I guess I should tell you that I’ve been physically ill since last weekend, but Obama’s speech isn’t helping. It was way too reminiscent of the scenes in the book (or movie) 1984 where the public is forced to participate in mass hate and love demonstrations for their enemies and leaders.

The Painter Announces He Will Install the Plumbing

The first thing that blows my mind about what was spoken on the topic of economics is the absolute retardation of reason. Nobody in the government knows anything about economics. Time and time again, they make predictions and statements that turn out to be completely wrong. These people (Congress, the President, and other bureaucrats) are not economists (and they only acknowledge the economists who support the philosophy of never-ending increases in government spending and power).

They are not the bringers of solutions. If our problems went away, then they’d lose their jobs because we’d have no need for them. They are problem-creators. They are hired to fail.

We are expected to celebrate an announcement that the stimulus worked? Hey didn’t the last President announce our swift victory in Iraq? Why do we forget so easily that talk is cheap no matter how smooth it sounds?

Rally Against The Enemy!

The next elephant in the room is the government’s dedication to deal with “Wall Street.” What a farce. The government created Wall Street. How else do you think something so unnatural, hated, and powerful could come into being in a so-called free market?

Wall Street is created by government regulation. The stock market crashed in 1929. Then the government created the Securities Act. The Securities Act regulates investment. Regulation creates a cost to doing business. Cost means big, well funded ventures can deal with the regulation while small businesses (the engine of our economy according to Obama) cannot. Ultimately, investment into small businesses is nearly illegalized while regulation steers virtually all the investment capital into the hands of… well, the regulators’ friends.

So let’s put this story together. The government created Wall Street. In fact, Wall Street and the government are really the same organization. Those in charge simply swap titles from one year to the next as they go back and forth between being an executive and a government official. But the titles are just semantics. It’s all one big organization.

So the big organization sucking up power, authority, and resources, and destroying prosperity says it will start to get the enemy (itself) under control. Well, golly, everyone on the TV screen is standing up and applauding so this must be it. Finally! Somebody said they would fix our problems!

I hate to spoil the fun, but there is a long history of government saying it will fix the problems of society, and the history of them actually doing it just doesn’t exist.

America is the story of the most enormous and rapidly-built prosperity in the history of humankind. And it wasn’t the government that made it happen. It was the lack of government. We did a little experiment in freedom and spent so much time celebrating the outstanding results that we lost our freedom when we weren’t looking.

The Hidden Meaning

So if your job has been destroyed in the process of creating half of one phony stimulus job, you were just in the wrong industry. You should have paid attention to the phony demand the government would create with its spending of the new money it just printed up in its basement.

If your business has been destroyed in the process of “stimulating” Obama’s friend’s business, you made the wrong friends.

The hidden meaning behind Obama’s recent telepromtedly-smooth speech is that the government is out of its mind and nobody is stopping it. Don’t think they are so moral that they won’t inflate you into poverty and steal your retirement fund from the bankers who you are letting possess it.

Think for yourself. Question authority.

What now? Well, don’t fret. Just quit leaving your savings and retirement funds in the hands of government-regulated oligopolies. Take control. Put your wealth back into your own hands, literally. Avoid dollar-based assets like the plague, and you won’t get sick.

I’m going to go throw up now, and I’m not sure if it’s from my cold or the State of the Union address. But no matter how sickening viruses and bureaucrats can be, I feel at ease for knowing my hard-earned wealth is safe and protected.

We recently caught up with Thomas Woods the author of the best selling book Meltdown. Learn what he has to say about auditing the Federal Reserve (FED).

Currently, over 300 Congressmen Republicans and Democrats in the House Of Representatives have co-sponsored a Bill HR 1207 – dubbed Ron Paul’s Audit the FED Bill, which would allow Congress to audit the FED.

With the national debt spiraling out of control and fiscal policy seemingly unmanageable, many taxpayers want to see the FED audited. The proposed bill will force the FED open their books to the US taxpayers and their Representatives.

FED Chairman, Ben Bernanke and US Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, according to Thomas Woods, are deeply concerned about the possibility of the FED being audited. What is even more suspicious to Woods is that Tim Geithner has publicly expressed concerns although he is not part of the FED.

You can learn more about Thomas Woods here

http://www.thomasewoods.com/books/mel…

This is my favorite excerpt taken from the interview between Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes and Brooks Hamilton, who Kroft interviewed in his expose on 401(k)s.  Hamilton is an expert in designing retirement plans for large corporations.

“The fact is that the typical 401(k) investor is a financial novice. They don’t know a stock from a bond. And we give ‘em a list of 20 or 30 mutual funds with really, really powerful names, you know, they sound like, ‘Gee, that’s where I want to have my money,’” Hamilton said.

“What are the, generally, the quality of the mutual funds in 401(k) plans?” Kroft asked.

“Mediocre,” Hamilton replied. “I’m being real honest with you, with half the funds on the list really dogs, what people would characterize as dogs shouldn’t be on the list to start with.”

So many Americans believed that the 401(k) would be the sure-fire way to safely save for retirement.  In fact, it has been reported that 401(k) plans that have become the primary source of retirement income for 60 million Americans. Companies would match our contributions making it irresistible to sock away money in these mutual funds.  But the truth is, as exposed by 60 Minutes a few weeks ago, that companies turned to 401(k)s as a cheap alternative to offering costly pension plans.  This decision created millions of new employee investors in Wall Street – creating a boom on Wall Street and putting trillions of dollars of investable cash into the hands of unsophisticated investors.

In the 60 Minutes piece, however, experts in the field say that Wall Street more than cashed-in on this phenomenon by offering employees what is categorized as “dog” mutual funds that shouldn’t have been offered in the first place.

So now that Americans know the flaws in the 401(k) system, how can they go about breaking their 401(k) addictions?

Here are some ideas:

Look Elsewhere: Look for alternative places for your money. With most companies are backing away from offering company matches (which incentivized people to sock away even more money in their 401(k)s), it has never been a better time to seek alternative advice and alternative strategies.

Read and Learn: Just by reading a few good books on the topic of investing outside of Wall Street, you can learn so much. Jeff Nabers is coming out with his first book to address this topic called, “Unlimited Investing:  Break-Free from Wall Street to Build Real Wealth with Alternative Investments,” (I know this is a little self-promotional, but this book is amazing!)

Explore Outside Investment Vehicles: While companies make it convenient to save for retirement through direct deposit of savings into a 401(k) account, an investor can easily set up an automatic bill pay to make regular contributions to another savings vehicle that gives them more options.  If you want to continue to invest in securities, look into other IRA options where you have more control over the funds you can invest in.

Bonus for the Self-Employed: If you have any sort of self-employment income (which many of us do from side jobs), you are eligible to set up a Self-Directed Solo 401(k), which allows you to invest your retirement funds in real estate, gold, private companies and without taking a distribution.  Plus, all the income made on these alternative assets is tax-deferred too.  Imagine having your retirement money free to invest outside of Wall Street – it’ll make you wonder why you were restricted to investing in only securities in the first place.

Ask Your Friends: Chances are you have some friends who are doing well. Ask them their secret and how they’re doing it.  In the book, “Rich Dad Poor Dad,” the author Robert Kiyosaki says that friends of the rich only ask for a loan or a job – but no one ventures to ask how that person got rich in the first place.  You may find your friends are willing to share their investment strategies with you if you took an interest in learning.

I hope these tips helps you on your journey to break your addiction from your company’s 401(k) and take control of your finances.

An unsurprising story surfaced a couple of days ago… SEC attorneys are under investigation for insider trading!

If you can’t truly value that exclamation point I just used, let me help you. The Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) is a government organization that was formed to convince us that investing in the stock market was safe. Part of their role is to make sure people don’t use their non-public knowledge to make profitable investments in the stock market (yeah, right). This is called “insider trading”. In business, this is known as “doing business”. In real estate, non-public knowledge can turn a peon into a mogul overnight. But in the stock market it is a crime and we give the SEC billions of our dollars to make sure it doesn’t happen.

But, whoops, SEC attorneys are doing it themselves. And a lot. One of the two SEC attorneys currently under FBI investigation made 247 stock trades between January 2006 and January 2008. She said, in her defense, “…it’s my main hobby.”

This is the perfect opportunity for the misinformed to identify themselves by saying, “We need to issue more regulations, policies, memos, and procedures to fix this!” If those were your initial thoughts, step back for a moment and consider this:

Here’s what the securities laws and the SEC are not doing:

• Avoiding Madoffs, Stanfords, and countless other scandals
• Avoiding stock market crashes, unpredictable and violent swings
• Protecting investors’ investments

Here’s what the securites laws and the SEC are doing:

• Breaking their own laws in their own offices while being paid salaries from our tax money
• Oppressing small entrepreneurs by keeping the costs of promoting investments publicly in the millions of dollars
• Enticing Americans to skip their due diligence and invest in things that they don’t understand because the government will keep them safe

Think about that last point for a second. Imagine there are no securities laws. It would be transparent, clear, and obvious that an investor would need to do his due diligence before making an investment. Many average people would not be interested in educating themselves in the skill of investing and would keep most of their money in cash or gold. Both have outperformed the stock market over the last 10 years.

In such a case, sophisticated investors would make a point to understand an investment before buying it. As a result, all of the bad investments like subprime mortgage-backed securities would have never been successfully sold. This lack of a secondary market for stupid mortgages would have helped keep the real estate bubble from happening on such a grand scale. Simply put, regulation cannot be expected to solve problems created by regulation. And now this point is being driven home as we are slapped in the face with the news of regulators not following regulations themselves.

Perhaps we should go back to imagining that securities laws didn’t exist and act as if. If you are unwilling to develop the skill of investing, keep your money in cash or gold (preferably the latter if you want to preserve its value). If you are a skilled or learning investor, invest in what can be understood: real estate, private companies, and anything that hasn’t been repackaged and injected with financial steroids on Wall Street.