Tatlock & Mackaye – “The Pardoner’s Tale” from The Modern Reader’s Chaucer (1912)
I didn’t write this — a commenter named “Paul” on a website called DailyWTF did — but it’s so on point and clever that I just had to share it. The discussion above it was about the housing bubble and how the various perverse incentives and moral hazards at play in our government now that led to it and continue to lead to disaster. This little comment by “Paul” reaches all the way back in history to our currency going off the gold standard and the creation of the Federal Reserve. Hell, it even encompasses the welfare state as a whole. Sometimes I wish I could write this well:
Why Welfare Does the Opposite of What it Should:
The five inhabitants of Island A use the gold coins to keep track of trades they make among themselves. When one gathers coconuts and brings them back for all to enjoy, the others each give him a gold coin (they’re small coins…) as recognition of his efforts on their behalf. Later, when he wants to expand his hut, he gives a coin each to the two who help him, but not to the two who don’t.
By this process, over time, it becomes apparent who is the most valuable member of their small community, and who is basically napping most every day. (Let’s call him Larry.) Larry finds increasing difficulty getting the others to do things he needs, since he is running out of gold coins. This provides an incentive for him to get off his ass and either fend for himself or start doing something useful to others.
One of the inhabitants (let’s call him Karl) persuades the others that it is a pain lugging heavy coins around all day, and they could accomplish the same record-keeping function by scratching numbers on banana leaves. Two of the others, being basically idiots, don’t realize that banana leaves are much easier to obtain than additional gold coins, so they vote for the plan and Karl has a majority.
After some time passes, Karl moves to the next phase of his diabolical master plan. He points out, tears flowing, that Larry is practically starving and has a leaky hut that is about to fall down. The solution, obviously, is to mark up some new banana leaves and give them to Larry. Then he can be as comfortable as everyone else.
After some more time passes, the islanders notice that Karl’s scheme has not actually increased the total amount of work being done. Four people are still working and Larry is still napping. Actually things have got slightly worse because Larry now naps all day every day, having no incentive to perform even the minimal self-care he did before.
What has happened is that Karl’s scheme has gradually reduced the value of the islanders’ gold coins, because when one of them wants to buy a pile of coconuts for one gold coin, Larry can outbid him with a banana leaf that says “two” on it. Whenever Larry runs out of banana leaves, Karl just gives him some more. But the gold coins are still in limited supply.
The other islanders observe that weakness is rewarded and strength is penalized, so they all stop working. Everyone starves to death.
* * *
Do you ever wonder why the do-gooder politicians don’t just take their “solutions” seriously and have the government write a ten million dollar check to everybody? What could possibly be more fair? Then we’d all be wealthy. Wouldn’t we?
Aww, yiss! Trayzhure!
If you’d like to read the other posts in the thread, or just give “Paul” a big thumbs up, check it out here.
Last night, I watched the new Kathryn Bigelow/Mark Boal offering Zero Dark Thirty, which purports to dramatize the actual events and people involved with the finding and assassination of Osama bin Laden in 2011. Unlike the previous Bigelow/Boal collaboration The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty is primarily a procedural and contains much “shop talk” and little in the way of action, suspense, drama, or characters about whom you much care. The denouement of the story will be well known to all who view the film, because the script relies heavily on placing the viewer at major, well-known moments of terrorism (9/11, 7/7, the Marriott Islamabad Bombing, etc.) in order to make clear what’s at stake, much of the film feels more like a plodding, 48-Hours-style news show re-enactment than an original screenplay.
Not THAT 48 Hours!
Having said that, I don’t write this blog with my film-critic hat on, so I’ll leave most of you to decide for yourselves if you think Zero Dark Thirty succeeds as a film. I will try not to include any so-called spoilers in the following analysis, but since the film doesn’t depart much from what most of us already know, I’m sure I won’t be ruining anyone’s holiday if a few details slip through. Just be warned.
My concerns with Zero Dark Thirty are with the way the film depicts, matter of factly, a CIA-controlled, Navy-operated death squad flying into a sovereign country (Pakistan in this case), and shooting people that they easily could have captured alive. To be fair, much — much – of Zero Dark Thirty is taken up with the various fits and starts of the investigation into where to send this death squad in the first place, but the only part audiences are likely to much remember is the assault on bin Laden’s actual compound. No one in the CIA, the President’s office, no newsman, nor any character in the film whatsoever, seems to have anything but assassination in mind as a given. There is no voice of: should we be doing this? What are the moral consequences? Sure, it’s a dramatization, but for a film so concerned with “telling the real story,” is there no voice to be given to another point of view. Maybe nobody even thought there could be another point of view. Even more disturbingly, however, none of the real-world film critics I’ve read on Zero Dark Thirty (and I’ve read quite a few) have even raised the issue of inappropriateness — if you want to call it that — of sending a kill team to execute somebody, without even being sure of who that somebody is.
Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury – Detail from The Assassination of Brion, Tutor to the Prince of Conti During the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1833)
Let’s be clear: Osama bin Laden was as bad a guy as they come, and no one laments justice being done to him, but what about doing that justice with proper procedure? At one point in the film, the primary CIA operative, “Maya” tells one of the SEALs that she didn’t even want to use the SEALs for a raid, but wanted to “drop a bomb” instead. Drop a bomb on a house she knows is the residence of at least nine children. Instead, however, she does send in the SEALs, who kill every adult male member of the house they find with extreme prejudice. Sure, one of the terrorists shoots at the SEALs through a door, and they kill him in response. No problem there, and that first kill comes with an armed terrorist to reassure the audience that yes, these guys are dangerous and need to die. But the SEALs also kill the first guy’s wife, although Bigelow justifies this with a one-second shot of the woman perhaps reaching for her dead husband’s AK-47. Later, the SEALs lure a second man out of hiding by whispering to his name in the darkness. When he cautiously emerges, they instantly shoot him dead. He is unarmed. They repeat this exact procedure with bin Laden himself. No attempt whatever is made to capture anyone alive. Presuming any of this is true, should we be given pause here? Even if it’s fictional, should audiences feel this is a “victory” (albeit an ugly one, war being hell and all that)?
Meanwhile, simultaneously with the assault on the house, Pakistani civilians in the neighborhood outside begin to mass and approach bin Laden’s house. The SEALs threaten to kill them if they don’t retreat. The civilians do hold back, but one wonders just how much leeway the SEALs had been given by the CIA at this point. Could they have en masse killed Pakistani civilians, if they felt there was a threat to their mission? If so, would that change the moral calculus here?
Just like Call of Duty!
My point with all of these questions is to ask: where were the questions in Zero Dark Thirty? Where are the questions from the critics? Many critics have discussed the film’s depiction of torture as a necessary step in capturing bin Laden, and we should all worry about that. But the real question is much deeper. The real question is: do we, as Americans, condone the sort of summary justice that occurs in this film, even to really, really bad guys? Was bin Laden a terrible human being? Yes. Did he deserve to die? Probably. But even if he did deserve to die, does that give our government the right to send a team of killers into a foreign country and summarily execute him (and other members of his household)?
Ask yourself if the reverse had happened, how you’d feel. The United States has been responsible for some awful war crimes in its history, no one denies that. I’m not trying to create a moral equivalency between the U.S. and al-Qaeda, but I want people to understand that there are folks out there, foreign governments too, with real grievances against the U.S. and its agents. If one of those foreign governments organized a team of hit men to infiltrate the U.S. and kill one of these war-criminal Americans, would you be okay with that? Would you simply say: “well, he deserved it,” and go on your merry way? Or would you be disconcerted? Would you wonder about the limits of what’s acceptable for one country’s armed forces to do, just because they can? You might wonder what, in the end, really stops governments from using force for whatever ends they might desire, so long as those ends are popular enough. Actions have consequences in the lives and minds of others that ripple far beyond our meager, human ability to predict.
Alan Lee – Frodo and Gandalf (1992)
Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends.
- J.R.R. Tolkien, via Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings
Why couldn’t bin Laden have been captured alive, and then tried for his crimes? Perhaps there is a good reason, but Zero Dark Thirty does not posit it for audiences. Zero Dark Thirty certainly demonstrates that the wherewithal was there for him to taken alive, but the mission was instead to terminate with extreme prejudice. I think we should all be concerned that movies like this dilute our ability to understand the real moral issues at stake here. We focus only on the goal, without asking ourselves if the goal we’re after is right — or even worthwhile. Killing others without trial or due process of any kind, no matter how bad those others are, ought not to be what America is about. All the pundits discussing Zero Dark Thirty‘s depiction of torture have raised the salient point: what gives government the right to torture people, even really bad people, to achieve their ends? But these same pundits have ignored an equally important issue: what gives a government the right to kill people, even really bad people? There seems to be little moral difference between torture and killing, in my estimation. I wish Zero Dark Thirty had made audiences leave the theater with more questions than: “Do I still have any time left on my parking meter, because that movie was two-and-a-half freakin’ hours long.”
Since the awful tragedy in Connecticut yesterday, I’ve been bombarded on Facebook, Twitter, and in the sad existence I call my “real life” by folks who want to get guns out of American life. I completely understand their reaction. Indeed, some friends have made a more nuanced argument this time than the one you typically hear regarding gun control. These friends have said: “Perhaps banning guns won’t stop the violence in our society, but it will reduce its severity.” Since some maniac stabbed 22 children in China with a knife the other day, and — fortunately — most of those children are going to be all right, it seems there’s merit in this argument. While I normally update this blog on Mondays, I’m getting so bombarded that I feel like it makes sense to discuss this issue a little bit here, just so I can post a link and not have to copy-past my arguments all the time.
I can only handle so many pro-gun-control emails, folks.
If you want to know why banning guns will never keep guns out of the hands of people who want them, just look at all the other substances/activities we’ve attempted to ban, and ask yourself how gun “bans” would be different. I wrote a lengthy piece about this last week, so if you want to understand that logic, go ahead and read that.
But assuming arguendo that gun bans would actually be effective in eradicating guns both legally and illegally, I think we must say that violent crimes might indeed be less severe in terms of death toll if that were the case. It would be foolish, I think, to argue otherwise: guns are far more efficient at killing than blades or bows, and that is why guns have largely replaced them in warfare and other killing-based pursuits. Of course, even if guns were gone, explosives would still be available to would-be killers, which might cause even greater death and destruction, but let’s leave that aside for now.
Clearly, removing guns from the equation would be a good thing from the point of view of reduced severity of violence. And this realization, friends, inspired me to go further — indeed, I feel we can ameliorate almost all of society’s problems merely by reducing the scope to which perpetrators can perform them. For example: software, music, and film piracy are major issues in our country today. People are getting ripped off all the time. The easiest way to reduce these in scope — to minimize the damage done — would be to ban broadband, high-speed internet and return to dial-up. Sure, there would still be downloads, but they’d be fewer, and the culprits would have to work much harder to make them happen. Just like returning to knives instead of guns would allow us to reduce the severity of violence, the same concept applies to broadband. Of course, like guns, we would still allow the government, police, etc., to use broadband, who would certainly not use it for anything like spying on its citizens, and would definitely not be susceptible to being bribed to allow certain groups access to illegal downloading anyway. Government can be trusted with broadband, just as they can be trusted with guns.
Don’t worry, politicians are here to HELP us!
I feel like we can take this further. The logic is there. I’m on a roll! Check this out: gambling is also a problem, in fact, gambling addiction is a serious issue in America today. You might think that, since evidence shows casinos do not increase the rate of gambling addiction, the existence of guns would similarly not cause an increase in gun violence, but forget that for now. Point is, gambling is a problem and I have an easy way to solve it: ban money. Let’s go back to the barter system, people. It’s so simple. Sure, people would still gamble, just as there will still be school violence with knives and explosives in the absence of guns, but think about how much harder it will be to lose a ton of money, and how much we will reduce the power of casinos and the like by forcing them to trade in goats and seashells, rather than dollars.
And you know, now that I think about it, illegal immigration is a major issue where I come from. An easy way to stop that, it seems to me, would be to ban shoes. It’s far hard to walk across the scorching Mexican desert in bare feet than it is in shod ones, believe me. Sure, it wouldn’t stop people crossing over entirely, but a lot of folks would be deterred from even trying by simply making shoes go away.
No fun to do barefoot.
What’s that you say? “Banning broadband, money, and shoes will cause all sorts of other problems that aren’t worth the cost.” Well, you may be right. I hadn’t considered a cost-benefit analysis, I suppose. I just wanted illegal downloading and gambling to go away, like we all want guns to just go away, and I had reached my “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” phase. Sure, if we ban guns, we may also ban good things that guns do, like: protecting people from being robbed, stopping rapes, making hunting easier and more humane, and by far the most important — protecting citizens from the government, which is what the purpose of the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution was in the first place. But do we want to reduce the extent of violence in our society or not? It seems to me that a few hundred rapes and robberies here and there are a small price to pay for converting most of our shootings to mere stabbings instead.
Okay, I’ve made my point, and the longer I belabor it, the less Jonathan Swift and the more Jon Stewart I feel, so I’m done. All I’ll ask is that you please consider the idea of cost-benefit as a practical effect of bans. We all are prone to knee-jerk or anger/panic-inspired reactions to tragedies, and that is absolutely human and I’m right there with you, but there is never, never a time to abandon a logical process when it comes to structuring our way of life.
William Adolphe Bouguereau – The First Mourning (1888)
Finally, here’s a prayer of sorts for the families of the lost ones and the survivors, and for all of us who are struggling with the death of those near to us. While the songwriter would surely disagree with my defense of gun rights, the beauty of great music is that it applies to all mankind, regardless of personal biases. At the end of the day, we all only want the best society for our children.
The blues is where American music began. Except for classical music and traditional/folk forms (from which blues itself partially grew, in part), nearly all modern, popular music, from the most avant garde electronica to straightahead jazz to country all derived, at least in part, from blues music. What exactly is the blues? Well, you could go with Wikipedia — or you could go with B.B. King’s famous, and considerably simpler definition. When asked how he defined the multifaceted art of the blues, King responded: “Man, the blues ain’t nothin’ but three chords and the truth.”
King was one of the first blues superstars, who not only helped popularize the ancient genre, but also modernized and modified it with musical devices from other musical forms. His breakout hit “The Thrill is Gone,” apart from being a powerful, elegant blues tune in its own right, added motifs from jazz and then-incipient rock-and-roll to make for a fuller, more easily digestible blues sound. As a result, King is often dismissed by the blues hardcore as being some sort of musical apostate, but I am a huge B.B. King fan, and I think his contributions to the genre are undeniably immeasurable.
B.B. always looks like he might be having a heart attack when he plays. You’re never really sure. It’s part of the draw.
As a huge music fan, it’s always interesting when a titan of the music scene performs a song, however inadvertently, that lines up with my bizarre political beliefs. B.B. King recorded “Inflation Blues” early in his career, a song that is surprisingly astute at breaking down inflation, how it ends up being a regressive tax on the poor, the mechanism behind it, the motivation behind that mechanism — and manages to be extremely catchy at the same time. Forget Conjunction Junction, this is how our children ought to be taught economic principles:
The lyrics demonstrate a correct knowledge of inflation’s mechanics:
I’m trying to make a living, I can’t save a cent. It takes all of my money, just to eat and pay my rent.
Inflation is a form of taxation. It works by printing currency in a given area (generally, a country) while the value of the goods and services in that are are fixed. Each unit of currency, then, is worth less than it had been before the new currency was printed. Because the printers of the money (generally the government and its cronies) have early access to the newly printed money, they can buy things at prices that have not yet adjusted to its lower value. This enriches them at the expense of everyone else, whose money is now worth less, as the price of everything will eventually go up to compensate for the new influx of currency units.
You know, I’m not one of those highbrows. I’m average Joe to you. I came up eating cornbread, Candied yams, and chicken stew.
Inflation is inherently regressive — that is, it taxes poor people and middle-class people more than rich people. This is, first of all, because rich people are more likely to have early access to the inflated currency, such as big U.S. banks that are receiving “bailout” monies. The bailout dollars are just dollars printed by the Federal Reserve Bank to tax the people at large in order to fund the continued operation of the “too big to fail” banks. Second of all, it’s because poor people are more likely to spend a larger percentage of their income on necessities and therefore be less able to absorb devaluation and taxation.
Chicken stew actually looks pretty good. Not sure what B.B.’s deal is.
Now you take that paper “dollar” — it’s only that in name. The way that buck has shrunk, it’s a lowdown dirty shame.
In order to have inflation, you need to have currency that isn’t tied to any fixed standard. It’s money by “fiat” — that is, in name only. If each dollar represents a fixed amount of gold/silver/oil/pizza, then the government cannot alter the value of that dollar without adding to the supply of those fixed goods, a much harder process, and one that can be easily monitored and evaluated by the people whose money is being devalued. Of course, an even better solution would be to allow for competing private currencies that are tied to all sorts of things, in order to allow the best currencies to rise and the worst ones to fail, rather than lash all of us, Ulysses like, to the mast of a ship sailed by the shadowy Federal Reserve into the joint maws of Scylla and Charybdis.
Inflation quickly makes people look for alternative uses for the dollar.
Mr. President, please cut the price of sugar, I wanna make my coffee sweet. I wanna smear some butter on my bread, and I just got to have my meat.
Here, B.B. sadly deviates from the sound economic line he had been taking up to this point, and instead advocates for the president of the U.S. to institute some sort of price controls on sugar. This would be a terrible idea, B.B. — but, like the consummate gentleman you are, you recover quickly from your mistake.
When you start rationing, you really played the game. And things are going up and up and up and up, and my check remains the same.
Rationing was a bit of a holdover from World War II at the time this song was recorded, but, again, it was another scheme that allowed certain, government-connected people to get access to what they needed first and best, while the people at large were forced to resort to waiting in long lines with coupons and scrip, or — much more likely — simply resorting to the black market to get what they needed. Unfortunately, other than counterfeiting, it’s difficult to think of a black market alternative for currency itself. But, when you think about it, if the Federal Reserve were a non-governmental entity, what it does every day with inflation would merely be counterfeiting, anyway.
Whatever you take from this article, go listen to more B.B. King. He released an album a few years ago called80, in which he does a duet with Mark Knopfler on Carl Adams’ “All Over Again,” that might be the best blues song I’ve ever heard.
For those of you who read this blog regularly or know me in the physical realm we all infest, you already know I’m a big fan of the NFL. I come from a city without an NFL team, so I’ve been able to grow up and around the sport as a kind of disinterested connoisseur, appreciating the intricacies of professional football without hooking my caboose to any one team in particular. So, although I am not a Kansas City Chiefs fan, it was with sadness and perplexity that I read and watched of the suicide of Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher following his earlier murder of his girlfriend Kasandra Perkins. The whole incident is a tragedy, and something I can’t begin to comprehend with the information I have at hand.
Did I mention that I hate the freakin’ Cowboys?
It was with even more perplexity and consternation, however, that I watched the halftime show on NBC’s Sunday Night Football last night, during a game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Philadelphia Eagles. Despite the fact that the Eagles put on an athletic performance of a level not unlike that of a 6th-grader pianist at a recital for which he did not practice, the game itself was not the most disappointing thing the fans watched. Instead, veteran journalist and sports commentator Bob Costas decided to use the halftime show, much of which was taken up with the discussion of the Jovan Belcher tragedy, to blame both Belcher’s death and Perkins’ murder on the existence of and, what I presume he must feel is easy access to, handguns. You can see his speech here:
Before discussing all the many things that are wrong with Costas’ (and by extension Jason Whitlock’s) comments here, let me say this. I have tremendous respect and admiration for Bob Costas as a journalist. He has been among the very best at his job (and sometimes at other people’s jobs) since before I can remember. From his coverage of the Olympics, to American sports of all kinds, to his excellent, touching appearance on Ken Burns’ Baseball (one of my favorite documentaries), to his recent, fantastic coverage and interviews of the Jerry Sandusky matter, Costas has, as the famous opera composer Donizetti might say, covered himself in glory.
This time, though, he is wrong.
And not just wrong, but frankly, ignorant. I have often said that I can understand and am willing to engage liberals and conservatives on a variety of issues over which men can have reasoned debate — and there is a variety. But one of the few issues over which I can countenance no debate, no counterargument without immediate loss of respect for the intelligence of the counter-arguer, is prohibition. How anyone, anywhere (but especially in the United States and Canada) can support prohibition of any kind, in the face of the overwhelming historical evidence that it is ineffective and causes more problems than it solves, is beyond me. This is especially true of so-called liberals and others on the political left, who claim to disdain “faith”-based arguments and instead to ground all of their thinking in “science” and empirical evidence. How, then (assuming Mr. Costas is a liberal), one can look at the vast, Martian-volcano-sized mountains of evidence in historical and current prohibitions around the world, and then advocate for more prohibition, is beyond my feeble, American mind to grasp.
Myeah! Now no one will be able to have a beer but them dirty rats, see?
Costas quotes writer Jason Whitlock, saying that Belcher and Perkins would be “alive today,” he believes, if Belcher simply had not had a handgun. And how, one might wish to know, should we make handguns disappear from this mortal coil? Perhaps Costas and Whitlock have access to some sort of Harry Potter-esque, faux-Latin incantation they can use to wave a wand and make guns disappear. If so, why are they sitting on it? If not, what do they suggest in its place? Prohibition? Making guns “illegal,” I suppose, would make them disappear, goes their sclerotic logic. One might wish to ask them about places like Mexico, which has far stricter gun laws than almost all U.S. states, yet has vastly more and more severe per capita gun violence than any U.S. state. Or, one might raise this Virginia study, in which gun purchase rates have gone up 63% while gun-related crime has gone down more than 25% in the face of more gun rights for Commonwealth citizens.
Ultimately, though, the question is much deeper than that. The real question is: how do Costas and Whitlock actually formulate their political opinions? Is it through a process based on the evidence of history and the world around them? Clearly not. So, perhaps it is based on some internal logic. Well, let’s pursue that. Let’s assume, against all evidence to the contrary, that making handguns illegal would somehow have prevented Jovan Belcher from killing his girlfriend and himself. As Frederic Bastiat, the greatest economic mind ever produced by the French nation, told posterity: we must look not only at the immediate consequences and effects of a law, but at all effects on all people at all times, to the extent possible, in order to assess that law’s value.
So, again, let’s assume the law were passed and Belcher were unable to acquire a handgun. He could still, of course, have run his girlfriend over with a car, or stabbed her, etc., but let’s assume he would have thought better of those media of murder because they require that much more effort than loading a gun and pulling a trigger. Even assuming that’s the case, we’d need to look at all the other consequences of the Costas-Whitlock Gun Dissapearance Act, too. Once the Act goes into effect, this woman gets raped, robbed, and possibly murdered (note the assailant in her house was armed with a knife, not a gun). Others would be robbed, mugged, carjacked, or worse, because they weren’t able to have access to the one thing that could have put them on equal footing with their assailants, despite a difference in physical size, aggressiveness, or training. Indeed, quite apart from the implication that Costas and Whitlock make — that guns somehow cause more violence to be perpetrated — one could make a much more logical (and empirically supported) argument that knowledge of a potential victim being armed will make criminals of whatever stripe think twice before committing their crimes.
Gun control working well in Mexico, where this huge pile of guns was definitely not seized from people who weren’t allowed to have them.
Again, I don’t want to get into the nuts and bolts too much, as these arguments have been done to death, on this blog and elsewhere. But it’s so damn disappointing to see one of my heroes fall victim to foolish thinking, let alone to have him advocate such claptrap on a national program, with no place for counterargument, and no real, explicit statement that his advocacy was mere opinion and not part of the factual reporting on the Belcher issue. Leaving aside the argument that Costas was using the Belcher tragedy to advance his personal political agenda and the moral/journalistic implications therein, he was just wrong here, plain and simple.
The truth is, though, I can understand where Costas is coming from. See, this whole thing reminds me of this friend I had in high school. He was a linebacker, too, for a rival school’s team. Sure, he wasn’t going to play D1 college, but he was a good player who loved to play, and was a nice guy, too. Unfortunately, my friend got into drugs, cocaine to be exact, and then harder stuff. The drugs made him into a different person. He took unnecessary risks, acted erratically, slipped in school. I later found out that he was having problems at home, too, and that he’d been receiving psychiatric treatment for a long time for his own personal demons — maybe it was those demons and those problems that led to the drug use in the first place. I’ll never know, because my friend was killed, along with another driver, in a fatal DUI collision in his senior year of high school. If only cocaine and other narcotics had been illegal, and therefore my friend had not had access to them, he would still be alive today.
If you were wondering about the current state of our failed state, take a look at the above graphic from the Pew Research Center in Washington. Basically, the government takes in far less than it spends — you knew that, though. However, it takes in less and spends more today than it did just a decade ago. And not to any small degree, either. Obviously, this chart says it all — we need to either cut spending or increase tax revenues (or both) to keep the government afloat… if that’s something we care about at all.
Tax the Rich, Right?
Of course, for those of you interested in raising taxes, say, on the “wealthy” (since, screw them, right?), you might want to take a look at what happened when that was tried in the UK. Should you not have the energy to click the link, I’ll put it smartly: more than two-thirds of the UK’s richest folks left the country, or their money did, in order to avoid the highest tax rate. Instead of increasing tax revenues, the higher rate actually decreased them by billions of pounds. This is due to a variety of factors best explained by economist Arthur Laffer in his well-known Laffer Curve hypothesis.
The Real Issue
The problem, kiddos, is not that taxes aren’t high enough. It’s that the government is an endless maw into which the fruits of our labors flow and are ground into grist for the bread of government’s friends. It will never stop expanding to spend more, borrow more, inflate more, because it is, by its very nature, a system of entitlements for entitled people with no viable form of oversight. There is no real way to curtail spending as long as government can count on an endless supply of lucre from its various different money-extraction schemes. We try to reduce the ways government can tax us, but don’t realize it just borrows us into debt to fund fancy new offices for Senators and Congressmen. We try to monitor its use of our tax dollars, but we don’t realize that the Federal Reserve inflating the currency is simply an alternate form of taxation. We place all sorts of regulations on what can be spent on whom, where, and when, but never realize that the regulators are paid by the same people they are supposed to be watching. And then we complain when money disappears, or when the oversight committee itself siphons off funds to write reports about reporting on reports — just so it can fund itself more and more.
Some of you may get this reference. Others may not.
The great Roman quipper Juvenal was once asked by a friend of his how to prevent his wife from having sex with his male slaves when the friend was away from home. The slaves couldn’t very well resist, as the wife was the mistress of the house and could visit terrible punishment on them should they refuse. The master couldn’t simply do away the slaves, as they were protected by the wife, and besides, he imagined they performed at least some form of service for his household. They’d become ingrained in his way of life.
So, the friend wrote to Juvenal for his opinion on buying more slaves to guard the male slaves in order to stop the women from sleeping with them. Juvenal replied in a lengthy, biting letter, as was his wont, and famously asked his friend: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” that is, “[But] who will guard these guards?”
What to Do?
Government will always find a way to enrich itself and its cronies at the expense of the people at large. That is its nature. It can’t be expected to do otherwise, as the politicians who run government are beholden to their special-interest backers, just as the slaves are to the mistress of the house. That is, more regulations will not help, as watchmen will simply be bribed with no one to “guard” them. More taxes won’t help, either, as they’ll just encourage more corruption. The only solution is to dismantle government at every possible turn.
Best to get these guys out of your house entirely.
Juvenal should have advised his friend to free his slaves.
More like “Heard it Through the Rape Vine,” amirite!?
You might not know this, but a crazy old law from the Great Depression era, still in effect today, compels farmers of raisins, nuts, cranberries, and other fruits, to give as much as 47% of their crop to the Federal government for free (or at least well below the cost of producing the goods). Yes, they have to give away half their crop for free, you read that right.
Why? Well, it’s a fool who looks for logic in the chambers of the United States Congress, but the idea here comes from the government’s attempts during the Depression in the 1930′s to fix the price of certain goods and therefore prevent the price from dropping too low on the market, thus potentially impoverishing farmers. This didn’t work, of course, and merely impoverished the public as a whole — at least those who needed raisins and nuts — and encouraged the public to look for alternative foods that would fill the same roles, but at a lower cost. Did this lead to the creation of zucchini bread when raisin bread was too expensive? One cannot conjecture, but if it did, it would be a true testament to the power of the human mind in finding ways around dopey government schemes.
Anyway, there’s a lawsuit now, by a couple of California raisin farmers, the Horne family in particular, who decided to package and sell their raisin crop directly to the public, rather than go through a middleman wholesaler like Sun-Maid. When they did, and didn’t render unto Caesar, the government sued them. A District Court judge said the government taking of their property wasn’t unconstitutional, because — get this — the Hornes and others had voluntarily entered their raisins into “interstate commerce” and therefore, apparently, lost all rights to derive profits from it if the federal government said so. The District Court based its ruling on a reading of previous Commerce Clause cases, especially the onerous ruling in Wickard v. Filburn, a Roosevelt-era case giving the federal government broad powers to do whatever it wants with private property so long as it enters interstate commerce.
When the Hornes appealed this ruling, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California refused to even rule on the merits of the Commerce Clause issue, and instead dodged with a procedural result compelling the Hornes to go to Washington, D.C. to argue in front of the Supreme Court. Of course, since the Ninth Circuit refused to rule on the substantive issue, all the Supreme Court is going to do, presumably, is decide whether or not its fair to send small business owners clear across the U.S. to defend themselves from takings by the government in Washington. Not, that is, whether or not its fair to make those takings at all.
The dickhead who started this whole debacle.
At least that would be a start, though, allowing the Hornes to go back and argue in the District Court that the government took their property without due process. Since this all started in 2004, the government has earned plenty of interest on the money it took from the Hornes, and has continued to forcibly take raisins from them all this time. It will likely continue to do so until forced to stop either by the courts, or a change in legislation in Congress. Good luck waiting for either, but I really respect hardworking farmers like the Hornes for at least standing up for what’s right.
For more information, please see the NCLC’s page here.
