I have stated that I know the doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints are true.  How do I know this?  The first thing to understand is that we are spirit beings.  We are the spirit sons and daughters of our Heavenly Father.  Our spirit body is made of a different matter than our physical body and in this mortal life our spirit is within our physical body.  The Holy Ghost is a personage of spirit and can communicate with us spirit to spirit.  The process starts when a person wants to know a truth, and seeks to understand by listening to explanations, reading, and pondering, until they come to believe in this truth.  By humbly asking Heavenly Father in the name of Jesus Christ to confirm what they believe to be true, the answer will come according to the Lord’s timing and method by the Holy Ghost.  This confirmation by the Holy Ghost is usually described as a ‘feeling’ like peace or burning within or pure intelligence.  Trying to describe it has been characterized as like trying to explain how salt tastes.  It is not possible to explain it, one has to taste it to know.

I can imagine there are those who would say that a person can simply conjure this ‘feeling’ up and declare that they know.  Certainly a person could do this, but to what end?  They would only be fooling themselves.  One person’s testimony does not prove or disprove anything for another person.  Each person has to go into the laboratory of their own heart and do the experiment themselves.  Anyone who sincerely follows the process will know that the confirmation they receive through the Holy Ghost is not something they could conjure up.

The best way to test the truthfulness of what I am saying is to read the Book of Mormon.  The Book of Mormon was translated by Joseph Smith.  Joseph Smith was called as a prophet and given the task of translating the Book of Mormon from ancient records written by prophets on the American continent.  The Lord has given us something tangible in the Book of Mormon to verify the restoration of His church through the Prophet Joseph Smith.  I encourage you to make the experiment: read the Book of Mormon, and ask Heavenly Father in the name of Jesus Christ to verify that it came from Him.

Central planning is alive and flourishing. In most countries today, governments practice central planning through taxation, inflation, and regulation. This is not so much government ownership of the means of production as in the former Soviet Union, but rather the centrally planned and inefficient use of resources that have been taken from the private sector. Even if those resources go back to private enterprise as government contracts, the government is deciding rather than the market on where those resources will be used. Government control of resources in any way is central planning.

Central banks are another way for government to take resources out of the economy and regulate the banking industry to our detriment. They create money out of thin air which goes first to the privileged recipients of the central planners. This causes the money supply to go up such that eventually prices go up and it is the average citizen on the street who loses out. Wage rates don’t catch up unless maybe you can legislate it. This creation of money is a subtle form of taxation and is also the source of the boom and bust cycles that we go through. The government causes the inflationary boom and takes credit for the apparent prosperity. When the inflationary bubble becomes known and bursts, the government now accuses the private sector and assumes the posture of rescuer. It turns out that the rescue is more inflation and regulation. Of course, they might borrow the money first and later print the money to pay for it, but it ends up being higher prices and more taxes for the average citizen. The whole system of creating money out of thin air is immoral since it is a legalized form of counterfeiting.

Why should government decide how to spend half of our income? Are politicians and bureaucrats smarter or of higher moral character than other citizens? (I am not trying to be sarcastic. I just don’t know how else to put it.) We as private citizens have no right to take other citizen’s property, so how can we authorize our government to do so? It is actually like any other thief; they do it because they can and expect to get away with it. And they do get away with it as long as we buy in to the miss-information and euphemisms that are used to cloud our minds.

Freedom and prosperity go together. So far we have enough freedom in the western democracies that the private sector can carry the tax burden. If we allow our governments to keep expanding, this will eventually turn around. I think the economy is one major factor contributing to more women having fewer children and working out of the home. I think health care line ups have the same origin as grocery line ups in the former Soviet Union.

I don’t fault the people working in the public sector. The resources taxed out of the private sector are also taking jobs out of the private sector. When the government uses some of those resources to ‘create’ jobs in the public sector we cannot blame people for taking those jobs rather than sitting idle. Most of the people that I know in the public sector are working as diligently as they would in the private sector. It is the system that is the problem, not the people. If we returned the resources and the people back to the private sector, we would have greater productivity and prosperity and the people who moved from the public to the private sector would be happier along with everyone else. Prosperity and happiness comes with the freedom of consumer sovereignty not through central planning.