Augustine2004's opinions on Lew Rockwell, Plato, and assorted other subjects

[Augustine2004]

The link below is to an article about the famous Zapruder film of the JFK assassination, titled, "The Two NPIC Zapruder Film Events: Signposts Pointing to the Film’s Alteration," authored by

Douglas P. Horne

(I may not link anywhere else in TWeb as per an agreement with Theology Web)

http://lewrockwell.com/orig13/horne-d1.1.1.html

[Augustine2004]

Remember Katherine Forrester. Hero for liberty and justice for all.

Why am I apparently the first to post something like this one in Tweb?

[Augustine2004]

Clause 1: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

You probably recognize it as a part of the US Constitution. Except the uniformity requirement above, do you not realize that there is no limit set on the "Power"? What is often called unconstitutional is actually constitutional. Is the War on Terror constitutional? I don't see Congress as really trying to stop it on the grounds that Congress didn't declare war. (Yes, the Constitution is contradictory. That can put us in logical knots, therefore, in trying to determine the constitutionality of some federal action or another.)

Clause 2: To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;

No limit here, either. Any argument against, say, unbalanced yearly budgets cannot therefore use the "unconstitutional" tack.

Clause 3: To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

Again, no limit.

The argument that the founders meant the Constitution to limit the federal government is nonsense, given the plain meaning of those clauses. Were the founders simply incredibly thoughtless? Maybe, but arguments for limits should not be based on the Constitution.

The Constitution just doesn't deserve our reverence.

Anyway my thoughts after reading this article: http://lewrockwell.com/barnett/barnett53.1.html

[Augustine2004]

Inflation or deflation?



Readers need to understand "standard money" as defined by George Reisman
http://mises.org/daily/3556


Perhaps two examples will suffice--or at least help. In a free-market gold system gold things would be used as standard money such as gold coins of a defined purity, gold bars of a defined purity, gold jewelry (perhaps!), etc. The other example is the complicated United States system. We have coins (pennies, nickels, dimes, etc.), paper money, and checking deposit liabilities. I now explain the last item. The Federal Reserve central bank maintains checking accounts in many banks. If payment of a particular check is demanded, the central bank can create dollars (better called digital dollars now?) out of thin air and redeem the check with those dollars. To each check for which payment is not yet demanded, there corresponds a liability on the books of the bank.

Readers also need to understand "fiduciary media" as defined by Reisman. These are instruments that are used as money, but are not standard money, nor are backed by reserves of standard money. The complete definition is, "money representing transferable claims to standard money, payable on demand by the various banks that issued them, accepted in commerce as the equivalent of standard money, but for which no standard money actually existed." (I think "but for which no standard money actually existed" means "neither standard money nor backed by reserves of standard money.") You should realize that in the free market credit should normally be 100% backed by standard money. People save money and part of that may be deposited in banks, which then makes loans based on that part (I think? I will check Rothbard on that).

According to Reisman, as of December 2007, standard money in the United States totaled $836.4 billion, but fiduciary media dwarfed that, totaling $6065.5 billion.

I just saw a graph of bank credit of all commercial banks (adjusted in a way that need not concern us). The credit reached a peak of more than 9T dollars in about 2009. Then it collapsed in the worst recession since WWII. It is now recovering since bottoming at a little less than 8.5T dollars (funny, writing 'a little less' here) in 2011.

There it is, we did have deflation for a while. Keep in mind that increases or decreases in the part of the money supply that are currently involved in trades have effects are not immediate (effects lag the increases or decreases by months or even years).

I have a feeling I should say more. For one thing, how did the stock market and the bond market behave? Later, perhaps.

I posted twice (or more?) on Federal Reserve effects. Here
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com...nipulates.html
is an explanation. Note that it says, "Because there is huge hot money flowing into the U.S. from the eurozone, the Fed has to drain reserves to keep the Fed funds rate at 0.15%." What I said was not wrong, but that does alter the picture considerably.

[Augustine2004]

More examples of "purely free-market" societies

Murray Rothbard (URL given below)

There are numerous historical examples of the growth and development of such a purely free-market society. Two may be mentioned here. One is the fair at Champagne, that for hundreds of years in the Middle Ages was the major center of international trade in Europe. Seeing the importance of the fairs, the kings and barons left them unmolested, untaxed, and unregulated, and any disputes that arose at the fairs were settled in one of many competing, voluntary courts, maintained by church, nobles, and the merchants themselves. A more sweeping and lesser-known example is Celtic Ireland, which for a thousand years maintained a flourishing free-market society without a State. Ireland was finally conquered by the English State in the seventeenth century, but the statelessness of Ireland, the lack of a governmental channel to transmit and enforce the orders and dictates of the conquerors, delayed the conquest for centuries.[2]

The American colonies were blessed with a strain of individualist libertarian thought that managed to supersede Calvinist authoritarianism, a stream of thought inherited from the libertarian and anti-statist radicals of the English revolution of the seventeenth century. These libertarian ideas were able to take firmer hold in the United States than in the mother country owing to the fact that the American colonies were largely free from the feudal land monopoly that ruled Britain.[3] But in addition to this ideology, the absence of effective central government in many of the colonies allowed the springing up of a "natural" and unselfconscious free-market society, devoid of any political government whatever. This was particularly true of three colonies. One was Albemarle, in what later became northeastern North Carolina, where no government existed for decades until the English Crown bestowed the mammoth Carolina land grant in 1663. Another, and more prominent example was Rhode Island, originally a series of anarchistic settlements founded by groups of refugees from the autocracy of Massachusetts Bay. Finally, a peculiar set of circumstances brought effective individualistic anarchism to Pennsylvania for about a decade in the 1680s and 1690s.[4]

© source where applicable

http://mises.org/daily/3735 (I did mention Pennsylvania before.)

[Augustine2004]

Another article I would have preferred to post in the "JFK murder reexamined" thread, but the only TWeb thread I'm allowed to post lewrockwell.com articles in is this one.

http://lewrockwell.com/orig13/horne-d2.1.1.html

[Augustine2004]

Justin Raimondo wrote, "Far from promoting Marxist ideology, or serving as the center of a revived worldwide Commie Conspiracy, the Chinese Communist Party is presiding over the largest-scale destatization process ever attempted." ---------- http://lewrockwell.com/raimondo/raimondo54.html Is that still true today? If not, what nation now? It seems to me that not much have changed since 1999, when the article linked to above was published.

[Augustine2004]

"Living within your means is now considered austerity. And unfair." The author Simon Black meant national governments, living within their means. Clearly he's the sort who thinks the world would be better off without national governments. Here in this article http://www.sovereignman.com/expat/wh...al-bankruptcy/ he gave two real-life examples of services that the free market is providing that people think only governments could provide.

[Augustine2004]

Joel likes data showing gold price ratios to selected market goods such as houses. Here's one for West Texas Intermediate crude oil (scroll down for chart of the past 40 years)
http://www.bullionbaron.com/2011/08/...t-heading.html
unfortunately, that does not have 2012 data.

[Augustine2004]

Blow for liberty?
http://lfb.org/today/cryptography-for-the-rest-of-us
This may be a temporary link (today's). If you see this late, you may have to search lfb.org for 'cryptography.'

[Augustine2004]

Is the author of http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewr...es/113635.html
saying that the FED can achieve its dual mandate of full employment and price stability by practically eliminating itself, i.e, liquidate its portfolio and then itself? Of course "full employment" does not mean there is no one who had just been fired and has to go look for new work or who is looking for work the first time. And didn't Murray Rothbard say that given a money supply that grows not at all or slowly the free economy can drive down prices through capital accumulation and ongoing deployment of new technologies? Nevertheless, I tend to agree with the author. Abolish the FED!

[Augustine2004]

It seems to me that some benefit may be had from taking a more broad view of things than the problem of the State. Namely, the problem to rather see is the struggle between these two classes:

First, people who are willing for the great part to respect the property rights of others, by following these two precepts:

1) Do all that you agree to do, and
2) you may do anything you wish with your mind, body and other property, subject only to the limitation that others have the same, equal, power over their mind, body and other property.

The other class of people are of course those who don't want to follow either or both of these precepts.

The problem then is, how is the first, property-right respecting, class to do with the other, property-right dissing, class?

The state is a problem whose enormity is primarily because its power attracts members of the second class far more than those of the first class. In other words, the second class hijacks or creates the State and consequently has far more power than otherwise. Absent the state, the problem with the second class then reduces simply to this, that the first class needs ways to detect and handle members of the second class. Surely I need say nothing more on this, because you can be sure creative people will be able to come up with better solutions than I can. The point, however, is that absent the State we still need ways to handle the second class. Another point possibly is that, even if the State existed, the tools that we qua the first class develop for coping with individual members or small parts of the second class may prove to be beneficial anyway. For example, maybe we can find a way to bring down Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton?

Of course I do not promise Utopia once we get rid of the State. Always the efforts of the first class to combat the second class will be inadequate if not actually mistaken. But it is not true that the State can nevertheless make the world better than otherwise. How can it? Already the problem of keeping members of the second class from hijacking the State has been mentioned, and even if that was successfully solved, one still has to make the argument that the State can make the world better than otherwise, perhaps by showing in detail how that can be done.


We need a compendious name for the second class. It would be so powerful to call Nancy a __________. "Second class" . . . nah.

[Augustine2004]

http://lfb.org/today/capitalists-who-fear-change/ A reason for the link: I'm reading The Lily, which I understand applies modern evolution theory to whether free economies can outperform other kinds of economies. I'm not yet finished. Maybe not until a few weeks. But I think I'll quote the article linked above on the need for freedom to experiment with a wide range of possible solutions.



A study of gold's performance in the Weimar Republic hyperinflation = 1.8 times!! http://www.caseyresearch.com/cdd/doe...hyperinflation

[Augustine2004]

when did the Wells Fargo incident--see article linked below--happen?

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...edding-bombing

It's amazing and appalling I didn't know until today. Why didn't I know?

[Augustine2004]

Eric Peters suggests how we may start to recover our liberty (actually, we've already made a good start by recovering our right to bear arms, a subject he discusses here--unfortunately the comments have bad language)

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j...ujq1AJeCNe_Zfw

Well, wa'd you think?