Category Archives: Op-Eds

Op-Eds

What Does the Federal Reserve Have to Hide?

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Organization of the Federal Reserve System
Organization of the Federal Reserve System (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Over the years, dissidents in Congress (notably including former US Representative Ron Paul and current Republican and Democratic presidential contenders Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders) have periodically proposed legislation to audit the Federal Reserve. The legislation is always rejected and, when it gets any significant attention at all, roundly denounced by the Federal Reserve itself and groups like the US Chamber of Commerce.

Such was the case on January 12, when the US Senate defeated a motion to bring the latest version of “Audit the Fed” to the floor for full debate and a vote. What’s up with that?

Supporters paint a Fed audit as simple common sense; opponents as an attempt to “politicize” US monetary policy.

It seems to me that logic and reason are entirely with the pro-audit side. The Federal Reserve system was established by Congress in 1913  for the express purpose of manipulating the national currency pursuant to statutory objectives (creating and maintaining “maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates”). That’s inherently “political.”

It’s not “politicization” that audit opponents really object to. What they object to,  their dark references to “conspiracy theory” and other attempts at distraction notwithstanding, is transparency.

Why? Well, given that the primary opposition to an audit comes from the the political class and the usual Wall Street suspects — the rest of us either support an audit or, more likely, don’t think much about the matter at all — it’s pretty obvious:

The Federal Reserve operates, its statutory goals be damned, for the purpose of protecting the interests of “the 1%” in preference to the interests of, and when necessary at the expense of, the rest of us.

That’s the only plausible motive for audit opponents’ insistence that the Fed be allowed to operate in secrecy, immune from public inspection or even inspection by the political authority that created it and gave it its alleged mission.

If you’re like me, you probably find lengthy discussions of monetary policy complex and, well, boring. And therein lies the danger. For more than a century, that complexity and dullness has effectively cloaked the Federal Reserve system’s operations from public scrutiny. It’s hard to get most Americans, including me, very worked up about it.

But the political class’s fear of public scrutiny makes my ears perk up. As it should yours. Yes, we should audit the Fed, if for no other reason than that they don’t want us to.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

The Self-Driving Dilemma: Safety versus Freedom

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RGBStock.com Car Wreck

A new study by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute examines the difference between regular automobiles and the new “self-driving” models. According to the study (commissioned by an admittedly self-interested party, Google) humans behind the wheel crash 4.2 times per million miles, self-driving cars only 3.2 times per million miles. And the self-driving era is in its infancy. As the new cars improve, pass regulatory scrutiny and gain wider adoption,   tens of thousands of lives could be saved every year in the US alone.

But even assuming the validity of the study’s findings, self-driving cars are not necessarily without their problems. Given government’s growing interest in controlling how and where Americans travel, they could become just another piece of our ever more pervasive surveillance state.

Above and beyond immediate, local situational awareness — staying on the road, keeping track of the distance from and speed of surrounding cars, etc. — self-driving cars need constant awareness of the larger environment: Where they are on the map, what turns to make to get where they’re taking you, and whether or not there are accidents, traffic jams or road repairs ahead.

While any single piece of this information might be available from a number of sources, it’s easier to get everything from one source: A network to which the car either remains connected at all times, or connects to frequently when driving. And this is a two-way street (pun intended!). The car requests information from the network … and  takes instructions from the network too.

This fact creates all kinds of opportunities for abuse by government agencies with command influence over the network.

Something going on your government doesn’t want you to see? The network says there’s been a train derailment and routes all traffic so as to detour around the area.

Someone your government DOES want to see? When she gets in her car to go to work, the doors lock, she finds that she cannot turn off the engine, and she’s driven straight to the nearest police station.

I’m sure you can come up with other dystopian possibilities.

Widespread, even universal, adoption of self-driving cars is probably inevitable, and probably a good thing. It’s important that we don’t lose site of priorities other than safety and convenience, though. The market should demand, and government should be powerless to forbid,  a driver prerogative of assuming manual control of his or her vehicle at any time, for any reason.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

Disband and Defund the Touchy, Stealy Administration

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A TSA officer inspects a piece of luggage. Source: Wikipedia
 

“Inappropriate.” “Invasive.” That’s how Kevin Payne of San Diego, California describes a Transportation Security Administration employee’s “patdown” of his daughter Vendela at the Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina airport. He’s unduly kind. The “patdown” — which Payne captured on cell phone video — was a sexual assault which, in any sane society, would have ended with the perpetrator’s arrest.

The TSA’s response? The assault “followed approved procedures.” Turning every airport terminal in the US into the functional equivalent of one of Uday Hussein’s “rape rooms” is apparently a feature, not a bug, in America’s post-9/11 “security” software.

It’s time and past time to permanently disband TSA and let airports and airlines go back to providing for their own security.

After 13 years of operation, with an annual budget of nearly $7.5 billion, the TSA has yet to demonstrate its usefulness in stopping terrorism aboard airplanes. It routinely fails tests in which inspectors smuggle weapons past its security checkpoints. So far there’s been not a single verifiable instance of TSA foiling a terror plot. And it’s invariably local law enforcement, not TSA, which  effectually responds to security incidents at airports (as in the 2013 LAX attack, in which a TSA agent was killed before local airport police shot the gunman, and the 2014 New Orleans incident in which a deputy sheriff shot a man who was chasing a TSA agent with a machete).

The only thing the organization appears to be any good at is empowering its employees to ogle and feel up travelers and steal goodies from travelers’ luggage.

As for the costs, that $7.5 billion budget doesn’t even begin to touch them. According to the US Bureau of Transportation statistics, there were 685 million airplane passenger boardings in the United States between October 1, 2014 and September 2015. Assuming an average wait time of 10 minutes to get through the TSA’s screening line, that’s 1.1 million hours of lost time for passengers — hours they could have spent working, or shopping, or getting to where they were going, instead of waiting to find out whether or not they’d win the TSA lottery to have their genitals fondled or their laptops swiped from their checked luggage.

Yes, I get it. 9/11 was a horrible day and the urge to “do something” to prevent future attacks is entirely understandable. But the Transportation Security Administration is clearly not up to the task. It doesn’t make us safer. It just inconveniences, assaults and steals from us.  Let’s end this nonsense.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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