The Right Laen update 4.03.13

The pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, free markets and individual liberty

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington

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Progressives Believe in Money Magic By Sheldon Richman
It's hard to believe that in the 21st century, educated people believe the government can produce real wealth by creating money. It's especially ironic that the main preachers of this superstition fancy themselves progressives and are the first to accuse their opponents of being against science. What could be more anti-science than the alchemic proposal to create wealth by having the Federal Reserve make entries in a digital ledger? It's more absurd than alchemy: Alchemists claimed they could turn base metals into gold. Inflationist's require only thin air.

The commonsense reaction is: "Balderdash!" So it takes real devotion to the power of government to embrace such a ridiculous idea. Consider Chris Hayes, the MSNBC host. Last Saturday on his program, Up, he said this in introducing a segment on the proposal that the Treasury mint a $1 trillion coin to get around its debt limit: 

The simple truth is it [the government] creates money simply out of thin air. Someone at the Federal Reserve punches in a number on a spreadsheet and — voila! — more money… . While there are rules that guide legal tender, at base, what makes money valuable is simply social convention, a norm. We all agree it's valuable, so it's valuable. The genius of the trillion dollar coin isn't just that it provides some much needed leverage against a foe unencumbered by any sense of propriety, it also illustrates the uncomfortable, foundational reality of modern capitalism: money is nothing more than a shared illusion. It's a kind of magic. But is it good magic … or bad magic?

At least he admits that in this case he believes in magic. The value of money is a convention, a norm, a shared illusion? Did society agree that the dollar should lose 95 percent of its purchasing power since the Federal Reserve opened its doors nearly a hundred years ago? This view is as unscientific as one can imagine. The science it rejects is economics. Beginning with Adam Smith (actually well before that), the most enlightened thinkers understood that economic regularities exist apart from human will; they are forces, or "laws," generated by intrinsic features of human action, particularly exchange. It is not a social convention that, for example, when the supply of a good increases relative to demand (other things equal), the price falls, and vice versa. Nor is it a convention that when demand for a good rises relative to supply (other things equal), the price increases. It is the result of the "logic of choice," which has been the "mainline" of economic thinking for hundreds of years, Peter Boettke writes in his new book, Living Economics. To hold otherwise is to believe that a society could have generated other norms, under which, say, a fall in supply relative to demand caused prices to drop, or a fall in demand relative to supply caused prices to rise. But it is not by social agreement that those things never happen. As the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote, 

The development of economics … did more to transform human thinking than any other scientific theory before or since. Up to that time it had been believed that no bounds other than those drawn by the laws of nature circumscribed the path of acting man. It was not known that there is still something more that sets a limit to political power beyond which it cannot go. Now it was learned that in the social realm too there is something operative which power and force are unable to alter and to which they must adjust themselves if they hope to achieve success, in precisely the same way as they must take into account the laws of nature.

Disbelief in economic laws that operate independently of human will is the sign of a primitive mind. No one has a good excuse for believing that government can create real wealth simply by creating money. The value of money is not determined by social convention. It is determined by supply and demand. When the central bank creates money, it doesn't create useful goods. It may merely shift purchasing power from the people to the Treasury or to special interests. That is, inflation is a form of theft.

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Cost of Food Stamp Fraud More Than Doubles In Three Years

For any Federal program, there are people out there learning how to scam the system and YOU are paying for it.  In 2012, a U.S. Department of Agriculture official said that food stamp fraud totals $750 million each year – a number that more than doubles the cost of trafficking reported in a 2006- 2008 USDA study. Kevin Concannon, U.S. Department of Agriculture undersecretary for food, nutrition and consumer services, told the Huffington Post last year that food stamp fraud totals around $750 million each year. The $750 million number is more than double the amount in total dollars of fraud detected annually in a 2006-2008 study on trafficking – a type of fraud that involves selling Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to food retailers for cents on the dollar. “This is $750 million that isn’t being used to provide food to individuals and families and that issue isn’t lost on us. We want to maintain the confidence of American taxpayers because everyone is challenged in this economy – the payers as well as the folks who are benefiting from the program,” Concannon said. CNSNews.com reached out to the USDA to verify this number. A spokesperson stated via email, “In 2011, program costs totaled $75.7 billion. Using the most recent data on trafficking available, USDA estimated that trafficking would be 1 percent of $75 billion, or approximately $750 million.” This number is $420 million more per year than a report released in March of 2011 that wrote on fraud within the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) from 2006-2008. And people wonder why so many Americans do not trust the government to run large give away programs.  They are always rift with fraud!

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Obama Can Simply Ban All Handguns

You have read it on these pages before; we must get out of the UN!  If you are a UN watcher, you will know how it has been taken over by some of the most radical thinkers there are.  We were warned about this treaty and now we have it!  Not only that, Obama would claim he was doing it for the children.  Prospects look fairly bleak for sweeping gun-control legislation in Congress, but action at the United Nations and in several states may end up having the same effect – possibly even opening the door for Obama to ban all handguns. On Tuesday, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to approve the Arms Trade Treaty, or ATT. Supporters, including the Obama administration, contend this is designed to crack down on illicit arms trafficking, but critics say it’s really an effort to stamp out gun rights in the U.S. and beyond. “It’s far beyond what it’s purported to do. It requires this country keep a national gun registry of gun owners. In addition, it could be used as a justification for banning semi-autos and banning handguns without any further legislation,” said Mike Hammond, chief counsel at Gun Owners of America. “It could be interpreted as self-implementing, and by an executive order Obama would simply ban all handguns using this treaty.”  Might want to read up and become informed.

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ACLU Forces Jesus Portrait Out of Ohio School

They’ll probably replace it with a picture of Obama.  A Jesus portrait at one Ohio school, that sparked controversy and a lawsuit, is coming down. The Jackson City School District agreed to remove the picture from its high school after a hearing in federal court in Columbus Tuesday. There wasn’t a court order. But Superintendent Phil Howard says it decided to have the picture taken down after its insurance coverage was denied for the legal battle. The decision comes one day after the ACLU of Ohio and Freedom From Religion Foundation filed a temporary restraining order to have the portrait removed from the high school. Note the name of the foundation "Freedom From Religion".  The left is not longer being subtle with their agenda.  The complete first Amendment:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

We need states to stand up and sue entities (like the ACLU) and people (atheists) that are bent on "prohibiting the free exercise thereof" of religion in the manner in which our freedom allows us to.  In this instant case, the congress passed no law the required to placement of a picture of Jesus.  What courts with the help of people like the ACLU are doing is "prohibiting the free exercise thereof".  When are you going to stand up?

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Psychotropic Drugs: The Common Denominator in Mass Murders

Nearly every mass shooting incident in the last twenty years, and multiple other instances of suicide and isolated shootings all share one thing in common, and it's not the weapons used. The overwhelming evidence points to the signal largest common factor in all of these incidents is the fact that all of the perpetrators were either actively taking powerful psychotropic drugs or had been at some point in the immediate past before they committed their crimes. Multiple credible scientific studies going back more than a decade, as well as internal documents from certain pharmaceutical companies that suppressed the information show that drugs have well known, but unreported side effects, including but not limited to suicide and other violent behavior. One need only Google relevant key words or phrases to see for themselves. www.ssristories.com is one popular site that has documented over 4500 “ Mainstream Media “ reported cases from around the World of aberrant or violent behavior by those taking these powerful drugs.

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55% See Major Cyber attack on U.S. As Act of War

Following the recent major computer attack on South Korea, Americans continue to worry about the safety of this nation’s computer systems, and most still believe a foreign attack on them should be viewed as an act of war. Eight-four percent (84%) of Likely U.S. Voters are at least somewhat concerned about the safety of America’s computer infrastructure from cyber attack, including 44% who are Very Concerned. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 14% are not very or Not At All concerned about such an attack.

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Click if you like this column! Thomas Sowell
We all know that guns can cost lives because the media repeat this message endlessly, as if we could not figure it out for ourselves. But even someone who reads newspapers regularly and watches numerous television newscasts may never learn that guns also save lives-- much less see any hard facts comparing how many lives are lost and how many are saved. But that trade-off is the real issue, not the Second Amendment or the National Rifle Association, which so many in the media obsess about. If guns cost more lives than they save, we can always repeal the Second Amendment. But if guns save more lives than they cost, we need to know that, instead of spending time demonizing the National Rifle Association.

The defensive use of guns is usually either not discussed at all in the media or else is depicted as if it means bullets flying in all directions, like the gunfight at the OK Corral. But most defensive uses of guns do not involve actually pulling the trigger.  If someone comes at you with a knife and you point a gun at him, he is very unlikely to keep coming, and far more likely to head in the other direction, perhaps in some haste, if he has a brain in his head. Only if he is an idiot are you likely to have to pull the trigger. And if he is an idiot with a knife coming after you, you had better have a trigger to pull.  Surveys of American gun owners have found that 4 to 6 percent reported using a gun in self-defense within the previous five years. That is not a very high percentage but, in a country with 300 million people, that works out to hundreds of thousands of defensive uses of guns per year.

Yet we almost never hear about these hundreds of thousands of defensive uses of guns from the media, which will report the killing of a dozen people endlessly around the clock. The murder of a dozen innocent people is unquestionably a human tragedy. But that is no excuse for reacting blindly by preventing hundreds of thousands of other people from defending themselves against meeting the same fate.

Although most defensive uses of guns do not involve actually shooting, nevertheless the total number of criminals killed by armed private citizens runs into the thousands per year. A gun can also come in handy if a pit bull or some other dangerous animal is after you or your child.  We need to recognize the painful reality that, regardless of what we do or don't do about gun control laws, there will be innocent people killed by guns. We can then look at hard facts in order to decide how we can minimize the number of needless deaths.

"They define a republic to be a government of laws, and not of men."

--John Adams, Novanglus No. 7, 1775

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