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Today

Bangorian Controversy, March 31

A sermon on “The Nature of the Kingdom of Christ” by Benjamin Hoadly, the Bishop of Bangor, provoked the Bangorian Controversy in the Anglican Church. The sermon was delivered on March 31, 1717, to George I of Great Britain, with the text being John 18:36, “My kingdom is not of this world,” and from that Hoadly deduced, supposedly at the request of the king himself, that there was no Biblical justification for any church government of any sort.

March 31, 1979 is remembered in the Maltese calendar as Freedom Day (Maltese: Jum il-Ħelsien). This is the anniversary of the withdrawal of British troops and the Royal Navy from Malta. On taking power in 1971, the Labour Government indicated it wanted to re-negotiate the lease agreement with the United Kingdom. Following protracted and sometimes tense talks, a new agreement was signed whereby the lease was extended till the end of March 1979 at a vastly increased rent. On March 31, 1979 the last British Forces left Malta. For the first time in millennia, Malta was no longer a military base of a foreign power and it became independent de facto as well as de jure.

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Thought

Destutt de Tracy

Government is a very great consumer, living not on its profits but on its revenues.

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Today

Spiritual Baptists on March 30

March 30 is Spiritual/Shouter Baptist Liberation Day in Trinidad and Tobago. The holiday commemorates the repeal on March 30, 1951, of the 1917 Shouter Prohibition Ordinance that prohibited the activities of the Shouter or Spiritual Baptist faith.

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Thought

Mario Vargas Llosa

Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections.

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links

Townhall: Their Solution, Our Problem

Some simple solutions are really complex problems in disguise.

This weekend, at Townhall.com, your Common Sense columnist expands on a very popular meme, covered earlier: that the federal debt is no problem because the government, after all, can just print more money.

Amazing. It’s like we, wow, never thought of that!

Not.

Click on over to Townhall, then back here. You know, to add your two cents (yes, comments really are appreciated). Or to click through to a few of the additional links, below. Just scroll down to Saturday’s presented video to watch (in case you’d missed it) the sheer bravado of simple-minded inflationism and insider hubris (that is, the video in question). There are a few links in the column, but here please find some more interesting reading related to the subject:

  • Interested in the tradition of public finance that is critical of deficit spending? Well, it’s a long history. You could start here: “Destutt de Tracy: A French Precursor of the Virginia School of Public Finance,” by Robert W. Dimand and Edwin G. West.
  • Just noticed that the above-mentioned essay is not where it used to be online. It must be cached away somewhere, but in case you don’t find it for free, try reading Destutt de Tracy’s treatise — as translated into English under the supervision of Thomas Jefferson, no less. Timothy D. Terrell’s  introduction is terrific.
  • Wondering about the distinction between inflation and inflationism? Try Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action, the chapter on “The Inflationist View of History.”
  • Wondering where to start with all the competing ideas in economics, about today’s economic trends, and much more? Try listening to Russ Roberts work at EconTalk. Great conversations with experts as interviewed by a conscientious educator.
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video

Video: A Simple Explanation

Though simplicity is a good thing, Occam’s Razor and all, not all simple explanations are correct. As discussed on Thursday and Friday, Matt Yglesias has simply laid out the “liberal” (or is that “progressive”?) case for the federal debt’s non-problem status. Here’s the video you may not have bothered to watch:

And we’re not over. Tomorrow, at Townhall, the Common Sense column by Yours Truly will be an expansion of what was presented on Thursday and Friday, here.

Why?

Because the dismissal of the public debt’s grave danger reveals, in simple splendor, the assumptions of the dominant liberal-progressive paradigm. The video is placed here not merely for the convenience of tomorrow’s Townhall readers, but also to challenge all readers to give the video a thorough debunking of their own.

We should thank Matt Yglesias. He has provided such a convenient target.

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Today

March 29 McCarthy

On March 29, 1916, Eugene McCarthy, American political maverick, was born.

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Thought

Mario Vargas Llosa

Prosperity or egalitarianism — you have to choose. I favor freedom — you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture too much government

Their Solution Is Our Problem

J.D. Tuccille at Reason took on journalist Matthew Yglesias’s vox.com video that I wrote about yesterday, focusing on Yglesias’s pooh-poohing of the sheer size of the national debt. Tuccille noted that Yglesias under-reported its humungosity, and that the Congressional Budget Office finds, counter to Pollyanna-liberals, no small reason to worry about the ballooning debt.

But I’m still shaking my head that Yglesias really did argue the federal debt is no problem, because — get this! —  the Fed can always just print more money. 

We know! What he sees as a solution we see as a problem.

The modish government-as-savior view of society seems pure simplicity: major inputs and outputs — money supply, fiscal spending, debt, inflation — all of which liberal-progressives will “expertly” adjust.

Fed this, no wonder people ask questions like “why haven’t we seen inflation, following the huge influxes of quantitative easing?” Well, it is not just about consumer prices, but investment prices, too, which we have long known to be more volatile than consumer goods; investments can easily suck up new money to create an unstable boom, which bursts.

The biggest problem for today’s market recovery — aside from subsidies and wage controls and all the folderol that directly discourage new jobs — is federal government irresponsibility itself (symbolized neatly by the federal debt) which signals to investors and other market participants that they cannot make viable long-term plans.

Economist Robert Higgs called this effect “regime uncertainty.” It’s the uncertainty bred by bad policy.

Just the kind Yglesias and his comrades adore.

Fiddle with the economy’s dials, oh wise ones, and uncertainty seems a certain result.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Today

Vargas Llosa March 28

On March 28, 1936, Mario Vargas Llosa was born. Vargas Llosa became a leading Peruvian author with an international reputation, a politician and winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature.