There are a lot of people who do not understand money. This is unfortunate since it is the cause of much grief.
The most important thing to know about money is that it has no intrinsic value. You can’t eat it, wear it, or build a house out of it. You can use it to make a fire, but people don’t usually do that unless very, very stupid people get in charge of the government. More on that later.
Many things have been used for money, but those things all had certain features in common. To be useful, money must be durable, portable, divisible, recognizable, and most importantly, scarce.
The reason things like gold and silver have been used as money around the world and throughout history is because they have all the above features. Recently, shoplifters have been stealing brand name laundry detergent to use as money – for the same reasons given above.
Many people very stupidly think that since money can be exchanged for goods and services, creating money will somehow conjure more goods and services into existence. What actually happens is that price of everything goes up. This is called “inflation” and has been a problem for nearly every currency in history. The British pound, for example, is the world’s oldest continuously used currency, and it has lost about 99% of its value since 1751. You’d need 200 pounds today to buy the same amount that 1 pound did in 1751. The US dollar is even worse. It has lost about 97% of its value since 1913, the year the Federal Reserve banking system was created. The dollar lost about 2/3 of its value since 1971, the year the US officially went off the gold standard.
The second most important thing to realize about money is that is a symbol. It is both a symbol of desire and a way of measuring it. For the only way to measure how much someone wants something is to ask what they are willing to trade for it. Money is what makes this trade possible.
Prices are the way we measure desire. They are critical information about how much a good or service is worth and how much demand there is for it. Many very stupid people think that the government can somehow raise or lower prices by decree. The only result of such decrees is economic chaos. In countries like Venezuela and Zimbabwe, socialist governments attempting to help the poor set low prices for food and fuel. However, since they set them too low, those goods are in short supply and what goods do exist are only available on the black market for much higher prices. In Venezuela, many people earn a living by standing in line to buy goods for the official price just so they can sell it on the black market for a higher price.
51st Emperor of The Roman Empire
This is not the first time this has happened, 1700 years ago, a Roman emperor named Diocletian didn’t have enough money to pay for everything. He ordered the mint to decrease the amount of silver in each coin so he could buy more. It worked initially, but then prices rose because it did not take long for people to figure out the coins were worth less than before. So Diocletian then decreed that it was illegal for merchants to raise prices. One historian at the time wrote that Diocletian might as well have commanded the winds not to blow.
Just like today, the inflation was blamed on everything except the government. Diocletian blamed speculators, money lenders, and foreigners for the inflation. Sound familiar?
Inflation can only come from a government creating more money, and there are numerous examples of this.
So why then does a trained economist like Paul Krugman think that minting trillion dollar coins would be a good idea? My only answer is that someone who knows economics but not history will invariably be dumber than a person who has studied neither. This is probably why Krugman also thinks the US economy could be jump-started by a fake alien invasion.
Why do they schedule the NCAA championship game so late? People on the east coast, especially those Tar Heel fans with a serious rooting interest, had to stay up till midnight. I guess their kids can all find out today who won rather than have actually gotten to watch what was a pretty good game.
Who’s gonna win? This guy!
Anyhoo, we have a winner in the inaugural Glibertarians March Madness Pick Em!!! Congratulations Crunchy Dolphin, whoever you are. Send us an email (from the email that matches the one on Yahoo) so we can get you your prize. Same goes for our Canadian friend Rufus for winning the international division (actually for coming in second) and whoever submitted under “Jeremy” for coming in third. Kristen wins the ladies division by narrowly coming in fourth overall. All of you send in emails so we can get you something as well.
And now we can move on to the links of the day…
The United States will stop sending money to the United Nations Population Fund. Back up, because a wave of progressive tears are about to crash down upon us since they keep saying the federal government must fund abortions and other “family planning” services here. I’m sure they equally think we should be funding it in the rest of the world too.
What, you want the truth? From me?!?!Yes, Susan. That’s exactly what I want…under oath.
Work has the better of me so I’m going to keep the analytics you don’t read anyway short and get to the video of strong men picking things up, setting them down in slightly different places, hugging, and ripping each others’ shirts off. Bonus points for those who find burly fellows attractive, one of the men is Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, aka The Mountain, who is not only strong, but adorable. The other is British strongman Eddie Hall who is large in a way I find somewhat unappealing, but the man is impressive both in picking things up and putting them down again in slightly different places, but also swimming.
Warty sent me a link to a paywalled video of this event which is much better, but–you know–paywalled, so you’ll have to make do with the potato-quality one here. I highly recommend watching to the end:
It’s Monday, I’m still up to my ass in boxes from a move (Thanks to Swiss and ZARDOZ for picking up the slack), and I’m grumpy. I will catbutt anyone who posts a link that I already posted. RTFLs!
I think all libertarians (glib, yokel, comso, and furries) can agree that being fired from a Federal job for violating the rules should not include 30 days of paid leave.
One can only imagine how much pancake it takes to choke a Catholic girl.
Remember, just one more law can stop domestic violence. Unless the cops tell you to stop calling 911.
Tesla passes Ford in market cap. One makes 25,000 trucks a week, the other 25,000 cars a quarter. I know, I know, the market can stay irrational longer than a rational man can stay solvent.
Now that you’ve read Part One and Part Two of my discussion of the career of Raoul Berger, it’s time for the part with Nixon in it.
In the late 1960s, impeachment (accusation by the House of Representatives, followed by trial in the Senate) was thought of primarily as a means of getting rid of crooked federal judges, who could not otherwise be removed from office. Still, there had been some dramatic impeachment trials in the distant past, and there were many legal controversies left over from those trials.
One issue was the definition of “high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” the constitutional description of the grounds for impeaching members of the U. S. government. Some advocated a narrow definition, by which only the commission of an indictable crime would justify impeachment.
Professor Raoul Berger, after diving into the source material, decided that the Founders meant the term to mean something besides indictable misconduct. Any serious misconduct or official oppression by an officeholder, Berger argued, was impeachable.
Berger’s discussion went through a good many points, but let’s look at one case Berger studied: The impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase in 1805.
Samuel Chase
Conventional historiography portrayed the U. S. Senate’s acquittal of Justice Chase as a defeat for Thomas Jefferson’s Republican (now Democratic) Party and a victory for judicial independence. Had Jefferson’s Republican backers in Congress managed to remove Chase, ran the standard narrative, then other Federalist judges who stood in the way of Republican policies – people like Chief Justice John Marshall – would have been knocked down like ninepins. Only the Federalist minority in the Senate, backed by a courageous group of Republicans who put principle above party, had saved judicial independence by voting Chase Not Guilty. Such was the conventional wisdom.
Berger had a different take. He believed that the Senate should have convicted Chase and removed him from office for numerous acts of judicial oppression. None of these acts were indictable, but they were the type of official misconduct which was impeachable under the Founders’ principles, principles which a partisan minority had violated by letting Chase get away with his behavior.
Chase’s judicial misconduct, as Berger saw it, took place while Chase was presiding at trials of various enemies of the Federalist party (which held office before 1801, becoming a minority party afterward). Berger, just as Congress had in 1805, gave particular attention to the 1800 treason trial of John Fries, who is shown here:
Seriously, though, Fries (proper pronunciation: “freeze”), an auctioneer in eastern Pennsylvania, was one of the leaders of groups of discontented German-American farmers who resisted federal taxes and tax assessments on their houses and land. The 1798 house tax was graduated or, in modern terms, “progressive,” so as to impose higher burdens on wealthy homeowners. But those paranoid Germans – despite their generally moderate income – thought that higher taxes could be in the offing unless the trend was nipped in the bud. Plus, the new taxes were too reminiscent of the oppressive taxes their ancestors had faced in Germany (an early example of Godwin’s Law). Fries, a Revolutionary War veteran, rallied his supporters to drive out some of the tax assessors from his town. Then he and his forces went to demand bail for fellow-resisters who had been arrested nearby, and to insist that these defendants be tried by a local jury rather than in distant Philadelphia (about fifty miles away). When federal officials didn’t meet these demands, Fries freed the prisoners.
Auction Hero? John Fries, auctioneer and tax resister, detained some tax assessors at Enoch Roberts’s Tavern (now the Red Lion Inn) in Quakertown, PA. Fries attempted (somewhat successfully) to stop his drunken followers from beating up the tax men. Justice Chase planned to have Fries hanged in front of the tavern, but a Presidential pardon prevented that from happening.
The federal government put Fries and others on trial for treason – the trials were in Philadelphia. The first prosecution ended in a mistrial, and Chase presided at Fries’ second trial. Before he could hear from the defendant’s lawyers, Chase issued a ruling that Fries’ actions, if proven, constituted treason, and that the defense would not be allowed to argue otherwise to the jury. Fries’ lawyers withdrew from this farce of a trial, despite Chase’s efforts to walk back his behavior. Fries managed his own defense as best he could. Fries was convicted and sentenced to hang, only to be saved in the last minute when President John Adams pardoned Fries and other “rebels.” (This pardon was the final provocation which led Alexander Hamilton – who wanted Fries hanged – to break with Adams.)
Alexander Hamilton
(Incidentally, for what it’s worth, here is Murray Rothbard praising an earlier tax revolt, the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. Interestingly enough, Fries had served in the militia to suppress that revolt.)
Chase had engaged in oppressive behavior toward defendants in other trials, too, including the seditious libel trial of James Callender. Chase pressed, with more than judicial zeal, for Callender’s conviction for the “crime” of publishing a critical pamphlet about President Adams. (Judging from Callender’s “biography” on the Web page of the Federal Judicial Center – an agency of the federal judiciary – it seems that there may still be some hard feelings toward Callender in official circles.)
Basically, Berger portrayed Chase as a classic case of an impeachable official. Presumably, Berger hoped that the next time someone in the federal government committed comparably grave misconduct, they wouldn’t get away with it as Chase had.
By around 1971, Berger had completed work on his book, Impeachment: The Constitutional Problems. His publisher, Harvard University Press, didn’t exactly rush the book into print, delaying the publication of this boring treatise until 1973. By that time Berger had resumed his research on executive privilege in preparation for a book on that subject, Executive Privilege: A Constitutional Myth, which came out in 1974.
In the publishing industry, this is known as “good timing.”
Impeachment hit the shelves as President Richard Nixon was in the middle of the Watergate scandal, and the public eagerly bought up copies of this suddenly very relevant book. When Executive Privilege came out, that book was popular too, due to Nixon’s claim that he could withhold information from Congress and the courts. As the title suggests, Berger thought executive privilege was a myth cooked up by modern Presidents in defiance of the Founders’ intentions.
After his impeachment book came out, Berger became a popular Congressional witness for Nixon’s opponents, testifying about the legal standards for impeachment. He also testified about executive privilege, pressing Congress to have the courage to demand the necessary Watergate information from the Nixon administration, in the face of Nixon’s resistance.
The executive branch under Nixon (see alt text for punch line)
Berger was a celebrity with a message which was welcome to the media and many parts of the public: Congress had the power to investigate Nixon for abuse of power, and Nixon should be impeached. Berger appeared on a Bill Moyers special on PBS, and on Pacifica Radio.
And there was a flattering profile in the New York Times, which commenced with some really classy ethnic humor: “Raoul Berger thinks of himself as a Dutch housemaid sweeping out dark corners of the Constitution….Every few months he lays his broom aside long enough to testify before a Congressional committee, transforming himself from Dutch housemaid into Dutch uncle.”
I looked for an image of a Dutch maid, but all I found was this painting of a French kitchen maid peeling turnips
Anyway, Berger got a lot of favorable attention from the media and Congressional foes of Nixon, emboldening them in their determination to remove him from office.
(One of Berger’s stances might have been helpful to Nixon – Berger said that the U. S. Supreme Court could review impeachment cases, so that even if the Senate had convicted Nixon, Berger’s view was that Nixon could have taken the matter up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court itself would reject this position in 1993, in the case of another Nixon – Walter Nixon, a district judge who was impeached and removed from office. The Senate’s decision was final, said the Court.)
The end came when the U. S. Supreme Court – under Chief Justice Warren Burger, who had been appointed by Nixon…
Warren Burger
…ruled that Nixon’s claim of executive privilege would have to yield to the need of the courts for information. Shortly after that, Nixon resigned under threat of impeachment.
But as Professor Berger noted in the UCLA Law Review, the Court had simply assumed that the President possessed some level of executive privilege which might, in other circumstances (not involving Watergate) justify withholding information from the courts or Congress. Professor Berger complained that the Supreme Court had not even considered his scholarship refuting the idea of executive privilege.
But for the moment, thanks to Watergate and Nixon’s disgrace, broad constitutional claims of executive power and executive privilege were for a time discredited. As Baked Penguin has reminded me, this was the era of a strengthened Freedom of Information Act, allowing individual citizens to go to court to demand information in the custody of the executive branch. Judges, not executive officials, make the final decision about whether citizens get to see the material – though there are numerous grounds the executive can give in court for not releasing the documents (privacy, national security, etc.). (When someone does a full-blown biography of Berger, including looking at his papers at Harvard, his role in FOIA and other developments of the time can be more fully described.)
The seeds of a backlash were already being planted. Just as progressives, faced with Republican Presidents and Democratic Congresses, had become more alarmed about executive power than they had been under Democratic Presidents, so too many conservatives were reversing their former support of Congressional power and coming to see a strong Presidency as a counterbalance to a liberal Congress. In this context, conservative Yale law professor Ralph K. Winter, Jr., wrote a scathing review of Berger’s Executive Privilege. To Winter, Berger was an over-hyped academic whose views on executive privilege were not worthy of serious consideration.
Perhaps Winter grouped Berger among the leftists who (Winter believed) were trying to hamper the Presidency, now that Congressional power had become a progressive cause. To Winter, left-wingers were bitching about the growth of Presidential power because they were looking for scapegoats for the failures of the Great Society.
(Winter was later appointed to the Second Circuit court by Ronald Reagan, and in the 2000’s he served on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review – the FISA appeals court. In the latter position, Winter showed his sympathies with broad executive-branch surveillance. Perhaps privacy is something the President needs but not something the President has to respect when snooping on others?)
Winter’s criticism of Berger was the exception. As Nixon left office in disgrace, most of the intelligentsia and the media praised Berger for his meticulous legal scholarship and his willingness to speak truth to power.
“A toast – to a stout-hearted champion of the Constitution!”
It was time for Berger to turn to another research project. This time, he decided, he would tackle the Fourteenth Amendment.
Works Consulted
Raoul Berger, , Executive Privilege: A Constitutional Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.
___________, Impeachment: The Constitutional Problems. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973.
___________, “The Incarnation of Executive Privilege,” 22 UCLA L.R. 1 (October 1974), pp. 4-29.
Gary L. McDowell, “The True Constitutionalist. Raoul Berger, 1901-2000: His Life and His Contribution to American Law and Politics.” The Times Literary Supplement, no. 5122 (May 25, 2001): 15.
Paul Douglas Newman, Fries’s Rebellion: The Enduring Struggle for the American Revolution. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Johnathan O’Neill, Originalism in American Law and Politics: A Constitutional History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
Israel Shenker, “Expert on the Constitution Studies Executive Privilege,” New York Times, July 26, 1973, online at http://www.nytimes.com/1973/07/26/archives/expert-on-the-constitutionstudiesexecutive-privilege-became.html
“Raoul Berger, Whose Constitution Writings Helped To Sink Nixon,” Boston Globe, reprinted in Chicago Tribune, September 28, 2000, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2000-09-28/news/0009280256_1_executive-privilege-writings-constitutional
“Watergate, Politics and the Legal Process,” American Enterprise Institute Round Table, March 13-14, 1974.
This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning. Let us press onward. There’s another 40 miles of bad road ahead.
In this installment, the prog responds to the broken window fallacy and the parable of the pool. The broken window fallacy was first explained by Bastiat. He said that while a broken window is beneficial for glass making and window repair, it is harmful to the owner of the window, because the owner could have spent that money on something more productive than repairing the window.
The best recent example of the broken window fallacy was the Cash for Clunkers program, which paid people to destroy perfectly good cars in order to stimulate demand for new ones. The main result of that program is that the price of a used car rose by about $900.
Once again, the broken window fallacy is, well, a fallacy. Another false comparison, unless of course you are speaking specifically of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, which netted BILLIONS in taxpayer dollars for defense contractors that were providing the weaponry to blow up schools and bridges, and the contractors to repair those roads and bridges, and the private security forces to protect them at 5 times the rate of the US Military. All of which, of course was completely orchestrated and designed by said corporations, that are foreign multi-nationals, that were mapping out plans for war from day one of the Bush presidency and arguably had a hand in allowing 9/11 to happen unobstructed. Cheney’s company alone has made 50 billion+ to date and he inevitably profited handsomely from it. That is where the broken window fallacy makes sense. When it comes to roads and bridges and crumbling infrastructure or the post office or other necessary and needed services the comparison doesn’t really apply, because those things actually have to be maintained and fixed. Not to say there isn’t a lot of superfluous and unnecessary spending going on in government, but about 90% of that is on non essential military spending. Keeping troops stationed in hundreds of bases around the world and spending billions on planes and weaponry that are never going to be used and we’re never needed in the first place as well as spending billions if not trillions rebuilding countries we destroyed in the first place unnecessarily is the TRUE broken window fallacy in US government.
So there you have it. According to him, 90% of unnecessary govt spending is for the military. Pay no attention to the fact that the military is about 20% of total US federal govt spending.
Some background on the parable of the pool: according to the parable, trying to enrich the poor by taxing the rich is like taking water out of the deep end of a pool and pouring it into the shallow end. Just as the depths do not change, so the relative wealth of the two groups will not change. Of course, some water gets spilled along the way. This represents the indirect cost of govt transfer programs.
On the pool analogy. Once again, a completely false and misleading comparison. Our economy is far from a pool that we are all in together. There are TRILLIONS taken out of our economy by the very wealthy and corporations every year and put in offshore investments and bank accounts. A true analogy would be that the people in the deep end are taking thousands of buckets of water a day and pouring them into a series of tanker trucks that drive away with it, whereas everyone else is slowly pouring thimbles full of water into the shallow end. Once again this “redistribution of wealth” conservatives are always screaming about isn’t about taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor, it’s about leveling the playing field that the rich constructed in their favor over the last 3 decades where all the wealth gets redistributed to THEM. This isn’t rocket science. 97% of all economic growth has gone to the top 1%, when the top half of the 99% are the ones putting in all the hard work and effort. If you can’t understand that taking more and more FROM the economy and giving less and less back to the economy causes and enormous rift, no amount of poorly constructed half baked videos are going to help you understand. Just like anything else that is alive and grows, if it is not managed properly, it dies. If you cut down all the trees in the forest, without planting new ones, guess what? The forest dies. If you keep extracting more from.the economy than you give back to it, guess what? It dies. The economy should be treated like a business of any kind, or a well.managed forest, you give back to it as you take from it to help it grow and thrive. Too many people at the top are treating it more like a strip mine, and we all know what that has done for West Virginia.
Well, he’s right about trillions being taken out of the economy- except it’s by the govt. Sort of. Still more zero-sum game economics.
I hope everybody had a great weekend. We finally started getting our pool ready to open but the rains yesterday, as well as the howling winds, tornadoes in the area and general unpleasantness mean that we probably won’t get it done until this next weekend. Oh well, that’s life…
Some relaxed links for a relaxed day. If you are looking for substance – these are not the Links you are looking for. You want a bit of fun, then stick around!
I would laugh at this guy, but some of my family almost got on a plane to Portland, Maine rather than the Voodoo Donuts one.
Not quite thicc, but a Daily Fail for those that like wimminz.
In the interests of fair play – some Daily Fail about Manly Menz.
.jpg "Like an old-fashioned ladies' locker room, there were no subpoenas allowed")
This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning. Let us press onward. There’s another 40 miles of bad road ahead.
