The root purpose of currency is to allow the quick and equitable trade of goods and services.

The economy is (almost) always growing. There are more goods and services and thus a need for more currency… currency that will retain its value because it is more dollars “chasing” more goods.

Currency is subject to supply and demand and its value is determined the same way. If you fail to meet demand, the value of currency goes up. If you print too much, value goes down. But don’t forget, demand IS constantly going up and not always predictably. Being able to “print money on demand” is important.

Associating interest costs with printing money is a way to ensure the printing only takes place when there is in fact demand. This is a great way to gauge demand and avoid inflation. Also, this “cost” is money that will still be circulating and so does not impose a cost on the economy as a whole (unlike putting gold in a vault where a useful commodity is rendered useless and thus worthless).

When the federal government borrows money, it also spends that money. It is exchanged for goods and services just like any other money. So, this borrowing is a legitimate form of demand and the corresponding printing of money does not reduce it’s value. This point in no way addresses the wisdom of going into debt, it only is meant to show that governmental debt should not be thought of as a drag on currency value. Of course, the irrational currency markets aren’t sophisticated enough to recognize this so state debt does often effect the value of a currency… just not for any rational reason.

Regarding inflation, we need to differentiate between inflation due to currency imbalance and inflation due to the interplay of supply and demand in other goods and services. Properly managing currency is not a guarantee that prices will not rise because currency has nothing to do with the supply and demand of *other* products.

The supply of oil for example is finite and the cheaply available, easy to drill for oil has already been used for the most part. Also, global demand is rising at an astonishing rate. These factors have very predictably led to a spike in oil prices. As the basis of so much of our economy, that spike is causing a rise in all prices. No currency policy can or even should attempt to prevent this kind of rise in prices. Prices are going up because they MUST.

There are of course some government policies that are exacerbating the situation. Ethanol subsidies are just about the dumbest thing the government has ever done and we are suffering because of it. But the rise in prices is not an effect of the money supply… it is an effect of ordinary market forces that are ultimately the necessary feedback mechanism that keeps the entire system running. Rising energy costs represent a very real shortage in supply as compared to demand and those rising costs affect all corners of the economy. It is up to us to adapt to new realities.

For anyone not already aware; in the US, many states have shield laws. Prior to setting finger to key for this post, I took a quick look at the Wikipedia entry for “Shield laws in the United States“. I will use its definition…

A “shield law” is legislation designed to provide a news reporter with the right to refuse to testify as to information and/or sources of information obtained during the newsgathering and dissemination process.

I will attempt to explain the justification for said protection. “The press” is a vital part of society whose role is to report on current events. In that role, it often serves as a watchdog, protecting the citizenry from corruption and criminal activity by making it public. Due to the importance of this function, we are obligated to do what we can to remove barriers to their acquisition of “news”.

Often, “confidential sources” give reporters information. Sources are usually confidential when said source does not want his or her role in providing information revealed. As a result, people are more likely to talk about a sensitive subject if they are confident that no one will know that they talked.

So far this all makes sense. And a shield law is meant to protect the news reporter by not forcing them to reveal these sources thereby giving sources better peace of mind. But this is where the logic breaks down.

Dramatic pause…

What is the point of having sensitive information if it can not be used?

Shield laws only come into play when the news story in question involves some crime. Suspect X is on trial for crime A. Information pertaining to the crime comes to light in an article written by a reporter, attributed to a “confidential source”. Let’s presume this information is genuinely useful to the trial. Let’s presume that it is pertinent and incriminating information or perhaps could exonerate the defendant…. but is the news story evidence? No, it is not. It is hearsay.

A shield law gives journalists special protection. They may not be forced to reveal specific information they have that is pertinent to a criminal case. Let’s make it clear here… you and I are under an obligation as citizens to divulge anything we know that may pertain to a crime. There are a few other special exceptions but they are few and far between… and frankly, they don’t make a lot of sense to me either.

One of the handful of legitimate roles of government is to protect we the people from assault and theft (including fraud)… basic, legitimate crimes. I think it is right and proper that the government have a method to compel people to testify on such matters. Contrary to conventional wisdom within the legal system, the basic purpose of a court is to find out the truth. The ability to compel testimony is central to that… and benefits all citizens who are not trying to get away with murder.

It makes no sense to offer anyone exemption from that duty for any reason. Yes, the exemption may indeed inspire more snitches to speak to reporters but that is immaterial because it is not admissible in court. Nor should it be. Without being able to question and investigate the source, the information has no credibility no matter what reputation the reporter may have.

It is perfectly acceptable for a reporter to keep a source’s name out of the story. It is not acceptable to allow a reporter to keep silent in a court of law. If the ultimate purpose of the press is to serve as a watchdog, it is still the legal system that provides the teeth when it comes to crime. Or perhaps another approach to the metaphor would be better. It doesn’t do us much good for the watchdog to bark if it won’t lead us to the intruder.

We are still animals first, last and always. Beyond abstract endeavors having no real impact on our lives, emotion and instinct rule us… rational thought only serves those forces, it does not direct them. We can be very cleaver indeed in the pursuit of our base needs and in rationalizing our simple biases.

In other words, we collectively will always be violent and foolish. It is a fact of biology.

What is the point of a law? This is a subjective question and so my answer can only be an opinion but I hope to convince you the reader that it is a rational, effective and practical opinion.

The point of a law is to prevent people from performing acts we do not want them to perform. In my opinion, that is the only valid purpose of a law. [For the sake of discussion, let us say that a law is not always the same thing as a legislative act or bill. In other words, I do not consider a spending bill a "law" in this context]. I have strong objections to laws designed to promote some positive outcome. That is coercion.

For the moment I am not going to dwell on what sorts of acts we should be trying to prevent. I will leave that for a later post.

In general, the way a law deters an act is to establish a punishment for that act. Now we come to the real point of this post. We should avoid redundancy in law and be direct in addressing exactly the act we wish to deter.

What am I talking about exactly? Well, a classic example would be the case of gun laws. Why do some people wish to limit access to guns? Because guns are often used in crimes… crimes such as armed robbery and murder. Fine. There’s no disputing that such an association exists. By the same token, there is no denying that possession of a gun is in and of itself harmless. Someone may use a gun in a crime or they may never do so.

The ultimate goal of gun control is to prevent crimes like armed robbery and murder. Now, here’s the important part… those acts are already illegal. We already have laws in place that will punish people who commit such crimes.

I am going to stipulate a point which I believe is dubious at best but I will stipulate that it is so in order to speak directly to people who believe it is 100% true. Let us say that easy, legal access to guns does in fact increase that amount of violence in an area. The argument is, I guess, that merely owning a gun makes a person much more likely to be violent… and of course it’s true that guns make for more effective violence. So anyway, for the sake of argument I will accept that access to guns means an increase in violent crime. However, I must insist that anyone in favor of gun control for this reason also accept that not every gun owner is going to end up involved in some kind of violence. Indeed, only a small handful will.

I’ve said that the ultimate goal of a law is to deter acts we do not want people to commit. There is of course a counter-weighing consideration… liberty. Were we to outlaw every act that could conceivably contribute to the actual behavior we are trying to deter, liberty would suffer enormously. This is why it is so important that we maintain a tight focus in our laws. We don’t want people to murder so therefore, murder is illegal. There is no need to control access to guns for the simple reason that access to guns is by itself harmless. Owning a gun does no harm until the gun owner also chooses to murder someone.

The basic ideal of liberty demands that we allow people to do any harmless thing they like. We still have the ability to criminalize any harmful act but it is absolutely vital that we differentiate between behavior that can in some cases contribute to a harmful act and the actual act of harm itself.

I will briefly touch on another example. Hate speech. Speech is harmless. Anyone acting to harm another due to race or creed is guilty of that harmful act… no amount of speech that may be associated with that act can possibly be harmful. Harm is a very real and easily detected thing and words have never hurt anyone. Emotional distress is a separate entity and it is not government’s place to attempt to prevent it.

First, it assumes that a universe could exist with a different set of physical laws that do not foster life. There is no evidence of this. All we know is that this universe exists and it has this set of laws. Are or were there other possibilities? We have no idea. Without knowing that it is simply not reasonable to construct an argument that assumes this outcome is either one of countless other possibilities OR is designed by an intelligent creator.

The ID “tuned universe” argument also claims to know enough about the nature and requirements of life to accurately calculate probabilities. That is simply absurd. We don’t know enough about life as we know it to do truly useful calculation and obviously we know absolutely nothing about how life could possibly develop under a different set of physical laws.

There is one admittedly abstract concept that kind off kills of the entire argument. Even if we accept the scenario as an IDer would have it… that is, that there are all these factors that need to be just right for life to exist and that the chance of that happening is vanishingly small… there is an answer to this. Even if we allow this argument to make its assumptions unchallenged, it can still be handily dispensed with. That we happen to enjoy a universe that is hospitable to life is inevitable. ONLY a universe that can support intelligent life can be inhabited by beings capable of asking the question “how did this happen?” So fine, we can suppose that the chance of the universe forming in such a way as to allow life is “billions to one” against. It is still possible. The chance that we as thinking beings capable of asking these questions would inhabit just such a universe is 100%. Guaranteed. It is a self-selecting criteria. There is zero chance that we could be in a universe that doesn’t support life therefore, it can’t be viewed as an improbable coincidence and so can not justify speculation about an intelligent designer.

This final point is more or less what the Anthropic Principal embodies.

In a minor point of irony, the reason that I am an atheist is the same reason that I am not a “strong atheist”. Lack of evidence. I do not believe in god because I have never encountered or heard a reputable account of evidence that suggests there is a god. Nor have I heard a logical line of reasoning that asserts that god must exist. It is as simple as that. The long standing analogy of the Invisible Pink Unicorn illustrates the logic behind this well. I do not believe in the IPU or dragons or souls or ghosts or Bat Man or bigfoot because there is no credible evidence that any of these things exist. I do not believe in god because there is no evidence that any such thing exists. The reason I am not a strong atheist is much the same… there is no evidence that there is NOT a god. Of course, there is a difference between the two… one would expect there to be evidence that something exists but it is fundamentally much harder to demonstrate that a thing is NOT than it is to demonstrate that a thing IS. Some say it’s impossible to prove a negative. I’m still not sure on that (it seems to me that if you constrain the subject by careful definition, you can prove its negative) but it is certainly a thornier proposition.

The existence of the world or the universe is not evidence of a creator. An intelligent creator is a possibility but there are many other possibilities as well. There is no evidence that suggests that “God” is the answer.

Languages like English often do us a great disservice. Needless to say, there is no alternative but it is important to acknowledge these problems. Language shapes thought. This can sometimes make it difficult to think about a subject rationally. In the case of the nature of human existence, language and tradition and perhaps vanity has lead us to embrace a false dichotomy.

My next statement embodies that false dichotomy… but the limitation of language makes it difficult to avoid. I am my body. I am nothing but my body. The environment around me has a great deal of influence on who I am and what I do but in terms of identity, there is nothing “more”.

Put another way, there is no spirit or soul of any sort.

The dichotomy I spoke of comes from the way I must first assert that there is an “I” and then tie that self to my body as if they are separate things. They are not. I can refer to myself as I or Me or White Wraven… or “this body”. All methods of address refer to exactly the same thing and none of them imply anything more.