Confidence Games — Hamilton Mobley

A confidence game is any swindle in which the swindler, after gaining the confidence of the victim, robs the victim by cheating at a gambling game, appropriating funds entrusted for investment, or the like. Today is the midterm election. The Democrats are going to lose power as people lose confidence in big government. But Republicans won’t be able to cut the size of the government without millions of Americans losing their source of income. If they don’t cut spending, then people will lose confidence in the dollar as the government prints money because there are not enough taxpayers to afford the size of big government. This is the end of the Progressive Era.

The midterm elections are today. It feels like the Democrats are going to lose the US House of Representatives and possibly the US Senate. It feels that way because voters have had two years to realize that the mainstream media (CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, Twitter, Facebook, and whatever newspapers are left) lied to them. They lied by covering up that covid was created by the US government and the Chinese Communist Party in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that covid would probably kill you, that people needed to wear a mask for just 2 weeks to stop the spread, that the impoverishing lockdowns were necessary, that the shots and boosters were safe and necessary so that others would not die, that green energy was affordable, and that Quantitative Easing (QE) was transitory.

These policies have resulted in people losing their jobs, so the Federal government stepped in to spend money on Americans in the form of stimulus payments and government employment. They printed money (QE) to do this, starting under Trump. The money printed combined with the decline in production as the industrialized world locked down has resulted in higher prices (more money to buy fewer things).

President Biden even said that there would be no new oil drilling to help alleviate inflated gas prices as recently as two days ago on November 6.

Via David Blackman writing in Forbes,[1]

“Stumping for embattled New York Gov. Kathy Hochul at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers Sunday, the President responded to a shouted question from an audience member about his longstanding promises to shut down fracking and new drilling on federal lands and waters by saying ‘no more drilling...there is no more drilling...I haven’t formed any new drilling.’”

The mainstream media’s answer to the impoverishment of Americans has been to blame everything on white people- the majority of the USA. The impoverishment and scapegoating of white people has led to a loss of confidence in the mainstream media by the majority of the USA (regardless of race). The loss of confidence in the mainstream media has resulted in a flourishing of alternative media sources such as Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, and Zerohedge, to name only a few.

Even Twitter has been bought out by an African-American immigrant, Elon Musk, who tweeted that people should vote Republican. Twitter, along with Facebook, have been unofficial mouthpieces for the Democratic Party and for Republicans In Name Only (RINOs), censoring and shadow banning people who question the status quo in their posts.[2]

“To independent-minded voters: Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic.”

The Republican victory will likely bring the lies justifying the covid lockdown’s into scrutiny. RINOs will have to contend with a media atmosphere hostile to the status quo of RINOs conserving progressive policies (government only gets bigger every generation, regardless of party). While almost all Democrats are progressives, the majority of Republican policticians at the Federal level are also progressive. Keynesian/Neo-Conservatives/RINOs still dominate the Republican party.

The Republican victory will also bring with it a call to shrink the size of the government. The fundamental problem with this is that Republicans are not going to keep power by cutting social programs and employment upon which most Americans depend for their income. This is why RINOs dominate the party.[3]

“After eight years of reckless expansion of the federal workforce under Barack Obama, Donald Trump vowed to downsize the wildly growing bureaucracy of Washington. In 2016, he promised to ‘cut so much your head will spin.’ However, during the first two years of his presidency, there has been no significant effort to reduce the bloated federal payrolls. In fact, the federal government is the largest employer in the nation.
Walmart, which has a presence in communities of all shapes and sizes, is the largest private employer in the nation with 1.5 million workers. Yet the number of Americans who rely on the corporate giant for their livelihoods is dwarfed by the number who rely on the federal government for their paychecks. The federal government employs nearly 9.1 million workers…”

However, if they don’t cut spending, then they will either have to raise taxes or have the Federal Reserve print more money to loan it to the government. That will result in higher prices and hyperinflation.

Now that most Americans do not get their news from the mainstream media, the fact that politicians are stuck between a rock and a hard place will likely became mainstream inflormation. This will lead to a loss in the confidence in the dollar’s purchasing power.

According to dictionary.com, a confidence game is,[4]

“any swindle in which the swindler, after gaining the confidence of the victim, robs the victim by cheating at a gambling game, appropriating funds entrusted for investment, or the like.”

If the government can’t print money to pay for everything because the dollar is printed to worthlessness, then the government will necessarily shrink. People will lose confidence in the government as they are impoverished. This will be the end of the Progressive Era- the past century of progressively big government.

The Progressive Era was marked by former president Teddy Roosevelt splitting with the Republican Party to form the Progressive Party in 1912, popularly known as the Bull Moose Party. That led to the Republican vote being split and Democrat Woodrow Wilson becoming president. During his presidency in 1913, the income tax and the direct election of senators were amended to the Constitution (16th and 17th amendments) and the Federal Reserve was created. The size of government was expanded to participate in WWI in 1917 and then to fund prohibition from 1919-1933 (18th Amendment).

The collapse in the stock market to start the Great Depression in 1929 was caused by the money that the Fed printed being drained from the economy, resulting in less money for low interest rate loans and speculators.[5]

President Hoover then increased spending to help those impoverished. FDR expanded on his policies after his election in 1932 and called it the New Deal.

According to Steven Horwitz writing at Econlib,[6]

“Roosevelt’s own advisors understood that much of what they created during the New Deal owed its origins to Hoover’s policies, going as far back as his time at the Commerce Department in the 1920s. Thus the quote at the start of this article by Rex Tugwell, one of the academics at the center of FDR’s ‘brains trust.’ Another member of the brains trust, Raymond Moley, wrote of that period:
When we all burst into Washington . . . we found every essential idea [of the New Deal] enacted in the 100-day Congress in the Hoover administration itself. The essentials of the NRA [National Recovery Administration], the PWA [Public Works Administration], the emergency relief setup were all there. Even the AAA [Agricultural Adjustment Act] was known to the Department of Agriculture. Only the TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] and the Securities Act was [sic] drawn from other sources. The RFC [Reconstruction Finance Corporation], probably the greatest recovery agency, was of course a Hoover measure, passed long before the inauguration.”

FDR confiscated Americans’ gold in 1933. Gold only became legal to own again in 1974- three years after the USA abandoned the gold backing of the US dollar under Republican Richard Nixon. This has allowed the government to progressively print money to progressively pay for everything to the point the the government is involved in most everything. This is coming to an end.[7]

“But then finally the masses wake up. They become suddenly aware of the fact that inflation is a deliberate policy and will go on endlessly. A breakdown occurs. The crack-up boom appears. Everybody is anxious to swap his money against ‘real’ goods, no matter whether he needs them or not, no matter how much money he has to pay for them. Within a very short time, within a few weeks or even days, the things which were used as money are no longer used as media of exchange. They become scrap paper. Nobody wants to give away anything against them.” -Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (1949), page 428.

A confidence game is any swindle in which the swindler, after gaining the confidence of the victim, robs the victim by cheating at a gambling game, appropriating funds entrusted for investment, or the like. Today is the midterm election. The Democrats are going to lose power as people lose confidence in big government. But Republicans won’t be able to cut the size of the government without millions of Americans losing their source of income. If they don’t cut spending, then people will lose confidence in the dollar as the government prints money because there are not enough taxpayers to afford the size of big government. This is the end of the Progressive Era.