Government Spending as a Measure of Individual Freedom

I am a rational individualist.  As such, I cherish the ability to make the decisions of what my own values in life are and how I will achieve them.  Basically, I want as much control over my life as possible, without infringing upon the equal rights of others to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

We are now voting or about to vote in a major national election, which as such elections are wont to do, will bear on the ways and broad degree in which governments will exercise control over our lives.  The core legitimate function of governments is to prevent others from depriving us of our individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.  There is a small sphere of other functions of governments which extends to cover situations in which the scale of resources required to address a problem of the general welfare and/or the range over which that issue extends is so great that only governments can reasonably handle them.  In this set of functions, I would include a role in transportation systems, international trade, pandemics, the mail in the early USA, and dangerous substances and pollutants.  However, our governments are much, much too bossy and controlling today.

Our governments take and spend far too much of the money those of us in the private sector earn through our hard work.  We ought to be very conscious that the money they take is a taking of many hours of our lives.  The taking of those hours represents a very real form of enslavement.  Governments do not stop with taxation.  They require endless paperwork, especially directed at businesses in the private sector.  They also make many irrational laws that limit our choices.  These limitations on our choices may totally deny us the pursuit of perfectly valid values or they make us pursue them in very inefficient ways.

As a rational individualist, when I face an election, my primary focus is on how can I vote to minimize the growth of governments, which I believe are uniformly too damn big.  As the population of a country grows and as its economy grows, it is reasonable that government will spend more money.  Some of the legitimate functions of government grow as the population grows and some grow as the economy grows.  At least prior to the massive illegal immigration under the Biden administration, the economy has grown in the U.S. faster than the population has grown.  Our governments ought not to have grown faster than GDP in that case.

The GDP is the sum of the private sector economy and that of government spending -- federal, state, and local.  A large portion of the control of the governments over the individual can be measured by the amount of government spending.  As noted above, this leaves out the effect of many irrational laws and mandates and of many regulations, so it is only a partial measurement.  Let us examine the size of the federal government and of all government in the United States as a percentage of the GDP:

The most recent data is for the second quarter of 2024.  The Q1 2020 data was used because this preceded the spikes in government spending due to Covid 19.  The Q4 2016 data was chosen since it immediately preceded the Trump administration.  Q1 of 1960 was chosen because that was the earliest Federal Reserve data I readily could find covering All Government Spending and it was within my long memory of life.

I did not think that the U.S. had far too little government in 1960.  If anything, it seemed too big and intrusive even then.  Since then, the federal government percentage of the GDP has grown by a factor of 11.50!  Total federal, state, and local government spending as a percentage of the GDP has increased by a factor of 10.67.  Total government spending is now 43.74% of GDP, while federal government spending alone is 29.56% of GDP.

I very much feel the reduction in my freedom that has been caused by this insane increase in the size of government.  This added spending comes with ever-increasing laws and mandates, regulations, hours of paperwork, and a host of infractions of our many and broad individual rights.  Governments are imposing restrictions on our freedom of speech, our freedom of association, our freedom of assembly and the right to petition governments when they err, our property rights, our privacy, our ability to educate ourselves and our children, our ability to earn a living, our freedom to pursue excellent health care, our freedom to invest money, our independent opinions (pandemics, so-called climate change, history, Marxism, and so-called social justice), and the equality before the law of individuals no matter what their ethnic origins may be.

The private sector allows us the broadest freedom of choice that can be available to us.  Government when expanded beyond its core legitimate functions, reduces that freedom of choice.  Government has the monopoly on the use of force.  When we turn to government to do something, we do so for the purpose of unleashing that use of force or at the least the threat of using it.  I prefer a society in which force plays as minimal a part as possible.  In fact, government is supposed to do just that.  It is supposed to minimize the use of force -- not to become the biggest, most threatening brute in the nation.  Unfortunately, irrational, dangerous brutes are exactly what our governments have become.

Both Democrats and Republicans have been guilty of growing governments way beyond their rational limits.  Nonetheless, it is the Democrats who are almost always seeking to spend the most and seeking the most control over our lives.  The Democrat Party has always been the party of slavery.  When a party acts to prevent another such restriction of our individual rights, it is usually the Republican party.  I believe this is still the current case.  Republicans are usually more interested in individual rights than are Democrats.  The Democrats used the Covid 19 pandemic (even after it was over) and their false claims of catastrophic man-made global warming as excuses to massively expand government budgets and controls.  This is in accordance with their maxim that no crisis should ever go to waste as an excuse to expand the role and size of government.

This expanding role is very evident in the employment statistics that show that most of the hiring for many months has been for government jobs and for the health care industry, now principally run and controlled by governments.  There will be no way to even pretend that the people are not enslaved when governments employ everyone or completely control every industry in America.  We know how that has turned out in the USSR, Nazi Germany, Red China, Cuba, and Venezuela.  Despite all of these historical lessons, the Democrat party is eagerly pursuing a mixed Marxist and Fascist model for governing the United States of America.  This effort must be opposed at the polls if we are not to lose the ability to exercise many more of our individual rights necessary to the management of our lives as rational beings.

This Country? My Country. Our Country.

The media appears to be mandating a style manual that requires them to say "This country" whenever they refer to the United States of America.  Whatever happened to "My country" or "Our country?"

Whatever happened to Americans having a commitment to the USA?  How could you better signal your lack of investment in the United States of American than by constantly referring to it as "This country?"

The people of Fox, CNN, NPR, ABC, and CBS all refer to "My country" as "This country."  We need to ask ourselves why are they so blatantly telling us that they have no deep stakes in the country whose central principle is a respect for the many and broad rights of the individual?  Yes, many of those media people are authoritarians with a commitment to destroying the American Principle.  Many are the political evolution of slaveholders, the enforcers of Jim Crow laws, educational segregation (Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden and a host of other Southern Democrats), segregation within the government (Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt), the creation of the welfare state and its chains of dependency (FDR, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Obama), including the discouragement of two-parent families, and a host who argue that some ethnic groups and females are unable to compete in a free market and must be provided with government-enforced advantages.

But why are the Fox people, who buy into at least much of the American Principle, going blindly along with this alienation for individual rights and for all those individual freedoms that the United States of America advanced more assiduously than other nations did throughout its history?  Apparently, they do not understand how they are signaling their own lack of integrity to the most important commitment a civilized people can make.

Freedom-loving Americans must take adamant possession of the American Principle that every American has many and broad rights which no combination of elitist and no-nothing authoritarians should be allowed to suppress.  We should be proud to be Americans, to embrace the American Principle, and to call the United States of America "My country."  When talking to other individuals who share these values with us, as all good people should, we should speak of "Our country."  Do not allow the authoritarians to dictate an alienated style of speech designed to sever our commitment to the American Principle and our country's proud history of pursuing and adhering to it.

Self Ownership, Obamacare, and Abortion Rights

I was asked to publish the following article at the Savvy Street.  I agreed, but I wanted to revise it a bit.  The revised version is entitled The Ninth Amendment, Self-Ownership, and Abortion Rights.  

The Supreme Court has noted that abortion is not mentioned in the U. S. Constitution.  It is not.  Neither is it mentioned explicitly that every individual owns his or her own life.  Yet those rights acknowledged explicitly in the Constitution in the First and Second Amendments would seem to have a basis in an assumption that every individual owns his or her own life.  The right to self-ownership is surely one of the rights that was meant to be protected by the Ninth Amendment.  "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

The Ninth Amendment is the most important amendment in the Bill of Rights philosophically because it recognizes that an individual's rights are not just a grant of government.  It recognizes, as did the Declaration of Independence, that all men are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness --"  It is the Ninth Amendment that recognizes the sovereignty of the individual in accordance with our philosophy of government spelled out in The Declaration of Independence.

Tragically, those who seek to expand the powers of government far beyond its enumerated powers in the Constitution, have never wanted to acknowledge the sovereignty of the individual.  His broad rights to self-ownership, to freedom of conscience, and to freedom of association have been subject to frequent violation by government too eager to control the lives of its citizens.  The central role of the Declaration of Independence and of the Ninth Amendment have both been denied.  This means that many government overreaches that should have been held unconstitutional on the basis of the Ninth Amendment have not been so thwarted.  The Ninth Amendment has been almost totally ignored.  This has led to many very contorted rulings by the federal courts trying to find some protection of rights that many Americans believe they have somewhere in the Constitution.  Justice Clarence Thomas has been notable for his lone attempts to point this problem out.

It has been noted by many that the Justice Alito argument that abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution and therefore is not a right recognized by the Constitution, opens the door for making a similar argument against a right to same-sex marriages, the use of contraceptives, and interracial marriages.  Based on the Alito argument, each of these rights might be returned to the states for legislation limiting or protecting them.  These rights, as is the case with an abortion right, must have their proper basis in the right to self-ownership and freedom of association, both of which should be seen as protected by the Ninth Amendment.

The abortion rights decision by the Supreme Court has greatly angered many people, most of whom have consistently voted for the Democratic Party, though a sizeable fraction of Republicans also believe in abortion rights. The Democratic Party has been most vociferous in its denial of the right to self-ownership in all contexts but one and in its denial of the protections of the Ninth Amendment.  The existence of an abortion right must start with a woman's ownership of her own body. 

One of the best examples of the Democratic Party interfering with the right to self-ownership was the enactment of Obamacare.  Every Democrat Senator and 87% of the Democrats in the House of Representatives voted for Obamacare.  They spent an incredible amount of political capital on this highly unpopular legislation.  While there were other reasons why many Democrats wanted this control over the maintenance of every American's mind and body, many wanted and understood that they were  really asserting a principle that no one owned their own mind and body exclusively.  They asserted that there was a collective ownership of every person's mind and body, which gave the collective, acting through the government, the right to dictate how every American would maintain his or her own mind and body.  The principle of collective ownership of our minds and bodies was explicitly noted in the first income tax return Obamacare applied to that designated the tax penalty line Shared Collective Responsibility.  I made the argument at the time that this assertion of collective ownership was the real issue with Obamacare, but almost no one supported me in this.

So now many women are furious that their abortion rights may be limited by the state they or other women live in.  They insist that they own their own bodies and should have the right to decide for themselves whether they will have an abortion or not.  Unfortunately, it does not dawn on them that if there is a right to self-ownership, then it applies far more broadly than just to abortion issues.  It surely also applies to the right that every individual, man or woman, has to determine how they will use and maintain their bodies.  It applied to Obamacare and many other examples of government limits on our board sovereign individual rights to self-ownership, including the ownership of our labor and our freedom of contract.  But no, selective assertion of a broad principle is all they care about.  Because of that failure to think in terms of principles, the Supreme Court now has no basis to assert any national abortion right.  The matter has been turned over to the states to decide.

I believe a woman has an abortion right, but its boundary is limited by that time when the development of a fetus makes it a human being protected from murder, or by when it is capable of independent life.  I am not asserting where that boundary is.  That is a thorny problem.  Perhaps that is a problem best left to the states and the more local beliefs of the people who live in those states.  However, wherever those decisions are made, if a woman has an abortion right, it is critically dependent upon her right to self-ownership.  Women who want to assert this right, ought to assert the right to self-ownership for every individual, man or woman, in all the contexts to which it applies.  If they do this, government will be far more limited than it is today and everyone but a few invidious special interests will benefit immensely.

Celebrating the Declaration of Independence Day

The Second Continental Congress agreed upon the 13 colonies of America becoming independent on 2 July 1776.  We should celebrate Independence Day on 2 July, as Benjamin Franklin thought we would.

There was a still more important event on the 4th of July, 1776.  The Declaration of Independence was signed by the members of the Second Continental Congress on 4 July.  This document stated the fundamental principles that would define the United States of  America.  These ideas were uniquely revolutionary in 1776.  Revolutions as uprisings were not too unusual, but the principles of the Declaration of Independence were entirely innovative as a basis for a new nation.

On this great day, this Declaration of Independence Day, we should read these inspiring principles and renew our commitment to them.  Our beloved Declaration of Independence says:

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 to 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.  Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shown, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.  But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

No nation had ever committed itself to the principle that all men were created equal before.  No government had ever stated that its purpose was to secure the rights of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Before this vision of the United States of America, nations had been dedicated to a few among a given tribal group or ethnic group.  In rare cases, a foreigner found to be particularly useful to the ruling oligarchy might be accepted into consideration for the nation's benefits.  But in the new United States, whose people were primarily English, Scots, Germans, French, Dutch, Swedes, Portuguese, Africans, and American Indians by ethnic origin at the time, all men were created equal, with unalienable rights, which it was the proper purpose of the government they were forming to secure for them.

Yes, the government long did not properly and morally follow through on the implementation of this principle for those ethnically African or American Indian, but its actions could always now be held up against the yardstick it had clearly stated in its foundational principles.  This universal recognition of human rights had never, ever been done by any nation before and is very rarely done even now by any nation.  The Declaration of Independence made the Civil War almost inevitable.  It also made the end of Jim Crow laws virtually inevitable. 

The Declaration of Independence puts a principled duty upon each of us to throw off the attempts of Government to abuse our individual rights.  It states that when Government fails to earn its legitimacy by ruling with the consent of the governed for the purpose of securing their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then we have both the right and the duty to provide new guards for the security of our universal and individual rights.

Our Constitution is a great document also.  The Constitution puts the means in place to organize the powers of government in such form as to achieve the goals and principles given to us in our sacred Declaration of Independence.  Our Constitution cannot be properly understood if this is not realized.  The context for interpreting our Constitution is the principles of the Declaration of Independence.  The widespread failure to understand the severe constitutional limits on the power of the federal government is a consequence of a refusal to recognize the fundamental principles of The Declaration of Independence.

Today, the 4th of July, is the greatest of all American holidays.  It is Declaration of Independence Day!  Love this day, love our Declaration of Independence, and celebrate its inspiring principles of universal individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  If we do not do this, we will surely lose our ability to exercise our many and broad individual rights.  It is the exercise of these rights that makes life worth living.  Live free or die!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Democratic Socialists Used the Capitol Intrusion and its Associated Violence as a Reichstag Moment

The Democratic Socialists are socialists of the fascist persuasion.  Some say that cannot be because socialists are those who believe all the means of production and all property should be owned by the government.  I reject that argument.  Prior to WWII, the fascists were commonly accepted to be socialists.  They were nationalists, but there is no contradiction created by a nationalist socialism.  They did not generally believe the government should own all property or all of the means of production.  No, they were much more cunning than those Communists and the various off-shoots of Marxism.  It is very, very difficult to promote Communism in a developed society where property ownership is widespread.  It is much, much easier to promote fascism, a form of government which controls all of the means of production and all property, but leaves the pretense of ownership, along with many of its responsibilities, in the hands of the gullible or the crony allies of the government.  Fascist governments generally do form a close alliance with big businesses.  The most famous German form of fascism went by the name of the National Socialist German Workers Party.  Of course they fought a bitter street war with their primary socialist competitors, the Communists.  At the end of WWII, fascism had a generally awful reputation, so academic socialists rewrote the definition of socialism to exclude fascism.  I see no reason to accept their definition of socialism.  Total control of the means by which the People control, secure, and support their lives is socialism, whether the government takes such control by overtly owning all of the means of production and all property or not.

The Democratic Socialist Party of America has had a mix of fascist and Communist tendencies at least since the New Deal.  Many of its elite adherents had loved Mussolini in the 1920s and up until he invaded Ethiopia in 1936.  Many were Marxists and many praised the Soviet Union.  Today, most of Democratic Socialist Elite have beliefs that are a mix of fascism without the nationalist elements and woke offshoots of Marxist beliefs.  These Woke Fascists seek control of every aspect of our lives, but recognize that we Americans will not completely give up our property rights or our rights to choose aspects of how we earn a living.  They are slightly pragmatic idealists, but only slightly pragmatic.  As their stated ideal, they seek equal outcomes for everyone economically, even as they actually set up sweetheart deals with big businesses such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and others such as "green" energy companies, extreme environomentalists, abortionists, and labor union leaders who will sign on to their social programs to control the Deplorables.

The Deplorables are those who want to retain more freedom to choose their own values and to control their own lives than the Democratic Socialist Party Elite want to allow them.  Many of the Deplorables have excessive allegiance to the concept of a limited government under the Constitution as well as to the ideals of The Declaration of Independence.  They like being somewhat self-reliant and self-responsible.  This cannot be allowed.  The Swamp Creatures cannot prosper to extent of their dreams if this is tolerated.

So the Swamp Creatures launched attack after attack upon the President elected as the Deplorables rebelled against their modified fascist program of subjugation in the 2016 election.  One false accusation after another was created out of whole cloth by the Swamp Creatures centered upon the Democratic Socialist Party leaders, but also including many Never Trumpers who found that they could not exercise their usual power lust within a Republican administration under Trump.  There are plenty of fascists in the Republican Party also, though they are commonly rather less rabid in their quest for power.  These fascist allies reframed Trump's tendency to exaggerate into a strong commitment to constant lying.  They made up a claim that he was a stooge of Putin, then that he was wrong to seek to investigate the corrupt use of power by Biden and his family when Biden was Vice President, and now they claim he encouraged an insurrection to overthrown the "democratically elected" government.

The insurrection charge rests on the unauthorized mass entry of Americans into the Capitol building, property damage done there, violence against the police brought in late to deal with the intruders, and the fears of some Congress people and their staffs.  This was a riot, but it was not one incited by Trump, though it did include some who voted for him, along with some Antifa and some idiots who just love being involved in anything that gives them an excuse for violence.  Antifa is usually tolerated by the left, but it is essentially a nihilist group that has nothing to do with the followers of Trump and does not even like Biden.  They are against everything, except chaos.

The Elitist Socialists and Swamp Creators spent the last four years dreaming up ways to wrest control of the country from the Deplorables who elected their nemesis, Trump, President.  While claiming he was a liar, they repeatedly told the huge whopper that Trump was responsible for every death by Covid-19.  They claimed he was destroying the planet with his refusal to accept their anti-science catastrophic man-made global warming failed hypothesis.  They proclaimed him and all of his voters to be racists, even as Trump took great pride in the fact that so-called Blacks and Hispanics benefited far more from the booming economy under his administration prior to the onset of Covid-19 than they had under Obama/Biden and under Bush.  They claimed he was anti-LGBT, despite his long working history with LGBT people, his opposition to the Obama-backed DOMA and DADT, his appointment of Ric Grenell to be Ambassador to Germany and then his Director of National Intelligence, and his worldwide program to end discrimination against LGBTs.  In addition to their crazy attacks on him, they schemed up ways to run an unconstitutional election that would open up innumerable means to count illegitimate votes.  The result was that the unconstitutional election changes did result in untold illegitimate votes and that very likely resulted in the declaration that Biden was the winner.

An unconstitutionally elected president whose party was also undeniably commited to vote fraud is on very shaky grounds.  Much of the power of the presidency depends upon the freely given consent of the governed.  A constitutional election is the means by which legitimate consent of the People is determined.  The Deplorables did not give that consent.  They may well have been in the majority.  They most certainly do not believe that the election was a valid one and they are right.  In the USA, an unconstitutional election is not a legitimate election.

The Democratic Socialist Party Elite and Swamp Creatures know that they came to victory and total power by chicanery.  The Deplorables know this too.  The Democratic Socialist Party Elite and the Swamp Creatures are very uneasy and feel very threatened.  They used the Capitol intrusion as their Reichstag moment.  They brought in 25,000 National Guard troops in their fear of the People.  Then they grilled those troops, whom many had earlier called Storm Troopers back when leftist riots and violence were the norm in many cities they controlled, to find troops who were strong Trump supporters and remove them.  They are afraid.  Their fear is the cause of the rapidly developed effort to discriminate against the Deplorables in employment and in every social manner they can.  They have stampeded.  They forgot that they are supposed to turn the heat up slowly on the frog Deplorables so they will not jump out of the pot.  Their mad and inept dash for power may well prove to be their undoing in the next election.  They have been too overt in their power lust.

The Deplorables are in for a hard time.  They had better become more familiar with the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional safeguards for their freedoms.  They need to do a better job of defending their many and broad rights as individuals, if they want to maintain their ability to choose their own values and to manage their own lives.  Those idiot Socialist Elitists and Swamp Creatures do not care about your lives.  They think you are worthless people.  They claim you are all racists, though their own claim is clearly racist.  They claim every "white" person is privileged and a racist.  Most of you know you are not racists.  Most of you know you are worthy enough to choose your own values and to manage your own life.  Most of you know that those power-lusting Woke-Fascist Elitists are utterly wrong in claiming they can improve your lives by dictating your actions from Washington.  So do not let these Woke-Fascist fools get away with their evil power-grab.  Make the effort to maintain your individuality and the integrity and efficacy of your own mind.  There is no higher purpose in life.

Note:  I use Deplorables the way the Patriots called themselves Yankee Doodle Dandies in response to the British effort to put them down with a drinking song calling them such during the American Revolution.  Throw it at them.  Throw it forcefully.

Should the Deplorables Respect the Swamp Creature Declared Winner of an Unconstitutional Election?

The Chief Executive of the federal government is the highest elected officeholder in the great and exceptional United States of America.  The USA is great and exceptional because it is the first government ever established with the aim of being a legitimate government.  Governments achieve legitimacy only to the extent that they protect the exercise of the many and broad rights of the individual.  These rights accrue to every individual, which was recognized in our Declaration of Independence, yet denied initially in our otherwise quite great Constitution.  We had to fight a horribly bloody Civil War to  recognize everyone's basic right of self-ownership.  Unfortunately, the ideology of socialism, whether Marxist or Fascist or a mix of both with other strains of socialism, continues to limit the self-ownership of the individual.  ObamaCare was a dramatic example of our government limiting self-ownership, with its claims of shared healthcare responsibility and its limits on what health insurance we were allowed to purchase for the maintenance of our own life and health.  Most recently, we have been reminded that the primary socialist party in the USA does not honor the right of each and every citizen to have one and only one vote in a federal election undiluted by illegitimate votes.

Respect is absolutely due a President who uses his best effort to cause the federal government to pursue policies that protect the exercise of the many and broad rights of every individual.  A President worthy of respect would battle foreign powers bent on using force against Americans, domestic gangs and individuals who initiate the use of force to take what they want from others, and those presumptuous government officials who believe it is their right to use the monopoly of force held by government to hurt some of the people or many of the people.  Any society of significant size harbors evil people who  use force to make other people do their will.  Some do so claiming to do it for the good of others.  Some are simply uninhibited in their own wants.  We know this to be historically true.  We know this to be presently true.

Today, in America, it is those called the Deplorables who by and large assert their self-ownership, their right to choose their own values, and their right to manage their own lives.  They have a greater sense of self-responsibility than do the socialists.  The Deplorables do not want the heavy boot of government upon their necks.  They almost entirely work in the private sector.

Opposing them are the Socialist Elitists, who are sure they have the right to use the force of govenment to claim at least substantial ownership of every American, to indoctrinate and program Americans to accept heavy government rule using their monopoly on education and control of massive government contracts and welfare programs, and to regulate with a heavy hand virtually every economic activity of the People.  These Socialist Elitists gravitate to positions in education, media, lobbies, and government.  Those in government settle in comfortably into its myriad agencies and official positions.  The lobbyists fill law firms, promotion and publicist firms, professional groups, environmental groups, animal rights groups, firms promoting the interests of foreign powers, defense companies, alternative energy companies, and labor union leadership positions.  Almost all educators work in government-run schools or colleges highly dependent upon government grants and student loans and scholarships.  The media, whether print, broadcast or Internet based, want the power to control the news that gets to the People.  They choose what is newsworthy and put the spin on it that suits them.  Controlling information and its access is their game.  While the term swamp creatures is usually applied to those Socialist Elitists in government and lobbying positions, it ought to also include educators, media workers, and the many special interest groups that thrive on government money or laws biased to their special interests.

One of the Granddaddies of all Swamp Creatures is Joe Biden, the beneficiary of the highly unconstitutional election of 2020.  The unconstitutional nature of the election was assiduously planned and worked for by the Democratic Socialist Party that so craves power and harbors the great majority of the worst Swamp Creatures.  The unconstitutional election rule changes, which violated the election laws passed by the state legislatures as empowered by the Constitution, were generally designed to enable radical Democratic Socialist Party groups to cast the votes of the dead, non-citizens, those who had moved from a prior address, felons who had lost the right to vote, massive numbers of mailed ballots that never reached the addresses they were mailed to, and simply printed ballots pretending to be mailed-in ballots.  This power-lusting party arranged to prevent observers adequate access and viewing to monitor the nefarious activities at many of the ballot counting facilities under the control of the Democratic Socialist Party.  One does not do this if one is not cheating.  One does not do this if one has confidence in Americans to make a good democratic choice of their President.  But if you want desperately to put the non-campaigning, granddaddy of all Swamp Creatures into the Presidency, you do not want to have a democratic election protected by constitutional requirements.  And who cares about earning the respect of the American People when all you want is the right to Lord it over them.

The Socialist Elitists are those who lust for power over the American People and for the money they can extract from the productive work of the Americans in the private sector who are more harmed by government than helped by it.  The Deplorables serve as the hosts upon whom the Swamp Creature Parasites thrive.  Interestingly, many of the Socialist Elites defame the Deplorables because they understand the ignominy of being a parasite dependent upon its host.  These are the knowingly evil ones.  Of course, others are so deluded with their claims that they hurt the many for the benefit of the few weak, that they claim this as a badge of honor.  They resent anyone who attempts to strip this justification for their evil acts from them.  The Deplorables who would deny them the use of force to benefit the few weak are hated for depriving them of an easily attained and unjustified sense of virtue.  An act of virtue one gets credit for, which costs you little since you transfer the costs of others, is hard to give up.

Trump Derangement Syndrome -- the state of mind when a claimed Elitist is denied his false sense of morality and largely revealed as a parasite by a very self-assured critic determined to reduce the power of government to interfere with the People managing their own lives.  The Liberator is strongly resented.

I will grant that President Trump does not seem to be entirely self-assured as a man, but he was generally self-assured that those who view themselves as the Elite did not have the right to micro-manage the lives of Americans.  He reduced taxes and regulations to allow productive work to blossom to the absolute horror of the Elitists.  He was determined to control the borders so that the laws on immigration and nationalization were obeyed. He opposed the destruction of the carbon-based fuel industries.  He was an advocate for American manufacturing, while the Democrats continued to view manufacturers as rapists of Gaia and wished to chase them out of the country with a proliferation of highly irrational regulations.  He opposed the Elitist claim that China should be treated as a Most Favored Nation.  He was forthright about China's role in exporting its coronavirus and was critical about its human rights violations.  He recognized China's increased belligerence and determination to dominate the world militarily.  He pushed NATO members to live up to their commitments.   He favored the building of safe pipelines to deliver fuel around the country and to our ports.  He spoke up against violations of constitutional elections, while the Elitists and Swamp Creatures are counting on those violations to keep them in power even after the People will rise against them in the next election for their use of power excesses.  Because of these actions, the American economy had boomed prior to the advent of the Chinese Communist Party coronavirus invasion.  Black and Hispanic Americans had been the greatest beneficiaries of this booming economy.  President Trump took particular pride in their increased prosperity.

The Socialist Elitists responded to the Liberator's efforts with desperate claims he was a rascist and those who voted for him were also.  They claimed the Liberator was a despot and some kind of fascist.  They twice voted to impeach him on false charges. Their claims were indeed deranged, but they were widely believed in academia, the media, and in government.  This belief was near universal in the Democratic Socialist Party, which is not at all democratic, but is highly socialist.  The Republican Party also has its denizens of government power who opposed the Liberator's efforts.  National Review, The Bulwark, The Lincoln Project, The American Prospect, and a host of ex-officials who loved doing business in Washington the way it used to be done.  Even many Libertarians and Objectivists joined with the oppositon to the Liberator's efforts because he did not believe in open borders, free trade with thieves and slaveholders who were arming to the teeth for future wars of aggression, and traditional decorum.  Some even said they opposed him because he did not have sufficient trust in the foreign policy and intelligence advisors, despite the track record of their past decisions.  This included the backing many of them gave to the first nefarious attempt to impeach Trump and to the first successful attempt to impeach him on false grounds.  The Liberator was too disruptive for many Libertarians and Objectivists, who apparently have become traditionalists, or should we say conservatives, who would rather pursue a course of on-going compromise with the Socialist Elitists than be so disruptive as to do actual battle with them.

Should the Deplorables respect the swamp creature declared the winner of the unconstitutional 2020 presidential election?  Most certainly not.  Respect of the President is dependent upon the context that the President is actually trying to uphold his oath of office to protect the Constitution.

That context assumes the President actually believes in the principles of the Declaration of Independence, which Joe Biden has explicitly stated holds no role in American law.  If the Constitution is not held to be the instrument by which the federal government is held accountable to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, then one can understand the train of abuses of our Constitution that the Democratic Socialist Party is particularly determined to pursue.  It becomes easy for them to ignore the enumeration of the very limited powers of the government.  Unbounded by the principles of the Declaration of Independence, they re-interpret clause after clause of the Constititution to enlarge the powers of government.  The taxation power to fund the enumerated powers becomes an excuse to make any law as long as it includes a tax, as made clear by Supreme Court Justice Roberts' ruling on ObamaCare.  The regulation of commerce, intended to make the entire USA a free market for trade, is converted into a means to prevent those in the private sector from trading freely with one another.  The statement that the Constitution was intended to provide for the welfare of the People by ensuring their liberties, became a justification for any act said to be for their welfare, even as that act deprived individuals of their rights.  Even the principle of the Declaration of Independence that a legitimate government must have the consent of the governed is ignored by the Socialist Elitists.

Joe Biden has fully and willingly embraced these abuses.  This is the most solid of reason to deny this man any respect at all, let alone that measure of respect one would grant a man honestly trying to perform his duties as President of the United States of America.  To top this off, Biden is a long-time crime syndicate head.  He has abused his lifetime of public offices by selling his hold on government power to special interests, including the Russian faction in Ukraine and the Chinese Communist Party in Red China.  After Hilary Clinton's defeat, Joe Biden took a job at the University of Pennsylvania as the non-teaching Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor at a salary of $900,000 to lead the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, DC funded by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).  The Penn Biden Center was a transition depot for a number of Biden appointees, all of whom are tainted by its funding source.  Not too surprisingly, Biden has failed to recognize the great harm the CCP did in exporting its coronavirus to the rest of the world.  Biden believes that more trade with Red China is a wonderful thing.  This man is not only a power-luster, but he is knowingly willing to hurt America to further his family's wealth.

The Office of the President depends on the respect of the American People for much of its power.  Withhold that respect from Joe Biden.  He does not deserve it.  In fact, given his and his party's long train of abuses, we are obligated to oppose his program adamently in every case in which it erodes our freedom to exercise our many and broad individual rights.  For my part, I will honor those who stand with me on the bulwarks to defend our individual rights.

Police use of deadly force is not about racism

Police use of deadly force is not about racism

Reality is far more complicated, but agenda-pushing activists don’t want to discuss it

David Wojick

The screaming headline said "Black Americans 2.5X more likely than whites to be killed by police." The statement is false. It is the kind of assertion that is used to claim police are systemically racist. It leads to fewer police, fewer arrests, more crime, more racial discord, and more innocent black deaths.

Accurate, honest statistics show just the opposite. When police must use deadly force, whites are more likely to be killed than blacks. But we rarely see these statistics, because they do not support claims of systemic, systematic racism against blacks. The statistics we do see are too often agenda-driven.

The sad reality is that, as a percentage of their total American population, black deaths by police are around 2.5 times white deaths. But this has nothing to do with likelihood, because the vast majority of people of both races have near-zero likelihood of being killed by police.

In fact, up to 88% of people killed by police were armed and being arrested at the time of their deaths. Such people are indeed at greater risk of being killed. However, racism has nothing to do with it.

On a per-arrest basis, the data say whites are much more likely to be killed by police than blacks. If so, the police are clearly not racist. Indeed, they seem to be deliberately trying not to kill blacks. Another study found that 36% of officer-involved shootings were “suicide by cop,” 16% of whom were blacks.

Statistical reality must begin with the fact that black males represent 6.5% of the US population – but according to FBI data they constitute 54% of arrests for robbery and 53% of arrests for murder. Far worse, nationally syndicated talk show host Larry Elder points out, in 2018 there were approximately 7,400 black homicide victims, more than half of America’s total homicides, and nearly all were murdered by other blacks. (Have Black Lives Matter or NFL-NBA-MLB athletes ever acknowledged any of this?)

Those are the real reasons blacks outnumber whites in the nation’s prisons – the real reasons more blacks are likely to be killed during arrests and other confrontations with police.

Even more telling, when we look at the issue that motivates and infuriates Black Lives Matter (BLM) and its allies – unarmed blacks killed by police – we learn that the Mapping Police Violence database tabulates “just” 25 such police killings in 2019, resulting from shootings, tasers, beatings, chokeholds and vehicles.  (A Washington Post database records only police shootings.) And then we read this:

“A wave of gun violence swept through the nation over the [July Fourth 2020] holiday weekend, leaving dozens dead from coast-to-coast – with children as young as 5 among the casualties,” the New York Post despaired. In Chicago, the article continued, police reported 87 shootings and 17 deaths, and nearly a dozen [of those shot] were children caught in the crossfire. The vast majority were black.

Think about that. In one weekend, in one city, we had three-fourths the number of deaths that BLM is raging about, for the entire nation, over the course of an entire year. Or consider this awful news:

“Every single person who has been shot in New York City [so far] this July, nearly 100 in total, has been a member of the minority community” and “97% of shooting victims in June were members of the city’s minority community,” NBC News reporter Tom Winter tweeted. New York City witnessed a 204% increase in shooting victims over the past 28 days, compared to the same period in 2019, he added.

Meanwhile, Darrius Sutton participated in at least three drive-by shootings after he was released from NYC jails without bail on attempted murder charges – a far too frequent occurrence in Di Blasio Town. Again, no comments, no outrage from BLM.

What about law enforcement officers like David Dorn and Patrick Underwood? What about Mekhi James, LeGend Taliferro, Secoriea Turner and too many other Black children gunned down by their fellow blacks? Seven-year-old Natalia Wallace was playing with other children in Chicago over this year’s Fourth of July weekend, when thugs leapt from a car and sprayed gunfire into a crowd, killing her.

Why don’t their black lives matter to Black Lives Matter, its often violent supporters, and its corporate, Hollywood and pro athlete funding sources? Does anyone really think the solution is “defunding” or “reimagining” police forces – perhaps replacing thousands of police officers with social workers?

The victims’ families certainly don’t. Natalia’s father told local news media he wants more police, not fewer. Her aunt said, “We talk about Black Lives Matter, but at the end of the day, we’re killing each other off. We’re killing our babies.”

“The No. 1 cause of preventable death for young white men is accidents, such as car accidents and drownings,” Larry Elder notes. “The No. 1 reason for death, preventable or otherwise for young black men, is homicide, almost always at the hands of another young black man.” How depressing.

Police have to deal with way too many criminals, attacks, confrontations and murders, especially in poor and minority areas of our cities. They never know who will pull a gun, even during a routine intervention, traffic stop or domestic disturbance – or which incident might be a setup, an ambush. That’s part of the reason some officers are jumpy or feel they must use potentially deadly force when they would much prefer not to. But racist tendencies, much less systemic racism, have nothing to do with it.

The United States once had systemic, government-decreed racism. This is no longer the case, and elevating individual, thankfully now pretty rare cases of racism into something systemic gets us nowhere.

It is much more likely that what is happening today is the result of too many black boys being raised fatherless, by gangs, amid street violence – and to their not attending school, and thus growing up with no education, skills or future. They likewise receive no grounding in civics, humanity, morality or religion, and have few scruples and little remorse over murdering someone to settle a score or perceived insult.

Just as in medicine, getting the diagnosis wrong can be much worse than useless. Trying to blame or cure systemic white racism or supposedly widespread individual white racism will only make matters worse. Blaming people for things they are not doing just makes them angry. Intimidating them into silence over these accusations just makes them angry and resentful.

Honest, probing social science, media coverage and debate could help us find solutions. Name calling, guilt trips and false assertions of systemic racism will make the situation worse. That people are being told everything is due to racism is tearing us apart, instead of pulling us together in search of solutions. It is a political trick that is causing horrific, widespread social upheaval, whether by accident or design.

Marching, screaming, burning, looting and simplistic, deceptive slogans are not solutions. They are not even calls for constructive action. They are certainly not calls to ponder the points presented here and in countless other articles and reports – or to reexamine some of the well-intended but woefully misguided government programs that helped get us where we are today.

Angrily demanding that “things have to change” is not a step forward. It may even be a step backward, if it leads to more confusion, and more stupid or useless programs. Promoting racial division and discord will ensure that the real causes of crime, violence and murder in our black and other minority communities are never addressed

These issues cry out for attention they are not getting. Perhaps after the elections, after the insanity and riots are over, we can have honest, no-holds-barred conversations about this, without being shouted down and canceled out. We must hope so. Otherwise, our nation’s future is bleak indeed.

David Wojick, PhD is an independent analyst working at the intersection of science, technology and policy. He writes regularly about climate change, energy and social issues.

My Comments:

Many violent young men in black communities were forced to attend government-run schools that were little more than holding pens.  They received extremely inadequate educations, despite the fact that the school systems often cost taxpayers very high ratios of money per student.  It is extremely frustrating to be forced to spend your time in a boring environment for many hours a day.  It also does not help that the mostly government education establishment in the name of feminism decries males as brutish and chauvinist suppressors of women, thereby depriving males of their role as protectors and providers of women and children.  This is hardly conducive in convincing young men to behave responsibly, to care for the women they have sex with, and to care for the children who may result.  Being so poorly educated, taking on such responsibilities becomes much harder.  So more children wind up without a father at home.  In these poorly educated communities, most of the people are not knowledgeable enough to vote intelligently.  It is common for them to cast 90% of their votes for the Democratic Party, which was almost always responsible for their extremely inadequate educations and for providing less policing than is needed to make their neighborhoods more secure. The lack of security and Democratic barriers to business formation, make it more expensive to live in their neighborhoods and result in few job opportunities.

A very vicious cycle has been set up in many black communities, especially those where there has long been Democratic Party control of the local government.  That party fights hard to prevent educational choice by suppressing non-government schools, it provides poor teachers, a poor school curriculum, and surprisingly poor school facilities and safety given the education budgets.  The Democrat Party is especially likely to create many barriers to starting businesses and causes business expenses to be much greater than they should be.  That party also underfunds police who are much needed to make these black communities safe enough to raise families in them and to operate businesses that provide needed services and jobs.

The systematic racism that does exist is that perpetrated by the Democratic Party.  It is hardly surprising that this is the same party of slavery, of Jim Crow laws, of the KKK (including President Woodrow Wilson and Senator Robert Byrd, who Joe Biden said was his Senate mentor), and the party that provided many more of the votes against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than did the Republicans who voted for it with much higher percentages in both the House and the Senate.

If you want a society in which every life is valued, then you should understand that such a society is one that believes that every individual has many broad rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.  These rights include the right to pursue an education, to pursue a livelihood, freedom of contract, freedom of privacy, freedom of conscience, and freedom of association.  None of these rights require that anyone else has to serve you or provide for you, but they certainly do require that no one initiate the use of force to prevent you as an individual from pursuing your values and managing your own life while enjoying these individual rights.  In our society, as in many, it is the government which is the main initiator of the use of force to prevent individuals from exercising their individual rights.  None of these individual rights is neither enhanced, nor diminished by virtue of one's ethnicity or skin color.  These are not collective, block, or faction rights.  They are the rights of each and every individual human being and must be honored for every citizen of the United States of America.  For that matter, every government and every society around the world should be doing the same.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Economist: Should political parties let just anyone run for president?

In an article deploring the fact that there are 25 candidates for the Democratic nomination to run for the presidency of the United States of America, The Economist wants American political party establishments to play a much bigger role in choosing a small number of candidates who will be allowed to run in party primaries.

They even advise increasing the number of superdelegates, who played a big role in selecting Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Party nominee for President in the 2016 election.  Superdelegates are not required to vote in accordance with the primary vote outcome in their states and they are usually chosen from the ranks of the Deep Party Apparatchiks.  This is a most undemocratic method for choosing a party nominee for President or any other elected office, but democracy is another of many words robbed of meaning by those elitists who hunger for power and have long grown accustomed to exercising it without challenge.  There was a backlash among Democrat voters to the role of superdelegates in the Clinton nomination that led to a cutback in the present power of superdelegates in the party.  An alternative suggested in the article is having a convention to choose a small number of candidates to put before the primary voters.  Still another is to have the party's Congress members put out a recommended slate of candidates, rather as the teachers unions do in public school board elections.

Why does The Economist think that many candidates are a problem?  Because:

"the system has thrown up too many candidates for voters to evaluate.  It rewards name recognition and social-media prowess, and asks activists to make decisions about people about whom they know little."

These are valid concerns.  However, there are so many loony birds among the candidates in this case that it is really easy to winnow out almost all of the candidates.  No, I can make a much stronger statement than that.  It is really easy to eliminate all of the Democrat candidates from any extensive evaluation because they are all nuts, power-hungry, and suffer from a huge delusion that they have the intellectual power to evaluate the needs of all Americans in their lives and to make decisions about people whom they know little.

If the people of the United States are unable to properly evaluate 25 candidates for the presidency, then how can one entertain a faith that any one of those candidates even has the capability of evaluating the real needs of 329 million individual Americans?  How can anyone maintain the delusion that any candidate can know enough about 329 million Americans to then micromanage their lives as the federal government already largely tries to do and the Democrat Party is united in wanting to do on a much grander scale?

We have a federal government that is four times the size it ought to be.  It is constantly violating the many and broad rights of the individual to life and self-ownership, liberty, to earn a living, property, and the pursuit of happiness.  It is constantly deciding who will be given a benefit and who will be deprived under force in order that the politicians can steal what they need to give that benefit.  Republicans have no business exercising these powers and Democrats have even less business doing so because they are even more blind to their unrealistic assumptions about their mental capabilities.

Is the State Sovereign?

States or governments are never sovereign -- they are at best legitimate. The individual is sovereign and rights reside only in the individual. The legitimacy of government is derived from its protection of the many and broad sovereign rights of the individuals within its territory of operation. It is this individual rights protection service that justifies the existence of government. To say that a government or state is sovereign is the equivalent of saying that all rights reside in the government and the state hands out such privileges as it sees fit to individuals. Those privileges can be revoked at the whim of the sovereign state. The sovereign state demands that the people serve it, while the sovereign individual demands that the state serve each and every individual. There is a world of difference.

Joe Biden has explicitly embraced the sovereign state that grants such privileges as it chooses to individuals and denies the sovereignty of individuals and their pre-state assertion of rights which governments are formed to protect. This viewpoint highly dominates those of the Democratic Party and is also held by quite a few Republicans. It is the basis for the belief that it is a proper function of the government to do harm to some as long as it can claim it is doing good for more people than are harmed or that it is doing good for the "least among us." This viewpoint removes sovereignty from the individual and effectively removes all of his rights, while opening the floodgates on an endless list of government powers. The only real limit on government power is that it is only legitimate to the degree that it protects the exercise of each and every individual's rights.

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.