–Don’t amputate the federal budget; never again amputate a leg

Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
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The July/August issue of DISCOVER magazine contained an amazing article titled, “The Healing Power Within,” by Adam Piore. Here is the revealing subtitle:

A remarkable substance extracted from pig guts enables the body to regenerate lost muscle tissue. Next up: Pioneer Stephen Badylak is working on treatments that would allow patients to regrow entire limbs.

Think of it: “ . . . regrow entire limbs.” Science fiction? Here are a few more excerpts:

The strange sensation in his right thigh muscle began as a faint pulse. Slowly, surely it was becoming more pronounced. Some people would have thought it impossible. But Corporal Isaias Hernandez could feel his quadriceps getting stronger. The muscle was growing back. . .Generally, people never recovered from wounds like his. Flying debris had ripped off nearly 70 percent of Hernandez’s right thigh muscle . . . Remove enough of any muscle and you might as well lose the whole limb, the chances of regeneration are so remote. The body kicks into survival mode, pastes the wound over with scar tissue, and leaves you to limp along for life.

The article goes on to explain how pig tissue was inserted into the muscle, and some miracle ingredient in the tissue made the muscle regenerate. Then began a long, difficult search for exactly what substance caused this effect.

Researchers thought that rather than the pig tissue itself, the magical properties were in the structural scaffolding that holds tissue together; it’s called extracellular matrix (ECM). After a great deal of experimentation, it was found that the scaffolding actually disappears during regeneration, so something in the scaffolding must be doing the job. It turns out that components called “cryptic peptides” caused the adjacent tissue to create stem cells – those basic cells embryos use to create all the various tissues in our body, from bone to organ to blood – and these stem cells were creating the missing muscle tissue.

I can’t do the article justice in this short post. You should buy a copy of DISCOVER and read the article yourself. There is however one paragraph I must share with you:

The challenge now is replicating Hernandez’s success in other patients. The U.S. Department of Defense, which received a congressional windfall of $80 million to research regeneration medicine in 2008, is funding a team of scientists based at the University of Pittsburgh’s McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine to oversee an 80-patient study of ECM at five institutions. The scientists will attempt to use the material to regenerate the muscle of patients who have lost at least 40 percent of a particular muscle group, an amount so devastating to limb function that it often leads doctors to perform an amputation.

That $80 million is one of the myriad initiatives the federal government funds every year – initiatives that are invisible to the voters who wish for a smaller government – initiatives without which thousands of benefits would not accrue to the American public – initiatives without which Corporal Hernanzez would not have a working leg..

If the government were not to spend that $80 million, and the regenerative research were not done, none of us in the public would be any the wiser. We would not know muscle and limb regeneration were possible, much less happening. The loss of those $80 million seemingly would be harmless.

There is an important lesson in all this, a lesson ignored in the headlong rush to reduce government: The federal government funds thousands of activities to benefit us, activities that never would occur without federal dollars, activities we never even would know existed. So when someone says to cut federal spending in any federal department, neither they, nor anyone else, knows what actually is being cut. Your children’s and grandchildren’s lives could be adversely affected, and you would be none the wiser.

Sure there is federal waste (though even wasteful spending is economically stimulative). Sure the government can be dishonest, clumsy, overbearing and dictatorial. Sure, the federal government does things each of us dislikes (though others may like).

But on balance, we need government support for thousands upon thousands of products and services that provide our loved ones and us with a better life. We give thanks for our plentiful and clean food and pure water, our safe air travel, our roads, our insured bank deposits, our vaccines and medicines, our safe borders and the untold numbers of valuable research projects, all provided by the federal government, and all at no cost to us.

(Yes, at no cost, because federal taxes do not pay for federal spending. In a Monetarily Sovereign nation, federal government spending is free to its residents.)

There is a hidden, though tragically real, penalty for meat-cleaver cuts to the federal budget and the refusal to increase the so-called “debt ceiling.” The penalty is a meaner, crueler, shorter, less safe life for each of us. No one can point specifically to what will be lost. But this you must know: Cutting federal spending will make your life worse.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
http://www.rodgermitchell.com

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No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth. It’s been 40 years since the U.S. became Monetary Sovereign, , and neither Congress, nor the President, nor the Fed, nor the vast majority of economists and economics bloggers, nor the preponderance of the media, nor the most famous educational institutions, nor the Nobel committee, nor the International Monetary Fund have yet acquired even the slightest notion of what that means.

Remember that the next time you’re tempted to ask a teenager, “What were you thinking?” He’s liable to respond, “Pretty much what your generation was thinking when it ruined my future.”

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY