Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Today

London Firebombed

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.

Ups and Downs

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.

Tags Brad DeLong, inflation, inflationism, Paul Krugman, Tim Cavanaugh

crime and punishment too much government

Government and Pain

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.

Tags Sean Greenwood, Sioban Reynolds, The Chilling Effect, war on drugs

Today

Paine arrested in Paris

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.

Thought

Dante

“The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.”

Thought

Thomas Paine

“He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”

Today

Flushing Remonstrance

On Dec. 27, 1657, thirty non-Quakers signed the Flushing Remonstrance, a petition to Peter Stuyvesant, Director-General of the New Netherland colony requesting an exemption to his ban on Quaker worship. In 1663, the Dutch West India Company informed Stuyvesant to end religious persecution in the colony, which was the northeast Atlantic coast, including what is now New York City. The petition is considered a precursor to the First Amendment’s provision guaranteeing freedom of religion.

First Amendment rights

A Gift to Remember

On this very date in 1657, in the Dutch colony of New Netherland, 30 residents of Flushing (in what is today New York City) signed a petition, the Flushing Remonstrance, requesting an exemption to the ban on Quaker worship imposed by Peter Stuyvesant, the colony’s director-general.

None of the signers were themselves Quakers; they were English citizens opposed to the prohibition of religions other than the Dutch Reformed Church.

The Remonstrance stated:

You have been pleased to send unto us a certain prohibition or command that we should not receive or entertain any of those people called Quakers because they are supposed to be, by some, seducers of the people. . . .

Wee desire therefore in this case not to judge least we be judged, neither to condemn least we be condemned, but rather let every man stand or fall to his own Master. . . .

Therefore if any of these said persons come in love unto us, we cannot in conscience lay violent hands upon them, but give them free egresse and regresse unto our Town, and houses, as God shall persuade our consciences, for we are bounde by the law of God and man to doe good unto all men and evil to noe man.

Four of the signers were arrested; two, who refused to recant, imprisoned. Years later, signer John Bowne was arrested for allowing Quakers to meet in his house. He petitioned the directors of the Dutch West India Company, which ultimately “advised” Stuyvesant to end his religious persecution in the colony.

The Flushing petition served as an important precedent to the First Amendment’s provision guaranteeing freedom of worship. Americans of all religions (or none) owe those brave petitioners a debt — a debt best repaid by taking good care of our current freedoms.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Tags Flushing Remonstrance, Peter Stuyvesant

general freedom ideological culture too much government

Two Decades Later

Twenty years ago yesterday, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned his position as head of the Soviet Union. It was a momentous occasion. It was also slightly comic, since he was resigning from a government that didn’t quite exist any longer.

December 25, 1991, was the last day of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

It was the end of an age. The republics that had allied to form the original empire withdrew their support and formed a new union, the Commonwealth of Independent States.

This was one of history’s most momentous developments — or “undevelopments”?

The abandonment of Marxian communism — indeed, of state socialism — marked a turning point in ideological thought, too. Total government control of economic life had been a joke — a miserable, bitter joke — within the Soviet Union during its heyday. The news of its demonstrated unfeasibility shocked the protected sensibilities of the West’s intelligentsia, even eliciting startling confessions from professional socialist rah-rah boys like Robert Heilbroner, who publicly admitted that “Mises was right” about the unworkability of socialism.

For my first 30 years of life, the Cold War with the Soviet Union dominated the newspapers and our imaginations. And then it collapsed. Surprisingly quickly.

As Russians take to the streets to protest Putin’s revealed corruption, and as the United States of America itself buckles under the weight of its own “internal contradictions” — that is, the attempt to live on debt alone — the lesson becomes clear: The mighty can fall.

Radical change becomes possible, even where impregnability was previously assumed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Thought

Carl von Clausewitz

“Never forget that no military leader has ever become great without audacity.”