Joel's Blog

“…of the doctrine of sin. Not sin but environment is at fault. The answer is a change of environment through legislation, and this changed environment will thereupon change man.” – R.J. Rushdoony

“…and presupposes a moral system, a moral law, and all morality presupposes a religion as its foundation. Law rests on morality, and morality on religion. Whenever and wherever you weaken the religious foundations of a country or people, you then weaken the morality also, and you take away the foundations of its law. The result is the progressive collapse of law and order, and the breakdown of society.” – R.J. Rushdoony

From Robert P. Murphy:

If an imperialist government paid for popular spending programs by levying a tax not on its own citizens but on a conquered land, the scheme would of course be a gigantic theft working across space and through the currency markets. Deficit finance is similar, working across time and through the bond markets. It allows today’s citizens to pay for government goodies by levying a tax on unborn generations who have no say in the political decision.

From Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School:

Though an undoubted classical liberal, unlike his friend Popper, [Hayek] condeded too much to the welfare state. “The state, Hayek insisted, is not soley a ‘coercive apparatus,’ but also a ‘service agency,’ and as such ‘it may assist without harm in the achievement of desirable aims which perhaps could not be achieved otherwise.’ … Predictably, Hayek’s endorsement of state activism in the ‘social’ sphere has provided knowledgeable opponents of the laissez-faire position with a rhetorical argument of the form, ‘even F.A. Hayek conceded…’”

From Robert Murphy’s blog:
…here’s something that has been bothering me about this fancy-pants economist critique of Ron Paul. (I’ve seen at least three economists make this argument.) It goes like this (paraphrasing):

[RPM's PARAPHRASING OF ACTUAL ECONOMIST CRITICS OF RON PAUL:]

Ron Paul is either a liar or a fool. The fact that the USD has lost 95% or whatever of its purchasing power since 1913, is completely irrelevant. To a first approximation, if the prices of goods have risen 20x (or whatever), then wages have risen 20x too, because of the printing press. Now in reality, wages have actually risen faster than most prices, and that is because productivity has risen over the decades. But if money is non-neutral at least in the long-run–and even Austrians claim they agree with this proposition–then the printing press doesn’t affect the real marginal productivity of labor. So nobody is really made poorer by the Fed, or at least, the factoid about the dollar losing 95% of its purchasing power since 1913 is a complete non sequitur. What would be scarier–if Ron Paul realizes this and cites the stat anyway, or if he is considered an expert on monetary policy and doesn’t know these elementary things?!

OK like I said upfront, I am super busy so I’m not going to be as cool as Krugman and literally do a formal model on this. But go ahead and write up a general equilibrium model with all the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed, where one agent has a printing press. Characterize an equilibrium where the agent with the printing press has the money stock grow at (say) 5% per year, and the agent uses this newly-produced money to buy a constant stream of consumption goods. Make the workers and the owners of capital have cash-in-advance constraints so that in equilibrium, they want to hold money.

OK so when you get that all pinned down, it is clearly the case that every year, the agent with the printing press siphons real consumption away that the workers and capitalists physically produce. If you set the rate of inflation to 0%, then clearly the printing press owner would consume 0% from that point onward, leaving the full product to the workers and capitalists. But at a positive rate of monetary inflation, there is a systematic flow of real goods out of the bellies of the other people and into the belly of the guy with the printing press.

So already we see that the “wages adjust in the long-run” isn’t quite right. It’s leaving out the crucial issue that the Ron Paul people are complaining about. (And this can happen with rational expectations, even with perfect certainty, in the model.)

Now here’s the point I’m not as sure about: I think I could come up with a pretty standard model, with “normal” utility functions blah blah blah, where we have a class of equilibria such that the proportion of total output transferred to the money-producer rises with the rate of price inflation, at least within a certain range. So in that class of equilibria, if somebody asked at time 87, “Hey, how much have we gotten ripped off in this timeline?” it would be an adequate answer to say, “Well, the price of a unit of food quoted in the money has risen by X%.”

UPDATE: I realized my last paragraph was very confusing. I don’t mean that I could come up with a model where an X% rise in the CPI corresponds to X% of GDP going to the money-producer. Rather, I meant that I think I can come up with a family of equilibria where there is a direct relationship between the total depreciation of the currency from time T=0, and the proportion of total GDP over the timespan that was diverted into the belly of the money-producer. So in that sense, if the dollar had lost 95% of its value since 1913, that would mean “the people” got ripped off a lot more over the years than if the dollar had only lost 2% of its value. Thus, the “naive” layperson applause for Ron Paul’s statements is a lot more defensible than the economist who cites “money neutrality” would have us believe.

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From the Ottawa Citizen:

Notice
Notice that it isn’t the productive sectors that even come close to leading in job growth; it’s the unproductive sectors (the sectors that do not generate either wealth or prosperity). 65,000 new public servants have been added to the Ottawa-Gatineau economy since 1996. Federal public servants have doubled to 150,000 since 1998. To put that in perspective, Ottawa-Gatineau has an employment base of 700,000.

This should be alarming.

From the Calgary Herald:

More than half of all Canadians believe Muslims can’t be trusted and nearly as many believe discrimination against Muslims is “mainly their fault,” according to the results of a new national survey released before Wednesday’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

While much will be said about this disturbing sign of racism in Canada, comparatively little will be said – if anything at all – about how these poll results illustrate the inevitable clash between democracy and liberalism. Democracy is ingrained such that it’s threat to liberalism will not be scrutinized even though this poll provides a perfect opportunity for doing so.

From LewRockwell.com Blog:

Each of us has a large impact on our own health by our life style choices, and these choices are not insensitive to price. The proponents of socialized medicine do not understand this important reality. They think that Nature deals out low blows to all those in ill health, and they think that everyone has a “right” to medical care. This mythical (nonexistent) “right” they want to be paid for by eradicating one’s personal rights to one’s own life, one’s own liberty and one’s own property.

If those who take better care of themselves must subsidize those who take worse care of themselves, the result is that fewer people take better care of themselves (since they are taxed relative to a free market solution) and more people take worse care of themselves (since they are subsidized relative to a free market solution). Socialized medicine produces worse health in the population.

There’s a helpful tutorial on YouTube that shows how to make a web-based search box that returns results from a MySQL data table as you’re typing in your search term(s).

The problem with the code in the tutorial is as follows: after entering your search term(s) once and finding what you want, deleting the search term(s) from the search box actually results in all possible results from the MySQL data table being returned.

In this post, I provide a very simple PHP fix to this problem so that when the search term(s) are deleted, no results are returned.

Here’s the original code from the PHP file, getStates.php:

Here’s the modified code (modifications highlighted in yellow):

That’s it!