There are phrases like "freedom” and "liberty” that are very commonly thrown around and are perceived to be synonymous with America, but what do these words really mean? I think most Americans have a genuine respect for people who have served in the military. This is because people in the military symbolize the defenders of the "freedom" that we all cherish and that defines our nation as the greatest nation. So I wonder, why would people who are so thankful for the freedom that we enjoy, elect to expand our own government just to take away that freedom. Isn’t that what freedom means, freedom from government? The word government can be defined as "direction; control; management; rule: the government of one's conduct." Why would people rejoice in shedding the chains of England only to willingly choose to slap on the shackles of another government? Is liberation from a British government somehow better than a new American government? If so, what is the difference? If I have to be under government control and have my freedom taken away, I wouldn't mind being British. I am actually quite fond of the accent. So what did these people die for? To defend our freedom, right? Not a politician's freedom. Freedom from what? Government? Who's government? If we reflect, every 4th of July, on the blood that was shed to buy our freedom, why do we embrace the theft of the same freedom? Why do we embrace more government control such as Universal Healthcare or salary caps for executives who received a bailout or the view that having the top 1% pay 40% of the taxes, the top 5% pay 60%, and the top 10% pay 70% of the taxes is not only acceptable but that they should even pay more?

In the past there have been many nations that have fallen victim to government control. How is it that so many nations have stumbled into the same trap without learning from the plight of other nations before them? Government control is, by definition, the opposite of freedom. The fact is that these nations were full of people that were not any different than the people of this one. How did these heads of state pull the wool over the people's eyes? They certainly didn't do it on the platform of blinding poverty, suffocating tyranny and unlimited government control, because the people would never have allowed it to happen. They would have been run out of the country if they were lucky. No, the only way it could have happened would have been under the guise of great sounding ideologies like "equal pay for women," "helping out the little guy," "providing for the have nots," "we all have to make sacrifices" (aka: tax increases), "healthcare for every american," and the list goes on and on of the types of phrases, used by a Marxist demagogue, to deceive the people that he believes are too stupid to know the difference. The leaders of these nations didn't tell the people: "Those of you that work 80 hours a week to create a better life for your children, we are going to take your money away from you and give it to people that don't really like to work, because those people need help too. We are going to create massive government programs and regulations that will control everything that you do.” Sometimes I wonder if people in this country have ever thought about what those heads of state said to the people. Do they really think that, when Hitler initially attempted to gain public office, he ran on the platform of creating a new Arian race? Do they think that he said vote for me because I am going to exterminate millions of people because they are not the superior race? Sounds pretty crazy huh? No, I doubt he got his foot in the door that way. In fact, while in prison in 1924 Hitler is quoted as saying, “Instead of working to achieve power by an armed coup we shall have to hold our noses and enter the Reichstag against the Catholic and Marxist deputies. If outvoting them takes longer than outshooting them, at least the results will be guaranteed by their own Constitution! Any lawful process is slow. But sooner or later we shall have a majority - and after that Germany." – Adolf Hitler 1924.

I am in no way comparing President Obama to Hitler. I think that Barrack Obama means well and is probably a good person. However, he is someone who has never been in charge of anything, never even run a business before and he has an ideology that he is going to stop at nothing to try out no matter what the current circumstances. He got 52% of the vote and now he is going to get as much of his ideology installed as he possibly can with absolutely no concern about being re-elected.

To borrow a phrase from Obama himself, which I am sick of hearing already, let me be clear. I don't believe that President Obama is intentionally trying to take away the freedom of Americans, like many many many right wing conservatives do believe with their whole heart. What I believe is that he is married to and will go to his grave with, an ideology who's victims have been trying to escape it for the shores of the United States for a very long time. I am a big believer in "don't fix what aint broke." When I say not broken I mean from a historical perspective, why do the opposite of what has gotten us where we are today by embracing an ideology that has de-railed super powers and powerful empires so effectively in the past? How did capitalism, something that has made this nation into what it has become in such a tiny amount of time (only around 200 years), become a bad word?

I was with an ex co-worker about a month before the election. We were at a bookstore and a book about Barrack Obama caught our eye. I asked him what his opinion was in relation to which way he might vote. He said “I don’t really know much about politics, but all I know is that it can’t get any worse.” This is a very scary and very popular school of thought in America. The truth of the matter is that it can get much worse. America has only been around for a few hundred years. There were Dynasties and Empires that were around for thousands of years, and there have always been shifts in power. In the grand scheme of things, America could just be a flash in the pan. Abandoning the vehicle that got us here could be a way to ensure it.
-Brooks Johnson

Will President Barrack Obama’s love affair with Keynesian economics bring us out of this mess?

During the 2008 Presidential campaign I was of the opinion that if McCain were to be elected that he would be blamed, by the general public, for every downturn in our country going forward, but if Obama were elected that he would get a free pass or at least the benefit of the doubt for quite a while because the general perception in America, with the help of mainstream media, would be that all of this is fallout from the “terrible and incompetent” Bush Administration. With this new completely partisan stimulus bill, which will be the largest expenditure in America’s history, President Obama will sign away that free pass. He doesn’t need Republican support for this bill to pass, but he wants it because if the boat sinks he doesn’t want to be known as the one who single handedly pulled the plug.

Keynesian Economics

Keynesian economics is an economic theory coined by British economist John Maynard Keynes. I will give a very quick and very basic description of the general premise. Keynes believed that, during times of recession or depression, the government should step in and “prime the pump.” The general idea is to borrow a massive amount of money and spend it. This is what Barrack Obama meant when he said “some say this is a spending bill; yes this is a spending bill; that’s the whole point.” In Keynes’ theory you have three major bodies, The Government, the People, and the Economy. The idea is for the government to “deficit spend,” the government would borrow money and put it in the hands of the people (ideally through social programs that would effectively increase the size of government.) The people would then pump the money back into the economy. Two obvious questions this raises to me is “what if the people put it under their mattress,” and "Where does the money come from?" (If we are borrowing it from domestic sources, there is no new money being pumped into the economy, it is just being moved around. If the Federal reserve is just printing it, we all know what inflation will do. If we are borrowing it from China It's all up to the imagination as to what that means.) One of the major tenets of Keynes’ theory is based on The Phillips Curve, which shows an adverse relationship between inflation and unemployment. If unemployment goes up, inflation goes down and vice versa. According to Keynes’ theory, the two can never co-exist. Keynes’ theories, according to many economists, were not only discredited but dis-proven in the 1970s when The United States was faced with very high unemployment and massive inflation. The occurrence was nicknamed “stagflation” because of the combination of stagnant growth and inflation.

In 1982, when the economy was worse than what we are seeing now, Ronald Reagan used the concepts of economists Arthur Laffer and Robert Mundell’s supply side economics or “trickle down economics,” by slashing the top marginal tax rate from over 70 to under 30%. Reagan also used Milton Friedman’s Monetarism or a free market economy and also used basic principles of Keynesian economics (the spending being largely on defense which does not increase the size of government.) Reagan led the U.S. into one of the greatest periods of economic growth in it's history.


Super brilliant economist Milton Friedman, winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Economics.

Keynesian Economics and The New Deal.

Its funny how there can be such drastic accounts of the same occurrence. You could conceivably line up a mile of Ph.D. Keynesian Economists that will tell you that The New Deal brought America out of the great depression. You could also find the same amount of Ph.D.s that will argue that The New Deal was the beginning of an irresponsible welfare state. Many Economists believe that the New Deal prolonged and deepened The Great Depression and that only World War II saved America from it.

I think the answer can be found in a direct quote from FDR’s own Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. "We are spending more money than we have ever spent before, and it does not work. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started and an enormous debt, to boot.” –Henry Morgenthau, Treasury Secretary 1939.

So Barrack Obama is going to hang his hat on pure Keynesian economics. I have to give it to him, the man certainly has guts. We will see what happens; hang on tight it’s going to be a wild ride.

--Brooks Johnson

Change is about to come alright, just maybe not the kind most are hoping for. Like a great man once said, “you aint seen nothin yet.”

It has only been 17 days. After 17 days of throwing around executive orders like he is handing out free comedy show tickets in times square, Barrack Obama has managed to go from the pragmatist that would reach across the isle to get things done during the brilliant and historic campaign that he waged, where he talked so abhorrently about “pork barrel spending,” “earmark spending,” and “eliminating the special interests,” (stopping special interest groups from having so much lobbying power in Washington) to stating yesterday in his speech to House democrats, with the most arrogant smirk he could muster, that “there hasn’t been a bill that’s gone out of here without some earmarks.” (Translation= I know I spoke passionately against it a thousand times during the campaign but c’mon guys you know how campaigns go. You know what I meant.) He has proven unequivocally to be very much the Ideologist.

He goes on to say that the failed policy of the last eight years has gotten us into this mess because of the huge deficit it created. Yep that’s right; he is really standing there explaining how his new “stimulus package” is going to help fix the problem, caused by the deficit that the last administration created, by doubling that deficit with one stroke of the pen. Wait what? I had to read that again myself, and I wrote it! My reaction to that was just like Borat’s when the driving instructor told him driving instructor: “in this country women have the right to choose who they have sex with.” Borat: “whaaaaaaaaaaattt????!!!!”

Ronald Reagan helped explain how much a trillion dollars is. He said imagine a nice fresh $1,000 bill. If you have a stack of them 4 inches high you are a millionaire. If you have a stack of them that is 63 miles high, then you have a trillion dollars. Some of these expenditures are certainly needed and are great, and many more are well meaning, such as buying hybrid vehicles for government employees at the cost of 600 million, but Is this really the time for such spending? Really? As much as I love the idea of helping out the environment by replacing the 2008 Chevy Tahoe with a 2009 hybrid Chevy Tahoe, wouldn’t a pragmatist wait until the 08’ needed replacing and just replace them as needed? Some of the expenditures just upset me though and actually threaten my freedom. I don’t want money taken out of my pocket to buy a boatload of condoms. This is my main issue with socialism. The small amount of time that people have on this earth and the time that they spend working for a better life and a better life for their children is taken away from them to provide for someone else. The most dangerous part is that it represents the extreme opposite of the foundation upon which America was built into the greatest and wealthiest country in the world.

Stimulus package includes but is not limited to:

• $2 billion earmark to re-start FutureGen, a near-zero emissions coal power plant in Illinois that the Department of Energy defunded last year because it said the project was inefficient.

• A $246 million tax break for Hollywood movie producers to buy motion picture film.

• $650 million for the digital television converter box coupon program.

• $88 million for the Coast Guard to design a new polar icebreaker (arctic ship).

• $448 million for constructing the Department of Homeland Security headquarters.

• $248 million for furniture at the new Homeland Security headquarters.

• $600 million to buy hybrid vehicles for federal employees.

• $400 million for the Centers for Disease Control to screen and prevent STD's.

• $1.4 billion for rural waste disposal programs.

• $125 million for the Washington sewer system.

• $150 million for Smithsonian museum facilities.

• $1 billion for the 2010 Census, which has a projected cost overrun of $3 billion.

• $75 million for "smoking cessation activities."

• $200 million for public computer centers at community colleges.

• $75 million for salaries of employees at the FBI.

• $25 million for tribal alcohol and substance abuse reduction.

• $500 million for flood reduction projects on the Mississippi River.

• $10 million to inspect canals in urban areas.

• $6 billion to turn federal buildings into "green" buildings.

• $500 million for state and local fire stations.

• $650 million for wildland fire management on forest service lands.

• $1.2 billion for "youth activities," including youth summer job programs.

• $88 million for renovating the headquarters of the Public Health Service.

• $412 million for CDC buildings and property.

• $500 million for building and repairing National Institutes of Health facilities in Bethesda, Maryland.

• $160 million for "paid volunteers" at the Corporation for National and Community Service.

• $5.5 million for "energy efficiency initiatives" at the Department of Veterans Affairs National Cemetery Administration.

• $850 million for Amtrak.

• $100 million for reducing the hazard of lead-based paint.

• $75 million to construct a "security training" facility for State Department Security officers when they can be trained at existing facilities of other agencies.

• $110 million to the Farm Service Agency to upgrade computer systems.

• $200 million in funding for the lease of alternative energy vehicles for use on military installations.

You may ask how the American people could stand for something like this. Well it’s all wrapped up in pretty new presents called “economic stimulus” and “putting Americans back to work,” (although the senates version of the package will put 300,000 illegal aliens to work, subsidized by the American taxpayer and the American taxpayer’s grandchildren, but that’s a story for another day.) What little money is left over, after large government expansion, (another tenet of socialism) that will actually go into taxpayer pockets will be small compared to the debt incurred by that taxpayer, which is around $7,000 per household. The bill is said to be creating about 3,000,000 jobs; a good bit of them being private sector jobs which is great, but what this means is that the total cost of creating each of these jobs would be about $285,000 per job.

Tim Coburn, Republican Senator from Oklahoma said, less than 10% of the bill could be considered true stimulus, if one assumes tax credits and infrastructure spending will jolt the economy. (It won’t! Sorry had to jump in there, back to Coburn!)The other 90% of the bill represents one of the most egregious acts of generational theft in our nation's history, with taxpayer money going to special-interest earmarks, an ill-conceived bailout to states, and permanent spending increases that expand government's reach in areas like health care and education.

Barrack Obama has also suggested, in his first 17 days, that he wants to institute government control over the salaries of Executives who have received a bail out. This would set the most dangerous precedent that I have seen in this country in a very long time, and it’s only been 17 days. Who is next? Are we going to start capping the salaries of baseball players, doctors, lawyers, movie stars? What about movie producers? (See line item #2 above, they will officially be tax payer subsidized just like the corporate executives that received a bail out.) What about professors? why don’t we go down to the subway and start capping the income of subway performers? They are benefiting from taxpayer money. Subway performers are provided a platform, by the tax payers, for their music through which their salary is made. They are, in a sense, government employees.

All jokes aside, doing small things like this, which are initially disguised as good and helpful ideas, send us in a direction that is very un-American, among many other much worse descriptions. If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water he will jump right back out of it, but if you put a frog in a pot of cold water and turn the stove on high, he will cook to death. We can learn a major lesson from this so that we can avoid becoming a socialist republic.

--Brooks Johnson