carter’s damaging policies and stabilize the American economy. He called in newly appointed Fed Chair Paul Volcker. And lo and behold, the “independent” Fed reversed its policies.

So, if the Federal Reserve gives in to the pressures of the President, then why is it that mainstream scholars believe that the Fed is independent? Well, the confusion begins at the divide between instrumental versus goal independence.

It’s true that the Federal Reserve has the independence to set day-to-day monetary policy without any interference, which is called instrumental independence. But the President can heavily influence and direct the goals of monetary policy, thereby making the instrumental independence worthless.

The President does this by exercising his powers of appointing the members to the Board of Governors. This board is comprised of the most powerful players in the Federal Reserve. With only five of the seven positions filled, President Obama now holds an enormous amount of power because he could add two votes to an already small board, making the current members less powerful and insisting his own appointee further his political goals.

Already, with the massive new amounts of spending, there is no doubt that Obama has been leaning on the Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to help finance all of the new bailouts and outright spending sprees to pay the debt.

The argument is that the United States needs to provide liquidity, or more cash, to the banks so that they can continue lending out money. What is going to inevitably occur, of course, is another boom period followed by a catastrophic bust.

All the while, the American people sit in the dark, while their money is being continually devalued by the Federal Reserve’s printing press, which will cause an artificial unsustainable boom and allow Obama to claim to be economic savior. Then, when the massive bubble eventually—inevitably—bursts, Obama will be either out of office, or (particularly if the mainstream media shameless idolatry continues) simply out of reach.

Perhaps, the last best hope for preventing all of this is the passage of H.R. 1207. The bill now gathering growing support in Congress to audit the Fed already has a staggering 227 supporters. If it reaches 300, Nancy Pelosi will certainly have to hold a vote.

And the beleaguered American people—victims of the “independent” Fed’s obstinacy for well nigh a full century—will finally have a prayer.

Justin Williams is a Contributing Editor of ALG News Bureau.

Written by Justin Williams from NetRightNation.com

The Federal Reserve Board, at the behest of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, has now decided to initiate a new program that will lend up to $1 trillion dollars for anything from student loans to small business bailouts. And his began the ultimate blurring of the lines between a commercial bank and the role of the Federal Reserve.

It is all to be done under a new program known as the Term Asset-backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF, created in October of last year. Significantly, TALF was set up not by Congress—which is, of course, answerable to those whose tax dollars it spends. It was created by the Fed itself, which is answerable to …well, itself. Commercial banks, which traditionally made TALF like loans, are defined as financial intermediaries. The Federal Reserve is supposed to be the lender of last resort. This means that the job of commercial banks (i.e. Bank of American, Wells Fargo, and BB&T) is to match those who are willing to save their money with those who are looking for a loan.

The Federal Reserve, on the other hand, is supposed to protect the fractional reserve banking system by supplying cash when banks get in trouble and people try to withdrawal all their assets at once. Now with Geithner’s new TALF plan, the Federal Reserve is in direct competition with these commercial banks. In short, in yet another major step in fulfilling the administration’s socialist agenda, the government is now preparing to use its fiat money printing press to compete with individual’s savings at private banks.

And there is no doubt that the Fed, having a monopoly on the printing press, will be able to destroy any attempt by the banks to fight back. For example, if Bank of America loans out money and the loan defaults, they lose money and learn that they should make their lending practices stricter. This is how the financial free market is supposed to work. If the Federal Reserve loans out money and the loan defaults, all they have to do is print money to make up for the loss. Commercial banks cannot print money they must raise their money from depositors, which is any person who holds a savings account or a CD.

Already with the constant pressure from the Fed to push down current rates of interest, today’s savings accounts lack any significant real rate of return. After the Federal Reserve gets done destroying the competition, the commercial bank’s real (minus inflation) interest rates will be nonexistent. In other words, there will be no real incentive for Americans to keep their money in a savings account. But not to worry: the Fed has even more tricks up its sleeves. As it prints more money to make more loans, the nominal (before accounting for inflation) interest rate will naturally rise with inflation.

Then as in the 1970s, the nominal interest rate gives people the illusion that they are making more money in their savings account, which is actually being devalued by inflation. This, of course, is a double whammy—because what actually matters is the real interest rate. This is the true amount of wealth an individual is accumulating. For example, if John Taxpayer puts $100 dollars in his savings account then he would be very happy if he receives a 7 per cent rate of interest (2008 average rate was less than 1 percent). Both this means that every year the bank will pay him $7 dollars on that initial $100 dollars.

If the inflation rate is at 6 percent, which was the average in the 1970s, then John is actually only making $1 dollar a year making the real rate of interest only 1 percent. Though government hopes, John just won’t notice Secretary Geithner and the Federal Reserve both believe that they can delude the American people, by creating another unsustainable bubble by printing money and competing with (while destroying) American savings. It’s a bubble that will be much bigger than the last.

And, it’s not only a bubble we cannot afford; it’s one we cannot survive. Unfortunately, unless the fiscal conservatives in Congress step in, the only thing that the American people can do is watch as their currency disintegrates. Or as Austrian Economist Ludwig von Mises said, “Money, like chocolate in a hot oven, [will be] melting in the pockets of people.”

But unlike chocolate the American people will be left with anything but a sweet taste in their mouths – or for that matter, sound money in their devalued bank accounts!

Justin Williams is a Contributing Editor of ALG News Bureau.