Who's to Blame?

Yesterday Bill O'Reilly noted that the candidates have spent the last few months campaigning without "warning" the American people about the recent drop in the Stock Market. Of course, neither Presidential hopeful knew that Fanny Mae, Lehman Bros., and AIG would be experiencing problems. And only a fool (such as millions of voters) should think that if either candidate is elected to political office they will all of a sudden know what to do to prevent a repeat of this week's problems.

Palin Blames Corrupt Wall Street Culture for Financial Crisis (Wall St. Journal). But that's also misguided.

Then today O'Reilly said that he was ANGRY that the government didn't protect us from Wall Street's reaction to Lehman/AIG.

Point to the clause in the Constitution that gives the federal government power to tell someone who they can lend to, and how much of a down-payment they must require. Especially since it was the government that virtually mandated that the "poor" be allowed to go into debt so they wouldn't be victims of "discrimination."

But none of the original lending, nor the derivative packaging of bad loans that followed, would have taken place if the federal government had not created the money to be loaned in the first place. Nobody in the mainstream media wants to talk about the root cause.

Prof. George Reisman explained everything back in July of 2002:

Small and narrow as the focus on the dishonesty and fraud of some businessmen may be, it nevertheless does have a real object. Unfortunately, it is overwhelmingly misdirected and totally ignores the truly massive fraud that is going on, which exceeds many thousand times over, all the frauds of dishonest businessmen, and which, as we have seen, actually occasions many of those frauds. This, of course, is the government's systematic depreciation of the value of paper money and thus of each and every contract and security that is stated in terms of a fixed number of units of that money.

What greater accounting scandal and coverup could there be than that the monetary unit, in which all accounting is carried on, is itself a fraud, a fraud that has robbed tens of millions of old people of a considerable part of the buying power of their life's savings, that has destroyed the reliability of fixed-income investments as a vehicle for providing for the future, and threatens the value of all contracts. Where are the reporters and the congressional committees to investigate this horrendous situation?

The government has stolen 95 cents out of every American dollar.

Measuring Worth - Relative Value of US Dollars

CPI Inflation Calculator

The money you think you will have for retirement will only be able to buy a fraction of what you think it will buy, because the government is removing a great deal of its purchasing power through inflation. This level of theft and corruption involves trillions of dollars, and vastly outweighs the dip in your 401(k) this past week.

Inflation is Caused by the Government

Abolish the Federal Reserve System

In addition, as the value of the dollar diminishes, you creep into higher tax brackets, and the government takes more of your wealth.

Don't expect Sarah Palin to talk about competing currencies.