Elon Musk, Falcon 9 Rocket Likely Changed the Economics of Space Exploration
AmericaSpace photo of the first flight of SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral. (Photo: Alan Walters)
Following one of the far too many Republican primary debates in 2012, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was mocked for suggesting the private sector be the focus of future space exploration and colonization efforts. However, considering what Elon Musk and his company just pulled off it may not have been too off base, at all.
The vertical landing successfully executed by the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket last Monday represented not only a milestone for reusable rocket technology but likely the economics of space exploration and colonization. Musk said after the test it could help humans colonize Mars, a far more ambitious short-term goal than Gingrich suggested when he suggested colonizing the moon.
“This is a critical step towards establishing a city on Mars,” he said, during a conference call with reporters after Monday’s launch. “Without [reusable rockets], it would be unaffordable – it dramatically improves my confidence that a city on Mars is possible, it’s what all this is about.”
Musk also noted that each Falcon 9 rocket costs roughly $60 million and the propellant for each launch costs around $200,000. On the flip side, each time NASA launches a rocket into space it costs the taxpayers roughly $150 million.
“The potential cost reduction over the long term is probably in excess of a factor of 100.”
NASA video observing the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in action. (Photo: Courtesy of NASA)
NASA previously set a 2035 target date for sending humans to Mars, but Musk and other private-sector innovators predict that people could be on Mars within 9 to 11 years. The successful orbit and landing of the Falcon 9, as well as the smaller Blue Origin rocket by billionaire Jeff Bezos at a Texas facility after a sub-orbital launch two weeks ago, has others engaged in private efforts increasing their expectations.
“The landing of their first stage is quite significant,” Chris Carberry, executive director of Explore Mars, wrote in an email to FoxNews.com after the launch. “It has been one of the key capabilities they have been developing to enable reusability – and to keep launch costs down. However, this capability also could help advance the goal of landing humans on Mars, by making such missions significantly less expensive.”
Carberry runs a non-profit organization that aims to advance the goal of sending humans to Mars within the next two decades, and says the next big challenge for the two firms is to keep repeating these feats.
(Source: SpaceX)
“Both SpaceX and Blue Origin will need to show that these vehicles are truly reusable – by relaunching previously launched stages,” he explained. “While their primary markets are different (SpaceX is developing an orbital market and Blue Origin’s market is suborbital – for the moment), I think the personal and corporate competition that has arisen could help to stimulate more innovation and generate more public interest.”
Unfortunately, Musk suggested this particular rocket would not be a part of the next journey into orbit and test landing. He called the rocket “one of a kind” yet promised to demonstrate the exact same rocket’s viability in some fashion. Still, the more recent successes have not come without failure.
Previous landing attempts ended in disaster, including the most recent accident that took place last summer. However, those flights attempted landing on an ocean platform, while the landing last week used a former Atlas missile-launching site roughly 6 miles from the Falcon 9 launch pad. Either way, the successful test yielded definitive evidence of one thing: Mr. Gingrich had it right because, as is often the case, the private sector has proven more efficient than the public, once again.
I wrote yesterday that governments want to eliminate cash in order to make it easier to squeeze more money from taxpayers.
But that’s not the only reason why politicians are interested in banning paper money and coins.
They also are worried that paper money inhibits the government’s ability to “stimulate” the economy with artificially low interest rates. Simply stated, they’ve already pushed interest rates close to zero and haven’t gotten the desired effect of more growth, so the thinking in official circles is that if you could implement negative interest rates, people could be pushed to be good little Keynesians because any money they have in their accounts would be losing value.
I’m not joking.
Here’s some of what Kenneth Rogoff, a professor at Harvard and a former economist at the International Monetary Fund, wrote for the U.K.-based Financial Times.
Getting rid of physical currency and replacing it with electronic money would…eliminate the zero bound on policy interest rates that has handcuffed central banks since the financial crisis. At present, if central banks try setting rates too far below zero, people will start bailing out into cash.
And here are some passages from an editorial that also was published in the FT.
…authorities would do well to consider the arguments for phasing out their use as another “barbarous relic”…even a little physical currency can cause a lot of distortion to the economic system. The existence of cash — a bearer instrument with a zero interest rate — limits central banks’ ability to stimulate a depressed economy.
Citi’s Willem Buiter looks at this problem, which is known as the effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal interest rates. …the ELB only exists at all due to the existence of cash, which is a bearer instrument that pays zero nominal rates. Why have your money on deposit at a negative rate that reduces your wealth when you can have it in cash and suffer no reduction? Cash therefore gives people an easy and effective way of avoiding negative nominal rates. …Buiter’s solution to cash’s ability to allow people to avoid negative deposit rates is to abolish cash altogether.
So are they right? Should cash be abolished so central bankers and governments have more power to manipulate the economy?
There’s a lot of opposition from very sensible people, particularly in the United Kingdom where the idea of banning cash is viewed as a more serious threat.
Allister Heath of the U.K.-based Telegraphworries that governments would engage in more mischief if a nation got rid of cash.
Many of our leading figures are preparing to give up on sound money. The intervention I’m most concerned about is Bank of England chief economistAndrew Haldane’s call for a 4pc inflation target, as well as his desire to abolish cash, embrace a purely electronic currency and thus make it easier for the Bank to impose substantially negative interest rates… Imagine that banks imposed -4pc interest rates on savings today: everybody would pull cash out and stuff it under their mattresses. But if all cash were digital, they would be trapped and forced to hand over their money. …all spending would become subject to the surveillance state, dramatically eroding individual liberty. …Money is already too loose – turning on the taps would merely further fuel bubbles at home and abroad.
As for negative interest rates, do we really want those? Or have we concluded that central bankers are doing more harm than good with their attempts to manipulate the economy? …a banknote is an incredibly efficient way to handle small transactions. It is costless, immediate, flexible, no one ever needs a password, it can’t be hacked, and the system doesn’t ever crash. More importantly, cash is about freedom. There are surely limits to the control over society we wish to hand over to governments and central banks? You don’t need to be a fully paid-up libertarian to question whether…we really want the banks and the state to know every single detail of what we are spending our money on and where. It is easy to surrender that freedom – but it will be a lot harder to get back.
Merryn Somerset Webb, a business writer from the U.K., is properly concernedabout the economic implications of a society with no cash.
…at the beginning of the financial crisis, there was much talk about financial repression — the ways in which policymakers would seek to control the use of our money to deal with out-of-control public debt. …We’ve seen capital controls in the periphery of the eurozone… Interest rates everywhere have been at or below inflation for seven years — and negative interest rates are now snaking their nasty way around Europe… This makes debt interest cheap for governments…and it and forces once-prudent savers to move their money into the kind of risky assets that are supposed to drive growth (and tax receipts).
Last but not least, Chris Giles wrote a column for the FT and made one final point that is very much worth sharing.
Mr Haldane’s proposal to ban cash has all the hallmarks of a public official confusing what is convenient for the central bank with what is in the public interest.
Especially since the central bankers are probably undermining long-run economic prosperity with short-run tinkering.
Moreover, the option to engage in Keynesian monetary policy also gives politicians an excuse to avoid the reforms that actually would boost economic performance.Indeed, it’s quite likely that an easy-money policyexacerbates the problems caused by bad fiscal and regulatory policy.
Let’s conclude by noting that maybe the right approach isn’t to give politicians and central bankers more control over money, but rather to reduce government’s control over money. That’s one of the arguments I made in this video I narrated for the Center for Freedom and Prosperity.
[brid video=”7813″ player=”2077″ title=”Time to End the Fed The Origin of Central Banking And Possible Alternatives”]
P.S. By the way, Ryan McKaken at the Mises Institute identifies a third reason why politicians would prefer a cash-free society.
…the elimination of physical cash makes it easier for the state to keep track of private persons, and it assists central banks in efforts to punish saving and expand the money supply by implementing negative interest rate schemes. A third advantage of the elimination of physical cash would be to more easily control people and potential dissidents through the freezing of their bank accounts.
The weapons used in the San Bernardino attack. (Photo: Courtesy of San Bernardino PD)
A federal class action lawsuit was filed in Rochester, New York, against the Justice Department for cross-checking potential gun-buyers with the terror watch list. Paloma Capanna, an attorney, filed the lawsuit on behalf of more than two dozen individuals led by Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America.
Ms. Capanna, a policy analyst with the New York-based gun rights group Shooters Committee on Political Education, took aim in his brief at the Terrorist Screening Database maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, a division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The proposal was raised by the White House in the wake of the San Bernardino terrorist attacks, but allegedly was already put into practiced to some degree in February 2004. However, Ms. Capanna says the policy not only tramples on the “innocent until proven guilty” principle but also would not have prevented the California attack.
“The federal government has enacted nine specific categories of persons, who, through their actions and omissions and after a rigorous legal course, can be deemed to have forfeited their privileges under the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution. Being a named person on a ‘terrorist watch list’ is not a federal statutory disqualifying factor, nor should it be,” Ms. Capanna said in the complaint.
The complaint also underscored how the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., was erroneously added to the federal “no-fly” list, as well as conservative journalist Stephen F. Hayes. There is virtually no recourse to appeal these placements and can take months if not years to be removed. Essentially, there is no due process for those alleged to have terror ties or those who simply have similiar names to others who should be.
The Justice Department has yet to respond to a request for comment, but the plaintiffs asked the federal judge in the Western District of New York to issue an injunction barring federal authorities from cross-checking the National Instant Criminal Background Check used during gun purchases with the terrorist databases. They argued that the policy violates constitutional rights to bear arms, to be free improper searches and seizures, and to due process.
“Permanent deprivation of a fundamental civil right cannot and should not occur because something as small as an alleged, anonymous tip places an individual in a secret database managed by the attorney general, the FBI, and/or the TSC to which the individual has no right of access and no method of recourse,” the complaint continued.
Left: S.C. Rep. Trey Gowdy, the chairman of the House select committee on Benghazi, and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., discusses Russian aggression during the CNN Republican presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum on Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2015, in Simi Valley, Calif. (PHOTOS: GETTY/AP)
South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy, the chair of the House select committee on Benghazi and well-respected conservative, will campaign with and endorse Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. PPD has confirmed Gowdy will appear with Rubio next week in Iowa on Tuesday and Wednesday during a three-day swing through eastern and central Iowa.
“Marco is a rock solid conservative and a strong leader we can trust,” Rep. Gowdy said in a statement. “I look forward to campaigning with him, and introducing my good friend to voters across the state.”
The stops include Burlington, Clinton, and Waterloo. However, it is on February 20, 20016 in Gowdy’s home state of South Carolina where Rubio will likely face a reckoning or path to victory. He put built an organization in preparation for a firewall ahead of his own state’s primary on March 15, 2016, and will need momentum in case his showing is weaker-than-expected or needed in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Currently, Rubio is running a distant third in the Hawkeye State behind Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, recently overtaking Dr. Ben Carson on the average for third place. In New Hampshire, a more moderate state widely believed to be a near or must-win state for Rubio, he is running Trump by over 16 points and is tied with Cruz at 12 percent of the vote in the PPD average of polls.
Chairman Gowdy campaigned for Rubio at a rally in South Carolina last week. Further, Rubio’s campaign manager, Terry Sullivan, worked as a consultant on Gowdy’s 2010 House race. Whether the endorsement is an sign of approval for Rubio’s neoconservative views or a favor that is now being cashed in remains unclear.
PPD Highly Encourages Readers, Subscribers to Research and Support Homeless Veteran Charities
Now that we are full fledged into the Christmas spirit, most find themselves donating to their favorite or convenient charity. There is one charity that touches our heart. These people are trying to branch out and with help they can accomplish the mission.
The average civilian does not understand the plight that our armed forces face everyday after discharge. The military trains these men and women to be protectors, bodyguards, and fighters for those who cannot or will not defend themselves. The training is key in order to survive but then they are to turn off this switch.
Most veterans have a difficult time turning that switch off, they find themselves lost, or even worse useless. The number of homeless veterans is depressing, the very ones that kept us safe in our beds are the very same ones that go without a bed. The Pates are dedicated to doing their part in putting an end to much of this tragedy. The Pates have dedicated their lives to helping the homeless veterans in west Texas.
The mission is to provide these men that have given so much for us a place to call home again.
This transitional community will enable them to get the benefits they deserve simply by having an address. This effort was started by the sale of the Pates personal home, and they are working harder than ever with it all on the line. We know if we as a country work together, we can finally help give back to those who have given so much. This effort can only be accomplished by donations from the entire community of “Americans.”
“Join us and others to help solve this issue and lets help these once great men put their lives back together,” the Pates ask. “Compassion and humanity is still whats great about our great nation. Lets do what we can to once again shine and do wonderful things.”
Who are the Pates? John Pate served in the Army National Guard, an EMT, and Police officer. Vaneta Pate is a LPN (Licensed Practical Nurse).
Mr. Pate has himself used the VA Hospital while receiving eight surgeries in the past year. This gave John an opportunity to speak with fellow veterans during his stay. He had a roommate in the hospital that served in Vietnam, giving the two men tome got to know one another. After some time, John’s roommate in the hospital confided that he was homeless. That was an eye-opening experience for The Pates.
According to recent studies, there are more than 50,000 homeless veterans in the United States and over 2000 veterans sleep on the streets at any given night in the El Paso area. . The decision was made for the Pate Family, they decided that all the profits from the sale of their home would be utilized to build a community for our homeless veterans.
Now the mission is on its way and we can help. How you ask? Research the project and make a donation via either of the methods below.
Donations can be mailed to
Freedom Home For The Forgotten
P.O. Box 392
Sierra Blanca, Texas 79851
You can also contact them by telephone 423-521-2890.
US national debt piles up next to the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., where no one has the political courage to rise to the challenge of staving off the coming crisis.
Politicians hate cash. That may seem an odd assertion given that they love spending money–other people’s money, of course. But what I’m talking about is the fact that politicians get upset when there’s not 100 percent compliance with tax laws.
They hate tax havens since the option of a fiscal refuge makes confiscatory taxation impractical.
And they hate cash because it gives consumers an anonymous payment mechanism.
Let’s explore the animosity to cash.
It’s basically because a cashless society is an easier-to-tax society, as expressed by an editorial from the U.K.-based Financial Times.
…unlike electronic money, it cannot be tracked. That means cash favours anonymous and often illicit activity; its abolition would make life easier for a government set on squeezing the informal economy out of existence. …Value added tax, for example, could be automatically levied. …Greece, in particular, could make lemonade out of lemons, using the current capital controls to push the country’s cash culture into new habits.
And some countries are actually moving in this direction.
J.D. Tuccille looks at this issue in an article for Reason.
Peter Bofinger of the German Council of Economic Experts…wants to abolish the use of cash… He frets that old-fashioned notes enable undeclared work and black markets, and stand in the way of central bank monetary policy. So rather than adjust policy to be more palatable to the public, he’d rather leave no shadows in which the public can hide from his preferred policies. The idea is to make all economic activity visible so that people have to submit to control. Denmark, which has the highest tax rates in Europe and a correspondingly booming shadow economy, is already moving in that direction. …the Danmarks Nationalbank will stop internal printing of banknotes and minting of coins in 2016. After all, why adjust tax and regulatory policy to be acceptable to constitutents when you can nag them and try to reinvent the idea of money instead?
By the way, some have proposed similar policies in the United States, starting with a ban on $100 bills.
Notwithstanding my attempt to be clever, the tide is moving in the wrong direction. Cash is beginning to vanish in Sweden, as reported by The New York Times.
…many of the country’s banks no longer accept or dispense cash. Bills and coins now represent just 2 percent of Sweden’s economy, compared with 7.7 percent in the United States and 10 percent in the euro area. This year, only a fifth of all consumer payments in Sweden have been made in cash, compared with an average of 75 percent in the rest of the world, according to Euromonitor International. …Cash machines, which are controlled by a Swedish bank consortium, are being dismantled by the hundreds
Though the article notes that there is some resistance.
Not everyone is cheering. Sweden’s embrace of electronic payments has alarmed consumer organizations and critics who warn of a rising threat to privacy and increased vulnerability to sophisticated Internet crimes. …The government has not sought to stem the cashless tide. If anything, it has benefited from more efficient tax collection, because electronic transactions leave a trail; in countries like Greece and Italy, where cash is still heavily used, tax evasion remains a big problem. Leif Trogen, an official at the Swedish Bankers’ Association, acknowledged that banks were earning substantial fee income from the cashless revolution.
What matters, by the way, is not the degree to which consumers prefer to use alternatives to cash.
That’s perfectly fine, and it explains much of what we see on this map.
The problem is when governments use coercion to limit and/or abolish cash so that politicians have more power. And (gee, what a surprise) this is why the French are trying to crack down on cash.
Writing for the U.K.-based Telegraph, Matthew Lynn mentions the new policy and France and also explores some worrisome implications of this anti-cash trend.
France is banning the use of cash for transactions worth more than €1,000…part of a growing movement among academics and now governments to gradually ban the use of cash completely. …it is a “barbarous relic”, as some publications loftily dismiss it. The trouble is, cash is also incredibly efficient. And it is a crucial part of a free society. There is no convincing case for abolition. …When it comes to creeping state control, it is no surprise to find the French out in front. …A cashless economy would be far easier to both tax and control. But hold on. Is that something we really want? In reality, cash is far too valuable to be given up lightly. In truth, the benefits of abolition are largely oversold. While terrorists and criminals may well use cash to buy weapons, or deal in drugs, it is very hard to believe that they would not find some other way of financing their operations if it was abolished. Are there really any cases of potential jihadists being foiled because they couldn’t find two utility bills (less than three months old, of course) in a false name to open an account?
Amen. Banning cash to stop terrorists is about as foolish as thinking that gun control will thwart jihadists.
In any event, we need to consider trade-offs. Chris Giles highlighted that issue in a piece for the Financial Times.
…an unfortunate rhetorical echo of Maoist China. It is illiberal… Some argue there would be beneficial side effects from abolishing notes and coins through the regularisation of illegal activities. Really? …Cash would have to be abolished everywhere and the BoE does not have those powers, thankfully. The anonymity of cash helps to free people from their governments and some criminality is a price worth paying for liberty.
Though I suppose we should grudgingly give politicians credit for cleverly trying exploit fear to expand their power.
But never forget we’re talking about a bad version of clever. If they succeed, that will be bad news for freedom. J.D. Tuccille of Reasonexplains in a second articlewhy a growing number of people prefer to use cash.
Many Americans happily and quietly avoid banks and trendy purchasing choices in favor of old-fashioned paper money. Lots of business gets done that way…the Albuquerque Journal pointed out that over a third of households in the city either avoid banks entirely (the “unbanked”) or else keep a checking account but do much of their business through cash, check-cashing shops, pawn shops, money orders, and other “alternative financial products” (the “underbanked”). A few weeks earlier, the Kansas City Star reported a similar local situation… In both cities, the phenomenon is growing. …Twenty-six percent cite privacy as a reason for keeping clear of banks – bankers say that increased federal reporting and documentation requirements drive many customers away. “A lot of people are afraid of Uncle Sam,” Greg Levenson, president and CEO of Southwest Capital Bank, told the Albuquerque Journal. …It’s a fair bet that those who “have managed to earn income in the shadow economy” and want to keep their income unreported to the feds and undiminished by fees are heavily overrepresented among the unbanked. …most people aren’t idiots. When they avoid expensive, snoopy financial institutions, it’s because they’ve decided the benefits outweigh the costs.
Very well said, though I’d augment what he wrote by noting that some of these folks probably would like to be banked but are deterred by high costs resulting from foolish government money-laundering laws.
More on that later.
Let’s stay with the issue of whether cash should be preserved. A business writer from the U.K. is very uneasy about the notion of a society with no cash.
…tax authorities have become increasingly keen on tracking everything and everyone to make absolutely certain that no assets slip under their radars. The Greeks have been told that, come 2016, they must begin to declare all cash over €15,000 held in safes or mattresses, and all precious stones, gold and the like worth more than €30,000. Anyone else think there might be a new tax coming on all that stuff? …number-crunchers…are maddened by the fact that even as we are provided with lots of simple digital payment methods we still like to use cash: the demand for £20 and £50 notes has been rising. …They are maddened because “as untraceable bearer instruments, it is not possible to locate where banknotes are being held at any one time”… Without recourse to physical cash, we are all 100% dependent on the state-controlled digital world for our financial security. Worse, the end of cash is also the end of privacy: if you have to pay for everything digitally, every transaction you ever make (and your location when you make it) will be on record. Forever. That’s real repression.
She nails it. If politicians get access to more information, they’ll levy more taxes and impose more control.
And that won’t end well.
Last but not least, the Chairman of Signature Bank, Scott Shay, warns about the totalitarian temptations that would exist in a cash-free world. Here’s some of what he wrote in a column for CNBC.
In 2010,VisaandMasterCard, bowed to government pressure — not even federal or state law — and banned all online-betting payments from their systems. This made it virtually impossible for these gambling sites to continue operating regardless of their jurisdiction or legality. It is not too far-fetched to wonder if the day might come when the health records of an overweight individual would lead to a situation in which they find that any sugary drink purchase they make through a credit or debit card is declined. …You might think then that the person can always pay cash and remain outside the purview of these technologies. This may be the case for the moment, but we are well on the road to becoming a cashless society. …there is…a sinister risk…a cashless society would certainly give governments unprecedented access to information and power over citizens.
And, he warns, that information will lead to mischief.
Currently, we have little evidence to indicate that governments will refrain from using this power. On the contrary, the U.S. government is already using its snooping prowess and big-data manipulation in some frightening ways. …the U.S. government is becoming very fond of seizing money from citizens first and asking questions later via “civil forfeiture.” Amazingly, the government is permitted by law to do this even if it is only government staff members who have a suspicion, not proof, of wrongdoing. …In recent years, it made it increasingly difficult for companies to operate or individuals to transact by adding compliance hurdles for banks wishing to deal with certain categories of clients. By making it too expensive to deal with certain clients or sending the signal that a bank should not deal with a particular client or type of client, the government can almost assuredly keep that company or person out of the banking system. Banks are so critically dependent on government regulatory approval for their actions… It is easy to imagine a totalitarian regime using these tools to great harm.
Some folks will read Shay’s piece and downplay his concerns. They’ll say he’s making a slippery slope argument.
But there are very good reasons, when dealing with government, to fear that the slope actually is slippery.
Let’s close by sharing my video on the closely related topic of money laundering. These laws and regulations have been imposed supposedly to fight crime.
P.P.S. If politicians want to improve tax compliance in a non-totalitarian fashion, there is a very successful recipe for reducing the underground economy.
New research shows the relationship between marriage, health and well-being.
High on most checklists for ensuring a long and healthy life is being married. Marriage is said to bestow protective health benefits, such as low blood pressure and better cholesterol numbers.
But does putting a ring on it confer the same well-being to all married couples or even most? No, according to a recent study out of Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City. It suggested that people in “ambivalent marriages” are not so healthy as other married couples.
This and similar studies have their critics, but they provide a needed deeper look into the nature of each marriage. The Brigham Young researchers asked married people without children to answer questions on how their spouse responds to their worries, their requests for advice and, importantly, their good news. Does the spouse share in their happiness?
About three-quarters of the husbands and wives surveyed see their spouse as sometimes supportive, sometimes not. They are ambivalent.
The researchers repeatedly took all the respondents’ blood pressure readings. Not surprisingly, those in relationships with mixed levels of support had higher blood pressure than those in consistently supportive marriages.
Some social scientists looked at the Brigham Young study and suggested that the health drain in an ambivalent marriage may not be the spouse’s negativity so much as the unpredictability.
“When you know someone is not going to be supportive, you acclimatize to that,” Arthur Aron of the Interpersonal Relationships Lab at Stony Brook University in New York told a reporter. “But if they are sometimes one way and sometimes the other way, it’s much harder.”
Ambivalence could help explain why so many couples live together rather than marry. Some of that could be a matter of keeping one’s options open and, with it, an expectation of constant change reinforced by the gig economy. In other, more bloodless words, staying a free agent leaves a path open “should something better come along.”
Surely, some of these couples end up marrying to end the craziness of having options. Not that divorce isn’t a possibility. It obviously is, but it’s a lot less traumatic to simply pack one’s suitcase and, as the song goes, “hop on the bus, Gus” than to go to court.
In olden times, marriage was an unbreakable lifetime vow for all except heiresses and Hollywood stars. The joke went: “Would I ever consider divorce? Never. Murder, frequently.”
The anthropologist Margaret Mead saw the growing acceptance of divorce as a destabilizing influence on marriages way back in the 1940s. She wrote: “Quarreling, sulking, neglectfulness, stubbornness, could be indulged very differently within a frame that could not be broken. But now over every quarrel hangs the questions: ‘Do you want a divorce? Do I want a divorce?'” And so forth.
In the interest of full disclosure, let us note that Mead herself was married and divorced three times. And she famously said that all her marriages were happy ones.
Mead knew that access to divorce had become an escape hatch adding an element of unpredictability to the marriage bond. This form of unpredictability wasn’t a measure of a spouse’s day-to-day reaction to his or her partner’s successes or need for comfort and advice. It was the growing unpredictability of the whole marriage enterprise.
In light of the Brigham Young study and the role the divorce option might play in undermining marital stability, one may question whether marriage is much of a health benefit at all. Perhaps the growing popularity of cohabitation simply took the ambivalent couples out of the marriage statistics. Perhaps living alone is not so bad.
Today, though, let’s be momentarily serious and enjoy a Christmas present to the nation from an unexpected source. The Obama Administration has announced that the odious practice of asset forfeiture is going to be curtailed.
Here are some excerpts from a Washington Postreport.
The Department of Justiceannounced this weekthat it’s suspending a controversial program that allows local police departments to keep a large portion of assets seized from citizens under federal law and funnel it into their own coffers. The “equitable-sharing” program gives police the option of prosecuting asset forfeiturecases under federal instead of state law. Federal forfeiture policies are more permissive than many state policies, allowing police to keep up to 80 percent of assets they seize — even if the people they took from are never charged with a crime. …Criminal justice reformers are cheering the change. “This is a significant deal,” said Lee McGrath, legislative counsel at the Institute for Justice.
But don’t get too excited. This almost certainly is not a sign of genuine libertarian thinking inside the Obama Administration.
Indeed, the story suggests that the Justice Department made this change at least in part because it didn’t want to share money with state and local governments.
The DOJ is suspending payments under this program due to budget cuts included in therecent spending bill. “While we had hoped to minimize any adverse impact on state, local, and tribal law enforcement partners, the Department is deferring for the time being any equitable sharing payments from the Program,” M. Kendall Day, chief of the asset forfeiture and money laundering section,wrote in a letterto state and local law enforcement agencies. In addition to budget cuts last year, the program has lost $1.2 billion, according to Day’s letter. “The Department does not take this step lightly,” he wrote. “We explored every conceivable option that would have enabled us to preserve some form of meaningful equitable sharing. … Unfortunately, the combined effect of the two reductions totaling $1.2 billion made that impossible.”
Now that we’ve been serious, let’s get back into the Christmas spirit.
An article in The Atlantic looks at Christmas cards, as designed by economists. Mostly they showed why we’re not at the top of people’s invite lists for holiday parties. Here are my two favorites.
Yup, only economists could describe things like love and family in this fashion!
I don’t even know how to characterize this card, but this sometimes is how economists think.
Last but not least, here are a couple of great Christmas-themed cartoons from two years ago, both by Michael Ramirez.
We’ll start with a Christmas wish that Santa hopefully granted.
After perusing that data, some of us may not be feeling like our statist friends deserve any holiday cheer. But this is Christmas, so let’s try to feel love and joy. So if you see some of your government worshipping friends and family today, we even have a Christmas greeting that’s appropriate for leftists.
The Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) released a new video the day before Christmas Eve showing the execution of alleged spies in Syria. The Islamist fighters are seen shooting men on their knees at point-blank range in this highly-graphic and disturbing clip.
PPD reluctantly releases these videos for the purpose of educating the millions of Americans who find this level of barbarism unimaginable. But, as we all willingly turn a blind eye to it, the spread of radical Islam and the level violence that comes with it continues. The reason
When we educate ourselves on these individual horrific acts, we can begin to spur interest in educating ourselves about the ideology that causes other humans to carry them out. Here’a good place to start:
Timeline Photos – The Children’s Home – a roots and wings organization (Photo: Facebook)
As if to promise a Christmas present, Congress has just finished approving the finances of the federal government for the next few months. Santa Claus would have done a better job. During early 2016, Congress will pay the government’s bills by borrowing money from individual and institutional lenders. Those folks will lend the feds all the money the feds need because the law requires the feds to pay them back.
The “pay them back” ideology is a very curious one. It is true that the full faith and credit of the federal government guarantees the payment of the government’s debts. Without that lawfully binding guarantee, who would lend money to an institution that carries a debt of $18.8 trillion? So the investors who have lent money to the feds know that their debts will be repaid in a timely manner.
Because the federal government spends $1.5 trillion more annually than it collects in taxes and other revenue and because its payments of interest alone on the money it has borrowed will soon be about $1 trillion a year, it can only repay its debts by borrowing more money.
Since 1911, the federal government has not repaid a debt from tax revenue. It has always borrowed more money to pay its lenders. This is known to economists as rolling over the debt.
President Woodrow Wilson — who gave us a racially segregated military and federal civilian workforce, brought us into the horrific and useless World War I, arrested Americans for singing German beer hall songs in public, campaigned for the federal income tax by promising it would never exceed 3 percent of income, helped to create the cash-printing Federal Reserve, laid the groundwork for Prohibition, and kept Jim Crow going — borrowed $30 billion to pay for World War I. That money was borrowed from investors and from the Federal Reserve, which in those days literally printed the cash that it lent.
The $30 billion that Wilson borrowed was repaid by the feds with borrowed dollars. And the folks who lent the feds those dollars were in turn repaid with borrowed dollars. That inflationary cycle has been repeated countless times since all this borrowing from Peter to pay Paul became the financing method of choice for the feds.
As a result of this, the federal government still owes the $30 billion that Wilson borrowed, but it owes it — obviously — to different lenders from those who originally financed the Great War. It has paid more than $15 billion in interest payments on that $30 billion.
Who could run a household or a business the way the feds have run the government in the past 100 years?
As we approach a presidential election year, the federal financing-by-borrowing scheme is seen as a standard operating procedure by all the Democratic candidates and by all the Republicans, as well, except for Sen. Rand Paul. He and he alone among the major candidates would have the feds live within their means and stop the vicious circle that Wilson began.
He understands that government has limits. Those limits are written down in the Constitution. He recognizes, as his competitors do not, that the government simply cannot morally or constitutionally right any wrong, regulate any behavior, borrow any amount, or tax any event as long as it can politically get away with it. When it does, we end up with war and debt.
Whenever you hear a presidential candidate proclaiming that the first job of the president is to keep America safe, challenge that absurdity. Invite that candidate to read the Constitution, which lays out the jobs of the president — the principal of which is to keep us free and safe. If a president keeps us safe but unfree, he is simply not doing his job.
Only Sen. Paul has made that argument.
The world today is a sad place, and those who love freedom sometimes feel we are shoveling against the tide. But for just a moment, at this time of year, we should pause and remember an event that occurred about 2,000 years ago in the Middle East.
The world then was a far worse place, yet a light seared through the darkness. A baby was born in a cave. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. The baby came into the world so that we might have life and live it abundantly. The baby came into the world so that we would be set free from our own sins, free from the temptations of the world and free from the governments that seek to control us.
The baby was the Son of God and the Prince of Peace and the savior of the world. This week we celebrate His birthday.
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