There are many people who can detail the rationale behind this comic far better than I can.  Below are a few links that touch on the concept illustrated in this cartoon – some directly, some more peripherally.  Of course there are technical differences between fiscal stimulus and monetary stimulus, but from the point of view of the average consumer, the effect is the same.

A brief overview of monetary stimulus.

A bit more of a “fun” overview of how quantitative easing works:

This video details a “Misesian” objection to stimulus spending:

This video details the objection of an Austrian economist investor to government intervention in the market:

A “Monetarist” explanation of the link between stimulus and the negative effects of inflation:

However, there are those out there that prefer hard numbers and a more empirical approach before they’re willing to take a particular stance on an issue.  See if the above theory at all parallels the story told by the data in the video:

(If you’ve the time, watch all three videos – Part 1)

And if you’ve a lot of spare time, have a look at this video.  It’s titled the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle, but it presents these ideas primarily using work of Hayek and other neoclassical economic models:

Senator Rand Paul’s recent filibuster was possibly the most bold attempt yet to bring the debate over drones to the forefront of the collective American consciousness.  Yet, on the whole, there seems to be little if any new meaningful discussion happening over the constitutional or moral ramifications of our targeted assassination program.  One can’t help but wonder why this is; certainly if George W. Bush were in office there’d be calls for impeachment.

As stated in the cartoon, the mere threat of war with Iraq in 2003 prompted the largest anti-war rally in world history – this before a single bullet was fired.  One administration and ten years later, The Federal Bureau of Investigative Journalism announces a new project called “Naming the Dead,” aimed at giving names and faces to all individuals killed by the U.S. targeted assassination program.  As of February 4th, 2013, TBIJ had officially named 331 non-combatant civilians, which included 87 children.  Moreover, it’s been confirmed that the U.S. has also engaged in a policy known as “double-tapping.”

Typically, double-tapping involves striking an area a second time after the initial strike, once medical response teams have already arrived in the area; this usually results in massive civilian casualties.  Further, Al Jazeera has confirmed reports that U.S. drones have gone as far as attacking funerals - a tactic that, supposedly, the mafia won’t even resort to.

Whatever your stance on the morality or necessity of drone warfare, I think we can almost all agree that the once sizable U.S. anti-war movement has grown curiously silent – especially when one considers the vitriole once inspired by such practices as waterboarding and indefinite detention under Bush.

For such an objectively controversial issue as targeted assassinations to pass without so much as a hearty and thoughtful discussion should cause people on both sides of the debate to raise an eyebrow.

Feel free to check the math for yourself here.

Another way to state the point of this cartoon: if you earned $1000 per second, every second, for exactly half of a millenium, you still wouldn’t have enough money to cover the current U.S. debt.  Keep in mind the $16 trillion does not account for unfunded liabilities, which were recently estimated to bring actual U.S. debt to $222 trillion.

And in case your wondering… 222 trillion milliseconds ago was around 5000 BCE – predating the dawn of Sumerian civilization.  $85 billion is “devastating”?  Again, 16 trillion milliseconds ago, the Sistine Chapel ceiling hadn’t yet been painted; 85 billion milliseconds ago, we already had the iPad.  Maybe it’s time we get serious about our current financial situation.

“The man of righteousness tends to be so sure of his own motives that he does not need to inspect consequences.”                                                         – Robert Penn Warren

Let me start off by stating that I am not a gun owner.  I did not grow up in a gun owning household, nor in a particularly “pro-gun” community – I don’t even like westerns or war movies.  Put simply, I have a hard enough time properly operating the space heater in my bedroom that owning a gun seems like a bit of a leap.  On a personal level, I am not very interested in guns; however, I am very interested in free choice and public safety.  And in the event we choose to encroach on the former for the sake of the latter, we ought to be certain we will see the results we had intended.

If you do a little homework on the issue of gun control, there’s one argument you’ll find conspicuously absent amongst criminologists: “more guns equal more crime.”  There’s not one serious academic I could find making this claim, as it seems to be no more than an emotional, knee-jerk reaction to a very complex problem.  This is quite understandable: I once held the same belief myself – after all, it does seem almost intuitive.  On the other hand, it also seems intuitive that heavier objects would fall faster than lighter ones, that the earth would be flat, and that bans on drugs would reduce drug use.  However upon further investigation, we find that which is immediately obvious isn’t always true.  The perplexing truth is that more guns do not equal more crime.  In fact, there’s evidence to suggest more guns produce the opposite result.  The academic debate is between the issue of increased gun ownership decreasing crime or having no effect at all.

One constant figure in the gun-control debate is John Lott, author of “More Guns, Less Crime.”  You’ll find in an article on “Gun Rhetoric vs. Gun Facts” at FactCheck.org that one of Lott’s most ardent critics is a man named John Donohue III.  Donohue routinely cites a report on Lott’s work provided by the National Academy of Sciences, which, according to Donohue, took issue with Lott’s conclusions.  There are a few problems with citing the findings of this council: first, their conclusion is often taken as a refutation of Lott – which it isn’t.  As the report states,

“the committee concludes that with the current evidence it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link between the passage of right-to-carry laws and crime rates.”

Second, using this report as the single, categorical unraveling of Lott’s conclusions ignores all other academic groups and peer-reviewed journals, of which there are many, that have similarly scrutinized Lott’s work and deemed it valid and scholarly.  It is only one opinion – Donohue never mentions any others.  Luckily, the internet is a beautiful place, and I was able to find a fantastic debate on the topic of gun control, in which both Lott and Donohue took part.  You can see Lott directly address Donohue’s criticism’s below:

And again here:

The NAS report is addressed once more here.

If you’ve the time, I strongly suggest watching the entire debate.  Some pertinent facts I took away from the debate:

• Guns are used defensively 4 to 5 times more often than to commit crimes.
• 50% of U.S. counties have 0 murders in any given year.
• 25% of U.S. have 1 murder per year.
• Over 70% of total murders are concentrated in just over 3% of U.S. counties.
• During the same period of time, off-duty Florida police officers were arrested and convicted of crimes at a rate of about 4 times as often as concealed carry permit holders.

One fair question on the part those in favor of gun regulation is, “Why not just remove assault weapons to prevent these awful massacres?  What do we have to lose?”

Firstly, the ban an assault weapons is purely cosmetic.  Military grade, fully-automatic weapons are already heavily regulated, and were not the weapons used in any of the recent mass shootings.  What’s worse is that the anti-gun movement is deliberately using “gun illiteracy” to their advantage.  A quote from a report released by the Violence Policy Center:

“The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.”

The report seems like an outright admission of deliberately playing on the naïveté of the general public to achieve predetermined ends.  Statistics don’t seem to matter, nor does any proof suggesting a gun ban would be ineffective.  In a recent “Google Hangout” with Joe Biden (see below), the Vice President was asked a question about the rationale behind the proposed assault weapon ban.  He responds by mentioning police safety.  While police safety is important, this is the first I’d heard of this issue being used as justification for any gun ban whatsoever.  So, I think it’s a fair question to ask: is the proposed assault weapon ban a solution in search of a problem?  If so, this debate isn’t as honest as we all may like to believe.

As I stated at the begininning, I am interested in both free choice and public safety.  If you’re going to remove any measure of individual liberty for the purpose of safety, increased safety had better be the result.  However – as we can see from the data – gun regulation at best has zero affect on crime.  When the public expects to see concrete changes from policies that are known to be ineffectual from the outset, you’ve deliberately set the public up for disappointment – making further public outcry for more stringent gun regulations (reductions in personal freedom) an inevitability.

Another common objection to assault weapons: “What do you even need an AR-15 for?  What justification do you have for possessing this gun?”

Implicit in this question seems to be the belief that the citizens obtain their rights from government; that our rights are an “allowance” by government somehow, and that we must justify them as being “necessary” in order to keep them.  However, in the Constitution, it’s clear the dynamic was meant to be completely opposite: it’s the government that has to justify what little powers it keeps for itself to the people – not the other way around.  As U.S. citizens, it’s not our job to justify our right to have a certain gun anymore than it’s our job to justify our right to speak freely.  Unless the government can provide clear and substantive reasons for abridging any of our individual freedoms, there’s nothing even to discuss.  It’s not a small matter, and shouldn’t be taken lightly.

The U.S.’s targeted killing program has been in the news recently after the U.N. announced it would conduct a formal investigation into the casualties caused by said program.  At least two permanent members of the U.N. security council anonymously requested this investigation (suspected to be China and Russia), along with Pakistan, which has requested repeatedly for a halt to U.S. drone strikes, as the program violates their sovereignty.

The U.S.’s targeted killing program began facing heavier scrutiny after the Bureau of Investigative Journalism released a report stating as many as - at the time of the report’s release - 881 civilians had been killed outside of recognized battle zones.  The high end of the civilian casualty estimate has since risen to 891.

One reason for the relative silence of the ‘anti-war left’ over the U.S.’s targeted killings is the similar silence in the mainstream media over the issue.  I, personally, was late to learn of the program for that exact reason.  It wasn’t until the story found its way to me through more independent media channels that I began to speak up about it.  Well… at least that’s the optimistic point of view; the cynic might say that this is “party politics at is very lowest,” and that, in the eyes of liberals, Obama can do no wrong.  However, there’ve been at least a few self-described liberals to publicly criticize Obama for the civilian casualties caused by targeted killings: one of them is Cenk Uygur of “The Young Turks.”  Below is a video of him speaking about the program.  It gets really interesting when he mentions something called “double tapping.”

There’s been a tremendous amount of outrage in the wake of the Newtown, CT shootings – and understandably so.  Not surprisingly, there’ve been countless calls for limiting the second amendment rights of U.S. citizens, followed by vehement pushback from pro-gun supporters.  However, if ”saving the lives of innocent people” is justification for limiting a constitutional right of individual Americans, why are there no calls for limiting the unconstitutional actions of the executive branch, which have had similar – if not far uglier - results than the recent mass shootings?  I’m referring to the targeted assassination program, often referred to as the “drone strike” program (in some cases, drones have not been used to carry out targeted assassinations, however, the conventional understanding of the program seems to have made the two terms nearly synonymous).

Some rather eye-opening details have been revealed about the targeted assassination program in recent months: the criteria for declaring people “combatants” are tenuous at best, many targets with legitimate ties to Al-Qaeda pose little to no immediate threat to the U.S., little if any explanation is given as to why an extraction – as opposed to an assassination – was not the chosen course of action, and in many cases there have been large numbers of civilian casualties: casualties that include women and children.

When it comes to the issues of ‘gun control’ or ‘drone strikes’, I’m not certain of the correct solution in either case.  However, I find it a little unsettling that there’s such a disparity in public outrage over the former issue when compared to public outrage over the latter.

Articles detailing the Al-Majalah bombing: Live Leak, Huffington Post

Jeremy Scahill, contributor to TheNation.com and a journalist I have come to admire, explains the issue better than I can.  If you’ve the time, I suggest watching the video from the beginning:

Most understood this idea to be outright silly.  However, some seemed to think – while the “trillion dollar coin” was unlikely to ever happen – it could potentially work. 

If paying off debts were as simple as assigning arbitrary values to random objects, why not just declare all rocks to be worth $1000 USD and end poverty overnight?  In fact, why ever work at all??  Let’s just print a yearly salary of $250K for each of us – wouldn’t that solution be along the same line of thinking?

I found this video to be pretty insightful.  I’m not sure what I like more about this guy: his dry wit or that he’s very well informed.  Short and sweet – check it out:

This comic parodies the silliness in the dialogue of the “Fiscal Cliff” debate.  How many times are we going to hear about “balancing the budget on the backs/corpses of [insert group here]“?  Just because there’s vitriole flying around doesn’t mean a serious conversation is taking place.

I took these numbers from a blog post by Austro-Libertarian economist, Robert P. Murphy.  Had we done nothing, 98.2% of the change in deficit would’ve come from tax increases – not spending cuts.  And all future budget projections have spending increase estimates factored in already – we can’t even get to a place where we’re just spending the same amount every year.  It’s like increased yearly spending is an inevitability.

Spending is (eventually) going to be a very real problem.  The proposals by Republicans have been meager (how can they be anything other without touching defense?), and the objections of Democrats have been groundless appeals to sentiment.

So, as Fred says in the comic: “[Can we] get serious already?”

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Also, a comment from Reddit-land: I posted the above cartoon and it received a little attention.  This comment was my favorite, by far…

The Westboro Baptist Church has been in the news recently for it’s decision to picket the funerals at Sandy Hook, and for the petition posted on the White House’s “We The People” website, requesting the WBC be formally recognized as a hate group.

So, I had a funny thought: if the afterlife does exist in the manner the WBC imagines it, doesn’t that mean – with their perpetual message of hate – the WBC members are all heading head first into the abyss they so gleefully assume they’re avoiding?  The above cartoon is what I imagine their punishment would be in the version of Hell depicted in “Dante’s Inferno.”  The members of Westboro Baptist Church spend their lives on earth full of [excrement], and the Devil waits for them in Hell, beer funnel full-o-fertilizer, to damn them to an eternity full of [excrement].

Admittedly, this cartoon is a bit of a departure from the original intent of my strip, but I thought the issue was worth commenting on.  To me, the best way to defeat ignorance and hatred is through laughter.  Making the effort to get angry at these people, in my opinion, is giving them too much credibility; paying them more mind than they’re actually worth.

This cartoon was inspired by Bastiat’s essay, “Taxes,” which is contained in his larger work, “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen.”

To me, Bastiat is about as poignant of a writer in the field of political and economic philosophy as one can find.  GMU economist, Bryan Caplan, recently had an exchange (1,2,3,4) with Matthew Yglesias of thinkprogress.org, in which he said:

“Bad policies often endure simply because the public has inane economic beliefs and votes accordingly.  When this is the problem, channeling Bastiat is the best remedy we’ve got.”

Amen, Mr. Caplan.  The simple truths posited by Bastiat in his refutations of common economic misunderstandings naturally lend themselves to be condensed into “cartoon form” – in my humble opinion .

Enjoy!