La citation du jour

The one incomparably powerful means of exploitation is the State. It is also the safest means, because it is irresponsible. It is exempt from all the basic sanctions of ordinary morality. It is free to murder, cheat, lie, steal, and persecute at its own good pleasure and without fear of reprisals. … Their irresponsibility brings on a regime of prodigality, waste, inefficiency and corruption.

-Albert Jay Nock

Socialisme=pénuries et rationnement

Via Antagoniste.net:

Venezuela introduces Cuba-like food card
The Miami Herald

Presented by President Hugo Chávez as an instrument to make shopping for groceries easier, the « Good Life Card » is making various segments of the population wary because they see it as a furtive attempt to introduce a rationing card similar to the one in Cuba.

The measure could easily become a mechanism to control the population, according to civil society groups.

« We see that in short-term this could become a rationing card probably similar to the one used in Cuba, » Roberto León Parilli, president of the National Association of Users and Consumers, told El Nuevo Herald. « It would use more advanced technological means [than those used in Cuba], but when they tell you where to buy and what the limits of what you can buy are, they are conditioning your purchases. »

Chávez said Tuesday that the card could be used to buy groceries at the government chain of markets and supplies. Former director of Venezuela’s Central Bank, Domingo Maza Zavala, said this could become a rationing card that would limit your purchases in light of the country’s recurring problems with supplies.

Jaime Suchlicki, director of the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, said that Venezuela’s current problems of scarce supplies are very similar to those Cuba faced when Fidel Castro introduced the rationing card.And although the cards were introduced as a mechanism to deal with scarcities, Suchlicki said, they later became an instrument of control.

Candeur Castriste

Via Yahoo.com:

Report: Castro says Cuban model doesn't work

By PAUL HAVEN, Associated Press WriterWed Sep 8, 3:18 pm ET

HAVANA – Fidel Castro told a visiting American journalist that Cuba's communist economic model doesn't work, a rare comment on domestic affairs from a man who has conspicuously steered clear of local issues since stepping down four years ago.

The fact that things are not working efficiently on this cash-strapped Caribbean island is hardly news. Fidel's brother Raul, the country's president, has said the same thing repeatedly. But the blunt assessment by the father of Cuba's 1959 revolution is sure to raise eyebrows.

Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, asked if Cuba's economic system was still worth exporting to other countries, and Castro replied: "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore" Goldberg wrote Wednesday in a post on his Atlantic blog.

Le mythe des 'stimulus' économiques

Via Mises.org:

For example, most pundits accept the claim that "World War II got us out of the Depression." And it's true that the official unemployment rate dropped like a stone with US entry into the war. But as economic historian Bob Higgs points out, FDR had hardly "fixed" the economy: all he did was force millions of American men to leave the conventional workforce and jump into a slaughterhouse. By the same token, if President Obama made it mandatory for five million Americans to cross the ocean and paint the Great Wall of China, it's possible that the official unemployment rate would drop.

-Robert Murphy

La citation du jour (2)

What happens to the social welfare state when the number of people who are meant to be supported becomes larger and larger…while the number of people who are meant to be supporting them becomes smaller and smaller? We don’t know. But we’re going to find out.

-Bill Bonner

La citation du jour

"Some have said that the key risk investors face today is of ‘policy error’. But isn’t that always the key risk? Financial history is one long series of ‘policy errors’ and while policy makers labour under the delusion that they know the unknowable it will remain so. All investors can do is try to see the funny side, and focus on things we can know."

-Dylan Grice, stratège financier, Société Générale

Banqueroute Keynesienne

Nous avons déjà cité le nobélisé Paul Krugman, qui implorait en 2002 Alan Greenspan de créer une bulle immobilière pour 'redémarrer' l'économie après l'implosion de la bulle techno.

Voici l'article intégral, avec commentaires de Tyler Durden de Zero Hedge:

How Keynesian Archduke Krugman Recommended A Housing Bubble As A Solution To All Of America's Post Tech Bubble Problems

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/08/2010 00:20 -0500

The year is 2002, America has just woken up with the worst post dot.com hangover ever. Paul Krugman then, just as now, writes worthless op-eds for the NYT. And then, just as now, the Keynsian acolyte recommended excess spending as the solution to all of America problems. Only this one time, at band camp, Krugman went too far. If there is one thing that everyone can agree on, is that the Housing Bubble, is arguably the worst thing to ever happen to America, bringing with it such pestilence and locusts as the credit bubble, the end of free market capitalism, and the inception of American-style crony capitalism. Those who ignored it, even though it was staring them in the face, such as Greenspan and Bernanke, now have their reputation teetering on the edge of oblivion. So what can we say of those who openly endorsed it as a solution to America's problems? Enter exhibit A: New York Times, August 2, 2002, "Dubya's Double Dip?" Name the author: "The basic point is that the recession of 2001 wasn't a typical postwar slump, brought on when an inflation-fighting Fed raises interest rates and easily ended by a snapback in housing and consumer spending when the Fed brings rates back down again. This was a prewar-style recession, a morning after brought on by irrational exuberance. To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble." If you said Krugman, you win. Indeed, the idiocy of Keynesianism knew no bounds then, as it does now. The solution then, as now, to all problems was more bubbles, more spending, more deficits. So we have the implosion tech bubble: And what does Krugman want to create, to fix it? Why, create a housing bubble... Well, at least we know now how that advice played out.

And now what? He wants another trillion in fiscal stimulus... Quadrillion? Sextillion (arguably this cool sounding number is at least 2-4 years away before the Fed brings it into the daily vernacular)? And just like the housing bubble he suggested then brought America to the biggest depression it has ever seen, so his current suggestion will be the economic cataclysm that wipes out America from the face of the earth.

So we have two simple questions:

i) how does Krugman still have a forum in which to peddle his destructive ways, and

ii) why does ANYONE still listen to this Nobel prize winner, a/k/a charlatan?

Being stupid is one thing. Being stupid and learning your lesson after seeing your idea crash and burn is another. Pushing for the same policy response time after time, layering misery upon misery, is an altogether third, and most Krugman, thing.

How many more lunatics in charge of the insane asylum do we need before we finally say "enough" to their deranged ramblings and their illusions of reality...

h/t Papa Swamp