Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Forward the Fed Audit

Will Ron Paul get his audit of the Federal Reserve?

The U.S. House has just approved it. Now it’s up to the Senate. That the proposal has gotten this far is a credit to Congressman Paul’s determination to give Americans a better idea of how their money is being misspent.

The central bank’s actions are often secret. During the 2008 bailouts, the Fed concealed which banks were getting how much of the trillions it doled out. We now have specific info — for example, $86 billion to a Bank of America that at the time touted its stability — mostly because Bloomberg LLC sued in court.

Fed defenders can be transparent about this government agency’s need for opacity. Isn’t it better, some burble, to let the Fed help dupe depositors at troubled banks about the condition of those banks so that depositors will be less likely to rescue their money? (I paraphrase.)

Some Fed champions declare that the Fed must not be “politicized” by any audit or other check on its abuses. Fine, fine, let’s stop the politicization right now. Privatize the money system, return to a gold standard, shutter the Fed and — oh, that’s not what they mean? They just want the Fed’s politically constituted and politically maneuvering officers to be able to fiscally frolic at will, a process that could be hindered if citizens knew in high-dpi detail what it’s up to?

Oops. Okay. Now I understand. . . .

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

ideological culture

Philosophic Anti-Fanaticism

Post author By Redactor
Post date July 31, 2012
9 Comments on Philosophic Anti-Fanaticism

Popular French philosopher Pascal Bruckner is in hot water with fellow left-leaning French intellectuals.

Bruckner doesn’t hate humanity and doesn’t want to unplug all the life-promoting conveniences of industrial civilization. He intimates as much in a controversial new book entitled The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse: Save the Earth, Punish Human Beings, available only in French for now, but soon in English translation as well.

The book assails ludicrous and nihilistic environmentalist pronouncements of the Left. As the title suggests, the author believes that these are based more in religious fervor than in carefully reasoned science. He stipulates that he does not object to ecology as such but rather to the “greenwashing” notions that the “planet is sick. Man is guilty of having destroyed it. He must pay.”

After all, what is the “carbon footprint that we all leave behind us [but] the gaseous equivalent of original sin, of the stain that we inflict on our Mother Gaia by the simple fact of being present and breathing?” A baleful implication of such views is that peoples in developing countries should forget about improving their economic and technological circumstances. The earth has suffered enough, n’est-ce pas?

Bruckner’s observations underscore how radical environmentalism is largely a convenient hook for anti-capitalism. Long before anybody fretted about our chronic exhaling of carbon dioxide, certain anti-capitalists urged the extinguishing of industrial civilization and a return to the blissful Tupperware-free, iPhone-free, hunting-and-gathering way of life.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Tags AGW, environmentalism, guilt, Pascal Bruckner

Thought

Milton Friedman

Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men. The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated — a system of checks and balances.

free trade & free markets too much government

An Olympian Budget Fiasco

The original conception of the modern Olympics was flawed. Its bedrock notion of an “international” contest unduly accented the “national.” This directed attention away from individual achievement and towards “national” competition, especially to the “national teams” and how many medals countries win.

The Olympics became a venue for Big Government in action. And so of course, that means: waste of money. The current events in London are way over-budget. CBS takes a look at this:

It seems there’s a trick to putting together a winning Olympic bid: You have to have a flexible relationship with reality.

The London bid that beat out New York and Paris won, at least in part, because it promised value for money.

And after the extravagance of the Beijing Games, London promised, in 2005, to deliver a more measured approach, games that would cost under $4 billion — a bargain.

But that figure turned out to be an underestimate. A whopping underestimate, if $15 billion meets your definition of a whopper.

No surprise, of course, as Katherine Mangu-Ward explains at Reason.com: “Hosting the Olympics is virtually always a big fat money suck, despite what you may have heard.” Nick Gillespie, at the same site, opines, “Mega-activities such as staging the Olympics are often sold as economic development programs for dreary local economies, but they almost never deliver anything other than big bills and useless infrastructure.”

This applies to sports stadiums and league franchises, too. It’s time to separate sports and state.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Tags London, nationalism, olympics

Thought

Milton Friedman

There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40 percent of our national income.

Thought

Milton Friedman

Society doesn’t have values. People have values.

Thought

Milton Friedman

There is no place for government to prohibit consumers from buying products the effect of which will be to harm themselves.

video

Video: Milton Friedman contra Conscription

Post author By Redactor
Post date July 28, 2012
No Comments on Video: Milton Friedman contra Conscription

The late Prof. Milton Friedman, whose birthday is on the 31st, exerted influence on a number of policy issues, none more important than “the draft”:

ideological culture media and media people Second Amendment rights

Caught in the Crossfire

There are some things people with different values just won’t “get” about their opponents. Folks who support gun bans and greater gun control just don’t “get” arguments for the Second Amendment and for “more guns” in peaceful citizens’ hands. And so, when confronted with a scholar and analyst of gun control like economist John Lott, they shy away from actually arguing with his points.

Their approach? Scattershot. Sniping. Crossfire.

Thus it was, this week, on Piers Morgan’s CNN interview show. Morgan grilled Lott in the wake of the Aurora, Colorado, movie theater atrocity. Lott ably started making his case numerous times, but Morgan refused to engage Lott’s points, instead unleashing a barrage of “isn’t your positions just ridiculous?” non-questions.

The lack of engagement with ideas is astounding.

When Alan Dershowitz joined the “debate,” it only got worse. Dershowitz repeated an accusation of “junk science” without really demonstrating how the science marshaled by Lott was unsound, and engaged (falsely) in the favorite ad hominem gambit of the age: “research funded by the NRA.”

The sad thing about this is not the inability of Morgan and Dershowitz to understand Lott. The sad thing is their unwillingness to even give it a good ol’ college try. It was downright uncivilized. Dershowitz is a lawyer, so his resorting to base rhetoric in a no-holds-barred attack is understandable. But Morgan is allegedly a journalist, on the advance guard of history, a seeker of truth.

But Morgan is not seeking truth; his mind is already made up. Facts be damned. That doesn’t lead to good interviews.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.