On Dec. 30, 1853, American Ambassador to Mexico James Gadsden signed what came to be known as the Gadsden Purchase, a treaty whereby the U.S. bought a 29,670-square-mile region of present-day southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico from Mexico. The purchase was the last major territorial addition to the contiguous United States. Purchasing property is the proper way for a free country to acquire it.
“The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it.”
On Dec. 29, 1940, London suffered its most devastating air raid when the German Luftwaffe firebombed the city. The next day, a newspaper photo of St. Paul’s Cathedral standing undamaged amid the smoke and flames seemed to symbolize the capital’s unconquerable spirit during the Battle of Britain.
On Dec. 29, 1890, the U.S. Army massacred hundreds of Sioux at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.
On Dec. 29, 1170, Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered by followers of King Henry II in Canterbury Cathedral, after engaging in conflict with the king over the rights and privileges of the Church. Becket is venerated as a saint and martyr by both the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion.
Inflationism is the ideology of increasing the money supply to spur economic activity and “growth.” In the 19th century, economists were generally against it, though certain “innovators” (cranks) thought that increasing the supply of money would “increase aggregate demand” with no bad repercussions. “Cross of gold” kind of nonsense; “free silver” idiocy.
In the 20th century, alas, inflationism went mainstream.
Today, a few respectable economists — high-profilers like the New York Times’s Paul Krugman and U.C. Berkeley’s Brad DeLong, for example — embrace inflationism. Occasionally their arguments sound sophisticated, but all are just warmed-over rehashes of very old errors.
It’s the economic equivalent of the “perpetual motion machine”: the eternal quest to get something for nothing, progress on the cheap. It inevitably fails — but only after fooling people by “working” for a while.
Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh, discussing declining housing prices, notes that “it’s becoming harder for the Fed, HUD, the Treasury Department and the National Association of Realtors to pretend the 25-year real estate inflation was anything but a $15 trillion rip-off.” He welcomes the deflation of housing prices. The idea that one’s house should increase in value by always increasing in price — that’s really just a recipe for social disaster. It endured as long as it did only “through government subsidized debt.”
Thank Congress; thank their Fannie and their Freddie; thank the inflationist Fed.
“Creating” money and loosening credit tends to nudge up prices … but not all prices equally. It signals people to over-invest in certain sectors, often real estate. This creates a sector boom … that then must “bust.”
The alternative? The honesty of sound money.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Siobhan Reynolds died last weekend in a plane crash. I learned about this from Radley Balko, who reviewed Ms. Reynolds’s crusade at The Agitator. Her story is worth remembering.
Sean Greenwood, her former husband, suffered from chronic headaches and a connective tissue disorder. Unfortunately, pain management was not taken very seriously by doctors in those days, and the federal government made matters far worse by treating doctors who prescribed pain medication as “pushers” rather than legitimate healers. In The Chilling Effect, a movie Ms. Reynolds produced about pain and policy regarding it, she details Greenwood’s travails, and other’s. It’s a harrowing story, and the government doesn’t come out looking very good.
Ms. Reynolds’s main effort centered on the Pain Relief Network, which she organized. Her mission was to defend those doctors whom she thought were being unjustly harassed by the drug warriors. Specifically, she defended doctors who engaged in high-dose opioid therapy, a course Mr. Greenwood and other patients found to offer some relief. As Balko puts it, she was not without success, getting “some sentences overturned, and hooked accused doctors up with attorneys who know the issue. ” Unfortunately, that’s likely why prosecutors went after her, and in another horrible misuse of sealed court proceedings, suppressed her organization and brought her close to ruin.
There’s an old phrase, “doctor knows best.” That’s obviously not always true, but it’s certainly the case that government does not know best. Especially about pain.
Though it surely causes a lot, adding to our suffering.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On Dec. 28, 1793, Thomas Paine was arrested in France for treason. The American patriot and author of the revolutionary pamphlet, Common Sense, had traveled to Paris to assist in the French Revolution. Originally, Paine was welcomed and given honorary citizenship. His book against royalty, The Rights of Man, was popular with the leaders of the revolution. However, Paine was a strong opponent of the death penalty and was vocal against the revolutionaries’ use of the guillotine. Paine was released in November 1794.
On Dec. 28, 1973, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was published in Paris. The book about the police-state system in the Soviet Union from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution to 1956 was an instant success in the West, but Soviet officials were livid and on February 12, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, stripped of his citizenship, and deported.