Chipper Farley’s Blog

It’s my first Titans post of the year. What do I have to say?  We suck.  That’s it.

In a world of uncertainty, there is at least one thing that you can count on…there is a segment of the US population that is convinced that limiting the rights of law abiding citizens to keep and carry guns somehow will better society.  These folks are out there spreading misinformation on this topic again, right now, in numerous stories and articles in the media that are decrying the Mexican drug wars and their violent fallout as somehow being significantly attributable to American gun shops and the general availability of guns here.  Somehow, these media outlets, as well as numerous politicians, are drawing a connection between the actions of criminals in another country and legitimate business here in the US.

Now, if there are gun stores here in the US selling weapons to Mexicans without going through the proper steps, then they are in violation of the law and should be dealt with accordingly.  However, my understanding is that many of the weapons being used by the Mexican drug lords and their “soldiers” are weapons that are not legal for sale here in the first place: fully automatic machine guns, grenade launchers, missile launchers.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen a grenade launcher in the local gun shop.

Whatever the details of this situation are, it never ceases to amaze me how many people in America are convinced that the solution to limiting the abilities of criminals is by limiting the rights of law abiding citizens.  It’s just absurd.  Let’s look at a real-world example.  I’m a father, husband, and all around normal guy.  I also love guns.  I love to shoot skeet, target shoot, and dove hunt.  I also like knowing that - God forbid - if I ever need to defend my home or family from a violent attacker, I can do it.  Now understand this…I hope and pray that I NEVER have to use a gun to defend myself or my family.  I also thank God that, up until now, I’ve never even come close to a situation where that would be necessary.  But if it ever does happen, I am thankful I live in a place where I can legally own and use a gun to defend myself or my family.

So, with all that being said I’d love to hear how taking away my rights by limiting my ability to own or carry a firearm helps anyone.  Is the country safer?  Am I?  It seems to me the only people that are safer by doing that are criminals who might want to harm me or my family.  Or you.  I wonder if those who would take away our gun rights would be so eager to do so if they were in a terrible situation and were defended by a good Samaritan with a gun.

So please, if you’re reading this and can explain to me how taking away my rights betters the country or makes people more safe, I’d love to hear it.  I’ll publish your comments right here so you can make your point to the countless three or four people who read this blog.  Seriously though, if you think I shouldn’t be allowed to own or carry a gun, please explain to me why.

This will be a quick post.  I just thought the one or two people who read this blog might like to know that…

As of Tuesday (August 25) the United States’ national debt stood at 11.7 trillion dollars.  Let me write that number for you…

$11,700,000,000,000.

Also, you probably don’t know this but a few years ago the Federal Reserve quit reporting how much total currency is in circulation in the US, something called the M3 money supply.  Estimates run around 13 trillion or so but we really don’t know anymore.  Without getting too technical here, the bottom line is that the US debt nearly equals to total estimated number of dollars in circulation. At the pace we’re going, we’ll surpass that soon.

Just thought you’d want to know.

Okay, so I’m one of the countless people that are infatuated with the Bacon Explosion. I’m not really sure why but for some reason I’m just fascinated by it. Unfortunately though, I’ve found that for many people, it’s just too dang heavy. At 5000 calories and 500 grams of fat per explosion, that’s a fair statement. But I’m infatuated, see. I can’t just let a ludicrous amount of calories and fat stand in the way of making such a succulent dish. So, I’ve altered the original recipe to make a lighter explosion that is still delicious but not so heavy. Here’s the ingredients:

1 pound thick cut bacon
2 pounds ground turkey
1/2 a red onion, diced
1 tbsp minced garlic
1/2 can diced tomotoes
your favorite bbq seasoning rub
your favorite bbq sauce
optional: 2 diced jalapeno peppers

First, weave the uncooked bacon together into a mat of bacon-y goodness. Then sprinkle your bbq rub on the mat. I sprinkle a lot of it on there but do it to your personal taste. Then, take the ground turkey and mix it in a bowl with the onion, garlic, tomatoes, and jalapeno if you want to add some heat. Now spread the turkey over the bacon mat. Sprinkle the rub again. I didn’t do this but next time I think I’ll drizzle some bbq sauce on the turkey at this point too. Now, roll up the turkey but not he bacon mat. This is where this recipe is tougher than the original as the turkey is more paste-like so it takes a very steady hand to roll it up. Once the turkey is rolled up, roll up the bacon wrap around it. The reason you want to first roll the turkey and then the wrap is so that none of the bacon mat gets rolled inside…it needs to stay outside. Once everything is rolled up, you’re ready to cook.

I cooked mine on a water smoker and it was completely done in 3 hours. It probably was ready by 2.5 hours. That’s way shorter than the original explosion due to the turkey. Plus it was really hot outside the day I cooked it so the smoker cooked a little hotter. When the thing is done, pour your bbq sauce all over it. I do this while still on the smoker and then close it up for 10 minutes or so. That just sort of solidifies the sauce a bit. If you like though, you can add the sauce outside the smoker…not so messy. Either way, a generous coating of bbq sauce is key. After that, let ‘er sit for a few minutes, slice, and serve.

So there it is, the Bacon Explosion Part Deux. We thought ours was pretty good. Comments for ideas to improve are welcome.

Cheers!

Chipper

Please encourage your representative to support HR 1207.  This bill would require an audit of the Federal Reserve.  If you’ve read my posts before, you know that I have great concern about the Fed and its strangle hold over our currency.  This bill is the first step towards a more sound monetary policy in the US.  But Ron Paul makes the case better than I do…

Well, a lot as been made recently of a new BBQ recipe, the Bacon Explosion.  This recipe has become an internet sensation after being featured in numerous major publications and viewed by countless individuals online.  You can see the recipe here…

http://www.bbqaddicts.com/blog/recipes/bacon-explosion/

This past weekend I made one.  Two actually.  And I thought the 3 or 4 people who read this blog might be interested to hear what I thought.

So, first off, the Bacon Explosion is actually pretty easy to make.  You just weave bacon, put a bunch of sausage on top of the weave, put on more bacon, season, roll it up, season more, and smoke it.  The hardest part for me was finding the mild Italian sausage to put in it.  I found that in the freezer section at Publix.

I smoked the explosions for 4.5 hours and started basting with Stubb’s Original BBQ Sauce about 45 minutes before I took them off.  I’ll say this…they’re beautiful on the grill.  After taking them off I let them sit for around 10 minutes and sliced them up.

So how does the Bacon Explosion taste?  Sausage-y.  Which isn’t bad…I love sausage.  I just don’t think I was ready for how prominent the sausage flavor was.  Again, not a bad thing…just not exactly what I was expecting.  Whatever the case, it was very popular at the party and most people liked it, but some thought it was too sausage-y.  I did.

What I learned about this though is that the Bacon Explosion’s bacon-weave wrapping is a culinary master stroke.  To me, the bacon weave is a foundation for all kinds of potential recipes.  I plan to fill one with ground pork and some as yet undetermined seasonings and diced veggies to make almost a BBQ meatloaf.  The beauty is that, with the bacon weave, it’s almost impossible to over-cook whatever it is you’re making as the bacon fat continuously melting onto the contents of the wrap ensures it stays moist.

So there you have it…the Bacon Explosion is awesome if you really like Italian sausage, pretty good if you just sort of like it.  But the bacon weave wrapping is surely going to find its way into countless offshoot recipes.  Look for me to invent one soon.

Now, I’m off to the cardiologist.

This will be a short post.  I just want anyone reading this to think about this -

The post office -losing money.

Amtrak - losing money.

Medicare - losing money.

Social security - broke.

OUR ENTIRE GOVERNMENT - BROKE.

Why don’t people see?  Government can not run anything efficiently because it has no incentive to. It is the one organization that isn’t accountable to its customers because there is no competition.  Once a government bureaucracy is implemented, it is usually never dismantled, no matter how poorly it performs.  And unlike any business or state, when it operates at a loss, it just prints more money to pay for itself.  HOW COULD AN ORGANIZATION LIKE THIS POSSIBLY RUN OUR HEALTHCARE SYSTEM?  OR ANY SYSTEM FOR THAT MATTER?  WHY DON’T WE WAKE UP AND REALIZE THAT THE SMALLER WE MAKE GOVERNMENT, THE BETTER WE’LL BE?

Sheesh!  I think I blew a vessel there…

Well, we’re at the finish line here.  We’ve now reviewed two steps to fixing our economy.  Step One - get rid of the Fed.  Step Two - repeal legal tender laws.  In a nutshell, these first two steps clear the way for a free market currency model.  Step one eliminates the private unregulated Federal Reserve which creates our money out of thin air and then loans it to us at interest.  Step two allows for market dynamics to impact our currency and allow for citizens to have choice in their currency.  This then paves the way for step three - an interest free currency issued directly by the government with no debt tied to it.

So let’s take a look at that idea.  Now, as you’ll recall, our currency is issued currently by the Fed.  They print it and hand it over to the government in return for bonds.  Those bonds have to be paid back by you and me with tax dollars and are essentially interest bearing loans.  Because of legal tender laws, we are forced to do our business with this debt-money.  But let’s look at another option: a currency issued by the government directly.

Let me start by saying that I’m essentially a Libertarian.  I think the federal government should be tiny.  Rather than some huge Federal bureaucracy running everything, the states should have control over most aspects of government.  But there are things that are appropriate for the federal government to do and one of those is to issue the currency.  This idea is so common sense that it really boggles the mind that we don’t do it already.  Remember though that the Fed and those behind it are businessmen.  They are making tons of money off this system while producing nothing of value.  They just push numbers around on a ledger and get rich doing it.  And they’ve been doing it for years, accumulating power and influence along the way.  Obviously, they’re not interested in getting rid of the Fed at all; it’s their golden goose.

Nonetheless, it’s what needs to happen.  In the past, our government has issued its own currency.  In fact, that is how several colonies did things before the revolution.  They printed legal tender notes, dropped them into the economy, and everyone was happy.  Benjamin Franklin himself lauded the model.  It was also done during the Civil War when Abaraham Lincoln issued “greenback” to fund the war.  So, it’s not a new concept.

Think of the benefits of going to this model.  Firstly, all the taxpayer dollars that are currently going to pay interest on the trillions of dollars we owe to the Fed and other lenders would be actually going to fund government programs.  As of right now, we’re only a few years away from having an interest payment so large on our federal debt that income tax revenues won’t cover it.  That means that all the income taxes collected won’t fund a single government program at all.

With a debt-free currency though, that all goes away.  Tax revenues will actually be available to pay for services.  Additionally, if the government needs additional money to fund a project, it can just print it.  Now, this may seem counter intuitive initially but it is basically what we do now.  Today, if the government needs money, it goes to the Fed and they print a bunch of money and loan it to the government.  In this new model, we’re doing the same thing, just without the debt.

But there is a problem with this model: inflation.  As we know from our current bail-out-o-rama, the government loves to spend.  And when it spends with money it just prints, that causes inflation by increasing the supply of money, thus reducing its value.  So what do we do about that?

Step two of our plan addresses that problem…we let alternate currencies simultaneously be legal tender along with the dollars issued by the government.  Gold is a great candidate.  What this does is create a check against government fiscal recklessness.  Let’s go through the logic…the government is always going to spend more than it takes in in taxes.  It can’t stop itself.  The easiest way to do that is to print the money it needs to pay for programs.  In order to have that process work, it needs the dollars it prints to maintain their value.  The best way for that to happen is to force the dollar to compete against another currency and let people choose which one they want to use.  That way, if the government loses its mind like it’s doing today and goes crazy with the spending, the population could shift from the printed dollar to gold coins, sliver certificates, or whatever the alternate currency is.

Here’s the bottom line…the current currency model makes no sense in that it plunges us hopelessly in debt.  So, we replace it with a model where the government can issue our currency directly, debt-free.  The problem with that is that the government will always spend recklessly and devalue a printed currency.  So to solve that problem, we legalize an alternative or two that the population can shift to in the event the government is irresponsible with its fiscal policy.

Now, this seems pretty simple to me but I’m no economist.  Perhaps the ideas I’ve thrown out in these last three posts won’t work.  I don’t know.  What I do know though is that the current currency model we have can’t work.  We need to replace it with a system that benefits the populace, not elite bankers.  I guess all I can hope for at this point is that people like you will start thinking about this issue.  The politicians aren’t going to bring it up.  The bankers aren’t going to bring it up.  Even many top economists won’t bring it up.  Nonetheless, it seems pretty clear that our current system can not work long term and that we need to reform it.  I just hope we get a politician to come along who has the clout and willingness to really fundamentally reform the system.  Now that would be change we really could believe in.

Alright, so if you weren’t bored enough with the first post I put up about fixing our economy, let me see if I can fix that with the second one.  We’re moving on now to step two of fixing our economy: repealing all legal tender laws.  Now, this is something I’ve never written about before so let me spend a few minutes explaining what legal tender laws are and why I feel they need to be repealed.

You’ll remember from my last post that the money that we currently use is issued by the Federal Reserve.  It is the private bank that creates money out of thin air and loans it to us to use.  One of the reasons that that is such a powerful ability is that the dollars it issues are legal tender in the US.  We have to accept them as payment for things.  US dollars, or as I prefer to call them, Federal Reserve Notes, are supposed to be “good as gold”.  If you look at a dollar bill, you’ll see several things printed on it.  One is the seal of the Federal Reserve System that issued it.  Another is a sentence on the front that says, “This note is legal tender for all debts public and private”.  Basically, that means that in the US, you have to use Federal Reserve Notes to pay for things.  You can’t use anything else.

So why is that bad?  Well, on its face it isn’t.  The idea of passing a legal tender law is that it normalizes the currency so there’s not a number of different payment media floating around in the economy that always have to be converted from one to another.  The problem though is that our legal tender is the Federal Reserve Note,  a fundamentally flawed currency as detailed in my previous post.  But because of legal tender laws, the citizens of our country have no choice but to use them.  We’re locked in and the Fed retains complete control over our economy with its stranglehold on our currency.  It’s ability to print money out of thin air results in its loss of value.  Also, the fact that each dollar is owed back to the Fed at interest means that we’ll be in debt forever.

So what does this have to do with repealing legal tender laws?  The reason we need to repeal legal tender laws is to pave the way for a new competitive currency model to be put in place.  You see, I believe that the free market is the solution to our currency problem.  And just so we’re on the same page, let me remind you of what that problem is…Our currency is a debt instrument issued to us by a private bank that is accountable to no one.  US dollars are not backed by anything of real value.  And, we are required to use them by law.  Additionally, they can be manufactured without limit at the request of our government and as a result are constantly losing value, something we call inflation.

Now, let’s imagine a different model, one where several currencies compete freely.  Image that we added gold and silver to the mix so that people could pay for things with gold, silver, or government issued money.  I recognize there are details as to how this would work that would need to be ironed out but those details are beyond the scope of this posting.  Just staying at a high level, let’s think about how that might work.  Rather than being forced to spend and save in Federal Reserve Notes as today, Americans would be able to choose the currency that they wanted to use for spending, saving, and paying taxes.  So would the government.  But since government issued money would still be able to be printed at will, the government would likely use the printed money as its currency of choice to pay for its endless programs.  But there would be a twist now…since gold and silver would also be legal tender, the populace could choose to reject government issued currency if it chose to.  Instead, gold, silver, or some other currency could be used.

Now why would people want to stop using printed money from the government?  Simple…to avoid its inflationary down-side.  You see, when you take a piece of printed money and put it in the bank as savings, you start losing money immediately due to inflation.  Thus you have to constantly try to earn high interest on that money by risking it in the stock market.  Also, since the money supply is always increasing and inflation is constantly reducing the value of your paycheck, you have to continually try to get raises to keep up.  With gold and, to a lesser degree, silver that’s not the case.

You see, gold in particular has been valued at roughly the same level for thousands of years.  Yes the value floats up and down in the markets.  But in general, over time gold retains its value.  It is a universally recognized store of value.  Silver is similar but is admittedly more volatile.

The point here though is that alternative currencies (gold and silver in my example), if they were made legal alternatives to government issued paper money, would serve as a check against the government doing what it is doing right now: printing money continually and thus reducing its value.  And there are lots of good reasons to make sure we do check that.  Printing money (inflating the currency) makes things cost more; it makes your paycheck worth less; it destroys savings by reducing their value; it hurts the poor because prices always increase faster than their pay increases; it hurts the elderly because the value of their fixed income declines.  Printing money recklessly, which we are doing right this very second, is extremely destructive to the general welfare of a population.  By making an alternative available, you force the government to control itself because it doesn’t want people to suddenly stop using or accepting its printed money.  It needs it to retain its value.  Thus, it would be inclined to spend with more discipline than it does today.  This would result in an enforceable fiscal discipline in Washington and would hopefully restrain the growth of government.

So that’s my case for why legal tender laws should be repealed.  But let me clarify something…I am not advocating a gold/silver standard.  There’s still a third step that needs to occur and that’s step three in fixing our economy: letting the government issue our currency debt free.  If you’re still awake, try to stop by in a few days when I publish the final post in this three part series.

As always, thanks for reading and feel free to leave a comment, especially if you disagree.

Chipper

Let me start this three-part posting with a little disclaimer - I am not an economist. I’m not even that smart! But, I’ve done a fair amount of reading and research on the topics of the Federal Reserve and our monetary system and feel that they are at the core of our economic problems. I am also convinced that no amount of “stimulus” or tax cuts or any other measure for that matter will have a lasting effect until we take this first step towards freeing our economy from the crushing debt we are mired in. So with that disclaimer, let’s look at my first step towards fixing the economy - Eliminating the Fed!

First, let’s discuss what the Federal Reserve, or ” the Fed”, is. I am going to try to keep this simple but accurate. The Fed is a private bank that controls the issuance of our currency. It is not a governmental agency. It is an extension of key banks like JP Morgan Chase and Citibank that are rooted in the banking cartels of the past century. It was created in 1913 under suspicious circumstances and has, since that time, been controlling US monetary policy. It is a secretive organization that operates behind closed doors and without any sort of oversight. What is most amazing about the Fed though is how it issues our currency. Here is the process in extreme summary: The Fed creates US Dollars out of thin air and then loans them to the US government at interest. I know…it doesn’t make sense but it is true. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 essentially outsourced the creation of our currency to a private bank. The idea then was that a central bank like the Fed could regulate the amount of currency in circulation and “manage” the economy, preventing turbulent economic phenomena from occurring.

That was what the bankers that were pushing for the Fed to be created said anyway. What the Fed actually does is act as a money manufacturing machine and a parasite on our economy. By forcing us to use a currency that it loans us, it siphons wealth from all of us by charging us interest on the dollars it issues, the very dollars we must use just to conduct daily business. Also, it is constantly reducing the value of our dollars by happily throwing more and more of them into the economy at the request of a government that can’t resist the temptation of spending money that can just be created from nothing at any time. The interest that the Fed charges us on the dollars it issues enriches the bankers that control it but destroys the middle class of the US. Need proof? Consider these questions. Why is it that today, most families need two incomes to succeed when for generations, one was enough? Why is it that a loaf of bread costs a couple of bucks today when it cost a nickel 50 years ago? Why is it that today debt is just a part of life for most Americans when in the past, it was considered a terrible thing? The answer is the same each time: because of the Fed and its debt-based monetary system that plunges us deeper into debt with every passing year and devalues our dollars, destroying savings and wealth for the middle class. Now, there are other factors too, like fractional reserve banking, that also contribute to our debt/inflation problem but those topics are outside the scope of this post.

So let’s go through an example of how the Fed inflates our money supply and piles debt on us. This is a simple scenario but is accurate. Whenever the government wants money and doesn’t have it, it issues bonds that the Fed then buys with money that it creates out of thin air. Yes, you read that right…the Fed creates the money from nothing and then buys US Treasury bonds with it. This allows the government to spend almost without limit without going to the people asking for more money in taxes. It is basically like the government is using a huge credit card with essentially no spending limit to fund its activities. It is also the reason that we have an ever-growing government and its sinister and also ever-growing partner, the national debt and that our dollar has lost over 95% of its value since the Fed was created.

You see, the bonds that the government issues in order to get the money from the Fed (which it creates from nothing) are basically loans that must be repaid with taxpayer dollars. And under the current model, issuing bonds is the only way that the government can create money. Oh, and by the way, the dollars that are created are not backed by gold, or anything at all for that matter. This is a common misconception. They are only backed by people’s faith that they have value. And therein lies one of our major problems right now. This model, with the Fed managing our money supply, has put us so ridiculously in debt that the world may start questioning the value of the dollar. If that happens, our economy will disintegrate as our dollars all become worthless. I know, it sounds crazy. But it has happened before in other countries like Germany, Hungary, and Yugoslavia.

Let’s review one more time. The country needs money in order to do business. So, the Government issues bonds that the Fed buys with money it creates from nothing. Additionally, the government needs money because it spends recklessly and is unwilling to tax the populace in order to pay for whatever it is doing. So it issues more bonds that the Fed buys with more money it creates from nothing. Remember, these bonds are loans that the government is taking out from the Fed and are thus interest bearing. Now, there are other ways that money gets into our economy. Fractional reserve banking and borrowing of foreign money are two ways but I’m trying to keep this simple. The bottom line is that ALL of the money in our economy is borrowed at interest. Every dollar in your wallet, every dollar in your bank account, every dollar you have invested was borrowed from either the Fed or some other lender and is owed back at interest. Every single dollar in our economy is like that. In order for US Dollars to exist at all, the Fed (or other countries) have to lend them to us. And what is amazing is that when the Fed lends us money, it actually never really had it. It just makes it, either by printing it or by making accounting entries.

So I’m guessing you are starting to see how this makes no sense at all. Since essentially all money in our economy is owed at interest to someone, that means there will NEVER be enough money to pay back our debt. There’s not enough money in the economy to do it. Instead our debt will just grow endlessly. But that can’t continue forever. At some point, something has to give. What is most likely is the dollar will collapse. People will lose faith in it as they come to realize that our national debt is unserviceable and its value will fall. Remember, the dollar isn’t backed by anything anymore…just people’s faith in it. Once that’s gone, so is the value of the dollar.

Let not your heart be troubled though…there is a way out. We can reclaim control over our currency and reestablish a sound economy for the long haul, topics I’ll discuss in upcoming posts. We can return issuance of our currency to the government where it can be issued debt-free. We can also allow the self-correcting qualities of a free market to be introduced into our monetary policy by allowing gold and silver to be used as money again, something that has been done for millennia. All of these things I’ll be discussing soon. For now though, I just hope that you recognize that our first step to righting our economy is freeing ourselves from the crushing debt-based monetary policy we currently have. The only way to do that is to eliminate the Fed.

So give this some thought. Let me know if you disagree. If you agree though, there are things you can do. First, contact your Representative and encourage them to support H.R. 1207: Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009. You can read the text of this bill here. The bill is designed to force an audit of the Fed. Next, you can grow your understanding of this issue by reading The Creature from Jekyll Island or The Web of Debt, two books that detail this problem, its history, and offer solutions. You can also visit The Money Masters website for information. Whatever you do, educate yourself. Ignorance of this topic is what the banking elite who designed this system are counting on in order to keep it going.

So that’s it. Thanks for reading and of course leave a comment if you like. I’ll be posting “Fixing Our Economy in Three Steps: Step Two - Repeal All Legal Tender Laws” in the near future.

Chipper