Finally, a Presidential Penny Policy.

Seventeen years ago, I noted that minting pennies was a drain on the Treasury, and forecast an end to the practice within the next decade. Like most of my predictions, I was over a decade ahead of the game, as it is only now that President Trump has indicated that US Pennies will no longer be produced.

Nickel and pencing us to death

I was in the store the other day where the cashier had run out of pennies, and was giving out change in nickels to the person ahead of me at the checkout. I pointed out that there were plenty of pennies (and a few coins of a more valuable denomination) in the 'penny jar' which is often found at the checkout counters of small stores. But the cashier wouldn't touch those pennies; apparently using them for any other purpose than providing a cash-strapped customer with access to free pennies needed to complete a purchase is culturally unacceptable. I intended to put a few of those pennies, and maybe even some of the larger denominations, to that very purpose--but as my purchase was being rung up, another store employee returned from a run to the bank, rolls of pennies in hand. I'm sure that bank run cost more than the store saved that day by giving out exact change (an inevitable result of ending all of their prices, already plenty low enough, with the digit 9).

It's been quite some years since I wrote on the upcoming demise of the American penny, and word out now is that not only the penny, but also the nickel, costs more than its face value. Yet the US Mint continues to churn them out, despite my prediction that the Obama administration would see an end to the penny. Well, in the meantime, Canada's penny, which is worth even less than America's, and produced of even cheaper metal, has in fact been pulled from distribution.

So what happens next? If the nickel and penny alike are too expensive to produce--as well as being worth less than a twentieth of what they were a century ago--the next logical step is remonetizing our currency down to the next order of magnitude; perhaps in conjunction with putting the visage of a woman on the new $10 bill.

That's probably the only way it would happen overnight.

Indiana Revival Report: Day 46

Baptisms are being held every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. Kyle took the day off to celebrate his oldest daughter's tenth birthday in Dallas, so he didn't do any of them. He encourages whoever is discipling the believer to be the one to baptize him, so there were a lot of females baptizing females. He'd also encouraged people to reach out to their own family, so there was an elderly Puerto Rican candidate whose relative had led him to Jesus. Due to his frail physical condition, he was provided effusion in the place of baptism.

As I had predicted, a local government official was brought in to speak--the mayor, having been invited by his ex-next-door neighbor. His response to the request to share prayer requests for his city was a 20-minute prepared speech that hit on every single one of the Democrat talking points. What would Jesus think about a family losing their house because one of its members didn't have a health insurance, etc. But the striking thing was that, after basically apologizing for being a politician in a room full of Christians, he admitted that he considers himself to be a Christian, then reeled off a long list of offices he has held in his church; some of which he had to give up to serve as mayor, but--not to worry, said his pastor, Phyllis--he was serving God and the church through the government.

I note that this is a pretty solid chord struck whenever a Democrat speaks to a crowd of Christians. Republicans, on the other hand, tend to harp on the need to bring America back to its Christian roots. Democrats would respond that in their opinion, America is never more reflective of true Christianity than when it is being led by--let's face it--unbelievers.

What this revival really needs is for the local sheriff to stand up and say that due to their efforts, his deputies have a lot less to do. That hasn't happened yet, but when it does, I hope that even the mayor would be grateful. He didn't mention that none of the deputies in this county earn what any liberal would consider a living wage--something the sheriff is trying to change, but hasn't been able to push past the Republican-controlled county government.

Crash alert!

 
From what my sources are telling me, it appears that Congress' inability to pass a budget means that the bond market is headed for a freefall.

Stand by for some wild gyrations in the price of everything subject to such.

Monowi, Nebraska: Requiem for the small town

Monowi had always been a small town. But it contained, within living memory, a school, a church, and a general store. And a tavern, of course--the only business still operating. Elsie Eiler, the proprietor, is also the town's mayor. This gives her the unique privilege of renewing her own liquor licence every year.

You see, in addition to being Monowi's mayor, she's also the town treasurer and tax collector. As well as being the only resident taxpayer. She is, in short, the sole resident of Monowi, and has been ever since her husband died several years ago.

What happened to the thriving town of Monowi to shutter its store, its church, and its school? Why are all its streets overgrown with grass? Why have all of its houses been left to collapse, many of them still containing the possessions of their last inhabitants? And why is the only business still standing a tavern?

We can trace the demise of this town back to the excessive regulations that have gradually made everything in town unprofitable, except getting people drunk. And oh--by the way--state regulations make it so unprofitable to transfer Elsie's liquor licence that she's stuck with running the tavern herself until the day she dies. So when she dies, so dies the town. The irony is that her tavern has no lack of customers; they just, for one reason or another, don't happen to live in Monowi.

Nebraska can be a hard place to make a living--especially for farmers. The Amish who followed Yost Yoder from Juniata County, Pennsylvania out to Gosper County, Nebraska 130 years ago found that out. The dry plains just didn't yield the kind of harvests they were used to, and within 25 years they had all packed up and moved back to Pennsylvania, where even to this day their hard-working and simple-living descendants are known as "Nebraska Amish."

They were the first Amish to leave Nebraska, but they weren't the last.

More farmers moved into Nebraska in the years leading up to World War One. Railroads crisscrossed the state, making it possible for farmers to sell their harvests to consumers thousands of miles away. Those who could hang in there through the lean years would make it all back, and more, when they harvested a bumper crop with the latest machinery. But the War brought many changes to Nebraska, including the first in a series of regulations that drove hard-working farmers and merchants from the rural areas, and from the state as a whole.

It started with the decree from the Nebraska State Council of Defense that banned teaching foreign languages in all schools in the state. This draconian measure, unthinkable today, was intended to inspire patriotism in the populace. A year later, they even banned the use of foreign languages in churches.

The Amish had the unfortunate distinction of not only using German in their church services, but also teaching it in their schools (so that their children would know how to read their German Bibles). Despite the fact that they had come to America for the very reason of escaping service in the Kaiser's armies, they were now labeled--for purely linguistic reasons--as enemy sympathisers. When the government moved in to shut down their parochial schools, the peace-loving Amish had had enough. To a man, they left the state--and have never returned, except to visit the graves of their ancestors. No one noticed it at the time, but the depopulation of rural Nebraska had already begun.

The War was now over; the State Council of Defense disbanded--but the regulations, as they always do, continued to mount. With the Amish gone, tractors began moving in. Mechanization now made it possible for one man to do the work of dozens. Children were no longer indispensable farm hands, but liabilities. The country schools that the Amish had left the state to avoid attending withered and died for lack of students to fill them. And as the schools closed, it was no longer feasible for families to live in the rural areas. Commutes to school stretched out to fifty, sixty, even seventy miles.

Back in Washington, D.C., legislators were reaching deeper and deeper into the pockets of Americans across the country, but spending that money disproportionately in urban districts. At the same time, legislators in Lincoln continued, year after year, to add to the ever-burdening list of regulations that everyone in the state, urban or rural, had to follow. It just wasn't cost-effective anymore to operate small stores and groceries. Selling raw milk became illegal, putting small dairies and the farms that supplied them out of business. Before long there was hardly anything that could be done profitably in the sparsely settled rural areas, except for getting people drunk. The demand for that never went away--not even in the cities, where the growing populations depended more and more on the largesse of the population at large. Driven from downtown by the rising crime rate, business and employed citizens moved to the suburbs.

Such is the foreseeable end of the overregulated populace: abandoned, decaying small towns and city centers, inhabited by hopeless drunks. EDIT SEPT 2024: Here is a rare YouTube video featuring Elsie, still the only resident of Monowi.

Whatever does American Capitalism have to do with the Price of Tea in China?

Well, I'll get started on this post today just to keep up my days-in-a-row thing, but as my longtime readers may or may not have noticed, I never post on Sundays. So this will be the last day in a row anyway.
Today's linked news article is "Why China Does Capitalism Better than the U.S." The article opens with a claim that 'ironically', China is doing a better job of managing capitalism's crisis than the US is:

"Beijing's stimulus spending was larger, infinitely more effective at overcoming the slowdown and directed at laying the infrastructural tracks for further economic expansion."

Ha, ha, ha. What this really is all about is "Why China Does Socialism Better than the U.S." The reason why China Does Socialism Better than the U.S. is because socialism never works without coercion, and China is way better and more experienced at coercion than the U.S.

I suppose I could say more, but that's it in a nutshell.

Why Taco Bell is Good For You

Here's something light-hearted for today; I'm working on a heavier series of posts for the rest of the week.

Taco Bell is one of my favorite fast food restaurants, if for no other reason that that one can regularly pick up an entree there for only a dollar (plus tax). The last time I was at one, I participated in their twelve-for-ten-dollars special, and noticed that they also had a low-calorie menu. I don't usually go for the low-calorie items, considering what each calorie is costing me financially, but I am interested in not putting too much junk into my body on those rare occasions when I eat other than home-cooked food.

So it was with some interest that I read this article claiming that Taco Bell's taco filling is not pure hamburger, but some concoction of polymeric water, wheat, and oats that is barely a third actual ground beef (Taco Bell says it's more like 90%). Actually, that's quite fine with me. I prefer to graze as low on the food chain as possible, and I'd rather eat the wheat and oats than the steer that ate them.

I won't be getting there any time soon, but you can reasonably expect that my next expedition long and far from the home fires will include a stop at a Taco Bell.

Islam will not take over the world after all, it appears

This video shows that the changes I predicted would happen in Muslim countries are already underway.

UPDATE DEC 20, 2012
The overall US birth rate decreased by 8% between 2007 and 2010, with a drop of 14% among foreign-born women. The overall birth rate has fallen to 63.2 births per 1,000 women who are of childbearing age. That is down from 122.7 births in 1957 at the peak of the Baby Boom.

UPDATE NOVEMBER 15, 2016
I may have spoken prematurely.  A closer look at the Pew Report shows that, whether they be way above replacement rate, or just barely, Muslim birthrates top those of non-Muslims in every area. So Muslims continue to grow as a proportion of every population.

Another Vatican abuse case

Got your attention, didn't I? Well, this probably isn't what you were expecting, so calm down.

The Vatican library is about to enter the digital age, apparently--for once--with no help from Google. This is an excerpt from their March 24, 2010 Newsletter:

The digitization of 80,000 manuscripts of the Vatican Library, it should be realized, is not a light-hearted project. Even with only a rough calculation one can foresee the need to reproduce 40 million pages with a mountain of computer data, to the order of 45 petabytes (that is, 45 million billion bytes). This obviously means pages variously written and illustrated or annotated, to be photographed with the highest definition, to include the greatest amount of data and avoid having to repeat the immense undertaking in the future.

And these are delicate manuscripts, to be treated with care, without causing them damage of any kind. A great undertaking for the benefit of culture and in particular for the preservation and conservation of the patrimony entrusted to the Apostolic Library, in the tradition of a cultural service that the Holy See continues to express and develop through the centuries, adapting its commitment and energy to the possibilities offered by new technologies.

Now, what I wish to focus on, and pick apart, is the following phrase: "without causing them damage of any kind." Simply put, this is fallacious thinking, but of a sort that is all to common to mankind, no matter the level of expertise behind such a statement.

Damage is an inevitable part of human existence, extending even to pride, which can be wounded, and feelings, which can be hurt. Nothing in human experience is immune to damage, and damage is so universal that its occurrence can only be limited to various extents; it can never be avoided altogether.

Now granted, leaving a book on the shelf in the darkened room of a climate-controlled library is the best way to minimize damage. Under such conditions, a book can be expected to remain in good condition for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But that is not why books were written, nor why they are retained. Books are made to be read.

What the Vatican curators hope to accomplish by this digitization project--indeed, what they can hardly fail to accomplish--is to both slightly prolong the life of the books by ensuring that they will hardly ever need to be taken from the shelf again, and to greatly expand the usefulness of the books by making them available to be read virtually, anywhere in the world, and by as many people as have access to the digital files in which their images will be stored.

This is a very noble goal, well worth the time and expense that need only be applied once in order to be effective for a long time to come. But meeting this goal comes at a cost--that of taking the books off the shelf, opening their pages to the light, laying them flat, and then turning each and every page for exposure to a bright flash. This act alone will probably age some of these books more in one day than they have aged in the past one hundred years of occasional but careful use.

This is damage, and it is unavoidable. The only question to be asked is whether this one-time dose of damage is worth it in the long run, and the answer to that question is undoubtedly, "Yes." One last dose of damage now, and the book can go back on the shelf, perhaps never to be opened again. For that matter, the book can be used to kindle the woodfire for the next Papal Conclave, with relatively little loss to the global knowledge of which it has heretofore only been a physical, rather than a virtual, part.

But "without causing them damage of any kind?" It's an unnecessarily lofty ideal, and one that simply cannot be realized. Yet we meet with this sort of thinking again and again. Take for example, the adage that having borrowed or rented an item, you should "return it in better condition than you got it." Inasmuch as any use of an item causes damage, even returning it in identical condition is impossible. To return it in better condition would require that you do something to improve the item while it is in your possession, thus making up for and even reversing some of the inevitable damage. You could, for example, shine a pair of shoes that you borrowed. This would certainly make up for the polish worn away from the tops of the shoes while they were on your feet, but would do nothing for the leather worn away from the soles. And if the shoes were already polished when you received them, all your noble efforts would still result in you returning the shoes somewhat the worse for wear overall.

To take this line of thinking in a slightly different direction, most people assume (or did until a couple of years ago) that their house, as a result of them living in it for a few years, will become worth more than they paid for it--at least if they do a good job of keeping it up. This fallacy is actually based on two different assumptions, in addition the the assumption that it is possible, by taking great pains, to "avoid causing damage of any kind" to an item being used.

The first of these assumptions is that nominal cost is equal to real cost. In this way of thinking, if you bought a house for $7500 in 1940, and could sell it for $100,000 now, your house is worth over $92,000 more than you paid for it. On the contrary, it's worth close to $10,000 less. Had the value of your house kept pace with inflation, you should be able to get $109,425 for it today. Only when all figures are adjusted for inflation do you see the change in an item's real value.

The other assumption is that the only cost of a house is its purchase price. While that may be true for the first few months, a period in which no one expects the value of a house to have had enough time to go up, the fact is that to continue holding on to a house has unavoidable ongoing costs. Many experts recommend an annual spending of 4% of the house's value on keeping it up. Under such a plan, even if your house is still worth $7500 in 1940 dollars, you already spent more than twice what you paid for the house just keeping it looking nice from 1940 up until 1990, and you're now closing in on paying for it the fourth time in annualized nickels and dimes. All this, even if you paid for it in hard-to-come by cash, and had no mortgage expenses during all those years. And don't forget property taxes! To truly turn a profit on your $7500 investment held for 70 years, you'd have to get well over three--quarters of a million dollars for it today: a one-hundred fold nominal increase would still leave you under water in the kind of terms that real investors use.

So, to get back to the original title: What is the Vatican abusing now? Well, if not the English language, at least the science of Economics. While it is less abusive to the delicate manuscripts in the long run to subject them to the indignities of being photographed for all the world to see, it is simply impossible to maintain that it can be done without causing them any damage at all.

As phony as a three-dollar bill

I have as of late been electronically sitting at the feet of certain historians so called, who have endeavored to enlighten me in the true history of the Americas. This experience has indeed been enlightening, as well as entertaining. But at length I have felt the need to pull back and peer into the history of this movement to re-write the ancient lore of this hemisphere. And behold, along the way I found the history of this movement to include, of all things, a phony three-dollar bill. I even saw with the eyes of my understanding, a facsimile thereof, though I have yet to have hefted it.

It can be found on the plate following page 148 of this book.

Keep the schools, close the prisons

Michigan is probably not as safe a place to be as it used to, now that the goverment has decided to close prisons in order to open more schools. Closing schools, of course, would mean releasing former students into the general population. Michigan's governor Granholm sees that as a greater risk to public safety than releasing former prisoners--many of them sex offenders--into the general population. But hey--maybe they'll go back to school--as high school Health & Human Reproduction teachers, maybe?

They will be monitored by the State, of course. Just like the State of California "monitored" regular sex offender Phillip Garrido.

Parents in Michigan, I suggest you keep a close eye on your children. And whatever you do, don't assume that they'll be safe in a public school.

Children: Cheaper than Chimps

It's not easy to direct a Primate Testing Laboratory these days. Never mind that it's almost impossible to come up with a new anti-viral vaccine (swine flu, anyone?) without primate testing, and that it wasn't until chimps were deliberately infected with it that the Hepatitis C virus could be isolated (before that the disease it caused was just referred to as "non-A, non-B Hepatitis"). And never mind that chimps are far more fecund in well-managed captivity then they are in the wild. There are entire organizations devoted to the promotion of "human rights" for chimpanzees, and they will not rest until every living chimp is released (never say that ideas don't have consequences). And as a result--without even having to join a union--laboratory chimps enjoy incredibly cushy employment benefits. Granted, without valid Social Security numbers, the chimps can't be paid in cash or equivalents--but their employment benefit packages are pretty impressive. Working mother chimps, for example, are now paid to breastfeed their babies for the first six months to a year (wow, what a maternity leave policy). From there, the chimps go to work as guinea pigs, getting injected with diseases that won't hurt them (they don't even get AIDS from the HI virus) so that they can be carefully studied in order to produce treatments for humans.

After 3 or 4 years in the lab, a chimp's life work is done. But alas, chimps live for at least 10 times that long. Time for early retirement! A laboratory chimp now moves to a tropical resort where it can live out its years being provided with free food and water. Well, first of all, a stop by the operating theatre where its ability to procreate is removed; we don't want any population explosions at those resorts now, do we? And this despite the fact that chimps are a Threatened Species in the wild.

Total cost over the lifetime of a laboratory chimp? Half a million dollars, or about $125,000 per year of services rendered. Those chimps are making more than their keepers! And if a chimp manages to escape wars, rebellions, and ecoterrorists, it may well live 50 years, at an average cost of $10,000 per year per chimp.

As someone very well acquainted with childraising, I can attest that children can be easily raised and educated from infancy through adulthood for a little over $2000 per year each. They get a bit more expensive after that, but--unlike chimps--by then they are earning their own way.

So, bring them on--children are way cheaper than chimps! Unless you send your children to public school in New Jersey--that alone adds $20,000 a head that somebody is having to pay for, year after year.

Hold on to your gold!

Well, I'm back with another scam that will probably replace all the hits I'm missing from corey.
A few months ago, when the price of gold reached an all-time high--in nominal terms, but certainly not in material terms--I sent away for an offer from Cash4gold.com. I received back an envelope in which I could send unwanted gold jewelry to be appraised. Before I parted with my 14k wedding ring, though, I wondered how much it would really be worth. I went to all the trouble to weigh it and it came out to about 5 grams, or one and a third troy ounces; at $1000 an ounce, that came to $133. Since my ring was 58% gold, I figured $70 would be a reasonable melt value. But gold4cash had its expenses, too, so I figured they'd probably only offer me about half that; maybe only a third.

But I wanted to be sure. So I decided to call them and ask what they were paying per ounce of gold, before I went and sent in my ring. It turns out that they won't answer such questions, "unless we can see it." Ha! The truth is, I would have been lucky to have gotten more than a dollar for my ring, but they didn't want me to know that until they had it in their possession. Because, as in the case of all such scams, their 'free return policy' has enough fine print to make it virtually worthless. Here is a first-hand account of how the scam is perpetrated.

Well, the good news is, cash4gold won't be able to put endless charges on your credit card. But once they have your gold, it's gone. So send for the free envelope if you must. Send it back if you must. But please, don't put anything in it that you think is worth more than the postage you're saving by using their envelope.

A new twist to an old scam

If you go to http://coreyhasmoney.com, you will see a photo of a bright young man in a tux, informing you that he is originally from your home town, but now he's a millionaire making his money by posting links on Google.

Don't you believe a word of it. Corey Peters is one big urban myth, and the swindler behind this website has figured out how to tap into your computer and identify the location of your web server in order to make you think that Corey's your homeboy. What he wants is your credit card number, and you're going to give it to him because you just can't believe that a nice guy from your home town is lying to you through his pearly white teeth. So what we need to establish right away is that he's not your homeboy, and he is a colossal liar. Here's how we'll do it:

This blog gets hits from every continent but Antarctica (and probably only because there's no ISP HQ'd there--but this post did incite one from north of the 72nd parallel), including a lot of viewers that do an excellent job of concealing their ISP; some are no more specific than the continent, and a rare few are even less so. I'd love to hear back from you as to where 'Corey' claimed to you that he's originally from. Just leave your comments below; and also please tell me whether or not you ran across Corey on Facebook.

Edited five hours later with the following revision: Come on, people. I'm getting hits on this post from several countries--probably at least one of them from Corey himself. Just to make it easy I've removed comment moderation to make it real easy to post comments (anyone who isn't a robot can participate). Please, tell me where Corey Peters told you he's from. And while you're at it, let me know what he's changed his name to this time. "Corey Peters" is less than a week into its run.

Added 2-26: Okay, folks, we can consider this project a success. A commenter alerted me to the following announcement posted to Facebook:

**Alert to Facebook Users**

You may have seen ads appearing on your FB profile in which a young man named Corey Peters or Mike Miller, and who claims to be from or near your home town, explains how he makes thousands of dollars posting links to websites. He claims that Google pays him to do this.

Some websites associated with this are:
coreyhasmoney.com
alexgetsgreen.com
mikemintsit.com

An American blogger asked people to send him a note to tell him where Corey was telling them he was "from" in his ad.
The answers he got back... Bedford, MA... Montreal, Quebec... and New Delhi, India.
Either Corey is quite the globe-hopping guy, or he has great software which detects your ISP address and then adjusts the ad to reflect a better "connection" to you.

When you go to these sites, they will ask you for your credit card information to sign up for a "Google Cash Kit".

Here are some comments from ComplaintsBoard, an online site dedicated to exposing web scams:
"ppl sign up for a google money system kit and have a couple $100 charged on their credit account. emails to contact them bounce back, the kit doesn't come and by the sound of it, neither does the promised cheque
13 days ago by T.Khan
I also did the same, no confirmation or e-mails, no such log in website. I found the ad on facebook and thought it was reliable. I am just waiting to see what i can do if they end up attacking my credit card. Such scammers..."

Other commentators on the ComplaintBoard explain how difficult it was to get the Google Cash Kit subscription cancelled... and many, many cases of people having to cancel their credit cards in order to stop the monthly payments.


RECENT NEWS

Official response from Google to an enquiry regarding CoreyHasMoney.com

"Ads like these appear to be the latest iteration of a trend we have observed for some time. Our Legal team reviews them and takes appropriate action if necessary. As Google is not affiliated with these sites, though, we can't comment on individual claims. We recommend that users exercise the same amount of caution they would when evaluating other types of get rich quick claims."

Update March 21, 2009

Well, this post continues to get dozens of hits a day--including one recently from Google Inc., so let's hope they do something about it. In any case, today I did something I'm not ever supposed to do--I actually read one of the ads that I've allowed Google to post on this blog. Boy, was I ever surprized to read a corey-peters type scam from cathysteeth.com being advertized right on my blog! Supposedly Google will cancel my Adsense account for doing this, but I'm going to cancel it anyway, maugre the money I'll be out for doing so. I refuse to participate in these sort of scams. Just look at the fine print for this "free trial offer:"

You have 14-days from the date that your order ships to use the product and evaluate the results. If you enjoy the system, simply do nothing. You will be billed the low price of $78.93 at the end of your 14-day trial period. Additionally, you will be automatically enrolled in the AlwaysBright™ Membership Program and every 30 days from your trial signup, you will receive a new 30-day supply of Bright Teeth™ Whitening Gel (10cc) and Remineralization Gel (3cc) at the low price of $80.93, plus $4.99 shipping and handling, totalling $85.92. . .

It goes on to say as much as that unless you cancel your credit or debit card, these charges will go on indefinitely. Because of course, you'll never be able to get through on their toll-free line, with thousands of other people from Pond Inlet to New Delhi all trying to cancel too.

Well, thanks to corey peters, I've gotten more hits in less than a month than I typically got in a year. But in the end, by participating in such scams, Google Inc. lost my Adsense business. And, I expect, unless they face the music soon, that of a lot of other bloggers as well.

There are ways to make money, and there are ways to take money. This is clearly one of the latter, and I will have none of it.

Update 3/23/09
To the kind folks at Google, Inc., who frequently check this post for new comments:
1) Thanks for deleting my Adsense account. You can keep the change.
2) I'm sorry I'm not able to keep up on approving comments as fast as they come in. I trust, however, that you've seen enough by now to get the picture. So I think I'll be taking this post down again; I could use a break from this issue for a while. Unless you take decisive action, it's not going to go away.

Update 3/26/09 I'm taking this offline again. Way too many hits to handle!

Update:  2013: This post has finally fallen out of my 'top ten' so I'm bringing it back up.

What I look forward to in an Obama Presidency

The White Man has voted for the President of the United States only twice. That is to say, two different men have attained (or retained) the presidency, having done so in part due to a single vote cast in their favor by The White Man.

The White Man has cast a losing vote for President once. That is to say, his choice for the Presidency (who had not been his first choice, but rather the lesser of two evils) was not the choice of enough other voting Americans to allow him to win the election.

The White Man has voted 'Present' in one Presidential Election. That is to say, he voted, but left the line for "President" blank, not being able to hold his nose tightly enough to take responsibility for electing the lesser of two evils. As it turned out, that would have been a losing vote anyway.

The White Man, no longer a registered voter, has therefore abstained from all subsequent Presidential Elections.

So I write on the topic of this November's Election from the standpoint of an outside, dispassionate observer.

Sixteen years ago, I looked forward to a Clinton Presidency. I hoped that a Democrat President would be able to push through some badly-needed bills that had been held up by a Democrat Congress. Whether he was successful or not may yet remain to be seen.

A year ago, I again looked forward to a Clinton Presidency and the return of Bill Clinton to the White House, this time as First Gentleman. But things have changed, and a Clinton Presidency is no longer in the cards for 2009. Barack Obama, scion of the Chicago Political Machine, has pulled his usual trick of procedurally eliminating his more popular opponent, and we face the likelihood of an Obama Presidency for the next eight years.

We are, in fact, in a very similar place as we were sixteen years ago. After several years of prosperity, the economy is slumping. "Inflation" is a problem. Taxes are high. The Democrat Candidate promises to stimulate the economy, tame "inflation," and raise taxes. I foresaw that Clinton would in fact increase inflation, and bought gold as a hedge against that likelihood. As it turned out, the tax decreases of the early 80's finally kicked in about the time Bush Sr. left office, bringing in a wave of prosperity fueled by the increased productivity of the Computer Age. Bush's and Clinton's tax increases are what have brought us to where we are today, fueled by the housing bubble brought on by the stupidity of sub-prime mortgages backed by the full currency-printing power of the US Government.

So what do I look forward to in an Obama Presidency?

For one, I look to see the printing presses shift into an even higher gear, with the demise of the penny coming by the end of a second Obama administration. I kind of doubt, though, that we will ever see the $1000 bill again; cash transactions will be more and more restricted.

I expect the federal deficit to double.

I expect, by the end the first Obama administration, to see Social Security Numbers made mandatory for medical treatment.

I expect to see more raids on religious groups, with all the children taken away from their parents regardless of any evidence of abuse.

I expect to see all churches lose more tax exemptions, or more churches lose all.

I expect riots should Obama fail by a thin margin to be re-elected.

I expect some well-placed Americans to be held hostage in a rogue state for years.

What good do I expect to come out of an Obama Presidency?

One thing: I hope that the Multi-level marketers who have hitched their hopes to the Republican Party will receive their comeuppance.

I hope, but unlike my other predictions, I hardly expect.

The Success of the Public School System

The Public School system in the Untited States, as overseen by the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, is a big business--a very successful business, I propose.

Now, in any unregulated industry, only the successful businesses survive. Others go under. Granted, public eduction is a heavily regulated industry, but it thrives nonetheless, even in the face of serious competition. Why have public schools survived? It is because they are so good at what they do.

What do public schools do? Well, whether they are crime-ridden inner-city structures or posh suburban campuses, all public schools do one thing, and they do it well:

They pay teachers a lot of money.

A few years ago, the taxpayers of Kalkaska, Michigan, tried to change this. They cut funding to the school system so severely that all the students were dismissed and the schools for all intents and purposes shut down.

The Teachers, however, continued to get paid. Thus the school, even while closed, succeeded in its primary mission: To pay teachers a lot of money.

This is not the story you will get from the AFT. According to their website,

"Teachers, especially new ones, are finding it increasingly difficult to find affordable housing in their communities and to pay off student loan debts. These and other factors place the teaching profession—already plagued by high turnover and recruiting challenges—in further peril, according to the latest AFT teacher salary survey. The AFT teacher salary survey for the 2004-05 school year found that the average teacher salary was $47,602, a 2.2 percent increase from the previous year. The report asserts that, to make teacher pay competitive with pay in other professions by the end of the decade, teachers need a 30 percent raise—an additional investment in our children’s future of almost $15 billion per year. The 2005 salary survey also examines the impact of rising housing costs and student loan debt on teachers in the 50 largest cities."

Now, it may surprise my readers, but I am all in favor of teachers getting paid $30 or $40 an hour. In fact, I have some educational needs in my family for which I would be willing to put up such a sum myself.

I, however, take no joy in paying such sums for the supposed education of other men's children. And I forsee the day in which the Public School System will loose its monopoly on education, and be forced out of business because competent teachers will be able to earn more money in the private sector, and parents will be unwilling to continue turning their children over to substandard teachers when other options become available.

Why do I foresee the demise of the Public Schools?

Because they have a Flawed Business Plan. Paying teachers a lot of money is no way to build a business, as long as it is tied to the level of their perceived needs rather than to the level of their contribution to the education of children.

Stuck on Stupid

From the AFA:
For the 13th month out of the last 15, the boycott of Ford Motor Company by AFA and other pro-family groups has helped cause Ford to lose sales. Sales dropped 6.8% during May when compared with May 2006.

The drop came as sales for GM [up 9.6%], Chrysler [up 4.3%] and Toyota [up 14%]were all increasing. Of the big four, only Ford showed a loss.

AFA has identified Ford as a leading corporate promoter of homosexual marriage and the homosexual agenda. More than 700,000 individuals have signed the Boycott Ford Pledge.

Even while losing billions of dollars and laying off of thousands of employees, Ford continues to financially support various homosexual groups.*
I must admit I'm at a loss to see what Ford's purpose is in all this. Surely they realize that the conservative voting bloc outnumbers the pro-homosexual voting bloc by several orders of magnitude in this country. Or did no one notice when Jerry Falwell died?

One of my hobbies is taking surveys, and now that I think of it, even though I've taken several automobile-related surveys in the past year, none of them linked to my conservative stance--unlike all of the political surveys I took, and I don't even vote.

It appears to be a bad case of Head In The Sand Syndrome. Or Stuck On Stupid Disease.

UPDATE 2013
Ford Motor Company sales zoomed after AFA called off their boycott.

Some interesting consequences of instant unemployment

Hit counter
"Instant Unemployment" isn't a very suitable way of describing the impetus behind the Interesting Consequences I'm about to discuss. But this being a blog, not a journal article, the term will suffice. As we shall see shortly, "Unemployment by Edict" would be a more descriptive term.

I begin with the army of stonemasons assembled by Herod the Great, King of Judea, Galilee, Idumea, and Perea, to renovate the Second Temple in Jerusalem. This task stretched on for more than a mortal lifetime, thus involving several generations of sponsors, overseers, and workers. In short, an entire industry emerged focused on beautifying the Temple. Inevitably, this work finally came to an end, and abruptly so, when the Temple was totally destroyed in 70 CE. Instant unemployment ensued for every stonemason formerly on the government payroll. What was the result?

Interestingly enough, the destruction of the Second Temple was the direct impetus, through the instant unemployment it engendered, for the explosive growth of a whole new industry, and the cultural artifact it produced: The Ossuary. These hand-carved boxes of stone, into which the bones of deceased Judeans were placed for permanent burial, had begun to be used by the rich and famous as work on the temple began to wind down during the earthly lifetime of Jesus, but they became an integral part of the local culture as long as the previously government-employed stonemasons were forced to practice their craft in the private sector.

Another act of the Roman imperium resulted, perhaps not so directly, in yet another cultural artifact. In 392 CE, the Byzantine Emperor Theodosius II put an empire-wide ban on the production of all artifacts of pagan culture, including the Egyptian mummy portraits associated with the worship of Isis and Serapis. An entire industry, thus instantly unemployed, turned their creative attention to theologically approved art forms, resulting eventually in the icons which to this day form an integral part of the rites of Eastern Orthodoxy throughout its various patriarchates.

Closer to home, the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution resulted both in Prohibition, and in the enabling legislation--which produced an army of Treasury Agents whose sole duties involved the arrest of those producing and selling alcoholic beverages. With the repeal of Prohibition in the Twenty-First Amendment, instant unemployment was about to ensue. This, however, being the Roosevelt administration, something surely would be done to keep them on the federal payroll. The result? The first piece of federal Gun Control legislation, the impetus behind the addition of "Firearms" to the name of the Bureau of Alcohol and Tobacco. Treasury agents would henceforth arrest those who produced and sold guns, and the handgun as an artifact of mainstream American culture was now on its way to eventual oblivion.

Three examples of instant unemployment by government edict: the first two pushed artisans from the public into the private sector, resulting in the emergence of a new cultural artifact; the third was tampered with in such a way as to retain on the government payroll men who had made no contribution to the physical culture of their nation; a retention which continues to lead towards the extinction of part of that physical culture.

An unintended consequence?

This post was thoroughly edited in March 2015.

Generous Paupers

I can't remember who it was who said that if all the money was taken away from the rich people and given to the poor--provided that it was only a one-time deal and everthing else was kept the same--within a year the rich would have it all back. The poor would have spent every dime.

Today's story, about poor people who were given a 0% mortgage by Habitat for Humanity refinancing it with a 16% home equity loan, are a prime example of the truth of that statement. Two percent of HfH's 0% loans end up in foreclosure after being transferred to predatory lenders.

Poor suckers.

This is one of the best articles I've seen explaining the coming inflation crisis

Bernanke Confuses Depression Cure With Disease

Peter Schiff

An article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal discussed how self-proclaimed "Depression buff" Ben Bernanke claims understanding of how the Fed caused the Great Depression and precisely what he would do to prevent such a calamity from reoccurring under his tenure. Not only are his assertions naïve and egotistical, but flat-out absurd.

Though he claims to have studied The Great Depression in depth, Bernanke is completely clueless as to its actual cause. However, he is partially right about one thing: the Fed did help create the Depression, but for the opposite reasons Bernanke believes. The Fed-induced credit boom of the roaring 1920's laid the foundation for the inevitable bust that ushered in the Great Depression. Bernanke has mistaken the disease for the cure, and his antidote, were it ever administered, would prove to be economically fatal to the U.S. economy.

The mistake made by the Fed during the 1920's was expanding the supply of money and credit too rapidly. However, as increasing productivity prevented consumer prices from rising, the Fed was unconcerned about the inflation it was creating. Instead, the excess money and credit that spilled into financial and real estate markets caused asset prices to rise, which resulted in claims of a "new era" (sound familiar?). The bust of 1929 led to the Great Depression of the 1930's not as a result of Fed tightening, as Bernanke claims, but due to the misguided economic policies of the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations. By preventing market forces from efficiently correcting the imbalances created during the inflationary boom of the 1920's, the Federal Government turned what otherwise would have been a normal, though severe, cyclical recessionary bust, into what became known as The Great Depression.

During the 1920's the British pound, then the dominant world currency, was under pressure. In an effort to prevent British inflation from causing the pound to weaken against the dollar, Federal Reserve Chairman Benjamin Strong decided to increase inflation in the United States as well. By debasing the dollar along with the pound, their relative values could be maintained, thus preserving the illusion of pound stability. Through competitive devaluation, Great Britain exported its inflation to the United States, much the way the U.S. now exports its inflation to China and Japan.

However, the money and credit supplied by the Fed unexpectedly produced the speculative stock market bubble of the roaring 1920's. When Benjamin Strong died in office in 1928, his successor George Harrison (not of Beatle's fame) understood the problems and addressed them by correctly tightening monetary policy, reversing the inflationary expansion that occurred under Strong.

It is to this action which Bernanke objects and for which he blames the ensuing Great Depression. However, the problem was not that stock and real estate prices collapsed, but that they rose so much in the first place. It was not the mistakes of Harrison that caused the bust, but those of Strong that produced the false boom, making the subsequent bust necessary.

Had Harrison allowed the monetary expansion to continue, as Bernanke suggests he should have, the result would have been hyper-inflation, which would have produced even more dire economic consequences than did the bursting of the bubble. The problem is that Bernanke, like Harrison, will soon replace Greenspan, the modern version of Benjamin Strong (though a more accurate comparison may be to Montague Norman, the governor of the Bank of England during the 1920s.). However, unlike Harrison, Bernanke will likely make the wrong policy choice.

Ben Bernrnake believes that credit expansions need never end - that a boom can be prolonged indefinitely simply by printing enough money. The fact that the incoming Fed chairman believes such nonsense is similar to a cold-war president having believed he could win a nuclear war. However, Bernanke's finger will not be on the button, but on the printing press: and he seems itching to crank it up as he is convinced he will win the deflation war.

When asset prices are too high, credit out of line with savings, and consumption out of line with production, serious economic imbalances result. Curing those imbalances is a painful but essential process. In attempting to prevent the adjustments from taking place, Bernanke will do far more harm then good.

As a result of his confusion, Ben Bernanke wants to cure the disease by killing the patient. The best analogy is to a heroin addict continuously shooting-up to avoid the unpleasant reality of withdrawal. He may "succeed" but only by dying. In economic parlance, hyper-inflation is the monetary equivalent of a drug overdose, and Dr. Ben (Kevorkian) Bernake seems dead set on administering it.



December 8, 2005

Peter D. Schiff
President/Chief Global Strategist
Euro Pacific Capital, Inc.
www.europac.net