Misguided Contribution of Philanthropist

Many of you have given to colleges and universities. Ken Griffin gave $500 million and Bill Achman gave untold millions to Harvard. Mark Rowan gave $50 million to the University of Pennsylvania. Now they are outraged at the universities’ indifference at best and support at worst to pro Hamas demonstrations. The money they donated has been used for these exact same purposes for the last 30 years. The donors have unconsciously joined George Soros in undermining America. 16 years ago an articulate, attractive, community organizer turned Senator was elected President of the United States. If you did not anticipate what he would do based on his radical background, friend to the likes of the terrorist Bill Ayres, the America hating Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the antisemite Louis Farrakhan, you should have at least opened your eyes when he adopted economic policies based on discredited theories and foreign policies hostel to our friends like Israel and accommodating to our enemies like Iran. Perhaps you noticed that while claiming the high ground in curing racial ills, he was consciously provoking racial strife. After all, without racial strife what is the Democratic party’s raison d’etre? He simultaneously gave unqualified support to the teacher’s union whose failures have handed millions of life sentences in a poverty prison to poor children. Apparently that was not enough to open your eyes. Money given to a university supports all its programs. Most universities and particularly the Ivy League have accepted large donations from the Chinese communists and made many accommodations for them. They all but eliminated conservative thought on campus by offering tenure only to “right minded “teachers. They have embraced the woke agenda while brooking no dissent, dissent being a necessary element for any learning environment. Indoctrination has replaced education. Anti-Semitism has run rampant wearing the fig leaf of BDS and the Palestinian movement. All this while educational standards have precipitously declined. Make no mistake. The money that was donated supports George Soros district attorneys, no bail, defund find the police and every other idiotic anti-American woke idea. It supports the most corrupt party in the history of American politics, the Democrats. It supports a justice department that targets conservatives and turns a blind eye to liberal corruption. Can you imagine if Merrick Garland had been made a Supreme Court Justice? This justice department recently sentenced six peaceful demonstrators at a late term abortion clinic to between two and four years in prison. The same justice department supported eight years of lawfair against President Trump. To all of you who have blindly donated money to leftist organization like the universities; do you have the strength of character to admit your mistake and reverse course? No one needs mea culpas. What is needed is support. By virtue of your success, you have a megaphone. Use it. Speak out against those who are trying to undermine this great nation. If you are inclined to make donations, make them to organizations that further conservative values. You may not get the adulation Harvard provides, but you can rest knowing you did real good and no harm. No one cares about the mistakes of the past. Everyone very much cares about the present.

Shame on You George Bush

I forgave you when you passed No Child Left Behind. Did you not know that it would do nothing to help educate children, but entrench the bureaucracy that has sentenced them to the economic and social prison that a lack of education insures? I forgave you when you signed McCain-Feingold after correctly saying it was unconstitutional, and you would never sign it. Did your father’s “Read my lips, no new taxes” broken pledge to the American people make you think it was OK? I forgave you when you signed the North Korean deal that any observer should have known would only serve to give the rogue nation more funding. But I can never forgive you for your recent comments about Donald Trump. You were silent while Obama all but nationalized the banks with Dodd Frank, and you were silent when he did the same with Obamacare. You were silent when he signed the Iran deal which effectively promoted terrorism throughout the world, and worse, brought us closer to a nuclear disaster. You were silent when Obama’s Israel policy had the effect of giving obscene justification for Palestinian terrorism. In fact you were silent throughout the most destructive series of foreign and domestic policy decisions in modern presidential history. Yet, after all this silence, you decide to bring out your megaphone because of Donald Trump‘s unorthodox/crude manner. How dare you? Trump has made more progress with North Korea in nine months than Bill Clinton, you and Obama made in 24 years. He has reversed as many of the evils of the Obama’s wrong headed thinking as is possible, and is committed to reversing as many more as possible. His cabinet appointments are not simply good, but superlative, each committed to a pro growth freedom agenda. That hardly sounds like the end of the Republican Party. It is colossal gall that you would suggest such a thing, given the vast losses the party incurred as you left office, all of which have been reversed with Trump’s election. Mr Bush, “It is better to be silent and thought the fool, than to open your mouth and leave no room for doubt.”

Why Vote for Trump? Extreme Realpolitik

The Republican establishment should wake up. Over the last few weeks I am heard many renowned and accomplished conservatives say that they will not vote for Donald Trump. Donald Trump is a buffoon. He is a crude, a bully and a clown with migrating ideas and values, to the extent that he has any thoughts at all. But life does not present us with perfect or sometimes even good choices. Was Bob Dole even a good choice? John McCain is far more liberal than conservative, and worse yet he has repeatedly furthered liberal propaganda by allowing himself to be the poster boy for bipartisanship (defined as a singular John McCain joining the Democrats.) In fact we have had exactly 2 presidents in the 20th and 21st century that qualify as “good choices,” Calvin Coolidge and of course Ronald Reagan. I promise you most of the “I won’t vote for Trump” crowd who are old enough, voted for Richard Nixon. He was a liberals dream. He created the EPA, passed cost of living increases, imposed wage and price controls, and his dream of universal healthcare came close to reality.. George H. W. Bush found it more expeditious to violate his oath on taxes than to withstand the heat from the entrenched political class. George W Bush signed campaign finance reform after telling the world that it was patently unconstitutional, signed No Child Left Behind with the support of Teddy Kennedy (frightening), a law that any observer of public policy knew would only pour more money into the bottomless pit called education reform, and then he tried to give us Harriet Miers, who likely would have been as much a disaster on the Supreme Court as his father’s appointee David Souter. And so along comes Donald Trump. I will not defend him. He is indefensible. His language, his thought process, his knowledge base and his chameleon nature, are repugnant. Who knows what he will do as president? Not me. But there is one thing of which I have no doubt. He will be infinitely better than the Hillary Clinton. Charles Koch said that Obama is driving us towards a cliff at 100 miles per hour. He also said that George Bush was pushing us there at 50 miles per hour. Sadly, those are our only choices. Should conservatives run towards the cliff at 100 miles an hour by not voting, or at 50, holding our noses while we vote for Trump and pray that a savior is on the way? Donald Rumsfeld wisely said you go to war with the army you have, not the one you wish you had.

Elizabeth Warren Is Only A Distraction For Hillary

The political pundits advising Hillary to move to the left in order to pre-empt a threat from Elizabeth Warren have it wrong. It is questionable if such a move will gain her any votes, but it is unnecessary to win the primary and will hurt her in the general election. In 2004 Howard Dean had the same crowd of radical leftist groups like moveon.org backing him. Up until the actual voting he polled great. Of course once the battle began he crashed and burned, losing to the more “centrist” candidate John Kerry. In 2008 Obama started with the same supporters as Dean, but he won. There was one major and telling difference. Black voters represent about 25% of Democratic primary voters. and traditionally the vote is divided. Obama entered the primary and true to form it remained divided because no one thought he had a chance of winning. But once he won in Iowa, people realized he could win the nomination and the entire black community lined up behind him. Hillary would have won in a landslide absent the black vote, and would have won decisively had the black vote been divided. In 2016 the it will be divided, and Hillary will win the nomination easily. After all, wasn’t Bill Clinton “the first black president”?

How Did Obama Get Elected?

How is it possible that Barack Obama got reelected? One might explain his original ascendency, however unlikely, to his hidden nature, something the press studiously avoided talking about. But to make the same mistake again is almost unfathomable. He is a man that sat in the pews of a racist, Jew hating, America hating preacher and called him his mentor. He refers in his autobiographies (the plural is not a typo, he has two of them) to Frank, who is Frank Marshall, another mentor. Marshall was a lifelong communist, as thus an apologist for Joseph Stalin, the murderer of 80 million people. He cut his teeth in Chicago politics at the home of Bill and Bernadette Ayres, convicted domestic terrorists. He attended events for fundraisers for Hamas, terrorists in the middle east. And if anyone doubts that past is prologue, he has governed using the same destructive principles that the aforementioned rogues gallery advocate. Who would vote for such a man? How could this happen? The founding fathers believed that a representative democracy could only flourish if the voters had a vested interest in the long term health of the country. It is often the case that the long and short term interests are opposite one another. Some men are willing to delay gratification in order to enhance long term benefits, while others seek instant gratification at the expense of long term health. Our founding fathers understood that allowing everyone to vote was a recipe for disaster. Too many voters would opt for instant gratification regardless of the longer term costs. It was almost self evident that any system embracing one man one vote was doomed to fail. The fathers wanted to insure that only voters with a long term interest qualified to vote. Because women were considered ignorant in the ways of government and business, and a man not owning property was thought to be too young and inexperienced to cast a thoughtful ballot, or simply unqualified by virtue of his station in life, they were excluded from voting. Land was prized above most things (this was a time when Ben Franklin said of our agrarian society, “All wealth will come from the ground.”), so that or a minimum amounts of land, savings or taxes paid were used as a criteria to qualify to vote. Below are quotes illustrating the thinking at that time. It applies today as much as it did then. My thesis is that if only people with a vested interest in the long term survival of the US were voting, this aberration of an Obama re-election could never have happened. ‘Property requirements were widespread. Some colonies required a voter to own a certain amount of land or land of a specified value. Others required personal property of a certain value, or payment of a certain amount of taxes. Examples from 1763 show the variety of these requirements. Delaware expected voters to own fifty acres of land or property worth £40. Rhode Island set the limit at land valued at £40 or worth an annual rent of £2. Connecticut required land worth an annual rent of £2 or livestock worth £40. John Adams, signer of the Declaration of Independence and later president, wrote in 1776 that no good could come from enfranchising more Americans: Depend upon it, Sir, it is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy and altercation as would be opened by attempting to alter the qualifications of voters; there will be no end to it. New claims will arise; women will demand the vote; lads from 12 to 21 will think their rights not enough attended to; and every man who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks to one common level. The true reason of requiring any qualification, with regard to property, in voters, is to exclude such persons as are in so mean a situation that they are esteemed to have no will of their own. If these persons had votes, they would be tempted to dispose of them under some undue influence or other. This would give a great, an artful, or a wealthy man, a larger share in elections than is consistent with general liberty.” Interesting that the quote above believes limiting who can vote would protect against wealth having an undue influence. What has happened since the one man one vote policy was adopted is not that wealthy individuals have gained undue influence, but the government itself has become the wealthy force that trades favors for votes. The never ending expansion of the social programs has provided a framework for Democrats to gain and expand power. These programs have proven to be cancers destroying the nations economic and social fabric under the false banner of compassion, but they succeed in garnering votes. Most Democratic voters have no idea what philosophy the party employs, they don’t know who the Vice President is, who their senator is, or anything else related to the economy, civics or the legal system. But they do know how to apply for welfare, food stamps, aid to dependent children, heating subsidies rent subsidies and Obama phones, and they know what party to vote for to insure the money for these programs keeps flowing. Whether these laws limiting voting accomplished their purpose, or could have been crafted better is open to debate. Even if there was merit at the time to the prohibition on women voting, it certainly would be an absurdity today. But the idea that letting the entire public vote would destroy the democracy is as true today as it was then. In order to expand the class of uninformed voters, the Obama crowd routinely insults our intelligence with nonsensical claims such as arguing that identifying oneself at a polling place is undemocratic and an undue burden. To the contrary it is both democratic and a small step in

Pope Francis and Wrong Ideas

I am a great admirer of the Catholic Church, even though it has been under attack by the left and their media allies for decades. The child abuse scandal is the most recent of many failures during the Church’s 2000 years history. Popes have been less than infallible, the church has often been intolerant, cruel, self indulgent and power hungry. But none of that should be unexpected. The Church is made of men, and men are by definition failed, even men of God. Therefore the institutions made of these men are failed as well. How could it be otherwise? However, failure does not mean evil. When all the church’s wrong doing is tallied, and there is a great deal of it, the sum total is tiny when compared to the massive good it has done for centuries. For example…how many readers are aware that one third of all healthcare in the United States is provided by a Catholic institution. Imagine what that number would be if all the christian faiths were included. One quarter of healthcare worldwide is provided by the church. Education, adoption services, all manner of care for the poor and infirmed and other charitable works too numerous to name are staples of the church. I could go on and on about their good works, but these are but a small part of what the church does for society. It works every day to provide a moral framework, a guide to life, teaching people how to maintain the important building blocks of self, the family, and community. There is no metric I know of to quantify this, but I do know we would be in a Hobbesian state of nature without it. The church is at the heart of our social structure, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and nourishing the mind and spirit. There are many valid arguments why moral behavior is self serving. But at the end of the day right for right’s sake is indispensable for a civil society, without which it would crumble into chaos. Teaching this through God and His goodness is the church’s raisnon d’être. This is why I am distressed by the recent 84 page apostolic exhortation from Pope Francis. Some of what he says is insightful and of great value to us all. But much of it shows a complete blindness to economic and social history, and no understanding of the dynamics of either. He is seeking a Utopian dream instead of advocating capitalism, the only path for the material betterment of mankind. The paper refers to unfettered capitalism as “a new tyranny.” It criticizes the “idolatry of money” and beseeches politicians to guarantee all citizens “dignified work, education and healthcare.” If ever there was an argument against papal infallibility, the certain abuses to come from these ideas would make a compelling case. In the movie Wall Street Gordon Gekko said, “For lack of a better term, greed is good.” He was right. Instead of condemning greed and unfettered capitalism, the Pope should be condemning theft, fraud, misrepresentation and dishonesty in all its forms, but pursuing wealth through honest means should be celebrated. To condemn greed is to condemn most men’s call to greatness. Would the Pope condemn Beethoven for wanting to write great symphonies, Michelangelo’s want to create unfathomable beauty, or Newtons rewriting of the laws of physics? Was their push for the perfection of their craft a sin? If they pursued it seeking fame and fortune, was what they did any less valuable to society? Why then would the Pope condemn a man’s want to create more and more wealth? The creation of wealth is as important a public good as the works of any of the great men listed above. It rewards its creator, but it rewards society far more. Bill Gates, his employees and shareholders made untold billions. But that is trivial when compared to what the people using his products made. His work lifted people out of poverty and improved the lives of everyone. None of the goodness Microsoft did could have been done without profits. The magnitude of those profits reflect the magnitude of what society gained. Walmart is the richest largest retailer in the world, making more money than probably the next 10 retailers combined. But the impoverished are the biggest beneficiaries of their high quality and low prices. Would Pope Francis want Walmart to cease operations? Profits are the life blood of these wealth producing machines. This is a debate about capitalism, unfettered as the Pope would say, and socialism, the anti-christ of economic prosperity. Look at history. In every case capitalism has fed the poor while socialism has created more of them. Thanksgiving calls to mind one such example. The first arrivals here from England set up a socialist system in the Plymouth Colony of New England in 1623. It failed miserably. Food and other essentials were scarce and everyone suffered. Out of desperation the Governor switched to a free market system (privatized property, eliminated collective farming etc.) and the colony flourished. It produced more food and staples than could be consumed, and was the start of our great economic machine, the greatest in history. Chile was destitute in 1973 under it’s socialist system. Pinochet took over and changed it to a capitalist one and Chile quickly became the economic miracle of South America. Is there poverty still in Chile…of course. But far less than before, and everyone, even those still impoverished, are far better off than before. In 1945 under a capitalist system Argentina had a standard of living equal to France. Then the communists took over and a country blessed with more oil and minerals than most languished in economic purgatory. In China Mao Zedong promised Utopia to the people, but instead gave them poverty and death… 60 million to be exact. Stalin promised the same, and like Mao, delivered death, 80 million. Castro has promised a workers paradise for over 50 years but instead created a police

Some Common Sense Please

There should be a central talking points unit for conservatives that puts out concise rationals for our positions, answers the lies or misleading statements by liberals, and answer questions by the public. How often have you heard centrists or liberals (often disguised as independents or middle of the road voters) say they only wish congress would compromise. The President uses this “failure” by congress to justify his extra legal appointments and executive orders, as well as a basis for reelection. Someone should infuse some common sense to this. When two ideas are diametrically opposite, when both suggest that the other will not only not gain the objective, but will rather drive us farther from it, then how is any imaginary compromise possible? It’s as if we reach a crossroads, knowing our destination is either to the right or left, but because we can’t agree on which way to go we proceed straight ahead, insuring that we will fail. If higher spending and taxes, a.k.a. a welfare state, is the best thing for the voters, then lower taxes and less redistribution would not only not help, but would be harmful. Of course we know that the tax and spend agenda is destructive, the collectivist mentality is worse, and if conservatives don’t have the power to lower taxes and spending, preventing increases is the next best thing. This is not rocket science, but one might think it is given the conservative failure to clearly respond. When Newt attacked Romney because of his wealth, Romney was given the perfect tool to amplify the message that wealth creation benefits everyone. It provides jobs, as well as lowering prices. Wealth for everyone expands when created (as he has done), and contracts when destroyed as the government routinely does. Instead he cowered in the corner, making up a list of excuses, until the public pressure to release his tax returns grew too great. I assume he had a poll number saying people would resent it. His advisers should take note. Most of the resentment of success comes from people whose votes he could never win. Others like those of us on the right not only have no problem with it, but celebrate it. The voters who could be affected are in that theoretical middle. Doesn’t he see that if those voters really want to understand, he can win their votes with a common sense explanation about the nature of economic activity. His attempt to hide however, leaves the collectivist argument unchallenged, and a voter who doesn’t understand the issue but could be swayed, will gravitate to the argument by the left, however idiotic. I will repeat myself. Ronald Reagan taught us the principled is also the political. Newt….Mitt..try the truth. It works.

Newt and Mitt

Ann Coulter eviscerated Newt Gingrich on the Mark Simone radio show Saturday morning, and everything she said was right. She even defended John King and his opening question in the debate about Newt’s second wife’s claims (talk about strange bedfellows.) There is an endless horizon above the territory where Newt can be criticized. With that being said, he has also done great things for the country and conservative causes. Now there is no bigger fan of Ann than I. She has repeatedly pointed to liberal hypocrisy, failures, lies, distortions, and about everything else despicable that liberals do. And she does it with humor, facts and logic, presenting common sense and irrefutable evidence. However, when she criticizes Newt while advocating for Romney, she leaves half the relevant facts in the file. Mitt is not conservative, or if he is we have no evidence pointing to it. The problem is knowing, really knowing Mitt. He has been on both sides of every issue, past and present. If you watch him closely you will see he is willing to go either way on the most trivial of issues. Politics drives him even more than Obama. Did you see the news clip of the CNN debate when he was asked if he would release his tax returns. He said, “I will check with advisers and”….then there were boos from the audience, and instead of finishing as he intended, that he would make the determination after checking, he switched gears and said “and I will release them.” My point is the boos made him change. He has no core convictions, and since everything he says is tailored to what he thinks will garner the most votes, we can’t determine what he believes or for that matter how much he really knows. His claim to “understanding how an economy works” rings hollow in the light of his economic plan. The sign of a genius is to make a complicated thing simple. Unfortunately, his plan has 59 points. But the single most frightening part is that he raises taxes on the rich. His explanation is that the middle class have been hurt in recent years and the rich can afford more taxes. The rich create most of the wealth in the economy, and that creates most of the jobs. His plan is Democratic light, and would undermine wealth creation and job creation. Does he not understand this, or is he “only” pandering? His defense of his totally failed (by every metric) health care plan in Mass. seems to indicate he just doesn’t get it. It is as if he is saying, “Government is the answer if we just do it differently than the Democrats.” The question voters must ask themselves, is who is most likely to pursue conservative principles. Santorum actually meets that qualification more than Newt or Mitt. However, he too has a few economic blind spots. He relies too much on the government, and thinks government sponsored rewards and penalties will promote prosperity. He believes that manufacturing, the primary beneficiary of his reward/ tax system, is key to economic success.He is wrong, but that’s for another day. Mitt and Newt could both learn a lot from the Gipper. Anyone who watched Ronald Reagan should know that the principled is also the political. Reagan was eviscerated by the pundits, press and even moderate Republicans every time he made his point in “bold colors, not pastels,” but within days the positive public response silenced the critics and made him even more loved and respected than he had been before.

State of the Election

This election will be the first of its kind in my lifetime, and possibly in all American history. The President has a failed record on economic and foreign policy issues. Naturally, he and his surrogates (ABC, NBC, CBS, NY Times, NPR, Hollywood elites etc) would rather avoid the topic, and when they do discuss it they casually lie. They say he’s had the most foreign policy successes of any president this far in his term (a total fiction..in reality he has failed miserable). He has failed on the economy as well, but the main stream media is assisting him by certifying his lies and distortions. He says he created 2 million jobs. At least there is a seed of truth in that. However, 2 million is far fewer than any recovery in US history, it is fewer than the jobs lost during his term, and his “job producing” policies have caused the national debt to skyrocket by literally trillions of dollars. No wonder he would rather not discuss these things. He can no longer do the “vision” thing, or the “can’t we all get along” thing, having attacked every opponent on every issue and painting them as cold and heartless. Representative Paul Ryans budget is “social Darwinism”, doctors would rather operate than give a drug because they make more money, insurance companies, oil companies, banks, are all evil enemies of the working man. These wealth producers are the enemy of every man in America, and if only they are brought to heel life will be good once again. uggg… As if this isn’t bad enough, it has entered a new, even more scary phase. If one listens to what he is saying, it is east to imagine the words of Stalin, Mao, Marks, Lenin, Castro, Chavez or Engels. I’m not kidding. Obama’s ideas are the very ideas sold to the masses in Russia, China and elsewhere which took over the governments and destroyed whatever economic system the countries had. He says that imposing a jobs destroying tax on the rich will somehow solve our economic woes. “From those according to their means, to those according to their needs.” The top 1% of earners pay 40% of the taxes, and the top 10% pay 70% of the taxes. Half the nation pays no taxes at all. And for good measure, if the tax passed, and if it raised the projected revenue (highly unlikely), it would account for 1/10 of 1% (.001) of our annual budget. Doesn’t sound like an answer to anything to me. How can Obama win on a series of lies and distortions, most having nothing to do with the country’s problems? If California is representative of the nation as a whole (I pray it is not), he will win in a heartbeat. California has lost 1,200,000 net people in the last ten years. Actually, about 4 million left and 3 million came into the state. Now..33% of Californians are on welfare. Ask yourself. Did any of the people who left the state come from the welfare rolls? Very few. Did any of the people who came into the state join the welfare rolls? Quite a few. That means the percentage of voters dependent on the government increased, and the percentage of productive wealth producing people decreased. What does this portend? More Democrats elected in California. Those people voting for whoever promises them the most has increased, making this obscene state government even more entrenched. There is only one outcome. California will go the way of Detroit. It is richer, and therefore will take longer, but Detroit, it will become. The more important question is, nationally, have Obama and the Democrats succeeded in demonizing the wealth producers enough to get elected? Have they promised the non producers enough freebies to get them to vote for the destruction of the greatest nation ever on God’s earth? Stay tuned. The answer will appear on November 6, 2012.

Inflation: Hell to Pay

I have a problem with the methodology used to measure inflation. In business we segregate operating expenses, those costs that recur on a regular basis, and capital expenses, costs that are non recurring and are better understood as a longer term “investments,” such as equipment purchases, real estate purchases etc. In our personal lives, rent, food, gasoline etc. might be considered operating expenses. Buying a house (not the mortgage payment,) a computer, television etc would be more like capital expenses, not rapidly recurring costs. Last year we had had 10% food inflation in our home operating expenses, probably 30% energy inflation, health care and education inflation are still running at 6% or higher, and things like airline tickets have gone way up. But we are told by Bernake and company that inflation is running at around 2%. The reason is that he is combining reduced capital expenses with increased operating expenses, a methodology which would cause endless bankruptcies if used for decision making in business. The value in your home went down the last few years, computers are cheaper, as are TVs and many other large ticket items. When those declines are combined with increases in day to day expenses, the net is about 2%. Well, I don’t need the latest model computer or TV to survive, and I don’t need a new car or home. But I do need food, energy and health care. And they take up the largest percentage of most household budgets. Cheaper houses, TVs and computers offset very little, and they certainly don’t help pay household bills. The inflation rate is probably closer to 6% than 2%. If you think that is bad, the following is far more depressing. BBB, aka Banana Ben Bernake (banana republics have been printing money excessively for decades,) has repeatedly told us that he sees no sign of inflation, and as soon as he does he will raise interest rates and tamp it right down. Nothing to worry about. Laurence Meyers, Federal Reserve Governor from 1996 until 2002, similarly said that controlling inflation is simple. We know how. If the inflation rate pushes above 3%, we will raise rates and it is easily controlled. The arrogance by both of these men is only exceeded by their blindness. Below are excerpts from a Bloomberg piece by Amity Shlaes listing inflationary cycles and assigning causes. The speed with which they occured was like a fire spreading through a dried timber building. “When you see the flood, it is too late to build the arc.” I make no claim to understand all the dynamics governing inflation, and neither do I know when the cycle will occur. It could be one, 3 or 5 years, but the seeds have been planted. This is all going to end very badly. Consumer price index for urban areas, went from 1 percent in 1915 to 7 percent in 1916 to 17 percent in 1917. How did it happen? The Treasury spent like crazy on the war, creating money to pay for it, then pretended that its spending was offset by complex Liberty Bond sales and admonishments to citizens that they save more. In 1945, all seemed well: Inflation was 2 percent, at least officially. Within two years that level hit 14 percent. All appeared calm in 1972 too, before inflation jumped to 11 percent by 1974, and stayed high for the rest of the decade, diminishing the quality of life for all Americans. The thing about inflation is that it accelerates. The acceleration hit storybook levels in the most sudden case of all, that of Germany in 1922. Many financial analysts thought the Weimar authorities weren’t producing enough money. “Tight Money in German Market: Causes of the Abnormally Rapid Currency Deflation at Year-End,” read a New York Times headline. The Germans didn’t know it, but they had already turned their money into wallpaper; the next year would see hyperinflation, when inflation races ahead at more than 50 percent a month. It moved so fast that prices changed in a single hour. Yet even as it did so, the country’s financial authorities failed to see inflation. They thought they were witnessing increased demand for money. Germany in the 1920s is always the extreme example. But one form of denial then warrants comparison to the U.S. today. Bernanke talks about prices in one area – energy, for example — as different from those in the rest of the economy. The Germans, in their denial, thought their problem was limited to exchange rates, and that their domestic economy had hope. Risibly, Chancellor Joseph Wirth tried to tie down prices by regulating foreign currency. The equivalent, and equivalently risible move today is the Ralph Nader effort to get the administration to push down oil prices. Based on his study of the Great Depression, Bernake has justified printing vast amounts of money (The largest lender to the US government by far is the Federal Reserve) by pointing to that “evil” genius deflation. The currency did deflate then, but perhaps he should look at the period preceding the depression. Deflation also punctuated the Coolidge administration, arguably the most prosperous economic period in American history. Mankind has been in search of perpetual motion machines, a loom to spin gold from straw, and many other impossible dreams. Bernake and company (liberal economists) hopes that they can boost the economy with currency manipulation is just another in a long line of fools dreams. Their result will be the same as all the others.