Vote Buying, Election Spending and Money Supply Growth

At the Library of Economics and Liberty, Ms Emily Skarbek cited an interesting study that correlates vote buying with money supply growth: (bold mine)

Traditional theories of political business cycles - Nordhaus (1975), MacRae (1977), Persson and Tabellini (1990) - predict monetary expansions in the run up to an election. Stimulating the economy, they argue, can help the incumbent politicians win elections. These theories suggest that the growth in M1 is a result of deliberate manipulation of the money supply leading up to the election as a means of gaining support.

But what if that isn't the story in countries with weak institutions? What if the increase in the monetary aggregate occurs actually as a by-product of outright vote buying, which happens concurrent with the election because of increased cash demand? This is the hypothesis for democracies outside the OECD put forward by Toke Aidt, Zareh Asatryan, Lusine Badalyan, and Friedrich Heinemann in a recent working paper.

The paper looks at month-to-month fluctuations in the growth rate of M1 in 85 low and middle-income democracies. The evidence shows a sizeable increase in the growth rate of M1 in election months. Their mechanism to explain this is vote buying in machine politics, where vote buying means outright payments or gifts in exchange for voting in a particular way or for showing up to vote.

The idea is that vote buying requires significant amounts of cash to be disbursed right before the election is held. This increases the demand for liquidity and affects M1 in several ways. First, resources to buy votes could come from converting illiquid assets into cash. This substitution from broad money into cash or deposits directly increases M1. Second, vote-buying funds may come from the shadow economy. Once this is used to buy votes, a fraction of it ends up in bank deposits. Third, incumbent governments may simply run the printing press. Each of these would result in a spike in M1 very close to the election date.

What they find is that systematic, large-scale vote buying has short-run effects on aggregate measures of the money supply. But to be an effective electoral strategy, vote buying requires weak democratic institutions, poorly monitored elections, and an electorate willing to "sell" their votes. Their pattern of evidence supports this, finding no effect of this mechanism in established OECD democracies.

I'd expand the issue as not just direct vote buying but also indirect vote buying or overall election spending; particularly campaign materials (shirts, tv ads, wrist bands etc), campaign spending (travel expenses, food lodging, etc), cost of mobilization of campaign machinery and more.

Let us see how this applies to the Philippines. Below are changes in M1* 1 year prior to national elections

* note M1--consists of currency in circulation (or currency outside depository corporations) and peso demand deposits (BSP).

2004 national elections (presidential and senatorial)

2007 senatorial elections 

2010 national elections (presidential and senatorial)

2013 senatorial elections

2016 national presidential and senatorial elections

Hmmmmm

Why the Election Winner Through Plurality Votes Is Not the Preferred Candidate

Elections function as an outlet for regime change through peaceful means. 

Yet democratic elections are supposed to "represent" people's choice. This would be true under a majoritarian vote. But under a plurality vote setting, this would hardly be the case. Reason? The outcome would most likely be different under a two way runoff elections.

Using the Kenneth Arrow's impossiblity theorem as previously posted here, Professor Don Boudreaux at the Cafe Hayek writes to the expound on the theory

(bold mine)

It’s a common (and understandable) mistake to read a vote cast for candidate A as being only a vote for candidate A. But a vote cast for candidate A might well be – and in practice certainly often is – motivated more by opposition to candidate B than one motivated by enthusiasm for candidate A. If candidate A wins an outright majority, this reality creates no problem under the rules of majoritarian democracy, for even if all votes cast for candidates B, C, … N are motivated exclusively by utter hatred of candidate A rather than as enthusiasm or support for the candidates who received those votes, the fact remains that a majority of the voters prefer candidate A over all other available candidates. But if candidate A wins only a plurality and not a majority of the votes, then – as students of collective decision-making have long known – there is no good reason to declare the plurality vote-getter as the winner. Again, the reason is that the chances are high enough that those who voted for the other candidates did so more to keep A out of office than to install in office one of the candidates B, C, … N. And given Trump’s huge negatives, this possibility is even more likely with him than with more quotidian candidates who win only pluralities.

Put more succinctly (and ignoring the countless other flaws that infect all collective-decision-making processes), a candidate who wins a majority of the votes can at least be said to be preferred over any of the other candidates by most of the voters. The same cannot be said of a candidate who wins only a plurality. Most of the voters might well prefer above all to keep that candidate (A) out of office even if most of the voters have no clear preference for which of the other candidates (B, C, … N) is the best option in place of A.

Here’s an example of ten voters and four candidates (A, B, C, & D). The example follows the rules of the method that many U.S. states use to choose governors. That method is the “general election, runoff election.” The rules are simple. If a candidate wins a majority of votes in the general election, that candidate wins the election. But if no candidate wins a majority of the votes, the plurality winner is pitted in a runoff election against the candidate who got the second-highest percentage of the votes in the general election.

Each voter’s preference is shown below in descending order. For example, voter 1 prefers candidate A above all, and she prefers D to C and C to B.

In the general election, candidate A will win 40 percent of the votes; candidate B will win 30 percent; candidate C will win 20 percent; and candidate D – seemingly a fringe candidate – will win only 10 percent.

So in the runoff election candidate A is pitted against candidate B. (Candidates C and D are ousted from the race.) Below is the very same preference ordering, but with candidates C and D excluded.

B wins the runoff with 60 percent of the votes.

But, just for kicks, let’s see what happens if that fringe candidate D were to be pitted in a runoff election against B. Surely D would get trounced, right? Wrong. If you look at the first preference table above (the one with all the candidates included), you’ll find that 60 percent of the voters prefer candidate D over candidate B! You’ll find also that 60 percent of the voters prefer candidate D over candidate A. (And, to continue a bit further with the exercise: 70 percent of the voters prefer candidate D over candidate C; 60 percent of the voters prefer candidate C over candidate B – the ultimate winner of the election; and 60 percent of the voters prefer candidate C over candidate A – the plurality winner in the general election.)

The main point of the above exercise – which involves a perfectly reasonable representative example of reality – is to reveal that a candidate who wins a plurality of the votes but who does not win a majority of the votes in fact is not at all clearly the most preferred candidate of all the voters. Trump very well might be the real-world equivalent of candidate A in this example.

What more if the number of NON-voters have even been LARGER than the winning vote, like in the Philippines elections of 2010,  and most likely will be the same scenario for the 2016 national elections? 

And the supposed 'angry votes' have been reinforcement signs that the popular sentiment have been more about the 'opposition to candidate B' (for Philippines, the incumbent) than about motivation by enthusiasm for candidate A!

Doug Casey: Top 5 Reasons Not to Vote

I will be out for the entire week to flee from the drama and hysteria of the coming Philippine national elections where the results will most likely be what Savoyard philosopher, writer and diplomat Joseph de Maistre once sardonically described as "In a democracy, people get the leaders they deserve" or might I say "be careful of what you wish for"

But before doing so, let me share of the splendid top 5 reasons not to vote as propounded by one of my favorite libertarian philosophers, author and investment guru, Doug Casey. 

While Mr Casey addresses this to US voters, I think this applicable universally.

From Doug Casey (thanks to the International Man) [bold mine]

Democracy is vastly overrated.

It's not like the consensus of a bunch of friends agreeing to see the same movie. Most often, it boils down to a kinder and gentler variety of mob rule, dressed in a coat and tie. The essence of positive values like personal liberty, wealth, opportunity, fraternity, and equality lies not in democracy, but in free minds and free markets where government becomes trivial. Democracy focuses people's thoughts on politics, not production; on the collective, not on their own lives.

Although democracy is just one way to structure a state, the concept has reached cult status; unassailable as political dogma. It is, as economist Joseph Schumpeter observed, "a surrogate faith for intellectuals deprived of religion." Most of the founders of America were more concerned with liberty than democracy. Tocqueville saw democracy and liberty as almost polar opposites.

Democracy can work when everyone concerned knows one another, shares the same values and goals, and abhors any form of coercion. It is the natural way of accomplishing things among small groups.

But once belief in democracy becomes a political ideology, it's necessarily transformed into majority rule. And, at that point, the majority (or even a plurality, a minority, or an individual) can enforce their will on everyone else by claiming to represent the will of the people.

The only form of democracy that suits a free society is economic democracy in the laissez-faire form, where each person votes with his money for what he wants in the marketplace. Only then can every individual obtain what he wants without compromising the interests of any other person. That's the polar opposite of the "economic democracy" of socialist pundits who have twisted the term to mean the political allocation of wealth.

But many terms in politics wind up with inverted meanings. "Liberal" is certainly one of them.

The Spectrum of Politics

The terms liberal (left) and conservative (right) define the conventional political spectrum; the terms are floating abstractions with meanings that change with every politician.

In the 19th century, a liberal was someone who believed in free speech, social mobility, limited government, and strict property rights. The term has since been appropriated by those who, although sometimes still believing in limited free speech, always support strong government and weak property rights, and who see everyone as a member of a class or group.

Conservatives have always tended to believe in strong government and nation­alism. Bismarck and Metternich were archetypes. Today's conservatives are some­times seen as defenders of economic liberty and free markets, although that is mostly true only when those concepts are perceived to coincide with the interests of big business and economic nationalism.

Bracketing political beliefs on an illogical scale, running only from left to right, results in constrained thinking. It is as if science were still attempting to define the elements with air, earth, water, and fire.

Politics is the theory and practice of government. It concerns itself with how force should be applied in controlling people, which is to say, in restricting their freedom. It should be analyzed on that basis. Since freedom is indivisible, it makes little sense to compartmentalize it; but there are two basic types of freedom: social and economic.

According to the current usage, liberals tend to allow social freedom, but restrict economic freedom, while conservatives tend to restrict social freedom and allow economic freedom. An authoritarian (they now sometimes class them­selves as "middle-of-the-roaders") is one who believes both types of freedom should be restricted.

But what do you call someone who believes in both types of freedom? Unfortunately, something without a name may get overlooked or, if the name is only known to a few, it may be ignored as unimportant. That may explain why so few people know they are libertarians.

A useful chart of the political spectrum would look like this:

A libertarian believes that individuals have a right to do anything that doesn't impinge on the common-law rights of others, namely force or fraud. Libertarians are the human equivalent of the Gamma rat, which bears a little explanation.

Some years ago, scientists experimenting with rats categorized the vast major­ity of their subjects as Beta rats. These are basically followers who get the Alpha rats' leftovers. The Alpha rats establish territories, claim the choicest mates, and generally lord it over the Betas. This pretty well-corresponded with the way the researchers thought the world worked.

But they were surprised to find a third type of rat as well: the Gamma. This creature staked out a territory and chose the pick of the litter for a mate, like the Alpha, but didn't attempt to dominate the Betas. A go-along-get-along rat. A libertarian rat, if you will.

My guess, mixed with a dollop of hope, is that as society becomes more repressive, more Gamma people will tune in to the problem and drop out as a solution. No, they won't turn into middle-aged hippies practicing basket weaving and bead stringing in remote communes. Rather, they will structure their lives so that the government—which is to say taxes, regulations, and inflation—is a non-factor. Suppose they gave a war and nobody came? Suppose they gave an election and nobody voted, gave a tax and nobody paid, or imposed a regulation and nobody obeyed it?

Libertarian beliefs have a strong following among Americans, but the Liber­tarian Party has never gained much prominence, possibly because the type of people who might support it have better things to do with their time than vote. And if they believe in voting, they tend to feel they are "wasting" their vote on someone who can't win. But voting is itself another part of the problem.

None of the Above

Until 1992, when many decided not to run, at least 98% of incumbents typically retained office. That is a higher proportion than in the Su­preme Soviet of the defunct USSR, and a lower turnover rate than in Britain's hereditary House of Lords where people lose their seats only by dying.

The political system in the United States has, like all systems which grow old and large, become moribund and corrupt.

The conventional wisdom holds a decline in voter turnout is a sign of apathy. But it may also be a sign of a renaissance in personal responsibility. It could be people saying, "I won't be fooled again, and I won't lend power to them."

Politics has always been a way of redistributing wealth from those who produce to those who are politically favored. As H.L. Mencken observed, every election amounts to no more than an advance auction on stolen goods, a process few would support if they saw its true nature.

Protesters in the 1960s had their flaws, but they were quite correct when they said, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." If politics is the problem, what is the solution? I have an answer that may appeal to you.

The first step in solving the problem is to stop actively encouraging it.

Many Americans have intuitively recognized that government is the problem and have stopped voting. There are at least five reasons many people do not vote:

1 Voting in a political election is unethical. The political process is one of institutionalized coercion and force. If you disapprove of those things, then you shouldn't participate in them, even indirectly.

2 Voting compromises your privacy. It gets your name in another government computer database.

3 Voting, as well as registering, entails hanging around government offices and dealing with petty bureaucrats. Most people can find something more enjoyable or productive to do with their time.

4 Voting encourages politicians. A vote against one candidate—a major, and quite understandable, reason why many people vote—is always interpreted as a vote for his opponent. And even though you may be voting for the lesser of two evils, the lesser of two evils is still evil. It amounts to giving the candidate a tacit mandate to impose his will on society.

5 Your vote doesn't count. Politicians like to say it counts because it is to their advantage to get everyone into a busybody mode. But, statistically, one vote in scores of millions makes no more difference than a single grain of sand on a beach. That's entirely apart from the fact that officials manifestly do what they want, not what you want, once they are in office.

Some of these thoughts may impress you as vaguely "unpatriotic"; that is certainly not my intention. But, unfortunately, America isn't the place it once was, either. The United States has evolved from the land of the free and the home of the brave to something more closely resembling the land of entitlements and the home of whining lawsuit filers.

The founding ideas of the country, which were highly libertarian, have been thoroughly distorted. What passes for tradition today is something against which the Founding Fathers would have led a second revolution.

This sorry, scary state of affairs is one reason some people emphasize the importance of joining the process, "working within the system" and "making your voice heard," to ensure that "the bad guys" don't get in. They seem to think that increasing the number of voters will improve the quality of their choices.

This argument compels many sincere people, who otherwise wouldn't dream of coercing their neighbors, to take part in the political process. But it only feeds power to people in politics and government, validating their existence and making them more powerful in the process.

Of course, everybody involved gets something out of it, psychologically if not monetarily. Politics gives people a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves and so has special appeal for those who cannot find satisfaction within themselves.

We cluck in amazement at the enthusiasm shown at Hitler's giant rallies but figure what goes on here, today, is different. Well, it's never quite the same. But the mindless sloganeering, the cult of the personality, and a certainty of the masses that "their" candidate will kiss their personal lives and make them better are identical.

And even if the favored candidate doesn't help them, then at least he'll keep others from getting too much. Politics is the institutionalization of envy, a vice which proclaims "You've got something I want, and if I can't get one, I'll take yours. And if I can't have yours, I'll destroy it so you can't have it either." Participating in politics is an act of ethical bankruptcy.

The key to getting "rubes" (i.e., voters) to vote and "marks" (i.e., contribu­tors) to give is to talk in generalities while sounding specific and looking sincere and thoughtful, yet decisive. Vapid, venal party hacks can be shaped, like Silly Putty, into salable candidates. People like to kid themselves that they are voting for either "the man" or "the ideas." But few "ideas" are more than slogans artfully packaged to push the right buttons. Voting for "the man" doesn't help much either since these guys are more diligently programmed, posed, and rehearsed than any actor.

This is probably more true today than it's ever been since elections are now won on television, and television is not a forum for expressing complex ideas and philosophies. It lends itself to slogans and glib people who look and talk like game show hosts. People with really "new ideas" wouldn't dream of introducing them to politics because they know ideas can't be explained in 60 seconds.

I'm not intimating, incidentally, that people disinvolve themselves from their communities, social groups, or other voluntary organizations; just the opposite since those relationships are the lifeblood of society. But the political process, or government, is not synonymous with society or even complementary to it. Government is a dead hand on society.

Quote of the Day: Voting is Not a Duty, but a Right—Including the Right to Abstain

Economist Gary Galles writes at the Independent Institute on voting:

“If you don’t vote, you don’t have a voice in government”: This claim is falsified by the fact that even casting your vote won’t give you an effective voice in government.

“If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain about government”: This argument fails for the same reason. It also ignores the fact that facing what are typically binary choices between candidates, and yes-or-no votes on special-interest initiatives, further degrades your ability to invoke your preferences.

“If you don’t vote, you don’t care about America”: This is similarly unconvincing when your vote doesn’t alter the outcome. Not only has abstaining been common since America’s foundation, but not voting is perhaps the most effective way to protest that “none of the above” represent what you consider acceptable, because voting for “the lesser of two evils” is still voting for an evil.

“It is your duty to vote”: This assertion runs aground because if your vote won’t change the outcome, it cannot be your social duty. Voting is not a duty, but a right—including the right to abstain. Further, most voters are far from informed on most issues, and casting an uninformed vote is more a dereliction of duty than a fulfillment of it.

“You must vote, because the electoral process would collapse if no one voted”: This ignores two facts—that your individual vote won’t matter, and that virtually no one’s individual choice of whether to and/or how to vote alters an appreciable number of others’ voting choices. (Politicians, who won’t be taken seriously if they abstain from voting, are an exception.)

Does the fact that so many “your vote is crucially important” arguments are invalid imply you shouldn’t vote? No. However, those claims cannot justify voting on issues you are uninformed about, since that offers society no benefits. Since your electorally insignificant vote won’t change the outcome, it also means that voting to forcibly transfer others’ wealth to you or your pet causes is ineffective, as well as morally objectionable.

However, if such errors are avoided, voting can provide a means of cheering for those candidates and proposals that advance what James Madison called “the general and permanent good of the whole” without plundering others. So, while logic does not demand that you vote or that you abstain, it does impose limits on what one can justify voting for.

The above should not just apply to America, but elsewhere, including the Philippines

Quote of the Day: There is No Difference between Psychopaths and Politicians

At the Rutherford Institute, Attorney John W. Whitehead writes of the similarities between politicians and sociopaths:

There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians.

Nor is there much of a difference between the havoc wreaked on innocent lives by uncaring, unfeeling, selfish, irresponsible, parasitic criminals and elected officials who lie to their constituents, trade political favors for campaign contributions, turn a blind eye to the wishes of the electorate, cheat taxpayers out of hard-earned dollars, favor the corporate elite, entrench the military industrial complex, and spare little thought for the impact their thoughtless actions and hastily passed legislation might have on defenseless citizens.

Psychopaths and politicians both have a tendency to be selfish, callous, remorseless users of others, irresponsible, pathological liars, glib, con artists, lacking in remorse and shallow.

Charismatic politicians, like criminal psychopaths, exhibit a failure to accept responsibility for their actions, have a high sense of self-worth, are chronically unstable, have socially deviant lifestyle, need constant stimulation, have parasitic lifestyles and possess unrealistic goals.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Democrats or Republicans.

Political psychopaths are all largely cut from the same pathological cloth, brimming with seemingly easy charm and boasting calculating minds. Such leaders eventually create pathocracies—totalitarian societies bent on power, control, and destruction of both freedom in general and those who exercise their freedoms.

Once psychopaths gain power, the result is usually some form of totalitarian government or a pathocracy. “At that point, the government operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups,” author James G. Long notes. “We are currently witnessing deliberate polarizations of American citizens, illegal actions, and massive and needless acquisition of debt. This is typical of psychopathic systems, and very similar things happened in the Soviet Union as it overextended and collapsed.”

In other words, electing a psychopath to public office is tantamount to national hara-kiri, the ritualized act of self-annihilation, self-destruction and suicide. It signals the demise of democratic government and lays the groundwork for a totalitarian regime that is legalistic, militaristic, inflexible, intolerant and inhuman.

So why do we keep doing it over and over again?

There’s no shortage of dire warnings about the devastation that could be wrought if any one of the current crop of candidates running for the White House gets elected. Yet where the doomsayers go wrong is by ignoring the damage that has already been inflicted on our nation and its citizens by a psychopathic government.

According to investigative journalist Zack Beauchamp, “In 2012, a group of psychologists evaluated every President from Washington to Bush II using ‘psychopathy trait estimates derived from personality data completed by historical experts on each president.’ They found that presidents tended to have the psychopath’s characteristic fearlessness and low anxiety levels — traits that appear to help Presidents, but also might cause them to make reckless decisions that hurt other people’s lives.”

The willingness to prioritize power above all else, including the welfare of their fellow human beings, ruthlessness, callousness and an utter lack of conscience are among the defining traits of the sociopath.

When our own government no longer sees us as human beings with dignity and worth but as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police, conned into believing it has our best interests at heart, mistreated, jailed if we dare step out of line, and then punished unjustly without remorse—all the while refusing to own up to its failings—we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic.

Quote of the Day: More Socialism Means Less Real Democracy

From economic professor Sandy Ikeda at the FEE.org:

The greater the degree of central planning, the less the authority can put up with deviation and individual dissent. I also realize that there is more than one dimension along which you can trade off self-direction for direction by others, and some of these dimensions do not involve physical coercion. For example, groups can use social or religious pressure to thwart a person’s plans or shrink her autonomy, without resorting to physical aggression.

But there is no denying that along the dimension of physical coercion, which is the dimension along which governments have traditionally operated, the more coercive control there is by an outside agency, the less self-direction there can be. Coercion and self-direction are mutually exclusive. And as government planning supplants personal planning, the sphere of personal autonomy weakens and shrinks and the sphere of governmental authority strengthens and grows. More socialism means less real democracy.

Democratic socialism, then, is not a doctrine designed to protect the liberal values of independence, autonomy, and self-direction that many on the left still value to some degree. It is, on the contrary, a doctrine that forces those of us who cherish those liberal values onto a slippery slope toward tyranny.

US Pollitics: Will Donald Trump Spur the Demise of the GOP? Will a New US Political Structure Emerge?

The Donald Trump phenomenon seems to have caused a Richter scale 7.0 earthquake on establishment politics... 

Caricature from Ben Garrison/hat tip zero hedge

Here are some noteworthy quotes on 'The Donald Phenomenon'

From analyst Martin Spring: (bold mine)

Without Ohio’s 66 delegates, Trump now faces an extremely difficult path to reach the majority of delegates he needs to avoid a “contested” GOP convention. So the establishment looks like it will win and no candidate will enter the convention with a majority of delegates locked up. So after the first ballot, they are free to vote for whoever the establishment wants. It looks like the computer may be right after all. This is beginning to appear to be a very insane situation. The last time no candidate had the required amount for a nomination was 1976. Under the rules of the GOP, all these primaries were pointless. Delegates can choose one of the candidates who ran, or someone else entirely – Romney?

With the people voting for Trump, the Republican Party may have to face a huge, strong anger backlash from his supporters. We are more likely to see a third party candidacy from Trump himself. The establishment will not have an outsider in that office so Trump might as well run third party to illustrate the corruption. The Republicans prefer Hillary to Trump any day of the week. The establishment fears ending elections that cannot be bought by their supporters, for their families might get fired from cushy jobs. Trump would not just sign whatever bill was put before him...

Someone like Trump presents a huge threat to the establishment. They would have to assassinate him because he got in their way. The establishment might try blaming Cuba again or someone else they really do not like. The talk behind the curtain is clear— hand it to Hillary and everything remains intact.

So a Republican split is looking more likely. They have drawn the line in the sand. By no means will they accept Trump. He might as well begin forming a third party. What is going to be exposed is that we do not live in a Democracy. As long as the people vote for their groomed candidates, the pretense is fine. Now when it threatens their existence, well it’s time to bring the grapes of wrath down upon everyone. Their mistake: they assume this will all blow over. Where they are wrong is that to defeat Trump, they must expose the truth. It’s their game and they make the rules. Your vote really means nothing to them. I suspect this is step one in what the computer warns will be an entirely new political system ahead.

From Libertarian author Robert Ringer: (bold added)

But make no mistake about it — all members in both wings of the party fully understand the importance of the theater aspect of the political game, never losing sight of the fact that their overarching, joint objective is to stay in power. Everything else about the game is secondary. The unspoken understanding among Demopublicans is, “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. And if you refuse to play the game, you can be sure that you won’t be around long.”

Nevertheless, the Republican wing of the party has been dying a slow death since the end of the Calvin Coolidge era. Coolidge was the last great U.S. president, a fervent believer that the government’s role was to stay the hell out of the way, hence his slogan: “The business of America is a business.”

But when Coolidge handed the freedom baton to Herbert Hoover, the downward spiral began. Hoover was the George W. Bush of his time, offering little resistance to the big spenders in the Democratic wing of the party and paving the way for Franklin D. Roosevelt, the first president to fundamentally change America.

Like the stock market, there have been a few upticks here and there, most notably under Ronald Reagan, but the long-term trend line for America has been downward. And since the first anti-American president appeared on the scene in 2009, members of the Republican wing of the Demopublican Party have not even made a pretense of opposing policies that are specifically intended to collapse the economy.

As a result, everything has been going along just fine for the anti-American crowd for seven years, with the Demopublicans moving ever closer to fascist control of the populace. Then, suddenly, from out of nowhere that damn Donald Trump came along and started threatening to burst the Beltway bubble. Of course, the establishment didn’t take him seriously at first, which is likely to go down in history as their Waterloo mistake.

Like Napoleon, they were breathtakingly arrogant and, as a result, completely miscalculated the strength of their sworn enemy — the American people. Now that Republicans realize they made a terrible mistake in mocking and dismissing the chosen leader of the masses, The Donald, they have become increasingly frantic.

It’s become a real-life version of Road Runner (Trump) and Wile E. Coyote (establishment Republicans). Every time the latter thinks they’ve convinced Republican voters that Trump is a fraud, a phony, and/or an unknowledgeable fool, they wake up in the middle of the night to the haunting sounds of “Beep! Beep!”

I’m hoping that Trump’s great contribution to America will be the official end of the pompous Republican wing of the Demopublican Party — the wing that has brought us such frauds as Recreant Romney, Mush McCain, Mooch McConnell, and, more recently, Robo Rubio. Make no mistake about it, the power brokers behind the scenes are still determined to maintain the status quo, but there’s a good chance that their long-running scam is finally coming to an end

Will the Trump phenomenon expose on the populist fraud called Democracy which the establishment has used as camouflage to protect their interests?

From conservative author Pat Buchanan (emphasis mine)

What the co-conspirators of Sea Island were up at the Cloisters was about as religious as what the Bolsheviks at that girls school known as the Smolny Institute were up to in Petrograd in 1917.

From what has been reported, it would not be extreme to say this was a conspiracy of oligarchs, War Party neocons, and face-card Republicans to reverse the results of the primaries and impose upon the party, against its expressed will, a nominee responsive to the elites’ agenda.

And this taxpayer-subsidized “Dump Trump” camarilla raises even larger issues.

Now America is not Russia or Egypt or China.

But all those countries are now moving purposefully to expose U.S. ties to nongovernmental organizations set up and operating in their capital cities.

Many of those NGOs have had funds funneled to them from U.S. agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy, which has backed “color-coded revolutions” credited with dumping over regimes in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia.

In the early 1950s, in Iran and Guatemala, the CIA of the Dulles brothers did this work.

Whatever ones thinks of Vladimir Putin, can anyone blame him for not wanting U.S. agencies backing NGOs in Moscow, whose unstated goal is to see him and his regime overthrown?

And whatever one thinks of NED and its subsidiaries, it is time Americans took a hard look at the tax-exempt foundations, think tanks and public policy institutes operating in our capital city.

How many are like AEI, scheming to predetermine the outcome of presidential elections while enjoying tax exemptions and posturing as benign assemblages of disinterested scholars and seekers of truth?

How many of these tax-exempt think tanks are fronts and propaganda organs of transnational corporations that are sustained with tax-deductible dollars, until their “resident scholars” can move into government offices and do the work for which they have been paid handsomely in advance?

How many of these think tanks take foreign money to advance the interests of foreign regimes in America’s capital?

We talk about the “deep state” in Turkey and Egypt, the unseen regimes that exist beneath the public regime and rule the nation no matter the president or prime minister.

What about the “deep state” that rules us, of which we caught a glimpse at Sea Island?

Has the Trump phenomenon been the "karma" from US foreign imperialist backdoor policies or US government's meddling abroad?

Or could it be that the Donald may be just be another Trojan horse?

From Bill Bonner: (underscore mine)

But we find it hard to imagine that The Donald hasn’t already made a deal with the “powers that be.”

His career was forged in the white heat of the building trade – with mafia-run unions, along with banks and regulators in Las Vegas and New York hammering him.

He denies it. But he depends on all of them – the government, the banks, and the system of Bubble Finance – to keep his fortune intact.

He knows how important they are. And he knows how they operate.

Donald claims to be one of the greatest dealmakers in history. It is hard to imagine that he hasn’t made the most important deal of his life.

Central bank inflationism seem to have spread to drastically affect even the political spectrum. 

And yet the Trump, Europe's refugee crisis, Europe's rise of right wing politics, territorial disputes, Middle East crisis, Brexit and many more seems just the appetizer.

Quote of the Day: Politicians are Inveterate Liars

Writes Robert Higgs, Senior Fellow in Political Economy at The Independent Institute (source of the below quote) and editor at Large of the Institute’s quarterly journal The Independent Review: (bold mine)

Between the would-be, public office-holder on the one hand and the citizen in general and voter in particular on the other, lies a huge barrier that precludes the establishment of any rational connection. Think of genuine “representative government” on anything other than a very small scale as a practical impossibility. Many reasons explain the existence of this barrier, including the logical impossibility of an agent’s accurately representing each member of a group of principals who do not agree among themselves, but certainly one of the most fundamental factors is that the office seekers often lie to the public, or at least obfuscate and hedge about their statements in a way that makes them de facto lies.

Thus, Mr. Blowhard promises that if you elect him, he will do X. After he is elected, however, he does not do X, but offers an endless litany of excuses for his misfeasance or malfeasance in office. In any case, the essential reality is that no one can hold the successful office seeker to account for his infidelity in carrying out his promises. Everyone is stuck with him until the next election, in anticipation of which he will spew out another ridiculous series of lies and worthless promises. The office-seekers’ lies cover pretty much the whole ground of their speech. Of course, they are not forthcoming about past defalcations, de jure and de facto bribe takings, and personal peccadilloes. They almost invariably misrepresent their true reasons for seeking office, putting the shiniest possible public-service gloss on their raw ambition and lust for power. And they rarely if ever reveal truthfully the actual coterie to which they will be ultimately beholden, normally the largest and most influential supporters in their electoral campaign. Instead, they ludicrously declare that they will invariably “serve all the people.”

In policy matters, they lie about everything, although some of their lies may actually spring at least in part from their ignorance of how the world works and from their ideological blindness, rather than from deliberate, knowing attempts to misrepresent themselves and situations they will have to deal with in office. The lies about domestic policy are perhaps somewhat less blatant because many members of the public have personal acquaintance or contact with various aspects of such government action, which limits how big a whopper a politician can hope to get away with, whereas in defense and foreign-policy policy the office-seekers, regardless of their personal preferences or knowledge, can always rely on the general public’s near-complete ignorance of foreign lands and the political, social, and economic conditions that prevail there, and hence there is no practical limit to the enormousness—and the enormity—of the lies they can tell in regard to these types of issues.

In the case of past presidents seeking reelection, it is a simple and oft-performed exercise to document the lies they told to gain reelection, usually by representing themselves in some fashion as “peace candidates,” even while in some cases they were actively maneuvering to involve the United States in foreign quarrels that might well have been avoided if the office-seekers/office-holders had been concerned with the nation’s genuine security and well-being, as opposed to their place in the history books as “great presidents” or “world saviors.” These cases are illustrative, too, of the uselessness of elections as checks on office-holders’ departures from their campaign promises. Voters who cast their ballots for Woodrow Wilson in 1916, for Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940, and for Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 in a quest to help elect the self-represented “peace candidate” must have been sorely disappointed by the actions these men took immediately after their reelections, but what could the voters do once so much fat was in the fire? By the time the next election came around, the world had been utterly transformed—and millions of lives had been lost, as well.

So, what possible intelligence can voters exercise in casting their ballots? They can vote in accordance with the appeal a particular candidate’s promises hold for them, but relying on candidates to carry out their promises would be childishly foolish. Anyone who pays the slightest attention to politics knows that politicians are inveterate liars; many would sooner lie than speak truthfully even if the truth did not thwart their purposes, because lying would be more congenial to their true, dishonest character. Thus, voters can do nothing more than throw ideological darts, casting their ballots for the candidate who makes the most appealing noises, has the handsomest face, or displays peacock-like the most fabulous partisan posturing.

To perceive any fixed and reliable link between what the candidates promise and what they deliver in office would be wildly counterfactual. Politicians have no more backbone than an earthworm. Even if they could not be bought—and most obviously can be—they are constantly at auction for rent, and the bidding never ceases. Thus, we can count on them with complete confidence in only one regard: their mendacious shilly-shallying.

Quote of the Day: Against Political Romanticism

At the Cafe Hayek, Professor Don J Boudreaux explains why he isn't a political romanticist

I’m afraid that I don’t share your enthusiasm for politics, be they democratic or not. Where you “see citizens [at the polls] selecting our leaders,” I see people voting on which power-mad person will crack the whip over those same people and brand and herd them like cattle. Where you are “inspired by candidates campaigning openly to win the election,” I am frightened to realize that one of those hubris-slathered men or women will actually come to possess such power that no man or woman is, or ever will be, fit to possess. Where you are “charged” by the “vigorous debates” among candidates, my stomach is sickened and my intelligence is insulted by the economics-free, fact-strained, and too-often-vacuous talking (and shouting) points that pass for a serious discussion of issues.

And where you say that you “trust voters” more than I trust them, that depends. You’re correct that I distrust people as voters, for in that capacity they largely express opinions on how other people’s (their fellow citizens’) money should be spent and on how other people’s lives should be led. But I trust – perhaps more than you do, and certainly more than do any of the candidates – those same voters as individuals each to spend his or her own money wisely and to lead his or her life well, each according to his or her own lights, without interference or direction from any of the officious, arrogant, and venal candidates seeking power over the lives of other people.

Video: Special Interest Groups and Not Voters Influence Political Landscape in America

The following video, originally entitled “Corruption is Legal in America” by represent.us, trenchantly describes not only how corruption is legal in the US, but more importantly, how corruption has endemically been embedded into the system from which corruption became legal.

It is also interesting to see how the popular concept of representative government (seen from academic theory) works in complete departure from reality where voters have little influence on the legal landscape. Instead, the current political economic environment has been dominated by special interest groups via public choice, regulatory capture and revolving door politics.

Because of the enormous windfalls or colossal return of investments when political mandates have been enacted on their favor, many corporations resort to them.

The lesson here shouldn’t be seen only in the frame of US politics but also applies to other representative governments as the Philippines.

(hat tip Gary North/LewRockwell.com)

Quote of the Day: Individual Freedom versus Democracy

The democratic process allows people certain freedoms. People do not have freedom to start with. But because people are allowed certain freedoms by the collective process, they think they are free by the individual freedom process of free association. This is not so. That it is not so is evident by the fact that the collective decision-making process takes away freedoms and gives freedoms; and the individual has no say over this except through the voting process. The other road to confusion is historical. The system used to be one of relatively large individual freedom and the scope of collective decision-making was limited constitutionally and by habit, custom and practice. The mythology grew up that the system was one of individual freedom, since voting played so small a role in decisions being made. As time passed and the democratic collectivism became entrenched, people kept right on thinking they had the system of individual freedom, which by then was long gone. And since they possessed a number of what are called personal freedoms still allowed by the collective they thought they still had individual freedom. But they didn’t because the collective had amassed so much power to make laws that any of these freedoms was at the will of the elected representatives, not individual freedoms arising from a system of free association.

To understand the actual system we live by, we cannot start with the set of our observed freedoms and then infer the system’s type. We can’t do this because under both systems, there may be a substantial amount of freedom left in individual hands. Instead, we have to inquire as to the origins of what freedoms we have, that is, the kind of legal system we have, who has the ultimate decision rights, who decides on the freedoms and whether or not we have freedom of association. Freedom of association distinguishes the system of individual freedom from a collective system like democracy or any comparable system of state. If freedoms are decided by individuals, that is not the same as their being decided by voting, which is a collective process. In addition, voting is by citizens many of whom are involuntarily bound into a state, so that the process itself, not only its outcomes, is collective and forcible.

This is from retired finance and economic professor Michael S. Rozeff at the LewRockwell.com

Video: Milton Friedman on the Robin Hood Myth

The late Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman explains via the "Director's law" why the popular perception of the Robin Hood role of governments is a myth. 

(hat tip Cafe Hayek)