Fractional Reserve Banking: Unimportant or Unrighteous?

French toast for breakfast!  Who doesn’t love the appetizing aroma and delicious flavor?   Of course we need a few ingredients before we can have our pile of steaming goodness in the shape of French toast.  Bread, eggs, and milk – later on, butter and syrup – all need to be available for our ideal breakfast, and in the right quantities.  When was the last time you were able to create ten slices of French toast out of one slice of bread?  For that matter, when was the last time you were able to use one of anything to produce ten of the same?  You may not have that kind of power but, surprisingly, there is someone just around the corner who does.  When a bank accepts a deposit and then loans it out, it actually creates additional money out of nothing!  This practice (which we will explain in more detail in the next paragraph) is called fractional reserve banking.  But creating money with a few clicks of a mouse is a power that does not come without strings attached.  It has economically undesirable consequences and even moral implications that need to be considered.  Sadly, these often go completely under the radar.

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Airborne Chicken

   It is not often that I condescend to meddle with those conceited, cackling nuisances of a bird species, commonly called chickens; but when I do, I always regret it heartily for at least three days.  They’re all very well, lying serenely on your plate with a nice, crispy coating over them, but in any other way, shape, or form, chickens have ever been my mortal foes.

   We live on a five acre hobby farm with twenty chickens or so running loose, free to amble up and stare you out of countenance as you go innocently about your business, leaving moreover small but revolting traps across the yard.  To crown it all, they have a distinct tendency – especially on those days when we’d stayed up laughing and joking until the wee hours of the morning – to crow and squawk and cackle directly beneath my window at sunrise… Continue reading “Airborne Chicken” →

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The Affordable Care Act, Calorie Labeling, and You

                “Every year our government adds thousands and thousands of pages of new rules,” John Stossel stated in his TV special, War on the Little Guy.   Now a new regulation is scheduled to go into effect – one that FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg says “will help consumers make informed choices for themselves and their families.”  Vending machine operators that run more than twenty machines must post calorie counts (when not otherwise visible before purchase) for sale items.  This rule, buried in the 2010 Affordable Care Act, is to go into full effect July 26th, 2018 – it took the FDA four years just to spell out a regulation that would fulfil the ACA’s provisions.  In fact, their final ruling even regulates “type size, color, and contrast requirements for calorie declarations in or on the vending machines.”   While this regulation will clearly have costs for the industries it affects, the FDA contends that it will “enable consumers to make informed and healthful dietary choices.”  It sounds fantastic!  Operators spend a little on calorie labels, and now all vending machine consumers can be healthy!  Is this the case?  Do the benefits really outweigh the costs?

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