Money Bomb

Lincoln may not have welcomed Obama's election

by Leonard Pitts

On Tuesday, Barack Obama will stand on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and take an oath making him the nation's first president of African heritage.

The statue of Abraham Lincoln, which sits facing the Capitol in a temple two miles away, will not give two thumbs up. Neither will it weep, commune with the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. or dance a Macarena of joy.

The point is obvious, yes, but also necessary given that when Obama was elected in November, every third political cartoonist seemed to use an image of a celebrating Lincoln to comment upon the milestone that had occurred. Lincoln, they told us, would have been overjoyed.

For more on this commentary, go to McClatchy Newspapers

Sweatshops offer world's poor hope, not despair

by Nicholas D. Kristof

Before Barack Obama and his team act on their talk about “labor standards,” I’d like to offer them a tour of the vast garbage dump here in Phnom Penh.

This is a Dante-like vision of hell. It’s a mountain of festering refuse, a half-hour hike across, emitting clouds of smoke from subterranean fires.

The miasma of toxic stink leaves you gasping, breezes batter you with filth, and even the rats look forlorn. Then the smoke parts and you come across a child ambling barefoot, searching for old plastic cups that recyclers will buy for five cents a pound. Many families actually live in shacks on this smoking garbage.

Mr. Obama and the Democrats who favor labor standards in trade agreements mean well, for they intend to fight back at oppressive sweatshops abroad. But while it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough.

For more on this commentary, go to The New York Times

Surviving the Great Depression II? Yes, we can!

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

For years, many of us puzzled about how something so stupid and destructive as the New Deal could have happened. The stock market crashed because it was over-inflated. That's nothing new. History is filled with credit-filled bubbles that pop. Resources are reallocated to reflect economic reality and we move on.

The New Deal was different. It actually began under Hoover, who initiated new spending programs and jobs programs, and tried to inflate the money supply and bail out the banks. He was blasted by FDR for his big government policies, and FDR won the election. Once in power, FDR went nuts, instituting a program of central planning that combined features of the Soviet and Fascist models.

For more on this commentary, go to LewRockwell.com

The bankruptcy of mainstream economics

Banks, home builders, and auto manufacturers are not the only ones going belly-up these days. If we may credit Louis Uchitelle's January 7 report in the New York Times, mainstream economists have, in effect, declared their intellectual bankruptcy. According to Uchitelle,

Frightened by the recession and the credit crisis that produced it, the nation's mainstream economists are embracing public spending to repair the damage – even those who have long resisted a significant government role in a market system. . . . Hundreds of economists who gathered here [in San Francisco] for the annualmeeting of the American Economic Association seemed to acknowledge that a
profound shift had occurred. At their last meeting, ideas about using public
spending as a way to get out of a recession or about government taking a role to
enhance a market system were relegated to progressives. The mainstream was
skeptical or downright hostile to such suggestions. This time, virtuallyeveryone
voiced their support, returning to a way of thinking that had goneout of fashion
in the 1970s.

At this point, one cannot help but recall Proverbs 26:11: "As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly."

Modern economics suffers from a variety of weaknesses and defects, among which faddishness ranks high. The chronic pursuit of fads, however, springs from a more serious problem: the mainstream profession's faulty epistemological foundation – positivist presumptions that lead economists to believe that by aping nineteenth-century physicists they are acting as "scientists." Laboring under this grave misconception, they are destined to be blown erratically by the winds of changing events. So tenuous is the contemporary appreciation of economic verities that the slightest apparent breakdown of the economic order completely befuddles the economists and sends them running about wildly in search of a new model that will predict better than the old, now discredited one.

For more on this commentery, go to LewRockwell.com

Alan Greenspan - The real culprit of the current economic crisis

by Stefan Karlsson

With no one denying anymore the obvious fact that America is in a deep slump, the discussion has instead shifted to why it happened. The Austrians (including me) who predicted these problems based on Greenspan's low-interest-rate policy know of course that the main cause was that low-interest-rate policy, with his numerous bailouts of failed financial institutions also creating a moral hazard that encouraged risky behavior.

But non-Austrians who for various reasons seem determined to exonerate the central bank have instead offered various other explanations. I will not here answer them all here. Instead, I will simply comment on the most common alternative explanations and the various arguments used for the explicit purpose of exonerating Greenspan.

For more on this op/ed, go to Mises. org.

IUPUI - the face of intolerance, and ignorance

Ga. Tech ordered to pay $200K in speech-code case

In March 2006 two brave Georgia Tech students, Orit Sklar and Ruth Malhotra, launched a challenge to several unconstitutional policies at the school. These policies included a speech code, a restrictive speech zone, discriminatory student-fee regulations, and a program of state religious indoctrination called "Safe Space" that explicitly compared those who have traditional views of sexual morality to slaveowners. (Full disclosure: Ruth and Orit are represented by the Alliance Defense Fund Center for Academic Freedom, and I am lead counsel in the case.)

Despite the fact that, if successful, Orit and Ruth would restore the First Amendment rights of every single student, they were immediately subjected to the most vile threats on campus and dishonest reporting off campus. The university's own campaign of disinformation aided and abetted the students' enemies.

For more on this story, go to Phi Beta Cons, David French's higher education blog on National Review Online

New Year's Substitutions

by Gary North

Well, it’s that time of the year again. All over America, smart people are sending out last-minute charity donation checks to get their income tax deductions for 2003, making sure they get stamped, dated receipts from the Postal Service (this costs an extra 37 cents).

Other smart people are making last-minute sales decisions on investments that did well, offsetting the capital gains tax by selling investments that did poorly.

But most people aren’t this smart. They are spending their time looking forward to New Year’s Eve parties and the bowl games (husbands, anyway) on New Year’s Day. College football teams that nobody outside of the home town paid any attention to three months ago will fight it out for mythical second through tenth place, which will entitle them to be forgotten by January 2nd. One team will wind up number one. The public will remember which one until at least Super Bowl XXXVIII, just as they remember the winners of Super Bowls past: Packers, NFC (I), Packers, NFC (II), Jets, AFC (III: Joe Namath > Earl Morrall/Johnny Unitas) . . . ?

This op/ed piece was originally published on Dec. 31, 2003 on LewRockwell.com where it can be read in full.

Neese pulling double duty as Pratt mayor, police chief yields fine, prohibition from public office

CHARLESTON - Former Pratt mayor Ann Neese must repay town officials $7,000 and pay a $500 fine for violating state ethics rules, the state Ethics Commission ruled this week.

Neese resigned as mayor in August. In June, she resigned as Pratt's interim police chief, a job she had been holding since 2006.

Ethics officials said Neese appointed herself interim police chief in April 2006, after the town's former police chief resigned suddenly. That summer, officials for the state Ethics Commission told Neese she could not be both mayor and police chief at the same time, but Neese replied she was only acting as police chief until she could hire someone else to fill the job.

Neese made $400 a month as mayor, but reported working more than 3,000 hours of overtime as police chief between 2006 and her resignation in June. Ethics officials said Neese made $34,118 as police chief in 2006, $29,200 as police chief in 2007 and $16,128 in the first half of 2008.

"From summer 2006 through January 2008, the Ethics Commission's staff clearly and repeatedly advised [Neese] that she could not serve both as mayor and police chief without violating the Ethics Act," ethics officials wrote.

Members of the ethics commission voted on Feb. 7 to initiate an ethics complaint against the former mayor. Neese resigned as police chief in June, saying her resignation had nothing to do with ethics proceedings. She resigned as mayor in August.

Ethics officials ruled Thursday that Neese would have to pay back the town $7,000 for unauthorized overtime and pay the ethics commission a $500 fine.

She was also prohibited from holding public office or working for any municipality for 10 years.

Neese declined comment on Friday, referring to a four-page response she filed with the ethics commission.

In her response, Neese said she thought she was acting legally while serving as interim police chief. Neese said she was trying to honor a promise to the citizens of Pratt to provide 24-hour-a-day police protection.
She also said she was deeply affected by the deaths of her mother and aunt within a month of one another in 2007.

"After the death of my mom, I went through the motions of working, but I had no concept of time or date," Neese wrote. "It took all I had to get through the day and night. I remembered that my job was to protect and serve the citizens of Pratt, and on that I did not waver....

"I thought I was doing what was best for Pratt.... To have acted with love for Pratt and those wonderful people who supported me leaves me with sadness that I did not get to complete the job to which I was elected."

This story originally appeared in the Nov. 14 edition of The Charleston Gazette, and is reprinted with permisison.