A Missouri Senate committee rejects legislation banning the use of automated cameras to catch red-light runners.

The cameras automatically snap digital photos of those entering intersections after a traffic signal has turned to red. A color copy of the picture and a ticket is then mailed to the vehicle’s registered owner. About 30 Missouri cities now use the cameras.

Critics of the red-light cameras question the constitutionality of the cameras and contend that they lead to rear-end accidents as cars stop suddenly. But supporters, including several police chiefs, said using the cameras at dangerous intersections deters unsafe driving.

via Missouri Senate rejects legislation barring red-light cameras – WDAF.

Note to self: check into what would be required for a referendum.

Findings – Politics in the Guise of Pure Science – NYTimes.com.

This editorial takes the place of a rant that was about to break out on this blog.   (Listening to the porkaholic, self-worshiping guests on Science Friday on NPR can be aggravating).

Imagine that nearly everyone is put to work for a month by businesses that build high-priced houses induced by government stimulus. While that is happening, fewer people are employed baking bread. At the end of the month, people try to buy bread and find that there is not enough. Meanwhile, they do not want to buy the high-priced houses. There are too many of those. Home prices fall. Bread prices rise. Consumer goods prices rose 0.3 percent in January. The workers in homebuilding are laid off. Home prices decline. Lenders find their home loans going bad. The economy goes into an adjustment that is a recession in order to correct the imbalance. The economy needs more bread factories and bread makers. Left to its own devices, the adjustment will occur. The possibility of making profits by making bread will see to that. The losses in homebuilding will see to it that fewer homes are built.

But suppose that the government steps in with a stimulus bill and hires labor to pave roads. The adjustment toward bread making is delayed. At first overall production seems to improve, counting the money spent on roads. But eventually there is a surplus of paved roads and not enough bread. The bread makers try to hire labor. They compete with the road pavers. Wages rise. The economy sees price inflation. It still does not have the bread it wants.

There is much more to it, of course. But this is the idea. Deflation in prices is not a problem. It is part of the solution

via There’s No Conspiracy Here by Michael S. Rozeff.

This is so helpful that I’m re-posting the entire entry:

The Fed’s monopoly of money has meant not only monopoly (i.e “play” money that lacks fixed value, in contrast to gold), but also actual monopolies in every industry across the board. The reason is that bigger organizations can and do borrow more, paying back only in “cheapened” money. That lets them outlast their smaller competitors and lets them grow bigger and bigger….

The Fed’s monopoly of money also makes possible the rise of “pirate” states which can shift the tax inherent in rapidly cheapening money onto others:

1) internally, onto the backs of its savers

2) externally, onto the backs of other countries which have to use the monopoly currency. (e.g. emerging markets have to use the US$).

Here’s an excellent comment on that:

“Anyway, the appalling truth, which explains what’s happened in our own era, is that when Roosevelt managed to make the dollar the world’s currency, and the Federal Reserve began to be able to tax the rest of the world simply by expanding the money supply, what happened is that the whole American economy quietly started to shift from production-and-taxation mode, into “pirate” mode, “without anyone noticing!”

The global consequences have been enormous. It’s enabled American power (and the amount of military spending possible) to expand enormously, beyond what was sensible in the long term. It’s made foreign war seem cost-free to the American public, which in turn has caused a whole string of foreign lobbyists to try to buy American support and intervention in every corner of the world. It’s also made the American economic and political system very unstable in the long term, I suspect, because it’s now “addicted” to getting things cheap. Pirate economies (unlike the old boring taxation ones) tend to collapse, when they can no longer expand, or at least can no longer tap the outside world any more. It’s also gutted American industry and production, because once you could pay for things in paper dollars, it became cheaper to outsource everything possible and buy things from the third world. It’s had a very oligarchic effect on government and big business, since their access to easy credit enabled big organisations to buy up smaller ones on an unprecedented scale; and, finally, it’s been very corrupting, to get something for nothing in this way, for so long. It’s the true background reason for the predicament you’re in today.

And as I said, it’s created a world were “everything” is rigged against traditional conservatism. Currencies that are purely creations of government not only give unprecedented power “to” governments to interfere in all of our lives, but their inherently inflationary nature has created a world that rewards borrowers at the expense of savers. That is historically unprecedented, and an extraordinary thing to build a civilisation on. Should one be surprised that the culture associated with this civilisation should be one of personal self-indulgence, rather than one of self-restraint? That is the world that Roosevelt (and, later, Nixon) gave us…”

Comment by ‘Alexander’ on Rod Dreher’s Crunch Con

via The Monopoly of Money and the Money of Monopolies | Lila Rajiva: The Mind-Body Politic.

Some time I will have to try to list here all the outcomes I have defended because I believed they were market outcomes, when they were never anything of the kind.  Mea Culpa in advance.