The global economy is on the brink of collapse. Unemployment has risen to 24%. Gas is now $42 per gallon. Brilliant creators, from artists to industrialists, continue to mysteriously disappear at the hands of the unknown. Dagny Taggart, Vice President in Charge of Operations for Taggart Transcontinental, has discovered what may very well be the answer to a mounting energy crisis – found abandoned amongst the ruins of a once productive factory, a revolutionary motor that could seemingly power the World. But, the motor is dead… there is no one left to decipher its secret… and, someone is watching. It’s a race against the clock to find the inventor before the motor of the World is stopped for good. Who is John Galt?
Directive 10-289 On Conservapedia
Source: http://conservapedia.com/Directive_10-289
Directive 10-289 (May 1, 2019), in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, was an Executive Order drafted by Wesley Mouch, with the willing participation of James Taggart, Orren Boyle, Clem Weatherby, Floyd Ferris, and Fred Kinnon, and signed by Mr. Thompson, Head of State. Its eight points were an attempt to freeze the collapsing economy of the United States at then-current levels. Instead of doing that, it accelerated the decline, strengthened the case of John Galt and his friends, and hastened the ultimate collapse of economy and government.
This Directive was issued on May 1, 2019, in the last full year of the strike of the men of the mind. The economy had been slowly declining for the previous twelve years, a decline that had accelerated in the previous year. Colorado had famously collapsed, and the culmination of that collapse was the defection of Ellis Wyatt and the lighting of his famous Torch, a phrase that referred to his shale oil fields that continued to burn.
In April, Wesley Mouch, Senior Coordinator of the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources, convened a meeting with five of the most politically influential men in government, business, and labor, and insisted that he would need wider powers to deal with what everyone now agreed was a crisis. Mr. Thompson was also present, and gave his explicit clearance to the Directive to be known by its number, 10-289. The numbering system, and the specific meaning of those numbers, were never explained.
Full Text
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In the name of the general welfare, to protect the people's security, to achieve full equality and total stability, it is decreed for the duration of the national emergency that:
Point One. All workers, wage earners and employees of any kind whatsoever shall henceforth be attached to their jobs and shall not leave nor be dismissed nor change employment, under penalty of a term in jail. The penalty shall be determined by the Unification Board, such Board to be appointed by the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources. All persons reaching the age of twenty-one shall report to the Unification Board, which shall assign them to where, in its opinion, their services will best serve the interests of the nation.
Point Two. All industrial, commercial, manufacturing and business establishments of any nature whatsoever shall henceforth remain in operation, and the owners of such establishments shall not quit nor leave nor retire, nor close, sell or transfer their business, under penalty of the nationalization of their establishment and of any and all of their property.
Point Three. All patents and copyrights, pertaining to any devices, inventions, formulas, processes and works of any nature whatsoever, shall be turned over to the nation as a patriotic emergency gift by means of Gift Certificates to be signed voluntarily by the owners of all such patents and copyrights. The Unification Board shall then license the use of such patents and copyrights to all applicants, equally and without discrimination, for the purpose of eliminating monopolistic practices, discarding obsolete products and making the best available to the whole nation. No trademarks, brand names or copyrighted titles shall be used. Every formerly patented product shall be known by a new name and sold by all manufacturers under the same name, such name to be selected by the Unification Board. All private trademarks and brand names are hereby abolished.
Point Four. No new devices, inventions, products, or goods of any nature whatsoever, not now on the market, shall be produced, invented, manufactured or sold after the date of this directive. The Office of Patents and Copyrights is hereby suspended.
Point Five. Every establishment, concern, corporation or person engaged in production of any nature whatsoever shall henceforth produce the same amount of goods per year as it, they or he produced during the Basic Year, no more and no less. The year to be known as the Basic or Yardstick Year is to be the year ending on the date of this directive. Over or under production shall be fined, such fines to be determined by the Unification Board.
Point Six. Every person of any age, sex, class or income, shall henceforth spend the same amount of money on the purchase of goods per year as he or she spent during the Basic Year, no more and no less. Over or under purchasing shall be fined, such fines to be determined by the Unification Board.
Point Seven. All wages, prices, salaries, dividends, profits, interest rates and forms of income of any nature whatsoever, shall be frozen at their present figures, as of the date of this directive.
Point Eight. All cases arising from and rules not specifically provided for in this directive, shall be settled and determined by the Unification Board, whose decisions will be final.[1]
Point One served two purposes: to establish the Unification Board, and to require that all persons presently employed, stay employed in their present capacities. The age of twenty-one was selected because that was the voting age at the time of writing. (The voting age remained at twenty-one until the first term of the Richard Nixon administration, during which time Amendment XXVI formally set the voting age at eighteen.)
Point Two was a direct response to the phenomenon of people quitting and vanishing. This was the real reason for the economic decline, as the bureaucrats half suspected, half feared. Under this point, anyone who quit and vanished faced arrest, imprisonment, and expropriation of his assets.
Point Three provided for the surrender of all intellectual property of any kind to the government. This point actually directed that holders of patents and copyrights voluntary surrender their rights, clearly an oxymoron.
Point Four simply provided that no new inventions were to be introduced for the duration. Wesley Mouch and his associates regarded new inventions as destructive of people's livelihoods.
Point Five attempted to freeze all industrial or commercial output at present levels. For the purpose of determining those levels, the Directive declared a very special fiscal year to be the year ending on the date of the Directive, which was May 1.
Point Six attempted to freeze consumer spending at the levels seen in the fiscal year ending on the date of the Directive, as Point Five had done for business output.
Point Seven was an indefinite wage and price freeze.
Point Eight, the "elastic point," vested in the Unification Board the power to decide, finally and not subject to appeal, any question not covered in Points One through Seven.
Obama's New Deal No Better Than Old One By Michael Barone
Source: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/10/obamas_new_new_deal_no_better.html
October 29, 2008
With victory in sight, Barack Obama's supporters are predicting that he will give us a new New Deal. To see what that might mean, let's look back on the original New Deal.
The purpose of New Deal legislation was not, as commonly thought, to restore economic growth but rather to freeze the economy in place at a time when it seemed locked in a downward spiral. Its central program, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), created 700 industry councils for firms and unions to set minimum prices and wages. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), the ancestor of our farm bills, limited production to hold up prices. Unionization, encouraged by NRA and the 1935 Wagner Act, was meant to keep workers in jobs that the unemployed would have taken at lower pay.
These policies did break the downward spiral. But, as Amity Shlaes points out in "The Forgotten Man," they failed to restore growth.
Double-digit unemployment continued throughout the 1930s; despite population growth, the economy failed to rebound to 1920s production levels. High taxes on high earners (a Herbert Hoover as well as Franklin Roosevelt policy) financed welfare payments ("spread the wealth around") but reduced investment and growth.
The political verdict was negative. New Dealers were whalloped in the 1938 off-year elections. Polls show that Democrats would have lost the White House in 1940 if that election had been decided on domestic issues. But war loomed. France fell in June 1940, just before America's two national party conventions, and Adolf Hitler and his then-ally Joseph Stalin controlled most of the landmass of Eurasia. Republicans did not have an experienced leader in this world crisis -- Democrats did: Franklin Roosevelt, who cynically engineered his nomination for a third term and then swept to victory on foreign policy.
Roosevelt had thought that economic expansion was a thing of the past. But World War II stimulated huge growth in the American economy. New Deal welfare programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) arts program were terminated. Wartime domestic policies were growth stimulators. Veterans Administration home mortgage loans, building on the FHA mortgage program, encouraged home-buying and after the war converted a nation of renters to a nation of homeowners. The G.I. Bill of Rights subsidized higher education for millions of veterans.
These programs stimulated growth partly because they required real effort -- down payments, military service -- from beneficiaries before they received aid.
The postwar Republican Congress elected in 1946 dismantled some New Deal anti-growth policies. Labor unions' powers to strike were sharply restricted. Tax rates were lowered, and wage and price controls were dismantled. Many hold-the-economy-in-place policies were retained until the deregulation of the 1970s and 1980s. But the New Deal was transformed sufficiently to permit buoyant economic growth for two decades after the war.
Obama seems determined to follow policies better suited to freezing the economy in place than to promoting economic growth. Higher taxes on high earners, for one. He told Charlie Gibson he would raise capital gains taxes even if that reduced revenue: less wealth to spread around, but at least the rich wouldn't have it -- reminiscent of the Puritan sumptuary laws that prohibited the wearing of silk. Moves toward protectionism like Hoover's (Roosevelt had the good sense to promote free trade). National health insurance that threatens to lead to rationing and to stifle innovation. Promoting unionization by abolishing secret ballot union elections.
The impulse to social engineering is unmistakable. Government officials will allocate resources, redistribute income, and ration good and services. Use government stakes in banks, insurance companies and Detroit auto manufacturers to maintain the position of those already in place, at the cost of preventing the emergence of new enterprises that might have been spawned by the capital being allocated.
Social engineering of course is far easier when you are dealing with an economy that is frozen in place. It's harder when you have to deal with the creative destruction, the emergence of new firms and businesses, and the decline of old ones, which as Joseph Schumpeter taught is the inevitable consequence of economic growth.
Roosevelt in the 1930s had some extremely competent social engineers, like Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickes and Fiorello LaGuardia, who could enroll 750,000 people on welfare in three weeks and build an airport in less than a year. But even they could not spur the economic growth produced by utterly unknown and unconnected people, as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates were in 1970.
When financial crisis looms, there is an impulse to freeze everything in place and accept what is as the best there can ever be: Barack Obama's new New Deal. The history of the old New Deal suggests this is not a sustainable approach in the long run.
Obama's Political Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome
By Otis A. Glazebrook IV
Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/03/obamas_political_munchausen_by.html
March 9, 2009
In the field of Psychiatry, Munchausen by Proxy is a disease of a child's custodian, usually a mother, who induces sickness, real or imagined in her child (sometimes resulting in death) in order to gain sympathy and to portray herself as the heroine. The child accepts his/her abuse as "normal" in exchange for a perception of safety provided by the caretaker. The adolescent child has no other choice.
Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome* (MPS) was named after Baron von Munchausen, an eighteenth-century German dignitary known for telling outlandish stories.
In the political arena President Obama has purposely recreated a version of Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome by following the Hoover/FDR model of economic destruction, increasing taxation and regulation during a recession. Obama is compounding the damage by destroying the domestic nuclear, oil and coal industries at the same time. It should be obvious that, we need to double or triple our domestic energy production and reduce absurd government regulations. It is imperative that we double and eventually triple our GDP as soon as possible to pay for Obama's rampant spending in unproductive areas.
Instead of an adolescent child, Obama's victim is ultimately the forgotten man: the taxpayer, who actually creates wealth and pays the bills. The unspoken agreement is that the "forgotten man" will trade his freedom for the illusion of security.
As H.L. Mencken pointed out three generations ago:
"The average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe."
Franklin D. Roosevelt pioneered the Democrats' model of the political version of Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome by exploiting uncertainty in the aftermath of the stock market crash of 1929, and by refusing to work with the Hoover Administration on the severe economic problems then facing the Country.
The annihilating event that followed the crash was deflation, brought about through government over-reaction and over-regulation. The economy continued to deteriorate because of uncertainty during the interregnum. Despite repeated pleas from Hoover (like G.W. Bush later) to work together towards a resolution, Roosevelt (like Obama) was clearly not interested; the continued crisis only strengthened his mandate for his (new) "New Deal" policies.
Roosevelt rolled into Office on March 4th, 1933 as the restless self confident hero who would save us from the evils of Laissez-faire Capitalism. As he made clear in his First Inaugural Address:
"This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself-nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
The country cared little that much of FDR's "New Deal" policies had been originated by Hoover, or that Roosevelt and his "Brain Trust" viewed the Country's dire situation as chance to experiment.
Action was called for and what mattered most was change.
FDR (Obama) appeared to be so caring and attentive, few suspected any wrongdoing. Just as in the case of the abusive parent, FDR (Obama) was jovial, cool, and unusually calm in the face of serious adversity.
In both versions of MPS, blame is typically placed on a previous caregiver as part of the deception and to provide a scapegoat. In the political version of MPS, instead of an incompetent nanny the New Dealers (and Obama) create populist villains, Hoover, Wall Street, Bankers, or G.W. Bush.
The denial of reality is crucial.
Roosevelt was able to successfully perpetrate the initial abuse because the science of international global economics was in its infancy. The mobilization and technical boom brought about by WW I, coupled with laissez-faire capitalism, led to the boom of the Roaring Twenties. This put an end to agricultural based economies of the past.
Hoover proved to be Roosevelt's perfect fall guy, largely because Hoover failed to understand the enormity of the problem of deflation and he retreated into personal depression. This withdrawal made Hoover an easy scapegoat.
The simple truth was that Roosevelt and Hoover were remarkably similar men. Their principle difference was that Hoover believed in staying within Constitutional boundaries. Roosevelt (Obama) viewed the Constitution as an impediment to progress. Both men made major mistakes largely because neither understood the ability of free markets to self-correct without government intervention. The simple proof that the New Deal policies did not work was the recession inside the Depression in the autumn of 1937.
"American Capitalism did not break in 1929. The crash did not cause the Depression. It was a necessary correction of a too-high stock market, but not a necessary disaster." Pg.5, The Forgotten Man
Coolidge's laissez-faire policies had in fact worked, the Dow Jones Stock Market Index would not equal its high of 381 on September 3rd, 1933 until the 1950's and full employment would not return until 1943.
Just as the MPS parent needs crisis and chaos to succeed in the abuse of a child, Obama Democrats create the crisis and chaos necessary for MPS to succeed in their abuse of the forgotten man.
The Obama Administration cynically follows FDR's model. As Obama's new Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel revealed:
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before."
H.L. Mencken also said:
"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods."
That statement has never been truer than it is today.
*Munchausen by proxy syndrome (MBPS), or Factitious Disorder by Proxy, as it's listed in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Fourth Edition, Text Revision, also known as DSM-IV-TR).
The global economy is on the brink of collapse. Unemployment has risen to 24%. Gas is now $42 per gallon. Brilliant creators, from artists to industrialists, continue to mysteriously disappear at the hands of the unknown. Dagny Taggart, Vice President in Charge of Operations for Taggart Transcontinental, has discovered what may very well be the answer to a mounting energy crisis – found abandoned amongst the ruins of a once productive factory, a revolutionary motor that could seemingly power the World. But, the motor is dead… there is no one left to decipher its secret… and, someone is watching. It’s a race against the clock to find the inventor before the motor of the World is stopped for good. Who is John Galt?
Directive 10-289 On Conservapedia
Source: http://conservapedia.com/Directive_10-289
Directive 10-289 (May 1, 2019), in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, was an Executive Order drafted by Wesley Mouch, with the willing participation of James Taggart, Orren Boyle, Clem Weatherby, Floyd Ferris, and Fred Kinnon, and signed by Mr. Thompson, Head of State. Its eight points were an attempt to freeze the collapsing economy of the United States at then-current levels. Instead of doing that, it accelerated the decline, strengthened the case of John Galt and his friends, and hastened the ultimate collapse of economy and government.
This Directive was issued on May 1, 2019, in the last full year of the strike of the men of the mind. The economy had been slowly declining for the previous twelve years, a decline that had accelerated in the previous year. Colorado had famously collapsed, and the culmination of that collapse was the defection of Ellis Wyatt and the lighting of his famous Torch, a phrase that referred to his shale oil fields that continued to burn.
In April, Wesley Mouch, Senior Coordinator of the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources, convened a meeting with five of the most politically influential men in government, business, and labor, and insisted that he would need wider powers to deal with what everyone now agreed was a crisis. Mr. Thompson was also present, and gave his explicit clearance to the Directive to be known by its number, 10-289. The numbering system, and the specific meaning of those numbers, were never explained.
Obama's Political Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome
By Otis A. Glazebrook IV
Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/03/obamas_political_munchausen_by.html
March 9, 2009
In the field of Psychiatry, Munchausen by Proxy is a disease of a child's custodian, usually a mother, who induces sickness, real or imagined in her child (sometimes resulting in death) in order to gain sympathy and to portray herself as the heroine. The child accepts his/her abuse as "normal" in exchange for a perception of safety provided by the caretaker. The adolescent child has no other choice.
