READ THE BILLS – An Open Letter to Congressman Dent from Jake Towne

I attend a town hall discussion with my Congressman and try to help out with solutions, instead of more excuses and “politics as usual.”

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” – Mohandas Gandhi

“There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.” – Ayn Rand

“A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.” – George Bernard Shaw

Dear Congressman Dent -

I very much enjoyed the office hours you held Monday, July 6, 2009, in my hometown of Nazareth.  As you are now aware, from the comments there are very many concerned citizens in our district and the next town hall discussion will likely require a new venue as the hall was bursting full, even though the meeting was at 10 AM on a working day.

One of the items the group discussed was the fact that you did not have time to read the recent Cap and Trade Bill due to a last-minute amendment that added 300+ pages. While it is understandable that you cannot have time to read bills that are dumped last-minute on your desk before a house floor vote, I find it completely unacceptable that you have not taken steps to remedy the situation.

I also remark that in October 2008, that while you rejected the first version, you signed the Banker Bailout immediately after 332 pages of pork were added to it, as I remarked in “One Subject at a Time – Open Letter to Congressman Dent from Jake Towne“. May I inquire as to whether you read the complete text of this bill? As I listed just several of them in my last letter, I was horrified to see the pork barrel spending you approved.

I remind you that complaining about the status quo without proposing solutions is unbecoming someone of your experience who has spent the last 19 years in politics as a congressman or state senator.

As I related to you and the group yesterday, please read the “Read the Bills Act” available here from www.DownsizeDC.org. I request you to introduce this bill because I would do exactly the same in your shoes. If not, please reply by letter or email and inform me as to why not. A fuller description of the bill is listed below. I have some modifications I’d like to make to it, but if you do not support it then they won’t be of interest.

I have some further comments that I will send to you shortly. On Monday, I personally handed you paper print-outs of all of the un-replied letters and phone calls I have made to your office over the past three months. I understand you are very busy, but if you have time only to reply to one issue, PLEASE reply to me on my questions on your stance on monetary policy and the Federal Reserve.

After I asked you about monetary policy, you  did remark to me that you were very concerned about the monetization of debt that the FED is doing, and so am I.  I most recently wrote about that here “FED to Monetize Another $1.75 Trillion in 2009” last week. However, I really have not found any details of your thoughts on monetary policy, which I view as paramount.

I remain unclear about your level of economic understanding. During the town hall discussion, you mentioned a better way to stimulate the economy faster then Obama’s plan was to immediately purchase a bunch of brand-new military vehicles and ship them to Iraq. This comment completely contradicts and flaunts basic economic law, and makes me extremely uneasy. To that effect, at the end of this letter I will include a chapter from Henry Hazlitt’s “Broken Window” fallacy from Economics in One Lesson.

Please, Congressman Dent, I implore you to take a solid look at our nation’s fiat monetary policy and let me know what you think. I would be very happy to consult with you publicly or privately on this issue. I understand you probably view me as a small-time annoyance since I will be running against you in the 2010 election, but I really just want to help the people in our district, and I hope you believe this.

I also believe that the cumulative actions of Congress and the Federal Reserve are unleashing ill effects on our community such as high unemployment, continued outsourcing of our jobs, and the destruction of the purchasing power of the dollar and we MUST take steps to protect our community.

Please allow me to close this letter with three positive remarks. First, please continue with the town hall discussions, they’re great!! – but please spend more of your time listening. Second, I will thank you yet again for co-sponsoring HR 1207 to audit the FED our government does need more “sunshine” as you aptly put it. Third, thank you for voting against the Cap and Trade bill despite the fact that you believe carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant.  I will write you back separately on this matter.

I have also called your office and left a message on this matter with the attendant, who was quite courteous.

Sincerely, your fellow citizen,

Jake Towne

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We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Veritas numquam perit. Veritas odit moras. Veritas vincit. Truth never perishes. Truth hates delay. Truth conquers.

Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito. Do not give in to evil but proceed ever more boldly against it.

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From DownSizeDC.org’s “Read the Bills” Campaign:

For Members of Congress, fiduciary responsibility means reading each word of every bill before they vote.

But Congress has not met this duty for a long time. Instead . . .

• They carelessly pass mammoth bills that none of them have read. Sometimes printed copies aren’t even available when they vote!
• Often no one knows what these bills contain, or what they really do, or what they will really cost.
• Additions and deletions are made at the last minute, in secrecy.
• They combine unpopular proposals with popular measures that few in Congress want to oppose. (This practice is called “log-rolling.”)
• And votes are held with little debate or public notice.
• Oh, and once these bills are passed, and one of these unpopular proposals comes to light, they pretend to be shocked. “How did that get in there?” they say.

There’s a basic principle at stake here. America was founded on the slogan, “No taxation without representation.” A similar slogan applies to this situation:

“No LEGISLATION without representation.”

We hold this truth to be self-evident, that those in Congress who vote on legislation they have not read, have not represented their constituents. They have misrepresented them.

And since Congress has repeatedly committed “legislation without representation,” strong measures to prohibit these Congressional misrepresentations are both justified and required.

To this end we have created the “Read the Bills Act (RTBA).” RTBA requires that . . .

• Each bill, and every amendment, must be read in its entirety before a quorum in both the House and Senate.
• Every member of the House and Senate must sign a sworn affidavit, under penalty of perjury, that he or she has attentively either personally read, or heard read, the complete bill to be voted on.
• Every old law coming up for renewal under the sunset provisions must also be read according to the same rules that apply to new bills.
• Every bill to be voted on must be published on the Internet at least 7 days before a vote, and Congress must give public notice of the date when a vote will be held on that bill.
• Passage of a bill that does not abide by these provisions will render the measure null and void, and establish grounds for the law to be challenged in court.
• Congress cannot waive these requirements.

The effects of these provisions will be profound . . .

• Congress will have to slow down. This means the pace of government growth will also slow.
• Bills will shrink, be less complicated, and contain fewer subjects, so that Congress will be able to endure hearing them read.
• Fewer bad proposals will be passed due to “log-rolling.”
• No more secret clauses will be inserted into bills at the last moment.
• Government should shrink as old laws reach their sunset date, and have to be read for the first time before they can be renewed.

And all of these things will enable a larger DownsizeDC.org to more effectively lobby Congress for small government.

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From Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson“:

THE BROKEN WINDOW

Let us begin with the simplest illustration possible: let us, emulating Bastiat, choose a broken pane of glass.

A young hoodlum, say, heaves a brick through the window of a baker’s shop. The shopkeeper runs out furious, but the boy is gone. A crowd gathers, and begins to stare with quiet satisfaction at the gaping hole in the window and the shattered glass over the bread and pies. After a while the crowd feels the need for philosophic reflection. And several of its members are almost certain to remind each other or the baker that, after all, the misfortune has its bright side. It will make business for some glazier. As they begin to think of this they elaborate upon it. How much does a new plate glass window cost? Fifty dollars? That will be quite a sum. After all, if windows were never broken, what would happen to the glass business? Then, of course, the thing is endless. The glazier will have $50 more to spend with other merchants, and these in turn will have$50 more to spend with still other merchants, and so ad infinitum. The smashed window will go on providing money and employment in ever- widening circles. The logical conclusion from all this would be, if the crowd drew it, that the little hoodlum who threw the brick, far from being a public menace, was a public benefactor.

Now let us take another look. The crowd is at least right in its first conclusion. This little act of vandalism will in the first instance mean more business for some glazier. The glazier will be no unhappy to learn of the incident than an undertaker to learn of a death. But the shopkeeper will be out $50 that he was planning to spend for a new suit. Because he has had to replace a window, he will have to go without the suit (or some equivalent need or luxury). Instead of having a window and $50 he now has merely a window. Or, as he was planning to buy the suit that very afternoon, instead of having both a window and a suit he must be content with the window and no suit. If we think of him as a part of the community, the community has lost a new suit that might otherwise have come into being, and is just that much poorer.

The glazier’s gain of business, in short, is merely the tailor’s loss of business. No new “employment” has been added. The people in the crowd were thinking only of two parties to the transaction, the baker and the glazier. They had forgotten the potential third party involved, the tailor. They forgot him precisely because he will not now enter the scene. They will see the new window in the next day or two. They will never see the extra suit, precisely because it will never be made. They see only what is immediately visible to the eye.

THE BLESSINGS OF DESTRUCTION

So we have finished with the broken window. An elementary fallacy. Anybody, one would think, would be able to avoid it after a few moments’ thought. Yet the broken- window fallacy, under a hundred disguises, is the most persistent in the history of economics. It is more ram- pant now than at any time in the past. It is solemnly re- affirmed every day by great captains of industry, by chambers of commerce, by labor union leaders, by editorial writers and newspaper columnists and radio commentators, by learned statisticians using the most refined techniques, by professors of economics in our best universities. In their various ways they all dilate upon the advantages of destruction.

Though some of them would disdain to say that there are net benefits in small acts of destruction, they see al- most endless benefits in enormous acts of destruction. They tell us how much better off economically we all are in war than in peace. They see “miracles of production” which it requires a war to achieve. And they see a post- war world made certainly prosperous by an enormous “accumulated” or “backed-up” demand. In Europe they joyously count the houses, the whole cities that have been leveled to the ground and that “will have to be replaced.” In America they count the houses that could not be built during the war, the nylon stockings that could not be supplied, the worn-out automobiles and tires, the obsolescent radios and refrigerators. They bring together formidable totals.

It is merely our old friend, the broken-window fallacy, in new clothing, and grown fat beyond recognition. This time it is supported by a whole bundle of related fallacies. It confuses need with demand. The more war destroys, the more it impoverishes, the greater is the p war need. Indubitably. But need is not demand. Effective economic demand requires not merely need but corresponding purchasing power. The needs of China too are incomparably greater than the needs of America . But its power, and therefore the,” new business” that it can stimulate, are incomparably smaller.

But if we get past this point, there is a chance for another fallacy, and the broken-windows usually grab it. They think of “purchasing power” merely in terms of money. Now money can be run off ‘by ‘the printing press. As this is being written, in fact, printing money is the world’s biggest industry-if the products measured in monetary terms. But the more money is turned out in this way, the more the value of any given unit of money falls. This falling value can be measured in rising prices of commodities. But as most people are so firmly in the habit of thinking of their wealth and income in terms of money, they consider themselves better off as these monetary totals rise, in spite of the fact that in terms of things they may have less and buy less. ‘Most of the “good” economic-results which people attribute to war are really owing to wartime inflation. They could be produced just as well by an equivalent peacetime inflation. We shall come back to this money illusion later.

Now there is a half-truth in the “backed-up” demand fallacy, just as there -was in the broken-window fallacy. The broken window did make more business for the glazier. The destruction of war will make more business for the producers of certain things. The destruction of houses and cities will make more business for the building and construction industries. The inability to -produce automobiles, radios, and refrigerators during the war will bring about a cumulative post-war demand for those particular products.

To most people this will seem like an increase in total demand, as it may well be in terms of dollars of lower purchasing power. But what really takes place is a diversion of demand to these particular products from others. The people of Europe will build more new houses than otherwise because they must. But when they build more , houses they will have just that much less manpower and productive capacity left over for everything else. When they buy houses they will have just that much less purchasing power for everything else. Wherever business is increased in one direction, it must (except insofar as productive energies may he generally stimulated by a sense of want and urgency) be correspondingly reduced in another.

The war, in short, will change the post-war direction of effort; it will change the balance of industries; it will change the structure of industry. And this in time will also have its consequences. There will he another distribution of demand when accumulated needs for houses and other durable goods have been made up. Then these temporarily favored industries will, relatively, have to shrink again, to allow other industries filling other needs to grow.

It is important to keep in mind, finally, that there will not merely he a difference in the pattern of post-war as compared with pre-war demand. Demand will not merely he diverted from one commodity to another. In most countries it will shrink in total amount.

This is inevitable when we consider that demand and supply are merely two sides of the same coin. They are the same thing looked at from different directions. Supply creates demand because at bottom it is demand. The supply of the thing they make is all that people have, in fact, to offer in exchange for the things they want. In this sense the farmers’ supply of wheat constitutes their demand for automobiles and other goods. The supply of motor cars constitutes the demand of the people in the automobile industry for wheat and other goods. All this is inherent in the modern division of labor and in an exchange economy.

This fundamental fact, it is true, is obscured for most people (including some reputedly brilliant economists) through such complications as wage payments and the indirect form in which virtually all modern exchanges are made through the medium of money. John Stuart Mill and other classical writers, though they sometimes failed to take sufficient account of the complex consequences resulting from the use of money, at least saw through the monetary veil to the underlying realities. To that extent they were in advance of many of their present-day critics, who are befuddled by money rather than instructed by it. Mere inflation-that is, the mere issuance of more money, with the consequence of higher wages and prices-may look like the creation of more demand. But in terms of the actual production and exchange of real things it is not. Yet a fall in post-war demand may be concealed from many people by the illusions caused by higher money wages that are more than offset by higher prices.

Post-war demand in most countries, to repeat, will shrink in absolute amount as compared with pre-war demand because post-war supply will have shrunk. This should be obvious enough in Germany and Japan , where scores of great cities were leveled to the ground. The point, in short, is plain enough when we make the case extreme enough. If England, instead of being hurt only to the extent she was by her participation in the war, had had all her great cities destroyed, all her factories destroyed and almost all her accumulated capital and consumer goods destroyed, so that her people had been reduced to the economic level of the Chinese, few people would be talking about the great accumulated and backed up demand caused by the war. It would be obvious that buying power had been wiped out to the same extent that productive power had been wiped out. A runaway monetary inflation, lifting prices a thousand fold, might none the less make the “national income” figures in monetary terms higher than before the war. But those who would be deceived by that into imagining themselves richer than before the war would be beyond the reach of rational argument. Yet the same principles apply to a small war destruction as to an overwhelming one.

There may be, it is true, offsetting factors. Technological discoveries and advances during the war, for example, may increase individual or national productivity at this point or that. The destruction of war will, it is true, divert post-war demand from some channels into others. And a certain number of people may continue to be deceived indefinitely regarding their real economic welfare by rising wages and prices caused by an excess of printed money. But the belief that a genuine prosperity can be brought about by a “replacement demand” for things destroyed or not made during the war is none the less a palpable fallacy.