Power & Market
Claudine Gay Resigns from Harvard – And Not a Moment Too Soon
The news arrived in an email from The New York Times, so it had to be true, given the NYT calls itself the “Newspaper of Record.” (The three young men falsely accused in the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case might differ with the NYT’s adherence to keeping an accurate record, but that is a discussion for a different time.)
After the education activist Christopher Rufo had pointed out in a number of articles that Harvard President Claudine Gay had engaged in near-serial plagiarism on her doctoral dissertation (obtained at Harvard), Gay finally resigned, announcing in a letter to Harvard’s faculty: “It is with a heavy heart but a deep love for Harvard that I write to share that I will be stepping down as president.”
She failed to mention any of the plagiarism allegations, having earlier declared: “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship,” even though Harvard has expelled or disciplined students for incidents that were not even as severe as what Rufo had uncovered. Perhaps it is telling, then, that the NYT repeatedly declared that the plagiarism accusation from Rufo were made in “conservative” publications. While one cannot know the mindset of Anemona Hartocollis, who wrote the article, the NYT has a long history of slanting its coverage to promote progressives and discredit conservatives.
The problem for the NYT and Harvard, however, was not that Gay’s plagiarism was discovered and publicized by a conservative activist, but rather that both the university and the “Newspaper of Record” were happy to ignore both Gay’s academic felonies and continue the fiction that she was academically and morally qualified to lead one of the world’s top academic institutions. Once again, we find that elites in academe and journalism are willing to engage in a massive fraud while telling everyone else to move along because there is nothing to see.
This sorry tale has many layers that cannot be covered fully in this brief article but suffice it to say that despite all protestations from Harvard and Gay’s supporters elsewhere, she never should have been president of Harvard University. For that matter, given her thin publication record, she should not have been tenured at Stanford University or Harvard. Her academic resume contains just 11 peer-reviewed papers which might get one tenured at an R2 institution, but certainly not an R1 university as supposedly prestigious as Harvard. The Harvard Crimson might gush over Gay’s academic record, but in what is left of reality in the world of academic elites, Gay was not academically qualified to be tenured or even hired at that level. Her plagiarism further confirms that point.
So, why did Gay rise so quickly in a world where one’s publishing record means everything? The answer is obvious but purposely hidden in plain sight: her ethnic background. Her parents were Haitian immigrants, and she clearly is an intelligent and well-spoken person, and in the academic world where DEI now reigns supreme, she didn’t need much more. What publications she had were centered around ethnic and racial issues and while she was a dean at Harvard, her main accomplishment was advancing ethnic studies.
Both the areas of ethnic studies and accompanying identity studies have a primary purpose not of expanding learning but being a source of campus activism. For example, the majority of the 88 faculty signees of the infamous Duke Chronicle advertisement prematurely assuming guilt in the Duke Lacrosse Case came from identity studies departments at Duke.
Instead of adding to learning in higher education, ethnic and identity studies departments serve as repositories for minority faculty members who would not qualify in traditional academic areas of study, such as physics, chemistry, or mathematics. That was Claudine Gay’s world, and she excelled in it.
It is ironic that the person who owed her career to the establishment of academically fraudulent standards is taken down by her own fraudulent behavior which many at Harvard tried either to conceal or downplay. As I wrote earlier, Claudine Gay never should have been in that position at all. Brett Stephens in his NYT column better understood the situation than the rest of his journalistic colleagues, writing:
The point may now be moot, but the important question for Harvard was never whether Gay should step down. It was why she was brought on in the first place, after one of the shortest presidential searches in Harvard’s recent history. How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?
The answer, I think, is this: Where there used to be a pinnacle, there’s now a crater. It was created when the social-justice model of higher education, currently centered on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and heavily invested in the administrative side of the university — blew up the excellence model, centered on the ideal of intellectual merit and chiefly concerned with knowledge, discovery and the free and vigorous contest of ideas.
Indeed, Gay was an active participant in blowing up the old standards of academic scholarship and Gay succeeded well beyond what she might have imagined. However, enough of the old world has survived to expose her fraudulent behavior. However, do not expect any changes in the world of elite academics where those in charge mirror the attitudes of what the French statesman Tallyrand once said about the Bourbons: “They learned nothing and forgot nothing.”
A New Year’s Resolution Worth Keeping
In the closing days of 2023, the Biden Administration once again announced a large military aid package for Ukraine, this time a “mere” quarter of a billion dollars. Without a new authorization of funds from Congress, it is said to be the last bit of money left over from the more than $100 billion already authorized by Congress for the proxy war with Russia through Ukraine.
President Biden’s request for an additional $100 billion to spread around Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan was rejected by a Congress eager for its winter break, and with each passing day it looks like it’s going to be harder to push it through. Poll after poll show that Americans are increasingly opposed to more of their money being spent on the neocon’s lost-cause war to overthrow Putin in Russia.
For example, a recent Fox News poll revealed that more than 60 percent of Republican voters do not want any more money sent to Ukraine. As we enter an election year, it’s probably safe to predict that Republican candidates will be wary of crossing the wishes of the clear majority of voters.
That is why the Biden Administration has been desperately trying to re-frame its request for more Ukraine war money as anything but a request for more Ukraine war money. For example, they even brought back the old discredited “domino theory” used to justify US actions in the Vietnam war. If we don’t stop Putin in Ukraine, Biden said in December, then he will keep going into western Europe where we will be forced to fight him there.
On the one hand, supporters of the Ukraine war warn that Russia is about to reconstitute the Soviet empire in Europe, while at the same time the same people tell us Russia is out of missiles and on its last leg. One more infusion of US money will end the “Russian threat” once and for all. Both of these things cannot be true at once. In fact, neither of them is true.
But still the Administration, much of Congress, and an insatiable military-industrial complex keep selling the lies.
Last month Secretary of State Antony Blinken inadvertently revealed what exactly all the spending for war is about when he stated that as much as 90 percent of the aid for Ukraine is actually spent in the United States. The money is used “to the benefit of American business, local communities, and strengthening the US defense industrial base,” he said in an interview. In other words, the money “for Ukraine” is actually a massive welfare program for well-connected military contractors back home.
As we begin the year 2024, we need to home in on the real threat to the United States. It is not Russia or China or Iran. The true threat is closer to home: it is a corrupt system that bleeds the country dry to fight imaginary enemies while enriching the military-industrial complex.
For the New Year, Congress should resolve to end the stranglehold of the military-industrial complex by reining in out-of-control military spending. Members should simply vote “no” on military spending bills until they are drafted to benefit the American people rather than the Beltway elite. I don’t hold out much hope of this happening in the short run, but it only takes a few dedicated Members to make a real difference.
Coach Fino Denounces Denver Public Schools
Not many teachers would admit they had taught eight or nine murderers and a number of criminals in over four decades on the job. Coach and educator Steve Finesilver makes this confession in his book Hard Knocks & Dirty Socks: Through the Eyes of Coach. The book is 80 percent indictment of the Denver Public School system (DPS) with the remaining 20 percent devoted to inspirational stories of kids, coaches and instructors who rose above DPS’s continued and growing failures. In Finesilver’s words, “Our current system cheats kids, rips off taxpayers, and sucks the energy and creativity out of teachers.” At the same time, “where I and my colleagues work are places where lawlessness prevails.”
Finesilver, the son of the famous U.S. District Court judge Sherman Finesilver, was a star offensive lineman at Washburn University in the 1970’s. This writer was one of his teammates. Fino was always earnest and idealistic and Hard Knocks shows that now Coach Fino hasn’t changed. The Denver Post called the Finesilver family “Colorado wrestling royalty” when Coach’s two sets of twin boys finished their high school careers. The four young Finesilvers would go on to have successful collegiate careers on the mat, wrestling for Duke. Besides coaching and teaching, Coach founded Jobs By George, a non-profit organization that places students in jobs around Denver. For a man who has achieved much, Jobs By George may be his greatest legacy.
Those hoping Coach Fino tells numerous tales of hard knocks from the gridiron or the wrestling mat will be disappointed. How George Washington High School fared on the field during Coach’s four decades is left out. Like all good stories this one is about people. The kids and teachers are the good guys (other than the murderers). The bad guys are the school bureaucrats. The “suits” don't have the teachers’ backs, there are too many of them, and they are a waste of money. Millions of dollars from taxpayers and the Gates Foundation go to pay administrators and these people never come in contact with students. And these “thirty-somethings-with-a-fancy-resume” have the audacity to require Coach Fino to document his activities.
Coach has plenty of ideas how to repair the Denver government school system’s steaming pile of failure but misses the root problems, the government and the Colorado Education Association (teachers’ union). The CEA website says “We are educators from across Colorado, working together in a strong union to ensure all students get the exceptional public schools they deserve.” These are the same schools Coach Fino wants to break down the walls of because the system “has cheated our children and robbed and stripped them of what could have been.”
Economist and historian Tom DiLorenzo explains,”As Milton Friedman once wrote, government bureaucracies — especially unionized ones — are like economic black holes where increased ‘inputs’ lead to declining "outputs." The more that is spent on government schools, the less educated are the students. The more that is spent on welfare, the more poverty there is, and so on. This of course is the exact opposite of normal economic life in the private sector, where increased inputs lead to more products and services, not fewer.”
Parents have wised up and are either moving to suburban Denver districts or homeschooling their kids, which Coach takes particular issue with: “These are hidden and forgotten children and families.” Homeschooling parents and the homeschooled children don’t feel hidden or forgotten, they feel empowered.
As for dirty socks, in the movie “Apocalypse Now” Robert Duvall’s Col. Kilgore famously said "I love the smell of napalm in the morning.... smells like..... victory.'' For Coach Fino it's the smell and smothering humidity of the room where wrestlers practice and sweat. “The (wrestling) room smelled like a cross between a herd of goats and my sock drawer (which smells worse).” He could have added, it smells like victory.
Coach Fino has forty-plus years of material to draw from, so more books are coming. A book about the criminals and murderers as students would be especially enlightening.
The "Affirmative Action" Hoax
Most discussions of affirmative action center on whether it is legal. Can universities give special advantages to groups that are supposed to be “disadvantaged,” especially blacks? From a libertarian standpoint, private institutions should be free to set whatever admission requirements they want. State-run universities raise more complicated issues, but this isn’t what I want to discuss. We need to ask, is affirmative action a good idea?
Thomas Sowell tells us why it isn’t. “The human tragedy, amid all the legal evasions and frauds, is that, while many laws and policies sacrifice some people for the sake of other people, affirmative action manages to harm blacks, whites, Asians and others, even if in different ways.
Students who are kept out of a college because other students are admitted instead, under racial quotas, obviously lose opportunities they would otherwise have had.
But minority students admitted to institutions whose academic standards they do not meet are all too often needlessly turned into failures, even when they have the prerequisites for success in some other institution whose normal standards they do meet.
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When black students who scored at the 90th percentile in math were admitted to M.I.T., where the other students scored at the 99th percentile, a significant number of black students failed to graduate there, even though they could have graduated with honors from most other academic institutions.
We do not have so many students with that kind of ability that we can afford to sacrifice them on the altar of political correctness.
Such negative consequences of mismatching minority students with institutions, for the sake of racial body count, have been documented in a number of studies, most notably ‘Mismatch,’ a book by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., whose sub-title is: ‘How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.’
When racial preferences in student admissions in the University of California system were banned, the number of black and Hispanic students in the system declined slightly, but the number actually graduating rose substantially. So did the number graduating with degrees in tough subjects like math, science and engineering.
But hard facts carry no such weight among politicians as magic words like ‘diversity’ — a word repeated endlessly, without one speck of evidence to back up its sweeping claims of benefits. It too is part of the Supreme Court fraud, going back to a 1978 decision that seemingly banned racial quotas — unless the word ‘diversity’ was used instead of ‘quotas.’
Seeming to ban racial preferences, while letting them continue under another name, was clever politically. But the last thing we need in Washington are nine more politicians, wearing judicial robes. See this.
Michelle Obama illustrates Sowell’s point that affirmative action leads to the admission of unqualified students. “In 1985, Michelle Obama presented her senior thesis in the sociology department of Princeton University. Although Michelle drew no such conclusion, the thesis is a stunning indictment of affirmative action. Those who benefited from it, Michelle most notably, may never recover from its sting.
Her thesis reads like a cry for help. ‘I have found that at Princeton no matter how matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me,’ she writes, ‘I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as I really don’t belong.’
She didn’t. Michelle should never have been admitted to Princeton. Thanks to the ‘numerous opportunities’ presented by affirmative action, however, Princeton is where she found herself. ‘Told by counselors that her SAT scores and her grades weren’t good enough for an Ivy League school,’ writes biographer Christopher Andersen, ‘Michelle applied to Princeton and Harvard anyway.’ Sympathetic biographer Liza Mundy writes, ‘Michelle frequently deplores the modern reliance on test scores, describing herself as a person who did not test well.’
She did not write well, either. She even typed badly. Mundy charitably describes the thesis as ‘dense and turgid.’ The less charitable Christopher Hitchens observed, ‘To describe [the thesis] as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be “read” at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn’t written in any known language.’
Hitchens exaggerates only a little. The following summary statement by Michelle captures her unfamiliarity with many of the rules of grammar and most of logic:
Ending 2023 on a High Note
What’s in store for 2024? Will the Fed cut rates? If so, will it be because everything is awesome and the fabled soft landing has been achieved? Or will rate cuts just be a small part of a new multi-trillion-dollar bailout package? If the latter, who will bear the brunt of the blame?
Those on Wall Street seem largely unperturbed. On the final trading day of 2023, CNBC reported that:
Stocks fell slightly on Friday, but the S&P 500 closed out 2023 with a surprising gain of 24% as inflation slowed, the economy remained strong and the Federal Reserve signaled an end to its rate-hiking campaign.
Even better:
The S&P 500 rose for nine straight weeks to end the year, its best win streak since 2004.
The largest win streak in the last 20 years is impressive. Should we believe it’s because "inflation slowed," as measured through price indexes coupled with the promise of upcoming rate cuts?
Whether the stats follow the narrative or the narrative follows the stats is debatable. However, the St. Louis Fed's webpage shares the “Pulse of the Economy” below, showing somewhat favorable data.
Additionally, Chair Powell's press conference in December announced:
Inflation has eased from its highs, and this has come without a significant increase in unemployment. That’s very good news. But inflation is still too high … As we look ahead to next year, I want to assure the American people that we’re fully committed to returning inflation to our 2 percent goal.
Many so-called experts continue to endorse the Fed’s narrative, as CNBC shares:
The forecast among many economists for a recession in 2023 did not come to pass … history may consider this year to be a good one, as low unemployment and rapidly declining inflation prevailed.
They even quote a senior vice president and chief economist at PNC Financial:
It [a recession] is less likely now than it was three or six months ago, just because of the ongoing strength we’ve seen.
Certainly, we can never predict the future with pinpoint accuracy, considering the infinite and immeasurable variables that cannot be factored into any financial model. It's also important to recognize that the aforementioned perspectives likely vary widely from those on Main Street. While some of these perspectives can be quantified, for example, CNBC goes on to highlight that it's estimated that:
…60% of Americans now live paycheck to paycheck.
Other factors exist that are fraught with uncertainties, such as the effects of the soon-to-be $34 trillion US debt level, the upcoming Presidential election, and the boom-bust cycle, which, despite the Fed's sincerest efforts to achieve a never-ending era of prosperity, must eventually confront the reality of its policy actions.
The effects of the 2020 boom/bailout and the easy monetary policies will run their course. It's best to anticipate a scenario worse than a slowdown or soft landing. The when will always be the question, so all one can do is continue making predictions to prepare for whatever unfolds in 2024.
If there's a glass-half-full perspective, it might come from understanding the ebb and flow of the Fed's policies. At this stage, the longer the bust/recession is postponed, the more severe when it eventually occurs. This, in turn, will prompt the Fed to buy any bond necessary as it implements emergency measures to salvage the economy once again.
Texas Bullion Depository Five Years On
June 6, 2018, is a historic day as the 74th anniversary of the allied forces D-Day invasion of France and the opening day for the Texas Bullion Depository (TxBD). 2023 is the five-year anniversary of its operation. Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts Glen Hegar states, “We're proud that the nation's first state-administered bullion depository is now a reality — this is a big day for Texans who want to secure their precious metal assets,"
The depository accepts deposits of physical gold, silver, platinum, palladium, and rhodium from U.S citizens and residents. Bullion by definition is not limited solely to gold. Bullion defined as a noun from dictionary.com is, “gold or silver considered in mass rather than in value and gold or silver in the form of bars or ingots.” The permanent home was completed in 2019. The third party bullion administrator Lone Star Tangible Assets (LSTA) was authorized to, “. . . to build its own on-site firearms range and tactical training area.”
As of December 2023, the state of Texas is the only state to authorize, operate and maintain a bullion depository with gold as one of the metals stored. The gold price from its June 2018 opening was approximately $1300 per ounce and as of December 2023, its closing price is above $2000 per ounce. The gold price per ounce continues to climb as sovereign governments around the world proliferate their printing and spending of fiat money since early 2020 (remember coronavirus).
As of September 2017, Tennessee is the only other state to have passed legislation calling for a depository similar to Texas’, and this was only a joint resolution expressing support for the idea. Idaho, Arizona and Louisiana have passed or considered legislation to end state-level taxation on gold and silver coins and bars, and in some cases to treat them as another form of legal tender. These states primarily base their legislation on an interpretation of the U.S. Constitution’s Article I, Section 10, which states that “No State shall… make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.”
The TxBD depository is comparable to federal gold reserves stored at Fort Knox, Kentucky, as well as U.S. Mint facilities in Denver and West Point, N.Y. and the Federal Reserve Bank in New York City. The gold, silver and other metals stored in Texas is growing and efforts to expand its presence beyond Texas are shown. “As of June 2021, nearly 1,000 account holders had deposits at TxBD, with the average account valued at approximately $140,000, . . .”
“The coronavirus pandemic prompted a surge in deposits at TxBD: From September 2019 to February 2020, total deposits increased by $12 million (42 percent). In the following six months, however, from March 2020 to August 2020, total deposits increased by $52 million (129 percent). As of June 2021, the total value of all deposits at TxBD was about $129 million.” Exhibit 1 shows the trend. This is encouraging to see precious metal ownership and storage growing in spite of federal government fiat money printing and out of control spending.
EXHIBIT 1: TOTAL DEPOSITS AT TXBD, SEPTEMBER 2019-JUNE 2021
Source: State of Texas Comptroller
The state of Texas does not own any physical gold and silver bullion as of December 2023. Will other states follow Texas’ lead on state authorized bullion storage is hard to say as part of the long term trend of decentralization or federalism. The Texas effort begun in 2015 was a clear statement to our bureaucrats and legislators in Washington, D.C to cut spending, get back to sound money with full or partial gold backing and wean themselves from overdosing on debt.
When Will the FED Pivot?
I previously produced a chart like this one below. There I showed the US Federal Reserve Liabilities normalised to 1914 dollars. This has the effect of visually amplifying the massive currency creation around the World War I and World War II. It does not change anything but puts them all into the same dollar value terms and so we are comparing 'apples with apples'. I also showed that as those wars ended the currency tightening brought the Fed’s balance sheet liabilities back to a background trend line (1) in Fig. 1.
After 2003 we saw a massive uptick in currency creation with QEs 1 through 3 and then again with the COVID pandemic QE in 2020. Now 6 months has past and we need to look again at these liabilities. In Fig. 1 I have added to the plot. You’ll notice a short blue extension of the data from June 2023 to December 2023.
Figure 1: US Federal Reserve Liabilities on its balance sheet normalized to 1914 dollars (red curve). Blue data are for the last 6 months.
Source: Liabilities data for 1916–2023 from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, statistical release H.4.1, Factors Affecting Reserve Balances of Depository Institutions and Condition Statement of Federal Reserve Banks, via FRED; and M2 money supply data for 1959–2023 from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, statistical release H.6, Money Stock Measures, via FRED. Note: The solid trend line (1) is a curve fit to the data between 1965 and 2003. The solid trend line (2) is a double exponential curve fit to the data after 2003. The two world wars are indicated by arrows pointing to the pink regions. Recessions are indicated by sepia-colored strips. QE is Quantitative Easing (credit creation). QT is Quantitative Tightening (credit contraction).
If we zoom into Fig. 1 and use only data above 2003 on a linear scale we get the following Fig. 2. This is still normalised liabilities. Curve (2) is the same exponential curve fit above 2003. The QE 2 and 3 just touch the line. At the time of the QE bail out of the failing regional banks (SVB etc) in March 2023 the liabilities comes back to the trend line. Since the bank bail outs the Fed has been tightening (QT).
Figure 2: US Federal Reserve Liabilities on its balance sheet normalized to 1914 dollars (red curve) from 2003 to December 2023.
On this chart (Fig.2) I have shown when the 2019 repocalypse – the repo market crisis – occurred. The repo market is the overnight interbank lending known as repurchase agreements. The Fed had been tightening, which is easily seen in the Fig. 2 plot, just before the vertical dashed line in 2019.
The Fed, immediately after this long, dark day last December [2018], slammed the brakes on its interest-rate increases and promised it would stop tightening sooner than it had originally said it would. Repocalypse: The Second Coming
But by the end of 2019 the Fed liabilities had dropped 36 percent below the exponential trend line (2).
To study this more closely I have plotted the same data but this time unnormalized and show it from 2014 to the present time in Figure 3.
Figure 3: US Federal Reserve Liabilities on its balance sheet (red curve) from 2014 to December 2023. This is unnormalized data.
Currently the Fed is tightening at a linear QT rate of about $116 B/month as indicated. At this rate, assuming it continues, the liabilities will reach the point 36 percent below the exponential trend line (2) on August 31, 2024, as indicated. Of course there is no guarantee that this trend will continue. But if it does get there, it means that to increase the liabilities from $6.7 Trillion on August 31, 2024 up to the trend line (2) $3.8 Trillion of new credit must be injected. This would bring the total liabilities up to $10.5 Trillion.
During the 2020 COVID pandemic QE the Fed injected $3 Trillion and overshot the trend line (2) by $800 Billion. That is a 27 percent overshoot. If they do the same in late 2024 and overshoot by 27 percent that means they will inject $5.2 Trillion, assuming they do it at the end of August 2024. If it is later they’ll need to inject even more as the exponential trend line (2) is exponentially rising. This means if they wait another 8 months they will need to inject more than $5 Trillion to re-inflate the economy in very short order.
On this plot I have also shown the intersection point were the Fed liabilities fall back to the background trend line (1) established from 1965-2003. To reach this the US would need to end all wars and close off all the easy credit issuance. But I suspect a financial catastrophe would occur long before they got to February 2027 which the current linear QT would bring the liabilities to, if continued somehow.
At best we have only 8 months before another financial crisis and massive QE when the Fed pivots and cranks up the printing presses again. But it could come much sooner than that and they may choose to pivot early in 2024 long before we get to the 36 percent reduction figure. That would mean less ‘money printing’. And another war would be a good excuse to ‘start the presses’.
*I would like to thank Rafi Farber of the End Game Investor for his valuable advice.
The Terror of Reconstruction
In last week’s column, I warned that brain-dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers want to use illegal immigrants to join the armed forces in order to suppress patriotic rebellion against their plans. If we want to know what suppression would be like, we have a good precedent. After the War Between the States, the Union’s “Reconstruction” tyrannized the South.
Under the Constitution, the states are supposed to retain all powers not delegated to the central government. The fact that the South lost the war did not change that. The states were back in the Union, even though they didn’t want to be. But they hadn’t lost their rights under the Constitution.
The Radical Republicans overthrew the Constitution and established a military dictatorship that lasted until 1877. As Tom DiLorenzo says
“The main purpose (and effect) of the 1865–1877 “Reconstruction” policies was to centralize and consolidate state power and to establish Republican Party political hegemony. It was not to “heal the nation’s wounds” or economically revitalize the South. Indeed, Reconstruction created new wounds and economically destroyed the South. Its purpose was to continue the economic plundering of the Southern states for as long as possible, and to establish a national Republican Party political monopoly.” See this.
How did the Radical Republicans overthrow the Constitution? They did so through a cunning and illegal trick. The Republican-controlled Congress passed the 14th Amendment, which allowed the federal government to intervene in state affairs to protect “civil rights.” But there was an obstacle that had to be overcome. An Amendment has to be ratified by three-quarters of the states in order to become part of the Constitution. The Amendment couldn’t be passed just on the votes of the Northern states alone. There weren’t enough of them to do this. The Radicals couldn’t decide not to count the South as states any more—-remember, the whole point of the war from their perspective was that secession was illegal, The South was still in the Union. Thus, the Radicals needed to get as many Southern states to vote for the Amendment as they needed to secure its passage.
But the problem in doing this was obvious. The Southern states were hardly likely to vote for an amendment that would allow the federal government to interfere in their affairs. As you would expect, the Southern state legislatures voted down the Amendment. What could the Radicals do? Their answer was breathtaking in its audacity. They would refuse to recognize any state government that didn’t vote for the Amendment. Vote the way we want, or else!
The whole idea was logically preposterous. What meaning does a vote have if you have no choice except to vote “yes”? The Amendment process was designed by the Constitutional framers to be difficult. They wanted to make it hard to change the Constitution. But if Congress could compel a “yes” vote, the whole process of amendment would become easy. Once you had the needed number of votes in Congress, that would be enough to make the amendment part of the Constitution. The “ratification” would have no purpose.
There’s another problem with the alleged “ratification” of the amendment. Only a state (or a special convention called by the state) can ratify an amendment. The legislature that ratifies the amendment must be legally constituted. It can’t be just some assembly that doesn’t hold legitimate state power. If that is right, the notion of a state legislature ratifying the 14th Amendment as a condition of having Congress recognize it as legitimate is absurd. If the body that passed the coerced “ratification” vote wasn’t already a legislature, it didn’t ratify the Amendment. You have to be a recognized legislature first, before you have the ratification vote, not afterwards.
The great historian Forrest McDonald argued that because of the Radicals’ strong-arm and logically incoherent tactics, the Amendment is illegal:
“We now come to the pivotal point upon which the constitutionality of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment turns. Let us assume that the amendment had been constitutionally proposed; assume that the ratifications in Tennessee, Oregon, and West Virginia were proper and should have been counted; and assume that the rescissions by New Jersey and Ohio were illegal and that their ratifications should be counted. Even so, as of April 1, 1868, the approval of six more states was necessary to validate the amendment. Let us further assume that the Reconstruction Act of March 2, 1867, was constitutional, and that ratification by the governments of the reconstituted southern states would count toward the necessary total.
Even if we make all these assumptions, it remains a fact that the southern state governments could have a voice in ratifying the amendment only if they were duly recognized as governments at the time they acted on the amendment. Congress had taken it upon itself-properly or improperly, it does not matter for present purposes-to be the arbiter of whether the governments were legitimate.
Blame Woke Authoritarians for COVID Learning Loss
The Program for International Assessment (PSA) recently released its 2022 assessment of the math and reading skills of students from over 200 countries. This is the first assessment since 2018 and it provides more evidence that schoolchildren were damaged by the COVID hysteria. American students’ math scores were lower than 27 of the 38 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The other OECD countries do not have any reason to celebrate, as the average math scores of students in all OECD countries declined by 17 points.
American students’ reading scores “only” declined by one point since 2017 – as compared to an 18-point average decline amongst all OECD countries. However, the National Assessment of Education Progress national report card recently reported a historic decline in reading among 18 years old.
While the drastic reductions in reading and math across the globe can be attributed to the COVID panic, Americans’ scores have been declining for years. The lockdowns are a symptom of the problems with the American education system. The real problem is that progressives have seized control over government schools. These progressives are more concerned with indoctrinating children than providing them with a quality education.
Progressives seek to control education because they understand that those who are indoctrinated as children will likely support progressivism as adults. It is no coincidence that progressive control of education and the decline of quality of the nation’s schools coincide with increased federal control.
Progressive federal bureaucrats used the promise of funding to entice states and local governments to surrender control of schools to federal educators. Wokeness is just the latest iteration of the progressivism that has been undermining America’s free-market economy, constitutional government, and all sources of authority — including parents and churches — outside of the federal government for over a century.
Ironically, the lockdowns may have set back the woke progressives by giving parents an opportunity to see how wokeness had infiltrated their children’s education. Wokeness is also suffering a backlash because of the claim that the only reason anyone could object to allowing a biological male to compete in athletic events with biological females is bigotry.
The backlash against woke education has led to parents showing up at school board meetings and/or running for school boards themselves to fight the woke agenda. The combination of lockdowns and wokeness are also causing many parents to explore alternatives to government schools, including homeschooling.
Parents looking to provide their children with a quality home-based education that promotes real learning and does not push a political agenda – but does instruct in the history and philosophy of liberty – should look into my homeschooling curriculum. My curriculum provides students with a well-rounded education that includes rigorous programs in history, mathematics, and the physical and natural sciences. The curriculum also provides instruction in personal finance. Students can develop superior communication skills via intensive writing and public speaking courses. Another feature of my curriculum is that it provides students the opportunity to create and run their own businesses.
The government and history sections of the curriculum emphasize free-market economics, libertarian political theory, and the history of liberty. I encourage all parents looking at alternatives to government schools — alternatives that provide children with a well-rounded education that introduces them to the history and ideas of liberty without sacrificing education for indoctrination — to go to RonPaulCurriculum.com for more information about my homeschooling program.
How ’Bout that Christmas Inflation?
This holiday season, it might be interesting to bring up the topic of "inflation.” A simple "how ’bout that inflation?" could likely prompt those around you to share their grievances, from the rise in cost of food, groceries, and cars, to their Netflix subscription.
While on the topic of movies, you could discuss whether they've seen any great films and speculate how long the era of blockbuster franchises can last. Hollywood may not be immune to price increases either. Indiewire claims:
Only One 2023 Movie with a Budget Over $200 Million Has Made a Profit (So Far) This Year
Like many other facets of life, Hollywood budgets are being “inflated” as well. Yet the word “inflation,” commonly used today, is not actually correct. Whether by manipulative design, loss of knowledge, or both, inflation originally referred to the act of increasing money supply.
The effects? For starters, the ongoing loss of purchasing power year after year. The Federal Reserve, since its clandestine inception and Congress's acquiescence, has done an astounding job of debasing the US Dollar for over a century. Since 2022, the Federal Reserve has shrunk its balance sheet by over $1 trillion. As history shows, this process normally doesn’t end well.
The United States is only about $55 billion away from a $34 trillion debt level. The $1.7 trillion student loan debt stands as the country's largest asset. To no surprise, lending $1.7 trillion to students across the country has also inflated the price of education.
Naysayers might argue that "inflation" is good for the economy, championed by mainstream economists, Fed members, and highly paid experts on TV. Nobel Prize winning economists advocate yearly price increases to ensure we have a smooth functioning economy.
Perhaps offer a light read on the topic of Austrian economics, such as Henry Hazlitt's What You Should Know About Inflation, or a reasonably priced copy of Mises’ Human Action as a gift.
As the year comes to a close, headlines suggest prices are finally coming down, implying the Fed has everything under control. A similar sentiment can be said about Venezuela. Recently, a Spanish newspaper, El Pais reported positive news:
… price indices in Venezuela are finally beginning to lose ground. The Central Bank tables average a rate of 3.2% in the month of November, the lowest in many months in the country…
This sounds promising, yet:
The current annual average stands at 185%...
While this is hardly Venezuela, it is critical to look beyond the headlines. Every year we struggle with currency debasement. Unless “negative inflation” or “deflation” occurs, which the Fed abhors, the cost of living will only rise year after year. We find ourselves working more, producing more, only to save and spend less than the year prior. Inflationism as monetary policy is backed only by economic dogma and popularity. There is no economic benefit to the general public under such a system.