Vox Popoli

I spoke with the Elliott Wave people about how I could add some more economic content to this blog, and they were kind enough to allow me access to their affiliate content. As those of you who actually read the economic columns know, I think Elliott Waves are a potentially useful method of understanding the patterns of the markets, and perhaps even history as well.

Just to make things clear, I have no relationship with Elliott Wave International, I do not have any financial interest in the products they are selling nor am I interested in accepting blog ads at this point in time. However, I think you’ll find that they do have an intriguing take on the financial and currency markets at what is proving to be an all-too-interesting moment in history.

Read if it interests you. Ignore it if you don’t. And, as always, caveat emptor.

Dreadpiratesnuggles shows off his math:

That’s 290 years… Ok, my bad, closer to 300 years vs. 800… So I was off by a measly 500 years! Relatively speaking, what’s the difference?

Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that there’s an executive at CNBC barking at his secretary: “Get this guy on the phone! We need to give him a show now!”

Puzzled wonders:

It must be that you don’t understand our electoral system. Unless Petrouka gets -more- electoral votes than either Kerry or Bush, he will not be elected. Drawing votes away from Bush only add’s to Kerry’s margin.

I find it incomprehensible that anyone would think that Kerry would be a better pro-life vote, when powerful figures in his party are calling pro-lifers terrorists, and Christians a greater threat than Al-Qaeda.

Who said Kerry would be a better pro-life vote? It’s quite clear that Bush=Kerry when it comes to abortion. Neither of them will end it, neither of them will return the issue to the states, neither of them will restrict it. Even if one takes the unprincipled pragmatic approach, it makes absolutely no difference if you vote for Bush or Kerry with regards to this particular issue. Bush has a Republican House, a Republican Senate and a Republican-nominated Supreme Court… if he has not acted, then he will not act.

Oh, sure, Bush affects to feel bad about abortion… wait a minute, so does Kerry. Okay, Kerry will allow money to go directly to fund foreign abortions, while Bush will require it to go through the United Nations first. There IS a difference!

Even a pro-abortion Libertarian would be a better pro-life vote than George Bush, as he would be willing to return the issue to the States, where it belongs.

Bill responds:

1) We’ve stopped one of the major terrorist sponsoring states in the region, and rounded up several leaders of terrorist organizations.

2) We’ve killed thousands of militant islamo-wackos, a small start, but a start. If we’d pulled out as soon as the Iraqi government had toppled Iraq would definitely be another Ashcanistan.

3) We now have a major military base in the mid-east that ain’t in Saudi.

4) We’ve removed the principal sponsor of Palestinian terrorists. Saddam was a powerful symbol for them, and provided money and training as well.

5) Just the reforms that have happened to date are putting serious pressure on Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. If things continue to improve the pressure on them builds.

1) No, we haven’t. Iraq was number five, at most, behind Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria and Egypt. Iraq wasn’t funding anyone except the Palestinian Authority. Of course, so was he United States.

2) Afghanistan turned into Afghanistan after a decade of Soviet occupation. What makes you think Iraq won’t regardless of how long we stay there? It is estimated that 10 percent of the global Muslim population is sympathetic to the jihad. Since the Soviet butchery in Afghanistan and Chechnya hasn’t exactly proved dissuasive to this point, I don’t think a few thousand more can be considered as amounting to much.

3) As you note, we already had plenty of bases in the Middle East. Why did we need to leave our bases in Saudi Arabia? Why will the new Iraqi government, or the next Iraqi government, prove to be any more cooperative regarding our bases there? How are the new bases indicative of more protection than the old ones?

4) Total nonsense. We are personally guaranteeing the safety of the most powerful symbol of the Palestinian terrorists. We are also helping pay his salary.

5) This has nothing to do with America being safer now than five years ago.

I note that none of these addresses my point that none of our actions in Iraq has made America one iota safer from terrorist attack than before. Simply refusing to provide visas to terrorist-sponsoring countries would have accomplished more. This is neither a defensive war against the global jihad nor preparation for it, instead, the administration has weakened the national resolve for any such future conflict.

But then, I don’t expect anything but incompetence and unintended consequences from the Federal government anyhow, so I’m not exactly surprised. Tolstoy addresses this rather nicely in his section on administrators. More on that later.

That noted liberal Democrat, Paul Craig Roberts of the Creators Syndicate, is apparently less than impressed by the Senate’s ability to report on the administration’s misdeeds:

The only open question is whether President Bush was an active participant in the disinformation or was deceived like the American public. If he knowingly participated in the deception, he must be impeached. If he was deceived by his own appointees, why hasn’t he fired them? Bush’s reelection would signify that the American people lack the competence or character for self-rule.

The report from the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence proves once again that government lacks the moral integrity to conduct an investigation. The senators did not bring responsibility to any individuals for a gratuitous invasion that has generated hatred of, and insecurity for, Americans for decades to come. Instead, the senators’ report held accountable that which cannot be held accountable: “the process.”

We were told that 9/11 was due to the failures of flawed procedures. So, too, was the incorrect intelligence on Iraq, according to the Senate Select Committee. In neither case are any individuals to be held responsible. Nothing, it seems, bears any significance except for the increasingly fictional economic statistics and the bureaucratic machinery. Ideologies aside, Washington appears to be evolving into something more weirdly Soviet by the week.

As to those who are still convinced that the Iraqi occupation is making Americans safer, I have a simple question: how? If I had millions of dollars in Saudi money, a cadre of fanatical followers and connections into Russia via Chechnya and China via Ningxia Hu, the fate of Saddam Hussein and his Ba’athist regime, for good or for ill, would have absolutely no effect whatsoever on my ability to send a few young men to flight school or to plant a black market explosive device in a shipping container bound for Boston Harbor.

Think, people. Think.

John Maynard Keynes on Lenin and inflation:

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, Governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity (or fairness) of the existing distribution of wealth.

As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of Society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

Bill Fleckenstein, the market analyst and hedge fund owner who continues to hammer away at the disaster that Alan Greenspan and the politicians of both parties are creating for us, quoted this in the context of the inflation that the CPI charade no longer hides. He also adds that he is concerned about the likelihood of a medium-term market crash:

My gut feeling — though there is no way for me to quantify it — is that probability of a crash at some point in the next six months to a year is far higher now than in 1987. One subjective reason is that I just don’t think it’s possible for all the thousands of hedge funds and hundreds of thousands or millions of people who think they’re talented enough to outwit the stock market — and who believe they can play this game of speculating in an overvalued, dangerous stock market — to get out whole….

Personally, as I often note, I am short stocks (mostly tech stocks), own gold and silver (as well as gold and silver mining stocks) and foreign currencies.

I haven’t gone short yet – I’m waiting until the next mini-bounce plays out, but that otherwise describes my essential positions as well. This is NOT the time to be long stocks, as it does not look as if the Fed can extend the Wave 2 countertrend any longer. I learned my lesson from last time – don’t fight the Fed, but instead wait until they throw in the towel. The Fed can’t defeat the market, but it can delay the inevitable for a while.

Many conservatives have tried to overlook President Bush’s liberal tendencies in hopes that at the least G. W. Bush will appoint a pro-lifer to the Supreme Court, and in so doing, help overturn Roe v. Wade. Their hope is not only without evidence, it is plainly contrary to evidence. In his prime-time television debates with Gore, George Bush flatly denied that he had a pro-life litmus test for Court appointees…. His record as Governor of Texas shows that he does indeed appoint pro-abortion judges, so we should not be surprised if President Bush were to appoint pro-abortion judges to the Supreme Court.

Frequently displayed as evidence of President Bush’s pro-life views is his signing of legislation when he was Texas’ Governor that forbade underage girls from getting abortions without parental consent. The pro-life community roared their approval: a 13-year-old girl can’t get an aspirin without parental consent, why should she be allowed to undergo a surgical or chemical abortion without parental consent?! That’s sound pro-life legislation, right? George Bush must be pro-life, huh? Wrong! Did you realize that this piece of legislation was nullified by a Texas Supreme Court decision that ruled 6-3 that an unexceptional 17-year-old could get an abortion without telling her parents? The New York Times reported, “It was, after all, appointees of Gov. George W. Bush who took the lead on the issue…” You see, it was G.W. Bush who appointed or approved of four of the court’s nine justices and has been a political patron for a fifth, Harriet O’Neill, who wrote the majority opinion in the parental notification case. If this is what President Bush means by “strict constructionists,” then any hope that he will appoint a pro-lifer to the Federal bench is baseless.

This abundantly-footnoted article, written by the founder of a pro-life physicians group, should suffice to explode the last principled reason to vote for the Republican candidate. (Anyone who believes a Democrat won’t leap at the chance to use the war on method as an excuse to continue strengthening central state power is ignorant of both US military history and dialectic.) Bush has already shown that he is unwilling to face down the Democrats despite having a majority in both House and Senate; if elected to a second term he will surely cave to the minority, as is his wont, and give us more Supreme Court judges in the mode of David Souter.

I assert that both Michael Peroutka of the Constitution Party and Michael Badnarik of the Libertarian Party are demonstrably better than Bush on abortion, despite the Libertarian Party platform’s pro-choice policy. (Badnarik, by the way, is openly pro-life on the grounds that the unborn child has a same right to life as any other individual.) Returning the question of abortion to the states, as the Libertarians demand, would end 1000x the abortions that the Partial-Birth Abortion ban has, and as the PBA ban is all that the Republican President, House, Senate and Supreme Court have been willing to do in four years of power, it is safe to assume that this is all that they will do.

If you’re not voting for Bush because you believe in him, but simply because “he can win”, then you might as well stop paying attention to the campaign and go cheer for the Yankees this summer. This is not principle, it is simply bandwagon-hopping. And, as I have previously demonstrated, political pragmatism is nothing more than long-term self-immolation.

Mark Steyn helpfully points out that Palestinian official Saeb Erekat is of course, “democratically elected”, being presently in the ninth year of a five-year term. And in like manner, if Yasser Arafat was elected President of the Palestinian Authority in 1996, shouldn’t there have been another election by now?

Or is this just the sort of complicated subject that we can’t expect the mainstream media to address? After all, it does have more pressing matters of interest to cover, such as the soda preferences of the Democratic presidential candidates.

RB writes:

America is dead. If it is, what a lively corpse it is! The old bad old Abraham is asserted again- The good Framers and the clear and understandable language of the Constituion is asserted again- Instead of rehashing all of this, let;s just remind you of one small thing, to set the assertions you made into the ground-as in six feet under!

Thomas Jefferson, who is held up by you and yours as the American philosopher of small republics and limited goernemt, went and did what he, Jefferson, called an illegal act, and destroyed the Constituion-his words, not mine. What was that act? Why the Louisiana Purchase! First off, the national government had no powers to purchase the land, and Jefferson himself pointed that out! Yet he defended the action saying that if left to the States, the opportunity to expand the nation, which was necessary, according to him, would have slipped away! Oh yes, you’ll want a source-see Jefferson’s letter to Beveridge, in late 1803. It’s in the collections of Jefferson’s papers, which you can read at any library- To continue-Who got the money from the purchase? Why Napoleon Bonaparte, who used the money to finance his military conquest of Europe! and you and the rest have accused Clinton of selling out to China, of Bush’s deals with the bin Laden family(see Moore’s film) or Reagan’s arms for hostages etc etc ad nauseum. Again, What was the effect of the Purchase? to increase the size of the nation by double, and that Purchase area was Federal terriroty, not States, not in 1803! So the national government had increased its own land size to be larger than the combuned States!

What does this prove, except that the founding fathers knew whereof they spoke with regards to the temptations of State power? The fact that Jefferson was tempted and gave into corruption says nothing about the fact that today’s government is neither small nor limited as it was conceived to be. And every act of illicit government expansion is defended as being necessary. The public is not generally known to welcome dictatorship, after all, unless they have been sufficiently alarmed by the presumed alternatives.

And here’s the next problem. the French thinker Montesque, argued that the bigger a nation becomes the more the power is centralized and the more tyrannical it becomes–gee, what if he was right? Then Jefferson went from the small republic limiited government man to the Hamiltonian tyrant in one fell swoop- According to Lew Rockwell, when I pointed this out, Jefferson was a good political thinker but a bad President-so what else is new? And Jefferons was one of the Framers, one of the Founders, indeed, he was at least the assistant head coash after Washington, he was the main architect, with Madison of the Founding documents-If he can go wrong, then it is all up! and was all up then- But what if he was right, and what if the Framers, ressurected today, would nod approvingly at what has happened? I am quite sure that Hamilton would!

So am I. So is L. Neil Smith, the libertarian, which is why his sci-fi villains are called “Hamiltonians”. But the rest would almost certainly not. The fact that it is difficult to keep a Republic is why Franklin famously said: “if you can keep it.” Any sober analysis will suffice to demonstrate that we have not.

Among Libertarians and libertarians, I have found, after all of the rhe rhetoric about the Constituion and Declaration has died down, they will admit that they prefer the Articles of Confederation, that the Articles have the provisions for that “voluntary association” which the Constituion doesn’t. that the Articles say that States are sovereign, which the Constituion doesn’t and that the many word and phrases, such as “absoltelu” in the Articles “elastic clause” do not appear in the Contituion-which gives the new independnent executive, judiciary and Vongress great latitutes for expansion of powers. recall that there was no independent executive in the Articles! So, in your column, you have again, failed American histroy, American Constitional law, and American politics. and America isn’t anywhere near dead-you sound like the Carter administration people when they campaigned against Reagan!

Sure, many libertarians would prefer the Articles to the Constitution. But they would also prefer Constitutional government to what we have now. The Constitution certainly allows some latitude, but nowhere near so much as is being claimed by the three branches of the federal government. RB may have failed to understand the difference between America the nation-state and America the concept, he has clearly failed to disprove my assertions, as well, one is forced to assume, fifth-grade spelling, but at least he has succeeded in proving that one can read American history without being burdened by the heavy weight of understanding it.

DVH writes:

America is very different now than it was in the days of the founding fathers; such has to be taken into account when thinking about what is ideal government in the US today. In the old days you had lots of small independent farmers; nowadays you have huge numbers of people all working for corporations owned by a few people. Need I list all the technological changes since the days of the founding fathers?

I think Count Tolstoy already addressed this argument: “- mentioning “our days” as people of limited intelligence are fond of doing, imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of “our days” and that human characteristics change with the times -”

Apparently DVH doesn’t see that most of the significant changes have nothing to do with technological change. What technology was involved in the creation of the corporation and granting it legal personhood? What technological imperative required a shift from Congressionally-issued metal money to privately-issued paper notes? The founding fathers understood that while the world will change, human nature doesn’t. Their vision was conceived to limit the depredations of the latter, and is every bit as relevant today as it was 230 years ago.