Where is the Investment Money Going in Response to the Left's Irrational Energy Plans?

Today's Wall St. Journal has an article summarizing a study by the Atlas Public Policy and Utah State University on where the announced investments in the Left's energy policy are to be made.  The Atlas Public Policy group is strongly in favor of the Left's "green" energy policies and is not an Ayn Rand-inspired effort.  Companies plan to spend $170 billion on projects in response and supposedly create 200,000 new industrial jobs.  Most of these projects and jobs are to be in Republican states.  New York, Illinois, Colorado, and New Mexico will get a decent share among the Democrat states, but mostly the investment will go to Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.  The battleground states of Nevada, Arizona, and Michigan get a great share of the investment money.  The top investment states from most to less are:  Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Indiana, South Carolina, Nevada, Ohio, and Arizona.  Not one of these states is a solid Democrat state.

The announced projects are to make car batteries, electric vehicles, low-emission buses, solar equipment, electrical grid supplies, wind turbines, recycling, mine for critical materials, hydrogen electrolyzers, and carbon dioxide sequestration.  Companies are choosing to make most of their investments in Republican states because of lower labor and living costs, lower taxes, more dependable and affordable supplies of electricity, and fewer restrictions on land use.

Republicans and the residents of these states should not rejoice in this investment overmuch.  Most of the investment is malinvestment.  It is not in response to real human need and enrichment.  It is mostly built upon the fable that oil, gas, and coal use will cause catastrophic man-made global warming.  That hypothesis has failed scientifically, though it has become powerful in building special interest groups.  More and more people are having doubts about it.  In fact, the most reliable data we have in the USA on the direction of the temperature change is that we are in a very moderate cooling stage since 1895.  I am referring to the rural weather station data before it is manipulated into a false substantial warming trend, as explained in my article The Fake Climate Record using data provided by Tony Heller.

Many of these projects are going to fail.  The money invested in them will be lost.  The people hired will learn skills for which there will be no market when they lose their jobs.  People will own homes they cannot afford to leave because they cannot sell them in the ghost town that will be left behind when the bubble of "green" energy bursts.  Schools and the many service and goods-selling businesses built to serve the workers on these wet-sand projects will be sunk and abandoned.  There will be many a tragedy.  Much of the investment money would otherwise have gone to the same areas to perform productive work.  The people who took dead-end jobs could have taken jobs that were fulfilling real needs and wants.  Many good Republicans will be left holding the bag.  The Democrats will just tell them coldly to study computer coding as Hilary told the West Virginia coal miners to do.

Before the Progressives can transform America, they must destroy America.  Sowing chaos and creating a state of nihilism is their thing.  Destroying our private sector affordable and reliable energy supply is essential for making Americans more dependent upon government and more willing to do as they are told by their elitist betters.  In many ways, those elitists will take us back to the Middle Ages so they can exercise unquestioned authority.  In their ideal world, the politicians will be the aristocracy and the bureaucrats will be the clerics of the church.  The rest of us will be serfs.

The Many Rights of the Individual

Two hundred and forty two years ago, the Second Continental Congress issued the Declaration of Independence, which states

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

The idea that every person has unalienable rights by virtue of the nature of man which are not dependent upon a government granting or recognizing those rights is very frightful to socialists or any other supporters of tyrannical government.  They hate the Declaration of Independence.  They hate the fact that it declares that the only justifiable reason for government is its dedication to the protection and support of every single individual’s rights.  They hate the fact that the Declaration of Independence states clearly that when government acts to deprive men of their equal, individual rights, then it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it.

The Declaration of Independence is not the only essential American governing document that the socialists hate.  Barack Obama declared in a radio interview when he was an Illinois state senator in its state legislature that he did not like the U.S. Constitution because it was a barrier to socialism.  Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan just wrote in the opinion of the four dissenting justices of the Supreme Court in the Janus case that decided that public employees cannot be forced to pay union dues that the majority were “weaponizing the First Amendment.”  The five justices of the majority had used freedom of speech as the reason for not allowing unions to forcibly collect union dues or even to collect them as a default unless a public employee underwent a process to deny the union the right to collect the money from his paycheck.

Justice Kagan and many others of the left have become very incensed that freedom of speech and freedom of religion have been used to thwart them in their dictation of how Americans can think and act.  They are terribly upset that people associating with one another in business were allowed freedom of speech in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010.  They have been incensed that some businesses have been able to escape infringements of their right to freedom of association by virtue of claiming their freedom of religion, whether in their hiring practices or in their wedding cake baking services.  The present session of the Supreme Court also used freedom of speech to deny the socialist California legislature to require organizations giving advice to pregnant women to tell them about their options to have an abortion.  Hence the socialists or Progressive Elitists are more and more horrified by the individual rights recognized in the First Amendment of the Constitution.

Unfortunately, those who favor a government whose functions violate the individual rights of some, often in the name of providing more security or comfort for others, have long been able to keep the courts from recognizing the many individual rights which were supposed to be protected by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.  It was recognized when the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution that individuals had many rights not explicitly dealt with in the earlier amendments of the Bill of Rights.

What are our individual rights, whether recognized by our government are not?

• The right to life, not to be supported, but to be allowed to act to support it ourselves, as we allow others to do so also.  This is a general right to manage our own life and to fully claim self-ownership.
• The right to determine our own actions and to undertake them, provided we do not act to prevent others from determining their own actions and undertaking them with all of us barred from the initiated use of force.
• The right to choose our own values and to pursue those values to try to achieve our own happiness.
• The freedom of conscience, the right to use our own judgment and to act upon it.  Freedom of religion is a subset of this right and is far from all-inclusive.
• The freedom of association, which is also the freedom to choose who we will cooperate with and for what purposes.  This includes our domestic partnerships, our business partnerships, our hiring choices, our freedom of contract, our choice of friends, and those we join in our recreational activities.
• Freedom of speech or communication of our thoughts and ideas in all the forms this may take.  The freedom of assembly is part of this, as it is part of our freedom of association.
• The freedom of privacy, or the freedom not to share those parts of our lives we do not wish to share knowledge of with others.  This includes the right to be secure in our papers, our homes, and such as prescribed in the 4th Amendment.
• The freedom of equal protection of our income and property and the other fruits of our labor and thought.
• The right to own and bear arms so that we might protect our own lives and individual rights.
• The right to fair and just treatment when accused of a crime as prescribed in our 5th , 6th, 7th, and 8th Amendments.

I will not claim this to be an all-inclusive list of our natural rights.  I do not claim that life is so simple that it is always easy to understand how one individual’s exercise of his rights will affect others as they try to exercise their own rights.  But, good societies and good governments -- legitimate governments – will always try very hard to make individual liberty their primary goal and will defer as much as is possible to the individual’s right to make his own value choices and manage his own life.  No legitimate government can take the stance that it is justified in violating the rights of some in the interest of other persons.  Legitimate government cannot violate any person’s rights.  It must respect the equal rights of every citizen and legal resident.

A society with such a legitimate government will be one which minimizes the use of force.  The government should act to prevent all individuals from initiating the use of force.  That government also minimizes its restraints on liberty such that its own use of force is also minimized.  Government which violates individual rights does so by the use of force or its threatened use.  Governments are commonly the worst abusers of the use of force in the nations of the world today.  There are no highly legitimate governments operating at this time.  Some are much less worse than others, but all are massive abusers of the rights of the individual.  The United States federal government violates very many of our rights today and American socialists and Progressive Elitists want it to violate many more of our individual rights.

Many Americans, whether socialists or religious traditionalists, want to use government to prescribe a moral code by which everyone is expected to live.  They are often certain that their moral code is right and that a good society can be achieved if only the government will force everyone to live by their moral code.  The fact that there is often more variation in the moral codes held by the political factions pursuing such moral code prescriptions by law than could possibly be encoded into law rarely dawns on them.  These same people, especially the socialists, are very inclined to either use government or extra-governmental force and intimidation to prevent dissenters from their moral ideas from exercising their freedom of speech, press, and assembly.  According to the socialists and sometimes those who speak for God, if you have morally wrong ideas, you forfeit your freedom of speech, press, and assembly.

No freedom is a freedom at all if one will not allow those you think are wrong from exercising their freedom.  There is no freedom of speech if a minority or a single individual is not allowed to state their own ideas.  There is no freedom of association if one is not allowed to discriminate in the choosing of those one wishes to associate with, even if that discrimination may be what many may call bigotry.

The Christian who refuses to associate with gay people is wrong in my opinion, but he is acting fully within his rights.  To make him bake a cake for a gay wedding may very well be an infringement upon his freedom of conscience.

The gay organizations that want to force non-discrimination against gay people outside of the government itself are very wrong in doing so.  They should be as determined to protect their own freedom of association and conscience as anyone else should be.  Imagine a law that requires every gay bar to bring in heterosexual people until they represent their proportion in the population at large among their customers each night when the federal inspectors come around to make a count at the bar.

Many of the religious conservatives were very unhappy about the Supreme Court ruling allowing gay marriages.  In fact, this should have been a very obvious requirement respecting freedom of association.  Unfortunately, our government does not actually recognize the freedom of association.  It also very much limits the freedom of contract in general.  In reality, people should have as much freedom in forming their domestic partnerships under contract as they would have in forming a business partnership.  If three men and three women wanted to form a domestic partnership, that is their right as much as it would be the right of one woman and one man.  The same is true for one woman and two men or for two men and one woman or for three men or for three women.  The government has no business interfering with such an exercise in freedom of association and freedom of contract.  What such domestic partnerships might aim to accomplish and their sexual relationships are not government business, except insofar as the adults entering into the contract choose to make those matters a part of their lawful domestic partnership contract.

A much more harmonious society results when government is not being extensively used as a tool to prevent individuals from exercising their broad and many individual rights.  There are many claims that we live in an very uncivil society today.  Well, what do you expect when we have to fight over the control of a government that is constantly willing and wanting to violate our rights.  When we have a government that loves to take more from the rich and redistribute it to the many more voters who are not as rich, do the rich not have a right to believe they are threatened by that government?  If the rich use their money and connections to manipulate the regulatory state so that it is much harder for small, upstart companies to compete with their larger companies, is it not reasonable that the small businessmen will be very upset?  If the federal government owns half the land in a state and it controls the use of that land so that the environmentalists on the left and right coasts are happy, is it not to be expected that many in the state where that land is not of use to them are going to be unhappy?  If you are a coal miner, a river barge operator, a store owner in a coal town, or a dock worker in Norfolk, VA, is it not reasonable that you will be very unhappy when the federal government decides that a pregnant woman eating only fish from a river downwind from a coal-fired power plant might according to very imaginative argument and highly cherry-picked studies of islanders who only eat seafood develop some problem due to mercury released from coal combustion so that coal-fired power plants are being shutdown?  Or you want to build an office building, but you have to wait 5 years before starting as you work through endless environmental studies which keep requiring you to spend more and more on the building itself, not to mention the lawyers fees.

Then there is the shear weight of the taxes.  You are young and you do not expect Social Security to be around in 40 years when you might retire, but you are paying into it out of every paycheck, instead of putting that money into your own retirement investment fund.  Medicare costs will exceed its revenues in 2026 according to the ever-changing projections, so if that program is still going to be around, you will have to pay higher Medicare taxes soon.  Meanwhile, you may still be struggling to pay off the money you borrowed to go to college.  Thanks to all of that loan money available, the colleges built themselves up like spas for the rich, but the education you received was no better and maybe worse than the education people received 30 years earlier, but you paid much more for it.

Perhaps you are struggling to start a new business and the paperwork required by the governments and by your business customers is overwhelming, thanks to big government.  Meanwhile, you need to buy equipment so you can expand, but the county personal property tax penalizes you for having that equipment, making it harder for you to hire more people.  The more people you hire the more the governments expect you to act as an unpaid tax collector.  If you do business across state lines, you now have to worry about collecting sales taxes for each and every one of many thousands of taxing authorities even though you have no presence in their areas and no vote to determine the taxes or the politicians who decide to levy them.  Imagine the deluge of paperwork now coming your way.

When the governments do too much and forget the principle that their legitimate function is simply to protect everyone’s equal individual rights, then it is pitting the people against one another.  Good people are simply trying to protect themselves from the hurt that the government can do to them.  Immoral people are very happy to try to wrest control of government so they can take advantage of most of the people.  If you think there are not endless numbers of schemes or conspiracies to do just that in Washington, you are very naive indeed.  The evil-doers are some foundations, environmental groups, people who want welfare, labor unions, educators, scientists, professions that want restrictive licenses, and many businesses, not to mention many politicians.

It is absolute pie in the sky nonsense to think government should hurt some and violate the rights of some in order to help some greater number or the most needy.  Government will start with some plausible such proposal that almost everyone will agree with.  After it has established numerous such programs, the people will no longer have the time or will to think about them.  The government arguments for the next set of programs can be much less plausible now.  Soon it is a free-for-all.  Soon one has what we have now, government for special interests.  The people are bewildered and no longer in effective control.  Some simply trust to the authorities, but most Americans are now very jaded.  But, this is exactly what should have been expected when we allowed government to disregard a strict adherence to its legitimate role as the protector of every individual’s many and broad rights.  When we give this up as a critical and essential principle, we give up all hope for a just, fair, and harmonious society.

Progressivism Evolves from Soak the Rich to Soak the Poor

Progressivism used to pretend to soak the rich in order to provide welfare for the poor.  To some degree it did what it pretended to do, but it mostly hurt the middle class to provide welfare for the poor and a false and easy sense of morality to the rich.  Of course the rich looked down on the poor and claimed to make their supposedly miserable lives better even as they shut them off from joining the middle class.

The platform of the Hillary-run Democratic Party has now been proclaimed the most Progressive in terms of its environmental policies ever.  Tom Steyer, the single largest campaign donor of the 2014 elections with donations of about $74 million, has already spent $31.5 million on the 2016 campaign with most of his effort aimed at ensuring the Democratic Party has radical and destructive environmental and energy policies.  Once again, he is the biggest campaign donor so far in this election.  The Democrat pledge to end freedom of speech for corporations and for-profit companies is not intended to apply to this businessman's gigantic donations.  "Free speech for me, but none for you" is the motto of the Democrat Party.

Under the bought influence of Tom Steyer, the Democrat Party platform is the "most progressive environmental platform in the history of the Democratic platform or in the history of American politics", according to the buyer himself.  Steyer boasts that efforts to thwart climate change appear everywhere in the platform document.  “So it really isn’t a question of any one single silver bullet. It’s an attitude where we basically put it into every discussion we have, so when we’re talking about jobs, we’re also talking about clean energy, we’re also talking about fighting climate change.” 

Of course, the number of coal mining, oil and gas fracking, railroad, pipeline, and power plant jobs killed is de-emphasized and the number of so-called green energy jobs is hugely exaggerated.  The health benefits of using less and less fossil fuel are multiplied many times in their imaginative telling of the story.  The dangers of fossil fuels to the environment are blown to heroic proportions, while those of covering state-sized sunny areas with photovoltaics, boiling birds with directed and amplified sunlight, and blenderizing birds with spinning dicing blades are lost in silence.  Where any other structure made by man is an abomination to the beauty of nature, tall and broad wind generators are a problem only when they are in the backyard of wealthy "Progressive" aristocrats eager for the absolute power of the nobility of ages once thought behind us. The fact that the few unemployed coal miners so deep in despair that they commit suicide greatly exceed the numbers of those killed by air-borne pollutants downwind of coal-fired power plants, is never noted.  The fact that unemployed workers due to the war on fossil fuels who commit suicide can actually be counted, while there is no epidemiological evidence for those imagined downwind deaths due to the use of coal or natural gas in electric power generation plants, gives the aristocrats of power no qualms at all.

Not only does the War on Fossil Fuels cause unemployment and the destruction of huge prior capital investments, but it causes the cost of energy to go up greatly.  It also causes energy to be less reliably available.  Both increased cost and decreased reliability hurt the poor and the lower middle class the most.   They pay a larger fraction of their incomes for energy.  They are the most likely ones to lose their jobs, whether they work in an energy related field or for a company whose energy prices are going up because of the Democratic Party efforts to make them go up, or to skyrocket, as Obama once said was his purpose. Some companies are so dependent on reliable energy that as energy becomes unreliable, their costs go up due to lost time and production.  My own materials analysis laboratory is such an example of a company that pays a terrible price when the electricity goes down.  And while the rich can afford a stand-by generator at their home, less than rich Americans commonly cannot afford that luxury.

So, the Democratic Party "Progressive Environmental Agenda" is absolutely committed to harming the poor and generally the less than wealthy.  It offers rich scammers wondrous opportunities to turn modest campaign contributions into huge government loans and grants for their fake green energy companies, which fail left and right, err ... left and left and left.  The companies go bankrupt after paying the principals great salaries and the taxpayers lose the money they loaned the fraudulent companies and receive little in innovations for their grants.  The green companies last longer than they should because of additional mandates that their energy output be used to meet unrealistically high quotas.  The economic fallacy of a government-directed economy once-again has proven the principle that government direction is vastly inferior to private sector direction. 

It takes but a little unproductive kick to the head of the private sector to significantly reduce the growth of the per capita real private sector income.  The new big government real per-capita private sector income growth rate is about 1%.  This is the growth rate which the new Progressive Democrat program will actually try to decrease in the name of the environment. Most Americans can expect to live another 40 years.  So under the "Progressive" embraced 1% real per-capita private sector income growth rate, that essential measure of the health of the economy will be 1.489 times larger than it is today.  An easily achievable growth rate, with a modest decrease in the size of government and in regulations, of 2%, gives us a private  sector economy which is 2.208 times larger than what our economy is now.  A little more effort to reduce the relative size and scope of government could achieve a real per-capita growth rate of 3% a year.  At the end of 40 years, the private sector economy would be 3.262 times larger than it is now.

So, the economy desired by the Democrat Party in 40 years will be a pip-squeak economy compared to that of an economy with a real per-capita growth rate of 3%, such as a smaller government economy can readily achieve.  The smaller government private sector economy is 3.262 / 1.489 = 2.19 times larger.  Does big government really offer sufficient value to trade it for an economy that can readily be more than twice as big in 40 years?  The many more jobs and much better paying jobs of 40 years from now also will come with many more improved products, more scientific advancement, much better medical care, much more national security, improved retirement security, and even more ability to treat the environment with care than will the Democratic Party dream private sector economy dominated by big government.

This choice really is a no-brainer choice.  It requires one to shun the truly retrogressive Democratic Party platform and to embrace with confidence the productivity advantages of the private sector.  One has only to understand that the fear and the alarmism spread by the Democrats on the environment and against the private sector comes with horrible consequences for our future, that of our children, and especially that of our grandchildren. It appears that Democrats simply do not care about the future.  In fact, the near zero economic growth of the Middle Ages appears to be their favored growth model.  For some of them, the ravages of the plague with huge population and economic decreases are even better.  So of course, not caring about the future of human beings, they represent themselves as Progressives!  That lie and their refusal to recognize the existence of individuality in their embrace of collectivism are the most fundamental errors of their political worldview.  These are grievous, unnecessary errors indeed.

A Democrat Wants to Know, Sort Of

A young Democrat of my acquaintance, who was educated as an engineer at Georgia Institute of Technology and has a Wharton School of Business MBA, sent me the following note:

Again the GOP strikes with the Govt shutdown. It all stinks of politics, and the unfortunately for the GOP, they are not very likeable right now, so the American people don't buy what they are selling. How childish was Cruz the other day?? If every politician threw a tantrum every time they didn't get what they wanted or believed in, where would we as a country be? 

Simple questions. Why is there no leadership in the GOP? Why is the Tea Party effectively blocking the everything? This GOP is frankly a shitshow (excuse my french), and there is no site in end. It is a shame, I am starting to think that an independent may have just as good a chance as the GOP in the next presidential elections, because almost everyone there is either useless, or has to flip flop numerous times just to get the party nomination (a la Romney - a good candidate). I know how you feel about the Affordable Care Act, but I don't think it is a bad idea to ask people to chip in when it is health related. America needs to go away from the "every man for himself" motto when it comes to basic fundamentals like health. The Affordable Care Act does not make America a socialist country.

Now despite this thinking, this young man is of considerable importance to me.  As a consequence, I have had several discussions with him, though as is usually the case when talking to a Democrat, there has been no change of his opinions despite my sterling reason!  There is always the sense that a Democrat simply lives in a different universe and all the laws of physics and economics are different there and they cannot imagine what those laws are on Earth.

Here is my reply:

When government spends 24 to 25% of the entire GDP and has a couple of hundred thousand pages of regulations that impose restrictions on the actions of individuals and many cost and time requirements on individuals in addition to its actual spending, then passions will run high on political issues.  And contrary to the pretense of those who believe wholeheartedly in Big Government, government is all about the use of force.  With our democratic pretense, we suppose that 50.1% of the voters have the right to use that force to make 49.9% do anything they please.  This is not the case.  It does make every government act of the legislature and of the President a matter of politics.

The purpose of legitimate government is to protect the rights of the individual.  These rights are very broad with respect to freedom of conscience, freedom of association, and the freedom to take all actions which support your own life and happiness without the use of force against others.  Those broad freedoms are only partially spelled out as a few particulars in the Bill of Rights.  The 9th Amendment which might protect the full scope of our individual rights is ignored and this is not surprising because too few people have thought out the complete scope of our individual rights.
 
The Constitution listed the few powers of the government and the list was short.  Had the government and many special interests not long fought to ignore the limits of that list, most individual rights would not be violated by the government.  In fact, many of the Framers of the Constitution made this very argument against a Bill of Rights, noting that a Bill of Rights would be too narrow a protection and just protect a portion of one's individual rights.  They argued that this would be taken as a reason to say the government can do anything to anyone which is not then denied by the Bill of Rights.  This is what has happened and then some.  Now even rights explicit in the Bill of Rights are violated, such as Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom to Assemble, Freedom to Petition the Government, and the right to own and bear arms.
 

Let us return to the problems of unfettered democracy with a big government.  This creates a society in which on issue after issue a slim majority (in the ideal case, in actuality, special interests very often control such a government and the beliefs of the people be damned) uses force to impose their will on a minority.  The minority is enraged both by having to do something they think is wrong and by the fact that they are forced to do it by force-wielding thugs, agents of the government.  There is the wrongness of the thing itself and there is the wrongness of the force itself.

Even if you are on the majority side in many cases, you will inevitably be on the minority side many times also.  This is an awful way to live life.  It is very stressful and very confrontational.  But, it is the nature of unfettered democracy and is a substantial part of the reason such democracies soon collapse.  They destroy the society and replace a natural tendency to cooperate with one another in the private sector with a mob or gang mentality striving to control the use of government force to their advantage.  They also make laws to cover many activities they simply do not understand.  This really gums up the works by removing the specialists in the private sector from the decision process.
 
If a minority and a number of special interests combine with a socialist President, they can even impose a monster system such as ObamaCare, despite most of the People opposing it.  Most of the things that big government does have some special interest group wanting it and most of the People are actually remarkably uninformed about it.  They are also generally victims of that action and do not understand that.

Big Government is all about every faction for itself.  It is not about the welfare of the People.  That is the pretense and it is very clear these days that it is a very hollow pretense.  Contrary to your statement, the private sector is not properly characterized as "every man for himself."  The private sector is characterized by people cooperating with one another for a multitude of purposes of their own choosing and helping one another to achieve the goals that each has chosen of his own free will.  The private sector, unlike the government sector, does not live by the use of force and does not allow some to impose their will on others.  It is the government sector that refuses to allow us to work out mutually agreeable contracts and associations with others in many, many ways.  The government limits our activities mostly in interactions with others and thereby forces us to go it alone in many cases where we would have sought out a mutually beneficial cooperative enterprise with others.

Such effects are very clear with such laws as the Minimum Wage Law.  If I wish to hire an under-educated and inexperienced young person and he wishes to take the job I may be able to give him, we are not allowed to negotiate any wage lower than the minimum wage.  I never get to evaluate his work ethic and ability to do productive work and he never gets to prove he can do the job and move on to a higher pay grade.  I have to go it without his potentially good production and he gets to turn to a life of crime.

Or take the fact that ObamaCare is forcing employers to stop hiring before they grow to 50 employees and it pushes them to reduce the hours worked in a week to fewer than 30 hours.  In effect, ObamaCare is forcing the employer to go it alone.  His ability to cooperate with others for their mutual benefit is restricted.  Then there are many, many medical providers who are now being laid off because their employers cannot make enough money to survive under ObamaCare.  Once again, Big Government is making people go it alone.

You say you do not think it is a bad idea to ask people to chip in to provide health care to others.  I do not much care whether you ask them to do so or not.  Go ahead and ask all you want, provided you are not being terribly dishonest and are not actually using force to make them contribute their hard-earned income to provide for the health of others.  But you are being dishonest here.  There is nothing that gives you the right to make others do this.  This is nothing but your particular wish.  Unfortunately, others wish that everyone had the same income.  Others wish that everyone has a nice home.  Others want everyone to eat well.  There is no end to what people wish with respect to others.  Imagine how awful a society would be if everyone got to use force to make everyone else live according to their wishes.

By and large, the Republican Party is for a slightly smaller government than is the Democrat Party.  To have a slightly smaller Big Government, such a party will often say no to the Party that is constantly proposing a new government program.  Some of the People actually want a substantially smaller government.  Many of these people are in the Tea Party movement, which I associate with myself.  They generally are Republicans, though not very happy Republicans.  Some are in the Libertarian Party.  But, naturally they are not going to join the party most enthusiastic about Big Government.  So, they have become a fractious element in the Republican Party.  They want that party to stand up for something closer to a constitutional government.  Naturally, they are opposed to most programs that would make the government still bigger and still more intrusive in our lives.

You bemoan the lack of Republican leaders holding the membership in an iron grip of control.  Well, what do you really expect of people who want to manage their own lives and choose their own values.  Those who want government to do this for them are naturally inclined to follow leaders.  Those who like to think independently and control their own decisions in life do not naturally turn to a leader to tell them what to do.  Traditionally, Americans never did, but after 100 years of growing Progressive Elitist effort and influence in the government-run or bribed schools, there are many people now well-conditioned to do as they are told.  I am of the old school and never allowed myself to be so conditioned.

The iron grip of control of the Democrat Party line is actually very exposed as it forces them to maintain beliefs obviously contrary to reality.  They still maintain that Americans will have better healthcare under ObamaCare at a lower cost and that enough medical care providers will be available.  This is clearly not going to be the case.  Many employers are dropping health insurance plans, many people will find that their doctor is no longer available, most people will find their costs will go up and that much of the cost provides them with care they do not want.  Many young people especially will not be able to get jobs because they would cost the employer more under ObamaCare than they used to.  It used to be that if you hired a young person, the average age in your insurance pool dropped so your health insurance cost went down and gave you some incentive to train the young hire.  Now you add a young person and his affordable plan cost at 9.5% of his pay is likely to force the company to reduce the coverage offered to its longer time employees to keep the young hire's health insurance below 9.5% or cost you a $3000 penalty tax.  Or you do not hire the young person.  It is so simple.  More and more Americans are realizing how ridiculous the Democrat Party claims are and the lock-step adherence to the party line will be deadly to the Democrats.

Another clear example of the inability of the Democrats to think rationally and independently is the adherence to the claim that man's emissions of CO2 will cause catastrophic global warming.  After 17 years of no surface temperature increase and rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, this claim has become entirely laughable.  Yet Obama just recently made the claim that 97% of scientists support the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis, which is also a very untrue statement.  So his EPA is putting out a new regulation to keep anyone from building a coal-fired power plant and he still has not approved the Keystone XL Pipeline using this specious argument as the justification.  It is imposing many uneconomic mandates such as for the use of ethanol in gasoline, an increase in vehicle gasoline efficiency, electric vehicle programs, and programs pushing solar and wind energy generation that are very much hurting the economy and helping to raise the unemployment rate.  Despite these obvious deleterious effects, few Democrats have departed from the party line.

No X, I prefer to think for myself and be a member of the Republican Party that at least sometimes acts to slow down or stop the growth of society-destroying government.  I will remain in the libertarian and the Tea Party wing which is most determined to keep the iron hob-nailed boot of government off of our necks.  However many people want to be dependents of the government, I will not be one who wants that.  I want to be left alone by gangs of thugs to establish my own cooperative agreements with others to work toward our mutually chosen goals.  It really matters to me both that I am able to pursue my goals and that they are able to pursue theirs.

Please give what I am saying some real thought X.

Public School Monopoly Favored by Obama over Education

I have long opposed the government monopoly on our school system and education.  There is only a path to less and less freedom so long as this monopoly control continues.  It is the greatest of all impediments to the protection of individual rights in the USA.  The government will always use the schools as a propaganda tool to gain more and more power for itself at the expense of our liberties.  Children are rarely capable of teaching themselves how to think critically and independently enough to overcome the onslaught of highly biased Progressivist attacks on the private sector as the government is held up as the cure to all problems.

Not only are they devoured as individuals by a biased view of history, economics, and of society, but they are all too often left even more defenseless by schools that deliver them into adulthood unable to read, write, and perform basic math skills.  These government-run and controlled schools are making adult dependents, which really means they are producing people who will always be children.

Daniel Mitchell has written a very good article on the Obama administration backing of public teachers unions at the clear expense of the education of mostly black and totally poor students in the Louisiana voucher program.  Louisiana is a state particularly cursed with a long tradition of awful public schools.  Obama wants to prevent the reform of these terrible schools simply to keep the backing of the powerful public teachers unions.

Dan also gives some interesting links to articles by the always great Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams, as well as to articles on how Chile, Sweden, and the Netherlands are using vouchers to reform their school systems.

Daniel Mitchell is an economist and commentator well-worth the read.  He is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and a very good man.

Building the Progressive Socialist Train from Nowhere to Nowhere

California has long wanted to build a 500-mile long high speed passenger train, a so-called bullet train, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, through the Central Valley.  California voters approved a bond ballot measure for $9.95 billion in 2008 for the project, ten years in the planning, which they were told would:

• Cost $40 billion.
• Have a ticket cost of $55 to travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
• Transport 94 million passengers a year.
• The time of travel would be 2.5 hours.
• The rail line would operate with a surplus and no subsidies would be needed.
• 450,000 sustainable jobs would be created.

The Progressive Socialist federal government of the first half of the Obama administration has approved money to assist California in this effort.  The federal and state monies presently approved will build a 65-mile long segment of the railroad for $4.15 billion.  It will go from Corcoran, CA, with a population estimated to be about 25,000, to Borden, CA.  Borden is a tiny suburb of Madera, whose population is about 57,000.  Corcoran is on the less populated side of the Central Valley with complete desolation to its south and west and the small city of Tulare, population 58,000, about 19 miles to its northeast.  Corcoran is best known for the state prison there.  It probably needs bullet train service so the prisoners released from California prisons, because California cannot afford to keep them in prison, can leave the area quickly.

With the Republicans about to take over the money appropriations control in the House of Representatives, there will be no more federal tax money going to this project for quite some time.  I think we can be sure there will be no more for at least the next 6 years, if not for the next 10 years.  The short segment of the rail to be built will not be operated until more is built.  This is likely to help guarantee that if a bullet train is ever built from San Francisco to Los Angeles, the short segment will be obsolete and the route may well be changed.  It will be better if it were never built even in part.  It will be good if it is abandoned even after this segment from nowhere to nowhere is built.  The California authority that planned this line and two years ago made the claims above before the voters approved the bond measure, now says in the best bait and switch fashion:

•  The cost will be $42.6 billion.
•  The one-way ticket cost has increased to $105.

More realistic estimates are:

• The construction cost will be somewhere between $62 billion and $213 billion.
• The one-way ticket cost will be about $190.
• At least $19 billion of federal money will have to be provided if there is to be any hope that the train will not have to be subsidized by California taxpayers, even though the authorizing legislation forbids that.
• The 450,000 sustainable job workers are twice as many as the California government's active work force.  How realistic is it that so many jobs might be created by this rail line? 

The only bullet train railroads in the world having substantial segments of their systems able to operate without subsidies are in Japan and France.  Both are in much more densely populated areas than the comparatively low density Central Valley of California with its farming industry.  As we can see, California's Progressive Socialist central planning bureaucrats are about as competent as central planners always are.  They have done an excellent job of setting California's taxpayers up for a huge fall.

Meanwhile, the Central Valley of California has suffered from severe water shortages for the last several years.  Central planners have a lot to do with this problem also.  California has two major water projects controlled by central planners.  The Central Valley Project of 1933 is a creature of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.  The State Water Project of 1960 began under Democrat Gov. Pat Brown.  These two programs caused agricultural land use to increase from 4.9 to 8.6 million acres.  This huge increase in agricultural water use was based on water subsidies, water user fees rather than prices that fluctuate with supply and demand, water monopolies by the government, and a lack of water property rights.  All of these factors cause the uneconomical use of water.  This generally means that water will of course be used carelessly and wasted.  The effect is not unlike the use of the hard-earned money of California and American taxpayers to pay for a short bullet train track segment from Nowhere to Nowhere which will never be used.

Meanwhile, it is worth our noting that the newly elected Republican governors of Ohio and Wisconsin, have announced that they were returning the high speed train grants given to their states by the Progressive Socialists.  The returned Wisconsin money was for a train route from Milwaukee to Madison and the Ohio line was to go from Cleveland to Columbus to Cincinnati.  Secretary of Transportation LaHood has given the returned $1.2 billion to 13 states that want to build these taxpayer blood-sucking high speed trains.  John Kasich and Scott Walker have no doubt saved the states of Ohio and Wisconsin a fortune in wasted capital expense and subsequent train subsidies.

The returned money is going to the Democrat states of California, Illinois, New York, Washington, Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon, North Carolina, and Iowa.  The toss-up states of Florida, Missouri, and Indiana are also getting money.  It is really hard to imagine how Maine, Oregon, North Carolina, Iowa, Missouri, and Indiana will find areas with dense enough populations to make their high speed trains pay.  The otherworldly winner of this nonsense has to be Vermont.  Its high speed train will go from St. Albans in the northwest corner of the state to Vernon in the southeast corner of the state.  St. Albans has a population of 7200 and Vernon's population is 2,000.  The biggest city in Vermont is Burlington, with a population of about 39,000.  Yes, this is the state that gave us Howard Dean and Bernie Sanders.  What can you expect.  The 13 states taking the high speed train money will rue the day they did.  No, not the damn politicians, it is the weary and overloaded taxpayer mules who will do the ruing.  At least most of these non-ruminating mules are Democrat asses.

The Deception of the Reduced Employee Share of Payroll Tax

I am sure there are many employees who are delighted that the government has decided to make the total 2.0% reduction in the rate of the Social Security tax in the employee's contribution and not in the employer's contribution.  In fact, this is a nearly meaningless distinction, except that it plays well with those who have not thought the problem through.  I can tell you from my experience with mostly quite intelligent employees that very few people have thought this issue through.

In view of this ignorance, the ploy makes great political sense.  First, there are many more employees than there are employers, so it wins more votes for the politicians.  Second, the disappointed Progressive Elitists who so badly wanted to raise taxes on those guilty of being productive enough to earn more than $200,000 or somewhat less or couples earning more than $250,000 together or somewhat less are likely to feel that the reduction of the Social Security tax only on employees making less than $106,800 helps to equalize their disappointment in not getting to soak the rich.  They are also getting even with those rich, exploitative employers by not letting them have a share of the tax break for 2011 offered by this Social Security tax reduction.  Progressive Elitists hate business, profits, and businessmen, so this plays well.  But then this little triumph is entirely based on their own ignorance of employee compensation, which they display in many ways in addition to the present case.

Why is the distinction of employee and employer shares of the Social Security and the Medicare taxes meaningless?  On one level, it is because they are both paid by the employer.  The employee does not take his paycheck home and then send his Social Security withholding of 6.2% and his Medicare withholding of 1.45% in to the IRS.  His employer does that, unless he is self-employed, in which case he sends 12.4% in Social Security tax and 2.9% in Medicare tax.  But while this fact is important, it is not the hard part to understand.  Let us get to that.

An employer hires an employee because he wants the employee to help him produce goods and services and hiring the employee is calculated to produce enough more goods and services that the employer can cover all the costs of hiring the additional employee and make some profit as well.  The employer and the employee make a deal that the employee will be so productive that the employer can rationally afford to keep him employed.  There are two sides to this issue that need to be considered.  What will the employee add in company income and what he costs the employer.  For our purposes here, we will mostly consider what the employee costs the employer.

Adding an employee will generally require more work space and more equipment.  Workman's Compensation Insurance payments will go up.  The company may need to do more advertising to bring in more customers for the employee to provide goods or services for.  There will be an incremental increase in liability insurance in many cases.  There will be generally added expenses for business cards, office supplies, pollution controls and other regulation compliance, and the materials and goods the employee must use to make the company's finished goods or provide services.  There will also be overhead expenses due to the added work in doing payroll and keeping records for the IRS and reporting to them and other government agencies on tax and labor issues, and to provide and keep track of benefits.

Finally, there is the matter of providing the compensation package to the employee.  His compensation cannot rationally be greater than his additions to the company's income minus the many expenses of the previous paragraph.  If they are, for more than a brief training period, he should be fired.  Now every company is also in a bidding war with every other employer and even with the employee's potential thoughts of being self-employed, so that he has little leeway on the downside as to what he can offer in a compensation package.  He may increase that leeway somewhat by providing a nice work environment, good people to work with, good customers to work with, extra freedom in hours worked, and interesting work to do.  But one way or another, he is still in a stiff competition to keep desirable employees, who are likely to be desirable to other employers as well.  But most important of all, the employee's total compensation has a strict upper bound determined by what he adds to the company income minus the expenses associated with his doing so.

The compensation package is usually considered to be his wages or salary plus the costs of his benefits such as health insurance, retirement plans, vacation, sick leave, etc.  One could say that the employer's share of the Social Security tax and the Medicare tax, that state and federal unemployment taxes, and Workman's Compensation costs are all overhead expenses.  But if you do, the employer still needs to consider them as part of the costs of adding an employee and the employee still has to cover those costs or lose his job.  But, unlike added equipment, office or warehouse space, advertising, and other common overhead expenses, these taxes, which Workman's Compensation also is for all intents and purposes, are very easy to attribute to each particular employee and most rational employer's will do just exactly that.  They are part of your compensation package then.  Sure, most employees do not think of them as such, but that is the real case.

Why is this?  It is because the employer would have been just as happy to have given these tax monies to you as to give them to various governments or insurance companies.  If you are employed, you are worth the sum of these taxes, your take-home pay, the other taxes fictionally paid by you though he pays them for you, and all of your benefits.  In fact, if the employer could hand all of this money to you he should be happier.  He probably likes you and he would surely be very happy not to have go to all the trouble of separating the amount you are worth into separate piles with all the associated record keeping, report filings, and payments needed to

• Withhold income taxes for the state.
• Pay unemployment insurance to the state.
• Withhold income taxes for the federal government.
• Withhold Social Security taxes for the federal government.
• Withhold Medicare taxes for the federal government.
• Pay unemployment insurance to the federal government.
• Pay Workmen's Compensation insurance.

I can certainly vouch for the fact that I would love to give all this money to my employees and if any of these taxes had to be paid, I would be delighted if they would relieve me of all the tedious work involved and do it themselves.  Of course, I have a devious motive.  I know that that would create so many very angry voters that we would soon have a much simpler tax system and much smaller governments.  Many more people would pay more attention to how much they were paying in taxes.  The present system is designed to fool them into underestimating the amount of taxes they pay.  That deception works with most people.

Now, let us consider the case of a tax increase.  It does not matter a bit whether the tax increase is designated as paid by the employer or the employee.  The employer is still the one who is actually going to make the payments, though the employee is involved in some minor adjustments on the income tax.  Let us suppose that either the Social Security or the Medicare tax goes up.  If it does, the employer will have to do one of a few things:

• If he has many employees, he can easily fire one or more of the least productive employees to compensate for the cost increase.
• He may crack the whip and say all employees must work harder.
• He may defer pay increases until increases in worker productivity match the increased tax cost.
• He probably will be loathe to take on new workers who will not be able to match their cost of employment for an initial period of time as they learn the job.
• He may cut back on benefits.
• He might have to decrease wages or salaries, though this is usually psychologically a tough choice for everyone.

The employer has options and he will have to exercise them.  Losing money is not a choice he can handle for long.  But, you should note that such compensatory actions are harder on small businessmen than on big companies.  If your costs go up 2% and that wipes out your profit, but you have four employees, firing one causes you to lose 25% of your income.  That is most often not an option.  So you have to use the remaining options or go out of business altogether.  The going out of business option is very frequently exercised by small businesses, especially since they are usually already working very hard and productivity increases are often harder for them to come by.

Now let us return to the 2% decrease in the employee share of the Social Security tax.  Each employee gets to now take that 2% home and spend it as he wishes.  But, what would have happened if the 2% decrease had been in the employer's share of the Social Security tax?  Well, perhaps for a few weeks the employer might have had a few extra dollars to reinvest in his company or to call net income and to be taxed, but there would be a very rapid readjustment in the marketplace in which employers found that they must offer employees 2% more to retain them or to get them to come to work for them.  Why?  Because the worker in question has already proven that his labor is worth that extra 2%.  That is why he had a job in the first place.

Good, productive employees are a scare resource.  There is always an active bidding process for their services, just as there is a market for plumbers, accountants, gold, wheat, pork, televisions, and other goods and services.  The inescapable Law of Supply and Demand applies here as it generally does in life.  Governments often pretend that they are above the Law of Supply and Demand, but all they do is shift the equation is some way, usually some bad way, but some new Supply and Demand equilibrium ensues.

In the case of the 2% reduction from 6.2% to 4.2% in the employee share of Social Security, there will be more money available in the short run for people to spend.  Generally, I favor reductions in taxes.  However, this reduction is going to make the financial straits of the Social Security system all the worse.  The Baby Boomers are about to start retiring in large numbers.  The politicians have been unwilling to face that program's severe underfunding.  The Ponzi scheme is about to collapse upon us all.  The best solution is simple, but few will yet accept it.  The problem is the size of the Baby Boomer wave and the fact that retirees are living a long time.  The life expectancy of the 65 year old in 2006 was 18.5 years.  That is a long time in retirement, particularly given that many people aged 70 are now in good enough health to be working.  The retirement age should be at least age 70.  I expect to work at least until I am 75 and longer if my health allows, which it probably will.

Given that the federal government has long been using Social Security tax revenues to generally pay for the obscenely excessive spending of the government, either major retirement age increases or major tax increases will be required.  Taxes are already much too high and they are already very much degrading the health of the private sector.  What we generally need are massive government spending decreases.  They are coming because the People will not put up with higher taxes and they are coming to understand the fatal nature of government deficit spending.  The process by which the necessary spending decreases will occur is going to be very interesting to observe.  Because a simple problem has so very long been ignored, its solution will now be all the tougher and may be catastrophic for some.

The Right to Travel and the Illegimate TSA

As I have often observed, our Declaration of Independence defines legitimate government as government limited to the protection of the equal, sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The protection of our property and the ownership of our own bodies and minds is implied as among those legitimate functions of government.  Any powers exercised by government which do not serve to protect the individual rights of the People are illegitimate and tyrannical in nature.  This establishes the standard by which we are to judge the recent actions of the TSA with its random, warrantless intimate searches of individual's bodies.

The federal government has been under the total control of very committed Progressive Socialist Elitists for nearly two years now.  Early in their tenure, Joe Biden, in a manner consistent with Progressive Socialist dogma going back to the turn of the 20th century, made the very explicit claim that the People only have those privileges which the government chooses to allow them.  This was an explicit rejection of the idea that the individual has sovereign natural rights.  It was a rejection of the Declaration of Independence, which the Progressives have always found to be a particularly objectionable document.  They do not believe it has any place in American law, though in fact, the U.S. Constitution can only be understood in the context of the Declaration of Independence with its claim that the individual has equal, sovereign rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and that the purpose of legitimate government is to protect, under the mandate of the individual Americans, these individual rights.  The Progressive agenda requires a government of very strong powers and one which is not at all limited by a respect for the equal, sovereign rights of the individual.  Indeed, they hate the very idea of individual rights.  They replace our sovereign and equal rights with a much smaller set of privileges assigned to the chosen by government officials on as unequal a basis as they wish.

John Pistole, the head of the Transportation Security Administration or TSA, had this to say about the recently enhanced intimate search methods being used on airline passengers:

I see flying as a privilege that is public safety issue. So the government has a role in providing for the public safety and we need to do everything we can in partnership with the traveling public, to inform them about what their options are.  I clearly believe that passengers have a number of options as they go through screening. But the bottom line is, if someone decides they don’t want to have screening, they don’t have the right to get on the plane.

Is it legitimate for the government to claim that traveling by air is a privilege which the government is free to deny?

The local government does have the police power to protect people in general from violence.  It is, however, a stretch of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to argue that the federal government has a role in providing this security.  But, for the sake of this argument, it will be accepted that government in some form has the job of providing travelers with freedom from violence.  The question is whether the TSA is in violation of individual rights and the principle of legitimate government with its intimate random search policy without warrant.  Actually, the latter part of that question is actually obvious.  The TSA is clearly in violation of Amendment IV of the Bill of Rights which states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Warrants issued upon probable cause and upon Oath before a judge are clearly missing in the TSA procedure.  Whatever protection of travelers from violence is to be provided must be done, as it otherwise is in all other aspects of our lives, in accordance with the Bill of Rights.

Note that it cannot be argued that government is saving lives with this intimate search program in violation of the Constitution.  This is because the effectiveness in reducing deaths of these procedures is not really known and because many people will be driven to driving long distances they would have chosen to traverse in the air and driving is much less safe.  It is highly likely that the net number of deaths from the TSA policies will actually increase.  This is not important to the government.  All that is important is that the Progressives will not be blamed for the many additional driving deaths.  It is therefore more important to them to prove that they are serious about American security by putting on a big show in our airports.  This is all about public relations and not at all about real safety.

Is flying a privilege?  Does an individual have a right to travel or not?  If he has a right to travel, is there some reason why that right does not extend to air travel?  As the title implies, I argue that the individual has the right to travel and that right surely extends to travel by air.

To live, man must use his mind to survive and to flourish.  He must be able to produce clothing, housing, food, and many other goods and services to survive and to flourish in life.  This is not an easy enterprise and it is hugely aided if a man can associate freely with others and trade goods and services and other values in his life with them on a voluntary basis.  His life is more secure and enhanced when he can travel to trade goods and services, to visit friends and relatives, or to gather knowledge and trade ideas with others.  Travel has proven to be extremely important as a contributor to man's increasing body of knowledge, not to mention as a means to trade with people who have resources or the means to make products which were not found in other locales.  Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations understood this well. 

Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, John Adams, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman of the draft committee to write the Declaration of Independence understood this.  When that document stated that legitimate government was limited to the purpose of protecting the equal, sovereign right of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they definitely believed that man had a right to travel.  If I am denied the right to travel by plane from Maryland to Oklahoma to see my mother periodically, my pursuit of happiness is greatly impaired.  My right to earn a living is certainly impaired if I am not allowed to fly to Connecticut to testify as an expert witness in a trial on intellectual theft.  My right to earn a living is also impaired if a customer with a critical materials development issue, or a materials process control issue, or a dubious materials vendor cannot visit my laboratory from Utah or California to participate in the analysis of his materials.  These are not matters of privilege which a legitimate government is free to deny or allow.  These are essential rights of mine by virtue of my requirements to live my life in a state of liberty and for the purpose of my happiness.  It is precisely to secure these equal, sovereign rights that We the People of the United States ordained and established the Constitution for the United States of America and the government it set up and controls.

But the Progressive Elitists do not believe man has a right to travel.  One merely has the privilege to travel, which is about to become more clear because this administration is moving to require intimate, warrantless random searches of travelers by bus, train, trolley car, van, and taxicab.  Well, maybe not by taxicab.  Until these other searches are begun, they may pretend that they are only denying our right to travel by air.  But on what basis?  They have not bothered to tell us.  I am sure it is because they know that their argument will not hold water as many Americans assess it.  They will probably just say that air travel has something to do with interstate commerce and the government has any power it wishes to claim based on the Commerce Clause.  The federal courts have largely allowed them to get away with such arguments, but the argument is absurd in the context that the Framers of the Constitution were trying to set up a government of very limited powers which had no powers that would interfere with our equal, sovereign individual rights.  They were trying hard to help the People to ordain and establish a legitimate government as that was defined by the Declaration of Independence.

But, while the Progressive Elitists have some reservations, usually, about telling the American People they rule that they feel free to ignore both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, many a politician recently bloated with power lust in having near dictatorial powers over the lowly ruled classes, has been very explicit in saying before the camera that he cares not a fig for these great American documents.  Indeed, they snort and laugh at them.  If we examine the literature they trade among themselves we find a combination of derision for the very idea of natural individual rights and limited government powers and many a rationale for interpretations of the Constitution and the purpose of government which circumvent any limits on the development of a tyrannical government.  Of course, while I see this government they seek as tyrannical, they often see it as the Nanny State and think of the People as Children who cling to religion, guns, fatty and sweet foods, fears, and bigotry.  This anti-individual rights literature of the Progressive Elitist movement goes back at least into the 1880s in pretty recognizable forms relative to many of the ideas still held by Progressives today.  Their great admiration of the Prussians then is now mute, as is their claim, acted on by Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, that war was very transformational for the production of big government. 

The denial of a right to travel is not the only denial of a fundamental right by the TSA.  The passage of ObamaCare established that this illegitimate Progressive Socialist Elitist government laid claim to the ownership of each American individual's body.  That tyrannical legislation required each of us to acquire health insurance acceptable to the government or pay a large fine or even go to jail for five years.  This was a draconian claim to the ownership of our bodies.  But, that claim, while made, has not yet come to the point where the government is actually touching us yet and subjecting us to specific treatments defined by the insurance they will require us to buy.  Many of the more draconian mandates of ObamaCare are yet to be implemented.  Perhaps to train us to submit docilely to the future death panels of ObamaCare and the long waits in pain for treatment, they are now implementing this slightly smaller scale intimate body search which will assert their claim to the ownership of our bodies.  They are conditioning us now to a state of subjugation.

It is very important to notice that the agenda of the Progressive Socialist Elitist is not just to expand government's powers to allow the next program under discussion.  The real agenda is the eradication of the very idea that man has an equal, sovereign individual right to life, liberty, property, the ownership of his body and mind, and the pursuit of happiness.  They wish to destroy the individual by belittling his very individuality and his ability to choose his own values and to manage his own life.  There is no more fundamental hatred of human beings than this.  That this is so is made all too clear in their many calls to depopulate the world, which they try to justify on the basis of saving the "environment", "man-made global warming", or "sustainable resources."  John Holdren, Obama's science advisor, is among the many who have called for programs to depopulate the world.  One has to expect that one of the purposes of ObamaCare is to cull the American population, given all the Progressive Elitist claims that there are just too many people.  We should expect that it is those of us who are not with them that they wish to cull.  That is, they wish to cull those who proclaim and defend their equal, sovereign individual rights.  For now, they will deny us the right to travel by air.

Allegiance to the American Principle, Not to Democracy

Today in the United States of America, most of the People believe that the laws and regulations of the federal government, or for that matter of the state and local governments, should be what they want them to be.  They recognize that these laws cannot be what everyone wants them to be, however, so they decide the impasse should be decided by a virtually unfettered democratic vote.  This is a viewpoint which is inconsistent with the great and original American Principle:  Legitimate government must have limited powers and have the sole purpose of protecting and defending the equal, sovereign right of the individual to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own body and mind, and the pursuit of happiness.

Our revolt against Great Britain was justified in our Declaration of Independence.  That great document, written by Thomas Jefferson, with some modifications by Ben Franklin and John Adams, defines legitimate government as that government instituted by the People to secure the unalienable rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  To this list, I explicitly add the right to property and the ownership of one's own body and mind, because though these rights are fully contained in the shorter list of the Declaration of Independence, modern Americans have largely rationalized them into oblivion.

The early citizens of the states freed from colonial rule by Great Britain, established an initial form of government which was exceedingly limited at the national level and found that it was incapable of sufficiently providing for the defense of the nation and allowing free trade between the states, that the government needed to be strengthened.  The result was a new government mandated by the People with the very highly limited powers carefully enumerated in our Constitution.  These few powers primarily dealt with defense and foreign relations and trade.  Some of the powers had internal consequences such as the maintenance of post offices and post roads, the establishment of patent rights and copyrights, the standardization of money, and the regulation of trade between the states.  The purpose of these internal powers was to strengthen the communications, interactions, and trade of Americans, each of whom had the right to associate with other individuals to establish a wide range of relationships with them and to trade with them.  The strengthened ties across state lines had immense consequences for the thinly populated American states for their defense of their extensive territory.

The Framer's of the Constitution did not at first think the Bill of Rights was necessary.  The federal government they had provided for in the Constitution did not have the power to violate the rights of the individual as they interpreted its provisions.  But, the People who had to ratify it had concerns about just that issue.  Many states would not ratify the Constitution without more explicit protections of individual rights, so the Bill of Rights was written to protect those rights which the People had seen damaged by earlier governments, including most prominently those violated by Great Britain in their recent memory.  Amendment IX made it clear that the listed protected rights were not a complete list of the individual rights of the People.  Amendment X made it clear that powers not explicitly given to the federal government were retained by the People and the states.  The entire structure of the Constitution and its purpose in promoting the tranquility, justice, general welfare, common defense, and the blessings of liberty to the People, clearly is an attempt to provide a government of highly limited powers consistent with the legitimate government defined by our own Declaration of Independence.

Today, Americans usually test a proposal for a new law or regulation by asking whether it would be good for them as an individual or as they imagine it might be good for some group of Americans they think are not capable of acting in their own self-interest.  Most Americans fail to test a law against the American Principle.  Rather than ask if the proposed law or regulation is supportive of every American's individual rights, they ask only that it be good for them or for some particular group of Americans, or in some cases, some particular group of illegal aliens.  In that process, the critical role of individual rights is lost.  The tyranny of the majority or a plurality of voters is made the gold standard of legislative priorities and political morality.  This is a huge mistake.

It is one that the Framers of the Constitution were very aware of and from which they tried very hard to protect us.  The American people thwarted the Framers great work by adopting the very creative expansive interpretations of the powers to regulate interstate commerce, to tax, and to provide for the General Welfare that they were indoctrinated in by the Progressive Elitists who have taken over education and most of the media in America.  The Progressive Elitists eviscerated Amendment IX, claiming that the People have no rights except those explicitly mentioned in the Constitution.  This is not even a creative interpretation of the Constitution - it is a very willful determination to ignore an amendment so basic and critical that it was put into the Bill of Rights.  They have also largely ignored Amendment X, reserving powers to the states and the People.  Amendment XVII, gave the people of each state the vote for their Senators and undermined the republican form of government and state powers, promoting the idea that the United States was a nationwide democracy, subject to the tyranny of the plurality of voters throughout the nation.

In the recent health care reform debate, we observed how the loss of the American Principle twisted the terms of debate.  American governments have actually made it more difficult for the People to provide for their own medical care by interfering with the rights of the individual to choose his own medical providers, his own health insurance policy, and his own standards of medical quality.  While minorities of the debaters were aware of this, the federal government and most state governments have ignored these arguments and plowed ahead with their programs to increase their control over the People.  They refused to take the liberty-enhancing arguments seriously and promoted those of the Progressive Elitists who argued that the governments must exercise still more control over our medical and health care insurance options.  They argued that some people did not buy health insurance and they counted on the People thinking this was unwise.  The Elitists said they must buy health insurance and because some of them will not buy complete enough coverage, we will tell them what must be covered in their insurance plans.  Some people have health problems already, which means their insurance costs will be high, so we must set up large pools in which the healthy will pay much more for their insurance so that the known unhealthy can be covered at as low a cost as the healthy can be.  Thus, the healthy will be heavily taxed to subsidize the health care of the unhealthy and this will be the case even if the unhealthy are unhealthy because they have made themselves unhealthy.

The staying hand of the American Principle was barely discussed.  It was rarely noted that the reform plan greatly reduced a man's right to control and promote his own life.  It was rarely noted that it represented a government claim that the government owns a large share of our very bodies.  It was rarely noted that the plan was a hugely confiscatory transfer of wealth from the young and the healthy to the old and the unhealthy, as well as from the middle class to the poor, making this bill one with very unequal impact upon the citizen's individual rights and their welfare.  It was not noted that if one is not free to provide for one's own medical care and seek protection from pain, then one cannot be said to be free to pursue one's own happiness.  The necessary government rationing of health care in ObamaCare will take the power to seek relief from pain out of our individual hands.

We have seen the destruction of the American discourse on the extension of the Bush tax cuts as well.  The Progressive Elitists wish to increase taxes on Americans making more than something over $200,000 per year, claiming that those people can afford it.  Of course, they do not know all of those people, so it is patently absurd for them to claim that those people can afford it.  It is even more absurd that they think that it is their right to make any decision on who can afford to be taxed more.  If we all have equal rights, then the government should not be taxing some of us more than others of us.  Also, in the midst of the Great Socialist Recession, these Progressive Elitists are recommending many increased taxes on business activities, such as an increase in the capital gains tax rates, the corporation tax rate, and the death tax.  This is a straight play on the weakness of a democracy in that it wants to place greater burdens on those with fewer votes, so the majority will be given as large a bribe as possible to reward the governing Progressive Elitists with more power.  The American Principle that every American individual's rights are paramount, including those in business, is stomped upon.

The intimate body searches of the TSA in airports is being discussed vigorously, but many are refusing to give due consideration to the American Principle.  Amendment IV, written when Americans believed in the American Principle, says

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

When Dagny passes through the TSA security check area, no Warrant has been issued based on probable cause that she is carrying explosives onto a plane, yet she is searched in the most intimate way.  It really could not be more clear that this is a fundamental violation of her individual rights. All the talk that people will feel safer from terrorist attack if they are searched and therefore if Dagny is searched, is completely irrelevant.  It is fine for anyone who wishes to volunteer to be searched intimately, but it is not within their rights to force someone else, for whom they have no Warrant based on probable cause, to be searched.  This matter is no different in principle from

•  a random search of anyone to check if they are under the influence of marijuana,
•  randomly forcing people to describe what they were doing throughout the last 24 hours just in case they might have been involved in a crime which the government knows nothing about,
• a random stop to see if you are on the list of people who filed a tax return with the IRS last year or not,
• or a random search to see if you can prove that you are a documented U.S. citizen, immigrant, or visitor. 

You may argue that this is a matter of life and death, but I would argue that giving up the American Principle is a much more critical matter of life and death.  Besides, the present policy means that we have ceded victory to the terrorists, whose goal is less to kill some of us, than it is to degrade the quality of most of our lives.  A life without our equal, sovereign individual rights is a very degraded life.

Democrats Want to Pass DISCLOSE Act Again

Having failed once to pass the DISCLOSE Act, which is designed to suppress political ideas prior to elections and to intimidate Americans who oppose those in power, the Democrats in control of Congress are trying to revive this nefarious act.  It is designed to help incumbents, mostly Democrats, stay in office by preventing the opposition from revealing and discussing their voting record at election time.  It is designed to replace the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Reform Act which the Supreme Court rightly found unconstitutional.

This act passed the House of Representatives in June, but it could not get enough votes in the Senate to bring it up for a vote at that time.  It is only the Senate which needs to act on it now.  Tomorrow, there is to be a provisional vote to end debate on the act.  If the Democrats succeed on that, they will vote it through, despite it obviously being unconstitutional.  It will take years to go to the Supreme Court for a decision, which the Democrats are counting on to help reduce their losses in the November election.  It might even reduce their losses in the 2012 election.

The DISCLOSE Act is also anti-business in that it puts all of its restrictions upon businesses and special purpose political corporate entities.  Labor unions, the NRA, the AARP, and the Humane Society are exempted.  Note that all of the exempted groups are long-time Democrat allies, except the NRA.

The NRA's opposition to the law was bought off with their exemption.  So, while the NRA has done good work in protecting our Second Amendment rights, it has proved a traitor on this fundamental issue of our freedom of speech.  The AARP has long supported ageist warfare and advocated the redistribution of wealth from the poorer young to older and wealthier Americans.  Of course, the labor unions, who spend incredible sums influencing elections in favor of the Democrats as their most-favored special interest group, are exempted.

On the other hand, the DISCLOSE Act discriminates against business and special purpose political groups that incorporate.  They have to spend valuable air time having their CEOs explain who funded the ad.  The CEO also has to invest valuable time in the making of the ad.  Some incorporated Tea Party or other political groups will have their freedom of speech suppressed.  The idea is clearly to make it harder for the opposition of those now in power, who are mostly Democrats, to effectively influence the People during the upcoming election in November.

The Progressives believe the People are stupid and foolish.  They need to be controlled by the college educated elite who are properly indoctrinated in their elite qualifications to choose the People's values and to micro-manage their lives in accordance with Progressive rules.  Sunstein, Obama and friends know how to nudge us in the right direction, but they need to cut us off from the opposing storyline.  We are so dumb, we might believe much of what the evil corporations or Tea Party groups tell us.  Yes, only the Progressive message of the labor unions, the AARP, and the Humane Society should be allowed to reach our so-susceptible ears.  This is the political correctness of the government-run schools written large across the entire country.  The People cannot be expected to evaluate information on their own.  No, only that information shifted and selected by the Progressives should be allowed to reach the ignorant and dumb People.

When the People are seen as ignorant and dumb, they are also seen as the servants of their masters.  The Democrat elitist Progressives are supposed to be our masters and they will not brook any opposition voices, such as businesses and Tea Party incorporated groups.

It is sweet to observe that one of the two Republicans who voted for this measure in the House was Mike Castle of Delaware.  Mike Castle expected to fill out the remaining four years on Joe Biden's Senate term, but was beaten by the Tea Party candidate, Christine O'Donnell.  That was a great act of justice, since Castle really is a Progressive control freak.

Meanwhile, O'Donnell is strongly opposed to ObamaCare, the financial control bill, the incredible deficit spending, labor union card check, renewable energy subsidies and mandates, and the nonsense that CO2 emissions are causing a global warming catastrophe.  She has some considerable conservative lifestyle and "family values" nonsensical baggage, but in the present context, it is important to get her into the Senate.  If she goes awry too much on promoting that "family value" nonsense, she can be replaced in 2014, after much of the Progressive program for governmental controls has been derailed.

Congress Members in the Democratic Socialists of America Caucus

The American Socialist Voter, a publication of the Democratic Socialists of America, claims that the Democratic Socialists of America Caucus in the United States Congress has a membership of 70 Representatives and one Senator.  It also claims that 11 of these Democratic Socialists of America sit on the House Judiciary Committee.  The members of the caucus are:

Co-Chairs

Hon. Raúl M. Grijalva (AZ-07)

Hon. Lynn Woolsey (CA-06)

Vice Chairs

Hon. Diane Watson (CA-33)

Hon. Sheila Jackson-Lee (TX-18)

Hon. Mazie Hirono (HI-02)

Hon. Dennis Kucinich (OH-10)

Senate Members

Hon. Bernie Sanders (VT)

House Members

Hon. Neil Abercrombie (HI-01)

Hon. Tammy Baldwin (WI-02)

Hon. Xavier Becerra (CA-31)

Hon. Madeleine Bordallo (GU-AL)

Hon. Robert Brady (PA-01)

Hon. Corrine Brown (FL-03)

Hon. Michael Capuano (MA-08)

Hon. André Carson (IN-07)

Hon. Donna Christensen (VI-AL)

Hon. Yvette Clarke (NY-11)

Hon. William “Lacy” Clay (MO-01)

Hon. Emanuel Cleaver (MO-05)

Hon. Steve Cohen (TN-09)

Hon. John Conyers (MI-14)

Hon. Elijah Cummings (MD-07)

Hon. Danny Davis (IL-07)

Hon. Peter DeFazio (OR-04)

Hon. Rosa DeLauro (CT-03)

Rep. Donna F. Edwards (MD-04)

Hon. Keith Ellison (MN-05)

Hon. Sam Farr (CA-17)

Hon. Chaka Fattah (PA-02)

Hon. Bob Filner (CA-51)

Hon. Barney Frank (MA-04)

Hon. Marcia L. Fudge (OH-11)

Hon. Alan Grayson (FL-08)

Hon. Luis Gutierrez (IL-04)

Hon. John Hall (NY-19)

Hon. Phil Hare (IL-17)

Hon. Maurice Hinchey (NY-22)

Hon. Michael Honda (CA-15)

Hon. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (IL-02)

Hon. Eddie Bernice Johnson (TX-30)

Hon. Hank Johnson (GA-04)

Hon. Marcy Kaptur (OH-09)

Hon. Carolyn Kilpatrick (MI-13)

Hon. Barbara Lee (CA-09)

Hon. John Lewis (GA-05)

Hon. David Loebsack (IA-02)

Hon. Ben R. Lujan (NM-3)

Hon. Carolyn Maloney (NY-14)

Hon. Ed Markey (MA-07)

Hon. Jim McDermott (WA-07)

Hon. James McGovern (MA-03)

Hon. George Miller (CA-07)

Hon. Gwen Moore (WI-04)

Hon. Jerrold Nadler (NY-08)

Hon. Eleanor Holmes-Norton (DC-AL)

Hon. John Olver (MA-01)

Hon. Ed Pastor (AZ-04)

Hon. Donald Payne (NJ-10)

Hon. Chellie Pingree (ME-01)

Hon. Charles Rangel (NY-15)

Hon. Laura Richardson (CA-37)

Hon. Lucille Roybal-Allard (CA-34)

Hon. Bobby Rush (IL-01)

Hon. Linda Sánchez (CA-39, though incorrectly given as Loretta Sanchez' CA-47 in The American Socialist Voter)

Hon. Jan Schakowsky (IL-09)

Hon. José Serrano (NY-16)

Hon. Louise Slaughter (NY-28)

Hon. Pete Stark (CA-13)

Hon. Bennie Thompson (MS-02)

Hon. John Tierney (MA-06)

Hon. Nydia Velazquez (NY-12)

Hon. Maxine Waters (CA-35)

Hon. Mel Watt (NC-12)

Hon. Henry Waxman (CA-30)

Hon. Peter Welch (VT-AL)

Hon. Robert Wexler (FL-19)

Not surprisingly, my Representative, Donna Edwards, is one of these Democratic Socialists of America.  It is clear that there is a core group of Democrats who do not hesitate to proclaim themselves socialists in socialist circles, though I expect they are reluctant for the most part to tell their constituents of this.