President Biden recently repeated the claim that high prices are caused by greedy businesses. Biden is not alone in trying to gaslight the people into thinking price inflation is rooted in the actions of private individuals and not the fiat money system Americans have lived under since 1971.

In the media, we see excessive consumer spending on luxury items, for example, being blamed for continued price inflation. The fact is that increased consumer demand can only cause prices to rise in those sectors of the economy subject to the increased demand. Prices increasing across the economy are always the result of the Federal Reserve’s conduct of monetary policy.

Trying to minimize the harm of inflation, some people in government and media will insist that, while many prices for goods are higher than they were pre-lockdown, they are still lower than were prices in the 1990s when you consider that the quality of these goods has increased. The argument is that buyers are getting higher value today than 30 years ago. Of course, any increased quality is because of market-driven innovation. If America had a free-market monetary system instead of central bank-controlled fiat currency, prices would drop as quality increases.

It is also important not to ignore the fact that the Federal Reserve’s devaluation of the dollar’s purchasing power creates an incentive for individuals to spend money as soon as they receive it and a disincentive for them to save. This is because the dollar will have less value a year from now than today. Therefore, high levels of spending are a rational response to an irrational fiat money system.

High prices and supply shortages were inevitable after the lockdowns. However, prices would have adjusted back more if the Federal Reserve had not pushed interest rates to zero. While the Fed has raised interest rates, it has not raised rates to anywhere near where they would likely be in a free market. In fact, rates are not at historically high levels, yet many worry the Fed’s rate increases are pushing the economy toward a recession. This shows how addicted Americans are to the Fed’s “easy money,”

When the dollar’s purchasing power erodes, workers will seek higher wages. This is why periods of high price inflation are accompanied by strikes and other types of union activity aimed at increasing wages. This has made unions another popular scapegoat for price inflation when the truth is that Fed-caused price increases are the real reasons behind labor unrest.

Sadly, the increase in nominal wages gained by the recent series of strikes is unlikely to keep up with the declining real wages resulting from the Federal Reserve’s assault on the dollar’s value. This is why, contrary to the claims of many progressives, working people are the victims, not the beneficiaries, of price inflation. As a Texas union official once told me, “Gold has always been the friend of the worker.” This makes sense because gold is money whose value cannot be manipulated by the central bank.

Inflation is the act of money creation by the Fed, and high prices are a symptom of inflation, not a cause, and not the fault of greedy businesses, consumers, and unions. The Federal Reserve is also the engine of the welfare-warfare state. Therefore, to restore a system of limited government, individual liberty, and free markets, Congress must cut spending and audit, then end the Fed.

 

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HB1291 reduces the power of our consistently anti-liberty zoning boards to write anti-liberty rules where there is no basis. A typical town’s 1.8-acre minimum lot size has been justified by the scarcity of water and septic capacity and was adopted in an era of poorer understanding and technology.

HB1291 simply limits the ability of town zoning to impose this restriction when water and sewer are not an issue. The previous bill freed lots that are on town water and sewer; the current bill frees those lots, plus lots for which engineering ensures adequate water and septic capacity. That is not exactly “HB44 on steroids,” as the Coalition of NH Taxpayers claimed here on Saturday.

I did check the bill’s sponsors, as that article requested. One is my own Representative, Josh Yokela, rated 100% and Legislator of the Year by the NH Liberty Alliance. Another is nearby Scott Wallace (93.8%, grade A), for whom I have voted. Even prime sponsor Ellen Read (27.1%) is not quite rated a Constitutional Threat.

The text of the bill, as introduced, is available on the General Court website. That version does not permit minimum-acreage lots to be “chopped up” into four lots, as the CNHT article states. It permits one “accessory dwelling unit” as a matter of right and one more subject to the usual restrictions for subdivisions, including “aesthetic standards,” but only as applied to ordinary lots.

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The conflict between zoning and liberty plays out across the state. I hung out with some sign carriers outside the polls a couple of years ago and was astonished to be arguing for liberty AGAINST my comrades. You see, a landowner here is planning a huge subdivision of riverfront condos. (“He’s not even from New Hampshire,” my homies whisper.) The development will have a drastic impact on traffic and on our “rural character,” as development always does. So the goal of local “conservatives” is to use our gunpoint apparatus to shut the flatlander down: to deny him his preferred use of what is his land, no matter if he recently bought it to develop it.

New Hampshire’s unaffordable housing is legend and is caused by insufficient supply to meet demand, driving up home prices and rents. The key reason we can’t meet demand is municipal regulation. HB1291 limits this regulation in cases where it is clearly senseless. It is a dainty amendment of RSA 674:71. I would instead have taken a chainsaw to a power originally granted to protect against contaminating adjacent water but now corrupted to let town busybodies dictate “aesthetic standards.”

And lack of “affordable workforce housing” has been deemed a “crisis,” and towns are now required to ensure that they provide a suitable amount, now written into law (RSA 674:58). That’s a big-government solution to the problem. HB1291 is a small-government solution.

Preserving the “rural character” of a town is a value. It’s not everyone’s value. My town has a board that uses tax money to achieve “conservation” – and another board tasked to lure new business. A politician’s “vision” for a town or the state should always face a key question: Do we have to make this decision as a collective? Do we have to have a single “vision” and use the threat of armed force to restrain nonconformists?

And how does restraining town zoning boards become a key issue for a “taxpayer coalition” at all? Ah yes, the newcomers, certainly illegals from Brazil with twelve kids apiece, will burden our government schools. But this is a consequence of New Hampshire providing free instruction as an entitlement. Declaring something a right, with its price set to zero, results in overuse and calls to and by conservatives to regulate unrelated things that might drive up the cost of providing that “right” – just as “free health care” gave Washington a rationale to punish unhealthy lifestyles.

Who should decide? In this case, the landowner should decide. That is the essence and the huge benefit of having private property.

 

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Man Made Global Climate disasters have an annoying habit of not happening. The predictions of experts never come to pass. And that’s great for blogging. One sad tale of demise we are particularly fond of is the disappearing beaches.

 

In 1995, 2500 experts got together and decided they could make a comfortable living if they said things like in 25 years, “most of the beaches on the East Coast would be gone.”

 

Tony Heller uses Jones Beach on Long Island as his example, showing satellite photos from 1994 and 2023. The beach looks bigger today than before the doomsday predictions. We prefer the shoreline closer to home. Hampton Beach is a top-shelf, well-maintained strip of sand. It’s clean, and it’s still there. It hasn’t shrunk at all, not since 1995 or, as we showed here, 1950.

 

Hampton Beach, NH shoreline 1950 Hampton Beach High Tide 2020 For educational use only

 

My wife made a few trips this past summer and assures me it’s the same beach she’s been visiting since she was a child. The prediction wasn’t just bad or wrong; we’re three years past the end of East Coast beaches, and there’s not only no there there, but there might be more there than in 1995. A result common when considering the armageddon predicted by those who – predictably – have a fiscal interest in precipitated fear.

We also spent a lot of time boating over Portsmouth Way and out into the ocean, and high tide or low, and there is zero evidence of the apocalypse predicted by the Climate Cult or the myriad globalist beneficiaries of those fears.

It’s a scam. An expensive one. And it is not going away unless we make it so.

 

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