Recruiting Future Casualties

Military recruiters disgust me. They are paid to convince young people to abandon civil society and become a cog in Washington's awesome death machine. Of course, they don't tell them that they are going to be cogs. They tell them that they are going to be leaders. Leaders of brave men and women as they keep the evil that is the rest of Earth's population from killing Americans or even each other. Then they tell them of all the financial benefits that the federal government will heap upon them as payment for their "sacrifice". I'm sure they typically avoid mentioning the dearth of medical care providers veterans are experiencing or the astronomical suicide rate of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan (and veterans in general). The gritty truth is replaced with romantic visions of honor, justice, and adventure. The State requires some to give all and it makes their job a lot easier if the some are kept in the dark about these matters.

It's bad enough when young men and women seek out military recruiters, but what I find especially despicable is the targeting of children for military recruitment. The government calls this contemptible program the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC). The JROTC aims to "instill in students in [United States] secondary educational institutions the values of...service to the United States" as well as developing patriotism and responsiveness to constituted authority and "increasing a respect for the role of the U.S. Armed Forces in support of national objectives". In other words, they are teaching them to be obedient to the State. It turns out that Marion High School has a chapter of the JROTC and recently had a "field day". The JROTC claims that 30% of the kids that go through the program end up in the military. Indeed, Army recruiters, Marine recruiters, and the Indiana National Guard were all in attendance as well as the Marion Police Department and Marion Fire Department. I learned from the Chronicle article that one young lady plans on joining the National Guard. She thinks being a cadet is fun. I don't doubt that being a cadet and playing soldier is fun. But I'll tell you it wasn't much fun for me listening to a friend of mine, who had returned from overseas duty with the Guard, describing pulling the charred remains of his buddy out of his Humvee after their convoy was disrupted by an IED. No fun at all. Just somber silence.

But the Feds need fodder for their offensive wars. And they are not above targeting educationally and economically deprived children. In fact, that's their stated policy:

Encourage program expansion into educationally and economically deprived areas. Focus efforts on at-risk youth by maintaining at least 20 percent of units in educationally and economically deprived areas.

That's right. Join the military. We will feed you. We will clothe you. We will educate you. All we ask in return is your life.

To be fair, not all people who join the military will be killed in action. Many will be the ones doing the killing. Remember the Afghanistan Kill Team? Or how about those "servicemen" who mercilessly gunned down first responders (after murdering a journalist)? Assistant Superintendent Ken Folks described the JROTC program's leadership as "fantastic role models". I don't think our children should be modeling themselves after brutal killers or dismembered corpses. And I don't think they should be modeling themselves after mindlessly obedient servants of the warfare state. And they certainly shouldn't be modeling themselves after the people who seek children out in order to turn them into brutal killers or dismembered corpses. Maybe we should be teaching these kids Math and English instead of obedience.

Avoiding the Taxman's "Services"

Last Sunday the Chronicle Tribune reported, in an article about spring property taxes coming due, that Grant County residents will avoid being robbed of $4.2 million thanks to circuit breaker caps. We should all be celebrating this. That's $4.2 million that the residents of Grant County will get to decide how to spend instead of being coerced into handing it over to a wasteful and destructive government. Some of this money will be spent at local businesses. Some of it will be put into savings accounts where it becomes capital to be lent. All of it will be used to improve the lives of the rightful owners of the money, viz., the people who earned it. Surely there can be no downside to this.

Not so fast, says County Council President Jim McWhirt. “As a taxpayer, you’re going to pay less property tax … but it means we may not be able to afford some of the services you expect your government to do. Is that good?” Hmm. It seems Jim thinks you might be happier if he were to spend that money for you. I know he meant for his question to be rhetorical, but I'm going to go ahead and answer him anyway. Yes, it is good that we will be paying less property tax. People who are taxed reflexively understand this. But people on the other side of the table, the Jim McWhirts of the world, think that you should always be forced to give them more money. It's for your own good. I'll assume that McWhirt and the rest of the council are a bunch of sweethearts and only want what is best for us, but if they think government spending is in any way superior to market transactions, then they are misguided to say the least.

In a market transaction, people exchange goods and services that they value inversely. If I go to my local grocer to get a gallon of milk and pay him $4, it's because I value the milk more than I value the $4. He, likewise, values the $4 more than the milk. I say 'thank you' and he responds with "thank you". It's a win-win. Both parties are made better off by trading. But let's say that I don't want to pay for the milk. I now enter the grocery store not with money in my hand, but a loaded gun. I threaten to shoot the grocer if he does not provide me with milk. He complies. No "thank yous" are exchanged. I am made better off, but the grocer has been robbed. He has been made poorer.

But what if I promise to give the milk to the poor, only keeping one glass for my troubles? Is it still robbery? It is. But what if I only did it so I could combine the milk with chocolate (of which I relieved another poor vendor) in order to mix a delicious beverage for the grocer himself? Is it still robbery? It still is. But what if the grocer values the chocolate milk more than the $4 he is out? If that was the case, there would have been no need for the gun. You could have made a voluntary (i.e. market) exchange. No matter how you look at it, when someone uses violence or the threat of violence to abscond with another's property, it is robbery. It's even robbery when Jim McWhirt does it in the name of "government services". And robbery, as we noted earlier, makes society poorer because it's a zero sum game. There's a winner and a loser unlike market transactions which are win-win and build wealth.

I think I have clearly shown why I disapprove of the government's means of collecting money. The obvious objection that people will bring up is that the county government does provide us with many services and that these services must be paid for somehow. So, even if it is technically robbery, we all get to enjoy the roads and such that our collective dollars go to purchase and maintain. These "services" make us better off. But how do we know they make us better off than we would be had we kept our money? On the market, profits signal to entrepreneurs that they are making consumers happy. Losses show that they are failing. Profitable companies grow and prosper while those that continually fail their consumers go bankrupt. But there is no such profit/loss test for government because there are no market prices for their "services" (remember, market prices are determined by voluntary exchanges). Governments don't go away when they lose money. They just borrow or tax more. And often times there is no one offering competing services because the government has outlawed competition in the areas it deals with. All of the incentives to spend wisely, offer improving products, and lower prices (taxes) are absent from government services. On top of that, every dollar the government spends bids away resources, such as labor and capital, from the market where they would be used to increase wealth. That means your tax dollars are in competition with your personal spending dollars, bidding all of your costs higher and higher.

The citizens of Grant County are, without a doubt, better off with that $4.2 million in their hands than if it was in the hands of Jim McWhirt, Wayne Seybold, or Mike Pence. To argue otherwise is to argue that robbery is beneficial to society.

How Much Is That Doctor In The Window?

I used to have a hound dog named Hank. Whenever I had to take ol' Hank to the veterinarian, I would call them up and schedule an appointment. If the vet suggested a treatment for Hank, I would ask, "How much will that cost me?" But Hank never asked about prices. I assume he didn't care about prices because he wasn't the one paying them. Hank would just obediently accompany me to the doggy doctor and accept whatever treatment was dished out. But I did care about the price. I had car payments, mortgage payments, groceries, utilities, and gasoline to buy. If there was a cheaper way to make sure Hank was healthy, I wanted to know about it. When consumers care about prices, businesses include price competition as part of their overall strategy to attract customers. But if people didn't care about the price, then the business would need not worry about offering a lower price than the next guy.  Hank, as I said, did not care about the price. He had a third party (yours truly) funding his medical bills.

Most Americans don't care about price when it comes to healthcare expenses. Unless they are paying a co-pay or dishing out cash for prescriptions, they let a third party worry about the costs. We are dogs. We let our insurance company or the government haggle over price with the hospital. We are happy to avoid the whole discussion. And now no one will be allowed to represent themselves, as a human being would, when choosing the price of their medical care. Obamacare mandates that everyone be represented by a third party, or be forced to pay a fine. Insurance companies love this because they need the increased customer base to offset their skyrocketing costs. And hospitals love this because they can continue raising prices. Everyone wins! Except...the patients.

Whenever we obscure costs and prices, we are asking for a world of hurt. Human beings have a limited amount of resources available to them with which they can use to sustain themselves. We need food, water, shelter, and clothing. But we do not find infinite amounts of these things lying about like manna for us to merely gather up and enjoy. They are scarce resources. And how do human beings deal with the objective reality of scarce resources? By economizing them. This is why free market prices are crucial. Market prices convey information about the supply & demand of the items we wish to acquire.

 Let's use the example of medicine on a hypothetical free market. In this hypothetical world we will pretend that there are only six categories of spending: Food, water, shelter, clothing, entertainment, and medical treatment. We will also say that there is a fixed amount of income for these industries: $1200. This money is split evenly across all industries so that they all receive $200 in a given time period. Now let's say there is a fire and it destroys a portion of the stock of medicine. Supply has decreased while demand has remained the same. Since there is less medicine, the prices rise. Now the residents of our hypothetical world are being asked to spend $300 on medicine. The residents must economize. They must reduce their spending in the other categories if they want to continue purchasing medicine. Let's say they decide to decrease their expenditures on entertainment by $100 in order to spend that $100 on medicine. The market prices are conveying that medicine is more urgently needed than entertainment and those who seek to make a living will now be led to enter the medical treatment industry. This will increase the supply of medicine and bring the price back down.

So why doesn't it seem to work this way in the real world? Why does the cost of medical care continue to rise even relative to inflation? Answer: The third party payer system.

A few years back, my daughter had an extended stay in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) at Cincinnati's Children's Hospital. My wife and I were eventually met by one of the hospital's financial counselors (for lack of a better term) about the fact that our little girl had almost reached her lifetime limit for medical costs that my insurance company would cover and that we would need to fill out some paperwork to apply for various kinds of government aid. After she had finished guiding us through the enormous stack of papers, I explained to her that we had spent an awful lot of money at that hospital and I wanted to know if there wasn't any possibility of receiving a discount. Surely the hospital had raked in far more than the costs of the services so far provided. She said that there was absolutely discounts available...for those who applied for welfare but were rejected because they don't meet the criteria. Basically, the hospital isn't going to take a fraction of the money when the government will give them the whole thing.

And what would have happened to poor Hank if I had been driven into destitution by those medical bills? The same thing that will happen to us when Uncle Sam goes broke.

In Soviet Amerika, villains check YOUR background!

The U.S. Senate is working feverishly to expand background checks for people purchasing firearms at gun shows and over the internet. Supposedly this is an attempt to protect the American citizenry from gun violence such as the December 2012 shootings at a Connecticut elementary school in which 20 first-graders and six adults were killed. The problem is that Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of that heinous crime, did not purchase his weapons at a gun show or on the internet. He didn't purchase them at all. Obviously, that means  such background checks would have been useless in preventing the horrific events of that day. Could it be that the government is merely using this event as an excuse to restrict Americans' liberty further?

Governments love guns. They surround themselves with them and buy up every piece of ammo they can get their hands on. If you wear a government uniform, they want you to be armed to the teeth. But they do not like guns when they are in the hands of the non-government class. This is no surprise when you consider that criminals tend to prefer that their victims be unarmed. And that consideration is what led the Founders to enshrine the natural right of self defense via firearms in the Constitution. But Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, assures us that we can "strengthen the background check system without in any way infringing on Second Amendment rights". Perhaps she hasn't actually read the 2nd Amendment which states:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

I don't see anything in there about people only having a right to bear arms on the condition that they pass a federal background check. In fact, I don't see the words "background check" anywhere in the Constitution. Since such a power wasn't enumerated in that document, any action the federal government takes to restrict firearm access is necessarily unconstitutional. Of course, by that rationale, almost everything the federal government does is unconstitutional.

Republicans joining hands with Democrats in order to restrict or complicate access to firearms is a perfect example of why we should be wary whenever we see government officials touting "bi-partisan" measures. Whenever the two parties are able to come to an agreement on something, I start to get nervous. Adam Smith famously noted that "people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public". Smith was talking about private industry. But it is certainly applicable to the people in the trade of "public service". And the latter group's ability to carry out their plans is far more unsettling.

So, when politicians from both the left and right tell you that they are trying to enhance your security by limiting the supply of a very useful defensive tool, you should be very suspicious. The infamous communist dictator and mass murderer Mao Zedong understood that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." We need to make sure that the American people also understand this and never allow that power to be transferred, no matter how incrementally, into the hands of the already too politically powerful villains that call Washington home. 

Mo Purchasing Power Mo Problems?

The U.S. is urging Japan to refrain from competitively devaluing the Yen. The United States, a prolific destroyer of currency value in its own right (the dollar has lost 95% of its purchasing power since the inception of the Federal Reserve), fears that the Japanese are turning up the printing presses in an attempt to increase their exports and decrease their imports from places such as America. The Department of Treasury says this is unfair because it enriches the Japanese at the expense of the American economy. When I read things like this, it scrambles my brain. So, I would like to take the time to attempt to unscramble it.

Our problem seems to germinate in the foreign exchange market. That's where international currencies are traded for one another. If I own a factory in Indiana and I wish to purchase materials from France, I need to acquire euros in order to pay for those materials. On the foreign exchange market, I trade my dollars for euros and I'm all set. But what if the EU decides to "competitively devalue" the euro? What is competitive devaluing and how will this affect my business in Indiana? For simplicity's sake, let's say that $2 will get you €1 and you wish to purchase a machine from France that is priced at €1,000. Obviously, this machine will cost you $2000. But the European Central Bank (ECB) then decides to announce that it will begin increasing the supply of euros. Increasing the supply of euros decreases the euro's purchasing power because as more currency units are pumped into the economy, prices are bid up. Speculators at the exchange market begin to dump euros and purchase relatively stronger currencies, such as the dollar, in an attempt to make a profit before the prices inevitably rise. Let's say the euro moves to par with the dollar and that now your $1 buys €1. That means that you can now buy 2 machines priced at €1000 with your $2000. The relative cheapness of the European goods will serve to stimulate French exports and American imports simultaneously. Mainstream economists say this is a bad thing for American industry. The ECB has used monetary policy in order to gain an unfair advantage for European industries.

Now let's go back to Japan. According to Bloomberg.com, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) has recently doubled its bond purchases (which it creates credit in order to do) and the yen has depreciated against all 16 of its most-traded peers since April 4th. Japan says they are merely trying to fight off deflation and that the resulting devaluation is incidental. The U.S. Treasury seems skeptical. But it seems to me that Americans stand to benefit a great deal from this move by the BOJ and it is the Japanese citizenry who should be lamenting this development. In my earlier example, a company from Indiana was able to purchase more goods from France with the same amount of dollars due to competitive currency devaluation. This is most certainly a beneficial development from the point of view of the Indiana business who saves $1000 with which it can buy another machine or increase its capital investments. Or maybe it can even spend the money domestically. It's like a gift from the devaluing country to the people of the countries with relatively strong currencies. But what about the exporters in the devaluing country? Shouldn't they celebrate the increase in exports? Ludwig von Mises, the greatest economist of the 20th century, explains why we should refrain from heaping encomiums on the inflating central banks of the world:

The much talked about advantages which devaluation secures in foreign trade and tourism, are entirely due to the fact that the adjustment of domestic prices and wage rates to the state of affairs created by devaluation requires some time. As long as this adjustment process is not yet completed, exporting is encouraged and importing is discouraged. However, this merely means that in this interval the citizens of the devaluating country are getting less for what they are selling abroad and paying more for what they are buying abroad; concomitantly they must restrict their consumption. This effect may appear as a boon in the opinion of those for whom the balance of trade is the yardstick of a nation's welfare. In plain language it is to be described in this way: The British citizen must export more British goods in order to buy that quantity of tea which he received before the devaluation for a smaller quantity of exported British goods.

So, as is always the case, we find that the government cannot benefit any group of people without harming another group. And in this case, they're not even benefiting the people whom they claim to be. If the Treasury was really interested in helping the American economy, they would take steps to decrease their own burden on it and direct their scorn toward the inflationary measures of the Federal Reserve.

Kill Or Be Killed: The False Dichotomy of U.S. Foreign Policy

Earlier this evening I heard a coworker express a sentiment that, unfortunately, I've heard many times. Fox News is on 24-7 in our break room and they were reporting the provocative words and actions of the North Korean military. My coworker had a simple solution to this complicated problem: "We should just drop some nukes on them and be done with it." Now, I know he was just speaking off the cuff, and I would like to think that if he had the opportunity to melt the entire population of another country that he would decline to do so. But it still bothers me that murdering millions of people seems like reasonable foreign policy to some.

"But what if they were to nuke us first", I can hear you ask. "We have to kill them before they can kill us." The first thing I would like to ask you is who are "they" and who is "us"? Do you believe that the tyrannical government of the North Koreans should be conflated with the citizenry of that nation? Should they be punished for the actions of a mad man? If the United States government commits a heinous crime, is it your children who should be punished? My point is that this conflict is between governments. The government, despite what they teach us in social studies, is not the people.  I have no beef with any North Korean citizen, and I suspect that neither do you. And yet, we are taxed to pay for a massive military that can surround an impoverished little socialist dictatorship that can't even keep the lights on at night. "Okay", you might concede. "But maybe Kim Jong-un does conflate us with our government. Perhaps the only way to save American children from being nuked is to nuke him. It's sad that this means innocent men, women, and children will also die, but that is on Kim and not us. I don't want anyone to die. But if I have to choose between Americans being slaughtered or North Koreans being slaughtered, I have to go with the latter." It seems to be more palatable to enter into this line of thinking when we are considering dropping bombs from extraordinary heights on people in a faraway land who we will never have to see. But what if there were no nuclear bombs and it was determined that you had to shoot your way through the citizenry in order to get to the Korean leaders. What if you had to line up each man, woman, and child and shoot them in the head? Maybe we would begin to ask if there was another way. Perhaps this problem can be resolved without resort to barbaric bloodshed. Perhaps the idea that "we" have to kill "them" before "they" kill "us" is a false dichotomy.

The U.S.'s aggressive "war games" off the shore of North Korea and economic sanctions only prove to rile up the rulers there and convince them that they need more powerful weapons in order to preserve their positions as the ruling elite of that miserable land. Imagine if the North Koreans or the Chinese were practicing war tactics off the California coast. There would be hell to pay. I propose that the U.S. should unilaterally deescalate this conflict by being the bigger man and walking away instead of flexing its muscles in an attempt to intimidate the much smaller and weaker opponent. We, the citizens of the United States, have nothing to gain from a war with the Koreans. We have nothing to lose if the military packs up and heads home. The South Koreans and Japanese are several magnitudes wealthier than their socialist neighbor. They are more than capable of defending themselves without a subsidy from the American taxpayer.

America has a lot of problems to face here at home these days. Killing innocent foreigners will solve none of them. Don't let the government or the media divert your attention from the real issues that put you at risk, like the continuing destruction of the currency and the continuing assault on the Bill of Rights.