Jts5665

… is from Henry Hazlitt:

The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects, to his laziness, incompetence, improvidence or simple stupidity.

HT: Dennis Gartman in today’s The Gartman Letter

Daniel J. Mitchell

There’s an old saying that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

That may be true if you’re in Hollywood and visibility is a key to long-run earnings.

But in the world of public policy, you don’t want to be a punching bag. And that describes my role in a book excerpt just published by Salon.

Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematics professor at the University of Wisconsin, has decided that I’m a “linear” thinker.

Here are some excerpts from the article, starting with his perception of my view on the appropriate size of government, presumably culled from this blog post.

Daniel J. Mitchell of the libertarian Cato Institute posted a blog entry with the provocative title: “Why Is Obama Trying to Make America More Like Sweden when Swedes Are Trying to Be Less Like Sweden?” Good question! When you put it that way, it does seem pretty perverse.  …Here’s what the world looks like to the Cato Institute… Don’t worry about exactly how we’re quantifying these things. The point is just this: according to the chart, the more Swedish you are, the worse off your country is. The Swedes, no fools, have figured this out and are launching their northwestward climb toward free-market prosperity.

I confess that he presents a clever and amusing caricature of my views.

My ideal world of small government and free markets would be a Libertopia, whereas total statism could be characterized as the Black Pit of Socialism.

But Ellenberg’s goal isn’t to merely describe my philosophical yearnings and policy positions. He wants to discredit my viewpoint.

So he suggests an alternative way of looking at the world.

Let me draw the same picture from the point of view of people whose economic views are closer to President Obama’s… This picture gives very different advice about how Swedish we should be. Where do we find peak prosperity? At a point more Swedish than America, but less Swedish than Sweden. If this picture is right, it makes perfect sense for Obama to beef up our welfare state while the Swedes trim theirs down.

He elaborates, emphasizing the importance of nonlinear thinking.

The difference between the two pictures is the difference between linearity and nonlinearity… The Cato curve is a line; the non-Cato curve, the one with the hump in the middle, is not. …thinking nonlinearly is crucial, because not all curves are lines. A moment of reflection will tell you that the real curves of economics look like the second picture, not the first. They’re nonlinear. Mitchell’s reasoning is an example of false linearity—he’s assuming, without coming right out and saying so, that the course of prosperity is described by the line segment in the first picture, in which case Sweden stripping down its social infrastructure means we should do the same. …you know the linear picture is wrong. Some principle more complicated than “More government bad, less government good” is in effect. …Nonlinear thinking means which way you should go depends on where you already are.

Ellenberg then points out, citing the Laffer Curve, that “the folks at Cato used to understand” the importance of nonlinear analysis.

The irony is that economic conservatives like the folks at Cato used to understand this better than anybody. That second picture I drew up there? …I am not the first person to draw it. It’s called the Laffer curve, and it’s played a central role in Republican economics for almost forty years… if the government vacuums up every cent of the wage you’re paid to show up and teach school, or sell hardware, or middle-manage, why bother doing it? Over on the right edge of the graph, people don’t work at all. Or, if they work, they do so in informal economic niches where the tax collector’s hand can’t reach. The government’s revenue is zero… the curve recording the relationship between tax rate and government revenue cannot be a straight line.

So what’s the bottom line? Am I a linear buffoon, as Ellenberg suggests?

Well, it’s possible I’m a buffoon in some regards, but it’s not correct to pigeonhole me as a simple-minded linear thinker. At least not if the debate is about the proper size of government.

I make this self-serving claim for the simple reason that I’m a big proponents of the Rahn Curve, which is …drum roll please… a nonlinear way of looking at the relationship between the size of government and economic performance. And just in case you think I’m prevaricating, here’s a depiction of the Rahn Curve that was excerpted from my video on that specific topic.

Moreover, if you click on Rahn Curve category of my blog, you’ll find about 20 posts on the topic. And if you type “Rahn Curve” in the search box, you’ll find about twice as many mentions.

So why didn’t Ellenberg notice any of this research?

Beats the heck out of me. Perhaps he made a linear assumption about a supposed lack of nonlinear thinking among libertarians.

In any event, here’s my video on the Rahn Curve so you can judge for yourself.

And if you want information on the topic, here’s a video from Canada and here’s a video from the United Kingdom.

P.S. I would argue that both the United States and Sweden are on the downward-sloping portion of the Rahn Curve, which is sort of what Ellenberg displays on his first graph. Had he been more thorough in his research, though, he would have discovered that I think growth is maximized when the public sector consumes about 10 percent of GDP.

P.P.S. Ellenberg’s second chart puts the U.S. and Sweden at the same level of prosperity. Indeed, it looks like Sweden is a bit higher. That’s certainly not what we see in the international data on living standards. Moreover, Ellenberg may want to apply some nonlinear thinking to the data showing that Swedes in America earn a lot more than Swedes still living in Sweden.

Andrew J. Coulson

The Washington Post reports that the leaders of the world’s most hierarchical, centralized faith don’t much care for the philosophy most closely aligned with individual liberty. Huh. What gives the Post that idea? Well, the cardinal sometimes referred to as the “vice-pope” just headlined a conference in DC titled “Erroneous Autonomy: The Catholic Case against Libertarianism.” In heaping scorn on those who celebrate free minds and free markets, the conference attendees accused libertarianism of being responsible for “selfies” and of being anti-poor.

And can you blame them? Think of all those notorious selfies by prominent libertarians.

And, really, you have to admit they have a point on that second accusation as well. Consider that when innovation, commerce, and entrepreneurship were unleashed on a mass scale during the Industrial Revolution, poverty went into a sustained decline for the first time in the 200,000 year history of humanity. In just the last fifteen or twenty years, the poverty rate worldwide has been cut in half. And the absolute number of people living in extreme poverty has been falling since 1980. The economics preferred by libertarians–the economics of freedom–has been quite hard on poverty. I mean, if this keeps up, in another few generations, there will hardly be any poor left.

STUDY: Clean Home Could Leave Newborns Vulnerable To Asthma, Allergies...


(First column, 23rd story, link)

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What we have here is a failure of basic logic:

U.S. fertility is not recovering from the financial crisis — and demographers aren’t sure why. The fertility rate fell to a record low 62.9 births per 1,000 women aged 15-44 in 2013, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

The total number of births, at 3.96 million, inched up by a mere 4,000 from 2012, the first increase since the financial crisis. But the total fertility rate, or TFR, the average number of children a woman would have during her child-bearing years, fell to just 1.86, the lowest rate in 27 years. TFR is considered the best metric of fertility. A TFR of 2.1 represents a stable population, with children replacing parents as they die off.

Demographers expected the fertility rate to fall during recession, as financially strapped families put off childbearing. But what has surprised some demographers is both the depth of the decline and the fact that fertility has continued to drop even over the course of the country's five years of slow but steady recovery. The rate has fallen steadily each year since 2007, when it stood at 2.1 percent.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and point out that since it is known that the economic statistics are massaged and seasonally-corrected and smoothed and retrofitted to the point of literal fiction (try to find the 2001 recession in the GDP statistics now), the more reasonable conclusion is that rather than an inexplicable change in historically observed human behavioral patterns, the U.S. economy has simply not been in the slow, but steady recovery reported by the relevant government agencies. Occam's Razor indicates that the economy is not in a recovery, but an ongoing six-year depression, and as it happens, this can not only be seen in the falling fertility rates, but also in statistics that are not so easily manipulated as GDP, U3, and CPI-U.

In my last post, there was a quote from a media article in which the First Lady takes credit for rising academic scores — despite no data that I could find.  It’s those low-fat USDA lunches with the hearthealthywholegrains and vegetables, ya see.  Never mind that kids are throwing the vegetables in the trash.

My girls eat their vegetables, but that’s because we slather them (the vegetables, not the girls) in butter and other yummy fats.  Pretty much everything they eat includes yummy fats.  Yummy fats are good for the brain.

So pardon another post full of shameless bragging, but we just received their report cards, which include their scores on the national standardized tests.  They both got straight A’s in school and scored in the high 90s in all subjects on the standardized tests — except for science, where they both scored 100.  (Sara was a little disappointed about her 97 in math.  She scored 100 last time.)

Yes, their capacity to learn is largely genetic.  But I believe their high-fat, whole-foods diet is also allowing their brains and intellectual abilities to grow to their inborn potential.  I also believe the good diet helps them to concentrate and stay focused.

Alana did quite well in math but would like to increase her speed on timed tests, so I built her a little flash-card program I figured I may as well share with any Fat Head readers who have kids in elementary school.  When you fire it up, there’s a setup screen:

The little tyke can choose to work with one number — all sixes, for example — and then see the cards in order, or in random order.  Or she can choose to see all possible cards within a range — everything from 1 x 1 to 10 x 10 in random order, for example.  Younger kids can choose a lower range of numbers.  It works pretty much the same way for practicing division.

Clicking the button on the right displays the answer.  Clicking it again displays the next card.  Pressing the ENTER key is the same as clicking the button, so the wee one can just keep pressing ENTER to work through all the cards.

Anyway, if you’d like to try the program for your future math whiz, right-click this link and choose Save As … (or whatever your browser calls it).  Unzip the folder and run the InstallFlashCards.msi file on your PC.  (Sorry, no Mac or tablet version.)

If you download it and like it, feel free to show your appreciation by clicking the donate button below.  That will put $5 in the Fat Head tip jar.

Judge Orders NSA To Stop Destroying Evidence -- For Third Time!


(Second column, 10th story, link)

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(Don Boudreaux)

… is from Arthur Shenfield’s 1970 Modern Age article “The Ideological War Against Western Society”; specifically, it’s from pages 326-327 of the 1998 reprint of this article in Limited Government, Individual Liberty and the Rule of Law: Selected Works of Arthur Asher Shenfield (Norman Barry, ed.):

We need not dwell long here on Adam Smith’s ‘unseen hand’, though we ought to take note of the fact that the enemies of the free society love to make it the object of their derision, implying that poor Smith believed that there was some kind of beneficent magic at work in the free economy.  How easy to demonstrate the naiveté of the champions of the free economy if, after two centuries of experience, they believe in such magic!  But of course the ‘unseen hand’ was no more than a metaphor by which Smith sought to expound two propositions that are both true and important; one, that economic order or pattern can arise without any central direction; and two, that in the process of free exchange a man may promote the interests of others even though the interests he seeks to promote are his own.  There is nothing in Smith’s famous passage on the unseen hand to suggest that he thought that he had found the key to perfect order and harmony or that the way to serve others was always to serve oneself; still less that he thought that there was any magic in the processes he described.

Today is Adam Smith‘s birthday (or at least it is the date listed on his gravestone in Edinburg as that of his 1723 birth; some people argue that June 5, 1723, is instead the date of Smith’s baptism).  June 5th (1883) is also the birthday of John Maynard Keynes.  How’s that for historical irony?!

Alberto Mingardi remembers Smith’s birthday here, and Richard Ebeling does so here.

TALIBAN: WE'RE INSPIRED TO KIDNAP MORE!


(First column, 9th story, link)

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Tyrants Have Always Spied On Their Own People

Spying has been around since the dawn of civilization.

Keith Laidler – a PhD anthropologist, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a past member of the Scientific Exploration Society – explains:

Spying and surveillance are at least as old as civilization itself.

University of Tennessee history professor Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius agrees:

Espionage and intelligence have been around since human beings first began organizing themselves into distinct societies, cities, states, nations, and civilizations.

Unfortunately, spying hasn’t been limited to defense against external enemies. As documented below, tyrants have long spied on their own people in order to maintain power and control … and crush dissent.

Laidler notes:

The rise of city states and empires … meant that each needed to know not only the disposition and morale of their enemy, but also the loyalty and general sentiment of their own population.

Benevolent rulers don’t need to spy on their own people like tyrants do. Even the quintessential defender of the status quo for the powers-that-be – Cass Sunstein – writes:

As a general rule, tyrants, far more than democratic rulers, need guns, ammunition, spies, and police officers. Their decrees will rarely be self-implementing. Terror is required.

From Ancient Egypt to Modern America …

The Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence and Security notes:

Espionage is one of the oldest, and most well documented, political and military arts. The rise of the great ancient civilizations, beginning 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, begat institutions and persons devoted to the security and preservation of their ruling regimes.

 

***

 

Early Egyptian pharos [some 5,000 years ago] employed agents of espionage to ferret-out disloyal subject and to locate tribes that could be conquered and enslaved.

 

***

 

The Roman Empire possessed a fondness for the practice of political espionage. Spies engaged in both foreign and domestic political operations, gauging the political climate of the Empire and surrounding lands by eavesdropping in the Forum or in public market spaces. Several ancient accounts, especially those of the A.D. first century, mention the presence of a secret police force, the frumentarii . By the third century, Roman authors noted the pervasiveness and excessive censorship of the secret police forces, likening them to an authoritative force or an occupational army.

The BBC notes:

In the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church was more powerful than most governments – and it had a powerful surveillance network to match.

 

French Bishop Bernard Gui was a noted author and one of the leading architects of the Inquisition in the late 13th and early 14th Centuries. For 15 years, he served as head inquisitor of Toulouse, where he convicted more than 900 individuals of heresy.

 

A noted author and historian, Gui was best known for the Conduct of the Inquisition into Heretical Depravity, written in 1323-24, in which he outlined the means for identifying, interrogating and punishing heretics.

The U.S. Supreme Court noted in Stanford v. Texas (1965):

While the Fourth Amendment [of the U.S. Constitution] was most immediately the product of contemporary revulsion against a regime of writs of assistance, its roots go far deeper. Its adoption in the Constitution of this new Nation reflected the culmination in England a few years earlier of a struggle against oppression which had endured for centuries. The story of that struggle has been fully chronicled in the pages of this Court’s reports, and it would be a needless exercise in pedantry to review again the detailed history of the use of general warrants as instruments of oppression from the time of the Tudors, through the Star Chamber, the Long Parliament, the Restoration, and beyond.

 

What is significant to note is that this history is largely a history of conflict between the Crown and the press. It was in enforcing the laws licensing the publication of literature and, later, in prosecutions for seditious libel, that general warrants were systematically used in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. In Tudor England, officers of the Crown were given roving commissions to search where they pleased in order to suppress and destroy the literature of dissent, both Catholic and Puritan. In later years, warrants were sometimes more specific in content, but they typically authorized of all persons connected of the premises of all persons connected with the publication of a particular libel, or the arrest and seizure of all the papers of a named person thought to be connected with a libel.

By “libel”, the court is referring to a critique of the British government which the King or his ministers didn’t like … they would label such criticism “libel” and then seize all of the author’s papers.

The Supreme Court provided interesting historical details in the case of Marcus v. Search Warrant (1961):

The use by government of the power of search and seizure as an adjunct to a system for the suppression of objectionable publications … was a principal instrument for the enforcement of the Tudor licensing system. The Stationers’ Company was incorporated in 1557 to help implement that system, and was empowered

 

“to make search whenever it shall please them in any place, shop, house, chamber, or building or any printer, binder or bookseller whatever within our kingdom of England or the dominions of the same of or for any books or things printed, or to be printed, and to seize, take hold, burn, or turn to the proper use of the aforesaid community, all and several those books and things which are or shall be printed contrary to the form of any statute, act, or proclamation, made or to be made. . . .

 

An order of counsel confirmed and expanded the Company’s power in 1566, and the Star Chamber reaffirmed it in 1586 by a decree

 

“That it shall be lawful for the wardens of the said Company for the time being or any two of the said Company thereto deputed by the said wardens, to make search in all workhouses, shops, warehouses of printers, booksellers, bookbinders, or where they shall have reasonable cause of suspicion, and all books [etc.] . . . contrary to . . . these present ordinances to stay and take to her Majesty’s use. . . . ”

 

Books thus seized were taken to Stationers’ Hall where they were inspected by ecclesiastical officers, who decided whether they should be burnt. These powers were exercised under the Tudor censorship to suppress both Catholic and Puritan dissenting literature.

 

Each succeeding regime during turbulent Seventeenth Century England used the search and seizure power to suppress publications. James I commissioned the ecclesiastical judges comprising the Court of High Commission

“to enquire and search for . . . all heretical, schismatical and seditious books, libels, and writings, and all other books, pamphlets and portraitures offensive to the state or set forth without sufficient and lawful authority in that behalf, . . . and the same books [etc.] and their printing presses themselves likewise to seize and so to order and dispose of them . . . as they may not after serve or be employed for any such unlawful use. . . .”

 

The Star Chamber decree of 1637, reenacting the requirement that all books be licensed, continued the broad powers of the Stationers’ Company to enforce the licensing laws. During the political overturn of the 1640′s, Parliament on several occasions asserted the necessity of a broad search and seizure power to control printing. Thus, an order of 1648 gave power to the searchers

 

“to search in any house or place where there is just cause of suspicion that Presses are kept and employed in the printing of Scandalous and lying Pamphlets, . . . [and] to seize such scandalous and lying pamphlets as they find upon search. . . .”

 

The Restoration brought a new licensing act in 1662. Under its authority, “messengers of the press” operated under the secretaries of state, who issued executive warrants for the seizure of persons and papers. These warrants, while sometimes specific in content, often gave the most general discretionary authority. For example, a warrant to Roger L’Estrange, the Surveyor of the Press, empowered him to “seize all seditious books and libels and to apprehend the authors, contrivers, printers, publishers, and dispersers of them,” and to

 

“search any house, shop, printing room, chamber, warehouse, etc. for seditious, scandalous or unlicensed pictures, books, or papers, to bring away or deface the same, and the letter press, taking away all the copies. . . .]”

 

***

 

Although increasingly attacked, the licensing system was continued in effect for a time even after the Revolution of 1688, and executive warrants continued to issue for the search for and seizure of offending books. The Stationers’ Company was also ordered

 

“to make often and diligent searches in all such places you or any of you shall know or have any probable reason to suspect, and to seize all unlicensed, scandalous books and pamphlets. . . .”

 

And even when the device of prosecution for seditious libel replaced licensing as the principal governmental control of the press, it too was enforced with the aid of general warrants — authorizing either the arrest of all persons connected with the publication of a particular libel and the search of their premises or the seizure of all the papers of a named person alleged to be connected with the publication of a libel.

And see this.

General warrants were largely declared illegal in Britain in 1765. But the British continued to use general warrants in the American colonies. In fact, the Revolutionary War was largely launched to stop the use of general warrants in the colonies. King George gave various excuses of why general warrants were needed for the public good, of course … but such excuses were all hollow.

The New York Review of Books notes that the American government did not start to conduct mass surveillance against the American people until long after the Revolutionary War ended … but once started, the purpose was to crush dissent:

In the United States, political spying by the federal government began in the early part of the twentieth century, with the creation of the Bureau of Investigation in the Department of Justice on July 1, 1908. In more than one sense, the new agency was a descendant of the surveillance practices developed in France a century earlier, since it was initiated by US Attorney General Charles Joseph Bonaparte, a great nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, who created it during a Congressional recess. Its establishment was denounced by Congressman Walter Smith of Iowa, who argued that “No general system of spying upon and espionage of the people, such as has prevailed in Russia, in France under the Empire, and at one time in Ireland, should be allowed to grow up.”

 

Nonetheless, the new Bureau became deeply engaged in political surveillance during World War I when federal authorities sought to gather information on those opposing American entry into the war and those opposing the draft. As a result of this surveillance, many hundreds of people were prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act and the 1918 Sedition Act for the peaceful expression of opinion about the war and the draft.

 

But it was during the Vietnam War that political surveillance in the United States reached its peak. Under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and, to an even greater extent, Richard Nixon, there was a systematic effort by various agencies, including the United States Army, to gather information on those involved in anti-war protests. Millions of Americans took part in such protests and the federal government—as well as many state and local agencies—gathered enormous amounts of information on them. Here are just three of the numerous examples of political surveillance in that era:

• In the 1960s in Rochester, New York, the local police department launched Operation SAFE (Scout Awareness for Emergency). It involved twenty thousand boy scouts living in the vicinity of Rochester. They got identification cards marked with their thumb prints. On the cards were the telephone numbers of the local police and the FBI. The scouts participating in the program were given a list of suspicious activities that they were to report.

• In 1969, the FBI learned that one of the sponsors of an anti-war demonstration in Washington, DC, was a New York City-based organization, the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee, that chartered buses to take protesters to the event. The FBI visited the bank where the organization maintained its account to get photocopies of the checks written to reserve places on the buses and, thereby, to identify participants in the demonstration. One of the other federal agencies given the information by the FBI was the Internal Revenue Service.

***

 

The National Security Agency was involved in the domestic political surveillance of that era as well. Decades before the Internet, under the direction of President Nixon, the NSA made arrangements with the major communications firms of the time such as RCA Global and Western Union to obtain copies of telegrams. When the matter came before the courts, the Nixon Administration argued that the president had inherent authority to protect the country against subversion. In a unanimous decision in 1972, however, the US Supreme Court rejected the claim that the president had the authority to disregard the requirement of the Fourth Amendment for a judicial warrant.

 

***

 

Much of the political surveillance of the 1960s and the 1970s and of the period going back to World War I consisted in efforts to identify organizations that were critical of government policies, or that were proponents of various causes the government didn’t like, and to gather information on their adherents. It was not always clear how this information was used. As best it is possible to establish, the main use was to block some of those who were identified with certain causes from obtaining public employment or some kinds of private employment. Those who were victimized in this way rarely discovered the reason they had been excluded.

 

Efforts to protect civil liberties during that era eventually led to the destruction of many of these records, sometimes after those whose activities were monitored were given an opportunity to examine them. In many cases, this prevented surveillance records from being used to harm those who were spied on. Yet great vigilance by organizations such as the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought a large number of court cases challenging political surveillance, was required to safeguard rights. The collection of data concerning the activities of US citizens did not take place for benign purposes.

 

***

 

Between 1956 and 1971, the FBI operated a program known as COINTELPRO, for Counter Intelligence Program. Its purpose was to interfere with the activities of the organizations and individuals who were its targets or, in the words of long-time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” them. The first target was the Communist Party of the United States, but subsequent targets ranged from the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference to organizations espousing women’s rights to right wing organizations such as the National States Rights Party.

 

A well-known example of COINTELPRO was the FBI’s planting in 1964 of false documents about William Albertson, a long-time Communist Party official, that persuaded the Communist Party that Albertson was an FBI informant. Amid major publicity, Albertson was expelled from the party, lost all his friends, and was fired from his job. Until his death in an automobile accident in 1972, he tried to prove that he was not a snitch, but the case was not resolved until 1989, when the FBI agreed to pay Albertson’s widow $170,000 to settle her lawsuit against the government.

 

COINTELPRO was eventually halted by J. Edgar Hoover after activists broke into a small FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971, and released stolen documents about the program to the press. The lesson of COINTELPRO is that any government agency that is able to gather information through political surveillance will be tempted to use that information. After a time, the passive accumulation of data may seem insufficient and it may be used aggressively. This may take place long after the information is initially collected and may involve officials who had nothing to do with the original decision to engage in surveillance.

In 1972, the CIA director relabeled “dissidents” as “terrorists” so he could continue spying on them.

During the Vietnam war, the NSA spied on Senator Frank Church because of his criticism of the Vietnam War. The NSA also spied on Senator Howard Baker.

Senator Church – the head of a congressional committee investigating Cointelpro – warned in 1975:

[NSA's] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. [If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A.] could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.

This is, in fact, what’s happened …

Initially, American constitutional law experts say that the NSA is doing exactly the same thing to the American people today which King George did to the Colonists … using “general warrant” type spying.

And it is clear that the government is using its massive spy programs in order to track those who question government policies. See this, this, this and this.

Todd Gitlin – chair of the PhD program in communications at Columbia University, and a professor of journalism and sociology – notes:

Under the Freedom of Information Act, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) has unearthed documents showing that, in 2011 and 2012, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal agencies were busy surveilling and worrying about a good number of Occupy groups — during the very time that they were missing actual warnings about actual terrorist actions.

 

From its beginnings, the Occupy movement was of considerable interest to the DHS, the FBI, and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies, while true terrorists were slipping past the nets they cast in the wrong places. In the fall of 2011, the DHS specifically asked its regional affiliates to report on “Peaceful Activist Demonstrations, in addition to reporting on domestic terrorist acts and ‘significant criminal activity.’”

 

Aware that Occupy was overwhelmingly peaceful, the federally funded Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), one of 77 coordination centers known generically as “fusion centers,” was busy monitoring Occupy Boston daily. As the investigative journalist Michael Isikoff recently reported, they were not only tracking Occupy-related Facebook pages and websites but “writing reports on the movement’s potential impact on ‘commercial and financial sector assets.’”

 

It was in this period that the FBI received the second of two Russian police warnings about the extremist Islamist activities of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the future Boston Marathon bomber. That city’s police commissioner later testified that the federal authorities did not pass any information at all about the Tsarnaev brothers on to him, though there’s no point in letting the Boston police off the hook either. The ACLU has uncovered documents showing that, during the same period, they were paying close attention to the internal workings of…Code Pink and Veterans for Peace.

 

***

 

In Alaska, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, intelligence was not only pooled among public law enforcement agencies, but shared with private corporations — and vice versa.

 

Nationally, in 2011, the FBI and DHS were, in the words of Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, “treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity.” Last December using FOIA, PCJF obtained 112 pages of documents (heavily redacted) revealing a good deal of evidence for what might otherwise seem like an outlandish charge: that federal authorities were, in Verheyden-Hilliard’s words, “functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.” Consider these examples from PCJF’s summary of federal agencies working directly not only with local authorities but on behalf of the private sector:

 

• “As early as August 19, 2011, the FBI in New York was meeting with the New York Stock Exchange to discuss the Occupy Wall Street protests that wouldn’t start for another month. By September, prior to the start of the OWS, the FBI was notifying businesses that they might be the focus of an OWS protest.”

 

• “The FBI in Albany and the Syracuse Joint Terrorism Task Force disseminated information to… [22] campus police officials… A representative of the State University of New York at Oswego contacted the FBI for information on the OWS protests and reported to the FBI on the SUNY-Oswego Occupy encampment made up of students and professors.”

 

• An entity called the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC), “a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the private sector,” sent around information regarding Occupy protests at West Coast ports [on Nov. 2, 2011] to “raise awareness concerning this type of criminal activity.” The DSAC report contained “a ‘handling notice’ that the information is ‘meant for use primarily within the corporate security community. Such messages shall not be released in either written or oral form to the media, the general public or other personnel…’ Naval Criminal Investigative Services (NCIS) reported to DSAC on the relationship between OWS and organized labor.”

 

• DSAC gave tips to its corporate clients on “civil unrest,” which it defined as running the gamut from “small, organized rallies to large-scale demonstrations and rioting.” ***

 

• The FBI in Anchorage, Jacksonville, Tampa, Richmond, Memphis, Milwaukee, and Birmingham also gathered information and briefed local officials on wholly peaceful Occupy activities.

 

• In Jackson, Mississippi, FBI agents “attended a meeting with the Bank Security Group in Biloxi, MS with multiple private banks and the Biloxi Police Department, in which they discussed an announced protest for ‘National Bad Bank Sit-In-Day’ on December 7, 2011.” Also in Jackson, “the Joint Terrorism Task Force issued a ‘Counterterrorism Preparedness’ alert” that, despite heavy redactions, notes the need to ‘document…the Occupy Wall Street Movement.’”

 

***

 

In 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee learned … that the Tennessee Fusion Center was “highlighting on its website map of ‘Terrorism Events and Other Suspicious Activity’ a recent ACLU-TN letter to school superintendents. The letter encourages schools to be supportive of all religious beliefs during the holiday season.”

 

***

 

Consider an “intelligence report” from the North Central Texas fusion center, which in a 2009 “Prevention Awareness Bulletin” described, in the ACLU’s words, “a purported conspiracy between Muslim civil rights organizations, lobbying groups, the anti-war movement, a former U.S. Congresswoman, the U.S. Treasury Department, and hip hop bands to spread tolerance in the United States, which would ‘provide an environment for terrorist organizations to flourish.’”

 

***

 

And those Virginia and Texas fusion centers were hardly alone in expanding the definition of “terrorist” to fit just about anyone who might oppose government policies. According to a 2010 report in the Los Angeles Times, the Justice Department Inspector General found that “FBI agents improperly opened investigations into Greenpeace and several other domestic advocacy groups after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, and put the names of some of their members on terrorist watch lists based on evidence that turned out to be ‘factually weak.’” The Inspector General called “troubling” what the Los Angeles Times described as “singling out some of the domestic groups for investigations that lasted up to five years, and were extended ‘without adequate basis.’

 

Subsequently, the FBI continued to maintain investigative files on groups like Greenpeace, the Catholic Worker, and the Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh, cases where (in the politely put words of the Inspector General’s report) “there was little indication of any possible federal crimes… In some cases, the FBI classified some investigations relating to nonviolent civil disobedience under its ‘acts of terrorism’ classification.”

 

***

 

In Pittsburgh, on the day after Thanksgiving 2002 (“a slow work day” in the Justice Department Inspector General’s estimation), a rookie FBI agent was outfitted with a camera, sent to an antiwar rally, and told to look for terrorism suspects. The “possibility that any useful information would result from this make-work assignment was remote,” the report added drily.

 

“The agent was unable to identify any terrorism subjects at the event, but he photographed a woman in order to have something to show his supervisor. He told us he had spoken to a woman leafletter at the rally who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent, and that she was probably the person he photographed.”

 

The sequel was not quite so droll. The Inspector General found that FBI officials, including their chief lawyer in Pittsburgh, manufactured postdated “routing slips” and the rest of a phony paper trail to justify this surveillance retroactively.

 

Moreover, at least one fusion center has involved military intelligence in civilian law enforcement. In 2009, a military operative from Fort Lewis, Washington, worked undercover collecting information on peace groups in the Northwest. In fact, he helped run the Port Militarization Resistance group’s Listserv. Once uncovered, he told activists there were others doing similar work in the Army. How much the military spies on American citizens is unknown and, at the moment at least, unknowable.

 

Do we hear an echo from the abyss of the counterintelligence programs of the 1960s and 1970s, when FBI memos — I have some in my own heavily redacted files obtained through an FOIA request — were routinely copied to military intelligence units? Then, too, military intelligence operatives spied on activists who violated no laws, were not suspected of violating laws, and had they violated laws, would not have been under military jurisdiction in any case. During those years, more than 1,500 Army intelligence agents in plain clothes were spying, undercover, on domestic political groups (according to Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics, 1967-70, an unpublished dissertation by former Army intelligence captain Christopher H. Pyle). They posed as students, sometimes growing long hair and beards for the purpose, or as reporters and camera crews. They recorded speeches and conversations on concealed tape recorders. The Army lied about their purposes, claiming they were interested solely in “civil disturbance planning.”

(More.)

Yes, we hear echoes to the Cointelpro program of the 60s and 70s … as well as King George’s General Warrants to the Colonies … the Star Chamber of 15th century England … the frumentarii of Ancient Rome … and the spies of the earliest pharaohs some 5,000 years ago.

Because – whatever governments may say – mass surveillance is always used to crush dissent.

Notes:

1. Spying is also aimed at keeping politicians in check.

2. The East German Stasi obviously used mass surveillance to crush dissent and keep it’s officials in check … and falsely claimed that spying was necessary to protect people against vague threats. But poking holes in the excuses of a communist tyranny is too easy. The focus of this essay is to show that governments have used this same cynical ruse for over 5,000 years.

3. This essay focuses solely on domestic surveillance. Spying outside of one’s country is a different matter altogether.

4. For ease of reading, we deleted the footnotes from the two Supreme Court opinions.

(Don Boudreaux)

… is from page 83 of the 1976 Vol. II (“The Mirage of Social Justice”) of Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty (footnote excluded):

Full [economic-outcome] equality for most cannot but mean the equal submission of the great masses under the command of some elite who manages their affairs.  While an equality of rights under a limited government is possible and an essential condition of individual freedom, a claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.

… is from Robert Murphy (“Thomas Piketty wants to keep billions of people poor to stop a few from becoming rich“):

Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the 21st Century is filled with shocking quotations making it perfectly clear that his proposed taxes are not designed to raise revenue, but instead are designed to prevent people from creating large wealth and incomes in the first place.

I must admit, I learned a lot from reading Piketty’s book. Specifically, I learned how many self-styled progressives today are willing to sacrifice the standard of living of billions of poor people, in order to prevent a few people from becoming really rich.

1. Number of new driver jobs created every month: 20,000

2. Amount of annual economic activity generated by Uber: $2.8 billion

3. Average Uber pickup time: Less than 10 minutes

4. Number of Americans who have Uber available to them: 137,451,000 (43% of the US population)

5. Number of years Uber has been in business: 4

6. Number of cities worldwide where Uber is available: 100

7. Median income of UberX drivers in NYC and San Francisco: $90,766 and $74,191

8. UberX fares compared to regular “cartel” taxis: 15% to 34% depending on the city and 26% on average across all Uber cities

9. Decrease in DUI arrests in Seattle following the entrance of Uber: More than 10%

10. Decrease in taxi crime in the city of Chicago in the 300 days following the entrance of Uber: 20%

Sources: Uber website and the Uber blog.

Chris Edwards

Peggy Noonan’s op-ed on the weekend was titled “The VA Scandal Is a Crisis of Leadership.” Noonan discusses how President Obama “doesn’t do the plodding, unshowy, unromantic work of making government work.” Obama is not a good manager, and so scandals like the current one are to be expected.

I enjoy Noonan’s articles and her observations on Obama’s style are right on target, but her view about why the VA scandal happened is off the mark. The president does seem to spend his time giving speeches, strategizing politics, and playing golf rather than rolling up his shirt sleeves and fixing programs. He does seem to be “a show horse, not a workhorse,” as Noonan says. But that’s not why the VA scandal happened.

The VA situation is appalling, but it has common elements with scandals that happen under every president. Those elements include bureaucrats behaving selfishly, politicians promising reforms and not following through, federal workforce dysfunction, and the failed central planning of a complex industry. The VA scandal happened because the government is a giant monopoly with none of the built-in checks of the marketplace. Federal politicians themselves are not a check because they are too distracted and the government is far too large for them to keep track of.

Noonan says, “the president is an executive, and executives manage.” Really? He could efficiently manage the entire $3.5 trillion government and its 2.1 million workers and 2,200 programs? I doubt it. I think we could vote in the head of PWC as the next president, and we would still have scandal after scandal in Washington.

Noonan worked in the Reagan administration, and so she remembers the 1980’s HUD scandal. The shenanigans, waste, and bad behavior under Reagan’s HUD secretary Sam Pierce over eight years were jaw-dropping. HUD under Pierce was a cronyism factory for the secretary’s buddies and Republican donors. Tad DeHaven discusses the abuses in this essay.

Perhaps Ronald Reagan should have been a better manager. But he understood that the problem in Washington is far deeper than just a need to run things better, as many of his famous comments reveal:

“Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem.”

“No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. So governments’ programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

As we noted last week, it was really the trial lawyers (with some help from pharma) that killed patent reform. While patent trolling operations and some big legacy companies with giant patent portfolios had been fighting against patent reform all along, they weren't responsible for killing it outright. In fact, in talking to many people involved, the same story comes up again and again: pretty much everyone was negotiating on a deal -- and, at the last minute, the trial lawyers called Harry Reid, who told Leahy to kill the bill. Joe Mullin quotes a tech industry lobbyist who notes that "I feel like a mouse who never knew he was a mouse," and that despite all the negotiating, the trial lawyers just put an end to it:

"We felt really good the last couple of days," said the tech lobbyist. "It was a good deal—one we could live with. Then the trial lawyers and pharma went to Senator Reid late this morning and said that's it. Enough with the children playing in the playground—go kill it."

Some have asked why trial lawyers (rather than patent lawyers) were so against it, and the key thing is that the trial lawyers don't want anything to do with fee shifting. They fear, greatly, that if fee shifting is shown to be effective in patent cases, it will then make it easier to spread to other types of cases. This isn't a huge surprise. Nearly a year ago, a high ranking Democratic Congressional staffer told me flat out that "fee shifting has to be off the table" because "the trial lawyers will never allow it." I was actually surprised that it stayed in the bill as long as it did.

But here's the thing: having the trial lawyers kill the bill outright may be incredibly shortsighted. That's because this bill was already pretty weak overall. All that "bipartisan negotiating" and lobbying pressure from patent trolling operations (and big tech firms who didn't want to lose the ability to exploit giant portfolios of bad patents) had basically weakened this bill drastically already. Even the fee shifting was pretty limited and unlikely to have a huge impact.

But the problem of patent trolls still remains.

And here's the big thing. The Republicans are very much in favor of patent reform, and many prognosticators expect the Republicans to take control of the Senate in this year's elections. As lawyer Matt Johnson points out, with the Republicans in control over both houses, much stronger patent reform might go through in the next Congress, and there won't be much the trial lawyers will be able to do about it. Republicans aren't known for bending to the whims of trial lawyers.

In the interest of making a deal with Democrats this year, Cornyn offered major concessions on fee-shifting, heightened pleading, and discovery abuse during his negotiations with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Those concessions won’t necessarily be on the table next year in a GOP-controlled Senate. And House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte may similarly be unmotivated to make concessions with Democrats in his chamber. Moreover, the trial bar certainly can’t count on the President to be a backstop. President Obama has championed many of the litigation reforms they oppose, including loser-pays and heightened pleading standards.

Reform opponents made the calculation that they’ll take their chances in 2015 rather than swallow a bipartisan compromise this year.

As he says, "this year’s Schumer-Cornyn deal is probably as good as it gets" for those looking to limit patent reform. Next year, the trial lawyers may be able to call Harry Reid, but it might not matter at all.

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In two separate TV interviews, Secretary of State John Kerry made some ridiculous arguments about how Ed Snowden should "man up" and come back to the US. This was in response to Snowden's claims that the only reason he's in Russia is the US State Department pulling his passport -- an argument that no one in the US government has ever denied. Given the chance to respond to this, Kerry effectively changed the subject, saying that Snowden can and should come home to face charges. Here was his statement on NBC's Today show:

QUESTION: Well, Mr. Secretary, what about it? Does he have a point? He’s basically saying but for the U.S. State Department revoking his passport, he wouldn’t be in Russia at all.

SECRETARY KERRY: Well, for a supposedly smart guy, that’s a pretty dumb answer, frankly. Look, I’m not going to get into the – who he was, what he was. Let me just say this: If Mr. Snowden wants to come back to the United States today, we’ll have him on a flight today. We’d be delighted for him to come back. And he should come back, and that’s what a patriot would do. A patriot would not run away and look for refuge in Russia or Cuba or some other country. A patriot would stand up in the United States and make his case to the American people. But he’s refused to do that to this date, at least.

The fact is that he can come home, but he’s a fugitive from justice, which is why he’s not being permitted to fly around the world. It’s that simple and he knows it.

QUESTION: Have you softened your stance at all with regard to his alleged conduct here? I noticed earlier this year you said that there were disclosures about the NSA made because of Snowden that you yourself were not aware of that constituted NSA overreach. Does that change the calculus at all for you?

SECRETARY KERRY: That’s entirely up to the justice system. Let him come back and make his case. The fact is that he should – if he cares so much about America and he believes in America, he should trust in the American system of justice. But to be hiding in Russia, an authoritarian country, and to have just admitted that he was really trying to get to Cuba, I mean, what does that tell you, really? I think he’s confused. I think it’s very sad.

But this is a man who has done great damage to his country, violated his oath which he took when he became an employee, and yes, in fact, stole an enormous amount of information and released it to the public, to the detriment of his country.

Then, in an interview with CBS he effectively said the same thing, including the ridiculous "man up" statement, which is perhaps even stronger than his silly "that's what a patriot would do" statement above:

QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, let me ask you about Edward Snowden. He has now given an interview in which he says he was trained by the United States as a spy. How damaging is this disclosure?

SECRETARY KERRY: Well, it’s not – it’s the same disclosure that everybody’s known. He very cleverly wraps it into his language about: I was a technical person; I didn’t go out there and work with humans, with other people; I wasn’t working and interacting with human beings. Basically, what he was doing is computer stuff, and that’s exactly what he says. So he wraps it into this larger language.

The bottom line is this is a man who has betrayed his country, who is sitting in Russia, an authoritarian country, where he has taken refuge. He should man up and come back to the United States if he has a complaint about what’s the matter with American surveillance, come back here and stand in our system of justice and make his case. But instead he is just sitting there taking potshots at his country, violating his oath that he took when he took on the job he took, and betraying, I think, the fundamental agreement that he entered into when he became an employee. And the fact is he has damaged his country very significantly in many, many ways. He has hurt operational security. He has told terrorists what they can now do to be able to avoid detection. And I find it sad and disgraceful.

I'm not even going to touch "what he was doing is computer stuff" quote, because that just kind of speaks for itself, doesn't it?

But of course, for all this "manly" (actually: sexist and misogynistic) talk, Secretary Kerry is being dishonest and disingenuous. As we've detailed a few times now, Snowden has been charged under the Espionage Act and, as such, he is not allowed to present a "public interest" or "whistleblowing" defense. His motive isn't even allowed to be used in the case at all. So all this talk about "making his case" is ridiculous. Snowden knows damn well that "our system of justice" on issues like this is inherently unfair and biased. Kevin Gosztola has highlighted examples of others who stayed and "made their case" under Espionage Act charges, showing how they were railroaded by a system that is not fair and does not allow them to actually present their case.

Similarly, as one of Snowden's legal advisors, Ben Wizner of the ACLU, points out, no matter what Kerry claims above, Snowden isn't dumb:

“He isn’t blind,” Wizner said. “Snowden saw what happened to other people who faced prosecution under the Espionage Act, and he saw the state of the law, which would not have allowed him to either to challenge the government’s improper withholding of this information in the first place, or to hold up the enormous public value of these disclosures. All that would have been irrelevant.”

So if we're going to use ridiculous misogynistic phrases like "man up," can we at least ask if Secretary Kerry will "man up" and admit that his claims about what Snowden would face back home were not even close to accurate? Or do real "men" like Secretary Kerry think it's appropriate to aggressively lie and mislead the American public? If so, perhaps it's time for someone to "woman up" instead. Though, as Glenn Greenwald points out, Kerry appears to be arguing that a female whistleblower in Snowden's shoes "wouldn't have the same obligation to return home." Or, perhaps (just perhaps) none of this has anything to do with manliness, and folks in the government could stop the macho aggressive bullshit and actually deal with the reality: Snowden blew the whistle on a program that all three branches of government have now admitted were illegal (and potentially unconstitutional). If someone has to "face the music," shouldn't it be the US government?

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David Brooks openly calls for "constant garden-tending", or in other words, an ongoing state of aggressively militaristic global policing by the United States:

As Robert Kagan shows in a brilliant essay in The New Republic, for the past 70 years, American policy makers have understood that underreach can lead to catastrophe, too. Presidents assertively tended the international garden so that small problems didn’t turn into big ones, even when core national interests were not at stake. In the 1990s, for example, President George H.W. Bush and President Clinton took military action roughly every 17 months to restrain dictators, spread democracy and preserve international norms.

This sort of forward-leaning interventionist garden-tending will be even more necessary in an age of assertive autocracies. If the U.S. restricts intervention to “core interests,” as Obama suggests, if it neglects constant garden-tending, the thugs will grab and grab and eventually there will be horrendous conflagrations. America’s assertive responses will not need to be military; they rarely will be. But they’ll need to be simple, strong acts of deterrence to preserve order.

This is insane and this is wrong. The reason that "the number of countries that moved in an autocratic direction has outnumbered those that moved in a democratic one" has been because the supposedly democratic countries have demonstrated to all and sundry that they are not democratic at all. The United States, Italy, Greece, Ukraine, Ireland, France, the UK, and above all, the European Union, have proven, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that their "democracy" is a sham.

Switzerland is the only genuinely democratic country in Europe. It is the only country where the will of the people can actually, at times, override the will of the government elite. The government there has voted twice to join the EU. The people voted it down twice and that is why Switzerland is not in the EU. Contrast that with, for example, the UK, where the people have never voted to join the EU and the government has repeatedly lied to them and denied them the opportunity to decide for themselves if they wish to belong to it. Or Ireland, where they voted down the Lisbon Treaty, then were forced to vote again until the will of the Irish elite had been accomplished. Or the USA, where one of the largest invasions in human history - 50 million strong - was aided and abetted by the three branches of government.

The concept of representative democracy has failed abysmally. It is no wonder that people are now trying other options. It's hard to believe that Brooks is crazy enough to demand the US engage in national sovereignty-violating military action twice every three years. This is the madness of the neocons reaching terminal velocity.

New federal database will include 227 million Americans' SSNs, entire credit history...


(Third column, 7th story, link)

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COP: Bosses target young drivers, want ticket quotas...


(Third column, 12th story, link)

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Children as Young as Five Labeled 'Suspicious' by Florida Police...

Walter Olson

Wow, more of this please [St. Paul Pioneer Press]:

It’s no longer a crime in Minnesota to carry fruit in an illegally sized container. The state’s telegraph regulations are gone. And it’s now legal to drive a car in neutral — if you can figure out how to do it.

Those were among the 1,175 obsolete, unnecessary and incomprehensible laws that Gov. Mark Dayton and the Legislature repealed this year as part of the governor’s “unsession” initiative. His goal was to make state government work better, faster and smarter….

In addition to getting rid of outdated laws, the project made taxes simpler, cut bureaucratic red tape, speeded up business permits and required state agencies to communicate in plain language.

If lawmakers in Minnesota could identify 1,175 worthless or outdated laws that could be rooted out with little real political resistance, imagine how many other worthless or outdated laws there are that are not so easy to uproot because they work to the benefit of one group or other.

(Don Boudreaux)

From The Spectator comes this thoughtful comparison of the worldview of Deirdre McCloskey with that of Thomas Piketty.  (HT my Mercatus Center colleague Bob Graboyes)

McCloskey, by contrast, has long argued that economists are far too preoccupied by capital and saving. She doesn’t even like the word capitalism, on the grounds that capital is not what got us where we are today. ‘If Scotland is trying to become Holland, then capital accumulation is how to do it. That will double your income, maybe triple it.’ But for her, that sort of accumulation is a scratch-card-sized prize — and the lottery jackpot beckons. She enthuses about the Great Enrichment of the 19th century. ‘What happened, understand, is not 100 per cent growth, but anywhere from 2,900 per cent growth to 9,900 per cent growth. A factor of either 30 or 100.’

That jump in incomes came about not through thrift, she says, but through a shift to liberal bourgeois values that put an emphasis on the business of innovation. In place of capitalism, she talks of ‘market-tested innovation and supply’ as the active ingredient of our economic system. It is incidentally a system ‘drenched’ in values and ethics overlooked by economists.

Professor McCloskey has a point, of course. Think of the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, big wealth accumulators in recent times. It wasn’t the magic of compound interest on capital that made them rich; it was intellectual property. They created billions of dollars of business from virtually nothing at all. If you measure the profits as a return on the small amount of initial capital invested, then it looks huge; but capital was no more important an ingredient of the original Apple or Microsoft than cookies or cucumbers.

An important insight – central to the story of modern economic growth told by deeply insightful scholars such as Schumpeter, Mises, Hayek, Lachmann, Kirzner, and McCloskey, but which is lost on thinkers such as Piketty – is the following: indispensable to our modern prosperity is not only the innovative creation of capital but also the continual destruction of capital that such successful innovation entails.  Creative destruction.  What is destroyed is not only some jobs (e.g., t.v. repairman) and the value of some consumer goods (e.g., crutches for polio victims) and services (e.g., postal delivery), but also the value of capital.

Capitalism’s nature is not, contrary to Piketty’s claim, to forever protect and augment existing capital.  Central to capitalism’s nature is what McCloskey calls “market-tested innovation.”  And this innovation inevitably destroys the value of older, less-productive capital that is in competition with with it – in competition with the new capital, the new goods, the new production and consumption processes, and the new knowledge that innovative entrepreneurs create.

Piketty’s apparent obliviousness to this central feature of market-driven capitalism creates a foundational flaw in his celebrated book.

You know that relative of yours, who last Thanksgiving called you anti-science because you had not fully bought into global warming alarm?

Well, it appears that the reason we keep getting called "anti-science" is because climate scientists have a really funny idea of what exactly "science" is.

Apparently, a number of folks have been trying for years to get articles published in peer reviewed journals comparing the IPCC temperature models to actual measurements, and in the process highlighting the divergence of the two.  And they keep getting rejected.

Now, the publisher of Environmental Research Letters has explained why.  Apparently, in climate science it is "an error" to attempt to compare computer temperature forecasts with the temperatures that actually occurred.  In fact, he says that trying to do so "is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of 'errors' and worse from the climate sceptics media side".  Apparently, the purpose of scientific inquiry is to win media wars, and not necessarily to discover truth.

Here is something everyone in climate should remember:  The output of models merely represents a hypothesis.  When we have complicated hypotheses in complicated systems, and where such hypotheses may encompass many interrelated assumptions, computer models are an important tool for playing out, computationally, what results those hypotheses might translate to in the physical world.  It is no different than if Newton had had a computer and took his equation Gmm/R^2 and used the computer to project future orbits for the Earth and other planets (which he and others did, but by hand).   But these projections would have no value until they were checked against actual observations.  That is how we knew we liked Newton's models better than Ptolemy's -- because they checked out better against actual measurements.

But climate scientists are trying to create some kind of weird world where model results have some sort of independent reality, where in fact the model results should be trusted over measurements when the two diverge.  If this is science -- which it is not -- but if it were, then I would be anti-science.

Bruce McQuain has an article on how McDonald's is closing some contract-operated fast food outlets at military bases.  The article speculates that the closures on new government minimum wage regulations for government contracts.

Frankly, I doubt this explanation.  I know something of the world of government contracting, and contractors in these cases routinely just pass on wage increases to their customers in the form of higher prices.  After all, their contracts give them a monopoly of sorts in these bases.

I would like to offer an alternative explanation.

In March, a new regulation took effect that all contractors with anything larger than a $50,000 a year contract with the government must go through an expensive affirmative action planning process for ALL of their locations, not just for the people involved in that particular contract (41 CFR 60-2.1  and 41 CFR 60-4.1)

We don't do government contracting work.  We lease government facilities, but get paid 100% by customers -- since we don't take government money, we are not a contractor.  But there is one exception.  We have a $52,000 a year contract to clean bathrooms near the campgrounds we operate in California.  Basically, we bid this contract at cost because we want the bathrooms cleaned well -- if they are not, it hurts our nearby businesses.

In this contract, we have government-mandated wage requirements under the Service Contract Act.  When these mandated wages go up, we just raise the price to the government in proportion.  No big deal.

We were informed that having this contract, under the new March Obama regulations, now made us liable to go through an expensive and time consuming affirmative action planning process for every location -- of which we have over 120 -- not just for this one contract.  So this one contract was going to force us to create 120 annual written plans and presumably get them approved by someone in the government.  No way.  I might have done it if I only had to do a plan for the contract, but it is just too much work to do this everywhere merely because I have a $52,000 contract on which I make no profit.  So we told the Feds we were dropping the contract.

I think it is very unlikely that private businesses will be accepting government contracts as 5 or 10% of their business any more.   This new regulation just imposes too much cost on the other 95% of the business.  Many will drop the government contracts.

I wonder if this is what is really going on with McDonalds.  A regulatory requirement that applied just to the base operations, like a minimum wage, strikes me as manageable.  But having these three or four contracts drive an expensive requirement to create some sort of affirmative action plan for every location - essentially every one of their tens of thousands of stores, so tens of thousands of plans - that would drive them out of these contracts VERY fast.

Submitted by Mike Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

It’s shameful that the president of the United States, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the leaders of the country’s surveillance agencies refuse to accept consensus reforms that will keep our country safe while upholding the Constitution. And it mocks our system of government that they worked to gut key provisions of the Freedom Act behind closed doors.

 

- Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, original cosponsor of the USA Freedom Act

In what will come as no surprise to any of you, there are very few members of Congress I have even the slightest degree of respect for. However, Justin Amash is one of them.

Rep. Amash is 34 years old and was first elected to Congress in 2010. He has been on my radar screen for several years now as one of the few elected representatives who act more like statesmen than politicians. He has been on the right side of many civil liberties related issues, including his opposition to the NDAA’s provision that allows for the indefinite detention of American citizens without a trial. More recently, last summer he authored an anti-NSA amendment known as the “Amash Amendment,” which was defeated by establishment authoritarians in both political parties. I covered that story in my post: NSA Holds “Top Secret” Meeting to Stop Powerful Anti-Spying Amendment.

Being the fighter that he is, Amash regrouped and came back with an anti-NSA spying bill with some teeth to it: The USA Freedom Act. This bill concerned the establishment to such a degree that Senator Feinstein launched her own competing bill, which believe it or not, intended to codify the NSA’s unconstitutional practices into law.

In the end, what the status quo did was water down the once robust USA Freedom Act into oblivion. Don’t take my word for it, Justin Amash wrote the following on his Facebook page:

Today, I will vote no on ?#‎HR3361?, the ?#‎USAFREEDOMAct?.

 

I am an original cosponsor of the Freedom Act, and I was involved in its drafting. At its best, the Freedom Act would have reined in the government’s unconstitutional domestic spying programs, ended the indiscriminate collection of Americans’ private records, and made the secret FISA court function more like a real court—with real arguments and real adversaries.

 

I was and am proud of the work our group, led by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, did to promote this legislation, as originally drafted.

 

However, the revised bill that makes its way to the House floor this morning doesn’t look much like the Freedom Act.

 

This morning’s bill maintains and codifies a large-scale, unconstitutional domestic spying program. It claims to end “bulk collection” of Americans’ data only in a very technical sense: The bill prohibits the government from, for example, ordering a telephone company to turn over all its call records every day.

 

But the bill was so weakened in behind-the-scenes negotiations over the last week that the government still can order—without probable cause—a telephone company to turn over all call records for “area code 616″ or for “phone calls made east of the Mississippi.” The bill green-lights the government’s massive data collection activities that sweep up Americans’ records in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

 

The bill does include a few modest improvements to current law. The secret FISA court that approves government surveillance must publish its most significant opinions so that Americans can have some idea of what surveillance the government is doing. The bill authorizes (but does not require) the FISA court to appoint lawyers to argue for Americans’ privacy rights, whereas the court now only hears from one side before ruling.

 

But while the original version of the Freedom Act allowed Sec. 215 of the Patriot Act to expire in June 2015, this morning’s bill extends the life of that controversial section for more than two years, through 2017.

 

I thank Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte for pursuing surveillance reform. I respect Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner and Rep. John Conyers for their work on this issue.

 

It’s shameful that the president of the United States, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the leaders of the country’s surveillance agencies refuse to accept consensus reforms that will keep our country safe while upholding the Constitution. And it mocks our system of government that they worked to gut key provisions of the Freedom Act behind closed doors.

 

The American people demand that the Constitution be respected, that our rights and liberties be secured, and that the government stay out of our private lives. Fortunately, there is a growing group of representatives on both sides of the aisle who get it. In the 10 months since I proposed the Amash Amendment to end mass surveillance, we’ve made big gains.

We will succeed.

So it is this watered down, toothless bill that passed this morning. Just in case you still had any doubt what the cretins in Congress are all about. As Mark Twain famously stated:

“There is no distinctly American criminal class - except Congress.”