Month: July 2018

I have been reading, well listening as an Audiobook, Thomas Sowell’s “Basic Economics.”

Just finished a very interesting section.  Back in the 19th century, bulk shipping of goods was expensive.  As a result, it was difficult (read expensive) for stores close enough to enough to be accessible to customers for whom the height of personal transportation was a horse-drawn buggy to keep in stock all the things their customers might want.  To fill this void the mail order giant Montgomery Ward arose.  Sears followed suit.  People could look through their extensive catalogs of everything from petticoats to shotguns and have them shipped to them.

These two merchantile giants thrived for a long time on that model.  But times changed.  The urbanization started changing the face of the American economic landscape.

Enter James Cash Penney.  Working as a store clerk in a dry goods store called Golden Rule.  In 1902, he joined a partnership with the owners of Golden Rule to start his own store under his own name.  He soon had two more stores and bought out his erstwhile partners in 1907.  By 1912 he had 34 stores in the Rocky Mountain States.

In addition to urbanization, other innovations were changing the American economic landscape:  the affordable automobile.  The Model T went into production in 1908.  With the automobile it became more convenient for people to buy from a local store–which need not be so close as it had to be when one is limited to a horse and buggy–and so each store could serve a greater area.  More widespread bulk transportation in the form of burgeoning railroads made it cheaper to keep inventory in those stores.  This became more attractive to many people than paging through a catalog, making an order, and waiting for the product to be shipped to them.

Thus began the spread of the “Department Store”.  First Sears, then Montgomery Ward were forced to open their own department stores to keep up. (And both merchants, over the years, have had their struggles with Montgomery Ward closing its stores in 2000.) During this time other department stores such as KMart got their start and grew–and some fell.  Along the way, a clerk in a J. C. Penney store by the name of Sam Walton went into business for himself and…

One of the keys of all this was that each step of the way it was the consumers that benefited.  Given the difficulties of travel and transportation combined with relatively low population densities local stores could only serve a relatively small population.  With such a small customer base, the cost of providing everything those customers, who could have widely different desires, might want would be prohibitive.  It was a lot cheaper for Montgomery Ward and Sears to keep all those varied products in one big warehouse and simply provide paper catalogs to their customers.

Then, as population grew.  Larger cities became more common.  More people had motorized transportation meaning they could venture farther for their shopping.  Individual stores could reach more customers.  And with more customers per store, the stores sold more making keeping a larger and more varied inventory practical.  And, so, instead of having to look something up in a catalog, send an order across the country and wait for the product to make its slow way back to them, customers could drive to the nearby store and pick up what they want right there.  More goods available to them at prices every bit as good as the catalogs available immediately.

But, again, things were changing in the background.  A huge Interstate road system was developed.  Air travel became ubiquitous.  Travel by jet aircraft, once the province of the very rich (dubbed the “jet set”) became the default mode of long distance travel.  These same, or related, aircraft carried cargo to the point where the massive effort of the Berlin Airlift would be a drop compared to the business of any large airport.  Courier services arose promising to deliver packages anywhere in the United States overnight.  Promising and delivering.

And so at the approaching dawn of the 21st century, a vendor started selling books online.  People would browse an online catalog, select books, and have the books shipped to their homes or businesses.  The business rapidly expanded including other products until eventually the selection dwarfed the old Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs.  Only instead of the slow delivery times provided by 19th and early 20th century transportation, products are delivered within a few days, sometimes even the same day.  Other vendors–Target and Walmart as example and perhaps mindful of the struggles and difficulties old vendors such as Sears and Montgomery Ward faced–set up their own online shopping services.  Indeed, Montgomery Ward, which closed its stores in 2000, relaunched as an online vendor in 2004.

And once again, the consumers benefit.  Enormous selection of products to meet the many and varied desires of the populace delivered quickly at low prices.  And while Amazon remains the giant in that field, as JCPenney was in its and Montgomery Ward in its,  they will remain so only until someone comes up with a new model dealing with changing conditions.  When that happens, perhaps Amazon will adapt quickly and continue, or perhaps not.

Regardless, when the next change happens, provided its allowed to happen and not stifled by excessive government restriction, the consumers will be the ones who benefit.

Short one today. (Listening to Sowell’s “Basic Economics” on audiobook so economics has been on my mind lately.)

People who want to “redistribute wealth” talk about the poor and people in poverty and we need to redistribute poverty to end that.  There’s only one problem:  it doesn’t work.

In 2016, the Gross World Product was just under $75.5 trillion dollars.   That sounds like a lot of money.  There’s just one problem.  In 2016 the world population* was just under 7.5 billion people.

If you redistributed all the money from all those business transactions to all the people that’s right around $10,000 for the year.  By American standards, that just means that everyone would be in poverty.

Congratulations, you haven’t redistributed wealth, you’ve redistributed poverty.

Now, most redistribution doesn’t call for complete leveling of income but that illustrates the underlying fallacy of redistribution to solve “poverty”:  there is simply no way to redistribute existing wealth that does not leave at least the vast majority of the human race living in poverty.   None.  It can’t be done, not that way.

If one wants to better the lot of mankind and end “poverty” (or, since poverty is actually a moving target, at least raise what we call “poverty” to something like we would call middle class today) it has to be another way.

Fortunately, there is another way.  Economic growth.  The pie is not fixed. (Do you really think the average person in 1750 when the population was less than 10% what it is today was 10 times as wealthy as the average person today?) And the one thing, more than any other, that spurs economic growth is economic freedom.  This unleashes the creative energies of that entire 7.5 billion people in seeking to better their own lives.  Some will fail.  Some will succeed.  Some will succeed wildly.  Others will see the ones succeeding wildly and copy them.  And the ones who failed, if they’re at all smart, will either catch a ride on the coattails of someone succeeding or try something else and keep trying until they succeed.

There will still be “poor”, as they count it.  But if we could look forward we would shake our heads in amazement at the people complaining about what to us is the wealth of Midas. (As I illustrated in a look backward.)

So, please, if you really want to help the poor, go out and start making that metaphorical pie.  Or at the very least, get out of the way of those that are.

*I’m not sure I believe those population numbers.   After all, for many locations there is a distinct incentive to over-report population numbers.  Higher populations mean more political influence or more money to the location.  There is not, however, any incentive to under-report population.  Thus, I suspect the number is high, but the basic principle remains even though the details may be off.

Last time we left carpenter turned capitalist John retired, with his capital passed on to his son John Jr.

This time we take a look at John Sr’s old workshop.  It’s still sitting there.  John Jr. could go into that workshop and start doing carpentry.  That’s one measure of the value of that workshop sitting there.  Another is that he could simply sell it and let someone else worry about doing the carpentry.  But there’s a third possibility.  Someone, let’s call him Andre, approaches him.  Andre wants to do carpentry but Andre doesn’t have any tools or workshop.  Andre could, in principle build his own workshop and acquire his own tools but there’s this one John Jr. has.  So he suggests John Jr. let him work in it.

There’s just one thing.  By letting Andre use the workshop John Jr. is denied any other benefit he could obtain from that workshop whether selling it–intact or parted out–or working in it himself, or even selling tickets for people to come see John Sr. the Famous Plane Maker’s first workshop.  Whatever would get him the most benefit, that’s what he’s denied by letting Andre work there.  Reasonably, then, John Jr. can justly demand recompense for that loss either in a straight fee (Andre basically rents the facility in the same way folk rented John Sr’s planes) or he can perhaps work out some other deal, perhaps some small portion of each sale would be passed on to John Jr.

In the latter deal, John would be investing in Andre’s carpentry business.  And it’s entirely valid that John be paid for this because he’s providing the means, the capital, for Andre to do his carpentry and generate an income.  By investing in Andre’s business, he’s denying himself whatever other benefit he could have obtained from that capital and deserves compensation for that.

Let’s suppose Andre, as it happens turns out to be a pretty good carpenter and gets lots of business.  He needs a bigger shop.  He could take the time and effort to build the shop (denying himself paying work in the meantime).  This is just the same thing I discussed yesterday with John Sr. and his first plane, only on a more comprehensive scale.  The principle is the same.  But another thing he could do is go to John Jr. and have John Jr. provide the expansion facilities.  And, John goes and finds somebody who can build the expansion and pays that person.  But in so doing once again, John is deprived of whatever benefit he could have gained from the resources he expends–both in the time and effort he spends and that he pays to the one doing the work–and deserves compensation for it.  This can be either a straight payment up front or a portion of future sales from the carpentry business.

Andre now has a bigger shop, and more work than he can handle.  So he finds Billy.  Billy is a carpenter too (lots of carpenters in this town–probably have a large export business with all this carpentry, or maybe it’s just a really fast growing place with lots of new construction).  Andre suggests that Billy work in his newly enlarged shop.  All Billy has to do is the work that’s provided for him.  He doesn’t have to go find customers.  He doesn’t have to negotiate prices for work.  He doesn’t have to make sure customers pay or have to deal with collections when the customers are slow in paying.  He makes the pieces and gets paid for it.  Andre does all that other stuff.  But, since Andre is doing that, he’s not doing other things that could be making him an income.  He’s losing on his personal income by doing that work that permits Billy to have an income.  So, to compensate him for that, he keeps a bit of the pay from each carpentry project (and John, by providing the facilities, keeps a bit too).

Soon Andre has a dozen carpenters working for him and isn’t doing any carpentry himself.  Instead, he’s doing all the things that let those carpenters focus on their carpentry.  And his little bit, from each of the carpenters working for him, may add up to more than any one carpenter’s income.

Billy, sees that he’s doing the carpentry and Andre is not, and notes that Andre is making more money than him and, frustrated, decides to leave and set up in business for himself.  Then he wouldn’t have to share any of his income with the “useless” manager, Andre, and the “parasitic” investor, John.  There’s just one problem.  Billy now has to do all the things Andre and John did.  He has to provide his own tools and work space.  He has to obtain his own materials.  He has to find customers, deal with setting prices, and collect payment.  And unless he’s better at those tasks than Andre and John were, he’s likely to find that he’s actually making less than if he were in the workshop (factory in fact) owned by John and run by Andre.

So the same principles that applied to John Sr. and his plane apply to John Jr. and his factory.  And it’s entirely proper that the people providing capital, the means of production, be compensated based on whatever benefit they could obtain through alternate uses of that capital.  And the people managing capital be compensated based not on the “labor” they provide but on the value they bring to the enterprise.

 

This is my own telling of one of Frederic Bastiat’s essays.  I like it because it makes clear, why those to provide capital–the means of production–are entirely justified in receiving ongoing recompense for providing that well beyond.

Suppose there was a rough carpenter, let’s call him John.  He makes a certain amount of money in a year from his work.  John, however, decides that if he could do finer, more finished, work he could make more than he has before with which he can provide his family with a few more luxuries.  The key that John needs to do this is a plane for smoothing his work and preparing it for the more exacting tasks of sanding and the like.  A tool something like this:

So, this being the case, John sets out to make himself a plane (for purposes of this exercise we’re presuming that everything is done by individual craftsmen, there are no factories.  We’ll get to what factories do to the situation in another post).  To do this, he takes some time off from his carpentry, foregoing the income he could otherwise be making but he grits his teeth and accepts that because once the plane is done he’ll be able to make more money and putting off a bit now for future gain is worth it to John who understands the concept of deferred gratification.

So, after some days, call it ten, John has his plane.  That plane has cost him what he could otherwise have made in those 10 days.  He is out ten days of income, but in return for that he has a plane.

Before John another rough carpenter, call him Karl, comes up to John and sees that plane.  He has the same idea as John, that with it he could make more money.  So Karl asks John to loan him the plane for a year.  At the end of that year Karl will return the plane–with any damage completely repaired so it’s in exactly the same condition as when he received it–for John to use.

Sounds fair, right?  At the end of the year John is out nothing.

Except John is out something.  He is out what he could have made with his carpentry if he had use of the plane.  The deferred gratification of working for something that will make him more down the road is one thing.  Deferring gratification still further for nothing?  That’s a whole different ballgame.

There is only one way that Karl can get the use of that plane for a year (I mean, other than stealing it):  that’s to offer John not just the plane back at the end of the year, but something additional to recompense John for not having use of the plane for that year.  Now it need not be all that John could have made using the plane.  After all, John isn’t having to do the work with it either.  And, of course, if Karl is just giving to John all the extra the plane provides to him, well, he’s not going to want to make that deal.  But somewhere between those two extremes they can come to an agreement.

The plane, in this case is Capital.  It is a means of production, specifically a means to produce finer, more “finished” carpentry than that provided just by hammers and saws.  And the one providing the Capital receiving compensation for providing it is only right and proper.

Now, let’s continue a bit.  Once John makes the deal with Karl, instead of going back to his rough carpentry, he makes another plane.  Because he’s done it before, the new one only takes him eight days to make.  When he’s done with this one, another carpenter, call him Edward, approaches him to make a deal like Karl’s.  John, of course, is willing, on the same terms as his deal with Karl.  Now, this might seem unfair since it only took him eight days to make this one while it took ten to make the one he rented to Karl but there are two things:  by loaning out the plane he’s giving up the same value from what he could do with the plane and Edward is gaining the same value from having use of it.  Indeed, the cost of producing the plane was completely left out of the deal with Karl, only the loss of use of that plane was considered.  So the deal is made and John goes back to making his next plane.

In the end, if there are enough rough carpenters out there looking to upgrade to doing more fine work, John soon finds that he is making his income entirely by providing planes to these other carpenters.  And everyone benefits from it.  John benefits because his return from providing means of production to the carpenters supplies his income.  The carpenters benefit from producing more value because they have access to these means of production.  They could produce their own planes as well, sure, but that would involve that up-front expenditure of time and effort and, well, it’s just easier and cheaper for them to continue paying rent to John.  And, finally, there’s more fine carpentry work available for people to obtain and appreciate.

And, when their yearly rental is done, Karl et al still want to do their fine carpentry so they continue the rentals.

And, of course, if John decides to charge too much for plane rental, why then Karl, or Edward, or any of the other carpenters (or even not carpenters) decides to make their own plane and before you know it John has a competitor.

Now, in the end, John dies and passes the ownership of all these rented out planes to his son John Jr.  After all, they’re his property and he can do what he wants with it.  John Jr., who never was a carpenter to begin with, continues to rent out the planes to all the carpenters.  And even though the person who is providing the means of production has no personal use for those means (not a carpenter) he is still providing the same value as John Sr. did.  The carpenters benefit from having a means of production provided for them  rather than have them do that for themselves.

This, then, is the essence of Capitalism.

I’ve had a few over the years.  Not many because, frankly, I’m not big enough to come to the attention of most reviewers.  Still, the question sometimes arises “what do I do when I get a bad review.”  The usual advice is to ignore it or even be grateful for a review (a number of writer friends of mine report getting about the same bump in sales from a bad review as they get for a good one).

Still, sometimes that’s not enough and one feels the need to do somethingmore.

Isaac Asimov had a method of dealing with bad reviews.

• Write a clever, witty, rebuttal to the review that discusses the reviewers lack of intelligence and breeding in the most scathing of terms.
• Read over your rebuttal.  Chortle over the best bits.
• Share the rebuttal with your significant other.  Laugh together over how thoroughly you skewered the reviewer.
• Print it on 100% rag paper.  Fold it neatly into thirds.
• Put the rebuttal into a #10 business envelope.  Address it to the reviewer.  Put a stamp on it.
• Tear it up and throw it away because you’ve gotten all the benefit you’re ever going to get out of it.

I heartily endorse this method.

Way back when then Presidential Candidate Donald Trump started talking about imposing tariffs I went into full facepalm mode.  Economically, tariffs are bad news.  They are a net drain on the economy.  “Protectionist” tariffs at best help a few at the expense of the many.

Let me expand on that a bit.  Take for instance iron.  A nation, call it Industria, can produce iron internally at, oh, 100 ID (Industria Dollars) per ton.  Another nation, call it Ferria, can produce iron, and ship it to Industria, at 80 ID per ton.  This makes the ironworkers (and the owners of iron producing businesses) very unhappy since either nobody buys their iron and they go out of business, or they have to find some way to match Ferria’s price.  This usually means making more with less which among other things means letting a lot of the former ironworkers go–much to their displeasure.

Enter the President of Industria.  He imposes a 20 ID per ton tariff on imported iron.  Now Ferria iron costs just as much as Industria iron.  And there was much rejoicing among iron workers and iron producing business owners.

All is good, right?

Not really.  This is what is seen.  There’s a flip side the “unseen” that Frederic Bastiat spent much time talking about.  By imposing that Tariff, the President of Industria has saved the iron making industry and lots of jobs.  But he’s done so by depriving every user of iron of the lower cost iron that Ferria would have made available.  That means everything that is made of iron and steel, everything that’s built with iron and steel machinery, everything that’s transported over iron rails, in iron and steel vehicles will cost more.  The iron workers were “saved” at the price of higher costs and lower standards of living for everyone else.  That part is “unseen” but it is nevertheless real.

Economically, there really isn’t any good justification for tariffs.

However, I have found reason to moderate my initial reaction to Trump’s talk of tariffs because while there’s no good economic justification, there can be other justifications. (Indeed, Bastiat makes that very argument–that there can be valid reasons for tariffs and other taxes, just not reasons based on economics.)

One of the reasons falls under national security.  If a nation allows itself to become entirely dependent on foreign supply of materials and industries critical to its defense, that nation is vulnerable to having that supply cut off.  In an ideal world every nation would recognize that it is in its own interest to trade freely on the open market in all these goods.  If they have a scarce resource that trade allows them to obtain the goods and services that make up the wealth of nations.  If one nation can produce goods more cheaply than another, it is in the other nations interest to trade for the cheaper goods in exchange for things the other nation cannot produce so cheaply.  In a free trade environment, everyone benefits.

The problem is, we don’t live in an ideal world.  Nations can make decisions based on things other than sound economic principles.  They may decide they are more interested in hurting you by depriving you of a resource they have than they are in reaping the benefit of that resource.  So, one needs to either have sufficient stockpiles of the critical goods to carry through a conflict, or to have the ability to produce those goods domestically, even if not as cheaply as a competitor.  An that may require a tariff on the competitor’s goods to support certain critical industries.

Another case where tariff’s might be of value is retaliatory.  If a nation has imposed tariffs on your nations goods, it might be valid to impose tariffs in rebuttal.  Ideally, the goal is to convince the other nation that tariffs to restrain trade are a bad idea and get them to the negotiating table so that you can eliminate tariffs entirely.  That may or may not work and you can end in a trade war that hurts everybody so extreme caution must be taken in when and where to use retaliatory tariffs.  But in the right circumstances, they can be valid.

And that is why I have had to moderate my position on President Trump’s proposed tariffs.  Other nations are starting to respond with suggestions of reducing or eliminating existing tariffs on American goods, which, if implemented, will have the benefit of encouraging trade generating more wealth and increasing the goods and services that make up the wealth of a nation available to people not just in the US, but in her trading partners.  A true win-win scenario.

As for the worries about a trade war?  We were already in one.  We just weren’t fighting back.

This is a topic I’ve spoken on before but a slightly different tack this time.

I am not a “believer” in the religious sense. That said, I recognize that a need for ritual and symbolism, a need to find “greater meaning” in things–or impose a meaning if one can’t find it–on the world. I resolve these two by following a religious “tradition” wehre the core is not belief, but actions which doesn’t care about “belief” so much as ones actions–Asatru, Germanic/Norse paganism.  I like the delightful term a friend of mine coined “agnostipagan.”

Actually it’s not really a tradition, or perhaps it is simply a very young tradition.  Very little record of the ancient belief and practice (commonly referred to as The Lore) has survived to the modern day, and much of that filtered through a very few authors who were not above altering the tales to fit their own views.  So those who seek to follow it are left with the task of creating a religion largely from whole cloth with only a few “bones” of the old beliefs to use as a guide.  But the important point for me is that the surviving records do suggest that the gods, if they exist don’t care what one believes but rather what one does.  To use a common oversimplification, die courageously in battle and go to Valhalla (or Folkvangr–Freyja gets half the warriors); don’t die courageously in battle and end up in Helheim.  (I have seen considerable dissent–some justified by the surviving Lore–as to just how hard and fast that rule is; and some discussion that there are quite a few other places one may end up and that the “heaven or hell” dichotomy may have been a creation of Christian recorders of the Lore.)

The upshot is that I can use it as a place to satisfy the innate human need for ritual and symbolism without the need to believe.  It has an ethos I find congenial with the “Nine Noble Virtues” (discussed elsewhere on this blog–not found in the Lore, but many modern Asatru use as a distillation of traits the gods are seen to value in that Lore).  If I were instead to try to fill that need via Christianity, I’d run afoul of the fact that the central tenet of Christianity is belief, is faith.  It’s summed up in John 3:16:

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

As a non-believer, the hypocrisy of pretending would trip me up and, well, it just wouldn’t work.

So, I chose a path which fills a hard-wired need of the human psyche for ritual, symbolism, and to put the experience of the world into a larger context.  I do so with the full knowledge that the meaning may exist only in my mind, but in a path where that’s okay.

A lot of problems come, I think, when people try to deny this hard-wired need as part of their disbelief in traditional religion.  They reject, justly or otherwise (I leave that to each individual to decide) “religion” (in specific or in general) and in so doing attempt to reject, at least consciously, the need for ritual and symbolism.

That need, however, will out, one way or another. And a common way it comes out is the deification of the State (with Marx as its prophet). And, since they are denying the religious nature of the need, why their new source of ritual, symbolism and meaning must be “rational” and “scientific” and everyone who disagrees is thus a benighted fool–an uneducated hick at best or more likely an actual worker of evil.

And, with “reason” and “science” on their side (It Says Here^TM) why anything they do, no matter how heinous, is justified to bring “enlightenment” to the rest of us.

This may explain much of the political violence of the last few years.

This is a bit different from a previous recipe which, while it seemed find at first, I ended up finding a little dry.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup butter, softened

2 eggs

2 cups Splenda brand sweetener or equivalent.

2 cups unsweetened flake coconut

1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

1 Tbsp vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F

Cream the butter and eggs together.  Add in the other ingredients and stir until well mixed.

Spread parchment paper on a cookie sheet.  Drop small balls of the coconut mix by spoonfuls, about 2 inches apart.  Flatten the balls slightly.

Bake at 325 for 12-15 minutes.

Let the cookies cool for a few minutes before transferring to an airtight container.

Enjoy.

 

Frederic Bastiat wrote about “The Seen and the Unseen”, essentially describing what economists call “opportunity cost”.  What this means is that while you can see the effect of money being spent–as in the case of money spent to fix a broken window (the classic example) puts money in the glazier’s pocket which he can then go and do other things with, what you don’t see is what else the person might have done with that money if he hadn’t had to fix that broken window.  Once you start looking deeper at those things, a different picture emerges.  The person, instead of fixing the window (since it’s not broken) buys a new suit of clothes, and the clothier then goes and does other things and…the upshot is the economy is ahead by one suit of clothes over the broken window case. (This is called “The Broken Window Fallacy”–look it up.)

The same principle applies in fields other than economics.  Take, for instance, what happens any time a high-profile crime (especially when the crime involves guns, but it doesn’t have to be) and people call for more “gun control” and the argument is “don’t you care about (the victims of that crime).”

Yes, I do care about the victims of those crimes.  But that is the “seen”.  I also care about the “unseen.” I care about the little girl whose father was accosted on the way home but whose attackers fled on seeing that the father was armed.  I care that she wasn’t rendered fatherless, or at the very least her father’s ability to provide for her reduced.  I care about the woman who was not raped because she was able to pull a gun on her putative rapist.  I care about not just the patrons and employees of a store not robbed because an employee or customer was armed; not just them but all the future patrons and employees of other stores that will not be robbed because that robber was stopped.  I care about the neighborhoods that riots diverted around, and the people living in them, because people living in them, armed people, presented a clear message of “this line you do not cross.”

I care about the hundreds to thousands of times (minimum) every day that crimes do not happen because people are armed for their own protection.

But these are the “unseen.” News doesn’t report “crimes that never happen.” People who aren’t robbed or raped or victims of battery often do not report the crime that didn’t happen to the police.  People alive, healthy, unmolested because they’re armed.  A “silent population” that doesn’t make headlines.

That these things are often not reported present a difficulty to attempts to study the phenomenon.  At the very low end, a survey of crime victims, we get numbers like 70,000 per year.  The problem with that one is that, again, it’s only the “seen”:  crime victims.  People who were not victims, who never reported the incident, usually where simply presenting the gun causes the criminals to flee, are excluded by its very nature.  So it’s going to be low.  But even there that’s twice as many people defending themselves with guns as being killed by people using guns.  And if we exclude suicides (the presence of a gun may affect choice of method; it does not render a non-suicidal person suddenly suicidal) it’s 4-5 times as many as are murdered with guns.

Most studies, which attempt to quantify the number of gun uses including those not reported to the police produce estimates ranging from 500,000 to a high of 3 million every year.  Even at the low end that’s better than half again as many as the total number of guns being used to commit crimes (300,000 for the year in 2008–and, incidentally violent crime in general and crime committed using firearms is down from 2008’s levels.  See the chart I generated here.)

This is the great unseen, not just because it’s not obvious without careful thought and study, but because the people who are publicly wringing their hands over the latest atrocity and using it to stampede you into agreeing with their political demands don’t want you to see it.  They’re purposely silent on this other side and, indeed, belittling those supporting it, playing the “don’t you care…” game.

So when people put up pictures of the latest atrocity up on your screens and asking “don’t you care” remember the others, the people you don’t see, the people who are able to go about their lives safe and unmolested that those putting the pictures up would have you forget.