IPFS Menckens Ghost

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Rate the candidates with this checklist for prosperity

Rate the candidates with this checklist for prosperity

By Mencken’s Ghost

Sept. 26, 2012

As a departure from my usual rants, I’m providing the checklist below as a public service.  It is a checklist of what absolutely has to be done at a minimum to restore prosperity to the United States, to stop the debt death spiral, and to end wild economic cycles.  It can be used to rate political candidates, especially Obama and Romney.

The checklist is based on the indisputable fact of life that prosperity comes from:

Doing real work in a true market economy to produce things of real value.Saving a large part of the income that results from the above.Using the savings to create capitalInvesting the capital in ways to improve productivity and increase the production of things of real value.Maintaining this virtuous cycle in the face of all those who always want to stop it --namely, utopians, socialists, ignoramuses, crony capitalists, bandits disguised as bankers, power-hungry politicians, and citizens with no self-control.

The above has been turned on it head.  The nation’s politics, economics and culture are all geared to penalizing workers and savers while rewarding debtors and moochers, thus strangling the nation of capital and investment, stopping the virtuous cycle, and transforming the country into a kleptocracy.

Here’s the checklist:

ü      Return the Federal Reserve to its founding mandate of keeping the money supply in proper balance to protect the value of the dollar.  The departure from this mandate is what has allowed politicians to buy votes with Monopoly money by giving people “free” stuff.  The odds of this happening are about one in a thousand.

ü      Repeal Davis-Bacon, Taft-Hartley, other counterproductive labor laws that hurt working stiffs, as well as President Kennedy’s executive order allowing public employees to unionize.  The odds of this happening are about one in five hundred.

ü      Restore fiscal sanity to the banking industry and eliminate the moral hazards that have created “too big to fail,” by outlawing fractional-reserve banking, repealing federal deposit insurance, dramatically increasing capital requirements on banks,  transforming banks from stock companies  back to partnerships capitalized with partner money, and repealing loony laws like Dodd-Frank.  The odds of this happening are about one in five hundred.

ü      Restrict welfare and entitlements to the truly needy--to those who don’t have the mental or physical capacity to make a living.  The odds of this happening are about one in ten thousand.

ü      Until the above restriction can be enacted, make Social Security and Medicare self-funding and stop using contributions to fund other parts of the government, so that what people contribute over their working lives matches the benefits they receive.  The odds of this happening are about one in ten thousand.

ü      End the government monopoly over K-12 schooling so that Americans can be educated instead of schooled--so that they know and understand all of the above and how the political system really works.  The odds of this happening are about one in a billion, given the political power of the nation’s 4.2 million teachers, 1.2 million teacher assistants, 236,000 principals, tens of thousands of school board members, and countless numbers of support personnel.

I hope you found this helpful.  Now bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.
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Mencken’s Ghost is the nom de plume of an Arizona writer who can be reached at ccan2@aol.com
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