Hey, why not run another Depression. We’ve clearly forgotten what the last one was really like. Apparently this sort of thing is something we’ll have to do every 50-100 years so that people can remember that damaging the economy is bad.

I’m sorry, are we looking on this one favorably?

http://tinyurl.com/yhknjku

We’re in the midst of a political coup, if anyone cares to note it.

If one’s intent were to destroy the economy it would be difficult to come up with a better plan than the one being concocted by the White House.

Everyone is just hanging onto their cash because they know they won’t ever have the opportunity to make any more with the current regime in power. Since the only feasible way to pay down the massive debts being run up now is through inflation it is likely that even just husbanding your resources is a losing hand.

Really, we have reached the point where there is no where a man can go to be free and live a decent and productive life. The US was the last, best hope of humanity and it has now been lost. We traded it for a few meager handouts just like the Indians traded away their existence for a few pretty baubles.

So as of right now the EPA could establish, for example, categories of “new stationary sources” to include things like “domestic fossil fuel sources,” e.g. your daddy’s gas grill out on the sundeck, or “domestic non-fossil fuel sources,” e.g. your boys’ weenie roast in the back yard. You then have to have an EPA-approved permit to host the neighborhood kids over to cook weenies and marshmallows, and if you should fail, and the neighborhood crank decide to rat you out to the new EPA inspector who just got hired to implement the “domestic stationary source compliance program,” and is consequently looking to make his bones with his boss . . . well, good luck to you.

Now let’s get a bit paranoid. How surreptitious would Congress have to be to include “moving sources” other than motor vehicles under the same sections (§§ 7401 et seq.) as the stationary sources the EPA currently can control? Shove a definition into the general definitional section that defines a “moving source” to be “any source of any substance identified in [reference the statutory designations of pollutants] or designated by the Administrator pursuant to [reference the various sections under which the EPA gets to make those designations] which is not a stationary source.” Folks, you, your children, your pets, and your livestock are now “moving sources” of a pollutant designated by the EPA. Whatever you do to create a new source or alter the emissions from an existing source is now subject to permitting and regulation by the EPA. And woe betide you if you fail to comply.

Think the above is too kooky for words? Remember when OSHA seriously opined that it had the power, and the intention, to come into your house to make sure your own den complied with its statutes and regulations because you just might be working from home? Remember that? Or who exactly it was that decreed that the toilet in your master bathroom be of insufficient capacity to accomplish its intended office on a single throw of the lever? Recall also that one of our president’s troupe of czars is on record as seriously advocating mandatory abortion to protect the environment. “Kooky” has to be defined with what is on the table right now. I hope my musings on “moving sources” other than motor vehicles never comes to pass. But it easily could, with a teensy bit of legislative drafting, and do we really, truly, genuinely trust that kind of power not only to the bureaucrats presently in power, but to all future power-holders? All of them? Remember that on 29 January 1933, the office of Reichskanzler wasn’t nearly what it became, starting the next day.