Economy makes sense to those who understand liberty
By Seth Grossman, Political Columnist
(Reprinted from the June 15, 2011 Current-Gazette Newspapers of Atlantic and Cape May Counties, http://www.shorenewstoday.com/snt/news/index.php/politics/12467-economy-makes-sense-to-those-who-understand-liberty.html)
From consumer confidence to home sales, jobs figures to casino winnings, the news about the economy reported by newspapers and TV networks around the country has suddenly turned bad in recent weeks.
Until now the media were telling us that the $3 trillion (that?s $3,000,000,000,000) we borrowed and spent during the past three years on the Wall Street, UAW, Fannie Mae and government employee bailouts had ?saved? jobs, the economy, and that the ?recovery? had begun.
Now they tell us that politicians, from Obama on down, and their highly paid economic ?experts? are ?surprised? by this ?unexpected? bad news, and puzzled as to what to do now. Some media websites even asked the public for suggestions on how to ?fix? the economy.
But for the past two years, ordinary citizens at tea party and LibertyAndProsperity.org Saturday breakfast meetings talked about how all these bad things had to happen.
We also talked of how to change our personal investments to protect ourselves. Many of us unloaded paper dollars in banks and Wall Street stock funds to buy gold and silver coins and bars. We also bought gold and silver funds, mining stocks, real estate in low-tax states, and stocks and bonds in other countries with more economic freedom, like Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Canada.
How could we ?tea party? outsiders be so much better informed about the economy than smart, highly educated ?experts? with inside information?
The short answer is that we tea party people are experts on liberty. And our ideas on liberty were developed by men like George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin ? true geniuses who were much smarter than the people running our government today.
The Declaration of Independence they wrote for us in 1776 says that each of us is created equal with certain unalienable rights and that we institute governments for the specific and limited purpose of securing those rights with the consent of the governed. The Constitution they gave us made sure government worked that way.
People in New Jersey knew this government of liberty brought prosperity, which is why they made ?Liberty and Prosperity? the state motto in 1776.
Mexico is blessed with just as much gold, silver, oil, and rich farmland as Texas. But the people of Texas are far more prosperous because they have far more liberty than the people of Mexico.
Liberty creates prosperity because it rewards people who work, save, and make good choices. At the same time, it makes people responsible for the consequences of their bad choices.
Where there is liberty, people don?t get bonuses, pay hikes, and pensions for doing poor work or making bad choices. When we had a free economy, banks succeeded when they made good loans to people who paid them back, while banks that made bad loans failed.
But in the 1980s Democrats and Republicans in Congress let savings and loan bank owners get rich by letting them make risky loans that were guaranteed by taxpayers. We paid $88 billion then to bail them out.
When Bill Clinton became president in 1992, Democrats and Republicans in Congress made new laws that forced all bank owners to make big loans to people who could never pay them back. When the crash came in 2008, Republicans and Democrats borrowed $3 trillion ($3,000,000,000,000) to reward them, along with every mismanaged corporation, union, and state and local government with friends in the White House.
At the same time, the federal government changed the bankruptcy laws to wipe out the savings of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens who invested in GM, Chrysler, Fannie Mae, etc.
The economic ?experts? said this saved jobs, the economy, and began the ?recovery.?.
But we ?tea party? people who know that only liberty brings prosperity never believed a word of it. We know that those politicians and their ?experts? destroyed our prosperity when they ignored the Constitution and killed so much of the economic liberty it once secured.
Somers Point attorney Seth Grossman appears on 1400AM talk radio 3-4 p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays and on 92.1FM 8-10 a.m. Saturdays. For information see www.libertyandprosperity.org, email sethgrossman49@gmail.com or call (609) 927-7333. Breakfast discussions are held 9:30-10:30 a.m. every Saturday at the Shore Diner on Fire and Tilton roads in Egg Harbor Township.
(Image source – http://libertyledger.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/sick_economy.jpg)