The Tennessee Three restore my faith in the power of the southern Black church, Rupert Murdoch and Fox look to be going down in the Dominion suit, Trump is caught showing classified maps to his Mar-a-Lago fans, Alvin Bragg makes Jim Jordan look like a fool -- it is not the Second Coming, but I will take it.
I have been preparing to lecture this Monday on John Rawls' A Theory of Justice. I will provide the link if anybody wants to join the zoom call. Lord, I like to teach.
Meanwhile, I struggle with my Parkinson's and try to look after my wife as best I can. A week from Saturday, if the arrangements can be made, I will make a zoom appearance at the 50th anniversary of the STPEC program I started at the University of Massachusetts. The parents of the students now in the program were either not yet born what is going to kindergarten when I created the Social Thought and Political Economy program all those years ago.
43 comments:
What's been happening in Tennessee, Michigan, and Wisconsin illustrates the importance of supporting the DLCC, as many of us on this blog did a few months ago. When I see a headline for these and similar instances, I smugly believe that my crumby little contributions are what made the difference.
Re STPEC: In fairly recent years politics/philosophy/econ programs have been started in various U.S. universities, but my impression is that most (not all) of them have a right-wing or "free-market" orientation. Different from STPEC, and also different from Social Studies. I believe at least some of the PPE programs get funding from right-wing foundations.
There is a more important way in which STPEC is unusual, if not unique. That will be the message of my comment at the celebration. After I give the comment, I will post it here on my blog but I do not want to give it away since it is rather surprising.
I look forward to reading the comment when it's posted here.
Faith gets restored on the one hand, faith gets taken away on the other? It took this many soldier types with guns and an armored vehicle to arrest a 21 year old? You can watch it here.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-65270387
According to some Christians, the Second Coming will occur after 7 years Tribulation, while according to Nostradamus some two or three thousand years from now after a 2nd Dark Age.
The Second Coming will happen in the future, but what everyone (Christian & nonbeliever) should be keeping an eye out for presently is the coming pre-Tribulation Rapture & the Great Reset (after the worldwide 7th Year Relaxation of Debt) by the Antichrist.
The Rapture is a starship ticket to a better Star Trek world like Risa, & the Great Reset will pay off everyone's credit card & bank loan debt.
Of course, without immigrating to a Star Trek planet, the Great Reset means basically nothing. Having all of the gold and silver in the world means nothing if it's going to go to ruin by a comet or E.L.E..
How times and politics have changed. As the NYT points out in an editorial today, when it was disclosed that Justice Abe Fortas had received payments for guest lectures he had given – payments which he returned before it became a scandal – both Democratic and Republican politicians (Fortas was a Democrat and a friend of LBJ) pressured him to resign, which he did. J. Thomas’ financial transgressions have been far more serious, egregious, and multiple than were Fortas’, but the Republicans will stand by him till kingdom come.
(Query: Did the fact that Fortas was Jewish, whereas j. Thomas is a devout Catholic, make Fortas more vulnerable to criticism and rebuke?)
I wd have to double check this, but my impression is that Fortas was a close friend of LBJ and wd talk to LBJ regularly, including about Sup Ct cases, which of course no Justice shd do.
I doubt the fact that Fortas was Jewish and Thomas is Catholic has anything to do with anything here. It appears that Thomas broke various disclosure rules and norms but the most that wil probably happen is that he'll be fined. He's not going to resign obvs and the chances of his bring impeached are small to zero.
I'll let Marc have the last word on this as it is off topic. At least M. Llenos' comment on the Rapture purported to have some connection to the original post.
"(Query: Did the fact that Fortas was Jewish, whereas j. Thomas is a devout Catholic, make Fortas more vulnerable to criticism and rebuke?)"
Let's see: Nixon involved Rehnquist in a matter involving a liberal Jew who earlier had, among other things, scrapped with Joe McCarthy, defended Owen Lattimore, and was counsel for Clarence Gideon. Johnson had earlier unsuccessfully attempted to make Fortas Chief Justice and faced a successful filibuster. Perhaps the only question when conservative racists and antisemites are able to force a "liberal Jew" to resign, is which term is the cake and which the frosting?
Anon, when the 21 y.o. is accused of a capital crime and is into guns a little over-kill might be expected.
Also, Thomas (and his wife) are cadres to be defended at all costs because that's what revolutionaries do. Thomas could be any or no religion as long as he was a conservative.
Some may be understandably confused by aaall’s cryptic comments about Abe Fortas, Nixon, Rehnquist, et al. I must once more compliment aaall on his encyclopedic knowledge of mid-20th century historical events, and his recollection of them.
First a few words about Mr. Fortas, the man. He put himself through college at Southwestern College in Memphis by playing the violin at college dances. He then went to Yale Law School, where he excelled, becoming editor of the Yale Law Journal. Graduating with an outstanding academic record, he was immediately appointed assistant professor of law (something not equaled until Alan Dershowitz was awarded the same title at Harvard Law School). He commuted between New Haven and Washington, D.C., where he worked on New Deal assignments, and met LBJ. They became fast and lifelong friends, and Fortas managed his campaign for Senate election.
Owen Lattimore was a self-educated (he never obtained a college degree) expert on China and Central Asia. He taught at Johns Hopkins and during WWII, served as adviser to Chiang Kai-shek. After the war, Sen. McCarthy accused him of being a spy for the Soviets, and he was charged with having committed perjury during a Senate hearing. He was defended by Abe Fortas, and the charges were dismissed.
“Gideon” refers to Clarence Earl Gideon, a Florida panhandler and drifter who was arrested in 1961 for stealing $5 in change and a few bottles of beer from a pool hall. He was charged with breaking and entering. Too indigent to retain an attorney, he represented himself and was convicted and was given the maximum sentence of 5 years in prison. While in prison, he educated himself about constitutional law and concluded that the trail judge had violated his right under the 6th Amendment to be assisted by legal counsel. After being denied relief in the Florida courts, he wrote a five-page, hand-written petition for certiorari to the S. Ct. The Court granted the petition and appointed Fortas to represent Gideon at the oral argument. Fortas present an oral argument with Justice William O. Douglas later described as “probably the best single legal argument” he had witnessed in his 36 years on the court. The Court ordered that Florida retry Gideon, and provide him with appointed counsel for his defense, paid for by the State. This was the landmark decision of Gideon v. Wainwright, which guarantees that anyone charged with a criminal defense, who cannot afford their own attorney, is entitled to have an attorney appointed and paid for by the State in question. On retrial, Gideon was acquitted. (The event yielded the book “Gideon’s Trumpet,” which was made in to a t.v. movie, starring Henry Fonda as Gideon, and Jose Ferrer as Fortas.)
(Continued)
LBJ nominated Fortas to the S. Ct., and where he was appointed to the “Jewish” seat, formerly held by Justices Goldberg, Frankfurter, and Cardozo. While on the Court, he championed expanding the legal rights of juveniles and minors. In the case of In re Gault (1967), he wrote an opinion overturning the conviction of a 15-year old boy for making an obscene telephone call to neighbor, for which he was sentence to prison for six years, in excess of the two month sentence he would have gotten as an adult. In Epperson v. Arkansas, the Arkansas S. Ct. had reversed a decision in favor of teachers who had challenged Arkansas’ anti-evolution law. Fortas, writing for the majority, reversed the Arkansas S. Ct. in a decision which banned religiously based creation narratives from public school science curricula.
In 1968, LBJ nominated Fortas to become Chief Justice of the Court to succeed Earl Warren. The Republicans, who had never forgotten Fortas’s defense of Lattimore, prevented the appointment by organizing a filibuster. Then Nixon was elected, In 1969, it was reported that Fortas had accepted a $20,000 gift ($148,000 today) from a foundation administered by Louis Wolfson, a friend and former client. As soon as the news broke, Fortas was under criticism, and he returned the money that year and never received another penny (something J. Thomas has not done). But the damage had been done. Nixon appointed then Assistant Attorney General William Rehnquist to conduct an investigation of Fortas and find out what other dirt they dig up. There were also cries to investigate J. Douglas for allegations of similar gifts. Then John Mitchell threatened to prosecute Fortas’ wife, a tax attorney, for tax evasion. Justice Black urged him to stay and fight. Concerned about what a drawn out fight would to his wife, and the possible ramification for J. Douglas, J. Fortas resigned on May 14, 1969. He was replaced by J. Harry Blackmun.
aaall, am I correct in interpreting your comment as endorsing the view that the opposition to Fortas was partially attributable to anit-Semitism?
Owen Lattimore was a self-educated (he never obtained a college degree) expert on China and Central Asia. He taught at Johns Hopkins and during WWII, served as adviser to Chiang Kai-shek. After the war, Sen. McCarthy accused him of being a spy for the Soviets, and he was charged with having committed perjury during a Senate hearing. He was defended by Abe Fortas, and the charges were dismissed.
This misses what are, from an historical perspective, the most important things about the Lattimore case. McCarthy's attack on Lattimore was part of McCarthy's wider attack on U.S. China experts ("China hands") and on the State Dept. As the Wikipedia entry on Lattimore notes: "Although charges of perjury were dismissed, the controversy put an end to Lattimore's role as a consultant of the U.S. State Department and eventually to his career in American academic life."
In other words, McCarthy and McCarthyism destroyed Lattimore's career in the U.S., as it destroyed other careers, though there was no evidence that Lattimore was a spy. Unfortunately, because it does not relate to his own accomplishments, this is, historically, the single most important thing to know about Lattimore. It's the most important thing to know about Lattimore because it puts him into the context of mid-20th century U.S. history. So if someone were trying to pass a hypothetical exam on "cultural literacy" or "historical literacy" and the question arose, the key thing to know about Lattimore is that he was one of several prominent China experts who were victims of McCarthyism. (I understand the discussion is about Fortas but the point nonetheless stands.) Just as, for example, the key thing to know about Mozart is that he was a great composer, not where he went to school, whom he taught, who his rivals or friends were, or what he liked to eat for breakfast. Some of those things are perhaps important, and if you were writing a book on Mozart you'd include them, but they're not the key thing.
Btw Lattimore's book The Inner Asian Frontiers of China, which I've looked at in the past though not properly read, is probably still worth reading.
The Lattimores were a very talented family.
Owen's brother, Richmond, translated Homer and Greek drama in the 1950's and his translations are still read today. Owen was also an accomplished poet.
Excuse me: Richmond was an accomplished poet.
LFC,
I don’t mind your expanding comments regarding Owen Lattimore and his outstanding achievements, but my comment was intended to clarity why aaall mentioned Mr. Lattimore’s name in the context of Abe Fortas, which had to do with Mr. Fortas’s defense of Mr. Lattimore regarding the unfounded allegations that he had been a spy for the Soviets and had committed perjury in relation to those allegations. I could have mentioned his other outstanding achievements in the area of Chinese relations, and how McCarthy managed to stifle those, as well, but that was not the purpose of my comment. Your comment sort of off-handedly suggests that I thereby shortchanged Mr. Lattimore’s outstanding career by not mentioning the Chinese aspects of McCarthy’s attack, but, as you know, there is only so much one can write in a blog comment, and I had other aspects of J. Fortas’ also outstanding life that I wanted to get to. Instead of implying that I had short-changed Mr. Lattimore, you, could, instead have stated something to the effect that, in addition to what Marc has stated about Mr. Lattimore, there were also these other aspects of his life that I (LFC) wish to highlight. Your comparison of my comment to writing a book about where Mozart went to school, whom he taught and what he ate for breakfast trivializes what I wrote, something you seem to have a habit of doing when re-commenting on what I have written.
Marc,
It just says something about all of us.
You find Fortas to be especially interesting, LFC finds Owen Lattimore to be especially interesting and I find Richmond Lattimore to be especially interesting.
Different people, different interests and different tastes.
There are near infinite regressions and expansions here. After each of the two world wars there was a "Red Scare." J. Edgar Hoover made his bones in the first and lasted through the second. Nixon made his in the second.
The paranoia around "who lost china" helped form the Domino Theory as well as the Leninist trajectory of modern Movement Conservatism. No Second Red Scare, no "who lost China," no Domino Theory, no Black List, and no Vietnam.
On Earth 2 Jerry Voorhis defeats Nixon, Lattimore and Oppenheimer (among many others) retire after distinguished and uneventful careers. As a side matter, that Jane Wyman doesn't divorce that Ronald Reagan.
Oh, and s.w. retires as an academic in the United States.
Marc, I assume that a certain satisfaction was involved that wouldn't have been there for a WASP. Given the timing I doubt it was dispositive on the whole, just a bonus for some. Johnson screwed up as Goldberg would have been on the bench a long time.
Those, again, who may not fully understand aaall’s assertion that LBJ made a mistake about replacing J. Goldberg by Abe Fortas, this is what occurred. J. Goldberg was perfectly happy serving on the S. Ct. He had, in fact, made substantial contributions regarding constitutional law, writing a strong dissent, e.g., opposing the death penalty as cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment. However, when Adlai Stevenson, who was the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. passed away, LBJ urged Goldberg to resign to replace Stevenson. According to Goldberg’s memoir, LBJ also promised him a prominent seat in the Cabinet. Goldberg was opposed to the Vietnam War, and thought that he could use his influence on the Cabinet to persuade LBJ to end the war, after which he would return to the S. Ct. LBJ also talked about making Goldberg his running mate in 1968. As we know, none of this transpired.
Fortas for Goldberg on the Scotus: the single most stupid personnel decision LBJ ever made....
and the US is still paying for it.
Since a Supreme Court position is a lot more important than the UN (which has no power), a fact that LBJ as a political realist knew well, I'd guess that he wanted Goldberg off the Supreme Court and an opportunity to give the job to his pal Fortas.
s. wallerstein,
Correct, and it backfired.
Playing historical counterfactuals, their futility notwithstanding, can be fascinating. Had Fortas not been appointed, and J. Goldberg remains on the S. Ct., there is no Fortas resignation, and no Harry Blackmun to replace him – and no Roe v. Wade legalizing abortion? Would J. Goldberg, instead, have written the decision?
As Kierkegaard wrote, “Life can only be understood backwards [sort of]; but it must be lived forwards.”
I happened to look at WaPo today (I have a digital subscription but I don't use it every day) and there was a piece about a chess craze in schools. Didn't read it but here's the link in case some here are interested:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/04/15/school-chess-class-clubs/
There was also, among other things, a piece about India's pop. surpassing China's and how India's demographic sit. varies from Indian state to state, which I bookmarked for later perusal.
Marc, Goldberg joined the majority in Griswold and was generally a liberal vote so not unreasonable that he would have supported Roe. Of course absent Roe as a convenient, non-racial organizing tool for Republicans, Bill Rusher might have succeeded in creating a Conservative Party after all. The state by state liberalization that was in process hadn't created a national movement pre-Roe.
LBJ needed to be patient. Warren was retiring by 1968 so he could have possibly appointed Fortas then or Warren could have picked 1967 to retire or waited to see who won the '68 election. As with Vietnam and LBJ's decision not to call Nixon on his treason, bad judgment by LBJ and Warren and Nixon wound up with two appointments. Good decade for music, NSM the nation.
LFC, when I bussed across India in the mid-1980s every small village had a clinic advertising birth control. Mao's idiotic and deranged one child policy has created a demographic time bomb. Russia also has its problems.
Great story about chess. Nice to see a nonviolent hobby gaining popularity.
Not that nonviolent. You are toppling over other human beings & killing them. Star Wars chess, in the 1977 blockbuster, shows the reality of one board piece picking up another & mercilessly throwing it down. Prince Harry was trained at Sandhurst to kill people like destroying game board pieces.
BTW, the Far Right would probably ban chess clubs in High Schools across the U.S. if they realized the irony of a pawn changing its gender to become a battle Queen more politically deadly than a male King. Of course, if the other Queen is still alive, the lucky King gets to own a Harem. I believe a Harem is when a man has two or more wives he's legally married to.
aaall
I don't entirely agree w you on the one-child policy (it made some sense at the time) but I'm getting over a rather bad cold and don't have the energy or inclination for an argument at the moment.
LFC
Hippocrates said you can treat head colds by gargling. The idea is to brush one's teeth with toothpaste then to gargle with clean cold water or mouthwash that has alcohol. I tried this myself and it didn't work. So what I did was repeat it by gargling way longer and with my head tilted up backwards as much as possible, but be careful when you do this. With the head titled backwards longer the water or mouthwash cleans more of the sinus passages of the nose and ears.
This of course is a forum dedicated to philosophy, so my defense on giving the above advice is that I'm imitating Eryximachus in Plato's Symposium in trying to solve a friend's case of the hiccups.
ML
Gargling in the way you suggest (though I wd do it w/ warm salt water, not mouthwash) may be helpful for certain things, but not particularly for what I had. (However, it probably couldn't hurt.)
LFC, Mao had a lot of deranged, stupid and genocidal policies. Backyard metallurgy, whatever could go wrong? Kill all the birds; where did all those crop destroying insects come from? Stir up the kids and let them engage in a reign of terror, again, what could go wrong?
A moment's reflection on the likely outcome of a draconian and intrusive policy limiting couples to one child in a culture that deeply values producing a male heir should have been obvious. More basic then that, of course, is that a state that engages in forced contraception, abortion and sterilization violates the most basic notions of human rights. Then there's the Uyghurs and Tibetans.
India backed off the more intrusive aspects of its population policies decades ago and the birthrate is still falling because when most folks, especially women, get them some education, rights, and can see a better future, their preferences resolve to producing 0 - 3 offspring. This seems almost universal.
Mao, because Marx, Lenin, and dementia, couldn't see beyond central planning and coercion. Unfortunately we seem to have Mao 2.0 in our future. This, like the economy, is where a soft landing is way better
There was a "population bomb" in the mid-twentieth century. ~Two percent is simply unsustainable (rule of 72). That very real crisis led to all sorts of crazy. Paul Erlich is right but a fool and Julian Simon was merely a fraud. There can be too many of us but a little education and hope cures that. I had a prof. back in the day who carefully explained that folks in the Third World needed to produce lots of kids to do war against Western Imperialists. That this reduced folks in those countries to breeding stock for the Revolution never occurred to him.
aaall,
Who is Mao 2.0?
Xi?
I'd say he's the opposite of Mao, far from being blinded by ideology as Mao was, he's pragmatic and Machiavellian.
aaall,
Marc has occasionally accused me, perhaps occasionally with justification, of being condescending, but you are Condescending 2.0.
First, I did not mean to endorse coercive methods of population control. (To the extent that the one-child policy entailed such methods, I would not have supported it. There cd have been a one-child goal w other methods, though admittedly that was not Mao's style.) At the time of its implementation, there probably (I'd have to double check) was a growing pop/resources/ag. output imbalance in China, and I assume that was Mao's motivation. I don't have time to do the relevant research right now. Mao did, at enormous and completely unacceptable human cost, achieve certain things. Of the three great historical social revolutions (France, Russia, China), the Chinese revolution was by far the most egalitarian in its results (from mid-50s through Mao's death and a little beyond). But I don't need to be told that Mao was a ruthless, murderous autocrat to whom 'human rights' meant nothing.
Second, it's, imo, ridiculous to blame Marx for Mao's policies. Marx didn't think a socialist revolution was even possible in a 'backward' agrarian country, so how can you blame Marx for Maoism or for what Mao did w the things he read?
I'll leave India for another time.
P.s. aaall, I'm not asking you to change your writing style and throw in lots of throat-clearing remarks. There's no need for that. But once every five or six months, say, it would be nice if you showed some glimmer of awareness that you're not omniscient. Sorry if that sounds harsh or rude, but so be it.
Just an off-hand comment to lighten the atmosphere a bit, next week the longest-running show in Broadway history closes after being performed every night, continuously, for 35 years – The Phantom Of The Opera. This American Life, hosted by Ira Glass, had an interesting segment about members of the pit orchestra and how, after performing the same music day in and day out, year in and year out, many of them got tired of the music, and of each other. Many of them never even saw the show itself, being below the stage. And they frequently engaged in joking and kibbitzing during the show, just to stay awake. One of their pranks was to write messages on the soles of the shoes of audience members who sat in the very first row, just above the pit. Every job has its shortcomings.
Golly!. I invoked M & L because Mao was a total ideologue. As Marx died in the 19th century he's hardly responsible for what some folks in the twentieth did in his name. Lenin, of course, is another matter.
We will have to disagree on Mao's Great Leaps which were mostly egalitarian is the sense that most everyone was poor. I did compress things too much and was unfair to the Chairman in that the excesses of the one child policy happened under Deng. Mao actually went back and forth on population even encouraging more births soon after the revolution but eventually came around to there being a problem. Of course, his applying ideology to agriculture had the usual result and his Leaps were disasters.
Not sure how France figures in but Russia and China were two oppressive and authoritarian land based empires that had revolutions which left them still oppressive, authoritarian, and imperialistic. After Mao's death and Deng's reforms China had a moment but with the recent backsliding, who knows?
s.w., one party authoritarian imperial states run by aging autocrats don't have a good record. Xi isn't Putin (who is just a thug) but "Xi Jinping Thought." Really? He's 69 so why break the post Mao reforms?
aaall,
I see the Chinese operating in Chile and throughout South America. They're buying up the electric power system, mines, etc.
During the pandemic they were the first to market their vaccine, Sinovac, to South America: we all got vaccinated with Sinovac, not as effective as Pfizer, but saved a lot of lives.
Now the Chinese are working with the Universidad Católica (hardly a leftwing institution) to build a plant to fabricate vaccines in Chile.
The Chinese have no problems working with a rightwing government such as that of Sebastian Piñera or a leftwing government such as the current one with Gabriel Boric. Business is business.
Now some people call that "imperialism". Others call it "investment". You take your choice.
Xi hasn't invaded anyone yet. He may invade Taiwan, but I imagine that he's watching the internal breakdown of the U.S. and he'll probably wait to see if outright civil war breaks out in the U.S., which would be a good time for him to invade.
The other possibility is that the mutual provocations between Xi and Biden over Taiwan get out of hand and that he blows his cool and invades, but he doesn't seem to be as stupidly macho as Putin is.
Lessons from recent gun-shooting incidents in New Mexico, Alabama and Missouri:
1. You don’t need a gun in your home to protect yourself. Just don’t open the door, especially after dark; call the police instead.
2. Don’t answer the door with a gun in your hand, and don’t aim it or fire it at anyone.
Five innocent people have died, and a teenager was seriously injured, in recent days – including children at a birthday party - just going about their lives, because this country is awash with guns. None of the people who fired the weapons were members of a militia.
Actually, and more accurately, none of the victims were members of a militia. In the case of the homeowner in New Mexico who answered the door with a gun in his hand and was shot and killed by police who went to the wrong address, the police would be regarded as members of a militia. Not excusing whatever negligence caused the police to go to the wrong address, it is never a good idea to open your door with a gun in your hand. Either the person on the other side of the door may also have a gun, in which case you are inviting getting shot at; or you are more likely to shoot an unarmed person. Just call the police. Even if the police are already at your door by mistake, they will get a radio message from headquarters that will alert them to the fact that they are at the wrong address.
In response to s.w.'s recent comments vis-a-vis China, he might find the following of interest. The first issue of this new on-line journal gives a Chinese view of things, including its engagement with the 'global south.'
https://thetricontinental.org/wenhua-zongheng/
And since I seem to be in a communicative mood, there's this on the contemporary relevance (or not?) of early modern philosophy, in this instance Spinoza:
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/culture/article-739160
s.w., it appears two people have been arrested for operating a secret police station in NYC:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-charges-two-new-yorkers-with-conspiring-act-chinese-agents-statement-2023-04-17/
Anyway, I didn't mean that everything the PRC does is imperialistic. That's why I qualified the term with"land based." Nations with colonies can also have normal trade relationships with other nations. The U.S. certainly doesn't have clean hands. I would be suspicious of the motives of any former/present imperial power.
While Imperial Russia/Soviet Union/Russian Federation is the poster child for land-based imperialism, both were forcibly cobbled together over time and include folks who would prefer a different arrangement.
Tibet and Xinjiang are the best examples but there are PRC incursions in Bhutan and Nepal. I believe it was a Ming Emperor who described the China/Tibet relationship as "uncle-nephew." Inner Mongolia and parts of Siberia also have a case.
As with the Soviet Union, both the initial Chinese Republic and version on of the PRC recognized the right of certain groups/areas to secede. After 1949 the PRC backed off and the ROC took a while to recognize Mongolia.
Maybe the world would be a better place if both empires right-sized. Check out the Silk Road history over the past couple millennia.
https://en.unesco.org/silkroad/content/dunhuang
BTW, most of China (like the RF) is relatively empty:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2095927321007635
They should pass a law everywhere that every gun & bullet newly manufactured should be made out of gold or silver. Instead of keeping them in their homes or cars, people would be keeping them locked away in bank vaults. Plus the price of previously manufactured bullets & guns would go up too.
Of course, bullet-proof vests would be at a market high. Probably everyone wishing they could catch enough gold in the chest to become millionaires.
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