Money and Civilization

In 1966 and 1967 I lived inside the walls of West Berlin, my apartment building scarred by the Russian guns of 1945, and now rattled by the guns of East German guards. Every time I walked to the grocery store, I passed a fascinating shoemaker's shop—his front window was piled with money. The bills looked very much like the marks in my pocket. 

Finally, I asked about the unusual “window display.” He explained it was the now worthless currency from the early 1920s hyper-inflation that brought Hitler to power. Having had a New York State public school education, it was news to me.

That day I started learning history. It is also when I started thinking about the function of money in a civilization. Not "money the root of all evil," but money the tool.

Money, the tool enabling people to trade skills and assets peacefully with other like-minded people.

Money, the tool facilitating the critical calculations in a society as to the price and value of a thing—so scarce resources can be allocated to their most productive uses.

Money, the protected stored value of your time and effort.

Money, the source of your security, your rainy day ace in the hole, your independence and dignity in old-age.

Thinking about money this way evolved into new perspective on theft. I started to see that theft is really like a mini-murder. But instead of stealing a victim's future— “real” murder, it kills his past. It takes his stored-up effort and ingenuity, it negates all the pleasures foregone, the hours of work and training that produced what was stolen. 

This line of thought gave me new perspective on the power of the printing press in the hands of governments today. Inflation is a form of theft. It is subtle. No gun, no mask. It is slow, you hardly notice a nibble here, a nibble there. It does not remove the money from your hands. It removes the value of the money.

I began to understand the shoemaker’s reason for keeping the money in his window. It was his way of hoping to save a future civilization: The German hyper-inflation had wiped out his country's stable middle class, made frugal moral behavior a bad deal, and made the citizens ripe for Nazi promises, ripe for a savior, ripe for a scapegoat.
 
America is on the verge of a similar fate. Government is spending money it can not repay, hobbling the productive individuals in our society by making them responsible for the mistakes of the foolish. It is making the productive person look like the fool for paying his bills, for working hard, for saving money. The government tells you, if you are not a victim, you are a greedy parasite living off the body of the nation. Our scapegoats have become the banks, the wealthy, the productive—but never the true villains, the over-spending politicians.

When you read what media and government spokesmen are saying about the necessity of government intervention in the free market, remember, government can produce no new wealth. Government can not make a single productive job, or hire one productive person. Productive means adding to the gross amount of real goods and real services available in the economy. Government can only take from someone productive and redistribute the “take” to non-productive people or projects.

But, you say, what if government borrows the money instead of printing it? Government borrowing drives up the cost of money—the interest rate. It makes money more expensive and therefore less available for those who want to start or expand businesses. Government spending hurts an economy, and if it ever seems to help, you can bet it will be close to an election.

Only a free market that allows the prices to determine value of resources (land, labor, capital, brains) can allocate those resources to their most productive use. If any government were truly productive, it would not need to tax or print money. It would earn it.

Governments use their power to (temporarily) distort the laws of economics because it wants power to do things the citizens would not willingly pay for or necessarily authorize it to do. For instance, Congress passed laws to ensure every American (read potential voter) could have a house (and for those same politicians to get every potential voter’s support). But, because government could not legislate houses into existence, it had to use use the power of law-making to manipulate banks into doing the next best thing. It passed legislation making home-ownership possible regardless of someone's ability to repay the mortgages. Fannie May and the bank and insurance bail-outs are a few of the pitiful results of that effort. Like all natural laws, economic reality eventually strikes back. Once that happens, governments resort to more and more control (Stimulus?), often ending in a flood of currency. Short run always extends into long run and unintended consequences always rain on political parades. Unfortunately, civilizations are often washed away in the flood politicians create.





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Vivian Yess Wadlin lives in Highland, NY and has published an area guide, About Town (of Ulster County), for more than a quarter century. She writes primarily on local history and natural history. She is an UCCC and Marist College graduate with an BA in Economics.





 

Health Care Not a Right

The Gorillas and Paper Tigers Of The Health Care Debate

Healthcare can not be a right. That is the 800 pound gorilla in the room.

Nothing can be a right that requires, read that “forces,” another human being to produce a product or provide a service. That situation undermines the 13th Amendment to the Constitution: No indentured servitude and no slavery.

No product or thing can be a “right.” The only things that are guarenteed rights are specified in the Constitution for instance the first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights . They are there to protect you from the actions of government that restrict your liberty to act in your own self-interest. 

If government healthcare is guaranteed by law and made a right, it means that unless Congress is filled with doctors, nurses, pharmacists, medical device inventors, researchers and drug developers and have the time and experience to provide services and care to all Americans, Congress will have to force someone else to do or provide those things. 

Passing a new law can not "bring health care" to anyone unless that law forces someone to do it. I don't want to be treated by slaves the next time I need medical services. Do you?

The next time you hear some politician try to muster support for government health care, picture the new slave: Your doctor.

Also, do not let those opposed to government health care use paper tiger reasons like: Costs too much, ruins private insurance, intrudes on privacy. Yes, it will do all those things, but the true Constitutional protection against government run healthcare lies in its hidden victims--the slaves it plans to capture.

I will personally support the ouster of anyone in public office who supports slavery. We rid this nation of it once, I do not want to fight that battle again. But, I will.

Preserve freedom.
Stay well.

The Plight of the Humble Bee
By Vivian Yess Wadlin

It is easy to wax poetic about honey bees. Fragile, fascinating, fruitful, and feisty, the once ubiquitous wild honey bee is now few and far between. Feral (wild) honey bee colony numbers have been decimated by loss of habitat, pesticides, infestations of an imported fungus and a mite. The mite clogs the adult bee's trachea and the fungus kills the larval bees.

Scientists are working on several promising ways to thwart these contagion threats--cross breeding with more hardy colonies (for example the Russian Honey Bee), genetic engineering, and cures or controls for the diseases themselves.

In the first half of the 20th century, hives were common on most farms. Between the domestic and feral honey bees, nobody gave a lot more thought to the process--pollination just happened. Now, with the death of wild honey bees, fewer small farms and hobby apiaries (bee farms), beekeeping, honey production and the renting of hives has evolved as an integral part of modern agribusiness.

For many, beekeeping is not a stay-at-home calling. Many larger apiaries load their hives on tractor trailers and go south for the winter. In addition to being able to harvest more honey (warmer climate means the bees eat less of their honey stores), keepers can more effectively keep an eye on the health of their bees. Hives in the colder climates can not be disturbed during the winter.

"How clever!" you might think, to move the bees to food sources, but the ancient Egyptians did it first--or at least they wrote about it first. They would load the hives on a barge and follow spring along the Nile, moving the boats at night when the bees were back from their daily toils.

You might also think bees would be confused by having their homes moved. Not the case. Within a matter of hours the bees are settled at a new location and scout bees have located pollen sources and communicated them to the hive. According to a 1989 article in Science News, they decipher food locations by "listening to the dance" performed by scout bees.

Scientists have largely decoded bee dances, but they did not yet understand exactly how one bee perceives another's dance signals. Now, for the first time, researchers have shown directly that honey bees can detect and discriminate among airborne sounds simulating those created in their dances, says study coauthor William F. Towne of Kutztown (Pa.) University.

Researchers at a university in Denmark are working to create a "dancing-bee robot" that could guide bees to pollinate specific locations--a sort of "misinformation" dance fooling the bees into doing more of our bidding.

Why do scientists and farmers care so much about the honey bee? One estimate I read puts the worth of honey bees to the aggregate US agricultural crop at about $14 billion a year. That's the value of additional crop produced in bee-pollinated fields verses the value of crop from fields not a-buzz with honey bees.

Some crops, almonds, for instance, are pollinated only by honeybees. Our New York State apple and stone fruit crops are also highly dependent on the honey bee and farmers now rent hives every spring to ensure pollination.

Mike Biltonen of Stone Ridge Orchard said he pays about $40 per hive during the pollination season and a single hive accommodates about about two acres. For each really top quality apple picked, its blossom had to have visits from about six bees. Mike said he likes the hives that have just come back from the Almond orchards in California because the bees are really "prompted" to pollinate. Those hives are stronger in number of bees and activity level from the day they arrive. The bees have never really had a "down-time," but these hives hard to find. Mike's rented hives are usually local or have wintered down south. On dark rainy days all bees just stay home, but fortunately, it takes just one really good day for the bees to work their magic on an orchard.

As to the value of the honey from apple blossoms, the question gets sticky. One source said honey made from apple pollen is not palatable to us, but the bees seem to find it agreeable. Another source said it is fine tasting honey. Mike said no honey is ever exclusively from one pollen source--hence the confusion. Most table honey is from clover and wild flowers if you believe the labels.

Worker bees, all female, live about six weeks if they avoid the common disasters of pesticide, mites, fungal infections, and panicked people swatting them into oblivion. During its busy six weeks, the worker bee has several jobs and lives on nectar and pollen. Early in life, she tends the baby bees, then later goes pollen collecting. The guy bees, drones, are just around to "pollinate" the queen.

Since 1907, someone has been keeping close track of the causes of honey bee death. The Agricultural Research Service is a diagnostic testing laboratory in Maryland. Every year, concerned individuals package and ship more than 2,000 honey bee carcasses to the center for a definitive "autopsy."

The service helps the agricultural community stay alert for new diseases as well as taking action to cure disease before they spread. According to Hachiro Shimanuki, who heads the Agricultural Research Service lab, currently, something called American foulbrood is the "second biggest threat to honey bees today, after mites.

In addition to diagnosis, just keeping gross statistics on bee deaths helps provide answers. When scientists found a decline of a specific cause of death within a given population, they become alert to potential natural defenses. For instance, when the cause of death from European foulbrood disappeared in southern New Jersey, scientist investigated and found something that was keeping it at bay. Although it was another problematic fungus, they were able to isolate the chemical inhibiting European foulbrood and could work toward a cure.

Just as we fear human diseases' growing resistant to the effects of antibiotics, entomologists are always trying to develop new weapons in the honey bee vs microbe battle. Appreciating all that bees do for us, we certainly wish the researchers sweet success.