President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Well, if you don't think we need a government made up of professional politicians competing to offer the most stuff to people, which those people personally don't have to pay for. ... you certainly have to love a government that is empowered to randomly interfere in people's business on "national security" grounds.

Exclusive: Told U.S. security at risk, Chinese firm seeks to sell Grindr dating app | Reuters

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (whenever I hear the word "committee" given any kind of governmental regulatory power, I know that something unjust is being done) has apparently decided that we are at grave risk because Chinese investors own a large gay dating app business operating in the U.S.

Mind you, this isn't even them trying to prevent an acquisition, what they usually do. This is them trying to take away something someone already has bought and paid for.

 

Nobody is qualified to sit on that board, at least any more than the Soviet poliburo was qualifed to decide how much toilet paper should cost, rather than allowing a free market to work.

But if Stephen Moore gets confirmed, can we finally put to rest the nonsense that the central bank is above politics and that it is doing some holy work that is based on a nonensical tea reading abiliyt?

What is particularly noteworthy to me is how the two parties have now become two heads of the same coin. Sure they use different rhetoric, but the game here is simple: Spend trillions of dollars wastefully (each promoting different constituents they want to buy). ... and rely on a central planning authority to monetize all of the debt you create in the pocess so you can keep doing it for as long as possible. Whoever is in power inevitably wants the same thing, whether it is George Bush, Barack Obama or Donald Trump. ... a central bank that keeps money as cheap as necessary to enable yet another year of runaway debt accumulation. No regard for what happens at the end of that game.

The idea that Stephen Moore is the "conservative" economist is the perfect demonstration of how perverted the terms conservative and liberal have become. There is absolutely no distinction between Stephen Moore and Ben Bernanke. They are both full of shit (their degrees have zero to do with that), and no, they don't know anything more than millions of people making decisions for themselves would if a free market could set the price of money (and calibrate lending risk). You don't need a PhD to subvert the decisions we'd all make if left free to make them ourselves. Especially when they have spent the last several decades creating a connected series of sugar highs (that they claim genius for) that has created a series of artificial booms followed by devastating credit-related busts. You don't need special training to rig the debt markets so they can't price risk well anymore, any more than a child needs a special degree to gorge on candy.