A New High (Or Should That Be Low?) In Government Incompetence?

One of the central tasks of government in the 21st century is to arrange for a stable and secure circulation of money. This is true of every government in every country in the world - except Scotland, which curiously has no government-sanctioned paper banknotes, only notes issued by seven retail banks. If the perception arises that the government can't issue money in a competent, trustworthy fashion, people will have to take refuge in other items of value. Fortunately, such a collapse of a nation's currency only happens in countries like Zimbabwe, where hyper-inflation has completely destabilized the Zimbabwe Dollar, which is now no longer issued at all. Most other countries, especially those in the West, are still to be trusted to supply secure money.

One of the few powers explicitly handed to the American Federal Government by the Constitution is "To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures" (Article 1, section 8, paragraph 5). So what should we make of the following news?

"Because of a problem with the presses, the federal government has shut down production of its flashy new $100 bills, and has quarantined more than 1 billion of them -- more than 10 percent of all existing U.S. cash -- in a vault in Fort Worth, Texas."

This is incompetence of a degree rarely seen at this high, powerful level of government. In order to make banknotes safer, it has made them so safe that they cannot be circulated at all. And this at the grand, total cost of $120 million and with all the notes together representing a value of $110 billion.

And this ought to have consequences for the American Fed's second attempt at quantitative easing (QE2). Quantative easing involves pumping money into the economy to lower long-term interest rates, usually by buying debt, an analogue to printing money. But this failure to actually print that money should give us pause at the Fed's or the government's ability to accomplish their goal. Unless this is a deliberate mistake to undermine trust in the value of the dollar, thereby stimulating inflation and perhaps lowering interest rates. But I'm not knowledgeable of economics to know whether this would work or not. What I am sure of is that Barack Obama is not nearly clever and dastardly enough to pull of such a Nixonian deception. So it seems that this money printing debacle is just incompetence, plain and simple.

Espionage, Not Whistleblowing

I haven't blogged in the last week due to real life stuff that needed to be done and in the course of that week I decided to let the whole Wikileaks mania pass by without comment. I didn't really see the big deal about learning that Silvio Berlusconi is a womanizer and that Nicolas Sarkozy is an arrogant, aspiring Napoleon and that Vladimir (Batman) Putin is the real overlord of mafia-invested Russia and not Dmitry (Robin) Medvedev. Not really worthy of shouty headlines, we knew it all already.

But today, the new Aussie messiah of the internet-age, Julian Assange, from his hideout somewhere in the English home counties, has fired a broadside at the United States that defies silence. By releasing documents detailing facilities "vital to US security" he has crossed from part-time whistleblower to freelance espionage. What good does it do the free world to know that the US and Western Europe rely on a pipeline junction in Siberia for most of their natural gas and that critical Trans-Atlantic communications cables come ashore (Dutch language alert) in Katwijk and Beverwijk? Are we less free for not knowing all this?

By revealing these things, Mr. Assange and the rest of the Wikileaks crew are in fact making us less free by handing knowledge of how to threaten us to people who will gladly use that knowledge for their own nefarious purposes. If terrorists manage to strike at that pipeline junction or at facilities that make desperately-needed vaccines for typhoid or rabies, or - God forbid - get their hands on smallpox samples being used in a lab in Denmark, they can easily hold the free world at ransom or simply destroy things for destructions sake. And this does not just concern Islamic terrorists, but also anarchists in Western Europe and nationalist or communist radicals in Russia. In a dangerous world like ours, ignorance - and I hate to say this as a truth-seeking historian - sometimes truly is bliss. We sometimes need secret keepers to stand silent on the ramparts, aware of things that might terrify us and keep us awake at night.

Mr. Assange can now no longer hide behind the cover of whistleblowing. Releasing these latest cables would, in time of war, have been called aiding and abetting the enemy: a treasonable offence. Mr. Assange is in luck that he is not a US citizen, so he can hardly commit treason against that country, but he might well be charged with espionage, and he would do well to stay in hiding if he wants to remain free. Yet as far as I'm concerned, if he believes in the freedom and the importance of the word, he would give himself up now and, if required, go to the United States to face the consequences of his actions. If a brave man speaks up for what he believes in, he does not cower in the shadows afterwards, but advances "to the muzzles of guns with / perfect nonchalance!"