The price of corn and soy have been exploding in recent weeks:
Is it just seasonal factors, or is Dr. Bernanke’s inflationary storm hitting main street? One thing’s for sure, the price of beef will drop will drop in the short term. See the full article at the Business Insider.
7/12/2012 Portland, Oregon – Pop in your mints…
We recently subscribed to Gary North’s latest project, a site called “The Tea Party Economist.” To be clear, we have no political interest nor affiliation. It is our feeling that government, in its current state, is best ignored and avoided rather than confronted. It will go away on its own.
To draw on a well known analogy, the Tea Party, like the Republican and Democratic parties, are all fighting for control of the steering wheel of the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. Rather than fight it out on the control deck, we at The Mint realize that the only ones who survived the Titanic were those who found a lifeboat or other means to stay afloat.
Despite our distaste for all things political, we respect Mr. North and have greatly enjoyed and benefited from what he shares. We suspect that the use of “Tea Party” is more of an attempt to attract his target audience than any endorsement of the Tea Party.
Today, Mr. North shared an article at Forbes which made us gasp. It was written by Jerry Bowyer and as we read through it, one thought passed through our mind: Has our manner of thinking really gone mainstream?
Mr. Bowyer points out a number of examples of a general decline in voluntary compliance with things the government increasingly uses its superior force to mandate, such as taxes and environmental laws. The irony is that as a government’s power grab via rules and regulations accelerates, voluntary compliance, from which all forms of government derive their power, declines.
If Mr. Bowyer is correct, then it would appear that Americans are taking the idea of Atheism with regards to government to heart.
It is clear, yet seldom acknowledged, that the absence of voluntary compliance is the most effective type of revolution which can be waged.
Mr. Bowyer also makes an important distinction. The lack of voluntary compliance is not a form of civil disobedience or act of aggression towards a government. Rather, it is the conscious choice to stop believing in the government and live one’s life as if it does not exist as anything more than a lethal nuisance to be avoided. Mr. Bowyer eloquently describes this phenomenon via an amoeba metaphor:
“It’s not civil disobedience that I’m talking about. It’s the opposite: Civil disobedience is meant to be noticed. It is a price paid in the hope of creating social change. What I’m talking about is not based on hope; in fact, it has given up much hope on social change. It thinks the government is a colossal amoeba twitching mindlessly in response to tiny pinpricks of pain from an endless army of micro-brained interest groups. The point is not to teach the amoeba nor to guide it, but simply to stay away from the lethal stupidity of its pseudopods.”
“The amoeba does not get smarter but it does get hungrier and bigger. On the other hand, we get smarter. More and more of our life takes place outside of the amoeba’s reach: in the privacy of our own homes, or in capital accounts in other nations, or in the fastest growing amoeba avoidance zone ever created, cyberspace. We revolt decision by decision, transaction by transaction, because we believe deep down that most of what government tells us to do is at bottom illegitimate.”
You can read the entire article here at Forbes.com:
July 4th Question, Part III: Americans Revolt Billions of Times a Day
Everyday, more and more people are recognizing the insanity of attempting to comply with the onslaught of rules and regulations which allegedly protect them against others. They are realizing that the Rules are building a prison in which they themselves are incarcerated.
We conclude today’s Mint with a quote from Ayn Rand which seems appropriate when considering an amoeba like government:
“When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed.”
While we may have no confidence in government, we make up for it in an abundance of faith in God and our fellow men and women. Are you ready to come out of Babylon?
Stay tuned and Trust Jesus.
Stay Fresh!
Email: davidminteconomics@gmail.com
Key Indicators for July 12, 2012
Copper Price per Lb: $3.43
Oil Price per Barrel: $85.76
Corn Price per Bushel: $7.71
10 Yr US Treasury Bond: 1.48%
FED Target Rate: 0.17% ON AUTOPILOT, THE FED IS DEAD!
Gold Price Per Ounce: $1,571 PERMANENT UNCERTAINTY
MINT Perceived Target Rate*: 0.25%
Unemployment Rate: 8.2%
Inflation Rate (CPI): -0.3%
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 12,573
M1 Monetary Base: $2,367,500,000,000
M2 Monetary Base: $9,963,900,000,000
For the few who missed it, Spain handily defeated Italy yesterday, proving Moody’s wrong once again and making us 1-0 on Euro cup calls here at The Mint. The Spanish national team, which has won each Euro and World Cup since 2008, will now go down as one of the greatest national teams of all time.
The continent will now turn its weary eyes to the Olympic games, while those who can afford it prepare for their constitutionally guaranteed summer vacation (no kidding, the EU high court has held it as such).
Unfortunately for footballers and vacationers alike, Europe is operating in a perpetual crisis mode, and it is possible that vacationers will return to a Europe that is quite different than the one they left just 30 days before. One in which their options are limited and their ATM card doesn’t work.
Yes, what started as a minor Hellenic financial problem has predictibly mushroomed into a political crisis at the highest level of the EU. Voters, fed up with the bailout/austerity approach to banker welfare, increasingly exercise what is left of their sovereign right to vote out relative conservatives and/or moderates and vote in technocrats and/or populists as their fearless leaders.
Here is another prediction, for what its worth, the populists take Germany in the fall of 2013, Europe’s version of Mega Maid will have turned all the way from suck to blow. The path of austerity that they are currently on will be but a faint memory as the ECB and policy makers move from bailing out the bankers to bailing out any and every political ally.
{Editor’s note: A populist, for our purposes, is a socialist who no longer masquerades as a conservative or moderate, they are out of the closet, as it were.}
Yet for all the drama and human suffering that is unfolding, we can’t help but think that this is all simply a high priced publicity stunt to get the doomed Euro currency some air time.
For many of the European peoples, the Euro currency has served as nothing more than an unwanted crash course in math and an agent of larceny on the grandest of scales. The average Jacque, Giorgos, Jorge, or Giovanni would have been better off in the long run had the Euro never been dreamed up.
However, the continued use of the Euro is an extremely high priority to for a select few with addreses on Wall Street, in The City, and anywhere in Germany. As such, the current tack for the doomed Euroship is for it to be spoken of in the same context as climate change or terrorism, which invariably involves an increasingly illogical and alarmist rhetoric.
The question of whether or not something should be done is glossed over in favor of handing supreme power to a body who demands that something be done. The only rhetoric that is allowed beyond fear mongering is a discussion of what the supreme power should do.
And so it is with the Euro.
There will be a number of elections over the coming months in the Eurozone, and not one of them will matter. The tone in Europe is turning decidedly populist, as George Friedman eloquently describes in his recent Geopolitcal Weekly report via Stratfor:
The Futility of European Elections
The only question that remains is whether or not the ECB will accomodate the populist agenda with an accomodative monetary policy.
Our guess is that they will, for populism has never been bound by fiscal restraint.
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