Thomas Sowell

By Thomas Sowell

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | China is the largest foreign holder of U.S. government bonds. But, instead of buying more of those bonds as our skyrocketing national debt leads to more bonds being issued, China has been selling some of its U.S. government bonds this year.

The Chinese are no fools. They know that all this unbridled spending — even when it is called “investment” — means that inflation is coming. That in turn means that the dollars with which U.S. government bonds will be paid off will be worth a lot less than the dollars with which the bonds were bought.

Governments around the world have played this game for centuries, robbing those who trusted them enough to buy their bonds. Like Bernard Madoff, they call it “investment.”

Inflation also means that all the talk about how higher taxes will be confined to “the rich” is nonsense. Inflation is a hidden tax that takes away the value of money held by everyone at every income level.

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Abraham Lincoln once asked an audience how many legs a dog has if you count the tail as a leg. When they answered “five,” Lincoln told them that the answer was four. The fact that you called the tail a leg did not make it a leg.

It is too bad that Lincoln is not still around today. He might emancipate us all from our enslavement to words.

When you call something a “stimulus” package, that does not mean that it actually stimulates. The way individuals, banks and businesses in general are hanging onto their money suggests that “sedative” package might be more accurate.

This is not a new phenomenon, peculiar to this administration. President Bush’s “stimulus” package did not stimulate either. The same was true back in the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “pump-priming” by spending government money to get private money flowing.

The circulation of money slowed down back then the way it has slowed down today.

Some of our biggest political fallacies come from accepting words as evidence of realities. “Rent control” laws do not control rent and “gun control” laws do not control guns.

The big cities with the tightest rent control laws in the nation are New York and San Francisco. The nation’s highest rents are in New York and the second-highest are in San Francisco.

There is a very straightforward explanation for that. Strong rent control laws can bring residential building to a screeching halt. Once politicians have milked the political advantages of passing rent control laws, they have to avoid a backlash if all building of apartments stops.

That leads to an escape hatch in the rent control law. Luxury apartments with rents above a certain level are exempted. That leads to the shifting of resources away from building affordable housing to building housing that is unaffordable.

It is even more painfully obvious that “gun control” laws do not control guns. The District of Columbia’s very strong laws against gun ownership have done nothing to stop the high murder rate in Washington.

New York had very strong gun control laws decades before London did. But the murder rate in New York has been some multiple of that in London for more than two centuries, regardless of which city had the stronger gun control laws at a given time.

Back in 1954, when there were no restrictions on owning shotguns in England and there were far more owners of pistols then than there were decades later, there were only 12 cases of armed robbery in London.

By the 1990s, after stringent gun controls laws were imposed, there were well over a thousand armed robberies a year in London. In the late 1990s, after an almost total ban on handguns in England, gun crimes went up another ten percent.

The reason — too obvious to be accepted by the intelligentsia — is that law-abiding people became more defenseless against criminals who ignored the law and kept their guns.

The same thing applies internationally. We might keep that in mind as the Obama administration pursues the will o’ the wisp of banning nuclear weapons. If that Utopian dream ever came true, those nations naive enough to get rid of their nuclear weapons would be at the mercy of those rogue states who kept theirs.

U.S. Offers to Cut Nuclear Arms – WSJ.com

Just like his grandmother and Rev. Wright got thrown under the bus, the US is being thrown under the bus!  See the pattern here? He will do and say anything to be liked. He is naive if he thinks that he can talk rouge countries into not developing nuclear weapons.

By JONATHAN WEISMAN, MARC CHAMPION and JAY SOLOMON

PRAGUE — President Barack Obama, in the face of a rocket launch this weekend by North Korea, announced an ambitious U.S. arms-control campaign aimed at drastically reducing atomic weapons globally while still recognizing developing nations’ rights to pursue nuclear power.

Mr. Obama’s strategy, unveiled Sunday in a speech to a Czech crowd of 20,000, commits the U.S. to take the lead in reducing its nuclear-weapons stockpile in a bid to gain Russian and Chinese support for curbing the mounting proliferation threats posed by North Korea and Iran.

In Prague, Mr. Obama, standing with his wife, Michelle, unveiled his arms-control plan. TheU.N. held emergency talks on NorthKorea’s latest missile test.The president said he would convene an international summit in Washington aimed at shrinking the world’s nuclear weapons arsenals. At that meeting, he is likely to propose creating a new international agency to pursue the effort, a senior U.S. official said.

The administration is also working to develop an international nuclear-fuel bank, potentially hosted by Kazakhstan, that fledgling nuclear-power states could tap, according to a senior Obama administration official.

Mr. Obama said North Korea’s defiance of the international community in launching the missile — which fell into the Pacific Ocean over 700 miles east of Japan — illustrated the urgency for a new round of arms-control initiatives.

U.S. officials said they will seek to forge a strong response against North Korea during an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council that began Sunday.

“Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something,” Mr. Obama told the crowd, calling the launch a provocative act that violated United Nations Security Council resolutions. “The world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons. Now is the time for a strong international response.”

Discuss: How should the U.S. respond to North Korea’s launch?Mr. Obama is embracing the multilateral test-ban treaty that drifted under his predecessor, George W. Bush. Mr. Bush worked with a broad spectrum of allies to address the Iranian and North Korean programs, particularly in his second term. But the Obama strategy is a bet that a more active focus on diplomacy can win over the rogue actors — or else win support from Europe, Russia and China for tougher sanctions.

Mr. Obama specifically outlined U.S. plans to support treaties banning the production of weapons-grade materials, as well as the testing of atomic weapons, efforts backed by President Bill Clinton but largely ignored by Mr. Bush.

Speaking at Prague’s Castle Square, Mr. Obama told the audience his administration was committed “to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

“We have to insist: ‘

Click on the link below to read more…

via U.S. Offers to Cut Nuclear Arms – WSJ.com.