Fiddling While….

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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg seems to be a modern day fiddler. During the…negotiations…with rail unions just concluded, Buttigieg chose to go haring off to Portugal on vacation. He also appears to have told no one of the public he was heading out: previously undisclosed trip, according to the Washington Free Beacon as cited by Fox News.

“The secretary took a long-planned personal trip from Aug. 29 to Sept. 5,” a spokesperson for the Department of Transportation told Fox News. “As usual, while traveling on personal time he remained available and engaged on urgent issues, which in this case meant multiple calls with staff and stakeholders to work on the topic of rail labor negotiations.”

“Long-planned.” Nothing so trivial as a looming transportation strike with national economic implications was to disturb his precious vacation. Phone calls, though. Because there’s no need to meet in person with the players. Vacation.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio (R) noted the irony hypocrisy:

Rail workers just wanted a few days of paid sick leave. President Biden told them to pound sand and his Transportation Secretary vacationed in wine country[.]

And, of course, us taxpayers continued to pay Buttigieg’s his salary—he gets paid vacation, along with his paid sick leave.

What Biden’s Border Policy Has Accomplished

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Here’s the flow of fentanyl into our nation that President Joe Biden (D) and his administration is so actively permitting with his No Southern Border policy. (For both graphs, Left-Click|Open-in-New-Tab to get a larger view.)Nor is the death and destruction limited to our southern border States.

Biden is permitting the attacks throughout our nation with his refusal to deal with our southern border.

Beyond that, it’s not just the Mexican drug cartels that the Biden administration is actively allowing to flood our nation with fentanyl through his policy. The cartels are getting, free-flowingly and cheaply, the precursor chemicals for manufacturing fentanyl from the People’s Republic of China.

Not only is the Biden administration refusing to secure our border—especially against the importation of this murderous drug—the Biden administration is refusing to take action against the PRC to put an end to its active role in poisoning Americans.

Government-Tech Censorship?

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In his op-ed concerning social media censorship, Philip Hamburger, Columbia Law School Maurice & Hilda Friedman Professor of Law, had this:

Amid growing revelations about government involvement in social-media censorship, it’s no longer enough to talk simply about tech censorship. The problem should be understood as gov-tech censorship.

He’s on the right track, but he doesn’t take it far enough, even as he writes this:

The Biden White House has threatened tech companies and federal agencies have pressed them to censor disfavored opinions and users.

That’s the nub of the matter. It’s not gov-tech censorship; it’s Government-directed tech censorship. Nothing less.

Decreasing Rate of Inflation

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It’s still inflation, and it’s still growing. Wall Street Journal editors point out that

The 12-month inflation rate fell to 7.1% in November, which is down from 7.7% in October and is the fifth annual rate drop in a row since inflation peaked at 9.1% in June.

That decline, though, is against a higher rate of inflation that year ago—2021—than in 2020, the last year of the prior administration, which also was the last year of our economic burgeon.

In addition, greatly mitigating any beneficial effects of that reducing inflation rate, the prices generated by that inflation persist, and they will into the future. Those prices will be paid—into that same future—out of real wages that have shrunk by 3% year-on-year.

All of which suggests the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has good reason to stick to its leaked intention to lift rates by another 50 basis points on Wednesday.

No. The Fed should have stuck to its 75 basis points (0.75%) benchmark interest rate increase pattern, instead of its meek .50% increase of last Wednesday. Kill this inflation spiral. Kill it dead. Dragging things out only runs up the costs for us average Americans who continue to pay those increasing prices with shrinking dollars.

Even those editors seem to agree:

The better policy is to break inflation now and return sooner to the Fed’s target of 2%. That’s a stronger foundation for growth and a rising standard of living for workers whose budgets have been savaged by inflation.

The Editors’ headline is spot on: Inflation Isn’t Vanquished Yet.

Far from it. And neither are its pocketbook effects.

Blockchain and Cryptocurrency

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Lots of folks tout cryptocurrency as the be-all and end-all of currency and liberation of our money from Evil Government.

However.

Here’s a bit about blockchain.

A blockchain is a distributed database or ledger that is shared among the nodes of a computer network. As a database, a blockchain stores information electronically in digital format. … The innovation with a blockchain is that it guarantees the fidelity and security of a record of data and generates trust without the need for a trusted third party.

Guarantees the fidelity and security of a record of data—the fidelity part of that is that each transaction of good in a sequence of transactions is explicitly tracked and its provenance known: who or what did the transaction and who or what received the transaction. At every step of the way from first origin of the first transaction to the last recipient of the last transaction.

Here’s a bit about cryptocurrency, using the hoary Bitcoin as a canonical example.

The key thing to understand here is that Bitcoin merely uses blockchain as a means to transparently record a ledger of payments, but blockchain can, in theory, be used to immutably record any number of data points.

Cryptocurrencies use blockchain—and that ledger, here, of payments (from whom or what to what or whom)—to track the financial transactions.

That immutable record of transactions is just what governments love to have in order to track their subjects’ doings.

Cryptocurrencies are encrypted, though—that’s the “crypto” part. Except that any encryption mechanism can be cracked, and governments have the resources to do exactly that should the men in government decide they have a “need” to.

On the other hand, cash transactions still are untrackable.