After World War I the world’s monetary system was in disarray.  The victorious Allies sought to revive the gold standard.  However the structure which had been put in place after 1918 collapsed during the Great Depression. Some economists believe that the world’s attempt to remain on the gold standard prevented central banks from expanding the money supply enough to revive the world’s economies.

After World War II, representatives of the once again victorious allies met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to create a new international monetary system. At the time the United States accounted for more than 50% of the world’s manufacturing capacity and also held most of the world’s gold.  Since America was the uncontested economic Superpower these leaders decided to tie world currencies to the dollar.  The value of the dollar would in turn be controlled and supported by the fact that the dollar would be tied to gold at $35 per ounce.

While the Bretton Woods System was in force the central banks were given the task of maintaining fixed exchange rates. This was accomplished by massive and continuous intervention in foreign exchange markets. When a country’s currency became too expensive in relation to the dollar, that country’s central bank would sell its currency for dollars thus driving down the value of its currency.  And if the value of a country’s money became too low, that country would then aggressively buy its own currency to drive the price up.

This Bretton Woods System worked well until 1971.  By then, due to the “Guns and Butter” economic policies of the Johnson and Nixon administrations inflation in the United Statesand America’s rapidly expanding trade deficit undermined the value of the dollar. As a result America urged the now recovered and economically powerful Germany and Japanto increase the value of their currencies. Both nations did not want to do this. Raising the value of their currencies hurt their exports by increasing the prices for their goods in the United States which was their largest market.

When the pressure became unbearable, when too many nations were redeeming too many dollars against America’s dwindling gold supply the United States unilaterally abandoned the fixed gold value of the dollar allowing it to “float.”  Floating with relationship to money means it is allowed to fluctuate when compared to the currencies of other countries. Immediately the value of the dollar fell substantially when compared to other currencies, especially those of Germany and Japan.

This caused turbulence in the economies of nations and sent shockwaves through the political systems of the world.   In consequence the leaders of the major countries made an effort to revive the Bretton Woods system.  They came together in 1971, and reached theSmithsonian Agreement which for the first time allowed for the negotiation of fixed exchange rates.  However, this attempt soon failed.

In 1973, The United States and the other major economic powers agreed to a new system known as Managed Float.  This meant that central banks would still intervene with the buying and selling of their own currencies to eliminate any changes that might be perceived as too dramatic.

How long will this system of floating money, fiat currency, and systemic debt last?

Since I started with a quote from my favorite American philosopher, Yogi Berra I will frame my comments about the end result of America’s love affair with monopoly money and ever growing debt with another nugget from this source of double think profundity, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future”

You know, I know and anyone who has enough economic awareness to realize you can’t spend more than you make forever knows that our present governmental financial framework is unsustainable.  Why?  Apparently our leaders believe you can spend more than you make forever.

If you have ever tried to manage your Visa payments by charging them to MasterCard you know the end of that game.  Our leaders have pawned our grandchildren’s future for the votes they buy with social programs, tax give-aways, and bail-outs.  However it is hard to lay all the blame on the shoulders of the perpetually re-elected.  The government is the people writ large.  Almost every household in America is in debt.  Almost every business in America is in debt.

Debt is not a bad thing in and of itself.  Actually it is one of the most liberating inventions in the world.  It allows economic activity to grow based upon future activity instead of just on current holdings.  This provides a multiplier effect that has given rise to the modern world.

However, when we spend more of the future than the present can service we have inverted the pyramid and are inviting a correction.  Even if the Corporations Once Known as the Mainstream Media are blathering on about how good the stock market is doing, that the pretend unemployment rate is falling, that there is no inflation, and that the President says everything is getting better, the alternative media knows the present course is unsustainable.  Unsustainable. That word is spoken day after day on Fox and printed multiple times every day online from thousands of blogs, magazines, and newspapers.  All it means is it can’t last forever, or as an alarmist might say, “A crash is coming!”

Sure the stock market is flying high.  With the Fed pumping 85 billion a month into the banking system why wouldn’t it?  With that kind of money coming in why not play the Lotto?  Sure the unemployment rate is falling as long as you don’t count the people who have quit looking for a job.  Sure there’s no inflation as long as you don’t count energy or food.  And of course the President says everything is getting better all the time that is what his teleprompter tells him to say.

So, how long will this system of floating money, fiat currency, and systemic debt last?  None of us gets to live in the world we grew up in because the world moves too fast.  Things change. What was science fiction yesterday is your cell phone today.  One thing we can know for sure is that it isn’t over till it’s over.  Yet from a realistic evaluation of the deep hole we have spent ourselves into the future isn’t what it used to be and if the world were perfect it wouldn’t be.

Is there any way to stop this train wreck before we hit the wall?  Can we reign in Washington and stop the 6.85 million per minute that the best and the brightest are spending?  What do you think?  The great Tea Party victory of 2010 affirmed Boehner as the leader of the co-opted opposition, voted for multiple debt ceiling increases, and renewed the Patriot Act.  Do you think another Progressive Republican à la Romney has a chance to beat Hillary or would make any difference if they did?  I wish I had an answer to that because I’m tired of answering the question.  What do you think?

Tell Congress: Pass the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2013!

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Sen. Coburn told Cavuto that hearings in both houses of the U.S. Congress must probe the reliability of the IRS to manage a program that’s one-sixth of the U.S. economy and that will make decisions on something as important as citizens’ health care.

“President Obama and his minions may believe the Benghazi hearings are a ‘sideshow,’ but the real sideshow in the IRS scandal is the prospect of having thousands of agents controlling America’s health care system. How can they be trusted? Should they be trusted?” asked attorney and political consultant Mike Baker.

According to the director of the IRS’ department overseeing tax-exempt organizations, Lois Lerner, employees at an IRS office in Ohio began a probe of organizations using the terms “patriot” or “Tea Party.” IRS agents conducted politically-motivated reviews during the 2012 elections, including the presidential race, to see if conservative groups applying for 501(c) 3 status were in violation of tax-exempt regulations

As time passed, the IRS activities became a scandal on the level of Benghazi and Fast and Furious, two episodes that continue to cast a shadow over the Obama White House.

President Barack Obama’s health care law, although thousands of pages, was hastily created and frantically pushed through the House and Senate by Democratic majorities before many even had a chance to read its contents, according to Baker.

“That law is now being implemented—and has raised serious concerns about big government intrusion into American’s private lives,” said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The Committee examined how the IRS is implementing the Affordable Health Care Act, a/k/a Obamacare, and the consequences for Americans. The Oversight Committee addressed concerns about the “big brother process” it will create, the legality of rules it will enforce and the sacrosanct privacy of personal information once held only by the IRS but now share with state exchanges.

The lawmakers also reviewed the biggest spending item within Obamacare – its complicated subsidy scheme and the assessment of the challenges the IRS faces with implementation.

“Under Obamacare, taxpayers will have to provide within 30 days, notification to a government agency about key information in their lives: did they get a raise or take another job; did a family member move into the household; were they married or divorced; what is the nature of their employer-paid health care coverage. The IRS is ill equipped to deliver customer satisfaction in addressing disputes or questions with the public, according to key metrics and government surveys. The IRS is also ill equipped to handle the massive staffing and technology ramp-ups required to handle this data,” Chairman Issa told his committee.

According to Issa, under Obamacare, taxpayers will have to provide within 30 days, notification to a government agency about key information in their lives: did they get a raise or take another job; did a family member move into the household; were they married or divorced; what is the nature of their employer-paid health care coverage.

“The IRS is ill equipped to deliver customer satisfaction in addressing disputes or questions with the public, according to key metrics and government surveys. The IRS is also ill equipped to handle the massive staffing and technology ramp-ups required to handle this data,” said Issa.

The IRS executives are witnessing the largest manpower expansion — at least since withholding taxes were first introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II — to enforce the new tax mandates and penalties included in the health care law, according to Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas.

According to an analysis by the Joint Economic Committee and the House Ways & Means Committee staff, up to 6,500 new IRS personnel will be necessary to collect, examine and audit new tax information mandated on families and small businesses as a result of the Affordable Care Act.

“When most people think of health care reform they think of more doctor’s exams, not more IRS exams,” said Congressman Brady, a top House Republican on the Joint Economic Committee. “Isn’t the federal government already intruding enough into our lives? We need thousands of new doctors and nurses in America, not thousands of more IRS agents.”

Tell Lawmakers to INVESTIGATE the IRS!

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Don’t believe me? Try sending the agency an email, complaining about your last pat-down. Do you hear the sound of crickets? Me too.

But now a court has ordered the TSA to listen, and to pay attention — and maybe, if we’re lucky, to do something about it.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has ordered the TSA to engage in something known as notice-and-comment rulemaking on its screening procedures, and specifically its use of full-body scanners. You can leave your comment at the Federal Register website until June 24th.

The TSA hopes the public it’s assigned to protect will approve of the scanners and the way they’re used. But it promises to “review and analyze” the comments to develop a final rule related to the use of airport scanners.

What could they do? That isn’t entirely clear. The lengthy document seems to suggest that four options are on the table:

1. Metal detectors and pat-downs. Under this scenario, the passenger screening environment “remains the same as it was prior to 2008.” Which is to say, metal detectors, not scanners, are used as the primary passenger screening technology. Any alarms are “resolved” with a pat-down.

What if it were adopted? That system worked before 2008, and it could work again. But it wouldn’t address the problems many passengers have with “enhanced” pat-downs as a method of “resolving” an alarm. Those pat-downs are sometimes said to be abusive and punitive.

2. Metal detectors and random pat-downs. Under this alternative, TSA continues to use metal detectors as the primary passenger screening technology, but it “supplements” the screening with random pat-downs.

What if it were adopted? Chaos, probably. Those selected for a pat-down would complain, there would be allegations that the randomness wasn’t so random, and at the end of the day, the airport wouldn’t be any safer.

3. Metal detectors and explosive trace detection screening. This option would see the TSA return to metal detectors but conduct explosive trace detection screening on random passengers. ETD screening is fairly non-invasive, and usually involves swabbing luggage.

What if it were adopted? This would eliminate the difficult choice passengers are often asked to make between a scan and pat-down, and would replace it with proven technologies that could identify most threats. It’s the alternative preferred by TSA-watchers and privacy advocates.

4. Full-body scans or pat-downs. The final option would be to leave things exactly as they are: Using the scanners, which have already cost American taxpayers roughly $1 billion, and resolving any alarms with an “enhanced” pat-down.

What if it were adopted? This would be an unfortunate choice, because it would mean the TSA didn’t bother reading any of the public comments and doesn’t care what the American public thinks about the way it screens them. The current system costs too much, both financially and in terms of the constitutional rights we surrender at the airport, say critics. We can do better.

So what do travelers have to say about the TSA’s rulemaking so far? Plenty.

• From Matthew Richard Glucksberg: “Please remove the charade of security provided by full body microwave and backscatter X-ray facilities.”

• Sabina Gasper writes: “Nothing is going to make flying risk-free, but the TSA is arbitrary, rude and unprofessional in how it deals with the public — scanners or no scanners.”

• Patrick Pascal comments: “My visits to the airport bring back a childhood memory of the ordeal of crossing the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. After earning the respect of my community, my industry and my church, I deeply resent the unwarranted suspicion and lack of respect I regularly receive from the TSA.”

To be fair, there are a few comments supporting the body scanners and the way they’re being used. They fall into two general categories: The “if you don’t like it don’t fly” contingent and the “I work for the TSA and am commenting anonymously” crowd. Both deserve to be heard, of course, but they represent a very small minority.

What will happen?

After June 24, will anything change? Not immediately, and maybe not for a long time. The Department of Homeland Security will consider the comments in final rule, which could be months or years in the future.

Given that the life cycle of the scanners, from deployment to disposal, is eight years, it’s possible the TSA may decide to decommission its scanner program at about the same time the scanners have become obsolete. One way or the other, it seems the scanners are going to go away at some point in the future.

You can help make the policy change happen faster by leaving a comment on the Federal Register site now and urging the TSA to embrace option three immediately. It is the only reasonable choice.

But the entire scan-versus-pat-down era, which historians will surely come to recognize as one of the darkest moments in our democracy, begs a bigger question: At what point is it acceptable to shortcut the regulatory process and not be forthcoming with the public when it comes to keeping America safe? Is itever acceptable?

I would like to say “no.” You probably do, too. But no one knows what tomorrow will bring.

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The capitalistic social order, therefore, is an economic democracy in the strictest sense of the word. In the last analysis, all decisions are dependent on the will of the people as consumers. Thus, whenever there is a conflict between the consumers’ views and those of the business managers, market pressures assure that the views of the consumers win out eventually.

I have long believed he was correct. Like Mises’ disciple Murray Rothbard, I am a student of conspiracies. They all have this in common: the seek leverage through the state. They instinctively know that Mises was correct, that they are the servants of customers in a free market order. So, they seek to rig the markets by means of the state.

Once a person comes to grips with Mises’ observation, conspiracies appear less formidable. The state is a week reed when compared to the long-run effects of liberty. The free market prospers under liberty. It expands its control over production and distribution.

This leads me to the topic at hand.

Alex Jones and Paul Watson wrote a really interesting report on the CEO of Google, Eric Scmidt. He is a big supporter of Obama. They say that he is behind a new organization, Zeitgeist. It is a supplement to the Bilderberg organization. It may be about to absorb Bilderberg.

I have been fascinated for almost half a century with the attempts of various conspiratorial groups to influence the affairs of men. This has been the goal of power-brokers for as long as we have records of human societies. The quest for power, by way of specialized knowledge and behind-the-scenes influence, goes back to the story of the Garden of Eden. Men are always trying to get shortcuts to power. They want to have inside information. They want to be the powers behind the throne, at least in those cases in which they are not convinced that they sit on the throne.

POWER AND THRONES

One of the basic themes of writers who specialize in conspiracy historiography is at the people on the thrones are really not the true source of their own power. It becomes difficult to maintain this when you are dealing with somebody like Josef Stalin or Adolf Hitler. When you get a true megalomaniac on the throne of power, and he personally tells everyone what to do, on pain of death, it is difficult to maintain that there are any powers behind the throne. These rulers seem to have a kind of built-in sniffer that enables them to locate people who think they are the powers behind the throne, and those people tend to disappear.

Nevertheless, when it comes to the exercise of power, every person on a throne is dependent on information. The better the information he has access to, the more effectively he can wield power. The difficulty is this: people do not want to tell strongmen on the throne that what they had been told before is a pack of lies, or worse, utter nonsense. That can get you killed. So, the quality of the information that flows upward to the person on the throne is always suspect. So, the man on the throne attempts to have multiple pipelines of information. But the more pipelines of information there are, the more confusing events get.

The flow of accurate information is the crucial resource. The person without accurate information is flying blind. I think that this, more than anything else, is what brought down the Soviet Union in 1991. The more complex that a society gets, the more difficult it is to gain access to reliable information.

Then there is bureaucracy. It is difficult to enforce your decisions, no matter how powerful you are.

It would not surprise me if some of the non-technicians at the top of Google have some vision of a future which they think they are capable of engineering, the way that a technician engineers a circuit. But if you look at the history of the Internet, you see how things get out of control very fast. The Internet was the product of DARPA. DARPA is a military research organization. The reason the Internet was invented in the late 1960s was because of the threat of nuclear war. The military wanted a communication system that would withstand multiple nuclear attacks. It had to be decentralized. So, they invented the Internet to provide this decentralized communication system. But what grew out of that project is vastly beyond anything that anybody could have conceived in the late 1960s. The whole world is being restructured by that project, which now has little to do with nuclear war or military communications.

The same is true of the bright fellows who think that this massive decentralized flow of information can in any way be controlled by a group of technicians at the top of the system. There is no top of the system. That is the whole point. That was why the Internet was invented. It was specifically designed so that there would be no top to the system. In this respect, it is clearly the most ingenious technological invention of all time. It was centrally planned to be totally decentralized.

THE NEXT BIG THING

The ability of any group to identify the crucial piece of information does not exist. A few people may spot it, but they probably have no power. Furthermore, even if they have access to people with power, they are in competition with so many other people, who also claim to have spotted the next big thing. Nobody knows what the next big thing is. Or, at least if somebody out there knows it, he probably does not have any money, and he probably does not have any influence.

We are back to the dilemma that was posed centuries ago by a Scottish philosopher named Adam Ferguson. He discussed society as the product of human action, but not of design. Anyway, it is not of human design. In our day, the premier exponent of that position was F. A. Hayek. Hayek made it clear that the decentralized knowledge that the free market can draw upon is vastly greater than the knowledge possessed by any committee. Centralized knowledge cannot compete effectively with decentralized knowledge, when people who possess this decentralized knowledge seek out ways of profiting from it. The more intensely capitalized the free market is, the better the knowledge available to entrepreneurs.

Nobody knows which entrepreneurs will be successful, and which will fail. All we know is that most of them will fail. But the knowledge which they bring to the marketplace benefits specific customers. Customers pay for this knowledge and for the results of this knowledge. There is this massive, decentralized, profit-seeking system that traffics mostly in information. The Soviet Union could not possibly keep up with this. No centralized tyranny can keep up with it. That was Hayek’s point, beginning in the mid-1940s.

It may be true, as David Rothkopf argues in his book, Superclass, that there are somewhere between 6,000 and 6,600 people at the top of the world’s multiple pyramids of power and money. A portion of them — not all at once — get together on a regular basis in an attempt to shape society. They meet at Davos every year. The impression that I got from his book is that these people share a basic worldview, and they clearly have great influence over large corporations.

These people face an inescapable fact: these corporations are successful only to the extent that they serve the demands of customers. They make a lot of money, but they make it only by responding to the demands of the marketplace. So, any attempt by the owners, meaning the largest individual shareholders, to use their corporations to shape the marketplace is ultimately self-defeating. The managers of these corporations do not have sufficient knowledge of all of the decentralized information that is possessed by participants in the marketplace. The more that the participants communicate with each other by means of the Internet, the more these pockets of information and opinion gain access to power.

Google makes an enormous amount of money, but it makes it from individuals who make purchasing decisions. Google is always trying to find out how people search for information, but that does not give Google the power to tell people what to think. If anybody at the top of the pyramid at Google thinks that Google can shape the way people think, and then he attempts to force people to think in that way, will find that Google starts losing money. It is the vast complexity of the Internet which is the great single barrier to the expansion of centralized power. Combined with the complexity of the free market, the Internet will thwart every attempt to run the show from the pinnacles of money. The free market forces the money masters to serve as stewards of the masses.

Never in history has there been such an avalanche of information. It is not coordinated by any central institution. Its lack of coordination is the central fact of modern times. The Internet was designed to produce this, and that is what the Internet has produced. The larger the Internet gets, and the more it penetrates into the lives of people around the world, the less possible it is for any one source of information to influence the thinking of all those people who are connected to the Internet.

We have here an exponential growth of knowledge. It is not simply that this knowledge exists; it is that this knowledge can be shared so inexpensively. It also can be sold. The algorithms that are used by market traders are beyond the ability of the traders to shape pricing. They are price predictors, not price shapers. Nobody is fast enough to beat an algorithm to the punch.

The only markets that can be rigged in such a way that specific market riggers can predictably profit from the decisions are relatively narrow markets. The markets that really matter, such as the price of stocks and bonds, can at best be influenced by monetary policy, but only for relatively brief periods of time. The market effects of such rigging always bring to naught the goals of the planners who thought they would rig the outcomes. People are smarter in the aggregate than committees are. The only way that these market riggers have been able to survive has been by calling upon governments to bail them out. These fellows have been, in the famous British phrase, too clever by half.

Warren Buffett, who really is a genius investor, and probably the greatest investor of all time, has described the progression. First, there are the innovators. Second, there are the imitators. Third, there are the idiots. This progression is inevitable.

There may be power-brokers behind the thrones, but the thrones rest on the equivalent of algorithms. They get more complex. It already takes computer programs to design them. At some point, it will take algorithms to design them. Moore’s law shows no sign of ceasing to cut the cost of information by half every year or 18 months. This means power to the people, by way of algorithms. Power is not flowing to Al Gore-isms.

COMMITTEES VS. THE FREE MARKET

We know the Federal Reserve System is eventually going to fail. Why? Because the Federal Reserve System is premised on the assumption that a relatively small committee of people that Ph.D’s in economics are capable of making decisions based on the flow of information that is provided by a lot of other people with Ph.D’s in economics. The information that is collected by government agencies is sent up the pipeline, and a small committee at the top is supposed to be able to analyze this information, and then set monetary policy to shape the general outcome of the economy.

The idea that a committee could do this is simply preposterous. It is the essence of Keynesianism. It is the essence of central planning. This is what Mises said was utterly irrational back in 1920. This is what Hayek said cannot possibly produce predictable results, because the committee at the top does not have sufficient information, nor is the combined intellectual firepower of the members of the committee sufficient to match the decentralized knowledge of the free market.

The heart, mind, and soul of Austrian school economics is this: the free market provides better information and better incentives to satisfy customers than any rival system can ever offer. Therefore, the free market will grow at the expense of central planning. The decentralized decisions of people with money — decisions informed by market pricing — will be more accurate than the centralized decisions of any committee.

CONCLUSION

This is why I really do not pay a lot of attention to the Bilderberg, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission. Ultimately, they are going to lose, just as their British equivalents and predecessors lost, 1914-1945. The digital genie is out of the bottle. His great gift to mankind is that he keeps selling his services at ever-lower prices. He serves ever-more people by cutting prices. Nobody can get him back in the bottle.

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WASHINGTON –  Senator Mike Lee released the following statement on the IRS scandal involving the targeting of certain conservative organizations:

“It would be a mistake for Republicans to view the latest IRS scandal as a typical partisan squabble between political parties.  The real lesson is that our massive federal government bureaucracy is inherently dysfunctional, corrupt, and intolerant regardless of who is in charge.

“The IRS is a powerful agency that can influence nearly every decision Americans make through its authority to tax and regulate.  It is one of the primary beneficiaries of our out-of-control spending and runaway debt. Organizations and individuals that promote fiscal responsibility, balanced budgets, greater government accountability, and more local autonomy present a threat to the federal expansion that gives the IRS its power.  It should not come as a surprise, then, that the culture of the IRS would promote enhanced scrutiny of these groups.

“At its core, the IRS scandal is not the result of one political party attacking another. It is the inevitable consequence of a federal government that has gotten too big and too expensive to control.  When an agency like the IRS can single out Tea Party groups; or the Department of Justice can monitor reporters’ conversations; or HHS regulators can openly extort the regulated; and there are no consequences – we are no longer citizens but subjects.

“While it is important we get answers about how and why these groups were targeted by the IRS, firing a few employees will not solve the problem.  The long-term solution is for the American people to demand that government be less involved, less intrusive, and therefore less able to carry out these kinds of abuses.”

Tell Lawmakers to INVESTIGATE the IRS!

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Experts are divided on the impact of violent video games with some finding no real longterm impacts and others finding a contributing factor in violence or delinquency. Putting aside this debate, there is no discussion of why a tax would serve any purpose beyond driving up costs and of course producing more revenue for the government.

As many on this blog know, I am fairly hostile to the tax-first approach to public policy and the use of high taxes to address worsening economic situations in countries like France. This is an example of how reflexive the call for taxes is from politicians like Biden. Biden announced that he would like to tax the game and give the money “help victims and their families.” It is an all-too-common approach to tax politics. Find an unpopular industry, tax it, and then give the money to a more popular group. It appears the later group this term is a generally defined group of “victims” — not of video games but crime. It is not clear how such money will be awarded to victims or whether it would go to government offices that support victims.

When he was later asked if he could point to any study showing the effect of violent games on behavior or the effect of the tax on game playing, Biden simply said that the government would study the problem.

While I disagree equally with the no tax mentality of people on the other side of the political debate, I am constantly amazed by how taxes seem the first reaction of politicians like Biden. In this case, the tax seems to come first and the rationale will be supplied later. We simply tax them all and let God sort them out.

This article was written by Jonathan Turley //

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The Speaker told reporters, “My question isn’t about who is going to have to resign, my question is who is going to jail over this scandal.”

“There are laws in place to prevent this type of abuse,” Boehner said. “Someone made a conscious decision to harass and hold up these requests. … We need to know who they are, whether they violated the law. Clearly, someone violated the law.”

In the United States Senate, Kentucky’s Rand Paul offered a resolution to investigate the IRS scandal and charge all members found to have been involved.

“The IRS has been using taxing power as a political tool to bully these conservative groups and this type of intimidation is a major violation of our U.S. Constitution,” Sen. Paul said in a statement, “This act of discrimination should not be tolerated and I demand a formal investigation seeking criminal charges against any individuals who authorized or were involved in targeting people of the United States based on their political views.”

Tell Lawmakers to INVESTIGATE the IRS! Send Free Message to Lawmakers!

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The most recent example is Obamacare.

For one, in order for the president’s health-care law to work properly, large numbers of young people will have to buy insurance. Those young and healthy individuals, with their low claims costs, are needed in the insurance pool in order to offset the expected inflow of sick people. The law prohibits insurers from denying coverage to people with “preexisting conditions,” that is, those who are already sick. Those newly enrolled sick will make the overall insurance pool more costly, and unless those costs are offset by an equal inflow of the young and healthy, we are likely to see an adverse-selection “death spiral,” in which sick people in the insurance pool drive up premiums, causing the healthiest members of the pool to drop out. The pool then becomes even sicker, leading to still higher premiums. The healthiest remaining participants drop out, and so on, until the entire market collapses.

As noxious as the individual and employer mandates are, the penalties — or taxes, according to Justice Roberts — are too low to force participation, which has the administration worried.

As Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of Rahm, and one of the principal architects of the Affordable Care Act, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, if young people don’t participate in Obamacare in large numbers, it “could start the negative, downward spiral of exchanges full of the sick and elderly with not enough healthy people paying premiums.”

At the same time, Obamacare’s “community rating” provisions prohibit changing premiums based on health status and limit the degree to which insurers can charge based on age. Insurers cannot charge their oldest customer more than three times as much as their youngest, despite the fact that those older customers typically cost six times more in claims. Thus, premiums will rise more slowly or may even be lower for older and sicker individuals, but will shoot up for young people. In fact, a study in the American Academy of Actuaries’ magazine found that 80 percent of young adults aged 18–29 in the individual market and not eligible for Medicaid will face higher costs, even after exchange subsidies.

Even HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius admits that “some of the older customers may see a slight decline, and some of the younger ones are going to see a slight increase.” Or, not so slight. According to a survey by the American Action Forum, healthy young people in the individual or small-group insurance markets can look forward to rate increases averaging 169 percent.

Under Obamacare, then, young people have to pay far more than is actuarially fair in order to subsidize premiums for those who are older and sicker. There is an added irony to this, given that those younger Americans are actually less likely to be able to afford higher premiums.

It’s not just Obamacare that will leave young people paying more. The president’s big-spending is also being charged to their credit card.

Each young American currently owes at least $53,242 as his share of our national debt. And if one throws in the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare, that debt rises to as much as $401,000 for each of them. (That sort of puts their college loans in perspective, doesn’t it?)

Moreover, that debt might be a bit hard to pay off, since young people are having a very tough time finding a job in Obama’s economy. Overall unemployment in this country may finally be improving — albeit slowly — but unemployment among those under age 30 hovers around 13 percent, nearly twice as high as for the population at large. This is particularly damaging since research shows that workers who are unemployed as young adults lose valuable work experience and opportunities to develop skills. As a result, youth unemployment can lead to lower wages for many years even if young people do find a job. And many young people who are working are in low-paying jobs or jobs unrelated to their college degree.

By all accounts, the president remains personally popular with younger voters, a group he won by 23 percentage points in 2012. With a few exceptions, such as Rand Paul, Republicans have done little to reach out to these voters. Besides, young people are unlikely to respond to Republicans as long as the party resembles a cross between their curmudgeonly grandfather and the preacher from Footloose.

But there is an opening here. Despite their recent voting patterns, there is no reason to presume that young people will inevitably vote liberal or Democratic. If the GOP can bring itself to become more open, welcoming, and (especially) tolerant, it might find an audience willing to listen.

Tell your Governor and State Legislature to NULIFY Obamacare! Select here to send them a copy of the Federal Healthcare Nullification Act.

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Nothing will have been learned from this scandal if all that happens is the firing of some IRS administrators and the issuance of new guidelines on 501(c)(4) applications. That is not nearly enough.

Obviously, tax exemptions exist only because individuals and some organizations are subject to income and other forms of taxation. Congress levies a tax on incomes, then in its “wisdom” chooses to exempt certain activities but not others. This is social engineering, with Congress seeking to encourage some kinds of organizations — while not forgoing more revenue than necessary. The IRS then writes rules to carry out the directions of Congress.

Where possible, people will naturally strive to qualify for exemption by pushing the boundaries of the regulations. That incentive will always be strong because a nonprofit organization that is exempt from taxation will have more resources with which to pursue its mission. Since the language of statutes and regulations is inevitably vague, the IRS will have room to interpret when ruling on who qualifies and who doesn’t qualify for exemption. The line between vigilance and harassment is not bright, and the potential for abuse is great.

It should be apparent that this power, which is inherently arbitrary, ill suits a society that sees itself as free.

Take the current controversy. The IRS says that to qualify for 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status, a nonprofit organization must “be operated exclusively to promote social welfare.” To do that the “organization must operate primarily to further the common good and general welfare of the people of the community (such as by bringing about civic betterment and social improvements).”

What exactly constitutes the common good and general welfare of the people of the community, or civic betterment and social improvements? The IRS will let you know. What does “primarily” mean and how does it relate to the seemingly contradictory exclusivity requirement? This is subject to a “facts and circumstances” test — that is, the IRS will decide. Approved activities are generally regarded as educational, but how broadly or narrowly that term is interpreted is left to the IRS and, if challenged, to the courts. Lobbying for “legislation germane to the organization’s programs is a permissible means of attaining social welfare purposes.” However, direct or indirect participation in political campaigns is not regarded as promotion of social welfare — although an organization “may engage in some political activities, so long as that is not its primary activity. However, any expenditure it makes for political activities may be subject to tax.”

As this demonstrates, once government undertakes to tax income, it acquires even more power through its authority to define “income,” “taxable income,” subsidiary terms, and the rules of exemption. There is no escape from arbitrariness and caprice.

One might propose to remove the government’s arbitrary power by ending tax exemption. But that would make the tax burden worse. And besides, politicians aren’t likely to agree, because they would be giving up the power to dispense favors that manipulation of today’s tax code affords.

There’s a better way to go that’s demanded by liberty and justice. Since taxation is nothing less than the confiscation, under threat of force, of what belongs to productive individuals, it has no place in a free society. In other words, everyone should be exempt from income and other taxation. (Americans lived without income taxation for more than 125 years.) If something can’t be accomplished through consent, contract, and cooperation — without aggressive force — we should ask whether it is worth doing.

When the income tax was first proposed in America years ago, opponents always had the same word of warning: inquisitorial. How right they were.

Tell Lawmakers to INVESTIGATE the IRS!

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Kevin Kelly: Tell me a little bit about the event that you are planning in Arkansas.

Christina Tobin: “Rock the Nation Awake” is really our slogan for the United We Stand Festival. Dr. Ron Paul said it best, “If you’re ever going to bring about revolutionary change two things would have to be involved: the youth, and there would need to be music.” We have speakers like Jesse Ventura.

I think he’ll be coming down on a train or driven in…he doesn’t fly. Ralph Nader via social media, but he may come in person because Rocky Anderson has been confirmed. He’s good friends with Ralph.

Rocky Anderson was one of the four contenders that participated in our presidential debate last year, and I hope and I’m confident that the other three candidates will come on stage together in support of putting the Commission out of business.

KELLY: Anyone else?

Christina Tobin: Sheriff Richard Mack will be there. He fought the law and won back in the early ‘90s in the Supreme Court case… concealed carry…we can thank him for that lawsuit for upholding concealed carry and the right to bear arms. Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America, the only no compromise gun lobby in America according to Dr. Ron Paul, has been around 30 years and has 300,000 plus members.

Nineteen year old Dan Johnson, founder of People Against The NDAA started in January, now having 60 chapters, will be speaking. What better than to have a nineteen year old kid stand up in front of 13,000 people and say “I did it, you can do it.” Ben Swann, everybody knows Ben Swann in the Liberty Movement, and Amber Lyon, former CNN reporter…honest media. And the music will be so great. We have Jordan Page, Tatiana Moroz, Golden State Band recently featured on American Idol they did the song “Bombs -End this War.”

Imus-Zero will be an MC, we’re hoping that Joe Rogan will join her. This whole movement is about uniting honest media, leaders, organizations, and so on. A positive, powerful solution- based movement that will break the two party stranglehold and reform the electoral system. This is the kick off for us.

Kelly: With so much uncertainty in the world, what advice would you give to the young people of this nation/generation?

Tobin: I would say that history is on our side. Through the power of social media and technology anything is possible. Here’s this non-profit organization that went on to hold a debate that had over 20 million views, broke through to a certain extent, mainstream media by essentially creating our own media… so many times people said to me throughout the decades “there’s no way that you can do it,” and I always had a never give up mentality.

Kelly: How do you do keep that pace?

Tobin: You’ve got to be relentless, believe. When you believe in something so much you never give up. What I would tell the youth is that the future is in their hands, and the races in 2014 are the most crucial time that we could ever have in our history of  running and flooding races across the spectrum to replace D’s and R’s alike and take back our government.

This movement will be there to support them, to aid them, and to give them the resources directly and indirectly to win those races- to run on a platform of being against the NDAA, against the Patriot Act, drones, war, Drug War.  Coming together and uniting to make our world a better place is what we have to do, and the 18-28 year olds have to come out in full force.

Kelly: Any last words for the youth voters?

Tobin: Here is a movement that will help them, inspire them, as well as many others. I would urge them to get involved not only with Free and Equal, but all of the Liberty Movement and educate themselves. Get involved because this is it. This is our final chance.

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