My Favorite Books

Stained Glass
Witness
Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography
The Iliad
James
Sense and Sensibility
Pride and Prejudice
The Fellowship of the Ring
The Hobbit: Or There and Back Again
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster
Animal Farm
Doctrine of Endless Punishment
Marco Polo, If You Can
Who's on First
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
1984
The Hunt for Red October
A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows through Loss


Bill Peacock's favorite books »

Links

Spring Cleaning and Free Stuff

Since we are experiencing an early spring, we did some cleaning this week at the Peacock household. As a result, we have a few items we’d like to give away-most of it things for babies/small children. First come, first served. We’ve been blessed through the years by folks giving us things we’ve been able to use for William and John, so we’d like to return the favor. The only thing we ask is if you are ever finished with it, please pass it along to someone who can use it. Here we go:

Continue reading Spring Cleaning and Free Stuff

Inflation, Money Creation, and the Gold Standard

“In a social order that is entirely founded on the use of money and in which all accounting is done in terms of money, the destruction of the monetary system means nothing less than the destruction of the basis of all exchange.” – Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, p. 202.

In a recent email chain, some of my friends said the gold standard was crazy and wrote of the need for the Federal Reserve to manage our money supply—relying on appeals to “experts” to make their case. I wrote the following to try explain the problem with central banking. I hope you find it informative:

The fact that most economists and “experts” think returning to the gold standard to be crazy should be another reason to support such a move, given the competence of most economists these days.

But lest I rely too heavily on ad hominem attacks against them to make my case, let’s look at the facts.

Continue reading Inflation, Money Creation, and the Gold Standard

Economic Freedom and Quality of Life

Today’s Digest

The Right Kind of Bright in Your Eyes

Doug Wilson gave the commencement speech to the graduating class of New Covenant Schools. Lots of good stuff, here is a sample:

Scripture teaches us that to the pure all things are pure. To the defiled, all things are defiled. The principle can and should be extended. To the dullard all things are dull. One of the central reasons why G.K. Chesterton is such a wonderful thinker and writer is that he had the gift of making us see how extraordinary all ordinary things are. He would cock his head sideways and describe the living room from that vantage, and all of us would learn new things about a place where we had lived for years. The simpleton thinks that ordinary things are ordinary. The faux-mystic drops some acid—a weird custom you may have heard about in your history classes—in order to find out that extraordinary visions are extraordinary. But only a healthy soul can see how remarkable every unremarkable thing actually is.

Continue reading Today’s Digest

Rick Perry for President?

Yesterday morning, the Wall Street Journal ran an article, New Whispers of Perry 2012 Bid:

But over the past two weeks, political advisers and friends say, Mr. Perry has changed his tune on a possible presidential campaign. In private conversations, they say, the three-term governor said he worries that the current GOP contenders have yet to stir real excitement within the party and may struggle when facing President Barack Obama. “He thinks there is a void [in the current field of candidates], and that he might be uniquely positioned to fill that void,” said one Perry

A key point made in the story was, “Members of Mr. Perry’s still-extant group of campaign consultants say there is little chance he would embark on a 2012 campaign without Messrs. Carney and Johnson at his side.” Carney and Johnson are veteran Perry campaign staff. One of my coworkers said, “The last sentence is the most important one in the piece.”

Then, about 2 p.m. yesterday, this story hit the AP and the Drudge report: AP sources: Senior aides on Gingrich presidential campaign resign en masse. That was it, nothing else.

Later on, the WSJ wrote more:

Newt Gingrich’s campaign manager and top aides resigned en masse Thursday, a remarkable setback that could prove fatal to a presidential run that has stumbled from the outset. The departures followed a week of heated debate within the Gingrich camp over whether the Republican former House speaker was sufficiently committed to his long-shot political comeback more than 13 years after he resigned from Congress.

The resignations included the aforementioned Messrs. Carney and Johnson. So, of course, Austin is all atwitter over the prospects of a Perry candidacy. And Gov. Perry helped things get moving when he recently said “he planned to ‘think about’ a presidential run after the Memorial Day weekend. He added, with a smile, ‘But I think about a lot of things.’”

When I came home last night, I mentioned all this to William. Here is a recap of our conversation:

Daddy: Gov. Perry might run for president.

William: I hope he wins.

Daddy: What do you think he’ll do if he is elected?

William: I think he will lower taxes and give back our money that the government took from us. What do you think he will do?

Daddy: I think he will tell the government to stop taking our property.

William: The government won’t like that.

Happy 100th Birthday Ronald Reagan

“I never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference: it was the content. I wasn’t a great communicator, but I communicated great things.” – Ronald Reagan, in his Jan. 11, 1989 farewell address to the American people (text)



“The biggest misunderstanding about Reagan’s political life is that he was inevitable. He was not. He had to fight for every inch, he had to make it happen. What Billy Herndon said of Abraham Lincoln was true of Reagan too: He had within him, always, a ceaseless little engine of ambition. He was good at not showing it, as was Lincoln, but it was there. He was knowingly in the greatness game, at least from 1976, when he tried to take down a sitting president of his own party.” – Peggy Noonan, in her column on Ronald Reagan during this season of his 100th birthday celebration.


“We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, “Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters.”” – Ronald Reagan, in his October 27, 1964 “Time for Choosing” speech


“Reagan understood instinctively that modern liberalism represented a rejection of the constitutional premises of self-government. … Hence the core of Reagan’s political purpose was recovering an appreciation for the Founder’s understanding of the principles and practices of American government. This was central to his rhetoric to a much greater extent than it was to that of any other modern day president of either party. … ‘We’re for limited government,’ he said in his 1988 State of the Union speech, ‘because we understand, as the Founding Fathers did, that it is the best way of ensuring personal liberty and empowering the individual so that every American of every race and region share fully in the flowering of American prosperity and freedom.’” – Steven F. Hayward, in The Age of Reagan, 1980-1989: The Conservative Counterrevolution.

Continue reading Happy 100th Birthday Ronald Reagan

Creativity–A Gift from God

Fox News reports that the city of Taunton, Massachusetts is considering the use of eminent domain  to save some manufacturing jobs:

When the Haskon Aerospace plant in Taunton, Mass. shut down in October 100 workers lost their jobs. Many had worked at the facility for decades, making seals and gaskets for aircraft.

City leaders are considering an unusual measure to save the plant, which has been a staple in the community for 80 years, operating under the umbrellas of numerous corporate entities over the decades.

The Taunton City Council is exploring the possibility of exercising the power of eminent domain to take the machinery away from the parent company, Bellevue, Wash. based Esterline. The city would pay a fair price to prevent the equipment from being sold at an auction scheduled for December 14.

Former Haskon workers hope to raise the capital to buy it and run an employee owned operation or find a new corporation to take over the business.

A coworker of mine noted the creativity of this endeavor. I agree with him. In fact, governments area full of very bright, very creative people. So it never surprises me to see actions like this in government because God created man in His image and endowed all people–government employees as well–with a measure of His creativity to use when they face challenges. Normally, in a free market, the employment of that creativity works out to  the benefit of all because all the property and effort used in the process is voluntary. Not so in this case, where the government will use theft to supply the needed resources to carry out this project.

Creativity is a beautiful gift from God, but just like with all of His gifts, we are required to use them wisely for His glory and our good.

Desperate Republicans Turn to Kidnapping to Solve Policy Problems

“Some in Congress “have been holding hostage” American policy until there is an “agreement of 100 percent.” – House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.

“Is Senator Kyl holding New START hostage to tax cuts?” – Adam Serwer, Washignton Post

“Every one of us…[is] being held hostage by 42 Republican senators.” CNN’s Eliot Spitzer

“The White House accused Republicans today of… of holding unemployment checks hostage.” – New York Daily News

“The politically motivated strategy of holding unemployment checks hostage until Democrats will cave on GOP demands to extend tax breaks for the richest 2% of Americans will mean at least 2 million people go penniless this holiday season.” – Kenneth R. Bazinet

“The Republicans essentially want to keep those tax cuts hostage until there is exactly the same action on upper income tax cuts.” – Rep. Sander Levin, Marc’s cousin????

“Republicans are holding them hostage, with a ransom demand of tax cuts for the nation’s richest 1 percent. If the GOP doesn’t get what it wants, 2 million will lose unemployment insurance by year’s end.” – The Hill’s Leo Gerard

“Republican insurrectionists take Congress hostage over tax cuts for the two percenters.” Tucson Citizen.com

“The Republicans there are holding this hostage. That has been the sad story of this session. The Republicans are banding together and trying to starve every piece of legislation.” – Rep. John Tierney

“I don’t know what’s worse, that Republicans held the Start treaty hostage to get lower tax rates, or that we let them do it.” – A senior Democratic Senate aide, speaking on condition of anonymity

Quotes of the Day

“Democrats have produced historic legislation in the area of … cutting taxes for 95 percent of the American people and millions of small businesses. And we have restored fiscal discipline to the Congress. … Numerous congressional experts call this the most productive Congress in a half century. This was only possible because our Members had the courage of their convictions and put the interests of the Country first. … We have no intention of allowing our great achievements to be rolled back. It is my hope that we can work in a bipartisan way to create jobs and strengthen the middle class.” – Nancy Pelosi, in a letter to House Democrats announcing her intention to run for “House Democratic Leader” (most of us would call it Minority Leader).

“Over the course of two years we were so busy and so focused on getting a bunch of stuff done that we stopped paying attention to the fact that leadership isn’t just legislation, that it’s a matter of persuading people and giving them confidence and bringing them together and setting a tone and making an argument that people can understand. We haven’t always been successful at that, and I take personal responsibility for that and it’s something that I’ve got to examine carefully as I go forward.” – President Barack Obama, on 60 Minutes Sunday night.

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.” – Cool Hand Luke, from the 1967 movie of the same name starring Paul Newman.

Some Bipartisan Humor

It isn’t fair that Democrats are getting all of the criticism: