Birth of a Movement: ‘I am Darren Wilson’

There is a growing concern among law enforcement officers, as they face daily the criminal elements in their communities, that their political bosses, chain-of-command and communities are no supporting them. Police officers are concerned that they will be thrown under the bus in the name of race relations. This concern has turned into the “I Am Darren Wilson” movement. Three Portland, Washington police officers recently posted on their Facebook page the photo of a badge with a “I Am Darren Wilson” wrist band across it.

16420666-mmmainThe reaction by Portland Police Chief Mike Reese, who ordered these officers to take down images posted on their Facebook pages of the Police Bureau’s badge, is indicative of who will support them when push comes to shove.

The worst fears of the “thin blue line” have now been realized. No one has their back.

Law enforcement officers have every right to defend themselves. Unlike some who believe there is nation wide shoot first and ask questions later policy, nothing could be further from the truth. Police officers are trained on when deadly force is permissible. Any time a police officer responds to a call there is at least one gun involved, that of the police officer. Other than our military, police officers are among the best trained on how and when to use their weapons.

Abandoning them in the name of racial equality or community outreach is a false notion.

There is a war raging on Main Street  across America. The Ferguson protests involved 140 cities. Two New Black Panther members tried to bomb the St. Louis gateway arch. When you see these types of terrorist activities, what would you do? How would you respond? Who do you trust to respond?

If the police do not respond for fear of retribution, as in the case of Darren Wilson, then ordinary citizens are put in the position of either arming themselves, which they are, or letting their homes, churches and business burn to the ground.

Is this a race war? Certainly!

When the Ferguson coalition uses whites as human shields then we are talking race. These tactics are used by others such as Hamas in Gaza, the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

Is this what American is faced with, terrorism of a different variety? It appears so.

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Executive Amnesty: Will We Allow One Man to Fundamentally Transform America?

After six years of putting up with his eldest son actively working with those crazy racist white folks in the Tea Party against the first black president, my 86 year old black dad has finally begun to understand why.

A lifelong Democrat, dad contributed to the GOP shocking victory in Maryland by voting Republican in the 2014 midterm. It has taken me six years to convince Dad that Conservatism is much better for everyone than Liberalism. Dad is old school with basic beliefs. Democrats are for the working class little guy. Republicans are for the rich. Oh, and Republicans are also racists.

So, you can imagine the challenges I faced trying to re-educated him. Dad believed the Tea Party was racist because he heard it on CNN. I said, “Dad, I travel the country on the Tea Party Express tour bus. And, they allow me to sit upfront. However, I prefer riding in the back because there is a large TV back there and I can watch all the football games.” Dad chuckled.

I know what you are thinking. Lloyd, why haven’t you turned your dad on to Fox News? I have tried. I do not know why he rejects Fox and conservative talk radio. Still, I am working on it folks. I am working on it.

With the biased MSM as his main news source, Dad is a low-info voter. I have been working on Dad, educating him one issue at a time. Dad is a good guy, warm and compassionate. I am trying to get him to use his common sense and instincts for right and wrong rather than getting caught up in the Democrats’ and MSM emotional manipulative spin on issues.

We chatted about illegal immigration. Dad has been a Christian pastor for over 50 years. He is still the pastor of four churches; driving several miles to visit the sick and shut-ins.

“Dad, remember when mom used to get annoyed at people who used you and your church?” Dad chuckled. I do not recall Dad ever turning away anyone in need.

Mom was frustrated with people who did not want to contribute in anyway to Dad’s ministry; never attending a single service or listening to a sermon. All they were interested in was the freebies available at the church; food, clothing and so on. They wanted Rev. “My-cus-sin” (Marcus), never did get his name right, to perform their weddings and funerals for free. They expected Dad to show up at their homes or hospitals in the middle of the night in times of crisis, despite never setting one foot in Dad’s church. Still, Dad faithfully did it all. He was functioning on a higher level; God’s Love.

I told Dad that the illegals flooding across our borders have the same we’re-just-here-to-take mindset that frustrated mom. They do not want to assimilate. Heck, they could not give a rat’s derriere about what it means to be an American. Illegals proudly fly their Mexican flag and are offended when our kids wear American flag t-shirts to school on Cinco de Mayo. Illegals receive entitlements that are unavailable to U.S. Citizens. They have no desire, nor is there a pressing need for them to learn English.

While liberals claim that poor humble illegals are quaking in their boots “hiding in the shadows”, illegals are boldly and arrogantly protesting in our streets, demanding entitlements and that they not be deported. Illegals claim a moral right to be in our country, while blatantly breaking and ignoring our laws.

The spin promoted from the bully pulpits of the MSM and White House is anyone who does not turn a blind eye to illegals breaking our laws, making demands and abusing our system is a hardhearted racist.

Meanwhile, a mysterious polio-like illness has paralyzed 75 kids across America. A rare Enterovirus D68 is causing an outbreak across 45 states sickening nearly 700, mostly children. Illegal alien minors are also spreading dengue fever, swine flu, tuberculosis and possibly Ebola. Obama’s open border policy has delivered over 300,000 illegals, 75,000 of them are children who directly entered schools across America without proper examinations and so on.

It has been exposed that many of the illegals are gang members and drug dealers.

As inconceivable as this is to imagine, it does appear that one man, exploiting the historical aspect of his presidency to break the law at will, may be allowed to fundamentally transform America. Obama via executive action unilaterally imposed amnesty for 5 million illegals, plus the 75,000 children who invaded our country and their parents.

If Republicans do not stop Obama’s insanity, one characterless out-of-control arrogant evil liar will fundamentally transform America. That is totally unacceptable.

Years ago, I wrote a satirical article to illustrate illegal immigration and how we are expected to deal with it. I was shocked that many people thought my fictional scenario was true. Their reaction spoke to how crazy, brain dead and emotion driven the topic of illegal immigration has become and what people think of our government.

In my fictional parable, I came home to discover that a family had taken up residency in my backyard storage shed. Displaying remarkable arrogance and a sense of entitlement the squatters refused to leave arguing that they were simply seeking a better life. Their TV, computers and etc were powered with an electrical cord plugged into the exterior outlet of my home.

Infuriated, I asked the police and City Hall to remove the trespassers from my property. Upon local government discovering the race of my invaders, I was accused of being selfish, cruel and using the law to hide my hateful racism. Suddenly, I began witnessing a migration of my trespassers’ relatives and friends into my backyard; littering my property with tents, makeshift shelters and old vehicles.

The city cited me for numerous code violations which included all the dangerous electric cords and bizarre hook-ups into my electrical power source. I was ordered to immediately upgrade my electrical power to meet the needs of my current and potential new residents.

From that point in my imaginary tale, the pandering to my trespassers by my local government got even more outrageous. You get the idea. Folks, this is exactly what is happening in our national home, America. Illegals are showing up and making outrageous demands. The Obama Administration is siding with them. The reality of the situation is just that simple.

Imagine, “Jeopardy” game show host Alex Trebek saying, “The lawless man who fundamentally transformed America.” If we do not politically stop him, the correct Final Jeopardy question will be, “Who is Barack Hussein Obama?”

RELATED ARTICLE: ‘I,’ ‘Me,’ ‘My’—Obama Uses First Person Singular 91 Times in Speech on Immigration

Regulation of Lodging by the Market Process by Howard Baetjer Jr.

Does the lodging industry need government regulation? I don’t think so, and I’m more convinced than before after listening to a fascinating EconTalk conversation between host Russ Roberts and Nathan Blecharczyk, a founder of the lodging service Airbnb.

Blecharczyk explains that every Airbnb customer rates every property in which she stays for cleanliness, value, and the accuracy of its description on the website, and every property owner rates every customer who stays with him. Roberts then responds as follows (the emphasis is mine):

To a large extent, your trust system and the reviews that you generate on both sides of the transaction are the regulators. Right? So, the guest that came before me is the person who inspected the property for me. So in some sense the technology and the way it brings people together is a substitute for regulation.

I think Roberts is almost exactly correct here. The regulator of housing quality in today’s world is best understood not as a person or agency but as a process. First, the customers rate the properties; then, Airbnb posts the customers’ ratings; and then, both Airbnb’s prospective customers and other property owners react to that information. Property owners who would like to rent their properties via Airbnb are effectively forced to meet the standards upheld by the other properties offered, in order to win customers. That process of judgment, communication, and reaction is not “a substitute for regulation,” as Roberts says; it is a substitute for government regulation. It is a superior kind of regulation, provided by the market process.

Here are some of the ways in which it is superior:

  • Instead of being inspected every year or so, each property is inspected every time it is rented.
  • Instead of getting a cursory look-over by a government employee just doing his job, the property gets a thorough examination by someone with her own comfort and money involved.
  • Instead of being enforced by authorities’ restrictions on the choices of renters and property owners, standards of quality are enforced by those choices.
  • Instead of being subject to “capture” by the regulated insiders of the industry—hotels and motels eager to use regulation to suffocate these new competitors—this regulatory process is itself regulated (kept fair) by outsiders’ freedom to participate in the industry.
  • Instead of staying on the books for years after they stop making sense—if they ever did—the standards generated by this regulatory process are constantly being reevaluated, and they’re cast off as soon as they don’t make sense.

Airbnb’s collection and publication of customer ratings is something that every other hotel, motel, and lodging house is free to imitate. This freedom eliminates the rationale for government regulation of lodging services.

That rationale is based on “market failure” due to imperfect information. In the standard story, we need government regulation because lodging is not a repeat-purchase item, so the market fails to give consumers information on which to judge its quality before using it. Hence consumers might be taken advantage of, so they need government to regulate quality. Maybe that argument had some merit in days past—I’m doubtful—but it surely has no merit now. The quality of Airbnb offerings is as closely regulated as I can imagine it being.

Now that real-time customer ratings over the Internet are easy, governments should stop regulating hotels. The market process does that better than governments can.

ABOUT HOWARD BAETJER JR.

Howard Baetjer Jr. is a lecturer in the department of economics at Towson University and a faculty member for seminars of the Institute for Humane Studies. This article is based on ideas from his book, Free Our Markets: A Citizens’ Guide to Essential Economics.

Our Inflated Thanksgiving by Chuck Grimmett

What does the Federal Reserve have to do with your Thanksgiving dinner?

INTERACTIVE GRAPH:

For the past 29 years, the American Farm Bureau Federation has conducted an informal survey of the price of a classic Thanksgiving dinner for 10 people. At first glance, it looks like the price of food has been steadily rising. But when you adjust the numbers for inflation, you get a different story. It isn’t the cost of our food that has been rising, but the amount of US currency in circulation.
This year, we’re thankful for technologies like bitcoin breaking the Federal Reserve’s grip on money.
Happy Thanksgiving!
The individual prices of a traditional Thanksgiving dinner this year:
(Hover for items and prices.)

20130829_CAGCHUCK GRIMMETT

Chuck Grimmett is a project manager at eResources. Previously, he was FEE’s director of web media. Get in touch with him on Twitter: @cagrimmett.

The Bright Side to Amnesty

To many, the above title may seem much like speaking of the bright side to malignant cancer. And did it really come out of this writer’s pen? Long a staunch immigration critic, I’ve written many articles on the subject; Pat Buchanan used one of my lines in his book Death of the West; and Congressman John Conyers quoted me in the House on May 16, 2007, saying, “[C]onservative commentator Selwyn Duke just yesterday inveighed against any immigration (legal or not). He warned, ‘[R]eplace our population with a Mexican or Moslem one and you no longer have a Western civilization, you no longer have America. You have Mexico North or Iran West.’” (Conyers wasn’t exactly in agreement.) And, no, it’s not that a pod from outer space has taken over my body or, worse yet, that I’ve become a liberal. I inveigh against all immigration still. I still oppose amnesty in all forms and under all guises. Nonetheless, the latter would have, perhaps, a small bright side.

This cannot be understood without grasping that illegal migration is not the problem.

It is an exacerbation of the problem.

What does this mean? Aren’t the only problems posed by migration ones unique to the illegal variety, such as an uncontrolled entry into our country that can allow diseases, terrorists and WMDs to cross our borders?

The real problem — the only one that really matters over the long term — is that we are importing socialist-oriented voters with mindsets contrary to Western ideals. This is because of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (INA65), which created a situation wherein 85 percent of our new immigrants hail from the Third World and Asia. Moreover, the legislation has led to an increase in overall immigration from a historic average of 250,000 a year to approximately 1,000,000.

If you’re Obama and his fellow travelers and believe in “fundamentally” changing America, you love this because, upon being naturalized, approximately 80 percent of these newcomers will vote for you. You know Republicans get close to 90 percent of their votes from whites, so the formula for ideological conquest is simple: reduce the percentage of whites in America as much and as fast as possible. And INA65 certainly fits that bill. Non-Hispanic whites were close to 90 percent of the population in 1965.

Now they’re just under 63 percent.

And California is the model for the leftist hegemony in question. Once a solidly Republican state that launched Ronald Reagan to national prominence, it would not be carried by him in a presidential election today. The last time the state went Republican was 1988, when George H.W. Bush edged Michael Dukakis by four points. Since then no Democrat has carried the state by less than a double-digit margin; the best showing the GOP had was when it held Lurch-like John Kerry to 10 points. Obama won the state by 24 points in 2008 and 23 points in ’12. And in this year’s Republican wave election, it was considered an accomplishment that the GOP denied the Democrats supermajorities in CA’s legislative chambers.

Oh, did I mention that whites in CA are no longer even a plurality?

And here’s the reality:

Once the rest of the country looks like CA demographically, it will look like it politically.

This isn’t to say Republicans would disappear. They’d reinvent themselves as parties and politicians do, winning some elections by moving, to use our provisional terminology, “left.” It also must be mentioned that immigration isn’t the only factor in our decline; the media, academia and entertainment arena do a superb job fashioning leftist foot soldiers. And we should also note that with a world generally to the “left” of the US, it’s hard to imagine where we could find traditionalist immigrants; importing socialist Swedes, Germans and French is problematic as well. (A notable difference, however, is that while the latter assimilate into our more conservative white population, Hispanics often operate within America’s Hispanic milieu, which reinforces their socialist beliefs.)

Yet this is simply another reason why I adamantly oppose all (im)migration. When Ben Franklin famously answered the question of whether the 1787 Constitutional Convention had given us a republic or a monarchy by saying “A republic, if you can keep it,” there would have been no “ifs” about it if our nation had comprised mainly monarchical Englishmen. So the message here is simply a statement of the obvious: foreigners cannot be relied upon to preserve authentic Americanism because they’re not American. Full stop.

This is especially true when they harbor deep-seated un-American ideologies, hail from non-Western cultures and enter a multiculturalism-infected land that tells them “When in Rome…feel free to do as Ostrogoths would do.”

Despite this, most conservatives don’t get it. Imbued with what I’ve termed “immigrationism” and Proposition Nation pap, they’re very diligent about conserving the Immigration and Nationality Act status quo. An example that will shock many is Senator Ted Cruz, who last year proposed not only increasing the number of “high-skilled temporary workers fivefold” — as if there aren’t high-skilled Americans looking for jobs — but, unbelievably, also the doubling of legal immigration (the relevant portion of the video starts at 3:27):

Given that Cruz seems like a good man, I’ll just assume he’s out to lunch (in Tijuana) on this issue. But let’s be clear: if you had to pick your poison and choose just one culture-rending policy, a giant amnesty one year would be preferable to a giant legal-immigration increase applicable every year.

So what’s the bright side to amnesty?

The well-known metaphor about a frog in a frying pan of water tells us that since frogs can’t sense incremental temperature changes, a very low flame under that pan may mean the creature will remain fixed in his position until he boils to death. In contrast, turn the burner up high enough and he’ll jump out and save himself.

Along with our many other problems, “Americans” (insofar as they still exist) are enduring the slow boil of cultural and demographic genocide. And executive amnesty, as with other kinds of leftist overreach, just may serve to turn that flame up high and rouse people from their torpor.

Yet this is the dimmest of bright sides, a 1-in-50 shot whose mention is mainly valuable in service to a larger point: we do need fundamental change. We need a revolution of mind, heart and spirit in which we return to our Christian foundation and dispense with moral relativism and all its corollaries — of which cultural relativism is one. Related to this, John Jay wrote in Federalist No. 2:

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs….

The “American experiment” was never meant to be one in which we could learn if, for the first time in history, a nation could intensely balkanize itself and — by rebranding it “diversity” — survive.

I do not believe the U.S. will survive long in its present form. And when chroniclers finally write The Rise and Fall of the American Republic, they may record that the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was the most destructive legislation in her history, a turning point from which there was no turning back.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com

RELATED ARTICLE: Obama’s Unilateral Amnesty Really Will Be Unprecedented—and Unconstitutional

The Never-Ending Quest for Utopia: CONTROL by Fraud!

20141116_gruberdetail

Jonathan Gruber, Professor MIT, Obamacare architect.

I hope you had an opportunity to listen to one of the many recordings of Jonathan Gruber, designer of Obamacare. Jonathan told the world that Americans are STUPID – and therefore must be lied to, for their own good – in order to pass new laws designed to CONTROL them!! (READERS: HEADS UP! You will see CONTROL a LOT in this article!)

Jonathan Gruber and Obamacare: What His Quotes Really Tell Us … Please do not think his remarks are limited to Obamacare. This is the commonly-held view of most of the Regime, and of the Elite.

  1. YOU are not capable of making your own decisions.
  2. YOU are not capable of controlling YOUR life.
  3. YOU need someone else to CONTROL you, to determine YOUR Destiny.
  4. YOU need the Government!

I disagree, the terminology is wrong! Americans are not stupid; they are IGNORANT.

Ignorant…of what is REALLY going on behind the scenes. Ignorant…because the MSM (Main Stream Media) CONROL what they SEE in the News! Ignorant…because the American people…do not learn the BASICS in school… that the Elite CONTROL. There is a big difference. The sentence that hit me the most was when he said, “Americans have limited economic knowledge.” Therefore it is easy to fool them. Not one journalist asked, WHY?

The ROOT CAUSES of America’s problems are SCHOOLS and the Education Systems…under Elite CONTROL!

All Americans attend some form of school for the first 8 years of their lives. If schools concentrated on what they were supposed to, like reading, writing, and math – Americans would not be ignorant of economics. But instead of Basic Fundamentals, schools now contain so many social programs, I am amazed that a child can learn anything relevant at all!!

List of social programs in Schools:

Today, schools focus on the (right brain) – which enhances Emotional Responses for situations…

When a child is taught to focus on feelings and values…Eliminating Reason and Logic…COMMON SENSE and RESPONSIBILITY – LOSE OUT! (C’MON NOW, AREN’T YOU DISGUSTED?)

Instead, frustration and confusion often leading to temper tantrums – whereby our young people turn to Drugs…and a total cultural breakdown are the results.

Lying to make a point, or to sway an opinion – becomes the Societal Norm.

The desired results (outcome-based) become more important – than THE TRUTH, or the Ramifications of the ACT. This is why progressives focus on “Tomorrow.”

They can not tolerate the results of their actions, they do not filter in or assess the wake of the destruction created by their untested, unproven projects. When they are discovered and found out for their failed plans…they are angry, indignant, mad as hell, and the problem needs an investigation…None of which ever happens.

Remember Hillary’s famous remark: “What difference at this point, what difference does it make?”

The American Public is Ignorant. Ignorance occurs when knowledge is OMITTED, hidden, and conveniently…not provided. Common Core Standards (CCS) enhances Ignorance!

Confusion, leading to VIOLENCE – is often the result. The regime wants confusion and violence – because confusion will lead to MORE CONTROL!

They tell us if only we did this differently…spent more time explaining…spent more money…(That’s YOUR tax money, by the way! – another famous method of CONTROL)

They never once believe that their policies are at fault! The quest for Utopia is never-ending!

Progressives understand that if Americans knew history and understood history repeats, Americans would FORMULATE A DEFENSE…and STOP THE DESTRUCTION! That’s why CCS is VOID of American HISTORY! CCS teaches UN History!

For Example: U.S. Civil War, WWI, or WW2 are NOT even covered in CCS. CCS does teach the UN Treaty of the Seas and other key UN events. This is all a result of Bill Gates’ meddling in our education system, and making money from a contract with the UN that he arranged. Who gave him this Authority?

Gates signed a contract – with UNESCO to implement WORLDWIDE COMMON CORE STANDARDS!

Think of all the money Gates will make, forcing all of the SHEEPLE… YOUR KIDS… to think as HE commands!

That is why Progressives focus on the future…THEIR UTOPIA of CONTROL! They “kick the can” down the road, and take no responsibility or accountability…for their actions. Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow… Elites can CONTROL the future – but not the past.

They told us: Forget about No Child Left Behind (NCLB). (It was awful, kids didn’t learn!) Instead, the Elites said…We need more control…called cradle-to-grave education, and more money for technology. Scrap that old NCLB failure and let’s do a new program called “CCS” or Common Core Standards. We will give CCS more values, more feelings, more confusion, more lies. Elites never believe that the structure they promote is the problem…

Students have no foundation and can never draw conclusions by relying on their past experiences – because they never learn about the past, never learn TRUE U.S. History.

Is CCS tested? No. Will it work? No, but no one will notice – because the Elite will change the name in 4 more years. Vendors will get rich. The Elite get richer, and the middle class DISAPPEARS and becomes THE POOR. Children learn their Rights come from the Government. Americans live the Hunger Games.

In order to transform something you must first destroy it. In order to destroy it you must LIE to the people, so they will give you their power. Someone can only have power over you if you let them. We let the elite rule because that is what we are taught.

Our Ignorance…allows our rulers to subjugate us.

The Elite tell us what they want to accomplish. They want people controlled, so these people, now called “useful idiots” can be controlled and ruled in a socialist (communist) state.

How do you CONTROL 331 million people in the United States? You LIE TO THEM.

Consider the Elite’s “Playbook”: How to create a Social State, by Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: There are 8 levels of CONTROL (there’s that word again!) – that must be obtained before you are able to create a Social State. The first is the most important:

  1. Healthcare: Control healthcare and you control the people.
  2. Poverty: Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.
  3. Debt: Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.
  4. Gun Control: Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government. That way, you are able to create a Police State.
  5. Welfare: Take control of every aspect of their lives (Food, Housing, and Income)
  6. Education: Take control of what people read and listen to, take control of what children learn in school.
  7. Religion: Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools.
  8. Class Warfare: Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent, and it will be easier to take (Tax) the wealthy with the support of the poor.

Every American program is built on LIES… (Are YOU Spitting MAD, Yet?)

It does not matter what Industry, THE RESULTS ARE ALWAYS THE SAME!

  • Energy: Fossil fuels, the cheapest form of energy – is demonized.
  • Climate: Unprepared people die (which is OK with the regime) – or rely completely on their government.
  • Conservation: We will run out. YOU must control your usage – not the regime, just you.
  • Food: Inspect, regulate, control the food industry – putting producers out of business.
  • Water: We have a water shortage. We will run out. Not likely, since 75% of the earth is water.
  • School: Eliminate and alter history.
  • Foreign policy: Despise our allies, and romance our enemies.
  • Our kids are told America is at fault, humans destroy the planet.

This one is a Whopper of a LIE:

• Humans can control the weather and “make a difference” in Global Warming.

Remember THIS? – this just happened 4 DAYS ago! US-China climate accord gives hope for global agreement | Fox News. One has to consider: WHY is the U.S. making SO many concessions to “CARBON EMISSIONS REDUCTIONS” when China simply has “GOALS” to reach for. The Angry GOP Backlash to Obama’s Historic Climate Accord – The earth is entering a Cold Cycle. Who is warning you? Telling you? Preparing you? Get Prepared!! Climatologist: 30-Year Cold Spell Strikes Earth.

The problem with the Truth is… ONCE you learn it – you can’t UNLEARN it.

Now comes the hard part. You must share the TRUTH with others! Americans have a perfect opportunity to come together and say:

“I will not comply… I will not continue paying on a contract I know to be a LIE.”

– OR the likes of Gruber are RIGHT…Americans can no longer be told the truth, and are incapable of making their own decisions.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

  1. TALK and TEACH – Discuss US History with your kids. Incorporate history knowledge, books, TV historical movies, and articles in your conversations with your kids. Family discussions are CRITICAL, because your kids are NOT LEARNING about American Exceptionalism. They are NOT LEARNING about their Rights, Liberties and Freedoms they were born with as a FREE person. They are NOT LEARNING about American History. Talk with your kids in the presence of older people that lived through the Great Depression, WW2, Kennedy Assassination, Vietnam, Watergate, Iraq War…and other such key U.S. history events that impacted the lives of millions of Americans. Teach them about the CONTROL that the ELITE have over their Schools, and teach them to think independently…not to be part of the HIVE mentality. Remember, those that do not learn from History…are Doomed to repeat it.
  2. ACT – Contact your Representatives in State, Federal and local legislators. Pick an industry above. Find the committee investigating, and tell them the contract is a FRAUD, therefore Stop Payments. If they do not listen, then tell them this is the Last Vote they will ever get from you!
  3. READ – As we enter the Thanksgiving season, take time to read American Minute with Bill Federer, about the Failure of Communism in America. It failed then, and it will fail now. The rest is up to us.
  4. • Sign our petition: StopFundingFraud.com

Jonathan Gruber’s Big, Benevolent Fraud by D.W. MacKenzie

Obamacare, the noble lie, and cognitive dissonance at MIT.

It seems that critics of the so-called Affordable Care Act (ACA ) have a new ally in our efforts to expose the deficiencies of the legislation: Jonathan Gruber.

This development comes as a surprise, because Gruber was the ACA’s primary architect. He has made public remarks that expose problems with the ACA’s adoption and future operation. However, Gruber still supports the ACA and labors under the idea that it can be fixed.

Gruber admits that the ACA is a kind of fraud — that is, it was deliberately written in a misleading way. The ACA was presented as a way to increase the affordability and accessibility of health care. In reality, the ACA is a transfer scheme.

If the ACA benefits Americans, why did it need to be misrepresented? According to Gruber, transparent spending and transparent taxing are impossible: “You just can’t do it.… Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage.… Basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter.”

The ACA was written to hide the fact that it is designed as a transfer from healthier, younger people to less healthy, typically older people.

Why is a lack of transparency severely problematic? Because bureaucrats and politicians are supposed to serve the public in modern social-democratic welfare states. But why would we expect bureaucrats and politicians to actually serve the public?

Some scholars have suggested that competition in democratic elections can push politicians to serve the public, and elected politicians will therefore keep a watchful eye on bureaucrats. This is called the “median voter theorem.”

The problem is that political competition fails to discipline people in the public sector when governance is opaque. A well-informed electorate is a necessary condition for effective political competition.

Gruber is probably correct in saying that passing the ACA required misinforming the electorate. However, the opaque governance that Gruber lauds opens the door for large-scale waste and abuse by special interests. Opaque governance and a misinformed, or uniformed, electorate make it virtually certain that the ACA will be administered inefficiently, whatever one thinks of its merits.

Indeed, a lack of information causes adverse selection problems whereby the most corrupt people make the greatest efforts to rise in politics and within bureaucracies. Opaque governance thus guarantees abuse of the ACA by public officials and special interests.

What makes Gruber’s remarks particularly worthy of criticism is that he is employed as an economist — and at a top university. Worse still, he teaches public finance and policy at MIT: he really should understand the importance of transparency. And he does. Gruber is the author of Public Finance and Public Policy, chapter nine of which covers the median voter theorem. So, Gruber does understand the necessity of political openness and an informed electorate for efficiency in the public sector. Efficiency requires more than an informed electorate, but it is a necessary condition.

Anyone who understands even the basics of the median voter theorem knows full well that transparency is strictly required for efficiency. Anyone who simultaneously believes that transparency and opaqueness are both necessary for good public policy has cognitive dissonance. Jonathan Gruber has unwittingly helped reveal the incoherence of the case for the ACA.

Gruber is an economist who fancied himself able to reengineer dynamic markets through social policy. His conceit as a social engineer is matched by his disrespect for the American electorate. He thought that an opaque political process and obscure legal language could keep people in the dark. On top of that, Gruber fathered lies because he knew voters would reject the ACA if they were aware of the wrenching changes the legislation would bring. As his lies became obvious, he blamed poor legal phrasing for the federal government’s inability to hide the costly consequences of his transfer scheme behind the subsidies in the federal exchange.

It’s the conceit of the “nudger” — the classic case of an elite policymaker who thinks he is smart enough to design what’s best for you, even if you’re too stupid to understand why and too ignorant to check up on him.

Didn’t Gruber realize such monumental legislation would be under tremendous scrutiny? Didn’t he realize the painful economic effects would be felt by real voters with common sense? And didn’t he realize that it would only take pulling back one of the curtains to expose the totality of this Wizard-of-Oz-like scheme?

Fortunately, it has gotten much easier for people to become informed about the real facts concerning the ACA, as well as other social programs. Citizens will never be well-informed about all of the backroom politics and the internal operations of bureaucracies. But we can at least learn about their true nature in the abstract — and with regard to the ACA in particular.

Perhaps most importantly, we can be on the lookout for those claiming to be wizards in Washington.

20141117_mackenziethumbABOUT D.W. MACKENZIE

D. W. MacKenzie is an assistant professor of economics at Carroll College in Helena, Montana.

Greenhouse Gas Deal with China is an Attack on the American Economy

Ignore the cheers from the White House, the State Department, Mother Jones, and elsewhere over the U.S.-China greenhouse gas agreement. It’s simply another attack on abundant American energy and the economy.

Secretary of State John Kerry detailed the deal in the New York Times: “For the first time China is announcing a peak year for its carbon emissions – around 2030 – along with a commitment to try to reach the peak earlier.” In exchange, the “United States intends to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.”

Here are a few points:

1. Reason’s Ronald Bailey estimates how much the United States will have to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions under the agreement:

In 2005, the U.S. emitted the equivalent of 7.26 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. So cutting emissions by 28 percent by 2025 implies emissions of 5.23 gigatonnes in 2025, which is about the amount that the U.S. emitted in 1992. Assuming that Chinese emissions did peak in 2030, the country could by then be emitting three times more than the U.S.

2. China’s peak emissions year will be “around” 2030? Does that mean 2031, 2035, 2040? For international commitments to be meaningful and effective, they need to be precise. To put it mildly, “around” is not very precise.

3. This agreement is nonbinding and according to Reuters’ analysis is loaded with nebulous “intentions”:

The joint announcement employs language very carefully. Throughout, the operative word is “intend” or “intention”, which makes clear the statement is not meant to create any new obligations.

China’s 2030 emissions target is set in terms of a date but says nothing about the level at which emissions will peak.

4. Did China really agree to something that it expects will happen anyway? Ben White in Politico’s Morning Moneypoints to a 2012 story in The Guardian:

[B]arring any significant changes in policy, China’s emissions will rise until around 2030 – when the country’s urbanisation peaks, and its population growth slows – and then begins to fall.

5. Along those same lines, under the International Energy Agency’s baseline scenario (IEA-NPS) of greenhouse gas reductions, China’s emissions are projected to peak by 2030 anyway [see slide 17].

6. There’s plenty of international skepticism. A German newspaper commented on the deal, “[It’s] as if a grizzly bear and tiger discuss how the world can be more vegetarian.”

Add this all up and you have a one-sided agreement in China’s favor, as Karen Harbert, president of the U.S. Chamber’s Institute for 21st Century Energy said in a statement:

If actually implemented, this agreement would give an unfair advantage to Chinese manufacturers while forcing dramatic changes to America’s energy supply that will raise prices, threaten reliability, and increase the burden on hard working American families.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of workers moving coal out from a mine in Shanxi Province, China. China is the largest producer and consumer of coal in the world. Photo credit: Nelson Ching/Bloomberg.

The Four Core Beliefs of Enterprise by Lawrence W. Reed & Wayne Olson [+Video]

How to solve complex business problems.

The term tunnel vision carries such a negative connotation that no one ever really wants it, even if they’re traveling through a tunnel. We say we want to be conscious of as much of our surroundings as possible, not simply a narrow sliver. We want to perceive all the relevant factors and remain aware of new things that might improve our situation.

Alas, that’s almost always easier said than done.

Just ask Bartley J. Madden, author of a new, 122-page book, Reconstructing Your Worldview. Better yet, if you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, read the book and visit his website LearningWhatWorks.com, or watch this insightful video:

Madden has spent decades trying to understand the business world during his career in money management, investment research, and university teaching. His longtime fascination with methods of solving complex business problems led him to realize that the way we say we want to see the world and the way we actually do are two very different things. It takes a conscious, thoughtful effort to open wide our mind’s eye, so to speak. If you learn to do it systematically, the result can be a new worldview that will reshape how you notice opportunities and capitalize on them.

Nearly 40 years ago, we heard Austrian economist Israel Kirzner lecture on his specialty, entrepreneurship. He employed an analogy we’ll never forget. He asked his audience to imagine a free, dynamic economy as a place where a quiet blizzard of 10-dollar bills is raging just overhead. Most people never notice it, but one very special kind of person does: the entrepreneur. He sees the bills and musters the courage to reach up and grab one. In other words, he deploys his “entrepreneurial alertness” to seize an opportunity: to buy low and sell high, to assemble factors of production to make a product or service worth more than its input costs, or to move a good from one place to another where it’s more desired. Perhaps an even more apt analogy would be a blizzard in which most of the flying bills are fake and worthless, and only a few are “winners.” But in any event, it’s the entrepreneur whose powers of observation are great enough to see any of them at all.

Entrepreneurial alertness is essentially what Madden implores us to cultivate. We must start by recognizing what he calls “the four core beliefs” we need to solve problems in business:

  1. Past experiences shape our current assumptions.
  2. Language is perception’s silent partner.
  3. Improving any system’s performance requires that we identify and fix its key constraints.
  4. Human behavior is purposeful; we act not simply in response to stimuli (much as a ball rolls in the direction in which it’s pushed) but in a conscious, living fashion. We compare our actual experiences to our preferred experiences and then act to create new experiences that come as close to the preferred ones as possible.

These four core beliefs are more profound than Madden believes we commonly assume.

Each teaches a vital lesson. On a whole, their underlying message for economics concerns how innovation develops when the market is open to new entrants. Established businesses get caught up in the same old ways of looking at the world and the opportunities for value creation. So do government bureaucracies, but the difference is that government bureaucracies tend to institutionalize the conventional ways of looking at the world and create barriers to anyone trying to change them; private industries who fail to change will be swept away.

The book is thoroughly researched and rich with citations that allow the reader to pursue the subject in depth. Madden even delves into how people form beliefs and act on them, using the latest findings.

He beautifully illustrates the first two of the four core beliefs with a Kmart-versus-Walmart example. Kmart’s management had in their minds the word “store” and defined it in ways they’d always seen a “store” behaving and delivering profitable results for them: freestanding and run independently by its own manager. So they stuck to that business model, namely: put a big box in a big town and assume that is necessary for generating the desired economies of scale. In contrast, as Madden explains, “in Sam Walton’s worldview, each store was an integrated part of a networked system” that could create value in the wide-open small-town markets.

A “worldview” is not about one innovative idea that turns out well, but about openness to experimentation and knowledge building. Madden continues, “Walmart’s networked system of stores and distribution centers resulted in fast-paced learning and high efficiencies.… Over time, Walmart greatly expanded and improved its business processes at a far more rapid pace than did Kmart,” eventually leaving Kmart in the dust, even in the larger towns.

The third core belief is that in order to make a complex process create more value, it’s not enough to pick individual components and improve them; you have to identify where the constraints are in the process. If the bottleneck is at process B in the production line, improving the efficiency of process A will merely increase the size of the problem at process B. The problem is that the managers of process A in centralized operation have every incentive to propose “improvements” that actually create no value.

Madden follows this thought to an in-depth discussion of the merits of distributed systems over centrally planned systems, including “lean thinking” concepts, where he makes this key point: “A lean culture has a horizontal orientation in order to better coordinate work and reduce waste along the entire value streams that end with the customers.… In contrast, a command-and-control orientation is composed of vertical silos with incentives to improve local efficiencies.”

Placing this belief in a much broader context, he observes that “nature has a propensity for distributed solutions” and, echoing Hayek, “when a society’s institutions evolve through a naturally “evolutionary” process, rather than one of an imposed human design, the result tends to reflect decentralization and a selection of whatever works best.”

The fourth core belief should appeal to all those who have read Ludwig von Mises’s magnum opus, Human Action or are even moderately familiar with the central insights of the Austrian school that Mises represents. When you’re dealing with people, you’re dealing with independent actors who will respond to stimuli according to their own “control systems,” which Madden likens to a thermostat. Their reaction to something depends on whether it will move them closer to a desired state that represents their goals. So you can’t ignore the incentives — you can’t move people around like pieces on a chessboard, as Adam Smith’s central-planning “man of system” tries to do.

This is where government programs almost always fall down, but Madden makes it clear that private businesses can easily fall into the same trap if they’re not mindful — in which case, the market gives them the feedback that they’ve made a mistake, something that rarely if ever happens to the people running government programs.

In the summary video above, Madden offers an example in Michelin run-flat tires. Company managers got trapped in their historical line of thinking and their accustomed vocabulary: engineering breakthrough in tire technology leads to enormous profits. They fell in love with the run-flat technology, and so, apparently, did a bunch of industry observers. You could dispense with spare tires forever! How cool is that? Michelin failed, however, to see the total value stream ending with the customer; in particular, the company failed to take into account how the customer was supposed to get a tire repaired once he experienced a flat. Repair shops have their own control systems around whether they want to invest in the physical and human capital that would be required to handle this new product. And in the end, repair shops decided not to, so the product was dead on arrival.

One outstanding example of a dysfunctional interruption in the value stream from manufacturers to customers is the approvals process for new pharmaceuticals at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Madden has fully discussed this problem and a practical means to overcome some of the worst effects in his earlier book (see Reed’s review of Free to Choose Medicine). And in the final chapter of his current book, he demonstrates that the situation at the FDA is an excellent case study in the violation of the principles underlying the four core beliefs.

If you take Madden’s advice and reconstruct your worldview through the prism of his four core beliefs, you’re likely to think and behave more like a seasoned entrepreneur. Success becomes more probable, though never assured in an uncertain world. In an age in which changes happen fast, labor and capital are more mobile than ever, and technology opens doors widest to those who grasp it first, every little bit helps.

larry reed new thumbABOUT LAWRENCE W. REED

Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed became president of FEE in 2008 after serving as chairman of its board of trustees in the 1990s and both writing and speaking for FEE since the late 1970s. Prior to becoming FEE’s president, he served for 20 years as president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, Michigan. He also taught economics full-time from 1977 to 1984 at Northwood University in Michigan and chaired its department of economics from 1982 to 1984.

ABOUT WAYNE OLSON

Wayne is FEE’s Executive Director.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is courtesy of FEE and Shutterstock.

Being Anti-Energy is Being Anti-Humanity

Everything you need to know about how perverse and dangerous the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is summed up in its latest report. Released on November 2, it issued the same tired, old and untrue claims of “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems”

The IPCC wants the world to stop using coal, oil and natural gas, saying that they must be “phased out almost entirely” by the end of the century. The report reeks of their contempt for humanity.

Losing electricity, no matter where you live, is losing every technology that enhances and preserves your life. You lose the ability to cool or warm your home, apartment or workplace. You lose the ability to keep food safe in your refrigerator and freezer. You most certainly lose the lighting. You lose the ability to turn on your computer or television. Indeed, to use everything you take for granted.

Since the discovery and generation of energy with coal, oil and natural gas, generations have lived lives not only different from all who preceded them, but better in so many ways, not the least of which is extended life expectancy. Nations with energy are places where people live longer, healthier lives. They are also wealthier nations where the energy translates into industry, jobs, transportation, and all the other attributes of modern life.

Cover - Moral Case for Fossil FuelsAlthough we usually don’t associate energy with morality, Alex Epstein has. His book, “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels” ($27.95, Portfolio, an imprint of the Penguin Group) is the finest case for the role coal, oil and natural gas has played in our lives and the positive, emancipating impact they have had on humanity. Everyone should read it.

“I hold human life as the standard of value” says Epstein. “I think that our fossil fuel use so far has been a moral choice because it has enabled billions of people to live longer and more fulfilling lies, and I think the cuts proposed by the environmentalists in the 1970s were wrong because of all the death and suffering they would have inflicted on human beings.”

“Eighty-seven percent of the energy mankind uses every second comes from burning one of the fossil fuels: coal, oil or natural gas.” That has not stopped environmentalists from denouncing coal and oil as “dirty” or because their use generates carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. What they never tell you is how small those emissions are and that they play an infinitesimal role to influence the Earth’s weather or climate. They never tell you that the Earth has centuries more of untapped reserves. The modern world could not exist without them.

“In the last eighty years, as CO2 emissions have most rapidly escalated, the annual rate of climate-related deaths worldwide fell by an incredible rate of 98 percent. That means the incidence of death from climate is fifty times lower than it was eighty years ago.”

Epstein points to “the power of fossil-fueled machines to build a durable civilization that is highly resilient to extreme heat, extreme cold, floods, storms, and so on” to demonstrate the foolishness of those who oppose their use. Primary among them is the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. As part of its 40th session, in early November the IPCC adopted the final “synthesis” report of its Fifth Assessment Report; a full-scale update calling for the reduction of energy worldwide. They base this on the claim that “human influence on the climate system is clear.”

It is not clear. Despite the CO2 emissions, the Earth has been in a cooling cycle for the last nineteen years, during the same time the IPCC’s “climate experts” and others were telling us the Earth was going to become dangerously warm.

Epstein reminds us that “In 1972, the international think tank, the Club of Rome, released a multimillion-copy-selling book, “The Limits of Growth”, which declared that its state of the art computer models had demonstrated that we would run out of oil by 1992 and natural gas by 1993 (and, for good measure, gold, mercury, silver, tin, zinc and lead by 1993 at the latest.)

It is essential to understand that every one of the “global warming” predictions made in the 1980s and the decades since then has been WRONG. Every one of the computer models on which those predictions were based was WRONG.

A younger generation graduating from high school this year has never spent a day when the overall temperature of the Earth was warming. The Earth’s natural cooling cycle is based on a natural low cycle of solar radiation. The Sun is generating less heat. Indeed, the Earth is nearing the end of the Holocene cycle, one of warmth for the past ten thousand or more years that has given rise to human civilization.

Epstein’s book is more than just philosophical opinion. It is based on documented facts regarding fossil fuel use. At one point he quotes Paul Ehrlich who, in his 1968 book, “The Population Bomb”, declared that “the battle to feed humanity is over.” Epstein notes that in 1968 the world’s population was 3.6 billion people. “Since then it has doubled, yet the average person is better fed than he was in 1968. This seeming miracle was due to a combination of the fossil fuel industry and genetic science…” Farming today is mechanized and that requires fuel!

The claims that Epstein debunks are accompanied by the fundamental truths about fossil fuel use and science. His book, comprehensible to anyone whether they have any knowledge of science or not, should be on everyone’s reading list.

At the heart of environmentalism and its “save the Earth” agenda is the reduction, if not the elimination, of humans from planet Earth.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

The Case Against Rent Control: Bad housing policy harms lower-income people most by Robert P. Murphy

To someone ignorant of economic reasoning, rent control seems like a great policy. It appears instantly to provide “affordable housing” to poor tenants, while the only apparent downside is a reduction in the income flowing to the fat-cat landlords, people who literally own buildings in major cities and who thus aren’t going to miss that money much. Who could object to such a policy?

First, we should define our terms. When a city government imposes rent control, it means the city makes it illegal for landlords to charge tenants rent above a ceiling price. Sometimes that price can vary, but only on specified factors. For the law to have any teeth — and for the politicians who passed it to curry favor with the public — the maximum rent-controlled price will be significantly lower than the free-market price.

The most obvious problem is that rent control immediately leads to a shortage of apartments, meaning that there are potential tenants who would love to move into a new place at the going (rent-controlled) rate, but they can’t find any vacancies. At a lower rental price, more tenants will try to rent apartment units, and at a higher rental price, landlords will try to rent out more apartment units. These two claims are specific instances of the law of demand and law of supply, respectively.

In an unhampered market, the equilibrium rental price occurs where supply equals demand, and the market rate for an apartment perfectly matches tenants with available units. If the government disrupts this equilibrium by setting a ceiling far below the market-clearing price, then it creates a shortage; that is, more people want to rent apartment units than landlords want to provide. If you’ve lived in a big city, you may have experienced firsthand how difficult it is to move into a new apartment; guides advise people to pay the high fee to a broker or even join a church because you have to “know somebody” to get a good deal. Rent control is why this pattern occurs. The difficulty isn’t due to apartments being a “big-ticket” item; new cars are expensive, too, but finding one doesn’t carry the stress of finding an apartment in Brooklyn. The difference is rent control.

Rent control reduces the supply of rental units through two different mechanisms. In the short run, where the physical number of apartment units is fixed, the imposition of rent control will reduce the quantity of units offered on the market. The owners will hold back some of the potential units, using them for storage or keeping them available for (say) out of town guests or kids returning from college for the summer. (If this sounds implausible, consider just how many people in a major city consider renting out spare bedrooms in their homes, as long as the price is right.)

In the long run, a permanent policy of rent control restricts the construction of new apartment buildings, because potential investors realize that their revenues on such projects will be artificially capped. Building a movie theater or shopping center is more attractive on the margin.

There are further, more insidious problems with rent control. With a long line of potential tenants eager to move in at the official ceiling price, landlords do not have much incentive to maintain the building. They don’t need to put on new coats of paint, change the light bulbs in the hallways, keep the elevator in working order, or get out of bed at 5:00 a.m. when a tenant complains that the water heater is busted. If there is a rash of robberies in and around the building, the owner won’t feel a financial motivation to install lights, cameras, buzz-in gates, a guard, or other (costly) measures to protect his customers. Furthermore, if a tenant falls behind on the rent, there is less incentive for the landlord to cut her some slack, because he knows he can replace her right away after eviction. In other words, all of the behavior we associate with the term “slumlord” is due to the government’s policy of rent control; it is not the “free market in action.”

In summary, if the goal is to provide affordable housing to lower-income tenants, rent control is a horrible policy. Rent control makes apartments cheaper for some tenants while making them infinitely expensive for others, because some people can no longer find a unit, period, even though they would have been able to at the higher, free-market rate. Furthermore, the people who remain in apartments — enjoying the lower rent —receive a much lower-quality product. Especially when left in place for decades, rent control leads to abusive landlords and can quite literally destroy large portions of a city’s housing.

20141014_RobertMurphyABOUT ROBERT P. MURPHY

Robert P. Murphy has a PhD in economics from NYU. He is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism and The Politically Incorrect Guide to The Great Depression and the New Deal. He is also the Senior Economist with the Institute for Energy Research and a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. You can find him at http://consultingbyrpm.com/

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is courtesy of FEE and Shutterstock.

U.S. Veterans and Families Sue Six Banks Accused of Financing Iran Terror Groups

Just prior to Veterans Day, November 10, 2014, a lawsuit was filed in the Eastern Federal District Court in Brooklyn, New York against six major international banks allegedly engaged in transfers of funds with a leading Iranian bank. The defendants in the action include HSBC Bank USA, Barclays, London’s Standard Chartered Bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Credit Suisse, and London-based Iranian Bank Saderat.  The suit is on behalf of more than 200 plaintiffs Veterans and families of US service personnel and a journalist killed or maimed in Iraq. Attacks that occurred over the period from 2004 to 2008 by terrorist groups affiliated with Iran’s Quds Force and its proxy Hezbollah.  Over 80 wounded veterans are among the plaintiffs, many victims of Improvised Explosive Devices (I.E.D.).  The suit by the plaintiffs is requesting a jury trial.

The New York Times in its account of the lawsuit drew from the complaint compelling examples of the victims of Iran’s Quds Force and Hezbollah attacks in Iraq:

The sneak attack on the compound outside Baghdad in January 2007, the lawsuit said, was the work of a terrorist group “trained and armed by Iran’s Quds Force with Hezbollah’s assistance.” Once inside the compound, the group sprayed bullets and lobbed grenades, killing several American soldiers, including 20-year-old Jonathon M. Millican, who jumped on one of the grenades. Mr. Millican’s widow and father joined the lawsuit, along with the families of three other soldiers killed in that attack and a surviving soldier who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

The journalist, Steven Vincent, was kidnapped and shot in August 2005. His widow, mother and father are plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

Christopher M. Hake was on his second tour of duty in Iraq in March 2008 when an Iranian-manufactured explosive device went off near his vehicle and killed him.

The NYT noted this example of flagrant disregard by one of the six banks accused in the complaint caught evading financial sanctions against dealings with Iranian financial institutions:

The lawsuit cites a series of emails and conversations taken  from the banks’ settlements with federal prosecutors, offering a lens inside the banks’ flagrant disregard for sanctions against Iran. A Standard Chartered executive, in response to concerns raised by an employee in New York, reportedly replied: “You f–ing Americans. Who are you to tell us, the rest of the world, that we’re not going to deal with Iranians?”

The Eastern District Brooklyn federal court figured prominently in a jury verdict in the case of Almog v. Arab Bank  rendered in September 2014. The plaintiffs were 6,000 terrorist victims of more than 24 Hamas attacks involving Americans and families in Israel. The jury found the Jordan- based Arab Bank liable for transfers to the terrorist group Hamas.  The Arab Bank suit presiding federal Judge is now determining how best to handle the damages assessment phase.   Both lawsuits were filed under the 1990 U.S. Antiterrorism Act that provided a civil cause of actions for international acts of terrorism and an extraterritorial jurisdiction in federal courts.  Some of the lawyers in this current suit were also counsel in the Arab Bank matter.

There are similar cases pending against the Bank of China, NatWest and Crédit Lyonnais.  One example is the $338 million damages award against the Bank of China in 2012 in a verdict by a DC federal court in a case brought by Shurat HaDin Israel law Center of Tel Aviv headed by Nitsana Darshan Leitner and US co-counsel New York attorney Robert Tolchin.  The Center and US counsel brought the suit on behalf of the family of the late Danny Wultz of Weston, Florida who was mortally wounded in a Palestinian terrorist attack in Tel Aviv in 2006. The terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad involved in perpetrating the attack used funds provided by Iran through transfers via the Bank of China.

Washington Free Beacon report on the suit noted the arguments contained in the plaintiffs compliant:

The veterans argue that the banks helped Iran illegally move “billions of dollars” to terrorist entities that later targeted U.S. troops in attacks.

The suit alleges these banks are knowingly acting as key cogs in Iran’s efforts to evade U.S. sanctions and provide “material support” to Hezbollah and other terror groups, which, at Tehran’s behest, have carried out attacks against U.S. interests in Iraq.

“Defendants’ unlawful conduct was purposefully directed at the United States, and the conspiracy was specifically designed to effectuate the flow of billions of U.S. dollars through the United States in violation of U.S. laws, and in fact resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars illegally passing through the United States,” plaintiffs argue in the complaint filed by New Jersey-based Osen & Associates.

The veterans and their families are seeking an unspecified amount of damages from the banks as a result of their alleged support for Iranian terrorism.

The suit alleges that the international banks in question were “knowingly” part of a “conspiracy” by Iran to skirt international sanctions.

The lawsuit explains in great detail how Iran has funneled money to Hezbollah and other terror entities in Iraq. Iranian money, the suit alleges, was spent to train terrorists and arm them with IEDs and other weapons typically used to kill and wound U.S. soldiers.

The context of this latest US antiterrorism suit-Iran’s Quds Force involved with proxy Hezbollah fighting US forces in the Iraq War-comes at a time when the Administration has reached out to Iran’s Supreme Ruler, Ayatollah Khamenei seeking the Islamic  Regime’s  assistance in fighting the Islamic State, ISIS.  Already heavily engaged in Iraq advising the Iraqi national security forces on how to combat ISIS is none other than the head of the Quds Force, Qassem Suleymani, along with Hezbollah operatives.

We hope that this federal lawsuit at least finds these major banks dealing with Iranian financial institutions complicit in the terror financing of Al Quds and Hezbollah who killed Americans and maimed US vets for life.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

When Government Spreads Disease: The 1906 Meat Inspection Act by Jeffrey A. Tucker

Government has been spoiling stuff since well before the TSA.

You know the old myth about the meat-packing industry. In 1906, Upton Sinclair came out with his book The Jungle, and it shocked the nation by documenting the horror of the meat-packing industry. People were being boiled in vats and sent to larders. Rat waste was mixed with meat. And so on.

As a result, the Federal Meat Inspection Act passed Congress, and consumers were saved from ghastly diseases. The lesson is that government is essential to stop private enterprise from poisoning us with its food.

To some extent, this mythology accounts for the wide support for government’s involvement in stopping Ebola today. Not only that, but the story is also the basis for the US Department of Agriculture’s food inspection efforts, the Food and Drug Administration’s regulation of medical drugs, the central plan that governs food production, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the legions of bureaucrats who inspect and badger enterprise every step of the way. It is the founding template for why government is involved in our food and health at all.

It’s all premised on the implausible idea that people who make and sell us food have no concern as to whether it makes us sick. It only takes a quick second, though, to realize that this idea just isn’t true. So long as there is a functioning, consumer-driven marketplace, customer focus, which presumably includes not killing you, is the best regulator. Producer reputation has been a huge feature of profitability, too. And hygiene was a huge feature of reputation — long before Yelp.

Lawrence Reed deals ably with other myths of the meat-packing industry. Sinclair’s book was not intended as a factual account. It was a fantasy rendered as a socialist screed. It did drum up support for regulation, but the real reason for the act’s passage was that the large Chicago meat packers realized that regulation would hurt their smaller competitors more than themselves. Meat inspections imposed costs that cartelized the industry. That’s why the largest players were the law’s biggest promoters. Such laws almost have more to do with benefiting elites than protecting the public.

Still, there is more to this little-known history that speaks to the entire basis for government management of health. The legislation required federal inspectors to be on site at all hours in every meat-packing plant. At the time, regulators came up with a shabby method for detecting bad meat, namely poking a rod into the meat and smelling the rod. If it came out smelling clean, they would poke the same rod into the next piece of meat and smell it again. They would do this throughout the entire plant.

But as Baylen J. Linnekin points out in “The Food-Safety Fallacy: More Regulation Doesn’t Necessarily Make Food Safer” (Northeastern University Law Journal, vol. 4, no. 1), this method was fundamentally flawed. You can’t necessarily detect pathogens in meat by smell. It takes a long time for bacteria to begin to stink. In the meantime, bacteria can spread disease through touch. The rod could pick up bacteria and transmit it from one piece of meat to another, and there was no way for inspectors to know about it. This method of testing meat most certainly spread any pathogens from bad meat to good meat, assuring that an entire plant became a house of pathogens rather than having them restricted to just one carcass.

As Linnekin explains:

USDA inspectors undoubtedly transmitted harmful bacteria from one contaminated piece of meat to other uncontaminated pieces in untold quantities and, consequently, were directly responsible for sickening untold numbers of Americans by their actions.

Poke-and-sniff — incredibly a centerpiece of the USDA’s meat inspection program until the late 1990s — was, in terms of its sheer efficiency at transmitting pathogens from infected meat to clean meat, nearly the ideal device. Add to this the fact that the USDA’s own inspectors were critical of the inspection regime from the start, and that the USDA abdicated its inspection role at hundreds of meat processors for nearly three decades, and it becomes quite apparent that instead of making food safer, poke-and-sniff made food and consumers less safe.

Yes, you read that right. Poke-and-sniff began in 1906 and was common until the 1990s. The USDA’s own website recounts the career of one meat inspector who praised the shift from the old practice, a practice that persisted longer than even Soviet communism.

When people teach about this history in a conventional classroom environment, they tell the story of meat-packing horror and the act’s passage. But there the story ends. There is a pervasive lack of curiosity about what happened next. Did the regulations achieve their aims? Did the situation improve, and, if so, was this improvement due to the regulations or to private innovations? Or did the problem get worse, and, if so, can the worsening be traced to the regulations themselves? These are the sorts of questions we need to ask.

As for why bad practices last and don’t get weeded out through experimentation, this is the way it is with regulations. Once a rule is in place, no one can seem to stop it, no matter how little sense it makes. You know this if you have ever been in the TSA line at the airport. The sheer irrationality strikes me every time — and it strikes the TSA employees, too. They are taking away bottles of shampoo but allowing lighters on planes. Sometimes they confiscate a corkscrew and other times not. They test your hands to make sure you haven’t been handling bombs, but the sheer implausibility is so apparent that the inspectors themselves can hardly keep a straight face.

Whenever government imposes a rule, it begins to operate as if on autopilot. No matter how brainless, damaging, irrational, or outmoded it happens to be, the rule ends up trumping the reasoning of the human mind. This becomes a very serious matter regarding health. Ruling this sector of life, you don’t want an overlord who is unresponsive to new information and new evidence and innovation — a regime that specializes in following a routine, no matter how bad, rather than improving itself with a testable goal in mind.

This is why in societies where governments rule, all things slip into a frozen state. This is why even today Cuba seems like a tableau of the 1950s. This is why when the curtain was pulled back on East Germany and the old Soviet Union, we found societies that seemed stuck in the past. This is why the postal service can’t seem to innovate and why public schools are still structured as if it were the 1970s. Once a government plan is established, it tends to stick, even when it is not achieving its aims.

The case of poke-and-sniff in meat-packing should serve as a warning for all government regulatory measures, whether designed to protect us from disease or bring us safety or any other reason. We live in a world of change and of growing knowledge. Our lives and well-being depend on economic systems that can respond to change, extract that growing knowledge, and enable it to be used in ways that serve human needs. A competitive market economy specializes in doing just that.

ABOUT JEFFREY A. TUCKER

Jeffrey Tucker is a distinguished fellow at FEE, CLO of the startup Liberty.me, and editor at Laissez Faire Books. Author of five books, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is courtesy of FEE and Shutterstock.

5 Economic Myths That Just Won’t Die by Corey Iacono

A persistent set of economic narratives still plagues us.

Most people get their economic information through Internet memes and hit pieces filled with nonsense. A common theme is that the forceful hand of government is all that is needed to make things right.

For example, everyone “knows” that government laws ended child labor, and that the New Deal ended the Great Depression, but are these actually valid claims?

Here are five such myths that too many people just accept as true.

Myth 1. The idea that economic growth helps the poor is trickle-down economics … it doesn’t actually help them.

In a 2001 paper titled “Growth Is Good for the Poor,” economists Art Kraay and David Dollar of the World Bank found that when average incomes rise, the average incomes of the poorest fifth of society rise proportionately. This result held across regions, periods, income levels, and growth rates. In 2013, more than a decade after their original paper, Kraay and Dollar explored the relationship between economic growth and poverty again, using data from 118 countries over four decades. They came to the same conclusion. According to the economists,

This evidence confirms the central importance of economic growth for poverty reduction … institutions and policies that promote economic growth in general will on average raise incomes of the poor equiproportionally, thereby promoting “shared prosperity” … there are almost no cases in which growth is significantly pro-poor or pro-rich.

This means that policies that enhance economic growth through methods such as limiting the size of government and lowering barriers to international trade are key to alleviating poverty. Economic growth, not transfer programs, is in fact the primary driver of poverty reduction, and this empirical truth has been proved for a long time.

Myth 2. Free trade doesn’t lead to better economic outcomes in the real world.

Paul Krugman once quipped, “If there were an Economist’s Creed, it would surely contain the affirmations ‘I understand the Principle of Comparative Advantage’ and ‘I advocate Free Trade.'” However, critics of free trade, such as development economist Ha Joon Chang, have made very odd statements such as this one:

There is a respectable historical case for tariff protection for industries that are not yet profitable. … By contrast, free trade works well only in the fantasy theoretical world of perfect competition.

Comments like these are puzzling because proponents of free trade don’t assume there is perfect competition. They simply recognize that if one country can produce a product at a lower opportunity cost than another, trade between the countries (or individuals) is mutually beneficial. (This is known as the theory of comparative advantage.)

Economists have examined countless times whether or not freer trade leads to greater economic growth. In regard to trade liberalization — reform that lowers barriers to international trade — the evidence consistently shows that such reforms improve economic performance over time.

According to one study that examined 141 trade liberalizations and compared economic performance before and after liberalization (after controlling for confounding factors), “Per capita growth of countries [after]liberalization was some 1.5 percentage points higher than before liberalization, and investment rates were 1.5–2.0 percentage points higher.”

Subsequent research from Antoni Estevadeordal and Alan M. Taylor took the analysis further by comparing growth rates before and after 1990, when a wave of trade liberalizations occurred. The economists divided countries into an experimental group (the countries that liberalized trade regimes) and a control group (those that did not). According to a summary of their research, the authors “find strong evidence that liberalizing tariffs on imported capital and intermediate goods raised growth rates by about one percentage point annually in the liberalizing countries.” Research has also shown that trade liberalization has caused greater economic performance in sub-Saharan Africa, a region desperately in need of growth.

Reforms that result in freer trade generally lead to superior economic outcomes. This is a well-documented observation. Although there may be situations in which freer trade is undesirable, these situations are not the norm, and free trade policies are still the “reasonable rule of thumb,” as Paul Krugman has put it.

Myth 3. The government ended child labor. In a free market, child labor would still exist.

The assertion that government laws and regulations ended child labor is endlessly repeated and often used as “proof” that without such laws, child labor would be pervasive in the market economy. The Economic History Association (EHA) has shown this is not the case:

Most economic historians conclude that [child labor] legislation was not the primary reason for the reduction and virtual elimination of child labor between 1880 and 1940. Instead they point out that industrialization and economic growth brought rising incomes, which allowed parents the luxury of keeping their children out of the work force.

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, “While bans against child labor are a common policy tool, there is very little empirical evidence validating their effectiveness.”

Not only is there little evidence supporting the effectiveness of these laws; there is evidence that such laws actually make the families they are intended to help worse off. Research on child labor bans in India found that “along various margins of household expenditure, consumption, calorie intake and asset holdings, households are worse off after the [child labor] ban.”

Myth 4. Countries like Sweden and Denmark prove that high taxes don’t harm economic growth.

Saying that high taxation doesn’t harm economic growth because its effects aren’t superficially visible in one country, or a few, is like saying that cigarettes don’t harm an individual’s health because many young and healthy people smoke them and there are no immediately clear detrimental effects. Many factors affect economic growth. In order to see how high taxes affect growth, researchers control for confounding variables and use large national and international data sets.

According to research published by the European Central Bank that used annual data from 1965 to 2007 for 26 economies, “the effect of an increase in taxes on real GDP per capita is negative and persistent: an increase in the total tax rate (measured as the total tax ratio to GDP) by 1% of GDP has a long-run effect on real GDP per capita of –0.5% to –1%.”

Numerous other studies on government size and economic growth have come to the same conclusion. Furthermore, a study of the macroeconomic effects of Danish taxation found that

Danish taxation generates an overall efficiency loss corresponding to a 12 percent reduction in total income. It is possible to reap 4/5 of this potential efficiency gain by going from a high-tax Scandinavian system to a level of taxation in line with low-tax OECD countries such as the United States.

However, even relatively low-taxed countries like the United States are not immune to the detrimental effects of taxation. A seminal paper by Keynesian economists Christina and David Romer found that taxes are often raised during times of economic expansion and cut during times of economic downturn. This tendency makes it harder to observe the effect of taxes on economic growth. However, the Romers found that they could accurately estimate the effects of tax changes by examining those that were undertaken for reasons unrelated to economic growth. According to the Romers’ estimates, “tax increases are highly contractionary. The effects are strongly significant, highly robust, and much larger than those obtained using broader measures of tax changes.” Specifically, they find that increasing taxation by 1 percent of GDP shrinks GDP by 3 percent!

Overall, it seems clear that higher levels of taxation stifle economic growth and that countries with a higher total tax burden have slower-growing economies than countries with smaller tax burdens, holding other things equal.

Myth 5. Capitalism isn’t economically superior to socialism.

A considerable amount of research has examined how a transition from socialism (or a repressed-market economy) to a market economy (or a freer market economy) — a process known as economic liberalization — affects economic growth.

For example, using data from 140 countries over the time period 1960–2000, economists from Bocconi University compared countries that underwent economic liberalization to those that didn’t. After controlling for other relevant variables, they found that

economic liberalization is good along all dimensions: it is accompanied by better structural policies and better macroeconomic policies, and it is followed by improved economic performance. This timing suggests a causal interpretation, at least with regard to economic outcomes.

Subsequent research published in the Journal of Economic Surveys has found that “there are strong indications that liberalization … stimulates economic growth.” For a specific example, look no further than China.

Research from Oxford University’s economics department has found that China’s economic growth, which has been driving its massive poverty reduction, was fueled by trade liberalization, rapid privatization, and sectorial changes. As a result of these reforms, China’s GDP per capita grew 4.1 percentage points faster than it otherwise would have, lifting millions out of poverty.

A review of over 40 studies on the relationship between economic freedom and economic growth (with economic freedom measured using the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World Index) found that research consistently demonstrates that freer markets are robustly associated with greater economic performance. Studies have shown that economic freedom causes economic growth; the relationship is not a mere correlation.

Empirical research also finds that “countries can increase the utility of their national resources by approximately 45% simply by converting to market-based economies” and also consistently finds that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector.

Conclusion

It is often assumed that government is a tool for creating better economic and social outcomes, but what if government is actually an obstacle to these ends? The evidence cited here suggests that governments cannot simply legislate problems out of existence. In fact, intervention often exacerbates the problems it was meant to solve.

Furthermore, the assertions that traditional economic theories don’t apply to reality are false. Research shows that taxes do distort the economy, growth is good for the poor, and freer trade does lead to greater economic performance.

ABOUT COREY IACONO

Corey Iacono is a student at the University of Rhode Island majoring in pharmaceutical science and minoring in economics.

Should Google Run a City? by Mark Lutter

Let the search powerhouse experiment with governance.

Would you want to live in a private city?

No? What if Google were running the city?  Would that change your mind?  Google building and running cities is less crazy than you think.

Google has expressed interest in constructing cities, and Larry Page wants to create autonomous zones that can experiment with social rules. Combined, these two ideas have the potential to transform the world. Institutional change can jumpstart economic growth while competent, efficient administration can ensure those gains are not lost to corruption.

The idea of private cities typically invokes fears of a dystopian future, where malevolent corporations ruthlessly exploit the population for profits. Government is seen as a last defense against private tyranny. However, by replacing a nameless corporation with Google, the thinking changes. Rather than fear predation, we appreciate the benefits of efficient administration.

Companies like Google think long term. They are unlikely to sacrifice their hard-earned reputations for short-term gains. Further, Google is pragmatic. It will think outside the status quo, adopting the best policies to attract residents. Finally, Google is sufficiently big; it will not be intimidated by rent-seekers trying to live off others’ work.

Despite these benefits, many will be skeptical. People living in the United States and Europe tend to have good lives and fairly well-run cities. The recent battles between Uber and taxi cartels show the potential for improvement, but to a Westerner, the benefits of allowing Google to run cities are marginal.

The real potential for Google and others creating private cities is in the developing world. Poor countries are poor because they have predatory governments. These governments prevent their citizens from engaging in entrepreneurship. They also give monopoly privileges to their friends and family, enriching them at the expense of everyone else in society.

These restrictions typically benefit the elite of those societies, condemning the masses to poverty. Without secure property rights and the rule of law, economic development is a pipe dream. Google could offer hope.

Because Google is worldwide and sufficiently well known, it could negotiate with developing nations’ governments for institutional autonomy to run private cities. Governments would merely need to get out of the way. This may seem like a tall order: abdicating power is rare. Luckily, it is already happening.

Honduras passed a law allowing for ZEDEs (zonas de empleo y desarollo económico), or autonomous regions. ZEDEs allow Honduran regions to opt out of civil and commercial law and import a legal system of their choosing. Further, ZEDEs are able to create their own administrative systems, allowing reprieve from corruption.

Honduras is just the start. El Salvador and Costa Rica are considering creating their own autonomous regions. Whether the decision makers at Google choose to get involved is up to them. But Honduras offers a great opportunity to follow the company’s stated goals.

ABOUT MARK LUTTER

Mark Lutter is finishing his dissertation on proprietary cities at George Mason University. He is also helping to plan a ZEDE in Honduras.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is courtesy of FEE and Shutterstock.