Karl Denninger, whom I've quoted many times before in these pages, has shut down his Web site and forums for three days in protest at the current budgetary and fiscal nonsense in Washington. He's put up a detailed explanation, which will only appear there during the shutdown period, but which I think is worth preserving: so I've taken the liberty of reproducing it here. Read it, and consider carefully.
The Market Ticker is offline from October 11th-13th as a deliberate act to reduce to zero my economic activity, and thus taxable income, for those three days.
On 9/11/2013 I went dark to protest the NSA's unconstitutional and outrageous acts of spying against American Citizens -- acts they claimed at the time were "catching terrorists" but which they were later forced to admit had interdicted not dozens of plots but perhaps "one or two." Despite this forced admission our Congress has refused, thus far, to force the dismantling of these outrageous, unconstitutional, ridiculously expensive and abusive programs.
But the NSA is only the beginning of the mockery of freedoms that we, as Americans, are supposed to enjoy. No man or woman is free if he or she is defrauded and robbed via trickery or treachery. And yet that is what our Federal Government, along with many State governments, are doing to you every single day.
The Federal Government asserts that due to the debt ceiling it would be unable to "pay its bills" if Congress does not allow it to borrow yet more money it does not have and cannot acquire through taxation. This is an outrageous lie; the fact is that the Government has been unable to pay out what it has promised from tax revenues for decades, and by promoting this lie they are stealing from you the very monies they claim you're being paid in "benefits."
In point of fact the US Federal Government, on an actuarial basis, has promised to pay not $17 trillion dollars (or $53,000 per person) but north of $120 trillion when Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are analyzed on a forward basis -- an impossible sum that amounts to roughly $360,000 per man, woman and child in the country and exceeds the assets of all businesses, households and governments summed together.
In other words, we are now, as a nation, factually bankrupt yet both political parties are demanding to borrow and spend even more.
At the same time we are telling our Senior Citizens and those approaching that time in their lives that these programs are "secure" and will "be there" when it is trivially provable that this is a blatant and outrageous lie, since there is no possibility of ever covering that $120 trillion in political promises.
To add insult to injury you have the editors of Bloomberg, centered in the den of thieves known as Wall Street, arguing that John Boehner's puny (not to mention both staged and false) resistance to such deficits is "dangerous." It's outrageous to read a "news organization" calling for the victims of financial rape to bend over and give approval to yet another round of what they have renamed "consensual sex", despite the documented and easily-proved damage that has been done to the victims -- middle class Americans. How much outrage would they garner if the same demand was made of a woman that had just been assaulted while wearing a pretty dress?
The simple truth of the matter is that deficit spending, willful blindness to fraudulent credit creation and intentional tampering with interest rates, now being topped off with "Quantitative Easing", dilutes the value of your earnings and destroys the middle class and working American. The results have been seen over the last three decades and are not able to be disputed. You should be enjoying the gains of technology and productivity in your daily life. There should be plenty to feed and shelter the poor in this country and anyone willing to work should be living like Kings yet laboring only 20 or 30 hours a week. Instead the gains created by your hand in improved productivity have been stolen from you along with even more through these intentional acts of abuse, the poor are being decimated and the middle class are earning less in inflation-adjusted dollars than they were in the 1980s.
This is why the job market has not recovered and neither has your earnings power, despite the claim that the recession supposedly ended more than four years ago. Neither political party has the willingness to face basic, fundamental arithmetic that we all learn in middle school, and yet in less than 15 minutes I can prove to anyone in this country, using only the government's and Federal Reserve's own tables of figures, that these assertions as to the alleged "growth" in our economy and what has truly happened are not my opinion, they are mathematical facts.
The entrepreneurs and other producers in our economy, myself included, have been enabling this theft and myriad abuses served upon the public. The economic harm has been compounded by actors in several specific sectors within our so-called economy, most-specifically the educational, banking and health-care "industries."
Proof of the former is found in the fact that Calculus as a skill has not changed in hundreds of years and yet the ability to deliver pizzas to pay for a college education, very possible in the 1970s and early 1980s, is now impossible and the pursuit of said "education" routinely saddles our young adults with $100,000 or more in non-dischargable debt. Across our young adults this debt now exceeds one trillion dollars. We have not only allowed this but we actually cheer on the financial rape of our children and assist in their screwing by filing FAFSA forms so they can be bent over the table by glib-toungued admissions and finance counselors. In my opinion our youth would be fully-justified in eating us -- slathered in BBQ sauce -- for this willful and intentional act of abuse.
Proof of the latter is found in more examples than can be counted, such as the woman who was billed over $60,000 in Arizona for two doses of scorpion antivenom that can be bought over-the-counter for $100 in its country of origin -- Mexico -- just a few miles from where she was stung. Rather than respond to this sort of blatant financial rape with indictments and prison sentences our government passed "Obamacare" and demands that we all submit to being abused by medical monopolists under penalty of fine and forfeiture.
Since 2007 I have written thousands of articles detailing all of the above in the various schemes inflicted on the American people to strip them of their wealth and prosperity. Instead of a rising tide lifting all boats, these three sectors along with our government have been actively drilling holes in the boats carrying 99% of the population, leaving them with the choice of either furiously attempting to bail out the water or drowning while the 1% chortles with glee in The Hamptons.
As one of the producers in this economy and an entrepreneur I know, from my own experience, that I can personally outrun this blatant and outrageous theft. But by doing so I create much taxable income, which is then siphoned off in the form of taxes to power the drills that are used to intentionally harm everyone else.
I can no longer square my personal drive to succeed with what my success, and the taxes levied upon it, empowers in the form of harm to 99% of the people.
I have thus decided to "slim down" those activities, reducing my taxable income to essentially nothing. To cease my contributions to the so-called "common good", because irrespective of whether I keep the money or not that productivity improvement will wind up in the hands of government and these favored "industries-cum-scams" that will be used to drill more holes in the boats of ordinary Americans.
So on these three days, October 11th - 13th, I choose to produce a literal nothing. To sit on the beach and contemplate, to spend my days and evenings with people who I care about, and to deny government at all levels my labor -- the very essence of which they are using to screw everyone else.
This act, the voluntary reduction of economic activity, particularly among those who produce, is the only effective means available to we, the people, to protest in a manner that is both directly related to what is being done to the common American but in addition is both expressly lawful and directly attacks the source of the problem.
I ask that you consider joining me; the sunset remains beautiful, even if the sun is indeed setting on what was America as her founders roll in their graves.
IMHO, Mr. Denninger is absolutely right about his economic forecasts - and about our feckless politicians. I don't have the sort of income or asset balance he has, so I certainly can't afford to 'go Galt' like this. Nevertheless, I understand where he's coming from; and if I were in his shoes, I'd probably do likewise.
Peter
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