Gold Standard?

William Luther and Alexander William Salter, Associate Professors of Economics at Florida Atlantic University and the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University, respectively, argue that there are lessons to be learned from the days when the dollar was explicitly backed by gold. They’re right as far as they go, but they hang their hats on the premise that our current dollar—and only our current dollar—is a fiat currency.

“As far as they go” is this: there are lessons regarding fiscal discipline that must be learned and relearned, and relearned again. The learning is a generational matter as our population trends wealthier in our economy’s fits and starts of growth.

However.

Cue William Jennings Bryan and his cross of gold, I say.

Separately, what Luther and Salter missed is that gold/gold-backed currencies are every bit as fiat and arbitrary as are Luther’s and Salter’s fiat dollars. Governments set the price of their currency, regardless of their (metals) backing or lack, and they do so for political reasons at least as much as they do for economic reasons.

For this, we need look no further than FDR’s confiscation of everyone’s gold private property and the prompt, sharp change (by 75%!) he made in his fiat-determined value of that gold right after he’d paid just compensation for what he seized.

Rent Collections Moratorium

Recall earlier this summer when the CDC’s interminable ban on landlords collecting the rent payments due them came before the Supreme Court.

Recall, further, the 5-4 ruling that upheld the ban, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh rationalizing his vote to uphold by saying that he’d be a fifth vote to bar the ban beyond the end of July—because the ban was due to expire then, anyway—absent Congress’ specific authorization by passing a law allowing a rent collection moratorium. He averred the CDC had no authority to issue a moratorium on its own authority.

Then the moratorium expired last weekend, and the House recessed with no action taken on the matter.

Now President Joe Biden (D) has instructed his CDC to figure out how to extend the moratorium, and the CDC has done so—into early October.

Biden and the CDC have played Kavanaugh for a chump.

It’ll be interesting to see what the Justice’s excuse will be this time for upholding the “moratorium” in the event the matter comes back to the Supreme Court.

Reading Between the Lines

In an article centered on the relationship between law school student debt and law school graduates’ working income (short answer: law students, in the vast main, borrow far more than their subsequent incomes support), there appeared this statement by a University of Miami law school graduate on why she chose UM and huge debt over a “lesser” law school that offered her a significant scholarship:

You go to any courthouse in Miami and the judge went to UM, the judge is a teacher at UM, there’s some sort of connection to UM[.]

There is this expectation that judges will be swayed by personal relationships, by school tie relationships, far more than they will be by the merits of the case before them and text of the law(s) governing that case.

Sadly, that expectation is both widespread and at least partially valid.

“Voting System ‘Under Assault'”

So says President Joe Biden (D). He also says protecting it was the “single most important thing to do.”

The single most important thing that we have to do is we have to protect the voting system, protect the sacred right to vote. It’s under assault in ways that I haven’t seen in my entire career.

He’s right.

That assault, however, comes directly from his own Party’s attempt to nationalize how elections are run in each of the several States—in deliberate, cynical contravention of what our Constitution says–and from Progressive-Democrats’ lies about what’s actually in the election reform laws.

Here’s Article I, Section 4, on the matter of who sets the rules for elections:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of Chusing Senators.

The Congress cannot write its own laws regarding how States shall run elections in their jurisdictions. Congress can only modify State laws, and then only to ensure compliance with the rest of our Constitution, vis., our Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. Further, in order to modify a State law, that State law must exist. If Congress writes the Federal law, there will be no State law extant to be modified.

The other part of Biden’s and the Progressive-Democratic Party’s assault on our voting system rests on the fundamental dishonesty of their claims about what the States are doing.

Georgia, for instance, lengthened the weekend hours of early voting and added a Sunday to that early voting period. This is somehow suppressive of the vote, the Progressive-Democrats claim, and they want the expanded hours rescinded.

Georgia also legalized, standardized, and ensured the security of ballot drop boxes—drop boxes which did not exist prior to the Wuhan Virus-impacted 2020 election and whose creation for that election were illegal, having been created by the Georgia Secretary of State and not Georgia’s legislature. This legalizing and regularizing also, Progressive-Democrats dishonestly claim, are supposed to suppress voting, and they must be blocked.

Arizona’s proposed election reform laws would, among other things, prohibit mass mailing of absentee ballots, requiring instead each voter to explicitly request one, a move which would reduce the opportunity of fraud and enhance the safety of actually cast ballots. No, the Progressive-Democrats say; they want those fraud opportunities.

Progressive-Democrat lies about Texas’ moves are similarly broad. The proposed bills expand early voting hours, standardize procedures across counties, require the objectivity of some sort of voter ID with absentee ballots rather than the by-guess-and-by-golly of signature matching, and bar ballot harvesting. These improvements to vote integrity and ballot access are unacceptable to the Progressive-Democrats; they want here, too, their opportunity for fraud preserved.

And on top of all this, Texas’ House Progressive-Democrats, in the name of supporting the vote, have absconded from the legislature and departed the State explicitly to suppress voting on those bill proposals.

All of these expansions of voter access and of vote integrity are just Jim Crow on steroids, Biden says. Go figure.

Not a Bad Gig

Who needs work when Uncle Sugar will take care of you?

Under emergency response legislation, the federal government expanded eligibility for unemployment benefits, extended the number of weeks, and gave bonuses to state unemployment benefits. The expansion will sunset in September, but congressional Democrats have pressed President Biden for an extension.

The current state of affairs according to a report by Alli Fick, a Senior Research Fellow with the Foundation for Government Accountability, is this:

An individual can receive nearly $3,700 a month—or more than $44,000 a year—by staying at home. On top of tax credits, food stamps, and state unemployment benefits, an individual can receive an additional $1,300 per month with the $300 weekly unemployment bonus.

It’s not a bad gig, and nearly anyone can get it. All courtesy of virtue-signaling politicians of both parties.

It can get worse, too. Progressive-Democrats are pushing the trap of free income—universal basic income.