Biden and the Media’s ‘Anti-Disinformation’ Campaign
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
― George Orwell, 1984
For years the media, “fact-checkers,” and “anti-disinformation” initiatives told the public there was nothing wrong with Joe Biden. A few weeks ago, in the space of five minutes, they flipped. Rapid-onset dementia had struck the President and it was time for change.
The people who claim they can sort truth from fiction spent years lying despite the crippling obvious. What is more baffling is why so many people went along with it for so long. Was it fear? Complacency? Cowardice? An incredible level of discipline was enforced – that has thankfully now unraveled. Rather than debunking “misinformation,” Biden’s protectors often spread it.
In August 2020 the Aspen Institute coordinated a Hunter Biden laptop pre-bunk exercise that sought to suppress a true story to protect Biden’s wayward son and shield the President from major corruption allegations. A swathe of major media and Big Tech participated in that exercise, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Twitter, Facebook, and many more. Claire Wardle, former director of “anti-disinformation” NGO First Draft (now the Information Futures Lab at Brown University) also participated.
In a letter allegedly organised by Anthony Blinken, 51 former intelligence agents claimed the Hunter Biden laptop was a “Russian information operation” and Facebook, Twitter, and others suppressed the story on their platforms. Almost everyone now admits the laptop was real.
Or take Biden’s claim that “You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations.” PolitiFact thought that may have been an “exaggeration” but reassured us that cases of the vaccinated getting Covid are “rare.”
The Party told you to reject the evidence not just of your eyes and ears, but your whole body.
However, perhaps the biggest lie was the years-long campaign to “debunk” suggestions that Biden was growing incapable of commanding the highest office in the land. PolitiFact was very diligent in “fact-checking” “cheap fakes” and other stories that alleged Joe Biden was senile, reassuring us that everything was fine.
The term “cheap fake” was coined by Britt Paris and Hunter Biden laptop denialist Joan Donovan. Donavan has long been a darling of the “anti-disinformation” field.
In the words of Aspen Hunter Biden laptop pre-bunker Claire Wardle, the Biden cheap fakes are “the weaponization of context. It’s genuine content, but the context changes via minor edits. Anyone can be vulnerable with the right edit.” In fact, as recently as June 21 Wardle was carrying water for Biden. In a New York Times article that sought to debunk “misleading videos that play into and reinforce voters’ longstanding concerns about his [Biden’s] age and abilities,” Wardle explained that “This isn’t a new narrative, it builds on an existing one, which tends to be much more effective.” Yes, adding more true information to other true information tends to make an argument more convincing.
Or take Rebekah Tromble, Associate Professor of Media and Public Affairs and the director of the Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics at George Washington University. According to Tromble “Biden became a main target of deceptive edits.” “These clips draw on a common trope about President Biden that’s popular among his detractors: He’s old, bumbling, and senile, meaning he’s incompetent and incapable of doing this job.” His gaffes and inability to speak clearly are unrelated to his cognitive ability, and are instead because “Biden grew up stuttering.”
PolitiFact is a project of the Poynter Institute which coordinates the biggest network of fact-checkers in the world, the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). IFCN is funded largely by Facebook but also by the “Craig Newmark Foundation, the Koch Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Omidyar Network, the National Endowment for Democracy, Microsoft, and the Washington Post.” This is not a small fringe “fact-checking” outfit; it is one of the leading organizations in the sector.
Perhaps the name makes it clear – it is Politi(cised) Fact-checking.
Newsguard, a “disinformation” ranking service that can punish a news site’s advertising revenue through its rating system, has also been active. Power Line, a conservative online news outlet, alleges they were contacted by Newsguard in 2021 about their claims of Biden’s cognitive decline. In an email, Newsguard asked:
We’ve noticed that the site has repeatedly stated as fact in its article[s] that Joe Biden has dementia, both during the 2020 election cycle and since he became president. Why does the site make this claim without providing credible evidence that he has dementia?
Newsguard’s approach is particularly concerning because of its ability to impact the revenue of media outlets, and due to its strong links to the State Department and intelligence agencies – its board includes former CIA Director Michael Hayden.
If all that fails you can always blame the Russians. EUvsDisinfo, a European Union project to “forecast, address, and respond to the Russian Federation’s ongoing disinformation campaigns” claimed reports of Biden being “senile” are “false” and are part of “pro-Kremlin disinformation.”
Mainstream media have also been a critical part of the lying machine, claiming recent videos that show Biden wandering off at a G7 event were “misinformation” or “cheap fakes” and are part of a concerted effort to “hammer the narrative that Biden is too old to be president.” PolitiFact also “fact-checked” the story with the usual line.
The list could go on and on and on but Matt Orfalea’s amazing “sharp as a tack” compilation puts the nail in the coffin. More “out of context” clips and “cheap fakes” according to the “anti-disinformation” “experts” no doubt.
What is the lesson? On one hand, censorship and suppression only work for so long. Reality will eventually catch up with you. However, it also tells us that a lot of people can pretend the emperor does have clothes, even when he is stark naked and half the court is screaming and pointing at the top of their lungs – also known as “spreading misinformation.” It seems there is an endless supply of “fact-checking” and “anti-disinformation” sycophants ready to bow and scrape before the mad king.
Ultimately it tells us just how corrupt the “fact-checking” and “anti-disinformation” industries are. Whilst there are an increasing number of people on the outside speaking up, internally cowardice and the silencing of critics have allowed a prolific level of corruption to grow. This is an across-the-board problem in the liberal and progressive spheres where pious bullies have shut down dialogue. This corruption has led progressives and liberals down a disastrous dead end. Barring a miracle, Trump is coming.
If there is any justice a reckoning is also coming for the “fact-checkers” and “anti-disinformation” “experts.”
If Iran Is Blamed For Trump’s Assassination It Will Trigger WWIII— Is Netanyahu Setting Up Iran To Take The Blame If Trump Is Killed?
Biden’s Parting Deluge of Deceit Deserves Damning
In a mere 11 minutes on Wednesday night, President Biden settled any doubts about whether he was fit for another four years of the presidency. Uncle Joe wrestled with the teleprompter like a slacker high school boy blindsided by trigonometry questions on the math SAT test. By the end of the Biden’s brief spiel, most judges declared that the teleprompter had won by technical knockout.
A few weeks ago, Biden declared that it would take “the Lord Almighty” to get him to end his re-election campaign. Did the Lord make an unannounced visit to Biden’s Delaware vacation home?
When Biden threw in the towel on Wednesday night, everything was sacred – including the Oval Office (“this sacred space”), “the sacred cause of this country,” “the “sacred task of perfecting our Union,” and the “sacred idea” of America. Biden announced that “I revere this office” – a hint that viewers should revere him, too. Biden has worshiped political power his entire life – and so it was no surprise that religiosity suffused his valedictory address.
Biden asked: “Does character in public life still matter?” That signals that the coverups of his abuses and potential kickbacks will continue at least until January. No wonder Hunter Biden had a big smile as he sat just outside of the video sweep in the Oval Office. But will Biden finally permit his Attorney General Merrick Garland to release the audiotape of Biden’s bumbling interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur? Or is official Washington obliged to continue pretending that Biden has not been mentally AWOL for years?
Biden declared Wednesday night: “Nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy.” This was bad news for voters. So Democratic Party bosses had no choice but to nullify 15 million primary ballots cast for Biden and jam a replacement candidate down the nation’s throat. For years, the Democratic Party has equated Trump with saving democracy, justifying any tactic – fair or foul – to thwart Trump. Sending in the FBI to raid and potentially shoot people at Trump’s Florida home? Check. Ginning up bogus criminal charges to get Trump locked way from voters? Check. Using the FBI and other federal agencies to target anyone who is too enthusiastic on MAGA? Check.
There is no freedom or constitutional right that Team Biden would not destroy in the name of saving democracy. But barely a hundred days from the election, Biden got “Julius-Caesared” – knifed in the back – by his own party.
Biden exited as he entered, with a deluge of deceit. Biden reminded viewers of his “promise to always level with you, to tell you the truth.” Is Biden’s biggest lie his boast about always being honest with the American people? His falsehoods have been perpetually burnished with a sham idealism.
For at least 15 years, Biden has relied on a two-step routine – ruthlessly vilifying his opponents and then appealing to “our better angels,” a phrase recycled from Lincoln’s first inaugural address. Biden seeks to lull listeners into assuming that he is personally one of those “better angels” as he flails anyone in the way of his latest power grab or Democratic Party victories. From portraying any Republican who wanted to cut domestic spending as a “terrorist” in 2011, to claiming that Mitt Romney wanted to put black people back “in chains” in the 2012 presidential campaign, to endlessly misrepresenting the 2017 violence at a Charlottesville protest, Biden out-Nixoned Nixon while his media allies perpetually burnished his “nice guy” image.
Par for the course, it is difficult to tell when Biden is venal or when he is merely clueless. Biden boasted again about appointing the first black female Supreme Court Justice. But why should he be proud of a lifetime judicial appointment for a lady who openly fretted in a court hearing about the First Amendment “hamstringing” federal censorship schemes? The media has sainted Biden on civil rights despite his championing crime legislation in the Senate that vastly increased the number of black and Hispanic citizens sent to prison. In a 2019 piece headlined “Joe Biden and the Era of Mass Incarceration,” the New York Times hyped Biden’s favorite fix: “Lock the S.O.B.s up!”
Implicitly wagging a finger at Donald Trump, Biden declared that “presidents are not kings.” But how do we reconcile that with his endless boasting about how he scorns the Supreme Court ruling nullifying his illegal decrees abolishing federal student loan debt? Perhaps the media, grateful to Biden for abandoning his campaign, will resume pretending that he is the reincarnation of George Washington, a faultless president and the ultimate role model…
Biden promised that in his final months in office, “I’ll keep defending our personal freedoms and our civil rights.” This was shortly after he announced that he was supporting “Supreme Court reform” – i.e., adding new justices so that the court will no longer even attempt to curtail presidential demolitions of the Constitution. Maybe Biden and other Democrats can find enough judges to formally proclaim that presidents are sacred entities who deserve nothing but worship?
If Iran Is Blamed For Trump’s Assassination It Will Trigger WWIII— Is Netanyahu Setting Up Iran To Take The Blame If Trump Is Killed?
CBS Lies About Kamala Harris Helping Bail Out Murderer & Other Criminals
An X Community Notes fact-check called out CBS News Minnesota for posting a misleading story claiming Donald Trump accused Kamala Harris of “donating to” a fund that bailed out dangerous criminals.
The notice pointed out Harris promoted the Minnesota Freedom Fund on her Twitter account amid the 2020 George Floyd BLM riots.
Trump falsely accuses Harris of donating to Minnesota Freedom Fund, bailing out “dangerous criminals” https://t.co/5yrcEmZB8c
— WCCO | CBS News Minnesota (@WCCO) July 25, 2024
See Harris’ post below:
If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota. https://t.co/t8LXowKIbw
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) June 1, 2020
During a North Carolina rally on Wednesday, Donald Trump told his crowd, “One of the dangerous criminals Kamala helped bail out of jail was Shawn Michael Tillman. You know that name. A repeat offender who, with Harris’s help, was set free. He then went on to murder a man on a train platform in St. Paul, Minnesota, shooting him in cold blood six times, lying on the ground.”
While the CBS article and MFF both alleged Trump said Harris was “donating” to the fund, he actually just said she “helped” people get bailed out.
“It is not correct that then-Sen. Harris has donated to our organization. We have no relationship with Harris beyond a single four-year-old tweet,” MFF said.
Trump’s accusation is completely factual as even CBS admitted in its article,
“In June of 2020, just after George Floyd’s death, then-California Sen. Kamala Harris tweeted, ‘If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.’”
A couple years after the Harris post, Shawn Michael Tillman was bailed out via MFF and went on to murder less than two weeks later.
CBS wrote,
“Nearly two years later, on April 25, 2022, Tillman was arrested in St. Paul on a gross misdemeanor indecent exposure charge. Bail is set at $2,000 dollars and he is put in jail. On May 3, 2022, the Minnesota Freedom Fund paid his $2,000 bail and he was released. On May 20, 2022, Tillman murdered a man at the light rail station in downtown St. Paul. He is now serving a life sentence for that crime.”
The fund Harris promoted also helped get other allegedly violent criminals released, as exposed this week by the Trump War Room X account:
Meet Donovan Boone.
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) July 23, 2024
Boone was charged with invading the home of his ex-girlfriend and strangling her.@KamalaHarris raised money to bail Boone out of jail.
Kamala Harris is radically liberal and dangerously incompetent. pic.twitter.com/3z73JvXPLR
Meet Christopher Boswell.
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) July 23, 2024
Boswell, a twice-convicted rapist, was charged with kidnapping, assault, and sexual assault in 2020.@KamalaHarris raised money to bail Boswell out of jail.
Kamala Harris is radically liberal and dangerously incompetent. pic.twitter.com/2lRPRyz44i
Meet Thomas Moseley.
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) July 23, 2024
Moseley was arrested for damaging a police station, drug charges, weapons charges, and rioting charges.@KamalaHarris raised money to bail Moseley out of jail twice.
Kamala Harris is radically liberal and dangerously incompetent. pic.twitter.com/G6NYhr8YMh
Meet Darnika Floyd.
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) July 23, 2024
In January 2020, Floyd was charged with second-degree murder after fatally stabbing a man who refused to have sex with her.@KamalaHarris raised money to bail Floyd out of jail.
Kamala Harris is radically liberal and dangerously incompetent. pic.twitter.com/g8QvfnINI3
Meet Shawn Tillman.@KamalaHarris raised money to bail Tillman out of jail.
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) July 23, 2024
Upon release, Tillman brutally murdered a passenger at a rail station in St. Paul, MN.
Kamala Harris is radically liberal and dangerously incompetent. pic.twitter.com/yopaaCRx60
The media is doing its job ahead of the 2024 presidential election by trying to clean up Kamala’s poor political record.
Student Loans Are the ‘Fudge Factor’ That Allows Institutional Profiteering
Imagine an American college or university president making the following public statement:
“I regret that my institution, along with many others, has contributed to burdensome federal student loan debt and to rising college tuition levels, allowing our institutions to profit from the existence of student loan monies. At the same time, we have failed to offer our students adequate skills and knowledge required to compete in today’s world.”
If collegiate presidents struggled with questions about antisemitism on their campuses — as they did during recent Congressional testimony — they would surely be unable to speak frankly on student loan burdens, high and rising tuition levels, institutional profiteering from student loans, and whether students benefit academically from attending college.
But if a president did actually volunteer the hypothetical statement above, how would fact-checkers respond?
Student loan burdens
The news is full of stories about student loan debt and President Joe Biden’s attempts to ignore both statutes and courts to “forgive” billions in loans. Both the debt itself and a U.S. president’s unlawful efforts to erase that debt are a national disgrace.
As I wrote previously on this site, the federal loan program has evolved since the guaranteed student loan program was created by the 1965 Higher Education Act. Guaranteed student loans relied on private bank loans, which the federal government guaranteed against default and paid the interest while students were enrolled in college. The program worked well, with few defaults or worrisome loan burdens, until 2010 when it was replaced by the current program in which the U.S. Department of Education lends directly to students.
Rising college tuition levels
With tuition increasing on average about 8% per year, roughly twice the general inflation rate, tuition levels double every nine years. Student financial aid, particularly loans, have contributed to these tuition increases.
The student admission and financial aid process unfolds as follows:
Some institutions have adopted variants of need-blind admission policies, meaning that admission is independent of an applicant’s ability to pay. Once admitted by the school’s admissions office on the basis of secondary school grades, test scores, teacher recommendations, and extracurricular activities, the school’s financial aid office may offer an eligible applicant a financial aid “package.”
Loans are often the fudge factor in these aid packages, filling any gap between attendance costs and available funding sources. Consider the following hypothetical example:
$50,000 annual college tuition, fees, room and board + $1,000 books and incidentals = $51,000 total annual student attendance costs.
$25,000 student and family resources + $11,000 institutional and other awards, merit or need-based + $15,000 federal student loan, the “fudge factor” = $51,000 total annual funding sources.
Note how loans can become the fudge factor to equate total expenses with total funding sources. If, for example, an institution increases its tuition, or if family resources or other aid declines, the loan portion of the “package” can increase commensurately to become the fudge factor. Such are the trade-offs made in the financial aid office on behalf of student applicants.
Once applicants accept admission and financial aid offers (typically in May before the upcoming academic year), the DOE will advance the student loan proceeds to the institution when students matriculate in the fall. The federal monies are then in the institution’s coffers to be applied to student attendance expenses.
That is, student loan proceeds have already been spent the moment the DOE advances the funds to the institution. Student loans are not like a home equity line of credit that offers homeowners a means to tap the equity in their property at their discretion to remodel or buy a car.
Since the student loan procedure offers institutions an opportunity to increase tuition commensurately with student loan awards, the existence of federal loan funding has raised tuition levels over time. This cause-and-effect relationship offers institutions an open invitation to increase tuition.
Institutions profiting from student loans and other federal awards
Institutions can apply the increased tuition revenue to budgetary expenditures of their choice. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has shown that much of the increased tuition revenue has financed administrative bloat such as diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and other administrative bureaucracies such as student counseling rather than expanding educational offerings.
Student financial aid is, of course, not the only form of federal subsidy offered to collegiate institutions. Research universities have for many years accepted federal grants to conduct research projects on their campuses, a practice predating federal student funding.
But federal research awards and federal student aid funding differ significantly: federally sponsored research awards carry additional “indirect cost” funding intended to reimburse institutions for overhead expenses of providing campus space and services for grant-funded research. Indirect cost rates, which typically range from 35-50% of direct costs, are negotiated with federal grant-sponsoring agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Health and Human Services, and numerous others that fund the research. Thus, for example, a federal research grant funded at $100,000 in direct costs is awarded a total $135,000-150,000 including indirect costs.
Federal student aid awards, on the other hand, do not carry any allowance for institutional overhead expenses. Instead, institutions can effectively “help themselves” to some of the federal student aid monies by setting tuition higher than they might otherwise have charged.
Students’ educational attainment
Observers of the higher education industry have long been concerned that institutions have failed to provide college students with the skills and knowledge to earn higher expected lifetime earnings. A 2011 study entitled “Academically Adrift” tracked a cohort of undergraduate students over four years in college, documenting the declining hours attending class and studying outside class. This work is considered an indictment of higher education’s curricular dilution and grade inflation. Students self-reported having a good time in college but graduated with little academic achievement or critical thinking ability.
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni regularly surveys the course catalogs of many institutions to determine their graduation requirements, assigning Ds and Fs to many institutions (even, or especially, many of the most elite) for lax requirements of core subjects such as literature, science, mathematics, and history.
Richard Vedder, economics professor emeritus at Ohio University, goes further to equate grade inflation with recent campus protests, noting that lack of academic rigor encourages “mindless, militant mediocrity.” Stated bluntly, college students are bored, have a lot of free time, and find little to challenge them academically.
Harvey Mansfield, long-time Harvard political scientist, stated in a recent interview that a majority of grades today at Harvard and other elite institutions are A or A˗. The fallout from this is, of course, that “when everybody is somebody, then no one’s anybody,” quoting W.S. Gilbert, raising questions about the value of academic credentials.
Looking ahead from collegiate presidents’ perspective
Today’s collegiate presidents have a tough row to hoe. Some remain in the job for only five or fewer years, the more fortunate for up to ten years. Some negotiate deferred compensation contracts that often pay millions to reward longevity. The previous president of my own alma mater, for example, negotiated such a contract that paid her $1.2 million. She began her tenure in 2006, the contract fully vested in 2015, and she retired in 2016.
Gone are the days when these collegiate leaders regularly lasted for twenty or thirty years while held in high regard by their constituencies. Today’s presidential salary levels, which include a certain component of hazardous duty pay, reflect this lack of longevity in what has become a high-risk occupation.
Looking past current campus conditions and concerns of collegiate presidents, the federal government’s role in higher education will probably evolve now that the Supreme Court has abandoned Chevron deference. The DOE has been one of the more assertive administrative agencies with its recent Title IX and student loan forgiveness regulations, which have invited lawsuits in response.
Some observers go further, believing that higher education would be more efficient, effective, and better for society without federal government subsidies. In other words, get the feds out of the higher education industry.
Investigation of these sweeping issues is a discussion for another day. In the meantime, where is the collegiate president who will speak the truth about federal student loans?
If Iran Is Blamed For Trump’s Assassination It Will Trigger WWIII— Is Netanyahu Setting Up Iran To Take The Blame If Trump Is Killed?
What Project 2025 says about the Fed
Mandate for Leadership 2025 is an unofficial blueprint for a potential conservative administration, published by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Donald Trump has distanced himself from the project, even though many people associated with his first term as president contributed to the document.
It’s billed as “The comprehensive policy guide for a new conservative president, offering specific reforms and proposals for Cabinet departments and federal agencies, pulled from the expertise of the entire conservative movement.” Paul Dans, the Project 2025 Director, says that the project aims “to deconstruct the Administrative State.”
Chapter 24 of the 922-page document is on the Federal Reserve. It was authored by Paul Winfree, Distinguished Fellow in Economic Policy and Public Leadership at The Heritage Foundation.
The chapter is decidedly anti-Fed—it calls for abolishing the Fed altogether and returning to a commodity-backed money—but it also suggests some more politically palatable reforms that would merely limit the Fed, in case the more radical measures prove to be infeasible. Winfree lists the proposals “in decreasing order of effectiveness against inflation and boom-and-bust recessionary cycles.” Free banking (which entails abolishing the Fed), and a return to commodity money are listed first.
Overall, the chapter presents a great, albeit brief, critique of government intervention in money and banking. It blames the Fed for exacerbating the cycle of booms and busts, inflating away the value of the dollar, enabling exorbitant deficit spending by the federal government, picking winners and losers in financial markets, and expanding its own power with each crisis.
From a Misesian-Rothbardian perspective, it has a few Friedmanite flaws. But assuming Donald Trump isn’t going to read and adopt Rothbard’s views in What Has Government Done to Our Money?, this is much better than the tepid, Fed-embracing advice from “right-wing Keynesians” during the 80s and 90s. (See “Clintonomics: The Prospects” in Making Economic Sense for more on them.)
The influence of Friedman’s monetarism is not just in the third-, fourth-, and fifth-best policy compromises. The chapter begins in error: “Money is the essential unit of measure for the voluntary exchanges that constitute the market economy.” The idea that money is a unit of measure leads to a host of errors in monetary theory, leading to the conclusion that the purchasing power of money should be stabilized.
In fact, it was this idea that led to the creation of the Fed in the first place. Winfree acknowledges this: “The Federal Reserve was originally created to ‘furnish an elastic currency’ and rediscount commercial paper so that the supply of credit could increase along with the demand for money and bank credit.” Winfree says that the Fed’s ability to stabilize the purchasing power of the dollar is hindered by the full employment side of the Fed’s dual mandate and by discretionary, as opposed to rules-based, monetary policy. Instead of attacking the Fed on more fundamental grounds, namely that the original justification for the Fed was fallacious, Winfree accepts this justification and says that Fed doesn’t do a good job at this task.
The chapter also mentions Friedman’s diagnosis of what prolonged the Great Depression, but without citing him. According to Friedman, the Federal Reserve failed to prevent a collapse in the money supply from 1929 to 1933, and this is what caused what would have been a “garden-variety recession” to turn into the Great Depression. Winfree alludes to this diagnosis in more general terms: “the Great Depression of the 1930s was needlessly prolonged in part because of the Federal Reserve’s inept management of the money supply.” Of course, those who have read Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression know that it was the Fed-enabled monetary expansion in the 1920s that led to the inevitable bust, and that the depression of the 1930s was prolonged due to the host of interventions by Hoover and FDR. Bank failures and the concomitant collapse of money and credit actually help the adjustment process through the liquidation of mismanaged banks and by realigning the supply of credit with real savings.
The influence of Friedman and the Chicagoites is most apparent in the policy proposals offered as alternatives to ending the Fed. Friedman’s “K-Percent Rule” is listed after the proposal to return to a commodity standard. The “K” refers to a fixed rate of growth in the money supply—Winfree offers 3 percent per year as an example. The idea is to take central bank discretion completely off the table, much like the other proposed rules: the inflation-targeting rule (which Winfree acknowledges is already somewhat in effect at the Fed), the Taylor Rule, and the Nominal GDP Targeting Rule.
An important problem with all of these rules (aside from the fact that discretion can be good) is that they are arbitrary. Why a 3 percent fixed rate in money supply growth? Why should we have a 2 percent price inflation target? What weights should be applied in the Taylor Rule? Why should nominal spending be stabilized? To see why any explicit or implied target is arbitrary, consider what we would see in a progressing unhampered market economy.
In such a progressing economy, we would probably have steady (but not fixed) price deflation primarily due to the increased production of goods and services. This expectation accords with historical experience, especially the 19th century: “throughout the nineteenth century and up until World War I, a mild deflationary trend prevailed in the industrialized nations as rapid growth in the supplies of goods outpaced the gradual growth in the money supply that occurred under the classical gold standard.”
But even this is not grounds for a monetary policy rule that targets some fixed rate of price deflation, for the same reason we shouldn’t fix the price of anything based on what we assume is a natural trend. The economy is in constant flux as values change, the stock of known natural resources changes, technology is invented, and savings preferences change, among countless other factors. This is why Mises referred to stabilization policy as “an empty and contradictory notion” (Human Action, p. 220). To Winfree’s credit, he acknowledges that without a central bank, “the norm is for the dollar’s purchasing power to rise gently over time, reflecting gains in economic productivity.” It seems that this point is lost, however, once the monetary policy rules are discussed.
I’m not against taking incremental steps to chip away at State power, but the proposed rules seem more like side-steps or steps backward. For example, if the Fed were explicitly committed to the Taylor Rule, this would probably bolster the perception that the Fed is an impartial, scientific agency using sophisticated models and tools to manage the macroeconomy.
These issues, and a few other minor points (like the claim that fiscal policy is ok if it is “timely, targeted, and temporary”) keep me from giving this chapter an A+. But I wholeheartedly agree with the anti-Fed spirit and statements like the following:
A core problem with government control of monetary policy is its exposure to two unavoidable political pressures: pressure to print money to subsidize government deficits and pressure to print money to boost the economy artificially until the next election. Because both will always exist with self-interested politicians, the only permanent remedy is to take the monetary steering wheel out of the Federal Reserve’s hands and return it to the people.
It seems to me that all the alternative reform ideas involving “rules-based monetary policy” are moot because of these political pressures. Rules are easily bent and abandoned when political winds change. We should just remove the cancer and replace it with nothing.
Amazon Sells ‘Only Good Trump a Dead One’ Apparel Days After Assassination Attempt, Quickly Removes
Online marketplace Amazon briefly sold shirts reading, “The only good Trump is a dead one,” just days after former President Donald Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt.
Discovered in the “Amazon Fashion” department, one store contained apparel featuring the incendiary phrase, with the word “dead” highlighted in red text.
The store had available for purchase a zip-up hoodie for $33.99, a pullover for $31.99 and a t-shirt for $19.99, all featuring the same phrase.
According to Fox News, the shirts had been available since July 6, seven days before the fateful campaign rally in Butler, Penn., where Trump nearly lost his life.
The listings and store were removed on Thursday shortly after social media users called attention to the inflammatory attire, with Amazon telling Fox Business they were taken down “due to noncompliance with our guidelines.”
It’s unclear if any sales of the shirt had taken place or how many were sold before the store was taken down.
In a comment to Newsmax, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said the unsavory merchandise was on brand for the radical left.
“This is on par for the left and their disgusting tactics,” Cheung stated.