Editor’s note: This article first appeared on LewRockwell.com on July 12, 2005. 

If you haven’t seen this, it is really an outrage.

Digital surveillance promises to make institutions more secure by enabling them to see more. Automated license-plate readers, facial recognition systems, and interconnected databases allow authorities to identify patterns and retrieve information at speeds once considered impossible. Yet greater capacity to detect and classify does not necessarily improve the ability to determine what happened. An institution may acquire more information without gaining the ability to interpret it accurately.

The recent reaction in the gold market to the September US inflation data offers a textbook illustration of how short-term speculative noise can obscure and distort longer-term realities. After the CPI print showed a 0.6 percent month-on-month rise and 3.7 percent year-on-year, followed by an even hotter PPI of 1.3 percent monthly and 6.3 percent annually, spot gold sold off sharply. Prices briefly tested levels near $4,070–$4,100 before recovering most of the ground.

One major reason for studying history is to learn lessons that shed light on contemporary problems and avoid repeating the same mistakes. As the historian Clyde Wilson has reminded us, “history is not a mathematical calculation or scientific experiment but a vast drama of which there is always more to be learned.”

Washington policy wizards have discovered a new federal housing outrage: twice as many households could be collecting Section 8 rental subsidies in the nation’s capital if the program was better managed.

I know nobody wants higher oil prices except for the people in the oil industry. Higher oil and energy prices are a very noticeable effect of the Federal Reserve’s inflationary rampage in recent years. Obviously, our government’s choice to initiate a war in the Persian Gulf has made things particularly bad for working-class households. But, with everyone spending more on oil products, forced to consume less, other businesses are crying in economic pain at all the lost business dollars that are missing from their customers too.