Southern Bread Blog

Last time we discussed the myth that WWII ended the Great Depression. We looked at how wars do not create prosperity. They destroy it by wasting labour and resources on death and destruction instead of on making things that people want. But, one thing has been troubling me lately. Namely, it seems that the U.S. is able to station troops all over the world, and even fight large scale wars like Iraq and Afghanistan without any impact to our economy. We don’t even notice it. If you didn’t read the news, and instead just used the economy as an indicator of what was going on with U.S. affairs, you would struggle to even notice that we are fighting two large scale wars. That should scare you, and let me explain why.

Even the most cursory reading of world history will make one fact crystal clear: war is expensive; very, very, very expensive. In fact, it’s the most expensive thing a country will ever do. Historically, most countries that engage in large scale war eventually bankrupt themselves in the process and are forced to stop. Take the war of 1812 as an example. The U.S. was forced to sell $69 million in public bonds to finance that war. It took almost 25 years to pay off that debt – just from one large scale war. It was this debt load issued through the Bank of the United States and all of the shenanigans that followed it that directly led to the panic of 1819, as I’ve discussed here before.

The Mexican-American war in 1846 again forced the issuing of $63 million of public bonds. That was roughly equivalent to the entire federal budget. They hadn’t even made a dent in it. And, of course, all of this public debt issuance led directly to another bubble/banking panic known as the Panic of 1857. By the time the War for Southern Independence rolled around in 1860, that debt was still hanging around.

It’s also a fact of history that Napoleon sold Thomas Jefferson the Louisiana territory (Louisiana Purchase) to fund his war with England. That should demonstrate the amount of cash needed to fight a large war. He was willing to sell us almost an entire fifth of the North American continent in order to get enough gold to fight the British. And, this isn’t atypical. It’s entirely normal. As I said, war is really, really, really expensive. The cost of sending thousands of men and machinery across the globe to fight a war is just enormous.

All of this leads to the real issue I want to address. How is it then, that the United States apparently can continue to wage war multiple times per decade in seemingly endless fashion and not have any trouble paying for it? One answer: inflation. Massive, massive inflation. That’s the only way that this type of thing is possible. Robert Higgs calls inflation “death fuel” for this very reason. The only way to make war affordable for a country is to inflate it’s currency through debt creation, which then gets monetized by the Fed. That debt then goes to fund military endeavors quickly, before the money has lost it’s buying power. In this way, we are funding war by lowering our purchasing power on a daily basis. At least the selling of war bonds is an up-front way of accounting for the costs of war. Funding it through inflation is more insidious, since nobody sees it happening. It makes killing seem “free.”

Think inflation isn’t driving war? Take these figures:

• The first gulf war cost about $61 billion.
• The Iraq war currently stands at $700 billion.
• Afghanistan is currently at around $200 billion.

I’d say that those numbers show some serious inflation happening. When your government can spend almost a trillion dollars on something and you don’t even notice it economically, you can bet that there are some major inflationary games going on. Just for perspective, by the time we conclude the Iraq and Afghanistan wars(if we ever do), we will have spent more on them than the entire balance of the Social Security Trust Fund(if there was one). That means that we spent more in 10 years than the balance of a program that has been accumulating money since F.D.R was president. That, my friends, is inflation. Also, known as death fuel.

Uh, no. It didn’t. This is one of the most persistent of the Great Depression myths. And it’s easy, in one sense, to see why it’s an easy concept to believe. After all, if your government wages a huge war, it’s going to need millions of workers producing war-time goods in order to fill demand. You’re also going to have hundreds of thousands of soldiers getting paid for active duty service. The numbers bear this out as well. In 1944, the unemployment rate was 1.2%. That’s an astonishingly low figure. It would seem that, at least in the employment category, WWII ended the Great Depression. But, there’s a small problem with that interpretation.

Firstly, the most glaring problem is that it’s dubious, at best, to lower the unemployment rate by drafting the unemployed into military service. In 1939, there were 9.5 million unemployed workers in the U.S., reflecting an unemployment rate of roughly 17%. By contrast, there were 370,000 military employees at the time. But, by 1944, military employment had risen to roughly 11.5 million people; thus, virtually canceling out the unemployment problem. However, drafting able-bodied workers into anything will reduce the unemployment rate. You could draft them into painting interstates green, or draft 10 million workers into digging holes and then filling them back in. That doesn’t end a depression, it just shuffles people around from one place to another. And, remember what a draft is. It’s a legal mandate. You either submit, or go to prison. But, somehow, when it’s a war draft, people see it differently. All of the sudden it becomes an economic magic wand to eliminate bad economies. Hogwash.

Secondly, you mustn’t forget that when a State nationalizes industry for war-time goods production, it is by default robbing labour and capital from it’s citizens. In other words, that new garden hose that Mrs. Johnson desperately needs in order to water her garden is now unavailable. Instead, it’s been made into jeep tires for the war. That doesn’t make Mrs. Johnson’s life any better. It makes it worse. Her husband might have a job. But that’s small concession if she has to ration food just as much as she did before he had one. We saw this all throughout the war years with every product that included steel, copper, rubber, etc. Consumers needs were not being met because all of the capital goods were being forced into making war materials for the almighty State. Again, just because those confiscated goods were going to be used in war doesn’t make it ok. It’s the same as the State taking all of that rubber, steel and copper and building an enormous 2000 square foot head of F.D.R. in the middle of the Utah desert. There is no difference. When resources are stolen, then wasted, it doesn’t matter in what manner they are wasted. The fact remains.

Thirdly, WWII economic numbers such as GDP, GNP and CPI are generally ignored by any economist worth his salt. That’s because of the horrendous skewing of numbers that result from government price controls, rationing, labour drafting and currency manipulation. You simply can’t trust any of the figures put out by the government from ’41 to ’47. They reflect a phony economy being manipulated by government. David Henderson sums it up well:

The point is that it’s not prosperity to produce things that government quickly destroys. So, if we factor out this 38 percent[war-time GNP gain], we’re left with virtually no increase in real gross national product per capita between 1940 and the last fiscal year of the war.

It’s actually worse than that. Despite various policies of Franklin Roosevelt that extended the Great Depression, the economy was coming out of the Depression in the prewar years. The unemployment rate, which had reached 24.9 percent in 1933, the worst year of the Great Depression, had fallen to 17.2 percent in 1939, 14.6 percent in 1940, and, as mentioned, 9.9 percent in 1941. Relatively-free-market economies, as the U.S. economy was, even after eight years of FDR, tend to recover from recessions and depressions as businesses find valuable uses for previously unused resources. The odds are high, therefore, that the unemployment rate would have continued to fall, absent U.S. participation in World War II, possibly reaching as low as 6 or 7 percent by 1944. This means that GNP per person, properly measured to reflect consumers’ values, would have been well above its actual level in 1944. Whatever the value of U.S. participation in the war, for Americans’ standard of living, World War II was a bust.

–David R. Henderson, antiwar.com

Wars don’t help economies. They ruin them. I’ll talk about that in more detail next time.

I’ve finally honed in on the perfect fresh ground wheat sandwich bread loaf. You can consider this a much improved version of my prior “modern” sandwich loaf recipe, except that I’m grinding the wheat myself for freshness. The key differences are the use of so-called “Hard Red” wheat, soy lecithin for texture and an extended kneading cycle in the mixer for higher gluten production.

Gluten is produced through the kneading process. As you knead the dough, the protein in the wheat is converted into gluten, which makes it gooey. It’s this gluten that turns the dough into a balloon so that it traps all the gasses produced by the yeast and helps it rise really well. So, if you don’t have enough protein in your flour or if you don’t knead long enough, you won’t get enough gluten and the bread won’t rise well.

I think this is probably where the notion that ground wheat doesn’t rise well came from. Not enough kneading and/or using the wrong type of wheat. “Hard Red” wheat has the highest protein content with as much as 15% for spring wheat. That’s even higher than bread flour. Hard or soft “White” wheat has a much lower protein content and thus, won’t produce a fluffy sandwich bread without adding extra gluten. So, with all of that said, here is the recipe. I’ve provided links to the various ingredients. Enjoy!

Sandwich Bread Loaf:

Dry Ingredients:

• 3.5 Cups of Ground Hard Red Wheat Flour
• 2 TBSP of Ground Flax Seed
• 1 TBSP of Salt
• 2 TBSP of Soy Lecithin

Wet Ingredients:

• 12 oz. of Warm Water
• 2 TBSP of Olive Oil
• 2 tsp Instant Dry Yeast
• 2 TBSP of Honey

Instructions:

1. Mix all the dry ingredients together into the mixer bowl. Don’t add the yeast to the dry ingredients.
2. Now add the dry yeast, oil and honey to the warm water and stir it around with a fork vigorously until all of the honey is dissolved.
3. Now walk away and let the yeast liquid sit and fester for about 15 minutes. The yeast is going to get really active and start to foam up(this is called “proofing” the yeast).
4. Start the mixer on medium speed, using dough hooks, and let the dry ingredients get thoroughly mixed together.
5. Now begin drizzling the yeast liquid mixture into the bowl until the whole thing is mixed in.
6. Knead the dough on medium speed for 15 minutes.
7. Flour the counter top and dump the dough out onto it.
8. Knead the dough by hand for a few minutes just to make sure it’s smooth and not too wet.
9. Now stretch and shape the dough into a ball with the seam at the bottom.
10. Clean and dry out your mixing bowl and then spray it inside with cooking spray or wipe it with oil.
11. Drop your dough ball into the bowl seam side down and shoot it with a light shot of cooking spray also.
12. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and a hand towel and let sit for an hour or until it doubles in size.
13. After it doubles, uncover and punch down the dough to get all the air out. Don’t punch it hard, just make sure it’s deflated good.
14. Now turn it out on the floured countertop again and knead it very lightly for about a minute. You just want to work it a little to get it back to a good shape.
15. Now, crisco the inside of a loaf pan. Use plenty of lard/crisco. You don’t want the loaf sticking to the pan. That’s a disaster.
16. Form the dough into a square shape, seam side down, and drop it into the loaf pan.
17. Cover and let sit again until it rises about an inch above the sides of the pan.
18. Mix one egg together with 2 TBSP of cold water in a small bowl. Using a sauce brush, wipe the top of the loaf thoroughly with the egg/water mixture(called an egg wash) so that it’s coated good. You can also crush up some almonds and sprinkle them on top for a nice touch.
19. Lower your oven rack to a little below center and put the pan on the rack.
20. Set the oven to 400° F and set the timer to 30 minutes.
21. When the timer goes off the bread is done. Let it cool on a wire rack for about an hour, then slice and eat.

Have you heard the saying, “if you’re not growing, you’re dying?” Well, that’s ultimately what offensive war is about. It’s about empire building. It always has been, and it always will be. We can’t kid ourselves and pretend that Iraq somehow was a defensive war. It wasn’t. It was an attempt by us to set up a puppet government in one of the major countries in that region. Afghanistan wasn’t defensive either. It was no more of a defensive war than the Japanese invasion of Manchuria was. And, of course, the Japanese had their version of 9/11 too, in the form of the Manchurian Incident. Empires always find a pretext(however small) for invading small countries. England did it, Japan did it, Russia did/does it, Austria-Hungary did it, and we(the U.S.) do it too.

How can I say that Afghanistan wasn’t a defensive war? Imagine that you are a kid that gets bullied every day at school for years. One day you work up your courage and decide that you aren’t going to take it any more. When the bully walks in the room and starts taunting you, you sock him square in the nose. The only problem is that he is five times bigger than you, so your punch makes his nose bleed, but it didn’t really hurt him that much. What does he do in response? He beats you black and blue, rips your shirt off, chokes you with it and then throws you in the mud. And later he claims it was self-defense because you hit him first.

What will the people say when they wake up and realize that all of these wars that they have financed through taxes and inflation for decades have been just the empire building whims of ego-maniacal presidents?

Last time I promised another example of relativism being employed as a rhetorical device. This time it’s Andy Ihnatko doing it in an ad for audible.com during an episode of This Week in Tech(TWiT). He’s recommending an audiobook by Julia Sweeney entitled Letting Go of God. Watch the video of it starting at the 1:40:45 mark(you should be able to just click play and it will jump to 1:40:45):

So, here’s the key quote:

“This is the most powerful argument I’ve ever heard. She simply walks you through… not through the argument against God, but why she herself came to this decision ([that God doesn't exist]) and why this was the right decision for her.”

This is an often used tactic employed by atheists that are committed, but haven’t had the time or fortitude to dig deep into the arguments. So, they end up falling back on cliche’d, “God is an emotional crutch” rhetoric. But, instead of just coming out and saying that, he’s obscuring that idea behind some relativism language: “this was the right decision for her.”

Now, if God doesn’t exist for you, then he doesn’t exist for me either. We both live in the same world. And, if I believe he does exist then I’m either (A) ignorant or (B)playing emotional make-believe games. Those are the only two options I’m left with, given his view. But, it’s obvious that he is compelled by the personal journey type aspect of this lady’s story. So, He attempts to soften the logical blow a little by bringing in the “…for her” bit on the end. But, the message is still crystal clear.

What he is logically saying is that theists believe in things that aren’t real. On his view, we theists play make believe games. But, he’s going to be kind and not judge us for it since he’s saying that it’s simply a personal decision. That’s like saying it’s a personal decision whether or not to believe that polka dotted rabbit people from outer space live inside of coke machines and deliver cokes out of the hole when I put in my money. Of course that’s not a personal decision. If you believe that, you are insane.

Now, just as I did before, let’s re-package what he said into a syllogism to more clearly expose the relativism:

1. God doesn’t exist.
2. Julia Sweeney realizes this.
3. Therefore, God doesn’t exist for Julia Sweeney.

Again, the conclusion is not sound. In essence, he is arguing for conditional existence based on mental awareness of the truth of a proposition. That’s complete nonsense, and I doubt that’s what he even intended at all. It’s probably just force of habit on his part. He’s not stupid. But, when you employ relativism, that’s what you are left with. Nonsense arguments disguised in emotional sophistry. Evidently that type of thing qualifies as the “most powerful argument” he’s “ever heard.” Jeez. When it comes to the God argument, he really needs to dig a bit deeper than a stage performance by a lady that had a hard life. I hate that she had hard times, but that really has nothing to do with whether certain objects exist or not. The existence of things in the real world are not conditional upon the emotions of a lady on stage.

First there was the CPAC straw poll where Ron Paul won handily. Next came the SRLC straw poll where he came in second only by one vote to Mitt Romney. Now, Rasmussen has put out the results of a poll that shows that if the 2012 election were held today, the results would be Barack Obama 42%, Ron Paul 41%. Folks, this is huge. Ron Paul has been denigrated by the Republican party wonks for years. The fact that he is in a statistical dead heat against Obama in a 2012 matchup is amazing.

He gets absolutely no play from the main conservative news outlets. The only time Rush Limbaugh even mentions him is when he refers to the rest of the Republican presidential nominee candidates as a bunch of “kooks.” That means that the 41% number is coming entirely from a grass roots surge from independents. People are talking, and they are sick of the same old crap coming out of the Repulican establishment. Romney is just a mini-Obama and Sarah Palin was campaigning for John McCain last month. Same ol’, same ol’.

It’s going to be interesting to see how the conservative talking heads respond to Dr. Paul’s popularity over the coming months. Will they embrace him as the man who can take down Obama? Unfortunately, I doubt it. More likely, they will probably just continue to ignore him or call him an isolationist and dismiss him like always. But, this poll gives me lots of hope, regardless.

Just to clarify for those who still don’t know much about Ron Paul’s positions. Here is a quick summary of his platform:

• Sound money – He wants to eliminate the Federal Reserve and return us to some form of gold standard in order to save the dollar from collapsing.
• Eliminate the income tax – He gives the statistic that we could eliminate the income tax altogether if we would just reduce the size of the Federal budget back to 2001 levels.
• Reduce the power of the Executive branch – He would return the presidency back to what it’s supposed to be constitutionally by eliminating most all of the executive branch departments like the Dept. of Energy, the Dept. of Education, etc.
• Bringing the troops home – He is a staunch advocate of a non-interventionist foreign policy, so that we would stop being the world’s police force.
• Free trade with all – He would push for unrestricted free trade with all nations, in the spirit of Jefferson’s mandate of “commerce with all countries, entangling alliances with none.”
• Liberty and private property – You can be sure that he would veto any bill that infringes upon our liberties or encroaches upon private property.

Obviously there is more, but those are the main points.  If you read Hot Air, you will come away thinking that he is a lunatic 9/11 truther that believes in UFO’s.  That’s complete nonsense.  I’ve listened to probably 30 different lectures/speeches by the man, and read two of his books, End the Fed and Revolution.  He is man that we should all want in the White House.  Don’t take my word for it though.  Do your research.  Read his books.  Listen to his lectures and speeches at Mises.org and decide for yourself.

I was reading a blog post just now and got linked over to an article on a site called grist.org where this lady is talking about her decision not to have children. Evidently, grist.org is primarily an environmentalism website just judging from the headlines I skimmed through. So, her angle in the article was that not having kids is the environmentally friendly thing to do. In fact, she goes further, and calls being childless the most “humane” thing to do:

I come here before you today to make the same proclamation—with a twist. I am thoroughly delighted by the fact that the most humane thing for me to do is to have no children at all.

–Lisa Hymas, Grist.org

The most interesting thing to me in this quote is not the analysis of her environmentalism, but how her argument doesn’t mesh with her rhetoric. They are in conflict. She says, “…the most humane thing for me to do is to have no children at all.” I see this type of language all of the time. If you think about what she’s saying, it’s completely dishonest. There is an implied “given this condition” that is missing from her statement. It should read like this:

• The most humane thing for me to do, given the current toll that overpopulation is taking on our environment, is to have no children at all.

That’s what she’s actually saying. Now, the problem is that if there really is world-wide destructive overpopulation going on in the world, how can it be only morally binding on one person? Put another way: if the conditions she describes are real enough to be morally binding on her, then they are, by definition, morally binding on the rest of us also. But, of course, she goes to great lengths at the very beginning of the article to make it known that if you do indeed choose to participate in more world destruction by having children then she is just fine with that. Huh?!

She puts it this way:

Let me get this out of the way up front: I like kids—many of them, anyway. Some of my best friends, as they say, are parents. I bear no ill will to procreators, past, present, and prospective. I claim no moral or ethical high ground.

–Lisa Hymas, Grist.org

Then I have to ask, why the crap did she write a 2000 word article on the humane obligation of being childless if she actually doesn’t care about being childless. That’s relativism language. But, not in the formal sense. Instead, it’s relativism being employed as it most commonly is: as a simple linguistic tactic, to enable the writer to smuggle morality in the back door in a non-offensive way. She’s not a relativist any more than anyone else is. Real, formal relativism is self-refuting and, as such, has been mostly discarded from the public discussion. Instead, it’s been replaced by this type of rhetorical relativism, that let’s the game continue to be played by hiding some of the premises. But it’s still just as self-refuting.

It’s her use of the word “humane” that makes the whole phrase turn. The word “humane” defines what is morally acceptable treatment of our fellow man. Therefore, when she says that childlessness is the only “humane” thing for her to do, it’s the same thing as saying that having kids would be inhumane. Thus, immoral. And, an action that is inhumane is always inhumane, no matter who does it. It’s a concrete condition. If it’s true that it’s inhumane for her to have children because it contributes to overpopulation, then the same conditions apply to me. My children are an inhumane treatment to my fellow man. There is no difference, since the conditions she gives are true for all people.

The relativism becomes obvious when you reformulate her thesis into an easier to follow syllogism. Like this:

1. Overpopulation is destroying the environment.
2. Having children is the cause of overpopulation.
3. Therefore, it’s only immoral when I have children.

Of course, this is an absurd argument. If premise A and premise B are valid, then in order for the argument to be sound, the conclusion(C) should be something like: “Therefore, it’s immoral for people to have more children than is required for a stable, low population rate.” But, of course, a statement like that has all sorts of problems. It implies an Orwellian procreation management authority that I’m sure she would rather avoid getting in to. Not to mention the fact that it’s simply impossible to achieve something like that without horrible human rights abuses, such as forced abortions and such. Thus, she employs a little relativism to soften the blow of what she’s saying, yet still get across an air of moral imperative.

I am seeing this all the time lately. I’ll give you another example of it next time.

Yesterday, a committee of the Alabama House of Representatives voted to pass on H.B. 642 to the full house for a vote. The bill would allow medical marijuana usage in Alabama with a prescription:

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — A bill to legalize possession of small amounts of marijuana for medical purposes has been approved by an Alabama House committee.

The sponsor, Democratic Rep. Patricia Todd of Birmingham, acknowledges that with only five days remaining the bill has little chance of winning final passage this session.

The bill would allow a patient suffering serious pain because of cancer or other ailments to possess up to 2.5 ounces of marijuana. The patient would need permission from a doctor and could grow his or her own marijuana.

One committee member, Democratic Rep. Yusuf Salaam of Selma, expressed concern that allowing marijuana use for medical purposes might open the door to full scale legalization of the drug.

The bill now goes to the full House.

–AP via al.com

While this may instill fear of quickening societal decline in the hearts of Christians, when you sit back and think about it logically, it really doesn’t make any sense for drugs to be illegal in the first place. And, there is no solid biblical or ethical reason to criminalize drug use. Now, I don’t expect you to just take my previous statement on face value. So, I’m going to step through my argument and try and convince you.

Here’s my argument:

• Christians should support the repeal of all laws that criminalize the use, possession or cultivation of drugs, because the enforcement of those laws, and resultant negative externalities, cause more harm than the drugs themselves.

Here’s my disclaimer:

• I, personally, do not use/take any illegal drugs whatsoever. And, if any currently illegal drug was to be made legal, I still would not put it into my body. In short, I do not and will not use drugs, now or in the future.

Now, my argument for repealing all drug laws is based on what I think is a set of obvious, common-sense observations about the consequences of criminalizing human behaviours that don’t harm others. I’m going to go through these observations one by one using marijuana laws as my example, but please note that I believe this applies to all drug laws. Not just marijuana.

1.) Marijuana’s legal status is not the determining factor upon which people decide to smoke it or not. Think about it for a moment. If you don’t currently use marijuana, is it because it’s illegal? Of course not. The reason you don’t smoke pot is because you’ve made either a moral, or a health decision to abstain from it. Marijuana’s legality doesn’t play into that decision making process at all. There are plenty of things that are legal to ingest that you, in fact, do not ingest. Tobacco for instance. Tobacco is fully legal, yet only about 21% of the U.S. population smoke cigarettes. Furthermore, that 21% number represents a drop in smokers from almost 43% in 1964 to 21% in 2005. That’s a 50% drop in 40 years, with smoking still being fully legal the entire time.

So, what is the reason for this drop in tobacco smoking rates? The overwhelming factors are social stigma and health concerns. Legality has nothing to do with it. As a matter of fact, most people begin smoking early in life, before they are of legal age, only to quit later as adults. This fact shows how ineffectual bans on personal behaviour are. If a majority of people begin using a drug when it’s illegal and then quit when it’s legal, that blows the whole theory out of the water from the get go. The bottom line is that legality doesn’t influence usage among behaviours that have moral stigma attached. If a person doesn’t smoke weed now, it’s about 99% certain that he won’t smoke it when it’s legal.

2.) Drug laws put people in prison for engaging in a behaviour that doesn’t harm anyone. People should not go to jail for ingesting something into their body. I believe it’s immoral to lock someone in a cage for eating, smoking or ingesting something into their body that we don’t approve of. But, let me be clear. This is an entirely different argument from things like drunk driving or negligence. What I’m talking about is the simple act of picking a plant out of your back yard, sticking it in a cigarette paper and inhaling the smoke. Knocking down a person’s door, kidnapping them from their family and throwing them in prison for months or years at a time simply for doing that act is immoral.

3.) Drug criminalization creates violence and suffering. You know what’s worse than smoking dope? Children being killed in the crossfire of Mexican drug wars and innocent people being murdered to keep them quiet about drug trafficking in inner-city neighborhoods. If prohibition taught us anything, it’s that making the personal consumption of certain substances illegal instantly creates a black market. And, that black market spawns gangs, violence, murder and all sorts of horrible side effects. What finally brought down Al Capone’s gang? It wasn’t the FBI. It was the repeal of prohibition. Want to destroy Mexican drug cartels? Repeal all of the drug laws. When things are made illegal, people fight over them. When those things are legalized people engage in commerce. It’s been said that when goods can’t cross borders, bullets will.

4.) Being an addict is not the same as being a criminal. Drugs are addictive. That’s a fact. Putting someone in prison doesn’t make them any less addicted to heroine. In fact, it complicates their recovery from that addiction. There’s plenty of drugs in prison. There’s also plenty of rape and violence. And, in the mean time, the addict is now isolated from their family, church and other loved ones. It’s sick. Showing the love of Christ to an addict is only complicated and frustrated by locking them up in a cage. And treating them like a criminal, so that they have to hide from public view, creates in them a sense of criminality that leads to worse behaviour and possibly real crime. What’s better? Having a prison ministry to go and preach to drug offenders, or not having them be prisoners at all and witnessing to them on their own front lawn.

5.) Enforcement of drug laws consume tens of billions of tax dollars each year. The DEA(Drug Enforcement Agency) has a budget of $2.6 billion dollars. When you take into account all of the thousands of enforcement agents, local police, state troopers, marshalls, court employees, etc. that are required to enforce the U.S. drug laws, it’s just insane the amount of money that is wasted on this nonsense. There are now roughly 50,000 people in prison in this country on marijuana charges, at a cost of $1 billion per year to the tax payer. When drugs as a whole are taken into account, the numbers are far higher. Again, I believe it’s wrong to be in favor of the caging of my fellow citizens for simply smoking a plant. If they get behind the wheel of a car or neglect their children in favor of drugs, let’s intervene as a society, but anything less is just bullying.

6.) Drug laws are completely inconsistent. This is an easy one. Marijuana is illegal. Alcohol isn’t. There is no difference between the two. Case closed.

7.) Sin is not the same as crime. There are lots of things that are sinful, that aren’t criminal. For instance, coveting your neighbors possessions is sinful. But it’s absolutely not criminal. The same applies to drugs and alcohol. Scripture tells us that our bodies are the “temple of the Lord.” Therefore, we should take care of our bodies and not damage them carelessly. But, using that as the basis of a civil law is silliness. Where does it stop? Sure, some people drink too much and some people smoke weed, and that impairs their judgement. But, many people also willingly push their bodies to the physical limit and get drowsy behind the wheel from overwork. Should we imprison them too? Also, many people willingly don’t eat right, so that their bodies get sick and they can’t take care of their families like they should. Should we imprison them too? Of course not. Smoking marijuana may be sinful, but it isn’t criminal any more than becoming addicted to Ambien is criminal. Both impair your judgement, but you only go to jail for one.

8.) Drug laws increase State power at the expense of social power. Christians should be the first in line to come to the aid of those in the grip of drug addiction. But, we have acquiesced to the impersonal, faceless, cold State. They might get somewhat better after the State puts them through mandatory drug rehab programs, but where is the love of Christ? Drugs have always carried social stigma. And, even before there were marijuana laws(The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937) those addicted to drugs were social outcasts. Christ told us to minister to those people, not throw them in a cage. That effort is hindered, not helped, by zealous District Attorneys that just need another notch on their belt in an election year.

9.) Drug laws just simply don’t work. I heard it said recently that the drug wars are over and the drugs won. That’s a very true statement. It’s estimated that roughly 100 million Americans have smoked pot at some point in their lives or actively smoke it now. Statistically, this is an absolutely dismal failure. While this isn’t an argument in and of itself, it lends us an insight into the feasability of outlawing non-harmful behaviour. In short, banning a behaviour doesn’t stop that behaviour. It just empowers the State. The only thing that keeps people from doing drugs is shame and lack of funds. Not laws.

And finally:

Legalization of marijuana is inevitable. It’s going to happen folks. It’s just a matter of time. California could legalize marijuana as early as this year. And, if that happens and they successfully tax the crap out of it, you will see a rapid domino effect across all of the other states as they join in the action to save their dwindling budgets. What you won’t see is millions of non-pot smokers going to the pot store to buy some weed for the first time when it’s finally legalized. That’s just not the way things work. As a Christian, I want people to refrain from behaviour that could harm themselves. But, so much more harm comes from drug law enforcement than from the actual drugs themselves that I believe it’s the appropriate Christians stance to support repeal of drug laws. At the very least, it would put us back to the pre-1937 stance of curbing drug use simply through societal shame and addiction treatment, not laws.

Remind me again exactly who we are “liberating” in Afghanistan. To me, it just looks like a bunch of killing:

US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened, Afghan investigators have told The Times.

Two pregnant women, a teenage girl, a police officer and his brother were shot on February 12 when US and Afghan special forces stormed their home in Khataba village, outside Gardez in eastern Afghanistan. The precise composition of the force has never been made public.

The claims were made as Nato admitted responsibility for all the deaths for the first time last night. It had initially claimed that the women had been dead for several hours when the assault force discovered their bodies.

“Despite earlier reports we have determined that the women were accidentally killed as a result of the joint force firing at the men,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Todd Breasseale, a Nato spokesman. The coalition continued to deny that there had been a cover-up and said that its legal investigation, which is ongoing, had found no evidence of inappropriate conduct.

–Jerome Starkey, Times Online

This is the “new tone” that Obama brought to the world stage. This is how he restores “respect to America’s image in the world.” Just a few more children that will grow up without parents thanks to the whims of an American president. God help us. Christians love to rail against abortion, yet they actively worship at the feet of a military that just killed two pregnant women. And, yes, I said worship and meant it. Have you been to the Lifeway book store lately and seen their military section with paintings of soldiers kneeling at the cross? It’s sickening.

So, I posted the other day that a traditional retirement plan based on maximizing IRA contributions into things like mutual funds isn’t going to cut it moving forward. If that’s true, then we must seek alternatives. I don’t mind working well into my later years. In fact, I think it’s a really good choice, since it keeps us in touch with the community around us. But, that doesn’t mean that when I’m 75 I want to still be just as dependent on my current level of income. I think the goal with retirement shouldn’t be to live high on the hog and never work another day in your life. No, the goal should be to reduce your income dependency to a level that allows you to live comfortably, without constant financial worry, all while enabling you to do the things that are hard to do now, like ministry work and hobbies.

I’m going to take a page from Jack Spirko here and list the three things that worry us most in life: putting food on the table, keeping a roof over our heads, and clothing ourselves. Food, shelter, clothing. Those are the three staples that, if taken care of ahead of time, will help us to have a comfortable “retirement.” In order to do that, we need to focus on these things:

1. Paying off our homes and turning our homes into producers.
2. Increasing our food production and designing our life to be more simple.
3. Storing up money in an inflation resistant way.
4. Expanding our knowledge/skills to be less dependent on external systems.

The first thing we need to do is focus on getting out of debt and paying off our homes as quickly as possible. The myth that your home will forever increase in value has been exposed. It’s a lie. In reality, it takes constant in-flows of money to keep our homes in good shape, and the market can destroy your home’s value as easily as it increased it. We need to jettison that huge albatross of a mortgage from around our necks. Once you get rid of that $1200 per month mortgage, you have eliminated item of worry number one: shelter. And you’ve given yourself a $14,000 per year raise to boot. Yay!

Next, we need to focus on ramping up our own food production and learn to live more simply. Think about it: if you invest $75 in a bundle of 5 pear trees that will, in turn, produce a harvest of pears every year for decades afterwards, that’s a huge return on your investment. And if you take the time to learn the art of grafting/cloning, you can replicate new pear trees yourself and have a perpetual supply of pears for the rest of your life. Investing $500 in apple, pear, peach, plum, cherry, lemon trees will produce thousands of dollars worth of savings for the rest of your life, and probably on into your children’s lives as well.

The same is true for gardening in general. If you can begin to produce 10-20% of your own food supply, you’ve turned your home into a producer instead of being a constant money pit. You can spend $2 on a packet of heirloom tomato seeds and be able to save enough seeds each year that you will never have to buy tomatos again. These are real investments that pay back huge returns. Instead of dropping $50 into a mutual fund, spend that $50 on the necessary equipment to get started canning and preserving your harvest. Learning these things aren’t just quaint throwbacks to the past. They are real ways to live your life that save money and reduce your dependence on others. Next time you need some yeast, don’t just run down to the store and buy instant yeast. Try your hand at growing your own. It’s these little things that preserve the knowledge of the past that will give you the most freedom.

We, of course, also need to save money. But, if we just shove cash under the mattress it’s not going to do us much good. Those dollars will be losing value at a 3-4% clip every year due to inflation. In that case, we should put our money in the form of things that hedge against inflation. Silver is a fantastic inflation hedge. Let’s use another Jack Spirko example. In 1970 the average cost of a new car was $4000. At $1.64 per ounce(silver price in 1970), that’s 2,439 ounces of silver to buy a new car. Well, today, silver is currently running at about $16 per ounce, but let’s make it $12 per ounce to be really conservative since that’s what it was trading at back at the first of the year. That means that the same 2,439 ounces of silver it took to buy a new car in 1970 is worth $29,268 today. That would still buy you a really nice brand new car. That’s what it means to be a hedge against inflation. The same amount then buys the same amount now.

Jack recommends roughly 10-15% of your long-term savings in gold/silver. I’d say that’s a little low. I’d personally feel better in the 20-25% range, but that’s a personal decision that each person has to make for themselves. The point is, it’s a bad idea to dump all of your money into one thing. Even if it’s something stable like silver. There are other inflation hedges such as commodity indexes and such that are worth investing in. Even local businesses that you believe in. Just do some research and be creative. I showed in the last post how volatile the stock market is. It’s not the panacea it’s been made out to be.

You may think that what I’ve just outlined is strange, but this is the way our great-grandfather’s generation lived. They lived simpler lives and depended on the land more. Everyone loves to wax nostalgic for the simpler times of their grandparents, but nobody seems to want to actually live that way. But, I really think that in the future we won’t have any choice but to go back to that way of living. The good times of the boom cycle are over, and if we don’t want to work ourselves all the way to age 90 in the same ol’ high stress rat race, we’ll have to take these types of steps to do it.

*I mentioned Jack Spirko a couple of times in this post. Many of these ideas are directly influenced by him. Check out his podcast at The Survival Podcast.