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Month: July 2012

Update to Resources on Indefinite Life Extension – July 10, 2012

Update to Resources on Indefinite Life Extension – July 10, 2012

TRA’s Resources on Indefinite Life Extension page has been enhanced over the past two months with links to numerous fascinating articles and videos.

Articles

– “Scientists turn skin cells into beating heart muscle” – Kate Kelland – Reuters – May 22, 2012

– “Is Amyloidosis the Limiting Factor for Human Lifespan?” – Lyle J. Dennis, M.D. – Extreme Longevity – May 22, 2012

– “Israeli scientists create beating heart tissue from skin cells” – The Telegraph – May 23, 2012

– “Paralyzed rats walk again in Swiss lab study” – Chris Wickham – MSNBC.com – May 31, 2012

– “New Cancer Drugs Use Body’s Own Defenses” – Ron Winslow – Wall Street Journal – June 1, 2012

– “Bristol immune drug shows promise in three cancers” – Julie Steenhuysen – Reuters – June 2, 2012

– “Prostate cancer drug so effective trial stopped” – Victoria Colliver – San Francisco Chronicle – June 2, 2012

– “New ‘smart bomb’ drug attacks breast cancer, doctors say” – Associated Press – June 3, 2012

– “Alzheimer’s vaccine trial a success” – Karolinska Institutet – June 6, 2012

– “Man Cured of AIDS: ‘I Feel Good’” – Carrie Gann – ABC News – June 8, 2012

– “Artificial Lifeforms Promise Cleaner World, Healthier Humans” – Dick Pelletier – Positive Futurist – June 9, 2012

– “Secret of ageing found: Japanese scientists pave way to everlasting life” – RT – June 9, 2012

– “How aging normal cells fuel tumor growth and metastasis” – Thomas Jefferson University – June 14, 2012

– “People Who Justify Aging are Profoundly Wrong – Aging is Abhorrent” – Maria Konovalenko – Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies – June 14, 2012

– “Scientists tie DNA repair to key cell signaling network” – University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston – June 15, 2012

– “Deciding How We Age as We Age” – Seth Cochran – h+ Magazine – June 19, 2012

– “How we die (in one chart)” – Sarah Kliff – Washington Post – June 22, 2012

– “Modified humans: the most cost-efficient way to colonize space” – Dick Pelletier – Positive Futurist – June 2012

– “Japanese Scientists Grow Human Liver From Stem Cells” – Reuters and Singularity Weblog – June 2012

– “Why Do Naked Mole Rats Live So Long? Do they hold the key to human life extension?” – Maria Konovalenko – Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies – June 29, 2012

– “Scientists Develop Alternative to Gene Therapy” – ScienceDaily – Scripps Research Institute – July 1, 2012

– “How to live beyond 100” – Lucy Wallis – BBC News – July 2, 2012

– “Earth 2050-2100: longer lives; new energy; FTL travel; global village” – Dick Pelletier – Positive Futurist – July 3, 2012

– “Scientists discover bees can ‘turn back time,’ reverse brain aging” – Phys.org – Arizona State University – July 3, 2012

– “Secret formula may be key to reverse aging” – Mike Holfeld – Click Orlando – July 4, 2012

– “Is there a biological limit to longevity?” – Aubrey de Grey – KurzweilAI – July 5, 2012

– “Demystifying the immortality of cancer cells” – Medical Xpress – July 5, 2012

– “Suggesting a Test of Rapamycin and Metformin Together” – Reason – FightAging.org – July 5, 2012

– “Earth 2050-2100: Longer Lives; New Energy; FTL Travel; Global Village” – Dick Pelletier – Positive Futurist – July 7, 2012

Videos

Aubrey de Grey

Aubrey de Grey – Aging & Suffering – Interview with Adam Ford – May 31, 2012

Nikola Danaylov (Socrates)

Anders Sandberg on Singularity 1 on 1: We Are All Amazingly Stupid, But We Can Get Better – May 27, 2012

Hugo de Garis on Singularity 1 on 1: Are We Building Gods or Terminators? – June 2012

Frontier-Making Private Initiatives: Examples from History – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Frontier-Making Private Initiatives: Examples from History – Article by G. Stolyarov II

The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
July 8, 2012
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In my video “SpaceX, Neil deGrasse Tyson, & Private vs. Government Technological Breakthroughs”, I provided a brief discussion of notable counterexamples to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s assertions that private enterprise does not have the resources or exploratory orientation to open up radically new frontiers. Tyson argues that only well-funded government efforts can open up space or could have opened up the New World. History, however, offers many examples of precisely what Tyson denies to be possible: private enterprise breaking new ground and making the exploration of a frontier possible. Indeed, in many of these cases, governments only entered the arena later, once private inventors or entrepreneurs have already established an industry in which governments could get involved. Here, I offer a somewhat more thorough list of such examples of groundbreaking and well-known private initiatives, as well as links to further information about each. I may also update this list as additional examples occur to me.

The Industrial Revolution: The Industrial Revolution – the explosion of technologies for mass production during the late 18th and early 19th centuries – itself arose out of private initiative. The extensive Wikipedia entry on the Industrial Revolution shows that virtually every one of the major inventions that made it possible was created by a private individual and put into commercial use by private entrepreneurs. This paradigm shift, more than any other, rescued the majority of humankind from the brink of subsistence and set the stage for the high living standards we enjoy today.

Automobile: The automobile owes its existence to ingenious tinkerers, inventors, and entrepreneurs. The first self-propelled vehicle was invented circa 1769 by Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot. Cugnot did work on experiments for the French military and did receive a pension from King Louis XV for his inventions. However, subsequent developments that made possible the automobile occurred solely due to private initiative. The first internal combustion engines were independently developed circa 1807 by the private inventors Nicéphore Niépce and François Isaac de Rivaz. For the remainder of the 19th century, innovations in automobile technology were carried forward by a succession of tinkerers. The ubiquity and mass availability of the automobile owe their existence to the mass-production techniques pioneered by Henry Ford in the early 20th century.

Great Northern Railway: While some railroads, such as the notorious repeatedly bankrupt Transcontinental Railroad in the United States, received government subsidies, many thriving railroads were fully funded and operated privately. James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway – which played a pivotal role in the development of the Pacific Northwest – is an excellent example.

Electrification: The infusion of cheap, ubiquitous artificial light into human societies during the late 19th centuries owes its existence largely to the work of two private inventors and entrepreneurs: Nicola Tesla and Thomas Edison.

Computing: The first computers, too, were the products of private tinkering. A precursor, the Jacquard Loom, was developed by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801. The concept for the first fully functional computer was developed by Charles Babbage in 1837 – though Babbage did not have the funds to complete his prototype. The Wikipedia entry on the history of computing shows that private individuals contributed overwhelmingly to the theoretical and practical knowledge needed to construct the first fully functioning general-purpose computers in the mid-20th century. To be sure, some of the development took place in government-funded universities or was done for the benefit of the United States military. However, it is undeniable that we have private entrepreneurs and companies to thank for the introduction of computers and software to the general public beginning in the 1970s.

Civilian Internet: While the Internet began as a US military project (ARPANET) in the 1960s, it was not until it was opened to the private market that its effects on the world became truly groundbreaking. An excellent discussion of this development can be found in Peter Klein’s essay, “Government Did Invent the Internet, But the Market Made It Glorious”.

Human Genome Project: While the United States government’s Human Genome Project began first in 1990, it was overtaken by the privately funded genome-sequencing project of J. Craig Venter and his company Celera. Celera started its work on sequencing the human genome in 1998 and completed it in 2001 at approximately a tenth of the cost of the federally funded project. The two projects published their results jointly, but the private project was far speedier and more cost-efficient.

Private Deep-Space Asteroid-Hunting Telescope: This initiative is in the works, but Leonard David of SPACE.com writes that Project Sentinel is expected to be launched in 2016 using SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. This is an unprecedented private undertaking by the B612 Foundation, described by Mr. David as “a nonprofit group of scientists and explorers that has long advocated the exploration of asteroids and better space rock monitoring.” Project Sentinel aims to vastly improve our knowledge of potentially devastating near-Earth asteroids and to map 90% of them within 5.5 years of operation. The awareness conferred by this project might just save humanity itself.

With this illustrious history, private enterprise may yet bring us even greater achievements – from the colonization of Mars to indefinite human life extension. In my estimation, the probability of such an outcome far exceeds that of a national government undertaking such ambitious advancements of our civilization.

Federal Student Aid and the Law of Unintended Consequences – Article by Richard Vedder

Federal Student Aid and the Law of Unintended Consequences – Article by Richard Vedder

The New Renaissance Hat
Richard Vedder
July 8, 2012
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RICHARD VEDDER is the Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor of Economics at Ohio University and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. He received his B.A. from Northwestern University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Investor’s Business Daily, and is the author of several books, including The American Economy in Historical Perspective and Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much.

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on May 10, 2012, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C.

Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.

FEDERAL STUDENT financial assistance programs are costly, inefficient, byzantine, and fail to serve their desired objectives. In a word, they are dysfunctional, among the worst of many bad federal programs.

These programs are commonly rationalized on three grounds: on the grounds that assuring more young people a higher education has positive spillover effects for the country; on the grounds that higher education promotes equal economic opportunity (or, as the politicians say, that it is “a ticket to achieving the American Dream”); or on the grounds that too few students would go to college in the absence of federal loan programs, since private markets for loans to college students are defective.

All three of these arguments are dubious at best. The alleged positive spillover effects of sending more and more Americans to college are very difficult to measure. And as the late Milton Friedman suggested to me shortly before his death, they may be more than offset by negative spillover effects. Consider, for instance, the relationship between spending by state governments on higher education and their rate of economic growth. Controlling for other factors important in growth determination, the relationship between education spending and economic growth is negative or, at best, non-existent.

What about higher education being a vehicle for equal economic opportunity or income equality? Over the last four decades, a period in which the proportion of adults with four-year college degrees tripled, income equality has declined. (As a side note, I do not know the socially optimal level of economic inequality, and the tacit assumption that more such equality is always desirable is suspect; my point here is simply that, in reality, higher education today does not promote income equality.)

Finally, in regards to the argument that capital markets for student loans are defective, if financial institutions can lend to college students on credit cards and make car loans to college students in large numbers—which they do—there is no reason why they can’t also make student educational loans.

Despite the fact that the rationales for federal student financial assistance programs are very weak, these programs are growing rapidly. The Pell Grant program did much more than double in size between 2007 and 2010. Although it was designed to help poor people, it is now becoming a middle class entitlement. Student loans have been growing eight to ten percent a year for at least two decades, and, as is well publicized, now aggregate to one trillion dollars of debt outstanding—roughly $25,000 on average for the 40,000,000 holders of the debt. Astoundingly, student loan debt now exceeds credit card debt.

Nor is it correct to assume that most of this debt is held by young people in their twenties and early thirties. The median age of those with loan obligations today is around 33, and approximately 40 percent of the debt is held by people 40 years of age or older. So when politicians talk about maintaining low interest loans to help kids in college, more often than not the help is going to middle-aged individuals long gone from the halls of academia.

With this as an introduction, let me outline eight problems with federal student grant and loan programs. The list is not exclusive.

(1) Student loan interest rates are not set by the forces of supply and demand, but by the political process. Normally, interest rates are a price used to allocate scarce resources; but when that price is manipulated by politicians, it leads to distortions in the use of resources. Since student loan interest rates are always set at below-market rates, too much money is borrowed for college. Currently those interest rates are extremely low, with a key rate of 3.4 percent—which, after adjusting for inflation, is approximately zero. Moreover, both the president and Governor Romney say they want to continue that low interest rate after July 1, when it is supposed to double. This aggravates an already bad situation, and provides a perfect example of the fundamental problem facing our nation today: politicians pushing programs whose benefits are visible and immediate (even if illusory, as suggested above), while their extraordinarily high costs are less visible and more distant in time.

(2) In the real world, interest rates vary with the prospects that the borrower will repay the loan. In the surreal world of student loans, the brilliant student completing an electrical engineering degree at M.I.T. pays the same interest rate as the student majoring in ethnic studies at a state university who has a GPA below 2.0. The former student will almost certainly graduate and get a job paying $50,000 a year or more, whereas the odds are high the latter student will fail to graduate and will be lucky to make $30,000 a year.

Related to this problem, colleges themselves have no “skin in the game.” They are responsible for allowing loan commitments to occur, but they face no penalties or negative consequences when defaults are extremely high, imposing costs on taxpayers.

(3) Perhaps most importantly, federal student grant and loan programs have contributed to the tuition price explosion. When third parties pay a large part of the bill, at least temporarily, the customer’s demand for the service rises and he is not as sensitive to price as he would be if he were paying himself. Colleges and universities take advantage of that and raise their prices to capture the funds that ostensibly are designed to help students. This is what happened previously in health care, and is what is currently happening in higher education.

(4) The federal government now has a monopoly in providing student loans. Until recently, at least it farmed out the servicing of loans to a variety of private financial service firms, adding an element of competition in terms of quality of service, if not price. But the Obama administration, with its strong hostility to private enterprise, moved to establish a complete monopoly. One would think the example of the U.S. Postal Service today, losing taxpayer money hand over fist and incapable of making even the most obviously needed reforms, would be enough proof against the prudence of such a move. And remember: because of highly irresponsible fiscal policies, the federal government borrows 30 or 40 percent of the money it currently spends, much of that from overseas. Thus we are incurring long-term obligations to foreigners to finance loans to largely middle class Americans to go to college. This is not an appropriate use of public funds at a time of dangerously high federal budget deficits.

(5) Those applying for student loans or Pell Grants are compelled to complete the FAFSA form, which is extremely complex, involves more than 100 questions, and is used by colleges to administer scholarships (or, more accurately, tuition discounts). Thus colleges are given all sorts of highly personal and private information on incomes, wealth, debts, child support, and so forth. A car dealer who demanded such information so that he could see how badly he could gouge you would either be out of business or in jail within days or weeks. But it is commonplace in higher education because of federal student financial assistance programs.

(6) As federal programs have increased the number of students who enroll in college, the number of new college graduates now far exceeds the number of new managerial, technical and professional jobs—positions that college graduates have traditionally taken. A survey by Northeastern University estimates that 54 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed or unemployed. Thus we currently have 107,000 janitors and 16,000 parking lot attendants with bachelor’s degrees, not to mention bartenders, hair dressers, mail carriers, and so on. And many of those in these limited-income occupations are struggling to pay off student loan obligations.

Connected to this is the fact that more and more kids are going to college who lack the cognitive skills, the discipline, the academic preparation, or the ambition to succeed academically. They simply cannot or do not master well much of the rather complex materials that college students are expected to learn. As a result, many students either do not graduate or fail to graduate on time. I have estimated that only 40 percent or less of Pell Grant recipients get degrees within six years—an extremely high dropout or failure rate. No one has seriously questioned that statistic—a number, by the way, that the federal government does not publish, no doubt because it is embarrassingly low.

Also related is the fact that, in an attempt to minimize this problem, colleges have lowered standards, expecting students to read and write less while giving higher grades for lesser amounts of work. Surveys show that students spend on average less than 30 hours per week on academic work—less than they spend on recreation.  As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa show in their book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, critical thinking skills among college seniors on average are little more than among freshmen.

(7) As suggested to me a couple of days ago by a North Carolina judge, based on a case in his courtroom, with so many funds so readily available there is a temptation and opportunity for persons to acquire low interest student loans with the intention of dropping out of school quickly to use the proceeds for other purposes. (In the North Carolina student loan fraud case, it was to start up a t-shirt business.)

(8) Lazy or mediocre students can get greater subsidies than hard-working and industrious ones. Take Pell Grants. A student who works extra hard and graduates with top grades after three years will receive only half as much money as a student who flunks several courses and takes six years to finish or doesn’t obtain a degree at all. In other words, for recipients of federal aid there are disincentives to excel.

* * *
If the Law of Unintended Consequences ever applied, it is in federal student financial assistance. Programs created with the noblest of intentions have failed to serve either their customers or the nation well. In the 1950s and 1960s, before these programs were large, American higher education enjoyed a Golden Age. Enrollments were rising, lower-income student access was growing, and American leadership in higher education was becoming well established. In other words, the system flourished without these programs. Subsequently, massive growth in federal spending and involvement in higher education has proved counterproductive.

With the ratio of debt to GDP rising nationally, and the federal government continuing to spend more and more taxpayer money on higher education at an unsustainable long-term pace, a re-thinking of federal student financial aid policies is a good place to start in meeting America’s economic crisis.

A Taste of Realism – Article by Fred Reed

A Taste of Realism – Article by Fred Reed

The New Renaissance Hat
Fred Reed
July 8, 2012
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I wonder what purpose the public schools serve, other than to warehouse children while their parents work or watch television. They certainly don’t teach much, as survey after survey shows. Is there any particular reason for having them? Apart from their baby-sitting function, I mean. Schooling, sez me, should be adapted to the needs and capacities of those being schooled. For unintelligent children, the study of anything beyond minimal reading is a waste of time, since they will learn little or nothing more.

For the intelligent, a public schooling is equivalent to tying an anchor to a student swimmer. The schools are an impediment to learning, a torture of the bright, and a form of negligent homicide against a country that needs trained minds in a competitive world.

Let us start with the truly stupid. Millions of children graduate – “graduate” – from high school – “high school” – unable to read. Why inflict twelve years of misery on them? It is not reasonable to blame them for being witless, but neither does it make sense to pretend that they are not. For them school is custodial, nothing more. Since there is little they can do in a technological society, they will remain in custody all their lives. This happens, and must happen, however we disguise it.

For those of reasonably average acuity, it little profits to go beyond learning to read, which they can do quite well, and to use a calculator. Upon their leaving high school, question them and you find that they know almost nothing. They could learn more, average not being stupid, but modest intelligence implies no interest in study. This is true only of academic subjects such as history, literature, and physics. They will study things that seem practical to them. Far better to teach the modestly acute such things as will allow them to earn a living, be they typing, carpentry, or diesel repair. Society depends on such people. But why inflict upon them the geography of Southeast Asia, the plays of Shakespeare, or the history of the nineteenth century? Demonstrably they remember none of it.

Some who favor the public schools assert that an informed public is necessary to a functioning democracy. True, and beyond doubt. But we do not have an informed public, never have had one, and never will. Nor, really, do we have a functioning democracy.Any survey will reveal that most people have no grasp of geography, history, law, government, finance, international relations, or politics. And most people have neither the intelligence nor the interest to learn these things. If schools were not the disasters they are, they still couldn’t produce a public able to govern a nation.

But it is for the intelligent that the public schools – “schools” – are most baneful. It is hideous for the bright, especially bright boys, to sit year after year in an inescapable miasma of appalling dronedom while some low-voltage mental drab wanders on about banalities that would depress a garden slug. The public schools are worse than no schools for the quick. A sharp kid often arrives at school already reading. Very quickly he (or, most assuredly, she) reads four years ahead of grade. These children teach themselves. They read indiscriminately, without judgment – at first anyway – and pick up ideas, facts, and vocabulary. They also begin to think.

In school, bored to desperation, they invent subterfuges so as not to lapse into screaming insanity. In my day the tops of desks opened to reveal a space for storing crayons and such. The bright would keep the top open enough so that they could read their astronomy books while the teacher – “teacher” – talked about some family of cute beavers, and how Little Baby Beaver….

I ask you: How much did you learn in school, and how much have you learned on your own? Asking myself the same question, I come up with typing, and two years of algebra.

The bright should go to school, but it is well to distinguish between a school and a penitentiary. They need schools at their level, taught by teachers at their level. It is not hard to get intelligent children to learn things, and indeed today a whole system of day-care centers only partly succeeds in keeping them from doing it. They like learning things, if only you keep those wretched beavers out of the classroom. When I was in grade school in the early Fifties, bright kids read, shrew-like, four times their body weight in books every fifteen minutes – or close, anyway. In third grade or so, they had microscopes (Gilbert for hoi polloi, but mine was a fifteen-dollar upscale model from Edmund Scientific) and knew about rotifers and Canada balsam and well slides and planaria. These young, out of human decency, for the benefit of the country, should not be subjected to public education – “education.” Where do we think high-bypass turbofans come from? Are they invented by heartwarming morons?

To a remarkable extent, public schools are simply not necessary. I asked my (Mexican) wife Violeta how she learned to read. It was through a Head Start program, I learned, called “mi padre.” Her father, himself largely self-taught, sat her down with a book and said, see these little squiggles? They are called “letters,” and they make sounds, and you can put them together….. Vi contemplated the idea. Yes, it made sense. Actually, she decided, it was no end of fun, give me that book…Bingo.

The absorptive capacity of smart kids is large if you just stay out of their way. A bright boy of eleven can quickly master a collegiate text of physiology, for example. This is less astonishing than perhaps it sounds. The human body consists of comprehensible parts that do comprehensible things. If he is interested, which is the key, he will learn them, while apparently being unable to learn state capitals, which don’t interest him.

What is the point of pretending to teach the unteachable while, to all appearances, trying not to teach the easily teachable? The answer of course is that we have achieved communism, the rule of the proletariat, and the proletariat doesn’t want to strain itself, or to admit that there are things it can’t do.

In schooling, perhaps “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” isn’t a bad idea. If a child has a substantial IQ, expect him to use it for the good of society, and give him schools to let him do it. If a child needs a vocation so as to live, give him the training he needs. But don’t subject either to enstupidated, unbearably tedious, pointless, one-size-fits-nobody pseudo-schools to hide the inescapable fact that we are not all equal.

Fred Reed has worked on the staff of the Army Times, The Washingtonian, Soldier of Fortune, Federal Computer Week, and The Washington Times, and has been published in Playboy, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Harper’s, National Review, Signal, and Air&Space. He has served in the Marines, worked as a police writer, technology editor, military specialist, and as an authority on mercenary soldiers. See Fred’s homepage, Fred On Everything.
War Drums for Syria? – Article by Ron Paul

War Drums for Syria? – Article by Ron Paul

The New Renaissance Hat
Ron Paul
July 7, 2012
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War drums are beating again in Washington. This time Syria is in the crosshairs after a massacre there last month left more than 100 dead. As might be expected from an administration with an announced policy of “regime change” in Syria, the reaction was to blame only the Syrian government for the tragedy, expel Syrian diplomats from Washington, and announce that the US may attack Syria even without UN approval. Of course, the idea that the administration should follow the Constitution and seek a Declaration of War from Congress is considered even more anachronistic now than under the previous administration.

It may be the case that the Syrian military was responsible for the events last month, but recent bombings and attacks have been carried out by armed rebels with reported al-Qaeda ties. With the stakes so high, it would make sense to wait for a full investigation — unless the truth is less important than stirring up emotions in favor of a US attack.

There is ample reason to be skeptical about US government claims amplified in mainstream media reports. How many times recently have lies and exaggerations been used to push for the use of force overseas? It was not long ago that we were told Gaddafi was planning genocide for the people of Libya, and the only way to stop it was a US attack. Those claims turned out to be false, but by then the US and NATO had already bombed Libya, destroying its infrastructure, killing untold numbers of civilians, and leaving a gang of violent thugs in charge.

Likewise, we were told numerous falsehoods to increase popular support for the 2003 war on Iraq, including salacious stories of trans-Atlantic drones and WMDs. Advocates of war did not understand the complexities of Iraqi society, including its tribal and religious differences. As a result, Iraq today is a chaotic mess, with its ancient Christian population eliminated and the economy set back decades. An unnecessary war brought about by lies and manipulation never ends well.

Earlier still, we were told lies about genocide and massacres in Kosovo to pave the way for President Clinton’s bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. More than 12 years later, that region is every bit as unstable and dangerous as before the US intervention – and American troops are still there.

The story about the Syrian massacre keeps changing, which should raise suspicions. First, we were told that the killings were caused by government shelling, but then it was discovered that most were killed at close range with handgun fire and knives. No one has explained why government forces would take the time to go house to house binding the hands of the victims before shooting them, and then retreat to allow the rebels in to record the gruesome details. No one wants to ask or answer the disturbing questions, but it would be wise to ask ourselves who benefits from these stories.

We have seen media reports over the past several weeks that the Obama administration is providing direct “non-lethal” assistance to the rebels in Syria while facilitating the transfer of weapons from other Gulf States. This semi-covert assistance to rebels we don’t know much about threatens to become overt intervention. Last week Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said about Syria, “I think the military option should be considered.” And here all along I thought it was up to Congress to decide when we go to war, not the generals.

We are on a fast track to war against Syria. It is time to put on the brakes.

Representative Ron Paul (R – TX), MD, is a Republican candidate for U. S. President. See his Congressional webpage and his official campaign website

This article has been released by Dr. Paul into the public domain and may be republished by anyone in any manner.

Laissez-Faire Learning – Article by David Greenwald

Laissez-Faire Learning – Article by David Greenwald

The New Renaissance Hat
David Greenwald
July 7, 2012
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As a teacher in a public high school, I am daily confronted with the lamentable realities of state-monopoly education. Student apathy, methodological stagnation, bureaucratic inefficiency, textbook-publishing cartels, obsessive preoccupation with grades, coercive relationships, and rigid, sanitized curricula are just a few of the more obvious problems, attended by the cold-shower disillusionment and gradual burnout among teachers to which they almost invariably lead.

While outcomes such as these are certainly tragic, the process that produces them is not exactly the stuff of Greek theater. There is no climactic battle, no cathartic denouement, no salvific moral lesson to be taken home when the curtain falls, and seldom are there any readily identifiable heroes or villains. It is not a single, epic calamity but a thousand trivial defeats a day, each too mundane and too quickly obscured by its successor to be considered noteworthy. Like a bad movie, public education somehow manages to be both tragic and boring. It is only its cumulative result that would have impressed Sophocles.

Oddly enough, although there is overwhelming public support for compulsory, tax-funded schooling, enthusiasm for what actually goes on in public schools is noticeably lacking. Not only are they generally acknowledged to be falling short in their efforts to produce an enlightened citizenry, but it is even conceded that they have failed in what is ostensibly their most exalted mission: the provision of equal opportunity for all via a standardized system of mass instruction in which all students receive the same basic set of knowledge and skills. Nor has this indictment originated solely from among the ranks of those opposed to egalitarianism on principle. To the contrary, it is largely the refrain of embittered progressives for whom “free” universal education has long been the desideratum of social justice, and who cannot understand how the behemoth they so vigorously midwifed into existence and then wet-nursed for a century could have so thoroughly betrayed their loftiest and most cherished ideal.

Yet ironically, it is the unassailable faith in the achievability of precisely this ideal of universal equality that immunizes public education against every reasonable argument advanced in opposition to it. Notwithstanding its manifest shortcomings, none of which has found a remedy despite decades of legislative reform, hardly anyone is prepared to see this system replaced by anything resembling a real market in education due to the deeply held conviction that that those of lesser material means either would not be able to afford market-based schooling or, in the very best case, would receive only substandard services inadequate to the task of ensuring equality of economic opportunity later in life. It is a further irony, though hardly surprising, that neither the economic knowledge nor the analytic discernment necessary for an examination of these claims has ever been or will ever be taught in a public school. No emperor willingly trains his own subjects to recognize nakedness when they see it.

Given this state of affairs, it devolves on individuals, both within and outside of the school system, to educate others about education. In what follows I will attempt to address what I see as the three primary objections raised against the idea of market-based education:

  1. that educational services on the market would be at a premium, with prices high enough to exclude at least the lowest-income strata of society;
  2. that even if the less affluent could afford some market-based education, it would be of a substantially inferior quality to that received by wealthier consumers of educational services; and
  3. that the lack of a universal curriculum and standardized criteria of achievement would render the market incapable of providing the equality of opportunity that public education, however unsatisfactorily, at least aims in principle to ensure.

We will examine each of these arguments in turn. As will be shown, the first two rest on a misunderstanding of markets, while the third stems from a grossly distorted concept of education from which, if they took the time to examine it closely, probably even most progressives would recoil in horror.

Argument 1: Affordability

In order to understand why educational services on a free market would as a rule be priced well within the reach of the vast majority of income earners, we must first ask why the market produces anything at all for such persons. Since it is obvious that the wealthiest few have far more purchasing power per capita than those in the middle- and lower-income strata, why does the market not produce only for the former group and leave the latter two homeless and starving? Why is sugar, once a luxury of the rich, today a household item so widely and cheaply available that the US government feels called on to impose tariffs on imports and buy up domestic surpluses to keep the price artificially high? Why is the same kilobyte of computer memory that cost around $45 twenty years ago today priced at a fraction of a cent?

The simple answer is this: competition. When a good first appears on the market, the supply of it is strictly limited. To the extent that consumers value it highly, they will bid against each other for the minimal stock available, causing the price to rise until all but the wealthiest consumers drop out of the market. As long as there is no expansion of supply, and assuming the consumers do not change their valuations, the good will remain a luxury of the rich.

However, it is precisely this condition that provides producers with the incentive to increase production of the product. The high price yields supernormal profits that draw venture capitalists and entrepreneurs into that line of production, thereby increasing the supply, lowering the price, and most importantly, bringing exponentially greater numbers of consumers into the market. This process continues until that portion of profits that exceeds the general rate prevailing in other industries disappears, bringing the expansion to a halt. But by that time, the good has long since ceased to be a toy for the rich. To paraphrase Mises, yesterday’s luxury has become today’s necessity.

Of course, while this process works in essentially the same way for all goods, some goods — diamonds, for example — tend to remain luxury items indefinitely due to the high cost of producing them. It is, after all, the consumers who, in the aggregate, must ultimately pay for any lasting expansion of industry. If the capital expenditures necessary for the production of a good exceed the willingness or ability of the consumers to offset them, no sustained increase in the supply of that good will be possible.

So how would this dynamic work on a market for education? Assuming that educational services as such would be given high priority on the value scales of most consumers, would the cost of producing them keep them priced beyond the means of the typical wage-earner? Here we must be particularly careful not to engage in what psychologists call static thinking. We must ask ourselves, not how much it would cost for private entrepreneurs to produce curricula and instruction as these are presently constituted, but rather to what extent and in what ways schooling in its current form squanders resources, and how it might be streamlined and otherwise improved in the crucible of free competition.

One point is clear: the greater and more numerous the inefficiencies of the current system, the more radical its transformation by the market would be. And just how inefficient is the present system? Well, who runs it? On what principles does it operate? Does it allow students the freedom, for example, to take courses in what they are most interested in and eschew subjects they do not wish to study? Or does it rather saddle them with a bloated, one-size-fits-all curriculum prodigiously crammed full of skills and information they neither need nor want, thereby creating artificial demand for teachers and administrative staff, stimulating construction of needlessly large (or simply needless) facilities, boosting energy consumption and capital maintenance costs, and so forth? To get an idea of the sorts of “practical competencies” students in today’s public and state-regulated high schools are expected to (pretend to) master and retain for use in later life,[1] here is a randomly-selected excerpt from the scintillating epistle “Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Mathematics,” issued by the Texas Education Agency:

§111.35. Precalculus (One-Half to One Credit).

  1. Knowledge and skills.
    1. The student defines functions, describes characteristics of functions, and translates among verbal, numerical, graphical, and symbolic representations of functions, including polynomial, rational, power (including radical), exponential, logarithmic, trigonometric, and piecewise-defined functions. The student is expected to:
      1. describe parent functions symbolically and graphically, including f(x) = x^n, f(x) = (1/n)^x, f(x) = log_a (x), f(x) = 1/x, f(x) = e^x, f(x) = |x|, f(x) = ax, f(x) = sin x, f(x) = arcsin x, etc.;
      2. determine the domain and range of functions using graphs, tables, and symbols;
      3. describe symmetry of graphs of even and odd functions;
      4. recognize and use connections among significant values of a function (zeros, maximum values, minimum values, etc.), points on the graph of a function, and the symbolic representation of a function; and
      5. investigate the concepts of continuity, end behavior, asymptotes, and limits and connect these characteristics to functions represented graphically and numerically.

Got all that?

Of course, administrative costs and restrictions on entry and labor-market flexibility also impact cost-efficiency. How do public schools hold up in these areas? Are their operational rules and procedures clear, concise, and easy to follow? Or does it take, say, 670 pages and whole cadres of lawyers, consultants, and administrative support staff just to implement a single program? Regarding entry, how easy is it to qualify as a member of the academy? Is anyone who demonstrates a potential aptitude for meeting the educational demands of students given the opportunity to try to do so? Or is club membership restricted by legal quotas and licensure requirements necessitating lengthy and expensive formal training?

And how flexible is the labor market? Can an underperforming or incompetent employee be readily replaced? Or does even a mere suspension require a hearing before a three-member commission?[2]

We do not have space here to speculate on all the optimizing innovations creative entrepreneurs might come up with, and to do so would be presumptuous in any case. As John Hasnas has pointed out, if we could forecast the future market accurately, our very ability to do this would be the greatest possible justification for central planning.[3] Suffice it to say that today’s public and government-regulated private schools dissipate resources with a profligacy that would have made Ludwig II blush. We can hardly claim, then, that these institutions — whose costs are externalized onto the whole society — are paragons of affordability. Yet education is not a capital-intensive industry, and market competition would surely eliminate most of this waste in short order, allowing educational entrepreneurs to reduce their costs, lower their prices, and take advantage of economies of scale. As for those few who might still be unable to pay, lower prices would mean that private scholarships, grants, and student loans would be available in greater abundance than they are today, and the latter would no longer require ten years of indentured servitude to pay off.

Just as with sugar, automobiles, civil aviation, and cell phones,[4] so too in education high initial profits would draw competition, increase supply, reduce cost, and multiply innovation. There is no reason for market-driven educational services tailored specifically to the desires of those who consume them to be prohibitively expensive.[5]

Argument 2: Quality

A second argument against leaving education to the market is that to do so would result in grave disparities in quality of service. The rich, it is said, would get steak, while the poor got rump roast. Of course, there is a kernel of truth in this. The more you are prepared to offer for something, the more quality you are in a position to demand. The market is indeed a place where the principle embodied in the cliché “You get what you pay for” prevails.

But what exactly do you pay for? The answer to this question is not necessarily obvious. To illustrate, I offer a personal example.

Many years ago, I worked at a tavern-style restaurant that was part of a nationwide chain. With its eclectic menu, modest prices, and dollar-a-mug draft beers, it was a place where families could go on a budget, and weekend drinkers could go on a binge. Not exactly Alain Ducasse, but we did offer a steak (T-bone, as I recall) for around $10. What is interesting about this is that right next door was a more upscale steakhouse that also served T-bone; only this one went for something like $22. Nothing unusual about that, but here’s the catch: both restaurants were owned by the same company and both served exactly the same T-bone steak.

At first blush, this seems absurd. Why would any company compete with itself? And why, for that matter, would anyone in his right mind pay $22 for a steak he could get for less than half that just by walking across the parking lot? Situations like this have led to calls for governments to step in and “protect” consumers from their own “irrationality.” But there is nothing irrational going on here. The two restaurants were not in competition, because they served different clientele, and patrons had definite reasons for the choices they made about which restaurant to patronize. Ours wanted to cut the frills, sit at the bar, and save money; theirs were willing to pay more than double the price for the plush seats, subdued ambience, and tuxedoed waiters. The essential thing, however, is that both were eating the same steak.

The relationship between price and quality is therefore not as straightforward as we might imagine. It is certainly true that you get what you pay for, but it is equally true that you pay for what you get. To be sure, on the education market, those with the wherewithal could attend schools equipped with indoor swimming pools, tennis courts, amphitheaters, and state-of-the-art IT. But this does not mean that everyone else could not make do with less extravagance and still get the same basic service.

Of course, all this in no way suggests that quality of educational services would be identical. Such a conclusion would be absurd. What we have demonstrated is simply the fallacious reasoning behind the common assumption that where price is low, product must be unsatisfactory. What does not satisfy is not profitable. Products and services that do not meet the needs of consumers — rich and poor — will soon have, not a low price, but no price.

Argument 3: Opportunity

We now turn to a final argument for public education that goes beyond economics, though even here there is a parallel. Deeply rooted in the belief that justice means equality and equality means identical circumstances, this view holds that educational standards and curricula must be essentially uniform for everyone if all students are to be given the same opportunity to succeed in life. Here, the anticipated failure of the market lies, not in its high prices or disparate quality, but in its presumably excessive flexibility and diversity. In essence, this argument is really nothing more than a special case of the more general socialist contempt for the division of labor. But what is the “division of labor” in education? What is its meaning, and why should we fear its emergence?

We are accustomed to conceiving of education, not as an abstraction, but as a “real thing” existing in the world outside; a commodity possessed by some people whom we call “teachers” and transferred, more or less mechanically, to other people called “students.” This habit of thought is reflected in our language: it is far more common to talk about getting an education than about becoming educated. Yet the greatest thinkers in this area have repeatedly emphasized that education is, in fact, a process of becoming. This is what Maria Montessori meant when she said that if our definition of education proceeds

along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man’s future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual’s total development lags behind?

Montessori urged an approach to pedagogy that would “help toward the complete unfolding of life,” and “rigorously … avoid the arrest of spontaneous movements and the imposition of arbitrary tasks.”

John Dewey expressed similar views. In his seminal work Democracy and Education, Dewey places the onus of responsibility for education squarely on the shoulders of the individual student:

One is mentally an individual only as he has his own purpose and problem, and does his own thinking. The phrase “think for oneself” is a pleonasm. Unless one does it for oneself, it isn’t thinking. Only by a pupil’s own observations, reflections, framing and testing of suggestions can what he already knows be amplified and rectified. Thinking is as much an individual matter as is the digestion of food. [Moreover], there are variations of point of view, of appeal of objects, and of mode of attack, from person to person. When these variations are suppressed in the alleged interests of uniformity, and an attempt is made to have a single mold of method of study and recitation, mental confusion and artificiality inevitably result. Originality is gradually destroyed, confidence in one’s own quality of mental operation is undermined, and a docile subjection to the opinion of others is inculcated, or else ideas run wild. (p. 311–12)

For both Dewey and Montessori, education starts from the inside and moves outward.[6] Its purpose is to stimulate discovery and development of the personal resources latent within the self by allowing the student to experience the myriad possibilities for bringing them to bear creatively on the external world.

This means that becoming educated is not a matter of passively acquiring what is given, but of actively discovering what one has to give. It means that education does not create opportunity; opportunity creates education.

Regimentation and uniformity must therefore be jettisoned entirely; the individual must reign supreme within the sphere of his own development. The function of the school is to provide a stable environment rich in stimuli across a broad spectrum of disciplines, while the role of the teacher becomes primarily that of the observer who watches as closely — and intervenes as sparingly — as possible.

From this it follows that no two individuals would or could possibly educate themselves in exactly the same way. The self-directed intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual explorations of millions of people simultaneously thus result in an unfathomable diversification of interests and activities that amounts to an educational “division of labor” — one that supports and enhances the division of labor of the market economy, and is in fact its logical precursor.

It must surely be obvious that such a philosophy is in every way wholly incompatible with systems of compulsory or universalized schooling aimed at “equalizing opportunity,” and moreover, that even to use the word opportunity in connection with compulsion or regimentation is to abuse language, otherwise we might just as well reinstate slavery in the name of providing equal “employment opportunity.”

Education, if it is to be worthy of the name, demands a method opposite to that of bureaucratic management and entirely irreconcilable with it. It requires flexibility, parsimony, innovation, and above all, a means of daily subjecting the producers of educational services to the competition of their peers and the approval or disapproval of their clients.

It requires, in other words, the free market.

Conclusion

In Slovenia where I teach, the verb “to learn” literally translates “to teach oneself.” If the truth behind this linguistic convention were widely recognized, it would discredit the very premise on which all systems of public education are founded. But, as the great economist Frédéric Bastiat warned more than a century and a half ago, there is a pronounced tendency when confronted with important questions to consider only what is seen and ignore that which is not seen. And this just as true in education as it is in economics. We see students go to school day after day for 12 years, do as they’re told, get their diplomas, and finally go on to do something with their lives. Perhaps from our vantage point it does not look so bad. But what we do not see is what they might have become had they been allowed to be the architects of their own fate from the beginning.

Notes

[1] Note that on the market, service providers do not “expect” anything from their customers except payment. It is rather the consumer who expects satisfactory performance from the provider.

[2] Block, Walter and Young, A. 1999. “Enterprising education: Doing away with the public school system.” International Journal of Value-Based Management, vol. 12, pp. 195–207.

[3] Hasnas, J. 1995. “The Myth of the Rule of Law.” In Stringham, E.P. (Ed.), Anarchy and the Law: The Political Economy of Choice, pp. 163–192. Oakland, CA: The Independent Institute.

[4] According to Ask.com, the first cell phones sold for around $4,000.

[5] Those still in doubt should visit the Mises Academy, which has put all of its summer courses on sale for tuition fees ranging from $59 to $79 per class. Ever heard of an accredited — that is, state-cartelized — university having a sale? Neither have I.

[6] One of the most salient insights of both Montessori and Dewey is the theory of concentrated attention, according to which the one indispensable prerequisite of education is that children be allowed to focus on an activity for as long as they are absorbed in it. Both philosophers agree that what we call education can only occur as a result of this absorption, and so, just as it is the first duty of the physician to do no harm, so it is the first task of the teacher not to interrupt. Of course, the modern school is set up to be nothing but an endless series of interruptions. Like the thought-disruption device planted in the ear of the protagonist in Kurt Vonnegut’s story “Harrison Bergeron,” the school day is broken up into a hodgepodge of unrelated subjects and types of activity, disrupted every 45 minutes by the Pavlovian ringing of a bell. Under these conditions, nothing resembling what Montessori and Dewey would call education can take place. For more on this, see Kirkpatrick, J. 2008. Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism: Educational Theory for a Free Market in Education. Claremont, CA: TLJ Books.

David Greenwald received his BA in German from Hendrix College and his master’s in counseling studies from Capella University. He currently teaches high school English in Slovenia, where he conducts extracurricular projects on entry-level Austrian economics, banking and the business cycle, and the sociology of violence. He is also a lecturer at the Cato Institute’s Liberty Seminars. Send him mail. See David Greenwald’s article archives.

You can subscribe to future articles by David Greenwald via this RSS feed.

Copyright © 2012 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided full credit is given.

Prohibition: Bootleggers, Baptists, and Bandits – Article by Sanford Ikeda

Prohibition: Bootleggers, Baptists, and Bandits – Article by Sanford Ikeda

The New Renaissance Hat
Sanford Ikeda
July 7, 2012
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The political economist Bruce Yandle’s phrase “bootleggers and Baptists” captures the idea that special-interest groups with conflicting moral positions often find common cause in particular government interventions.  Many on the political left agree with crony capitalists that government should make taxpayers bailout some businesses that are “too big to fail”; some radical feminists agree with some Christian fundamentalists that government should ban pornography.  Their reasons are different but the policies they support are the same.

Bootleggers and Baptists

The inspiration for “bootleggers and Baptists” (pdf) comes directly from the diverse support that so-called “blue laws” have historically received.  According to Yandle,

Bootleggers . . . support Sunday closing laws that shut down all the local bars and liquor stores [because they increase the demand for illegal hooch].  Baptists support the same laws and lobby vigorously for them [because they believe drinking on Sunday is wrong].

Of course the story behind Prohibition era in the United States, marked by the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1920-33), is this lesson writ large.  Banning the sale of liquor, whatever it did to deter drinking, did wonders for promoting organized crime, which had (and still has) a comparative advantage over law-abiding people in supplying and demanding illegal goods. By clamping down on a product in such high demand, local and national governments (including the fledgling Federal Bureau of Investigation, which also prospered during Prohibition) spurred mob activity, intentionally or not, from Los Angeles to Chicago to New York.

Ken Burns: No Eighteenth Amendment without the Sixteenth

What I hadn’t realized until I saw Ken Burns’s excellent documentary “Prohibition” is that an important and, I think, less-known connection existed between the anti-liquor lobby–which included among others the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)–and passage of the Sixteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.  That amendment gave Congress in 1913 the power

to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

(The Supreme Court had ruled an earlier income tax law unconstitutional in 1895.)

In an earlier FreemanOnline column, Don Boudreaux explained why Prohibition was repealed after only a dozen or so years.  In short the inability to tax liquor, now illegal, along with the onset of the Great Depression, had a devastating impact on government tax revenues.  My focus is on the alliance between anti-liquor forces on the right, pressing for prohibition, and Progressives on the left, pressing for an income tax.

Now, according to one source:

By 1868, the main source of Government revenue derived from liquor and tobacco taxes. . . . From 1868 to 1913, almost 90 percent of all revenue was collected from . . . excises.

That’s a significant source of taxes, without which the government could hardly operate, let alone grow to the size needed to implement the Progressives’ agenda: making government more efficient in order to run society along “rational” principles.  Government programs to improve schools, health care, and industry need a steady funding source, and without liquor taxes intervention could not go far enough.  So no matter how hard prohibitionists argued, marched, and lobbied, and no matter how sympathetic government officials may have been to their cause, they would never dream of sacrificing their cash cow on the alter of idealism–at least not without an equally reliable alternative.

And that of course led naturally to the social conservatives support of the progressive (in both senses of the word) income tax.  The Sixteenth Amendment passed in 1913, opening the way in 1919 for the Eighteenth Amendment.  The rest is history.

Baptists and Bandits

I’m not arguing that the alliance was primarily responsible for passage of the amendment, but rather that it’s clear the interests of social conservatives and the taxman were perfectly aligned.  “Baptists” on the one side, and on the other, those eager to expand the use of aggression to plunder wealth created by trade and to spend it to indulge their own preferences–that is, bandits.

Sanford Ikeda is an associate professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Is Serfdom an Executive Order Away? – Article by Sheldon Richman

Is Serfdom an Executive Order Away? – Article by Sheldon Richman

The New Renaissance Hat
Sheldon Richman
July 7, 2012
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Sometimes a step back helps to provide perspective on a matter. President Obama provided such a step with his March 16 Executive Order, National Defense Resources Preparedness. In it we see in detail how completely the government may control our lives—euphemistically called the “industrial and technological base”—if the president were to declare a national emergency. It is instructive, if tedious, reading.

President Obama claims this authority under the Constitution and, vaguely, “the laws of the United States,” but he specifically names the Defense Production Act of 1950. As Freeman columnist and Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs observed, “Under this statute, the president has lawful authority to control virtually the whole of the U.S. economy whenever he chooses to do so and states that the national defense requires such a government takeover.”

We shouldn’t assume this is merely an academic exercise or that a third world war would need to break out. In the last decade, under circumstances representing no “existential threat” to our society, the executive branch has exercised extraordinary powers.

Reading the Executive Order, I was reminded of a quotation of Leonard Read’s: “[A]nyone who even presumes an interest in economic affairs cannot let the subject of war, or the moral breakdown which underlies it, go untouched. To do so would be as absurd—indeed, as dishonest—as a cleric to avoid the Commandment ‘Thou shalt not steal’ simply because his parishioners had legalized and were practicing theft.”

The Executive Order begins by authorizing executive-branch officers to “assess on an ongoing basis the capability of the domestic industrial and technological base to satisfy requirements in peacetime [!] and times of national emergency, specifically evaluating the availability of the most critical resource and production sources, including subcontractors and suppliers, materials, skilled labor, and professional and technical personnel.”

But these officials are to do more than assess. They are to be prepared to “ensure the availability of adequate resources and production capability,” to “improve the efficiency and responsiveness of the domestic industrial base to support national defense requirements,” and to “foster cooperation between the defense and commercial sectors. . . .”

Further, the President’s order notes his authority to “require acceptance and priority performance of contracts or orders (other than contracts of employment) to promote the national defense over performance of any other contracts or orders, and to allocate materials, services, and facilities as deemed necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense” (emphasis added).

That is, the executive branch is first in line for whatever it wants (except civilian labor—perhaps).

Under the section titled “EXPANSION OF PRODUCTIVE CAPACITY AND SUPPLY,” the heads of agencies engaged in procurement are authorized to “guarantee loans by private institutions,” “make loans,” and “make provision for purchases of, or commitments to purchase, an industrial resource or a critical technology item for Government use or resale, and to make provision for the development of production capabilities, and for the increased use of emerging technologies in security program applications, and to enable rapid transition of emerging technologies.”

Think of the potential for corporatist rent-seeking.

In the section on personnel we learn that the secretary of labor shall “collect and maintain data necessary to make a continuing appraisal of the Nation’s workforce needs for purposes of national defense and upon request by the Director of Selective Service, and in coordination with the Secretary of Defense, assist the Director of Selective Service in development of policies regulating the induction and deferment of persons for duty in the armed services.”

So along with the commandeering of private resources, there will be a draft, the commandeering of military (and other?) labor—that is, slavery by another name.

Advocates of the freedom philosophy have a dual concern: that the executive has virtually unchecked authority to declare an emergency and that in an emergency the private economy would be commandeered by government officers. The Executive Order is a breathtaking reminder that, as Higgs put it, “private control of economic life in the United States, to the extent that it survives, exists solely at the president’s pleasure and sufferance.”

Sheldon Richman is the editor of The Freeman and TheFreemanOnline.org, and a contributor to The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. He is the author of Separating School and State: How to Liberate America’s Families.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Are Immigration Laws Like Jim Crow? – Article by David Bier

Are Immigration Laws Like Jim Crow? – Article by David Bier

The New Renaissance Hat
David Bier
July 7, 2012
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Alabama Governor Robert Bentley was forced to defend his state’s harsh immigration law recently against charges that it amounts to a return to segregation-era racially biased policies.  “What took place in the civil rights era was a series of unlawful actions against lawful residents,” Bentley said in response to the charges. “It was a shameful chapter in our state’s history. The immigration issue of today is entirely different.”

Parallels to segregation might be slightly overdone, but to call immigration policies “entirely different” is disingenuous. America’s restrictive immigration system was invented by the Eugenics Research Institute’s future president, Rep. Albert Johnson (R-Washington), who wanted to protect America’s racial purity from, in the words he quoted from a State Department official, “unassimilable . . . filthy . . . and often dangerous” foreigners. While such laws are no longer justified on racial grounds, their impacts today are just as ethnically disparate—more than 80 percent of immigrants labeled “illegal” are Hispanic, and 97 percent (pdf) of deportees are Hispanic.

Nor was segregation “unlawful”—it was a bizarre system of legal controls. Although it’s best known as a system of social control, it was just as much a system of economic regulation. Jim Crow began humbly—with segregated streetcars in Georgia in 1891—but quickly escalated, imposing on southern businesses ever more burdensome requirements: twice the number of bathrooms, waiting rooms, ticket counters, phone booths, even cocktail lounges. The president of Southeastern Greyhound told the Wall Street Journal in 1957, “It frequently costs fifty percent more to build a terminal with segregated facilities.”

Businessmen Conscripted

Since laws that intend to control personal behavior are so rarely enforceable, governments conscript business people to act as de facto State agents. In this way social controls quickly morph into economic regulations. It is often forgotten that the railroad in the infamous Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) actually helped fight  the “separate but equal” doctrine because it “saddled employers with the burden of becoming the state’s race policemen.” Immigration law, which began as a way to restrict the movement of foreigners into the United States, has followed exactly the same pattern. Today a vast portion of America’s immigration code targets businesses, not foreigners.

Jim Crow’s regulatory state only affected businesses that served both white and African American patrons. For most small businesses, the costs of the regime were simply too great. Similarly, for many businesses today, hiring migrant workers has just become too dangerous. “I always relate it to tax law,” labor law consultant Barlow Curran recently told the Tampa Tribune. “Federal tax law is so complicated that if the IRS audits you, regardless of how careful you’ve been, they’ll probably find something. The same thing is true of farm labor law.” No wonder Immigration and Customs Enforcement has imposed $100 million in fines in just the last three years alone—more than the Bush administration’s previous eight years.

Alabama has only added to these regulatory threats. The state’s HB 56—enacted a year ago—mandated that employers use E-Verify to check the work authorization for potential employees. Over 60,000 Alabama businesses missed the deadline. If employers are unable to comply, they face license suspensions and may even be given the “business death penalty,” permanent closing.

As Isabel Wilkerson documents in her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Warmth of Other Suns, more than six million African Americans fled the Jim Crow South and left many southern employers facing labor shortages. “Farmers . . . have [woken] up on mornings recently to find every Negro over 21 on his place gone,” editorialized the Macon Telegraph in 1916 as the Great Migration began. “And while our very solvency is being sucked out beneath us, we go about our affairs as usual.”

Fleeing the State

Alabama is discovering that harsh immigration laws can just as easily “suck the solvency out beneath” them. “From a business point of view, it’s a terrible piece of legislation,” Henry Hagood, CEO of Alabama Associated General Contractors, told Reuters. “My counterparts around the country are saying, ‘thanks for sending workers our way.’” Tens of thousands of workers have already fled the state. University of Alabama professor Samuel Addy found that losing these workers reduced the state’s GDP by between $2.3 billion and $10.8 billion.

Conservatives who profess a commitment to the free market must extend that commitment to the labor market. They must realize that harsh immigration laws have the same dire effects on business as other burdensome regulations. They limit not only the free movement of foreign workers but also the rights of American businesses to hire, transport, and associate freely. They need to go the same way as Jim Crow—into the dustbin of history.

David Bier is the immigration policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Independence from ACTA Day – July 4, 2012 – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Independence from ACTA Day – July 4, 2012 – Video by G. Stolyarov II

July 4 now has a new meaning: it is the day European pro-liberty activists helped humankind declare independence from the powerful special interests that attempted to impose censorship, online surveillance, and draconian stifling of creativity via the misnamed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

Following the rejection of ACTA in the European Union Parliament by a vote of 478 to 39, ACTA is effectively dead. A great threat to human civilization is averted.

Remember to LIKE, FAVORITE, and SHARE this video in order to spread rational discourse on this issue.

Support these video-creation efforts by donating at The Rational Argumentator: http://rationalargumentator.com/index.html

References:
– “ACTA: The War on Progress, Freedom, and Human Civilization” – Essay by G. Stolyarov II
– “Victory! ACTA Suffers Final, Humiliating Defeat in European Parliament” – Rick Falkvinge
– “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” – Wikipedia