Friday, March 8, 2013

To Build up the Land part III – The Myth of Overpopulation

3/4/2013 Portland, Oregon – Pop in your mints...

We return to the series that started earlier this month, “To Build up the Land.”  If you need to refresh yourself, please take time to read the first two segments by clicking the links below:

To Build up the Land – part I

To Build up the Land part II – Maintaining the Peace

It has been so long even your easily distracted author had to do a bit of review!

It is common in modern day urban environments to lament the lack of open spaces.  Living in structures that are surrounded by other structures and spending time overcrowded streets or public transportation systems tends to solidify the perception that there are too many people in one’s immediate environment.  The feeling is completely normal and understandable.  What is not normal is to wish evil or impose limitations on others because of this perception, for a sober look at the data suggests that, while one’s immediate surroundings may appear to be hopelessly overpopulated, the earth continues to suffer from chronic under population, or a lack of people willing to build up the land, in the parlance of Old Jules.

The answer, then, to a personal state of dissatisfaction with a perceived state of local overpopulation is to remove oneself from the overpopulated environment to a lower density locale.

There is no doubt that the world today is more populated than at any other time in its brief history.  There is also no doubt that increasingly, mankind struggles to adequately nourish itself.  It is an error, however, to blindly assume that an increased population is the root cause of relative shortages of food and potable water.  It is equally erroneous to assume that there are limits to what the land can produce.

In Old Jules’ day, the Sandhills of Northwestern Nebraska were harsh and relatively uninhabited.  Old Jules recognized this as a problem.  Untamed land is largely unproductive land.  The land requires men and women to interact with it so that it will produce fruit and, in turn, allow the men and women to produce their own fruit, so to speak, and so on.

Old Jules, like many inhabitants of what Nabokov called the “Rotting old world,” or Europe, had come to America either in pursuit of greater opportunities or in flight from what was decrease of opportunities in Europe.  This phenomenon was most notable in England, as the Industrial Revolution brought about an exponential improvement in general living conditions and life expectancies, it also brought a population boom which overwhelmed the British Isle.  It was there that the idea of overpopulation bloomed.

As war seemed to grip Europe from time to time, it seemed that the continent was suffering from an overpopulation as well.  However, this feeling had nothing to do with actual scarcity of land.  It was, rather, a result of the various wars, socialist policies, and other acts of aggression which hindered man’s ability to build up the land to its full potential in Europe.

For this reason, during the 1800′s and continuing, in many respects, through today, the greatest immigration known to man has been taking place on both the Northern and Southern Hemisphere of the Americas.

The land was harsh and virgin yet, with a bit of luck and help from neighbors such as Old Jules, those who braved the frontier found an abundance of both resources and freedom beyond their wildest dreams.

What is surprising, or perhaps not, is that this untamed frontier produced not a chaos of fiefdoms waging war against one another, but rather gave birth to perhaps the most honest and upstanding society that exists on the face of the earth.  It is a society largely untainted by the banes of urban existence.  It is a society that understands that the planet, far from having an overpopulation problem, suffers from a lack of people willing to roll up their sleeves and build up the land.

To encourage and help people to choose to build up the land has proven difficult, especially in the aftermath of the farm crisis of the 1970s and 80s in America.  The crisis, which was largely the result of the sinkhole left in the money supply by erratic Federal Reserve policy, left thousands of family farms in ruin.

Even in Old Jules’ day, it was difficult.  It required someone who had a vision for the land and could see past the allure of temporary personal gain so that both the people and the land could carry on their productive intercourse.

Again, we pick up with Mari Sandoz in Old Jules describing Jules’ efforts to assist homesteaders to take advantage of the Kinkaid Act of 1904, an amendment to the original Homesteaders act passed in the 1860′s.  Jules had hoped that the act would reign in the cattlemen and bring in the people that the land so desperately needed to build it up:
“In the evening Jules, rifle across his arm, limped about among the newcomers and felt young again.  It was like Valentine {Nebraska} in the eighties, but different too – many more people and not so young, not nearly so young   Many of these were old – defeated men…
“…The day of the opening long queues of homeseekers waited for hours, only to find that even the sad choice of land that was free had been filed earlier in the day.  There was talk of cattleman agents who made up baskets full of filing papers beforehand and ran them through the first thing.  One woman was said to have filed on forty sections, under forty names, at five dollars a shot.  The land was covered by filings that would never turn into farms.  Yes, the Kinkaid Act as a cattleman law, as it was intended to be……
“Nevertheless Jules was busy.  His buckskin team, colts of Old Daisy, threaded in and out between the hills.  In six months, all unoccupied filings would be subject to contest.  For twenty-five dollars Jules showed the land, ascertained the numbers, took the settler to Alliance to the land office, helped him make his filings, and later, when he was ready to fence, surveyed the homestead completely.  If the homeseeker found nothing to please him, there was no charge.  Otherwise, Jules pocketed the twenty-five dollar fee……
“And every few days some land agent or attorney from, say, Chicago suggested that Jules charge fifty or a hundred dollars and give him a fourth or half of the fee for steering prospects to him.  Jules stuck his cob pipe between his bearded lips and threw the letters into the wood box.
“I am not in this business for the money.  I’m trying to build up the country.”
At the end of this discourse, Old Jules pins down the crux of the matter.  If one is in pursuit of money, overpopulation will always be a problem.  Money, as the good of highest order, is indirectly sought but all, and each additional person on the planet represents another competitor. This is an inescapable fact of the rigid debt based money supply of today.

However, if one’s aim is to build up the land, as was the case with Old Jules, they will quickly see that the truth of the matter, which the failure of the debt based money supply, as do all socialist machinations, serves to mask, is that money really does grow on well tended trees, and what is truly lacking are men and women brave enough to perform their conjugal duty to the land.

For without it, both the land and mankind will grow frigid, and the earth will become a cold and desolate place indeed.

more to come…

Stay tuned and

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Budgeting Healthy Habits: How to get the Dough you Knead has arrived

2/28/2013 Portland, Oregon – Pop in your mints…

Our latest E-book offering:  Budgeting Healthy Habits: How to get the Dough you Knead, has shipped and will soon arrive on digital shelves across the Internet.

More than a book on personal finance and budgeting, it is a collection of our personal finance tips told through a bakery metaphor.  It is now available and can be enjoyed with a coffee and danish on Smashwords, Amazon’s Kindle, and Google Books.

As an added bonus for visiting our page here at The Mint, you can download a sample budget spreadsheet in Excel format to help you to implement some of the tips here:

SAMPLE BUDGET

Dough: An introduction

dough -/dō/- noun -1. A thick, malleable mixture of flour and liquid, used for baking into bread or pastry. 2. Money: “lots of dough”.


Dough.  Unless you work in a bakery or pizza parlor, you probably can’t get enough of it.  As we began to elaborate this current volume, which, at its base, is a presentation of our unconventional budget tips, we knew that it would be necessary to employ a metaphor to keep fellow bakers, who have any number of demands upon their time beyond budgeting, or seeking out metaphors, for that matter, engaged long enough to revolutionize their approach to money, which in turn will give them time to knead dough, ponder metaphors, compose run on sentences, or indulge any number of whims which may be germinating in the dark recesses of their minds at this very moment.
 
Budgeting Healthy Habits: How to get the Dough you Knead
Budgeting Healthy Habits: How to get the Dough you Knead

Most of the human race spends the better part of their waking moments either doing something or wondering what they should be doing.  Human action is an ultimate given, and, as the band Rush reminds us in their early 80′s smash, Freewill,

“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”

The choices available to most of us are limited to the amount of dough that we have available or lack at any given moment.  This goal of this volume is to equip you, fellow baker, to dominate your dough situation and bake the loaves, pastries, or crusts in the style and quantities necessary to satiate your desires.  If we are fortunate, this volume will convince you that the key to happiness is in helping others, however, this is a hypothesis that must be proved by personal experience, and is not the central theme.


The central theme is dough, more precisely, how to manage your dough.  If you have been searching for information on budgeting and personal finance for any amount of time, we don’t have to tell you that there is an exhaustive amount of material available, and finding good advice that fits your situation, is can be as rare as finding a butcher, baker, and candlestick maker together these days.

With this in mind, we present these healthy habits as morsels on a platter.  You may choose to scarf them down in one sitting, which will undoubtedly shock your organism into convulsions, or you can take them in, one at a time, savoring each one while giving your organism adequate time to digest it, maintaining the nutrients and eliminating the waste through the proper channels.

The organism we speak of is your personal or family economy, which in this volume we refer to as the bakery, for all of us are cooking up one thing or another.  We recommend that you treat your bakery with the utmost of care.  This volume is designed to give you the tools to do just that.  If properly used in just the right proportions, these tips will help to ensure that everything you cook up will come out just right.

Stay tuned and Trust Jesus.

Stay Fresh!

David Mint

Email: davidminteconomics@gmail.com

Key Indicators for February 28, 2013

Copper Price per Lb: $3.53
Oil Price per Barrel:  $91.83
Corn Price per Bushel:  $7.19
10 Yr US Treasury Bond:  1.89%
FED Target Rate:  0.14%  ON AUTOPILOT, THE FED IS DEAD!
Gold Price Per Ounce:  $1,580 THE GOLD RUSH IS STILL ON!
MINT Perceived Target Rate*:  0.25%
Unemployment Rate:  7.9%
Inflation Rate (CPI):  0.0%
Dow Jones Industrial Average:  14,054
M1 Monetary Base:  $2,421,800,000,000 LOTS OF DOUGH ON THE STREET!
M2 Monetary Base:  $10,412,400,000,000