Liberty & Power: Group Blog
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Iraqi People Worse Off
The American government has accomplished many things in Iraq; however, improving the conditions of the people living there is not among them. This is especially true when it comes to the lives of women.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Will a 2nd American Revolution be French?
In an email exchange, a friend expressed his belief that America would soon have a second revolution that was brought about by political and economic instability. My immediate thought was "if that happens, I expect it will more closely resemble the French Revolution than the one in 1776." Then I sat back and tried to figure out why I had arrived at that instant conclusion, and whether it had any merit. As a proximate cause, I think the conclusion popped up as a result of some reading I did last night and from listening to CNN this morning as I did the ifeminists newsfeeds. CNN had two stories that clashed together in my mind: 1) there had been a sharp increase in the number of millionaires in the U.S.; and, 2) unemployment benefits now run for 99 weeks in order to alleviate the severe and widespread suffering of the jobless. To me that means the gulf between the haves and have-nots is widening and quickly so.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Ron Paul on the Lindsey Graham/Chuck Schumer Proposal for National I.D. Card
I wasn't too happy with Ron Paul's immigration stand during the presidential campaign, but he almost makes up for it here in this wonderfully effective warning about the dangers of a national I.D card.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Launching a Left/Right Coalition Against Empire
Over one hundred years later, are we finally witnessing the formation of a new Anti-Imperialist League? The first signs are proming.
A diverse group of progressives, conservatives, and libertarians, including David Henderson of the Independent Institute, lawyer-activist Kevin Zeese, Jesse Walker of Reason, and historian Paul Buhle, have met with the goal of "bringing together conservatives, progressives, liberals and libertarians who oppose American militarism and Empire."
The website of the group, tentatively named Come Home, America Citizens Opposed to U.S. Militarism and Empire, is here and suggestions, and volunteers, are welcome.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Excellent EconTalk Podcast
Check out Russ Roberts's recent interview with Michael Belongia (University of Mississippi), in which they discuss the operations of the Fed. Although I do not agree with all of Belongia's proposed reforms, he has many insightful observations that complement some of the arguments that David Henderson and I have made. For instance:
1. An early draft of our article on Greenspan exposed the Vockler myth, arguing that Vockler's monetary policy was not as tight as many believe and that his role in bringing down inflation in the early 1980s is grossly exaggerated. That section was edited out of all the published versions as too much of a digression, but Belongia offers some surprising (and even chilling) confirmation of our claim.
2. Belongia not only wholeheartedly agrees that interest rates are a poor way of gauging monetary policy, but he goes so far as to argue that, over the period when everyone claims that Greenspan's policy was expansionary, it was in fact too tight.
3. Belongia manages to score some significant points against the Taylor Rule, pointing out that if it had been subjected to the same standards that led to the rejection in the mid-1980s of money stock measures as a target for monetary policy, the rule would have been abandoned long ago. (For more on the ambiguity of the Taylor Rule, see this post by Brad DeLong.)
Dr. Pangloss: Patron Saint of the United States
Recent statements that the United States has "turned the corner" and embarked on sustainable recovery strike one a tantamount to faith-healing. Somehow, politicians and opinion-makers are able to reassure the public that its belief in American exceptionalism remains well-founded and true. Apparently they believe it themselves.
And, indeed, they believe it in the same way Dr. Pangloss believed that this is the best of all possible worlds. Even getting his left buttock cut off did not suggest to Candide's companion that he modify his outlook. Americans and their economy, too, are being systematically dismembered, but the wonderful tautological perfection of our belief system keep us from recognizing the threat to our integrity. Dr. Pangloss would have surely approved
What is most interesting is that, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, Americans do not see the correlation between a growth-oriented economy and rising fuel prices. Notice the jump to $81/barrel on Friday? That was because of number of job losses was not as high as expected. Imagine what might happen if the number actually turned positive. Triple-digit oil prices would arrive again instantaneously.
On second thoght, Voltaire is probably too removed for most Americans. "Spongebob," the cartoon characters, resonates better, and he projects the same unchallengeable optimism in the face of reality. So, let us make Spongebob the partron saint of America! I have no doubt that if I search the web diligently, I will find that he has already been made into an object of religious devotion.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Icelanders against the State
Iceland rejects Icesave bill in referendum.
Good for them, why should they bail out Landsbanki?
For more on the heroic resistance of the Icelandic people to the state, in this case, membership of NATO, go here and here.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Excellent Short Discussion of the Crisis
Gary Gorton is a monetary and financial historian who wrote a widely cited and well respected paper a couple of years ago on "The Panic of 2007," in which he explained more clearly and in greater detail than anyone else how such recent innovations as CDOs and SIVs worked and then interacted during the financial crisis. He has now written a shorter "Questions and Answers about the Financial Crisis," which I think is one of the most important contributions to explaining what happened. It ranks right along side the EconTalk interview with Charles Calomiris. Basically Gorton argues that there was a sudden, partly unrecognized panic in the market for repurchase agreements (also known as RPs or Repos) at the end of 2007.
RPs are close money substitutes. Bank-issued overnight RPs were an important way banks got around regulations so they could pay high interest to large depositors in the 70s and early 80s, and were counted in M2 until 1997, when the Fed moved them into M3, where it already counted term RPs issued by banks. Gorton's analysis implies that I was seriously mistaken about the insignificance of the Fed's ceasing to report M3 in February 2006. M3 was discontinued just at the moment it was diverging from M2 and providing important information not otherwise available about certain monetary instruments.
Gorton's paper also clears up some other things that puzzled or intrigued me. Among them:
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Quotation of the Week (On Treason)
The legendary comedian, Mort Sahl, had this to say: "If you maintain a consistent political position long enough, you will eventually be accused of treason."
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Is the Current Recovery a Piñata with No Candy Inside?
Many commentators would have us believe that the economy hit bottom in the second quarter of 2009, and afterward commenced a recovery, albeit a “jobless” one, as employment continued to decline. The main reason for believing in this recovery seems to be that real gross domestic product (GDP) reached a trough in the second quarter of 2009 and increased somewhat in the following two quarters.
Although macroeconomists, especially in theoretical work, tend to equate the economy’s aggregate output and its aggregate income, this equation does not hold when output is measured by GDP. To arrive at the concept known as national income (or net national product at factor cost), one must deduct several items, the most important of which is the capital consumption (or depreciation) allowance on the fixed capital stock. In 2008, for example, GDP was $14,441 billion, and national income was $12,635 billion. Even then, one has not arrived at personal income, and getting there requires several additional deductions. In 2008, personal income was estimated to be $12,239 billion.
Left Goes Postal on Rand
I have never read a more bizarre commentary on Ayn Rand than Mark Ames piece on AlterNet. In tracking the rising influence of Rand, my focus has been on libertarian, conservative or fairly neutral commentaries -- e.g. reviews of the two recent biographies. I had not credited the depth of panic, rage and insanity that her sudden popularity has caused in the Left...at least, if this fellow is any indication. He froths at the mouth so badly that my computer screen got wet. Is this the new left slant on A.R. -- Rand, the mother of serial killers?
Excerpt: One reason why most countries don't find the time to embrace her thinking is that Ayn Rand is a textbook sociopath. Literally a sociopath: Ayn Rand, in her notebooks, worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of "ideal man" that Rand promoted in her more famous books... Too many critics of Ayn Rand-- until I was one of them -- would rather dismiss her books and ideas as laughable, childish, hackneyed. But it can't be dismissed because Rand is the name that keeps bubbling up from the Teabagger crowd and the elite conservative circuit in Washington as The Big Inspiration. The only way to protect ourselves from this thinking is the way you protect yourself from serial killers: smoke the Rand followers out, make them answer for following the crazed ideology of a serial-killer-groupie, and run them the hell out of town and out of our hemisphere.
For more commentary, please visit wendymcelroy.com.
Monday, March 1, 2010
My Review Of "Complicit"
Complicit, by Mark Gilbert, the London bureau chief for Bloomberg financial news, is unusual — a book concerning our recently demised speculative boom that you can still take along to the beach. Using that peculiar British talent of evoking laughter by the use of sneering disdain (he refers to the last suckers to buy into the mania as "the hindmost"), Mr. Gilbert takes the reader on a tour of almost-impossible-to-believe tales of greed, stupidity, and woe across eleven short, engaging chapters.
Click To Read The Rest
Stemming the Tide of History
Why is history being squeezed out of the curriculum in North Carolina’s K-12 schools? (A North Carolina State University professor has slowed down the process with a triumphant victory, but this is just a skirmish in a long war.) One reason, Jenna Ashley Robinson suggests, is that the curriculum is planned by education school Ph.D.’s, none of whom has a degree (even a bachelor’s degree) in history, political science, economics, or philosophy.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
The Myth of Census "Confidentiality"
I had intended to blog on this important topic by Mary Theroux at the Beacon beat me to it. Theroux writes:
I saw a huge new billboard in San Francisco the other day—part of the $350 million ad campaign supporting this year’s $14 billion Census—picturing an American Indian in full regalia against a black background, apparently in the process of worshiping the sky, with the stylized text “Tell your story.”If he’s wise, he might want to think twice about thereby providing information that can be used against him.
As examples, 1940 Census data was released and used to locate and intern Americans of Japanese, Italian and German descent, as outlined in these stories from Scientific American, “Confirmed: The U.S. Census Bureau Gave Up Names of Japanese-Americans in WW II: Government documents show that the agency handed over names and addresses to the Secret Service,” and USA Today, “Papers show Census role in WWII camps.”
Saturday, February 27, 2010
OJ Simpson and Climate Change
The campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, and enormously effective. It’s worth trying to understand how they’ve done it. The best analogy, I think, is to the O.J. Simpson trial, an event that’s begun to recede into our collective memory. For those who were conscious in 1995, however, I imagine that just a few names will make it come back to life. Kato Kaelin, anyone? Lance Ito?
The Dream Team of lawyers assembled for Simpson’s defense had a problem: It was pretty clear their guy was guilty. Nicole Brown’s blood was all over his socks, and that was just the beginning. So Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian et al. decided to attack the process, arguing that it put Simpson’s guilt in doubt, and doubt, of course, was all they needed. Hence, those days of cross-examination about exactly how Dennis Fung had transported blood samples, or the fact that Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman had used racial slurs when talking to a screenwriter in 1986.
If anything, they were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: In closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.” His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instill considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That’s what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be.
Similarly, the immense pile of evidence now proving the science of global warming beyond any reasonable doubt is in some ways a great boon for those who would like, for a variety of reasons, to deny that the biggest problem we’ve ever faced is actually a problem at all. If you have a three-page report, it won’t be overwhelming and it’s unlikely to have many mistakes. Three thousand pages (the length of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)? That pretty much guarantees you’ll get something wrong.
Indeed, the IPCC managed to include, among other glitches, a spurious date for the day when Himalayan glaciers would disappear. It won’t happen by 2035, as the report indicated—a fact that has now been spread so widely across the Internet that it’s more or less obliterated another, undeniable piece of evidence: Virtually every glacier on the planet is, in fact, busily melting.
Similarly, if you managed to hack 3,000 emails from some scientist’s account, you might well find a few that showed them behaving badly, or at least talking about doing so. This is the so-called “Climategate” scandal from an English research center last fall. The English scientist Phil Jones has been placed on leave while his university decides if he should be punished for, among other things, not complying with Freedom of Information Act requests.
Call him the Mark Fuhrman of climate science; attack him often enough and maybe people will ignore the inconvenient mountain of evidence about climate change that the world’s scientific researchers have, in fact, compiled. Indeed, you can make almost exactly the same kind of fuss Johnnie Cochran made—that’s what Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) did, insisting the emails proved “scientific fascism,” and the climate skeptic Christopher Monckton called his opponents “Hitler youth.” Such language filters down. I’m now used to a daily diet of angry email, often with subject lines like the one that arrived yesterday: “Nazi Moron Scumbag.”
If you’re smart, you can also take advantage of lucky breaks that cross your path. Say a record set of snowstorms hit Washington, D.C. It won’t even matter that such a record is just the kind of thing scientists have been predicting, given the extra water vapor global warming is adding to the atmosphere. It’s enough that it’s super-snowy in what everyone swore was a warming world.
For a gifted political operative like, say, Marc Morano, who runs the Climate Depot website, the massive snowfalls this winter became the grist for a hundred posts poking fun at the very idea that anyone could still possibly believe in, you know, physics. Morano, who really is good, posted a link to a live webcam so readers could watch snow coming down; his former boss, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), had his grandchildren build an igloo on the Capitol grounds, with a sign that read: “Al Gore’s New Home.” These are the things that stick in people’s heads. If the winter glove won’t fit, you must acquit.
Why we don’t want to believe in climate change
The climate deniers come with a few built-in advantages. Thanks to ExxonMobil and others with a vested interest in debunking climate-change research, their “think tanks” have plenty of money, none of which gets wasted doing actual research to disprove climate change. It’s also useful for a movement to have its own TV network, Fox, though even more crucial to the denial movement are a few right-wing British tabloids that validate each new “scandal” and put it into media play.
That these guys are geniuses at working the media was proved this February when even The New York Times ran a front page story, “Skeptics Find Fault With U.N. Climate Panel,” which recycled most of the accusations of the past few months. What made it such a glorious testament to their success was the chief source cited by the Times: one Christopher Monckton, or Lord Monckton as he prefers to be called since he is some kind of British viscount. He is also identified as a “former advisor to Margaret Thatcher,” and he did write a piece for the American Spectator during her term as prime minister offering his prescriptions for “the only way to stop AIDS”:
... screen the entire population regularly and ... quarantine all carriers of the disease for life. Every member of the population should be blood-tested every month ... all those found to be infected with the virus, even if only as carriers, should be isolated compulsorily, immediately, and permanently.
He speaks with equal gusto and good sense on matters climatic—and now from above the fold in the paper of record.
Access to money and the media is not the only, or even the main, reason for the success of the climate deniers, though. They’re not actually spending all that much cash and they’ve got legions of eager volunteers doing much of the internet lobbying entirely for free. Their success can be credited significantly to the way they tap into the main currents of our politics of the moment with far more savvy and power than most environmentalists can muster. They’ve understood the popular rage at elites. They’ve grasped the widespread feelings of powerlessness in the U.S., and the widespread suspicion that we’re being ripped off by mysterious forces beyond our control.
Some of that is, of course, purely partisan. The columnist David Brooks, for instance, recently said: “On the one hand, I totally accept the scientific authorities who say that global warming is real and it is manmade. On the other hand, I feel a frisson of pleasure when I come across evidence that contradicts the models ... [in part] because I relish any fact that might make Al Gore look silly.” But the passion with which people attack Gore more often seems focused on the charge that he’s making large sums of money from green investments, and that the whole idea is little more than a scam designed to enrich everyone involved. This may be wrong—Gore has testified under oath that he donates his green profits to the cause—and scientists are not getting rich researching climate change (constant blog comments to the contrary), but it resonates with lots of people. I get many emails a day on the same theme: “The game is up. We’re on to you.”
When I say it resonates with lots of people, I mean lots of people. O.J.‘s lawyers had to convince a jury made up mostly of black women from central city L.A., five of whom reported that they or their families had had “negative experiences” with the police. For them, it was a reasonably easy sell. When it comes to global warming, we’re pretty much all easy sells because we live the life that produces the carbon dioxide that’s at the heart of the crisis, and because we like that life.
Very few people really want to change in any meaningful way, and given half a chance to think they don’t need to, they’ll take it. Especially when it sounds expensive, and especially when the economy stinks. Here’s David Harsanyi, a columnist for The Denver Post: “If they’re going to ask a nation—a world—to fundamentally alter its economy and ask citizens to alter their lifestyles, the believers’ credibility and evidence had better be unassailable.”
“Unassailable” sets the bar impossibly high when there is a dedicated corps of assailants out there hard at work. It is true that those of us who want to see some national and international effort to fight global warming need to keep making the case that the science is strong. That’s starting to happen. There are new websites and iPhone apps to provide clear and powerful answers to the skeptic trash-talking, and strangely enough, the denier effort may, in some ways, be making the case itself: If you go over the multi-volume IPCC report with a fine-tooth comb and come up with three or four lousy citations, that’s pretty strong testimony to its essential accuracy.
Clearly, however, the antiseptic attempt to hide behind the magisterium of Science in an effort to avoid the rough-and-tumble of Politics is a mistake. It’s a mistake because science can be—and, in fact, should be—infinitely argued about. Science is, in fact, nothing but an ongoing argument, which is one reason why it sounds so disingenuous to most people when someone insists that the science is “settled.” That’s especially true of people who have been told at various times in their lives that some food is good for you, only to be told later that it might increase your likelihood of dying.
Why data isn’t enough
I work at Middlebury College, a topflight liberal arts school, so I’m surrounded by people who argue constantly. It’s fun. One of the better skeptical takes on global warming that I know about is a weekly radio broadcast on our campus radio station run by a pair of undergraduates. They’re skeptics, but not cynics. Anyone who works seriously on the science soon realizes that we know more than enough to start taking action, but less than we someday will. There will always be controversy over exactly what we can now say with any certainty. That’s life on the cutting edge. I certainly don’t turn my back on the research—we’ve spent the last two years at 350.org building what Foreign Policy called “the largest ever coordinated global rally” around a previously obscure data point, the amount of atmospheric carbon that scientists say is safe, measured in parts per million.
But it’s a mistake to concentrate solely on the science for another reason. Science may be what we know about the world, but politics is how we feel about the world. And feelings count at least as much as knowledge. Especially when those feelings are valid. People are getting ripped off. They are powerless against large forces that are, at the moment, beyond their control. Anger is justified.
So let’s figure out how to talk about it. Let’s look at ExxonMobil, which each of the last three years has made more money than any company in the history of money. Its business model involves using the atmosphere as an open sewer for the carbon dioxide that is the inevitable byproduct of the fossil fuel it sells. And yet we let it do this for free. It doesn’t pay a red cent for potentially wrecking our world.
Right now, there’s a bill in the Congress—cap-and-dividend, it’s called—that would charge Exxon for that right, and send a check to everyone in the country every month. Yes, the company would pass on the charge at the pump, but 80 percent of Americans (all except the top-income energy hogs) would still make money off the deal. That represents good science, because it starts to send a signal that we should park that SUV, but it’s also good politics.
By the way, if you think there’s a scam underway, you’re right—and to figure it out just track the money going in campaign contributions to the politicians doing the bidding of the energy companies. Inhofe, the igloo guy? Over a million dollars from energy and utility companies and executives in the last two election cycles. You think Al Gore is going to make money from green energy? Check out what you get for running an oil company.
Worried that someone is going to wreck your future? You’re right about that, too. Right now, China is gearing up to dominate the green energy market. They’re making the investments that mean future windmills and solar panels, even ones installed in this country, will be likely to arrive from factories in Chenzhou, not Chicago.
Coal companies have already eliminated most good mining jobs, simply by automating them in the search for ever higher profits. Now, they’re using their political power to make sure that miners’ kids won’t get to build wind turbines instead. Everyone should be mighty pissed—just not at climate-change scientists.
But keep in mind as well that fear and rage aren’t the only feelings around. They’re powerful feelings, to be sure, but they’re not all we feel. And they are not us at our best.
There’s also love, a force that has often helped motivate large-scale change, and one that cynics in particular have little power to rouse. Love for poor people around the world, for instance. If you think it’s not real, you haven’t been to church recently, especially evangelical churches across the country. People who take the Gospel seriously also take seriously indeed the injunction to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless.
It’s becoming patently obvious that nothing challenges that goal quite like the rising seas and spreading deserts of climate change. That’s why religious environmentalism is one of the most effective emerging parts of the global warming movement; that’s why we were able to get thousands of churches ringing their bells 350 times last October to signify what scientists say is the safe level of CO2 in the atmosphere; that’s why Bartholomew, patriarch of the Orthodox church and leader of 400 million eastern Christians, said, “Global warming is a sin and 350 is an act of redemption.”
There’s also the deep love for creation, for the natural world. We were born to be in contact with the world around us and, though much of modernity is designed to insulate us from nature, it doesn’t really work. Any time the natural world breaks through—a sunset, an hour in the garden—we’re suddenly vulnerable to the realization that we care about things beyond ourselves. That’s why, for instance, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts are so important: Get someone out in the woods at an impressionable age and you’ve accomplished something powerful. That’s why art and music need to be part of the story, right alongside bar graphs and pie charts. When we campaign about climate change at 350.org, we make sure to do it in the most beautiful places we know, the iconic spots that conjure up people’s connection to their history, their identity, their hope.
The great irony is that the climate skeptics have prospered by insisting that their opponents are radicals. In fact, those who work to prevent global warming are deeply conservative, insistent that we should leave the world in something like the shape we found it. We want our kids to know the world we knew. Here’s the definition of radical: doubling the carbon content of the atmosphere because you’re not completely convinced it will be a disaster. We want to remove every possible doubt before we convict in the courtroom, because an innocent man in a jail cell is a scandal, but outside of it we should act more conservatively.
In the long run, the climate deniers will lose; they’ll be a footnote to history. (Hey, even O.J. is finally in jail.) But they’ll lose because we’ll all lose, because by delaying action, they will have helped prevent us from taking the steps we need to take while there’s still time. If we’re going to make real change while it matters, it’s important to remember that their skepticism isn’t the root of the problem. It simply plays on our deep-seated resistance to change. That’s what gives the climate cynics ground to operate. That’s what we need to overcome, and at bottom that’s a battle as much about courage and hope as about data.
Bill McKibbin
Friday, February 26, 2010
Forecast: A Housing Shortage
Every so often, just when you think all hope is lost, along comes a bit of news that makes you wonder why you had any hope in the first place.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Anatomy of the Current Recession
Not everyone has the stomach for perusing the national income and product accounts, but one who does can learn a great deal about what ails the present economy and about its prospects for returning to a healthier condition. (I draw the data I discuss here from Table B-2, “Real gross domestic product, 1960-2009,” in the statistical appendix that accompanies the 2010 report of the president’s council of economic advisers.)
We’ve all been told, of course, that the real gross domestic product has fallen from its peak in the second quarter of 2008. The data show a fall of nearly 4 percent by the second quarter of 2009. Although this drop bears no serious comparison with the precipitous decline of real GDP during the Great Depression—about 30 percent between 1929 and 1933—it has certainly entailed a great deal of difficulty and frustrated expectations in a situation where many people had made plans based on their anticipation of ongoing economic growth. Between the second quarter and the fourth quarter of 2009, real GDP grew by about 2 percent, making up for roughly half of the preceding decline.
Not So "Bizarre" After All: More on Bernanke, Paul, the Fed, and Watergate
Robert Wenzel has more details:
Clearly, there were some very, very odd transactions that went down which may, or may not, have been abnormally facilitated by the Fed. Was this a normal Fed wire, or something more convoluted? My sense has always been that there was something a bit extraordinary about the way the funds went through the Fed system. It does smell, for sure, and to ask about it is not bizarre.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Ben Bernanke Gives Ron Paul the "Idiot Treatment" (Watergate Payoffs)
After Ron Paul raised questions about possible past Federal Reserve misdeeds including allegations of involvement in Watergate payoffs, Ben Bernanke answered smugly: "These specific allegations you've made, I think are absolutely bizarre."
The crowd reflexively laughed at Dr. No's perceived looniness and pundits have already depicted his concerns as "wild" and "odd."
Well, it seems that Paul may have been onto something...or at the very least raised legitimate questions that deserve investigation. A few minutes on google news produced this 1982 story from the Milwaukee Sentinel by Richard Bradee of the paper's Washington Bureau:
"Police who searched the room the Watergate burglars used found $4,200 in $100 dollar bills, all numbered in sequence. Proxmire asked the Federal Reserve Board where the money came from. As he explained in a letter to the late Rep. Wright Patman (D-Tex.), chairman of the House Banking Committee: "I got the biggest run-around in years. They ducked, misled, lied, and gave me the idiot treatment."
BLACK HISTORY MONTH
February is Black History Month, and many times the focus is on the suffering of African Americans and historical wrongs rather than black achievement. Here is an article that reminds readers to avoid turning the month into one "steeped in guilt and oppression."
As a side note, the author urges readers to "blend black history into American history" rather than treat it as a separate category.
Recent Entries
- Iraqi People Worse Off
- Will a 2nd American Revolution be French?
- Ron Paul on the Lindsey Graham/Chuck Schumer Proposal for National I.D. Card
- Launching a Left/Right Coalition Against Empire
- Excellent EconTalk Podcast
- Dr. Pangloss: Patron Saint of the United States
- Icelanders against the State
- Excellent Short Discussion of the Crisis
- Quotation of the Week (On Treason)
- Is the Current Recovery a Piñata with No Candy Inside?
News
Roundup
HNN Blogs
- Cliopatria
- Liberty & Power
- Judith Apter Klinghoffer
- How Stupid?
- Mark A. LeVine
- Allan Lichtman
- Tim Furnish
- Gil Troy
Wikipedia
Contributing Editors
- Common Sense
- Stephen Cox
- Stephen Davies
- Grinder and Hagel
- Gus DiZerega
- Gene Healy
- Karen U. Kwiatkowski
- William Marina
- James Otteson
- Jim Powell
In Memoriam
Freedom and Standards on Campus
- Grade Inflation
- Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
- National Association of Scholars
- Acton Institute
- Atlas Economic Research Foundation
- Cato Institute
- Foundation for Economic Education
- Independent Institute
- Institute for Humane Studies
- International Center on Nonviolent Conflict
- Liberty Fund
- OnPower.org
- Pope Center
- Trebach Institute
Blogs & Columns
- The Adam Smith Institute
- Agoraphilia
- Alan Bock
- Alina Stefanescu
- A Tiny Revolution
- Antiwar.com Blog
- Austrian Economists
- Beacon
- Booker Rising
- Cafe Hayek
- Chris Sciabarra
- Colby Cosh
- Cold Spring Shops
- Colossus of Rhodey
- Crooked Timber
- David N. Mayer
- Diana Mertz Hsieh
- Discriminations
- Distributed Republic
- Division of Labor
- Econlog
- Education Wonks
- Gene Healy
- Gus diZerega
- Hit and Run
- James Bovard
- Jacob Levy
- Jesse Walker
- Jim Henley
- John Cole
- Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
- Juan Cole
- JustinLogan.com
- Karen De Coster
- Kevin Carson
- Knowledge Problem
- Lester Hunt
- LRC Blog
- Liberty and Culture
- Liberty Guys
- Liberty Magazine
- Liberty Papers
- Margaret Soltan
- Mises Economics Blog
- Peter Gordon
- Positive Liberty
- Progressive Historians
- Radley Balko
- Robert A. George
- Roderick Long
- SCSUScholars
- Sheldon Richman
- Stress
- Third Party Watch
- Tom G. Palmer
- Torch
- United Liberty
- Volokh Conspiracy
- War Historian
- Wendy McElroy
- Will Wilkinson
Old Archives
Recent Comments
- John D Shelkop on Will a 2nd American Revolution be French?
- Karen Kwiatowski on Will a 2nd American Revolution be French?
- Tim Sydney on Dr. Pangloss: Patron Saint of the United States
- Sheldon Richman on Left Goes Postal on Rand
- Sheldon Richman on Left Goes Postal on Rand
- William J. Stepp on Excellent EconTalk Podcast
- William J. Stepp on Excellent EconTalk Podcast
- Bill Courtney on Left Goes Postal on Rand
- Sheldon Richman on Anatomy of the Current Recession
- Ayla Armbruster on OJ Simpson and Climate Change
Archives
March 2010February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
March 2009
February 2009
January 2009
December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
September 2008
August 2008
July 2008
June 2008
May 2008
April 2008
March 2008
February 2008
January 2008
December 2007
November 2007
October 2007
September 2007
August 2007
July 2007
June 2007
May 2007
April 2007
March 2007
February 2007
January 2007
December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006
June 2006
May 2006
April 2006
March 2006
February 2006
January 2006
December 2005
November 2005
October 2005
September 2005
August 2005
July 2005
June 2005
May 2005
April 2005
March 2005
February 2005
January 2005
December 2004
November 2004
October 2004
September 2004
August 2004
July 2004
June 2004
May 2004
April 2004
March 2004
February 2004
January 2004
December 2003
