Is it better for all when government acts? Or are we safer when our leaders sit on their hands?

The New Jersey state government has proposed to crack down on the scourge of bicycle riders using handheld cell phones.

As per Assemblyman Jon Bramnick, riding without both hands on the handlebars “is, in our judgment, a danger to pedestrians as well as to the bicyclists themselves, due to the fact that now they have one hand on the handlebars, they're talking to someone and they're on a public highway.” (Via CBS news radio)

The proposed legislation does not require riders to pay attention to where they are going. Ear buds will remain legal.

Nor does New Jersey demand that they remain sober whilst propelling themselves and thirty pounds of steel through crowds of innocent civilians despite the fact that nationwide, 25% of bicycle wrecks involve alcohol.

They just demand that we keep our hands on the tiller.

Speaking of firm hands on the tiller, we now have a reasonably good idea as to how San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank President Janet Yellen will vote come January 31.

In a speech before the Joint Rotary Clubs of Reno and the East Bay (held quite conveniently in one of Reno's largest casinos), Yellen noted that while she does indeed wish that inflation would drop below current levels, she believes that “policy may now be well-positioned to foster exactly such an outcome while also giving due consideration to the risks to economic activity.”

If you finding Yellen's statements to be somewhat opaque, I will translate: She still thinks inflation is a threat (despite the fact that Washington currently denies that there is any inflation to speak of).

But she does feel that perhaps, if the Fed just slowly backed away from the whole problem, maybe, just maybe, everything would come out okay.

Inflation will subside (not that it existed in the first place). Economic growth (that also may or may not exist) will continue at the same rate. Hiring and firing will balance each other out, and no one will ask for a raise.

The economy will simply run in completely perfect Smithian fashion on its own without any conscious operator.

In fact, maybe we should just abolish the Fed and send all of our central bankers on an extended vacation to Hawaii.

This is funny, because working here at the TFN bunker, I run into a number of folks who pine for the days when John Pierpont Morgan handled all of our currency woes with a single telegram from his mahogany-paneled library on Fifth Avenue.

Maybe they are right. I can't honestly say that the bureaucrats have done a better job. Indeed there is probably a good chance that they have mucked things up so badly over the past 94 years or so that it is too late to quit.

This bicycle is moving too fast and is simply too unstable to run without some kind of corrective hand on the tiller.