www.JoeCobb.com

If Ron Paul gets the GOP nomination, I will support him for POTUS. If he doesn’t get the GOP nomination, the LP will still need a candidate. I was part of a team that would like to offer the LP nomination to Ron Paul, but he has already refused it. So, in the alternative: Kubby wants to use my economic program

(i) repeal the 16th Amendment (income tax) and
(ii) stop using “imaginary numbers” in government budgeting.
(iii) cut government programs in a tri-bi-partisan way in Congress, with supplemental appropriations and continuting resolutions only after Congressional oversight committee hearings, to review government inefficiency and get rid of waste.
Less-than-full-year appropriations: Continuing Resolutions can become a budgeting tool to cut spending. Kubby supports this idea, to use a “look back” method to determine how much each government program should be INCREASED (adjusted for inflation and/or cut in real terms) annually.
Negative COLA: If a program is not supplemented by new appropriations, it will be cut in real terms; the appropriated dollars buy less - and those programs just have to continue getting the same number of shrinking dollars. [ shed a tear ]

So, I support Steve Kubby’s effort to promote my budget-theory ideas - to use a Gandhi/passive resistance-with-veto technique to cut spending (in real terms).

Back in 1982-84, I am proud to tell you that I worked for Ron Paul, as his staff aide on the Banking Committee. Ron Paul introduced the bill I wrote to begin minting U.S. gold bullion coins, and it did become Public Law 99-185. Ron Paul has become famous for my work on gold coinage, and it makes me happy.

I hope Steve Kubby can become famous for my work on government budget systems, too. Mountains can be moved if you let others take credit for the miracle. Isn’t there a quote about Muhammad and a mountain?
_________________________
Regards, Joe Cobb
Glendale, Arizona
www.JoeCobb.com
.

by Cliff Kinkaid

A nice-sounding bill called the “Global Poverty Act,” sponsored by Democratic presidential candidate and Senator Barack Obama, is up for a Senate vote on Thursday [Feb.28] and could result in the imposition of a global tax on the United States. The bill, which has the support of many liberal religious groups, makes levels of U.S. foreign aid spending subservient to the dictates of the United Nations.

Senator Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has not endorsed either Senator Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton in the presidential race. But on Thursday, February 14, he was rushing Obama’s “Global Poverty Act” (S.2433) through his committee. The legislation would commit the U.S. to spending 0.7 percent of gross national product on foreign aid, which amounts to a phenomenal 13-year total of $845 billion over and above what the U.S. already spends.

The bill, which is item number four on the committee’s business meeting agenda, passed the House by a voice vote last year because most members didn’t realize what was in it. Congressional sponsors have been careful not to calculate the amount of foreign aid spending that it would require. According to the website of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, no hearings have been held on the Obama bill in that body.

A release from the Obama Senate office about the bill declares, “In 2000, the U.S. joined more than 180 countries at the United Nations Millennium Summit and vowed to reduce global poverty by 2015. We are halfway towards this deadline, and it is time the United States makes it a priority of our foreign policy to meet this goal and help those who are struggling day to day.”

The legislation itself requires the President “to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the United States foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty, and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide, between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day.”

The bill defines the term “Millennium Development Goals” as the goals set out in the United Nations Millennium Declaration, General Assembly Resolution 55/2 (2000).

The U.N. says that “The commitment to provide 0.7% of gross national product (GNP) as official development assistance was first made 35 years ago in a General Assembly resolution, but it has been reaffirmed repeatedly over the years, including at the 2002 global Financing for Development conference in Monterrey, Mexico. However, in 2004, total aid from the industrialized countries totaled just $78.6 billion-or about 0.25% of their collective GNP.”

In addition to seeking to eradicate poverty, that declaration commits nations to banning “small arms and light weapons” and ratifying a series of treaties, including the International Criminal Court Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol (global warming treaty), the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The Millennium Declaration also affirms the U.N. as “the indispensable common house of the entire human family, through which we will seek to realize our universal aspirations for peace, cooperation and development.”

Jeffrey Sachs, who runs the U.N.’s “Millennium Project,” says that the U.N. plan to force the U.S. to pay 0.7 percent of GNP in increased foreign aid spending would add $65 billion a year to what the U.S. already spends. Over a 13-year period, from 2002, when the U.N.’s Financing for Development conference was held, to the target year of 2015, when the U.S. is expected to meet the “Millennium Development Goals,” this amounts to $845 billion. And the only way to raise that kind of money, Sachs has written, is through a global tax, preferably on carbon-emitting fossil fuels.

Obama’s bill has only six co-sponsors. They are Senators Maria Cantwell, Dianne Feinstein, Richard Lugar, Richard Durbin, Chuck Hagel and Robert Menendez. But it appears that Biden and Obama see passage of this bill as a way to highlight Democratic Party priorities in the Senate.

The House version (H.R. 1302), sponsored by Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), had only 84 co-sponsors before it was suddenly brought up on the House floor last September 25 and was passed by voice vote. House Republicans were caught off-guard, unaware that the pro-U.N. measure committed the U.S. to spending hundreds of billions of dollars.

It appears the Senate version is being pushed not only by Biden and Obama, a member of the committee, but also by Lugar, the ranking Republican member.

Lugar has worked with Obama in the past to promote more foreign aid for Russia, supposedly to stem nuclear proliferation, and has become Obama’s mentor. Like Biden, Lugar is a globalist. They have both promoted passage of the U.N.’s Law of the Sea Treaty, for example.

The so-called “Lugar-Obama initiative” was modeled after the Nunn-Lugar program, also known as the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program, which was designed to eliminate weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union. But one defense analyst, Rich Kelly, noted evidence that “CTR funds have eased the Russian military’s budgetary woes, freeing resources for such initiatives as the war in Chechnya and defense modernization.” He recommended that Congress “eliminate CTR funding so that it does not finance additional, perhaps more threatening, programs in the former Soviet Union.” However, over $6 billion has already been spent on the program.

Another program modeled on Nunn-Lugar, the Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention (IPP), was recently exposed as having funded nuclear projects in Iran through Russia.

* * * * * *
[The bill calls for a massive increase in foreign aid spending]

Even these increases, however, will not be enough to satisfy the requirements of the Obama bill. A global tax will clearly be necessary to force American taxpayers to provide the money.

Americans who would like their senators to know what they are voting on can contact them through information at this official Senate site.

Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. He is a columnist for Accuracy in Media. This “AIM Column” was published February 22, 2008.

by Tibor Machan

Over the years, since I voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964, I have supported libertarian candidates and ballot measures, few of whom or which had any chance of winning. Often my more pragmatic, realistic friends tell me that I am throwing away my vote, and I should stop this if I want to be serious about giving concrete support to my political convictions. They sometimes even suggest that it is irresponsible to keep up this practice of hopeless voting.

I disagree. The reason is that political campaigns are very effective ways of taking to the media topics that would otherwise be mostly ignored. Consider just recently how many stories appeared about Ron Paul even though almost all of them also advised that Paul’s chances of becoming the Republican presidential nominee are nil.

So if there is a libertarian candidate or ballot measure, however little chance there is for victory, libertarians and their critics will likely be asked to appear on radio, TV, and in other forums of discussion. Arguably, then, they will be able to keep the dim flame of liberty from being extinguished. They may even give the flame a bit of strength over time.

Moreover, it doesn’t appear to me to be a good idea to give additional credibility to the candidacies of people who really have no interest in furthering the cause of liberty. In the current presidential race there is no viable candidate who seems to care one tiny bit about whether this country is loyal to the ideas of the founders, to the effective protection of the unalienable individual rights of all. It just seems to be an act of betrayal to vote for a person with no interest in human liberty, one who has fully bought into the currently fashionable politics of special interests and entitlements.

The only sensible alternative, barring a full-scale revolution, is to educate the electorate. And here is where a bit of optimism can also be justified. After all, it is no secret that the ideals and ideas of a fully free society are radical, novel, hardly explored by most people in the country and around the world. What John Locke and the founders proposed had only been considered by very few thinkers, and most of them paid attention only to certain limited aspects of the political philosophy that the founder’s sketched in the Declaration of Independence.

Yes, there had been talk of limiting the power of government, of restraining absolutism, of abolishing serfdom and slavery, or of freeing the press and even markets. But very few influential thinkers came out in favor of a totally free society, one in which government exists only to secure the basic rights of citizens.

So it makes sense to suppose that one good way of giving this radical political idea a good college try is to keep discussing it over and over again. As I have stressed many times, bad habits are not easy to get rid of even when one knows them to be bad. But in the case of statism – the belief in the omnipotence and omniscience of government – most people who embrace it are self-deceived into thinking that government really is the answer to most of our problems. Even in these United States it is nearly a knee-jerk response to any problem that some level or branch of government must be called upon in order to solve it. The self-deception is powerful enough to resist all the evidence staring us in the face of its futility.

All too many people also think in what can be called a fantastic fashion. They believe that if government might be of help, it will be of help. Of course, “might� is something for which no good argument is necessary; no history need support it. It need only be a matter of imagination, of speculation, of unsupported hypotheses.

Then if you combine this notion with the famous insight of the 19th century French economist Claude Frédéric Bastiat – namely that what isn’t seen is often completely ignored in assessing the merits of policies – you can figure out pretty well how difficult it is to make progress on the path to liberty.

So, to those who claim that supporting libertarian candidates or measures amounts to being totally ineffectual in the field of politics, I answer, “Not in the long run.� Moreover, the career of the free society actually is more a matter of the future than of the past. So focusing on the constitution of that future seems to make sense, at least for some of us.

Published in the Orange County (CA) Register, February 18, 2008, as an “Orange Grove” opinion essay.

Background to the American Eagle
Gold Bullion Coin Act of 1985

by Joe Cobb

This is the only legislation Ron Paul has introduced that has become law. It was drafted and introduced initially in 1983, when I was serving as his aide on the Coinage Subcommittee of the Banking Committee, in the 98th Congress.

He hired me in 1983 because we shared a common idea about the future role of gold in the international monetary system. He still believes in this ideal, that gold - only gold (by weight) - can be the natural unit of “money.”

I want to tell you the story of how the coin bill became law, after Ron Paul departed from Congress (it was enacted the following year, because I was still there working in Congress).

Ron Paul had served on the U.S. Gold Commission, appointed by Secretary of Treasury Donald T. Regan in June 1981, to examine the role of gold in the national and international economy. The Report of that Commission was published in March 1982 and it basically said gold had no role to play in monetary policy.

No role for gold: This has been the orthodox British Neo-Classical School opinion, both Keynesians and Monetarists, for about 150 years. The majority of the Gold Commission believed they had driven a stake into the heart of gold standard advocacy, which was strong at the end of the 1970s due to high inflation under Jimmy Carter.

Senator Jesse Helms had gotten authorizing legislation to study the role of gold as part of a compromise to give more U.S. dollars to the International Monetary Fund in 1978. Carter had never bothered to appoint members of this temporary study group. The Reagan Administration responded to Helms’ request to move forward. (I was a close friend of Howard Segermark, who was Jesse Helms’ aide on gold and economic issues. Segermark was the person who drafted Helms’ amendment to the IMF funding legislation in 1978.)

The U.S. Gold Commission also reported, and recommended, in favor of a different idea.

Milton Friedman had proposed: a real gold standard, in which gold actually circulated as money. This was published in The Journal of Law and Economics, vol.4 (1961), “Real and Pseudo Gold Standards.” This article by Friedman had orginated as his half of a debate at the international society of classical liberals, the Mont Pelerin Society. Friedman favored floating exchange rates among currencies, and gold (by weight) was just another “currency” in his floating exchange rate system.

The gold commission recommended a non-legal tender gold bullion coinage. When the Gold Commission was announced by Secretary Regan, I saw an opportunity. The idea for a specific U.S. Mint coinage was my version of Milton Friedman’s idea, combined with F.A. Hayek’s writings on the denationalization of currency. I incorporated a 501(c)(3) educational group, which I named “U.S. Choice in Currency Commission,” playing on the name of the U.S. Gold Commission. My idea was to put a bullion coinage at the center of a Hayekian scheme for parallel currencies.

The example of the South African Krugerrand had been around since the early 1960s, when the parliament there created a legal tender bullion coin, denominated only by its weight: one troy ounce of gold in a 22 carat alloy. The paper monetary units of South Africa are known as “rand” (ZAR) but there has never been a fixed price of the gold coin in terms of those paper rand units. The Krugerrand had become in the 1970s the most popular and widely owned gold bullion coin on the market. Many other governments had also gotten into the bullion coin minting business. Canada’s Maple Leaf bullion coin was very popular because of its .999 purity. The United States Treasury bureaucrats were strongly opposed to any kind of gold coinage in the U.S. monetary system.

[ to be continued ]

It is not a new idea. Excellence is just the “distilled spirits” of any kind of human activity, other than sloth. I think the pursuit of excellence should be understood as a moral imperative. Aristotle developed his ethical system with the pursuit of excellence as a major concern, and it is a theme that runs through all of the world’s religions.

So, what is excellence? Beauty? Being the best that you can be? Doing things with the greatest economy and efficiency? The shortest distance between two points.

We all know what excellence means when we see it, even if there is not a ready formula in English. We certainly know the opposite of excellence. Some important concepts, for example “Truth,” are very hard to define but their antonyms, e.g. “Falsehood,” are easier to identify. This is the central process in testing hypotheses against empirical evidence, at the heart of the scientific method.

In social situations, excellence is harder to specify, but its opposite is often more clear. You might not know how to please someone, but you can guess what might offend them. We have a sense of what is orderly and what is disorderly. Whenever I see inefficiency, or litter on the ground, I feel an impulse to put it straight. I do pick up random litter in a parking lot or some common area, and police it to the trashcan.

I wonder if anyone who has proposed new religious or spiritual ideas has made the pursuit of excellence a prime directive? There are versions of social gospel that say you re supposed to work to change things for the better. In other words, “better” means the pursuit of excellence. Jesus would pursue excellence, wouldn’t he?

But Aristotle said it best: “If we are to