A fisking we shall go?
About once a day I stumble on an article that is filled with half truths and lies about guns, gun laws and other second amendment issues. Some of those seem to travel far and wide with nobody calling BS on them.
I’ve started fisking one such article.
Let me know if you want more fisking articles. Feel free to send us articles you’d like us to fisk.
Feel free to let loose below and give us some feedback.
This might be true but is dependent on nobody else having reached the new world. There are indications of other peoples getting to the new world before the Europeans. But likely true. Of course the article leaves out the fact that the Chinese invented gunpowder long before and did have some cannon like things.
While they then put up the old saw that people were only firing 3 rounds per minute. Even though there were air rifles that fired much faster and a sort of automatic gun based on muzzle loading and black powder.
And the records keep being broken. The article seems to feel that there was no reason for people arming themselves, because everybody was locked down, socially distancing and businesses were closed. They just happened to leave out that there were a great deal of “mostly peaceful protests” and that violence seemed to be escalating.
Good for them! And they are buying more this year than last year. Seems to be a trend.
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<blockquote>The Constitutional definition regarding “the right to bear arms” is questionable in an age of mass shootings, dividing many Americans whose opinions on gun ownership differ. The Atlantic reports that while the “contextual reading is quite enlightening” in the amendment, its initial and sole purpose was to permit U.S. states to create armed militias legally.</blockquote>
And the not lie lie. They didn’t say it, <i>The Atlantic</i> reports it. If they got it wrong, sorry. Same game as “experts say”. This particular piece of BS is normal.
Language is delightfully colored. “claim to own firearms primarily for protection against crime.” The word “claim” doesn’t really need to be there. It leaves a subtle hint that it isn’t quite true that it is for protection against crime, they just claim it is.
Yep, they do say that. But most Americans have no idea what the actual gun laws are. Is the gun law that makes it a felony for my kid to carry a spent case across an imaginary line a couple of miles from us not strict enough? Do they even know what the gun laws are in their own state?
Most people have never purchased a firearm. They’ve never seen a 4473 or had to fill one out. They don’t know so the question is moot. Most people when they find out what the laws actually are, are not looking for still stricter infringments.
An out and out lie. The court denied certiorari. This does not mean that they upload the ban. It means they didn’t bother to hear it. That is likely because they wanted a clearer case, such as Bruen, which allowed them to say “if it isn’t in the text and history of the 2nd, around 1791, it is unconstitutional”
Words have meaning. When we think of “children” most people think ages 1-12. They think of 13-17 as teenagers or young adults. 18 and up are adults. But the term used is “adolescent fatality”. This means that it includes not just children age 1-12, but also all the gang bangers that ended up dead in very adult activities.
Another flat out lie. It seems that they don’t think that a NICS check is really a background check and that a more comprehensive “personal history release” is needed. And they claim that if you buy a gun “online” you don’t have to do a background check.
The blunt of it is that you need to go through a background check for any firearm you purchase that isn’t a person to person sale or FFL to FFL. And the feds do not take lightly to people making money buying and selling firearms without an FFL.
And it is highly likely that there will be more manufactured this year than last. Just like there are more of many items manufactured every year.
More guns is not something to be feared.
This is just a start of a debunk of “50 Facts About Guns In America” A follow up on a reader comment about narratives.
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Our datacenter did a forced upgrade of our infrastructure today. It was expected to be a few minutes of downtime but due to an error on their part we were unable to connect to our data stores.
This has been resolved. We are back up and running.
Sorry for the outage,
-AWA
Years ago my daughter and I were discussing the Constitution and I asked her to quote the second amendment. She picked up her history/social studies text book and read it to me from the back of the book.
“A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms in the militia will not be infringed”.
I freaked. I knew that was wrong. So I actually looked in her text book and it indeed had the second like that, but with “[in the militia]” in brackets added.
My daughter, a highschool student, thought that the words in brackets were part of the second amendment. I had to pull up a real copy of the constitution on my laptop in order to prove to her that somebody had added those words. That it wasn’t in the original.
The next day I started calling around and finally ended up talking to the superintendent of the school district. He told me “The students know that brackets indicated words that were added. We added the words to help clarify the meaning. ” He went on to indicate that they had added words throughout the constitution.
When I reviewed the text book I found one other added word [of] and it did not change the meaning of the phrase. But there were multiple words added to the2nd. The children reading that textbook would have no way of knowing that they were not reading the correct translation.
Most students entering high school today can’t read the constitution. They do not read cursive. They have to trust that the version they have is a true copy, just using block or typeset characters. This will become a bigger issue over time. “He who controls the past controls the future.”
[Darcy] Geissler [of Fairfax County, Virginia] told the principal directly in an email, “When I was in law school, our first assignment on persuasive writing – a skill necessary to be a lawyer – was on whether or not a misspelling in a deed was sufficient to pass title. Not exactly a sexy or emotional issue. We were not handed Roe v. Wade, the 2nd Amendment, or climate change, even though we were law students with significant education and life experience.”
“The reason we were not given hot-button issues when first learning to write was because in order to learn persuasive writing, it is imperative that the skill not be clouded by the issue before the skill is learned,”
The problem is that everything in the education industry is geared to messaging. In some cases this is good. In k-5 what this means is that a lesson in math is used in reading is used in history and back again. It is designed to teach basic skills and to help the student learn from those base lessons.
Unfortunately, today there is a different narrative being pushed. Not to get children to think, to analyze critically the information they are given, but to instead think the way that the industry (and teacher) want the child to think.
In a YAF talk, Michael Knowles spoke about “groomers”. The point he made was that if a 8 year old boy tells his teacher that he is really a girl and he is going to use the girls bathroom from now on, the teacher/school has to make a choice. Regardless of the choice they are going to be teaching a narrative. They can teach the woke narrative that a boy can be a girl and a girl can be a boy, or they can teach the boy that “no you aren’t a girl, use the correct bathroom.”
For us, it isn’t a difficult choice, for many on the left, it isn’t a difficult choice. The problem is that we have different answers and the education industry is filled with leftist.
The schools spend many learning hours per year teaching students how to respond if the fire alarm goes off. Yet somehow they manage to do it without creating soul crushing fear in the students.
Today they spend as much or more time teaching children how to respond to “active shooter”. And they have managed to instill terror in students and parents alike.
At the local high school a student was recently removed by the police during the school day. The boy had been playing airsoft with some friends. One of those “friends” snapped a picture of him holding an AR-15 airsoft rifle. That “friend” then added text to it something like “I can’t stand it, I’m going to bring my rifle to school and see just how many I can kill before they stop me.”
It was a prank. Yet everybody knows about it and there was panic within the school system. And kids were scared. This is not the way to live.
The narrative thus is “guns are bad unless you are a Hollywood Actor shooting up people in the movies”. Only the cops are good enough to carry guns. Only the military should have arms. 6 rounds is ok but 7 is a killing machine. A 10 round magazine is “safe” an eleven round magazine is only for killers.
The cops need 18 round magazines with two reloads but you can do it with just 5 rounds.
Nothing makes any real sense but the narrative goes on and on. Always evoking fear to get people to give up just one more bit of freedom.
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It is the summer in late 60’s. Two kindergarten boys roll down the slope between their houses and come to a stop. They climb back to the top and look up at the beautiful blue sky. They pant from running around the yards playing cowboys and indians.
One of them turns to the other and says “What are you going to do when you are drafted? Are you going to Vietnam or are you going to Canada?”
The other boy thinks hard, “Dad is in the Navy. I’m going to join up and be an officer like him.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do. I might go to Canada.”
War just was. Two young boys discussing what they were going to do in 13 years when they were drafted to go fight in a war that the government refused to call a war. A war that had been going on for decades, even before the US got involved.
The media was peddling the same narratives, the US military was evil. That our soldiers committed atrocities on a regular basis. Just a few years later, in April of 1971, John Kerry, future presidential candidate, testifies in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the horrible atrocities he witnessed.
At every turn the media delivered a story of failure.
Still a young boy was ready to go to war to defend his country. He didn’t understand all those big words, but his father was fighting for his country and he would go do his father and his country proud.
A small truth that is forgotten, an 18 year old man drafted and sent to Vietnam in this time period had a better chance of living than his civilian counterpart back in the states. Car safety was not as good as it is today. Many young men lost their lives on the streets and highways of this country. More per capita than lost their lives in Vietnam.
Please don’t misunderstand me, war is horrible. It does things to the body and mind that most, thankfully, will never experience and few will understand. I still thank those vets when I meet them. I’ve talked to them when the war was still fresh in their minds. I have huge respect for those that fought and continue to fight for our country.
Note also that my respect is for those that fight for our country, not all that are members of the military fight for our country.
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Discrimination exists. Anybody that tells you it doesn’t is lying. Some discrimination is good, some is bad. People telling you that all discrimination is bad are ignorant, lying, and/or evil.
You use discrimination when you pick one apple over another. You use it when you pick one barber shop over another. You use it when you pick one route over another. You use it any time you choose between two or more options.
Since The Panic one of my clients left. Because of that I no longer drive into the city. Because of that it is now inconvenient to use my old barber. I <b>needed</b> a haircut. There is a newish shop in town. I tried four times to get a haircut there. She was booked and told me to go away and come back some other time or make an appointment. Twice I showed up to find the shop closed. Twice I was told she was booked and to go away.
My lady was with me for the last one. When asked she told me her opinion, she didn’t like the lady. I didn’t like the lady. I didn’t like the shop.
Google is my friend and with a little looking I found another local barbershop. It was actually a little closer. Went there. It was hard to find, inside a business building. No real outside signs. I walk in and it feels right.
There are two young men and one immediately leaps up to get his chair ready. It is well lit and decorated with American Flags, some Vet Honors, Police Patch board, hunting stuff over one chair with fake (plastic) rifles. Over the other chair were car things. Everything about the shop yelled “We Love Our Country!”
And indeed they do.
Was I discriminating against a female when I choose a male barber over her? No. I was discriminating over the type of shop and the difference in attitudes. Turns out that the guy that did my hair is a “master barber” and interned under a his father-in-law, a “Master Barber Instructor”. Didn’t know that was a thing.
Yeah, it was a good haircut. I’ll be going back next month.
Discrimination works.
Discriminating based on inmutable external characteristics is not as good. You might agree that discriminating over a person in confined to a wheelchair would be bad. Just because they are in a wheelchair doesn’t mean they can’t do the job.
These are not auditions for the next Police Academy sequel. This is an actual IRS recruiting program: pic.twitter.com/KUFqxmbDpW
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) August 16, 2022
Note that the fact checkers say this isn’t really IRS training agents. Nor is it a recruiting exercise, instead it is an opportunity for college students to pretend to be IRS CI agents to help convince these accounting students to join the IRS, NOT recruiting which is doing things with people in order to get them to join your organization.
I have no problem with working with people of other races, genders, or religions. That is because I do discriminate based on merit. If you are good at your job, I do not care what you look like, who your partner is, or what god(s) you do or do not worship.
When discrimination is because of an immutable trait, then it starts to become bad. If you refuse to hire somebody because they are black, that is a bad discrimination. If you refuse to hire somebody because the are a female or because the are a male, that is a bad discrimination.
We just watched Something the Lord Made, based on the life and work of Alfred Blalock and Vivien Thomas. The casual discrimination contained within was saddening. Dr. Blalock didn’t discriminate against Thomas, but he didn’t see the institutional discrimination that was taking place.
I did grow up in a time where that casual discrimination still existed. In highschool I hung out with the “smart” crowd. I already knew I was going to be going to University to study Computer Science. In preparation I took a personal typing course. I was the only male in the class.
In talking to one of my friends, also one of the smart crowd, I found that she was also going into computer science. I asked her why she didn’t take a typing class.
“If I take a typing class I will become a secretary for the rest of my life.”
That was a casual discrimination. So she showed up at University with a significant handicap for being a computer science. She couldn’t “talk” to the computers easily. If you can’t touch type at 50+ WPM including special characters, you aren’t going to be doing very well in computer science. You can certainly do ok as a copy paste person, but there is now way you can write hundreds of lines of code in a day if you can’t type.
(Nor can you write long blog entries in a timely fashion.)
Because the Democrats refused to stop discriminating against blacks we ad to pass the 13th and 14th amendments and later the Republicans pushed the Civil Rights Bill through Congress and forced LBJ to sign it into law. A good thing.
The law basically says that you can discriminate against people based on immutable characteristics.
Enter the world of word redefinition. According to the left, a person is born gay. Since they are born gay and it can’t be changed then it is an immutable characteristic and as such is protected via the anti-discrimination laws.
Well it turns out that the won that battle. Mostly because nobody was really fighting it all that hard. Yes there were some people that thought that religious tracts said that homosexuality was a sin. Yes there were people that were badly hurt because they were homosexuals. In general, unless you flaunted it in the work place nobody knew, nobody cared.
Unfortunately we ended up in a situation where “You will be forced to care.” The act of discriminating morphed from actively discriminating to not celebrating enough.
And then we ran into the issue of anti-discrimination laws vs. the rights of people to choose who their clients are.
If somebody comes to us and requests that we do work for them, we can flat out refuse. A customer came to a client, they wanted a site to facilitate getting an escort for events. If you were a successful but fat slob, you could go to them and have some eye candy on your arm when you went to the awards ceremony. Everything appeared to be on the up and up. They had both male and female escorts. Everybody seemed to be of age. Everything was strictly of a non-sexual nature.
My client almost refused this customer. One of the devs had an “ick” moment. In the end, my client excepted and that customer was a customer for a good many years, paying well. At no time did it ever appear that they did anything even approaching illegal.
We have the right to reject a client for any or no reason. Except…
In Colorado they have an Anti-Discrimination Act. This was used to attempt to drive Masterpiece Cakeshop out of business in retribution for refusing to make a custom wedding cake for a long time customer. The baker had been doing business with this gay couple for years. When they were able to get married they came to Masterpiece Cakeshop and requested a custom wedding cake.
The baker told them that he would not make them a custom cake but that they were free to choose from any of the other wedding cakes his company made. He also suggested another bakery which had no religious beliefs stopping them from making custom wedding cakes for same sex marrages.
This went all the way to the supreme court and in 2018 they issued their opinion
Held: The Commission’s actions in this case violated the Free Exercise Clause. Pp. 9–18.
(a) The laws and the Constitution can, and in some instances must, protect gay persons and gay couples in the exercise of their civil rights, but religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage are protected views and in some instances protected forms of expression. See Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U. S. ___, ___. While it is unexceptional that Colorado law can protect gay persons in acquiring products and services on the same terms and conditions as are offered to other members of the public, the law must be applied in a manner that is neutral toward religion. To Phillips, his claim that using his artistic skills to make an expressive statement, a wedding endorsement in his own voice and of his own creation, has a significant First Amendment speech component and implicates his deep and sincere religious beliefs. His dilemma was understandable in 2012, which was before Colorado recognized the validity of gay marriages performed in the State and before this Court issued United States v.
Windsor, 570 U. S. 744, or Obergefell. Given the State’s position at the time, there is some force to Phillips’ argument that he was not unreasonable in deeming his decision lawful. State law at the time also afforded storekeepers some latitude to decline to create specific messages they considered offensive. Indeed, while the instant enforcement proceedings were pending, the State Civil Rights Division concluded in at least three cases that a baker acted lawfully in declining to create cakes with decorations that demeaned gay persons or gay marriages. Phillips too was entitled to a neutral and respectful consideration of his claims in all the circumstances of the case. Pp. 9–12.
This meant that the Supreme court said that Rights guaranteed by the Constitution could not be usurped by state laws, even if those laws were designed to stop discrimination.
So we now walk a delicate line. If you belong to a religion that hates white Christian Men, does that mean you can discriminate against white Christian Men? Likely “no” as discrimination because of race is Unconstitutional. Your right to be free of discrimination because of your race is balanced against his right to practice his religion free from government interference.
In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis the issue is back again. In this case 303 Creative is a web designer that creates websites celebrating marriage. She is refusing to create a website to celebrate a gay marriage because her religious beliefs say that it is not a real marriage.
We know that separate but equal doesn’t work. If a employer was discriminating against a openly gay person, is that a violation of that person’s rights? What if it is a Catholic School and they have a religious requirement that all employees act in keeping with the morals of the church? Since the church believes that homosexuality is a sin this means that the school will not higher homosexuals.
Is that discrimination?
In some cases it seems simple enough. If there are 1000s of web-designers that are willing to do the web page, is there really cause to force this particular one to do the site?
And how do you force somebody to do their best work when they are doing it under duress?
I don’t think there is a simple answer.
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This has been the law of the land since 1791. It was still the law but not formally acknowledged prior to then.
The language is very clear to anybody that is educated in English. Chances are that Miguel, who is not a native speaker of English can parse the 2nd amendment and understand exactly what it means per the rules of English.
So how did we end up in a place where there exists so many infringements? There is no other right in the Constitution that requires government permission to exercise it. You don’t need the government’s permission to post online. You don’t need the governments permission to move from state to state. You don’t need the governments permission to be secure in your papers and person.
These rights exist. The government needs permission in order to infringe on our rights. Where did they get it?
In the early history of the country we had small, individual locations pass infringements. These were allowed to stand because the people either did not care or their complaints were not heard by the courts or the government. There were so few of these laws that the Supreme court opinion in Bruen said that they were outliers and should be ignored.
In 1911 the most famous gun control act was passed. The one that lead to all the others. The Sullivan Act. This law required government permission to possess firearms.
The act was passed based on the idea of stopping people from having guns in violent areas. The reality was that it allowed for the Tammany Hall democrats to disarm all that opposed them while still putting muscle on the street as they wished. The law was always unfairly applied.
Prior to 1911, almost all gun control was based on disarming blacks. They were passed as “safety measures” and they did provide safety, for those attacking newly freed slaves. It wasn’t uncommon for the sheriff to show up and search a black home for “illegal guns”, confiscate the guns they found and for the Klan to arrive that evening to do violence to that household.
The level of corruption in gun control laws never goes away.
The first federal gun control law was the NFA in 1934. This was passed as a “safety measure”. The original goal was to ban all the things that “The Mob” were using. This was machine guns, pistols, sawed off shotguns, and silencers. But congress knew that this was unconstitutional.
Much as Obama Care was unconstitutional when it was a penalty for not having health insurance but it was constitutional when it was a tax, banning guns was known to be unconstitutional, but charging a tax to transfer or register one was constitutional. They took pistols out of the NFA but created a new class of firearm, short barrelled rifle, to keep people from calling a pistol a rifle to avoid the tax.
Because it was “just a tax” in the beginning, being caught with an unregistered NFA item merely required you register and pay your tax. It was only much later that having an NFA item without the tax stamp became an actual crime that you were prosecuted for.
This was challenged in 1936 when the supreme court issued its Miller opinion. The opinion was issued without anybody there to represent Miller. The question before the court was whether the NFA was “an attempt to usurp police power reserved to the States” and whether the NFA’s requirements to register and have taxed short barrelled shotguns was counter to the second amendment.
The court did not look at anything else.
In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a ‘shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length’ at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense. Aymette v. State of Tennessee, 2 Humph., Tenn., 154, 158.
With these words, the supreme court gutted the second amendment for the next 90 years.
The court focused on the right to bear arms meaning that the militia, all the people, needed to be able to have military arms. Since nobody told the court that shotguns were used in a military setting (“In the absence of any evidence…”) they found that short barrelled shotguns were not protected under the second amendment.
Implicit in their decision was the implication that if Miller had been caught with a Tommy Gun and that was what had been brought to the courts attention, then the NFA would have been found unconstitutional. It is unknown if the court would have struck down all of the NFA or only that part that was in question.
This opinion lad to the passage of many more gun control laws. The first challenges failed. In general these laws were passed where the government felt like they were “a good idea”. The district courts were often leaned the same way, and it wasn’t uncommon for the circuit court to also lean in the same directions.
This lead to many cases being dismissed for lack of standing. The lower courts ruled that because the second amendment referred to militia and since the person in question was not a member of the militia, then the 2nd amendment did not apply to the challenger. It went so far as to some states passing anti-militia laws.
The second method used was “level of scrutiny”. The gist is that yes, the law infringes on the second amendment but it is balanced by the needs of the government. In the eyes of the lower courts, an infringement was constitutional if the government said that it was needed for a good cause.
This lead to “you don’t need an AR-15 so it is constitutional to ban them.” and “You need to show good cause before you can have permission to have a gun at your premise” and “As long as we let you buy SOME guns it is ok to ban the rest of them.”
During this time, the different states worked hard to keep those few cases that did have standing in the courts eyes from making it to the Supreme Court. The state might fight tooth and nail through the appeals process claiming that people would die and the streets would run red with blood if their infringement wasn’t allowed to stand. And if they lost at the circuit court level they would look at what might happen if the case was heard by the Supreme Court and go, “you know what, good fight, you won.”
This lead to the interesting situation where it was sometimes better for the state to lose at the circuit court level because that gave them control of the appeal.
This started to change with Heller. In Heller the Supreme Court ruled that the second amendment was an individual right, not a right reserved for the militia which was now the national guard which was now the states police powers.
Heller was challenging D.C.’s law that banned the carrying of an unregistered firearm, even within the home. And that any resident of D.C. that did lawfully own a firearm had to keep it unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock. Because D.C. would not allow him to register a firearm Heller could not legally carry it, even in his own home.
The district court dismissed the case. It was appealed and the Second Circuit court ruled that the DC ban was, indeed, unconstitutional. Amazingly DC appealed to the Supreme court which heard the case and ruled in favor of Heller.
1. The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. Pp. 2–53.
(a) The Amendment’s prefatory clause announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative clause. The operative clause’s text and history demonstrate that it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms. Pp. 2–22.
This was the end of courts dismissing 2A cases for lack of standing.
Shortly thereafter the Court heard McDonald. This case stopped “no issue”.
Still the courts continued to use means-end balancing which allowed anti-gun states to pass infringements and then justify those infringements because government knows best how to keep you safe. Remember, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away.
Bruen was the end of the two stage analysis.
(1) Since Heller and McDonald, the Courts of Appeals have developed a “two-step” framework for analyzing Second Amendment challenges that combines history with means-end scrutiny. The Court rejects that two-part approach as having one step too many. Step one is broadly consistent with Heller, which demands a test rooted in the Second Amendment’s text, as informed by history. But Heller and McDonald do not support a second step that applies means-end scrutiny in the Second Amendment context. Heller’s methodology centered on constitutional text and history. It did not invoke any means-end test such as strict or intermediate scrutiny, and it expressly rejected any interest-balancing inquiry akin to intermediate scrutiny. Pp. 9–15
The states and the courts as well as many gun rights organizations have responded to this major change in precedent. GOA, FPC and other organizations have filed suits to overturn long standing laws. In some cases governmental entities have stepped up and made changes to laws, regulations and procedures to bring them in line with the Bruen decision.
The response from the infringers has been interesting, to say the least.
The responses fall into a number of categories:
Along with the states going in this direction, there have been a few court cases that have not gone as expected and these are things to keep an eye on.
In the Central District of California Judge George H Wu states that the plain text of the second amendment “plainly does not” cover the “self-manufacture of firearms”.
The goal here is to create a carve out from the second amendment. To do as much as possible to limit what is covered by the 2nd.
In addition the state of Maryland is arguing that there were historic bans on particularly dangerous weapons.
Others are arguing that the date to consider for “tradition” of firearm restrictions should be the late 1800’s with the passage of the 14th amendment rather than 1791 when the second amendment was ratified.
We need to stay vigilant to how the infringers are going to manipulate language and meaning to continue to infringe.
And we can expect the anti-gun courts to slow walk any decisions that are made.
Jim drove his cart over to Bill’s farm. He had a hundred bails of hay stacked in the back. When he got to Bill’s farm Bill’s son unloaded the hay and Bill gave Jim an IOU for 200 pounds of wheat.
Jim thanked Bill and headed off to town. When he got to town he went to the blacksmith to have his mare’s shoes replaced. He gave the IOU from Bill for 200 pounds of wheat to the blacksmith. The blacksmith handed him 3 IOU’s from Bill for 50 pounds each of wheat.
Jim thanked the blacksmith and headed over to the general store. There he picked up a bolt of cloth for his wife a box of 50 rounds of .45 Colt, and 50 pounds of flour. He handed the store clerk to of Bill’s 50 pound IOU’s. The clerk gave him back a 20 pound IOU and a 5 pound IOU.
Jim headed back home.
He had just traded 5000 pounds of hay for new shoes for his mare, cloth for his wife, cartridges for his pistol, flour for his food and he still had 1875 pounds of hay in his pocket.
Money is just a token used to indicate a certain amount of value. The value of that token is set by the trust of the people using that token.
In our example, Bill has promised that he will exchange any of his IOUs for the face value in wheat grain. In this he has set the value.
The blacksmith didn’t need or want hay or grain. He wants a pig to turn into food. He can trade the IOUs he got from Jim to some pig farmer in exchange for a pig. At no time did he have to transfer large bulky goods.
The blacksmith is mostly trading his time for the IOUs. He is selling his labor. The general store is selling convenience and storage in exchange for IOUs
The general store uses some form of barter or trade, including Bill’s IOUs, to purchase things that he doesn’t need in order to store them in his store. Since he has limited shelf space he can’t have everything. He is investing his wealth into his stock. While that stock is sitting on the shelves or warehouse he can’t use it for anything else.
The general store is also trading wealth for transportation. They are paying to have goods transported from where they are available to the store for resale.
If you have ever gone into a hardware store to purchase just a couple of bolts, screws or nuts, you are paying for that storage. The store has thousands of dollars invested in that stock of every type of nut, bolt, washer, and screw that normal people could want.
But what happens if Bill dies and his wife and children just up and go. Are Bill’s IOUs worth anything at that point?
Yes. They are worth exactly what people believe they are worth. If anybody else wants to match the face value in pounds of wheat then those IOUs are stable in value.
Even if nobody is willing to trade a 20# IOU for 20# of wheat, those IOUs still have value. It might be the case that instead of getting 20# of wheat for a 20# IOU you can only get 10# of wheat. Is the IOU worth less?
Maybe not. If you can still get your horse shoed for a 50# IOU and you can still get cartridges, cloth and flour from the general store with Bill’s IOUs, then they still have value.
The difference is that the value of Bill’s IOUs are no longer backed with physical wheat. It is backed by the concept of value assigned by each person that uses those IOUs to exchange wealth.
Here are some of the problems though, if Bill’s IOUs can be faked, counterfeited, then there is the possibility for bad actors to create IOUs without adding value to the system. To many counterfeit IOUs and the value of the IOUs will drop, as will the trust in those IOUs.
It is also possible for Bill to create more IOUs than he has grain to back. As long as everybody believes that the IOUs are backed by actual wheat, this doesn’t matter. As soon as people understand that Bill just creates more IOUs when he wants to buy something they will start to distrust his IOUs. This is inflation.
All money is, is a token to indicate value. That token holds that value as long as people believe in the token and as long as IOUs are not being injected into the economy with no added value. I.e. counterfeiting and printing them.
We’ve started a weekly link dump at the suggestion of some of our readers from last week.
A couple of longish articles went out.
The goal of this blog remains the same, to bring attention to gun related issues, to have a platform for our passions, to talk about things of value to this community.
We are actively seeking more articles from you our members. Send them in and we’ll see if they can be published.
What articles did you see this week that were of particular interest to you?
Do you have any links to stories you’d like us to look at?