Objectivist

Stop Collectivism Now!

2009-08-20T10:26:00.000-07:00

End Collectivism Now: No Federal Health Care!

At the last election many of us were hoping for a centrist president and administration. We feared anyone who would continue the Bush years. But we got a collectivist spender instead. This president happens on the scene after a Republican administration that worked to destroy more American values than many in generations, while enacting more collectivist policies. The trend toward collectivism that began in the 1930s (or even earlier with Progressivism) had already gone too far. It is amazing that people who claim to support individual rights did not get angry and speak out against this government sooner.

The Obama administration has overstepped the line. This is the last straw. If Obama's health care bill, HR3200 or anything close to it, this country is finished.

Collectivism has been growing in this country, sometimes with changes you could call communistic, sometimes fascist, but always statist. And now as if that had not gone far enough, the Obama administration seeks to add more: look at their agenda . Moreover, if you examine it closely, you will find many of the final steps toward fulfilling another agenda. America has been moving steadily for seventy years towards this set of 10 goals:

Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. [ALMOST DONE*]
A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. [DONE]
Abolition of all rights of inheritance. [TAXING IT HEAVILY]
Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. [PROPERTY SUSPECTED OF INVOLVEMENT IN A CRIME – EVEN IF OWNER IS PROVEN INNOCENT[
Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly. [DONE, PLUS THE HIDDEN TAX OF INFLATION OF THE MONEY SUPPLY]
Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state. [NEARLY ALL UNDER CONTROL
Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. [OWNS POST OFFICE, ONE AUTO MAKER, TWO MORTGAGE LENDERS, PARTS OF SOME BANKS]
Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc. [ALMOST DONE]

* "The ultimate ownership of all property is in the State; individual so-called "ownership" is only by virtue of Government, i.e., law, amounting to mere user; and that use must be in accordance with law and subordinate to the necessities of the State." Senate Resolution #62 , April 1933.

Less than 10 percent of the American population can name the source of those 10 goals: The Communist Manifesto . Several goals have already been achieved in the USA and the Democratic Party is busy trying to implement the remainder.

This administration intends to destroy the Free Market. It is clearly out to destroy health insurance firms, does not understand insurance or hedge funds. It will not tell you in honesty that its goal is to destroy capitalism. Capitalism is the system under which men trade for mutual benefit, subject to no more legal controls than individuals are, it is the system that for most of our history made this country the most productive and wealthy.

This administration will not defend individual rights such as is described in the Bill of Rights, but regretfully allows us a few privileges that the administration can tolerate and which support its goals.

Keep this administration, allow it free reign and kiss your freedoms goodbye.

It is not at all just about health care. But that is a real problem. Wait and listen for more. The administration tries to take our attention off it once in awhile with Presidential medal awards and speeches about a whole new approach to education, but health care is the major current problem for the administration. When they are done with health insurance, they will come for more.

This author is not alleging any crime against America 's elderly. It is acknowledged that the brouhaha about free counseling for end of life options was poorly chosen as a way to support the elderly, and that it was introduced into the House bill by Republicans. That is not the problem.

The problem is that no one that I have heard of has identified the cause of the unduly high medical expenses in this country and the exclusion of millions from current insurance options.

First, the facts about who is uninsured :

Of the 46 million who lack medical care insurance, in other words, subtract 12 million who are eligible for existing insurance programs need to be directed to apply for Medicaid or SCHIP (although these programs should be abolished as they, along with many programs, build on legalized theft to redistribute income), and 9 million should be allowed to continue their “self-insurance” approach. This leaves 5 to 13 million American citizens that we should be able to take care of through voluntary charitable contributions.

We must not put the cruel harnesses of government coercion on the whole population in order to deal with the problems of any portion of the people, let alone three percent (3%) of the population.

Next, What Factors Drive up Medical Costs

In the face of malpractice suits doctors have had to react in two ways:
they have had to pay much higher insurance premiums and
they have begun to prescribe more MRI usage and blood tests, etc.
they may prescribe more medications than necessary.

In addition to this, medical insurance firms are prevented by state governments from full and complete competition across the country. State laws even prevent Doctors Without Borders from doing pro bono clinical care outside their own state.

When the government begins to talk about “negotiating” with pharmaceutical firms about prices, you should realize that both sides are aware of the government having the gun. That is lowering prices by the use of coercion. Nothing will lower a patient's costs at the doctor's office as well as when the patient begins to negotiate with the doctor!

94 percent of health insurance markets in the United States are now highly concentrated, and insurers are thriving in the anti-competitive marketplace. See the American Medical Association study which is summarized by state at the blog Blurbomat.com , showing that in most states the market is dominated by one or two insurance firms.

The only way to correct this is to apply the original meaning of the constitution, which gave congress the power to “regulate commerce among the states” – in this case congress has the power to stop the states from making commerce across their borders irregular and less competitive.

The Obama administration is aiming at a single-payer health care system. That may not be what they seek to do immediately, but that is their long term goal. Like the Fabians, these people will resort to “baby steps” if opposition is somewhat effective. Whatever comes out under the heading of health care reform this year or next will go in that direction, even though only a first step. Our opposition must be total.

Supposedly you can keep your doctor and you can keep your current health care plan. What they soft-pedal or omit is that your private health care plan will be changing . When the prices charged for specific services are forced down directly or by subsidies, private insurance firms will not profit and will legitimately stop offering coverage for those services. The government will not tell your health care insurance company what care you may or may not receive. That is up to your doctor. On the other hand, your doctor may receive “suggestions” from the government.

It does not matter that without the “public option” you will not have reform. We do not need another government program, called “public option” or a subsidized co-op.

The Public Option or Subsidized Cooperatives

Private health care insurance will then become a thing of the past. HMOs, and other plans, whether in the form of individual policies or group, will disappear.

They may be outlawed or just squeezed out.

How can they be squeezed out? If you build enough restrictive fences such as maximum premiums, mandating new policy classes that lead to lower premiums, killing patent protection for prescription medications. Employers will have incentives, then, to drop their old plan and sign up their employees in the government's public option.

The next step might be to for the government to “negotiate” the pharmaceutical firms for lower prescription costs. You will then watch in horror as investments by pharmaceutical firms grind to a halt, and the pipeline of new wonder-working drugs will dry up.

The government can strangle or squeeze out private medical care insurance. Add on to that the same treatment of dental care, psychological counseling, etc., and eventually we will have what is called “socialized medicine” in other countries.

At some point a public medical care plan will be introduced. It will be subsidized. It will provide basic catastrophic coverage plus preventive care and cover routine doctor visits, whose competitive power will run private plans out of town. When the government steps in with a public option or with co-ops, it does not create a “new market.” Rather, the market that we have is damaged and eventually is wrecked. A government subsidized agency “competing” against an industry of hundreds of firms with government regulations imposed on them is not a market.

Later, all private health care plans will have to be processed through the centralized Federal health care Exchange .

There are hardly any steps left in making the U.S. government your single payer.

But just what is it that makes medical care that much more important than food, clothing and shelter?

Let this show go on and we could have a single-payer system for everything. And what do you call that? Statism. Collectivism.

The health care problem of America needs just three things:

Cap medical malpractice damages to $250,000
Make it illegal to prevent consumers from buying medical insurance from out of state firms
Allow American consumers to buy prescription medications outside the country.

These steps protect individual rights and do not initiate coercion on anyone. To go further would violate individual rights, initiating coercive force by the government, which is unconstitutional. Far from being a “moral obligation,” the planned health care reform is an immoral attack on individual rights and the free market.

Why Not For Himself?

2008-09-05T17:33:00.001-07:00

Many heard John McCain’s acceptance speech Thursday, Sept 5, 2008 in St. Paul. There must have been some last-minute rewriting, for he had been upstaged by his vice-presidential choice, Sarah Palin. Palin gave a rousing, clearly moral high ground speech the night before, which electrified the audience. I could vote for her, but not for John.

So what does he do? He postures as the ultimate altruist! Since age 17 he has done nothing but public service. This is taken by most to mean taking the high road compared to the rest of us who only work for our own living. To assert that he did none of this for himself but only for country deeply offends me. And what the hell is wrong with private service?

To claim that no time of his working life was spent for his own sake is utterly irrational, it is evil, it is altruistic.

To me the ideal of America is the entrepreneur who creates jobs, the drug researcher who comes up with the new penecillin, the person who works and saves to invest in new ventures, the man or woman who goes to war for the money and believes they are good enough to survive it and fights without pulling punches.

My heroes do not include anyone who sacrifices his or her life for individuals or country. Sacrifice means giving up a greater good for a lesser one. That is irrational.

Altruism is to value someone else as more worthy to live than oneself.

Rational self-interest (the philosophy of Ayn Rand) correctly values oneself and secondly others who are of value.

McCain is selling us a package deal, combining military heroism with the scummy drag of a beast in the gutter demanding admiration for nothing but their need and utter lack of worth.

What has McCain done for me? Has he made government smaller, less costly and less intrusive? Has he created new products? Has he figured out a way of making anything better? Making anything cheaper? Kept foreign enemies from my door? Has he done his best taking care of his own life and his loved ones?

No, he has done none of that. But neither do I believe he has only lived his life for his country. He plans to live a long life. He has, under the premises of our current system, a good plan. If he wins the election he may only be president for four years but will come away with honorable mention in history books and a quite rich retirement, plus gratuities for years of speech-making.

He will also be loved by the political machine that he serves. He worked all his life for a cause.

Why Not For Himself?

Capitalism is the Way

2008-09-01T15:11:00.000-07:00

Capitalism is not just a system that works

The government of China acknowledges that the principles of capitalism are required for a nation to do well economically. Russia has recently started to give up collective farming; no this is not 1990. It is fresh news. Russian agriculture is seriously behind in status and progress compared to Russian energy production and others also.

The growth of the populations of capitalist periods in various nations indicates that health and other things required for people to survive and live longer shows it works.

That is not good enough. With that admission you can still practice genocide, tyranny, legalized plunder, and all manner of bad government. You can still have bankers control things and suck the life blood from the economy. Capitalism works so well, that even with the banks doing that, through the ruling of the Federal Reserve, which has power over the U.S. government, pull out seven eighths of our wealth, and we are still better off than ever.

Capitalism is Right

Capitalism will never be allowed to succeed fully it cannot just be promoted because it works. Too many people have already demonstrated that capitalism will not be fully implemented if all you support it with is that it works. It needs to be recognized as the economic and political system that is right, as the only one that is right.

I am, by the way, talking about unfettered laissez faire capitalism. Many would object that capitalism cannot be allowed unless it is under many regulations and laws. I do not argue for a lawless society at all. However, I do argue that one set of laws for us all is sufficient. Laws against murder, bodily harm, fraud, property damage, breaking contracts, etc., ought to be sufficient to apply to all of us, investors, laborers, managers, owners, politicians, soldiers, policemen, judges and cleaning-persons.

Regulations are an illegal, unconstitutional kind of law. All laws are supposed to be created by legislators and congressmen. Most regulations are not. Breaking rules should always involve accusation, trial by evidence, confronting ones accuser in a court of law, resolution of the problem by set rules, objective processes and punishment, preferably making the victim whole through restitution. Breaking rules devised by regulators, however, involves self-reporting, not having clear knowledge beforehand of where the line of good behavior is drawn, and enriching the government rather than restoring the alleged (often missing) victim.

Consumers rely too much on government regulators, to get alleged wrongs done by corporations redressed. Consumer should instead demand (through consumer union type groups) full disclosure of product quality, and file suits when defrauded.

It is Time for Real Capitalism

Endorse full capitalism. Get the businessmen to stop going to Washington for favors. Demand that they stick to business, get out of politics, get out of "community service" and charity work. Just sell good products and services and make a profit. Remember also that your retirement fund does more for you if industry generates good profits.

For more information, go to Capitalism Magazine and Ayn Rand Institute

No Escape

2008-08-12T17:51:00.000-07:00

Bankers and politicians were thought to be strange bedfellows. Why? I wondered recently. Banking is now a business that thrives, rather than making a few percent more on what it loans out relative to what it pays for your deposited savings. It is a business that relies on being able to lend what capital it has on the books several times, at as high a rate as possible. However, when the crunch comes (recent lending proves to have been disastrous), you and I cannot get a loan even if we prove we absolutely do not need it.

Politicians thrive, rather than on carrying out the mandate that the voters struck a deal for when they last voted, but on the advice of lobbyists. What do lobbyists have to offer that we the voters don't have? Influence that can get the politicians cushy retirements. Influence that gets them a get home card in the lobbying business or other lucrative field.

Politicians passed laws to make it mandatory to make certain amounts of loans in slums and poor neighborhoods. They put real teeth in the laws. They also jawboned the public and the banking industry to make this an "ownership society." And they, through the Federal Reserve Bank, lowered interest rates (during the nineties and during recent times also), so that many of us went first for the dot com boom, and after that collapsed, we went for home ownership. Now they are busy saving mortgage lenders, in the name of preventing foreclosures. How can you tell a politician is lying? Their lips are moving.

Practically every use we found for "our money" in the last decade or so has turned to shit! Let's face it, the money is not ours. The money belongs to the banking system, but the problem is ours. No investment is safe. It appears that government bonds are safe, but why the hell should we believe any longer in the "faith and credit of the United States?"

Buy gold!

Origins and Tragic End of Sub-Mortgages: It’s the Government, Stupid!

2008-01-17T17:07:00.000-08:00

The “victims” of the real-estate bubble and sub prime mortgage crash, and the enemies of the free market would have us believe that “predatory lending” is the real problem. Guess again. Government and its regulations are behind it all.

What happens when government intervenes in order to create an “ownership society?” and curb “predatory lending?” The target of libertarians, a free market, recedes farther into the future.

“Shelter from the FHA

“As part of a continuing legislative reaction to the slide in the housing market and the sub prime mortgage problem, a bill to modernize the Federal Housing Administration has recently passed the House of Representatives.

“Similar legislation passed out of committee in the Senate, but the full Senate has not yet acted. Although the "Expanding American Home Ownership Act of 2007" promises to make it easier to own a home, some troubling factors may leave taxpayers on the hook for loans that cannot be paid back. Like many of Washington's policy initiatives, this is another bad public policy wrapped in the language of love.”

What exactly is Congress now preparing to fix?

It is hard to tell what bailouts and new regulations are coming. Obviously members of Congress include people who are commiserating with the people who lose their homes in foreclosures and/or angry with the lenders. Borrowers may not be smart enough to avoid bad loans, and lenders are, after all, dirty rotten scoundrels.

Something will be done; there are just too many foreclosures, too many crashing shares in the stock market, as well as "junkier" bonds.

Will the cure include un-doing what caused this all? Were interest rates lowered too far in trying to recover from the Dot Com Bubble bursting? Were other government actions also responsible for setting up this mortgage market crisis? Forcing lending to “communities of color” and other neighborhoods against which banks had allegedly been discriminating.

Remember the CRA?

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), enacted by Congress in 1977 (12 U.S.C. 2901) and implemented by Regulations 12 CFR parts 25, 228, 345, and 563e, is intended to encourage depository institutions [national banks] to help meet the credit needs of the communities in which they operate.

The CRA requires that each insured depository institution's record in helping meet the credit needs of its entire community be evaluated periodically. That record is taken into account in considering an institution's application for deposit facilities, including mergers and acquisitions. (See CRA Ratings) CRA examinations (see Exam Schedules) are conducted by the federal agencies that are responsible for supervising depository institutions: the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (FRB), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS).

Under these regulations, when the OTS rating of a lending/investing institution falls too low, the sanctions the OTS:

(1) May order that a bank's covered interstate branch or branches be closed unless the bank provides reasonable assurances to the satisfaction of the OCC, after an opportunity for public comment, that the bank has an acceptable plan under which the bank will reasonably help to meet the credit needs of the communities served by the bank in the host state; and

(2) Will not permit the bank to open a new branch in the host state that would be considered to be a covered interstate branch unless the bank provides reasonable assurances to the satisfaction of the OCC, after an opportunity for public comment, that the bank will reasonably help to meet the credit needs of the community that the new branch will serve.

(3) Penalties ranging from $5,000 to $1,000,000 per day.

What Did the Banks Do?

The CRA forced banks to lend to otherwise uncreditworthy consumers (read the article by Thomas J. DiLorenzo from 2007, who inspired me to research this topic).

In making loans of the types covered, including mortgages, the banks became creative and more liberal. The demand for mortgages was also causing an interest in making more profits in mortgages, due to the housing bubble.

There have been long periods in banking history during which the mortgages they let were kept on the books, rather than being sold. Borrowers with high qualifications could always be found by being selective. Further income after the closing on a mortgage could also be earned by owning the mortgage and processing it for its life, the greatest benefit would be the interest earned and the restoring of the cash capital.

Higher Rates for the Lower Grades. When faced with the “liberalizing” rules of CRA, other, less qualified borrowers had to be included. These mortgages were riskier. At first, the normal qualification process based on credit rating and ability to repay resulted simply in higher interest rates, to make up for the higher risk. Not enough loans resulted from this, as the clients in question often faced higher monthly payments than they could afford.

Further changes were required to meet CRA rules. Several other forms of lending resulted:

Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs), whose initial interest rate was 1 or more points below the current standard rate. The “adjustable” feature kicked in after 2 or 3 years, with the interest rate then being “reset” to a certain number of basis points above one of the leading index rates such as the 1-year constant-maturity Treasury (CMT) securities, the Cost of Funds Index (COFI), and the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR). The rate could then periodically move up (by set increments, up to a contractual maximum) or down in step with that standard rate. The hope of the client obtaining an ARM would be that his or her income would rise enough to cover the payments.

Options ARMs, on which the interest rate adjusts monthly and the payment adjusts annually (up to a contractual maximum), with borrowers offered options on how large a payment they will make. The options include interest-only, and a "minimum" payment that is usually less than the interest-only payment. The minimum payment option results in a growing loan balance, termed "negative amortization". Again, the hope is that income increases to meet the growing obligation.

Further Variations, including low or no down payment, “low-doc” or “no-doc” loans (where formal proof of ability to repay is lightened or omitted). Couple this with the borrower having pay cut or losing a job or the negative equity due to a falling real-estate market, and you have a house of cards (pun intended). A house with a falling value is sometimes abandoned, since even if the payments remain affordable, the financial incentive to make them is substantially weakened. The borrower walks away and defaults on the mortgage.

What Else Did the Banks Do?

The CRA changed the behavior of all of these national banks. What did they face? Keep doing sound banking, face unconscionable fines and closures, or accept losses due to defaults. I do not feel sorry for banks. I just demand justice. The government-banking complex bothers me. However, this was an anti-bank squeeze play; an injustice.

Mortgage defaults were bound to increase. Defaults would come in greater numbers than with the previous generations of loans. What did they decide to do? Just as in previous times, occasionally, to obtain cash for new lending, mortgages were sold to investors, now this made it convenient to avoid bearing the full burden of these defaults. The commissions and closing fees were kept by the originator, but a small amount given up in discounts on the mortgages sold.

Mortgage defaults results in not only the ending of the income stream of the monthly payments, but also taking a loss on repossessed homes. The market is not kind and considerate when you are in a hurry to sell unoccupied, possibly damaged property. The risk of carrying these riskier loans had to be mitigated. The legal way out, after having been forced to grant the loans, was to turn around and sell them. They might continue to service them, but they had to dump them.

The investment community probably bought these mortgages at a discount based on the grade of the loan. Now, not wishing to bear the full burden of this risky bundles of mortgages, these investors sliced and diced them and sold these in turn to large institutions, some of them foreign banks.

The banking system created mortgage-backed securities (MBS), collateralized debt obligations (CDO) and structured investment vehicles (SIV).

Then the Chickens Come Home to Roost

However, as the defaults on the underlying mortgages increases, many more people and institutions are hurt. They can no longer carry these investments on the books at cost. The derivatives values fall. MBSs are forced to be sold at fire sales. They must take write-downs.

32 sub-prime lenders that had become "defunct" since early 2006

Guess what happens to their stock values? Guess what happens to the CRA-controlled banks that started this? What happens to their ability to lend and what happens to their share prices?

Bust.

What Should be Done?

Repeal the laws that caused this all.

When the housing bubble bust ends, having a flexible lending industry will not do any harm. The public must be warned, however, should the same cycle begin again. But no bailouts should be made, no adding of “predatory lending” laws and regulations.

The investors of the nation deserve to be left alone. Their capital should be allowed to flow to where it will grow and work the most effectively. After all, in every legal free market exchange (including loans) both parties benefit, otherwise the motivation to make the exchange would be absent. Moreover, we know that government is the absence of that, absence of free market.

The whole CRA scheme should be abandoned. The taxpayers should not be on the hook for bailouts or regulations that are more burdensome. However, that is precisely what Congress will do to us, keep CRA, add more regulations, and take our money to bail out the losers. And cause more inflation by increasing the money supply (have you been paying attention to the credit market help coming from the Fed?).

Ben Bernanke is caught between the rock and the hard place, lowering rates to fight inflation versus a “stimulus package” to prevent a recession. But I do not feel the least bit sorry for him, for he (in his “private” central bank) and his cohorts in the government sector have caused this stagflation, credit crunch and recession.

2008-01-16T17:29:00.000-08:00

Biblical Constitution?

January 16, 2008

If Mike Huckable were to be elected president, would he place his hand on the constitution and swear to uphold the bible? Hell no, but he would proceed to make the bible our constitution.

Justice would be an eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, and every 49 years all debts would have to be cancelled. To be blessed would mean you sell all of your posessions and give the proceeds to the poor. If you want to inherit the earth, you would have to become meek. If you are spanked on one cheek, turn the other for the next smack.

What did Huckabee say yesterday morning?

"I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution," Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. "But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that's what we need to do – to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view." Find the whole thing at Raw Story. But on the contrary, “front-runner” now turns to crack-pot.

I cannot think of a single candidate who would not want to amend the constitution in one way or another. They know various amendments they can think up would not get passed, and they would probably work on another way (appointment of their favorites to the supreme court?) to have the constitution applied the way they want.

Suddenly being a Latter Day Saint is sanitized, if not made heroic. Oddly, Romney is the candidate that NBC’s Today show quizzed about this matter. Weird.

If there were a god, surely “god is love” would suggest the libertarian path. There would be standards, true, but standards of inclusion rather than what anti-abortion and anti-gay rules. Let’s have less of this “anti.” Let’s be more inclusionary and liberal.

He drew a circle that shut me out--

Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.

But Love and I had the wit to win:

We drew a circle that took him in!

"Outwitted" by Edwin Markham (complete poem)

Of course, I am not saying we include Huckabee any more. We want to, but he is now a “goner.”

If I were President for a day

2007-11-06T16:54:00.000-08:00

The first thing I would do is to abolish the special IRS tax courts. Then I would order the ending of income tax withholding, because it wastes one third of what we earn.

I would announce in a speech to the American people that they should, when serving on a jury, remember the right to nullify any bad law, because it is an age-old right of juries.

Then I would offer everyone in the country an executive clemency for carrying a hand-gun, and order all BATFE personnel to sit at their desks and do nothing, because everything they do is in violation of the Second Amendment.

I would also order every government employee to write a report justifying their jobs, because they need justification.

I would recall all American armed services troops who are stationed outside our borders, because they have nothing to do with defense.

I would then abolish the authority of the Social Security Administration to collect any “contributions” and shut down the agency, and would issue an executive order that everyone will be issued a credit for “contributions” al ready made, a credit against their future income taxes. This is beause Social Security is a ponzi scheme.

Government-owned property, lands and unused buildings, will be sold on the open market to reimburse other persons who are no longer liable for any tax, such as retired persons, for all of their Social Security “contributions.” This is because the earnings taken could have been invested in S and P 500 index funds earning almost 10% per year, which would have been worth over one million dollars per retired person, instead of a couple of hundred thousand.

An executive order would be issued to declassify everything that has anything to do with UFOs, Project Blue Book, swamp gas, the bizarre incident at Rozwell in 1947, and so on. This is because government has little if any need to keep secrets.

I would issue an executive order to abolish all the stupid regulations about politically correct toilets. This is because “Political Correctness” must be a matter of free choice, not of legislation.

Federal support for “reformulated” fuels, but still allow farmers to sell their alcohol from corn, and allow them to do so in their own filling stations. This is because the free market works better to direct capital to the most productive uses.

Establish December 15^th as Bill of Rights Day. This is to enable everyone to remember their liberties.

End the War on Drugs. This is because prohibition perversely never works. It always makes things worse.

Forbid payment of any government funds for abortions. Every woman who might become pregnant would think more carefully about preventing pregnancy if she knew she would have to raise the child or pay for the abortion herself.

Abolish the DEA. FBI, BATFE, and CIA. This is because these agencies do not secure our liberties, but rather threaten them.

Declare a Constitutional Emergency, suspending a long list of laws and regulations doing the most damage, and offer clemency to all who may have violated them. This is because it might inspire the repeal of many bad laws by juries or legislators, laws that do more harm than good, destroying liberty instead of securing it.

I would end that day by recommending that everyone read "Hope" by Aaron Zelman and L. Neil Smith.

American government went wrong. But how?

2007-11-06T12:53:00.000-08:00

This is about the fundamental problems of this country. The premise, however, is NOT about whether the main problems of the United States of America are inequality, starvation, poverty, illiteracy, discrimination, war, rape, murder, assault, theft, political dishonesty, divorce or illegal drugs. And there may be more. These are problems and they are serious.

These and other lesser problems have never been absent in history and never will disappear. As to whether they are more severe and impact more people than they should there is little dispute. However no single one of these explains the enormity of the total destructive effect of the rest. Much could be done to lessen the above problems, but they will always be with us, and they don’t constitute the big underlying problem.

Understanding the fundamental problem will help explain why all of these other problems are as severe as they are, and point the way to minimizing or alleviating most of them.

What is the fundamental problem then?

First some clues. How close to your ideal is our society, and what factors need to be examined?

1. The objectivity of our laws – legislating simple, well-publicized rules that protect our rights and enable us to know what government might do in most all situations, OR making laws that increase government power, delegating police and court powers to regulators who impose rules and punishments cannot easily be foreseen.

2. The example set by leaders and other major public figures – inspiring us all to being productive and voluntarily helping the least well off or dissembling, buying favor, selling influence, legalizing theft, punishing victimless crimes, etc. – “Why can’t I steal and cheat a little, too?”

3. Incentives that are built into our laws, encourage either a flourishing independence or a dependency on government and major efforts to circumvent laws instead of being more productive. An independent and neutral government which allows a vigorous economy to invent and create solutions to problems that arise to reduce the burden of labor, cure diseases, generate wealth that increases capital to create new jobs, support the arts and aid the hungry and poor, or a state which uses force to achieve environmental and welfare goals.

4. The scope of domains for which the majority may vote new laws – restricted to affirming and protecting all human rights and liberties, or unlimited democracy has replaced liberty as our chief value.

5. Overlooking to fact that 300 million people have 300 million potentially different dreams of the good life. This is replaced by regarding it as one homogeneous aggregate, leading to the perception or belief that society and the way life within it is organized is basically simple, and as a result, can be radically designed or at least continually adjusted and micromanaged toward some optimal state that is predeterminable through foresight and reason.

We need an independent and neutral government which allows (does not promote, but just freely permits) a vigorous economy to invent and create solutions to problems that arise to reduce the burden of labor, cure diseases, generate wealth that increases capital to create new jobs, does not interfere with the arts and aid the hungry and poor. We do not want a state which uses force to achieve environmental and welfare goals.

I think that also was the vision of our Founding Fathers, with the exception of the Tories like Alexander Hamilton. Unfortunately, from day one, a quiet war has been running between those who support the vision of liberty and those who want a nanny state.

The Myth of Consent

2007-10-10T14:53:00.000-07:00

We have been convinced that our wonderful and sometimes no so wonderful government relies on our consent. It gets along very well, thank you, without it. It always has.

The framers of the US Constitution did not all agree. The people alive at the time the constitution was adopted did not all vote for it. A minority did, but excluding women, slaves and children.

And in no way could they have spoken for us, and bind us to give even any sort of implied.consent.

Randy E. Barnett has now laid to rest this crazy idea, once and for all, in his book Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty. See chapter one. Part of the text is stored here