So I’ve made a change in my church affiliation. There is probably not a need for too much detail on the reasons and background intellectual development that brought me to this point. All that has been pretty well documented on this website through various conversations here over the last couple years.

Currently, we have finally settled on a new church home that has been a long time in the making. We are now actively attending Brentwood Christian Church. It is one I learned of from a local public radio advertisemet that grabbed my attention. They advertised themselves as a body of sojourners interested in issues of peace and social justice from the perspective of a faith community. My attraction should seem obvious to those who know me and have followed my spiritual journey over the years.

For anyone interested, their website is here: http://www.brentwoodchristianchurch.com/, although this one may be a bit more informative as to the work that initially appealed to me: http://www.springfieldawakening.com/.

Leaving the Catholic Church was a difficult, deliberate, and painful position for us to arrive at, but we now finally feel at peace with it. At last. Like I said, it has been a long time in the making, seeing as I first learned of Brentwood over two years ago, have had numerous contacts with their pastor since that time, have visited the church a handful of times, and have eventually realized that it would be the best fit for us.

For me, the decision was mainly ideological; for Amanda, it was mainly an issue of community. Whereas I grew tired of the friction of remaining in a body I constantly felt theological tension in, Amanda (well, and me too) grew tired of not having a sense of community with those we worship with.

We are now at home.

I’m in chapter 3 of Marx’s Capital and he’s hot and heavy about money. Which got me thinking…who cares about a Gold standard anyway? It’s certainly true that gold was the root of our money system but I see no reason to remain attached to it today.

Here’s the deal. The critique that our present money system is “fiat money” is, well, not helpful. Why does money have to represent a store of value? Gold is still around and can still be used for this purpose (I own Gold stocks presently, for this very reason). Modern money should act as a medium of exchange and on that front it does very well.

A critique to our modern money system is that “fiat money” opens the door for government intervention in the money supply. This, however, is untrue. Fractional reserve banking existed when money was backed by Gold as well – and that, I argue, opens the door to government intervention. In fact, there is no reason to assume fractional reserve banking would not exist in a perfect libertarian state – just the opposite. So blaming “fiat money” doesn’t seem to help.

Maybe we could regulate banks and restrict fractional reserve banking? Sure, go ahead and try it. Whatever you may wish to call that though, it most certainly isn’t free-market capitalism. And what good would come? I find unconvincing arguments that blame modern crisis solely on monetary policies and mechanisms. I believe there are deeper issues that, at times, are amplified by poor monetary policies, but are not the root cause.

As an example, some argue that poor monetary policy caused the recent boom in housing and the corresponding bust. No doubt it played a large roll. But who’s to say a free-market based monetary policy (so called gold-backed currency) would have put the reins on any better? I think the opposite may be true, actually.

So what gives? Money is a complicated phenomenon. Do you think our present system is unjust? Is there a better way?

From Readers Digest:

We raise 60 billion animals for food each year – 10 animals for every human on earth. If you grow corn and eat it, you expend 2.2 calories of energy to yield 1 calorie of protein.

But if you process that corn, feed it to a steer, and take into account the other needs that steer has in its lifetime – land use, chemical fertilizers (largely petroleum based), pesticides, machinery, transport, antibiotics, and water – you’re responsible for 40 calories of energy to get that same 1 calorie of protein.

A steak dinner for a family of four is the rough energy equivalent of driving around in an SUV for three hours while leaving all the lights on at home.

The average American meat eater is responsible for one and a half tons of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gase – enough to fill a large house annually – than someone who eats no meat.

Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_vegetarianism.

Other favorite music related YouTube videos… [...]

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Link to the paper.

There is a lot in this section that would benefit from either being clarified or corrected. He is my brief responses to problematic passages, in the order they arise:

1) A note on figure 1, which will become relevent later: The full decrease in consumer and producer surpluses is much greater than the deadweight loss shown. It includes both the shaded region and the full rectangle that represents the size of the tax collected, between Wf and Wl. However, we subtract the tax from the drop in surplus to arrive at the deadweight loss. Why? We are supposing that the tax will be spent efficiently on goods or services that are valued equally highly by society at large. (Alternatively, we are assuming that each dollar of tax paid means that the consumers’ other taxes will drop, and the government budget will remain the same — but to do this idea justice would require analysis of whether the deadweight loss caused by the other tax shrinks!) Under the standard assumption or my alternative one, the taxpayers don’t actually feel poorer due to the tax — it is made up to them in A) government goods or serves or B) a reduction of other taxes.

2) That brings us to figure 3. Firstly (and I’m really nitpicking here) it should be called the income effect rather than the substitution effect. Substitution effects only refer to goods that are substitutes for another good in the sense that McDonalds might be a substitute for Burger King, since they offer the same kind of utility.

3) The location of the shaded area in figure 3 makes no sense to me. If you go find the consumer and producer surpluses before and after the change, their difference is the diagonal column of area between the two demand curves, to the left of the supply curve. The label “Deadweight loss” actually appears to be referring to the horizontal distance between the two quantities (i.e. the change in quantity purchased). That makes a little more sense – we are just pointing out that consumer spending drops.

[...]

Quote from Murry Rothbard’s “For a New Liberty”

The geographical nature of the public school system has also led to a coerced pattern of residential segregation, in income and consequently in race, throughout the country and particularly in the suburbs. As everyone knows, the United States since World War II has seen an expansion of population, not in the inner central cities, but in the surrounding suburban areas. As new and younger families have moved to the suburbs, by far the largest and growing burden of local budgets has been to pay for the public schools, which have to accommodate a young population with a relatively high proportion of children per capita. These schools invariably have been financed from growing property taxation, which largely falls on the suburban residences. This means that the wealthier the suburban family, and the more expensive its home, the greater will be its tax contribution for the local school. Hence, as [p. 133] the burden of school taxes increases steadily, the suburbanites try desperately to encourage an inflow of wealthy residents and expensive homes, and to discourage an inflow of poorer citizens.

There is, in short, a breakeven point of the price of a house beyond which a new family in a new house will more than pay for its children’s education in its property taxes. Families in homes below that cost level will not pay enough in property taxes to finance their children’s education and hence will throw a greater tax burden on the existing population of the suburb. Realizing this, suburbs have generally adopted rigorous zoning laws which prohibit the erection of housing below a minimum cost level — and thereby freeze out any inflow of poorer citizens. Since the proportion of Negro poor is far greater than white poor, this effectively also bars Negroes from joining the move to the suburbs. And since in recent years there has been an increasing shift of jobs and industry from the central city to the suburbs as well, the result is an increasing pressure of unemployment on the Negroes — a pressure which is bound to intensify as the job shift accelerates.

The abolition of the public schools, and therefore of the school burden-property tax linkage, would go a long way toward removing zoning restrictions and ending the suburb as an upper middle-class-white preserve.

By Kevin Carson on May 15, 2009

In a 2005 interview, Bill Gates dismissed the free culture/open source movement as “some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises.”

Never mind Gates’ own hypocrisy on the subject. Never mind that he developed Microsoft’s BASIC compiler by a classic open source method: “The best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.” Never mind that this enthusiastic dumpster diver had the nerve to write a letter to the Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter in 1976, whining that the widespread infringment of BASIC was taking food out of his mouth (”most of you steal your software”) — despite being a multi-million dollar trust fund baby from birth.

Never mind what Gates practiced. Many a fortune founded in robbery has been sanctified by time.

What matters, rather, is what he preaches: if you don’t believe a return on effort should be guaranteed by the state, you’re a communist.

But as the American individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker observed more than a century ago, removing privilege and monopoly means that free market competition will cause the benefits of innovation to be “socialized.”

The normal process, in a free market without entry barriers, is for an innovator to derive short-term economic rents from being the first on the market, and for those rents then to decline to nothing as competitors adopt the innovation and drive price down to production cost.

So anyone who believes in genuinely free markets is a “communist.”

As many critics of “intellectual property” have pointed out, the term is inherently self-contradictory. “Intellectual property” is fundamentally at war with the principles of genuine private property. “Intellectual property” can only exist by infringing the rights of genuine, tangible property. Copyrights and patents give the holder a de facto ownership right in other people’s physical property, and prevents prohibits them from using their own property in ways that the copyright or patent holder has been granted a monopoly on.

And the reason for this, if you examine the assumptions behind IP law, is that the “artist” or “innovator” has a right to state-guaranteed returns on his investment or effort.
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This just in from Branden:

Hello, Amalie Rose Stone was born May 9 at 6:15pm. She was 7 pounds, 3ounces and 20 inches long. We are all home now and enjoying the new addition to the family.

 Below is a link to some pictures:

http://www.getdropbox.com/gallery/895842/1/Amalie?h=b3d5b2&p=0

Branden.

I love philosophers. The good ones seem to be able to communicate what they want to say in clear terms. I’m jealous.

Last week a friend asked me to explain my view of land as it relates to ethics. As everyone here knows, I have some strong views on this. But I always struggle to put my views into clear, short, and defensible statements. I responded to my friend with some links for further reading and a brief outline of the logic I like to use to explain my position. I hope it helped…but I also hope he hasn’t written me off as some commie.

Well, it’s been a while so I would like to try to revisit the land question here. With everyone’s help, maybe I can arrive at a short paragraph or two that clearly defines my view – whether or not others fully agree with the premises.

So let’s get started. I come to the land question from at least three perspectives all or which, in my view, are valid. They are:

1) A monotheistic understanding of the world. There is a God and He gave us a right and obligation to use the earth – that is, to steward the earth. No man naturally has any more or less a right to use the earth than another. Also, it seems reasonable that no one has a right to restrict another from using the earth provided there is as much and as good land available for others to use – but since the whole world is long past that proviso, land use must be regulated by some means. The land-value tax and other such mechanism are human inventions designed to equitably distribute land use – as opposed to less equitable land use distribution mechanisms such as the fee-simple property rights (a reasonable solution in less populace times, but not today).

2) An egalitarian understanding of the world. I don’t think you have to believe in a god to arrive at the conclusion above. In fact, so long as you believe that we are equals – that no one has any more of a right by birth to common wealth (as opposed to human created wealth) than the other conclusions follow.

3) A pragmatist view. Arguing from pure economic efficiency and real world examples there is strong evidence that a land-value tax creates the most efficient land use and thus the most efficient use of energy and material inputs. It also creates a wealth distribution that promotes economic growth by enlarging the middle class. See my paper on these ideas in a previous post.

So, what are the glaring questions that come to mind when you read this? What strikes you as total crap or poor logic? Obviously, I could have said a lot more. Do you disagree with any of this? If so, why?

And maybe after we flesh some of that out, you can help me rewrite my view. Thanks.