As impressive as that is, there is a severe downside. The Fed-manufactured crises of 2008 has literally made them the economy’s central planners. Here is an excerpt from Hummel’s paper:

Under the old central planning—which performed so poorly in the Soviet Union, Communist China, and other command economies—the government attempted to manage production and the supply of goods and services. Under the new central planning, the Fed attempts to manage the financial system and the supply and allocation of credit.

[…]

But now with Bernanke, the central planning aspect of central banking has become far more encompassing. As George Selgin put it in an interview, “the Fed . . . has morphed into a central planning agency with a corporate welfare department.”

Twenty months after the Federal Court’s ruling, Geithner mocks the judge and the rule of law by providing basically nothing:

They were so heavily redacted that most of what’s left are everyday messages such as “Did you just try to call me?” and “Monday will be a busy day!”
 None of the documents answers Pittman’s request for “records sufficient to show the names of the relevant securities” or the dates and terms of the guarantees.

This is all happening under the Obama regime, the one that campaigned on more transparency and “open government”.

PLAYBOY: In Atlas Shrugged you wrote, “There are two sides to every issue. One side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.” Isn’t this a rather black-and-white set of values?

RAND: It most certainly is. I most emphatically advocate a black-and-white view of the world. Let us define this. What is meant by the expression “black and white”? It means good and evil. Before you can identify anything as gray, as middle of the road, you have to know what is black and what is white, because gray is merely a mixture of the two. And when you have established that one alternative is good and the other is evil, there is no justification for the choice of a mixture. There is no justification ever for choosing any part of what you know to be evil.

When you chose the lesser of two evils, you still get evil.

You may not be aware, for example, that Israel conspired with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in 1987 to create Hamas. Israel also armed Hamas. It wanted an alternative to the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization]. The first Intifada began in 1987. It was primarily nonviolent on the part of Palestinians (not Israelis). Israel arrested or deported most of the nonviolent leaders while allowing Sheikh [Ahmad] Yassin, Hamas’s spiritual leader, to distribute anti-Jewish hate literature calling for the violent overthrow of the Zionist government. It is far easier for Israel to portray the Palestinians as psychotic killers in order to divert the world’s attention from its strategy of land theft and ethnic cleansing and thereby deceive the world into believing the Israeli army is merely defending itself than it is to justify land theft and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians when their resistance is nonviolent.

Read the rest here.

More info here: Hamas is a Creation of Mossad

As soon as oil hits water, the ocean begins its deconstruction. In fact, the marine environment handles oil much like a human body handles alcohol: destroying, metabolizing and depositing the excessive compounds —in oil’s case, hydrocarbons—then transforming the compounds into safer substances, says Stanislav Patin, chairman of the Aquatic Toxicology Committee under the Russian Academy of Sciences and international expert on marine pollution.

Explains how 1 million barrels of oil can naturally seep into the ocean each year and life mysteriously goes on.

The state’s solution to the BP spill? Add toxic chemicals.

It’s truly amazing despite all the crimes committed by governments, people still religiously cling to the idea governments are necessary to protect life, liberty and property. You can even point out governments not only have no duty to protect anyone, but also do a disasterous job at whatever they bother doing. Despite overwhelming evidence government is not only unnecessary, corrupt and a cancer on the world, its victims continue to revere them. Maybe this will help convince them governments are nothing more than gangs of killers, thieves and liars.

I disagree about them doing a disastrous job. Government actually does its job exceptionally well – which is to rob, rape, murder and plunder its subjects while doing everything in its power to expand and protect its monopoly on violence.