The Anti-Economic Freedom Party

The Club for Growth rates each member of Congress annually for their commitment to economic freedom and growth.  The 2022 ratings are not available, since the 2022 sessions are still underway.  The 2021 session ratings for the House of Representatives, controlled by a Democratic Party majority, are available here.  There are some very important lessons to keep in mind for the 2022 mid-term election coming up.

First, lets get the Big Picture View:

Republican Rating Breakdown:

28 earned 100% rating

79 earned 90-99% ratings

74 earned 80 - 89% ratings

19 earned 70 - 79% ratings

7 earned 60 - 69% ratings

3 earned 50 - 59% ratings

1 earned 40 - 49% rating

Democrat Rating Breakdown:

7 earned 10 - 19% ratings

3 earned 1 - 9% ratings

210 earned 0% rating

First Observation:  It is most remarkable that all but 10 Democrats had a 0% rating on economic freedom and growth, making the median Democrat rating 0%.

Second Observation:  The entire range of Democrat ratings was between 0 and 17%.  Democrats are extremely united in their opposition to economic freedom and growth.

Third Observation:  Republicans range from 48% to 100%.  There are Republicans who are not highly committed to economic freedom and growth.

Fourth Observation:  Democrats universally move in lock-step with Nancy Pelosi and her 0% rating, with a very few symbolic instances of rebellion, often because Nancy Pelosi was not thought to be as strongly anti-economic freedom as the Democrat wanted her to be.  Examples -- Ilhan Omar 13%, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 10%, and Rashida Tlaib 10%.

Many of these 0% Democrats will tell you they favor capitalism over socialism, but that is a lie.  They are adamantly anti-economic freedom.  They are universally in agreement that we should be driven into energy poverty.  They are universally in agreement that we should be hounded by IRS agents armed to the teeth and wasting many tens of hours of our time, with horrible economic costs.  They are universally in favor of ever more regulations weighing down small businesses.  They are universally in favor of mandating our subservience to corrupt union bosses.  They are universally determined to force our children to go to government-run schools where they are besieged with propaganda in favor big government as a supposed protection against immoral businessmen, never mind the immorality of politicians and bureaucrats.  Many of these Democrats believe the Earth cannot sustain its 8 billion people and are so anti-human as to suggest that we need to reduce the human population!  How can they make that happen?  

Simple -- destroy the capitalist private sector that provides us a high standard of living by putting it completely under the control of politicians, bureaucrats, experts in universities, and union bosses.  With the exception of a good fraction of the Republican politicians, these groups are in it only so they can exercise their own power lust.  They long for the control of the old Medieval aristocracy and clergy over the impoverished serfs.  But now with the establishment of huge databases of information on each of us, they can classify us as being in their camp as fellow elitists, in their camp as deceived dependents, or as their opposition -- that is as The Deplorables.  It is The Deplorables who want freedom and in the context of an increasingly authoritarian government, we are the Rebels.  Biden just called us near Nazis, revealing his total ignorance and transferring to us his own behavior and motivations.  Biden and the Democrats in the House of Representatives see eye to eye.  Economic freedoms must be suppressed in order that they can micromanage our lives and make us their serf slaves.

Of course our freedom of speech, freedom to write and read, freedom of assembly, freedom of conscience, and freedom of association are all also being ever more restricted too.  The Elite aristocracy cannot allow these freedoms either, because they can be used by the rebellious freedom-lovers to deny them power.

Science Theory Unbound by Test -- The Story of the Man-Made Global Warming Hypothesis

In 1988, James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, announced that NASA climate models indicated a tendency for heatwave drought situations in the Southeast and the Midwest USA in the late 1980s and the 1990s.  This prediction proved wrong.

Also in 1988, James Hansen, testified to our Congress that the Washington, D.C. area would go from 35 days a year warmer the 90F to 85 days a year in the next 50 to 60 years.  He also said the ocean will rise between one and six feet.  We are 32 years into that 50 to 60 years and so far the average number of days warmer than 90F has decreased.  According to NOAA, the rise in sea level from 1988 to 2020 was 9.81 cm or 3.86 inches. Once again, 32 years into that 50 to 60 year prediction, the rise of sea level is running way behind the low end of the prediction.

About the same time, James Hansen, told a reporter the West Side Highway running along the Hudson River on Manhattan Island would be underwater in 20 years.  The windows of Manhattan Buildings would all have tape across them due to the high winds.  I have been in Manhattan a number of times since the start of 2020.  Neither of these predictions have come to fruition.  

In June 2008, Hansen claimed there would be no Artic sea ice in the summer in 5 to 10 years.  Al Gore, not to be outdone, predicted that the entire North polar ice cap would be gone in 5 years. U.S. Navy scientists predicted the Artic could lose its summer sea ice in 2016.  In 2020 there was still considerable summer sea ice at the seasonal minimum, as there has been every year since 2008.  

In 2009, Prince Charles said we had 8 years to save the world.  Damn, we lost the world in 2017.

In 2014, the French Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius, said we had 500 days to avoid climate chaos.

Joe "The Great Idiot" Biden, Hanoi John Kerry, the stark raving mad 8 years to doomsday AOC, and the entire Elite of the Democratic Socialist Party claim that man-made global warming is an "existential" threat to planet Earth.  Where Trump may have exaggerated his Inaugeration crowd, Biden told us the massive lie that there is an existential threat to the Earth due to our use of carbon fuels.  This existential threat requires him to drag us back into the Paris Climate Accord, though it is an unratified treaty.  Of course, these politicians are just shills and mooks who have zero understanding of the science of radiative heat transfer.

Supposedly, the principal claim that the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis is true is the claim that its effects have been modeled correctly in their many global climate computer models.  They recently claimed these models are good at predicting the surface temperature, but the science the models are supposed to represent makes predictions of the atmospheric temperature throughout the atmosphere, not just at the surface.  What is more, the surface temperature record has been strongly biased upward in recent times and downward in the past, making it a very unreliable temperature record.  The atmospheric temperature record is much more a global record and has not been manipulated and affected by urban heat island effects in the way the surface temperature record has been.  So once again, let us present this comparison of the model temperature predictions for the atmosphere and actual temperature measurements of the atmospheric temperature:

The supposedly science-based global computer models predict much greater temperature increases than have been found in the measurements.  The scientific method demands that we declare the hypothesis of  catastrophic man-made global warming a failed hypothesis due its long history of failed predictions.  In other words, the continued belief in catastrophic man-made global warming is anti-science because it has ignored a basic requirement of the scientific method.

Why are its advocates claiming this anti-science belief is justification for putting more than 10,000 Keystone XL Pipeline workers into the already massive pool of the unemployed?  Why are they denying the livelihoods of some already who earn a living extracting oil and gas from federal lands and offshore fields and many in the future whose oil and gas jobs will not be created as a result?  Why are they damaging the earnings of the many people who provide goods and services to these carbon fuel industries and their employees?  Why are they forcing transportation costs for all Americans to rise greatly?  Why are they causing the energy costs to run our businesses and to operate our homes to increase drastically?  Why are they pushing a future of electricity brown-outs and black-outs upon us?  Why are they advocating spreading solar panels and wind generators over huge acreages of the nation?  Why do they now no longer care how many birds and bats are killed by wind generators?  Why do they want to saddle us with electric vehicles with their massive purchase cost, limited range, inconvenient recharging requirements, and massive repair costs?  Why do they not care about the massive damage to our future economy and the many jobs which will be lost, the many jobs that will not be created, and the many advances in other areas of human endeavor that will never come about because of a very harmful energy policy?

The answer is the desire for the Great Reset.  These advocates want what the World Economic Forum is advocating, which is an end to capitalism, an end to personal property, an end to individual rights, and a complete dependence upon government controlled by a socialist Elite.  Biden plagiarized his Build Back Better campaign slogan from the World Economic Forum for a reason.  Biden is not a creative man.  He has never created or built anything.  His specialty is the destruction of things built and created by others.  Even in his speeches and writings, he has a long history as a plagiarist.  So, it is entirely to be expected that the kind of people who are behind the World Economic Forum have made him their point man, albeit with many socialist managers, for exercising the program of the World Economic Forum upon the USA.  This program is absolutely evil and absolutely un-American.  Carrying it through is massively unconstitutional.  It will be extremely deleterious to the Welfare of the People of the USA.  Yet, it is moving forward rapidly under the Biden Regime.

The Goods-Producing Jobs Picture -- Trump Period Compared to Obama Period

In the last 21 months, namely for all of 2017 and 2018 to date, there has been a sky-rocketing increase in goods-producing jobs compared to the prior 21 months.  These goods-producing jobs are jobs in mining, construction, and manufacturing.  Charles Payne pointed this out in Strongest Economy Ever?

Trump last 21 months:  825,000 new goods-producing jobs

Obama prior 21 months:  275,000 new goods-producing jobs

Remember that the "New Normal" economy under Obama was said to have no place for less-educated Americans except in the low-paying portion of the service economy.  Their unemployment rate was expected to remain high forever.  They were doomed to be replaced by robots to the extent that goods-producing jobs were even going to be part of our American economy.  Goods-producing jobs were said to be planet-destructive and therefore we should be happy to see them become extinct.  The Obama regulatory agencies were tasked with seeing that large segments of the goods-producing industries were driven into bankruptcy.  Besides, American goods-producing industries simply could not compete with the low-cost labor overseas it was said, so they were doomed anyway.

The reality is that goods-producing industries were doomed to extinction under Obama, but not under Trump.  It takes a murderous hand to kill off the economic vigor of Capitalism and Obama with his determination to transform America had just such a murderous hand on the neck of goods-producing American capitalists.  Trump simply stopped trying to strangle goods-producing American capitalists and they responded by increasing the rate of new goods-producing jobs by a factor of 3.

Now tell me that that difference is not critically important to a great many American workers and their families.  Tell me that healthy American goods-producing industries are not important to our national security.  I will have a hard time suppressing my laughter at such foolish notions.

Perverse, conflicted ethical systems by Paul Driessen

Radical environmentalists put people last, and destroy habitats and wildlife to end fossil fuels

Third Reich Forest Minister Hermann Goering was an avid hiker and ecologist who once sent a man to a concentration camp for cutting up a frog for fish bait. In 1933 he and other Nazi Party leaders enacted anti-vivisection laws to stop what he called “unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments.”

Intensely hostile to capitalism, the Nazis controlled all industries and envisioned large-scale wind turbine projects that would generate “huge amounts of cheap energy” and create millions of German jobs.

But as Luftwaffe commander, Goering planned and directed the 1939 terror bombing of Warsaw and the final obliteration of the city’s Jewish ghetto. Thousands were slaughtered, and survivors were sent to the Treblinka concentration camp, under “the final solution” that he helped mastermind – to send millions of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, “mentally deficient burdens” and other “sub-humans” to ovens and mass graves.

About the most charitable thing one can say about Nazi ethics is that they were perversely conflicted and schizophrenic. People clearly occupied a lower niche than animals on their “moral and ethical” hierarchy.

Sadly, the same observations apply to the more rabid elements of modern environmentalism. Ironically, in the name of “keeping fossil fuels in the ground” to “save the planet” from “dangerous manmade climate change” and other imagined calamities, radical greens also demand actions that would ultimately destroy the very habitats and wildlife they claim to love. Their own words underscore their attitudes.

“If we don’t overthrow capitalism, we don’t have a chance of saving the world ecologically.” (Earth First! activist Judy Bari) “Loggers losing their jobs because of spotted owl legislation is no different than people being out of work after the furnaces of Dachau shut down.” (Friends of the Earth founder David Brower)

People have become “a cancer … a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” (National Park Service scientist David Graber) “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation.” (Prince Philip of England)

“Even if animal research produced a cure for AIDS, we’d be against it.” (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals president Ingrid Newkirk) “Six million people died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses.” (Newkirk again)

Banning DDT in Sri Lanka might well unleash a malaria epidemic, but “so what? People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any.” Besides, in the United States, DDT substitutes “only kill farm workers, and most of them are Mexicans and Negroes.” (Environmental Defense Fund scientist Charles Wurster)

“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” (Paul Ehrlich, who in 1968 predicted mass starvation and a collapse of civilization by the 1980s)

“It’s much cheaper for everybody in Africa to have electricity where they need it,” from little solar panels “on their huts.” (Actor Ed Begley, Jr.) People in developing countries “simply cannot expect to have the material lifestyle of the average American.” (Friends of the Earth president Brent Blackwelder)

These attitudes, policies and demands prevail today. Radical greens still advance the same irrational, intolerant views about pesticides to control insect-borne diseases; genetically modified crops to feed more people from less acreage with less water; and access to abundant, reliable, affordable energy required to power modern industrialized societies in Africa, Asia and other less developed regions.

The world’s poorest families still live unnecessarily squalid, miserable, diseased, malnourished, short lives. Billions still don’t even have electricity, clean water, light bulbs or a tiny refrigerator.

It’s awful enough that they were born into these places and conditions, and must endure corrupt, kleptocratic dictators. It is intolerable that their hopes and dreams are also stymied by unelected, unaccountable eco-imperialist activists and bureaucrats, who prance, preen and profess their commitment to “marginalized” people – but care about them only if they are “threatened” by capitalism or climate change. Not surprisingly, they brazenly ignore their own callous roles in this injustice.

The world’s dark-skinned people remain at the bottom of the environmentalist ethical hierarchy – with millions dying every year from preventable diseases of poverty, perpetuated by callous environmentalists. Developed country loggers, miners, factory workers, ranchers, pensioners and poor minorities are not much higher up; farmers also get short shrift, unless they grow corn, soybeans or canola for biofuels.

The battle over fossil fuels has recently entered other dangerous territory, as “protesters” launch campaigns reminiscent of radicals putting spikes in trees so that sawmill blades would explode and injure workers – while comrades bombed GMO and animal testing labs, meat packing plants and even houses.

Their targets now are oil and natural gas transport systems – as a prelude to more rampant destruction – as Putin aides and cronies assist and finance other groups that are trying to block US energy production.

A new cadre of Earth Liberation Front anarchists has taken to closing the valves on pipelines – sabotage that could result in pipeline ruptures, oil spills, explosions, injuries and deaths. In one case, the “valve turners” called the Keystone pipeline operations center just minutes before closing the valve, causing the valve wheel and ground below the saboteurs’ feet to shake. They could have caused a disaster.

If caught, arrested and prosecuted, these extremists invoke the “necessity defense” – asserting that they were compelled to break the law, in order to prevent a greater harm: manmade climate cataclysms.

The eco-terror groups have issued a “Decisive Ecological Warfare” manifesto, urging like-minded criminal elements to commit sabotage against pipelines, transmission lines, oil tankers and refineries. As in the past, the militants want “more moderate” environmental groups to support the “necessity” defense, acts of sabotage, and the use of eco-terrorism to “disrupt and dismantle industrial civilization” and “remove the ability of the powerful to exploit the marginalized and destroy the planet.”

They want more “mainstream” pressure groups to promote the notion that sabotage is acceptable and normal where Earth’s future is at stake. Environmentalists have already persuaded Western institutions not to support pesticide use, fossil fuel power plant construction and other modern technologies in poor, disease-ridden, energy-deprived countries – so maybe this lunacy [is] no longer so farfetched.

Several states have passed “critical infrastructure protection” bills, assessing criminal penalties on terrorists and organizations that conspire to trespass on or damage essential infrastructure sites. The bills also hold parties responsible for any resultant damages to property or persons; they should also penalize foundations and other financiers of eco-terror. All 50 states and Congress should enact similar bills.

The asserted justifications that drive perverse, conflicted environmentalist ethics are based on ideologies, assertions and computer models that label humans, capitalism and modern technologies as existential threats to our planet. They have given rise to a $1.5-trillion-per-year Climate Industrial Complex that is determined to expand its revenues and control people’s lives, livelihoods and living standards – while redistributing wealth mostly to those who would be in power and those who would keep them in power, while sending just enough to the world’s poorest families to improve their lives slightly at the margins.

Ironically, in the process, eco-activists will inflict far more damage on environmental values than do the technologies they despise. Their “solutions” to alleged ecological “problems” will turn billions of acres into wind and solar farms, biofuel plantations, hydroelectric projects, and mines for materials needed for wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and other “clean, green, renewable” energy alternatives.

The twentieth century revealed how thin the veneer of humanity, civilization and ethics can be, when propaganda, fear-mongering, hatred and emotions take over. We need to muster enough science, intellectual rigor and freedom of speech to prevent more deaths in the name of “environmental justice.”

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy and environmental policy.

Did You Know That a 4K Temperature Rise Would Melt All the Ice in Antarctica and Justify the End of Capitalism?

The state government of Arizona pays the advocate of these ideas to teach our children this pathetic propaganda.

The New York Times published an Opinion article by Benjamin Y. Fong, a faculty fellow at Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University, entitled The Climate Crisis? It's Capitalism, Stupid.  He calls for the end of Capitalism because Capitalism will inevitably bring about a mass extinction of life on Earth.  He says the mass extinction of life will be caused by a continuation of our current political systems.  By 2100, even with the USA in the Paris Accord, we were well on the way to a 7.2⁰F temperature increase by 2100 according to Fong.  He claims that a 7.2⁰F increase in the temperature of the Earth has previously melted all of the ice at either pole and may do so again.  Consequently, socialism, even communism, has no need to justify itself, because they cannot be as bad as the death warrant stupid Capitalism guarantees us.

Let us examine stupid.  A 7.2⁰F temperature increase is a 4⁰C temperature increase.  Ice melts at 0⁰C.  The highest temperature ever recorded at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station was -12.3⁰C.  The warmest month at the South Pole is January and the average highest daily temperature in that month is -26.0⁰C.  It will be a most interesting trick when a 4⁰C temperature increase melts all of the ice in Antarctica.  This would increase the warmest temperature ever recorded there to only -8.3⁰C and the warmest monthly average temperature to -22⁰C.  Yes, an average temperature increase of 4⁰C would probably be the result of a greater temperature increase at the poles than in the equatorial region, but there is plenty of margin at the South Pole to allow for that.

Before you kill Capitalism because you claim it will bring on a mass extinction of life, please show me that a continuation of our current political institutions will actually cause:

• an average temperature increase of 4⁰C
• a temperature increase at the South Pole of at least 12.3⁰C, or more realistically, an increase of 26⁰C
• that the melting of all the ice at the poles will bring on a mass extinction of life
• that an average temperature increase of 4⁰C, which must be much less in the equatorial regions in order to be 12.3⁰C or more at the South Pole and also more at the North Pole, will bring on the extinction of all life
• that my chance of surviving Communist or other authoritarian socialist societies, with their history of killing over 160 million people, is greater than my chance of surviving a mass extinction
• that a life under Communism is a life worth living

The burden of reasonable proof that Capitalism will inevitably doom us all does not go away simply because someone asserts that Capitalism will have dire consequences for the survival of living creatures on Earth.  So far, most living creatures are not doing badly under Capitalism, while specifically human beings are doing better than they ever have before because of Capitalism.  Capitalism has a history of improving the human condition, while Communism has a history of killing tens of millions of human beings and depriving those who manage to survive of their individual rights and making their survival much more marginal.

It is amazing what people with a political or religious agenda will claim for a 1.4% (4K/288K) increase in the average Earth temperature.  Or, consider the mass extinction that occurs in Denver every September when the temperature rises an average of 30⁰F (16.7⁰C) from the daily average low temperature to the daily average high temperature.  The stupid hat does not go on the Capitalist.  It belongs as anyone committed to reason knows on the head of those who embrace Communism and on those who embrace Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming.  These people seem to never learn the errors of their thinking, which must be the definition of stupid.  Intelligent people have some ability to identify their mistakes and to learn from them.  Intelligence does not guarantee that onw will not make mistakes in a complex world and universe, but it does require a constant concern that one's beliefs are consistent with reality.

It is apparent that intelligence is not a requirement for a faculty position in the Honors College at Arizona State University.  Unfortunately, it is no more required in many other universities either.  Conformity of belief to the Progressive Elitist beliefs in socialism and the essentially evil nature of man is much more important at most universities than is intelligence.

Cummins on Ayn Rand's View of Human Nature

Dr. Denise Cummins wrote an article entitled This is what happens when you take Ayn Rand seriously, on which I commented extensively.  She has followed that article up with another in which she takes exception to one of my comments and generally finds fault with Ayn Rand for not embracing altruism.  Her second article is entitled What Ayn Rand got wrong about human nature.  She starts her article by saying that the complaints of Rand's followers "primarily objected to my assertion that Rand celebrated unbridled self-interest."

Her first quote and the only quote of such a "follower" was taken from one of my comments.  This is that quote:

Rand’s good people do care about others. They do not care to be forced to give away the fruits of their invested time to others, but they are delighted to trade what they produce to others and delighted to see those trades improve the lives of others.

To which her only direct comment is "Such objections are without merit." Oddly enough, she then quoted Ayn Rand

Man gains enormous values from dealing with other men; living in a human society is his proper way of life — but only on certain conditions. Man is not a lone wolf and he is not a social animal. He is a contractual animal. He has to plan his life long-range, make his own choices, and deal with other men by voluntary agreement (and he has to be able to rely on their observance of the agreements they entered). The choice is not self-sacrifice or domination.

showing that she also believed in goodwill towards others provided our associations and trades are of a voluntary nature.  She introduces this quote of Rand's by saying that she acknowledged that human beings are social animals who should "look beyond their own immediate self-interest in order to function."  Looking beyond "immediate self-interest" is consistent with Rand's general philosophy and with my comment that Cummins claimed had no merit.  Note the sleight of hand by Cummins in claiming that Rand believed in "unbridled self-interest" in the first paragraph of her article even as she now acknowledges that Rand looks beyond "immediate self-interest."  Actually, Rand and I believe that rational man pursues his rational self-interest, not an "unbridled self-interest."  An unbridled self-interest is an emotion-driven and short-range viewpoint of others and one's relations with them which is not bridled by rational assessment and long-range planning of one's life.

Cummins then claims:

Despite embracing sociality, Rand saw more evil than good in this kind of interdependence between people. As she wrote in “The Fountainhead,” “The choice is independence or dependence. All that which proceeds from man’s independent ego is good. All that which proceeds from man’s dependence upon men is evil.”

Note that in the quote she gives here, Rand is discussing man's independent ego.  She is not discussing an independence from the trade of values with others.  Rand is saying that one's ego should not be dependent upon what others think of you or that you should not let others tell you what to think or whether you have self-value.  The contradiction Cummins claims is not supported by this quote.

Cummins then claims that Ayn Rand somewhat embraces altruism:

Perhaps the key to understanding this contradiction lies in a journal entry in which she writes, “Selfishness does not mean only to do things for one’s self. One may do things, affecting others, for his own pleasure and benefit. This is not immoral, but the highest of morality.”

Seen in this light, altruistic acts are sanctioned insofar as they bring pleasure or other benefit to the giver, who has no moral obligation to offer help to those who are suffering.

 Ayn Rand defines altruism as the act of sacrificing one's own self-interest for the sake of the interest of others.  Cummins appears to believe that any act done for the sake of others is an act of altruism.  There are certainly many situations in which a rational man will act to enhance the interest of others without sacrificing his own interest and indeed by enhancing his own self-interest as well.  Cummins wants to provide legitimacy for altruism by claiming it subsumes both the sacrificial and the self-interested acts that help others.  For strong moral reasons, Ayn Rand wants to separate these very different actions with respect to relations and associations with others.  Cummins wants to muddle them together.

Cummins next takes exception to Rand's claims that socialism does not work.  Cummins says that socialism can lead to abuse and poverty, but it can also lead to wealth, health, and happiness superior to capitalism.  So, she proves this by stating that a certain Prosperity Index lists the United States as the 11th most "prosperous" nation after a number of nations she calls socialist nations.  The criteria for this ranking are not given by her link and that link does not link to the criteria either.  But in any case, one critical assumption in her "proof" is that the USA is an example of an unadulterated capitalist country.  In fact the Cato Institute 2015 Economic Freedom of the World report ranked the USA as only the 16th country in economic freedoms.  The Heritage Foundation Economic Freedom Index of 2016 lists the USA as #11 in economic freedom.  So, it should not be a surprising result of an index of prosperity to rank the USA #11.  According to the Cato Economic Freedom of the World report, New Zealand, Switzerland, Ireland and Canada are economically more free than the USA.  According to the Heritage Foundation Economic Freedom Index, New Zealand, Switzerland, Australia, Canada, and Ireland all have more economic freedom than does the USA.  Apparently, Cummins is unaware of the many socialist programs and economic controls that American governments have saddled our business sector with.

Oddly, Cummins claims that

while a given individual can benefit from cooperating, he or she can usually do better by reneging.  The end result is that altruists go extinct.  But Trivers showed that altruists can survive if one simple condition is satisfied: Those who fail to reciprocate must be punished through exclusion from subsequent cooperative ventures.

Once again, Cummins is implicitly claiming that one who cooperates and does their part is an altruist, while the rational self-interested person will renege.  But, she says the altruist can do well in cooperative transactions if the reneger is not allowed to enter into future cooperative ventures.  So, the long-range rational self-interest of a person is not to renege, which takes us right back to Ayn Rand's self-interest -- one of rational thought and long-range planning!  Cummins then tries to make a strong contrast between future exclusion and the enforcement of contracts.  The enforcement of contracts as advocated by Ayn Rand does help to prevent harm to the partner in a cooperative endeavor who will live up to the spirit of the endeavor.  The one who does not is subject to legal action to recover damages and also to future exclusion from cooperative endeavors.

Cummins claims that Rand's idea of enforceable contracts says Rand expects "government to play a role in maintaining fairness in market transactions."  She may be trying to claim this opens the door to a version of fairness as Cummins would see fairness, not as Rand would see it.  If this is not the case, I do not see why she has brought this up.

Not surprisingly, Cummins claims that laissez-faire capitalism failed in the 2008 financial crisis.  She fails entirely to recognize the many ways in which that crisis was caused by government policies and the many ways that government policies iced a recovery.

Cummins wraps her article up with the Elizabeth Warren quote that every individual has a collectivist debt, which may be extracted by force, because we gain from living in a society in which we exchange values, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes at the point of a gun.  Well, of course, we gain from living in a society in which we are allowed to choose our own values and act, often in cooperation with others, in the pursuit of our values.  That is central to Rand's philosophy.

Warren claims that we gain even from those goods or services delivered by the force of government that provide us some benefit, even if that benefit cost us far more in expense than is the value of the benefit.  We owe the collective for allowing us to use the roads, no matter how badly government builds and maintains roads.  We owe the collective for long-term unemployment insurance, no matter how irresponsible the beneficiary is for not getting another job or creating his own job.  This is Warren's inversion of cause and effect and hers a great way to reduce productive and creative work.  It is also most strange that she is only interested in laying forceful claim to the products of creative and productive work.  There is no compensation to the creative and productive person in the hours others have invested into their entertainments and pleasures of a non-creative and non-productive manner.  Warren is simply a bank-robber, who claims it is moral to be a thief.

Of course we gain by living in a society in which the knowledge gained by others and the produce of others can be freely traded and made available to us.  Most people who act in the private sector do leave a legacy of values behind them which make it easier for others to survive and flourish in the future.  This is a major benefit of a free society.  It is not a benefit if these benefits of a free society are undermined by the claim that the legacy of prior productive people allows a moral right to take by force whatever one wants in the future from that legacy beneficiary.  This claim does nothing but infest with rot the process of productive and creative thinking and the actions needed to turn those thoughts into actual goods and services.  We rightly admire those who have led productive and creative lives, but this does not make us slaves either to them or to others in society who may not be very productive and creative.  To claim that the legacy of other productive and creative people should be a justification for the use of force to steal the fruits of the time and effort that others invest in their productive and creative work is a sacrilege against that legacy and the good people who left it.

The Context for the Prohibition Against Initiating the Use of Force

Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard: The Verdict After Fifty Years

By Nelson Hultberg

- See more at: http://www.thedailybell.com/editorials/36138/Nelson-Hultberg-Ayn-Rand-and-Murray-Rothbard-The-Verdict-After-Fifty-Years/#sthash.VDBHJde7.dpuf

Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard: The Verdict After Fifty Years

By Nelson Hultberg

- See more at: http://www.thedailybell.com/editorials/36138/Nelson-Hultberg-Ayn-Rand-and-Murray-Rothbard-The-Verdict-After-Fifty-Years/#sthash.VDBHJde7.dpuf

A talk given at Freedom Fest, Las Vegas, Nevada by Nelson Hultberg entitled Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard:  The Verdict After Fifty Years has appeared as an editorial in the Daily Bell.  He claims that Ayn Rand's principle that one should not initiate the use of force does imply, as Rothbard insisted, that she should have been an anarcho-capitalist as Rothbard was.  He goes on to call for Capitalism with a limited government as the Aristotelian mean and as the only system that could supply objective law.

Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard: The Verdict After Fifty Years

By Nelson Hultberg

- See more at: http://www.thedailybell.com/editorials/36138/Nelson-Hultberg-Ayn-Rand-and-Murray-Rothbard-The-Verdict-After-Fifty-Years/#sthash.VDBHJde7.dpuf

This issue of are you for or against the initiated use of force is one of many in which context is critical. 

Ayn Rand basically accepted the American Principle that government was legitimate when its only function was to protect the equal, sovereign right of every individual to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. Such a limited government established a framework in society that then made it possible to live in such harmony with one another as individuals that the initiated use of force among ourselves could be and was forbidden.  Without this context, the most secure one can be in one's own liberty is to be the top dog after the fashion of the warring Barons of Medieval times.  Anarcho-capitalists claim otherwise, but in reality they are unable to provide any better system than that.  A society which cannot eliminate the initiated use of force among individuals by providing a framework with strong protections for individual rights will force almost everyone to give up benevolent regard for their fellow man because threats to one's freedom and safety may come from anywhere at any time.  The resulting society is one of constant suspicion and wariness.

Clearly, welfare and socialist societies make the government a rapacious initiator of the use of force. The problem of initiated use of force is not solved by the anarcho-capitalist model either.  Different voluntary law enforcement groups operating in the same territory will inevitably come to blows. The mean that Rand was trying to achieve was one in which there was one government in a territory, or more exactly one federally associated set of governments in one area, to eliminate the conflicts of anarcho-capitalism's competing governments with a government of such highly limited powers that they were only such as to allow the protection of everyone's individual rights. If you wish to frame this as a matter of seeking a mean, well she was doing just that. 

Given the great complexity and highly multivariate character of individuals, it is not possible to please everyone with the nature of a government. Given an understanding of that, the best approach is to form a minimal government according to the American Principle. Individuals are then allowed the maximum freedom in the private sector to associate and cooperate with one another in as many groupings as they may choose, so long as they do not initiate the use of force.

If 50 people in Iowa want to start a commune together, they are free to do so. If 10 people in Georgia want to worship a golden calf, they are free to do so. If 6 people in Maryland want to operate a material analysis laboratory, they are free to do so. If Joe and John wish to be a domestic couple in Oklahoma, they should be free to do so. If 120 people want to retrieve oil and gas from a shale oil formation in Pennsylvania, they should be free to do so. If 40 people in California wish to generate electric power using coal as a fuel, they should be free to do so as long as they are not creating too much smog, but without regard to CO2 emissions which have no proven harm to others. As far as disappointed socialists are concerned, they can do all they want in voluntary groups. The only limitation is that they cannot force someone to join their group and submit to their rule, because they are not allowed to initiate the use of force. 

If you want to minimize the use of force in a society and promote the ability of people to flourish and be secure in their lives, you cannot do better than this. This is exactly what Ayn Rand was aiming for. This is the way to minimize the initiated use of force. It is the only way to outlaw its use in any objective sense.

The Falsely Framed Moral Evaluation of Capitalism

The Washington Post ran a long article on page 1 of its Outlook section on Sunday, 17 March 2013 entitled Is Capitalism Moral?  It was written by Steven Pearlstein, a Post columnist.  He claims that much of the reason for the stalemate in Washington is because the Republicans and Democrats have not really faced up to the question of whether Capitalism is moral or not.  He says that

The grand experiment with communism has been thoroughly discredited, a billion people have been lifted from poverty through free-market competition, and even European socialists have given up on state ownership and the nanny state.  Here at home, large swaths of the economy have been deregulated, and tax rates have been cut.  A good portion of what is left of government has been outsourced, while even education is moving toward school choice.  In embracing welfare reform, Americans have acknowledged that numerous programs meant to lift up the poor instead trapped them in permanent dependency and poverty.

This introduction to the Pearlstein article seems to bow to the power of Capitalism to do good, though it is always jarring to read that deregulation characterizes our government's efforts when about 80,000 pages of new regulations are added each year and the EPA is carrying out the Obama threat to kill the coal industry and coal-fired electric plants and to give us skyrocketing European gasoline prices.  The outsourced government continues to grow its many tentacles and keeps developing new tentacles such as those that sprout from the recent and still developing ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank "Too Big to Fail" acts.

Pearlstein notes that books by Arthur Brooks, of the American Enterprise Institute, and John Allison, of the Cato Institute, make a moral case for "even-freer-market capitalism than we have now."  The books he is referring obliquely to are:

Arthur C. Brooks, The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise, Basic Books, 2012.

John A. Allison, The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism is the World Economy's Only Hope, McGraw Hill, 2012.

Pearlstein characterizes their argument for capitalism as

As they see it, regulation is an infringement of individual liberty, while income redistribution, in the form of a progressive tax-and-transfer system, is nothing more than thievery committed against the most talented and productive by those who are not.  Regulation and redistribution, they contend, also undermine the vital incentives that drive capitalism, which throughout history has been the best system for freeing large masses of human beings from lives of misery and poverty.  What could be more moral, they ask, than that?

 Pearlstein even credits John Locke, Adam Smith, and Ludwig von Mises for their moral defenses of capitalism, before noting that the novels and writings of Ayn Rand really caused the idea of the morality of Capitalism to catch hold among "right-leaning intellectuals and politicians."

The remainder of this article mostly examines whether Capitalism is moral from Pearlstein's and frankly that of most people's perspective.  That perspective is implicit in the question he asks at the end of the article in his very last sentence:

If our moral obligation is to provide everyone with a reasonable shot at economic success, within a market system that, by its nature, thrives on unequal outcomes, then we ought to ask not just whether government is doing too much or too little, but whether it is doing the right things.

Basically, Pearlstein and most people believe that Capitalism is moral only if it is fair.  The bulk of the article is devoted to his belief that it is not really fair and loaded with implications that it must be controlled by government to see to it that it is as fair as possible.

One problem with judging the morality of Capitalism on the basis of whether it is fair or not is that even a toddler soon has a concept of fairness which need not have firm roots at all in a deep moral understanding.  It is extraordinarily common for the child to complain that it is not fair that her older brother always wins when they play Monopoly.  It is common that the younger sibling claims it is unfair that the older sibling can stay out to midnight on a Friday night with his friends or maybe even until 3 AM.  For many people, that concept of fairness evolves very little as they become adults.

The Founding Fathers and the Framers of the Constitution understood that what government should do was not governed by fairness.  They understood that the legitimate role of government was, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, the protection of our equal, inalienable individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The role of government was simply to see that we were not forced by government or by others to give up making our own choices of values and prevented from taking action to try to acquire and keep our values, so long as we did not initiate the use of force against others.  Government had no role in deciding what values we should seek and no role in the distribution of those values among the people.

Those, who like Pearlstein, claim that the central government role is to ensure fairness in the distribution of values among the people must push government to decide what values really matter and how they will be distributed.  Commonly, they then think almost entirely in terms of income and worldly goods as the values of importance and those to be redistributed.  To concede that government has such a fairness role, is to concede that the Nanny State is proper.  It is to concede that the less developed person is right to constantly challenge the more developed person, or at least that those who have fewer worldly goods are right to challenge the government to redistribute those goods more in their favor or even totally unto equality in the distribution.

Of course a more developed concept of fairness might recognize that someone who chooses to watch NBC and CBS every evening for hours rather than working 12 or 14 hours in a day does not have a moral claim on the earnings or wealth of a person who did make the choice to work the longer hours.  After all, the TV watcher does not trade his relaxation and laughter in front of the TV in any meaningful way for the proceeds of the many additional hours worked by someone making a very different value choice.  Yet, most Americans exercise their limited sense of fairness to think that the TV watcher deserves to have a significant part, maybe even more than half, of what the hard worker made in his additional hours of work.

To a large degree, most people think fairness is about equality.  Yet, people are too complex and too highly differentiated for them to be equal.  They may have equal rights, but that is about the only way in which people are equal.  The Founding Fathers understood this, but they feared democracy largely because they understood that most people are governed too much by a desire for a simple-minded fairness, which drove them to desire equality and the redistribution of money and goods.  Yet, it cannot be fair to deprive the person who has acquired income and goods without the use of force of what he has acquired.  No system based on a forced redistribution can be fair.  Why set out in the name of fairness to redistribute income and goods when this necessarily means that one is unfairly doing harm to many and that fairness cannot be achieved?  Even Pearlstein allows that it is hard to know when to stop the process of redistribution.

The morality of Capitalism has the same basis as the morality of the entire private sector, only some of whose activities are devoted to the values of income and worldly goods.  There is no role for government in choosing who my friends will be and how many hours I am to spend with each of them for our mutual enjoyment.  The government that tried to redistribute my friendship time and effort would clearly be recognized as a tyranny.  There is no role for government in determining how fair it is that a woman of good character may or may not be loved by the man she wants to love her.  There is no role for government in deciding who we may choose for our domestic partner or partners, though that issue is still hotly debated with respect to same-sex marriage.  Many of the greatest values in each of our lives are properly seen by most of us as beyond the sphere of government rules for distribution.

Yet, for some childish and foolish reason, most adults do think that government has a role in re-distributing income and wealth.  I believe this is in large part because they ignore the fact that this is really a theft of the time an individual put into acquiring that income and wealth, including the time he may have spent preparing himself for earning it, as in his studies, his thinking about markets over many years, and his careful attention to details in his work.  Many seem to think that they have not subjected someone to slavery just because they are taking by force only half of every added dollar he earns rather than all of it.  In fact, a paper by Peter Diamond (MIT) and Emmanuel Saez (UC Berkeley) is making its rounds among the Progressive Elitists now that claims that the correct marginal tax on high income people is 73%.  I frankly cannot understand how they so deceive themselves that taking half or 73% of every additional hour worked from someone is not the moral equivalent of slavery.

Most slave owners in the Antebellum South allowed their slaves to spend a few hours working in their own gardens to grow some of their own food.  Did this mean that they were really not slaves because the slaveholder did not have them in his cotton or rice fields 100% of the time?  The Progressive Elitist might argue that they only make slaves of those who choose to be very productive in the marketplace, so if you participate in the market you are choosing to be a slave.  Of course they fear to be that honest, but they do say that if you make a lot of money you are choosing to pay the progressive taxes.

Yet, the person who spends time on other values, such as watching TV, going fishing, running, or spending time with friends or family is not taxed in any way.  That is not fair.  If it is right to progressively tax the person who chooses to spend time making money, then it is unfair to give the person who could have made money, but did not, a tax deduction for the money he failed to make.  Fairness demands that he be taxed for the value of his time that he spent in a different choice of values.  Yet, government knows that people will not stand for it to discourage other values such as time with family with a tax, so it acts in a manifestly unfair way on those who spend productive time making money through voluntary trades with others.  It does this even though it is generally recognized, even by Pearlstein, that such economic activity has done wonders in improving the standard of living for almost everyone, even the inveterate TV watcher.

Pearlstein's characterization of the market as much more free than it is provides him with some of his arguments that free markets do not work so well.  He also treats the arguments of people like Allison  unfairly.  For instance, he says

The conservative case against regulation, for example, is premised on the proposition that everything that has gone wrong with the markets is the government's fault.

 Well no, free market advocates realize that many businesses will fail in a perfectly free market and that there will be a business cycle in a free market with recessions from time to time.  They just object to the fact that government action in the market has the consequence of causing more business failures, more frequent and deeper recessions, and in the present case a recession that seems to have no foreseeable end.

Pearlstein claims that free market advocates say that

Because pursuit of self-interest is the essential ingredient in a market system, it somehow follows that individuals and firms are free to act as greedily and selfishly as they can within the law, absolved from any moral obligations.

I do not think there are many who believe they are "absolved from any moral obligations" in their actions.  Pearlstein in particular seems to imply that Allison holds this view.  I have not read his book, but the way Pearlstein describes Allison's viewpoint leaves quite a large leap to the conclusion that Pearlstein seems to impose on Allison's viewpoint.  I surely do not believe that a businessman is only morally obliged to obey the law and that he is morally allowed to otherwise act immorally.  Indeed, that is a clearly immoral viewpoint, which an advocate of Capitalism on moral grounds is most unlikely to make.  But Allison correctly notes that when government uses a heavy hand in making moral decisions in the marketplace, the many laws that claim to define moral actions and value choices in the marketplace will naturally become a substitute morality for many people.  If Pearlstein wants everyone in the market to act morally, then he should remove the government from the market as much as possible so that people will understand that they must act morally in the market, rather than just obeying the laws.  Government morality acts as bad money does to drive good money out of the market.

Pearlstein repeats the liberal argument that economic success often is due to dumb luck.  Some have the good fortune to be born with the right genes and the right parents, to grow up in a good community, to be better educated, to be better mentored, and to be at the right place at the right time.   They argue that the market should reward virtue, not dumb luck.

Well OK, we like to see virtue rewarded.  But, in a system in which market success means that everyone involved in a voluntary transaction has entered into it because he believes he is better off for having participated in it, how is anyone hurt if someone in the transaction was lucky?  Everyone still benefited.  We all want the freedom to be lucky, do we not?  We may be lucky in a business transaction one day also.  Or, maybe we were lucky enough to meet the love of our lives 40 years ago.  Apparently liberals believe that luck should be re-distributed also.  So, why is it only luck in financial terms to be redistributed?  Did I not realize a greater value in having the luck to meet Anna than someone else has had who is unhappily married for the third time?  As in the marketplace, virtues and luck both play roles in our love lives.  Luck is not something to be redistributed and rationed among us.  Our luck and misfortunes are generally properly beyond the reach of government.  Yes, we may well choose to recognize that some people have suffered more misfortune in life than others in our private charity work or contributions, but this is not a proper function of government.  Rightly, there is no grant of power for the purpose in the Constitution.

Pearlstein continues to argue against the perceived fairness of the marketplace.  He says that 20 years ago wage and salary earners reliably captured about 75% of the national income, with the rest going to capital providers.  More recently, labor has only received about 67%.  I expect there are reasons for such a shift that make sense.  One is that there is a decrease in union labor in the private sector.  Another is that there is an increase in the importance of knowledge and professionalism and both are more and more often tied to capital and the founders of businesses.  Still another is that complex law and regulation has insulated very large companies from upcoming competition.  Another is the huge influxes of taxpayer money to companies such as Goldman Sachs, CitiBank, Bank of America, GE, GM, Lockheed Martin, Solyndra, and A123 Systems in recent years.  Corporate welfare seems to be a staple of Progressive Elitist government even as it pretends it is not.

Pearlstein claims that 50 years ago, the typical corporate executive earned less than 50 times the pay of the average front-line worker.  He says the ratio is now 350 to 1.  He implicitly believes this is a statement that morality is defied here.  I expect he is comparing the few large corporations of 50 years ago in a much smaller US economy with today's corporations acting in a much larger US economy and in a much larger world economy.  If he chose to compare the mid-sized companies and large small businesses today with similar sized businesses by income of 50 years ago, the ratios would be much more similar.  That is, compare the ratio in a $100 million income company today with a $100 million income company of 50 years ago and the ratio will be much less dissimilar.  Neither 200 years ago, 100, 50, or last year did most companies even have a 50 to 1 ratio.  That ratio is a phenomena of size.

Pearlstein laments the fact that inequality of income in the market threatens to overwhelm the ability of a progressive tax-and-transfer system to keep up with it.  So yes, Pearlstein simply assumes that income equality is a requirement of a moral economic system, despite the fact that almost no one advocates equality in other aspects of our private lives.  His, and that of most Progressive Elitists, is a very childish moral code.  It is manifestly biased in the application of equality and it absolutely refuses to recognize that individuals are highly complex and differentiated.  It refuses to recognize that as a result, we make very different value choices and bring very different abilities to bear on acquiring the values we choose.  It just assumes that using force to redistribute income and wealth is good.  It just assumes that largely enslaving those who make good money in the voluntary and mutually beneficial marketplace is justified as for the greater good.  It also assumes that it is right and proper to redistribute luck, but only luck operating in the market.  What an absolutely weird, yet common, idea of morality this is!

A society with a very limited government whose only function is to protect our equal, sovereign individual rights to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own body, mind, and labor, and the pursuit of personal happiness is the only society in which people are free to be moral.  They are then free to be moral in the entire private sector of their activities, including that subset of economic activities in the market.  Capitalism is moral for the same reason that other human action dedicated to the free choice of values and the freedom to pursue them is moral.  Capitalism is moral because it allows these choices of value by each individual in the marketplace.  It is moral as an exercise in our individual right to freedom of association to cooperate with others as we choose for financial reward, just as in other aspects of our lives we are free to associate with others as friends and lovers and family.  Our labor belongs to each of us by right and we trade it with others in some cases for monetary gain and in other cases as part of a family to instruct a child or to do the dishes and laundry.  Government has no moral obligation to equalize any of the rewards that we get from exercising our freedom of association or the use of our time.  Indeed, if it tries to do so, it has violated our individual rights and done an evil deed.

Obama Calls for More Spending on Education, But Does More Spending Improve Education?

In the last debate, Obama said that a cornerstone to recovery from the never-ending Great Socialist Recession was an increase in federal spending on education.  This he says is critical to improving the economy.

Now, we can all agree that an American population of thinking individuals with a broad and accurate knowledge base and excellent problem-solving skills would be a major economic factor.  One can even imagine an education system based on sound principles which might do a better job of educating the People if it had more money.  However, the present American education system gives no evidence that spending more money on education has any beneficial effect upon the knowledge base of Americans and on their development of critical thinking skills.  Let us examine the recent history of total spending on education:

Since 1981 there has been an almost 6-fold increase in education spending in the U.S.  To be sure, if we believe that education spending should be proportional to the GDP, then this is only a 23% increase in spending as a proportion of GDP.  In 1981, education spending was about 6.4% of GDP and in 2010 it was 7.9% of GDP.  However, the student population has not grown at anything like the rate of the growth in GDP, so one should be able to expect an equal level of educational results with a decreasing fraction of the GDP being devoted to education.  The trend is clearly in the wrong direction.

There are very fundamental reasons why the massively increased spending on education and on a per pupil basis has not resulted in any significant increase in student knowledge and thinking skills.  In almost every community, the local school labor unions assemble a slate of Board of Education members who appear to have good education credentials and their election is backed by lots of union money.  This slate wins almost every position on the school boards.  Because of this and the power of the teachers unions in also greatly influencing the election of city and county officials, the schools are managed for the benefit of the teachers labor unions, not for the education of the children.  Increasing the pay and  benefits of teachers who are blue-collar union members unable to even negotiate their own pay and benefits with their employer, guarantees that few of them will have the teaching skills, knowledge, self-confidence, and managerial skills needed by a professional educator.  Union members are not picked and not rewarded for their teaching professionalism.  Of course, as so often happens when a con is being performed, teachers present bogus certifications proclaiming them experts in teaching.

We have government-run schools specifically because Progressives saw them as a means to indoctrinate children to believe that big and socialist government was needed and moral.  Of course a government-run school could be counted upon to advance the never-ending quest of governments for power.  Such government schools could be counted upon to subvert the American Principle that government should be highly limited and only act to protect the equal, sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own mind, body, and labor, and to the pursuit of personal happiness.  Thus, government-run schools have become increasingly anti-American even as they became the dominant force in the education of American children.  The general viewpoint of American government-run school teachers is well-aligned with the socialist and extreme environmentalist viewpoints of Obama.  It is opposed to a healthy and robust private sector in which Americans should be free to exercise their freedom of association to cooperate with others to achieve their self-chosen goals.  The government-run schools are generally bastions of Progressivism and opponents of Capitalism.

Despite the large increases in education spending, we have not seen an increased ability of American young people to perceive reality and understand it.  In fact, they are more and more removed from reality and less and less capable of performing real productive work in the private sector without more and more massive training efforts by private businesses.  Few students graduate with a proper respect for those with the skills and motivation to produce in our society.  Few are able to communicate well and solve problems well.  Despite our spending more and more and spending far more of our GDP on education than does almost any other country, we keep losing ground to other countries in rankings of educational attainment.  It could not be more clear that we are throwing our education dollars into a black hole.

Marcos Cordero in an article called The Link Between Unemployment Rates and the Lack of Qualified Professionals in America notes that

The Defense Department found that 75 percent of Americans age 17 to 24 are not qualified to serve in the armed forces. In fact, 30 percent of the high school graduates who take the Armed Forces Qualification Test, a test of basic reading and math skills, fail it.

A very fundamental reform of American education is desperately needed and it will not come from government.  Governments are only eager to increase their power and politicians are easily bought by the massive teachers union money accumulated as the government automatically deducts union dues from teachers paychecks.  Labor unions and government increasingly see their interests to be largely in common and the interests of students and good governance are not now able to compete with them.  Only when the People understand these problems and massively rebel will there be any real hope of fixing this problem.

But most of the American People are largely in a feel good mode on education.  Because labor union members provide children with inflated grades, most parents think their child is doing well in school and they are inclined to assume that that means that they are actually learning.  The labor union policy of easy grading and of placing few demands on students lulls the parents and students to sleep.  Until parents and students wake up to the fact that they are being poorly educated and heavily indoctrinated in socialism and extreme environmentalism, America will continue to go downhill.  Obama is happy to push us down that hill.

Obama Kills Jobs and Resuscitates the Great Socialist Recession

Let us start off with a chart showing the number of jobs missing from our economy since January 2000 in thousands of jobs.  The number of missing jobs in January 2000 was equal to the number of unemployed people then who were looking for jobs or in some cases were simply taking some time off between jobs.  Jobs were plentiful then and had been for several years, so unemployment was only 4.0%.  Because of the boom and bust nature of the economy since then due to the Federal Reserve setting very low interest rates, the deficits run by our governments, increasing regulations and taxes, added energy costs due to drilling prohibitions, recent added uncertainty caused by ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank financial reform, and considerable class warfare and anti-business rhetoric, the number of missing jobs has increased greatly in the course of the last 11 years.

The number of missing jobs is calculated assuming that the same percentage of Americans would work today as did in January 2000 if good jobs were available.  The high tech bubble that burst in 2001 and 2002 had already created a situation with about 5 million more missing jobs than we had had at the beginning of the century.  In December 2007, the United States had not yet been much affected by the recession due to a sharp increase in the price of oil that was already hurting most other countries of the world.  But in 2008, companies began laying off employees and stopped hiring new employees.  This never-ending Great Socialist Recession was underway.

Since Obama occupied the White House, there has been no substantial or sustained return to normalcy.  The number of missing jobs for the last four months has been almost constant.  There was actually a small increase in the number of missing jobs in August, though the statistics are not really good enough to consider that a real effect.  What is real is that over the long term now, there has been no improvement.  This is not surprising since almost every action the Federal Government and the Federal Reserve have taken was effective in killing jobs, not in creating them.  Jobs are conserved in big businesses and many, many jobs are created by small businesses when the government does little to hurt their businesses.  The Federal Government and many state governments have worked very hard to create very tough business conditions and much uncertainty when American business already faced a world largely in recession and stiff competition from abroad.

Obama's socialist viewpoint, his servitude to labor unions, and his academic economic advisers with their belief in Keynesian economic theory, led him and the Democrats down a very wrongheaded path.  America is in misery because of this wrongheaded understanding of the economy and business by our ever more controlling central planners in Washington.  The private sector and Capitalist free market can do much better.

Many of 49% of Americans are Slaves,

while 51% are wastrels responsible for massive government spending they pay no income tax to fund.  Yes, in 2009, the number of Americans not paying income taxes to the federal government became a 51% majority.  For them, it does not matter how wasteful government spending is, because it is not their money.  They can and do ask, "Why should I care what it costs, I do not pay for it."  Obama has succeeded in creating a majority of recipients of his redistributionist theft.  It gets worse, since some of those 49% who pay some income tax, actually do get more in government goodies than the amount they pay in taxes.

For instance, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 1,909,000 civilian federal employees in November 2008, excluding the postal employees.  With their generally high salaries and extremely good benefits, they can be said to mostly be receiving more in government payments than they are paying in taxes.  It is interesting to note that the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides data on total employment in April 2011, but only provides the number of federal employees as recently as November 2008.  Do you suppose they do not want the taxpayer to easily find out how bloated the federal bureaucracy truly is?  On top of this, I have seen numbers for January 2009 civilian federal employees without security clearances reported to be 2,748,978.  The CIA, NSA, and other complete federal agencies were left out of that 2.7 million number.  This number may include the postal employees.  Does the federal government have as much trouble keeping track of how many employees it has as it does of how much land, how many buildings, and how much equipment it has?  I would not be surprised.

Then there are also those many businessmen so cozy with the government who are collecting subsidies and who benefit from mandates, such as those to use ethanol, wind energy, solar energy, and partially electric cars.  There are also crony mercantilists benefiting from many regulations designed to bury their competition, especially that of small businesses, under a mountain of government requirements and paperwork.  These people are often called crony capitalists, but that is a contradiction of terms.  Crony mercantilists have been around as long as there have been governed nation-states, which long predates the day of the capitalists with their philosophy of open markets and freedom of choice.  Capitalism is the manifestation of the equal, sovereign individual right to associate with whom one wants for the purposes of one's choosing.

Just recently, every business in America doing any business with FDA-regulated companies or with FAA and DOD regulated aerospace companies has been hit with a blizzard of quality assurance paperwork and the pressure is mounting for every company to become International Standards Organization (ISO) certified at huge expense both initially and in an on-going way.  This is expensive for large companies and will be the death of many a small company.  The small company that always had to try harder to provide good service or quality products will now be killed in many cases in the name of increased quality.  Ha.  We will see what the monopoly of the few companies that can bear the expense of this extra-governmental regulation required by government agencies will provide in future quality!  Every lab will have calibrated equipment, but will pay no attention to correctly interpreting the data provide to obtain the real properties of the materials investigated.  There will be no quality in the end product analytical report, but every laboratory will be a quality lab because ISO says they are.  As Ayn Rand noted long ago, regulation by government sets up lowest common denominator requirements and no company thereafter has as much pressure as before to exceed those low requirements.  But, many a tired, old, and large company is very happy with such regulations, whether set by the government or by a one-world organization such as ISO.  ISO also serves the function of providing import protection to Europe primarily, but secondarily to the U.S., Canada, and Japan.

If you wonder why it is so hard to reduce the size of government or to reduce its out-of-control spending, this is why.  There are too few people paying taxes and many too many people getting payments, subsidies, and protection from effort.  The many have truly enslaved the productive and wealth-creating few.  But it is these few who create the jobs.  As our society has become most determined to enslave and whip these few, they have responded by laying off many of the employees they can no longer support and by refusing to hire more new employees even as they struggle to increase productivity while robbed of the capital with which to do it.