What's the highest price that water fetches today?

The highest market price for potable water today is reflected in an art object. The bottle contains water from springs in France, Fiji, and a glacier in Iceland.  Oh, and then there’s 5 milligrams of 23 K gold dust sprinkled in the water. It's “Acqua di Cristallo Tributo a Modigliani." It costs $60,000. For us mere mundanes, however, we can still spend a bundle on water. Buy the Evian Facial Mister. Comprised of 1.7 ounces of mineral water, the Facial Mister water prices out at $592 per gallon. Bottled water is the unique case of market-priced water.

In the 1970s you could not find bottled water. But, by 2009, bottled water was a $21 billion business. We spend only $29 billion a year maintaining our entire water system in the United States. Bottled water is the only water product that Americans have routinely priced and marketed. We now happily pay as much as four times the cost of gasoline for potable water that we can have for free from fountains and taps. Of course, economists will tell us factually that bottled water is not the same good. The square Fiji bottle is a sexy statement, and the ubiquitous bottle of water is a fitness and convenience statement. Subjective valuation determines price. A real market in this water product does exist.

Markets for other water products are, meanwhile, mainly nonexistent. We routinely do not pay for most other forms of water. Until recently, water has been viewed and treated as a free good by all Earth's peoples. As with all free goods, water experiences unlimited demand. But, water cannot meet unlimited demand. Water needs prices in order to signal scarcity and guide demand. Different categories of water need different prices to reflect different preferences of users. Free can no longer be water's price. The profligate glory days of limitless water everywhere seem over.

As long as the atmosphere has molecules of hydrogen and molecules of oxygen, why should we ever run out of water?

Despite my own misinformation on this chemistry for decades, I have learned that just because oxygen and hydrogen molecules exist, they do not easily join into water molecules to solve all the world's water shortages. The reaction is not spontaneous. Joining those atoms requires explosions. So, if hydrogen and oxygen molecules are not simply mating up, just what has been the origin of our water? Until rather recently, the prevailing wisdom has been that Earth's water supply was primarily deposited via comets. A new theory suggests that water was already present at the birth of our planet.

But, it is not known how much water there is on earth. The 71% of the globe covered in water represents a lesser amount, perhaps by ten times, than the total figure. Besides the normal states of liquid, vapor or ice, most water exists in a fourth state locked in rock hundreds of miles deep in Earth's mantle. Captured there through subduction, it's released by belching volcanoes. Altogether, our water is all the water Earth has ever had. All life uses and reuses the same water. Some of everything is in our water because water is also the universal solvent. We can now detect pretty much any amount of anything in everything. Yes, every sweet tea can contain some T-rex pee.

It seems to take floods or droughts for water to get our rare attention.

As a nation, we've had plenty of both in this one year alone. In the spring of 2011, it was the Missouri River flooding for months. Then, summer ushered in "Drought Spreads Pain From Florida to Arizona" as a standard headline. Not only will there be fewer crops harvested, but entire herds of cattle will have to be sold off because they simply cannot be fed. With the droughts, wildfires scourge more acreage and people resentfully ration. Some regions will face more than mere rationing. Bob Rose with the Lower Colorado River Authority, which covers an area of Central Texas, said that if the drought continues through the winter, they could begin curtailing agricultural use in spring 2012 for the first time in their 77-year history.

Atlanta almost ran out of drinking water in 2008, but the city had not spent any effort over several decades on providing water to its growing population. Atlanta had also not contributed any money initially to the building of the Lake Lanier reservoir, yet demanded water from it when the city needed it. That legal water war between Georgia, Alabama and Florida has raged for twenty years. When all but dried up, Atlanta's response is to pray for rain. I don't see that that's worked all that well for them.

Just 150 miles northwest of Atlanta in the fall of 2007, the small town of Orme, Tennessee, did run completely out of water. Three hours of water each evening was temporarily provided residents by expensively trucking water in. One hundred twenty-eight days later, a real water pipeline restored water. But every member of the community had taken their water completely for granted.

Not unlike Orme paying for trucking water into town, oftentimes the water is free, but the delivery of the water costs dearly. In Georgia, the system a farmer used to get water from the ground ran on diesel fuel. His fuel bill for May and June 2011was an unheard of $88,442.

California's Imperial Valley is part of the Sonoran Desert. Barely three inches of rain falls annually. Hindsight makes this location less than the obvious choice for a big agricultural county. The Valley continues to expect cheap subsidized water delivery from the Colorado River, regardless of how crazy it is to make a desert a garden, or how over allocated the dwindling water in the Colorado is. The price for farmers there is a flat rate of $19 per acre-foot, or, $19 for 325,851 gallons of water. Average American homes pay $10,592, not $19, for that volume of water delivery. Yet, American homes are not paying market prices for the water, because the water markets do not yet exist. Even at $19 per acre-foot, $19 is not the cost of the water; it is simply the cost to deliver the water. The water is still free. California spends twenty percent of the state's electricity expense moving or treating water.

What needs to be done to create working markets so communities could expect to have the water they need?

Governments have handled water resources for the past hundred years. Freely ladling it out to friends and favored sectors, politicians have dictated every aspect about water that markets should have been busy shaping in respectful response to water's growing resource scarcity. It is no mystery that water's quality and quantity, affordability and availability are still mysteries in 2011. There has been no market to provide information and calculations.

And, no, command economies cannot play at market. There is no third way. Only private property and rule of law can create a viable market; bureaucratic mandates can deliver only shortages, higher costs and poorer quality.

Governmental over allocation of the water resource Lake Mead now threatens Lake Mead's very existence.

Without a market of solutions, a dictator-type water czar has stepped into the evaporating strip of desert called Las Vegas. Pat Mulroy has been getting her way in many aggressive actions and, so far, has lost only one big one, after she had laid claim to unused water rights in four counties. Mulroy bluntly forced citizens to use less water. Her raised water rates reduced the fixed charge but increased the cost of higher volumes. Her cash for grass was a gentler incentive toward xeriscaping instead of green lawns. She created a regional water power that she runs. And, toward smart water use, she separated types of water into their end uses.

It may seem a small thing, but most of America simply uses their potable drinking water to do all water chores. Water a golf course? Use your drinking water. Erect an impressive fountain? Use your drinking water. In a market fashion, Mulroy saw to it that treated wastewater, not drinking water, went to all the splashy Las Vegas exterior and interior extravagances. Ninety percent of the water used indoors in Las Vegas is now recycled. The city returns hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of treated wastewater back to Lake Mead each year.

Mulroy is not counting on rain or prayer. She is counting on engineering and the fact that she has gotten Las Vegas officials to think differently about water. But, Mulroy needs markets to do all the things she singlehandedly cannot. Markets might capture and divert floodwaters to Nevada. Markets might create new businesses selling catchments and cisterns wherever rain does fall. Markets might result in desalination plants springing up along the coasts. Mulroy considered one of those. Markets might spawn a whole industry of micro-monitors on water usage to pinpoint needed repair of multitudinous leaks in distribution pipelines. Monitoring can become so respected that instead of seeing water flow through a pipeline, users will begin to see dollars flowing.

As capital-based economists know, the cost of water is the cost of the next unit of water. The next unit of water might not even exist if we cannot get smart enough to use our single supply of water well. That's why a market is needed — to find, secure and deliver the next unit of water to the next demand for water.

Floy Lilley [send her mail] is an adjunct faculty member at the Mises Institute. She was formerly with the University of Texas at Austin’s Chair of Free Enterprise, and an attorney-at-law in Texas and Florida.

The Best of Floy Lilley

The patents that Bruce Ivins held with co-inventors were never going to make him any real money or give him the star attention he deserved unless the Army became convinced that his new-generation anthrax vaccine had to be given to seventy-five million service men — without delay.

But, the Army wasn't any longer paying any attention to anthrax.

Yes, a spike of fear in the early 1980s over the Soviet anthrax deaths at Sverdlovsk, and then the greater opportunity in 1990-91 that presented itself when it was thought that Saddam Hussein might use anthrax in the first Gulf War had worked well earlier in making Ivins a microbiologist star. Yes, his salary had risen from $27,000 in 1980 to $59,000 right after 1991. Those incomes, however, were pittances compared to the $150,000 each year that he could be allowed to receive from steady patent royalties, plus the glorious psychic rewards of being at the very epicenter of a critical military science project, if only the Army would demand his vaccine.

What were needed were fears. What were needed were massive waves of gut-chilling fears. Fears that near-invisible weapons of mass destruction were being unleashed and only one new anthrax vaccine could save lives. What was needed was a crisis. So, Ivins created it.

How can a man do what Ivins so deliberately did? This was not insider trading for profit, this was murder for power. In retrospect, a body of literature that includes The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek confirms that a shift in a man's moral fiber occurs when a state becomes super nationalistic, an enemy such as terrorism is created, and a scientist is employed in a military project. That certainly describes the U.S. by 2001 and Bruce Ivins in Fort Detrick, Maryland, employed by USAMRIID (United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases).

Hayek observed that

….where a few specific ends dominate the whole of society, it is inevitable that occasionally cruelty may become a duty; that acts which revolt all our feeling, such as the shooting of hostages or the killing of the old and sick, should be treated as mere matters of expediency…There is always in the eyes of the collectivist a greater goal which these acts serve and which to him justifies them because the pursuit of the common end of society can know no limits in any rights or values of any individual.

There is no need to invent excuses, such as mental illness, for Ivins' behavior when he had a greater goal. Or excuses for FBI director Robert Mueller's years-long vilification of a long-shot suspect, when he had a greater goal. Or excuses for media's disinformation, while having access to accurate facts, when they had a greater goal. Power becomes the goal in itself.

As Hayek understood

…information which might suggest failure on the part of the government to live up to its promises or to take advantage of opportunities to improve conditions — all will be suppressed. There is consequently no field where the systematic control of information will not be practiced and uniformity of views not enforced. This applies even to fields apparently most remote from any political interests and particularly to all the sciences, even the most abstract.

Military authority had taken favorable notice of Ivins' penchant toward obeisance. Bruce Ivins had the skill, the opportunity and the motives to single-handedly produce the crisis he needed for fame and fortune. And, the state had its own uses to make of his crisis.

Persuasive circumstantial evidence of Ivins' guilt as the creator of his crisis exists, but Bruce Ivins died by apparent suicide in 2008 before the FBI was able to formally charge him in the affair and before any conviction of him as the killer was obtained. David Willman in The Mirage Man: Bruce Ivins, the Anthrax Attacks, and America's Rush to War presents the full circumstantial case against Bruce Edwards Ivins. Details and evidence pile up page upon page.

The obligatory dysfunctional family, homicidal thoughts, fixations on female colleagues, conservative façade, genuine scientific achievements, and cunning manipulative skills all played their roles in Bruce Ivins' unexamined life of fifty-six years and his close-to-perfect anthrax letter crimes in 2001. This perpetrator had created a mirage that misled almost everyone he met.

Death and destruction, however, were no mirage. Over the next nine years, the manufactured crisis can be credited with murder, The Patriot Act and war with Iraq. Five people were killed by inhalation anthrax spread by the mail system via Ivins' anthrax letters. Seventeen additional people were infected. Senator Tom Daschle in the Hart building was spared, but he has acknowledged that the anthrax letters galvanized passage of The Patriot Act which has been no friend to American individual civil liberties. Daschle refers to that Act's passage in the aftermath of September 11 as a rush to judgment on policy that was regrettable. The Patriot Act has since been found to have impeded scientific knowledge of anthrax and Ebola.

Several factors helped manufacture America's rush to war in Iraq. Among them were: 1) unsupported claims that anthrax had been used in 9/11, 2) Ivins deliberately stated that Bin Laden terrorists had anthrax and sarin gas when they did not, 3) each anthrax letter was a photocopy with the inflammatory text listing that THIS IS NEXT, TAKE PENACILIN NOW, DEATH TO AMERICA, DEATH TO ISRAEL, ALLAH IS GREAT, 4) Secretary of State Colin Powell encouraged the public to make the connection between the letter attacks and Iraq, and 5) the Bush administration amplified fears of bioweapons and continued to suggest Iraq's complicity.

The media ran with rumors that there was an additive, perhaps bentonite, to the anthrax spores which could prevent clumping. Such deliberate preparation, had it been true, would have lent credibility to the possibility that this anthrax had been weaponized and was the product of biohazard terrorists. The newly created Homeland Security did make this false claim, while they disregarded data from Sandia National Lab that disproved it. Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were a myth, but war fever needs few facts. The Bush administration simply believed that the anthrax letters were linked to Iraq.

Deaths have mounted. Over 100,000 Iraqi civilians and over 5,000 American have been killed so far since the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Costs have mounted. $1.5 billion each year was authorized to build a dozen bio containment labs. VaxGen began developing Ivins' anthrax vaccine by the spring of 2002. They won two contracts totaling $101.2 million to begin making the vaccine. By 2003 they had an exclusive worldwide right from the Army to develop, manufacture and sell the rPA vaccine (Recombinant Protective Antigen anthrax vaccine for which Ivins held two patents). From 1998 through mid-2010 anthrax vaccine was given to 2.4 million U.S. service personnel. Ivins did not live long enough, nor innocently enough, to collect on his desired $150,000 yearly royalty share, but he did receive a few patent-related fees that totaled $12,100 through VaxGen. High revenues could have been anticipated because 11,457 scientists were licensed to be working on these biological agents by 2010.

By late 2008, the investigation of the anthrax letters, called the Amerithrax case, had totaled more than ten thousand interviews, executed eighty searches, and expended more than 600,000 investigator hours. The investigation itself was only completed in August 2010. The FBI and the media learned late two facts that could have prevented some hysteria had they been acknowledged earlier. They were that bloodhounds do not provide reliable evidence and that one cannot be exposed to inhalation anthrax by drinking water from a stream.

Senior FBI officials, toward the greater goal of unquestioned government response to an enemy, fixated on one innocent suspect, Steven Hatfill. They consequently destroyed Hatfill's career. Then, they had to pay him a $5.82 million settlement, but they admitted to no error. It was not until the spring of 2008 that Bruce Ivins was finally seen as the guilty scientist. Genetics, DNA and signature mutations of the spores led less-fixated investigators to the one man who had the skill, the opportunity and the motive for these murders. Ivins sought to implicate seven of his own colleagues, but ultimately the FBI concluded that it was solely American citizen Bruce Ivins who was responsible for the anthrax attacks.

Whatever the substance and legal outcome of an Ivins trial would have been (they are imagined in Willman's APPENDIX) it is obvious that Ivins did not operate in a vacuum. The anthrax letter attacks presented too many with too much opportunity to further other larger aims.

A crisis really is too good an opportunity for collectivists to waste.

Floy Lilley [send her mail] is an adjunct faculty member at the Mises Institute. She was formerly with the University of Texas at Austin’s Chair of Free Enterprise, and an attorney-at-law in Texas and Florida.

The Best of Floy Lilley

Europe debt woes have pummeled the euro and Asian shares. Eurozone taxpayers are now extremely exposed to high credit risk, leading to a panic in the world markets, as foreign holders of Greek and Portuguese debt have seized on emergency intervention by the European Central Bank to scamper out of their positions. The chief executive of Deutsche Bank said it would require u201Cincredible effortsu201D by Greece for its debt to ever be repaid in full.

Fears are growing that austerity measures facing the troubled eurozone countries will derail recovery and continue to spark social unrest as that which flared in Athens recently. Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain are lumped as PIGS, heavily weighing the EU down as their sovereign debts balloon past doable deficits. The euro has slid to a four-year low against the dollar, as if the dollar were something to write home about.

Britain, too, is at a crossroads. Its political leaders cannot bear the thought of not spending, so they have stopped thinking about it. They are falsely convinced that any cuts in public spending would destroy the country’s basic public services and stop any economic recovery from ever beginning. Their economists have this backwards. The British population can look forward to ever-increasing taxation under the thumb of a coercive and costly bureaucracy whose monetary policies serve the state, but do not serve people.

America has not dodged this bullet either. The finances of Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain, and Britain are not unique. Can Americans cast stones at Europe’s glass bubbles when our own national debt has already reached 86% of GDP, nearly on par with that of Spain? The Congressional Budget Office has a gloomy prediction about future years. It calculates that deficits will not fall below four percent of the economy under Obama’s policies and will begin to grow rapidly after 2015. The White House proposed budget would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade; the CBO says the debt will be higher than that.

Can we avoid such bottomless debt pits?

Can any nation jump back from the edge?

Politicians demand that we spend. Mainstream economists warn that saving would ruin us. Are they right? Has any nation tried not spending? One has. One nation has a well-documented story to tell us. It is just possible that we could listen to her story and learn how to jump away before our tragic tumble.

Each of us crippled by debt has a thing or two hundred to learn from the small country down under that did the impossible — New Zealand trimmed the size of its coercive, regulating, and taxing government and, not only lived to tell about it, but flourished. While we have been fattening into the most engorged leviathan state on the planet, New Zealand slimmed down on a healthy diet of fiscal restraint in the mid-1980s. In short order, New Zealand threw out the parasites and opened the wide door of opportunity for producers and entrepreneurs to create wealth and raise the standard of living for all.

New Zealand actually received hope and change when they demanded it. Leading the rollback was Maurice P. McTigue, former New Zealand cabinet minister. McTigue’s educational lecture is liberally reprinted in parts by permission from Imprimus, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College. This how-to primer is Rolling Back Government: Lessons from New Zealand.

New Zealand’s reform government asked each agency just two vital questions: What are you doing? and What Should You Be Doing? Then it told each agency to eliminate what it should not be doing. Is this too sensible for Americans? Isn’t this precisely what Ron Paulians would do?

Then New Zealand’s reform government told each agency simply to eliminate what it should not be doing. How clear is that? Stop digging the hole you are digging for yourself. Stop spending. Such straightforward focus reduced the number of government employees with the NZ Department of Transportation from 5,600 to 53. The US Department of Transportation had 59,189 public workers on payroll in Fiscal Year 2003 requiring $53.2 Million from taxpayers. The number of parasitic employees with the NZ Forest Service was slashed to 17 from 17,000. The US Forest Service had 28,330 in FY08 spending $5.806 billion.

McTigue himself was the Minister of Works. He ended up being the only employee left when the process was applied to its 28,000 employees. As McTigue says, most of what the Department did was construction and engineering, and there were plenty of people who could do that without government involvement.

Did all those jobs die? No. What died was government’s taxation of productive citizens. The need for those jobs still existed. Private companies happily employed that skilled labor force. As private workers, each employee earned three times as much and was sixty percent more productive.

Reform freed up the things government was doing that had no reason being done by government. New Zealand’s jump away from debt disaster resulted in one huge going-out-of-public-business sale. Telecommunications, airlines, irrigation schemes, computing services, government printing offices, insurance companies, banks, securities, mortgages, railways, bus services, hotels, shipping lines, agricultural advisory services, and more were sold off. Productivity rose; costs dropped.

The government roll-back determined that other agencies should be run as profit-making and tax-paying enterprises by government. Reforms made the air traffic control system into a stand-alone company, gave it instructions that it had to make an acceptable rate of return and pay taxes, and told it that it could not get any investment capital from its owner (the government). The accountability reformers did the same thing with about 35 agencies — agencies which had cost producers about one billion dollars per year, now, instead, produced about one billion dollars per year in revenue and taxes.

The institution of high levels of transparency was promised and was actually delivered in New Zealand. Significant consequences for bad management decisions, instead of bailouts, resulted in the following: the size of government was reduced by 66 percent measured by the number of employees; the government’s share of GDP dropped to 27 percent from 44 percent; surpluses were produced; the surpluses were used to pay off debt; the debt dropped to 17 from 63 percent of GDP (recall that ours stands today at 86%); the remainder of the surplus each year was used for tax relief; the income tax was reduced by half and incidental taxes were eliminated.

McTigue writes:

“We need to recognize that the main problem with subsidies is that they make people dependent; and when you make people dependent, they lose their innovation and their creativity, and become even more dependent. Reform took all government support away from the New Zealand sheep farmers. The process changed the farmers’ position from a receipt of about 44 percent of its income from government, to zero subsidies. In 1984, lambs’ market was $12.50 per carcass. By 1989, producing a different product, processing it in a different way, and selling it in different markets delivered $30. By 1991, the product was worth $42; by 1994, it was worth $74; and by 1999, it was worth $115. Rolling back government let the New Zealand sheep industry go to the marketplace to find people who would pay higher prices for its product. Such reform delivered a loss of only three-quarters of one percent of the farming enterprises — and those were people who should not have been in farming. Instead of a turn to corporate farming, family farming expanded. Freedom demonstrated that if you give people no choice but to be creative and innovative, they will find solutions.”

Thinking differently about government, New Zealand eliminated all the Boards of Education in New Zealand. Every single school came under the control of a board of trustees elected by parents of the children at that school, and by nobody else. The new accountability gave the schools a block of money based on the number of students that went to them, with no strings attached. All schools were converted to this system on the same day. Privately-owned schools were funded the same way. All of a sudden, teachers realized that if they lost their students, they would lose their funding; and if they lost their funding, they would lose their jobs. New Zealand moved from being 15 percent below its international peers to 15 percent above.

New Zealand’s reform government decided that providing social services and changing behaviors do not have any place in a rational system of tax collection. So they selected only two methods for gathering revenue — a lowered tax on income, and a flat tax on consumption. All other forms of taxation were eliminated, period.

Deregulators rewrote the statutes on which all regulations were based. All environmental laws, tax codes, farm acts, occupational safety and health acts — the whole lot, every single one. Laws that were 25 inches thick were reduced to mere hundreds of pages. New statutes repealed all of the old. The goal was only the best possible environment for industry to thrive.

And, thrive it has, or it seems to have. McTigue has not responded to my request for updates on the status of this remarkable transformation, but, I see aggressive ads for New Zealand in many places. u201CNew Zealand is now an entrepreneurial power houseu201D is part of one such invitation for people to invest and live there. Claims that the country is u201Cin a better position to face the global storm,” is u201Cranked first as the least corrupt,” is u201C5th freest economy in the world,” and, is u201Cfirst in the world for protecting investorsu201D all strike a great and jubilant cry of markets and people who have pulled themselves back from the brink.

New Zealand said no to death by debt; couldn’t we?

Floy Lilley [send her mail] is an adjunct faculty member at the Mises Institute. She was formerly with the University of Texas at Austin’s Chair of Free Enterprise, and an attorney-at-law in Texas and Florida.

The Best of Floy Lilley

Leigh Jacobson’s enthusiasm about recycling flies in the face of her task. When the markets crashed last year, Auburn University’s waste disposal needs fell on hard times. The company out of Atlanta that had been taking co-mingled trash for no charge said, "No longer."

No, this was no Georgia-Alabama feud. Simple economics prevailed. China’s demand slumped. The entire market for recycled materials dropped nearly to zero. When the market disappears, companies can no longer provide dumpsters, take waste at no charge, and carry that waste to a transfer center in Opelika, saving the University $20 per ton for landfill fees.

So, six months ago Leigh Jacobson and others representing the City of Auburn, Opelika and Lee County secured an annual Alabama Recycling Grant for $120,139. AU got $40,829 of that. The funds have come from an imposed extra $1 per ton on the landfill dumping fees in the state.

Sixty buildings have gotten new bins, labels, signs and posters. Single collections of paper/cardboard and plastic bottles/metal cans are underway. Residential areas have been the first to come on line with the project.

But, everything collected in these new bins still needs to be separated if the enterprise hopes to get paid for having collected it. Look out our windows. Across Magnolia, located on the east side of Donahue is Leigh’s workspace. Peek into the parking lot at the bins. Watch people manually setting paper aside from cardboard and cans aside from bottles. It is a small staff with a big goal.

Bundled cardboard fetched $17.50 per ton in September. Steel and aluminum cans generally get ten cents a pound. Plastic bottles earn one penny per pound. A great deal of human labor is going into this recycling project with a price tag of its own. Leigh optimistically thinks this can work.

Economically, the University should stop these recycling efforts and let the waste be hauled to the landfill. Those landfills can always be mined when there are actual markets for such materials.

The company that holds the University’s contract for hauling waste away is Waste Management. They do not recycle. They own their own landfill in Salem. The charge for dumping waste there ("tipping") is $21.75 per ton. AU does already landfill a large quantity of waste. They should landfill all of it.

Ten years ago, when open dumps were closed in the state, private companies began filling that need. Waste Management is today the largest landfill operator in the U.S., with 281 landfills.

Now, if they’re the largest with just 281 landfills, does that sound like enough landfills in the whole country to you?

Is it?

Isn’t that one of the three things everybody knows when we talk trash? 1) We know we’re running out of landfill space, 2) we know we’re saving resources by recycling and protecting the environment by doing so, and 3) we know no one would recycle if they weren’t forced to.

Let’s look at these three things we think we know. Are they real or are they rubbish?

1) Are we running out of landfill space?

Two events created the perfect garbage storm in the late 1980s. One barge and one bureaucrat created this one over-hyped myth. The garbage barge was the Mobro 4000. The bureaucrat was J. Winston Porter. Mobro 4000 gained infamous celebrity status by spending two months and 6,000 miles seeming to scour the Atlantic coastline and the Gulf of Mexico looking for a home for its load, as if no landfills existed. The physical availability of landfill space was not the issue, but you would not have guessed that from the hysteria the media whipped up.

J. Winston Porter became a star that season at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by writing Agenda for Action, in which Porter proclaimed that recycling is absolutely vital because America is running out of landfill space.

What Porter thought he knew simply was not so. The EPA had noticed that the number of landfills was dropping. They failed to notice that the size of landfills was getting much bigger much faster. Total landfill capacity was actually rising. The EPA also underestimated the prospects for creating additional capacity. Obviously, and as usual, the real landfill problem is not a landfill problem at all but a political problem. "Fears about the effects of landfills on the local environment have led to the rise of the not-in-my-back-yard (NIMBY) syndrome, which has made permitting facilities difficult. Actual landfill capacity is not running out."

Today, 1654 landfills in 48 states take care of 54% of all the solid waste in the country. One-third of them are privately owned. The largest landfill, in Las Vegas, received 3.8 M tons during 2007 at fees within the national range of $24 to $70 per ton. Landfills are no longer a threat to the environment or public health. State-of-the-art landfills, with redundant clay and plastic liners and leachate collection systems, have now replaced all of our previously unsafe dumps.

More and more landfills are producing pipeline quality natural gas. Waste Management plans to turn 60 of their waste sites into energy facilities by 2012. The new plants will capture methane gas from decomposing landfill waste, generating more than 700 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 700,000 homes. The end use of most landfills is parkland.

Holding all of America’s garbage for the next one hundred years would require a space 255 feet high or deep and only 10 miles on a side. Landfills welcome the business. Forty percent of what we recycle ends up there anyway. We are not running out of landfill space.

2) Are we saving resources and protecting the environment by recycling?

What are the costs in energy and material resources to recycling as opposed to landfill disposal which we’ve just looked at? Which method of handling solid waste uses the least amount of resources as valued by the market?

As government budgets tighten and the cost of being "green" rubs against the reality of rising taxes, recycling coordinators like Leigh Jacobson increasingly will be under fire to justify their programs as cost-effective alternatives to waste disposal methods such as landfilling.

I don’t think she will be able to do it. But it should be easier for Leigh at the University than it will be for her counterpart in the City of Auburn, or in any city that funds curbside recycling like San Francisco or Seattle. Curbside recycling is substantially more costly — that is, it uses far more resources — than a program in which disposal is combined with a voluntary drop off/buy-back option. Overall, curbside recycling costs run between 35 percent and 55 percent higher than other recycling methods because it uses huge amounts of capital and labor per pound of material recycled. Recycling itself uses three times more resources than does landfilling.

The largest U.S. organization dedicated to recycling just found out how difficult this chosen path can be. The final death knell for the National Recycling Coalition (NRC) appeared to ring earlier this year when the organization announced it would be filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The NRC ceased operations and terminated all staff members at the close of business on Sept. 4, shortly after an attempt to merge with Keep America Beautiful failed. NRC is now trying to avoid bankruptcy by reorganization. Even though they are a half million dollars in debt, NRC may legally continue to exist if they can raise funds, negotiate with their creditors and develop a business plan. What seems to be their business plan? They are counting on the Kerry-Boxer Bill on clean energy to include recycling language. In other words, they are counting on being bailed out and subsidized. The market knows this is a losing proposition, so these players are trying to get taxpayers to fund their enterprises.

The Solid Waste Association of North America found in the six communities involved in a particular study, all but one of the curbside recycling programs, and all the composting operations and waste-to-energy incinerators, increased the cost of waste disposal. Indeed, the price for recycling often tends to soar far higher than the combined costs of manufacturing of raw materials from virgin sources and dumping rubbish into landfills.

To recycle waste is to use twice the energy and to create twice the pollution from factories, trucks and byproducts.

Recycled newspapers must be de-inked, often with chemicals, creating sludge. Even if the sludge is harmless, it too must be disposed of. Second, recycling more newspapers will not necessarily preserve trees, because many trees are grown specifically to be made into paper. The amount of new growth that occurs each year in forests exceeds by a factor of twenty the amount of wood and paper that is consumed by the world each year. Wherever private property rights to forests are well-defined and enforced, forests are either stable or growing.

Glass is made from silica dioxide — that’s common beach sand — the most abundant mineral in the crust of the earth. Plastic is derived from petroleum by-products after fuel is harvested from the raw material. Recycling paper, glass or plastic is usually not justified compared to the virgin prices of these materials.

The best way to measure the scarcity of natural resources such as trees, sand or oil is to use the market prices of those resources. If the price of a resource is going up over time, and it’s not just inflation pushing those prices higher, the resource is getting scarcer. If the price is going down, it is becoming more plentiful. Indeed, since 1845, the average price of raw materials has fallen roughly 80 percent after adjusting for inflation.

This paradox of our having more by using more is explained by the use of the most important resource — man’s mind. Human ingenuity makes natural resources increasingly available through prices, innovation, and substitution.

Bureaucrats, however, appear to occupy a place at the far and opposite end from human ingenuity. Their interferences in markets do damage. Just two examples will illustrate what I mean by that. One is about a light that has a dark side. The other example requires that you either clean your plate or become a composter.

Our Congress in 2007 banned incandescent bulbs. Not exactly a market action. The phase-out of incandescent light is to begin with the 100-watt bulb in 2012 and end in 2014 with the 40-watt. By 2020, bulbs must be 70 percent more efficient than they are today. While a standard 100-watt bulb cost $1.24, the spiral compact fluorescent light (CFL) 100-watt sold for $4.97. Advocates argue, however, the CFL lasts longer and uses less energy. The packaging claims that after six years I will have saved $74 in energy.

Thereby, in the year 2007 alone, under this edict, some 397 million compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs were placed into the market. Their debut is counted as a success. However, the recycling of spent household CFLs has been an abject failure.

Already? That was 2007. Today is 2009. Doesn’t this suggest that several of those bulbs didn’t last any six years? Despite CFL disposal bans in states like Maine, despite continuing statewide education efforts and a free CFL recycling program there, households throw the used bulbs into the trash that ends up in the landfills.

What’s the problem with that? Landfills, as we’ve learned, have the space and the appetite for our waste. Well, the problem is the potential public and environmental health effects of the collective release of the small amount of mercury in each discarded CFL. For example, using the mean amount of 5 milligrams per CFL, the total amount of mercury contained in the 2007 shipments of CFLs alone is 4,376 pounds.

There is no mention on GE’s packaging of the bulb’s mercury component or any special precautions you must take when this bulb breaks.

Notice that "mercury free" is already a selling point to the producers of new LED technology Accent bulbs. Accent meaning you can’t actually get enough light from them to read by. But, you can tell the packager has obviously experienced how ugly the CFL-produced light is because the buyer is assured a warm white light, which is something you do not get with a CFL.

In June of this year, Maine adopted the nation’s first law that requires CFL bulb manufacturers to share the costs and responsibility for recycling mercury-containing CFLs through a producer-financed collection and recycling program, which must include an education component. This mandate will drive the CFL’s cost even higher. Additional specialized equipment will have to be created for handling light bulbs that will be seen to be hazardous waste. How can any savings ever result from such a boondoggle?

Then, bringing new depth and meaning to the word boondoggle, San Francisco’s newest mandatory recycling ordinance took effect last month. All residences, all restaurants and all commercial buildings must participate in the city’s recycling and composting programs. A recent study had unearthed the fact that 36 percent of the city’s landfilled waste is compostable. That happens to be the ingredient that makes the landfill valuable as an energy source.

Collecting your food scraps, plant trimmings, soiled paper, and other compostables is considered necessary by San Franciscans to fight global warming. Residents get both a green cart and a green report titled, Stop Trashing the Planet. Residents face $100 fines if they fail to separate their food scraps from their papers or cans. Businesses face fines of $500. Really bad actors could be fined $1000. The stated goal is to get to zero waste, meaning no garbage at all going into landfills, by the year 2020.

Obviously, San Francisco believes we have run out of landfill space. Obviously they do not have the vision to see the energy plants that landfills can become when waste is actually put there.

In light of these facts, how can San Franciscans and others think recycling conserves resources?

First, many states and local communities subsidize recycling programs, either out of tax receipts or out of fees collected for trash disposal. That’s the case with AU’s recycling grant. Thus the bookkeeping costs reported for such programs are far less than their true resource costs to society. Also, observers sometimes errantly compare relatively high-cost twice a week garbage pickup with relatively low-cost once or twice a month recycling pickups, which makes recycling appear more attractive.

Why do these same people think that recycling is protecting the environment by not polluting?

Recycling is a manufacturing process, and therefore it too has environmental impact. The U.S. Office of Technology Assessment says that it is "usually not clear whether secondary manufacturing such as recycling produces less pollution per ton of material processed than primary manufacturing processes."

Increased pollution by recycling is particularly apparent in the cases of curbside recycling. Los Angeles has estimated that its fleet of trucks is twice as large as it otherwise would be — 800 versus 400 trucks. This means more iron ore and coal mining, more steel and rubber manufacturing, more petroleum extracted and refined for fuel — and of course all that extra air pollution in the Los Angeles basin as the 400 added trucks cruise the curbs.

Manufacturing paper, glass, and plastic from recycled materials uses appreciably more energy and water and produces as much or more air pollution as manufacturing from raw materials. Resources are not saved and the environment is not protected.

3) Do people only recycle when they are forced to?

If all we knew about recycling was what we hear from environmental groups, recycling would seem to be the philosophy that everything is worth saving except your own time and your own money. Costs of recycling are so hidden. If we add in the weekly costs of sorting out items, it would make more sense to place everything in landfills.

But, private recycling is the world’s second, if not the world’s first, oldest profession. Recyclers were just called scavengers. Everything of value has always been recycled. You will automatically know that something is of value when someone offers to buy it from you, or you see people picking through your waste or diving into dumpsters.

Aluminum packaging has never been more than one small percent of solid waste, because metals have value. Ragpickers may not be in season now picking out cloth from waste, but cardboard, wood and metals have always been in some demand.

Scrapyards recycle iron and steel because making steel from virgin iron and coal is more expensive. Members of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries recycle 60 million tons of ferrous metals, 7 million tons of nonferrous metals, and 30 million tons of waste paper, glass, and plastic each year — an amount that dwarfs that of all government (city, county, and state) recycling programs.

Recycling is a long-practiced, productive, indeed essential, element of the market system. Informed voluntary recycling conserves resources and raises our wealth, enabling us to achieve valued ends that would otherwise be impossible. So, yes, people do recycle even when they are not forced to do so.

However, forcing people to recycle routinely makes society worse off. Mandated recycling exists mainly because there is plenty of money to be made by upselling products as "green" or "recycled" to get Municipal and Federal grants.

Henry Hazlitt and Ludwig von Mises speak to our recycling topic.

In Economics in One Lesson, Hazlitt teaches us that mandatory recycling considers only short-term benefits to a few groups — politicians, public relation consultants, environmental organizations, and waste-handling corporations — instead of looking at the longer-term effects of the policy for all groups. The negative consequence will be the squandering of human resources.

In conclusion, Mises also teaches us what to expect. Mises, in his great work, Human Action, does not tell us that recycling is a bad belief. He shows by example that mandatory recycling is an inappropriate means of caring about the environment. Waste is inescapable. Austrian economics leaves it to every person to decide whether your belief (what you think you know even if it isn’t so) is more important than the avoidance of the inevitable consequences of forced recycling policies: wasted natural resources and wasted human resources.

Floy Lilley [send her mail] is an adjunct faculty member at the Mises Institute. She was formerly with the University of Texas at Austin’s Chair of Free Enterprise, and an attorney-at-law in Texas and Florida.

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How embarrassing to have an "official" United Nations Climate Change Science Compendium caught most recently using an unscientific graphic from Wikipedia. The hockey stick graph selected had never been peer-reviewed, so it should not have been used, but it did back the global warming storyline being pushed. A citation to "Hanno 2009" was even made as if the graph had been from a published and peer reviewed work. It wasn’t. Having now been caught out, the United Nations has hurriedly replaced it. Isn’t this all a bit sloppy for science?

Then, a UK "scientist" is exposed for having used inexcusably frail studies. This is the same "scientist" whose work has been relied upon to support the Hockey Stick all along. Tree-derived temperature data have long been controversial. Keith Briffa’s Yamal series has been the basis of multiple papers since 1990. But, recent inspection of Briffa’s work has exposed that just a few trees yielded any unusual proxy warming information. Far too few trees and far too-highly-selected trees, at that, were used for any work that could be called science.

Were there no other trees to study in the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia? No, there were many other trees. Other scientists did study them. Briffa had to be aware of their work and results. Their resultant tree-ring studies did not yield any temperature "proof" that the Twentieth century was unusually warm. They were unhelpful in substantiating an infamous "hockey stick" graph of global warming. That "hockey stick" graph was the alarmists’ chief prop for at least seven years. It took several years for scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick to prevail in proving the Mann Hockey Stick to be unscientific in both its mathematics and its base bristlecone pine data. Flawed climate data should not be the basis for any mandated wrenching transformation of humankind.

On top of these two gaffes, it’s been barely a month since an entire government-funded research unit also violated basic scientific principles. It didn’t cherry-pick; it just wholly destroyed original raw data — data behind major studies claiming a global warming crisis. How credible can those studies be now? That’s a scandal. Data are stored and shared for the express purpose of all interested scientists who might work to replicate results. That is the scientific process. How convenient for that original data to disappear if it had been manipulated to produce certain results that backed climate change policies that require a global bureaucracy to monitor and ration energy use of developed countries. How convenient, indeed.

Our EPA has rested its own case to regulate carbon dioxide on studies that depended upon these destroyed records. The EPA is even a funder of that Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia that destroyed the evidence. Convenience again. This scandal stinks. The Competitive Enterprise Institute has boldly petitioned the EPA to reopen global-warming rulemaking in light of this suspicious behavior.

Despite these scandals, or perhaps because of them, alarmists will become even shriller in forthcoming weeks and months. The handwriting on the wall tells them taxpayers are tired of global-warming hysteria and mad about the certain cost burdens that will be dumped on them, so alarmists are launching last-ditch efforts to really scare everybody. Prepare for the sky to fall. That same handwriting even cautions that there is unlikely to be any climate change legislation passed in Congress this year, and unlikely to be any climate change concessions given away in Copenhagen in December by the US. But, before we shift our attention away from this old crisis, we should become aware of an item that surfaces in the Copenhagen Climate Change Treaty Draft that could spell pure trouble, if implemented. Anthony Watts refers to this Draft as "wealth transfer defined, now with new and improved u2018dignity’ penalty.”

17. (a) Compensate for damage to the Lesser Developed Country’s economy and also compensate for lost opportunities, resources, lives, land and dignity [emphasis added], as many will become environmental refugees; (p.122 of 181)

Dignity?

I find it distinctly undignified and fraudulent for persons to be held morally and financially accountable for unproved, unscientific alarms of man-caused catastrophic global warming. I understand that the International Socialist Party has been working on making this global agenda happen for a long time. Their Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio in 1992 and their Agenda 21 made that platform clear. I understand that these central planners feel entitled to such power and such wealth transfers by sheer perseverance. I listened closely to their claims and global plans for all of us through twenty-two United Nations sessions. But they have yet to make a rational case on climate change, among other things. Their proponents still avoid even debating the issue. Meanwhile, global-warming policies appear decidedly more catastrophic to productive humans than any two degrees of potential warming could ever become.

Let the world leave scandals, fraud and extortion behind, if it would. Let us move toward the real dignity of the human spirit. Let us create the dignity possible through social cooperation based on private property and division of labor in free market societies. That would be dignity I could get my arms around.

Floy Lilley [send her mail] is an adjunct faculty member at the Mises Institute. She was formerly with the University of Texas at Austin’s Chair of Free Enterprise, and an attorney-at-law in Texas and Florida.

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Then, the President of France, Jacques Chirac, told the thousands in attendance that the science of Global Warming was settled, that Global Warming was the essential third leg of Global Government, and that carbon cops simply needed to be issued their marching orders in every developed country as the Agenda for the Twenty-First Century got implemented.

Now, the Former French President is written about as having been the butt of jokes and a suspected crook, the science of global warming is far from settled, wannabe global government has no legs, and carbon cops have been turning in Keystone Cops performances.

The lost temperature data

The British have enacted a comedy straight out of the pages of my-dog-ate-my-homework. The Carbon Cops in charge of global temperature records now admit they have lost or destroyed all the original data that would allow any third party to construct a global temperature record. The Climate Research Unit in East Anglia, England, generates the most cited surface temperature record set used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose reports present alarming scenarios generated upon that data. Thus, data which cannot be seen or questioned is part of the settled science. You’ve got to love the sheer chutzpah of this move.

The biased temperature data

Cat On a Hot Tin Roof was not a comedy, but to be surprised that tin roofs do get hot makes me laugh. Nearly 90% of US official temperature stations show extreme heat bias, says a new study by meteorologist Anthony Watts. Nine out of every ten stations are reporting higher or rising temperatures just because they are placed near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat, are located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, are surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, or are on blistering-hot rooftops. Nobody drives to a city to experience its cooling effect. Of course instruments in urban centers will display higher temperatures. Besides bad siting, changes in the technology of these temperature stations have also caused the sites to report false warming trends. Additionally, NOAA and NASA Carbon Cops have made arbitrary adjustments to the data that have caused recent temperatures to look higher. Such biased data can hardly yield reliable temperature records

The misleading ice-claim data

It is difficult to maintain credibility when one of the captains of the Carbon Cops — Greenpeace — exaggerates. Greenpeace’s retiring leader, Gerd Leipold, released misleading information. He had in July urged action, claiming the Arctic would be ice-free by 2030 because of global warming. But, by mid-August Leipold admitted that that claim was "a mistake." The outgoing leader’s admission that Greenpeace did issue misleading information has become an embarrassment to the organization.

The EPA suppressed data

The US EPA is poised to become Chief Carbon Cop, but their antics this year is the stuff of comedic tragedies. A substantive 100-page report submitted by the senior EPA research analyst, Dr. Alan Carlin, showed that the EPA was not using best available science in its role of considering whether CO2 and other greenhouse gases were endangering human health. For his efforts, the EPA suppressed his internal report and its critical claims. Then, the EPA ordered Carlin to stop working on global warming issues, because criticism of the EPA could cause trouble. Now, the EPA considers closing down Dr. Carlin’s agency unit. Carlin himself feels that his job is in jeopardy. So much for the good American tradition of whistleblowing.

Isn’t it enough of a joke that as CO2 emissions rise, temperatures continue to fall? I mean, the alarmist hypothesis swears that CO2 emissions cause global warming. That’s why the world must stop breathing out to save the planet. So, why did warming stop and cooling take over in 2001? This wasn’t in any of the computer models.

Not only is the climate not cooperating, politicians have been contrary, too.

Senate Democrats keep delaying legislation. They may be so contrary that they leave Obama empty-handed for three big upcoming climate change attractions: the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh on September 24, UN continuing negotiations in Bangkok beginning September 28, and the UN conference in Copenhagen in December.

This circus production could be dismissed as bad comedy, but there is blowback coming our western way and it will not be funny. The world is now convinced that any climate anyone doesn’t like is the fault of us westerners who emitted CO2. We have screamed too much. We have lost the data that had to be secured. We have biased the temperature data that deserved honest sites. We have issued misleading data. We have suppressed data while persecuting the whistleblower. We have alarmed too many.

Africa, China and India don’t even need to believe in the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) hypothesis for them to see the path they will take. We have handed them the arguments to claim whatever we produce. After all, we caused the destruction of their planet. Our CO2 emissions made it too wet or too dry, too hot or too cold, too stormy or too calm, too static or too changing. If we insist on limiting carbon dioxide emissions, we will limit their development. It doesn’t matter that we will hamstring our own. The lesser-developed nations have learned that they are our victims. Financial and technological reparations will be demanded, despite the stark and bleak fact that the western economic cupboard is empty, also. They will have to blame someone.

All Al Gore and the earnest environmentalists wanted to do was to facilitate a "wrenching transformation" of our society. They will have it. Our head will be delivered up to us on a platter; and it will be the head of a clown.

Floy Lilley [send her mail] is an adjunct faculty member at the Mises Institute. She was formerly with the University of Texas at Austin’s Chair of Free Enterprise, and an attorney-at-law in Texas and Florida.

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Oh, really?

So you think a free society generated that monstrosity?

It is accurate to say that in 1900 a free society did exist. The government still approximated a minimal state, exerting minimal guidance, and commanding minimal economic regulation. But, after 1900, virtually all public policy proposals called for more extensive governmental guidance.

Perhaps the television talksters could benefit from a bit of homeschooling. An excellent source of data is Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episode in the Growth of American Government by Robert Higgs (1987). The time frame of the period up to and into the 1920s, in other words those years before the Great Depression, included WWI. That dramatic episode birthed government expansion and intervention, much of which remained in regulatory force after the generating crisis had past.

A partial list of interventions — those government economic regulations — would include:

• Bureau of Corporations (1903)
• Interstate Commerce Act major amendments (1903, 1906, 1910)
• Meat Inspection Act (1906)
• Pure Food and Drug Act (1906)
• Corporation Tax (1911)
• Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1913) (Income Tax)
• Federal Reserve System (1913)
• Clayton Antitrust Act (1914)
• Federal Trade Commission (1914)
• U.S. Immigration (cut to a trickle during 1915—1920)
• Adamson Act (1916) (railroad labor wage rates)
• Shipping Act (1916)
• National Defense Act (1916)
• Army Appropriations Act (1916) (later took over railroads)
• Selective Service Act (1917)
• Espionage Act (1917)
• Lever Act (1917) (food and fuel) (prohibited alcohol)
• Overman Act (1918) (executive powers)
• War Finance Corporation Act (1918)
• President’s Mediation Commission (1917) (labor relations)
• Federal Control Act (1918)
• Sedition Act (1918)

Does this look like a laissez-faire list?

Higgs summarizes just exactly how guided and regulated all economic activities were:

The two years, 1916—1918, witnessed an enormous and wholly unprecedented intervention of the federal government in the nation’s economic affairs. By the time of the armistice, the government had taken over the ocean shipping, railroad, telephone, and telegraph industries; commandeered hundreds of manufacturing plants; entered into massive economic enterprises on its own account in such varied departments as shipbuilding, wheat trading, and building construction; undertaken to lend huge sums to businesses directly or indirectly and to regulate the private issuance of securities; established official priorities for the use of transportation facilities, food, fuel, and many raw materials; fixed the prices of dozens of important commodities; intervened in hundreds of labor disputes; and conscripted millions of men for service in the armed forces. It had, in short, extensively distorted or wholly displaced markets, creating what some contemporaries called war socialism.

Additionally, Higgs documented that,

The public debt, which had been slightly more than $1 billion before the war, was over $25 billion at the end of the war and remained almost $17 billion as late as 1929.

While their heads were bobbing, my head was shaking.

This all had to have been a joke. Right?

Floy Lilley [send her mail] is an adjunct faculty member at the Mises Institute. She was formerly with the University of Texas at Austin’s Chair of Free Enterprise, and an attorney-at-law in Texas and Florida.

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Did it deserve to die? What was its crime?

It had provided us with nothing less than relative peace and prosperity over a span of 136 years. It had not only retained one hundred percent of its value, it had gained eleven percent. That’s right. The dollar we started with in 1776 bought us eleven percent more after almost seven generations. Then, J.P. Morgan’s creatures picked a quiet 23rd of December in 1913 to suffocate our sound money system. Since that manslaughter, the purchasing power of a dollar has plummeted over 95%. We now pay twenty times more than J.P. Morgan did for any item.

Morgan and his henchmen had global plans for the state. Their vision was of a state, under their direction, that would supplant the failing British Empire. This state would support and create wars, marshal powerful and intimidating forces over foreign and domestic affairs, dispense military contracts to political favorites, grow a professional bureaucracy, seize central powers while diminishing individual liberties, and fund any welfare plan designed to deliver votes. Importantly, Morgan’s bank would be the state’s bank for all of this activity.

So, under the guise of stabilizing the dollar, the Federal Reserve Act destabilized it, causing booms and busts while proliferating and prolonging conflicts everywhere. The new Central Bank designed for the state the secret paper door to all the money it could dream of spending, at the bald expense of unsuspecting, trusting citizens.

Morgan did not originate the concept of this taxation by stealth inflation. In Colonial times, Massachusetts had needed money and simply printed it, also. One Bostonian had seen the consequent harm clearly,

William Douglas understood that paper issues were a form of taxation on the public…that increasing the quantity of money only depreciates the value of each unit, so that a larger supply of money does no better or greater work for society than a smaller. Hardest hit by the severe depreciation of all the notes were nondebtors, especially creditors, fixed-income groups, charitable endowments, and laborers, whose wages rose less than prices. Conceived In Liberty, Volume II, p.139, by Murray N. Rothbard.

A military historian, Martin van Creveld, also sees clearly why and how the state grabs total monetary control. He tells the full story in The Rise and Decline of the State. Van Creveld reveals that,

"[the] states having finally succeeded in their drive to conquer money, the effect of absolute economic dominance on the states themselves was to allow them to fight each other on a scale and with a ferocity never equaled before or since. … The concentration of all economic power in the hands of the state would not have been necessary, nor could it have been justified, if its overriding purpose had not been to impose order on the one hand and fight its neighbors on the other. (pp. 241—2)"

Thus, the murder of sound money became the most consequential death of the last one hundred years. The Bretton Woods reform of 1944 was an acknowledged failure by August 1971 when Nixon closed the international gold window. The state, having cast off its golden restraints, made the Twentieth Century a nightmarish bloodbath the world around.

Today, the state’s fiat money theft and death machine wobbles. It can no longer animate spirits or digitally create everlasting bubbles. Observe the tremulous, palsied ravages of the wayward printing press:

• US Economy: Currently in a double-dip depression, the economy experiences the worst contraction since the first drop in the Great Depression.
• Debt: The US must borrow 46 cents for every dollar spent this year. Outstanding public debt as of 18 August is $11,704,322,903, 918. An estimated population of the United States is 307,209,243, so each citizen’s share of this debt is $38,127. The debt-to-GDP ratio is 82%. This debt will grow by a trillion dollars a year. The debt has to be rolled over every four years. That’s $240 billion a month to be skimmed off capital markets. The four largest budget items are wars, social security, Medicare/Medicaid, and interest on the debt.
• Credit cards: Credit card debt is $990 billion and rising. Private debt per citizen is $23,902.
• Pension and health-care liabilities: Believed to be over $99 trillion. Brookings Institution’s Alice Rivlin states that the long-term budget outlook is impending catastrophe.
• Home foreclosures: The housing bubble peaked in July 2005. One half of Americans now holding mortgages will be unable to pay them in 2011. One household in every 355 homes received a foreclosure-related notice in July. The Fed pays banks to keep their money with the Fed. Lending that money seems not as safe. Real estate is unlikely to rise, making it also unlikely that lenders will want to continue any mortgages whose value has dropped 20 to 40% even though many need to be re-set. States having the highest foreclosure rates are Nevada, California, Arizona, Florida, Utah, Idaho, Georgia, Illinois, Colorado and Oregon.
• Inflation/ Deflation: The monetary base has doubled over the last year, so inflation, or hyperinflation waits, but prices are currently falling 1.3% annually now. The Fed’s money machine is so broken that its efforts to produce just a mild-flavored inflation will fail. China’s imports are way down and we could be trapped in a long deflation.
• Bank Failures: Seventy-four banks have failed so far in 2009. This compares unfavorably with 25 in 2008 and just three in 2007. More defaults are ahead. The number of banks on the FDIC’s list of problem institutions rose to 305 in the first quarter.
• Unemployment: Officially 9.5%. June unemployment rate topped 20% in Michigan, Oregon, Nevada, California, South Carolina and Rhode Island. Rates are higher than published and often manipulated. If the number falls, it will probably only be because those people have given up looking. The government is the major employing sector now. Mike Shedlock predicts structurally high unemployment for a decade.
• Fed intervention increased: A Money Market Investor Funding Facility and an Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility were created; the government has taken equity positions in many larger banks; more moral hazard is encouraged by the Treasury issuing a blanket guarantee of money-market fund liabilities; and, more moral hazard is encouraged by raising FDIC limit to $250,000 from $100,000.
• Manufacturing: China has officially become the leading manufacturer of the world. The US does pizza delivery well. US manufacturing barely employs 11% of the labor force.

Fractional reserves and fiat funny-money caused the implosion of these areas of economic life in the US. Our monetary system is a collapsing apparatus. Clearing this market seems an impossible task. Yes, economic law will work its magic to match supply and demand, but can it plough through such an incredible economic global mess within our lifetimes? Will the frantic state stop intervening long enough for the economic body to heal itself?

Since a sound money system has delivered peace and prosperity in our historical past, could it not be called upon to do so again?

Is it an exercise in futility to spend any time even thinking about life after the Fed, embracing specie-backed money that is not the inflationary design instrument of the state? Gary North has written an article on replacing the dollar as the world reserve currency. Few have written on the mechanics of getting back to sound money. But, many are thinking that unthinkable. Audit the Fed cries are turning into End the Fed demands. That begs the question, "What then?" Repealing legal tender laws, generating competing currencies, denationalizing money, meeting the small change challenge of 100% reserve money, letting the market select which commodity will be the specie basis, and a few zillion other considerations tickle the mind.

It’s a fitting and proper time to be thinking of what such a free market monetary system could smell like, taste like, look like and be like. Who knows? The shambles that the central bank has made with the power Congress sadly placed in its paws, calls for rigorous analysis of a free society’s options. As this empire collapses, creating a fresh monetary system won’t be an option for our future. It will be a necessity. We once again will need to navigate our communities out of the barter systems we will initially be thrown into. No banker or politician or Keynesian economist will help us. Sound money is suicide to them. Literally, sound money is Bernanke’s worst nightmare. So, without those bankers, politicians, or most economists, we’ll need to have given the creation of a sound monetary system in our twenty-first century serious thought.

It’s time to get thinking. It’s time to prepare. It’s time to dream that impossible dream.

Floy Lilley [send her mail] is an adjunct faculty member at the Mises Institute. She was formerly with the University of Texas at Austin’s Chair of Free Enterprise, and an attorney-at-law in Texas and Florida.

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The shamefulness
of the spectacle of the passage of the Climate Bill did not spring
from the squeaked two votes "win" (217 would have denied
passage; 219 was secured) nor Pelosi's embarrassing squawks.

No. It oozed
from the now predictable spectacle of Democans and Republicrats
birthing yet another monstrosity of oppression.

Powerful parasites
teamed with clever-thinking thugs, clueless confidence men and large
numbers of brainwashed bellies to disgorge the latest bread and
circus baby that would have made Machiavelli proud. Machiavelli
knew all the ways to get people to voluntarily consent to their
own enslavement.

We witnessed
it live on C-Span. It was an ugly sight. The very nature of the
State apparatus itself was on display. Clearly, the tyranny ruling
our land hasn't been established by force or by inheritance; it
has been elected. Those elected have obviously worked feverishly
to convert a short-term shot in the driver's seat into a near-hereditary
entitlement for themselves and their friends, with the single exception,
known to me, being a humble doctor from Texas who has even refused
pension.

The men and
women who comprise Congress may not be evil, but they are aggressively
designing our economic and cultural prisons. Many of us are as convinced
as they are that the common good is their goal. It is untrue, but
how has this palatable corruption and deceit come about? Two strategies
– one material and one ideological – were implemented.

First, elected
representatives got as many as they wanted in on the take. This
is the raw purchase of consent. That tactic attracted a hard core
of powerful people benefitting from the pillage. Waxman, Markey,
Pelosi and Obama are busy this minute distributing promised loot
to big business special interests. The other side of the aisle will
get theirs also. It is equal-opportunity plunder.

Second, an
intellectual propaganda network bamboozled us with tales of a large
planetary cause, a looming crisis that they would avert. Such perception
management permitted the despots to appear wise and protective.
Some participant-props had been awarded Nobel prizes. Most garnered
authority credentials. Anthropogenic global warming was, this time,
the crisis-opiate that girded our loins and softened our forthcoming
sacrifice. We are duped into believing that we, or the planet, will
benefit by the micro-regulation and macro-taxation of our behaviors.
Prostituted scientists and "climatologists" in black robes
had christened natural, life-sustaining carbon dioxide a "poisonous
pollutant." The over-reaching Environmental Protection Agency
teamed with the pathetic Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
to steamroller legislation before their gig was up. (Way
too many inquiring minds had been exposing the AGW urgency, as presented,
to be fraud. The Australian Senate is rejecting its own version
of Cap-and-Trade. The EPA has been caught red-handed censoring a
global-warming study that was inconvenient. New EU Parliament Group
includes climate skeptics. The Polish Academy of Science is challenging
man-made global warming. The earth's temperatures have flat-lined
since 2001, despite growing concentrations of CO2. Green
jobs are found to be a cost not a benefit to our national economy.)

Thus, in two
subtle strategies, we have strengthened the chains that will keep
us bound to tyranny. The bad-seed baby – H.R. 2454: the American
Clean Energy and Security Act – sets in place a gargantuan
government army of bureaucrats to fleece trillions from an already
burdened and sinking middle-class sheeple. Rationing energy will
give this mob the power over who literally lives and who dies. There
is no part of this inflicted pain that will gain any significant
reduction of global warming. There is every piece of this inflicted
pain that will be impoverishing Americans through its economy-killing
mandates and, very likely, be precipitating
a trade war by taxing our large trade partner, China.

Having created
this new monstrosity, some members of the House may be feeling the
shame. There had been, after all, a refreshing crack in the serious
work of plunder and obfuscation when Minority Leader John Boehner
(R-Ohio) began to read from page after page of the 300 additional
pages that dropped onto the already massive 1200 page bill at 3:09
just that same morning. Mind-numbing details gave mere glimpses
of the newly unleashed tyranny to come. Guffaws were a rational
and healthy response as many members realized the absurdity of pretense
that any of them had had time to read and comprehend what he was
being asked to vote on. So much for transparency.

This awful
bill passes now to the Senate. Perhaps Senators will actually read
it. Having read it, perhaps there are enough Senators with integrity
to defeat it.

House
members have opportunities to redeem themselves. They can repeal
laws. Begin now. And, they hold the most important power. The House
of Representatives in the Congress of the United States of America
constitutionally holds the power of the purse. House Representatives
can, in fact, strangle oppressive activities by withdrawing financial
support. Just cut off funds and wars will wither from the Executive
vine. Just deny money and plunderers will have to turn to production.
Tough love could find a home in the House.

And, individually,
tough wills could find a way out from under this tyranny. We can
just say no. We can withdraw consent. The Prince had his
Machiavelli to show him the way to rule. We have our Gandhi and
our tienne de La Botie (the first libertarian political philosopher
in the Western world) to show us how to undo the seemingly overwhelming
power of the ruling State. Murray Rothbard uncovered those liberty-saving
strategies in The
Political Thought of tienne de La Botie. Listen carefully
to his sage and stirring words.

Tea Parties,
secession movements, bailout protests, and plummeting approval ratings
of both elected and unelected "leaders" show that thoughtful
citizens are restless. When our monopoly cartel central bank is
transparently audited, the statists' failed experiments and unhealthy
entanglements will be exposed. Unexamined faith in government will
face fresh and critical examination. If it withdraws its consent
to servitude, free society will flourish.

June
29, 2009

Floy
Lilley [send her mail]
is an adjunct faculty member at the Mises Institute. She was formerly
with the University of Texas at Austin’s Chair of Free Enterprise,
and an attorney-at-law in Texas and Florida.

Britain has
learned the hard way that their headlong green rush into medieval
technology has been wasteful and foolish. They spent time and money
trying to force a technology to do what it simply can't do. Despite
what Boone Pickens says, wind's optimum use is only as backup and
it can't supply more than twenty percent of required loads. Pickens
is a subsidy hunter, promising a 25% return on a 4,000 MW windmill
farm in Texas, based entirely on federal tax credits. Have you ever
seen how much land wind power requires? Pickens' project will need
1,200 square miles. But, none in his backyard, please. He thinks
the wind towers are too ugly to be on his large ranch.

Real, productive
people need real, industrial-sized power. And, don't even mention
conservation. Conservation is no energy policy. Conservation is
no more an energy plan than fasting is a food supply. Sure, greater
efficiencies save energy, but we immediately have more uses for
it. Only when the economy tanks do we use less energy. Nonetheless,
I don't consider that to be our current depression's silver lining.

So, lead us
Britannia. Let us, too, seize the day, the sense, and the cents.
Let us, too, use peaceful-atom energy technology, which can do all
that we need it to do. Why aren't we doing just that? Why do we
fear the best, most natural power provided on earth by earth?

Is nuclear
really saddled in the U.S.A. with insurmountable risks?

I grant that
things didn't get off to a smooth start with nuclear power. Think
about it. Would there be any electricity today at all if the first
electrical product had been an electric chair? Electricity would
have been dead on arrival after such a market launch. So, what can
you do when your initial product is an atomic bomb? That pretty
much set the stage for nuclear energy's dismal reception.

The curtain
fell on that stage before stardom was attained. At the Three Mile
Island Nuclear Station near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in the spring
of 1979, a hanging tag obscured a warning light. This human error
consequently led to the damage of 70 percent of the core and 100
percent of the forward momentum of the nuclear power industry. There
was, after close inspection during nine years, no unusual incidence
of ill health in the public found, but the utilities experienced
cardiac arrest. Public abuse, skyrocketing financial risks, draconian
commission demands and required government-led evacuation plans
sounded the death knell for the truly grand promises of nuclear
energy. The response was a rational and complete upgrade to nuclear
training, led by the Institute for Nuclear Power Operation and inspired
by Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear navy.

Still, nuclear's
potential went unrealized. By 1998 a company called Entergy stepped
up and began buying unpopular nuclear reactors and began making
immense improvements. All 104 nuclear reactors in the country were
upgraded and beginning to perform to potential by the millennium.
Since 1990, nearly one-third of our country's electrical growth
has been met by this upgraded performance. Nuclear now is the source
for 19.8 percent of total electricity provided, while it makes up
only 9 percent of our generating capacity. Our nuclear reactors
achieve an all-time low in production cost of 1.68 cents per kWh.
The reactors operate 24/7 for close to two years without interruption.
The new fuel rods that are required about every eighteen months
can be handled with gloves. The U-235 content of reactor-grade fuel
is only 3 percent and cannot explode under any circumstances. Have
these sound safety facts reassured our unscientific culture? Not
much.

Public fears
about radiation have persisted while there have been few fears about
that other transmission of energy — electricity. Like I said, expect
marketing challenges when your introductory product is a bomb.

But how well
founded is hysteria over radioactivity? Did we really not notice
that our blue home planet is a natural atomic energy reactor itself?
We might not know that every second of our lives we are struck by
15,000 particles of radiation. We even might not be aware that own
bodies are naturally radioactive. But, did we really not notice
that the sun's radiation is the source of our life? Have we really
not noticed that it is always the dose that makes the poison,
rather than the mere presence of a single photon or atom? We certainly
are arbitrary about what we choose to be frightened of.

I was representing
the American Nuclear Society in Manchester, England, in 1991 when
I first realized that the very rules written to regulate against
risks were, themselves, creating much of the hysteria over radiation
with which the general public was infected. The Nuclear Regulatory
Commission was saddled with a supposition that said that if a large
amount of something could cause you harm, then a single molecule
of it could and would cause harm. That concept is called LNT — the
linear no-threshold hypothesis. LNT disregards thresholds and proclaims
that there is no safe dose. It is not scientific. It is false.
But this false LNT is the reason workers around nuclear materials
are suited up in spacesuits. That's much more than a waste of money;
it's a truly scary signal. And, it's unwarranted.

Low
doses of radiation have exhibited positively beneficial effects
upon health. That foreign concept is called hormesis. Another
foreign concept could go a long way to putting the energy back into
the nuclear energy industry. It is "use 95 percent of the fuel
rod rather than just 5 percent." The French do it, along with
Canadians, Russians, English, Japanese and others. We even did it
until 1970.

Let's do it
again. Let's use 95 percent of the fuel rods by reprocessing and
use the remaining 5 percent in radioactive isotope applications
for health medicine and industrial applications. Let's have excess
energy to sell, as the French do. Let's gear up for nuclear plants
so we, too, can have them produce 80 percent of our electricity,
as the French do.

What do
we do? We Americans use only 5 percent of our fuel rods,
then fight like crazy to prevent the 95 percent "wasted"
rod from being buried in Yucca Mountain.

Nuclear energy
power isn't just tilting at windmills. There are good reasons for
it to be replacing them.

May
2, 2009

Floy
Lilley [send her mail]
is an adjunct faculty member at the Mises Institute. She was formerly
with the University of Texas at Austin’s Chair of Free Enterprise,
and an attorney-at-law in Texas and Florida.

Straightforward
or transparent legislation was not
looking promising. The U.S. Senate voted
down Obama's climate plan. Climate czar Carol Browner has been
so rebuffed
by the Senate moderates that no
one was wagering that cap and trade climate legislation was
going to get passed. Did Browner put her old EPA hat back on to
help rattle this saber? How embarrassing for greens to hold so many
political Democratic Party cards and still be so impotent.

It overall
is a very bad day for pushing expensive climate change alarmism.
Climate policies are shifting toward reason, sobriety, debate, engaged
real science, and fiscal restraint.

Obama ought
to have second thoughts about the advice he's being given when so
many prominent scientists are freshly skeptical:

• Freeman
  Dyson, professor
  of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton,
  has become outspoken and critical of the computer models which
  are driving climate alarmism. Dyson says, "I have studied
  the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve
  the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of
  describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans.
  They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the
  chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They
  do not begin to describe the real world that we live in."
  Dyson tackles these bogus
  climate models along with stratospheric
  cooling in two short YouTube videos.
• Antonio
  Zichichi,
  president of the World Federation of Scientists, is now saying
  that "models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
  Change (IPCC) are incoherent and invalid from a scientific point
  of view."
• Richard
  Lindzen,
  Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT, takes a harder look at
  negative
  climate feedbacks. "Future generations will wonder in
  bemused amazement that the early 21st century's developed world
  went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature
  increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross
  exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined
  into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate
  a roll-back of the industrial age."
• Australia's
  foremost Earth scientist, Ian
  Plimer, publishes Heaven
  And Earth: Global-Warming – The Missing Science.
  The inconvenient professor Plimer states that "The
  hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary
  because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics,
  astronomy, history, archaeology and geology."
• A U.S. Navy
  physicist
  warns of possibly "several decades of crushing cold temperatures
  and global famine." Concern
  about cooling becomes commonplace. Mother Nature might even
  be credited with saving capitalism if this climate realism can
  end the suffocating alarmism. Russia
  airs cooling concerns freely. The Russians say our twelve-thousand-year-long
  warm period is ending and we are entering another ice age.
• Scientific
  graphs (within the PDF report) show global temperature has
  been falling for seven years. The graphs also show "CO2
  concentration had been rising at about half the UN’s central estimate,
  requiring its warming projections to be halved and rendering them
  harmless; and that 20 years of satellite observations of changes
  in outgoing long-wave radiation had demonstrated conclusively
  that the UN had exaggerated the effect of CO2 on temperature by
  a factor of 7–10. The economic graph showed the cost of adapting
  to “global warming” (if and when it resumed) as being many times
  cheaper than the cost of attempting to mitigate it."

Obama's running
out of time to force us to swallow his catastrophic global warming
agenda. The catastrophe evaporates as the harsh reality of the economic
costs of such a global climate bureaucracy become clearer. Climate
policies in Europe are changing rapidly. France's most eminent climate
skeptic, Claude
Allegre, is likely to become that country's equivalent head
of the EPA. The G-20 meeting in London earlier this month ignored
climate change. The G-20's written statement mentioned the word
"climate" only two times out of 3,146 words. Expectations
are falling rapidly for the Copenhagen Climate Convention efforts
this December to birth Son-of-Kyoto.

"OBAMA’S
GREEN POLICY WILL KILL U.S. ECONOMY, SAYS OIL CHIEF"
screams another headline. Has this President forgotten already
that our U.S. economy is in a protracted nosedive? His budget calls
for a $646
billion climate tax through a carbon-trading system that will
throttle taxpayers. White House officials already admit this tax
could be three times larger. A family of four could have to shell
out nearly $45,000 in climate taxes during the coming decade. And
that is all before the EPA gets started regulating. Whatever is
he thinking of?

Some states
have not waited for any EPA to tell them they can't breathe out.
They've gotten a jump on rationing energy. One victim is protesting.
An electric utility
sues New York over CO2 regulation. The utility valiantly fights
the state on claims broadly ranging from "impermissible taxation"
to Constitutional violations. I wish the utility well, but our government
has never met a tax that was "impermissible" and doesn't
appear to give a flip about the Constitution.

That
having been said, you can take
action on the EPA's proposed action. The EPA's action is that
the EPA Administrator signed a proposal with two distinct findings
regarding greenhouse gases under section 202(a) of the Clean Air
Act:

• The Administrator
  is proposing to find that the current and projected concentrations
  of the mix of six key greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide (CO2),
  methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons
  (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6)
  — in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of
  current and future generations. This is referred to as the endangerment
  finding.
• The Administrator
  is further proposing to find that the combined emissions of CO2,
  CH4, N2O, and HFCs from new motor vehicles
  and motor vehicle engines contribute to the atmospheric concentrations
  of these key greenhouse gases and hence to the threat of climate
  change. This is referred to as the cause or contribute finding.

This proposed
action would not itself impose any requirements on industry or other
entities. An endangerment finding under one provision of the Clean
Air Act would not by itself automatically trigger regulation under
the entire Act.

The public
comment period is open for 60 days. Take the gloves off. Submit
written comments. Attend one of two hearings. Support those who
do. Obama has to already know that this issue is going to take him
down. Whatever is he thinking of?

April
20, 2009

Floy
Lilley [send her mail]
is an adjunct faculty member at the Mises Institute. She was formerly
with the University of Texas at Austin’s Chair of Free Enterprise,
and an attorney-at-law in Texas and Florida.

Creating money
"out of thin air" has been the stock-in-trade of the wizards
of the Federal Reserve. Every ruler attempts this gambit, so he
can seem to be able to finance all the wars he can profit by and
to buy all the votes needed to stay in privileged rule, but none
gets away with it forever. Our current economic depression is the
expected result of no longer getting away with it. The gig is up.
The piper must be paid. This "thin air" is what Meltdown
by Thomas E. Woods is about. It's the freshest blockbuster.
Hot off the shelf. It deals with my oldest interest – economic
freedom – by dealing unflinchingly with the Federal Reserve
and its failed inflationary framework. Woods masterfully
explains why the stock market collapsed, the economy tanked,
and government bailouts will make things worse.

Creating catastrophe
out of "hot air" has been the stock-in-trade of vanguard
protectors-of-the-planet since the early seventies when these alarmists
cried out about a coming ice age. Nimbly, alarmism shifted from
freezing to frying as some slight warming occurred. Even more nimbly,
"global warming" has morphed into simply "climate
change," upon a pause in warming. Patrick J. Michaels' Meltdown
confirms the predictable distortion of "hot air" global
warming by scientists, politicians, and the media.

Monetary policy
and climate policy were monolithic untouchables. Monetary policy
was Hamiltonian centralist guiding wisdom utilizing an impartial
Federal Reserve group above politics to steer the ship of state
through steady inflation while avoiding crashes. Only in the Colonial
beginning was there debate about monetary policy. Jefferson lost
that debate. The debate is forcibly being taken out of Federal
Reserve hands now.

Climate policy
has been chiefly Al Gore's vision of required wrenching transformation
by mankind in order to restore balance to Mother Earth, acting always
out of achieved consensus and settled science. There was never debate.
Climate alarmists don't debate. This debate, too, is being taken
out of alarmists' hands now.

Besides,
current headlines reveal just how hard it is today to get any respect
as a catastrophic man-made global-warming alarmist:

• "Cyclist
  braves brutal cold to battle global warming"
• "Global
  warming activist limbs go numb from cold on trek to Antarctica"
• "Minnesota
  dog sled race cancelled because of too much snow"
• "Eiffel
  Tower closed, flights hit by snow"
• "Blizzards
  close down over 1,000 village roads in Turkey"
• "The
  day the sea froze: Arctic conditions continue to grip UK"
• "Communist-era
  power shortages hit as deadly cold, heavy snows grip Europe"
• "Indian
  geologist declares: Global cooling will lead to our extinction"
• "Poor
  burn books to stay warm in chilly India"
• "Record
  levels of CO2 unable to stop record cold!"
• "Earth's
  average temperature showed no detectable warming from December
  1978 until the 1997 El Nino"
• "NCDC:
  the U.S. cools down by 0.49 degrees F per decade"
• "Global
  sea ice ends year at same level as 1979"
• "Reality
  check: Politically left scientists now rejecting climate fears"
• "Claims
  of impending marine species extinctions due to CO2 warming refuted
  by real-world evidence"
• "Princeton
  professor fired by Gore says warming-fear promotion has turned
  into a cult"
• "Sunspots
  had been predicting major cooling since 2000"
• "Extreme
  –60F Alaska cold grounds planes, disables cars"

Not only does
real weather not cooperate with warming alarmists, but a few stellar
deniers have been pulling the wraps off the Goracle's
methods. MIT Meteorology Professor Richard S. Lindzen writes a devastating
critique
exposing Gore's corrupted science. Lindzen details how climate science
in general and Al Gore in particular are not designed to answer
questions.

Many scientists
are unable to stand the hypocrisy any longer. Six hundred fifty
of them have signed a minority
report stating their beliefs that, contrary to the UN and former
Vice President Al Gore, no consensus exists among scientists on
man-made global warming. The story
of Gore's mentor, Roger Revelle, is a telling one. Revelle, the
grandfather of global warming, backed away from the carbon dioxide
alarmism before his untimely death. Gore called Revelle senile and
blew past, but the hot air hype is cooling.

Hot air policy
has engendered as much exaggeration and as many outright falsehoods
as has thin air policy. Corruption is rampant. Doctoring data is
bad behavior, especially when the scientist playing doctor is one
of the most prominent alarmist advocates. James Hansen should know
better, but he adjusted
temperatures upward so that cooling trends look like warming
trends. Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS)
is in an untenable conflict-of-interest bind as he alters recorded
temperatures. GISS has just had to admit that their "warmest
October" claim was wrong. Hansen's former boss, Dr. John Theon,
last month publicly disagreed
with Hansen's work. Perhaps Hansen had felt empowered by watching
the whole world swallow the fabricated famous "hockey stick"
graph that was the prize prop of the alarmists for six years before
being caught out.

Beyond mere
corruption, bamboozlement's popularity is also waning. As crazy
as it is to brand any carbon — the stuff of life — a "pollutant,"
think how crazy it is to create "money" out of carbon dioxide. But
that's what the current carbon markets have tried to do. They initially
soared. Counting on monopoly position and privileged green-energy
projects, managers and investors jumped onto the gravy train of
carbon markets and cap-and-trade restrictions in a future ruled
by men who would ration energy, deciding who dies and who thrives.
But, Enron and Lehman Brothers have been casualties of this inflated
carbon market now taking its deserved deep economic hits.

On top of the
green carbon market tanking, all of those green energy projects
which boast that they do not emit carbon dioxide are behaving just
like other bubble-induced poor investments. Think housing boom.
All have gone begging.
Renewable projects expanded quickly because of subsidies and mandates,
but have shriveled just as quickly in the economic realism that
the projects were not financed by any savings, just thin air credit.

We will face
the same government-induced green unemployment problems that countries
like Spain are now facing as Obama foolishly tries to spend us out
of this depression by throwing funny fiat at problems caused by
the lack of real production and real savings. Hot air policies are
collapsing because workers today want to hear about jobs, not about
costly climate change policies that are asking them to cut their
carbon emissions by 90%. That just is not going to happen. Nor does
it need to.

Additionally,
some U.S. Democrats have become sensitive to the economic damage
climate policy will inflict, especially in the Midwest and Plains
states, while President Obama tries to move quickly on his environmental
promises. Obama's plans are being designed by those from California
and the East Coast, not by the states that still have working manufacturing.
The already crippled and hemorrhaging car industry faces increased
regulatory costs of $1,500 to $3,000 per automobile now that California
is going to set its own regulations on greenhouse gas emissions
from vehicles. This will pit
the car industry against Obama. California intended to lead the
country in green jobs. The experiment did not
go well. It leads the country in unemployment now.

Unfortunately,
Sen. John Kerry is behaving as if the United States still had money.
Kerry expects to be an influential player at climate change talks
in Copenhagen. He insists,
“People have to get beyond the Bush mentality and realize it’s a
very different ball game” under Mr. Obama. Mr. Bush resisted committing
the U.S. to economywide curbs on greenhouse-gas emissions, whereas
Mr. Obama has called for legislation to cut U.S. emissions 80% from
1990 levels by 2050." Sen. Kerry is eager to begin spending
the $825B created out of thin air in the bill just passed by the
illustrious and confused Senate.

Even though
breathing out emits carbon dioxide, don't hold your breath waiting
for Obama to spend those false fortunes combatting global warming.
No real money exists. We are broke.
The Federal Reserve is within two percent wiggle room of insolvency.

All of Obama's
and Kerry's efforts at stimulus will simply further impoverish us
all because wealth creation has ever only been about savings and
real production, not about thin air credit and debt-ridden consumption.

Depressions
and collapses do have unintended consequences of drastically lowering
carbon dioxide emissions, if you are someone who happens to think
that would be a good thing. There are few emissions from collapsed
industries. Hot air and global warming policies should waft away.
Be thankful that no more will be wasted upon such a fruitless endeavor.

Additionally,
the collapse of the house of Keynesian cards that produced money
out of thin air will permit market clearing to begin its heavy work.
A fresh monetary policy will be constructed upon competitive currencies,
sound money, no legal tender laws, an abolished Federal Reserve,
100% redemptive reserves, no sales or capital gains taxes on precious
metals, and reaffirmation of the enforceability of gold clauses
in contracts. This new monetary policy will give Americans a safety
net against total financial collapse. We do not have that now.

Now the air
is neither thin nor hot. The air is cleared. There is work calling.

February
13, 2009

Floy
Lilley [send her mail]
is an adjunct faculty member at the Mises Institute. She was formerly
with the University of Texas at Austin’s Chair of Free Enterprise,
and an attorney-at-law in Texas and Florida.

DIGG THIS

Pull the plugs.
Let the dead men be buried. Trying to keep insolvent bad deals alive
uses all the scarce resources that newborn good deals need. This
produces staggering costs of lost opportunity. Like Japan, we might
not recover for a very long time if we think we can keep dead men
walking. Let necessary liquidation happen. Recession is the mandatory
painful reality of clearing markets in order to regain a recovering
economy. Booms and busts will happen as long as the money system
we have in place is such an unsound one.

But,
within the reality of the money system we do have, happy days can
not be here again by propping up the corpses of all the bad stuff
that was birthed by reckless Federal policy. Greenspan and Bernanke
deliberately drove interest rates from 6% to 1% and deliberately
reduced the purchasing power of each unit of money by flooding the
money supply by a 9% increase. It was boom time. Credit was thrown
at everybody. Debt was the name of Nirvana, while savings were taxed.
Everyone was high on a wealth effect that came from the effervescent
bubbles. Our homes became our ATM machines. We were never as rich
as the boom times led any of us to believe.

Don't adopt
the corpses through bailout deals. They will not revive. Ever. Bury
them properly through liquidation. Return them to dust. Hunker down.
Stop spending beyond means. Save.

October
2, 2008

Floy
Lilley [send her mail]
is an adjunct faculty member at the Mises Institute. She was formerly
with the University of Texas at Austin’s Chair of Free Enterprise,
and an attorney-at-law in Texas and Florida.

DIGG THIS

The former
U.S. vice president, Al Gore, is now urging civil disobedience to
stop coal plants. He told a New York audience recently, "If
you’re a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking
at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have
reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent
the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture
and sequestration.”

Global Warming
and Reinventing Government have been Gore's two lifelong causes.
He is using the one to accomplish the other. His fundamental assumptions
and views of global warming were well documented in his film, An
Inconvenient Truth. Thousands of schoolchildren have viewed
it. Gore was even awarded a Nobel Peace prize for the documentary
in 2007 which he shared with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC). It is telling that the very first Chairman of that
IPCC group, John Houghton, had pronounced, "Unless we announce
disasters, no one will listen." True to script, Gore announced
disasters and many listened.

As Gore urges
civil disobedience to stop coal plants for the sake of carbon dioxide
emissions, it is time to revisit several of those assumptions and
implications he made in An Inconvenient Truth. Each of the
fourteen highlighted here is a snapshot of the Global Warming doomsayers'
views. The added perspective shows the fraud of the catastrophic
manmade Global Warming thesis:

Carbon dioxide
drives the temperature of the planet. Gore assumes that
carbon dioxide (CO2) is the causal factor of warming temperatures.
But, for at least 240,000 years carbon dioxide has been a lagging
indicator of any warming. That means that the earth warms and, later,
there is an increase in the gas carbon dioxide. Roy Spencer, Climate
Research Scientist in Huntsville, Alabama, notes that "the
cooling effects of weather have a stronger influence on surface
temperatures than the warming influence of greenhouse gases."
The major greenhouse gases are water vapor (which accounts for 70–90
percent of the effect), carbon dioxide and methane. Many scientists
work on the theory that the sun is the prime driver of Earth's climate.
Earth temperature and sun activity do correlate closely. Additionally,
many scientists examine the larger cosmos. Their theories reveal
an interplay between the sun and cosmic rays — sub-atomic particles
from exploded stars. Further, they discern long-term temperature
patterns as our solar system moves through the arms of our Milky
Way galaxy. Again, those events correlate more closely to Earth's
temperatures than do manmade carbon dioxide levels.

Temperatures
will rise 1.5–4.5 degrees Celsius when CO2 levels double
from a pre-industrial level of 280ppm to 560ppm. Because
Earth's sensitivity to carbon dioxide changes has been overstated,
the scientifically likely temperature result of such a doubling
is 1.5–2.0 degrees Celsius. Earth's current CO2 level is 380ppm.

Catastrophic
Global Warming will cause sea levels to rise 20 feet. The
work of scientists supports a sea level rise of about one inch per
decade. In one hundred years it should rise 10–12 inches.

Catastrophic
Global Warming is forcing island nations to evacuate their populations
to New Zealand because of rising sea levels. Tuvalu was
the poster child for this alarm, but neither Tuvalu nor any other
islanders have evacuated to New Zealand.

Catastrophic
Global Warming is melting Antarctic sea ice. But, Antarctic
sea ice is thickening over the gigantic continent. This thickening
reduces sea level. There is ice loss on a tiny sliver of the continent
stretching out far northward. That is what Gore's movie image relies
upon. The ice shelf collapse there was more likely to have been
driven by ocean current fluctuations.

Catastrophic
Global Warming is resulting in extreme weather. Tornadoes?
The US is home to one-third of all the world's tornadoes. But, tornadoes
have not increased. Drought? There is not greater incidence of drought.
Record typhoons and cyclones? No. Hurricanes? There are about ninety-five
hurricanes annually and globally. But, hurricanes are neither more
frequent nor more intense. In 2004 the IPCC hyped hurricane-fears
without any scientific soundness. Gore's film footage implies that
hurricane Katrina was an inescapable consequence of manmade globally
averaged warming. Facts do not support that alarm.

Catastrophic
Global Warming has caused global temperatures to be warmer now than
they have been in 1,000 years. Gore's graph displays a long
level period ending in an upward sweep like a hockey stick, displaying
the appearance of runaway temperatures. A young IPCC scientist named
Mann created this hockey stick graph for a 2001 report, making the
real Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age disappear. It was
an enormously effective prop. Alarmists used it for their the-science-is-settled
position. It made the 20th-century temperature increase
look unique. But, Mann's methodology would have conjured any random
set of numbers into a hockey stick. And, the temperature increase
was not unique. In 2006 the National Academy of Sciences issued
a report stating that this graph used flawed data. The IPCC has
dropped the use of the Mann hockey stick from its 2007 Report. But,
this piece of deliberate disinformation caused great damage to truth
and science.

Catastrophic
Global Warming has dried up Lake Chad. Lake Chad has been
totally dry several times before humans were adding any CO2. That
situation is due to over-extraction by communities.

Catastrophic
Global Warming has been shrinking the snows of Kilimanjaro. By
the time Ernest Hemingway wrote The
Snows of Kilimanjaro in 1936, half of the snow was already
gone. This is before man began releasing CO2 into the atmosphere
to any extent by burning fuels for energy. No temperature on the
mountain is above freezing. There has been no temperature change
in fifty-five years. Shrinking is likely to be a circulation issue
and lower precipitation, not a rising temperature issue.

Catastrophic
Global Warming increases mosquito-borne malaria. Malaria
was endemic to most of the developed world just fifty to one hundred
years ago. We eliminated malaria in Europe and the United States
while the world warmed. 600,000 people died of malaria in Siberia.
Malaria sickens 300 to 500 million poor people annually, killing
as many as 2.7 million each year. In sub-Saharan Africa, one in
20 children dies of malaria. The approximately forty million humans
killed by malaria since 1972 have died because a politician, William
Ruckelshaus, as the Environmental Protection Agency's first head,
banned the beneficial pesticide DDT.

Catastrophic
Global Warming is quickly melting Arctic sea ice. Arctic
sea ice decreases during the summer melt season, and Arctic temperatures
have risen faster than anywhere else. But, the Arctic region was
warmer in the 1930's. That could not have been caused by mankind.
And, Artic sea ice has recovered from 3 million square kilometers
to 14 million square kilometers. Ice-cover around the Bering Strait
and Alaska has more recently been at its highest level ever recorded.

Catastrophic
Global Warming is killing polar bears. Factually, that claim
was based on a single sighting of four dead bears the day after
an "abrupt windstorm" in an area housing one of the increasing
bear populations. Global polar-bear population has increased dramatically
over the past decades.

Catastrophic
Global Warming is melting Greenland's ice. Greenland has
been warmer. Its ice did not melt — except around its edges. There
has been no net warming — and perhaps a slight cooling — since 1937.
Vikings colonized and farmed Greenland during the Medieval Warm
Period. The return of colder climate drove them away.

And, lastly,
for An Inconvenient Truth,

Catastrophic
Global Warming has caused mass extinctions. Warming extends
ranges for plant and animal species. Biodiversity is enhanced. That's
why the greatest concentration of biodiversity is in the tropics.
Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide are shown to increase plant
production, while lowering water requirements and reducing stress.
Animals thrive on more abundant plant-life. Enriched CO2 has yielded
an additional one-sixth production which would not have happened
in its absence.

Each of these
fourteen scenarios would have been an environmental bad had it happened
and had it been empirically proven to have been caused by humans.
The alarming events did not happen. The scary scenarios all came
from computer climate models. There has been no empirical proof
substantiating Gore's claims and implications.

The hypothesis
of catastrophic globally averaged warming resulting from human-caused
carbon dioxide increases has failed. Failed hypotheses should be
rejected.

The catastrophic
Global Warming hypothesis fails to show that changes in carbon dioxide
drive changes in temperature. Changes in carbon dioxide do not account
well for the highly variable climate we know the Earth has had,
including the Roman Warming (200 B.C. to A.D. 600), the cold Dark
Ages (A.D. 440 to A.D. 900), the Medieval Warming (A.D. 900–1300
when CO2 levels were much lower than today), and the Little Ice
Age (1300–1550 when there were few sunspots). The catastrophic Global
Warming hypothesis is a feeble theory made seemingly true by pure
repetition.

The catastrophic
Global Warming hypothesis fails to explain the reality of the last
one hundred years. Half of our modern warming occurred from 1905–1940,
when carbon dioxide levels were still quite low. The net warming
since 1940 is a minuscule 0.2 degrees Celsius. An interlude of global
cooling occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, when CO2 levels were increasing.
It totally fails to explain the absence of warming in the last ten
years, despite a continuing rapid increase in CO2 concentration.
If greenhouse action by carbon dioxide drove warming, the upper
air should have warmed faster than the surface, but observations
show the opposite has been the case. Although computer models say
temperatures should have risen, Alabama temperatures have fallen
for 115 years. Citrus crops used to be common. What could you do
about this catastrophe? Buy jackets and get out of the citrus business.
In other words, adapt.

It is fraud
to spread alarmism of catastrophic "human-caused global warming"
based upon projections generated from computer climate models which
have substantial uncertainties and are markedly unreliable. It is
fraud upon fraud to throw scarce resources at Global Warming when
such expenditures will have inconsequential results except to impoverish
us, notwithstanding that Al Gore believes it will be good for our
spirituality to work together on such a common cause. There are
real and achievable global causes of diseases, malnutrition, sanitation
and energy that are valid projects and worthy efforts — efforts
that Bjrn Lomborg endorses in his book, Cool
It. No global efforts toward expensive CO2 cuts are valid
or worthy. Current Climate policies are health and wealth destruction
policies.

Doomsayers
are claiming that climate can be adjusted in some predictable way,
but it can not. It is fraud to claim that it can. As published in
the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Richard
Lindzen of M.I.T. has conducted studies that thwart the greenhouse
effect. What that means is that "just because the greenhouse
effect is real, it does not follow that an increase in intensity
will necessarily lead to a significant increase in mean global
air temperature, as climate alarmists are wont to claim…Hence it
is not inconceivable that an increase in the atmosphere's CO2 concentration
may result in no warming at all. Or even a cooling!…Much
more research will be required before we can determine that the
ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content even constitutes a
problem, much less specify its magnitude and prescribe ameliorative
measures for dealing with it."

The magnetic
attraction of government funding for global-warming research, the
political climate of fear-based policies seen in both climate issues
and economic issues, and doom-sopping journalism works to push events
into a downward spiral of exaggeration and hype. Al Gore rides this
emotional wave. He has refused all debate with climate scientists.
It is after all, for him, not about truth. For him truth is simply
inconvenient.

COOL
It and Six Other Books to Lower Your Global Warming Fever

Cool
It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming
by Bjrn Lomborg (2008) tells us to stop the focus on carbon dioxide
cuts. Stop throwing good resources at global treaties and global
command and control plans. They will have inconsequential results
upon climate. You will fail to do any real good, cautions Lomborg.
Put global warming into perspective. There is useful common sense
packed into this slender and readable work from this Danish environmentalist.

The
Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global
Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud**And those who
are too fearful to do so by Lawrence Solomon (2008) checks
to see if those who differ from the "consensus" claimed
by Gore and the UN really are just crackpots. Surprising himself
with his findings, Solomon’s efforts revealed the skeptics to be
more accomplished and more eminent scientists than the Gore &
co. group who have gone along.

Climate
Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering
Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor by
Roy Spencer (2008) says that the policies being advocated by environmentalists
and politicians in the frenzy over global warming are sure to fail
and bound to harm people. Governmental funding for research has
predictably created biased scientists, but Washington, too, has
been corrupted by this hyped "problem" and the money being
thrown at it. Spencer shows with a light touch that he knows people
as well as he knows weather.

Unstoppable
Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, Updated and Expanded Edition
by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery (2008) presents the case
of how the Earth tells its own climate tale. This reasoned perspective
of natural climate change driven by our own sun refutes the alarmists’
baseless fears of man-made global warming caused by increases in
carbon dioxide. The authors argue for humane policy consequences.

The
Chilling Stars: A Cosmic View of Climate Change by Henrik
Svensmark and Nigel Calder (2008) calls the carbon dioxide theory
feeble and presents a far more robust theory of galactic cosmic
rays. Based upon Svensmark’s research at the Danish National Space
Center, The Chilling Stars offers the broadest perspective
yet presented on climate change. If confirmed by further research,
sub-atomic particles from exploded stars affect Earth’s climate
more than man-made carbon dioxide.

Shattered
Consensus: The True State of Global Warming edited by Patrick
J. Michaels (2005) presents essays by climate experts which reveal
what is and what is not known in climate science. Cautioning
that bad policy will result from flawed scientific assumptions,
each expert carefully notes what has been predicted and what has
been observed. Major discrepancies raise major questions about any
policy created to "fight" climate change.

Meltdown:
The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians,
and the Media by Patrick J. Michaels (2005) is a premier
presentation of the cycle and culture of exaggeration. Never shy,
Michaels does tell it like it is. What
he reveals is not professional and is not pretty. Spencer’s Climate
Confusion echoes these same sad discoveries of scientific ignorance
and fraud.

For websites
on global warming, the two kings still reign:

• http://www.worldclimatereport.com/
• http://www.co2science.org/

September
27, 2008

Floy
Lilley [send her mail]
is an adjunct faculty member at the Mises Institute. She was formerly
with the University of Texas at Austin’s Chair of Free Enterprise,
and an attorney-at-law in Texas and Florida.

DIGG THIS

The Revolution
is the best thing happening at the right time to the best of ordinary
people.

Reading through
The
Revolution: a Manifesto, I see so clearly the humble hero
that is Ron Paul. I see him living his values as few do. His embrace
of truth, his courage to speak that truth to power affect me deeply.
I see that he, himself, describes his own efforts as a peaceful
continuation of the American Revolution.

I may have
a better idea than even he does about just how accurate his portrayal
is of his continuing the Revolution.. I am volumes into a
history of the times and conditions of our American Revolution.
As I voice record Conceived
In Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard, certain episodes claim
the man Ron Paul as one of their own. See if you, too, don't find
Ron Paul standing squarely on the colonialists side in his integrity
and shared view of freedom's meaningfulness in ordinary lives.

Ron Paul sees
that man and state hold opposing goals. Murray Rothbard expressed
this vital difference:

I see history
as centrally a race and conflict between "social power"
— the productive consequence of voluntary interactions among men
— and state power. In those eras of history when liberty — social
power — has managed to race ahead of state power and control,
the country and even mankind have flourished. In those eras when
state power has managed to catch up with or surpass social power,
mankind suffers and declines. P. 10 Vol I, Preface

Ron Paul deeply
understands that the basis of behavior and social contracts and
law and economics must be respect for people's values and choices.
He has made such respect the core of his beliefs. His way of respect
is the way of freedom, for self and others. He learned that when
we "respect one another as individuals with rights and goals
of our own, cooperation and goodwill suddenly become possible for
the first time."

From 1681 through
1690, Ron Paul would have stood beside Quakers in Pennsylvania as
they achieved

a remarkable
pattern of peace and justice with the Indians [while they established]…a
virtually self-governing colony. P. 404–406 Vol I, Chapter
55.

Colonialists
felt, as Paul has felt, the same strong moral reasoning for opposing
government intrusion into their lives. Both have reasoned, as John
Locke had, that dissent and opposition sometimes become duties,
as

Whenever
the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property
of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power,
they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are
thereupon absolved from any farther obedience, and are left to
the common refuge which God hath provided for all men against
force and violence. Vol I Pre-Preface

Ron
Paul's courage to confront harmful, destructive behavior of legislators
for thirty years is his continuation of the Revolution. He
questions. He wonders whether it is actually compassionate to give
handouts, as domestic welfare or as foreign aid. He has keen insight
into the demeaning consequences of patriarchal behavior. It dehumanizes
recipients into SSN numbers. It enslaves spirits through entitlements
into giving up on being responsible for their own lives. He understands
the generative power of the free market. It is simply put, "Give
a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats
for a lifetime. Ron Paul would agree with Sir John Templeton, a
skillful fund manager and philanthropist who said, "As a philanthropist,
I feel that love can mean helping people discover their own abilities,
including thrift, responsibility, and character."

Without the
state putting themselves into a state of war with we the people,
we would live more deeply and effectively. The state's coercion
is not the most potent force on our planet, our individual giving
is. Our giving, not the state's giving. A vote for the state to
give instructs the state to steal. That is not our gift, that is
our theft. State giving must first engage in state plundering of
some producer's own earnings — his own property. Our giving requires
creation and creation requires freedom.

Continuing
the Revolution requires salutary neglect from whatever state exists.
Please, meddlesome parasitical bureaucrats, leave us alone. Neglect
us. Neglect us the way British rulers neglected us when they had
been drawn into yet another continental military debacle. Leave
us in liberty as defined in the 1720's:

By Liberty,
I understand the power which every man has over his own actions,
and his right to enjoy the fruit of his labor, art, and industry,
as far as by it he hurts not the society, or any members of it,
by taking from any member, or by hindering him from enjoying what
he himself enjoys. The fruits of a man's honest industry are the
just rewards of it, ascertained to him by the natural and eternal
equity, as is his title to use them in the manner which he thinks
fit: And thus, with the above limitations, every man is sole lord
and arbiter of his own private actions and property…. Pre-Intro
Vol II Cato's Letters

Leave us so
that we might take up the libertarianism of Rhode Island before
1750.

True to its
tradition of freedom and free trade, Rhode Island paid even less
attention than other colonies to British trade restrictions. Nor
did Rhode Islanders, with their Quaker traditions of antimilitarism,
treat war as sacred; they continued happily to trade with their
designated "enemies" even in time of war. … No colony
was as decentralized as Rhode Island. Each town largely governed
itself and often an individual town would simply neglect to tax
its inhabitants for military or other expenses. P. 27 Vol II,
Chapter 3.

Paul was asked
about the flat tax, "Do you favor it?" "Why yes,"
he replied, ""as long as it is as flat as zero."
Paul knows, as Pennsylvania and Rhode Island knew, that "economic
freedom is based on a simple moral rule: everyone has a right to
his or her life and property, and no one has the right to deprive
anyone of these things."

Ron Paul has
tapped into the lives of young people with his anti-tax message.
The young are the ones facing a future burden of our debt that simply
staggers them and shatters dreams. Paul's appeal to the freshest
generation plugs him into the critical mass that continues all positive
revolutions. Witness the Paulian enthusiasm continuously in eruption
on YouTube and other internet sites. Power roots surpassed power
professionals when the amateurs produced the best videos of Ron
Paul and his message. The Revolutionaries are feeling competent
and effective. As he has been present and supportive of his own
children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, Ron Paul has been
present, supportive, encouraging and inspiring to untold numbers
of us. He is the patient teacher. He is the gentle guide. Yet, he
is the unflinching social activist, also. He writes the manifesto.
He drafts and submits necessary and proper bills into our Constitutional
process.

As a Congressman,
does Ron Paul have quarrels with Washington? Of course he does.
He is, after all, one man of integrity in a setting whose DC initials
could stand for the District of Criminals. But, from my perspective,
Ron Paul simply continues such quarrels just like the tax
refusal that permeated Rhode Island hundreds of years ago:

What did
the groups quarrel about? About the essentials of government in
any era or any country: allocation of the privileges to be derived
from government, and of the burdens to pay for these privileges.
The essence of government is an exploitative rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul
process, and the jockeying of factions is to become as much of
the Paul and as little of the Peter as possible. P. 54 Vol III,
Chapter 9.

"Frdric
Bastiat's term u2018legal plunder' applies to the role our own government
plays today. Citizens of all classes u2018endeavor to live at the expense
of everybody else.' It would be called what it is — u2018theft' — if
carried out by a private individual," notes Paul. The state
forcibly robs some men who have produced and saved to pay other
men who have not, all the while retaining a large fee — as much
as seventy percent — for themselves for the thieving service. The
least prosperous individuals are the most vulnerable to the unintended
harm of this looting when runaway printing of the robbers' money
creates the hidden tax of inflation and current dollars purchase
less and less.

Our national
robbery program must be abolished. Citizens now work almost half
of each year for the state. All that the individual has produced
until that time is taken from him in some form of taxation. This
is a policy of forced labor. This is not a humane or moral policy.

Paul posits,
"What if we decided to stop robbing one another?" What
if we had the imagination to conceive how a free people might solve
its problems without introducing threats of violence — which is
what government solutions ultimately amount to?

"I oppose
the whole apparatus [of interest group lobbyists], the whole immoral
system by which we use government to exploit our fellow citizens
on behalf of our own interests," he states. Paul recalls that
"This simple idea, that government should stay out of the looting
business and leave people to their own pursuits, has had great moral
appeal throughout U.S. history." "Walt Whitman urged that
…government…make no more laws than those useful for preventing a
man or body of men from infringing on the rights of other men."

Rethink what
the role of government ought to be. "If we continue to think
of our government as the policeman of the world and as the Great
Provider from cradle to grave, our problems will grow worse and
worse and our downward economic spiral, the first signs of which
we are now witnessing, will only accelerate," Dr. Paul assures
us.

Dr. Paul has
spent his life saving life, not making war and wasting lives. Dr.
Paul shakes his head at the drum beats of warmongers, wondering
how they can choose such destruction in lieu of freedom, peace and
prosperity.

Voracious appetites
of a military-industrial machine always demand more and bigger wars.

There was
method in the madness of [Massachusetts Governor William] Shirley's
persistent and almost frenzied zeal for more and bigger wars.
His ties of friendship and political alliance were held together
only by the tenuous band of continuing mutual profit. The end
or even the slackening of war meant lower government spending,
diminished war contracts, lower patronage, slackened inflation,
and tighter credit. And almost immediately, Shirley's plundering
friends…grew sullen and restive. P. 221 Vol. II, Chapter 36.

That opportunity
for plunder is why Randolph Bourne called war the health of
the state. But, Ron Paul sees that war is the death of liberty and
of many young people. "The domestic side effects of war are
taxes, debt, lost liberties, centralization and the emasculation
of the Constitution." He sadly notes that," Nonintervention
is never presented as an option."

The arrogant
administration of a contemporary King George continues.

King George
III was determined to play a direct and decisive role in government…
He was the "patriot king" smashing all political parties
independent of his will, and ruling the nation without check or
limit. P. 261, 264 Vol II, Chapter 41.

Our Current
King George is using his own Patriot Act to smash us. "War
has been used by presidents to excuse the imprisonment of American
citizens of Japanese descent, to silence speech, to suspend habeas
corpus, and even to control entire private industries. War does
not justify the suspension of torture laws any more than it justifies
the suspension of murder laws, the suspension of due process, or
the suspension of the Second Amendment. Why are we allowing it?"
demands Ron Paul.

Ron Paul's
consistently courageous and principled truth-telling is changing
our political landscape. He is not the unscrupulous demagogue that
voters love to elect in anticipation of privileges and favors; he
is actually worthy — he is our greatest champion of freedom. He
is the mover of our continuing Revolution movement.

The Revolution
is continuing. A successful opposition is being mounted against
the status quo. Ron Paul is leading us to "begin to pull ourselves
out from the crushing burden of debt and unfunded obligations. Enjoy
a far more robust economic performance. Look to the future with
confidence. Lift ourselves out from underneath a state apparatus
that threatens our liberties, squanders our resources on needless
wars, destroys the value of the dollar, and spews forth endless
propaganda about how indispensable it is and how lost we would be
without it."

But the propaganda
of the state is simply that. Propaganda. There are those of us who
do know that we would not be lost without government micromanaging
our steps. We know, in fact, that only without such a state will
we be free to breathe and choose and risk and love and live. Ron
Paul has delivered a powerful indictment of the one-party system
that governs and loots us and of official media that pretends we
have real debate. No one in Washington would ever consider writing
a book such as this

What does our
tomorrow look like? Our tomorrow looks like our finest moments of
our past. We go back to the future. We continue the Revolution.
We do what voluntary Sons of Liberty did as

The revolutionary
situation rendered the royal executive impotent and the colonial
assemblies ineffective. The judges did not usually meet, and when
they did it was at the behest rather of the radical organizations
of the people than of the legally constituted authority. In short,
effective rule of the colonies passed from the organs of government
to voluntary organizations: to the Sons of Liberty and their popular
allies. P. 138, Vol III, Chapter 32.

Ron
Paul volunteer groups, building upon thousands of MeetUps, arise
across the entire land to be heard and listened to. They are our
Sons of Liberty returned. Their bombs are forcefully explosive,
yet life-friendly, unlike those of the state. Candidates espousing
similar freedom-friendly views of mankind now run as "Ron Paul
candidates."

Read and listen
to Ron Paul's message. Hear the echoes of our forefathers as they
established ways to live respectfully, lovingly, prosperously and
peacefully. As Paul proposes, honor ourselves.

Continue
the Revolution.

April
28, 2008

Floy
Lilley [send her mail]
is an adjunct faculty member at the Mises Institute. She was formerly
with the University of Texas at Austin’s Chair of Free Enterprise,
and an attorney-at-law in Texas and Florida.

DIGG THIS

When Vaclav
Klaus, who has just won reelection as President of the Czech
Republic, states that he has comparative advantage over other speakers
on the issue of Climate Change, he is trenchantly correct. Klaus
lived under the last large central planning scheme — communism.
He rejects the offer to live under the even more draconian central
plan of our time — climate alarmism and environmentalism.

Klaus
explained his déjà vu vantage point to over
five hundred participants at the 2008
International Conference on Climate Change assembled
at Times Square New York City on March 2–4. Stressing his personally
acquired wisdom, Klaus said, "Future dangers will not come
from the same source [communism]. The ideology will be different.
Its essence [environmentalism and climate alarmism] will, nevertheless,
be identical — the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea
that transcends the individual in the name of common good, and the
enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their
right to sacrifice the man and his freedom in order to make this
idea a reality."

"What
I see in Europe and the U.S.," Klaus cautioned, "is
a powerful combination of irresponsibility, of wishful thinking,
of implicit believing in some form of Malthusianism, of a cynical
approach of those who are themselves sufficiently well-off, together
with the strong belief in the possibility of changing the economic
nature of things through a radical political project."

Klaus focused
on facts that showed that decreases in CO2 emissions in the EU have
come about because manufacturing radically disappeared when the
communist economy collapsed. Future decreases appear to rely on
miracles or the deliberate pushing of the EU countries back into
the Dark Ages. Carbon dioxide decreases are not normal for growing
and prospering civilizations, given current technology. Most of
those assembled would not consider such decreases to be either needed
or desirable.

Klaus brought
to our attention that the thinking of the climate alarmist is the
same as Hayek's portrayal of central planners in The
Fatal Conceit. He boldly challenged the large assembly,
"We have to restart the discussion about the very nature
of government and about the relationship between the individual
and society. [Freedom] should be the main message of our conference."

The aim and
objective of this stimulating gathering was to collapse the fake
"consensus"
on human-induced catastrophic global warming. Achieving this is
a necessary step toward turning climate alarmism into climate realism.
The step was taken. "Consensus"
collapsed. Over one
hundred scientists were provocative proof of the absence of
"consensus" that has been touted by alarmists.

These scientists
presented, exchanged and debated research showing global warming
to be mostly natural, definitely moderate and realistically unstoppable.
They held no consensus in their approaches or their results. Enter
the dawn of climate realism.

The New
York Times on Tuesday, March 4, ran an article by Andrew C.
Revkin titled "Cool View of Science at Meeting on Warming."
Written as a criticism, Revkin wrote that "the group…displayed
a dizzying range of ideas on what was, or was not, influencing climate."
That was the very point of the conference.

No "consensus"
can be touted when, in fact, so many scientists do indeed dispute
what data are meaningful and causative of the highly complex dynamics
of climate change. Several, like Dr.
Willie Soon, astrophysicist and geoscientist, displayed data
showing
the sun to be the more likely driver of temperature variations,
as compared to carbon dioxide radiative forcings.

Howard Hayden,
physics professor, concluded that astronomical phenomena cause about
seventy-five percent of the fluctuations in Earth's temperature.
The combined effects of all greenhouse
gases, changes in surface reflectivity of the sun's radiation,
and other Earthly changes account for no more than about three degrees
Celsius of the changes during transitions between ice ages and interglacials.
Hayden provided a repeatable sound bite when asked about computer
models that are the basis for alarmist views. He simply said, "Garbage
in; gospel out."

Dr.
William M. Gray, meteorological researcher for more than
forty years, contributed that the deep oceans, not carbon dioxide,
are driving climate. Rather than global warming, Gray believes a
recent up-tick in strong hurricanes is part of a multi-decade trend
of alternating busy and slow periods related to ocean circulation
patterns. Contrary to mainstream thinking, Gray believes ocean temperatures
are going to drop in the next five to 10 years.

Dr.
Vincent Gray, knows water vapor to be the principle greenhouse
gas as others do. However, Gray emphasizes that climate models fail
to reflect the fact that water vapor is extremely variable. Gray's
work finds that the global warming claim fails on two fundamental
facts: 1.) No average temperature of any part of the earth’s surface,
over any period, has ever been made. 2.) The sample is grossly unrepresentative
of the earth’s surface, mostly near to towns. No statistician could
accept an “average” based on such a poor sample. It cannot possibly
be “corrected.” Dr. Vincent Gray, a member of the UN IPCC Expert
Reviewers Panel since its inception, has written to Professor David
Henderson, to support the latter's
call for a review of the IPCC and its procedures. Gray's call
for such a review ends with these harsh words, "The disappearance
of the IPCC in disgrace is not only desirable but inevitable. The
reason is that the world will slowly realize that the "predictions"
emanating from the IPCC will not happen. The absence of any "global
warming" for the past eight years is just the beginning. Sooner
or later all of us will come to realize that this organization and
the thinking behind it is phony. Unfortunately severe economic damage
is likely to be done by its influence before that happens."

Dr
Roy Spencer, NASA senior scientist, produced recent
evidence for reduced climate sensitivity. Background “noise”
in climate systems creates temperature variations that are not random.
This "noise" exceeds all of the warming that has been
thought to have been made by humans. Climate models don't handle
clouds and convection in the tropics well. Precipitation systems
interactively regulate the climate system. Computer models predicting
climate change are necessarily flawed. Spencer releases his new
book March 27, 2008: Climate
Confusion — How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering
Politicians, and Misguided Policies That Hurt the Poor.

Dr.
Robert Balling, professor of climatology, questioned what the
increase in global temperature does and does not tell us. Water
vapor and non-solar control seem dominant. The theory, measurements,
and understanding of the greenhouse effect are advancing rapidly,
and drastically changing the original predictions from only a few
decades ago. Measured warming has been nowhere near the earlier
predictions, and the mathematical models are being constantly revised.
Both Balling and Dr. Ross McKitrick highlighted failings
in data collection. Many temperature stations have been discontinued.
Technology for recording temperatures has changed. Urban heat-island
effects continue. Data adjustments made by alarmists appear biased.

Dennis
T. Avery, and co-author S.
Fred Singer, wrote Unstoppable
Global Warming — Every 1,500 Years They presented
their findings and stressed, "Most of our modern warming
occurred before 1940, before much human-emitted CO2. The net warming
since 1940 is a minuscule 0.2 degree C – with no warming at all in
the last nine years. The Greenhouse Theory can't explain these realities,
but the 1,500-year cycle does." The cycle is solar induced.
Ice
cores show sun, not humans, controlling Earth's climate.

So, no consensuses
surfaced.

None need exist
when the subjects are scientific.

Hypotheses
and theories should continue to be tested.

By different
skeptical approaches each scientist at this gathering proved he
was courageous. Why courageous? Because, to be a climate change
skeptic is political-funding suicide. Few feel they can step forward
before they retire. Many, even when gathered together and taking
courage from the presence of so many others, felt they had to step
away from being in group pictures. Those are choices. They are respected.

Debunking the
false "consensus" position of climate alarmists didn't
end with the mere conclusion of the conference. Several synchronous
efforts include: A Manhattan
Declaration on Climate Change. It was endorsed by scientists
and researchers. The document stated clearly that "Global warming"
is not a global crisis. This tangible product with many signatories
declared among other points: That attempts by governments
to inflict taxes and costly regulations on industry and individual
citizens with the aim of reducing emissions of CO2 will pointlessly
curtail the prosperity of the West and progress of developing nations
without affecting climate; the furtherance of the nascent International
Climate Science Coalition (ICSC)
publication of a current and future Nongovernmental International
Panel on Climate Change report (NIPCC)
a new journal on climate science; making video presentations from
the conference online; making audio CDs of either a session or the
complete conference available; enlistment of interested parties
into a speakers bureau; and a 2009 London conference being planned.

This agenda
is aggressive, necessary, and appreciated. Hopefully there will
be many others who step up, especially in response to Vaclav Klaus'
plea that we recognize that the issue has never been global climate
cooling or global climate warming. It has always and ever been about
political power and control of earth's population.

For
over seventeen years I have witnessed at United Nations international
gatherings so much ego, money and meeting time being poured into
this global central plan to ration energy — to control carbon dioxide
by controlling people. To control people by controlling carbon dioxide.
To brand the stuff of life — carbon — a deadly pollutant. Political,
activist and business careers, especially legal careers, now depend
upon creating this new bureaucratic global layer of rules and regulations.
The new-age rulers want the wealth and power that will accrue to
them as they impose their centralized, consummate plans upon us.

The Czech Republic's
President stands firm, honoring the lives and liberties of his citizenry
against this particular brand of fresh oppression. Would that these
United States had such a courageous leader.

March
11, 2008

Floy
Lilley [send her mail]
is an adjunct faculty member at the Mises Institute. She was formerly
with the University of Texas at Austin’s Chair of Free Enterprise,
and an attorney-at-law in Texas and Florida.

        Pre-Order the book         Pre-Order the audiobook             

We've just finished watching yet another boring presidential debate in which, with the exception of the contributions by Ron Paul, no major issues were debated. Instead, John McCain and Mitt Romney were permitted to spend the bulk of the time arguing about the supposedly major differences that separate them, when in fact they actually agree on everything.

And that's what our larger debate in American society is like, too: we never get to discuss fundamentals, only minutiae. Should we have troops in 129 countries or 130? Income tax or national sales tax? This restriction on freedom or that one?

Ron Paul is about to blow the lid off the whole political establishment, the whole crooked game of which McCain, Romney, Clinton, and Obama, for all their supposed differences, are all an intimate part.

Ron Paul has written The Revolution: A Manifesto, to be released by Grand Central Publishing. It covers everything establishment politicians lie about or ignore: war, sound money, terrorism, the economy, the IRS, civil liberties — you name it. It's written to be understood by ordinary people — and to wake them up.

It is the most extraordinary book ever written by a public figure in America. And Ron Paul, as we well know, isn't just any public figure. He is the great truth-teller of our time, and the greatest champion of freedom the U.S. Congress has ever seen. Ron Paul is throwing down the gauntlet, defining the issues that he and his movement — which are not going away — intend to hammer home from now until the end of time.

The preface to the book is already online, courtesy of Grand Central Publishing (which is not connected to the Book Bomb). Read it at the Preface link here.

An excerpt:

Every election cycle we are treated to candidates who promise us "change," and 2008 has been no different. But in the American political lexicon, "change" always means more of the same: more government, more looting of Americans, more inflation, more police-state measures, more unnecessary war, and more centralization of power.

Real change would mean something like the opposite of those things. It might even involve following our Constitution. And that's the one option Americans are never permitted to hear….

With national bankruptcy looming, politicians from both parties continue to make multi-trillion dollar promises of "free" goods from the government, and hardly a soul wonders if we can still afford to have troops in — this is not a misprint — 130 countries around the world. All of this is going to come to an end sooner or later, because financial reality is going to make itself felt in very uncomfortable ways. But instead of thinking about what this means for how we conduct our foreign and domestic affairs, our chattering classes seem incapable of speaking in anything but the emptiest platitudes, when they can be bothered to address serious issues at all. Fundamental questions like this, and countless others besides, are off the table in our mainstream media, which focuses our attention on trivialities and phony debates as we march toward oblivion.

This is the deadening consensus that crosses party lines, that dominates our major media, and that is strangling the liberty and prosperity that were once the birthright of Americans. Dissenters who tell their fellow citizens what is really going on are subject to smear campaigns that, like clockwork, are aimed at the political heretic. Truth is treason in the empire of lies.

There is an alternative to national bankruptcy, a bigger police state, trillion-dollar wars, and a government that draws ever more parasitically on the productive energies of the American people. It's called freedom. But as we've learned through hard experience, we are not going to hear a word in its favor if our political and media establishments have anything to say about it.

If we want to live in a free society, we need to break free from these artificial limitations on free debate and start asking serious questions once again. I am happy that my campaign for the presidency has finally raised some of them. But this is a long-term project that will persist far into the future. These ideas cannot be allowed to die, buried beneath the mind-numbing chorus of empty slogans and inanities that constitute official political discourse in America.

That is why I wrote this book.

The only drawback to Ron Paul's manifesto is that it will not be released until April 30. That's where RonPaulBookBomb.com, a new grassroots effort, comes in.

The goal of RonPaulBookBomb.com is twofold. First, for The Revolution: A Manifesto to debut at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Second, to reach 1 million Americans with Dr. Paul's manifesto.

The site asks people to pledge to buy at least one copy of Dr. Paul's book on or before the April 30 release date. It keeps a running counter of how many people have pledged. How high can we get it by April 30? (Is there any precedent for anything like this in the history of publishing?)

This book can change our political landscape. It is brilliant and explosive, the kind of book no one in Washington would ever consider writing. The more it sells, the harder it will be for business as usual to go on — and the more firmly we will lay the groundwork for the freedom movement in the years ahead. Here is the instrument to propel the Ron Paul Revolution well into the future.

If the media won't deliver Ron Paul's message to our fellow Americans, we must do so ourselves. This book is a classic for our time, a powerful and devastating indictment of the one-party system that governs and loots us and of the official media that pretends we have a real debate in this country. It is also one of the greatest, most learned and inspiring defenses of freedom and the traditional American republic ever written.

If this doesn't wake up America, nothing will.

The organizers of RonPaulBookBomb.com hope to make publishing history on April 30. Let's go pledge, and make it happen.

And pre-order the book!

Floy Lilley [send her mail] is an adjunct faculty member at the Mises Institute. She was formerly with the University of Texas at Austin'’s Chair of Free Enterprise, and an attorney-at-law in Texas and Florida.