The Geography of Aging

Why Millennials are headed to the Suburbs 

by Joel Kotkin

One supposed trend, much celebrated in the media, is that younger people are moving back to the city, and plan to stay there for the rest of their lives. Retirees are reportedly following suit.

Urban theorists such as Peter Katz have maintained that millennials (the generation born after 1983) show little interest in “returning to the cul-de-sacs of their teenage years.” Manhattanite Leigh Gallagher, author of the dismally predictable book The Death of Suburbs, asserts with certitude that “millennials hate the suburbs” and prefer more eco-friendly, singleton-dominated urban environments.

Green activists hope this parting of the ways between the new generation and the preferences of their parents will prove permanent. The environmental magazine Grist even envisions “a hero generation” that will escape the material trap of suburban living and work that engulfed their parents.

Less idealistic types, notably on Wall Street, see profit in this new order, hoping to capitalize on what Morgan Stanley’s Oliver Chang dubs a “rentership society”; in this scenario millennials remain serfs paying rent permanently to the investor class.

But a close look at migration data reveals that the reality is much more complex. The millennial “flight” from suburbia has not only been vastly overexaggerated, it fails to deal with what may best be seen as differences in preferences correlated with life stages.

We can tell this because we can follow the first group of millennials who are now entering their 30s, and it turns out that they are beginning, like preceding generations, to move to the suburbs.

We asked demographer Wendell Cox to crunch the latest demographic data for us to determine where people have moved by age cohort from 2007 to 2012. The data reveals the obvious: People do not maintain the same preferences all their lives; their needs change as they get older, have children and, finally, retire. Each stage leads them toward somewhat different geographies.

Bitcoins vs. Greenbacks and/or Precious Metals

A Reality Check

By Gary North

There are conflicting stories among Bitcoins' supporters about why a Japanese programmer or team of Japanese programmers, who are known by a pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, developed the original idea for the Bitcoins software.

The primary justification for Bitcoins among libertarians is the prediction that Bitcoins will become an alternative currency to all existing central bank currencies. Bitcoins are seen as a first-stage revolt against central bank money.

In this essay, I'm going to make a series of arguments. I'm going to tell you in advance what my arguments are. You can then judge whether or not I have been successful in presenting my case. Here are my arguments.

First, the primary benefit that libertarian promoters of Bitcoins offer in justification of their theory that Bitcoins will become an alternative currency is this one: Bitcoins offer privacy. Paper money today offers a much greater degree of privacy that Bitcoins do, plus a whole series of other major advantages that Bitcoins do not offer.

Second, money is the most marketable asset. Paper money is vastly more marketable than Bitcoins.

Third, gold-based and silver-based digital currencies are more likely to become future world digital currency than Bitcoins.

Fourth, most Americans do not want privacy in their exchanges. This is manifested by the fact that they do not use the form of currency in which privacy is easily available and totally legal: greenbacks.

I will compare the advantages of Bitcoins with the advantages of greenbacks. I will then compare the disadvantages of Bitcoins with the disadvantages of greenbacks. Then I will compare Bitcoins to digital currencies that are backed by either gold or silver.

1. PRIVACY

Here, I discuss the price of buying privacy.

Greenbacks. There are three ways that anyone with a bank account in the United States can obtain greenbacks. First, he can walk into his bank, fill out a request for greenbacks, hand it to the teller, and the teller will hand over a specific quantity of paper money. Second, he can drive up to a booth in the bank's parking lot, put a check into a tube, put the tube back into a reception box, and within a couple of minutes, the tube will come back with a specified amount of paper money in it. Third, an individual can walk over to an ATM machine, specify how many dollars he wants, run his bankcard through the machine, and will immediately receive his paper money.

The Expanding scandal of the Nobel peace prize

A modern definition of Peace

By Fredrik S Heffermehl 
OSLO - A March 2012 decision by the Swedish authority supervising foundations is a ticking box of dynamite under the Nobel Peace Prize. Even presented in an official, open document, the decision has not reached the general public and become the news story it actually is. 

The order implies that the decision to award the 2013 Nobel to the bureaucrats enforcing the ban on chemical weapons, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), is illegal. 

It is true, as the citation of OPCW mentions, that disarmament was important to Alfred Nobel. But why is it the secretive committee's best-kept secret that Nobel's will included a recipe for a weapons-free world? 

Nobel did not believe in civilizing war, reducing a weapon here and an army there; he was quite specific when, in his 1895 will, he described a prize for "the champions of peace" seeking to abolish all weapons in all nations, as an alternative to militarism and military forces. With terms like the "brotherhood of [disarmed] nations", he used language that anyone familiar with the history of the peace movement will recognize. 

Even though its secretary is a historian, the Norwegian Nobel Committee chooses to ignore that the kind of recipients Nobel had in mind were the Austrian baroness Bertha von Suttner, author of the bestseller Lay Down Your Arms, and her political friends. 

In the last years of his life, Nobel joined Suttner's Society of Friends of Peace and gave substantial financial support to this Austrian society and the (still existing) International Peace Bureau, and - very important to understanding his purpose in setting up a peace prize - promised Suttner to "do something great" for her movement. 

Those Who Can't, Govern.

Don't just do something. Stand there.

by Mark Steyn
For much of last year, a standard trope of President Obama's speechwriters was that there were certain things only government could do. "That's how we built this country — together," he declared. "We constructed railroads and highways, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. We did those things together." As some of us pointed out, for the cost of Obama's 2009 stimulus bill alone, you could have built 1,567 Golden Gate Bridges — or one mega–Golden Gate Bridge stretching from Boston to just off the coast of Ireland. Yet there isn't a single bridge, or a single dam ("You will never see another federal dam," his assistant secretary of the interior assured an audience of environmentalists). Across the land, there was not a thing for doting network correspondents in hard hats to stand in front of and say, "Obama built this."

Until now, that is. Obamacare is as close to a Hoover Dam as latter-day Big Government gets. Which is why its catastrophic launch is sobering even for those of us who've been saying for five years it would be a disaster. It's as if at the ribbon-cutting the Hoover Dam cracked open and washed away the dignitaries; as if the Golden Gate Bridge was opened to traffic with its central span missing; as if Apollo 11 had taken off for the moon but landed on Newfoundland. Obama didn't have to build a dam or a bridge or a spaceship, just a database and a website. This is his world, the guys he hangs with, the zeitgeist he surfs so dazzlingly, Apple and Google, apps and downloads. But his website's a sclerotic dump, and the database is a hacker's heaven, and all that's left is the remorseless snail mail of millions and millions of cancellation letters.

For the last half-century, Obama has simply had to be. Just being Obama was enough to waft him onwards and upwards: He was the Harvard Law Review president who never published a word, the community organizer who never organized a thing, the state legislator who voted present. And then one day came the day when it wasn't enough simply to be. For the first time in his life, he had to do. And it turns out he can't. He's not Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos. And Healthcare.gov is about what you'd expect if you nationalized a sixth of the economy and gave it to the Assistant Deputy Commissar of the Department of Paperwork and the Under-Regulator-General of the Bureau of Compliance.

The Economy of the Future

Posterity cannot vote against us, but we can vote against them.

BY JR NYQUIST

In Niall Ferguson’s book, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, he quotes one of my favorite passages from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France where Burke explains that “one of the first and leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated is — that [people] should not think it among their rights to cut off the entail or commit waste on the inheritance [of posterity] by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society, hazarding to leave those who come after them a ruin instead of an habitation….” Burke added that society is a partnership between the living, the dead, and the unborn. About this partnership Ferguson wrote, “In the enormous inter-generational transfers implied by current fiscal policies we see a shocking and perhaps unparalleled breach of precisely that partnership.”

Our economic future is now threatened by the government’s inability to control public spending. The developed world is going deeper and deeper into debt, sacrificing the future to the present. Already in the 1890s the Irish historian and political theorist William Edward Hartpole Lecky saw that increasing government taxation and expenditure was a trend which might eventually lead to bankruptcy on a massive scale. He believed government indebtedness was a serious and long-term threat to liberty and prosperity; for when a government borrows it is stealing from the future. Even worse, when such a theft is accomplished in the name of equality, warned Lecky, it only proves that “democratic tendencies are distinctly adverse to liberty.” Such a realization is unsettling, and we do not know how to fix what now seems broken.

If we return to Burke’s quotation, above, we today find that the partnership between the living, the dead, and the unborn has given way to the selfishness of the moment. The unborn have no vote and the U.S. Constitution never really protected posterity from the vagaries of the democratic present. Supposedly we are to feel a natural concern for the future, and this was to restrain our behavior. But our feelings for the future are clearly attenuated. Perhaps we don’t even believe that the future will come. But when it comes let us admit that the banks will be empty. Uncle Sam will be broke. Every taxpayer will be stripped bare. And why must this be? The answer is given at every election by our leading politicians. Social justice requires solutions now, regardless of the future cost; for everyone must have healthcare and every country in the Middle East must have democracy; and it’s all very expensive, of course, so we settle the bill on posterity.

Posterity cannot vote against us, but we can vote against them. If we were decent folk this would not happen. But we aren’t decent. Not any longer. Let us therefore eat up our inheritance and leave nothing for our children. Such is the logic of our system of government. Such is the logic of our governors – those great visionaries. The politics of our time is about arranging the economy in such a way that our children will pay. Who, after all, can stop us from doing this? We are determined. It is already largely accomplished. The system of the Founding Fathers, which was designed to limit the power of the government, has been subverted by a generation that wants everything for itself now.

Recent testimony before a Congressional Committee offers fascinating insight into the breakdown of limited government in America. Congressman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) recently put a question to legal analyst and scholar Jonathan Turley: “How does the president’s unilateral modification of acts of Congress affect both the balance of power between the political branches and the liberty interests of the American people?”

Pope Francis: the new King of Italy

In a country with little faith in politics, the 'people's pontiff' has become Italy's de facto head of state.

By PATRICK WEST

Much has been written recently about how Pope Francis has become a new pin-up for progressives, anti-capitalists and those who feel that the US president, Barack Obama, has disappointed the poor and downtrodden. It’s an interesting turn of events for the papacy, a hierarchical institution that normally makes the headlines for the wrong reasons: paedophilia, clerical cover-ups and its unfashionable stance on women and homosexuality.

The ‘Austerity Pope’, who shuns the traditional opulence of the role, has certainly tapped into today’s spirit of banker-bashing, non-judgementalism and inclusion (even if many Catholics rather like a pope that pontificates), but another more curious development is afoot. This is that Francis has, in all but name, become Italy‘s new monarch. In a country where politicians are abhorred like nowhere else in Europe, he is the figure most Italians look up to for guidance, inspiration and leadership.

Pope Francis made the first state visit of his pontificate last month. He travelled two miles to Italy’s presidential palace, where he told President Giorgio Napolitano of his solidarity with Italy and the challenges it faces on immigration, poverty and hard-up families. Francis also recalled his visit to Lampedusa, the island off which more than 300 Eritrean refugees drowned in October.

The Pope’s intervention after that disaster – ‘Pope Francis says Lampedusa migrant boat disaster a “disgrace”’ read a headline in the Mirror – achieved far greater global coverage than President Napolitano’s. Indeed, the Pope’s visit had its direct parallel with the visit to Santiago di Compostela by King Carlos of Spain, following a train crash there in July. Providing comfort and hope is what heads of state do, and it’s what Pope Francis basically does for Italians.

The Right to Our Own language

For $100K, You Would At Least Think That College Grads Could Write

By George Leef

Suppose you sent your daughter to a music camp—an expensive camp lasting months. She had said that she wanted to learn the violin, so you bought her a nice one and sent her off to camp.

Upon her return, you ask how the camp was and she replies, “Great! We studied lots of stuff about music and the violin.” Then you ask her to play something.

“Well, we didn’t play much and I still don’t know how to tune my instrument. But it was still a terrific experience!”

You would probably think that a music camp ought to concentrate on essentials first—tuning, scales, simple pieces—before moving on to music theory, music history, conducting technique, and so on.

For many American students, college is like that music camp. They take lots of courses and study lots of stuff (or at least seem to), but don’t even learn how to use the English language well. You might think that would be a top priority, but actually it’s not a priority at all.

A recent CNBC article, “Why Johnny can’t write, and why employers are mad” puts a spotlight on this remarkable omission. Companies are trying to fill many job openings but find that hard, even with lots of un- and under-employed college graduates looking for work. “Often,” writes author Kelley Holland, ”the mismatch results from applicants’ inadequate communication skills. In survey after survey, employers are complaining about job candidates’ inability to speak and write clearly.”

She quotes Brandeis University professor William Ellet, who says that the neglect of writing starts early in school and often continues straight through college: “Nobody takes responsibility for writing instruction.”

From personal experience, I can attest that he’s correct. Many students enter college with amazingly poor writing ability, owing to the fact that no one paid much attention to their writing while they were in their K-12 years. Once I had a student come to my office with her test in hand, a test on which she had scored very poorly on all three of the essay questions. “But I never had to write essay answers before,” she complained. Throughout her previous years of schooling, she had taken almost nothing but true-false and multiple-choice tests.

Changes in South African Inequality During Mandela’s Life

Income disparity in South Africa is larger now than under Apartheid

BY MARC CHANDLER

This Great Graphic shows how the average income and population by racial group changed during the life of Nelson Mandela. It comes from The Economist.

It illustrates a sad fact. Income disparity in South Africa is larger now than under Apartheid.

There have been joint and distributional gains since the end of Apartheid. The distributional gains have gone disproportionately to white and Asian South Africans.

Economically, the challenge is not racism per se, but governing issues, education quality and a skills shortage among South African blacks. Black empowerment has been modest and appears to be limited to a relatively small group that is politically connected.

Sadly, South Africa, post-Apartheid, is among the most unequal countries in the world. It may be beyond the ability of the one-party rule of the African National Congress, with its weak leadership, cronyism, and rent-seeking incentives. 

Why the Jews left their Arab lands

Jews who had been present in Arab Muslim countries for a 1,000 years were squeezed out in the span of one generation

By David Bensoussan 

There has been a Jewish presence in Arab-Muslim countries since well before Islam was introduced and it dates back to before the 6th century before the current era. These communities have disappeared or are in the process of disappearing in the majority of Arab-Muslim countries. In fact, 865,000 Jews found themselves excluded in the very countries they were born in and felt that they had to leave. [1,2] 

The traditional legal status of non-Muslims in Muslim countries
Non-Muslim minorities in Muslim countries have the status of dhimmi, which means "tolerated" or "protected". This flows from the assertion that Jewish and Christian scripture was distorted by their unworthy depositories. It is legislated under the Pact of Umar which was amended several times with the addition of other discriminatory measures. 

A dhimmi is in an inferior position within Muslim society: they have special taxes, wear recognizable clothing, are the subject of humiliating measures, and do not have legal status when they are involved in a legal matter involving Muslims. Shi'ite Islam considers Jews to be a source of impurity. While the conditions of Jews have differed between countries, some features overlap for Jews in Morocco, and in the Ottoman and Persian Empires. 

In the 19th century, several travellers, consuls and educators, sent out by the Alliance Israelite Universelle, sent back alarming reports on the situation of Jews, including the following: daily humiliation, objects of scorn, submissive to the point of atrophy, constant insecurity, abductions, densely populated Jewish quarters, dramatic impoverishment and seriously unsanitary living conditions. They described nightmarish fanaticism on the one hand and resignation on the other.   

The difficult circumstances of Jews, who made up 0.5% to 3% of the population, depending on the country, was also raised by Muslim chroniclers. Jews automatically became the scapegoats whenever there was political instability, a military defeat or difficult economic conditions, as well as drought. Massacres and plundering happened on a regular basis. [3] 

Putin the Perónist

Will Putinism survive Putin?

by NINA L. KHRUSHCHEVA

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been compared to many strongmen of the past – Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, to name a few. But, after nearly 14 years in power, perhaps the best comparison now may be a transgender cross between the former Argentine leader Juan Perón and his legendary wife, Eva (“Evita”).

In the early 1940’s, Colonel Perón, as Minister of Labor and Secretary of War, was a “gray cardinal” to Argentina’s rulers. Before communism collapsed in 1989, Colonel Putin, also memorably gray, was a devoted KGB operative, entrusted with spreading disinformation and recruiting Soviet and foreign agents in East Germany.

At the labor ministry, Perón initiated social reforms, including welfare benefits for the poor. Although his motivation, at least in part, may have been a desire for social justice, Perón was, in effect, bribing the beneficiaries to support his own rise to power and wealth. With his beautiful and outspoken wife – a “woman of the people” – at his side, Perón was able to persuade voters in 1946 that, as President, he would fundamentally change the country.

He was as good as his word. Perón’s government nationalized banks and railroads, increased the minimum wage and improved living standards, reduced the national debt (for a while at least), and revived the economy. Argentina became less reliant on foreign trade, though the move toward autarky eventually undermined growth, causing the country to lose its position among the world’s richest.

During this period, Perón also undermined freedom of speech, fair elections, and other essential aspects of democracy. He and his emotional wife spoke publicly against bourgeois injustices and luxury, while secretly amassing a private fortune. Finally, Perón was ousted in 1955, three years after the death of Evita, his greatest propagandist.

Green Power Gridlock

Why Renewable Energy Is No Alternative

By Larry Bell

Since just about everything we do and the equipment needed to support it depends upon a source of energy, wouldn’t it be great if someone would invent perpetual motion machines that  can  generate all we want without consuming any resources or producing pollution? Okay, some of you are doubtless saying: 

“Yes, and they already exist. There are wind turbines and solar power systems that can do that if we build enough of them.”

Sorry…but it just isn’t that easy.

First of all, without reversing progress back to the Stone Age (and even then, remember those smoky caves), we couldn’t create adequate numbers of either or both  to accommodate modern power demands regardless how much conservation we practiced. One constraint is suitable land area. There simply aren’t enough appropriate wind and solar site locations to make that happen. Another limitation is power supply unreliability. For example, recharging those nifty plug-in electric cars would present a big problem when the wind isn’t blowing, at night and when it’s cloudy.

There are also such unfortunate matters to consider as high development and operations costs, low output efficiencies, and the fact that environmental groups and near-by landowners fight them tooth-and-nail in the courts.

I’ve discussed all of these issues at some length in other articles, and won’t dwell on them again here.  Instead, let’s revisit that previously-mentioned output reliability limitation on renewable power dependence alone, and just hypothetically imagine that installations and outputs will be pretty much limitless.

In other words, contemplate renewable energy (wind + solar) as true power source “alternatives” to fossils, nuclear and hydro which currently provide more than 96 percent of all U.S. electricity. Only about 3.4 percent now comes from wind, and about 0.11 percent from solar.

Grid Balancing On a High Wire:

Managing the uninterrupted transfer of electrical power from myriad sources wherever and whenever it is needed is a hugely complicated challenge. It’s one thing when the principal supply sources use gas, heat or hydraulically-driven turbines which provide constant, unfluctuating outputs that can be adjusted and counted upon independent of weather or season.

The Liberty of Addiction

Troubled Spirits and Weak Flesh

by Theodore Dalrymple        

Celebrities do not interest me, in part because I often do not know who they are. Not having had a television for forty years, and having survived quite happily without one, people apparently world famous are to me completely unknown, either by sight or sound; while those figures whom I consider important are often comparatively obscure and unknown to millions. I count myself lucky: there is evidence that those who interest themselves in the lives and doings of celebrities are unhappier than those who do not, though in which direction the causative relationship, if any, lies I cannot be certain.

However in the modern world, unless you are a complete hermit, celebrities, or rather news about celebrities, will come to you regardless of your wishes or interest. And even I, who have neither radio nor television, could not altogether avoid some knowledge of the current trial in England of two Italian sisters, former servants of Charles Saatchi and Nigella Lawson, who are accused of having defrauded the couple of $1 million by the unauthorized use of the couple’s credit cards.

Mr Saatchi was an advertising magnate, now art collector and dealer, and his wife is a famous television cook and author of best-selling cookery books. Evidently they lived in a world in which $1 million can go missing without anyone really noticing.

The defense case of the two accused is that Nigella Lawson knew and approved of their use of the credit cards, on condition that they did not tell her husband of her use of cocaine, which they claim was heavy and persistent. She spent several hours in the witness box being examined by the lawyer for prosecution and cross-examined by the lawyers for the defense.

One of the latter asked her whether she has ‘a drug problem,’ to which she replied that she had ‘a life problem.’ The lawyer asked her whether that is what she wanted to say under oath, to which she replied that it was.

I am glad that she stuck to her guns, for to have admitted that she had ‘a drug problem’ would have been to imply that the problem was with the drug rather than with the person taking it (or them). And this would have been to get everything exactly the wrong way round. It is not the drug that takes the person but the person that takes the drug. Therefore Nigella Lawson was being absolutely honest when she said she had a life and not a drug problem.

Currency War Means Currency Suicide

There is one country that is speaking out against this madness: Germany

by Patrick Barron

What the media calls a “currency war,” whereby nations engage in competitive currency devaluations in order to increase exports, is really “currency suicide.” National governments persist in the fallacious belief that weakening one’s own currency will improve domestically-produced products’ competitiveness in world markets and lead to an export driven recovery. As it intervenes to give more of its own currency in exchange for the currency of foreign buyers, a country expects that its export industries will benefit with increased sales, which will stimulate the rest of the economy. So we often read that a country is trying to “export its way to prosperity.”

Mainstream economists everywhere believe that this tactic also exports unemployment to its trading partners by showering them with cheap goods and destroying domestic production and jobs. Therefore, they call for their own countries to engage in reciprocal measures. Recently Martin Wolfe in the Financial Times of London and Paul Krugman of the New York Times both accuse their countries’ trading partners of engaging in this “beggar-thy-neighbor” policy and recommend that England and the US respectively enter this so-called “currency war” with full monetary ammunition to further weaken the pound and the dollar.

I am struck by the similarity of this currency-war argument in favor of monetary inflation to that of the need for reciprocal trade agreements. This argument supposes that trade barriers against foreign goods are a boon to a country’s domestic manufacturers at the expense of foreign manufacturers. Therefore, reciprocal trade barrier reductions need to be negotiated, otherwise the country that refuses to lower them will benefit. It will increase exports to countries that do lower their trade barriers without accepting an increase in imports that could threaten domestic industries and jobs. This fallacious mercantilist theory never dies because there are always industries and workers who seek special favors from government at the expense of the rest of society. Economists call this “rent seeking.”

A Transfer of Wealth and a Subsidy to Foreigners

As I explained in Value in Devaluation?, inflating one’s currency simply transfers wealth within the country from non-export related sectors to export related sectors and gives subsidies to foreign purchasers.

French Industrial Output Drops Unexpectedly, As Usual.

France Finance Minister in Complete Denial

By Mike "Mish" Shedlock

I am in a near-constant state of amusement regarding what economists and analysts expect vs. what happens. A perfect example came up today.

MarketWatch reports French Industrial Output Drops Unexpectedly. 

 French industrial output dropped unexpectedly in October for the second month in a row, data from national statistics bureau Insee showed Tuesday, providing a further indication of a weak start to the final quarter of 2013 in the euro zone.

Industrial production in the currency bloc's second largest economy fell 0.3% in October from September, when it also fell 0.3%, Insee said. Analysts polled by Dow Jones Newswires had expected a 0.2% rise in October.

The October decline confirms a steady shrinking of output in industry. Over the three months through October, industrial production was 0.6% below the previous three months, Insee said.

The disappointment comes after separate data showed Monday that German industrial production dropped 1.2% in October from the previous month.

Why Was This Unexpected?
This decline should have been completely expected. I can give you three reasons.

1.  On December 2, the Markit France Manufacturing PMI final data showed "France PMI sinks to five month low as output and new orders fall at sharper rates".

2.  On December 4, the Markit France Services PMI final data showed "French service sector slips back into contraction in November".

3.  On December 4, the Markit Eurozone Composite PMI final data showed "Eurozone growth slows further as France and Italy suffer renewed contractions".

If you are looking for a 4th bonus reason, please pencil in "Francois Hollande" and all the socialist ministers in his government.

The State Causes the Poverty It Later Claims to Solve

The paper money system is at the center of the growing income inequality and expanding poverty rates

by Andreas Marquart

If one looks at the current paper money system and its negative social and social-political effects, the question must arise: where are the protests by the supporters and protectors of social justice? Why don’t we hear calls to protest from politicians and social commentators, from the heads of social welfare agencies and leading religious leaders, who all promote the general welfare as their mission?

Presumably, the answer is that many have only a weak understanding of the role of money in an economy with a division of labor, and for that reason, the consequences of today’s paper money system are being widely overlooked.

The current system of fractional reserve banking and central banking stands in stark opposition to a market economy monetary regime in which the market participants could decide themselves, without state pressure or coercion, what money they want to use, and in which it would not be possible for anyone to expand the money supply because they simply choose to do so.

The expansion of the money supply, made possible through central banks and fractional reserve banking, is in reality what allows inflation, and thus, declining income in real terms. In The Theory of Money and Credit Ludwig von Mises wrote:

The most important of the causes of a diminution in the value of money of which we have to take account is an increase in the stock of money while the demand for it remains the same, or falls off, or, if it increases, at least increases less than the stock. ... A lower subjective valuation of money is then passed on from person to person because those who come into possession of an additional quantity of money are inclined to consent to pay higher prices than before.[1]

All The Plans We Make For Our Futures Are Delusions

We love to tell ourselves how smart we are. It’s time we walk that talk.

by Raúl Ilargi Meijer 
What worries me most about the world today, in the last weeks before Christmas and New Year’s Day 2014, is that all the plans we make for our futures and more importantly our children’s futures are DOA. This is because nobody has a clue what the future will bring, and that’s more than just some general statement. Is the future going to be like the past or present? We really don’t know. But we do exclusively plan for such a future. And that’s not for a lack of warning signs.

One might argue that in the western world over the past 50 years or so, we’ve not only gotten what we hoped and planned for, but we’ve even been to a large extent pleasantly surprised. In a narrow, personal, material sense, at least, we’ve mostly gotten wealthier. And we think this, in one shape or another, will go on into infinity and beyond. With some ups and downs, but still.

While that may be understandable and relatively easy to explain, given the way our brains are structured, it should also provide food for thought. But because of that same structure it very rarely does.

The only future we allow ourselves to think about and plan for is one in which our economies will grow and our lives will be better (i.e. materially richer) than they are now, and our children’s will be even better than ours. If that doesn’t come to be, we will be lost. Completely lost. And so will our children.

The ability of the common (wo)man to think about the consequences of a future that doesn’t include perpetual growth and perpetually improving lives (whatever that may mean), is taken away from her/him on a daily basis by ruling politicians and “successful” businessmen and experts, as well as the media that convey their messages. It’s all the same one-dimensional message all the time, even though we may allow for a distinction between on the one hand proposals, and their authors, that are false flags, in that their true goal is not what is pretended, and on the other hand ones that mean well but accomplish the same goals, just unintended.

This all leads to a nearly complete disconnect from reality, and that is going to hurt us even more that reality itself.

We extrapolate the things we prefer to focus on in today’s world, with our brains geared for optimism, into our expectations for the future. But what we prefer to focus on is, by definition, just an illusion, or at best a partial reality. We don’t KNOW that there will be continuing economic growth, or continuing sufficient energy supplies, or continuing plenty food. Still, it’s all we plan for. Not every single individual, of course, but by far most of us.

Obamacare Is Dead. Long Live Obamacare!

Squaring the circle

By Victor Davis Hanson

In the next 90 days, the Obama administration will have to declare victory and then abandon most of Obamacare. 

The legislation defies the laws of physics—more and broader coverage for more people at less cost—as well as logic: Young people, on average as a cohort with higher debt and less employment, will pay more for coverage they do not use much to subsidize others, often better off, to pay less for coverage they use a lot. It will be interesting how the administration pulls it off, given its past record of often being successful at this sort of dissimulation.

The “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”—despite the euphemistic name, the legislation has caused millions to lose their coverage and upped the costs for millions more—is a stone around the necks of Democratic congressional candidates, and something political will have to be done within the next year to address it. The Obama administration’s first impulse will probably be haphazard and periodic non-compliance with the law in the manner of its treatment of the employer mandate, and, for that matter, all sorts of other “settled” legislation that, for political reasons, it simply chose not to enforce, from pre-election border enforcement and the Defense of Marriage Act to the contractual order of the Chrysler creditors. In that regard, the administration might table the individual mandate or administratively change the wording of required insurance protocols to let people keep their old plans that were recently dismissed as “bad apples” or “junk.” Maybe they could call all that “pro-choice,” or “good apples.”

Johnny took his (imaginary) gun

Quivering in Place

By Mark Steyn

Further to the unarmed man who went on a shooting rampage, we now have the schoolboy suspended for bringing an imaginary weapon to school:

A fifth grader in Pennsylvania has been suspended for shooting an imaginary arrow at a classmate. The 10-year-old also faces possible expulsion.

The Rutherford Institute, which is defending Johnny Jones, says he was told he violated the school’s zero tolerance policy on weapons.

Little Johnny had, in fact, zero weapons, but that’s no reason for imaginary educator John Horton not to destroy the l’il tyke’s life:

Principal John Horton contacted Ms. Jones soon thereafter in order to inform her that Johnny’s behavior was a serious offense that could result in expulsion under the school’s weapons policy.

It would be interesting to fire an imaginary arrow at Principal Horton’s crotch and see whether he hops around howling in agony. But, for the students terrorized by this insanity, these stories are not funny: A man who’d do such a thing really shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near children. 

‘You Must Be Sodomized’

You can't make this thing up

By Jonah Goldberg

Now, at first I thought this was a hoax. But it appears it isn’t. Apparently a fellow writing into a Jihadi chat show wants to do “martyrdom operations.” The sheikh he talked to says they’ve got a great new technique to blow up infidels. We hide explosives up your butt. There’s just one hitch. You’ve got to be repeatedly sodomized in order to be able to accommodate the explosive. So, the questioner wants to know if it is permissible for him to be regularly rogered, if doing so makes his posterior more amenable to hiding explosives. The fellow on camera, Shiite cleric Abdallah Al-Khilaf, says that even though sodomy is forbidden if it is necessary for jihad, well, then it is required. Because jihad is the highest obligation.

Now, what I find hilarious here is that it never occurs to anyone that there might be some kind of technological work-around short of repeated sodomy. You know, maybe there’s a device or a technique, something that is a little less unpleasant, inconvenient or forbidden than straight-up buggery? Nope. Gotta go with the sodomy. The Saturday Night Live skit writes itself.

Jihadi: What if we make the bomb smaller?Sheikh: What? That’s crazy. Sodomy is the only way.Jihadi: Couldn’t I use replica of a male, well, you know. In private like . . .Sheikh: Shh!  Let’s not even discuss it.Jihadi: What if I’m willing to tolerate a lot of discomfort when it comes time for the martyrdom operation? I mean, it’s my choice. I am blowing myself up after all. What’s a little discomfort?Sheikh: You’re not hearing me. This is the way it has to be. Don’t you want to murder infidels?

The Dark Side of Human Equality

Everyone should suffer just as much as me!

By Theodore dalrymple

It has long been my opinion that all notions of human equality, other than that of formal equality before the law, are destructive of human intelligence and sensibility. My opinion was confirmed recently when I read an editorial in the Lancet, one of the two most important general medical journals in the world.

The title of the editorial was “Equity in Child Survival.” I could have written the editorial myself from the title alone, so utterly predictable was its drift:

Although Indonesia has reduced child mortality by 40% during the past decade, data from 2007 show that children in rural areas were almost 60% more likely to die than those living in urban ones, while those in the poorest 20% were more than twice as likely to die as those in the richest 20%, and girls were 20% more likely to die than boys.

Note here that even if inequality were the same as inequity, there is nothing in these figures to show that inequity had increased in Indonesia during the decade, or to show that it had not actually decreased; and if equity in this sense were an important goal in itself, it would matter little whether the health of the poorest improved, or the health of the richest deteriorated.

In a country the size and complexity of Indonesia, with hundreds of inhabited islands, some of them very remote, it is hardly surprising that there should be quite wide geographical variations in health, wealth and productivity. It is no more inequitable that there should be these variations than that the French should have so much better health than the Americans, or for that matter than the Bangladeshis.