Biden's Executive Order 14019 is Designed to Take Over Zuckerberg's Election Rigging Function

Walter Donway's article at The Savvy Street entitled Is Biden's Executive Order 14019 Designed for Electoral Wrongdoing? describes some of the provisions of this little discussed attempt to use the Democrat-dominated bureaucracy of the federal government to rig elections, including replicating much of Mark Zuckerberg's effort in the 2020 election.  The Democrats, despite being watched more closely this time, are still hard at work on one task -- cheating on elections.  They hide in the dark shadows of their constant false claims that Republicans are the threat to democracy.  In fact, there is no greater threat to legitimate government than rigged elections.

Getting out the vote efforts may sound like a good thing, but they are not when the effort, as in taking the Census, is directed in a partisan manner.  If you are only eager to count every person in Democrat-controlled areas, while ignoring those in Republican areas, you skew the apportionment of the House of Representatives and for many state elections as well.  If you only try to get out the vote in Democrat-controlled areas, you skew the vote in favor of Democrats.  In truth, low information voters are the ones you round up to vote and they tend to vote Democrat.  There is really no good to be achieved by having the government encourage people to control the government when they are not at least motivated to vote on their own.  If they are not self-motivated to vote, then they are surely not motivated to vote on sufficient information and with sufficient thought.  Rounding up the bread and circuses crowd to vote does not promote legitimate government -- it destroys it as surely as Rome was destroyed.

How to Change a Society from a Largely Free Democratic Republic to a Fascist Socialist Totalitarian State

1.  Divide individuals by gender, by ethnicity, by wealth and income, by education, by age, and by sexuality; 

2.  Pit one group against another using the force of government to provide unearned rewards to some at the expense of others by putting limits on the rights of individuals to earn a living, limiting their freedom of association, and their freedom to cooperate with one another; 

3.  Thereby, creating distrust and hatred as the factions fight to control the government that insists on hurting many, making it a threat to all, thereby making it a matter of life and death for each group to control the government;

4.  Watch a country that once honored merit in the market place, but became an unlimited democracy, succumb to greed for the unearned with the development of ever more special interest groups dependent upon government largess;

5.  The government-run and funded education system becomes a tool promoting more and more government powers, seeks to suppress all private education alternatives, seeks to suppress individual rights especially freedom of speech and the freedom of the press or media, promotes the collective rights of some groups at the expense of the rights of the individuals in other groups, and promotes versions of the country's prior history that diverge ever more from the truth such that more and more power and money flow to the government and the education system;

6. In which a majority coalition of those who have less wealth and want government forced transfers of wealth to themselves and those who most lust for power turn the country into a socialist, fascist country (very poor, primitive countries usually turn communist instead);

7. Which in turn comes to be ruled by the most brutal elements of the power lusters with a total loss of individual rights.

I read William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich the summer after the 9th grade and came to understand most of this.  I think I understood some of these lessons better than Shirer did.  There have been many further examples of this process since WWII.

Here is a very interesting analysis video of what we are presently facing based on a young woman's experience during the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

Government is a great servant but horrid master by Jeffrey Foss

Today bigger, supremely powerful global governments are justified by environmental claims

Jeffrey Foss

Through the ages, the suffering, destruction and murder perpetrated by governments like those of Caligula, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro and their ilk reduces the evil of common criminals like Al Capone, Daniel Ortega, Bernie Madoff and El Chapo to the scale of breaking wind at Sunday dinner.

There is a historical lesson here for any of us who would entrust our sustenance, security and happiness to government. History teaches us that when governments go bad, they can really stink – enough to make us ashamed of our very species. But the more we entrust to government, the bigger it gets; and the bigger it gets, the more likely it is to become our ill-odored, malignant master, instead of our servant or helper.  

Governing is all about power, of course. Otherwise the governed would not obey, and anarchy would ensue, assuming it wasn’t there already. Thus the first power of government must be the appropriation of violence (such as imprisonment, torture and execution) unto itself for its sole use. All other forms of violence are outlawed.

If you or I kill someone, that is murder, which is illegal. But when government kills someone, it is execution or warfare, which is perfectly – and ever so conveniently – legal. If we take money from someone by force or stealth, that’s theft, But when government does likewise, it’s taxation, fees or fines. If I break into your house, I do not pass Go, I do not collect $200, I go straight to jail. If government breaks into my house, they get the police (or even a SWAT team) to do it.

All governments are born in sin: the appropriation of overwhelming power. Power doesn’t immediately or necessarily entail evil, of course. Power can be used for good. But misuse of power is as seductive as Delilah sitting at the side of the bed.

So government must be controlled, like the powerful beast it is, by putting a ring though its nose. The genius of democracy is that it ties that ring by millions of strings to the hands of ordinary people like you and me, by our votes. By pulling together we can control the beast – unless we let it get too dang big, or we get divided into one faction that wants small, controllable government and another that wants free stuff and payment for not working, courtesy of legalized government theft and violence against others.

So our first rule must be to vote for less government, not more. Note well that, by a cruel irony of fate, the so-called Democratic Party, which advertises itself as the champion of the powerless, is for ever-bigger government. Note also that the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln that freed the slaves, is for less.

    

To be clear as blue skies, I am not arguing against government. Far from it. Government is necessary. Good government is a wonderful servant: it lubricates our cooperation while putting a lid on our violence as we procure food, clothing, shelter, safety and (if we engage in the proper pursuits) happiness.

If you take a look at what’s around you, you made or created little or nothing. Others made it for you, just as you make things for them, in a system of cooperation involving money, banks, sales, purchases, property, mutual benefit and so on. This system gives us virtually everything we have.

History and observation teach that democratic governments linked to economic freedom have excelled in helping us produce the plenty we now enjoy. Our form of democratic, republican government, relative to every other form that has ever existed, is best at serving the people.

But government can also be a horrible master. The reason people outside the developed democracies do not enjoy the health, wealth and happiness we have is that their governments suffer from the disease universally endemic to government: serving itself to achieve its own goals.

It is no accident that the government atrocities of Stalin, Mao and their ilk were inflicted on their own citizens. These leftist governments gained and sustained power by claiming they cared deeply about the people and pretending the vice of envy is really a virtue. They thereby instigated hatred of the rich by the poor, hatred of the successful by the unsuccessful, hatred of the happy by the discontented. Weakened by internal conflict, the people were readily conned into domestic and foreign wars both hot and cold, and into bizarre economic experiments. Over 100,000,000 were starved, murdered or worked to death.

By yet another cruel irony of fate, the poor were the main victims. Stalin, for instance, reorganized millions of previously successful farmers into communes, and then starved them to death when they were bold enough to protest that farming itself was being destroyed. Those citizens he permitted to live did so in despicable poverty and fear, while Stalin himself spent his days in the palaces of the Czars, the very people he reviled, strutting about like a toy soldier, grinning like the cat that ate the canary.

Today we are told even vastly bigger government is needed – at a global level – to protect planet and civilization from the ravages of fossil fuels, runaway climate change and big evil corporations.

We already see this eco-imperialism imposed on billions of people, who are told they develop as they wish, use fossil fuels or improve their health and living standards more than a trifling bit. As the globalist ruling elites gain ever more power, they are demanding that citizens of already developed countries reduce their living standards, stop driving cars and flying airplanes, and eat insects and organic vegetables instead of meat or conventional foods. Of course, like Stalin, the ruling classes would exempt themselves from the diktats and penalties they impose on the masses.

Let there be no doubt: history teaches there are two keys to the levels of health, wealth and happiness that we humans have so far achieved. The first is democracy: putting government under our control. The second is freedom to make our own economic choices, to work for whom we choose, to own property, and to start businesses if we like, without being smothered by endless regulations, paperwork and taxes.

But keeping government under control isn’t easy. Government power stealthily increases, even in democracies. As Figure 1 shows, the growth of US government has been relentless, creeping and sneaky since the halcyon days when the Original Colonies first cut off the chains of monarchy. 

The graph shows that government’s share of all the money made in the country has steadily increased from about 3% in 1790 to over 40% today. Who can doubt that government had less power in 1790 than it does now? Or that the people rebelled over far less odious usurpations than they face today?

Those who lean left preach that there are good reasons for us to envy and revile the rich – indeed, anyone in the arbitrarily designated 1% of top earners. But by a stroke of unparalleled self-deception they refuse to see that this same logic applies with its ultimate force to big-spending, big-taxing, big-borrowing, big-leftist government itself.

So if you are tempted by some politician’s promise to play Robin Hood for you, you are being fooled. Politicians may pretend to be Robin, but under their disguise of forest green you will always find the evil Sherriff of Nottingham and his taxman. And what honor is there in getting someone to steal for you?

It is wrong for any of us to envy, revile or hate the rich simply because they are rich. We should instead rejoice in the success of law-abiding people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Stewart Butterfield (my former student, Canadian entrepreneur and midwife of Flickr and Slack). They are beacons of hope. 

Those decent people among us who legally acquire a few millions or billions of dollars to pose against the many trillions of dollars taken from us by government are like those 1776 colonists, who rose up against King George III, wrote a Declaration of Independence and Constitution that set down their inspirations, aspirations, and belief in God, unalienable natural rights, and small government with limited powers, intentions and instruments of taxation and suppression.

They show us that we too can get ahead, be free and prosper with limited government that understands its proper role.

Dr. Jeffrey Foss is a philosopher of science, Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, Canada, and author of Beyond Environmentalism: A Philosophy of Nature.

FIGURE 1. Growth of U.S. government, 1790 to 2016.

Comment by Charles:  I have posted this article at the request of Paul Driessen.  Jeffrey Foss understands the threat of big government very well.

The Electoral College is Vitally Important

The Democrat Socialist Party wants to eliminate the Electoral College.  Others are pushing a compact among the states to have each state ignore the votes of its own citizens and award their electoral college votes to the Presidential candidate who won the plurality of votes in the nationwide election.  This interstate compact does not eliminate the Electoral College, but it does eliminate its purpose.

Both of these ideas would have awful consequences.  Among them are:

• Already extensive voter fraud will explode.  Contrary to the oft repeated claims of academics, who are in the pocket of the Democrat Socialist Party, that voter fraud is insignificant, actual election managers have known for decades that every Democrat Socialist Party Presidential Candidate has 150,000 fraudulent votes in Philadelphia.  New York City, Boston, Providence, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago will all deliver large numbers of fraudulent votes to the Democrat Socialist Party also.  Voter fraud can only operate on a massive scale where one political party has long held power over an area with a large population for a long period of time.  A nationwide plurality contest will make it much harder to triage the many cases of voter fraud for investigation.  With the Electoral College, one can focus voter fraud investigations on those areas where the vote will actually change the outcome of the state-wide election and the way its Electoral College votes are cast.

• The Democrat Socialist Party presidential candidate will spend even less time in rural areas of the country and in towns and small cities than they already do.  It is a great advantage to have the richest lode of one's voters crowded together in a few large cities.  Limited time and money can be far more effectively focused on these high density ant-nests of humanity than is possible for a candidate who seeks the votes of Americans living in lower population density areas of the nation.  Post-election maps will show even more of the nation in red even as a few dots of blue carry the Presidential election.  Future Presidents will be less and less able to claim that they are the President of all the People.  It will become ever easier for them to disregard those who live in fly-over country and to designate them the Deplorables.

• Legitimate government is government that protects the exercise of every citizen's individual rights.  Unfettered democracy is actually pressed to trample the rights of many citizen's in order to purchase the votes of a plurality of citizens.  In many cases, the interests of people living in cities and high density areas are different than those who live in lower density areas.  The city-dweller may be very happy to have all the products he needs that require natural resources as inputs to come from China, Africa, and South America.  He may be more ready to buy into environmental scare tactics than some who live in a mining area.  The city-dweller might be susceptible to using the government to drive down food prices at the expense of farmers and those who process and transport food materials.  The city-dweller likely has no interest in the fate of fishermen.  He is likely to want federal tax deductions for heavy state and local taxes at the expense of more rural people with less expensive governments.  The city-dweller will push for expensive subsidies for public transportation at the expense of people from lower density population areas.  City-dwellers and the Democrat Socialist Party are already very often seeking to force employers to pay high minimum wages such as the commonly demanded $15/hour wage.  Even in cities a minimum wage requirement does great harm to those who are little educated, have low work skills, or are little motivated to work.  But minimum wage requirements on the national level are even more devastating in rural areas where businesses have fewer potential customers and where the cost of living is commonly much lower.  Our Republic, under which the Electoral College is a key leg, was designed to discourage a portion of the disregard that an unfettered democracy has for individuals and minorities of the electorate.

• That party most eager to have a federal government which provides goodies to its voters while showing a great willingness to harm those who do not vote or who vote for another party will benefit most from keeping the Electoral College from doing the task it was set up to do by the Framers of the Constitution.  The Framers knew the dangers of democracy.  They knew that governments are biased in favor of increasing their power over the People.  They put many checks and balances into our system of federal governance in order to provide for our welfare by minimizing the dangers to individuals and minorities that democracies are inclined toward and by making it harder for governments to increase their power and control over the lives of the People.  When the state legislatures were no longer allowed to designate the electors to the Electoral College, the federal system was undermined.  The power of the states was diminished.  This made it easier for a party to ignore many states as it sought power at the federal government level.  

• A constitutional amendment is required to eliminate the Electoral College.  Such amendments are hard to pass.  An amendment ultimately requires the approval of three-quarters of the state legislatures.  This is pretty much an impossible task for the Democrat Socialist Party to achieve, since so many of the states are clearly to be ignored by them once they have eliminated the Electoral College.  The idea that everyone's vote should count in a Presidential election has a lot of naive appeal to many Americans, so the compact between the states that each state will cast its electoral votes for the winner of the popular vote across America has some appeal.  It requires the approval of many fewer state legislatures than does an amendment to the Constitution.  Many of the states to be ignored by the future government can also be ignored in the process of putting this compact into play.  I do wonder if once the People of a state have voted for candidate A, but candidate B wins the national popular vote, how stable the compact of legislatures will be when the People of that state find their own legislature betraying their state-wide vote.  For instance, imagine that Trump had won the popular vote.  Can you imagine the uproar in New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and California when their electoral votes were cast for Trump?

• The entire plurality that Hillary Clinton won over Donald Trump was based on the vote in California, where Republicans are largely disenfranchised by a state election system that places Democrat Socialists running against Democrat Socialists for virtually every state-wide office in the general election and few if any Republicans are on the ballot.  This Democrat Socialist voting system is a strong voter suppression factor.  The interstate compact to award each state's electoral votes to the popular vote winner will encourage more states solidly controlled by a party to adopt this form of voter suppression.  All evidence to this point is that Democrats are more willing to suppress the vote of Republicans than Republicans are eager to suppress the Democrat vote. 

Most of the support for weakening the Electoral College is in the Democrat Socialist Party.  That is the same party that wants to have children, felons, and non-citizens vote, a $15 minimum wage, welfare for those who choose not to work, Medicare for all, no power except intermittent wind and solar, ever more federal land, regulations against any environmental harm that can be imagined by Chicken Little, catastrophic man-made global warming based on faulty physics and lacking any catastrophe, open borders with a welfare state, and which discourages people from having children.  There is no lunacy too loony for the Democrat Socialist Party which is well-represented by the donkey or ass and in some states also by the white segregationist rooster.

Hilary Clinton's loss of the last election brought on a new sense of urgency to undermine the Electoral College with her claim of a majority of the votes.  Actually, she only had a plurality.  What is more, the sum of the votes to the smaller government parties such as the Republican, Libertarian, and Constitution parties was greater than that for the likes of the Democrats, Green, Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the Socialist Workers parties.

Rather than more unfettered democracy, we need more institutions and laws that protect individuals and minorities of all kinds -- not just racial, gender, or sexuality -- from the brutal use of force and the harms that a plurality of voters and their chosen power-hungry politicians are all too often eager to inflict upon them.

Mid-Term National Elections Have Fewer Uninformed Voters - Let Us Have More Mid-Term Elections

Only a small fraction of the US adult population know who the first President of the United States was.  No, I am not even talking about the first President under the 11 years of the Confederation of the United States.  I am saying they cannot name George Washington as the first president.  Most also do not know that we gained our independence from Great Britain, cannot name the original 13 states, do not know who the combatants were in the War of 1812 or in World War I, do not know the enumerated powers that Congress has under the Constitution, do not know how many justices serve on the Supreme Court, and have a greatly exaggerated idea of the powers of the President under our Constitution.

Now we ask these same people to follow and understand the operations of their local and state governments and of the federal government and cast an informed vote at least every two years.  Is there even a bit of realism in such an expectation?  The Framers of the Constitution certainly knew there were limits on the wisdom and knowledge of the People.  They were fully aware of the short lifespans of earlier democracies.  Indeed, they believed a short lifespan and great instability was a characteristic of any democracy.

Ben Franklin said:

Democracy... Is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.

John Adams said:

Remember democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

The Framers of the Constitution were familiar with mobs in the streets, which we still have to this day in Ferguson, Missouri and not long ago had in many cities, such as Watts, California.  But 1789 and the 124 years that followed, government was much simpler to understand.  Government still paid attention to the enumerated powers of the Constitution.  The power to tax in order to fulfill the functions enumerated had not become a power to do anything which might be supported by a tax.  ObamaCare was recently ruled by the Supreme Court to be justified because it was so supported by a tax.  The interstate commerce regulation authority had not then been expanded to allow the regulation of all commercial activity.  The power and scope of government were much smaller then.  This was not only at the federal level, but also at the state and local level.  Yet, the People were not to have their intelligence and their diligence to inform themselves so taxed that they were to choose their own Senators.  Until 1913, Senators were chosen by state legislatures, which represented a body of people who were more interested in and informed about government.

Because so many of the People have an exaggerated expectation of the power of the President and so few appreciate the real power of Congress, they turn out to vote in much larger numbers for presidential national elections than they do for the mid-term elections.  Let us examine the voter turnout in the last few elections:

2014, 36.3%
2012, 53.6%, presidential
2010, 37.8%
2008, 56.8%, presidential
2006, 37.1%
2004, 55.3%, presidential
2002, 37.0%
2000, 51.3%, presidential

The average presidential year turnout was 54.25%, while the mid-term election turnout was 37.05%.  In presidential election years the turnout is 17.2% higher on average.  The significance of this is more readily seen by noting that presidential elections have 1.46 times as many voters.  I would maintain that in a presidential election year this means that for every 3 voters there is one voter who is less informed than the average voter in a mid-term election.

We made the federal government excessively democratic when we made Senators stand for popular election in 1913.  This also decreased the power of the states in the state - federal balance of power.  This loss of state power is now clearly seen to be ill-advised and has greatly contributed to the political divisiveness of the present times.  While I think it would be wise to remove the 17th Amendment that unbalanced our federal system of government, there is more that we can do to rectify the ills that plague our federal government.

Government is now so powerful, so into everyone's pocket and business, that it is no wonder that even fairly intelligent people do not have the time or the will to devote effort to understanding what it is doing and what the consequences of those actions are.  Even full-time politicians are overwhelmed and uninformed.  Just in the last day or so, Obama said in a press conference that he had just become informed that Jonathan Gruber had spoken about how the framers of the PPACA, more accurately the Patient Subjugation and Unaffordable Care Act, had purposely deceived the voters, who Gruber called stupid in a too forthright admission of the Progressive Elitist assessment of others.  Of course, that infamous bill was passed by a Democrat Congress few, if any, of whose members who had read the bill.  Other such examples abound.  So if the full time politicians are so uninformed, how can the People generally be expected to make rational choices at the polls?

The present system of too much democracy has led us into a morass of tyrannical government.  People vote on the basis of their wishes after buying into undeliverable promises by politicians.  They do not critically evaluate the promises for their supportability or their consequences.  To be sure, some major element of democracy is unavoidable if one is to avoid a tyranny of an oligarchy or of a despot.  So, how can we adjust the system modestly so that the People may still exercise their vote and make their corrections to the system?

I propose that we have more mid-term elections and fewer presidential elections.  Let us allow a President one and only one six-year term of office.  With government as complex as it is today, the demands placed on a President are much greater than they were in the early years of our Republic.  Yet, when I read biographies of our early Presidents, even with much smaller governments, they were extraordinarily busy men, beset with huge burdens of worries.  Most who served even four years in office were worn out.  Eight years in office is too much for mortal man and very few of our Presidents are really extraordinary men.  They come into office with a few core ideas and those that are politically palatable are commonly put into place in the first couple of years they are in office.  After that they seem to tire out, run out of ideas, and certainly lose touch with the People.  At the end of six years, it is time to send them back to their plows.

Yet, it is not the worn-out President that is the chief reason for this proposal.  The chief reason is that having two mid-term elections for every presidential election would tend to keep that one out of three voters who is least informed away from the polls for two elections for every time they vote.  Everyone who is a citizen would still have the right to vote just as often, but he would have to motivate himself to come to the polls even when no one was up for the office of the now Imperial Presidency.  This would give us more of the outcomes for smaller government that the 2014 and 2010 elections provided.  This would give us a less tyrannical set of governments at all levels of government, since it is clearly the less informed and less motivated voters who are most susceptible to the empty promises of politicians who would grow the governments at the expense of the private sector and our individual rights.

Frankly, it would help to diminish the power of the Democratic Party, the party Franklin and Adams might name the Murder or Suicide Party.  Government is never a proper means of association unless it is necessary that force be used and supplant voluntary cooperation.  Whenever an individual asserts his individual rights as justification for not obeying the dictates of government, government replies that it is ready to use deadly force to command obedience.  When government fulfills its legitimate function of protecting individual rights and does no more, there is no conflict with the rational individual.  But when government tries to take the life, or the hours of the life, or the income of one's work, or the property acquired through prior work, it is actively using force to deprive one of what is one's by right.

Such governments are prepared to murder citizens and in so doing or threatening to do, they do great harm to many of the People.  They are weakening the society.  Big Governments put different groups with special interests at one another's throats and cause a general breakdown in cooperative, private sector associations.  Such governments murder some minorities and even the more favored minorities suffer the general losses due to a weakened society.  In the end, a society so ruled commits suicide.

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.

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.

Obama White House: 8% Unemployment Until 2013!

Obama's economic advisers believe the U.S. unemployment rate will continue to be above 8% until 2013.  We have already had 17 months of unemployment above 9%.  We have had 20 months of underemployment above 15%.  Now Obama and his team are saying we will have another 32 months or so of unemployment above 8%!

Obama and the Democrats have had a series of economic advisers who have been unable to prescribe any actions to take on the economy which have been beneficial.  Instead of the obvious beneficial recognition that taxes on businesses and the wealthy are too high, Obama and team have insisted on one tax increase after another.  Instead of recognizing that business needs the freedom to produce and to provide services, Obama, with his clueless socialist philosophy, has insisted that businessmen and women are all evil, conniving slime balls, who must be evermore intrusively regulated by government bureaucrats.  Since the phenomenal growth of the government's spending from 2000 to 2008 with an increase of 66.7%, was not enough, Obama stole huge measures of wealth from the private sector with huge additional spending and with huge mandates. The mandates require businesses to spend much more money and time to provide what Obama regards as social services, but does not want to add to the federal budget and deficit.

If you wonder how the huge increases in actual federal spending are a drain on the private sector, it is because that spending will be paid for by the private sector through a combination of:

• Higher future taxes
• The loss of present and future property values on buildings, equipment, and facilities
• The unavailability of money for present and future investment in new plant, equipment, facilities, and training
• Higher interest rates on borrowed money due to inflation and increased business risk brought on by growing government, which is always a threat
• The lower value of the dollar, making resources and supplies from abroad more expensive
• The lower growth of the economy due to money for political purposes doing nothing to increase the productivity of the American worker and businessman
• The mischief of using some of the money to subsidize very uneconomic products such as ethanol, solar power, wind energy generation, and mandated health insurance as a means to dump the costs of these lunacies upon the private sector
• Huge increases in the time to provide government with much more paperwork and to keep many more records for such things as ObamaCare, energy use, CO2 generation, financial activities, and recording and filing 1099 Forms for every person or company more than $600 was spent with

As a businessman trying to rationally plan your future investments, the blizzard of federal spending, mandates, regulations, paperwork, and taxes is mind-numbing.  You stop dead in your tracks and say "I do not understand what is going on.  Clearly Washington is trying to kill my business.  I have to stop making decisions until I can figure Washington out.  But I do not have enough copious free time to do that.  Is that even possible?  What they are doing is so clearly lunacy.  I will just hold as tight as I can until this mess is somehow straightened out.  If it is not, then it is time to retire."

 Meanwhile, one thing you will definitely not do is hire anyone.  So, remembering that the one thing we can count on from the Democrat socialists is that they have no understanding of the economy and even less of business, especially small businesses, who is crazy enough to believe that unemployment will come down to 8% in another 32 months under their management of a very meddlesome and ubiquitous government.  So long as a clueless government guided by the theories of Marx, Alinsky, Mao, Castro, Chavez, and Mussolini has its hands in everyone's every pocket and its fingers in everyone's personal apertures, the unemployment rate will never again be less than 8%.

Unless the government pretends to give everyone a job as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics used to do.  The good old USSR used to have three to six people watch one person work, but all were said to be employed.  Look where that got them.  That is not the fate Americans want.  The majority understand economics and the business of business better than do Obama and his economic advisers from academia.  They are about to overthrow his regime of childish and destructive control-freak meddlers into the workings of the very complex and very adult private sector of America.  The Socialist Party is going to lose 69 seats in the House of Representatives, giving the Republicans a substantial majority in the House and mercifully ending the Pelosi "You have to pass the bill to know what is in it" regime there.  The Republicans will come to have 49 or 50 Senate seats and look to end up with 33 or 34 governorships just in time for the decadal redistricting of House seats.

The Republicans, even given more resolve by Tea Party members, may not be able to undo all the ill-gotten gains of the socialists with only control of the House, but they can and should defund all of the mischief of that socialist program.  Will they have the guts and will the American People prove to be the Winter Soldiers who will stand with then to fight Obama?  It will come to that, because Obama is a committed socialist and his promise to fight viciously with fists and elbows is the only promise we will ever be able to count on from him.

Of course we will always remember these whoppers:

• I will cure disease throughout the world, stop the warming and stop the rise of the oceans.
• I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
• I will not increase your taxes unless you make more than $250,000 a year.
• If you like your health insurance, you can keep it.
• The health care reform bill will decrease the cost of your insurance premiums.
• The Stimulus Bill will keep unemployment below 8%.
• There are no earmarks in the $787 billion Stimulus Bill.
• The health care package will pay for itself.
• The ObamaCare fee is not a new tax.
• We have run out of places in the U.S. to drill for oil.
• I will not rest until the BP Oil Spill stops.
• The Finance Bill will provide transparency and end the risks and abuses that nearly collapsed the financial system.
• The health care bill will not increase the deficit by one dime.

We can count on him adding greatly to the list over the remaining two sad years of his occupancy of the White House.  The man is a joke and a tragedy.

If only the first black American President had been Prof. Walter E. Williams and his wife had retracted her promise to assassinate him if he ran for the presidency!  With his good understanding of economics and the limits of legitimate government, what a President he would have been.  With advice from his friends Dr. Thomas Sowell and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, that triumvirate would have saved America much misery and would have demonstrated why you do not write anyone off on the basis of identity politics.

Sowell: Dismantling America

Thomas Sowell has written another excellent Opinion Editorial entitled "Dismantling America" in which he discusses the fact that our Constitution has always been seen as a terrible obstacle by those elitists seeking power over the People.  In particular, he notes that the Progressives in America have been at war with it openly and that President Wilson was the first President to openly attack it.  Progressive Teddy Roosevelt also attacked it by saying that he would do whatever he felt was necessary as long as the Constitution did not tell him he could not do what he intended to do.  See p.4 of Bully Boy by Jim Powell, where he quotes from Teddy Roosevelt's autobiography, published in 1913.  This is also an attack, because the Constitution says that the government and President can only exercise a few enumerated powers and makes no comprehensive effort to tell them what they cannot do in other terms.  Teddy Roosevelt's statement is a clear attempt to circumvent the restrictions of the Constitution on his power.  While he attacked the Constitution as President prior to Wilson, I do not know how publicly he did this while still President, so Sowell may be correct in his statement.  The Progressives have steadily eroded the interpretations of the Constitution ever since those earlier days and redefined words and read the white space between lines in a mad effort to circumvent it ever since.  There is now a huge body of legal precedent for doing just that.

Here are my further comments on his commentary from the Atlasphere website:

Ben Franklin clearly recognized that the American People had to believe in and understand the Constitution if the limited government republic it set up were to continue to exist. The failures attributed by some to our Constitution are actually failures of the American People to understand and support the Constitution. With due diligence, our Constitution would be strong to this day. That diligence required that each and every generation of Americans should have been educated in our colonial, revolutionary, and later history, as well as having an appreciation for the failures of monarchies, dictatorships, oligarchies, and, yes, democracies throughout human history.

Allowing the Progressives to turn us from private education to public education give them all the long-term advantages in the fight to maintain legitimate government as defined in our Declaration of Independence. Legitimate government protects the equal, sovereign right of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. All the implied rights should have been discussed endlessly in our schools and they almost never are discussed beyond the First Amendment.

The fact that Congress has only a few powers closely delineated and most of them relate to dealings with external countries and people is not taught. These powers are further restricted by the requirement that they be exercised only in accordance with the General Welfare. The power to tax is given only to carry out the enumerated powers and is further restricted in kind. The interstate commerce clause's purpose was to free interstate trade because a man in one state has a right to trade with a man in another state. The Ninth Amendment recognizes that the federal government cannot infringe upon our many individual rights or privileges and immunities. The Tenth Amendment further protects our right to local government for such other purposes of government as we may have need. The Fourteenth Amendment protects our privileges and immunities from infringement by state and local governments. All this could have been taught in the schools, but we gave the schools away to the Progressives and to the governments from which we need protection. Government-run schools have a serious conflict-of-interest. They will distort the Constitution in order to give government the power that governments always lust for.

The crucial issue of our day is the protection of our equal, sovereign individual rights. This cannot be achieved without the private education of American children with a greatly renewed interest in history and the principles of legitimate government.

The Real Jobs Situation in July 2010

As I have noted a number of times in the course of the last year, the usual unemployment rate becomes rather meaningless in a long and deep recession.  People become discouraged and stop looking for a job, or the situation being bleak, they decide to go back to school for a degree or training, or some young people currently facing unemployment rates as high as 24.8% for 16 to 19 year olds simply do not look for their first job or do so obscurely.  I believe it makes more sense to compare the number of jobs available now to those available in a time when employment was enticing enough to induce many people to work or search for work.  In January 2000, the first month of this century, the economy was robust and 67.49% of the work age population was working or looking for work.  Only 4.04% were unemployed.  At the end of the first half of the first decade of the century, the jobs situation had worsened somewhat.  4.91% were unemployed, which does not seem too bad relative to the 4.04% five years earlier, but the situation was actually far worse than that would make it seem.  The number of jobs required for the economy to be as robust as it had been in January 2000 was in shortage by 6.98%, not 4.91%.  That situation was static through December 2007, but began to worsen again in the current recession in 2008.  The worst month of job shortage was January 2010, when we had a job shortfall of 14.41%.

So far this year, the real job situation has improved slowly.  Glacially slowly, but it is improving.  The new job statistics for July 2010 show that the unadjusted unemployment rate is 9.75%.  The adjusted rate is given as 9.5% for the second month in a row, if you have faith in the adjustments just prior to an election.  I do not, so I use the unadjusted rates.  By March, the job shortfall was 13.79% and in July it is now 12.72%.  The job shortfall is more than three times worse still than it was in January 2000 for perspective.  The shortfall is 20,418,000 jobs.  Note that the adjusted July jobs numbers imply a loss of jobs, since a greater increase in the number of jobs than occurred is generally expected in July.  Thus, the slow improvement in the actual job numbers may reverse soon as colder weather cuts back the number of outdoors jobs.  See the table below:

Way back in 2007 oil prices spiked upward and this strained economies around the world.  Contrary to the popular myth, many economies went into recession well before the U.S. economy did.  Those economies in recession coupled with the effects of the oil price spike burst our housing and credit bubble.  That bubble was inflated primarily and most enthusiastically by our Democrat Congress in 2007 and 2008, though its origins go back further by many years.  Legislation in the Clinton administration made home mortgage creditors take on riskier and riskier borrowers.  Progressive socialist groups such as ACORN threatened lawsuits against mortgage lenders who did not grant many risky mortgage loans.  Law firms, such as the one Obama and his wife worked for, managed the lawsuits brought against banks reluctant to make many risky loans.

The corrective response by the private sector this far into most recessions would have led to rapid, not glacial, improvements in the economy and in many more jobs.  We are not seeing that because the Democrat Congress and Obama are beating up the private sector with deadly laws, poisonous regulations and many more promised regulations to be created by many known to be committed socialists, and much rhetoric and prosecution aimed at making entrepreneurs and business owners look like villains.  With the huge costs of ObamaCare, EPA regulations on CO2 emissions, ethanol and other alternative energy mandates, the financial reform, the interest on government debt, the end of the Bush tax cuts, oil and gas drilling moratoriums, and the massive business uncertainty delightedly promulgated by the Democrats, businessmen cannot rationally plan investments and returns on them.  This prevents them from hiring.  So, we have a glacially slow recovery of the economy and particularly of job creation.

Nonetheless, business is doing what it can under the circumstances and has, against all odds, managed to create some jobs.  Atlas struggles on with the world weighing frightfully heavily upon his shoulders.  Despite the jeers of the many socialists, he carries on and carries them.  But, clearly he is staggering.  Usually his stride is stronger and steadier after he shakes off a recession.  As yet, it is not clear whether Atlas will slowly regain his stride or he will stumble and drop his burden.  We can help him by turning the bums out of Congress in record numbers in the November elections.

Democrats Want Control of Oil Slush Fund

The Wall Street Journal has a good article on several bad policy moves the Democrat Congress wants to make with respect to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  As usual, these socialists are not about to let a crises go unexploited.  The article notes that among these misbehaviors are:

• A "public announcement by Attorney General Eric Holder that his Department had opened a criminal probe of the spill, a fact usually kept under wraps to protect the innocent."
• Obama pressured BP to suspend its stock dividends.
• "Democrats in Congress are preparing to lift their own $75 million liability cap and apply that retroactively to BP, another move of dubious legality."
• The Democrats want to set up a $20 billion oil spill slush fund to be controlled by the Democrats to make payments to reimburse the injured, though a court-controlled reimbursement system without political influence already exists.
• Just " last week Democrats on Capitol Hill wanted to siphon money out of the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund—established in 1986 and funded by oil taxes to help clean-up spills—to pay for their extension of unemployment benefits. The history of such government funds is that they are always raided for politically favored purposes."

The only problem I have with the article was the qualifier at the end of the third bullet above.  There is nothing of dubious legality in retroactive or ex post facto laws.  The Constitution is very clear about such ex post facto laws.  Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution says "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." A retroactive change to the $75 million liability cap is an ex post facto law and it is clearly unconstitutional. But as we know, our Democrat Congress cares not a fig about the Constitution.

The Democrat Congress and Obama only care about exploiting crises to pay off its benefactors and favored special interests and to grab more power.  This is why they want an oil spill slush fund that they control.

Al Gore Cancels Presentation in Copenhagen

Apparently, Al Gore is afraid of the possible heat from 3000 ticket holders for his 16 December 2009 presentation called Climate Conclusion.  Yes, he has a new presentation based on his book Our Choice.  Those who paid $1200 for tickets were going to be allowed to shake his hand.  He has backed out, the heat from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia document dump and the resulting scandal, in which most of the leading climate scientists strongly backing the idea of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming have been revealed as data manipulators and schemers to prevent the scientific airing of opposing viewpoints, being too much for him.  Being the politician he is, he can only stand to be loved and cannot take criticism.  His future will be full of criticism now.

The 3,000 Danes who bought tickets will have their money refunded if they take their tickets back to the ticket window where they had bought them.  Would it not be great if everyone who has already been fleeced with higher energy prices or had their jobs threatened by idiot politicians who say they want to kill the coal industry or want no more coal-fired power plants built could be reimbursed?  There surely are coalminers out of work in this recession who would still be employed were it not for the catastrophic AGW fraud.  The same is true for the industries that transport coal.  Perhaps the Democrats in Congress would have allowed a bit more oil drilling if it were not for this AGW nonsense.  The sales of more SUVs might have employed more Americans. Of the 15.7 million Americans unemployed, how many are out of a job due to Obama's tough talk on destroying the coal industry, bankrupting coal-fired power plants, and his threatened energy restrictions?  How many are out of work in anticipation of new foolish regulatory rulings by the EPA, which will not listen to its internal dissenters?

There are many reasons why the unemployment in America has hit such high numbers, the most unemployed since the Great Depression.  But the attacks on energy use and the negative effects of subsidies for alternative energy developments must surely already be responsible for several hundred thousands of the unemployed.  If we allowed more drilling for oil, a few 100,000 more Americans could easily be employed.  Exxon Mobil says it can create 160,000 new jobs with the development of oil fields on and off shore.  Many other oil companies could create tens of thousands of new jobs each.  Yet, we allow the rabid environmentalists and the catastrophic AGW alarmists to cripple our economy still.  When will these wrongheaded policies change?

Obama's Job Creation Summit

This is really a funny event.  Obama has gathered together some executives from large companies, government Labor and Commerce Department people, and his ever popular labor union leaders for a jobs creation conference.  After taxing small business owners to death and wanting to tax them still more beyond the grave, after threatening everyone with energy restrictions under the ridiculous claim that CO2 is a pollutant causing catastrophic man-made global warming, after telling businessmen in industry after industry that he has a Marxist hatred for them, after threatening to saddle companies with new health care expenses, after a Stimulus Package that creates no private sector jobs, after threatening business contracts and property, and after making all investment decisions a roll of the dice, Obama is having a job creation conference.  Is he admitting finally that he who sits at the feet of every Marxist professor he can find in college has no idea how the economy works?

Indeed, he does not.  Including labor union leaders in such a meeting flies in the face of its purpose: job creation.  Labor union leaders are experts in one thing related to jobs: killing them.  This is why private sector employees have been avoiding labor unions now for decades.  They have come to understand this.  This is also why the labor union bosses so badly need card check.  Without intimidation, they cannot force private sector employees to join the unions.

The executives of large businesses are not really interested in spurring job creation either.  The large businesses do not hire many people.  It is small businesses that hire most people.  So, if a large business executive were to spur more jobs in the economy in general, he is doing more to grow his competition, the lean and mean small companies who are always trying to make inroads in his product and service areas.  The big businessman usually fears small business.  The last thing he wants to do is to help them grow.

With 15.7 million Americans unemployed, this jobs summit should have an easy job creating new jobs.  There are plenty of sufficiently skilled and interested potential employees available for hire.  All we need is for large numbers of small business owners to gain the means and the confidence to hire them.  Within a framework of Marxist theory, there is no way to motivate the small businessmen to hire.  No, it would require Capitalist theory to understand what government actions and inactions are needed to spur job creation.  The answers are tried and true.  Most small businessmen can tell you what is needed.  They just need these very simple encouragements:

• No new payroll taxes.
• No threats to take down their businesses when they die with a death tax.
• Lower individual income taxes for higher income brackets.  Finally come to understand that the net government revenues increase with lower upper bracket income tax rates than those we presently have, while encouraging growth of the economy.  The onlyreason for higher rates is to punish the rich.
• Remove the minimum wage laws or at least lower the minimum wage.
• Stop increasing unemployment insurance rates.
• Control Workmen's Compensation Insurance costs with tort reform.
• Do not raise the cost of health insurance as ObamaCare will certainly do.
• Do not increase energy costs and lower energy reliability as carbon cap and trade or the EPA's plan to declare CO2 a pollutant will do.
• Do not threaten businesses with union takeovers as card check will do.
• Cut back on government spending so investment capital is available for the private sector.
• Lower corporate income taxes, so American companies can compete with companies abroad, almost all of which now have lower taxes than do American corporations.
• Reduce barriers to trade.  Simplify both import and export laws and regulations.
• Understand that Medicare and Social Security will both be turning in their IOUs in just a very few years and that increasing payroll taxes on them at that time will kill many jobs.
• Reduce the burdens of government regulations, instead of constantly increasing them.
• End subsidies that distort the markets into inefficient activities.
• Allow the drilling of oil and gas fields in the US and its offshore waters.
• Sell off much of the federal lands which are not being used productively, so that private owners can use them productively.  Use the income to reduce government tax rates.
  
• Encourage the states to stop business discouraging activities, such as those common in California, New York, Michigan, and Ohio to name a few.

OK, so if we saw Obama and the Democrat Congress doing these things, rather than the opposite in every case, we small businessmen would be hiring people instead of firing them.  As long as Obama and his cadres of comrades refuse to recognize these basic factors in the economy, there is simply no justification for companies to hire.  It is all very simple, if you are not a childish, Marxist blockhead.