What If. . . ?

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s bold assertion was that without the people who possess the money, talent, and ideas to keep the economy humming along, it would surely die a quick, ignominious death because all that would be left would be consumers. And consumers don't produce.

Perhaps, it’s finally time for the Engine of the World to turn off the ignition switch.

Wealth, after all, is a fungible commodity, and talent and ideas are intangible by nature. What I’m proposing is that life imitate art and that those of use who drive the global economy show the rest of us just what would happen if — for a time — the engine were to sputter to a halt.

What would happen?

Rand’s thousand-page tome is a pretty fair description of the consequences of such an event. I don’t need to repeat here in much less eloquent language what she wrote more than 50 years ago.

However, if I may be permitted my own take on the subject, this is what it might look like in a very different world, a half-century later. 

A general slowdown would take place almost immediately. The recent credit crisis and stock market crash would pale in comparison. Wall Street, again, would be blamed for it, as would George W. Bush.

The Internet would be ablaze with speculation about who, what, when, where, and why, making this political season look like a tea party with a bunch of little old ladies.

It wouldn’t be Wall Street’s fault or, for that matter, GWB’s. Traders at the NYSE would be standing around with nothing to do because the ones with the money — let’s call them investors — would not be calling back with buy orders after their initial orders to sell their assets.

Accordingly, stocks would drop; not like a cat from a high perch, landing on its feet, but like a little, old, osteoporotic lady. And when she meets the ground at terminal velocity, her every bone will be shattered.

Businesses of all sizes will begin to feel the effects of the engine seizing up, but small businesses will be the first to fail for lack of sales. The bloodbath of jobs will begin at the bottom and quickly work its way to the Fortune 500 where it will stain the landscape red.

Travel will come to a standstill. As will trade. Food and fuel production will come to a halt. Shortages, after a short time, would be widespread.

Liberals will alternate between screaming for the government to “do something” and begging for the wealthy, the talented, the brightest among us, to have mercy, to demanding that Congress seize the assets of anyone not investing, and make the talented and bright people “give up the goods,” so to speak, a kind of intellectual slavery.

This is not the same America I grew up in, my friends; not by a longshot.

Because capital will dry up, everything we take for granted as a part of everyday life will come to a halt.

The price of fuel will probably plummet due to lack of demand. No jobs, no work, no income, no money for gas. Within a couple months of this, people will begin leaving their cars at home and taking mass transit, riding bicycles, or walking. Only there won’t be anywhere to go because businesses will start shuttering en masse. Why? Because they don’t have the capital to buy goods wholesale.

Within a year, we could be seeing breadlines and soup kitchens again. A stunned look of incredulity will wash across the faces of everyone you see in public.

Suicides will be rampant; so will murder-suicides because breadwinners won’t be able to care for their families.

But this is what it may take to wake the American public from its slumber. We have been sleepwalking far too long and we’ll soon walk off a cliff if we don’t awaken.

We may yet have to go through a purge to get over the binge of buying into the dystopian nightmare the Democrats, the liberals, the leftists, the socialists, the Marxists have been slowly foisting on the public as “economic justice” all in the name of "fairness."

Before it comes to that, what we need to do is rid ourselves of these vermin. While we still can.

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Postscript: This is one of the most powerful videos I've seen this election season. Please take 2 minutes to watch it.

In The Toilet

Yesterday, three weeks from Election Day, my dear friend, Jeramy, wrote in response to my last blog entry:

I have been responding to you all afternoon...mentally. Now all I can say in response is that the Bush jr. administation [sic] has been the biggest fiasco in American History. Anyone that wants to replace it with anything that even remotely resembles it is either sound asleep or has his head so far up his own ass that only a serious laxative can extract it. Head for the toilet on Nov. 4 !

I love ya, Jay. But you're so very wrong about your misplaced loyalty to "The One." The media's favorite messiah is only going to put us into a tailspin from which we may not recover.

If you recall from your American History classes. . . after the crash of '29, Hoover immediately raised taxes and enacted protectionist legislation -- the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.  Raising tariffs was one of the worst things that could have been done at that point. This is exactly what Obama wants to do -- raise taxes on the "evil rich" and enact protectionist legislation to "save American jobs."

FDR came in after Hoover, promising to balance the budget and to keep his hands off the economy. That didn't last long. FDR expanded on Hoover's policies and shortly added some of his own to the mix, including the Davis-Bacon Act, which established the requirement for paying prevailing wages on public works projects. That and several other policies suffered from the same problems that Hoover's programs did:  they reduced price flexibility, and often set minimum prices that made the Great Depression not so great after all. 

FDR's widely worshipped (by liberals) New Deal policies seemed to work at first; the economy began to expand again in 1933 and continued through the spring of 1937. At that point, a second depression began and lasted until June of 1938. It wasn't until WWII began (for the U.S.) in 1941 that the depression was officially pronounced dead.

Here's some enlightening reading, if you're interested:

"In an article in the August [2004] issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Lee E. Ohanian and Harold L. Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.

"[The] two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

"After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Cole and Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years."

Your candidate wants to tax the very people who provide the jobs for this economy. Obama wants to "spread the wealth" -- a tenet of the Marxist philosophy so vaunted by the Left -- as he very casually said to a pissed off plumber questioning Obama about his tax policies just the other day at a rally.

Obama is the furthest left candidate of a major party ever to run for president. And his policies will not be good for this country. On the contrary.

Though the Bush administration has proved disappointing on many fronts -- yes, even to me -- it's been far from the "fiasco" you and many of your fellow libs claim it has been. You seem to conveniently forget about Jimmy Carter and 22% interest rates and gas lines. Another Democrat, Harry Truman, was also vilified before he left office; he had an approval rating of 21% -- lower than Bush's. History, however, has treated him more kindly. I'm sure that neither of us will be around to hear how historians one day will give Bush much better grades than the mainstream media does today.

I suppose if by "anything that remotely resembles it" you mean any Republican president -- regardless of his/her experience, policies, or basic principles -- then, yes, I do plan on supporting John McCain and voting for him on Nov. 4th.

However, I am neither sound asleep nor do I have my head up my ass. I did once -- actually, three times -- when I voted for McGovern, Carter, and Dukakis. But never again.

Maybe you should actually spend a little time studying what Obama really believes, what his policies are (if you can find them), and look into his track record. That is, if you can find a track record because, it doesn't take much to discover that he is a man of very little accomplishment. He's good at voting "Present" when it's time to take a stand; he has very poor judgment when it comes to the people he associates with (e.g., Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, and Bill Ayers); and he's a student' of the far, far left. To say he's a closet socialist is not stretching the truth at all. In fact, if fits him like a glove.

But, alas, it looks as if your guy may indeed win the election; though I'm far from ready to concede the race yet. When (or if) he does I will be spending some time at the toilet -- retching at the thought of the next four years and how we may never recover as a nation.

The More I Learn About Obama. . .

The more I learn about Barack Obama, the less I like him. . . and I didn't much like him to begin with.

Why? Because he's an empty shirt. He's arrogant. His associations are, at the very least, highly questionable. He not only has no accomplishments worth putting on a presidential resumé, he expects people to worship and adore him.

I'm really quite scared three weeks or so before the election. The poll numbers don't look good for McCain and though I support him with every fiber of my being, he's got another debate to go through and he's just not a very good debater. Smart guy. Sticks to the talking points way too much in critical situations -- like a debate.

If he doesn't unload both barrels in the next debate, reload and keep firing, Obama is going to win this election in a cakewalk and we will have the most far-left government in the history of this country. And the public are so ignorant of the consequences of what that means that they are salivating at the thought of a bigger government, huge restrictions on free speech, and an increase in taxes on the very people who can save this economy -- small business owners.

We will be less safe from attacks on our nation because the safeguards we put in place will be destroyed. We'll give enemy combatants rights they don't deserve. And we'll simply be more complacent, less vigilant than we are now.

The latest accusation about Barack Obama is that not only was he "palling around" with Bill Ayers, there is some interesting, though inconclusive, evidence that shows a very strong likelihood that Ayers actually ghostwrote Dreams From My Father.

Is this allegation true? I don't know. The accusation doesn't seem to come from left. . . or, right. . . field. If the investigation's methodology is valid, I think it's worth a second look. I've made no decision so far.

Taken as a whole, the life of Barack Hussein Obama -- yeah, yeah, I know it's politically incorrect to use his middle name -- is not that remarkable. I know several people who exceed his accomplishments and for whom I'd much rather cast a ballot.

I really hope you'll think twice about what grave consequences await this nation if we elect Obama president. John McCain is a man of integrity and grit and even though I may disagree with him on some issues, he's not likely to send this country down the drain.

Obama would only lead the leftward lurch into oblivion for the USA. Don't let that happen. Vote for John McCain on Nov. 4th.

Oh, Yeah. He's The ONE, Alright.

I LOVE THIS!!!

What's 10% Between Friends?

If I were in charge, I'd bring down the cost of gas to what it was when I was a kid when they used to have "gas wars."

Memory is not the best testament to the truth, particularly when it is a memory so distant; however, when I was about 12 or so, I remember seeing gas on sale for 8 cents a gallon when the usual price was around 20–21 cents a gallon. It sticks in my mind because I had recently started learning to drive. But that's another story for another day.

Now that would make it truly affordable and would bring down prices across the board. Wouldn't it?

The trouble with this scenario is the fact that it is merely wishful thinking. For the sake of our argument, let's say the cost of a gallon of gasoline were to suddenly drop to $1.00 — just so the math won't tax the minds of too many government school graduates.

Out of that greenback, want to venture a guess as to the profit the oil companies in this country make? Interestingly, the profit margin and the profit would be equal in number in our little quiz, though they use different units. If you went to a government school, you might make note of that.

The profit on that gallon of gas would be less than one thin dime. Therefore, the profit margin would be less than 10 percent.

How much is the government's take on that gallon? Funny you should ask.

A very quick search led me to the Energy Information Administration's website. According to their numbers, "From 2000 to 2007, taxes averaged about 24% of the retail gasoline price." This doesn't include county and local taxes, they go on to say. (A downloadable PDF is available here.)

Now, if my math teachers in the government schools I attended taught me anything it is that 24 is a larger number than 10. So, let's add county and local taxes and very conservatively call it 25 percent, though we both know that misses the mark widely.

The sundry costs of that gallon of gas amount to about 65 cents. That's 65 cents that the oil companies must PAY for the crude that makes the gas. The oil companies don't own the oil; they must buy it on the open market and they must compete with other oil companies, speculators, and the emerging markets of China and India, which are consuming vast quantities of oil in order to grow their own economies.

OPEC, which is not the friendliest of cartels in the world, say that the supply is adequate for the world and only, occasionally, will offer the tiniest of bumps in production output, which tends to keep the price of crude rather high. They rake in the cash while the world's economies experience an extreme case of "pucker-factor," tightening everything up.

If we say that the average price of oil for 2007 was $70 (it was actually $72.32) and that world oil consumption was 80 million barrels of oil per day (it was upwards of 82 million), then the roughly 2 trillion dollars spent for that oil seems to look like "real money," to quote the late Sen. Everett Dirksen, compared to the US oil industry's profit of 120 billion dollars.

My point is, If I only made a profit margin of 10 percent. . . Me? I'd find another line of work. There are plenty of investments out there that pay much more than 10% and of which anyone of almost any means could take advantage.

What do we do to reduce the impact foreign oil has on our economy? The most logical answer seems to lie in accessing our own resources; resources that, even today, are illegal to touch. Dare I mention it? ANWR by any other name would smell as sweet as the crude beneath its frozen soil. There are offshore sources in the Atlantic, the Gulf, and the Pacific that are out of bounds only because of environmental crazies who are afraid of huge oil spills — that simply haven't happened in significant quantities — and harming the caribou or snail darters or some other B.S. Drill here. Drill now. Pay less.

It's time to shove these idiots out of the way and head to the oil fields — wherever they are. Even the oil locked up in the shale of Colorado, Montana, and Utah cannot presently be tapped because of moronic laws passed by a Congress overly intimidated by these environmental weirdos.

Should we be good stewards of the earth? Absolutely. Should we invest in new, renewable sources of energy? Of course. Should we engineer new, more fuel-efficient automobiles? Kewl! Should we use the resources provided to us by Nature to improve and enhance our lives on the planet? Damn right!

If the oil companies turn a tidy 10 percent profit while providing a product upon which the world's — and particularly the United States' — economies heavily depend, good on them. That's what capitalism is all about.

When fools like Richard Beller of Summit, New York call for more regulation of the economy in an op-ed on the Times Union website and he doesn't have the vaguest understanding of the difference between profit and profit margin, nor any idea what costs make up that gallon of gas (above) you can bet your gas money on Congress listening to him.

Why? Because it's an election year and the squeaky wheel gets oiled. And the rest of us get lubed.

Hillary — Stay the Course

I read a story today on Politico.com about how Clint Eastwood feels "sorry" for Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“I watch Clinton and feel kind of sorry for her and wonder, ‘What are all these people telling her to run away for?’” Eastwood said. “She’s showing her strength by hanging in there.”

It should come as no surprise that I'm no fan of Hillary Clinton — or any Democrat for that matter. But I can't help agreeing with Eastwood. Politics is a very rough game. The thin-skinned never last long. If Clinton is anything, she is a damn tough broad. Say what you will about her politics — and I do, frequently — no one can call her a quitter.

That brings me to another point: The people in the Democrat Party who are bemoaning her determination to hang in there until the last primary vote is counted are the same people who want the United States of America to quit the War in Iraq and come running home with our collective tail between our legs. They're the quitters of the world, the givers-up, the appeasers of despots.

Hillary's politics are not my own; I dislike her immensely and would never vote for her. But I hope for the sake of everyone who has ever stood strong against the hurricane of naysayers in the world that she "stays the course." In doing so, maybe she'll begin to truly understand one of the primary values of the Bush administration. A value she has railed against for the past eight years.

Cindy Sheehan Strapped to a Tomahawk

If I ruled the world, we'd be drilling both in ANWR and off Florida's Gulf coast, researching alternative energy sources, new forms of transportation, and developing a vaccine for children so they wouldn't grow up to be liberals.

But I'm not. So, here we sit with OPEC (and China and India) in a demand-driven oil-price war that is straining the pocketbooks of most every family in the country and threatens to put our economy into a nosedive. Plus, that 50¢ package of rice is now $2.00. That's not as bad as  other parts of the world because the U.S. produces 80% of the rice it consumes. Try living in Vietnam right now. They live on rice and the price of the little white grains has gone up some 1200% in the past year or two.

Corn? Well, I don't have to tell you about corn; do I? The idiots on Capitol Hill don't have much sense so they actually listened to the environmental wackos who have been screaming that we've got to create ethanol from corn so we can replace the foreign oil on which we're so dependent. Trouble is, robbing from the food chain to feed the fuel chain turns out to be a net negative strategy. Everybody loses. Will someone please wake up Congress and tell them we won't be able to afford to eat soon?

I drive a car that used to get somewhat decent gas mileage -- 22 mpg/city. At $2-2.50/gallon, that's still not bad. But we're approaching $4 for a freakin' gallon o' gas and 22 mpg just doesn't cut it. That's almost 2 dimes for every mile I drive.

I'm lucky; I work at home. No hour-long commute twice a day in stop-and-go traffic out to the 'burbs. I suppose I could live in Frisco, a suburb 25 miles north of downtown Dallas, as the mockingbird flies. And drive a Hummer. 

I read a story yesterday about people trying to dump their gas-guzzling SUVs in favor of less thirsty transportation. Unfortunately, no one's buying. As Lucy would say, "Eeeeuuuwwww."

I may end up buying a smaller car myself. With talk of SEVEN dollar gas in the news (if oil hits $200/bbl) I may just have to settle for a bicycle. Or a trike. With a basket on the back and little horn and. . . and. . . a flag! Oooh, yeah, that's me. Oh, well, it may just be if we can't find a solution to this foreign oil dependency.

Hey! I just had an idea. Man, this is gonna make me MILLIONS! Let's track down all the environmentalists who were screaming about corn-based ethanol and put 'em in a big pot and render the fat from them and use that to run our bio-diesel cars!

Oh, wait. . . Damn! They're all vegetarians and don't have but about 3% body fat. Another net-negative energy strategy. 

Okay. . . then the only thing left is to bomb Ahmadinejad back to the Stone Age and take his oil. We can strap Cindy Sheehan to the first nuclear-tipped Tomahawk missile.

Oh, this is gettin' goooood.