‘Greedflation’: Biden’s Scandalous Blame Shifting

In Progressives Urge Biden to Push Harder on ‘Greedflation’, the Washington Post reports that President Biden’s campaign advisers are urging him to peddle “greedflation,” the ridiculous moniker meant to blame big business for inflation. Biden and many Democrats have been using this grossly unjust smear on and off for a while. Now they want Biden to make it central to his campaign. 

Biden is just the latest in a long line of politicians who blame private enterprise for the disasters their own inflationary policies caused. (Janet Yellen also blamed consumers. But the main focus is on business, probably America’s most persecuted minority today.) 

Inflation, properly understood, is strictly a monetary phenomenon—an artificial, unwarranted expansion of the money supply, which acts as a tax, not on actual dollars, but on the purchasing power of the dollar. The resulting general rise in prices (as opposed to the isolated price spikes caused by supply chain disruptions, tariffs, and the like) is actually the manifestation of the falling value of the dollar. And everyone—business big and small, consumers, workers, and even state governments, everyone—is stuck dealing with it the best they can. There can only be one cause. The government. In the U.S. the government nationalized money over 100 years ago. So how can Biden and the misnamed “Progressives” blame business? Simple. He and they are desperate liars.

But as I said, Biden’s not the first blame-shifting scoundrel. In the 1970s, the last inflation disaster, three presidents blamed private enterprise; Nixon (wage/price controls), Ford (his WIN initiative), and Carter (Council on Wage and Price Stability). All engaged in dishonest victim-blaming. All were morally despicable. And so is Biden’s latest campaign scheme. Every American should be morally outraged. No one should be duped; I will not be. The current inflation is a result of Biden’s spending/monetary policies layered on top of Trump’s spending/monetary policies. And that’s it. 

Related Reading:

Joe Biden’s Despicable ,Unjust Blame Game

Memo to Jersey City Mayor Fulop: The Federal Reserve, Not Supermarkets, is to Blame for 'Hidden Food Inflation'

Economics in One Lesson—Henry Hazlitt

Did the New York Times Just Vindicate Reaganomics?

Blaming the Victims: The Government’s Theory of Inflation by Robert Higgs

Inflation occurs, by definition, when the economy’s aggregate volume of money expenditure grows faster than its aggregate real output. The excessive growth of money expenditures can have, again by definition, only two sources: either the velocity of monetary circulation grows excessively or the money stock itself grows excessively (or both). Our current inflation is attributable almost entirely to excessive growth of the money stock.

Because the excessive growth of the money stock and the inflation it causes do not happen simultaneously, some people always fail to perceive the relationship. Increases in the money stock take some time before their effect on the volume of expenditure becomes significant. But once the actual lag is recognized, the relationship is seen to be very close.

America: Democratic Republic or Constitutionally Limited Republic?

The Founders were clear on what form of government they intended to create—a republic. They were also clear on what kind of republic—a revolutionary kind never before seen. The basic principles are laid out in the Declaration of Independence—a republican form of government that protects individual rights equally at all times, requires the consent of the governed, and limits the elected officials to that function, thus protecting rights from the tyranny of the majority. 

Yet America’s Founding is widely misunderstood today, thanks largely to the Democratic Party’s centuries long, largely successful reactionary campaign to recast America as a Democracy. Thus it was of interest to me to come across Theodore R. Johnson’s Washington Post article American democracy is fine. It’s the republic that’s in trouble. He’s right, and points in the right directioin. But he still gets some things wrong.

I posted these comments, slightly edited for clarity:

America is not a “democratic republic.” It is a constitutionally limited republic, in which, contrary to Biden and the Democratic party, the inalienable rights of the individual to personal self-governance trumps the vote. When Biden said “the fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow,” he got it exactly backward. Our fundamental rights do not depend on other people’s vote—they are protected from it.  Of course, Biden’s reactionary view is the totalitarian heart of his party that dates back to its pro-slavery “states rights” origins, which held that the enslavement of a segment of Americans could be determined by vote.

America is not based on rule by “the peoples’ will”; i.e., majority rule. That’s a totalitarian concept and leads not to a free, peaceful civil society but to Robespierre and Napoleon. America is a nation that protects individual rights from “the tyranny of the many”—democracy. The people’s will as expressed in electoral outcomes, usually a majority, matters, but only within limits established by the Constitution.

The Electoral College does not “trump the popular vote”: It is based on it, at the state level. It is a balance of power mechanism that protects the relevance of state legislatures vs. the federal government. A national tally is only one way of counting the popular vote, and in a diverse nation it is absurd. Furthermore, an individual’s vote “counts” proportionally more when broken down into 51 distinct contests, rather than thrown into one giant pot of 160 million or so. I prefer the Electoral College, for these and other reasons.

Hamilton was right. “The voice of the people” as expressed in elections needs to be checked, not blindly followed. That’s the purpose of a republic whose elected representatives are themselves checked in their power by an individual rights-protecting constitution.

Related Reading:

Senator Mike Lee is Right: America ‘is not a Democracy’

The 'New American Socialists' Dilemma: The Declaration is as much anti-Socialist as anti-Slavery 

Slavery was in fact defended by pro-slavery Confederate intellectuals like George Fitzhugh on socialist grounds.

America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson

A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War by Harry V. Jaffa

Mesmerized by Elections, the NJ Star-Ledger Forgot that Tyranny is Tyranny

The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty—Timothy Sandefur

Rights and Democracy

Constitutional Republicanism: A Counter-Argument to Barbara Rank’s Ode to Democracy

QUORA: ‘Why does the Electoral College of the United States of America exist?’

Democracy is Democracy

Iraqi Democracy vs. Freedom

Democracy in Action in Egypt

This Memorial Day, Remember that the Military Protects Our Borders, Not Our Freedom

American soldiers killed in action certainly deserve our gratitude and honor. But not for the usually recited reason. 

Memorial Day once again featured the mantra that soldiers died defending our freedom and individual rights. One popular song even includes the phrase, “At least I know I’m free, and I won't forget the ones who died who gave that right to me.” Yet today our rights are under attack on multiple fronts. We are just emerging from a wave of pandemic-related lockdowns imposed by politicians. The news is full of horror stories of business owners being fined and shut down, they and their employees’ livelihoods stripped away, price controls imposed under the guise of “anti-gouging," even their customers arrested, for defying orders by political leaders wielding “emergency powers”.Where’s the military? 

In the last 100 years, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers died on the battlefield. In that same 100 years, our general freedom, especially economic freedom, has steadily eroded due to the growth of the regulatory welfare state. Today we have an administration dictatorially shifting the burden of paying off student loans from the borrower to the rest of us taxpayers, ignoring the rule of law, the courts, and the Constitutional separation of powers, and coercing us into buying electric cars, to name just a couple of freedom restrictions. While our First Amendment freedoms have fared somewhat better, they today face withering attacks on multiple fronts, as are the governmental checks and balances put in place by the Founders to protect us from tyranny due to concentration of government power. Bodily sovereignty is under attack, through vaccine mandates and abortion rights threatened. 

With our freedom and rights threatened or infringed in ever-wider ways, where was the military? Where is the military?

The fact is, contrary to the common well-meaning but wrong-headed Memorial Day propaganda, the military’s job is to protect our borders, not our freedom. Every country has a military. Not every country is free. Why? The fight to establish, maintain, and defend freedom is a philosophical, not a military, fight. It is fought with words and ideas, not guns and tanks. It is fought within, not outside, our borders. It is fought among the civilian, not military, population. The fight for freedom requires, not military combat, but mind-to-mind combat. The Founding generation’s defeat of the British Army, heroic as that was, did not secure our rights. Our rights were secured afterward, on the battlefield of political philosophy and constitutional law. That battlefield—the one of ideas, not arms—is where our Founders took the first and most crucial steps toward fulfilling the promise of the Declaration of Independence, the creation of a government “to secure these rights, drawing their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The enemies of freedom exist not only in foreign dictatorships, but among us right here in America. The military has done a fine job of protecting us from foreign enemies. We, the people of the United States, have done poorly in our job of protecting our rights. By the design of some, the neglect and complacency of others, and ignorance of many, we have granted our government more and more power to restrict our individual rights. We must abandon our false sense of security that we can rely on the military to preserve and restore our liberty. The U.S. military has given us a virtually impenetrable forcefield to live behind. But it did not give us those rights. And it won’t protect those rights. It is entirely up to us, as individual citizens, to secure and restore our freedom and make our rights inalienable.

The military protects our borders from external threats, giving us the protective wall we need to fight the moral and intellectual battle to preserve and protect our liberty rights from internal threats. We're far from an authoritarian state, and we're still very free. But the threats are real. Let's not let it go. That's the best way to honor those who died protecting our country.

Related Reading:

A Memorial Day Tribute

July 4, 1776: Words that Will Never Be Erased

The Declaration of Independence

Atlas Shrugged: America’s Second Declaration of Independence—Onkar Ghate

On This Constitution Day, Remember the Declaration of Independence

On This Veterans Day, Remember the Productive Americans Who Support the Greatest Military in History

The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty – Timothy Sandefur

A New Textbook of Americanism — edited by Jonathan Hoenig

Gaza, not Hamas, Attacked Israel

QUORA: ‘Does anyone really believe Hamas attacked Israel?

I posted this answer:

I don’t. That’s too simplistic. The truth is much broader than that.

Analysis of the Gaza conflict grossly misses the point. I think that to say Hamas attacked Israel way understates the full truth and understanding needed to fully grasp the magnitude of what actually happened on October 7. Hamas was not merely some criminal enterprise operating in an underworld of a nation governed more or less under the rule of law, like the Mexican Drug Cartels.

The fact is, Hamas was the GOVERNMENT of Gaza. Therefore, it was Gaza, not merely Hamas the terrorist group, that attacked Israel, just as it was the Empire of Japan that attacked the USA in 1941. And just as Japan got what it deserved because of its Imperial Government’s attack on Pearl Harbor, so it is that Gaza is getting what IT deserves in attacking Israel. All of the suffering and destruction and death Gaza residents are enduring is what THEIR OWN GOVERNMENT, not Israel, brought down on them.

It's morally black and white. And it’s not merely about terrorism or anti-Semitism. Israel was the victim of an unimaginably vicious, unprovoked aggression directed at civilian targets (which was arguably morally worse even than Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan at least chose a military target). Israel is now defending itself. Who has the moral high ground? By any rational moral judgment, the defender, Israel—100%.

Israel shouldn't be called on to “cease fire” (i.e. surrender). The world should demand that Hamas unconditionally surrender, just as Japan did. And the world should commit to tracking down and forcing Hama members to answer for their war crimes, along with Hama’s state sponsors, just as the Nazis and Japanese war mongers did. The Gazan War would end immediately, just as WWII did.

[Supplemental, posted 5/15/24]

Some of the comments indicate the need for some clarification of my position. Apparently, I left the impression on some that anything Israel does in response to Oct. 7 is justified. That’s certainly not the case.

Israel is not seeking, and should never seek, revenge. For Israel to become like Hamas would surrender its moral high ground. Israel is fighting a war of self defense, not revenge. It does not target civilians. Its goal is military. When Japan attacked America, President FDR set the goal of his defensive military strategy—Japan’s (and the other Axis Powers’) unconditional surrender. It took Truman’s atomic bombs to reach that goal regarding Japan. Israel has set a goal to destroy Hamas. Just as America’s goal was not to kill civilians but to force Japan’s surrender, so it is Israel’s goal to eliminate the Gazan Hamas threat. As long as Israel sticks to that goal, and its military operations are in service to that legitimate goal, all consequences, including civilian deaths, are not the moral responsibility of Israel, but of Gaza’s Hamas dictatorship.

One commenter states that “Every conflict has to have a limit and a line not crossed?” Why? For what it’s worth, that is the “standard analysis.” But it’s not mine. There is no line that Israel must adhere to that stands in the way of achieving its strategic goal of eliminating the threat to its people, which is any government’s first responsibility. Israel is the victim! Any line prior to securing the safety of its people amounts to the victory of the aggressor, a moral abomination. I do not believe in Just War Theory. The only line that should not be crossed is for any country to attack another unprovoked, a line which Gaza crossed. 

Related Reading:

"Who is morally responsible for the deaths of innocents in Gaza?"

The Morals of the Israel/Hamas War—and the Vindication of Leonard Piekoff

On “War with Iran” After 3 U.S. Soldiers Killed

Economic Power and a Free and Independent Media

There is a significant and distressing lack of understanding in America about freedom of speech and press. For example, this meme has been circulating on social media:

 

My comment:

There is a basic contradiction in Carlin’s statement. If private media companies can make legally unfettered editorial judgements about what will or will not be published on their outlets, even if slanted—which is their First Amendment right—they are by definition independent (and free). “The news media” is NOT monolithic, as Carlin implies. They are subject to competition, as Elan Musk proved when he bought Twitter and revised its biased policies. Remember that economic power is benign and voluntary because it derives from consumer choice. Economic power is NOT political power, which is coercive because it grows out of the barrel of a governmental gun. I’ll take economically driven media over politically shackled media any day. It is to the glory of America that we [still] have an economically-driven media.

The First Amendment is clear: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. . .” Carlin makes the immensely dangerous equivocation of political and economic power. The First Amendment refers only to political power, and seeks to impose a strict separation of press and state. Carlin’s equivocation implies an opening for the government to step in and enforce an “independent” media, thus making an end run around the First Amendment and—in the name of “an independent media”—substitute political power for economic power, making the press subject to government coercion. On economic vs. political power, see the first link below.

Related Reading:

The Dollar and the Gun by Harry Binswanger

When Private Media ‘Colludes’ With Government, Blame the Government, Not Media: The Dollar is No Match for a Bullet.

Malinowski's Censorship-By-Proxy 'Protecting Americans from Dangerous Algorithms Act' Advances

Americans Abandoning Free Speech Better Brace for the Consequences by J.D. Tuccille for Reason: Government will happily suppress misinformation in favor of misinformation of its own.

Note to #FREEPRESS: A Free Press Derives from Freedom of Speech

Earth Day: a Pro-Human Perspective vs. the Anti-Industrial Revolutionaries

As I've said in past years, Earth Day grew out of the New Left's anti-industrial revolution. It's still true that Earth Day carries a bias against industrialization, man's great achievement at turning a hostile natural environment brimming with potential into a great place to live.

That's because “The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow”, as Ayn Rand observed. So Earth Day powers on as an unthinking celebration of hostile pre-industrial Planet Earth.

One such uncontested (except by Rand) absurdity was inaugurated on April 22, 1970…the first Earth Day. The inability or unwillingness of Americans to understand and appreciate the actual meaning behind that concept has allowed Earth Day to evolve into a powerful symbol of an ideology that is anti-human life.

Ayn Rand coined the term “anti-industrial revolution” to describe the “ecology” movement of the 1960s and 1970s. That movement was the precursor to the modern Environmentalist movement* [I use an upper case 'E' to highlight its ideological nature].

The basic premise of Environmentalism is that “nature” in its raw state—which means unaltered by human intervention—has intrinsic value. But the concept "value" cannot be divorced from the concept valuer. Nothing can have intrinsic value ... i.e., value in and of itself. But that is exactly how Environmentalism sees nature. The consequences to human freedom and well-being by the acceptance of that doctrine are horrendous. Mark Levine puts it thus:

  If nature has "intrinsic value" then nature exists for its own sake. Consequently, man is not to be preferred over any aspect of his natural surroundings. He is no better than any other organism and much worse because of his destructive existence.

  Is not man, therefore, expendable? And if he is, is not the suppression of his liberty, the confiscation of his property, and the blunting of his progress at all times warranted where the purpose is to save the planet - or any part of it - from man himself? After all, it would seem that there can be no end to man's offenses against nature if he is not checked at every turn. (Liberty and Tyranny, pages 121-122)

Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, puts it another way—in terms of a moral standard of value. The environmentalists' standard of moral value is unaltered nature, not human flourishing. Since man's means of survival is to apply productive—i.e., reason-guided—work to the task of transforming the Earth nature gives us into an environment suitable to human living, everything man does above the level of the higher animals is immoral. Man is not to improve his natural surroundings; not to maximize his well-being while minimizing the negative consequences of his industrial development. He is to minimize his impact on the Earth, regardless of the consequences to his life. This is the underlying meaning of Earth Day, of "going green"—deindustrialization, not as a means to a better environment for humans, but for deindustrialization’s sake. Earth Day stands for anti-humanism.

Think of what it means if unaltered nature is the moral standard; if nature has intrinsic value. It means that whatever nature "does"—raw nature—is valuable and not to be altered. A volcano erupting and destroying Mount St. Helens, taking with it millions of trees and wild animals, is raw nature, and thus good. Man clearing a forest and “destroying” an ecosystem to build a housing development is not "natural," and thus bad. Animals devouring one another to survive is raw nature. Man using animals for the purpose of testing (human) life-saving medicines is not. Crop-destroying insects or plant diseases is raw nature. Insecticides and bio-engineered pest- and disease-resistant crops is not. A black primordial goo lying underground is raw nature. Refined protroleum products like gasoline and heating oil and plastics are not. Natural climate change is acceptable. Human-caused climate change is not. A natural 400 foot rise in sea levels is not bad. Let human activity contribute a couple of inches in the last century to the 20,000 year trend, and its a catastrophe. Modern agriculture, transportation, health care, buildings, amusement parks, even household appliances—everything manmade—results from altering raw nature in some way, which destroys intrinsic value and is thus immoral and needs to be minimized and ultimately stopped and reversed.

The common denominator of that which is not “raw” nature is that it represents the application of human intelligence to the advance of man’s well-being and survival. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. Every living species, from the lowest bacteria to the most advanced mammals, must act according to its nature to sustain its life. In other words, every living species is provided by nature with some means of survival, which it must rely on and exercise.

There is one crucial fact of nature that sets man apart from every other living species. Every other species must essentially adapt itself to its natural environmental background. It has no choice in the matter, since it basically has no way of altering that environment. It is thus equipped with the basic means of survival determined by its nature to survive in that manner. Any species that lacks or loses the means to adapt perishes. Man, however, is not equipped to adapt to raw nature. He must, if he is to survive and thrive, adapt his environmental background to his own needs ... by building homes, inventing medical treatments, developing advanced agriculture, producing fuel for transportation and heating ... all produced from exploiting the materials found in raw nature.

Environmentalism’s elevating of nature to the absurd and logically indefensible status of having intrinsic value is a direct assault on, and denial of, man’s method of survival; his need to transform raw nature as dictated by his very nature. That man is himself a product of nature does not daunt the environmentalist mindset. They champion nature, except the one creation of nature that sets man apart. Since man’s primary, basic means of achieving this is his rational mind, the anti-science of Environmentalism is thus anti-mind, which means anti-man.

Environmentalism should not be confused with the idea of developing cleaner methods of producing and consuming that which we need to survive and thrive. Pollution--ingredients around us that is harmful to humans above a certain scientifically validated threshhold--can and should be cleaned up. That is not what the leaders of the environmental movement have in mind. It is human production and technology itself that is the enemy. That's why, for example, Environmentalists oppose nuclear power as a sollution to what they call the "climate crisis" induced by human emissions of carbon dioxide.

Following are some quotes from some of those leaders:

The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans.

—Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project

Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planet ... Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.

—David Graber, biologist, National Park Service

The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing....This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run.

—Economist editorial

I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.

—John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

We, in the green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which killing a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year-old children to Asian brothels.

—Carl Amery

We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion—guilt-free at last!

—Stewart Brand (writing in the Whole Earth Catalogue).

This last is the ideal that drives environmentalism…the return of mankind to a pre-industrial age--a new Stone Age, essentially--when man lived “in harmony” with nature. A time when nature was worshiped, rather than exploited for human gain. Rather than a warm winter home, they long for an existence of savages cowering in fear of natural forces. The name itself, “Environmentalism”, captures the very essence of its meaning, just as Communism or Theocracy captures the essence of those systems. In fact, statists of every stripe have latched on to the environmental movement to further their anti-capitalist agendas.

But make no mistake. The agenda of Environmentalism is to thwart, roll back, and destroy the life-giving technology and industrialization of the modern age. This is not to say that I believe that they will succeed (although the seeming popularity of the Green New Deal questions that assumption). Most people don’t equate Environmentalism with an anti-man’s-life agenda. There is a real danger, though, that they will succeed at advancing a statist (socialist) agenda under cover of Environmentalism, leading to a deteriorating economy, rising impoverishment, and possible dictatorship. I submit in evidence the two news items cited in my 2010 Earth Day post.

By celebrating “Earth Day”, we should be aware of the enemies of man that we are helping to bring to power in America and around the world.

Rather than celebrate raw nature, as embodied in “Earth Day”, we should instead look around at all of the life-giving benefits we enjoy as a result of industrialization. We can celebrate Industrialized Earth Day, celebrating man's great achievement at transforming raw nature into a human-friendly planet. Here some articles for a pro-human perspective:

Forget “Earth Day”…Celebrate Life On Earth Day!--Michael Hurd 

THIS EARTH DAY, SHRUG OFF ENVIRONMENTALIST FEAR AND GUILT—Amanda Maxham for The Ayn Rand Institute 

An Unnatural Amount of Happiness — Why I Celebrate Transforming the Earth--Alex Epstein 

5 Environmental and Human Trends Worth Celebrating This Earth Day--Ronald Bailey
Peak population, expanding forests, more abundant resources, falling air pollution, and plenty of farmland.

Exploit-the-Earth Day by Craig Biddle for The Objective Standard

The Great Enrichment by Deirdre McCloskey

State of Fear by Michael Crichton