The fact or action of becoming a god; deification; Glorification, exaltation; crediting someone with extraordinary power or status; A glorified example or ideal; the apex or pinnacle (of a concept or belief); Loosely, release from earthly life, ascension to heaven;

–Wiktionary.org

And as the title declares, the painting depicts George Washington, assumed into heaven as a deity. The angel on the left is, of course, holding the symbol of the fasces. Because, if there’s one thing the state will worship, it’s itself:

This is just a closeup of the center. Click on the image for a full, hi-res version of the complete painting.

What a coincidence that a giant painting depicting the deification of the state just happened to be completed right at the moment in history when the Federal government was crushing the final vestiges of state independence at Appomattox. The only thing I’m surprised about is that it isn’t called the Apotheosis of Lincoln. I guess even he couldn’t be that brazen.

At about 8:45 a.m., the department opened shop for a gun buyback at its east precinct in Alberta, offering gift cards to anyone who brought in a gun.

Officers handed out $50 Visa gift cards to those who brought in handguns, $75 gift cards for rifles and shotguns and $100 for assault rifles. Those who brought in inoperable weapons received a $25 gift card.

No names or addresses were taken during the event and no charges were made against those who turned in a gun without a license.

The department had $1,400 in gift cards to trade for firearms, and by 9:30 a.m. the cards had run out.

People continued to drop off guns, however, and by the end of the buyback at noon, the department had collected more than 30 guns.

–Wayne Grayson, Tuscaloosa News

So, the Tuscaloosa Police Department just crapped $1400 down the toilet. The article goes on to say:

Anderson said most folks who dropped off guns had no use for them and simply wanted them out of the house.

“And most of the guns we see used in crimes are those just laying around the house, readily available,” he said.

“This was a huge success,” said Police Chief Steve Anderson. “Any gun that we get off the street is a gun that we can be assured won’t be used at a later date in an assault or robbery.”

–Wayne Grayson, Tuscaloosa News

A “huge success?” What are the odds that most of the people that turned in those guns have at least one other gun in their home? I’d say the chances are pretty high. And from looking at the picture that accompanied the story, I’d say that most of the guns that were turned in look like gun show surplus stuff anyway. Who wouldn’t turn in a beat up old AK-47 and get a $100? I would in a heart beat.

Look, I can sympathize with people being concerned about gun violence, but programs like these do absolutely nothing. You might as well just put up a sign in the yard that says: “Come get free money for that extra gun you were gonna sell on gunbroker.com anyway.”

They got 30 guns “off the street. Only about 60 million to go and they can call it a day.

Capt. Jeff Hartley pointed out the large amount of small weapons collected during the buyback.

“This was our main goal here. We wanted to get these easily concealable weapons out of people’s hands,” he said

–Wayne Grayson, Tuscaloosa News

I bet it was. The main goal of government is always to disarm the people. The less guns we have and the more guns they have the better they like it.

For many years, pro-lifers have expended vast time, energy, and money “marching on Washington” every January, to exactly zero effect. Worse, they hark back to pro-redistribution events. And always, as with the latest 9/12 extravaganza, headed by red-state fascists, the marchers assemble on the “National Mall,” the government grass that extends from Lincoln’s Roman temple — where he sits enthroned like Jupiter, fasces and all — to George Washington’s obelisk, an Eqyptian monument to the god Amun-Ra. In the distance is the capitol, whose dome copies the Roman pantheon, temple to all the gods. In the top of the dome is a painting of Washington being assumed, like the divinized Julius Caesar, into Heaven upon his death. Even Jefferson is portrayed as a god in a Roman temple. Not far away is the the Greek temple where the nine supremes hand down the “law.” Then there is the vast executive apparatus, headed by a living god, and dedicated to killing, spying, taxing, redistributing, inflating, and controlling, symbolized by the Pentagram. Really, DC is one nasty place. So why would anyone concerned about the state and its power “march on Washington”? Such events only dissipate energy, and fool people into thinking that their time and money have accomplished something, as the regime laughs up its sleeve. Indeed, that is the purpose. So stay home. Read, write, work, organize, and avoid DC like the plague it is.

–Lew Rockwell, LRC

What struck me, as in the last post showing the Lincoln Memorial, is how grandiose the architecture and statuary is in D.C. Government structures are always intentionally designed to make the citizen feel small and insignificant. Have you ever driven by the local federal courthouse branch? It’s huge and imposing in order to put you in the right state of mind for control before you ever enter.

From the cover of a two-volume set, Abraham Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life by William Herndon and Jesse Weik. Published in 1892 and reprinted in 1913, both editions had the same cover. The seminary library where I currently work had both editions, but we have gotten rid of both editions. Not necessary to the mission of a seminary library today. But someone thought it was once…

–Charles Featherstone, LRC

To which David Kramer replied:

Charles—You didn’t need to find some obscure book that honors Lincoln with the symbol of Fascism. Under both his left and right hands of the Lincoln Memorial sculpture you can see the Fascist symbol sans ax head.

–David Kramer, LRC

Tom Dilorenzo then pointed out:

Charles, it is relevant that the co-author of the book on Lincoln from your library which displays the fasces, the symbol of fascism, on the cover, was Lincoln’s longtime law partner, William Herndon. He knew Lincoln as well as anyone, even better than Lincoln’s wife. And yes, as David points out, the fasces is right there on Dishonest Abe’s armchair on which he sits in his memorial in D.C. (As Clyde Wilson once said, the symbol of America has been transformed from George Washington on his white horse to a corporate lawyer/lobbyist in an armchair).

Dating from the Roman Empire, the fasces stood for Government Power and Unity. Dictatorial government that crushes all dissenters, in other words. “Unity” is coerced unity that comes from governmental military “power,” not persuasion. This is the kind of “unity” that existed in the Soviet Union, and Germany and Italy during the 1930s and early 40s. Totalitarianism, in a word.

–David Kramer, LRC

It’s disgusting that so many Americans have been duped by court historians into mock worship of politicians. Lincoln presided over the slaugther of 620,000 American lives. More than any other war in U.S. history. He deserves scorn and judgement. Not, a monument to his fascism. How is that any different than Lenin’s tomb?

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.”

It is not in every case easy or pleasant to ask men of the nation to leave their homes and women of the nation to give their men to the service of the nation. But the men and women of America have never held back even when it has meant personal sacrifice on their part if that is sacrifice for the common good.

The greatest attack that has ever been launched against freedom of the individual is nearer the Americas than ever before. To meet that attack we must prepare beforehand — for preparing later may and probably would be too late.

There is, moreover, another enemy at home. That enemy is the mean and petty spirit that mocks at ideals, sneers at sacrifice and pretends the American people can live by bread alone. If the spirit of God is not in us, and if we will not prepare to give all that we are to preserve Christian civilization in our own land, we shall go to destruction.

–F.D.R, Smokey Mtn. Nat’l Park Dedication Speech

The tactic of labeling every nation that doesn’t play ball with the administration as an enemy of freedom is a time-honored tradition. George Bush used the same tact:

On September 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country. Americans have known wars, but for the past 136 years, they have been wars on foreign soil, except for one Sunday in 1941. Americans have known the casualties of war, but not at the center of a great city on a peaceful morning. Americans have known surprise attacks but never before on thousands of civilians. All of this was brought upon us in a single day, and night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack.

–George W. Bush, Joint Session of Congress

Oddly enough, Bush referenced Pearl Harbour in his speech. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s without doubt that FDR had foreknowledge of the attack on Pearl Harbour because he specifically goaded the Japanese into attacking by following Arthur McCollum’s eight-action plan. This plan was meant to force Japan into a first strike against the U.S., since that would allow the U.S. to enter the war with popular support. Japan had allied itself to Germany and Italy, so that any attack by it would allow the U.S. to attack all of the countries included in the “axis powers” (or “axis of evil” in Bush-speak). Here’s some pertinent quotes to support this:

“The Roosevelt strategy of maneuvering the Japanese into striking the first blow at America was unknown to us,” [Admiral Husband] Kimmel wrote in his book, Admiral Kimmel’s Story, published in 1954. His first suspicions that someone in high office in Washington had consciously pursued a policy that led straight to Pearl Harbor “did not occur to him until after December 7, 1941.”

Richardson’s removal on February 1, 1941, strengthened the position of McCollum. Only five months earlier, in mid-September 1940, Germany and her Axis partner, Italy, had signed a mutual-assistance alliance with Japan. The Tripartite Pact committed the three partners to assist each other in the event of an attack on any one of them. McCollum saw the alliance as a golden opportunity. If Japan could be provoked into committing an overt act of war against the United States, then the Pact’s mutual assistance provisions would kick in. It was a back-door approach: Germany and Italy would come to Japan’s aid and thus directly involve the United States in the European war.

The number one problem for the United States, according to McCollum, was mobilizing public support for a declaration of war against the Axis powers. He saw little chance that Congress would send American troops to Europe. Over the objections of the majority of the populace, who still felt that European alarmists were creating much ado about nothing, he called for the Administration to create what he called “more ado”: “It is not believed,” wrote McCollum, “that in the present state of political opinion the United States government is capable of declaring war against Japan without more ado.”

His solution to the political stalemate: use the eight proposed actions to provoke Japan into committing an overt act of war against the United States, thus triggering military responses from the two other signers of the Tripartite Pact. An allusion to McCollum’s eight actions was recorded by Assistant Secretary of State Breckenridge Long. He wrote that on October 7, 1940, he learned of a series of steps involving the US Navy and that one included concentrating the fleet at Honolulu to be ready for any eventuality. “It looks to me as if little by little we will face a situation which will bring us into conflict with Japan,” Long wrote in his diary.

–Stinnett, Day of Deceit

The point I’m trying to make is that a simple ideology that says “they are bad guys and we’re good guys” or “they hate our freedom” is just way too clean and tidy to be real. I mean, seriously, who “hates freedom” except government? Isn’t it far more believable that the reason we are attacked by terrorists is not because they “hate our freedom”, but because they hate the things our government does to their life? After all, the west has been meddling in the middle-east for over a century. Just read The First World War and see how England invaded middle-eastern countries left and right for no apparent reason.

What’s more believable in all of these situations is that, in order for governments to maintain their legitimacy with their own people they must find convenient enemies. In the 40′s it was the Japanese. Today it’s the middle-east. What we are spoon-fed by the media is 75% propaganda to deliver a constant theme that we all come to believe in. Something like: “The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour was unprovoked.” The reality behind the headlines is almost always way more complicated and orchestrated than that. You have to look behind the curtain.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I’m not anti-war, and I’m definitely not a pacifist. What I’m opposed to is standing armies and governments being the only ones allowed to legally use force. It’s dangerous and it leads to just the type of things we see over and over. Namely, politicians using military action for political purposes, not defense.

[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.

After reading the writeup, I just came away shaking my head and wondering what is prompting him to put himself out front in the media on this issue. Doesn’t he realize that the mainstream media uses people like him to drive whatever meme’ they are currently interested in? If he doesn’t, he needs to recognize soon before they just use him as a tool and throw him out. It’s what they do.

But, beyond that concern, I’m even more bothered by the horrible excuse for a logical argument that he uses. He makes this statement:

“There’s really nothing conservative — and certainly nothing evangelical — about a laissez-faire view of a lack of government regulation,” Moore says, “because we, as Christians, believe in sin.”

“That means if people are sinful, if all of us are sinful, then all of us have to have accountability — and that includes corporations.” Moore says. “Simply trusting corporations to go about their business without polluting the water streams and without destroying ecosystems is really a naive and utopian view of human nature. It’s not a Christian view of human nature.”

–NPR, Interview with Russell Moore

As is customary with bad argument analysis here on SB, we need to turn Dr. Moore’s argument into a syllogism for clarity:

• A. Christians believe in sin.(a)
• B. Accountability places a check on sin.(a)
• C. Conservative evangelicalism aims to minimize sin.(a)
• D. Government regulation places accountability on corporations.(a)
• Therefore, conservative evangelicals should be in favor of government regulations on corporations.

I believe that is a very fair representation of his argument. Now, let’s analyze it’s flaws.

Firstly, the most obvious flaw with his argument is that it proves too much. Every one of his four premises are universal positives. That’s always a dangerous way to argue because it ends up proving way more than you would like it to. In effect, I could use his argument to argue in favor of government regulation of anything. In fact, let’s do that:

• A. Christians believe in sin.(a)
• B. Accountability places a check on sin.(a)
• C. Conservative evangelicalism aims to minimize sin.(a)
• D. Government regulation places accountability on churches.(a)
• Therefore, conservative evangelicals should be in favor of government regulations of churches.

Churches do all kinds of horrible things as well. Just look at the Catholic sex scandals of the last two decades. Dr. Moore’s argument is ready and willing to justify government regulation of churches to curb the sinfulness of their congregants and leaders. All we would need to do is just tweak the last noun in premise D and we can justify the regulation of anything at all. That’s the sign of a bad argument.

But, getting back to his argument as stated; while it’s true that Christians believe in sin, and accountability helps to curb some forms of sinfulness, it’s not true that government regulation acts as a check on corporate “sinfulness.” As I show here often, government regulation is the very lifeblood of big business. The oil industry lives and dies by government. They use government regulation to stifle competition by making market entrance cost astronomical. They use regulations to limit their own liability in the case financial disaster. They use regulations to gain unfair advantage over foreign competitors, and on, and on. Government regulations are practically the mission statements of big business. The notion that a large corpus of government regulation places a real check on corporate malfeasance is utterly naive. Regulations don’t check corporate shenanigans, they enable them.

The concept that Dr. Moore seems to misunderstand is that government is inherently unable to perform the role of impartial regulator. It appears that he is under the impression that simply changing actors within the government structure, or perhaps changing the structure itself, would effect efficient regulation of corporate self interest. That is incorrect. I’ll repeat: government is inherently unable to regulate. This is because, no matter what regulatory structure you erect, or who you position within that structure, the undermining fact is that government has a monopoly on the use of force. They are the only ones that are legally allowed to use coercion at the barrel of a gun. You can’t reform that situation. It’s the very definition of moral hazard.

Let’s look at some real life oil spill regulations as an example:

But not as much for BP, thanks to a law passed in 1990 that will limit its liability for economic damages to a small fraction of the likely cost of the disaster.

The Oil Pollution Act of 1990, signed in the wake of the Exxon Valdez disaster, limits a firms’ economic liability from an oil spill to $75 million — a fixed number that hasn’t been indexed for inflation.

Any costs above that are covered by the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund — funded by U.S. taxpayers — which can spend up to $1 billion per incident for oil removal and damages.

And for a company like BP, $75 million is truly a drop in the bucket: In 2009, BP’s daily profits average $93 million a day — which means they could absorb the loss in 24 hours and still have $18 million to spare.

BP has said that it will waive the limits on its liability and pay whatever claims come their way, although there’s nothing in the law that will compel them to do so. And as long as the law allows companies to carry out drilling projects but not face much economic risk in the case of an accident, critics say it gives a green light to risky behavior.

–Chris Cromm, Southernstudies.org

Guess who was the president in 1990. Yep, Daddy Bush. The “conservative evangelical.” The true punishment that the market would inflict on BP has been artificially inhibited by government regulations. Tell me how lassez-faire created that little gem.

On the other hand, there is a mechanism that provides an effective check on sin within the marketplace. It’s called the price mechanism, and it’s guided by the laws of economics. If allowed to function without interference, the pricing mechanism will regulate the behaviour of actors within the market by punishing them with losses or rewarding them with profits. Let’s look at the BP oil spill as an example. In a free market, what would keep BP from polluting and spilling oil all over the Gulf of Mexico? Simple. Every gallon of oil that goes into the water is a gallon of oil that BP can’t use. BP is self-motivated to not spill oil for the same reason that the deli owner is motivated not to leave his meat out on the counter all day. It would go rancid and he would lose money by having to throw it away. That’s a complete waste of money and resources. And you know what the market does to companies that waste money and resources? It drives them out of business.

But, BP has decided it’s far more in it’s own interest to protect itself from waste by lobbying and bribing a lot of regulations into place that insulate it from the harsh reality of the market. If Russell Moore really wants BP to bear true responsibility for the oil spill it created, he needs to take away it’s safety blanket of government and let the free market pronounce judgement on BP the way it’s supposed to.

And to get a glimpse of how this number is being used in the media, let’s look at a quote from the grist.org article that I posted on a few weeks ago:

A childfree life also means a lot more financial freedom. How expensive are kids? Try $291,570 for a child born in 2008 to parents bringing home between $57,000 and $98,000 a year, according to figures from the USDA. That’s for the first 18 years, so it doesn’t include college. If you make more, you’re likely to spend more. Couples bringing in upwards of $98,000 a year can expect to spend an average of $483,750 on a child’s first 18 years. (Dig into the numbers yourself [PDF] for all the caveats and conditions.)

–Lisa Hymas, grist.org

These numbers are so ridiculous that I hardly know where to start. One thing is for sure, though. This report smacks of the same egg-headed naivety that many academic economists fall victim to. They’ve anyalyzed an issue that can really only be understood by an investigation of human behaviour. But they’ve tried to look at it as a simple math problem instead. The end result is that they have come up with numbers that are demonstrably absurd, yet they stand by them as if they are, in some way, useful. Economists do this same thing. They develop mathematical models of the economy and come up with results that are obviously non-real. This doesn’t seem to stop them from touting their useless findings though.

Any father that looks at that figure of $291,570 will know instantly that it’s a load of horse crap, but let’s dig in a bit deeper. For instance, the report says that for the first year of life a child will cost you approximately $11,000. The reason this number is so big is because of the inclusion of stuff like housing in the number. They’ve tried to devise a way to extract how much of the cost of a home is being incurred because of each child. As if couples without children live in single bedroom apartments and only buy houses when they have kids. That’s obviously not the case. Housing has less to do with how many kids you have than it does with your age and income level. For instance, a single guy that used to live across the street from my parents lived in a 3 bedroom, 2 bath. He moved out of that house after a couple of years and moved into a giant house in a wealthy neighborhood near by. Most couples don’t buy large houses when they first get married because they can’t afford it, not because they don’t have kids.

We just had our third child back in March. My wife is breast-feeding, and with this child we started using cloth diapers. We also got lots of clothes from the baby shower. My best guess is that we will end up having spent less than a thousand dollars on her first year of life. And that includes the $200 deductible we had to pay for our hospital stay to give birth. I’m not sure what people are buying that costs $11,000. I’d have to see that to believe it.

Now, if you take our other two kids(ages 8 and 6), I figure they are costing us about an extra $100 a month on groceries. They cost about $200-$300 per year on homeschool supplies. And they cost about $50 a month for clothes since they grow so fast. My wife shops sales and consignment a lot to keep the costs down on that. If you add in about $300 per child for birthday and christmas then I figure we’re spending about $2000 per year on our children’s expenses combined. That cost will probably stay consistent until they get to driving age. I anticipate that we’ll end up spending more for groceries since they will eat more in their teenage years, but other than that, those numbers should stay pretty consistent until they get to driving and marriage age.

So we can roughly sum up that it will cost us about $50,000 to raise three kids to 16. What happens in those age 17-20 years are going to be different for each child. One might decide to work and go to school. Another might decide to get married or start a business, so it’s difficult to say how much that will cost for them and us. But it’s safe to say that $50,000 to raise three kids is a lot different than $291,570. But, then again, the people that come out with reports such as this are working for the government and are making well above what you and I do. So their idea of what constitutes a decent upbringing for a child is probably a lot different than mine. I, for one, don’t think a 4G iPhone is a necessity for my 11 year old.

There’s another aspect to this whole thing that bothers me too. It’s the same problem I have with the overpopulation argument. The core flaw in both is that the person making the argument doesn’t factor in the utility of the person. Humans are not fixed costs. They have production capacity. In fact they have higher production capacity than anything else on the planet. Persons don’t just exist. They cultivate, create, build, innovate, appropriate resources, bring pieces together, etc. People care for themselves and each other. Just one example is our family. We have gone from being completely dependent on store bought food to growing maybe 5% of our food ourselves. We hope to steadily increase that number each year with a target of about 50%. It’s that type of creation capacity that puts the lie to the persons as fixed costs argument.

And a final thing to note is that inflation is highly distortive in a study such as this. It’s the resources that you consume that matter, not how much they cost. In 15 years, that $291,570 number might be $500,000. But, have you used up any more or less resources in the upbringing of a child in 2025 than you did in 2010? No. As I’ve said a thousand times before, money is a medium of exchange. Measuring resource usage against a fiat medium of exchange is like measuring how tall you are using a bungie cord. When the measuring instrument isn’t fixed, the numbers it gives you are meaningless.