(snip)"Well, Total Fed Credit was up $7.6 billion, foreign central banks stashed another $11.8 billion at the Fed, the Treasury printed up another $2.4 billion in actual cash, repo activity in the banks last Thursday alone was a staggering $32 billion, and the nation's current-account deficit went through the $880 billion per year mark. Gahhh!

With big numbers like these impacting my fragile nervous system, the rest is history; all spent shell casings reeking of burnt gunpowder, the smell of fresh poop oddly redolent of burritos, the smell of napalm in the morning and smelly people being unpleasant to me, also smelly.

I know, I know; I should feel sorry for the dumb, ignorant bastards who are doomed because their money is doomed because the Federal Reserve is creating so much money and so much credit that we are cruising to a huge inflationary bonfire and the destruction of the American economy, and they don't have any gold to protect themselves and blah blah blah.

Then I remember that they are the same dolts who consistently elected and re-elected collectivist bozos to erect a suffocating, huge, expensive system of governments that not only looked the other way, but encouraged the Federal Reserve to create all that money because everyone wanted inflation in stocks, bonds, the size of government, and (later in the cycle) houses! There was just too much money to be made!

And now we have price inflation in everything, painfully manifested in a dollar that is losing its buying power, just like the Austrian Business Cycle Theory so elegantly, and so confidently, predicts. After this short mental exercise, I naturally deduce "To hell with them AND their stupid boats! And the stupid trailer they had it on, too!"

And it is not just us, either, as the stupid idea of constantly increasing government size, spending and number of people being given money is becoming apparent to the British, as the blaring headline of the Daily Express, "Highest Taxes In History", so dramatically attests. The article notes that things are getting much worse, as "When a crippling barrage of more than 100 stealth taxes is added, workers are paying almost half their earnings" in taxes.

I will note, with an appropriate dose of Snarling Mogambo Outrage (SMO), that paying roughly 50% of income is exactly the proportion of income that Americans pay in total taxes, too, when you include income taxes, Social Security taxes, surtaxes, sales taxes, property taxes, excise taxes, government fees, etc.

And why is all of this happening? Well, in his essay "Monetary Anarchy", Dr. Kurt Richebächer quotes Jean-Baptiste Say from his 1803 "A Treatise on Political Economy." The quote is "The encouragement of mere consumption is no benefit to commerce because the difficulty lies in supplying the means, not in stimulating the desire for consumption; and production alone furnishes those means. Thus, it is the aim of good government to stimulate production, of bad government to encourage consumption."

Well, I got some bad news for Mr. Say, and it is a good thing that he is dead because he would probably croak from a brain explosion if he knew that not only do today's bad governments encourage consumption, but they are actually the country's largest consumer!

And, to compound their folly, they actually give out money to people so that they, too, can consume, or the government provides the services to be consumed, or (as in the case of health care) the government requires that people with insurance and/or wealth pay higher prices for healthcare to cover the bills of those who don't (or won't) pay. This is, for one thing, communism gone freaking insane."(snip)