Stimulus Pork... Yummmmm!

Tea Party

This past Friday, February 27th, "tea parties" were held across the country. Inspired by the now famous report by Rick Santelli on CNBC and the Boston Tea Party carried out by America's first patriots, the tea parties were a protest against the stimulus bill recently passed by Congress and signed by President Obama. Reports, found mostly on blogs and twitters with occasional support from the mainstream media, indicate that the parties drew anywhere from 100-500 participants per city and included organized speakers and marches... not bad considering that these were all organized in three days with most participants joining in as the protests were going on. Participants in Atlanta even braved severe weather and a close-call with a tornado!

I perused some pictures of some of the protests this morning (I didn't attend any since I was bringin' home the bacon and tryin' to stay off the dole that day). I always like to see the signs people bring to these events. I am never clever enough to come up with these. I have to admit to a bit of "slogan envy." (Although I was rather proud of the Libertarian t-shirts we made for a street fair we participated in a few years back.) My kids love to make signs for events like this. Maybe I need to organize more protests so that we can hit art and civics in one shot. *grin* It might help to spark my creative juices, too. Practice makes perfect and all that.

Some of my favorite slogans from the tea party signs were:

"Give Me Liberty or Give Me Debt?"

"Chains We Can Believe In"

"Why would YOU want to pay for MY health care?"

And a picture of a little girl (I'm guessing she was about 4) holding a sign that read: "I read as much of the stimulus bill as my Congresswoman" (seriously, it was 1100 pages and it was not available in its entirety until after the vote, so don't believe any Congressman who told you they read it before they voted... they didn't, they couldn't)

You can view pictures here and here.

I only hope that the energy and push to action that inspired these protests continues. We need to live the lives of free men and not just be content with the appearance of freedom. It begins with protest. Hopefully it will end with government action.

Other People's Money On Other People

Milton Friedman said there are four ways to spend money:

1. You spend your money on yourself.

2. You spend your money on other people.

3. You spend other people's money on yourself.

4. You spend other people's money on other people.

If this list sounds familiar, you are either very well-informed or you remember me mentioning this before. *grin*

The economic stimulus package that the House of Representatives is voting on today (you can read all 647 pages here) is a very good example of what happens under situation #4. Here is a summary from today's Wall Street Journal:

"Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before."

So said White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in November, and Democrats in Congress are certainly taking his advice to heart. The 647-page, $825 billion House legislation is being sold as an economic "stimulus," but now that Democrats have finally released the details we understand Rahm's point much better. This is a political wonder that manages to spend money on just about every pent-up Democratic proposal of the last 40 years.

We've looked it over, and even we can't quite believe it. There's $1 billion for Amtrak, the federal railroad that hasn't turned a profit in 40 years; $2 billion for child-care subsidies; $50 million for that great engine of job creation, the National Endowment for the Arts; $400 million for global-warming research and another $2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects. There's even $650 million on top of the billions already doled out to pay for digital TV conversion coupons.

You can read the entire article here.

The Senate has their own version of the stimulus bill which should come up for a vote in a few weeks.

Sounds like the same old pork, different congress. Whether your political beliefs or understanding of the Constitution allow for a government stimulus of private commerce or not, shouldn't the majority of the bill contain laws which would actually stimulate something economic? Maybe they are trying to stimulate a faster economic downfall? In so, way to go!

So much for change.

Update: The House passed the bill this afternoon (Jan. 28th) 244-188.

We were warned

I think I'll be listening to Peter Schiff from now on for an accurate report on the state of the economy. I'm definitely not going to listen to the people who just sat there and laughed at him... laughed. Even if he hadn't have been right on target, how disrespectful is that? What ever happened to civility in disagreement?

(HT: Judy at Consent of the Governed)

I just don't get it

Frodo and I were watching the eleven o'clock news on Black Friday (which Frodo was convinced was taped in advance since all the stories were rather generic with little to no detail and generally didn't seem very newsworthy... but I digress). The lead story was the required "look at all the crazy people who slept in front of the Stuff Mart to buy the new and improved Tickle Me 'Til I Pee Dancing Cockroach and Alarm Clock" story. I was doing fairly well tuning it out until I heard a woman interviewed say this, "I got some great stuff. I got this monitor. I didn't know what it was, but everyone else was grabbing one so I got one too."

What?!

This brings keeping up with the Jonses to a whole new level. I guess what really shocked me about this was not that this woman bought something because it was "cheap" even though she didn't really need it (or even know what it was). It was that she was admitting it to millions of people and didn't seem all that ashamed or embarrassed by it.

Repeat after me:

"I am only saving money on a purchase if I am buying something I was planning on buying anyway, but I buy it at a price less than I was originally planning on paying."

Now if this woman was planning on buying a monitor anyway and was sharing how happy she was to have saved 75% by buying it on Black Friday, I would have no problem with the story (except that I still find it hard to beleive that someone buying something at a sale is news). Frodo and I have braved the crowds on previous Black Fridays. I love going out the day after Christmas to buy my cards for the following year. But I was planning on buying those things anyway.

This woman isn't saving money... she is just spending it less quickly than she would have if she had been buying random, unidentified things she doesn't need at full price.

Ugh.

A Great Loss

Milton Friedman, recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Economic Science, senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, recipient of the 1988 Presidential Medal of Freedom, a hero of Frodo's, one of the strongest influences on my own political and economic philospohies, and arguably the staunchest modern advocate of Freedom (both economic and personal), died this morning at the age of 94.

A couple years ago, Frodo worked at the Libertarian booth at our town's annual street fair. The night before the fair, Frodo and I stayed up late making t-shirts for each of us and our kids to wear to the fair. My shirt bore a quote from Dr. Friedman:

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

Tax Freedom Day, the date on which we stop working for the government and begin working for ourselves, is said to have its origins with Dr. Friedman. He wrote in one of his 1974 Newsweek columns that the United States should have a national holiday called "Personal Independence Day" to celebrate:

...that day in the year when we stop working to pay the expenses of the government, and start working to pay for the items we severally and individually choose in light of our own needs and desires. In 1929, that holiday would have come on Feb 12; today it would come about May 30; if present trends were to continue it would coincide with July 4.

Sadly, according to Americans for Tax Reform, Dr. Friedman's prediction was all too accurate. In 2005, the group determined that "cost of government day" occurred in the second week of July.

In his bestselling book Free To Choose, co-written with his wife, economist Rose Director Friedman, Dr. Friedman cements the connection between economic freedom and personal freedom:

Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction, it reduces the area over which political power is exercised. In addition, by dispersing power, the free market provides an offset to whatever concentration of political power may arise. The combination of economic and politcal power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.

Milton Friedman on The Power of the Market (video)

Dr. Friedman did not limit his defense of personal freedom to those areas obviously affected by economics, however. In the 1990 version of his PBS series Free to Choose, he makes clear his view on America's government school system and who should be in charge of children's education:

Milton Friedman on Education (video)

(this is my favorite Friedman moment ever)

In regard to education, Dr. Friedman and his wife put their money where their consciences were and started the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice which supports parental choice in education through educational choice in the form of school vouchers... a concept Dr. Friedman originally introduced in his book Economics and Public Interest in 1955.

The rights that Dr. Friedman worked so hard to defend were not just those that benefited

the individual. He purported that total freedom includes not only the right to work to make one's self successful, but also to harm one's self. Man has the right to be stupid as well as to be wise.

"The reign of tears is over. The slums will be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent."

That is how Billy Sunday, noted evangelist and leading crusader aginst Demon Rum, greeted the onset of Prohibition in 1920, enacted in a burst of moral righteousness at the end of the First World War. That episode is a stark reminder of where drives to protect us from ourselves can lead.

Prohibition was imposed for our own good. Alcohol is a dangerous substance. More lives are lost each year from alcohol than from all the dangerous substances the FDA controls put together. But where did Prohibtion lead?
New prisons and jails had to be built to house the criminals spawned by converting the drinking of spirits into a crime against the state. Al Capone, Bugs Moran became notorious for their exploits - murder, extortion, hijacking, bootlegging.Who were their customers? Respectable citizens who would never themselves have approved or engaged in, the activites that Al Capone and his fellow gangsters made infamous. They simply wanted a drink. In order to have a drink, they had to break the law. Prohbition didn't stop drinking. It did convert a lot of otherwise law-obedient citizens into lawbreakers. It did suppress many of the disciplinary forces of the market that ordinarily protect the consumer from shoddy, adulterated, and dangerous products. It did corrupt the minions of the law and create a decadent moral climate. It did not stop the consumption of alcohol.

If the government is to try and ban private consumption of alcohol and tobacco, it must surely ban such activities as hang-gliding, skiing, rock-climbing and so on. Where should it stop? Rugby? American Football? Ice Hockey?

Insofar as the government has information not generally available about the merits or demerits of the items we ingest or the activities we engage in, let it give us the information. But let it leave us free to choose what chances we want to take with our own lives.

- from Free to Choose

Edward H. Crane, president of the CATO Institute, summarized Dr. Friedman's contributions better than I ever could:

Here's a guy who won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work in monetary theory and he was a great Chicagoan, a great empiricist and theoretician of economics. But ultimately, what Milton believed in was human liberty and he took great joy in trying to promote that concept....Milton would say, "Maybe I did well and maybe I led the battle but nobody ever said we were going to win this thing at any point in time. Eternal vigilance is required and there have to be people who step up to the plate, who believe in liberty, and who are willing to fight for it." ...In my view he was the greatest champion of human liberty in my lifetime, certainly in the 20th century. And he didn’t slack off in the 21st century.

Milton Friedman

1912-2006

A Top Notch Education In Economics

If you want to learn about a topic, the best person to learn from is an expert - preferably one who is world-renown in his subject. Who wouldn't want to take art classes from Leonard DaVinchi, learn astronomy from Galileo, or receive golf lessons from Tiger Woods? Unfortunately, for many of us, learning any craft from such an expert, living or dead, is equally impossible. Fortunately, this is not the case in economics. Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, has made his "Free To Choose" lectures (originally aired on PBS in the 1980's) free for the viewing. Don't miss this rare opportunity to sit under the tutelage of a master.

Note: I had some trouble with the audio, so you may need to fiddle with it a bit. Trust me, it is worth some fiddling!

A Lesson in Education Statistics

Human Events Online has an interesting article, and accompanying graph, showing each state's (and the District of Columbia's) per pupil spending for government school students and the percentage of eigth-grade students reading and doing math computations at grade level. NONE of the 50 states or the District of Columbia had more than 44% of its eigth graders reading or doing math computations at grade level! This is unacceptable!

What is even more unacceptable is that I have to turn over a portfolio of my third-grader's work to a local government school official who will decide whether or not I am properly educating my homeschooled child! I understand that all school districts are different, and that the percentages presented in the aforementioned article include students in districts where many negative factors influence thier school performance (or lack thereof). Our school district only spends about $4300 per student (about half the state average), and actually scored much better than the state averages at 63% math and 64% reading (state levels were about 1/3 proficient at math and reading).

In contrast to the government schools, our homeschool budget last year was about $500. That works out to $166.67 per student (one pre-K, one 2nd grader, and one 3rd grader), and 100% of our school's students are reading and doing math computations at or above grade level!

Just something to think about.