How the Ethanol Mandate is Destroying America’s Prairies

Many years ago, I wrote an article on the research of Cornell University professor David Pimentel.

Pimentel, a geneticist and evolutionary biologist, claimed it takes more energy to produce ethanol from corn than the combustion of ethanol yields. Because of this fundamental input-yield problem, corn is a really lousy crop for making ethanol, Pimentel said.

This seemed to me like a bit of a problem. After all, about 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop is used to make ethanol. There seemed a certain madness in spending billions of taxpayer dollars on subsidies to turn our food into fuel, especially when many people around the world go hungry. Alas, my article on Pimentel’s research was not well received. I was living in Iowa at the time (aka the Corn State), where ideas critical of corn or ethanol are, to many, a form of local heresy.

I bring all this up because of an article I read in Investor’s Business Daily last week. Here is what it said:

“America's long war on fossil fuels is destroying the famed American prairie.

According to a report by the Organic Consumers Association, 95% of the 240 million acres of prairie land that once blanketed the middle of our country, from Texas to North Dakota, already is gone. Only isolated pockets of prairie tall grass, some 35 million acres set aside for soil and wildlife conservation, remain. And that — largely in the Great Plains — is at risk of being destroyed.

Among the factors most responsible for this tragic loss of our prairie heritage is the federal renewable fuel standard, a congressional mandate requiring refiners to mix renewable fuel (mostly corn-based ethanol) with U.S. gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and heating oil products.”

It's a stunning development. But one person unlikely to be surprised by these result is Pimentel. He predicted this course more than a decade and a half ago.

"Abusing our precious croplands to grow corn for an energy-inefficient process that yields low-grade automobile fuel amounts to unsustainable, subsidized food burning," he told the Cornell Chronicle in 2001.

What’s strange is that conservative and liberal thinkers for years now have generally agreed that the federal government’s ethanol regulations have been a disaster—both to the environment and the economy.

Still, the regulations persist; they have merely changed. Federal ethanol subsidies were allowed to expire in 2011 to great fanfare. Corn farmers hardly cared because by that time the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) (established under George W. Bush) had created an artificial, government-guaranteed demand for corn that kept prices high.  As Kevin Drum of Mother Jones wrote: the subsidies are not gone; they are just better hidden.

If ethanol mandates are as harmful as both many liberal and conservative thinkers claim, how do they persist? I suspect it comes down to the world’s second oldest profession: money politics.

As the EPA chart below shows, the RFS requires 25 billion gallons of renewable fuel to be blended into transportation fuel in 2017, an amount that will only increase from year to year until 2022. 

That creates a lot of demand, and high demand means high prices for growers, who are organized and know how to lobby lawmakers.

The IBD article says “kicking the ethanol habit should be as much of a no-brainer as buckling up before starting a car.” This sentence assumes, of course, that reason still governs in our nation’s capital. Time will tell.  

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[Image Credit: By PD-USGov-Interior-FWS [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons​]

This post How the Ethanol Mandate is Destroying America’s Prairies was originally published on Intellectual Takeout by Jon Miltimore.

The Market's Glorious Resurrection of Mystery Science Theater 3000

Almost 20 years after being canceled, comedy series Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) has returned.

During its original run in the 90s, MST3K earned a cult following by doing what pop culture does best, namely, taking a mundane idea and elevating it to an art form.

For MST3K, the idea was to build a show around a favorite pastime of movie fans: mocking cheesy movies. The concept seems simple today, but thirty years ago it was groundbreaking, all the more so because the cast of MST3K was really good at it. Yet despite winning many fans, the show was never a favorite of the networks that aired it, which were often unsatisfied with the ratings and therefore eager to control its creative direction.

The revival of MST3K is a testament to the devotion of “MiSTies” around the world. But it’s more than that: it’s also a way to explain how markets work, and other economic science facts.

Crowdfunding Puts Consumers in Control

First, entrepreneurs can use markets to satisfy our most mysterious, scientific, and theatrical wants. In the case of MST3K, there wasn’t an obvious desire for a new season, and certainly not enough to attract the attention of the major networks. There seemed to be only a small, devoted, and mostly decentralized fan base that lacked a clear way to signal the value of a revival to investors.

Yet there actually was enough support, but the producers needed the market to show it. That’s why they turned to crowdfunding to gauge interest in the project. Rather than waste time and money cold-calling networks looking for investments, creator Joel Hodgson and his team asked the fans to vote with their wallets.

And so they did: the “Bring Back MST3K” Kickstarter campaign, launched in November 2015, and shattered many previous fundraising records, ultimately grossing over $5.7 million. Eighteen months later, the fans have season 11, this time via Netflix.

Privately Funding the Arts

Like Kickstarter, Netflix is closer to a free-market model than many of the oversized networks that dominate the industry. These privileged, cartelized companies are increasingly threatened by platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime, which have largely succeeded by taking big risks on seemingly obscure or impossible projects.

Second, the success of the MST3K Kickstarter hints at a deeper point: the arts can be privately funded. When people are convinced an artistic venture has merit, they’re happy to support it—and most art forms require far less investment than a TV show.

Entrepreneurs excel at finding an audience, however niche or dispersed, and the arts are no exception. Crowdfunding can even provide public goods. But too often, calls for public funding of the arts are calls for art that doesn’t create value for anyone but the artists. Of course, public organizations do fund some art projects that appeal to large audiences, but to the extent that those audiences feel strongly about them, they should be willing to support them. There’s no need to force others to pay and then funnel the money through a public bureaucracy first.

Third, using the market to fund the arts benefits creators and audiences, and hurts no one. People support MST3K because they love it. But people who don’t like the show aren’t obliged to pitch in, or even to pay attention, much less sacrifice to their money or viewing time to a show that doesn’t interest them. Contrast this to public programming such as PBS, which delivers one-size-fits-all content at taxpayer expense. That’s the beauty of the market: it doesn’t punish people for having different tastes. My enjoyment of a show like MST3K doesn’t stop others from enjoying art that they like. Publicly-funded art, on the other hand, always involves favoring some tastes at the expense of others.

The Market is the Ultimate Judge

Finally, the market is uncertain. Even successful entrepreneurs can’t be sure consumers will always want what they have to offer. And the fact is, MST3K’s return is not by itself a signal of success: we have to wait and see if fans continue to watch and support the show and if it can capture a new audience, to know whether their money was well-spent.

The creative minds behind the show are bearing this uncertainty, and will profit or lose according to the strength of their artistic judgments—ultimately, the market makes it possible for entrepreneurs to create value, but it can’t guarantee it.

The return of MST3K is a great example of the democracy of the market. And it’s only one of many shows to be resurrected after an untimely cancellation. These revivals are a way for fans to get more of what they love, but they’re also good for artists, who get another chance to create art the way they want.

Welcome back, Mystery Science Theater 3000!

Matthew McCaffrey

Matthew McCaffrey is assistant professor of enterprise at the University of Manchester and editor of Libertarian Papers.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

You Are Here Gallup asked Americans why they go to church. It’s not for the music.

On Good Friday, Gallup published results of a survey that asked respondents why they go to church (or some other place of worship).

Some fifteen hundred adults across the nation were asked to which degree these seven things were important to them:

1. Sermons or talks that teach you more about scripture;

2. Sermons or lectures that help you connect religion to your own life;

3. Spiritual programs geared toward children and teens;

4. Community outreach and volunteer opportunities;

5. Religious leaders who are interesting and inspiring;

6. Social activities that allow you to get to know people;

7.  A good choir, praise band, cantors or other spiritual music.

As one can see from the results below, respondents identified sermons as the primary factor they go to church.

In fact, more than nine out of ten respondents said the sermon—both to learn about scripture and to help connect religion to one’s own life—was a factor in their decision to attend religious service; three in four respondents said it was a "major factor" they attend.



What ranked last? Music. Just 38 percent said it was a major factor for them.

I found this last item amusing, surprising, and telling. A lifelong Protestant, I grew up in a small-town Pentecostal church. Since that time, I’ve mostly been a free agent, playing the field for numerous other evangelical teams—Baptist, Lutheran, non-denominational, and probably other denominations I can’t remember. (My excuse for this lack of religious fidelity: I moved a lot.)

Each church, to one degree or another, had different theologies, religious dogmas, and social protocols. But the one thing they had in common: lots of music. I mean lots of it.

Some of the music was good; much of it, in my opinion, was less than good. Regardless of the quality of the music or the talent of the performers, attendees were of course expected to worship God to the music and be deeply moved.

Between me, you, and the internet—I never liked this part of church very much. This is not the fault of the performers. I’m simply not a hip-swaying, hand-waving guy. I saw Florence and the Machine live last year; I was the one guy in the Xcel Energy Center who never budged.

I bring all this up because I’ve always assumed evangelical churches feature music heavily because that’s what people want and demand. But this Gallup poll suggests that might not be the case.

The poll made me wonder: When and why did music became such a prominent part of evangelical services? And are these churches missing out by focusing on music at the expense of other aspects of church life?

I suspect the former question might be linked to the increasing need for people in our culture to be entertained.

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other," Neil Postman famously wrote in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. "They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images.”

I’m not suggesting churches need to stop playing music. I’m merely wondering if dedicating nearly half of a church service to musical performances is the most efficient use of time.

One wonders if people in pews would not receive more spiritual nourishment from other church-led activities: An extended reading of scripture? Silent prayer? A longer sermon?

I’m curious what readers think.

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[Image Credit: Touch Canada Broadcasting]
This post Gallup asked Americans why they go to church. It’s not for the music. was originally published on Intellectual Takeout by Jon Miltimore.

Global finance leaders find a more temperate Trump in Washington

By Howard Schneider and Jan Strupczewski

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Donald Trump took power in January pledging to overhaul a global order that he said cheated middle-class Americans with a promise to tear up trade agreements and impose tariffs on China and Mexico.

Some of Trump's policy advisers named allies like Germany and Japan as possible targets for economic retaliation.

Fast-forward almost 100 days into Trump's presidency and the world's most powerful finance officials, gathered in Washington for the International Monetary Fund spring meetings, have found an administration that is far from the disruptive force Trump promised.

Although Trump did act on his campaign promise to tear up a 12-nation Pacific trade pact that had been the cornerstone of President Barack Obama's Asian pivot, he has taken a much softer stance on other issues. He has refrained from pulling out of the North American Free Trade Agreement, did not carry out a pledge to label China a currency cheat, and his administration has signaled the United States may stay in the Paris climate accord.

Constraints being put on Trump by Congress and the courts on issues ranging from healthcare to immigration that would have filtered into the economy and the slow pace with which he is filling key administration jobs have played a role. And some foreign policy makers say they are still not sure who their counterparts are in the Trump administration.

But these policy makers said that important initial decisions have been far more centrist than might have been expected. The European Union's commissioner for economic and financial affairs, Pierre Moscovici, summed up a widely shared sentiment as he highlighted how two people at the top of Trump's economic team - Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council - have curbed the worst fears over the young U.S. presidency.

"We have the feeling that Mnuchin and Cohn are sensible people with whom we can discuss things, who are conscious of what an open economy requires," Moscovici told Reuters in an interview.

The European Union's view of a more pragmatic administration was shared by Mexico, which attracted some of Trump's greatest ire. Trump's threat to impose punitive tariffs on Mexican exports sent the peso currency tumbling, but it has since recovered.

Mexico's finance undersecretary, Vanessa Rubio Marquez, said  discussions with the Trump administration so far have become "anchored" around a handful of issues "that Mexico would be able to deal with."

"There is still a lot of uncertainty," she said in a seminar on Wednesday. But "dialogue has been more structured, more constant."



"FREE TRADE WILL CONTINUE"

What Trump might mean for the U.S. and world economies has preoccupied central bankers, investors and analysts since the new president took office promising a virtual revolution in the way the United States relates to the rest of the world.

Though much about Trump's policies remain unformed as the administration approaches the 100-day mark, the more extreme risks - such as a trade war or a budget-busting fiscal program that unhinges inflation - seem to have receded.

"My belief is that a multilateral framework promoting free trade will continue. There won't be huge changes to that," Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda told reporters on Thursday.

In remarks on Thursday, Mnuchin said tax reform remained a priority as are other steps to boost U.S. growth. But he said the hope for faster growth would mean a stronger world economy, and that it was constructive to coordinate policies through international organizations like the Group of 20.

"This administration is willing to reach out and get ideas from the outside," Mnuchin told top-level bankers at a conference organized in parallel with the IMF meeting.

There are still risks. The Trump administration said on Thursday it would embark on a study of whether cheap steel imports from China and other countries were damaging national security. And there are still huge gaps in personnel at key bodies like Treasury and Commerce.

"Many of the top jobs are still vacant," said one European diplomat who was attending the IMF meetings and spoke on condition of anonymity.

"Nobody outside the U.S. really knows who is the most powerful or influential one at moment," the official said.



 (Reporting by Howard Schneider and Jan Strupczewski; Additional reporting by Leika Kihara and Gernot Heller)

Florida state senator resigns after racial slur

By Bernie Woodall

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (Reuters) - A Florida state senator resigned on Friday after coming under pressure for yelling obscenities and racial slurs inside a lounge frequented by lawmakers at the state capital in Tallahassee.

Senator Frank Artiles, a Republican from Miami-Dade County, made the comments on Monday night to two Democratic senators, both of whom are black, at the members-only Governor's Club, the Miami Herald reported on Tuesday.

"I am responsible and I am accountable and effective immediately, I am resigning from the Florida State Senate," Artiles wrote in a resignation letter delivered to the state Senate Majority Leader Joe Negron on Friday.

Artiles yelled at Democratic Senator Audrey Gibson, who earlier that day had questioned some bills Artiles sponsored, according to the Miami Herald. He called the Jacksonville senator a "bitch" and a "girl."

Artiles also called Democrat Perry Thurston, a black senator from Fort Lauderdale, an "asshole."

He also said Negron had risen to majority leader because of the support of six Republican senators he called "niggas," the newspaper reported.

Artiles on Wednesday apologized on the state Senate floor. He did not directly mention the comments he made on Monday night, but admitted he made offensive comments.

Thurston on Thursday filed a formal complaint to have Artiles expelled from the legislative body. He could not be reached for comment on Friday.

Gibson issued a statement on Friday, saying, "This has been an ordeal that no one should have to endure."

On Tuesday, Negron said in a statement that he has been informed of Artiles' comments by the senate's minority leader, Democrat Oscar Braynon.

"Racial slurs and profane, sexist insults have no place in conversation between senators and will not be tolerated," Negron's statement said.

Public protests followed, including one at Artiles' Miami-area headquarters where signs were posted on his office windows demanding that he resign.

Artiles, a former Marine, was elected in November to the senate after serving six years in the Florida House of Representatives.

"My actions and my presence in government is now a distraction to my colleagues, the legislative process and the citizens of our great state," he said in his resignation letter.





(Reporting by Bernie Woodall; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Richard Chang)

The Bad Manners of the Campus Left

It snowed last Thursday (April 20) in Colorado.

It’s not unusual for folks in the Centennial State to witness snow in April if the snowflakes are outside. But on this occasion, they appeared inside a university classroom, which, it turns out, is not unusual either.

Having been invited by the local chapter of the student organization, Turning Point USA, I arrived on the campus of the University of Colorado-Denver to deliver a lecture on “Lessons from Ancient Rome.” The subject was 2,500-year-old history with a sprinkling of observations about what we today might learn from it all. Not exactly a hot-button topic such as abortion, immigration, Trump, or the most recent season of The Walking Dead.

What I saw from a minority of radicalized students in the audience, however, was an appalling microcosm of the smug, arrogant, self-righteous, politically-correct, campus insanity that you see on TV with increasing frequency these days.

About a dozen of the students at last Thursday’s event interrupted my lecture repeatedly with lengthy diatribes. One held up a sign that read, “Bullshit!” They heckled me. When that failed, they accused me of racism. I was able to deal with the interruptions and conclude my speech, but that was due to a failure in the protesters’ organizing capabilities rather than any generosity in their intent. They exhibited far more “selfishness” than the conservatives and libertarians they think of as “selfish” and seek to silence. It certainly helped that the rest of the audience wanted me to speak, and enthusiastically applauded each time I put a protester in his place.

For me, next year will mark 50 years in the “liberty movement.” It was in 1968, a month shy of my 15th birthday and prompted by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, that I participated in a public demonstration in Pittsburgh. So I know and appreciate the importance of protest. In the right places and at the proper times and for noble causes, it’s a healthy and necessary thing. In Mellon Square in downtown Pittsburgh that day forty-nine years ago, we protested the vicious deployment of tanks, guns and troops by a communist regime to crush the rights and freedoms of a neighboring country.

What the hooligans last Thursday at my lecture in Colorado were objecting to was a very different kind of invasion—a peaceful, voluntary offering of ideas they were unaware of, didn’t want to hear, and thought it was their right to prevent others from hearing. Their intent was to intimidate, to harass, to silence, to dominate. This is not conduct that a citadel of education should tolerate for an instant.

Interesting, isn’t it, that what some go to college for, others find “offensive.” As I watched the incident occur, I thought to myself, “I’m standing in a taxpayer-funded institution of supposedly ‘higher’ education, not a Khmer Rouge re-education camp, for crying out loud!”

The disruptions commenced a mere five minutes into my lecture on Roman history, before I had progressed much beyond about 300 B.C. So it was hardly anything I could have said that the disrupters truly found indecent. They had come voluntarily but were annoyed—deeply and personally aggrieved, it seemed—for no more reason than the speaker and the sponsoring organization possessed viewpoints they knew little about, didn’t understand, couldn’t articulate, and don’t like.

Far-left students derailing speakers with whom they disagree have been in the news a lot. Sometimes they’ve resorted to violence. Many times, the speech being protested was canceled before it happened or protesters forcibly prevented the speaker from finishing his job. My encounter was small potatoes by comparison and fortunately, never descended into fisticuffs. And I did push back, and I did finish speaking.

When I taught college classes 40 years ago, I didn’t tolerate a sleeper or a ball cap, let alone a bad-mannered brat with no respect for the rights of his fellow students. So I wasn’t about to let these “progressive” brownshirts shut me up.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald explained where this tawdry deportment is coming from:

Campus intolerance is at root not a psychological phenomenon but an ideological one. At its center is a worldview that sees Western culture as endemically racist and sexist. The overriding goal of the educational establishment is to teach young people within the ever-growing list of official victim classifications to view themselves as existentially oppressed. One outcome of that teaching is the forceful silencing of contrarian speech…The silencing of speech is a massive problem, but it is a symptom of an even more profound distortion of reality.

Like Mac Donald, I doubt that many of the anti-free speech bullies in today’s colleges and universities enter those institutions with the intent to shut people up. It’s not typically their parents who teach them intolerance, it’s a handful of their professors—the very professors their parents are bankrolling with their hard-earned tax and tuition dollars. They are besmirching the entire profession, which neither the serious students who want to learn or the good professors who want to teach deserve.

I’m guessing that UC-Denver's course on “Problematizing Whiteness: Educating for Racial Justice” is not helping matters.

My FEE colleague Jeffrey Tucker recently shed light on the influence of Herbert Marcuse, a key Marxist intellectual from whom the troublemakers draw inspiration. In a similar vein, I wrote four years ago about how ugly ideas permeating British academia contributed to ugly behavior in the streets in the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s death in 2013.

Here are some highlights of the exchange at the University of Colorado-Denver last week:

A few minutes into my lecture, a student raised his hand and started speaking. I politely said, “Please let me get through my lecture and then we’ll have a Q & A period.” He muttered something that only those around him could hear, but I doubt it was “Thank you.”

A minute or two later, I mentioned that ancient Roman road-building was so massive that nothing would compare in magnitude until the 20th Century. One of the snowflakes found that offensive.

“Not true! The Mayans built roads too!” that same student rudely interjected from the back of the room.

“Yes, the Mayans built roads too, but nothing on the scale of the Romans,” I responded.

“Not true!” he insisted. “We have professors who have researched this!”

Well, here are the cold, hard facts: Roman road mileage totaled 250,000. By contrast, the most extensive road system in pre-Columbian South America was constructed by the Incas, not the Mayans, and it amounted to a mere 25,000 miles. Mayan civilization (everything, not just the roads) covered about 125,000 square miles at its height, compared to Rome’s 2.5 million square miles. You could fit all of the Mayan Empire into just half of the Roman province of Egypt. So the student who felt so put upon and so sure of himself that he had to interrupt the speaker didn’t actually have a clue of what he was babbling about.

There’s another point worth making here. Why do you suppose the student was so indignant that I didn’t give inflated road-building credit to the Mayans in a lecture on Rome? Answer: Because Romans were white Europeans and in the official Newspeak of far-Left academia, white Europeans are barely a notch above persona non grata. Mayans, on the other hand, were “indigenous, native peoples” who must be elevated and celebrated.

Never mind that the state religion of the Mayan Empire incorporated idol worship, human sacrifice, hallucinogenic rituals and decapitations. Let’s not talk about the pandemic internecine warfare of the Mayan Empire, or its severe environmental degradation and enslavement of subjugated peoples, either. That would not be politically correct.

Again, I asked that I be allowed to make my presentation and take questions afterwards. Mumblings and a few brief outbursts persisted but I mostly ignored them.

Fifteen or so minutes later, another student raised his voice from the back row, “You haven’t allowed any questions yet!”

I replied, “I already said I would take questions when the lecture is over, and I promise I’ll call on you first.” He insisted on speaking then and there, whereupon one of the Turning Point students asked him to leave the room. He did, but returned moments later.

In the video clip above, you can observe a part of this student’s Second Coming. As promised, I called on him during the Q & A. Do you suppose his question was about Roman history? Of course not. Here, slightly abbreviated, is how it unfolded:

Student: “You wouldn’t take my question when I wanted to ask it. Why should I listen to anything you say if you won’t listen to what I say? Why should I bother?”

Me: “What am I doing right now but listening to you?” A few incoherent mumblings in response, which prompted me to then assert, “This has happened before on some campuses and I’m guessing that you just can’t stand the fact that somebody might have a viewpoint different from yours.” Vigorous applause followed from the great majority of the audience, boos and catcalls from the minority.

The video clip, unfortunately, doesn’t quite capture a subsequent moment that I regard as the high point of the whole affair. I raised my voice to convey an important observation to the disrupter: “You have a character problem!” I doubt he understood that I was informing him that his rude intolerance was not only indefensible, it was a manifestation of something wrong inside, something flawed about his personal choices and conduct.

“Now you’re calling me an idiot!” he exclaimed, to which I instantly shot back, “I did NOT say you were an idiot. I said you have a character problem!”

That’s when some shouting and epithets began to pour forth from the know-it-all snowflakes: “You’re a racist! “Bullshit!” Nazi!” And a few F-bombs as well, the first of several aimed at me both during the event and while I was walking to my car. It was amazing how swiftly and seamlessly these wise guys toggled between “offended“ and “offensive”!

And oh, the sanctimony was so thick you could cut it with a knife! The slogans that rolled off those immature tongues were what Anthony Esolen refers to in his superb book, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture as “cant”—the insincere or hypocritical use of pious language to cover up for one’s ignorance while making a pretense to moral superiority. In Esolen’s words,

You have to be educated into cant; it is a kind of stupidity that surpasses the capacity of unaided Nature to confer…

People are especially prone to cant when they describe their feelings in public. When someone says, “I am offended by that remark,” the first thing you must think, in our time, is that the remark has broken upon the person’s day like the bright sun through a week of rain and gloom. An owl is not offended by the little field mouse; it is just what the owl is on the lookout for. If the offended person loses any sleep that night, it will not be for sorrow, but for delightful dreams of vengeance and public displays of virtue. The cannibal rolls up his sleeves and whets the knife. For truly tolerant people are hard to offend. They do not seek occasion to bring others into ill repute. They do not put the worst construction on someone else’s words or deeds.

Disturbingly, this lowering of the most basic standards of interpersonal communication makes a mockery of “higher” education in this troubled age of ours.

Blake Scott from Littleton, Colorado was there last Thursday evening (and provided the video clip). In his words, “I was shocked at how the students attacked Mr. Reed with unwarranted claims. Rather than derailing from his speech that he was invited to give, he respectfully took the moral high ground. Hecklers accused him of racism during the question and answer session, claiming he selectively picked students for questions by racial profile, without any evidence whatever. The students constantly attempted to disrupt the speech but he calmly rebutted their outbursts.”

Bradley Beck of Erie, Colorado, another eyewitness, says, “The whole time, Mr. Reed smiled and stayed professional, calm and in charge.”

So the good news is that this time, the bad guys didn’t get away with it.

The increasing frenzy of the campus Left may be an indication that, in the words of Robert Tracinski in The Federalist, we are approaching “peak leftism.” We should certainly hope Tracinski is right.

Writing in The Washington Post on April 20 (the same day as my Colorado speech, coincidentally), Catherine Rampell advised, “Don’t blame college students for their hostility to free expression. The fault ultimately lies with cowardly school administrations, who so often cave to student demands for censorship.” (In that same article, she recounted a crazy episode at American University in Washington. It’s worth your attention. Also, check out the headlines to commentary at The College Fix and you’ll get the drift.)

Rampell makes a good point. Cowardly school administrators are indeed partly at fault, and not just because they coddle reprehensible student conduct. When they hire barbarians to teach in their classrooms and collaborate with them to blackball serious scholars of a different viewpoint, they are accomplices in the degradation of education and the decay of civilization.

But I don’t let the students off the hook. They are young adults. Even if they act like toddlers in a temper tantrum, nothing will nip this stuff in the bud quicker than treating them as adults. That means one fair warning before a second offense. Then you get expelled and perhaps fined and maybe even a night or two in the slammer, if I had my druthers. Unlike the barbarian Left, I take freedom of speech seriously, and assaults on it even more seriously. Let’s stand up to these bullies. Civilization depends on it.

The students from the UC-Denver Turning Point chapter suffer through intimidation tactics from the campus Left all the time, as do courageous students from TPUSA chapters elsewhere, along with students in similar organizations like Young Americans for Liberty, Students for Liberty, Young Americans for Freedom, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. At FEE, we are proud to work with them, provide literature and speakers and moral support, and we applaud their efforts to resist the barbarians in their midst. If anything, the incident last week only emboldens us to assist them all the more.

Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. Reed is President of the Foundation for Economic Education and the author of the book Real Heroes: Inspiring True Stories of Courage, Character and Conviction. Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

It’s Almost Impossible to Find Out the Cost of a Medical Procedure. This Company Is Trying to Change That.

For a patient looking to see a doctor for any given medical procedure, costs often vary wildly based on the facility or physician.

Take non-surgical repair for a broken ankle.

For a 26-year-old female insured by Cigna who chooses a top-rated orthopedic surgeon in Washington, D.C., such a procedure costs $1,729.

But if she chooses another top-rated orthopedic surgeon in nearby College Park, Maryland, the procedure costs $1,199.

That’s according to a company called Amino, which mines data from billions of health insurance claims from the private and public sectors. Amino then gives patients access to information on the cost of various procedures and how much experience doctors nationwide have in those procedures.

And in the age of rising deductibles and out-of-pocket costs for health care, this Silicon Valley-based company is working to put more of such information in the hands of  patients.

An alumnus of Zillow, a real estate company that provides data on the housing market, Amino CEO David Vivero decided to start the company in 2013 based on what he personally had gone through in searching for a new insurance plan.

Because Vivero has a pre-existing condition, he realized he probably would have trouble finding a good insurance plan and a good doctor.

“I realized just having the consumer experience that health care had offered me was really frustrating,” Vivero says in an interview with The Daily Signal. “So I decided to build Amino to solve that.”

The company provides consumers with access to specifics about procedures, doctors, and costs generated by its massive database of health insurance claims from government and private-sector partners.

Users head to its website, Amino.com, and click through five screens—procedure, gender, age, location, and insurer, which is optional—before they’re presented with results for doctors based on quality and prices for more than 90 procedures.

Need a chest X-ray in the Arlington, Virginia, area?

For a 26-year-old female enrolled with UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest insurance provider, the procedure will cost $662 at Virginia Hospital Center, the top-billed facility.



Need to repair a broken ankle in the Sarasota, Florida, region?

For a 48-year-old male insured by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida, the procedure will cost $2,029 to see the top-rated doctor for fixing a broken ankle.



The website doesn’t have any ads or sponsorships, and because of this, Vivero says, he hopes Amino can offer “truth” to health care consumers.

“By committing to not taking advertisements or allowing for providers of care to bid up, we can promise the results are data-driven for consumers,” he says.

Vivero says he believes that having access to this information helps consumers make more informed choices about their health care:

Transparency can really change markets. Having an empowered consumer was really something that would really create both a competent set of choices, and also solve problems for insurance plans and providers who are now dealing with the realities of this emerging consumer class in health care.

And as deductibles on health care plans have continued to rise, leaving consumers to pay more out of their own pockets, more companies see a market for showing patients the costs of medical procedures.

“When people pay their own way, they’ll start to shop and demand prices,” Twila Brase, president of the consumer group Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom, tells The Daily Signal. “Lots of people wanted to force doctors to be transparent about their prices, but it didn’t matter until people pay their bills.”

When it first launched, Amino provided users with information on the quality of doctors featured on the site.

In October 2015, the company introduced a service allowing users to tap into its database of doctors nationwide to determine which they like based on how much experience doctors have with specific conditions and the insurance accepted. It also allows users to book an appointment.

And last year, the health care company unveiled its cost estimates, allowing patients to find the costs of 49 different services or procedures and estimate what they may have to pay based on their insurer.

Today, Amino provides cost estimates for more than 90 procedures.

“They’ve been able to finally compare and understand the prices that are available for them, which is a huge opportunity for the average consumer,” Vivero says of users.

‘The Pioneers’

As of 2015, health care spending in the United States reached $3.2 trillion, according to the federal government, and health insurance data has been used by others in the industry to build actuarial models and combat fraud.

But Vivero says his company is the first to marry access to that data with patients’ desire for transparency.

“As it relates to using this data to empower consumers to feel informed and confident in their health care choices, we feel we’re the pioneers,” Vivero says.

The company is one of several ushering in a new era of transparency in health care, fueled by higher deductibles and the increased amount patients pay out of their own pockets.

“As deductibles rise in health care, more and more decisions become the sole financial responsibility of that head of household or that individual insured member,” Vivero says. “As a result of that, the information appetite that people have has grown substantially.”

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the size of deductibles increased 12 percent in 2016 for consumers in the group market.

For employers with fewer than 200 employees, 65 percent of workers are in high-deductible plans, with the average deductible totaling $2,000.

In the individual market, deductibles have continued to rise as well.

According to an Avalere study of plans sold on Obamacare’s exchanges, combined deductibles—which include medical and drug deductibles—for silver-level plans jumped 20 percent from 2016 to 2017.

In 2016, for example, the average combined deductible for a silver-level plan was $3,075. In 2017, that rose to $3,703.

Though many patients began noticing a rise in deductibles after implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the Kaiser Family Foundation notes that this trend began before Obamacare was signed into law.

Still, as consumers move toward health insurance plans with lower premiums in exchange for higher deductibles, they tend to desire more information on health care services.

“Private-sector companies see an opening because people are now forced to pay cash to meet their deductibles,” Brase, of the Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom, says. “[Obamacare] has returned a cost-consciousness to a fair amount of people.”

Brase and her organization advocate a cash-based system of health care, where patients don’t have to rely on insurers to pay their bills. Removing insurers from the equation allows patients to negotiate prices directly with providers, she says.

But those with insurance, Brase says, are becoming more aware of the impact medical procedures will have on their pocketbooks:

Transparency is really important because it moves us back to true sensitivity about prices. Because of Obamacare, it forced people into paying for their own bills, [and] they then naturally gravitated toward transparency. They started asking for prices, shopped around, and went on the internet.

Brase warns that in today’s system of health care, it’s difficult to know what the “true cost” of any given procedure is, since insurance companies negotiate prices directly with providers.

That means that even within the same hospital or medical facility, costs may vary.

But the push for more transparency in the health care industry can help get patients closer to solving that puzzle, Brase says.

“It brings us closer to the true cost,” she says. “It also brings the prices down because then there’s competition between the posted costs.”

‘Nuanced Choices’

Vivero says he has heard from many Amino users who use his company’s website for different purposes.

Some report that Amino helped save “tens of thousands of dollars,” he says. Other consumers praise the company for helping to avoid misdiagnoses, since they were able to find experienced doctors to get a second opinion.

And others changed their habits of health care consumption based on the information Amino provided.

“Being able to see that information up front is incredibly empowering,” Vivero says of consumers, adding:

What they do with that is either to choose a physician, or sometimes they budget differently. Or they might decide to get that procedure done in one calendar year versus another. But at the very least, you have the information you need to make that informed choice.

To provide patients with cost estimates, Amino partnered with more than a dozen companies across the health care supply chain—health IT companies, payment processors, insurers—to compile data on patients’ health insurance claims.

That gave the company access to a trove of insurance information from the private sector.

Then, in 2014, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services—the federal agency that also oversees Obamacare—named Amino a “qualified entity,” making it the first for-profit company to receive the designation. As a qualified entity, the company received claims data from Medicare Parts A, B, and D.

Amino removed all identifying information from the data it received and, with the claims, built a database with information on which doctors take which insurers, how much different procedures cost, and how much consumers will pay.

Vivero says his company now has data from more than 9 billion health insurance claims, and Amino users can book appointments online with more than 900,000 doctors and facilities.

The company recently added Amino Plus, a service for insurance companies or employers that gives members access to additional information on their insurance plans, including plan documents, network data, and the current status of their deductibles and out-of-pocket maximum fees.

“The effect of that is to drive even greater use of in-network services so that … the consumer gets fewer surprise bills and so the employer gets fewer surprise bills and out-of-network charges,” Vivero says.

In March, Amino released a study with Ipsos, a market research company, exploring Americans’ attitudes about health care costs.

The study found that 63 percent of Americans said that receiving a medical bill they can’t afford is worse than or as bad as being diagnosed with a serious illness.

Additionally, 55 percent said they received a medical bill they couldn’t afford, and 1 in 5 said they avoid high medical bills by avoiding the doctor.

Vivero says Amino’s mission is to help patients make more informed decisions that save money.

“We hope to give them the information they need to make smart choices that in the long run are better for their wallets and better for their health,” he says.

Why Record Numbers of Americans Are Renouncing Their Citizenship

Would you give up your citizenship in order to keep your bank account?

That’s a question few Americans would ever want to confront, yet many Americans living abroad are now having to answer.

A little-known tax law, known as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, has resulted in some foreign banks no longer serving Americans.

The law, signed in 2010 by President Barack Obama, was intended to make it harder for Americans to keep money overseas and out of the reach of the IRS. The primary target was rich Americans allegedly hiding money from tax collectors.

To find tax avoiders, foreign banks are conscripted by the U.S. government to serve as a compliance arm of the IRS. As a result, many of these stranded Americans have had to make the undoubtedly difficult decision to give up their citizenship just to continue to access their banking services.

Last year, 5,411 people renounced their U.S. citizenship, the largest number of published expatriates in one year, continuing a four-year streak of record-breaking numbers.

The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act requires foreign financial institutions, such as banks, to identify and report to the United States most types of transactions for all American clients.

These new regulations are enforced by the threat of applying a 30 percent withholding tax on revenues generated in the United States by the noncompliant foreign financial institution.

The reporting burden and withholding penalty faced by foreign banks trying to comply with the new regulations has made it easier for some Americans to renounce their citizenship than to find a bank that is willing to bear the bureaucratic costs of complying with the law.

These penalties are not just hitting the rich, and they are not just harming tax dodgers. The cost of complying with this law hits every American living overseas, not just those targeted by the original legislation.

Middle-class Americans living abroad who are fully compliant with U.S. tax laws are losing their mortgages, business bank accounts, and personal banking services. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act has unintentionally ruined some Americans’ livelihoods.

To add insult to injury, the cost of implementing this law may soon outpace the money that it brings in.

Furthermore, the direct cost to taxpayers does not include the compliance costs to financial institutions. A legal challenge to the law in 2015 estimated compliance costs alone were on track to total more than the 10-year revenue estimates.

These regulatory costs can discourage international business, slow investment, and hamper the global economy.

The root of the problem is more than just compliance costs, it’s the U.S. government’s presumption that it is entitled to your money even if it’s earned in another country.

The U.S. is one of just a few countries that claims taxing rights on labor income earned abroad. Such a system of worldwide taxation hurts the American economy and makes it much harder for Americans to live abroad

Hopefully, relief from this law is around the corner. Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., recently released a bill that would repeal the onerous regulations.

Congress and the IRS should focus on the U.S. domestic tax system and leave Americans living abroad alone. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act is yet another example of continued government overreach.

Hopefully, tax reform will bring with it relief for all Americans—including those living overseas.

‘Communism for Kids’ Turns Deadly Ideology Into a Fairy Tale

In order to make the deadliest ideology of the 20th century palatable to young Americans, “Communism for Kids” is coming to a bookstore near you.

This newly released book from MIT Press “proposes a different kind of communism, one that is true to its ideals and free from authoritarianism.”

The death toll from communist regimes in the 20th century is well-documented. One study found that more people were killed under communism than homicide and genocide combined, and only 9 million more people were killed in World War I and World War II combined than under governments of this ideology.

Another study showed how the mass killings of civilians by their own governments took an immediate nosedive after the collapse of the Soviet Union and international communism.

According to the Amazon synopsis, the book weaves a fairy tale of “jealous princesses, fancy swords, displaced peasants, mean bosses, and tired workers.”It is bewildering why MIT Press would publish a book that cutesies up the political creed that gave the world Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and many more of the world’s most prolific mass murderers. None of these brutal dictators are mentioned in the book, according to The Washington Free Beacon.

Communism seemingly gets a pass to be reimagined as a sweet fable while it’s inconceivable that a book called “Fascism for Kids” would ever be printed by a reputable publisher.

Marion Smith of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation wrote, according to The Washington Free Beacon:

While I can imagine a book so titled that would make a valuable contribution to a reader’s understanding of the truth about communism, the book MIT Press published is not it. ‘Communism for Kids’ whitewashes and infantilizes ideas that, when put into action, have cost more than 100 million lives.

This odd attempt to get kids into communism is unlikely to spawn a new generation of true believers on its own, but it does highlight the growing problem for younger Americans who are generally clueless about even recent history.

As The Daily Signal previously reported, a study from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that millennials, in particular, are stunningly ignorant about what occurred under the Soviet Union and other communist regimes just a generation ago.

One-third of millennials surveyed actually believe that more people were killed under former President George W. Bush than under Soviet dictator Stalin.

If one truly wants to teach young Americans what communism is really about, it would be better to hand them a copy of the classic “Animal Farm,” by George Orwell.

The book is an allegory—using farm animals as stand-ins—about the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia a century ago. The revolutionary promise of “all animals are equal” is used to overthrow farmers, but quickly turns into a new, even more oppressive tyranny under animal overlords

A reign of forced labor, intimidation, and terror puts the animals under the thumb of their new masters—their ideals used to prop up an all-powerful regime. The refashioned creed becomes “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” In the end, human, or rather “animal,” nature proved to be more powerful than any ideology.

As the Roman poet Horace once said: “You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but she will ever hurry back.”

This lesson from Orwell would be a much better way to teach young people about destructive ideology than a fanciful account of how “true” communism—minus the mean authoritarian stuff and mass murder—would be truly grand.

Under communism, tyranny is a feature, not a bug.

Fascism and Communism Were Two Peas in a Pod

Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini have become, for many of us today, mere Hollywood villains – generic personifications of evil or (in Mussolini's case) buffoonish authoritarianism. Yet their ideologies were rooted in specific philosophical ideas – ideas which had many respectable adherents in their day.

Dictator Fanboys

One person who understands this is Jonah Goldberg, author of the 2007 book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Ten years on, the book still holds up. Goldberg argues, provocatively, that fascism shared roots in common with what we call modern liberalism or progressivism.

People often argue over whether Hitler and Mussolini were “right wing” or “left wing.” More to the point is that both men's ideologies had roots in the Progressive movement of the turn of the 20th century.

The Progressive movement was closely tied to the philosophy of Pragmatism: the belief that thought is a tool for action and change. In contrast to the ancient and medieval philosophers, for whom philosophy was the contemplation of reality, the Progressives were animated by the desire to mold reality and to harness knowledge for social betterment. Many in the vanguard of progressive thought initially were enamored of Mussolini and even Hitler, considering their dictatorships a useful “social experiment.”

H.G. Wells, the popular science fiction writer, was one. In a number of speeches and books he praised the militaristic social mobilization in the new fascist regimes: an entire society moving as a single unit under the rule of a Nietzschean superman.

Complete state control of all aspects of life was seen as highly pragmatic and scientific by many. Nationalism and militarism – elements commonly associated with the Right – were actually key components of the Progressive Era, flourishing in particular under President Woodrow Wilson, as Goldberg documents.

Ideological Twins



Popular wisdom holds that Fascism and Communism were diametrical opposites. Actually, the two ideologies were (and are) so similar that they had to define themselves in opposition to each other in order to survive. At the very least, both were socialistic in origin: Mussolini was immersed in socialism by his father, and the name of Hitler's party – National Socialist German Workers' Party – speaks for itself.

These regimes fostered hostility to traditional religious beliefs and morality (both men despised Christianity), “salvation by science” (as shown, for example, in the Nazi's racist eugenics movement), and state-controlled health and environmental projects (as shown in a Nazi slogan, “Nutrition is not a private matter!”).

All of these elements grew out of the “scientific” progressivism of the early 20th century. Even the Nazis' vÖlkisch ideology—with its nationalist and traditionalist overtones – was at heart a secular religion-substitute which enshrined the Will of the People, a concept which Goldberg traces to the French Revolution.

It would seem undeniable that Hitler and Mussolini, like the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin, were revolutionaries and in no sense conservatives or traditionalists. Their ideologies grew out of the avant-garde positivist, progressive, and pragmatic philosophies of the late 19th century.

A Progressive Moment

The point here is not to engage in “left wing”/“right wing” name calling. Rather, it is to realize that all these political movements were tied up in a historical moment – Goldberg calls it the “fascist moment” of Western history – which originated in the French Revolution and came to fruition in the 20th century.

This moment was “progressive” in that it signaled the abandonment of the West's moral and philosophical traditions. And it was embodied, philosophically, in the turn away from the contemplation of truth to “action, action, action.”

Reprinted from Intellectual Takeout.

Michael de Sapio

Michael de Sapio writes at Intellectual Takeout.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Health Insurance and Good Health Are Not the Same Thing

Whether you’re into this sort of thing or not, you’ve probably been hearing a lot about healthcare policy these days. Public debate has roiled as Republican lawmakers attempt to make good on their seven-year promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA). As the debate rages on, one metric in particular appears to hold an outsized importance for the American people: the number of Americans covered by health insurance.

Analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, which showed that 14 million more Americans could lose coverage by 2018 under the Republican replacement, caused an intense public outcry and was frequently cited as a rationale for not abandoning the ACA. There is immense political pressure not to take actions that will lead to a large loss of coverage.

But here’s the thing: the relevant metric by which to judge Obamacare isn’t insurance coverage numbers. To do so is to move the goalposts and place undue importance on a number that might not be as significant as we imagine.

The ultimate point of health insurance, and the implied rationale for manipulating insurance markets to cover sicker people, is that people will use insurance as a means by which to improve their health, not just carry a plastic card in their wallets.

Health Insurance ≠ Health

The impulse to use insurance coverage as a proxy for health is misguided but understandable. For one thing, it’s a simple, singular number that has dropped precipitously since the implementation of the ACA. That makes it a great marketing piece for supporters. For another, health insurance is the mechanism by which most of us pay for most of our healthcare.

And yet in 2015, the uninsured rate fell to 10.5% (down from 16.4% in 2005) while age-adjusted mortality increased for the first time in a decade. It turns out a nominal increase in the amount of insured Americans doesn’t necessarily translate into improved health outcomes for those individuals.

A newly released paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) finds that while the ACA has improved access to healthcare, “no statistically significant effects on risky behaviors or self-assessed health” can be detected among the population (beyond a slight uptick in self-reported health in patients over 65).

These results are consistent with other studies, like the Oregon Medicaid Experiment, which found no improvement in patients’ blood pressure, cholesterol, or cardiovascular risk after enrolling them in Medicaid, even though they were far more likely to see a doctor. There were, however, some notable-but-mild psychic benefits, such as a reduction in depression and stress in enrollees.

In short, despite gains in coverage, we haven’t much improved the physical health of the average American, which is ostensibly the objective of the ACA.

Why Not?

To be fair, the ACA is relatively young; most of its provisions didn’t go into effect until 2014. It may well be that more time needs to pass before we start to see a positive effect on people’s health. But there are a few reasons to think those health benefits may never materialize – at least, not to a great extent.



A lot of what plagues modern Americans (especially the poorest Americans) has more to do with behavior and environment than access to a doctor.

Health insurance can be a lifesaver if you need help paying for antiretroviral medication, but it won’t stop you from living in a neighborhood with a high rate of violent crime. It won’t make you exercise, or change your diet, or stop you from smoking. It won’t force you to take your medicine or stop you from abusing opioids, and it certainly won’t change how you commute to work (that’s a reference to the  rapid increase in traffic deaths in 2015).

Of course, all things being equal, more insurance coverage is better. But nothing comes without cost, and as a society we want to be sure that benefits justify costs. So far, that’s not clear. This poses an existential question about our current pursuit of universal coverage, and, by extension, the relevance of coverage as a metric for the success of healthcare policy: If insurance isn’t the cure, why are we prescribing it with such zeal?

Eddie Ferrara

Eddie Ferrara is a writer from western Massachusetts. He blogs at eddiethoughts.com.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Shoot Like a Sniper: Simple Tips to Hone Your Marksmanship

This article is presented in the hopes of giving you a method for being able to practice your marksmanship both on the cheap and (logistically) under “friendly” surroundings.  There are a host of different air rifles to choose from.  I must state there has been a marked deterioration in the quality of air-powered (or pneumatic, if you prefer) firearms over the past thirty to forty years.  No matter: you can still accomplish what you need with what is on the market today.

Fundamentals of Markmanship

Air rifles can be either powered by Carbon Dioxide (CO 2) cartridges, or with an internal pneumatic pump, either with multiple pumps for increasing power or a single pump (as with “break-barrel” models of rifles).  For the most part your standard air guns come in either .177 or .22 caliber models.  Beeman offers one that has interchangeable barrels in both calibers, with the velocity decreasing slightly as the caliber is larger.

There are many things you can do with an air rifle from a hunting and survival perspective.  You can hunt small game quietly without the need for a suppressor if you’re doing it on the q-t, and ammo for it is both affordable and (when the SHTF) able to be reproduced simply (refer to the recent article I wrote on how to build your own forge).

The air rifle or air pistol fires pellets and/or BB’s (little ball bearings) that can be reused repeatedly.  There are several “trap” targets like this one available with replaceable buffer materials on the inside.  These targets enable you to collect your air rifle ammo and use it again.  It is a simple thing to set up a range within your own basement or out in your backyard with an air rifle or air pistol.  Although the motion of the weapon in terms of recoil is reduced from that of a rifle, the fundamentals of marksmanship are the same.  Here they are:

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Breathing: Before you pull that trigger, you need to control your breathing, and optimally should pull immediately after you have exhaled

Aim: Self-explanatory, but it involves you zeroing on your target to line up your sights with your eyes and enable you to hit that bullseye.

Trigger squeeze: Should be accomplished with the very tip/end of your index finger, and should be a smooth, non-jerky action akin to squeezing a lemon

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This article is not intended to cover rifle marksmanship in general; however, you get the picture.  Hand-eye coordination and the employment of these three fundamentals can be accomplished effectively with the air rifle.  There are several European and Korean firms that manufacture air rifles in “big bore” calibers that can take down large game, if you wish to pursue air rifle marksmanship further.  For starters, you can take your pick from Daisy, Crossman, Beeman, Benjamin, even Ruger, among others in the two mentioned calibers.

Just remember to lay out your range in a professional and safe manner.  Treat your air rifle as a firearm at all times, as it is a type of firearm that can hurt someone severely, or worse if misused or used in an unsafe manner.  As a field-expedient trap, you can even make one out of telephone books/directories mounted in the front of a carboard box.  These work better for BB’s, as the pellets are usually made of lead and the strike tends to deform them.  Safety glasses or goggles are also recommended, as a ricochet can come straight back in your direction.

The air rifle or air pistol are great tools to introduce your kids to principles of firearms safety and train them in marksmanship.  It is quality time spent with them, in which they will learn how to do things the right way before they are old enough to fire that .22 rifle or that Winnie ’94 for the first time.  Affordable and effective, the air rifle is an excellent training tool that you never really outgrow, and can enable you to have your own indoor range during the winter months that is both safe and cost-effective.  Be safe, take care of one another, and happy shooting!

Jeremiah Johnson is the Nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces (Airborne). Mr. Johnson was a Special Forces Medic, EMT and ACLS-certified, with comprehensive training in wilderness survival, rescue, and patient-extraction. He is a Certified Master Herbalist and a graduate of the Global College of Natural Medicine of Santa Ana, CA. A graduate of the U.S. Army’s survival course of SERE school (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape), Mr. Johnson also successfully completed the Montana Master Food Preserver Course for home-canning, smoking, and dehydrating foods.

Mr. Johnson dries and tinctures a wide variety of medicinal herbs taken by wild crafting and cultivation, in addition to preserving and canning his own food. An expert in land navigation, survival, mountaineering, and parachuting as trained by the United States Army, Mr. Johnson is an ardent advocate for preparedness, self-sufficiency, and long-term disaster sustainability for families. He and his wife survived Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Cross-trained as a Special Forces Engineer, he is an expert in supply, logistics, transport, and long-term storage of perishable materials, having incorporated many of these techniques plus some unique innovations in his own homestead.

Mr. Johnson brings practical, tested experience firmly rooted in formal education to his writings and to our team. He and his wife live in a cabin in the mountains of Western Montana with their three cats.

This information has been made available by Ready Nutrition