In another move toward dytopia, the UK is using drones for domestic policing, and is looking to significantly expand such operations. Apparently, US wars are the health of the British state. And since the UK is oftentimes a sign of where the US is headed, we might expect to see Big Brother soon saturating our once-spacious skies.
Americans, except those living in Arizona and Hawaii, got to sleep an extra hour this weekend. Daylight Saving Time (DST) ended at 2:00 a.m. Sunday, November 7, when the local time reset to 1:00 a.m. and the hour “lost” last spring was paid back.
Unfortunately, no interest is earned on those savings. That’s because the length of the day, measured by the number of hours of daylight, is unaffected by “springing forward” or “falling back.”
DST is a ruse that generates no measurable benefits for society, but does impose some real costs on every man, woman and child.
Conceived originally by Ben Franklin, DST was first imposed during the emergencies of the First and Second World Wars, supposedly to furnish workers in defense-related industries an extra hour of daylight at the end of the working day. Of course, many of those industries operated 24/7 and so that hour actually was gained only by people assigned to the first shift.
DST became a permanent fact of life during the energy crises of the 1970s. Its stated purpose was to reduce electricity usage by allowing sunlight to replace artificial light for an hour after commuters had returned to their homes. The goal of energy savings plausibly was fulfilled early on, but nowadays those savings are offset in many parts of the country as workers arriving home in the summer while the sun is still shining crank up their air conditioners.
All of the studies published by professional economists therefore show either no change in energy consumption during the months of DST or a small, but significant increase in it.
DST also supposedly benefits farmers, who get an “extra” hour a day to tend to their fields and livestock herds. Although I am not a farmer – and don’t even play one on TV – I find it improbable that cows and chickens start getting up an hour earlier in the spring and then begin sleeping an hour later in the fall. Like human beings, their internal “clocks” are governed by seasonal changes in the length of the day and, because animals don’t wear watches, don’t really care what time it is.
What are the costs? First and foremost, time is money and time spent adjusting clocks twice a year is a complete waste of it. Even if one does not sacrifice wages before retiring Saturday night, one has to sacrifice something of value, such as missing five or ten minutes of playing with the children, of a favorite TV show, or of sleep. The managers of every hotel in the 48 states that comply with this biannual ritual must assign employees to change the clocks in guest rooms or print and distribute leaflets reminding the current occupants to do so.
Second, and more seriously, clinical studies conducted in Sweden have reported evidence of spikes in heart attack risks in the week following the switch to either daylight savings or standard time. Unlike cows and chickens, the body clocks (circadian rhythms) of people are forced twice a year quickly to accommodate themselves to a new time regime. That adjustment may cause fuzzy-headiness on the job (and lost productivity) for a few days, but in some cases result in death.
Third, and of particular relevance for this season, the return to standard time is associated with an increase in the number of automobile accidents, especially those involving pedestrians, because drivers are not yet accustomed to commuting home in the dark.
So-called standard time lasts for a little over four months. If DST really is the boon our politicians say it is, it ought to be extended year-round. If, as I suggest, it produces no real benefits, then abolish it. One way or the other, it would be far better, in my view, for government to leave our clocks alone
Do election results reflect voter preferences? No one seems to think so, despite most people’s enthusiasm for democracy. Consider the analysis of the recent US midterm elections. The Democratic narrative is that the voters enthusiastically chose Barack Obama and the Democrats in 2008 because they were “hungry for change,” and supported the main points of the Democratic agenda. The Republican gains in 2010 are explained, however, by the Democrats’ failure to “get their message out.” The voters were misled, in other words, by slick Republican ads, Tea Party emotionalism, and poor campaigning by Democratic incumbents. The idea that voters may have fully understood the Democrats’ message, and knowingly rejected it, is ruled out a priori.
Of course, the Republican narrative is no better; voters were suckered by the Obama propaganda machine in 2008, then came to their senses in 2010. I’m not picking on either party in particular. My point is that each side believes that voters really prefer its policies, and that election outcomes are a function of political advertising. In both cases, this core belief is entirely unfalsifiable. If voters really did prefer one set of policies over another, or change their aggregate preferences over time, how would party bosses know this?
In short, if election results reflect marketing, not substance, than what’s the point of elections?
This week in my local newspaper, Florida’s Lieutenant Governor Jeff Kottkamp wrote an op-ed reporting that a drug known as “Spice” is becoming “… a nightmare for law enforcement, because it is sold and used openly as a so-called legal alternative to marijuana. Currently, there is no way to test for the use of Spice — making it that much more attractive to would-be users.”
Kottkamp reports, “Spice is, in fact, more potent and more dangerous than marijuana.”
I am very out-of-touch with the drug scene, so maybe unsurprisingly, this was the first I’d heard of Spice. I do have a son who is a senior in high school, so I figured I could ask him and get some information about Spice, but he claimed he’d never heard of it either. Could be he’s a Spice-head trying to hide his habit, but (parents can be so naive) I think he was telling me the truth.
If any readers know anything about Spice, feel free to speak up and inform the rest of us! (When I Google “spice drug” some information does pop up.)
Kottkamp goes on to say, “Just two weeks ago, I was speaking with our community anti-drug organizations gathered at the annual drug prevention conference, and they asked for help to stop this new drug from infiltrating their neighborhoods.”
I can give Kottkamp a sure-fire way to stop Spice in its tracks: Legalize marijuana. Kottkamp claims Spice is more dangerous than marijuana, so surely this would be a step in the right direction.
The issue here is not about Spice; it is about alternatives to marijuana. Making Spice illegal would simply open the door for drug entrepreneurs to develop other recreational drugs that are “more potent and more dangerous than marijuana.”
We’ve been fighting a war on drugs for 30 years, and the drugs are winning. There is ample evidence that the harm from illegal drugs comes more from the fact that they are illegal than that they are drugs.
I am no advocate of recreational drug use. Following Nancy Reagan, if someone offers you some, my advice would be to “Just Say No!” But there are two strong arguments in favor of legalization. One is that this used to be a free country, and freedom has to mean the freedom to make what people in the government think are bad choices. Another more utilitarian argument is that the harm from their illegality is greater than the harm from the drug use itself.
San Francisco, a wonderful American city known for its traditions of tolerance and freedom, banned Happy Meals. My home county of Santa Clara already had. So this isn’t just the most far-left radicals pushing this agenda; it’s the center-left progressives who dominate the Bay Area.
Some friends have wondered why I care about this so much, especially in a country at war, with a Bill of Rights in tatters and the dollar slipping every day. It just seems to me there’s something vaguely. . . anti-American. . . about all this. This is to say, American culture has long sustained a very statist system in terms of foreign policy, Social Security, public schools, regulations, wars on drugs, gun controls, peripheral acts of censorship, corporatist subsidies, middle-class welfare, national-security excuses for eroding civil liberties, and so forth.
But Happy Meals? They are a ritual, however vulgar, tacky and easily associated with public health concerns, that is at the core of modern American culture. And I make no apologies for a society where children want little more for lunch than a lame hamburger, some soggy fries, and a cup of sweetened water, all wrapped up in a box with easy crosswords plastered on it, and accompanied by a junk piece of plastic made in China.
This is one element of living in a free society. Even a semi-free society. Parents will occasionally buy their kids fast food, and that food will sometimes come with a toy. It’s the Crackerjack thing. It’s the prize in a box of sugary cereal. It’s what it means to be an American.
Is there a health epidemic? If so, stand up to the corn lobby and end corn subsidies. If McDonald’s is really so unnatural, and maybe it is, it won’t stand free market competition. Address the horrible school lunch programs. Better yet, rethink this whole program of forcing kids to sit in classrooms for 8 hours a day. Stop externalizing the costs of health care.
But the prohibition of Happy Meals is a shot across the bow of American freedom. It is an attack on American institutions, family rights, common sense, free enterprise, and the particular meaning of childhood in our culture. Yes, there’s a thousand things worse than a Happy Meal ban, but there’s a million things worse than a Happy Meal. The war on American fun continues apace. And I ask those who think this is petty—what’s next? They are already taxing lemonade stands and banning Happy Meals. They are putting more cops in public schools and monitoring children at every turn. They are spying on students at home through their laptops, adulterating classic cartoons by purging them of images of tobacco and persecuting pupils for drawing pictures of weapons and bringing aspirin to class. Poor kids.
First performed publicly last week in New York at The Economist‘s conference, The Buttonwood Gathering, here is the sequel to the sensational rap video pitting the economic ideas of Austrian School economist F.A. Hayek against those of interventionist John M. Keynes. The original video, “Fear the Boom and Bust,” has had more than 1.5 million views on YouTube and is extremely timely in presenting the Keynesian economic theory behind the gigantic Bush and Obama stimulus and bailout measures and the Austrian School critique and defense of free markets.
For further information, please see the following books:
Depression, War, and Cold War: Challenging the Myths of Conflict and Prosperity, by Robert Higgs
Money and the Nation State: The Financial Revolution, Government and the World Monetary System, edited by Kevin Dowd and Richard H. Timberlake, Jr.
Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth-Century America, edited by Richard K. Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway
Light rain falls from the leaden skies
As the slaves proceed to the hall.
No light shines in their languid eyes.
They mark their X, and that is all.
They take their leave, having been polled.
A sick one falls; they file past her.
They can do no more: they’re controlled.
But soon they’ll have a new master!
The government has announced that total spending on “intelligence activities” in fiscal year 2010 was $80.1 billion. According to a report in the Washington Post,
The National Intelligence Program, run by the CIA and other agencies that report to the Director of National Intelligence, cost $53.1 billion in fiscal 2010, which ended Sept. 30, while the Military Intelligence Program cost an additional $27 billion.
Although this is the first time that the total amount has been made public, analysts have long pegged it with fair accuracy. Of course, this species of spending is now at an all-time high. Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, affirms that it is also more than twice the amount spent in 2001. It increased 7 percent in the past year alone.
In recent years, we have become accustomed to reading reports of enormous government spending — billions, trillions, gazillions. These numbers mean practically nothing to ordinary people. Out here in peasant-land, we have trouble enough in trying to figure out how we’ll pay a $400 bill for the electricity used in August.
So, let’s try to bring the “intelligence” spending into comprehensible focus by using a little arithmetic and asking a few questions.
First, the $80.1 billion the federal government spent on “intelligence” activities in fiscal 2010 translates to approximately $1,000 for each family of four persons. You can imagine the sort of benefit you get from spending that much money, say, to purchase about 400 gallons of fuel for your car — enough to drive the car 8,000 miles, at a 20 mpg rate of fuel consumption. Or enough to purchase electricity while your air conditioner is running flat out through the summer months. You get the idea: $1,000 is not an amount the average family can afford to sneeze at; the family must take care to get a substantial benefit in exchange for that much of its money.
Now, think of all the concrete benefits you get from the government’s spending for “intelligence.” Go on, think about them — not in vague terms, such as “protection from terrorists,” in but concrete terms that you can relate directly to your family’s well-being. Go on. I’m waiting.
If you are honest, you will admit that you cannot think of any concrete benefit whatsoever that you are getting — unless, of course, a member of your family happens to be employed in one of the thousands of so-called intelligence operations run by the government and its vast corps of “national security” contractors. The government constantly assures you, of course, that you are “being protected,” but the protectors do not spell out exactly how all of this spying is protecting you or from whom in particular you are being protected. All you are expected to do is to credit the government’s vague statements to the effect that it is working day and night to protect you from nameless “terrorists” who are said to be equally devoted to the destruction of your family.
What these nameless terrorists expect to gain by, say, wiping out my family, ensconced here in rural St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, I cannot fathom. No doubt your family has a higher priority than mine does on the terrorists’ hit list, yet if you are honest, you will be compelled to admit that the chance that you and yours will be harmed in any way by a handful of homicidal maniacs lurking “out there” somewhere is much, much less than the chance that you will die in an automobile accident or a household mishap, such as a fire.
Moreover, the so-called intelligence gathering that the government bankrolls so lavishly is aimed in great part, not at Muslim madmen, but at you and me. The government’s banks of super-computers and legions of apparatchiki are busily gleaning data on your telephone calls, Internet messages and Web searches, financial and other business transactions, and virtually everything else that touches your life in a way that can be snatched into data banks by soulless bureaucrats and techno-flunkies. Yet, while every nook and cranny of your privacy is being invaded, at your expense, you are being assured that these official crimes are all legitimate means of protecting you from grave, impending harm. Should we also believe in fairy tales and ghost stories?
Let’s face it: this “intelligence” gambit is nothing but the latest government hoax to extract money from your bank account and to subject you to wholly unjustifiable deprivations of your just rights. If you think it’s anything else, you probably have not paid it much attention or given it much thought.
I have previously posted on the corrupting influence of the State on the church, and we now have an incredibly overt case-study example in the Obama administration’s recent use of the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives to enlist pastors as propagandists for Obamacare.
In a conference call to religious leaders, Obama exhorted them to:
Get out there and spread the word. …The debate in Washington is over, the Affordable Care Act is now law … I think all of you can be really important validators and trusted resources for friends and neighbors, to help explain what’s now available to them.
During the same call,
Joshua DuBois, director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Partnerships, gave activists a rallying cry: “Get the word out there, get information out there. Make use of the resources we’ve described on this call: the website, door hangers, one pagers and so forth. We’ve got work to do.”
The call was organized through the Dept. of Health and Human Services Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, which additionally helpfully offers Grants-Writing Training and Technical Assistance Trainings for “Grassroots” Faith and Community Based Groups.
With the Dept. of Health and Human Services having its very own office for faith-based partnerships, imagine the uses to which other government agencies could use such outreach opportunities:
Indeed, the possibilities are virtually endless.
Separation of Church and State anyone?
I can still remember,
Mainstream theory used to make me smile.
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make equations dance
And, maybe, they’d be happy for a while.
But Joseph Stiglitz made me shiver
With every paper he’d deliver.
Bad news in the journals;
I flung them in the urinals.
I can’t remember if I sighed
When I heard the link to gold decried,
But something touched me deep inside
The day the dollar died.
So bye-bye, Miss American Pie.
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’, “this’ll be the day that I die;
This’ll be the day that I die.”
Did you write the macro book,
And do you have faith in gobbledegook,
If professors say it’s true?
And do you believe in risk alone,
Does uncertainty chill you to the bone,
And can you teach investors what to do?
Well, I know that you’re in love with math
‘cause I saw you dancin’ down that path.
Your Hessions were well bordered,
And your preferences well ordered.
I’d been a lonely teenage undergrad
With a K&E slide rule and a yellow pad,
But I knew I had just been had
The day the dollar died.
I started singin’,
Bye-bye, Miss American Pie.
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’, “this’ll be the day that I die;
This’ll be the day that I die.”
Well, since Nixon, we’ve been on our own,
And fiat grows on a rollin’ stone,
But that’s not how it used to be.
Till Bill Phillips sang for the president,
‘bout a curve that he had just invent-
ed to fine-tune where the gods thought we should be.
Oh, but while old Bill was looking down,
Uncle Milton stole his laurel crown.
The profession was confounded;
Friedman’s doctrines were propounded.
And while Lucas read a book on math,
The real world’s business took a bath,
We wrote the Phillips Curve’s epitaph,
The day the dollar died.
We were singin’,
Bye-bye, Miss American Pie.
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’, “this’ll be the day that I die;
This’ll be the day that I die.”
Helter skelter in a summer swelter,
Inflation blew up our fallout shelter,
Eight, ten percent and risin’ still.
It led to strikes and social unrest,
For politicians it became such a test
That Paul Volker was brought in to close the till.
Now the half-time air was sweet perfume
While Reagan played a marching tune.
We all got up to dance,
Oh, but we never got the chance!
‘cause the lobbyists swarmed on the field;
The marching band was quick to yield.
Do you recall what was revealed
The day the dollar died?
We started singin’,
Bye-bye, Miss American Pie.
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’, “this’ll be the day that I die;
This’ll be the day that I die.”
Oh, then we became confused and leery,
With no firm ground of econ theory
And bad ideas ‘bout what was wrong.
So come on: Fed be nimble, Fed show verve!
Maestro fooled with the bank reserves
‘cause fiat is the devil’s only song.
Oh, and as I watched him play that game
My hands were folded in professional shame.
No angel born in hell
Could break that satan’s spell.
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite,
I saw Wall Street laughing with delight
The day the dollar died.
They were singin’,
Bye-bye, Miss American Pie.
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’, “this’ll be the day that I die;
This’ll be the day that I die.”
I met a man who sang the blues
And I asked him for some happy news,
But he just smiled and said you’re toast.
I went down to the sacred store
Where I’d bought some Hayek years before,
But the man there said the Austrians were just ghosts.
And in the streets: the children screamed,
The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed.
But not a word was spoken;
The mainstream’s bells were broken.
And the three men needed in this flurry:
Ludwig, Fritz, and my old friend Murray,
Were laughed out of court by the mainstream jury
The day the dollar died.
And they were singin’,
Bye-bye, Miss American Pie.
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’, “this’ll be the day that I die;
This’ll be the day that I die.”
–
(With my apologies to Don McLean)
