SEC. 3. PURPOSES AND PRINCIPLES.

(a) STATEMENT OF PURPOSES.—The purposes of this Act include the following:

• (1) To preserve and create jobs and promote economic recovery.
• (2) To assist those most impacted by the recession.
• (3) To provide investments needed to increase economic efficiency by spurring technological advances in science and health.
• (4) To invest in transportation, environmental protection, and other infrastructure that will provide long-term economic benefits.
• (5) To stabilize State and local government budgets, in order to minimize and avoid reductions in essential services and counterproductive state and local tax increases.

(b) GENERAL PRINCIPLES CONCERNING USE OF FUNDS.—The President and the heads of Federal departments and agencies shall manage and expend the funds made available in this Act so as to achieve the purposes specified in subsection (a), including commencing expenditures and activities as quickly as possible consistent with prudent management.

–Readthestimulus.org

I started thinking about it the other day when it sort of dawned on me that I hadn’t even heard anyone mention the stimulus bill in a while. This is strange, because everyone on the right predicted that most of the stimulus money would be held back and spent during the months leading up to the November 2010 elections. That isn’t really panning out though. According to the recovery.gov website, only $201 billion (about 25% of the total) has been spent so far. And with only three and a half months to go until the November elections, I don’t think they’re gonna make it.

So, why didn’t the predictions come true? After all, it makes perfect sense that Congressmen would vote themselves a huge slush fund right after an election and then spend most of it right before the next election. Well, the answer is that you have to remember the inherent limitations of government. Government is a gargantuan, lumbering behemoth. It is incapable of doing anything on a set time table. While I am sure that those who passed the stimulus bill probably fully intended it to be spent in their own districts to help their reelection bids, the fact remains that spending $850 billion dollars isn’t exactly easy. And it’s anything but quick or efficient.

And, there is another problem. Where are all of the “shovel ready jobs” that the stimulus was supposed to create? I have seen exactly none in my travels around the state of Alabama. Evidently I’m not alone:

It would appear that most of the stimulus money spent so far has gone to the states to retain existing government jobs — teachers, police, firefighters — thereby moving state payrolls onto the national debt and allowing them to defer the hard decisions they will have to make eventually. My own observation of the narrowly limited landscape between the Sandhills and Kansas City did not reveal much in the way of highly touted “shovel-ready” construction projects, or even routine maintenance.

–Fred Wolferman, The Pilot

So, that’s where the money is going. It was a way for the states (i.e. public employees unions) to fund themselves using federal debt. Basically, the stimulus is a huge ATM card for the public sectors of each state. That makes perfect sense when you think about it. After all, that’s why money flows from Washington down through the states anyway. Money trickles down from D.C. to the states. And then from the states to local programs. Then, influence and vote buying flow back up to D.C. via organizations and individuals that benefited from the influx of money. It’s not just the stimulus bill that works this way. It’s the entire political machine that is structured like this. Just take this story as an example:

Moore’s farm — her husband died in 1999 — was among the last eight farms in Alabama to grow tobacco, mainly due to the end of a government quota-and-price-support system nearly five years ago. The eight farms shut down between 2002 and 2007, according to the latest U.S. Farm Census released earlier this year.

The biggest reason for tobacco farms’ final demise in Alabama was a decision by Congress five years ago to end a quota and price support system.

That system had been around since 1938 to help Depression-era tobacco farmers. Tobacco farmers signed up for government quotas — allotments that limited the number of acres they could grow. That helped keep tobacco prices high for farmers.

But with lessening demand for tobacco in the 1980s and 1990s, combined with a price support and quota system that kept prices high, the amount of imported tobacco grew.

As a result, Congress voted in the fall of 2004 to do away with quotas and price supports and offer a buyout to farmers who had a quota. Congress set aside $10.1 billion to pay out to farmers with quotas through 2014. The buyouts are based on a formula involving pounds of production in previous years. Farmers who had leased quotas get a portion of the buyout.

Many farmers took the buyout and decided not to try growing tobacco without the quota system, Sanford said. Nationwide, the number of farms growing tobacco fell from 56,977 in 2002 to 16,234 by the 2007 farm census. That’s a nearly 72 percent drop. But production fell only about 11 percent as some growers expanded their farms.

Besides the few Alabama farms that were growing tobacco after the 2002 census, many other Alabamians are getting annual buyout payments because they owned or leased quotas for growing in other states.

Jo Moore’s husband, Lila, died in 1999. By that time the couple had been leasing their land, barn and quota to another farmer.

Moore said she decided to take the buyout because the farmer leasing from them wasn’t making much off the tobacco. Her share of the buyout amounts to about $3,500 a year, she said.

Moore still leases her 400 tillable acres to a cotton farmer.

–John A. MacDonald, B’ham News

Here you have an entire system set up to artificially inflate the price of a product for 60 years by paying farmers not to grow more than a certain number of acres. And when it finally became untenable, instead of just ending the payments, Congress started giving those farmers cash payments in the form of a buyout. So, now they are being paid not to grow anything at all. The lady in the story, Jo Moore, now leases her land to another farmer, and in the mean time collects a check from the government for not doing anything at all. It’s farm welfare, and it’s a way to ensure that Mrs. Moore keeps on voting for the guy that promises to extend her buyout check for a few more years.

It will take a few years, but eventually all of that stimulus money will flow into these types of long-term projects to prop up the rent-seeking and vote-buying. Politics is about producing long-term stability to the super rich elites. It has very little to do with the “next election.”

[Capt. Mike Clauer was]…halfway through his deployment [in Iraq] when he got a bolt from the blue — a frantic phone call from his wife, May, back in Texas.

“She was bawling on the phone and was telling me that the HOA [homeowners association] had foreclosed on our house, and it was sold,” he says. “And I couldn’t believe that could even happen.”

Clauer had a hard time understanding what his wife was saying. His $300,000 house was already completely paid for. Could it be possible that their home was foreclosed on and sold because his wife had missed two payments of their HOA dues?

In many states it is not difficult for an HOA to foreclose on a member’s home for past dues even if the amount owed is just a few hundred dollars.

But by the time he got back to Texas, it was too late. The Clauers’ four-bedroom, 3,500-square-foot home had been sold on the courthouse steps for just $3,500 — enough to cover outstanding HOA dues and legal costs.

The new owner quickly sold it for $135,000 and netted a tidy profit.

“Basically it’s everything to us,” Clauer says. “Having a house like this paid for was huge for us, for our retirement plans. We thought we were so far ahead, and now it’s like we’re starting from the beginning.”

Lawyers for the HOA say that while Clauer’s case is regrettable, it was his and his wife’s fault for not paying their dues in a timely manner.

“The fact of the matter is, the laws of the state of Texas allow the homeowners association to file assessment liens on properties who haven’t paid their assessments, and they also allow foreclosure on those liens,” says Patrick Whitaker, who represents the HOA. “And the homeowners association followed the letter of the law.”

–Wade Goodwin, NPR

So, this HOA, stole this active duty soldier’s house and sold it out from under his wife and kids while he was deployed. Tell me again why I should ever want to subject myself to that type of unfairness. And what makes it worse is that it was probably some member of the HOA that bought and flipped the house and made a killing on it:

There have been complaints that some members of HOA boards have bought HOA-foreclosed properties for a pittance, and then sold them for a hefty profit.

In Texas, there are no laws to prevent this. Carona says the best way to address this apparent conflict of interest is not by passing new state laws but by letting the HOAs handle it internally through modification of the association’s constitution.

“I think that an association can avoid that type of thing by adopting conflict-of-interest rules,” he says.

–Wade Goodwin, NPR

Uh… yeah sure. That’s BS. You use the government to give yourself an unfair advantage over your members and then act like you’re all free-market. Get that crap out of here.

The protection of the creation isn’t just about seagulls and turtles and dolphins. That would be enough to prompt us to action, since God’s glory is in seagulls and turtles and dolphins (Gen. 6-9; Isa. 65).

Pollution kills people. Pollution dislocates families. Pollution defiles the icon of God’s Trinitarian joy, the creation of his theater (Ps. 19; Rom. 1).

Will people believe us when we speak about the One who brings life and that abundantly, when they see that we don’t care about that which kills and destroys? Will they hear us when we quote John 3:16 to them when, in the face of the loss of their lives, we shrug our shoulders and say, “Who is my neighbor?”

–Russell D. Moore, Blog

His point here is a decent one, but I think he’s on the cusp of over-spiritualizing the issue though. It might be right, in principle, for a Christian to be more in touch with the land and environment around him or her. In fact, I’m in the process of doing that very thing with my family at the moment. We are trying to buy some rural land where we can have livestock and larger agriculture on our homestead. But, tying the reputation of the Christian message to the ecological conscience of those who proclaim it is suspect. Augustine has been quoted as saying “never judge a philosophy by it’s abuse.” It’s the job of the hearer to rightly discern the truth of a particular message, independent of the messenger. If a fellow throws his #2 combo wrapper out of his car window and then turns to the passenger to tell him about Christ, so what? This Christian fellow is simply misinformed about the liability of his littering. He doesn’t understand properly how his actions harm others around him. That’s a separate argument from the legitimacy of the gospel. Confusing the two is strange.

I understand why he is linking the oil spill to Christian environmental attitude though. It’s an easy connection to make if you only read headlines and don’t look behind the curtain of government/media propaganda. He’s almost right when he says:

Too often, however, we’ve been willing not simply to vote for candidates who will protect unborn human life (as we ought to), but to also in the process adopt their worldviews on every other issue.

–Russell D. Moore, Blog

I would put it another way. We’ve been grossly naive to think that politicians who espouse pro-life rhetoric have any intention of actually doing anything about abortion on demand. Bush ran on pro-life this, pro-life that. What did he do in eight years in office? He signed a meaningless executive order to repeal the Mexico City policy. What a joke. Likewise, liberals are finding out the hard way that Obama has no intention of actually carrying through on all of his green rhetoric. I’ve posted here recently on how in bed with the oil industry he is and how the grass roots left are totally confused at how silent he has been on the oil spill issue. The religious right expected the conservative majorities of the 90′s and early 2000′s to gain some serious traction on the abortion issue. They didn’t. And, likewise, the liberal left expects the liberal majorities of today to do the same thing on the environmental issue. They won’t. The problem is not just that we have adopted the worldview of our political blowhards, it’s that we’ve actually believed that they took the issues seriously.

And this leads me to my real beef with his argument. There is an underlying assumption that state power is absolutely necessary, and that social power is only effectual when it is used as a tool to aim state power at a certain issue. He isn’t entertaining the notion that there is any effectiveness in social power itself to solve problems directly. He says:

Because we believe in free markets, we’ve acted as though this means we should trust corporations to protect the natural resources and habitats.

–Russell D. Moore, Blog

He didn’t think that statement out clearly before he wrote it. This is a question of ownership. If I own something, and it makes money for me, I will protect it and care for it. Why wouldn’t I? Allowing my property(an oil field in this case) to be ruined profits me nothing. It’s totally contrary to any logical expectation of human behaviour. You better believe that BP has every incentive in the world to get that leaked fixed and cleaned up rapidly. They are losing millions per week over this. That’s a far more powerful incentive than some government regulatory threat that has no teeth because the people making it are bought and paid for by BP lobbyists. This is the real world, not a naive 12th grade civics class.

He continues:

But a laissez-faire view of government regulation of corporations is akin to the youth minister who lets the teenage girl and boy sleep in the same sleeping bag at church camp because he “believes in young people.”

The Scripture gives us a vision of human sin that means there ought to be limits to every claim to sovereignty, whether from church, state, business or labor. A commitment to the free market doesn’t mean unfettered license any more than a commitment to free speech means hardcore pornography ought to be broadcast in prime-time by your local network television affiliate.

Caesar’s sword is there, by God’s authority, to restrain those who would harm others (Rom. 13). When government fails or refuses to protect its own people, whether from nuclear attack or from toxic waste spewing into our life-giving waters, the government has failed.

…

Moreover, we’ve seen some of the theological and ideological fringes in the environmentalist movement, fringes that enabled us to see them as not “with us,” and, frankly, to enable us to make fun of the entire question as a silly enterprise. But perhaps the void is being filled by leftists and liberals and wannabe liberal evangelicals simply because those who ought to know better are off doing something else. Working with our secular progressive neighbors on, for instance, saving the Gulf no more compromises the evangelical witness than our working with feminists to combat pornography or with Latter-day Saints to protect marriage.

–Russell D. Moore, Blog

If I’m reading him correctly here, he starts off by saying that having government set business regulations is like having the fox guarding the hen house. I would whole-heartedly agree with that. But then he diverts into the typical mistake of using bad analogies to demonstrate how the free market is just like any other organization or group that would be dangerous if given “unfettered license.” The fact is, the free market is not just a different version of a government or corporation. It’s not an entity at all. It’s not a “system.” The free market is a loose set of concepts that identify human behaviour and economic law. It says “when X happens, Y will be the natural economic or praxeological result.” Giving an analogy of pornography as a result of unregulated free speech isn’t a legitimate criticism of the free market. That’s like saying, if you pay someone a salary, they might buy drugs with the money. Therefore, we should heavily regulate wages.

The problem with the BP oil spill is that someone made a mistake and lots of oil is now flowing into the gulf and needs to be cleaned up. That’s it. Period. BP screwed up and needs to clean up their mess. The thing that needs to be remembered is that the oil industry is NOT a free market. They haven’t been a free market in over a hundred years. They enjoy all types of regulatory protection from competition in exchange for lobbying dollars to Congress. Therefore, making arguments about the failure of the free market as it relates to this oil spill is illegitimate. And, likewise, arguing that the government should stay out of BP’s way and let the free market work is also illegitimate, because BP’s market isn’t free. The true solution is to have the government get out of the way altogether so that the economic and praxeological principles of free market exchange can work correctly, unencumbered by artificial influence from the outside.

Conservatives Christians aren’t to blame for turning a blind eye toward ecological concerns. We all operate in a rigged system, where the real answer to the problem is prohibited. But, things are changing. The local, organic food movement is a tide that has been rising for quite a few years now. Farmer’s markets and CSA’s are appealing to people of all political persuasions – conservatives and liberals. These things represent real alternatives to the artifical food marketplace that has been created by misleading government regulation of agriculture. In short, a real market is being born to compete with the fake one. And, people are flocking to it. Just drive around. You’ll see hundreds of people planting gardens for the first time this year. Many of these people are conservative Christians.

My criticism of Russell Moore’s argument is that he isn’t seeing these issues clearly. You can’t say that conservative christians have neglected ecological concerns when the game has been rigged the whole time. When the only options they are given are two different types of new government regulations then what are they supposed to do? If they choose to remain silent in the face of that rigged proposal, that isn’t the same as being unconcerned. It just means they’d rather not choose between two decisions that both serve corporate interests through increases in state power.

For instance, when people say that “China” is doing something, they mean the Chinese government itself is doing it. Sure, they may use front companies to actually strike the deal, but it’s the government that is directing it all and funding it. So, it’s not some truly private Chinese company that is investing in African mining interests, it’s the national Chinese government that’s doing it, with confiscated money from it’s citizens. That can’t last for the long term. It may seem like a really good move for someone to invest in more commodity reserves such as food and metals, but as an aggregate investment by a government, it’s probably mostly wasteful. So, the first problem with the Chinese economy is that it’s not a free market. It’s a tightly controlled communist system with minimal private property rights. Those types of systems don’t endure.

The second problem is China’s currency. It’s just as fiat as any other paper currency, but it’s even more manipulated than most. For years, China has pegged the Yuan to the U.S. dollar in order to keep their exports artificially low priced. That means that every time we inflate, they inflate. Every time we deflate (which is never), they deflate. This would be bad enough if they were simply a clone of the U.S. in general, like Japan. But, having to bear all of the inefficiencies of being a communist state already, it makes their currency even that much more worthless.

Thirdly, China has very limited natural resources of it’s own. Even water is at a premium in Northern China. They are a net importer of natural resources. This is why they have invested so heavily into places like Africa to make long-term deals. On it’s face, their plan looks brilliant. They print money in order to buy our worthless paper debt in return for a massive trade imbalance, which they use to fund the purchasing of natural resources in Africa and the Middle-East. But, as happens so often, things on the outside of a command and control economy look much rosier than they actually are. Everybody was worried in the 70′s about Russian imperialism. Look what happened. Their economy went from looking awesome to being exposed as an absolute train-wreck.

With all of this in mind, I saw an article today where Marc Faber and some other investors are voicing their belief that the Chinese economy is headed for a crash in the next 9 to 12 months:

“The market is telling you that something is not quite right,” Faber, the publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom report, said in a Bloomberg Television interview in Hong Kong today. “The Chinese economy is going to slow down regardless. It is more likely that we will even have a crash sometime in the next nine to 12 months.”

China is “on a treadmill to hell” because it’s hooked on property development for driving growth, Chanos said in an interview last month. As much as 60 percent of the country’s gross domestic product relies on construction, he said. Rogoff said in February a debt-fueled bubble in China may trigger a regional recession within a decade.

The government has banned loans for third homes and raised mortgage rates and down-payment requirements for second-home purchases. Prices rose 11.7 percent across 70 cities in March from a year earlier, the most since data began in 2005.

The government has stopped short of raising interest rates to contain property prices. Within an hour of the central bank announcement on reserve ratios, Finance Minister Xie Xuren said that officials remained committed to expansionary policies to cement the nation’s recovery.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601010&sid=aMbfBKW.uKn4

I don’t make predictions about stuff like this, so I can’t speculate on when any type of correction in China’s economy will occur. But, I can say that I do fully believe that the China that the media and investment communities have been so high on for so long now is probably fake. Communist economies always look great from the outside because of their crazy GDP numbers and high profile money moves, but they are almost always rotten on the inside. China is no different. And, when they do crash, you can be sure that civil unrest will follow suit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In light of that discussion, I’d like to post the material that I’ve read or listened to that changed my mind on the topic of war. I’ve tried to lay these out in the order that I encountered them. I did move John Denson’s lectures to the top of the stack though. Denson is a lawyer, and a Trustee at Auburn University. He is also a well respected history researcher with a focus on the history of American wars. I consider his lectures and books to be formative to my current thinking. It took a couple of years of research to go from being pro-Iraq war to totally anti-war as I am now. Hopefully you will put these links to use and maybe it will change your mind too. Cheers!

Denson – Six Months That Changed the World:

Denson – Roosevelt’s WWII Policies of Unconditional Surrender and the Morgenthau Plan:

Denson – Origins of War: Civil War and World War I:

[PDF] Denson – A Century of War

Murphy – The Cry For Security:

Murphy – A Critique of the Invasion of Iraq:

Woods – Interview on Antiwar Radio:

DiLorenzo – Trade Barriers as a Cause of War:

Higgs – War and the Leviathan State:

Higgs – The Myth of War Prosperity:

Higgs – Death Fuel:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/195390-what-if-it-was-all-just-a-big-bubble