"Smooth Sailing"
by Bill Bonner
Poitou, France - "Uh oh. In the fight between virtue and vice, it looks like our fav congressman is going down. The Washington Examiner: "Pro-Israel billionaires spent over $1.5 million in 38 days to oust Thomas Massie. Polling shows him running way behind the candidate Trump/AIPAC paid for."
Massie made a good point in a recent interview. It’s not just Trump and the Israel lobby he’s up against...it’s America’s firepower industry too. They all want more of the public’s money. But it’s worse. Massie is up against the whole system of fake money and inflated prices. Anyone who stands in the way is marked for elimination. .
Massie: “The Pentagon provides Congress with a handy map showing all the districts where defense industries are located and all the jobs they create.” That is what we see. What we don’t see is all the jobs, incomes, sales and earnings taken from elsewhere. Every pound of steel used to make a tank is not used to build an HVAC system. And even if the money is fake - ‘printed’ and borrowed - it still is used to buy real resources that must come out of the real economy.
Which brings us to our question for today. What is it we’re not seeing? What’s the rest of the story? We see what is, not what could be...or ought to be…or will be. A man takes a vacation to Milan, and misses the sights in Paris. Napoleon takes his soldiers to Moscow; they might have enjoyed the Cote d’Azur instead. A bomb goes off...and kills a man who might have found a cure for cancer. We only know a small part of the story. And the part we think we know we see only through a glass darkly.
We are told, for example, that the tariffs are a big success because the revenue to the Treasury will reduce deficits and debt. In this case, the ‘more to the story’ didn’t take long in coming. CNBC: "US deficit grows to $291 billion in July despite surge in tariff revenue. The deficit for July was up 19%, or $47 billion, from July 2024. Receipts for the month grew 2%, or $8 billion, to $338 billion, while outlays jumped 10%, or $56 billion, to $630 billion, a record high for the month."
At this rate, expected revenues from tariffs, while substantial, will still be negligible from a debt reduction standpoint. Until last week, Mr. Trump looked upon the job numbers as proof of a healthy economy. Then, when the numbers were revised downward, he claimed they were ‘rigged.’ But either way, the numbers prove nothing.
Some of the disappeared jobs might have vanished because industries feared the uncertainty of Trump’s unpredictable Big Man management. Others might have gone away because women are leaving the workforce. Newsweek: "Hundreds of Thousands of Women Are Leaving the Labor Force."
Or because the immigrants are packing up. USA Today: "The country's immigrant population may have dropped by roughly two million people in the first six months of the year, according to new government data."
And in the stock market, record prices prove that the Trump Team must be doing something right...right? Stock prices are data. Facts. They don’t lie. Reuters: "S&P 500, Nasdaq hit record highs at open..."
But wait. What stories are stock prices not telling us? Stocks in the US are up almost 10% this year. But in Germany they’re up 35%. Has the Trump Team cost investors a 25% gain? We don’t know. But congratulations may be premature. Like praising the captain of the Titanic for four days of smooth sailing…or Herbert Hoover for the remarkable stock market of the summer of 1929… It might be wise to wait for the rest of the story."
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"Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard - the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money - the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law - men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims - then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.
Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed."
An excerpt from “Atlas Shrugged,” by Ayn Rand.
Full text of “Francisco’s Money Speech” is here:
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