"Catch And Release" Is A Truly Dumb Policy That Makes Zero Sense

"Catch and release" of criminals is literally one of the very dumbest policies in all of recorded history, right up there with "defund the police" and similar half-baked ideas.  And the results of such no-accountability de facto tacit decriminalization of crimes big and small have sadly been predictable.

Only the most dyed-in-the-wool, super left-brained (and hare-brained), out-of-touch, ivory-tower academics and their acolytes could possibly think that such a real-life, literal "get out of jail free card" is somehow a good idea on balance.  People can argue "root cause theory" till they are blue in the face, but that does NOT somehow negate the non-root causes that clearly need to be tackled as well.  It's NOT an either/or situation, and clearly most of the root causes of crime are much harder and slower to solve.  Forest, meet trees.  And map, meet territory. 

Also, as much as we loathe victimless crime laws, per the late, great Peter McWilliams, author of Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do:  The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Society, that does NOT somehow imply a lax attitude towards real crimes (whether big or small, violent or not) that objectively harm (or unduly endanger) the person or property of nonconsenting others, or that otherwise violate the civil or human rights of others.  In other words, "Get tough on REAL crime" should really be the appropriate slogan here, something even the Libertarian Party has long agreed with.

(That is precisely where we at the TSAP decidedly part ways with the late criminologist James Q. Wilson, the main proponent of the "broken windows" theory, who we otherwise at least partially agree with.  In any case, the "broken windows" theory was ultimately inspired by the late sociologist Jane Jacobs.)

The TSAP has long compiled a list of promising ideas called "Smart On Crime", that should be food for thought indeed.  And guess what it does NOT include?  Catch and release, defund the police, or anything of the sort.  Focused deterrence actually does work, and these latest silly "new" (old) fads only monkeywrench and vitiate such a proven crime-fighting strategy. 

The one major city that bucked the disastrous trend recently was Dallas, Texas.  And not only did they NOT defund the police, they actually increased the use of smart policing tactics to target violent and serious crime.  And whaddya know, it worked.  So let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater now!

There is a strong inverse correlation between police numbers and crime.  Gee, who woulda thunk it?  In other news, water is wet, and the sun rises in the east.

And while the "deterrence" effect (whether general or specific) of incarceration is fairly weak, the "incapacitation" effect on crime is still fairly strong nonetheless, as Wilson famously noted long ago.  Meanwhile, it has long been known that the swiftness and certainty of punishment is far more important than severity is for effective deterrence.

And yes, the age-old correlation between poverty and crime, and also inequality and crime, is just as strong today as it has ever been.  Marcus Aurelius was right about that, both back then and now: "poverty is the mother of crime," and inequality is not far behind.  In the long run, any solutions that don't address poverty and inequality are simply not real solutions.  We certainly need a much better social welfare state, UBI, etc. among other things, to tackle that.  And of course, we must continue getting the lead out as well to further take a bite out of crime.

For example, street gangs (yes, even in today's flavor of Gangland Chicago) can be at least temporarily extirpated from an area by going RICO on them, that is, applying that law to them and vigorously enforcing it.  Many states, including Illinois, have their very own RICO laws as well, so they can do so even without any federal help.  However, such gangs will ultimately return and rise again if we don't also stamp out the conditions that cause such gangs in the first place.

That said, once again, it is not only root (or distal) causes that we should tackle, but also branch (or proximal) causes as well, as in practice the latter causes often get in the way of actually solving the former.  It's not either-or, and we can walk and chew gum at the same time.  Upstream AND downstream are the both important.  So what are we waiting for?

UPDATE:  The term "anarcho-tyranny" comes to mind.  While that term was (unfortunately) apparently coined, or at least popularized, by an infamous white supremacist guy back in the 1990s, and while I really don't like to willingly use the lingo of bigots of any kind, there is nonetheless no more suitable term than that for the current sorry state of affairs.  So, let's reclaim it for ourselves so the racists don't have exclusive use of such a useful term.  In Orwell's dystopian novel 1984, keep in mind that there was a "vast amount of criminality" that was openly tolerated by the dictatorship, ironically enough, so anarchy and tyranny are NOT mutually exclusive like many may think.  Dictatorships, tyrannies, and oligarchies can and do indeed exist without the rule of law.  It is a mutually-reinforcing textbook example of "Problem, Reaction, Solution".  And clearly, tyranny is always whimsical in practice. 

A "Job Guarantee", Without The Guarantee?

The TSAP has once endorsed the MMT idea of a Job Guarantee (JG), which is exactly what it sounds like.  Of course, we also supported Universal Basic Income (UBI) with NO strings attached as well for years now, but still maintained that a JG would be good in addition to that.  However, we no longer support that idea anymore.  JG, in all of its flavors, has far too many conceptual, logistical, and ontological problems to be workable at scale, as Rodger Malcolm Mitchell notes in his article, and several others.

So what do we at the TSAP support instead of JG?  Well, we clearly support UBI, hands down.  But beyond that, we support a scaled-up version of something like Job Corps, and which is basically a Job Guarantee but without the "guarantee" part.  That is, simply a jobs program, both for finding and creating jobs as needed, and one that provides only useful work rather than the Sisyphean make-work boondoggles that would inevitably occur in a true JG program.  Otherwise, it is guaranteed to fail.

Hindsight Is Literally 2020

Hindsight is quite literally 2020.

Four years ago (roughly) today, the world lost its marbles and began to shut down.  And as we have noted before, it was effectively all for naught.  In the end, the lockdowns, masks, and jabs did more harm than good on balance. 

From the ever-insightful Dr. Steve Kirsch's recent Substack article last year, in a nutshell:

"Special mention for the fact that the entire pandemic was completely unnecessary. 3 supplements work better than vaccines and are safe and cheap. All the lockdowns, masking, vaccines, mandates, social distancing, etc. were all unnecessary. And even though this is now known, nobody will pay attention since it will make them look bad.

"Uptake of vitamin C, vitamin D and zinc were significantly associated with the reduced risk of infection and severity of COVID-19 (OR: 0.006 (95% CI: 0.03–0.11) (p = 0.004)) and (OR: 0.03 (95% CI: 0.01–0.22) (p = 0.005))... this study was conducted before the start of mass vaccination against COVID-19 in Bangladesh."

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/23/5029

That's over 150x decreased risk just from taking these 3 dirt-cheap supplements that everyone has known to be safe + effective for decades! And it was all pre-vax, it was for the original Wuhan strain that was most dangerous!"

Read that again, and again, and again and let it sink in.  Vitamin C, Vitamin D, and Zinc.  Those three things alone would have largely defanged and declawed this overall already relatively humdrum virus to begin with, which was basically a classic super-flu at worst, and never an existential threat.

And especially for Vitamin D, but the others too, this was confirmed time and again.  And again and again.

Oh, and one of the other thing that we at the TSAP have long advocated, the humble xylitol nasal spray, has also been confirmed yet again as prophylaxis.

It gets even worse still for the powers that be, apparently, when one also notes that the standard of care for patients with post-viral pneumonia was abruptly changed worldwide, at or before the beginning of the pandemic.  And not for the better, either. The change was to no longer give antibiotics for pneumonia if Covid was thought to be the cause, even though it was very likely that many if not most of such deaths were from secondary bacterial infections.  And antibiotics would have been given had they not been inexplicably removed from the protocols, and thus deliberately withheld from patients for political reasons.  A good chunk of excess deaths could thus easily be attributed to that alone.  

Just #3tablets of azithromycin or doxycycline would often have been enough to save their lives.

What should have been done?  "Letting it rip", that is, "adopting the flu strategy", ultimately would have in fact been the least-worst alternative in the long run, all things considered.  That is precisely what a properly right-brain dominant person would have advocated from the get-go, at least if they were properly informed and NOT bombarded 24/7 with fearporn news media.

Looks like "Stockholm Syndrome" should really be renamed "Melbourne Syndrome" because #SwedenGotItRight.  The verdict is in.  In terms of cumulative all-cause excess mortality, Sweden, who famously eschewed lockdowns and masks and such, actually came out as one of the best in Europe, and not very different from their much stricter neighbors in the long run.  Ditto for other countries and US states that largely ignored the plandemic, but did similarly or better than their stricter neighbors.  Lockdowns, masks, and jab mandates were thus worse than useless.

On March 12, 2020, interestingly enough, the band The Killers released the song "Caution".  The song, while not about the virus, is nonetheless basically about the theme of "throwing caution to the wind".  And in hindsight, that is ironically pretty much what should have been done in regards to the virus, at least for the vast majority of the population who was at relatively low risk overall, whose resulting "herd immunity" would have thus ultimately protected those who were truly vulnerable to the virus.  Lockdowns, on the other hand, merely dragged things out and ultimately put the genuinely vulnerable at greater risk.  The science of epidemiology and public health didn't really change, but the politics sure did.

And failing that, once those who were genuinely fooled (including myself somewhat as well, regrettably) had wised up early on, the second least-worst policy would have been to, as the same song says, "go straight from zero to the Fourth of July" in terms of reopening and ending all restrictions at once.  That's right, ALL at once, all the way back to 2019 normal, period, and don't look back. 

But instead, the unholy "public health" trinity of collective action problems, prevention paradox, and precautionary principle had all been turned on their heads and weaponized against We the People.  Benjamin Franklin spins in his grave.

Moral of the story:  NEVER give up any rights "temporarily", that you are not willing to say goodbye to forever.  Or at the very least, you will not get them back without a fight. 

Indeed, hindsight is 2020, in more ways than one.

How To Escape A Stagflationary Quagmire

What happens when the FERAL Reserve uses raising interest rates in an attempt to quash inflation?  You guessed it:  STAGFLATION. That is, a combination of economic stagnation (or even recession, if they keep raising it "until something breaks") and persistently high inflation.  But if the only tool that have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail to them.  And a quagmire thus results when tight monetary policy is kept in place well beyond its (very short) shelf life.

Contrary to Milton Friedman, the godfather of neoliberalism (who literally coined the term "neoliberalism" himself, along with the term "stagflation"), who claimed that "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon", it is more accurately described as being (almost) always and everywhere a supply-side problem of goods and services, as Rodger Malcolm Mitchell notes.  And the only way to cure it is to cure the shortages, which counterintuitively often requires increasing (and better targeting) federal spending to incentivize production of scarce goods and services, especially energy.  There is clearly an extremely strong correlation (almost perfect, in fact) between energy prices (especially oil) and the general price level (CPI) of goods and services overall.  While there is, contrary to popular opinion, very little to no correlation between inflation and federal deficit spending, or even the general money supply itself.  (The general money supply consists of deficit spending of new money into existence plus banks lending new money into existence, though the latter is of course inflationary albeit only due to interest.)

(And let's not forget greedflation as well!)

At best, as a "break glass in case of emergency" measure, raising interest rates, especially to above the inflation rate, has a weak, very short-term benefit on fighting inflation, followed by a longer-term exacerbation and prolonging of inflation that seems to be unrelated but is in fact caused by it.  After all, hiking interest rates is effectively a blunt and regressive tax that increases costs across the board, which are then passed onto the consumer in the form of...higher prices.  And so on.  That is, MORE INFLATION, in a vicious cycle like a yo-yo.  The "cure" is in fact far worse than the disease, like applying leeches to cure anemia, as Mitchell would put it.

The plandemic-induced supply-chain issues have been resolved, and even the global geopolitical issues would should by now have less effect in the domestic oil and gas powerhouse that is the USA.  Oil and gas prices are now down significantly stateside.  The money supply and federal spending have shrank since then as well.  And yet inflation, though much lower than its 9% peak in 2022, remains stubbornly above than 3% today.  Could it be that keeping interest rates well above the current inflation rate is actually not only part of the problem, but now THE problem?

BINGO.  So the FERAL Reserve would be wise to end Quantitative Tightening and cut interest rates yesterday from the current 5.25% to 3%, then to below 3% very shortly thereafter (within days or weeks).  Then when inflation falls, cut it again to below the new inflation rate, and so on. All the way to zero if necessary.  Failing that, the only thing that would end this quagmire is a severe enough recession to kill demand across the board, which will clearly do more harm than good.  History certainly bears that out.

(It explains not only today's quagmire, but also the 1970s and 1980s in the USA and a fortiori in Canada.  And it even at least partially explains the phenomenon of "chronic inflation" in various Latin American countries in the 1990s and beyond.)

Then, Congress must increase, not decrease, federal spending to cure the stagnation part, which is the other half of the stagflation.  Yesterday. 

And while we are at it, we should also phase out the scam known as "fractional reserve banking" (or more accurately, "fractional capital lending") by increasing the reserve requirement for private banks from the current 0% to 10% immediately, as it was before March 15, 2020, then very gradually raising it all the way to 100% over a number of years.  (The only reason to do it gradually is to prevent markets from suddenly seizing up and causing a financial crisis.)  And also either break up, nationalize, or tax heavily any banks that are "too big to fail" as well.

So what are we waiting for?

P.S.  This argument does NOT apply to "creeping inflation" (i.e. consistently below 3%), as that level of inflation is easily controlled and adjusted for, promotes economic growth, and is actually beneficial on balance.  Such low to moderate inflation is far better tolerated than risking even a small amount of deflation (negative inflation), which, at best, is VERY difficult to control and can all too easily become a vicious cycle and downward spiral into a full-blown depression or long-term "stagpression".  In contrast, inflation only becomes net harmful on balance when it greatly exceeds 3%.  Again, history bears this out.

A Better Than Nordic-Style Social Welfare State With Less Than Florida Taxes

A friendly reminder to all readers:  contrary to popular opinion, it is entirely possible to have a better than Nordic-style social welfare state with less than Florida taxes.  Why?  (You really may want to sit down before reading any further.)

Because federal taxes do NOT fund federal spending, that's why!  Not the individual income tax, not the corporate income tax, not FICA, not the various excises, duties, and tariffs, not estate or gift taxes, nor any other federal tax for that matter.  It is all a Big Lie illusion to prop up the oligarchy, especially the big banks, via artificial scarcity of dollars.  As Rodger Malcolm Mitchell famously notes, and echoed by Dr. Joseph M. Firestone, the federal government is Monetarily Sovereign, that is, being the issuer of it's own currency, it by definition has infinite money.  Any money they receive, through taxes or otherwise, is effectively like bringing coals to Newcastle, in that it disappears into infinity (thus de facto destroyed).  And whenever they spend money on anything, they create each dollar on an ad hoc basis to pay as they go.  

Switching to what Dr. Firestone calls "Overt Congressional Financing (OCF)" is LONG overdue.  On August 15, 1971, the gold standard effectively ended for good, but the method of Congressional financing remains more or less stuck in the past.

Meanwhile, the so-called "National Debt" (TM) is also an illusion, in that it consists of Treasury securities that are only spuriously linked to federal spending due to arcane and archaic rules left over from the now-defunct gold standard that ended over half a century ago.  Each T-security is effectively equivalent to a CD savings account for those who choose to invest in them.  Additionally, the idea that money can only be created with interest or other "strings" attached to it is yet another part of the Big Lie as well.

(It could literally be paid off in one fell swoop at zero cost to anyone, in fact.  And it's technically not even "borrowing" at all.  Infinite money, remember?)

Ditto for the Social Security, Medicare, and other federal "trust funds", which are literally nothing more than accounting gimmicks based on artificial scarcity.  They could fund all of that and more by simply creating the money on an ad hoc basis.

As for inflation, that is generally caused by shortages of goods and services, NOT by printing too much money.  It is ultimately a supply-side problem that requires supply-side solutions, including (counterintuitively) more federal spending targeted to incentivize more production of scarce goods and services.  Thus, rationing dollars via austerity measures and/or raising interest rates to fight inflation and/or recession is like applying leeches to cure anemia.  It is a fundamental category mistake that does far more harm than good on balance.

Of course, the oligarchs want to condition We the People to accept mere crumbs from the tables of the rich.  That way they can keep widening the yawning gap between the haves and have-nots, givng the oligarchs more power to lord it over us all.

Bottom line: all of these gimmicks are completely artificial, contrived, and designed to deceive us all.  The ONLY purposes of taxes in a Monetarily Sovereign government that issues it's own currency (like the federal government, but not (yet) state and local governments) are 1) to control and regulate the economy by encouraging or discouraging various behaviors and activities, 2) to (crudely) fight inflation, 3) to create demand for the currency, and 4) to prop up and give credence to the Big Lie.  But the supposed need to raise revenue is NOT one of them at all.

Thus, with the stroke of a pen, Congress can very easily square the circle of a better than Nordic-style social welfare state with less than Florida taxes.  They gave the FERAL Reserve its power in 1913, and they can just as easily take it away today if they chose to.  But of course, their oligarch masters would NOT want that at all!  Most Congresscritters save for a tiny few, are of course bought and paid for by the big money interests.  Thus we need to throw the bums out!

So what are we waiting for? PAGING DR. FIRESTONE!  NEEDED IN WASHINGTON, DC, STAT!

Politics In One Lesson

There is, in fact, an eternal law of nature that at once explains just about everything, and even makes politics possible to finally understand. It is called The Law of Eristic Escalation:

Imposition of Order = Escalation of Chaos

By that, it pertains to any arbitrary or coercive imposition of order, which at least in the long run, actually causes disorder (chaos) to escalate.  Fenderson's Amendment further adds that "the tighter the order in question is maintained, the longer the consequent chaos takes to escalate, BUT the more it does when it does."  Finally, the Thudthwacker Addendum still further adds that this relationship is nonlinear, thus rendering the resulting escalation of chaos completely unpredictable in terms of the original imposition of order.

We see the real world consequences of this in everything from Prohibition to the War on (people who use a few particular) Drugs to zero tolerance policies to Covid lockdowns to sexual repression and so much more.  And especially in the ageist abomination that is the 21 drinking age in the USA.  Any short-term benefits that these arbitrary and coercive impositions of order may provide is entirely outweighed when they inevitably backfire in the long run.  For example, Miron and Tetelbaum (2009), Asch and Levy (1987 and 1990), and Males (1986) illustrate this very nicely in the case of the 21 drinking age.

(This same logic applies to practically every "victimless crime" law, and pretty much every other form of government overreach, as well as various excessive socio-cultural repressions of all kinds.)

Perhaps that is why most bans on various things have historically had a track record that is quite lackluster at best.  Ironically, bans tend to give more power to the very things that they seek to ban.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, you finally understand politics.

P.S.  The Dutch seem to understand this better.  They even have a proverb:  "when you permit, you control", which is the antithesis of the American proverb, "when you permit, you promote".  Carl Jung would also likely have a field day with that as well.

Two Kinds Of Identity Politics

We often hear the term "identity politics" bandied about as a negative thing.  Certainly, the flavor we have seen in recent years, sometimes called by the nebulous catchall terms "woke" on the left and "based" on the right, has proven to be quite toxic.  At best, it tends to be a distraction from other issues.  Even Bernie Sanders has, years ago, criticized it, and rightly so, and predictably caught very much flak for that.  And both of the two corporate duopoly parties in the USA are guilty of their own brands of toxic identity politics, as their versions of "left" and "right" are really both two wings of the same bird.

But did you know that there are TWO kinds of identity politics?  According to Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, the two flavors are 1) "common humanity identity politics", and 2) "common enemy identity politics".  And they are exactly what they sound like. The latter is the toxic and low-vibration kind we have seen in recent years, while the former is essentially what propelled the Civil Rights Movement, most notably Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., along with some other mass movements.  That is, the former is the high road, while the latter is the low road.

Truly, there is really only one race:  the HUMAN race.  And we must never forget that, for we forget our common humanity at our own peril. 

Contrary to common enemy identity politics, life is NOT a zero-sum game.  Or at least, it certainly does not HAVE to be.  It is NOT inherently or automatically necessary for someone to lose for another person to win.  A positive-sum, win-win, mutually-beneficial world is certainly possible, and it even happens now to some extent in some cases.  But following such a virulent toxic ideology only guarantees that we all fall into a net NEGATIVE-sum game where we ALL lose to one degree or other, in a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Much like how Buckminster Fuller once noted that war and scarcity are really NOT inevitable in themselves, but rather a result of a self-fulfilling prophecy when men believe they are inevitable. 

As the band Seether once put it more poetically, "nothing grows in the desert when you covet the drought". Probably the best analogy there is for that.

Choose the common humanity version.  It will never let you down when done properly.  Because the only real common enemies in politics are oligarchy, tyranny, and ochlocracy.  That is, the three "bad forms of government" per Aristotle, the latter of which is "mob rule" or "tyranny of the majority", merely the other side of the very same evil coin as oligarchy and tyranny of the minority.  All three of which, interestingly enough, are effectively promoted by the toxic, common enemy version of identity politics.  And Big Tech of course enables and literally profits from it all.  Currently, there are really only two sides:  oligarchy versus humanity.  All the rest of politics is a mere sideshow.  We must not let wokeness, hate, tribalism, and all of their attendant infighting distract us from that.  In other words, choose humanity.