And this is why Irwin Schiff is a national hero and should be known as one. 

His story needs to be more well known.  We need to band together more as a community and demand his release. 

here once was a grizzled old man named Irwin who owned an insurance brokerage business.  Irwin was a good businessman that people trusted to insure their possessions.  Because Irwin was so good at serving his customers, he ended up making a lot of money.

As Irwin set about growing his business and reinvesting his profits, the mafia began to take note of Irwin’s business dealings.  Irwin happened to be living in an area where the mafia had established a “protection” racket.  The “protection” racket operated something like this:  a business owner would pay the mafia a percentage of his profits, and in return for this, the mafia would “protect” that business from other thieves and mafia families.  Of course, if a business owner refused to pay for protection, he would end up being kidnapped and thrown into a dungeon surrounded by violent men for many years.  Once the businessman had been kidnapped, the mafia would then take all of his possessions for themselves as “restitution” for being inconvenienced.

Most businessmen who lived under the control of the mafia readily agreed to this.  In fact, many even appreciated the mafia’s protection since they knew that no other thieves would dare mess with them.  To keep up appearances, the mafia dons made a point of helping out the communities they controlled.  After all, the more businesses earned, the more the mafia was able to skim from them.  So the mafia dons would do nice things, like buy food for some of the poorer families in their neighborhoods, provide low interest loans to businessmen, and even fix a few pot holes in the streets outside of the businesses they “protected.”

The mafia knew they couldn’t take too much from the businessmen or they would put them out of business, but the mafia had other ways of making money for themselves besides robbing businessmen and profiting from the black market.  One of the main sources of revenue for the mafia was counterfeit money.  The mafia managed to acquire some very expensive Simultan printing presses, which they used to create the counterfeit money.  The mafia would then loan out the printed money through their foreign operations to keep the flow of money hidden from the public eye.

Irwin didn’t like this one bit.  Irwin knew that the mafia was eventually going to destroy his savings from the inflation that resulted from their money printing.  Irwin also knew that the “good” the mafia was doing was simply to keep up public appearances.  Since the public greatly outnumbered the mafia, the mafia only did just enough “good” to keep the public from revolting against them, while keeping the balance of money for themselves.  Irwin figured that if the public was allowed to keep their own money, they could do more good than the mafia ever could.

Being the crotchety old man that he was, Irwin decided he wasn’t going to pay the protection money the mafia was demanding from him.  Irwin sent the mafia letters telling them that what they were doing was wrong and he wasn’t going to take it any more.

Today, Irwin Schiff is sitting in a Federal Prison for tax evasion.

As an employer, unemployment insurance run by the state is over priced, inefficient, and makes it more expensive to hire and fire employees.  Privatizing unemployment insurance would make it a lot easier for employers to hire and would decrease the unemployment rate.  To me it is a no brainer. 

If unemployment insurance was privatized and not a requirement for one it wouldn’t cost as much.  When things become “required” and monopolized the price will always be higher when there is no competition.  Private insurance companies could offer unemployment insurance the same way they offer disability and health insurance. 

Companies could offer this to their employees if they so wished.  The more benefits a company can offer the more attractive the job offer might be.  Of course in the same respect a competing firm could offer to pay their employees more money but with out any benefits.  This is why competition is a good thing.  It doesn’t all have to be the same. 

Like all other insurances, it could and most likely would be risk based.  If you have a strong track record of holding a job your rate would be a lot lower than that of someone who has a record of losing his job often.  Rather than those who have a good record subsidizing those who don’t. 

When governments want to prohibit a product, such as alcohol or tobacco, they tax it heavily to try and stop its consumption.  Labor is no different.  When the government makes it more expensive to hire and employee in effect the government is restricting the labor force. 

Like all things the private free market can handle anything better than the government, unemployment insurance included. 

The only REAL anarchists are the Anarcho-Capitalists

You can either borrow to consumer or borrow to produce.  They are not created equal.  One is good for the economy and the other isn’t. 

We’ve always been told that saving money is bad for the economy.  We as the American people have a duty to spend, spend, and spend some more to keep the economy going.  Which is why pretty much everyone is in debt.  Whether it be student loans, home mortgage, or credit cards.  Everyone is in debt. 

I’m not against consumerism.  I’m am against going into thousands and tens of thousands of dollars in debt to consume.  There is a worlds of difference between the two.  Especially when most of the goods we purchase now are produced in other countries creating an ever increasing exorbitant trade deficit. 

The federal government through tax incentives, credits, and artificially low interest rates caused by the federal reserve has created this debt problem.  There is no incentive to save when you can’t earn any interest on your money.  There is even less incentive to save when your dollar will have less purchasing power tomorrow than it does today. 

Now if you are borrowing to invest in capital to produce goods for the economy that is the good kind of borrowing and spending.  That is what drives the economy.   This is one of the primary reasons the American economy is so horrible.  We no longer produce anything. 

by Gary North

F. A. Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom in 1943. It was published in 1944. Americans who read the 1945 Readers Digest version liked it. University professors didn’t. This is one more bit of evidence that American voters have more sense than university professors. Are you surprised?

When Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom, he had a marketing problem. The book’s title was absurd. He knew that. He knew the difference between Western serfdom, which had limited but defined property rights and the rule of law, and socialism, which in theory had neither. Serfdom was a system of liberty compared to Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism. But he was trying to sell the book to educated Leftists, who were favorable to socialism. He could not very well have sold copies in 1944 based on a title like The Road to Fascism, which was in fact the road the West was on in 1944.

We have been on the road out of “serfdom” ever since 1947, the year after Truman removed wartime price and wage controls. Anyone who doubts this development has no awareness of the lack of influence that free market ideas had in 1945. It was worse on campus, but it was bad in general. Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson was a breath of fresh intellectual air in 1946. He was alone among financial journalists in 1946.

He would not be alone today.

…..

BUREAUCRACY IS NOT SOCIALISM

This is why I do not understand why conservatives believe that there is going to be a massive increase of socialism in the United States. There will be a lot of regulation. There will be a lot of special-interest legislation that benefits the Good Old Boys back home and the Old Boy Network that has its headquarters in New York City. There will be a lot of corruption. There will be a lot of Congressmen running around with their secretaries. There has been all this since 1788. What there isn’t going to be is socialism. The idea of socialism is dead in the water. It has almost no supporters any more, outside of universities. It has no legitimacy any more. There is no drift into socialism, because, since at least December 31, 1991, there has been a drift out of socialism. The USSR went belly-up.

It astounds me that there are still conspiratorial conservatives who tell us that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a deception. It also astounds me that anybody could believe this. I think it is a hangover of the outlook of the 1950s and 1960s, in which American conservatives really did think that the West might lose the Cold War. If we had stumbled into a nuclear war, as we almost did on several occasions — thank God for Stanislav Petrov — the West would have lost the war, but not the Cold War. In any case, we did not go to nuclear war, and we did not lose the Cold War. We won it. Our opponent disappeared in late 1991.

The simplest proof of this is to look at a map of Russia. The Soviet names of cities, which had been substituted for czarist names, have been changed back to the czarist names. Leningrad is back to St. Petersburg. It had been re-named Petrograd in mid-August 1914, a few days after Russia entered World War I, then Leningrad in 1924, three days after Lenin died. It was re-named St. Petersburg in September 1991, a few weeks after the failed coup by the Communists to regain control (August 19-21), but before the Soviet Union was officially disbanded — getting the czarist name back for the nation (December 31): Russia. Anyone who does not think name changes are significant has no understanding of how societies operate. What we call our cities reflects who we are as a people. Lenin was not St. Lenin, for there were no saints in Marxism. There were, however, pseudonyms: Lenin (Ulyanov), Stalin (Dzhugashvili), Trotsky (Bronstein).

I don’t care if Obama is a socialist, if he really is. Obama does not run the country. The entrenched Civil Service-protected bureaucracies run the country. They write 83,000 pages a year of three-column, fine print regulations that run the country. The people who implement the Federal Register run the country. The President and Congress have very little say in the details of running the country. The only major piece of legislation that Obama got through, other than a Keynesian stimulus package, which was no worse than George Bush’s Keynesian stimulus package, was Obamacare. The Supreme Court may throw it out next month. The man has almost nothing else to show for the first four years of his administration. He is not Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson.

The system rolls along. For as long as investors turn their money over to the federal government in exchange for IOUs, the system is going to continue to roll along. When they stop turning their money over to the federal government, the Federal Reserve will begin to buy up the IOUs in order to make up the difference. But, at some point, the Federal Reserve will stop. The Federal Reserve will not go to hyperinflation unless Congress mandates it and threatens to take over the Federal Reserve. There will be time under those circumstances to hedge our bets. In any case, times of hyperinflation do not last very long. At the end of the period of hyperinflation, the government goes back to a stable money system, and the economy recovers. A lot of people will lose their wealth in the interim, and a few people will get very rich. If they sell their gold and silver and get into something like cash, they will do very well in the aftermath. But the bottom line is this: hyperinflation does not last very long. It is no solution, and central bankers know this. That is why I don’t think we are going to get hyperinflation.

The only place communism can work is in a fantasy land. 

by Murray Rothbard

For centuries the alleged ideal of communism had come to the world as a messianic and millennial creed. Various seers, notably Joachim of Fiore, had prophesied the final state of mankind as one of perfect harmony and equality, one where all things are owned in common, where there is no necessity for work or need for the division of labor. In the case of Joachim, of course, problems of production and property, indeed of scarcity in general, were “solved” by man no longer possessing a physical body. As pure spirits, men as equal and harmonious psychic entities spending all their time chanting praise to God, might make a certain amount of sense. But the communist idea applied to a physical mankind still needing to produce and consume is a very different matter. In any case, the communist ideal continued to be put forward as a religious, millennial doctrine. We have seen in volume I its enormous influence on the Anabaptist wing of the Reformation in the 16th century. Millennial and communist dreams also inspired various fringe Protestant sects during the English Civil War of the mid-17th century, particularly the Diggers, the Ranters, and the Fifth Monarchy Men.

The most important forerunner of Marxian communism among these Civil War Protestant sectarians was Gerrard Winstanley (1609–60), the founder of the Digger movement and a man much admired by Marxist historians. Winstanley’s father was a textile merchant, and young Gerrard became an apprentice in the cloth trade, rising up to become a cloth merchant in his own right. Winstanley’s business failed, however, and he found himself downwardly mobile, an employed agricultural laborer from 1643 to 1648. As the Protestant Revolution escalated in the late 1640s, Winstanley turned to writing pamphlets espousing mystical messianism. By the end of 1648, Winstanley had expanded his chiliastic doctrine to embrace egalitarian world communism, in which all goods are owned in common. His theological groundwork was the heretical, pantheistic view that God is within every man and woman, and is not a personal deity external to man. This pantheistic God has decreed “cooperation,” which for Winstanley meant compulsory communism rather than the market economy, whereas the antithetical creed of the Devil glorified individual selfishness. In Winstanley’s schema, God, meaning Reason, created the earth, but the Devil later originated selfishness and the institution of private property. Winstanley added the absurd view that England enjoyed communist property before the Norman Conquest in 1066, and that this conquest created the institution of private property. His call, then, was to return to the supposedly original communist system.[1]

In the final, most fully developed version of his system, The Law of Freedom in a Platform, or True Magistracy Restored (1652), Winstanley envisioned a largely agrarian society, in which all goods would be communally owned, and where all wage labor and all commerce or trade would be outlawed. In fact, all sale or purchase of goods would be punishable by death as treasonous to the communist system. Money would be clearly unnecessary since there would be no trade, and presumably it would be outlawed as well. The government would establish storehouses to collect and distribute all goods, and severe penalties would be levied on “idlers.” By this time, Winstanley’s pantheism had begun to shade into atheism, for all professional clergy would be outlawed, there would be no Sabbath observation, and “ministers” would be elected by the voters to give what would be essentially secular sermons, teaching everyone the virtues of the communist system. Education would be free and compulsory, and most of the children would be channeled into useful crafts — a foreshadowing of the progressive educational creed. Book-learning, which the uneducated Winstanley felt to be far inferior to practical vocational skill, would be discouraged.

Winstanley’s strategic recipe for communist victory was for various groups of his followers, or Diggers, to move peacefully into waste or common lands, and to set up communist societies upon them. The first Digger group, led by Winstanley, moved on to waste lands near south London in April 1649, and ten Digger settlements were thereby established over the next year. Only 30 Diggers moved into the first commune, and only a few hundred set up communes across the country. The notion was that these egalitarian communist settlements would so inspire the masses that they would abandon wage work or private property and move on to Digger settlements, thus bringing about the withering away of the market and of private property. In reality, the masses treated the Digger communes with great hostility, causing their suppression in a short period of time. By the time of his magnum opus in 1652, Winstanley was vainly appealing to the dictator, Oliver Cromwell, to impose his cherished system from above. The idea of mass direct action to establish his system was rapidly abandoned in the face of reality.

End the state to end the ruling class. 

It was inevitable, argued English liberal Oliver Brett in his 1921 work A Defence of Liberty, that so-called “state socialism” would become simply another class society — this time with the state bureaucracy in the position of privilege. “So long as Government exists at all” — so went his brilliant quip on the principle — “a governing class is inevitable.” Just as everyone who attended Eton — regardless of their class of origin or what rustic access they originally spoke — “bore the stamp of Eton,” everyone who exercises state power bears the stamp of that power. Government molds everyone who wields its authority into a governing type.

What’s more, Brett argued, it was questionable whether the state bureaucracy would really be a new ruling class at all:

“English history is full of the chameleon qualities of the rich. How quickly the feudal Baron is metamorphosed into the landed aristocrat, and the landed aristocrat into the mine owner and the railway director. We find often the same family names cast for these varied parts across the centuries. And these people will control the new bureaucracy. They know which way the wind is blowing, and they are preparing for the change of direction.”

Brett was part of a larger current, in the early years of the 20th century, of writers who applied Pareto’s “circulation of elites” theory to the state socialist movement. It included writers on the Left, like Robert Michels and William English Walling, who drew pessimistic conclusions from the socialist parties’ growing tendencies toward authoritarianism and collusion with the state and capital.

Michels argued that genuine majority or rank-and-file control of a large hierarchical institution was impossible, because it would be subverted by the “Iron Law of Oligarchy”: Representatives or delegates would transform their full-time inside control over information and agenda-setting to reduce the de jure authority of those they represented into a mere rubber-stamping function.

Walling argued (as did the Distributist Hilaire Belloc in “The Servile State”) that state socialist parties like the Social Democrats and Fabians were being coopted into the service of capital. Democratic socialist movements would by and large give up on the herculean political task of actually seizing control of industry, and would instead choose to leave the industry in capitalist hands while regulating it “in the popular interest.”

In practice, those “progressive” regulations would serve mainly to stabilize the economy in the long-term interests of big business, and use a minimalist welfare state and labor regulations to clean up the worst (and most politically destabilizing) forms of destitution left by the capitalists. As Belloc put it, if only the Fabians’ lust to manage and regiment the underclass were satisfied, they would be quite accommodating about capitalist ownership. So the de facto role of the “democratic socialist” state would be to oversee the economy on behalf of big business.

The historic continuity of the ruling class is another theme that has appeared in many guises. Immanuel Wallerstein and Christopher Hill, both Marxists, argued that a significant minority of the landed ruling class under the late Medieval political economy managed to reinvent itself as agrarian capitalists and negotiate the transition to capitalism, where they survived in such forms as the Whig landed oligarchy in Great Britain. The persistence of bastard feudal forms of concentrated land ownership, through such expedients as large-scale enclosure of the Open Fields, common pasture and waste, and the mercantile system of state finance and chartered monopoly, ensured a great deal of structural continuity between the medieval and early capitalist systems.

A similar continuity bridged agrarian and industrial capitalism, as silent partners in the landed classes provided much of the capital for industrialization and the most successful capitalists bought titles or married into noble families. That continuity between the European landed nobilities and industrial capitalists in the modern era was the thesis of Arno Mayer’s book The Persistence of the Old Regime.

Wallerstein, like Brett, feared either that the giant finance-capitalists would manage to install themselves as the new ruling class in control of the postcapitalist state, or that the bureaucratic apparatus would use its control over the economy to live in privilege. The same has been true of left-libertarian critics like Emma Goldman and the post-Trotskyist Frankfurt School, who used terms like “bureaucratic state capitalism” and “bureaucratic collectivism” to dismiss the USSR as a new form of class society.

If there’s anything to such analyses — and I believe there is — we should take a long, hard look at whether state socialism (i.e., a system in which genuine working class political and economic power is exercised through the state) is even possible.

Murray Bookchin, in his multivolume work The Third Revolution, presented a historical typology of revolution in which, in the course of a revolution, popular struggle by working people themselves gave birth to all sorts of decentralist, self-managed, liberatory institutions like soviets and workers committees. But in every case, once a revolutionary party had firmly established itself in the capital and purged the state of its rivals, it proceeded either to suppress working class organs of self-management or to coopt them as top-down transmission belts for state policy.

That’s what happened when Lenin liquidated the other parties of the Left in his governing coalition, suppressed the Workers’ Opposition, and put down the Kronstadt mutiny. It’s what happened in Spain, when the Communist-dominated government in Madrid set up its own Soviet-trained OGPU unit and showed its willingness to lose to Franco in preference to tolerating anarchists in Catalonia.

In essence, it’s the cyclical phenomenon described by Orwell’s fictional “Emanuel Goldstein”: The high and middle eternally jockeying for power over the low, with the middle in each revolution enlisting the help of the low long enough to oust the old ruling class and set themselves up as the new one.

Since the rise of the state as an instrument of economic exploitation on behalf of a ruling class, there have been endless attempts to achieve justice through revolutionary seizure of the state — each one ending in failure and disillusionment. Ending injustice and exploitation through machinery which is purpose-built for injustice and exploitation is doomed. To repeat Brett’s observation: “So long as government exists, a governing class is inevitable.”

So maybe we need to do it different this time.

I just donated.  You should too. 

Dear Peacemongers, 

 

We struggled with the thought that for a moment, our fundraising campaign was going to fail.  We once again agonized that we would have to start firing people — even close down Antiwar.com.

 

Fortunately, several generous donors have come together. They have pledged $31,000 —  when our readers and supporters can match it.

 

The bottom line is that we must out quarterly goal of $100,000 — a very modest goal as Antiwar.com is an excellent value for your hard earned activist dollars but it is essential that you make your contribution today: give as much as you can, as soon as you can.

 

Every dollar you contribute is tax-deductible, which means your money, instead of going to the Pentagon, will help keep the last opposition to the War Party alive. And I do mean to say “last opposition”: with the “Left” uniting behind Barack Obama, and the “Right” still living in the Bush era, we here at Antiwar.com are left pretty much alone, holding the fort.

 

But we can’t continue to hold the fort without your financial help.

 

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Gold is and will always be money whether people like it or not.  Fiat currencies don’t last the test of time while gold does.  When the dollar and other currencies collapse gold will be there to fill the void. 

Gold - A Reality Check

Investors have “defriended” gold recently in favor of the dollar, as Greek and French voters rejected austerity measures. Greeks have been responding to their escalating debt issues for a while by steadily pulling money from overnight deposits. I often say, money goes where it is best treated, and these deposits will need to find a safe haven.

….

In the end, I believe governments in Europe lack the courage to be fiscally disciplined. Earlier this week, I told Aaron Task and Henry Blodget on The Daily Ticker that when push comes to shove, Europe will likely continue to print money. This should be positive for gold.

At the Hard Assets Conference earlier this week, Greg Weldon compared the money printing situation to a sink. In an interview he gave with The Gold Report, Greg said:

“It’s going to be very difficult to see how economies in Europe, the U.S. and Japan can stand on their own two feet without the assistance of central banks debasing currency through debt monetization. I liken it to filling the sink halfway up with water and pulling the plug out of the drain. Of course, the water level will recede unless you turn the faucet on and start more water pouring into the sink. The level of water represents asset prices, the water flowing out of the faucet represents liquidity provided by global central banks and the drain represents the real macro economy, which has not been fixed.

“At the end of the second round of qualitative easing, when the Fed shut off the faucet, the water level (asset prices) started to go down. But now the water is running again - particularly with some of the measures instituted by the European Central Bank, with its three-year loan program, the federal liquidity swaps and the back-ended way that it’s managed to involve the International Monetary Fund.

“The problem with all of this is it does nothing to fix the underlying problem, which is too much debt. This is not sustainable. Central banks turning on the water faucet is good for asset prices. The real solutions of fiscal austerity, which are probably not palatable to most politicians in Europe, are the real struggle as we go forward. This problem is not going to go away.”

So, during times like we’ve had recently, when the dollar is chosen over gold, I apply math. The chart below shows the 60-day percentage change of the gold price and the U.S. dollar. Gold’s recent weakness has triggered a -2.2 sigma event in standard deviation terms. Over the past 10 years, this has happened less than 2 percent of the time. Historically, each time gold has touched the -2 sigma mark, the precious metal has rallied.

At least according to Peter Schiff. 

I first came to national attention back in 2008 and 2009 when the housing and credit markets imploded. I became known as the guy that other market “experts” laughed at when I warned of trouble brewing in the seemingly indestructible American economy. After the wheels ground to a halt in mid-2008, people noticed that my book Crash Proof, originally released in early 2007, read like a detailed preview of many of the events that eventually unfolded.

Three years later I am now catching heat from many who assume that my predictions actually fell short. They argue that I was able to anticipate the crash but that I severely underestimated the resiliency of the American economy. They admit that we took an “unexpected” blow to the chin, and that it left a lingering bruise, but they argue that we never hit the canvas like I predicted we would.

However, they mistakenly assumed that the crash I was warning about was solely a housing led credit bubble. While that was part of it, I never saw it ending there. The crash that most concerned me was the one that would result from the government’s response to the initial crisis. My concern was not that our economy would succumb to the disease that I had diagnosed, but instead would be taken down by the “cure” that the government unleashed to combat it.

When the government’s delaying tactic, which involves continuous borrowing and money printing is no longer tenable, the dollar could collapse, interest rates and consumer prices could soar and the U.S. economy could implode. That’s the real crash that I was warning about, and the one we all need to be worried about now.

This is the subject of my new book “The Real Crash: America’s Coming Bankruptcy, How to Save Yourself and Your Country.”  For now it is just a prophecy but as with my first book, it soon may be regarded as history. Unfortunately, the policies of both the Bush and Obama administrations, and the Ben Bernanke led Federal Reserve, have vastly raised the chances that my catastrophic view will come to pass.  However, it’s not all gloom and doom — I devote a large majority of the book to solutions. The real crash may be inevitable, but what we do in response is not. We can follow on the path that I recommend back to prosperity, or we can continue on our current course which I believe will lead to economic ruin.

When looking back from a point in the future, I believe that the years immediately after the credit collapse of 2008 will stand out as a period of dangerous economic negligence. We have bought ourselves some time by sweeping enormous problems under the rug. Through a combination of political cowardice, economic ignorance, and false confidence, we are digging ourselves into a hole so deep that it may take generations to crawl out.

Most people assume that half way through 2012 we have made some important positive strides since flirting with the brink of economic catastrophe in the dark days of 2008. Although no one is wildly celebrating the below trend 2 to 3 percent GDP growth, we are continuously reminded that we have turned the corner and that our situation is better than many other regions around the world. But what has really changed?

Immediately prior to the crash, the United States economy was experiencing unprecedented consumer debt levels, persistently high trade deficits, historically large government budget deficits, high-energy prices, and a moribund manufacturing sector. Four years later, all of these problems have gotten worse. And unlike four years ago, we are now saddled with the highest unemployment rate in generations and levels of public debt that would have been unimaginable then. Yes we are no longer technically in recession. But I believe that is just an illusion created by perhaps the cheapest, and most obvious, trick ever devised.

I had argued that our economic growth prior to the crisis was largely a function of the real estate bubble. When that bubble popped, I knew that the economy would have to shrink. And that’s just what happened. From 2008 to 2009 our national GDP (of around $14 trillion) contracted by $212 billion. To prevent any further dips, the government aggressively spent, borrowing heavily to do so. To the relief of just about everyone, these moves did stop the nominal contraction. From 2010 to 2011 the U.S. GDP expanded by $502 billion, and from 2011 to 2012 it added an additional $508 billion. All told, from the end of 2008 the U.S. economy added a cumulative $798 billion in GDP. But those gains came at a very high price.

The combined federal deficits for the same time frame come in at a staggering $4.2 trillion! In 2009 alone the feds chalked up a chart breaking $1.4 trillion in debt (the deficit was a mere $161 billion in 2007). In other words, we borrowed five times more than we grew. This “strategy” for growth is no different from an individual who loses half his income, but continues to spend by running up credit card debt. Could this be described as economic growth? But that’s just how we are describing our current economy, and for the large part, expert economists, politicians, investors, and academics all agree.

I felt certain before writing Crash Proof that the government would never let the economy contract far enough to restore balance and sustainability. I knew the spending and deficits would head off the charts. I thought those realities would push down the dollar and cause foreign creditors to shun American government debt. However, I did not factor in the reprieve we have gotten from the false perception that Europe is in even worse shape than we.

As the curtain eventually falls on the drama unfolding in Europe, the world will refocus its attention on the more spectacular events in the U.S. The sovereign debt crisis that is now playing out in Europe will cross the Atlantic, and when it opens here The Real Crash may indeed finally begin. The average American will have a front row seat but will hardly enjoy the show.