To Anonymous

Don Stott - gold-eagle.com
Tuesday afternoon, after hours, the phone rang, and an 82 year old man said that someone had told him to call me. He is very wealthy, and has gobs of money in CD/s and actual cash on hand. At least he says so, and he does talk like it. He was a successful businessman, and worries about his cash. He, rightfully believes the dollar is insecure. He considers himself old fashioned, has no computer, and we had a long talk. He agreed with everything I said, and told me to fax him something to read. Not having any brochures or anything outside of hundreds of columns I have written for Gold Eagle, I had to sit at the keyboard and write to this man, whose name and address I know not. I may never hear from him again, but what I wrote may be of interest, even though it is well plowed ground. All I have done is delete the area in which he lives.

To the 82 year old man near ……!

Where to start? I think we covered most of it in our conversation yesterday, but briefly, I firmly believe that the dollar, which we measure our wealth by, is sliding in value, purchasing power or what have you, and most people either refuse to believe it, or think merely that "prices are going up." I well remember 10 cent trolley rides, nickel Cokes, phone calls, and ten cent hamburgers and ice cream cones.

Why does the dollar go down in value and purchasing power? Because "The more of anything there is, the less they will be worth." Be it hay, corn, copper, Model A Fords, homes, lumber, water, or used cars ands trucks. The more of them there are, the less they will sell for, and the less they will be worth, in currency anyway. Their value, of course remains the same. . Since the D.C. politicians always spend more than they take in, they simply print more dollars to pay their bills. This is a simple way of explaining it. The stupid war in Iraq, as well as the stupid wars in Korea and Vietnam also caused lots of dollars to be printed, and prices went up proportionately, because these wars fought with printing press money. The money became worth less during and after these wars, and prices of goods went up in dollars because of this. World War Two made prices exactly double, so expensive was this war. My parents bought a new Plymouth in 1940 for $660, and in 1949 a New Ford for $1950.

The War Between the States saw the North as well as the South print paper money to pay their expenses. So much did they print, that both currencies went to zero. The Revolutionary War saw the same thing happen, and the continental dollar went to zero also. Germany was forced to pay for the damage they did in WW I, and they were broke. But they had printing presses, which they used, and the Reichsmark went from 25 cents, to a millionth of a dollar, and were used as insulation, fire starters, and even bathroom tissue. It is happening every single day, and there is nothing we can do to stop it other than to protect ourselves.

We vote for the right persons, but they are always in the minority, and have no power. History has shown that this always happens! Governments always grow and grow, and grow, and always go bankrupt, taking their currency and citizens with it. The smart thing to do is to get out of a failing currency, and into another denomination, be it square feet of home, acres of land, gallons of oil, tons of steel, bushels of corn, or what have you. While these things are BOUGHT and SOLD in dollars, they are denominated in other measurements. As dollars go down, these go up in dollars. Gold and silver are compact, easily stored, bought, sold, and throughout history have been real, tangible, beautiful MONEY, in all nations and in all years. Here in America, very few understand this, even though it is undeniable. Today, everyone considers dollars to be valuable, and they store their surplus assets in them, even though they constantly lose value (prices go up). Very few understand this. They simply fret about "prices going up," and haven't the slightest idea of what to do about it!

The thing to do is to get out of a failing currency. Get out of a falling building or sinking ship. Get out of something which is unstable and falling in value. Stocks? Yes, if you know which ones to pick from out of ten thousand, and can realize that the "insiders" are the ones who usually make the profits, rather than Joe Blow, who has no inside information. With gold and silver, there are only two choices to make, rather than ten thousand. Simple! Not paper gold and silver, but real, shiny, beautiful, tangible gold and silver, which you hold in your hands. There is something very comforting about having real gold and silver in ones' safe. Security personified.

Pieces of paper, in order to have value, must be backed by something. Car titles are backed by the car. Deeds to homes and land are backed by the home or land. A share of stock, may mean you own a hundred millionth of a corporation, and the future of the corporation is in the hands of the CEO, board of directors, and their skill, brains, and decision making capability. Dollars are backed by nothing. Gold and silver require no CEO, or bard of directors. Gold and silver require no government legislation, and no backing.. They are self backed! They are valuable themselves, and require no laws, votes, or support from anyone or anything. They are themselves actual wealth, all by themselves.

Which to buy? Gold is far more compact than silver, and requires less storage space. Silver, as it returns to its 16 to 1 historic ratio, may go up, percentage wise, three times as far as gold, but it requires a lot of storage space. As recently as 1980, the ratio was 16 to 1, and throughout history that ratio has been common. I say buy both, but it is the buyer's decision to make. I think one should get the most gold and silver for the least dollars, and this is usually the gold Krugerrand or 100 silver ounce bar.

The possibility of the dollar crashing to zero, quickly, and abruptly, I think is remote. However, the dollar's decline will continue, and if foreign nations who have been buying our debt, decide to stop, the dollar's rate of decline could increase. The Chinese are slowing their dollar purchases, and so far, one oil rich mideast nation has decided they want no more dollars in payment for their oil, which isn't a good sign. As wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue and increase in size and cost, the dollars flow endlessly to fight these wars, thereby causing a huge increase in their number, and conversely their lower value and purchasing power.

It's sort of like a Monopoly Game in a way. One wins in Monopoly when their opponent is bankrupt. With D.C. they can't lose because they can print all they need to pay their bills, support their wars, and give endless handouts in the form of welfare, earmarks, programs, and subsidies for everyone and everything. The eventual bankruptcy is in the dollar currency, with which they pay, and which numbers they constantly increase to win the game. The game will be won, but the dollar may eventually become Monopoly money. The reason it is not declining faster, is because all currencies in the entire world are printing as well as America. However, other nations aren't fighting wars, and don't have earmarks, as far as I know. All currencies are going down in value, not just the dollar. The dollar is just declining faster than the euro, for instance. The euro has gone from 82 cents to well over $1.30, but prices are going up in euros also. Just ask anyone who uses them. No currency is safe from being inflated, because no one has yet figured a way to force governments to balance their budgets. This might explain a few things, and if there are more questions, feel free to call me!

Sincerely

Don Stott, Colorado Gold

That, unedited, is what I sent to the 82 year old. I hope he protects himself!

June 21, 2007

The Gold Problem

by the Mises Institute

Why have a monetary system based on gold? Because, as conditions are today and for the time that can be foreseen today, the gold standard alone makes the determination of money's purchasing power independent of the ambitions and machinations of governments, of dictators, of political parties, and of pressure groups. The gold standard alone is what the nineteenth-century freedom-loving leaders (who championed representative government, civil liberties, and prosperity for all) called "sound money."

The eminence and usefulness of the gold standard consists in the fact that it makes the supply of money depend on the profitability of mining gold, and thus checks large-scale inflationary ventures on the part of governments.

The gold standard did not fail. Governments deliberately sabotaged it, and still go on sabotaging it. But no government is powerful enough to destroy the gold standard so long as the market economy is not entirely suppressed by the establishment of socialism in every part of the world.
Governments believe that it is the gold standard's fault alone that their inflationary schemes not only fail to produce the expected benefits, but unavoidably bring about conditions that (also in the eyes of the rulers themselves and most of the people) are considered as much worse than the alleged or real evils they were designed to eliminate. Except for the gold standard, governments are told by pseudo-economists that they could make everybody perfectly prosperous. Let us test the three doctrines advanced for the support of this fable of government omnipotence.

1. The Fiction of Government Omnipotence

"The state is God," said Ferdinand Lassalle, the founder of the German socialist movement. As such, the state has the power to "create" unlimited quantities of money and thus to make everybody happy. Intrepid and clear-headed people branded such a policy of "creating" money as inflation. The official terminology calls it nowadays "deficit spending."

But whatever the name used in dealing with this phenomenon may be, its meaning is obvious. The government increases the quantity of money in circulation. Then a greater quantity of money "chases" (as a rather silly but popular way of talking about these problems says) a quantity of goods and services that has not been increased. The government's action did not add anything to the available amount of useful things and services. It merely made the prices paid for them soar.

If the government wishes to raise the income of some people, for example, government employees, it has to confiscate by taxation a part of some other people's incomes, and then distribute the amount collected to its employees or favored groups. Then the taxpayers are forced to restrict their spending, while the recipients of the higher salaries or benefits are increasing their spending to the same amount. There does not result a conspicuous change in the purchasing power of the monetary unit.

But if the government provides the money it wants for the payment of higher salaries by printing it or the granting of additional credits, the new money in the hands of these beneficiaries constitutes on the market an additional demand for the not-increased quantity of goods and services offered for sale. The unavoidable result is a general tendency of prices to rise.
Any attempts the governments and their propaganda offices make to conceal this concatenation of events are in vain. Deficit spending means increasing the quantity of money in circulation. That the official terminology avoids calling it inflation is of no avail whatever.

The government and its chiefs do not have the powers of the mythical Santa Claus. They cannot spend except by taking out of the pockets of some people for the benefit of others.

2. The "Cheap-Money" Fallacy

Interest is the difference in the valuation of present goods and future goods; it is the discount in the valuation of future goods as against that of present goods. Interest cannot be "abolished" as long as people prefer an apple available today to an apple available only in a year, in ten years, or in a hundred years.

The height of the originary rate of interest,[1] which is the main component of the market rate of interest as determined on the loan market, reflects the difference in the people's valuation of present and future satisfaction of needs. The disappearance of interest, that is, an interest rate of zero, would mean that people do not care a whit about satisfying any of their present wants and are exclusively intent upon satisfying their future wants, their wants of the later years, decades, and centuries to come. People would only save and invest and would not be consuming.
On the other hand, if people were to stop saving, that is, making any provision for the future, be it even the future of the tomorrow, and would not save at all and consume all capital goods accumulated by previous generations, the rate of interest would rise beyond any limits.

It is thus obvious that the height of the market rate of interest ultimately does not depend on the whims, fancies, and the pecuniary interests of the personnel operating the government apparatus of coercion and compulsion, the much-referred-to "public sector" of the economy. But the government has the power to push the Federal Reserve System, and the banks subject to it, into a policy of cheap money. Then the banks are expanding credit. Underbidding the rate of interest as established on the not-manipulated loan market, they offer additional credit created out of nothing.

Thus they are inescapably falsifying the businessmen's estimation of market conditions. Although the supply of capital goods (that can only be increased by additional saving) remained unchanged, the illusion of a richer supply of capital is conjured up. Business is induced to embark upon projects which a sober calculation, not misled by the cheap-money ventures, would have disclosed as mal-investments (over-investment in capital). The additional quantities of credit inundating the market make prices and wages soar. An artificial boom, a boom built entirely upon the illusions of ample and easy money, develops. But such a boom cannot last. Sooner or later it must become clear that, under the illusions created by the credit expansion, business has embarked upon projects for the execution of which the real savings are not rich enough. When this mal-investment becomes visible, the boom collapses.

The depression that follows is the process of liquidating the errors committed in the excesses of the artificial boom; it is the return to calm reasoning and a reasonable conduct of affairs within the limits of the available supply of capital goods. It is a painful process, but it is a process of restoration of business health.

Credit expansion is not a nostrum to make people happy. The boom it engenders must inevitably lead to a debacle and unhappiness.

If it were really possible to substitute credit expansion (cheap money) for the accumulation of capital goods by saving, there would not be any poverty in the world. The economically backward nations would not have to complain about the insufficiency of their capital equipment.

All they would have to do for the improvement of their conditions would be to expand money and credit more and more. No "foreign aid" schemes would have emerged. But in granting foreign aid to the backward nations, the American government implicitly acknowledges that credit expansion is no real substitute for genuine capital accumulation through saving.

3. The Failure of Minimum Wage Legislation and of Union Coercion

The height of wage rates is determined by the consumers' appraisal of the value the worker's labor adds to the value of the article available for sale. As the immense majority of the consumers are themselves earners of wages and salaries, this means that the determination of the compensation for work and services rendered is made by the same kind of people who are receiving these wages and salaries. The fat earnings of the movie star and the boxing champion are provided by the welders, street sweepers, and charwomen who attend the performances and matches.

An entrepreneur who would try to pay a hired man less than the amount this man's work adds to the value of the product would be priced out of the labor market by the competition of other entrepreneurs eager to earn money. On the other hand, no entrepreneur can pay more to his helpers than the amount the consumers are prepared to refund to him in buying the product. If he were to pay higher wages, he would suffer losses and would be ejected from the ranks of the businessmen.

Governments decreeing minimum wage laws above the level of the market rates restrict the number of hands that can find jobs. Such governments are producing unemployment of a part of the labor force. The same is true for what is euphemistically called "collective bargaining."
The only difference between the two methods concerns the apparatus enforcing the minimum wage. The government enforces its orders in resorting to policemen and prison guards. The unions "picket." They and their members and officials have acquired the power and the right to commit wrongs to person and property, to deprive individuals of the means of earning a livelihood, and to commit many other acts which no one can do with impunity.[2] Nobody is today in a position to disobey an order issued by a union. To the employers no other choice is left than either to surrender to the dictates of the unions or to go out of business.

But governments and unions are impotent against economic law. Violence can prevent the employers from hiring help at potential market rates, but it cannot force them to employ all those who are anxious to get jobs. The result of the governments' and the unions' meddling with the height of wage rates cannot be anything else than an incessant increase in the number of unemployed.

It is precisely to prevent this outcome that the government-manipulated banking systems of all Western nations are resorting to inflation. Increasing the quantity of money in circulation and thereby lowering the purchasing power of the monetary unit, they are cutting down the oversized payrolls to a height consonant with the state of the market. This is today called Keynesian full-employment policy. It is in fact a method to perpetuate by continued inflation the futile attempts of governments and labor unions to meddle with the conditions of the labor market. As soon as the progress of inflation has adjusted wage rates so far as to avoid a spread of unemployment, government and unions resume with renewed zeal their ventures to raise wage rates above the level at which every job-seeker can find a job.

The experience of this age of the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society confirms the fundamental thesis of the true British lovers of political liberty in the nineteenth century, namely, that there is but one means to improve the material conditions of all of the wage earners, viz., to increase the per-head quota of real capital invested. This result can only be brought about by additional saving and capital accumulation, never by government decrees, labor-union violence and intimidation, and inflation. The foes of the gold standard are wrong also in this regard.

4. The Inescapable Consequence, namely, the United States Government Gold Holdings Will Shrink

In many parts of the earth an increasing number of people realize that the United States and most of the other nations are firmly committed to a policy of progressing inflation. They have learned enough from the experience of the recent decades to conclude that on account of these inflationary policies an ounce of gold will one day become more expensive in terms both of the currency of the United States and of their own country. They are alarmed and would like to avoid being victimized by this outcome.

Americans were once forbidden to own gold coins and gold ingots (from 1933 to 1976). Their attempts to protect their financial assets consisted in the methods that the Germans in the most spectacular inflation that history knows called "Flucht in die Sachwerte" (flight into real values). They are investing in common stocks and real estate, and prefer to have debts payable in legal tender money rather than holding claims payable in it.

Even in the countries in which people are free to buy gold there are not yet (1965) conspicuous purchases of gold on the part of financially potent individuals and institutions. Up to the moment at which French agencies began to buy gold, the buyers of gold were mostly people with modest incomes anxious to keep a few gold coins as a reserve for rainy days. It was the purchases via the London gold market on the part of such people that reduced the gold holdings of the United States.

There is only one method available to prevent a further reduction of the American gold reserve, namely, radical abandonment of deficit spending as well as of any kind of "easy-money" policy.
Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) was dean of the Austrian School. Comment on the blog.
This article originally appeared in The Freeman, June, 1965. Minor editing was done for its inclusion in Planning for Freedom, pp. 179–187.

Notes
[1] See "Originary Interest" in Human Action.
[2] Cf. Roscoe Pound, Legal Immunities of Labor Unions, Washington, D.C., 1957, page 21.
10 August 2007

Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?

Race and the transformation of criminal justice

Glenn C. Loury

8 The early 1990s were the age of drive-by shootings, drug deals gone bad, crack cocaine, and gangsta rap. Between 1960 and 1990, the annual number of murders in New Haven rose from six to 31, the number of rapes from four to 168, the number of robberies from 16 to 1,784—all this while the city’s population declined by 14 percent. Crime was concentrated in central cities: in 1990, two fifths of Pennsylvania’s violent crimes were committed in Philadelphia, home to one seventh of the state’s population. The subject of crime dominated American domestic-policy debates.

Most observers at the time expected things to get worse. Consulting demographic tables and extrapolating trends, scholars and pundits warned the public to prepare for an onslaught, and for a new kind of criminal—the anomic, vicious, irreligious, amoral juvenile “super-predator.” In 1996, one academic commentator predicted a “bloodbath” of juvenile homicides in 2005.

And so we prepared. Stoked by fear and political opportunism, but also by the need to address a very real social problem, we threw lots of people in jail, and when the old prisons were filled we built new ones.

But the onslaught never came. Crime rates peaked in 1992 and have dropped sharply since. Even as crime rates fell, however, imprisonment rates remained high and continued their upward march. The result, the current American prison system, is a leviathan unmatched in human history.

According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.

Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes. One third of inmates in state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug offenders. Inmates are disproportionately drawn from the most disadvantaged parts of society. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.

How did it come to this? One argument is that the massive increase in incarceration reflects the success of a rational public policy: faced with a compelling social problem, we responded by imprisoning people and succeeded in lowering crime rates. This argument is not entirely misguided. Increased incarceration does appear to have reduced crime somewhat. But by how much? Estimates of the share of the 1990s reduction in violent crime that can be attributed to the prison boom range from five percent to 25 percent. Whatever the number, analysts of all political stripes now agree that we have long ago entered the zone of diminishing returns. The conservative scholar John DiIulio, who coined the term “super-predator” in the early 1990s, was by the end of that decade declaring in The Wall Street Journal that “Two Million Prisoners Are Enough.” But there was no political movement for getting America out of the mass-incarceration business. The throttle was stuck.

A more convincing argument is that imprisonment rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen because we have become progressively more punitive: not because crime has continued to explode (it hasn’t), not because we made a smart policy choice, but because we have made a collective decision to increase the rate of punishment.

One simple measure of punitiveness is the likelihood that a person who is arrested will be subsequently incarcerated. Between 1980 and 2001, there was no real change in the chances of being arrested in response to a complaint: the rate was just under 50 percent. But the likelihood that an arrest would result in imprisonment more than doubled, from 13 to 28 percent. And because the amount of time served and the rate of prison admission both increased, the incarceration rate for violent crime almost tripled, despite the decline in the level of violence. The incarceration rate for nonviolent and drug offenses increased at an even faster pace: between 1980 and 1997 the number of people incarcerated for nonviolent offenses tripled, and the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses increased by a factor of 11. Indeed, the criminal-justice researcher Alfred Blumstein has argued that none of the growth in incarceration between 1980 and 1996 can be attributed to more crime:

The growth was entirely attributable to a growth in punitiveness, about equally to growth in prison commitments per arrest (an indication of tougher prosecution or judicial sentencing) and to longer time served (an indication of longer sentences, elimination of parole or later parole release, or greater readiness to recommit parolees to prison for either technical violations or new crimes).

This growth in punitiveness was accompanied by a shift in thinking about the basic purpose of criminal justice. In the 1970s, the sociologist David Garland argues, the corrections system was commonly seen as a way to prepare offenders to rejoin society. Since then, the focus has shifted from rehabilitation to punishment and stayed there. Felons are no longer persons to be supported, but risks to be dealt with. And the way to deal with the risks is to keep them locked up. As of 2000, 33 states had abolished limited parole (up from 17 in 1980); 24 states had introduced three-strikes laws (up from zero); and 40 states had introduced truth-in-sentencing laws (up from three). The vast majority of these changes occurred in the 1990s, as crime rates fell.

This new system of punitive ideas is aided by a new relationship between the media, the politicians, and the public. A handful of cases—in which a predator does an awful thing to an innocent—get excessive media attention and engender public outrage. This attention typically bears no relation to the frequency of the particular type of crime, and yet laws—such as three-strikes laws that give mandatory life sentences to nonviolent drug offenders—and political careers are made on the basis of the public’s reaction to the media coverage of such crimes.

* * *

Despite a sharp national decline in crime, American criminal justice has become crueler and less caring than it has been at any other time in our modern history. Why?

The question has no simple answer, but the racial composition of prisons is a good place to start. The punitive turn in the nation’s social policy—intimately connected with public rhetoric about responsibility, dependency, social hygiene, and the reclamation of public order—can be fully grasped only when viewed against the backdrop of America’s often ugly and violent racial history: there is a reason why our inclination toward forgiveness and the extension of a second chance to those who have violated our behavioral strictures is so stunted, and why our mainstream political discourses are so bereft of self-examination and searching social criticism. This historical resonance between the stigma of race and the stigma of imprisonment serves to keep alive in our public culture the subordinating social meanings that have always been associated with blackness. Race helps to explain why the United States is exceptional among the democratic industrial societies in the severity and extent of its punitive policy and in the paucity of its social-welfare institutions.

Slavery ended a long time ago, but the institution of chattel slavery and the ideology of racial subordination that accompanied it have cast a long shadow. I speak here of the history of lynching throughout the country; the racially biased policing and judging in the South under Jim Crow and in the cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and West to which blacks migrated after the First and Second World Wars; and the history of racial apartheid that ended only as a matter of law with the civil-rights movement. It should come as no surprise that in the post–civil rights era, race, far from being peripheral, has been central to the evolution of American social policy.

The political scientist Vesla Mae Weaver, in a recently completed dissertation, examines policy history, public opinion, and media processes in an attempt to understand the role of race in this historic transformation of criminal justice. She argues—persuasively, I think—that the punitive turn represented a political response to the success of the civil-rights movement. Weaver describes a process of “frontlash” in which opponents of the civil-rights revolution sought to regain the upper hand by shifting to a new issue. Rather than reacting directly to civil-rights developments, and thus continuing to fight a battle they had lost, those opponents—consider George Wallace’s campaigns for the presidency, which drew so much support in states like Michigan and Wisconsin—shifted attention to a seemingly race-neutral concern over crime:

Once the clutch of Jim Crow had loosened, opponents of civil rights shifted the “locus of attack” by injecting crime onto the agenda. Through the process of frontlash, rivals of civil rights progress defined racial discord as criminal and argued that crime legislation would be a panacea to racial unrest. This strategy both imbued crime with race and depoliticized racial struggle, a formula which foreclosed earlier “root causes” alternatives. Fusing anxiety about crime to anxiety over racial change and riots, civil rights and racial disorder—initially defined as a problem of minority disenfranchisement—were defined as a crime problem, which helped shift debate from social reform to punishment.

Of course, this argument (for which Weaver adduces considerable circumstantial evidence) is speculative. But something interesting seems to have been going on in the late 1960s regarding the relationship between attitudes on race and social policy.

Before 1965, public attitudes on the welfare state and on race, as measured by the annually administered General Social Survey, varied year to year independently of one another: you could not predict much about a person’s attitudes on welfare politics by knowing their attitudes about race. After 1965, the attitudes moved in tandem, as welfare came to be seen as a race issue. Indeed, the year-to-year correlation between an index measuring liberalism of racial attitudes and attitudes toward the welfare state over the interval 1950–1965 was .03. These same two series had a correlation of .68 over the period 1966–1996. The association in the American mind of race with welfare, and of race with crime, has been achieved at a common historical moment. Crime-control institutions are part of a larger social-policy complex—they relate to and interact with the labor market, family-welfare efforts, and health and social-work activities. Indeed, Garland argues that the ideological approaches to welfare and crime control have marched rightward to a common beat: “The institutional and cultural changes that have occurred in the crime control field are analogous to those that have occurred in the welfare state more generally.” Just as the welfare state came to be seen as a race issue, so, too, crime came to be seen as a race issue, and policies have been shaped by this perception.

Consider the tortured racial history of the War on Drugs. Blacks were twice as likely as whites to be arrested for a drug offense in 1975 but four times as likely by 1989. Throughout the 1990s, drug-arrest rates remained at historically unprecedented levels. Yet according to the National Survey on Drug Abuse, drug use among adults fell from 20 percent in 1979 to 11 percent in 2000. A similar trend occurred among adolescents. In the age groups 12–17 and 18–25, use of marijuana, cocaine, and heroin all peaked in the late 1970s and began a steady decline thereafter. Thus, a decline in drug use across the board had begun a decade before the draconian anti-drug efforts of the 1990s were initiated.

Of course, most drug arrests are for trafficking, not possession, so usage rates and arrest rates needn’t be expected to be identical. Still, we do well to bear in mind that the social problem of illicit drug use is endemic to our whole society. Significantly, throughout the period 1979–2000, white high-school seniors reported using drugs at a significantly higher rate than black high-school seniors. High drug-usage rates in white, middle-class American communities in the early 1980s accounts for the urgency many citizens felt to mount a national attack on the problem. But how successful has the effort been, and at what cost?

Think of the cost this way: to save middle-class kids from the threat of a drug epidemic that might not have even existed by the time that drug incarceration began its rapid increase in the 1980s, we criminalized underclass kids. Arrests went up, but drug prices have fallen sharply over the past 20 years—suggesting that the ratcheting up of enforcement has not made drugs harder to get on the street. The strategy clearly wasn’t keeping drugs away from those who sought them. Not only are prices down, but the data show that drug-related visits to emergency rooms also rose steadily throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

An interesting case in point is New York City. Analyzing arrests by residential neighborhood and police precinct, the criminologist Jeffrey Fagan and his colleagues Valerie West and Jan Holland found that incarceration was highest in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, though these were often not the neighborhoods in which crime rates were the highest. Moreover, they discovered a perverse effect of incarceration on crime: higher incarceration in a given neighborhood in one year seemed to predict higher crime rates in that same neighborhood one year later. This growth and persistence of incarceration over time, the authors concluded, was due primarily to the drug enforcement practices of police and to sentencing laws that require imprisonment for repeat felons. Police scrutiny was more intensive and less forgiving in high-incarceration neighborhoods, and parolees returning to such neighborhoods were more closely monitored. Thus, discretionary and spatially discriminatory police behavior led to a high and increasing rate of repeat prison admissions in the designated neighborhoods, even as crime rates fell.

Fagan, West, and Holland explain the effects of spatially concentrated urban anti-drug-law enforcement in the contemporary American metropolis. Buyers may come from any neighborhood and any social stratum. But the sellers—at least the ones who can be readily found hawking their wares on street corners and in public vestibules—come predominantly from the poorest, most non-white parts of the city. The police, with arrest quotas to meet, know precisely where to find them. The researchers conclude:

Incarceration begets more incarceration, and incarceration also begets more crime, which in turn invites more aggressive enforcement, which then re-supplies incarceration . . . three mechanisms . . . contribute to and reinforce incarceration in neighborhoods: the declining economic fortunes of former inmates and the effects on neighborhoods where they tend to reside, resource and relationship strains on families of prisoners that weaken the family’s ability to supervise children, and voter disenfranchisement that weakens the political economy of neighborhoods.

The effects of imprisonment on life chances are profound. For incarcerated black men, hourly wages are ten percent lower after prison than before. For all incarcerated men, the number of weeks worked per year falls by at least a third after their release.

So consider the nearly 60 percent of black male high-school dropouts born in the late 1960s who are imprisoned before their 40th year. While locked up, these felons are stigmatized—they are regarded as fit subjects for shaming. Their links to family are disrupted; their opportunities for work are diminished; their voting rights may be permanently revoked. They suffer civic excommunication. Our zeal for social discipline consigns these men to a permanent nether caste. And yet, since these men—whatever their shortcomings—have emotional and sexual and family needs, including the need to be fathers and lovers and husbands, we are creating a situation where the children of this nether caste are likely to join a new generation of untouchables. This cycle will continue so long as incarceration is viewed as the primary path to social hygiene.

* * *

I have been exploring the issue of causes: of why we took the punitive turn that has resulted in mass incarceration. But even if the racial argument about causes is inconclusive, the racial consequences are clear. To be sure, in the United States, as in any society, public order is maintained by the threat and use of force. We enjoy our good lives only because we are shielded by the forces of law and order, which keep the unruly at bay. Yet in this society, to a degree virtually unmatched in any other, those bearing the brunt of order enforcement belong in vastly disproportionate numbers to historically marginalized racial groups. Crime and punishment in America has a color.

In his fine study Punishment and Inequality in America (2006), the Princeton University sociologist Bruce Western powerfully describes the scope, nature, and consequences of contemporary imprisonment. He finds that the extent of racial disparity in imprisonment rates is greater than in any other major arena of American social life: at eight to one, the black–white ratio of incarceration rates dwarfs the two-to-one ratio of unemployment rates, the three-to-one ration of non-marital childbearing, the two-to-one ratio of infant-mortality rates and one-to-five ratio of net worth. While three out of 200 young whites were incarcerated in 2000, the rate for young blacks was one in nine. A black male resident of the state of California is more likely to go to a state prison than a state college.

The scandalous truth is that the police and penal apparatus are now the primary contact between adult black American men and the American state. Among black male high-school dropouts aged 20 to 40, a third were locked up on any given day in 2000, fewer than three percent belonged to a union, and less than one quarter were enrolled in any kind of social program. Coercion is the most salient meaning of government for these young men. Western estimates that nearly 60 percent of black male dropouts born between 1965 and 1969 were sent to prison on a felony conviction at least once before they reached the age of 35.

One cannot reckon the world-historic American prison build-up over the past 35 years without calculating the enormous costs imposed upon the persons imprisoned, their families, and their communities. (Of course, this has not stopped many social scientists from pronouncing on the net benefits of incarceration without doing so.) Deciding on the weight to give to a “thug’s” well-being—or to that of his wife or daughter or son—is a question of social morality, not social science. Nor can social science tell us how much additional cost borne by the offending class is justified in order to obtain a given increment of security or property or peace of mind for the rest of us. These are questions about the nature of the American state and its relationship to its people that transcend the categories of benefits and costs.

Yet the discourse surrounding punishment policy invariably discounts the humanity of the thieves, drug sellers, prostitutes, rapists, and, yes, those whom we put to death. It gives insufficient weight to the welfare, to the humanity, of those who are knitted together with offenders in webs of social and psychic affiliation. What is more, institutional arrangements for dealing with criminal offenders in the United States have evolved to serve expressive as well as instrumental ends. We have wanted to “send a message,” and we have done so with a vengeance. In the process, we have created facts. We have answered the question, who is to blame for the domestic maladies that beset us? We have constructed a national narrative. We have created scapegoats, indulged our need to feel virtuous, and assuaged our fears. We have met the enemy, and the enemy is them.

Incarceration keeps them away from us. Thus Garland: “The prison is used today as a kind of reservation, a quarantine zone in which purportedly dangerous individuals are segregated in the name of public safety.” The boundary between prison and community, Garland continues, is “heavily patrolled and carefully monitored to prevent risks leaking out from one to the other. Those offenders who are released ‘into the community’ are subject to much tighter control than previously, and frequently find themselves returned to custody for failure to comply with the conditions that continue to restrict their freedom. For many of these parolees and ex-convicts, the ‘community’ into which they are released is actually a closely monitored terrain, a supervised space, lacking much of the liberty that one associates with ‘normal life’.”

Deciding how citizens of varied social rank within a common polity ought to relate to one another is a more fundamental consideration than deciding which crime-control policy is most efficient. The question of relationship, of solidarity, of who belongs to the body politic and who deserves exclusion—these are philosophical concerns of the highest order. A decent society will on occasion resist the efficient course of action, for the simple reason that to follow it would be to act as though we were not the people we have determined ourselves to be: a people conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that we all are created equal. Assessing the propriety of creating a racially defined pariah class in the middle of our great cities at the start of the 21st century presents us with just such a case.

My recitation of the brutal facts about punishment in today’s America may sound to some like a primal scream at this monstrous social machine that is grinding poor black communities to dust. And I confess that these brutal facts do at times incline me to cry out in despair. But my argument is analytical, not existential. Its principal thesis is this: we law-abiding, middle-class Americans have made decisions about social policy and incarceration, and we benefit from those decisions, and that means from a system of suffering, rooted in state violence, meted out at our request. We had choices and we decided to be more punitive. Our society—the society we have made—creates criminogenic conditions in our sprawling urban ghettos, and then acts out rituals of punishment against them as some awful form of human sacrifice.

This situation raises a moral problem that we cannot avoid. We cannot pretend that there are more important problems in our society, or that this circumstance is the necessary solution to other, more pressing problems—unless we are also prepared to say that we have turned our backs on the ideal of equality for all citizens and abandoned the principles of justice. We ought to ask ourselves two questions: Just what manner of people are we Americans? And in light of this, what are our obligations to our fellow citizens—even those who break our laws?

* * *

To address these questions, we need to think about the evaluation of our prison system as a problem in the theory of distributive justice—not the purely procedural idea of ensuring equal treatment before the law and thereafter letting the chips fall where they may, but the rather more demanding ideal of substantive racial justice. The goal is to bring about through conventional social policy and far-reaching institutional reforms a situation in which the history of racial oppression is no longer so evident in the disparate life experiences of those who descend from slaves.

And I suggest we approach that problem from the perspective of John Rawls’s theory of justice: first, that we think about justice from an “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance” that obstructs from view our own situation, including our class, race, gender, and talents. We need to ask what rules we would pick if we seriously imagined that we could turn out to be anyone in the society. Second, following Rawls’s “difference principle,” we should permit inequalities only if they work to improve the circumstances of the least advantaged members of society. But here, the object of moral inquiry is not the distribution among individuals of wealth and income, but instead the distribution of a negative good, punishment, among individuals and, importantly, racial groups.

So put yourself in John Rawls’s original position and imagine that you could occupy any rank in the social hierarchy. Let me be more concrete: imagine that you could be born a black American male outcast shuffling between prison and the labor market on his way to an early death to the chorus of nigger or criminal or dummy. Suppose we had to stop thinking of us and them. What social rules would we pick if we actually thought that they could be us? I expect that we would still pick some set of punishment institutions to contain bad behavior and protect society. But wouldn’t we pick arrangements that respected the humanity of each individual and of those they are connected to through bonds of social and psychic affiliation? If any one of us had a real chance of being one of those faces looking up from the bottom of the well—of being the least among us¬—then how would we talk publicly about those who break our laws? What would we do with juveniles who go awry, who roam the streets with guns and sometimes commit acts of violence? What weight would we give to various elements in the deterrence-retribution-incapacitation-rehabilitation calculus, if we thought that calculus could end up being applied to our own children, or to us? How would we apportion blame and affix responsibility for the cultural and social pathologies evident in some quarters of our society if we envisioned that we ourselves might well have been born into the social margins where such pathology flourishes?

If we take these questions as seriously as we should, then we would, I expect, reject a pure ethic of personal responsibility as the basis for distributing punishment. Issues about responsibility are complex, and involve a kind of division of labor—what John Rawls called a “social division of responsibility” between “citizens as a collective body” and individuals: when we hold a person responsible for his or her conduct—by establishing laws, investing in their enforcement, and consigning some persons to prisons—we need also to think about whether we have done our share in ensuring that each person faces a decent set of opportunities for a good life. We need to ask whether we as a society have fulfilled our collective responsibility to ensure fair conditions for each person—for each life that might turn out to be our life.

We would, in short, recognize a kind of social responsibility, even for the wrongful acts freely chosen by individual persons. I am not arguing that people commit crimes because they have no choices, and that in this sense the “root causes” of crime are social; individuals always have choices. My point is that responsibility is a matter of ethics, not social science. Society at large is implicated in an individual person’s choices because we have acquiesced in—perhaps actively supported, through our taxes and votes, words and deeds—social arrangements that work to our benefit and his detriment, and which shape his consciousness and sense of identity in such a way that the choices he makes, which we may condemn, are nevertheless compelling to him—an entirely understandable response to circumstance. Closed and bounded social structures—like racially homogeneous urban ghettos—create contexts where “pathological” and “dysfunctional” cultural forms emerge; but these forms are neither intrinsic to the people caught in these structures nor independent of the behavior of people who stand outside them.

Thus, a central reality of our time is the fact that there has opened a wide racial gap in the acquisition of cognitive skills, the extent of law-abidingness, the stability of family relations, the attachment to the work force, and the like. This disparity in human development is, as a historical matter, rooted in political, economic, social, and cultural factors peculiar to this society and reflective of its unlovely racial history: it is a societal, not communal or personal, achievement. At the level of the individual case we must, of course, act as if this were not so. There could be no law, no civilization, without the imputation to particular persons of responsibility for their wrongful acts. But the sum of a million cases, each one rightly judged on its merits to be individually fair, may nevertheless constitute a great historic wrong. The state does not only deal with individual cases. It also makes policies in the aggregate, and the consequences of these policies are more or less knowable. And who can honestly say—who can look in the mirror and say with a straight face—that we now have laws and policies that we would endorse if we did not know our own situation and genuinely considered the possibility that we might be the least advantaged?

Even if the current racial disparity in punishment in our country gave evidence of no overt racial discrimination—and, perhaps needless to say, I view that as a wildly optimistic supposition—it would still be true that powerful forces are at work to perpetuate the consequences of a universally acknowledged wrongful past. This is in the first instance a matter of interpretation—of the narrative overlay that we impose upon the facts.

The tacit association in the American public’s imagination of “blackness” with “unworthiness” or “dangerousness” has obscured a fundamental ethical point about responsibility, both collective and individual, and promoted essentialist causal misattributions: when confronted by the facts of racially disparate achievement, racially disproportionate crime rates, and racially unequal school achievement, observers will have difficulty identifying with the plight of a group of people whom they (mistakenly) think are simply “reaping what they have sown.” Thus, the enormous racial disparity in the imposition of social exclusion, civic ex-communication, and lifelong disgrace has come to seem legitimate, even necessary: we fail to see how our failures as a collective body are implicated in this disparity. We shift all the responsibility onto their shoulders, only by irresponsibly—indeed, immorally—denying our own. And yet, this entire dynamic has its roots in past unjust acts that were perpetrated on the basis of race.

Given our history, producing a racially defined nether caste through the ostensibly neutral application of law should be profoundly offensive to our ethical sensibilities—to the principles we proudly assert as our own. Mass incarceration has now become a principal vehicle for the reproduction of racial hierarchy in our society. Our country’s policymakers need to do something about it. And all of us are ultimately responsible for making sure that they do. <

Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences in the department of economics at Brown University. He is the author of The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, and he was a 2002 Carnegie Scholar.

Originally published in the July/August 2007 issue of Boston Review.

Microwave ovens destroy the nutritional value of your food

By Mike Adams

The rise of widespread nutritional deficiencies in the western world correlates almost perfectly with the introduction of the microwave oven. This is no coincidence. Microwave ovens heat food through a process of creating molecular friction, but this same molecular friction quickly destroys the delicate molecules of vitamins and phytonutrients (plant medicines) naturally found in foods. One study showed that microwaving vegetables destroys up to 97% of the nutritional content (vitamins and other plant-based nutrients that prevent disease, boost immune function and enhance health).

In other words, eating raw broccoli provides you with natural anti-cancer medicine that’s extremely effective at halting the growth of cancer tumors. But microwaving that broccoli destroys the anti-cancer nutrients, rendering the food “dead” and nutritionally depleted. There’s even some evidence to suggest that microwaving destroys the natural harmony in water molecules, creating an energetic pattern of chaos in the water found in all foods. In fact, the common term of “nuking” your food is coincidentally appropriate: Using a microwave is a bit like dropping a nuclear bomb on your food, then eating the fallout. (You don’t actually get radiation from eating microwaved foods, however. But you don’t get much nutrition, either.)

Why microwave users are so unhealthy

Consumers are dying today in part because they continue to eat dead foods that are killed in the microwave. They take a perfectly healthy piece of raw food, loaded with vitamins and natural medicines, then nuke it in the microwave and destroy most of its nutrition. Humans are the only animals on the planet who destroy the nutritional value of their food before eating it. All other animals consume food in its natural, unprocessed state, but humans actually go out of their way to render food nutritionally worthless before eating it. No wonder humans are the least healthy mammals on the planet.

The invention of the microwave and its mass adoption by the population coincides with the onset of obesity in developed nations around the world. Not only did the microwave make it convenient to eat more obesity-promoting foods, it also destroyed much of the nutritional content of those foods, leaving consumers in an ongoing state of malnourished overfeeding. In other words, people eat too many calories but not enough real nutrition. The result is, of course, what we see today: Epidemic rates of diabetes, cancer, heart disease, depression, kidney failure, liver disorders and much more. These diseases are all caused by a combination of malnutrition and exposure to toxic chemicals (plus other factors such as emotional trauma, lack of exercise, etc.). Microwaves make malnutrition virtually automatic, and being exposed to toxic chemicals is easy to accomplish by simply eating processed foods (which are universally manufactured with the addition of toxic chemicals that act as preservatives, colorings, flavor enhancers and so on).

Microwaving is, technically, a form of food irradiation. I find it interesting that people who say that would never eat “irradiated” food have no hesitation about microwaving their food. It’s the same thing (just a different wavelength of radiation). In fact, microwaves were originally called “radar ranges.” Sounds strange today, doesn’t it? But when microwaves were first introduced in the 1970’s, they were proudly advertised as radar ranges. You blast your food with high-intensity radar and it gets hot. This was seen as some sort of space-age miracle in the 1970’s. Perhaps someday an inventor will create a food heating device that does not radically alter the nutritional value of the foods in the process, but I’m not holding my breath on this one. Probably the best way to heat foods right now is to simply use a countertop toaster oven, and keep the heat as low as possible.

The microwave does work as advertised, by the way. It makes your food hot. But the mechanism by which heat is produced causes internal damage to the delicate molecular structures of vitamins and phytonutrients. Minerals are largely unaffected, however, so you’ll still get the same magnesium, calcium and zinc in microwaved foods as you would in non-microwaved foods, but the all-important B vitamins, anthocyanins, flavonoids and other nutritional elements are easily destroyed by microwave ovens.

The microwave is the appliance of the living dead. People who use the microwave on a regular basis are walking down a path towards degenerative disease and a lifelong battle with obesity. The more you use the microwave, the worse your nutritional state gets, and the more likely you are to be diagnosed with various diseases and put on pharmaceuticals which, of course, will create other health problems that lead to a grand spiraling nosedive of health.

Do yourself a favor: Toss your microwave, or donate it to some charity. It’s much easier to avoid using the microwave if you don’t have one around. It will clear up counter space, save you electricity and greatly enhance your dietary habits. When you need to heat something, heat it in a toaster oven or a stovetop pan (avoid Teflon and non-stick surfaces, of course). Better yet, strive to eat more of a raw, unprocessed diet. That where you’ll get the best nutrition anyway. Buy yourself a Vita-Mix and blend up some smoothies. It’s faster than microwaving foods are far healthier. (See my book Superfood Smoothies for recipes).

I drink a superfood smoothie every morning, and I haven’t used a microwave in years. Protecting health is our own responsibility, and it’s up to us all to make informed decisions about how we buy, prepare and consume our foods. You have to save yourself. Click here to see my CounterThink cartoon on this topic.

Happy Couples: What’s Their Secret?

Happy Couples: What’s Their Secret?

By Kimberly Dawn Neumann

How is it that some couples seem to stay starry-eyed for years, and others let their sizzle, um… fizzle? Well, it appears that successful chemistry sustainers develop healthy coupled-up habits which allow them to keep their love alive and kicking. “People can have a lot of trouble staying close,” says Joyce Catlett, author of Sex and Love in Intimate Relationships. “They get into relationships and think they’re automatically going to know how to make everything work, but figuring out how to stay passionate together is really a skill.” But luckily, these are skills that anyone can learn. Here are six habits that you’d do well to adopt if you want your date to become your happily-ever-after mate.

Habit #1: Catch romance where you can
“You may start out with champagne and roses, but the likelihood of being able to sustain that feeling with a busy schedule is pretty unlikely,” says JoAnn Magdoff, Ph.D., a New York City-based psychotherapist. Successful couples learn to build a bubble of romance at unexpected times – during their daily commute, while doing laundry – and in low-impact ways, whether that be a long, lingering smooch or just holding hands. In other words, the next time you hear yourself say “Oh, look, we’ve got 15 minutes to ourselves,” make use of it—that’s what keeps the spark alive.

Habit #2: Fight fair
Believe it or not, learning to fight right is an important part of keeping chemistry alive. Why? Because if you are constantly cutting each other down, it’s hard to feel mutually amorous. “There is no such thing as a relationship without disagreements,” says David Wygant, author of Always Talk to Strangers. “But if there is an understanding that your partner can come to you with any dissension without being attacked, you will have an honest relationship comprised of ‘open discussions’ rather than ‘fights.’” Debra Tobias, who has been happily married for almost 10 years to her husband Steve, agrees. “Steve and I have learned to listen to each other when we’re upset and we admit when we’re wrong,” says Tobias. “We also make a rule of never, ever saying ‘I told you so’ no matter how much we might want to say it.” The result is that their chemistry doesn’t wane because they never let their arguments escalate to a personal level. Focus on the issue at hand instead of throwing verbal punches.

Habit #3: Nurture your separate selves
Going off to your book club when your sweetie’s out golfing isn’t a sign you two are drifting apart. On the contrary, developing individual interests allows for a richer life as a couple. By taking little “couple breaks,” you gain a greater appreciation of the gifts your partner brings to your life and you have more to offer as well. “It’s very sexy to be independent sometimes,” says Magdoff. “You feel better about yourself and you’re less demanding of your partner when you’re together.” After all, taking some personal responsibility for your own well-being relieves the other person of the pressure to “provide” happiness—so go ahead and nurture some solo adventures. That’ll also keep each of you stocked with plenty of adventures to chat about, which also builds your bond.

Habit #4: Take on a project together
Separate interests aside, exploring new ground together is also important since it strengthens your history of shared experiences. Jo Smith and her husband of four years found this out when they committed to running their first 10K together. “We were training together, carbo-loading and hydrating together, running the race together and ultimately succeeding together when we both finished,” says Smith. “It brought a whole new level of closeness to our relationship because of the time we spent learning as a duo during this endeavor.” Couples who take on adventures together get a sense of daring and accomplishment that can really kick up their chemistry!

Habit #5: Don’t let your sex life slide
No doubt about it, couples with healthy sex lives have no problem keeping chemistry cooking. (That whole “couples’ sex lives naturally fades over time” excuse? Not true.) The trick to injecting more electricity into a lagging love life has to do with trying new things—sure, it can be easy to work on tricks and techniques when you first meet, but people’s preferences can, and do, change over time. “In interviewing people on the topic of sexuality, it became clear that the couples who were the most satisfied sexually were also the ones who were open to some experimentation,” says Catlett. This isn’t to say you suddenly have to become a wild thing, though. Even returning to the basics you may have abandoned along the way – lots of kissing and eye contact, for example – can make the usual encounter feel very different… and much more intimate.

Habit #6: Engage in some mutual admiration
In order for chemistry between two people to thrive, there needs to be mutual respect. “It’s about putting yourself in the role of an observer of your partner,” says Magdoff. “Watch them “perform” – I’m not saying they need to do a song and dance for you – just pay attention to the everyday things that remind you why you find them so special.” Then, make it a point to lob compliments their way. “A good exercise is to occasionally create a mental list of the qualities you dig about your partner, and to occasionally share one of your thoughts with the one you love,” says Wygant. Because the reality is, you’ll always want to be around someone who thinks you’re fantastic.

Kimberly Dawn Neumann is a New York City-based writer whose work has appeared in such publications as Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and Fitness.