Who'll Slash the National Debt?

In a 51-page report titled Primary Numbers: The GOP Candidates and the National Debt, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget puts the budget plans of the four GOP Presidential candidates through a detailed review. The results show that only one candidate has a budget plan that will halt the growth of the national debt over the next nine years. That candidate? Ron Paul.

Only one candidate reverses the deficit curve over the next decade. (CRFB graphic)
The plans of Gingrich, Santorum and Romney are similar to a large degree. They all propose big spending cuts, lower taxes, and major changes in Social Security and Medicare. Only Ron Paul proposes a plan that would reduce the national debt over time and protect those currently enrolled in Social Security and Medicare, while giving younger workers the ability to opt out of those plans.

Follow the Yellowcake Road -- Again?

Time Magazine, July 9, 2003 - bolding mine throughout this essay.

Is a fib really a fib if the teller is unaware that he is uttering an untruth? That question appears to be the basis of the White House defense, having now admitted a falsehood in President Bush's claim, in his State of the Union address, that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa. But that defense is under mounting pressure from a variety of sources claiming that the White House could not have been unaware that the claim was false, because it had been checked out — and debunked — by U.S. intelligence a year before the President repeated it.

During the buildup to the Iraq invasion, few questions were asked concerning the administration's claims, and they were generally dismissed as somehow unpatriotic, politically biased, or just plain mean-spirited. Not until after the invasion did the real questions start to surface.

Now, nine years later, the spin seems to be that Iran is going to have a Nuclear Weapon, real soon now, so we better just go ahead and invade before that happens. News coverage superficially seems to indicate that war is all but inevitable. Once again, challenging that assertion is all but forbidden.

Shall Not Be Infringed?

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Second Amendment to the United States Constitution
Merriam-Webster defines right as something to which one has a just claim; the power or privilege to which one is justly entitled, and defines infringe as to encroach upon in a way that violates law or the rights of another. Keep those definitions in mind. ¹

Also keep in mind that violent crime in Washington D.C. is more than three times the national average of 403.6 reported offenses per 100,000 people in 2010.

Now, on with our story.

Emily Miller is the Senior Editor of The Washington Times Editorial and Opinion Pages, and, not inconsequentially, a resident of Washington DC. On October 5^th of last year, she made the decision to legally own a handgun. On February 8^th of this year, over four months later, she finally took possession of her handgun, with the caveat that she carry it directly home and keep it there, transporting it only when she takes it out of state to practice, since there is no place in Washington where she can legally fire it.

As she explains in her February 8^th column, "The bad guys buy guns off the street in five minutes, and the city has no record of the transaction. Law-abiding citizens have to take a five-hour class that is only taught outside of the District, pay $465 in fees, sign six forms, pass a written test on gun laws, get fingerprinted, be subject to a police ballistics test and take days off work."

The Transformational Generation

I had other plans for today's post, but then I ran across a compelling essay, on Pastebin, by way of Twitter, which tangentally restates the theme of the essay itself.

I don't know who Piotr Czerski is, or his age, or where he lives, other than that he is young, and from Poland. Nor does it matter, as Piotr himself points out.

What I do know is that Piotr is representative of a generation like none the world has seen before. I'm not sure what conclusions can be drawn from Piotr's essay, other than a warning that those who fail to recognize the fundamental shift that it represents are rapidly sowing the seeds of their own irrelevance.

I can't recommend reading the entire essay strongly enough. You'll find it included at the end of the post under Creative Commons license, which represents yet another restatement of his theme.

After noting the superficial differences that separate the various 'generations' that get bandied about, he proceeds to point out what makes his generation the transformational one. His generation is the one that has grown up with the richness of the Internet as a natural extension of their lives, rather than as a tool that can be used, or not, to provide some benefit. Piotr's generation breathes the Internet, as we do not.

What unites us is not a common, limited cultural context, but the belief that the context is self-defined and an effect of free choice.

We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not ‘surf’ and the internet to us is not a ‘place’ or ‘virtual space’. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it.

The One Percent's Revolving Door

In Defining the One Percent, I explained that big government and big business work together to their advantage, while occasionally pretending to be mortal enemies. Then I provided a definition of the One Percent.

The One Percent is composed of both those who would seek to influence those who write the laws to create legislation that prevent competition and force business their way, and those politicians and bureaucrats who gladly pass and enforce the legislation that provides those benefits.

The One Percent includes both Crony Capitalists and Crony Politicians. We ignore their collusion at our peril.

In On Law and Sausages - SOPA, PIPA and Cronyism, I explained how these two groups work together to create legislation that ends up benefiting a particular industry or a particular corporation at the expense of consumers and the small businesses on Main Street. But they have plenty of other tricks up their sleeves to maintain their hold on the reins of power.

One of the favorite tricks of crony politicians is to appoint a well-connected industry insider who was particularly helpful to their election campaign to a high government position. Quite often it turns out to be a position where they're responsible for regulating the industry they just departed. This generally results in a few murmurs from members of the opposition party, quelled by a lot of head-nodding over the common wisdom that it takes people with an intimate knowledge of an industry to effectively regulate that industry.

Show of hands, please. How many in the audience would recommend to their local bank that they hire bank robbers as security guards?

Anybody?

Uncle Sam's Clogged Arteries

There are many reasons for the listless, if not moribund, state of the US economy. Today, this Tireless Agorist would like to tackle the topic of the clogging of the arteries of commerce. I'm not referring to the continual degradation of the physical infrastructure on which commerce depends; the roadways, railbeds, waterways and airways along which products move, the systems that bring us clean water and carry away our waste, or the pipelines, electrical generation plants and transmission grid that power our industry, although that would be a good topic for a future posting. In this essay, we'll address the impact of ever-growing regulation on economic production, innovation, and competition.

The Code of Federal Regulations totaled 165,494 pages as of the end of 2010, the most recent data according to the Office of the Federal Register. This is an increase of 132% from 71,224 pages in 1975. These regulations are enforced by more than 50 agencies, and a 2005 study by the Small Business Administration found that the cost of all these rules seven years ago was more than $1.1 trillion dollars a year, more than Americans paid in federal income taxes in 2009. That figure includes only the direct burden placed on consumers. Constraints on innovation, new inventions or products that never reached the marketplace cannot possibly be measured, since they are by nature undefinable.

And note we're speaking only of federal regulations; for businesses involved in interstate commerce, there may be as many as 50 sets of state regulations they must adhere to. Nor does it stop there. Many counties and municipalities have their own sets of rules and regulations that must be strictly adhered to under the risk of financial penalties or even permission to continue operations.

Agorism, Country Style, in Hardyville

"If we as individuals can't find freedom in our own lives, our own work, our own communities, we're never going to find it. And that's what Hardyvillians do."

Claire Wolfe, interview with Brian Wilson, 8/12/2011
Although I've written on a number of topics over the last month, I've always felt remiss for not explaining the name of my blog. While "Tireless" is explained by the masthead quote, I've never defined the term agorist, although most of my posts reflect the agorist philosophy in one way or another. ¹

So here it is, briefly stated.

Agorism is a libertarian philosophy that holds as its ultimate goal a society in which all relations between people are voluntary exchanges and rejects the view that the solution to human aggression is to institute aggressive governments. It proposes that such a society can only be brought about by circumventing or ignoring the state.

Agorism embraces the libertarian philosophy of individual choice and responsibility and expands it to include a method for instituting that philosophy.

Claire Wolfe, libertarian author and columnist at Backwoods Home Magazine, wrote extensively of the rural community of Hardyville between October 2003 and September 2007. Hardyville, as a profoundly libertarian community with strong agorist tendencies, is a perfect example to illustrate the meanings of both libertarianism and agorism.

The Great Depression of 1920??

Everybody knows about the Great Depression, beginning with Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, the secondary crash in the late summer of 1930, and an initial recovery beginning in 1933. Unemployment peaked at about 25%. Recovery was lackluster, with a secondary recession occurring in 1937. Unemployment stayed high through a weak economic recovery, still at 15% just before the war machine cranked up for World War II in 1941.

Although war production boosted GDP, the standard of living stayed depressed throughout the war years, with widespread rationing a major cause. Society as a whole didn't really recover until after the war ended in 1945. In total, the Great Depression significantly impacted the standard of living for most Americans for a period of 16 years.

Many people aren't aware that there was a depression almost as severe in October of 1920. The impacts in the first few months were on the same level as those of 1929, with the market down 33%, industrial production down 30%, GDP down 17%, and a spike in the unemployment rate from 4% to almost 12%, all occuring in a short time. Nor are they aware that by the fall of 1921 the recovery from this major crash was well underway.

Delegate Count Media Misinformation

The Wall Street Journal and FOX credit Mitt Romney with 123 delegates to the Republican Nationa Convention in Tampa, Florida in August. CNN says no, it's 127, unless it's 106. CBS argues it's 111, the New York Times 105, Quinnipiac 102, RealClearPolitics 98, and National Public Radio says it 73. Every news source seems to disagree just as widely about the counts for the other three candidates as well.

Everyone seems to agree there will be a total of 2,286 delegates, and it will take 1,144 to win the nomination. Everyone also seems to agree that there are four remaining candidates. That's about where the agreement ends, however.

Reviewing the table below, you'll find that there's very little agreement among news outlets as to the current delegate count.¹ I'm sure I could check a few more sources and find a few more sets of widely differing numbers. Why all the confusion?

Source	Romney	Santorum	Gingrich	Paul
CBS	111	44	30	15
CNN calculator	106	37	35	27
CNN scorecard	127	37	38	27
FOX	123	72	32	19
New York Times	105	71	29	18
Quinnipiac	102	37	35	27
Real Clear Politics	98	44	32	20
Wall Street Journal	123	72	32	19
NPR	73	3	29	8

The Perils of Paper Money

Over at The Atlantic, David Wolman has written A Short History of American Money, From Fur to Fiat, which might better be called An Apologia for the Bernanke-Krugman Philosophy of Turning Paper into Gold. What was left out of this commercial for fiat money and the Federal Reserve is much more telling than what is included. Later columns will be devoted to the important parts of history that the article passed over, but in this essay we'll deal only with the most glaring of many problems I see: an inverted understanding of the purpose of money that ignores the fundamental purposes of money itself.

Money has three fundamental functions to perform: to act as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value.

A lack of understanding of the importance of the third of these three functions is apparent in this statement, describing the Bretton Woods Agreement, which the author interestingly never mentions by name:

Bizarre as it may sound, a small group of men sitting around a table determined that a 1-ounce nugget of gold would be worth, not $34 or $36.75, but $35.

This is a total inversion of the concept of sound money. The decision was not that "a 1-ounce nugget of gold would be worth $35," but rather that the value of a dollar would be fixed at 1/35 of an ounce of gold. While that may seem to be an arcane difference, it really speaks to the heart of the matter. Since gold could be depended on to hold its value relative to other goods, and history has repeatedly shown that ink on paper cannot, this decision was intended to maintain relative stability in the value of the dollar against material goods -- what we speak of as "sound money."