When I have time, I’d like to read the other point-of-view.

Posted in Travel on October 8th, 2008 Read More One

My friend Alan mentioned that he probably won’t vote because he doesn’t think his vote makes any difference.

Well, here’s an answer from Peter Norvig’s Presidential Election 2008 FAQ. The best answer I’ve seen for this question, IMHO.

Is it rational to vote?

Let me explain what the question means. For your vote to have an effect on the election, you would have to live in a decisive state, meaning a state that would give one candidate or the other the required 270th electoral vote. More importantly, your vote would have to break an exact tie in your state. With 100 million voters nationwide, what are the chances of that? If the chance is so small, why bother voting at all?

Historically, most voters either didn’t worry about this problem, or figured they would vote despite the fact that they weren’t likely to change the outcome. Then the 2000 Florida election changed all that. That election was finally decided by the Supreme Court rather than by counting the ballots, but various approaches to counting the ballots would have had the result varying from a 171 vote win for Gore to a 537 vote win for Bush.

What is the probability that there will be a decisive state with a very close vote total? Nate Silver says there is (as of Oct. 3) a 4% chance that a recount will be required; that is, that a decisive state will have a margin within 0.5%. There are about 8 swing states, so the odds that any one (let’s say Florida) would require a recount is 1/8 of 4% or 0.5%. There are 6 million voters in Florida, so a recount occurs there when the vote totals are within 30,000 of each other. So there’s about a 1/30,000 chance that the recount will end up so even that your vote would decide it. All together that’s a one in 6 million chance that your vote (assuming you live in one of the 8 swing states) would decide the election. (If you live in a solid state like Oklahoma or California, it just ain’t going to happen.)

That’s a small chance, but what is the value of getting to break the tie? We can estimate the total monetary value by noting that the current office holder presided over a $3 trillion war and at least a $1 trillion economic melt-down. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) estimated the cost of the Bush presidency at $7.7 trillion. Let’s compromise and call it $6 trillion, and assume that the other candidate would have been revenue neutral, so the net difference of the presidential choice is $6 trillion.

The value of not voting is that you save, say, an hour of your time. If you’re an average American wage-earner, that’s about $20. In contrast, the value of voting is the probability that your vote will decide the election (1 in 6 million) times the cost difference ($6 trillion). That means the expected value of your vote is $1,000,000. What else have you ever done in your life with an expected value of a million dollars per hour? Not even Warren Buffett makes that much.

So make sure you vote, and make sure you choose the candidate with a better economic plan (also check climate plans, which could also lead to trillion-dollar differences) so that your expected monetary value for your vote is +$1 million rather than -$1 million.

By the way, here’s proof that voting is patriotic: If you think of the value of your vote to the country, $1 million, then obviously voting is the right thing to do. But if you think of the value to yourself, by dividing the $1 million by 300 million Americans, then the benefit of voting is less than a penny, and the rational choice would be not to vote (since it costs you an hour of your time). So anyone who votes is patriotic, and anyone who doesn’t is selfish (or irrational).. I hope you’re a rational patriot.    

Yes. Voting for president is one of the most cost-effective actions any American can take.

Posted in Travel on October 6th, 2008 Read More One

When I first started thinking about this Presidential election, I supported both Ron Paul and John McCain. I saw them both as good options, as I agreed with most of their positions. And the issues they disagreed on were not ones that I cared about. But as I learned more, I slowly began to oppose the War in Iraq. Initially, I supported it for two main reasons:

1. I thought it was a war against terrorism.
2. I believed the people who said it would be a relatively quick and easy war.

It turns out that both of these are false. As a result, I began enthusiastically supporting Ron Paul for President. He received 1.2 million votes in the Republican Primary– more than the combined totals of Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, Alan Keyes, and Duncan Hunter (Giuliani received about 600,000).

But McCain won. After Ron Paul suspended his campaign, I thought I might still support McCain. Choosing Sarah Palin definitely pushed me in his direction. Yet learning about the issues that matter to Ron Paul has made me care about things that I didn’t used to. And I’ve learned more about McCain that certainly pushes me away from him. (For instance, he wants to expand the government, whereas I really prefer small government.)

Recently, I’ve started to move towards voting for a third party candidate. Ralph Nader is the most well-known option, but I don’t like him much. Would a third party be better than the two major ones? Yes. And here’s why…

1. Both McCain and Obama support the Iraq War.

That’s a fact. You can look up their voting records. These are also facts:

• The Iraq War has nothing to do with the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001.
• It has no Declaration of War, as required by the Constitution.
• We can’t afford it. Anyone who cares about the economy should care about this point. Billions (trillions?) of dollars do make a difference.
• There’s an excellent alternative: H.R. 3076 — September 11 Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001, introduced by Ron Paul. If we’d chosen this route, Osama bin Laden would likely be captured and dead by now.

2. Neither McCain nor Obama would get rid of the Federal Reserve.

Here’s why you should oppose the Fed: 

• It’s a central bank.
• It caused the Great Depression.
• It caused the housing bubble by artificially lowering interest rates in 2003.
• It’s devaluing the dollar. Inflation and higher prices are merely a symptom of this.

Historically interesting: Norma McCorvey endorsed Ron Paul on January 22, 2008, stating: ”I support Ron Paul for president because we share the same goal, that of overturning Roe v. Wade. He has never wavered on the issue of being pro-life and has a voting record to prove it. He understands the importance of civil liberties for all, including the unborn.”

So I hope I’ve established that neither McCain nor Obama is a good option. Ron Paul agrees with me, repeatedly refusing to endorse McCain (even though members of McCain’s staff have called him asking him to do so). He’s a 10-term Republican congressman, but he does what’s best for the country, even if it’s not what the party says.

I had no idea which third party candidate to vote for, until I discovered (via Twitter, no less) that Ron Paul had endorsed Chuck Baldwin. Here’s an excerpt:

The Libertarian Party Candidate admonished me for “remaining neutral” in the presidential race and not stating whom I will vote for in November.   It’s true; I have done exactly that due to my respect and friendship and support from both the Constitution and Libertarian Party members.  I remain a lifetime member of the Libertarian Party and I’m a ten-term Republican Congressman.  It is not against the law to participate in more then one political party.  Chuck Baldwin has been a friend and was an active supporter in the presidential campaign.

I continue to wish the Libertarian and Constitution Parties well.  The more votes they get, the better.  I have attended Libertarian Party conventions frequently over the years.

In some states, one can be on the ballots of two parties, as they can in New York.  This is good and attacks the monopoly control of politics by Republicans and Democrats.  We need more states to permit this option.  This will be a good project for the Campaign for Liberty, along with the alliance we are building to change the process.

I’ve thought about the unsolicited advice from the Libertarian Party candidate, and he has convinced me to reject my neutral stance in the November election.  I’m supporting Chuck Baldwin, the Constitution Party candidate.

Source: Campaign for Liberty Post

When I read this, I knew nothing about Chuck Baldwin. Now I know this:

1. Baldwin opposes in the War in Iraq, instead supporting the likes of H.R. 3076. Good.
2. Baldwin opposes the Federal Reserve, instead realizing that only the market can set interest rates to optimal levels. Also good.
3. Baldwin opposes abortion, instead supporting Ron Paul’s Sanctity of Life legislation, H.R. 2597. Great!

Posted in Travel on October 1st, 2008 Read More 4

Ralph Nader visited USC today. Unfortunately, I didn’t make it, but I hope someone got it on video and will post it. I’ll ask some friends about it sometime

Here’s a letter by Ron Paul which again reminds me why I want to vote for a third-party candidate.

September 27, 2008

Disaster is About to Strike
By Ron Paul

The following letter was sent to Ron Paul supporters 2 days ago. I believe it is very important, and urge you to read it. - Peter

Dear Friend;

Whenever a Great Bipartisan Consensus is announced, and a compliant media assures everyone that the wondrous actions of our wise leaders are being taken for our own good, you can know with absolute certainty that disaster is about to strike.

The events of the past week are no exception.

The bailout package that is about to be rammed down Congress’ throat is not just economically foolish. It is downright sinister. It makes a mockery of our Constitution, which our leaders should never again bother pretending is still in effect. It promises the American people a never-ending nightmare of ever-greater debt liabilities they will have to shoulder. Two weeks ago, financial analyst Jim Rogers said the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made America more communist than China! “This is welfare for the rich,” he said. “This is socialism for the rich. It’s bailing out the financiers, the banks, the Wall Streeters.”

That describes the current bailout package to a T. And we’re being told it’s unavoidable.

The claim that the market caused all this is so staggeringly foolish that only politicians and the media could pretend to believe it. But that has become the conventional wisdom, with the desired result that those responsible for the credit bubble and its predictable consequences - predictable, that is, to those who understand sound, Austrian economics - are being let off the hook. The Federal Reserve System is actually positioning itself as the savior, rather than the culprit, in this mess!

The Treasury Secretary is authorized to purchase up to $700 billion in mortgage-related assets at any one time. That means $700 billion is only the very beginning of what will hit us.

Financial institutions are “designated as financial agents of the Government.” This is the New Deal to end all New Deals.

Then there’s this: “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.” Translation: the Secretary can buy up whatever junk debt he wants to, burden the American people with it, and be subject to no one in the process.

There goes your country.

Even some so-called free-market economists are calling all this “sadly necessary.” Sad, yes. Necessary? Don’t make me laugh.

Our one-party system is complicit in yet another crime against the American people. The two major party candidates for president themselves initially indicated their strong support for bailouts of this kind - another example of the big choice we’re supposedly presented with this November: yes or yes. Now, with a backlash brewing, they’re not quite sure what their views are. A sad display, really.

Although the present bailout package is almost certainly not the end of the political atrocities we’ll witness in connection with the crisis, time is short. Congress may vote as soon as tomorrow. With a Rasmussen poll finding support for the bailout at an anemic seven percent, some members of Congress are afraid to vote for it. Call them! Let them hear from you! Tell them you will never vote for anyone who supports this atrocity.

The issue boils down to this: do we care about freedom? Do we care about responsibility and accountability? Do we care that our government and media have been bought and paid for? Do we care that average Americans are about to be looted in order to subsidize the fattest of cats on Wall Street and in government? Do we care?

When the chips are down, will we stand up and fight, even if it means standing up against every stripe of fashionable opinion in politics and the media?

Times like these have a way of telling us what kind of a people we are, and what kind of country we shall be.

In liberty,

Ron Paul

Posted in Travel on September 26th, 2008 Read More Be the first to comment

All of the economic improvement we’ve experienced is due to technology.

Take a look at this graph of income per person.

And watch this speech by Larry Page, co-founder and former CEO of Google.

Posted in Travel on September 25th, 2008 Read More Be the first to comment

Dear Friends:

The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.

We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market’s attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.

Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I’d only be repeating what I’ve been saying over and over - not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.

Still, at least a few observations are necessary.

The president assures us that his administration “is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets.” Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?

We are told that “low interest rates” led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.

Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or “wildcat capitalism” (as if we actually have a pure free market!).

Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: “Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk.”

Doesn’t that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn’t that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn’t the federal government shown that the “many” who “believed they were guaranteed by the federal government” were in fact correct?

Then come the scare tactics. If we don’t give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary “the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet.” Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.

It’s the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.

The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.

F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks’ manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:

Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end… It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.

The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.

The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?

Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a “rescue plan”? I guess “bailout” wasn’t sitting too well with the American people.

The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you’re supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.

I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.

H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

In liberty,

Ron Paul

Posted in Travel on September 25th, 2008 Read More One

I’m using K2 with Psychic Search, and my blog looked a bit weird for users coming from search engines. The tag specified a class that was completely messed up. It showed Related Posts along with some keywords. I was confused, thinking it was caused by one of the Related Posts plugins I had installed.

Nope. Actually, Psychic Search by MaxBlogPress actually has related posts functionality built-in. And it’ll work even if you haven’t registered or activated the plugin yet. I was thinking of simply not using this feature of PS, but it shows some posts that are, in my opinion, more relevant than the ones returned by other related posts plugins.

The trick is to select this option in the plugin’s settings page:

Don’t Show Related Posts Automatically, I’ll Use the theme funciton or widget

Then, add this wherever you want Psychic Search’s Related Posts to appear:

<?php ps_related_posts(5, ‘<li>’, ‘</li>’, ‘Related Posts:<ul>’, ‘</ul>’); ?>

That’s it!

Posted in Travel on September 25th, 2008 Read More Be the first to comment

Typed it up before I realized it’s not part of our readings.

Posted in Travel on September 21st, 2008 Read More One

I refuse to vote for a candidate who doesn’t discuss this issue honestly. Watch Ron Paul now. And on MSNBC, Ron Paul discusses the national debt. (He also mentions the situation regarding Hurricane Ike, which hit near where he lives in Texas.)

Watch the video above!

Posted in Travel on September 18th, 2008 Read More Be the first to comment

I’m hearing a lot about the Great Depression in the news recently. The stock market fell 400 points, people are losing jobs. But what nobody’s mentioning is the fact that the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression. Obviously, there are some who disagree, but you’ll have to look at the facts and decide for yourself. I did.

Liberals are trying to blame the economy’s problems on a lack of regulation. It’s shocking to me that they can get away with being so deceptive. In fact, it is regulation that has caused and is still causing the worst economic disasters in history. Why do you think the Soviet Union collapsed? Well-intended socialist economic policies turned out to be fundamentally unsound, and their economy collapsed. Go a little further back in time to an event that everyone is currently talking about: the Great Depression. It was a normal down business cycle. It was only when the Fed stepped in that it spiraled out of control and became a terrible worldwide economic downturn.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-sponsored enterprises, were bailed out by the government on the backs of American taxpayers. Read more about the fraud here, and see that Ron Paul warned about this problem 5 years ago.

Posted in Travel on September 18th, 2008 Read More One