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Posted by M. C. on July 28, 2022
If you ever want to peer into the future, look at the names of the bills passed by Congress, and then assume the opposite results for their intended goals. The “Inflation Reduction Act” will be yet another example. You can expect much more inflation if such an act is ever implemented.
For a thousand years governments around the world have proven fiat money creates inflation.
Now the US congress wants to battle rampant inflation by printing yet another $billion.
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Posted by M. C. on July 28, 2022
Hence, supply drives demand, not the other way around. Increases in government spending result in the diversion of savings from the wealth-generating private sector to the government, thereby undermining the wealth generating process. Likewise, monetary pumping sets in motion the wealth diversion from wealth generators toward the holders of pumped money.
https://mises.org/wire/government-stimulus-schemes-fail-because-demand-does-not-create-supply
By popular thinking, the key driver of economic growth is the increase in total demand for goods and services. It is also held that overall output increases by a multiple of the increase in expenditure by government, consumers and businesses.
It is not surprising, then, that most commentators believe that through fiscal and monetary stimulus, government can prevent the US economy falling into a recession. For instance, increasing government spending and central bank monetary pumping will strengthen the production of goods and services.
It follows then that by means of increases in government spending and central bank monetary pumping the authorities can grow the economy. This means that demand creates supply. However, is it the case?
In the free market economy, wealth generators do not produce everything for their own consumption. Part of their production is used to exchange for the produce of other producers. Hence, production precedes consumption, with something exchanged for something else. This also means that an increase in the production of goods and services sets in motion an increase in the demand for goods and services.
According to David Ricardo:
No man produces but with a view to consume or sell, and he never sells but with an intention to purchase some other commodity, which may be immediately useful to him, or which may contribute to future production. By producing, then, he necessarily becomes either the consumer of his own goods, or the purchaser and consumer of the goods of some other person.
Note that one’s demand is constrained by one’s ability to produce goods, and the more goods that an individual can produce the more goods he can demand. If a population of five individuals produces ten potatoes and five tomatoes—this is all that they can demand and consume. The only way to raise the ability to consume more is to raise their ability to produce more.
On this James Mill wrote:
When goods are carried to market what is wanted is somebody to buy. But to buy, one must have the wherewithal to pay. It is obviously therefore the collective means of payment which exist in the whole nation constitute the entire market of the nation. But wherein consist the collective means of payment of the whole nation? Do they not consist in its annual produce, in the annual revenue of the general mass of inhabitants? But if a nation’s power of purchasing is exactly measured by its annual produce, as it undoubtedly is; the more you increase the annual produce, the more by that very act you extend the national market, the power of purchasing and the actual purchases of the nation…. Thus it appears that the demand of a nation is always equal to the produce of a nation. This indeed must be so; for what is the demand of a nation? The demand of a nation is exactly its power of purchasing. But what is its power of purchasing? The extent undoubtedly of its annual produce. The extent of its demand therefore and the extent of its supply are always exactly commensurate.
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Posted by M. C. on July 28, 2022
Let us be clear about what is happening in Amy Wax’s case. This is not just an attack on her, though it is also that. She is being attacked as the representative of a whole set of heterodox intellectual frameworks and bodies of research. It is that set of ideas that Ruger and his ilk—indeed, all the academic purveyors of woke morality–want to destroy. They will do it one individual at a time, as this is the most feasible and practical way to advance their agenda, but the goal is not just to remove the individuals.
This was just posted yesterday at The American Mind. Slightly longer version, with a lengthier attack on the dubious moral integrity of the Southern Poverty Law Center, below.
The Anti-Intellectual Attempt to Fire Professor Amy Wax: Evidence of the Fraudulence and Professional Incompetence of UPenn Law Administration
The UPenn Law School campaign to purge Professor Amy Wax from their ranks for making public statements that challenge the emerging woke left orthodoxy in higher education is now reaching a fever pitch. Just last month, that School’s Dean Ted Ruger made a formal charge to the faculty senate to bring “major sanctions” which could include stripping of tenure and removal from her position. His bold assertion is that Wax has failed to adhere to the standards of her profession and therefore should potentially be removed from its ranks.
FIRE managed to obtain the letter Ruger sent to the faculty senate chair and posted it online. It demonstrates, with stunning and depressing clarity, just how low the level of argument and analysis is at present at the highest levels of American academia. Wokeism is destroying higher education, and it is nowhere clearer than in the astoundingly anti-intellectual rhetoric being emitted from high-level administrators such as Ruger when they are faced with perspectives with which they disagree and about which they patently know almost nothing.
People outside academia only occasionally have an opportunity to peer inside the walls of the university to see at the nuts and bolts level just what kind of foolishness is now being perpetrated there in the name of the woke revolution sweeping through American culture. Ruger’s letter is a depressing document of this phenomenon. A short tour through its contents gives insight into what higher education is becoming.
Ruger’s language is denunciatory at the most elevated level, accusing Wax of having failed utterly as an intellectual: “Much of her public persona has become anti-intellectual: she relies on outdated science [and] makes statements grounded in insufficiently supported generalizations.” But somehow, no examples of this outdated science or insufficiently supported generalizations are indicated in his letter.
The letter’s charge against Wax consists of two parts: a list of student complaints against Wax, and a collection of brief excerpts from Wax’s public speech that purportedly show how unscholarly and bigoted she is.1
Let’s look a bit at this substance, to see precisely how little substance there is to be found there.
The Student/Classroom Complaints
The claims presented in Ruger’s letter about what she’s said in class are unverified by any objective evidence. For this reason, those knowledgeable about such things must conclude that they cannot alone serve as the basis for any formal action against Wax. Putting these comments into the general context of Wax’s teaching record raises real questions. In 2015, she received a prestigious UPenn-wide Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, which involved a detailed examination of her record in the classroom and a broad solicitation of student comments. So, just a few years ago, UPenn publicly recognized that Wax was not only not an incompetent teacher; she was an exemplar among her peers of excellent teaching. What’s different now? It seems clear that it is not Wax or her teaching style that have changed in the intervening years.
Anyone who teaches in higher education knows that students these days not infrequently have ideological axes to grind (which they have not uncommonly been provided by DEI institutions on their campuses), and they often mishear or misremember what was said in such a way as to be offended by things imagined that were in fact not uttered. I have had students make claims to my superiors about things they allege I’ve said in class during Zoom meetings that were recorded, so fortunately I had objective evidence of what was said. The difference between the claim and the reality was in every case remarkable. I shudder occasionally thinking what might happen in such situations when there is no objective record to which to compare the interpretive efforts of students with hostile motives or careless attitudes to accuracy.
But it turns out that even if you take Wax’s students’ highly doubtful claims on their face, they still constitute no case for major sanctions against her. A look at just the first three claims illustrates this.
The first example given by Ruger is a student claiming that in response to a question about whether Wax agreed that blacks are inherently inferior to whites, Wax responded: “You can have two plants that grow under the same conditions, and one will just grow higher than the other.” How this statement could be seen by any rational person as something objectively psychologically damaging to this or any other student is a mystery for the ages. This is obviously not an affirmation of inherent racial inferiority in humans, as it is not even a statement about humans. It is also a true statement.
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Posted by M. C. on July 28, 2022
Perhaps the lesson from all of this, is that Science is not the thing we should be Following in novel and uncertain situations at all. Perhaps Science is not after all a window into a higher world of wisdom and knowledge, but merely a mirror upon ourselves, that will only ever tell us what we want to hear. Perhaps we will never get out of this, until we can put the Science back into the closet where it belongs, and start thinking for ourselves again.
By Eugyppius
Eugyppius: A Plague Chronicle
A leitmotif of this plague chronicle is the profound decadence and dysfunction of modern academia. Following the Science would be inadvisable even if we had some semblance of science. Instead, alas, we have a massive, overbuilt, over-enrolled university apparatus that primarily caters to the careerist concerns of students, researchers and teachers. It is a factory, not of free inquiry, but of conformity. Participants in this charade pantomime disagreement and discovery, but almost nobody ever says anything new or interesting.
For a few days now, I’ve been thinking about this PNAS article published last year on Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science. Its authors marshal data to support their proposition “that when the number of papers published each year” in a given field “grows very large,”
the rapid flow of new papers can force scholarly attention to already well-cited papers …. Rather than causing faster turnover of field paradigms, a deluge of new publications entrenches top-cited papers, precluding new work from rising into the most-cited, commonly known canon of the field.
The more Science you do, in other words, the less stereotypically “scientific” your discourse becomes.
[W]hen many papers are published within a short period of time, scholars are forced to resort to heuristics to make continued sense of the field. … [C]ognitively overloaded reviewers and readers process new work only in relationship to existing exemplars … Faced with this dynamic, authors are pushed to frame their work firmly in relationship to well-known papers, which serve as “intellectual badges” identifying how the new work is to be understood, and discouraged from working on too-novel ideas that cannot be easily related to existing canon. The probabilities of a breakthrough novel idea being produced, published, and widely read all decline, and … the publication of each new paper adds disproportionately to the citations for the already most-cited papers.
The effect is easily quantified:
[W]hen the field of Electrical and Electronic Engineering published ∼10,000 papers a year, the top 0.1% most-cited papers collected 1.5% and the top 1% most-cited collected 8.6% of total citations. When the field grew to 50,000 published papers a year, the top 0.1% captured 3.5% of citations, and the top 1% captured 11.9%. When the field was larger still with 100,000 published papers per year, the top 0.1% received 5.7% of citations within the field and the top 1% received 16.7%. The bottom 50% least-cited papers in contrast decreased in share as the field grew larger, dropping from garnering 43.7% of citations at 10,000 papers to slightly above 20% at both 50,000 and 100,000 papers per year.
Remember that papers are merely conveniently quantifiable proxies for ideas, theories and findings; and that citations are the most straightforward way to measure the attention these ideas, theories and findings receive. At scale, the scientific enterprise rapidly becomes a kind of intramural spectator sport, with the vast majority of “scientists” reduced to passively observing the dialogue unfolding among higher-ups within their own field, while most of their own work – undertaken for careerist purposes – goes unread and unnoticed.
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Posted by M. C. on July 28, 2022
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the nationwide protests it sparked over two years ago, among the other alarming developments that eventually came to light was the level of government surveillance of Americans protesting Floyd’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department. Not only was the surveillance carried out by federal, state, and local law enforcement in Minneapolis, but apparently in every state where protest activity occurred, based on prior reporting by the New York Times, The Intercept, the ACLU of Northern California, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and others.
Federal players involved in the surveillance included Customs and Border Protection, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the DEA. But one particular US government department’s involvement sparked even greater concern: the Department of Defense.
It’s been just less than two years ago that an United States Air Force Inspector General (USAF IG) report on the use of National Guard RC-26B surveillance aircraft against protesters was made public. The propellor driven, twin engine aircraft has been in US military service for many years as an intelligence collection platform, which is precisely the role in which it was used to track Americans engaged in marches and rallies after Floyd’s murder. The USAF IG’s June 2020 report on the RC-26B incidents was contradictory in terms of exactly how much potentially personally identifying data on protesters might have been collected and shared with federal, state, or local law enforcement.
The USAF IG report claimed (pp. 1-2) that “The sensors on the RC-26B can only collect infrared and electro‑optical imagery, and this imagery was not capable of identifying distinguishing personal features of individuals.” Yet deeper in the report (p. 21), the investigators conceded that “Although it is difficult in an urban environment, it appears it would be possible to connect activities to an individual. One witness described developing a ‘pattern of life’ which is a term-of-art in intelligence practice for following a person or object to discern patterns that allow forecasts of movements of that person or object…That requires some amount of discernibility among objects. For instance, a flight could observe suspicious activity, follow the person, and law enforcement on the ground could be vectored by a control center or by a law enforcement officer on-board to the individual….It is important to emphasize here, though, that there is no evidence that such a risk manifested in any of these RC-26B flights.”
Yet a National Guard Bureau white paper on RC-26B capabilities notes that “RC-26B records evidence-quality full motion video, and high resolution still frame imagery for use by the law enforcement community, host nations, and other government agencies.” And as the USAF IG report itself noted (p. 50), a plan to use a Phoenix-based RC-26B to collect full motion video on protesters to “deter planned/unplanned demonstrations, protests or looting” did not go as planned because of software compatibility issues between the RC-26B and the Phoenix Multi-Agency Coordination Center (MACC). The USAF IG report described the Arizona National Guard operations plan’s counterprotest language as “in-artfully worded,” it conceded that “Deterring protests and demonstrations, assuming they are lawful, is not consistent with constitutional rights.” In fact, planning a military operation to disrupt First Amendment protected protests was, in fact, a violation of the rights of Phoenix protesters – contrary to the USAF IG’s assertions at the time.
There are good reasons to question the thoroughness of the USAF IG’s investigation and conclusions in this case, as the Defense Department and its components have a history of spying on domestic protesters.
During the administration of President George W. Bush, the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) was caught running a de facto domestic surveillance program known as Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON) that, among other things, monitored antiwar or other protests. The Defense Department regulation that was used to authorize that program, DOD Directive 5200.27, has been in effect since at least the late Vietnam War era. While CIFA was allegedly disestablished towards the end of the Bush 43 administration, DOD Directive 5200.27 remains on the books, and thus available to authorize potential domestic surveillance against those engaged in First Amendment protected protests.
To determine the extent of the continued use of that authority since the George Floyd protests, in May 2021 the Cato Institute filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against multiple Department of Defense components for records on DOD Directive 5200.27. As of this writing, the Pentagon continues to refuse to even search for such records, claiming Cato’s request was “not reasonably described.”
The directive in question requires DOD components to maintain such records on protest incidents for at least 90 days, and in some cases far longer with official authorization. DoD’s legal tactics have one objective – to try to prevent the American public from learning the exact scope of any ongoing DOD or component surveillance of US citizens engaged in peaceful, constitutionally protected activities.
Just over a week after Cato filed its FOIA lawsuit against the Pentagon, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) revealed that DOD components – including the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) – had been buying commercially available data on American citizens, including geolocation data. The fact that the practice is apparently ongoing, combined with DOD’s refusal to cough up any information about its use of the directive at issue in Cato’s FOIA suit, should be a cause of concern for every American – and a call to action for Congress to intervene and mandate the release of the data in question.
Patrick G. Eddington, a former CIA analyst and ex-House senior policy advisor, is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: DEA, DOD, Political Surveillance | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on July 28, 2022
More corporate taxes. Corporations collect taxes as costs of doing business. Guess who takes the heat.
Bureaucrats’ dream come true. A regulation extravaganza. The fun part for the enforcers-The ever present non-compliance penalties (IRS expansion).
Not a word about reduction of government spending.
A nightmare in the making.
https://badnews.substack.com/p/a-manchin-miracle?utm_source=email
Me, I always had faith in Joseph Manchin III.
You, of course, having become a bit cynical lately, may have looked at the million dollars he and his wife rake in annually from their coal business, may have picked up on the sadistic delight he takes in killing the hopes and dreams of Democrats, then bringing them back to life only to kill them again. You may have seen all of that and lost faith. But not me.
I’m kidding, of course. I’m as stunned as you are. This evening, seemingly out of thin air, Manchin and Chuck Schumer put out a joint statement announcing they had come to terms on a deal – a bill, even – that they called the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. I can’t ever recall a major deal being announced without the Capitol Hill press corps knowing that negotiations were even taking place.
The outline of the deal, as announced by the pair, looks like this:
That $369 billion for “energy security and climate change,” if it becomes law, will change the world. It represents the biggest climate investment made by any country ever, and it will unlock potentially trillions in private capital, which is waiting on the sidelines for the types of subsidies, credits and guarantees this bill will include. It’ll also spur other countries to make their own investments, not wanting to fall behind in the industry that will dominate the next century. It’s projected to reduce carbon emissions in the U.S. by 2030 by 40 percent. That’s huge.
“An initial review of the agreement indicates that this will mark a historic direct investment in renewable energy and will unleash hundreds of billions of private investment for moonshot projects,” Rep. Ro Khanna told me this evening after the deal was announced. Khanna has spent months working with Manchin to keep him in talks, and it looks like that finally paid off. “Activists who have been insisting on getting something done on climate should feel proud that we’ve gotten to this point,” he added. I think that’s right, even if it doesn’t do everything it ought to. It at least gives humanity a shot.
Climate hawks will criticize the bill for its “energy neutral” approach – in other words, the kinds of subsidies made available for clean energy are supposed to be available to projects that clean up dirty energy too, and cleaning coal is seen by many worse than a filthy pipe dream, but as a ruse actively deployed to stall the transition to clean, renewable energy. I’d say a few things to that:
One, looking at the reality of our energy infrastructure, fossil fuels are going to be with us for a very long time. Reducing and/or sequestering their carbon emissions during the transition is essential. I don’t like that fact, but it’s the reality we’re dealt. If this money can spark some exponential technological development in that direction, we’ll all be better off.
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Posted by M. C. on July 28, 2022
Milton Frieman: Money creation is the cause of inflation, government intervention in the marketplace amplifies booms and busts.
Rose Friedman: Milton’s advocating the withholding tax during WW II is unforgivable.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Libertarian, Milton Friedman | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on July 27, 2022
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: animals, Jordan Peterson | Leave a Comment »
Posted by M. C. on July 27, 2022
Birx knew that locking a country down in response to a virus was a radical move that would never be endorsed. So, as she admits in her new book, she lied about it.
“I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection,” she told Fox.
https://mailchi.mp/ronpaulinstitute/covidlies?e=4e0de347c8
July 26 – After two years of unprecedented government tyranny in the name of fighting a virus, the prime instigators of this infamy are walking free, writing books, and openly pretending they never said the things they clearly said over and over.
Take Trump’s White House Covid response coordinator Deborah Birx, for example. She was, as the Brownstone Institute’s Jeffrey Tucker points out in a recent article, the principal architect of the disastrous “lockdown” policy that destroyed more lives than Covid itself. Birx knew that locking a country down in response to a virus was a radical move that would never be endorsed. So, as she admits in her new book, she lied about it.
She sold the White House on the out-of-thin-air “fifteen days to slow the spread” all the while knowing there was no evidence it would do any such thing. As she wrote in her new book, Silent Invasion, “I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them.”
She was playing for time with no evidence. As it turns out, she was also destroying the lives of millions of Americans. The hysteria she created led to countless businesses destroyed, countless suicides, major depressions, drug and alcohol addictions. It led to countless deaths due to delays in treatment for other diseases. It may turn out to be the most deadly mistake in medical history.
As she revealed in her book, she actually wanted to isolate every single person in the United States! Writing about how many people would be allowed to gather, she said: “If I pushed for zero (which was actually what I wanted and what was required), this would have been interpreted as a ‘lockdown’—the perception we were all working so hard to avoid.”
She wanted to prevent even two people from meeting. How is it possible that someone like this came to gain so much power over our lives? One virus and we suddenly become Communist China?
Last week in a Fox News interview she again revealed the extent of her treachery. After months of relentlessly demanding that all Americans get the Covid shots, she revealed that the “vaccines” were not vaccines at all!
“I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection,” she told Fox. “And I think we overplayed the vaccines. And it made people then worry that it’s not going to protect against severe disease and hospitalization.”
So when did she know this? Did she know it when she told ABC in late 2020 that “this is one of the most highly-effective vaccines we have in our infectious disease arsenal. And so that’s why I’m very enthusiastic about the vaccine”?
If she knew all along that the “vaccines” were not vaccines, why didn’t she tell us? Because, as she admits in her book, she believes it’s just fine to lie to people in order to get them to do what she wants.
She admits that she employed “subterfuge” against her boss – President Donald Trump – to implement Covid policies he opposed. So it should be no surprise that she lied to the American people about the efficacy of the Covid shots.
The big question now, after what appears to be a tsunami of vaccine-related injuries, is will anyone be forced to pay for the lies and subterfuge? Will anyone be held to account for the lives lost for the arrogance of the Birxes and Faucis of the world?
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