“Friedman’s single variable-fixed money supply growth rule was basically academic poppycock” (p. 262).

“[B]y unshackling the Fed from the constraints of fixed exchange rates and the redemption of dollar liabilities for gold, Friedman’s monetary doctrine actually handed politicians a stupendous new prize.  It rendered trivial by comparison the ills owing to garden variety insults to the free market, such as rent control or the regulation of interstate trucking” (p. 264).

“The very idea that the FOMC would function as faithful monetaryeunuchs, keeping their eyes on the M1 guage and deftly adjusting the dial in either direction upon any deviation fromt he 3 percent target, was sheer fantasy” (p. 265).

“[T]he Greenspan and Bernanke Fed have been wholly preoccupied with manipulation of . . . interest rates, and have relegated Friedman’s entire quantity theory of money to the dustbin of history.”

“Friedman jettisoned the gold standard for a remarkably statist reason” (p. 267).

“Friedman thoroughly misunderstood the Great Depression and concluded erroneously that undue regard for the gold standard rules by the Fed during 1929-1933 had resulted in its failure to conduct aggressive open market purchases of government debt, and hence to prevent the deep slide of M1 during the forty-five months after the crash” (p. 268).

“Friedman thus sided with the central planners.”

“At the end of the day, Friedman’s monetary treatise offers no evidence whatsoever and simply asserts false causation; namely, that the passive decline of the money supply was the active cause of the drop in output and spending” (p. 271).

“For all practical purposes, then, it was Friedman who shifted the foundaton of the nation’s money from gold to T-bills” (p. 273).

“It was Friedman who first urged the romoval of the Bretton Woods gold standard restraints on central bank money printing, and then added insult to injury by giving conservative sanction to perpetual open market purchases of government debt by the Fed.  Friedman’s monetarism thereby institutionalized a regime which allowed politicians to chronically spend without taxing.”

I remember being in a conference with Ludwig von Mises in the sixties at FEE [the Foundation for Economic Education]. And I asked him about Friedman and economics. And he waved his hand in the typical Austrian way and he said: “Friedman is not an economist. He’s a statistician.”

Now in describing Friedman in these terms, Mises was not name calling but had a very specific meaning in mind. For Mises (pp. 247-48) a “statistician” was someone “who aim[ed] at discovering economic laws from the study of economic experience.” But Mises maintained that statistics is not a method useful for research in economics theory because it deals with historical facts. According to Mises:

Statistics is a method for the presentation of historical facts concerning prices and other relevant data of human action. It is not economics and cannot produce economic theorems and theories. The statistics of prices is economic history. The insight that, ceteris paribus, an increase in demand must result in an increase in prices is not derived from experience. Nobody ever was or ever will be in a position to observe a change in one of the market data ceteris paribus. There is no such thing as quantitative economics. All economic quantities we know about are data of economic history.

Indeed in his magnum opus, A Monetary History of the United States, co-authored with Anna Schwartz, Friedman confirmed the accuracy of Mises’s characterization. In their Preface (p. xxii), Friedman and Schwartz stated that their aim in writing the book was “to provide a prologue and a background for a statistical analysis of the secular and cyclical behavior of money in the United States and to exclude any material not relevant to that purpose.” In the final chapter, entitled “A Summing Up,” the authors (Friedman and Schwartz, p. 676) listed three propositions regarding money that they discovered to be “common” to U.S. monetary history and concluded, “These common elements of monetary experience can be expected to characterize our future as they have our past.” It would be difficult to find a better expression of the statistician’s view of the social world.

The Vermont House approved Senate changes to a marijuana decriminailzation bill this morning. The bill now goes to Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin. According to a Marijuana Policy Project press release, Shumlin will likely sign it "in the coming weeks." 

The whole process took a little over two months. Vermont's marijuana decriminalization bills--H.200 in the House and S.48 in the Senate--were introduced the first week of February. The Vermont House first approved the bill on April 16, the Senate approved it and returned it to the House last week. Today the House approved changes to the bill. Now it goes to Shumlin.

Here's what the legislation does, per MPP:

"[The bill] will remove criminal penalties for possession of up to one ounce of marijuana and replace them with a civil fine, similar to a traffic ticket. Those under age 21 would be required to undergo substance abuse screening. Under current state law, possession of up to two ounces of marijuana is a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail for a first offense and up to two years in jail for a subsequent offense.

Incidentally, Project SAM--the anti-marijuana group launched by former Rep. Patrick Kennedy (R-RI) and former drug czar advisor Kevin Sabet--started a Vermont chapter in late April. Considering that many legalization advocates (as well as the city of Burlington) see Vermont as a good candidate for tax-and-regulate, it's likely that Project SAM will be an active--and loud--participant in that debate. 

Post-Boston bombing, you be careful what you cook, folks.

From the British Daily Mail:

A Saudi student living in Michigan was questioned in his home by FBI agents after neighbours saw him carrying a pressure cooker and called the police.

Talal al Rouki had been cooking a traditional Saudi Arabian rice dish called kabsah and was carrying it to a friend's house....

Talal al Rouki, the Saudi student who was questioned by FBI agents in his home after neighbour saw him carrying a pressure cooker to a friend's house....

While armed agents surrounded his apartment block, other agents, asked a 'nervous' Mr al Rouki if they could come in to question him....

Officers said that two days earlier that a woman had seen him walking out of his apartment carrying the pressure cooker pot, which was described as ‘bullet coloured’.....

An FBI agent said: 'You need to be more careful moving around with such things, Sir' 

The original source of this story was a Saudi newspaper, as the Mail explains, so discount away if you wish.

Mike Riggs on past pressure cooker panics.

The IRS didn’t just investigate groups based on their perceived political views, but also targeted groups for “educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights” or advocating limits on government. The Washington Post reports:

At various points over the past two years, Internal Revenue Service officials targeted nonprofit groups that criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution, according to documents in an audit conducted by the agency’s inspector general.

The documents, obtained by The Washington Post  from a congressional aide with knowledge of the findings, show that on June 29, 2011, IRS staffers held a briefing with senior agency official Lois G. Lerner in which they described giving special attention to instances where “statements in the case file criticize how the country is being run.” . . . the agency revised its criteria a week later.

But six months later, the IRS applied a new political test to groups that applied for tax-exempt status as “social welfare” groups, the document says. On Jan. 15, 2012 the agency decided to target “political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform movement.,” according to the appendix in the IG report, which was requested by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and has yet to be released.

As Politico notes, the agency also scrutinized “groups focusing on specific issues including ‘government spending,’ ‘government debt,’ . . . and all groups that ‘criticize[d] how the country is being run.’”

The Wall Street Journal similarly reports:

The Internal Revenue Service’s scrutiny of conservative groups went beyond those with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names—as the agency admitted Friday—to also include ones worried about government spending, debt or taxes, and even ones that lobbied to “make America a better place to live,” according to new details of a government probe.

The investigation also revealed that a high-ranking IRS official knew as early as mid-2011 that conservative groups were being inappropriately targeted—nearly a year before then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman told a congressional committee the agency wasn’t targeting conservative groups.

Such viewpoint discrimination is forbidden, even in allocating discretionary government benefits such as tax exemptions where certain types of content discrimination might be permissible. As the Supreme Court noted in a case involving a college’s discrimination against a religious magazine in access to student-activity funds, ”viewpoint discrimination is . . . an egregious form of content discrimination.” (See Rosenberger v. Rector & Vistors of the University of Virginia, 515 U.S. 819, 829 (1995).) The IRS employees responsible should be terminated.

In other news, the Obama administration declared on Thursday that the federal civil-rights laws Title IX and Title IV require colleges to adopt campus speech codes broader than those that have been previously struck down by some federal appeals courts. It also demands very stringent snooping and micromanagement of students’ private lives. Education writer Joanne Jacobs writes that the new rules are so broad that they effectively “make every student a sex harasser.” The civil-liberties group FIRE objects to the new rules here at this link. So the IRS is not alone in disregarding the First Amendment.

Stockman Seminar

It has not been a good past few days for the IRS. After admitting that Tea Party groups were inappropriately targeted during the 2012 election cycle the IRS apologized and the White House said that the unfair scrutiny was unjustified. The apology was rejected by Tea Party groups, and it now turns out that other groups were also inappropriately targeted by the IRS.

Groups that were targeted in addition to Tea Party groups include organizations that aim to teach people about how to "make America a better place to live," which naturally ought to raise suspicions.

From CNN:

Washington (CNN) -- The Internal Revenue Service targeted other groups focused on government spending and the federal debt that were seeking tax-exempt status, in addition to tea party organizations, documents set to be released this week by the agency's watchdog show.

The IRS also applied extra scrutiny to applicants with statements that "criticize how the country is run" or that sought to educate the public on how to "make America a better place to live" -- designations that would have included conservative political groups looking to apply for 501(c)(4) status.

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Ross Douthat took an interesting angle on the unfolding IRS scandal in his New York Times column yesterday: He suggested it could be a part of a Brown Scare.

A Brown Scare is like a Red Scare, except its anxieties involve the right rather than the left; the historian Leo Ribuffo coined the term in his 1983 book The Old Christian Right. (I've written about Brown Scares several times, and at one point in his column Douthat quotes an old blog post of mine.) Here's how Douthat gets there from the IRS story:

I'm willing to guess this much: Even though an American Civil Liberties Union official described their excessive interest in right-wing groups as "about as constitutionally troubling as it gets," the bureaucrats in question probably thought they were just doing their patriotic duty, and giving dangerous extremists the treatment they deserved.

Where might an enterprising, public-spirited I.R.S. agent get the idea that a Tea Party group deserved more scrutiny from the government than the typical band of activists seeking tax-exempt status? Oh, I don't know: why, maybe from all the prominent voices who spent the first two years of the Obama era worrying that the Tea Party wasn't just a typically messy expression of citizen activism, but something much darker -- an expression of crypto-fascist, crypto-racist rage, part Timothy McVeigh and part Bull Connor, potentially carrying a wave of terrorist violence in its wings.

Douthat is speculating here, and this is hardly the only possible explanation for what happened at the IRS. Best-case scenario, the employees really were just choosing the most inept and unconstitutional method available to sort the legitimate 501(c)(4) applicants from the fakers. Worst-case scenario, we're looking at some old-fashioned, deliberate, Kennedy- or Nixon-style political harassment via the taxman. And of course all sorts of combinations of motive are possible, too. I look forward to reading the inspector general's report, and I hope a serious Congressional investigation follows.

But the IRS scandal is really just the article's newshook. I don't think Douthat's larger point is the possibility that a Brown Scare explains the agency's behavior; it's the fact that we were drifting into Brown Scare territory in the first place. It may be a few years late, but it's still good to see a New York Times columnist pushing back against the factually dubious narrative of "rising right-wing violence" that seemed to seize the paper's op-ed page in 2009 and 2010. Douthat even throws in a link to a Frank Rich article -- not one of Rich's pieces in the Times, naturally, but it's not hard to guess what Douthat thinks about his former colleague's columns on the subject.

Openmarket.org: Excuses, Excuses

The IRS today acknowledged that it had wrongfully targeted Tea Party groups for heightened scrutiny. In trying to explain the agency’s mistake, IRS spokeswoman Lois Lerner reportedly stated “I’m not good at math” – an excuse that now seems to be going viral.

Given the smashing success of this phrase, we wonder whether the IRS will now use a few variations of it in the new Obamacare lawsuit that it’s facing. This lawsuit challenges the legality of the IRS’ unauthorized extension of the employer mandate to states that have refused to set up their own health insurance exchanges. The plaintiffs contend that Congress limited the employer mandate to participating states, and that the IRS has no power to rewrite the law.

IMMIGRATION - DAVID BIER

Openmarket.org: Heritage Immigration Report Implies 70% of Americans “Increase Poverty”

The Heritage Foundation’s new report on the fiscal costs of legalization for unauthorized immigrants concluded that it will cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion. Yesterday, I listed some reasons why I think this number is much too high, and on Wednesday, explained why I thought John Locke would say, “Keep immigration. Reform welfare.” Today, I want to look at the broader economic implications of the Heritage study.

Heritage was certainly not wrong to draw attention to the fiscal impact of immigration reform, but before it jumped to the conclusion that it will increase poverty and that conservatives should oppose it, it should have looked at the economic evidence, and gave earnest consideration to the implications of its report. America would not be better off without 70 percent of its workforce—we’d be much, much poorer.

OBAMA EPA NOMINEE - MARLO LEWIS

Globalwarming.org: Gina McCarthy’s Responses to Sen. Vitter’s Questions Part I: Bait-and-Fuel-Switch

Gina McCarthy — President Obama’s pick to succeed Lisa Jackson as EPA Administrator — is often described as a “straight shooter” and “honest broker.” McCarthy has a history of misleading Congress about the EPA’s greenhouse gas regulatory agenda.

Specifically, McCarthy and the Air Office over which she presides gave Congress and the electric power sector false assurances that the EPA’s greenhouse gas regulations would not require utilities planning to build new coal-fired power plants to “fuel switch” to natural gas. McCarthy also denied under oath that greenhouse gas motor vehicle standards are “related to” fuel economy standards, even though anyone with her expertise must know that the former implicitly and substantially regulate fuel economy.

How to portray news that the Internal Revenue Service targeted Tea Party and other right-of-center groups, and then BSed about it as recently as last week? If you're The New York Times, you see it not as an example of government abuse, but rather as a political story about...Republicans. Check out the headline on today's front-pager:

I.R.S. Focus on Conservative Gives G.O.P. an Issue to Seize On

The article has a strong and original potential news hook: A new inspector general audit that the NYT obtained Sunday shows that IRS official Lois Lerner knew of the Tea Party targeting in 2011, contradicting her comments Friday that she only learned about it last week. And yet the paper takes this first-mover advantage and shifts immediately to how "the new information will only add to the criticism" from conservatives desperate for an issue:

Since last year's elections, Republicans in Congress have struggled for traction on their legislative efforts, torn between conservatives who drove the agenda after their 2010 landslide and new voices counseling a shift in course to reflect President Obama's re-election and the loss of Republican seats in the House and the Senate.

But the accusations of I.R.S. abuse are sure to fuel an effort that appears to be uniting dispirited Republicans and their conservative political base: investigating Mr. Obama and his administration. Republicans are pushing a portrayal of an administration overreaching its authority and punishing its enemies. [...]

Republicans got little political traction last year when they highlighted the "Fast and Furious" operation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, in which guns that were supposed to be tracked by the agency were instead lost to drug cartels in Mexico.

But the Republican focus on attacks on United States officials in Benghazi, Libya, got new life last week when Gregory Hicks, a State Department critic of the military's response, told a House committee that he had been effectively demoted after lodging his criticism. [...]

The I.R.S. disclosures present Republican critics a golden opportunity.

This is a classic demonstration of what Nick Gillespie has called "the politicization of everything." It's the inability to see discrete news events for what they are, rather than what they might mean for the neverending scrum between Teams Red and Blue. We have learned to expect such dreary reductionism from the dwindling bands of committed partisans, but newspapers are supposed to be above all that, bravely rooting through the muck of rhetoric to find truffles of truth.

Instead, what you get so often—from the IRS to Benghazi—is what I like to call "La La La La I Can't Hear You" Journalism. Because Republicans are inherently irritating and unhinged (oh hey look, here's the lead NYT editorial today: "Who Can Take Republicans Seriously?"), because adversarial politics and congressional hearings by definition produce hyperbole as well as information, then stories conservatives care about are assumed to be non-stories until some entity (preferably governmental) produces a preponderance of evidence.

Sometimes journalists slip up and let this decidedly anti-journalistic calculus find its way into print. For instance, here's Alex Koppelman writing about Benghazi in The New Yorker:

For a long time, it seemed like the idea of a coverup was just a Republican obsession. But now there is something to it.

Well, don't tell that to The New York Times editorial board, which headlined its reaction to the dramatic congressional hearings on the subject like this: "The Republicans' Benghazi Obsession." Read this section of the lead paragraph, and ask yourself who's obsessesed with who:

[T]he hearing showed, yet again, that sober fact-finding is not their mission. Common sense and good judgment have long given way to conspiracy-mongering and a relentless effort to discredit President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Journalism defenders like to tell you that they practice the "discipline of verification." But this looks an awful lot more like straight-up defense of Democratic power against the conservative hordes. Or maybe the Times is just discovering that every new revelation of administration misbehavior merely verifies what they've known all along: Republicans are crazy. 

Previously at Reason, Damon Root highlighted a remarkable 2012 NYT editorial about Tea Party targeting, headlined "The I.R.S. Does Its Job." 

The Heritage Foundation, arguably the leading conservative/Republican think tank in Washington, D.C. has rightly taken a beating over its incredibly flawed recent report on the costs of immigration. That study, co-authored by Robert Rector and Jason Richwine, claimed that amnesty for illegal immigrants would cost the country $6.3 trillion over a 50-year span.

The study, which recapitulated a 2007 study involving Rector, came to its conclusion by essentially ignoring all the economic benefits that illegals provide to the larger economy. Most tellingly, the Heritage scholars abandoned the "dynamic scoring" model which Heritage pioneered to show how tax cuts can lead to increased revenues. A wide variety of analysts on the free-market right and among libertarian-oriented groups condemned the study for its methodological flaws. "Garbage In, Garbage Out," is how Reason's Shikha Dalmia aptly summarized the study.

The most interesting criticism of the study came from former Heritage scholar Tim Kane, who now works at Hudson Institute. Here's what Kane said about the new study:

I am disappointed in its poor quality. Heritage.org asserts on its main page in the biggest font I have ever seen (and I worked there for years) “The COST of Amnesty TO YOU > $6.3 Trillion.”  Here we go.

It must be remembered that the same analysis was done by the same author in 2007, then warning the cost of amnesty was $2.6 Trillion (HT Andrew Stiles). But the current report indicates that the status quo cost of unlawful immigrant households is roughly half of the amnesty cost, which means YOU are already paying $3.15 Trillion. By this logic, the status quo (thanks to inaction six years ago) is more expensive than if reform had passed in 2007, to the tune of half a trillion dollars. The pileup of outlandish Heritage estimates presents a credibility hurdle.

In 2006, Kane co-authored a study on immigration for Heritage that flatly declared, "The argument that immigrants harm the American economy should be dismissed out of hand." In fact, Heritage - like most groups on the right - championed more-open borders until 2007. It's not particularly clear why and how the organization changed its stance on the issue, though Rector's 2007 study is widely credited with helping to undermine George Bush's comprehensive reform effort (another key factor: back then, organized labor was against immigration; now it tends to be neutral to favorable, sensing a shot at new members).

Heritage took another body blow when The Washington Post's Dylan Matthews reported that Jason Richwine's 2009 Harvard Ph.D. dissertation was an argument for keeping out low-I.Q. immigrants. Here's the dissertation's abstract:

The statistical construct known as IQ can reliably estimate general mental ability, or intelligence. The average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population, and the difference is likely to persist over several generations. The consequences are a lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low-IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market. Selecting high-IQ immigrants would ameliorate these problems in the U.S., while at the same time benefiting smart potential immigrants who lack educational access in their home countries.

Richwine has resigned from Heritage and the group issued this pro-forma statement:

Jason Richwine let us know he’s decided to resign from his position. He’s no longer employed by Heritage. It is our long-standing policy not to discuss internal personnel matters.

I haven't read Richwine's dissertation (something I perhaps share with the people who hired him at Heritage), so I can't comment on its seriousness (though as the grandchild of four low-skill, low-I.Q. immgrants, I feel vaguely angry about it).

The real issue is this: Will Heritage, under the relatively new leadership of former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) start producing serious work again? Whatever Richwine's (and Harvard's) academic interests, he co-authored a rotten study with Heritage's best-known analyst. That study is a scandal and it points to a serious lack of seriousness at a think tank long known for providing scenarios that fail the smell test to credulous Republican politicians (recall the ridiculous unemployment estimates they provided for Rep. Paul Ryan's budget plan in 2011).

It's good to see folks such as Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) pushing back against bad research. "Here we go again," tweeted Flake. "New Heritage study claims huge cost for Immigration Reform. Ignores economic benefits. No dynamic scoring." It'll be even better to see Republican (and Democratic) pols refusing to use shoddy policy work in their arguments for and against various policies.

Heritage has all but conceded its study's flaws by dropping out of tomorrow's immigration-policy forum co-sponsored by Buzzfeed and the Charles Koch Institute (a Buzzfeed spokeswoman confirmed this for me this morning). Apparently defending its work in public is too high a price to pay.

Here's hoping the Heritage spends its time getting more serious about producing methodologically sound work on immigration.

Note on old anti-immigration images: Check out the great site of the Georgetown Book Shop for a great cache of historic posters and images about immigration and just about everything else you can imagine (radical political movements, journalism, travel, you name it). The same folks also host HistoricFootballPosters.com, another great time-suck for a Monday morning.

In preparation for a 2016 presidential run, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is courting evangelical leaders. And we all know what that means! It's time to throw those hedonistic, libertine, drug-obsessed libertarians under the bus. The Washington Post reports on how that's going:  

At a lunch Friday with about a dozen evangelical pastors in a Cedar Rapids hotel, the younger Paul assured the group that he disagrees with libertarians who support legalizing drugs. When one pastor inquired about ideological ties between Paul and his father, the senator asked that he be judged as his own man.

Paul said he believes in freedom and wants a “virtuous society” where people practice “self-restraint.” Yet he believes in laws and limits as well. Instead of advocating for legalized drugs, for example, he pushes for reduced penalties for many drug offenses.

“I’m not advocating everyone go out and run around with no clothes on and smoke pot,” [Rand] said. “I’m not a libertarian. I’m a libertarian Republican. I’m a constitutional conservative.”

“He made it very clear that he does not support legalization of drugs like marijuana and that he supports traditional marriage,” [said Brad Sherman of the Solid Rock Christian Church in Coralville, Iowa].

Just to hammer home what's been said already: Paul isn't a libertarian on drugs. He wants to keep everything illegal, but institute gentler penalties. That's not remotely libertarian. (Is it politically practical? Sure. So are farm subsidies.) 

As for "traditional marriage," here's how Paul is selling his position to evangelicals: 

He said he’s not ready to “give up on” the traditional family unit. But he added that it is a mistake for conservatives to support a federal ban on same-sex marriage, saying, “We’re going to lose that battle because the country is going the other way right now.”

“If we’re to say each state can decide, I think a good 25 or 30 states still do believe in traditional marriage, and maybe we allow that debate to go on for another couple of decades and see if we can still win back the hearts and minds of people,” he said.

"Win back the hearts and minds of people"? What does that even mean? That if we give the country enough time, a majority of voters will change their minds about extending equal protection to same-sex couples, and revoke it? And that would be a good thing?

Considering just how "radical" candidate Obama was, I can't help but wonder how Paul would be different from any other Republican president.  

• Sustained high demand for ammo by government agencies and the public is leaving shelves empty.
• Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) wants President Obama to apologize for the way the IRS treated Tea Party groups.
• Rep. Darrel Issa (R-Calif.) insists neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton are targets in the House Benghazi probe.
• Texas joins New York to become the second state to require Bitcoin exchangers and administrator have a license.
• Pakistanis went to the polls on Saturday amid violence that killed at least 24. Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif looks set to return as prime minister for a third time as his PML (N) performed best in the high-turnout election.
• A rebel commander in Syria says Iran, Israel and Hezbollah are all aiding the embattled Assad regime.
• North Korea lays out the charges it prosecuted American prisoner Kenneth Bae for: smuggling anti-government materials and plotting the overthrow of the state. The U.S. and South Korea, meanwhile, begin a new set of joint naval exercises.
• An ammonia leak on the International Space Station was fixed this weekend.

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