Flashback: Kamala Promised to Confiscate Firearms by Executive Order in First 100 Days
Kamala Harris previously vowed to take executive action against firearms if Congress failed to pass gun reform legislation.
Footage from the “most liberal senator’s” failed 2020 presidential campaign showed Harris espousing support for former candidate Beto O’Rourke’s scheme for a mandatory gun buyback of “assault rifles,” telling reporters she’d make it an executive priority during her first 100 days in office.
Whoa – Kamala promises to take executive action to confiscate firearms the first 100 days of her term
— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) July 30, 2024
She’s going to seize the guns
Communism is here and it just organized a bloodless coup to push Biden out of the way
pic.twitter.com/ALAX7xvHeb
“Yeah, I think it’s a great idea. But listen, I don’t think we lack for great ideas. As I’ve said many times, we’ve been having great ideas for decades. The problem is that Congress has not had the courage to act. And that is why, from the beginning, I have said my agenda includes attempting to get Congress to act,” Harris said.
“But if they don’t within the first 100 days of my administration, I’m going to take executive action. Because what we need is action. We have a failure of supposed leaders to act,” she added.
The former California AG’s suggestion she’d circumvent Congress to infringe on the Second Amendment comes as her radical far-left record faces scrutiny following her coronation as Democrat presidential nominee, with everything from her sordid relationships with multiple high-level men to her failure as border czar to her calls to defund police laid bare for all to judge.
Watch: Acting Secret Service Director Left Shaken After Grilling Over Why Agency Denied Trump Security Requests
Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe Jr. was left visibly shaken after a heated exchange with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) over the agency’s reported denial of additional security resources to the Trump campaign leading up to the assassination attempt of the former president.
Cruz repeatedly asked Rowe who in the agency reportedly denied requests by Trump’s security detail and was unsatisfied when Rowe insisted, contrary to numerous media reports, that all requests for more security were fulfilled.
“It is accurate that the Trump team had not asked for additional security and had not been rebuffed?” Cruz asked during a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees Tuesday.
Heated exchange between Sen. Ted Cruz and U.S. Secret Service Acting Director Rowe.@SenTedCruz: “I believe that the Secret Service leadership made a political decision to deny these requests…”
— CSPAN (@cspan) July 30, 2024
Rowe: “Secret Service agents are not political.” pic.twitter.com/XFpD1ywlkc
“If you’re talking about Butler, Pennsylvania, all assets requested were approved,” Rowe replied before admitting that some requests for additional assets to Trump’s security detail in the past had been denied.
Notably, Rowe was “directly involved” in the Secret Service’s decision to deny additional security for past Trump rallies leading up to the MAGA rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, according to RealClearPolitics.
But both Rowe and Cheatle were directly involved in decisions denying requests for more magnetometers, additional agents, and other resources to help screen rallygoers at large, outdoor Trump campaign gatherings.
It was Rowe’s decision alone to deny counter sniper teams to any Trump event outside of driving distance from D.C., these sources asserted.
“I believe the Secret Service leadership made a political decision to deny these requests,” Cruz asserted. “And I believe the Biden administration has been suffused with partisan politics.”
Rowe replied, “Secret Service agents are not political.”
Cruz retorted that Secret Service leadership is appointed by the president and is therefore a political position.
Rowe’s own background is deeply political: he had previously worked in the Obama White House and under Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy (D).
FYI, Acting Secret Service Director Ronald L. Rowe, Jr. worked for:
— ?? Mike Davis ?? (@mrddmia) July 30, 2024
1. Obama White House
2. Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT)
Don’t let him pretend he is a career, non-partisan law-enforcement official.
He’s a former partisan Democrat staffer. https://t.co/7959nOqUNy pic.twitter.com/sFxq1TZnmm
Watch the full Senate hearing:
RELATED: Watch: Acting Secret Service Director Admits NOBODY’S Been Fired After Attempted Trump Assassination
RELATED: Watch: Sen. Kennedy Savagely Mocks FBI After Director Claimed Unknown if Bullet Hit Trump
RELATED: Live: Senate Committees Grill Secret Service, FBI Officials On Trump Assassination Attempt
Trump Wins In A Landslide, Says Top Economist Martin Armstrong
Economist Martin Armstrong joins Alex Jones to give his expert analysis on events taking place around the world.
Trump Wins In A Landslide, Says Top Economist Martin Armstrong pic.twitter.com/cduVdWrwIg
— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) July 30, 2024
Vermont Supreme Court Rules Schools Can Force Vaccinate Children Without Parental Consent
Schools have been given the green light to vaccinate children with Covid-19 mRNA shots without parental consent by the Vermont Supreme Court which ruled that schools are protected under the PREP Act which provides immunity […]
The post Vermont Supreme Court Rules Schools Can Force Vaccinate Children Without Parental Consent appeared first on The People’s Voice.
Is Increased Consumer Spending Good for the Economy?
Just about every so-called business periodical touts an increase in consumer spending as “good for the economy.” But is this really so? Can we really spend our way out of a recession? Lord John Maynard Keynes thought so, and his teachings have become the standard narrative just about everywhere in the world.
Probably the most influential economic treatise of all time is Keynes’ “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,” published in 1936 at the height of the Great Depression. Keynes theorized that the Great Depression was caused by insufficient aggregate demand, otherwise known as spending. A complementary concept is the paradox of savings, which theorized that savings is harmful because it causes aggregate demand to fall. Keynes (and others) preached that, although increased savings by an individual may be beneficial, a general increase in savings by most market participants would cause the economy to fall into a deflationary spiral.
The fallacy of the paradox of savings has had many excellent rebuttals. The fundamental problem is that it treats “the economy” as something separate from what each individual experiences for himself. An “economy” is a mental construct; it doesn’t exist apart from its billions of individual components. For an excellent debunking of Keynes and his new economics, I suggest the book “Where Keynes Went Wrong” by Hunter Lewis.
Nevertheless, the Keynesian concept of aggregate demand combined with the paradox of savings is fully embedded in the minds of most economists, financial reporters, and especially government functionaries because it liberated them from their status as a necessary parasite on the economy whose functions were protecting our life, liberty and property. These necessary functions had to be funded in the most economical way. Now these functionaries’ status has been flip-flopped to that of necessary driver of the economy through spending. This was a godsend to government which has allowed it to confiscate the wealth of the nation, all in the supposed “greater good.”
The favorite metric of the acolytes of the Keynesian concept of aggregate demand is gross domestic product. According to Keynesian theory, anything that increases GDP is good. It is represented by the formula C + I + G = GDP, whose components are Consumer spending, plus business Investment, plus Government spending. My first essay accepted by the Mises Institute as suitable as a daily article was “C + I + G = Baloney.” I viewed GDP as baloney in 2010 and I view it as baloney today! Therefore, please be skeptical of any report that tries to convince you that all is well in the economy because — ta-da! — GDP has gone up. It is a fallacious metric that equates spending with economic progress.
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Inequality Is Caused By Inflation
Many claim the problem with fractional reserve banking is that it loans money into existence.
It does, but under normal circumstances the money created by commercial banks disappears when loans are repaid or defaulted on, which therefore doesn’t create a permanent inflation of the money supply. Government intervention, however, converts temporary money into permanent money through bailouts like the Troubled Asset Relief Program. They purchase loans that would have been defaulted on, preventing the evaporation of credit. When banks hold loans that are at risk of default, they face having to write them off, which would remove this part of the money supply. Bailouts turn such disappearing credit into permanent money, in effect giving banks free money.
Without government bailouts, banks would be unwilling to make loans that are unlikely to be repaid, thus limiting their willingness to loan large amounts of money into existence. This would keep the money supply more stable. At any time, some part of the money in existence would still be destined for removal through repayment. This proportion would somewhat fluctuate with economic conditions, and the temporary money would be indistinguishable from other money until a loan is repaid, but new money would not continually get loaned into existence.
When high-risk loans inevitably fail, the state steps in to purchase them to prevent banks from having to write off so many loans that they have net negative assets on their books. However, seeing the creation of toxic loans as just excessive risk-taking in reaction to having a safety net misses the larger dynamic. Praxeologically, the production of toxic loans is the rational supply of a good in high demand. These financial assets can be sold for a higher value than it costs to make them, thus their production is economically rational.
Banks essentially perform the function of government contractors, producing the product “toxic financial asset.” Similar to how defense contractors produce fighter jets or fish farms produce caviar for state banquets, banks create failing loans knowing the government will purchase them. This demand ensures that banks continue to produce high-risk financial instruments. The financial sector profits from creating these products despite knowing they may become worthless. Ironically, it is their worthlessness that causes them to be valuable since that rationalizes the bailout.
Companies receiving bailout funds have not incurred typical costs, like having to maintain machinery or invest in future production, meaning they operate on much higher margins. Thus, they have much more money to offload before it loses value. They are looking for quick gains, not stable dividends, which can typically be found in assets like tech stocks and real estate, causing an unnatural inflow of funds into these sectors. This explains why tech giants grow disproportionately large; they happen to attract the interest of people with fresh money. Productivity and value creation become relatively less valuable as the economy becomes optimized toward capturing inflation investments. This process distorts market signals, misallocates resources, and perpetuates an economic environment where success ties more to financial maneuvering than genuine productive output.
Many businesses today, especially in the tech sector, function more as inflation-capturing devices than traditional profit-generating enterprises. They prioritize attracting investment from the recipients of fresh money. A second layer of these inflation-capturing suppliers grew to capture the trickle of funds from the first layer. This means the economy has geared itself to supply the businesses that get new money, instead of allocating resources to what actual people want to buy.
The closer to the inflation fan a business is, the more profitable it can be. In an economy that rewards inflationary rent-seeking, creating value has become unwise, as it only earns low-profit-margin money from stingy spenders who had to work to earn it. You will be able to confirm that practically anybody you know either receives money from an inflation source or supplies those who do. The economy has grown toward the money source, like a fungus toward a nutrient, rather than meeting real people’s needs. This means economic decisions are effectively made by what elites in palaces decide to finance, rather than the market. This is like a fascist economy where businesses were nominally private, but state planners in the capital made the production decisions.
Many superwealthy today were simply lucky initial owners of popular assets that got bid up by this unnatural inflow of new money. Attracting the money flow toward assets you own has become a more important means of wealth generation than profitable operation. And that is what all the top companies do these days, trying to dazzle investors. It is like starting a cryptocurrency and getting people to buy it so your initial coins grow in value. This explains the propensity for hype cycles. They are not trying to make a profit; they are trying to excite investors to bid up their stocks.
It is not just those who directly receive fresh money who benefit from an increase in the money supply. As everyone else’s purchasing power erodes from inflation, owners of substantial assets, like factories, are lifted relatively. They continually receive a transfer of purchasing power at the expense of everyone else. An 8% annual inflation rate — a realistic estimate considering that economic growth masks the true increase in the money supply — enhances the value of hereditary capital by 2,200 times when compounded over a century, or 220,000%. Conversely, a family without assets had their purchasing power reduced to 0.045% of its original value. This means inflation continually creates inequality. This is the real reason the rich get richer, why the world is so unequal, and why so many bad decisions are made in the internal power struggle for inflation capture.
By continually handing free money to the rich, government facilitates a transfer of purchasing power from the population to the moneyed class. This skews wealth distribution and continually impoverishes the working class. Earned money now makes up a smaller portion of the overall purchasing power available. In a free market, wealth accumulation would rely more on productive enterprise than rent-seeking, resulting in a more equitable distribution of wealth based on productivity. Work would be more highly rewarded, and even modest employment would provide substantial purchasing power, reducing the need for a welfare state. Thus, the current system perpetuates inequality that favors the rich at the expense of the broader population.
Marxists have misdiagnosed the cause of economic inequality. It’s not the extraction of surplus value from workers, as suggested by the labor theory of value, that gives capitalists unfair wealth. Instead, it’s the continuous influx of free money through increases in the money supply. Their analysis inverts the reality of how inequality arises. Karl Marx identified the natural market as the problem and called for state intervention to fix it. Thus, his cure was the disease. Interventionist policy ironically perpetuates the very inequality they decry. A culture steeped in his economic interpretation maintains an interventionist environment that benefits financial elites through inflationary policies and bailouts, perpetuating economic disparity. (Although praxeologically, this may have been his intention.)
The problem is not insufficient regulation of the financial sector. If one type of risky bet is banned, banks will find other ways to speculate or create derivatives of existing bets. You can’t ban all risky bets. Mortgage-backed securities were bets on other’s mortgages, and Enron bet on future energy prices. In a normal market, these risks would be self-correcting. Faced with losses when bets go sour, they would be unwilling to make unsafe bets. The real problem is having a system of involuntary force that transforms temporary credit into real purchasing power.
In a broader perspective, we can see distinct types of financial structures. During the industrial capitalism of the 19th century, power resided with industrial capitalists who created tangible products, driving progress and improving living standards. Today, the financial elite manipulate the allocation mechanism itself, without producing real value, having reduced industrial producers to the role of servants. This structure resembles feudal power systems, where medieval palace elites controlled society, disguised as modern financial theory.
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