Liberty Dollars and Inflation Sense

If the Federal currency police were looking to give the Ron Paul campaign a boost, their abhorrent raid on the offices of the Liberty Dollar was pretty much the wisest move they could make. Most Americans don't remember that from 1933 through 1974 it was illegal in this country to own gold bullion without a license. The end of gold ownership regulations, along with the ends of the draft (1973), wage and price controls (1974), and the U.S. war in Vietnam (1975), must have contributed to the optimism of the early days of the Libertarian Party. Unfortunately, those four decades of gold regulation contributed to a paranoia about currency that still lingers in libertarians like Ron Paul. They claim that the government statistics showing low inflation since 1982 are a lie, and aren't persuadable by technical information about the CPI or systematic rebuttals to their fevered and ever-shifting arguments.

Two delicious ironies arise here. The first is that, if the gold bugs are right, then they should at some point be getting rich from their contrarian insights. That point always seems to be slipping into the foggy future. The second is that, if gold bugs had sufficient faith in -- or at least understanding of -- how markets work, they would realize that the modest 2%-4% inflation they decry is a scourge that any semi-intelligent person can hedge against using the right market instruments. What's economically most poisonous about inflation is that it historically has come in spiky and hard-to-anticipate amounts. A steady pace of low single-digit inflation is really only a problem for people who stuff currency into mattresses. (Indeed, if inflation gets to close too zero, it might draw the economy into a liquidity trap -- for details, see this Bernanke speech, and Tyler Cowan's dissenting view). A year ago, I had the pleasure of watching Prof. David Friedman sit in a living room and systematically dismantle an overmatched gold bug's arguments against fractional reserve banking. The closest approximation I can easily find on the web is this wonderful little paper he wrote in 1982 for the Cato Institute: Gold, Paper, or...: Is There A Better Money?

A somewhat dated overview of the the details of how the Fed influences inflation is this 1990 entry in the indispensable Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, part of the invaluable Library of Economics and Liberty. Some newer information is in this 2002 blog posting by Brad DeLong, and this 2004 paper about a "new monetary consensus". When liberal economists like DeLong can agree with libertarian economists like Tyler Cowan on the uninterestingness of the gold standard as a policy position, it's clear to me that gold buggery and Federal Reserve conspiracy theories are just a movement burden that we sane libertarians will have to grin and bear. The only interesting question I see on the inflation front is that regarding asset inflation: equities and real estate, and the extent to which their premiums are being driven (respectively) by the post-1995 productivity resurgence and by allegedly loose monetary policy. The conventional wisdom seems to say yes, but at least one mainstream economist says no (to the second thesis). The wild card for me here is the geolibertarian analysis of real estate valuation. I need to search the writings of Prof. Fred Foldvary and find out what geolibertarians think about inflation and asset prices.

Impeach Richard Cheney?

There must be something Dick Cheney has done that is impeachable, right? But given how little formal authority his office holds, it's hard to get a grip on exactly what he should be impeached for. Bruce Fein is a wonderful constitutionalist (and of counsel to the Ron Paul campaign), but his Cheney indictment at Slate is pretty thin. His complaints all seem to consist of Cheney persuading George W. Bush to commit the many impeachable acts that Bush has committed. Dennis Kucinich's impeachment resolution against Cheney is a little bit better, being more focused (on WMD, al Qaeda, and Iran). It also is the second-best list I've seen (after this one) of the Administration's recklessly false statements about Iraq. In my model Bush impeachment resolution, I indeed included as a last (and most tenuous) charge that Bush "invaded Iraq under pretenses about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that at best were recklessly and negligently false." However, the impeachable offense here is the invading under the pretenses, and not the promulgation of those pretenses. If Kucinich is right that it's impeachable to win a policy debate that shouldn't have been won if that victory has dire consequences for the nation, then a President Kucinich would be impeachable pretty much as soon as he starts signing legislation.

When Technology Outraces Theology & Ethics

Pluripotent stem cells can now be generated from cells of the ordinary connective tissue of mature humans, according to forthcoming articles in Cell and Science. The Cell article's abstract reveals:

Successful reprogramming of differentiated human somatic cells into a pluripotent state would allow creation of patient- and disease-specific stem cells. We previously reported generation of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, capable of germline transmission, from mouse somatic cells by transduction of four defined transcription factors. Here, we demonstrate the generation of iPS cells from adult human dermal fibroblasts with the same four factors: Oct3/4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc. Human iPS cells were similar to human embryonic stem (ES) cells in morphology, proliferation, surface antigens, gene expression, epigenetic status of pluripotent cell-specific genes, and telomerase activity. Furthermore, these cells could differentiate into cell types of the three germ layers in vitro and in teratomas. These findings demonstrate that iPS cells can be generated from adult human fibroblasts.

A development like this tempts one to poke fun yet again at certain religionists, but been there, done that. Reason's Ronald Baily links to his own pokings from 2004:

Is Heaven Populated Chiefly by the Souls of Embryos?

[B]etween 60 and 80 percent of all naturally conceived embryos are simply flushed out in women's normal menstrual flows unnoticed. This is not miscarriage we're talking about. The women and their husbands or partners never even know that conception has taken place; the embryos disappear from their wombs in their menstrual flows. About half of the embryos lost are abnormal, but half are not, and had they implanted they would probably have developed into healthy babies.

So millions of viable human embryos each year produced via normal conception fail to implant and never develop further. Does this mean America is suffering a veritable holocaust of innocent human life annihilated? Consider the claim made by right-to-life apologists like Robert George, a Princeton University professor of jurisprudence and a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, that every embryo is "already a human being." Does that mean that if we could detect such unimplanted embryos as they leave the womb, we would have a duty to rescue them and try to implant them anyway?

"If the embryo loss that accompanies natural procreation were the moral equivalent of infant death, then pregnancy would have to be regarded as a public health crisis of epidemic proportions: Alleviating natural embryo loss would be a more urgent moral cause than abortion, in vitro fertilization, and stem-cell research combined," declared Michael Sandel, a Harvard University government professor, also a member of the President's Council on Bioethics.

As far as I know, bioconservatives like Robert George do not advocate the rescue of naturally conceived unimplanted embryos. But why not? In right-to-life terms, normal unimplanted embryos are the moral equivalents of a 30-year-old mother of three children.

Of course, culturally we do not mourn the deaths of these millions of embryos as we would the death of a child—and reasonably so, because we do in fact know that these embryos are not people. Try this thought experiment. A fire breaks out in a fertility clinic and you have a choice: You can save a three-year-old child or a Petri dish containing 10 seven-day old embryos. Which do you choose to rescue?

Stepping onto dangerous theological ground, it seems that if human embryos consisting of one hundred cells or less are the moral equivalents of a normal adult, then religious believers must accept that such embryos share all of the attributes of a human being, including the possession of an immortal soul. So even if we generously exclude all of the naturally conceived abnormal embryos—presuming, for the sake of theological argument, that imperfections in their gene expression have somehow blocked the installation of a soul—that would still mean that perhaps 40 percent of all the residents of Heaven were never born, never developed brains, and never had thoughts, emotions, experiences, hopes, dreams, or desires.

But religious fundamentalists make too easy a target. In fact, modern science and prospective technology pose some fascinating ethical questions even for people whose worldview isn't derived from unsigned stories about an unpersuasive [Mt 11:20, Lk 10:13, Jn 6:66, 10:32, 12:37, 15:24] unpublished slavery-tolerating genocide-affirming [Mt 24:38, Lk 17:27] exclusivist [Mt 10:5, Mt 15:24] family-resenting [Mk 3:33, 10:29; Mt 10:37, 12:48, 19:29; Lk 11:27-28, 14:26] apparently-illegitimate [Mt 1:18-24, Jn 8:41] carpenter.

Skipping past the obvious examples regarding intellectual property and cloning, here is a sampling of other prospective technologies and the ethical questions they raise:

• Corporate data-sharing and massive open-content community-maintained databases
• What are a private citizen's reasonable expectations of privacy against other people sharing what they know about the person?
• Photo-realistic computer-generated reality
• Is child pornography always evidence of a crime?
• Can recordings be trusted in court as evidence?
• Miniaturized ubiquitous hi-capacity recording (ultimately, smart dust)
  
• What are a private citizen's reasonable expectations of privacy against being recorded in public spaces?
  
• For how long can those in power escape sousveillance?
• Artificial wombs
• Can abortion be tolerated when the fetus or embryo can easily be saved?
• Cultured meat
• Will killing animals for food be allowed when perfect meat can be grown artificially?
• Will vegetarians eat cultured meat?
• Virtual reality and designer psychotropics
• As the cost of pleasure plummets while its intensity and realism skyrockets and its biochemical (as opposed to psychological) addictiveness declines, will it be a good or bad thing that so many people will be largely opting out of the traditional matter/energy economy?
• Mass-production of persons (through any combination of AI, nanotech, and biotech)
  
• How do inter-generational, inter-family, and international ethical relations deal with nearly-arbitrary potential increases in population?
  

For more such questions, see the (shockingly good) Metaphysics of Star Trek by Richard Hanley. My speculations on many of these topics are at http://humanknowledge.net/Thoughts.html#Futurology.

Knowing Humans 2.0

This is my last Knowing Humans posting on Yahoo 360 and my first posting on Knowing Humans 2.0, hosted by blogger.com through http://knowinghumans.net. Subscribe there now.

With the public announcement of Mosh and Yahoo's embarrassing lack of blog search capability, I can no longer use laziness and company loyalty as an excuse for not migrating off of 360. (When Personals was re-org'd into the Search subdivision a couple years ago, I asked when Yahoo was going to have solutions for searching blogs and our own intranet. We still lack good answers for either.) I've recently resolved to do more of my online political activism through blogs and wikis and less through email-based forums, and so this week I started looking for an alternative to 360.

I picked blogger.com because it met my minimal requirements in being totally free and able to 1) backup my blog, 2) manually import and back-date my 360 postings, and 3) operate through my own domain. I've imported my 360 postings of the last year and soon will all 200 of them up. I've also set my SiteMeter count of the new blog based on the 151K pageviews currently registered on the 360 blog. (Its technorati rank was 2,124,856, oddly up 400K from 2.5M in September despite relative quiescence. The rank of knowinghumans.net was 2.9M, as it was just a page of links to my 360 posts.)

I've indulged this week in customizing my blogger.com template, adding features such as:

• The title area is centered over an up-to-date image of the current shading of the Earth, and adjusts nicely on window resizings.
• A table of contents hack borrowed from Beautiful Beta.
• A borrowed hack to suppress the Blogger nav bar.
  
• My blogroll imported from Bloglines.
• My recent bookmarks imported from Yahoo My Web.
• My recent email correspondence imported from my Yahoo Group.

Next I want to add better search facility to replace the one that was in the nav bar. I also want to try out the AdSense integration, if only to see what sort of ads Google would place here. I have no financial need to try to monetize my blog, so the only ads I foresee posting here are for causes I endorse. In fact, I have a scheme in mind to de-monetize my blog by giving money to other bloggers. More about that later. :-)

Impeach George W. Bush

Whereas, George W. Bush has proposed and signed federal laws that have no basis in the Article I Section 8 powers of Congress, such as the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act and the No Child Left Behind Act;

Whereas, George W. Bush knowingly ordered the "extraordinary rendition" of suspected terrorists to other countries for purposes of torture, in violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture;

Whereas, George W. Bush allowed his administration to condone torture, failed to investigate and prosecute high-level officials responsible for torture, and officially refused to accept the binding nature of a statutory ban on cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment;

Whereas, George W. Bush knowingly violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by ordering warrantless wiretapping;

Whereas, George W. Bush knowingly deprived at least two United States citizens of their constitutional rights by means of military incarceration;

Whereas, George W. Bush proposed and signed the Military Commissions Act, which violates the U.S. Constitution's Article I Section 9 guarantee of habeas corpus;

Whereas, George W. Bush proposed and signed the USA PATRIOT Act, which contained provisions later ruled to be in violation of the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution;

Whereas, George W. Bush invaded Iraq under pretenses about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that at best were recklessly and negligently false;

Therefore, be it resolved that George W. Bush, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States.