To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.

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To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them. - George Mason

George Mason is known as the father of the Bill of Rights.

Because they failed to take away our guns, they're coming after our ammo

By John Silveira

It's called the Ammunition Accountability Act (AAA). You've got to love the name. It sounds so noble. But remember the great gun writer, Mel Tappan's, universal rule of law: "The nobler the language, the more nefarious the purpose of any legal instrument."

It's been proposed in 18 states and, with some minor difference among them, here's what it will do once enacted:

* Each box of ammo you buy will have a unique number.

* Each round in the box will have a laser-etched number on the base of the bullet and on the inside of the cartridge case that corresponds to the number on the box.

* Each time you buy ammo you will have to show ID with your name, date of birth, driver's license, etc., to be recorded so the box will be tied to you.

* There will be a 5¢ tax on each and every round in the box. This "tax" will be to support the database.

* You will have to maintain records if you give or sell ammo to relatives or friends. (And the above tax would be levied on each round, again, to maintain the database.)

* Anywhere from four months to three years after such bills are enacted, depending on the state, it will be illegal to own any uncoded ammo. There will be civil and criminal penalties if you possess any with fines of anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 for each instance of violation. Ostensibly, this will mean $1,000 to $5,000 per round. Forgot you got an old box of .22 ammo on the back shelf of the closet? And the well-meaning but snoopy babysitter finds it...and turns you in...

* You're going to have to dump it or shoot it all up. And you'll get no compensation for any of the old ammo you have to dispose of.

* It will be illegal to reuse cartridge cases, so reloading will not be an option, and you're a criminal if you do.

What's AAA's intent? Ostensibly, crimes committed with a round of the imprinted ammo will be traceable back to the owner and crimes are solved just like that. But criminals already circumvent laws and have access to guns, drugs, and anything else we've tried to outlaw. If you think they won't be able to get untraceable ammo, think again. This law will create a black market for stolen and untraceable ammunition. The only people who are going to obey these Orwellian laws are...you and me. Not surprisingly, most of those in law enforcement do not support this bizarre law.

What will happen to the cost of ammunition? The manufacturers and sellers say the cost of retooling and the ammo processing itself will make ammo prohibitively expensive and put it out of the reach of most citizens. One vendor I spoke with estimates it could raise the price of ammo by as much as 2000 percent. The criminals will not be disarmed by this, but you and I will be.

Who's behind it? Oddly enough, the usual suspects—Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, Mothers Against Guns, and others—are nowhere in sight. You'd think they would be. And with 70 to 80 million gun owners in this country, it should be a huge news story, but it's being ignored by the anti-gun media. But the fact is, the gun control people are keeping mum because they want AAA to look like a crime control bill, not the gun control bill it actually is. If you need more evidence consider a post to the ultra-liberal democraticunderground.org website that, a few months ago, warned, "All we need is for our three gun-grabber Dem senators to go on national TV demanding states pass this bill and we Dems can kiss the presidency good bye in the general election." They understand this is not something most Americans want, and they didn't want to be connected with it at election time.

And just how much support is AAA getting from the general public? If you google "encoded ammunition" you'll find that almost all of the comments are against it. This is not legislation the public is clamoring for, it's legislation the public is overwhelmingly against because it is transparently a sneaky backdoor attempt at gun control.

As of this writing, it's already died in 7 of the 18 state legislatures where it's been introduced, including New York, Rhode Island, and Indiana. They tried to pass this in California, the state that passed microstamping (where all new semiautomatic handguns sold have to microstamp spent cartridges). But it didn't make it out of the legislature. This law is too crazy even for Californians.

If, somehow, AAA passes anywhere, expect it to face constitutional challenges on several fronts, among which will be that it's an obvious effort to nullify the intent of the Second Amendment. It will also be challenged on the basis that it's an ex post facto law (essentially a retroactive law) since its provisions direct that ammunition legally obtained prior to the law would have to be "disposed" of—with no compensation to the owners. It is the danger of ex post facto challenges that have made it necessary for proposed gun-bans to "grandfather" previously owned firearms. But worse is that if it passes the "sniff-test" in any state, expect it to be introduced into the Democratic-controlled Congress.

Though it appears AAA is failing, in the future we have to remain ever-vigilant because the gun control crowd is going to come back again and again and again, like zombies in a grade B horror flick. Bet on it. And expect them to be even more creative the next time.

A frugal government shall leave [men] free to regulate their own pursuits.

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A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicity. - Thomas Jefferson

Did You Hear the One About...
by Floy Lilley

Did you hear the one about bobbing heads on Sunday agreeing that the cause of the Great Depression was the absence of government guidance? "The Great Depression would never have happened if there had been any economic regulations," agreed the policy wonks.

Oh, really?

So you think a free society generated that monstrosity?

It is accurate to say that in 1900 a free society did exist. The government still approximated a minimal state, exerting minimal guidance, and commanding minimal economic regulation. But, after 1900, virtually all public policy proposals called for more extensive governmental guidance.

Perhaps the television talksters could benefit from a bit of homeschooling. An excellent source of data is Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episode in the Growth of American Government by Robert Higgs (1987). The time frame of the period up to and into the 1920s, in other words those years before the Great Depression, included WWI. That dramatic episode birthed government expansion and intervention, much of which remained in regulatory force after the generating crisis had past.

A partial list of interventions – those government economic regulations – would include:

* Bureau of Corporations (1903)
* Interstate Commerce Act major amendments (1903, 1906, 1910)
* Meat Inspection Act (1906)
* Pure Food and Drug Act (1906)
* Corporation Tax (1911)
* Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1913) (Income Tax)
* Federal Reserve System (1913)
* Clayton Antitrust Act (1914)
* Federal Trade Commission (1914)
* U.S. Immigration (cut to a trickle during 1915–1920)
* Adamson Act (1916) (railroad labor wage rates)
* Shipping Act (1916)
* National Defense Act (1916)
* Army Appropriations Act (1916) (later took over railroads)
* Selective Service Act (1917)
* Espionage Act (1917)
* Lever Act (1917) (food and fuel) (prohibited alcohol)
* Overman Act (1918) (executive powers)
* War Finance Corporation Act (1918)
* President’s Mediation Commission (1917) (labor relations)
* Federal Control Act (1918)
* Sedition Act (1918)

Does this look like a laissez-faire list?

Higgs summarizes just exactly how guided and regulated all economic activities were:

The two years, 1916–1918, witnessed an enormous and wholly unprecedented intervention of the federal government in the nation’s economic affairs. By the time of the armistice, the government had taken over the ocean shipping, railroad, telephone, and telegraph industries; commandeered hundreds of manufacturing plants; entered into massive economic enterprises on its own account in such varied departments as shipbuilding, wheat trading, and building construction; undertaken to lend huge sums to businesses directly or indirectly and to regulate the private issuance of securities; established official priorities for the use of transportation facilities, food, fuel, and many raw materials; fixed the prices of dozens of important commodities; intervened in hundreds of labor disputes; and conscripted millions of men for service in the armed forces. It had, in short, extensively distorted or wholly displaced markets, creating what some contemporaries called war socialism.

Additionally, Higgs documented that,

The public debt, which had been slightly more than $1 billion before the war, was over $25 billion at the end of the war and remained almost $17 billion as late as 1929.

While their heads were bobbing, my head was shaking.

This all had to have been a joke. Right?

A fool and his money are soon elected.

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A fool and his money are soon elected. - Will Rogers

Small Government Caused Our Current Problems?
by Robert Higgs

As soon as I saw the headline of an August 10 article by financial columnist Peter Cohan, I knew that something was terribly wrong. It reads: "How did the politics of small government lead to big government bailouts?" This is akin to asking, How did the extinction of the elephants lead to Barack Obama's election as president? If you make a claim of the form "A caused B," but A never happened, then you are wasting your time by delving into the historical details of this bogus relationship.

Yet we continue to see one example after another of what suspicious readers may be tempted to view as the Big Lie that deregulation or other obliging government measures caused the present economic mess. I won't go so far as to characterize this claim as a Big Lie. Although some its purveyors, acting out of partisan motives, surely know that they are blowing smoke, others may simply suffer from economic ignorance, analytical confusion, or loss of historical memory. In any event, the public is ill-served by commentators who purport to speak with authority about our current economic troubles and related government's policies, yet peddle this worse-than-sophomoric tale.

The Cohan article in question consists of so much nonsense that a full critique of it might be enough to compose a student's senior thesis, but the part that interests me right now is the claim that "the idea of small government . . . helped create the ineffective regulatory agencies which allowed all kinds of questionable practices to thrive in American business, especially in the world of finance. By helping create a record debt bubble, which thrived in an era of weak regulatory oversight, small government nearly ruined the global economy last fall."

So, there you have it in plain English. To repeat: "small government nearly ruined the global economy last fall." Cohan spares us any evidence that we actually had a small government at any time during the past twenty-five years. I would be especially interested in such evidence, inasmuch as I have written a number of articles and books brimming with evidence that in fact the governments of this country at every level were growing in size, scope, and power during those years.

Like Cohan, those who continually blame insufficient regulation for our present plight offer little or no evidence, relying instead on the implicit assumption that if only the regulations had been much stricter, the bankers and other business-sector malefactors never would have perpetrated their evil deeds. This faith in the regulators is touching, to be sure, but it is also extremely naïve. We now have – and long have had – miles of regulations on the books and legions of regulators at work in scores of government agencies. What specific power did they lack? And had they been given even greater powers, budgets, and staffs, what enchantment would have transformed these ostensible guardians into smart, dogged champions of the public interest, rather than the time-serving drones and co-conspirators with the regulated firms that they have always been?

Somehow, no matter how many regulations are created and how many regulators are put on the government payroll, when these rules and enforcement agents fail to prevent a disaster, many people's response is to propose that the government write more regulations and hire more regulators. If these advocates of expanded government intervention had been in New Orleans as it was being submerged under floodwaters in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, they no doubt would have proposed that the Corps of Engineers dynamite the remaining levies – to prove that they favored "doing something."

"Ironically," writes Cohan, "another Republican, Ben Bernanke . . . decided that in the midst of a catastrophic economic collapse . . . the prescription for the problem was the biggest government in American history." And thank goodness, too, he opines, because owing to all of the wonderful mitigation that the Fed's unprecedented actions have produced to soften and reverse this inexplicable, out-of-blue episode of financial panic and recession, "there is a good chance that historians will look back on Bernanke as the man who saved the world." I can't speak for all historians, of course, but speaking for one of them, I can guarantee that no such story will be disseminated under my name. On the contrary, by taking into account how the government and the Fed created necessary conditions for the financial bubble that burst last September – as many competent analysts have already shown, notwithstanding Cohan's disregard of their findings – we quickly appreciate that Bernanke's supposed world-saving would never have been deemed necessary had he and others in high government places not done so much to place the world in jeopardy in the first place.

Never one to linger over a single piece of nonsense when another beckons, Cohan proceeds without transition to the question, "How do we keep this from happening again?" To which his amazing answer is: "The most important way is to change how bankers get paid." Oh, sure, that will turn the trick. Never mind the government's countless measures from the 1930s onward to steer money into mortgage loans to borrowers with little likelihood of repaying them. Never mind the massive efforts of the government-sponsored giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to create secondary markets for rotten mortgage-related IOUs galore. Never mind the Fed's pumping up of the real-estate bubble by rapidly expanding credit and holding interest rates at absurdly low levels for years on end. Never mind all of this and a great deal more. Simply change how bankers get paid, and the sun will shine on us again.

"We [by which Cohan seems to mean the government] need to change banker's pay so that they only get rewarded if their risks are profitable," he declares, "and punished if they lose money." Some readers might find this idea appealing, if they don't spend much time thinking it through. In truth, however, the government already plays too large a role: if the government and the Fed did not stand in the background, ready and willing to bail out reckless bankers, the bankers would act a great deal more prudently, as would their boards of directors when deciding how to compensate the managers. Moreover, I venture to remind our financial guru – who is described as the president of a consulting and venture-capital firm, a management teacher at Babson College and the author of eight books – that how bankers get paid lies properly within the domain of the banks' boards of directors. It's really none of my business, or his.

In contrast, how the government and the Fed act is my business because they purport to act on my behalf, and even if they didn't so purport, they still act in many ways that harm me. So I'm entitled to hold them to account for their actions. As long as the Cohans of this world continue to blame private actors and "the idea of small government" for the economic disasters that the government and the Fed produce, however, we have little chance to clarify what might – and should – be done to remedy our plight and preclude serial repetitions of such destructive actions.

Not content with having embraced several stupendously erroneous and misguided ideas, Cohan plows to an equally dim-witted conclusion by declaring that besides setting the compensation of bankers, the government should establish "an independent government agency to create financial statements for companies and money managers." Sure. Let the government keep the accounts. After all, the government has a flawless record of keeping honest accounts and scrupulously avoiding multi-trillion-dollar Ponzi schemes, such as Social Security, and pie-in-the-sky promises, such as Medicare that stretches to the limits of the known financial universe. The Department of Defense, which since 1994 has been required by law to perform an annual financial audit, has yet to perform one. Each year a DoD accounting functionary dutifully testifies before Congress that the department's accounts are in such a mess that its records cannot be audited. Is this the kind of financial-accounting proficiency we want to impose on the private sector? Cohan thinks so.

Got a problem? Just give the government a great deal more power, and our friendly, competent rulers will take care of everything. I shudder to think that columnists may actually get paid for spouting such childish twaddle.