On the Choice of Charities

My father and mother had a favorite charity:  St. Jude's Children's Hospital.  This is a choice some of my siblings have made and the choice is particularly reasonable in that St. Jude's Hospital has worked wonders to save the life of a young great nephew who had bone cancer in a leg.  My own choice of charities is different as I just explained in an e-mail to my siblings.

I wrote:

St. Jude's Hospital is a worthy cause.  However, many will give to medical institutions, while few care enough about the many and broad rights of the individual to support the think tanks that fight so hard to preserve and expand our freedom to exercise our many rights as individuals.  For this reason, I do all I can to support the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Capital Research Center, The Institute for Justice, Cato Institute, The Independent Institute, The Atlas Society, the Foundation for Economic Education, The Right to Work Committee, Judicial Watch, National Federation of Independent Businesses, The Mercatus Center of George Mason University, The Institute of Humane Studies at George Mason University, Americans for Prosperity, some very select activities of the Heritage Foundation, CFACT, and SEPP.  The last two are primarily about environmental and climate change sanity.  Because almost every educational institution and most of the press and media are advocates of ever greater collective power over the individual, these independent, pro-liberty think tanks are critically important.

It is our individual freedoms that make our standard of living possible and which allow us to choose our own values as goals in our own lives.  We must never allow anyone else to take over the management of our own lives.  Unfortunately, most Americans do want to exercise some control over the lives of other Americans, without even the obligation of knowing those they would dictate terms to and very often while knowing they are actually harming some, usually with the excuse that it is for the "greater good."  The "greater good" is always the demon that devours our individual freedoms and self-ownership.  The only greater good any of us actually share in common is our own liberty.  Other than that, we need the freedom to think and act independently and the freedom to associate with others as we choose.  It is those freedoms that then allow us the freedom to cooperate with others.  Individual freedom is not anti-social as many try to portray it.  Individual freedom is the means to make ourselves individually valuable and worthy of the respect and cooperation of others.

There is absolutely nothing wrong in admiring the work of St. Jude's Children's Hospital, aside perhaps from the religious name and the idea that by supporting it, you are doing good work that will win you the approval of the One God and a reward of Everlasting Life.  Freedom of conscience and freedom of association allow one to make this choice to support St. Jude's Hospital for Children.

Without them, one might be forced to instead support the Institute for Xi Thought, as a Red Chinese propagandist recently insisted when I refused to entertain a delegation from Red China at my laboratory.  Yes, the Chinese will impose Xi Thought upon us, he insists.  Given the weakness of our educational system and the collectivist ideology of the schools, many young Americans who embrace socialism, the media, the governments, and many other institutions in America, this is a possibility, though probably under some future Chinese Great Leader.

The Many Rights of the Individual

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Immigration Policy

While I favor a welcoming and less expensive immigration legal process than the one we have, it is important that the individual rights of Americans and those in the USA legally as residents or visitors be protected. The context of individual rights requires that those who would enjoy them must also honor the right of others to enjoy them. People known to have acted in violation of others individual rights in other countries should be culled from the pool of those allowed to immigrate to the USA. They have no right to expect the rights we Americans are supposed to protect for one another. The legal process for immigration that the Constitution wisely assigns Congress to create in law is a rational recognition of this context for individual rights. We have a legal process created by Congress and flawed as it is, it should be enforced as the Rule of Law requires. I would like to see many improvements in the immigration laws, but it is important that government review the character of those wanting to immigrate to the USA for the worst misfits for a society that values individual rights.

Context should also be applied to the anchor baby issue. The Constitution both states that Congress will create immigration laws and that those born in the USA are citizens of the USA. Congress having established a legal immigration policy and the federal government having enforced it in accordance with the Rule of Law, there are not supposed to be any illegal immigrants in the USA. The writers of the Constitution no doubt made those born in the USA citizens in that context. Making children born to illegal immigrants citizens violates the context and creates the horror situation of legally having to deport their parents even as the children are incorrectly deemed citizens. Context properly held, those born of illegal immigrants should not be considered citizens.

Context is again critical to the issue of Muslim immigrants. For those Muslims who believe that the use of force to make others practice Islam or to prevent those born into Islam from leaving is a requirement of their religion, the context of freedom of conscience is violated. Freedom of religion is a subset of that broader freedom of conscience. As with every right, the right can only be claimed and enjoyed by those willing to allow all others that equal right to freedom of conscience. It is entirely rational to prevent the immigration of those who practice the religion of Islam and who believe that it requires them to use force to prevent others from enjoying their equal right to freedom of conscience. Doing so is not an infringement of freedom of religion as it is often claimed to be, but a recognition of the critical context in which all individual rights can be exercised.

Comments on Immigration Policy

The basic American Principle is the understanding that the individual is sovereign, individual rights are broad and should be inviolate, and that the only legitimate purpose of government is to protect the exercise of every individual's right.  Unfortunately, few Americans understand this.  Many fewer understand this in most countries of the world.  What is more, not only do they recognize few if any individual rights in many countries, but even compared to most Americans of an authoritarian bent, they believe in much more brutal suppression of individual rights.  In some countries, the majority of the people do not believe in even such simple and fundamental freedoms as freedom of speech, freedom of press, or freedom of conscience.  Freedom of conscience means one is free to exercise a different religious belief or none at all.  One is free to exercise a moral belief which has no basis in any religion.  Our immigration policies should recognize the severity of the problems for our society that these differences in belief, which are often very firmly held, will have.

We should welcome everyone who believes in the American Principle as an immigrant.  It is reasonable to allow people to come to the United States as immigrants who are good candidates to learn this principle better in time and provided they are not too firmly set in beliefs that are anathema to this American Principle.  I see no reason to welcome immigrants who are adamantly opposed to the American Principle.  I do not see a reason why one is obliged to welcome someone into one's home who means to abridge your individual rights.  Yes, of course, my freedom of association and my property rights allow me to select who will enter my literal home.  There is some difference as to the limits of restriction one can impose in one's country without being intolerant and unwelcoming to different viewpoints and ideas.  As long as the differences of opinion and belief do not consist of a permission or a moral imperative to initiate the use of force to violate the rights of another individual, our society should be welcoming to newcomers who many have many very divergent viewpoints. But we do not as a People who control a government which is supposed to protect everyone's rights have a moral obligation to welcome individuals to the United States who want to suppress the rights of other individuals by the use of force.  Indeed, it is irrational to do so.

Every individual right exists in the context that each individual has that right only so long as he or she does not deny the exercise of that same right to others by the use of force.  I understand that many Objectivists and many libertarians believe that a complete open door immigration policy is a moral requirement.  That belief fails to understand the context for individual rights which I have just named. As I have pointed out before in The Pre-Conditions for Religious Freedom Unmet by Islam, there is no right to emulate The Profit Mohammed's use of force to spread Islam and to prevent anyone from giving up the religion.  There is no right to establish a government based on Islam.  There is no right to restrict criticism of Islam in speech or in the press.

The following article by Nick Saffran of AEI is quite interesting in addressing the problem of welcoming immigrants from many or most of the Muslim majority nations: Terrorism Is Not The Only Reason To Be Skeptical of Muslim Immigration.

Rationally Choosing a President

As an American with the right to vote for President, how does one rationally exercise that right?

The first task the rational individual has is to determine what the legitimate purpose of government is and how government acts to achieve that purpose.  It is easier to understand how government acts to achieve its purposes, than it is to understand what its legitimate purposes are.  Government achieves its purposes by using force.  If challenged by any of the people it governs, it is willing to use overwhelming and fatal force.  It is the nature of government that it achieves its ends through the use of force.  Without a clear understanding of that and which of many purposes it may have that are legitimate, it is not possible to make a rational choice of that government's chief executive officer.

Many people believe that government exists to enforce a morality upon a society.  Thus that portion of the left which is long educated in the government-controlled education system commonly believes that some groups deserve to be treated by everyone nicely.  These groups are usually people they see as systematically discriminated against or as rather helpless.  If those of the favored groups are not treated nicely by someone, the government should use force to see that those who are not nice will act nice.  On the other hand, that portion of the right which believes in religious fundamentalism largely believes that everyone should be forced to live in accordance with what they think Christianity requires of moral people.  There is some overlap in these two groups' ideas of morality, but there are also important differences.  What they have in common is a belief that it is right to have government enforce their idea of moral behavior upon those whose ideas of moral behavior differ from theirs or upon people who sin by not living up to the morality they themselves may recognize.

Neither group believes in a broad concept of freedom of conscience.  Because both groups are broadly willing to use force to achieve their goal of moral uniformity in individual's relationships with one another, neither believes in a broad concept of freedom of association either.  The socialist elitist group of the left and the Christian fundamentalist group of the right are the most polarized groups willing to use force to make every individual comply with their moral beliefs, but this is actually a trait of most Americans.

It does not dawn on most Americans that it is from a broad individual right to freedom of conscience and freedom of association that all of the individual rights that most think they should have arise.  Why should an individual have freedom of speech?  Because freedom of speech enables people to develop, with feedback from others, and trade the knowledge they need to survive and flourish on Earth in the midst of powerful natural forces and other people.  Freedom of speech is often opposed by those who wish to suppress the knowledge and understanding that may result.  A crucial portion of that knowledge and understanding is about a moral code suitable to sustaining life as a thinking and living being.  Freedom of speech is critical as a support for developing learning, identifying values to pursue, earning a living by production, and trading values with other individuals.

Today's socialist elitists are often weak on freedom of speech because they argue it can be hurtful to some among those groups they favor or think are incapable of managing their own lives.  Not infrequently, they even believe that scientific pursuit of knowledge should be suppressed if it might cause people to disagree with part of their belief system.  This is most apparent if those who disagree are pursuing profits in trade or disagree with their ideas about evolution or man's relationship with the environment.  The fundamentalist right sometimes forces the teaching of Intelligent Design or forces counseling prior to a woman having an abortion.  Freedom of speech means we have the right to say what we think, but also that we have the right not to be forced to listen to those we disagree with.  Real freedom of speech also rests in freedom of association.  We have the right to speak to those who want to listen to us.  Freedom of the press is just the right to put our thoughts on paper or electronic media and distribute them to those who want to read what we have written.  Consequently, freedom of press also has a foundation in our broad freedoms of conscience and association.

Of course, freedom of religion is just a subset of our broad freedom of conscience.  Indeed, the two were often conflated when the early state constitutions were formulated and in the debates about the federal Constitution.  Freedom of religion is clearly both about a set of beliefs and the freedom to gather with others of similar belief, as is our broader freedom of conscience.  Freedom of conscience, really the freedom to think and to act upon what we think, is inseparable from freedom of association in our interaction with others in a society.  Thus, when a socialist elitist has the government use force to make a Christian fundamentalist baker bake a cake for a gay wedding or to make one pay for a woman's abortion, that socialist elitist is violating the Christian fundamentalist's freedom of conscience and his freedom of association.  It is not of primary moral importance that the socialist leftist may be right that discriminating against gay people and their marriages is wrong or that a woman has a right to have an abortion.  If these are fact as I think they are, this is still not justification for using force to violate the individual rights of the Christian fundamentalist.  Neither would it be right for the Christian fundamentalist to deny the government contract for domestic partnerships to gay people or to force those who do not share their religious beliefs to attend and financially support their church.

Our Declaration of Independence correctly identified the legitimate and very limited function of government.  Its legitimate functions are limited to the protection of the individual's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  It accomplishes this purpose by not allowing individuals to initiate the use of force upon others and by not itself using any more force than is needed to prevent individuals or aliens from initiating the use of force against its citizens.  Legitimate government is not in the business of doing harm to some in the name of a greater good claimed for others.  Legitimate government lives under a rule that it must first do no harm to anyone who has not initiated the use of force.  Legitimate government minimizes the use of force in a society, including its own use of force.  This is why the Constitution gave the federal government very limited and enumerated powers.  Those powers have been expanded by present-day interpretations far beyond the context of this very limited role of simply protecting individual rights.

Legitimate government rests on the foundation of a People who are mostly competent to comprehend their lives and environment, choose their own values, and pursue those values in a robust and choice-rich private sector.  It is in the private sector that individuals can best exercise their quest for knowledge and understanding, learn about the many values they might pursue, and exercise their choice of values by acquiring them, often in cooperation with others who wish to enter into trades of values with them.  No such enabling environment is possible in a society following a large government model.  The nature of laws and regulations that go beyond prohibiting the initiated use of force is to reduce choices of values and reduce their free trade.  Such a society suffers a reduction of knowledge, the reduction of the happiness of many, and a subsequent reduction in the production of goods and services.

The socialist elitist thinks it is crass to argue that their web of laws and regulations lead to a reduction in the growth of an economy.  They believe it is fine to impose these limits on human activity in pursuit of their moral ideals because trade and business are immoral, or at least not endeavors suitable to the most enlightened minds.  Never mind the fact that a free society with limited government whose private sector production of goods and services may easily grow at a 4% rate will provide 1.83 times as many goods and services in a generation (about 31 years in America) as one growing at a 2% rate characteristic of their partially enacted agenda under Obama.  They never consider how many of those with lesser abilities or drive will find it much easier to live and to enjoy a much more interesting life in a society with 83% more goods and services in a generation.  They never ask if the medical achievements, the development of new life-enhancing products, the advancement of knowledge generally and its teaching, the increased wealth available for charities, and the shortened work hours in such a more developed private sector might not easily be much preferable to the society with more public housing, free food, long term unemployment benefits, higher taxes, less investment, more corn subsidies, more Import-Export Bank subsidies, more renewable energy subsidies, more college loans, incalculably less pollution, and higher minimum wages now at the expense of this growth.

A moral society starts with a government that does not itself act immorally by using any more force than it must to keep individuals from using force unnecessarily.  A harmonious society starts with this minimization of the use of force.  It allows individuals to choose their own values, manage and own their own lives, and to trade freely with others for each trader's mutual advantage.  Such a society prospers in happiness and security.

Being happy is less about having a good or service than it is about being free to choose what you want and being able to act for the purpose of achieving your values.  The competent individual is capable of doing this.  The individual who is free to do this is more likely to feel competent.  This esteem that follows from the act of using one's own mind to understand reality, to identify and choose one's own values, and to act to achieve those values is essential to happiness.  Self-chosen values are the food of dreams and the freedom to act to achieve them is the basis for hope.  Good government does not kill our individual dreams and does not subvert our hopes.  It does not squash any individual's dreams and hopes in favor of a chosen group.  It provides equal freedoms for all to choose their values and to pursue them.

The man to vote for to become President is the man who best understands this and will try his best to reform government to make it legitimate.

Obama Nonsense on Islam and Its Claim to Freedom of Religion

In his speech Sunday night, Obama claimed that those who use violence as a means to advance Islam are practicing a perverted form of Islam.  Since Islam is essentially a religion that obligates its believers to emulate Mohammad's life practices and Mohammad used violence and terror to advance his religion, it is nonsense to claim that people who believe they are using violence and terror to advance Islam are practicing a perverted form of Islam.  In the context of Islam, they are not radical, however radical they are as human beings.

Yes, most people who think of themselves as Muslims are not themselves violent in their practice of the religion.  Many are good people.  Nonetheless, those of us who are not practicing Islam have often observed that far too few Muslims are openly critical of those who use violence or terror to advance the religion.  Well, there is a very logical reason why Muslims do not offer such criticism as much as good people should.  They cannot criticize the present-day advocates of violence against non-Muslims without making an implied criticism of Mohammad himself for using violence and terror to spread his religion.  They must be silent.  Their silence is in some part due to fear, but it is also due to the fundamental beliefs of the religion itself.  Many of those Muslims who do not themselves use force to make others observe Islam make "charitable" contributions to organizations that advocate or actually use force for that purpose.

Contrary to Obama's claim that we owe Muslims all of the rights we usually allow people under the freedom of religion, we do not owe this religious freedom to any religion that advocates the use of force to make others practice that religion.  Freedom of religion, as with all freedom of conscience, has to have a foundation in the prohibition of the use of force against others as a means to practice the religion.   Given that prohibition of force, we can and should allow others their freedom of conscience, even as we claim the exercise of our own freedom of conscience.

Given that Islam is in essence the emulation of Mohammad, we can very reasonably ask if Mohammad were alive today, would we allow him to enter the United States?  I would not allow him in.  He is much too dangerous, too violent, and too committed to terrorism.  Neither would I allow those who followed his commands to commit violence against non-believers to enter the U.S.  In doing so, I would not be in violation of anyone's legitimate claim of freedom of religion.  I would be protecting most Americans from violence.

The Pre-Conditions for Religious Freedom Unmet by Islam

Religious freedom is a result of the individual right to freedom of conscience and thought.  Religious freedom is a subset of these broader freedoms.  Since religion usually calls on individuals to join with other individuals in activities including joint worship, it is also a result of freedom of association.  Religion commonly calls on people to act in prescribed ways, which they are allowed to do because individuals have a broad freedom of action, including freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the freedom to assemble, and the freedom to contribute one's time, effort, and wealth to a religious cause.

Note that freedom of religion exists in the context of broad individual rights.  These individual rights enable individuals to survive and flourish in life while preventing others from threatening them with violence and force.  Every individual has equal, sovereign individual rights based on his nature as a rational being who must use his mind and take action to sustain and maintain his life.  Man institutes government for the sole, legitimate function of protecting his and everyone else' individual rights, as properly stated in our Declaration of Independence.  When a highly limited government well-instituted, as by our Constitution, provides this protection, a very robust and choice-rich private sector results in which individuals can revel in their full individual complexity and differentiation, while cooperating for their mutual benefit with others for purposes of their choosing.  Thus men commonly live creative and productive lives in harmony and prosperity.

This understanding of the nature of man and his individual rights was unknown until the Enlightenment developed in Europe.  It mostly developed in England, Scotland, France, and the Netherlands.  These were generally Christian countries.  Christianity, as practiced for at least 1000 years prior to this, had been deeply entwined with government, actively invoking the force of governments to force the people of each country to believe in the religion, or at least to pretend to believe in it and to be constrained in their actions by its tenets.  Christianity during this period was guilty of many terrible acts of evil.  But, Christianity had a key individual at its root, Jesus Christ, who had not advocated the use of force to impose his religious ideas.  He had pointedly refused to interfere with the rule of Rome, admittedly maybe only because that would have been a pretty futile effort at the time.  The fact that Jesus Christ had not preached that Christians take control of government and use it to force people to practice his religious ideas made it feasible to reform Christianity after the Enlightenment to a sufficient degree that religious freedom became broadly possible to extend to the various forms of religions in the Enlightened countries.  The people who were brought up in this tradition came to believe that all religions should be granted freedom of religion.

Unfortunately, few people have a clear understanding of the conditions which must exist for it to be possible to have a broad freedom of religion without undermining the many individual rights that make freedom of religion possible.  It simply is not possible to offer freedom of religion to a religion which embraces the use of force to spread the religion and to subjugate those people who refuse to adopt it.

Islam became known to man through Mohammed in 610 AD in the Arabic peninsula.  The land was very primitive with many contending tribes, some of which were polytheistic and some of which were Jewish.  When Mohammed had few followers, he formed alliances of convenience with Jewish tribes and often proclaimed his desire for peace with at least some other tribal groups.  However, as he became more and more powerful, he became much more ready to use force to suppress any peoples who did not join him as followers and believe in his teachings.  He taught that Islam required Jihad, which generally was implemented by using force to conquer other people.  He developed Islam as an integrated set of religious and political beliefs in which Islam was established by the state through the Sharia Law.  Government was to advance Islam, to suppress non-believers often to the point of killing them, to collect tribute from those who submitted but did not believe, and to conquer new lands and people.  It was also to punish any Muslim who became a non-believer with death.  Basically, the integrated religion and tyrannical government model is not compatible with individual rights.

It will not be possible to extend religious freedom to Islam until and unless it reforms itself to eliminate its political component that uses force to limit greatly many individual rights.  The integrated rights of the individual cannot be in conflict with one another.  Whenever someone proposes a conflict of rights, that person has failed to correctly identify the rights of the individual.  It is very common that people do this and then they commonly say that rights bring with them responsibilities.  Meeting those responsibilities is supposed to reduce the friction, nay the conflict, of one person's rights with those of others.  Those responsibilities commonly include obligations of service to others and out and out self-sacrifice.  This is all nonsense.  Properly identified individual rights allow men to live in harmony, not conflict.

Because those who practice Islam are required to emulate Mohammed, they are essentially required to emulate his use of force to spread and maintain its integrated religious and political system.  Some may choose to emulate his earlier stage of operations when his forces were weak and he was less aggressive.  Others will follow his later actions when his forces were strong and quite ruthless in their conquering sweep across the Arabic peninsula.  People most often acquire their religious and political beliefs from their family and the society into which they are born.  They come to see their realistic choices as limited by their culture and will mostly allow their developed beliefs to vary but little from those common in their culture.  The Muslim cultures strongly discourage a wide range of beliefs within Islam itself in given areas.  Some more substantial variations do exist among Muslims as a whole, such as those between the Sunnis and the Shiites, who often have very nasty wars with each other.  We should realize that some Muslims do try hard to be decent people despite the limitations of Islam.  While we must work and fight to maintain an Enlightenment culture that honors and preserves individual rights, we do not want to be at war with all Muslims.

It is not an abberation when an Islamist uses force to advance Islam, however.  It cannot truthfully be said that the use of force means someone is not practicing Islam.  I understand this representation to be an attempt to discredit such Islamists and to limit the number of followers of Islam with which we have to contend in violent confrontations.  However, this is an attempt to deny the truth.  Islam is not so easily reformed to separate the control of government and the use of force from the religion as was the case with Christianity.  Mohammed was not Jesus Christ.  The brutal Arabic peninsula of 610 AD was not the somewhat civilized Roman Empire of Jesus' time.  The reformation of Islam may well take hundreds of years, given that the easier case of Christianity took hundreds of years.  Violence in the name of Islam may well continue for that entire time.  That violence may be extreme or radical in our Western Civilization context, but it is manifestly not extreme or radical in the context of Islam. 

There are many non-violent Islamists and many who are nice people when we interact with them on a personal basis.  We need not be at war with everyone who believes in Islam.  But, many of the personally peaceful Muslims do believe it is their religious duty to support and contribute to those who use violence to advance their religion.  Many believe that when it becomes possible for them to make Sharia Law the law of the land, they should do so.  This would trample individual rights and with the loss of those rights, a complete loss of freedom of conscience and its subset freedom of religion will result.  Understanding what is at stake in refusing to have our own society taken over by Islam is necessary if we are to maintain our precious individual rights.

It is vital that we also understand that the use of force is a true emulation of Mohammed's acts by present day Islamists and not an abberation despite Obama's and other Progressives' adamant claims that it is.  We must not lose focus on the fact that Islam is an integrated system of religion and government, not just another religion.  Islam is not compatible with individual rights and in its present common forms does not meet the conditions of a belief system that qualifies for religious freedom.  The present common effort to grant it religious freedom undermines religious freedom, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, and self-ownership.  Islam is unfortunately a very tyrannical religious and political system.

Freedom of Association and Anti-Gay Discrimination

As I have made it clear many times, I do not believe that homosexuality is in any way immoral.  Morality as it applies to homosexual acts is very similar to the application of morality to heterosexual acts in many important respects, though clearly it is differentiated by the absence of concern for the potential of responsibility for creating a baby.  I have supported gay domestic partnership contracts in their governmental form and noted that government really has no business addressing the spiritual aspects of marriage for anyone.  It should only grant domestic partnership contracts to consenting adults with no more concern for their sex or numbers than is appropriate for a business partnership contract. Adult individuals have the right to form the voluntary associations and contracts of their choice.

I have long been embarrassed by the stand of many Republicans for whom I have often voted on their stance on the issue of homosexual discrimination by government.  Government has absolutely no business discriminating against homosexuals or bisexuals or heterosexuals.  Government must support the rights of every individual to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of their personal happiness.  This does not allow exceptions for homosexuals, bisexuals, or heterosexuals or many other characteristics individuals have or choices that they make.  Of course, for every Republican who embarrasses me in this regard, there are many more destructive and immoral choices made by almost every Democrat Socialist Party candidate.  Political candidates are never entirely rational and moral.

I argued for an end to the Clinton Defense of Marriage Act and for the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.  I contributed to the Log Cabin Republican effort in accomplishing these tasks and praised their work.  I contributed to the Marylanders for Marriage Equality group when it was trying to promote the ballot initiative to equalize same-sex marriages in Maryland.  That campaign was successful, with about half of all Maryland Republicans voting for it.  Unfortunately, these groups are now turning to attempts to make it unlawful for businesses in the private sector to discriminate against gay people.  On this matter, I part ways with these groups, for reasons of general principle and because their effort actually undermines their own right to freedom of association in a very fundamental and harmful way.

I find it an immoral act for a business to refuse service to someone because they are homosexual or because a gay couple may be married. I prefer not to do business with such a business and I applaud others who would not do so also.  In doing so, I am discriminating in accordance with my values.  This personal choice and expression of my own values and moral code is not one that I have the right to impose on others by the initiated use of force.  It changes nothing morally if I join a majority of voters and elect politicians who will use the force wielded by government to accomplish this same goal of imposing my values and my morality on others.  They too have a right to choose their own values and their own moral code.  The fact that I disapprove of the choices some people make does not give me the right to marshal the force of government to suppress their choices of values and actions made in accordance with their moral values.

Good government cannot be achieved or evaluated without a rational reference to principle.  Legitimate government has one and only one purpose.  That purpose is to secure and protect the equal, sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own body, mind, and labor, and to the pursuit of one's own happiness.  Government cannot do this if it does not allow individuals the implied freedom of conscience and the freedom of association.  The individual in possession of his own mind establishes the principles and values of his conscience and he acts in his life upon those principles and values in forming associations with others.  Good government imposes very little in the way of morality on its citizens.  It only requires that they respect the equal rights of others by not initiating the use of force against others and by not defrauding them.

So if a person forms his moral principles and values in accordance with a Bible verse of the Old Testament such as Leviticus 20:13

Leviticus 20:13 If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood [shall be] upon them.

without regard for the primitive, brutal nature of the times and the need of a small tribe to procreate madly in the interest of survival, it is not the role of good government to instruct this person on morality or to take actions against his discrimination in putting his moral beliefs into action, so long as his actions do not involve the initiated use of force or fraud.  Government should not require that the believer in Leviticus 20:13 not have an aversion for gay sex, though it must draw the line in not allowing the believer in this brutal dictum to kill or use other violence against those who have voluntary gay sex as adults.  In general, good government will no more prescribe morality than it will prescribe speech or dictate who one will marry or befriend.  Individuals have the freedom to choose their values and the moral principles by which they will live.  They enjoy freedom of conscience and freedom of association by choice.

These are freedoms are as critically essential to gay individuals as they are to heterosexual individuals.  Indeed, when the general principles of individual rights are not respected by government, it is various small minorities who usually suffer the most.  Historically, this has been clearly the case for homosexual and bisexual individuals.

Gay marriage is most often sold as a matter of equality, but that is a weak argument.  The response of some conservatives and other religious people is that everyone has the equal opportunity to marry someone of the opposite sex, so equality is maintained.  Of course, the freedom to enjoy one's own mind and body and to pursue one's own happiness may not be served by the equal opportunity to marry someone of the opposite sex.  In the context of rights, only the even-handed behavior of government is mandated.  Government must not differentiate the availability of equal domestic partnership contracts.  A person of religious belief or otherwise in the private sector, however, need not regard a domestic contract as the equivalent of a requirement of respect for that partnership that he might grant to other partnerships approved by his religion.  The private individual retains all rights to discrimination outside of governmental actions.

But the same-sex marriage advocates seemed rarely to worry about making a fundamental argument based on individual rights.  Too few of them have thought in general principles of the legitimate function of government and its very limited purpose.  Support for same-sex marriage has been based on a popularity contest riding the crest of a recent fad.  The broad and necessary right of a gay individual to choose his own values, who he wants to associate intimately with, who he wants as a domestic partner, and who else he will discriminate against for these purposes, is apparently unknown to him, with few exceptions.  Part of the problem is that most gay people do not think in terms of general good political principles because that would be inconsistent with the fact that most are too closely associated with the Democrat Socialist Party.  It is very difficult to find a valid and strong argument for freedom of conscience and freedom of association from the perspective of a collectivist!  Those arguments derive their strength from individualism and the clear and certain recognition that individuals are complex and highly differentiated.  Every individual has the right to life and the right to pursue his own happiness.  The nature of our lives, of our bodies and minds, and the paths to our happiness are rich in their variety.

I am discussing these fundamental issues of individual freedom pertaining to gay individuals now because of the recent hullabaloo over the Arizona state Senate Bill 1062 which allowed business owners to make association choices based on their religious beliefs.  Now my objection to that bill is that it is defective in limiting the freedom of conscience to that subset of conscience deriving from religious beliefs.  This is a common error in American law.  In reality, the individual has a broad freedom of conscience and it is wrong for government to limit that freedom to only its religious expressions.  I do not believe that when one owns a business, one gives up one's basic freedoms.  If that were so, then every business owner in exercising his right to earn a living and to own property for the purpose of doing so, would be losing other fundamental and necessary rights.  Our rights are broadly owned by each of us and we are rightly and properly deprived of them only when we initiate the use of force against others.

If a businessman is deprived of the right to discriminate against others for some choices or actions they take, can he long expect that he will be allowed to fire an employee who does not perform his job well.  Will he soon be forced to buy goods and services for his business from inept suppliers because a supplier might be a brother-in-law of the governor or represent an industry that makes large campaign contributions?  Must he sell items or services to some people preferred by the government at lower cost than to others?  Will he be allowed to fire an employee or not do business with a supplier who lies to him?  Businessmen have every bit as much need to discriminate among people based on their values as those who are not businessmen. An employee of a business has the right to judge his employer and if he finds him wanting, he is free to leave employment.  The consumer is free to discriminate against a businessman and not buy the goods and services he offers for sale, unless the service falls under ObamaCare, if you go along with one important aberrant claim on how limited our rights are.  In reality, our individual rights are not narrow, as American law tends to mistakenly take them to be, but they are broad, generous, and rich.

Legitimate and good government recognizes this fact.  The presumption of good government is that the freedom of the individual is sovereign and inalienable.  Only extremely rational reasons, agreed upon by most everyone, can be used to limit individual rights.  It does not impose the moral preferences bare majorities or a favored faction on others.  It must allow the individual the freedom to use his own mind and to act upon his own view of reality with only the most necessary limitation that we all have the equal right to do that.  None of us has the right to initiate the use of force to limit the choices and actions of others and we do not gain that right by manipulating a government to do this for us.  The presumption of individual freedom must be very strong in the healthy, individualist society.

Does the gay person refused service by a business suffer a measure of harm?  Yes he does.  He is done an injustice.  But, if the government forces a business owner whose moral beliefs dictate that he should not serve the gay person to serve him, then the business owner has also suffered a harm.  There is no way violating the rights of one person to prevent a harm or an injustice to another can be worked to prevent harm and injustice.  That course of action simply guarantees more harm and more injustice.  We have to expect in life that some people are going to make moral choices others of us will not like.  We cannot treat someone as a slave to be ordered about just because we believe they have done an injustice and that their morality is not as good as ours is.  No, in a free society one simply seeks out other adults who are willing to associate with us.  This is so for much the same fundamental reason that we do not force someone to associate with us for the purposes of sex.  Voluntary consent is critical in a free society.

While the modern Progressive Elitist does not believe freedom of speech and of the press is a broad right anymore and often wishes to limit them based on harm or hurt feelings, these rights are very broad.  It has served us well to enjoy a broad right to speak and write our minds.  It has served our society well to allow people to choose their own values, formulate or adopt their own moral ideas, and to manage their own lives.  While freedom of conscience and freedom of association are not always given the broad protections they should be given, for the most part in the non-business private sector they are tolerated by our government.  They should be equally tolerated in the business sector.  Indeed, they should be given a very committed and strong protection in all of the private sector in America.  If they are, gay individuals will prosper and flourish more certainly than if they are not.

Germans are Taxed if Members of an Institutional Religion

While I am often a severe critic of the American government and its many violations of individual rights, it is also objective to understand that many governments are even worse.  For instance, if one is a member of a congregation in Germany, that church collects taxes from you as an appendage to the state income tax.  This is not a voluntary tax, except insofar as one may choose to be a congregation member or not.  The tax is 8% or 9% of income depending upon the German state one is in.  It is not surprising that the population of congregation members in Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany is dropping by 100,000 people a year.

It would be difficult to be able to afford being in a church congregation on top of the already heavy state and federal taxes, the high cost of home ownership, the high cost of German goods and services, and the high cost of energy in Germany.  Consumer Prices are 15.56% higher in Germany than in the United States.  The Average Monthly Disposable Salary After Taxes is 13.86% lower in Germany than in the US.  It does not help at all that the German government has many laws and regulations that keep each of these costs high, including a tax on those who exercise their infringed freedom of conscience by being a member of a church congregation.

I suppose you could look upon the church member tax as a penalty tax for bad behavior, such as that the Democrat Socialists in the USA applies to those who do not buy the health insurance with the 10 essential benefits that most of us to not need.  Of course the religions really are immoral and irrational, while buying a different health insurance plan than that mandated is generally both moral and rational.  So one can look upon the German congregation tax as a state imposed sin tax.  Nonetheless, it is a violation of the right to freedom of conscience.  After all, while it is not wise to actually sin, it is often a right to do so.  Of course I am using my own definition of sin, not that of a church.

Democrat Senator Durbin Questions Freedom of the Press

On Fox News Sunday, Democrat Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois questioned whether bloggers were protected by the 1st Amendment under freedom of the press.  Let us re-read the 1st Amendment of the Constitution and see if his doubts about the rights of bloggers to write as an exercise of their freedom of conscience makes any sense at all.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The breadth of this amendment as a means to allow individuals to use their minds, to produce their own ideas, and to make those ideas known to others is the unifying theme of this amendment.  Most people at the time of its adoption believed that this amendment guaranteed a broad freedom of conscience.  Certainly Thomas Jefferson and James Madison thought so.

When the amendment was written, the written word could only be distributed to others by using a rather expensive invention, the printing press.  But note that the amendment also allowed people to speak freely, to assemble and share ideas, and to complain to or seek reforms by the government.  In this context, it is not possible to believe that the 1st Amendment was only intended to allow those who distributed their ideas using a printing press to exercise their freedom of conscience.  I do not see the People then as thinking that freedom of the press was something that belonged only to someone who had made an investment in a printing press.  The core idea of the 1st Amendment was to allow people to use their minds and to share their ideas with others.

No, it seems very clear that the dissemination of an individual's ideas and thoughts by right was to be broadly protected by this amendment.  That being the case, the freedom to write down one's ideas and to disseminate them was to be protected from any abridging acts of Congress.  Thus, the right of bloggers to write down their ideas and to make them available to others for reading is clearly protected by the 1st Amendment.

With experienced Senators such as Dick Durbin showing such profound ignorance of the 1st Amendment, it is no wonder our government has become such a constant threat to the rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own body, mind, and labor, and to the pursuit of personal happiness.

To be sure, there is considerable evidence that Dick Durbin is less ignorant than a man of evil intent.  He, like all socialists, is only too happy to mislead the many who are uninformed about their individual rights.  Persons asserting their individual rights are necessarily a major problem for the supporters of Big Government and socialism.

Responding to a Progressive Elitist University Request for Donations

A Brown University student of the Class of 2015 sent me an e-mail request for a donation to the university from which I earned my Sc.B. in Physics degree in 1969.  Because of the magnitude of the tragedy that Brown has so failed to provide young and bright students with an adequate education, I took the time to write the following response:

It is precisely because far too many faculty, staff, and students at Brown University view themselves as "partners and agents for collective social change" that I am deprived of the pleasure of supporting a real education at Brown.  They share the image of themselves as Progressive Elitists justified fully in the use of governmental force to impose values on a largely immoral or amoral people.  They wish to micromanage the lives of millions of people they do not know, yet consider incompetent to manage their own lives.  They ignore the essential fact that people are complex and highly differentiated in character, life circumstance, and values.  They seek an easily acquired sense of intellectual and moral superiority, while abrogating to themselves power and money taken by force.

A real education would encourage students to see how honoring the equal, sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own body, mind, and labor, and the pursuit of personal happiness is the real path to achieving the general welfare.  This education would illustrate the need for a legitimate government whose only purpose was the support of these individual rights and which would never seek to harm some while claiming it was helping the majority or some favored minority.  A real education would make it clear that a government that forces some or many to serve the interests of others is tyranny and disruptive of the real benefits of life in a society.  It would show how those benefits flow from the incredible richness of choices and freedom of action when all of our relationships are freely chosen for our mutual benefit.  It would honor freedom of conscience and of association, rather than crippling these freedoms as the big government approved by most at Brown University does.  These freedoms are critical to man who must live by the use of his mind.  An education is supposed to aid man in developing the rationality and analytical capability of that mind.

Unfortunately, any money I give to Brown is used mostly to deprive me and those I love of our individual rights.  It is used to increase the level of already exorbitant tyranny in the Land of the Free.  It is used to diminish the many wonderful advantages of living among others willing to engage in a free trade of ideas, goods, and services.  It creates a government so complex that the vast majority of citizens cannot understand what it is doing and how to control it.  They become pawns due to their limited time, money, and intellect to those few Progressive Elitists who actually do control government to some degree.  But just as the slave master was enslaved by his slaves, so are the Elitists enslaved by the ignorant or insufficiently informed people they think they control.

Soon, as is the case now, control of government is really in the hands of haphazard and conflicting special interest groups (factions in the terms of the founders), who step in and take what they want at the expense of everyone else.  A few of these special interests or factions:

• Crony mercantilists such as green energy companies,
• GE, GM, Chrysler, Boeing with its Export Bank subsidies,
• farmers with crop supports,
• students taking government student loans,
• faculty taking government funded research grants,
• labor unions forcing workers to pay them dues and buying politicians' votes, while systematically underfunding worker pension plans,
• radical environmentalists claiming that economic development is the enemy even as developed countries do most to clean their environments,
• global warming alarmists falsely accusing user's of fossil fuels of overheating the planet,
• people faking disabilities by the millions,
• millions on unemployment benefits for years,
• big bankers and stock investors happy to see the Federal Reserve flood the economy with devaluing printed money,
• home buyers buying homes they cannot afford with government encouragement,
• insurers happy to see people forced to buy health insurance they cannot afford for coverage they do not need as the government asserts its ownership of our very bodies,
• millions happy to use food stamps and other welfare rather than take a job,
• those who use government licensing to keep others out of their profession, 
• a huge government-run education establishment dominated by pro-big government propaganda, teachers unions, and mediocrity,
• large companies that seek to cripple smaller companies with a myriad unintelligible regulations, and of course
• the many power-hungry and corrupt politicians who populate both major parties, though especially the one most favoring the accelerating growth of government.

I had the independence of mind and the knowledge of history, economics, civics, business, and science to withstand the many pressures at Brown to conform to the Progressive Elitist viewpoint that the brutal use of force to accomplish their goals was justified by the claimed purity of those goals.  Of course, kings and aristocrats of old, slave owners, fascists, and communists all made very similar claims.  The end result for any society that deprives its individual citizens of their rights is all too well-known and can be ignored only by the ignorant or the malevolent.

Being a small business owner who has repeatedly converted his limited retirement funds into capital to keep his independent laboratory going through this government caused and government maintained recession of five years duration, my charity activity has to be carefully directed to those fighting the critical battle of our time, indeed of all time.  I am supporting the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Atlas Society, the Institute for Justice, the Club for Growth, the Tea Party movement, the NFIB, and the Right to Work Committee.

Brown University is not very competitive given its concerted deception and propaganda exercised on young minds, too many of which are weak.  It gives me no pleasure to say this, since it is a huge tragedy that Brown is not performing the great service it should be and could be doing.

Obama: The American Government Respects All Religions

In his United Nations speech a few days ago, Obama said that the American government respected all religions.  Apparently, Obama has had a team of moral, theological, and epistemological experts evaluating the many religions in the world and they have decided that all of these religions are worthy of respect.  Or has he had this evaluation made?  Perhaps the only evaluation made was his own.  If he has had it made, under what power granted to the government under the Constitution did he have this evaluation made?

Was this issue put before the American people for a vote?  NO.  But if it had been put up for a vote and the majority had confirmed that it was their opinion that every religion was worthy of respect, what could be the result?  Government decrees that therefore every American shall respect every religion will surely not result in every American actually respecting every religion.  The only acts the government might take to enforce such a decree would be to suppress our freedoms of speech and press as protected in the First Amendment to the Constitution and to ignore all murders and other acts of violence or threats of violence issued in the name of a religion by whoever claimed religious freedom protection.

Obama's statement is nonsense, of course.  First, it is not at all true that every religion is worthy of respect.  I would argue that none are actually worthy of respect.  Many others believe their own is worthy of respect, but none or few others are.  Even very generous individuals toward the claims of the benefits of religion are likely to see some religions, which can be very inimical to living humans on Earth, as unworthy of respect.  In my own opinion, Islam is one religion with particularly few redeeming qualities and there are still worse religions out there.

No, the American government does not respect all religions.  What it does do is allow individual freedom of conscience, to include religious freedom.  To allow individuals their freedoms and their right to exercise the judgments of their own mind and conscience is not to actually approve of or respect their judgments.

It is critical to understand this.  If we do not understand it, then when we judge someone else' judgment to be bad, we have a tendency to want to interfere with their freedom to act on their judgment.  For instance, Mayor Bloomberg does not approve of super-sized soda drinks and wants them outlawed.  By right, he is free to be of the opinion that super-sized sodas are bad, but what he does not have the right to do is to outlaw them.  While the super-sized soda issue is obvious to many Americans, we do as a democratic mass of voters have a tendency toward outlawing many actions we do not like, simply because we would not do them personally or because we are ashamed that we do them.  Sometimes we outlaw acts which if done by most people might cause some problems, but which are actually done by few and cause no real problems at all.  For instance, it would harm the Republic if everyone became a physicist and therefore no one became a farmer.  Strangely, we never worry that everyone will become a physicist, but we do apparently worry that everyone will become gay.

Laws and the actions of government generally need to be based upon sound principles of governance, not just any conforming interests of a large bloc of voters.  The one legitimate function of government, as rightly stated in our Declaration of Independence, is the protection of individual rights.  When the American government announces that it respects all religions, it is violating the rights of Americans to decide for themselves what they think of religions.  There is no way in which the pronouncement that the American government respects all religions is a requirement of its protection of individual religious freedom.  Indeed, it is actually a violation of our religious freedom, which includes our being personally free to accept or reject whatever religious notions we want.  Our government should have no opinion of the various religions, except insofar as it must to protect the right-based freedoms of individuals.

What then does constitute a case in which the American government must form an opinion about a religion?  When people acting upon a religious idea initiate the use of force upon others and prevent others from exercising their sovereign individual rights, then legitimate government has to step in and provide the protection of individual rights which it is its function to do.  The only protected religious beliefs are those which do not result in followers using force to violate the rights of others.  Freedom of conscience is a most fundamental and critical right.  Government should take action against a religious group or a religion only when their violations of the rights of others are well-demonstrated and clearly cause substantial harm.  Yet, there are cases when government in proper fulfillment of its function must act against a religion or some subset of its adherents.

One major religion in recent times has had many believers who assert a right in the name of Allah to use force to strip non-believers of many of their individual rights.  I do not believe that every or even most believers in Islam should be treated as violators of the rights of others, but it is very clear that numerous believers in Islam are such rights violators.  Some are strong proponents even of death to non-believers.

This is a fact which the American government must recognize if it is to fulfill its legitimate function as the protector of the individual rights of Americans.  While it is not the case that the American government should disrespect Islam, it is the case that it should disrespect those branches of Islam and those groups within it who advocate the use of force to restrict and violate the rights of non-believers.  It is interesting that the non-believers whose rights are most commonly violated are people who themselves believe they are believers in Islam.  There are branches of Islam which are not worthy of respect from this limited perspective of legitimate government.

So, in summary, the American government does not have the power to make a judgment that all religions are worthy of respect.  The judgment that all religions are worthy of respect is itself ludicrous.  If it made such a judgment, it would not be able to carry out its legitimate function of protecting the rights of Americans.  In fact, it would be violating the very freedom of conscience, of which religious freedom is a subset, which it must protect.  Such a judgment belongs only to individuals, not to our government.  But, as usually is the case, Obama believes we must all have a collective judgment and that judgment will be rendered by big government, preferably with the Great Socialist Leader making the call.

It is apparently not a long-standing principle of the Democrat Party that all religions are respected.  Under the previous Democrat President, Bill Clinton, many Americans believed that the religious freedom of the Branch Davidians was violated.  I wonder what Obama had to say about that back then or whether he is now prepared to criticize Bill Clinton for the massacre at Waco.  Or, we might examine Obama's claim in light of his lack of respect for normal religious freedom when a Catholic-owned company or institution other than a church deems it a violation of their beliefs when they are forced to provide health insurance to employees that covers the cost of birth control or abortions.  Apparently, Obama just thinks it sounds rhetorically good to be claiming to respect all religions.

Court Thwarts ObamaCare Attack on Religion

A judge, John L. Kane, of the U.S. District Court of Colorado issued an injunction against the rules of the Obama administration that the health care payment plans under ObamaCare must provide for contraceptives.  The Newland family owns the Colorado company Hercules Industries, which manufactures HVAC equipment and materials.  They are a Catholic family and their company has several hundred employees to which they will have to supply Obama administration approved health care payment plans.  They maintain that this violates their religious freedom and is in clear violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.  The Jimmy Carter appointed judge ruled that the Newland family case was sufficiently good that the injunction against enforcement by Obama's administration should be granted until the courts make a ruling in the case.

In the Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court ruling, the right of individuals in a corporate association to freedom of speech was maintained.  The Obama administration had claimed that freely associated people in commercial activities lost their freedom of speech.  The Obama administration is now saying that people associated in a commercial activity lose their freedom of conscience or religious freedom.  I do not think that claim will hold up any better with the Supreme Court than did their loss of another 1st Amendment right to free speech.

Read more at NetRightDaily.com: http://netrightdaily.com/2012/08/federal-judge-in-colorado-issues-first-injunction-against-hhs-mandate-expect-more-to-come/#ixzz22MfehyLP

To be clear, I have nothing whatsoever against the use of contraceptives.  But people who do should not be forced by government to violate their own moral values.  Even religious ideas that I believe are irrational must not be threatened by government, if we are to maintain freedom of conscience and the freedom to independent thought.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Enforce

U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips, who earlier decided that the military's policy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell with respect to people in the military having or being inclined to same-sex sex was unconstitutional, earlier this week ordered the military to stop enforcing that policy.  I discussed her decision on its constitutionality here and expressed my agreement with her decision.  She had given the government time to respond to her decision with a plan to end the policy, which it failed to do.   The Democrats did try to pass legislation in Congress to strike the policy, but despite their overwhelming majority, they could not pass the legislation.  The Republicans, to their shame, largely opposed the legislation, as did numerous Democrats.  So, Judge Phillips has acted to halt enforcement of the policy that Obama and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have said they wanted ended.  Nonetheless, the Justice Department has decided to appeal the decision.

This is one of those Go Figure moments.  The Democrats have long claimed they were the champions of homosexuals, but have not ended this policy in the last nearly two years despite having the Congress and the presidency locked up.  Laws discriminating against same-sex relationships and sexual acts are mostly popular with the People yet, though the discriminatory attitude is very much tied to the older generations.  Mostly religious conservatives favor discrimination.  Because of that, the Republican Party is mostly on-board for such discriminatory acts.  This is one of its grievous faults.  Faced with a disastrous election in a few weeks, many Democrats did not have the nerve to defend the equal rights of homosexuals and bisexuals to their lives, liberty, and pursuit of their happiness.  Judge Phillips gave the Democrats an out, which they should have taken.

It is claimed that when a U.S. District Judge rules a law unconstitutional, the Justice Department must appeal the case, which is what it is doing.  This is nonsense.  The President is sworn to preserve, defend, and protect the Constitution of the United States, which of course the members of Congress are also.  The Justice Department reports to the President and he should have ordered them not to appeal the ruling of Judge Phillips because he is suppose to recognize the excellent argument she made as a correct interpretation of the constitutionality of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.  Perhaps, in the now well-established tradition of the Democrat Party, he has not bothered to read her decision.  If he did, he is failing us with his judgment of her argument.  If he did not, he is failing us with his turpitude.  He should be taking his duty to the Constitution more seriously.  Of course, from many things he has said and done, we know that he does not care to actually follow the Constitution since he sees it as being in opposition to many of his socialist policies.  For instance, he faults it for being a roadblock to redistributive policies.

Each of the three branches of the federal government has the obligation to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.  This is not a task given only to one branch.  When any of the three branches fails to exercise its independent judgment, the exercise of our individual rights is harmed.  When Congress considers legislation, it is obliged to consider whether it is constitutional.  If any Congressman thinks it is not, he is obligated to vote against it.  In fact, if he is not sure that it is constitutional, he is obliged to vote against it.  If the President is presented with a proposed law passed by Congress, he is obliged to decide whether it is constitutional or not.  If it is not, he is obliged to veto it.  Because it is the nature of government to try to expand its powers, it should be the practice to recognize that if any of the three branches of government believe a law is unconstitutional, we should be disposed to refusing to allow the force of government to be used to enforce that law.  The bias of the People should be toward limited government and a maximization of the rights of the individual.  If the federal courts rule a law limiting individual freedom of choice unconstitutional, then we have recognized in recent times that the law cannot be enforced.  Unfortunately, we seem to have lost the idea that the Congress and the President are also supposed to be bulwarks against the encroachment of government against our equal, sovereign individual rights as well.  A three-legged foundation is much more stable than a one-legged foundation.

On a related issue, the Justice Department is also wrongheadedly appealing two decisions of a federal judge in Massachusetts that the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act federal law is unconstitutional.  The judge ruled that the states, not the federal government, have the power to define marriage.  He also ruled the federal law violated citizens due process rights.  I have never seen any power given to Congress by the Constitution which would allow it to decide who has a valid marriage contract and who does not. 

In actual fact, I believe it very unwise to allow any government to define marriage.  Marriage is a spiritual union of people and there is no way to preserve fundamental freedoms of conscience and the right to pursue happiness if governments are allowed the power to define what constitutes such a spiritual bond.  What they do have within their purview is the job of enforcing domestic partnership contracts, which is done at the state and local government levels, not the federal level.  My views on this are given here, here, here, and here.  Domestic partnerships should no more define and limit the number and sex of partners than does a small business contract.  A single heterosexual couple, gay men, lesbians, bisexual people, multiple heterosexual couples, and polyamorous people should all be allowed the protections and benefits of domestic partnerships suitable to their needs and as agreed upon as free adults.

Plano, Texas Suppresses Student Speech

The Plano, Texas school district has banished all religious expression from its schools.  Religious expression is surely a form of freedom of conscience, which is the sovereign right of every individual.  It is hardly surprising that government-run schools, which are mostly controlled by the forces of big government, are now prohibiting virtually all non-verbal student speech in any school-related activities.  This has resulted in a court case, Morgan v. Plano Independent School District, hearing which the Fifth Circuit chose to uphold the school district's speech restrictions based upon the United States v. O'Brien immediate scrutiny test of "time, place, and manner."  Apparently, this test will allow schools to further erode all student speech relating to religious and political content.  The Cato Institute joined three organizations that support religious liberty to file a brief asking the Supreme Court to re-examine the Fifth Circuit's approach in favor of the alternative Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District test that free speech cannot be suppressed unless that speech "materially and substantially disrupts" the educational process.

The statist authorities want to train students from an early age to give up their inconvenient freedom of speech and their freedom of conscience.  It is very important to stop this.  Of course, the best way to stop this is to end the reign of government-run schools and to promote private educations.  As we discussed recently, private schools have the added benefits of generally providing a better education and they are less expensive compared to the real costs of the public schools.

Disclosure:  I hold a grudge against Plano, Texas.  In the late 1960s, I was given a speeding ticket there for going 45 mph in a 35 mph zone.  I had exited US 75 going north, returning to Tulsa from a visit with a Brown University friend who lived in Dallas, and was driving through farmland.  I was concerned about what the speed limit was and could find no speed limit signs.  Soon, a police car pops out and pulls me over for a speeding ticket.  He hauled me into town where I had to wait for a judge to finish his checker game.  I had to pay a fine on the spot.  On returning to US 75, I searched again for a speed sign and found none.  Plano, Texas was then a small town, which it is no more, and was raking in income from unsuspecting interstate drivers.  It was their racket.  So, I have an additional minor reason for wanting to see the Supreme Court clean Plano, Texas's clock.  The need for freedom of conscience and freedom of speech are much more important, of course, but I will still have an added bonus in this if the Supreme Court makes the right decision.

Dept. of Homeland Security on Rightwing Extremism

The Washington Times ran an article by Audrey Hudson and Eli Lake on 14 April 2009 called "Federal agency warns of radicals on right." You can link from the article to the Office of Intelligence and Analysis assessment report itself, by the Extremism and Radicalization Branch, Homeland Environment Threat Analysis Division. This is actually a rather vague and strange report, as noteworthy for those reasons as for any reasons some of us may have concerns that we are being targeted by government for simply believing in the Constitution of the United States. It has become clear that the government itself believes in very little of the Constitution.

In its discussion of Key Findings, the report starts off by saying, "The DHS/Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) has no specific information that domestic rightwing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence." What a curious statement. The rightwing terrorists are not currently planning acts of violence. If they were doing so in the past, shouldn't they be in jail now? If some group is free and is not planning acts of violence, then how is it called a terrorist group? Is it a terrorist group because someone in government is afraid of some group? If a grassroots mother's club called for a decrease in government power by calling for a transfer of secondary education from the public sector to the private sector, would this put the fear of God in this government branch and qualify the mother's club to be called a terrorist group even though it was not calling for acts of violence?

Apparently, this is not just a badly worded sentence, because the second paragraph says

Threats from white supremacist and violent antigovernment groups during 2009 have been largely rhetorical and have not indicated plans to carry out violent acts.

So, again I am puzzled. A violent antigovernment group is one which has no plans to carry out violent acts? What does this mean? It appears to mean that as an adjective, violent means anything that threatens a very expansive role of government. When the government has been taken over by socialists, as it now has, anyone who opposes socialism is now defined as "violent." This seems to be the criteria for the reporting by some reporters from CNN on the many local Tea Parties on 15 April. One woman CNN reporter was claiming that the protest she was at was no place for a family to be due to its threatening nature, though numerous people were there with their children and there were no acts of violence. Go figure.

A footnote at the bottom of this Key Findings page sort of defines "rightwing extremism." It says

Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

Now this is not actually a definition at all. It does give the impression that if someone hates some other group then they are rightwing. Does this mean that those who hate the rich are rightwing extremists, or would this government agency call them leftwing extremists? Or, rightwing extremists may simply favor state or local government or some concept of minimal government, much as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson did. So, are they trying to say that George, Tom, and I are rightwing extremists and that we should be watched with care because we are (or were) trying to convince others of our viewpoint? Do they have any interest in distinguishing those who oppose illegal immigration and those who simply do not want the U.S. to allow any immigrants to come legally to the U.S.?

There are repeated statements of concern that rightwing extremists continue "to focus on the economy, the perceived loss of U.S. jobs in the manufacturing and construction sectors, and home foreclosures." Heck, there are a lot of people discussing these things. Is there some reason to believe that discussing these topics makes one dangerous?

The report notes

Many rightwing extremists are antagonistic toward the new presidential administration and its perceived stance on a range of issues, including immigration and citizenship, the expansion of social programs to minorities, and restrictions on firearms ownership and use.

WELL. I suppose that covers about everyone who did not vote for Obama, except perhaps for the curious reference to minorities. Most social programs for a very long time have been preferentially expanded for the sake of certain minorities. That is not a change at all.

There is a lot of concern that rightwing extremists, whatever they actually may be, are having discussions about important issues and that they are exercising their right to bear arms. It seems that just the act of exercising your right to bear arms is almost alone considered reason to classify someone as a rightwing extremist. This means you are an extremist if you do nothing in violation of the Constitution. Yes, this is a bit odd. Apparently, you are a rightwing extremist if you oppose gun restrictions such as the Brady Law or think that federal law enforcement mishandled the confrontations at Waco, Texas and Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

Then there is the section called "Disgruntled Military Veterans", which I have been since the Democrat Congress stopped supporting South Vietnam, leaving it to fall to North Vietnam and the lives of 56,000 Americans to go for nought, not to mention many more good South Vietnamese. We disgruntled returning soldier's need special watching as enemies of the state.

While "rightwing extremist" was not well-defined, it appears that I clearly am considered a rightwing extremist. Hopefully considered one who is not currently planning violence against the hugely arrogant and overblown federal government or state and local governments. I hope they recognize that I am simply executing my rights to freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of assembly, freedom of petition, and my property rights. But despite all that, I am to be watched closely as a rightwing extremist because racists and small government people are assumed by our government to be in a state of near kinship. Thanks government. I'm going to add that to my list of grievances! I sure do not trust you anti-Constitutionalist tyrant running dogs either.