I Condemn Russia and Red China as an Axis of Evil

The Russian Federation, signatory with the USA and the United Kingdom of a guarantee of independent Ukraine's borders in 1994, has invaded Ukraine.  These guarantees were a critical reason Ukraine gave up the world's third largest number of nuclear weapons on its soil after the dissolution of the USSR.  Yes, Ukraine is not a member of NATO, so NATO is not obligated by treaty to defend Ukraine, but the USA and the United Kingdom are obligated by their 1994 treaty.  Both are defaulting on that obligation now as they did in 2014 when Russia took the Crimea.  To be sure, the treaty was perhaps an ill-considered one by the Clinton administration, but that administration was also very concerned, with justification, about the many nuclear weapons then in Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan as a result of the dissolution of the USSR.  To uphold our treaty, we would have had to provide more military aid and training to Ukraine, which might have stimulated Russia to an earlier invasion.  This was a very knotty problem.

Putin claims that Ukrainians are Russians or at least their close brothers.  He says that historically, Ukraine was part of Russia.  He claims they are both Orthodox by religion and share a language.  This being the case, Ukraine must be re-united with the Russians.

Actually, the Kievan Rus was a separate country with its own court, language, large capital city Kiev, now Kyiv, and distinct farming economy when the Duchy of Muscovy was a small fur-trading town.  The Kievan Rus was the largest country in Europe.  It had extensive interactions with the French court and its court was one of the most advanced in Europe for a couple hundred years (1000 - 1200 AD approximately), which was a status Moscow never achieved.  Present day Ukraine consists of an eastern part that Russia conquered and was largely brought under Russian control by Catherine the Great.  The eastern Ukraine generally became Orthodox in religion and the Russians worked hard to force the Ukrainians to speak Russian.  The western part of Ukraine was united with Lithuania and Poland in various combinations for hundreds of years, then was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from the late 1700s until after WW1, when it became part of Poland.  The western Ukraine is largely Catholic.  There is also a large Jewish population in Ukraine, including the present President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, whom Putin claims is a Nazi.

How have the Russians treated their Ukrainian brothers?  In Czarist times, the authoritarian Czars were constantly suppressing the more freedom-loving Ukrainians.  They discriminated against them for government posts, for education, and tended to call them denigrating names, such as Little Russians.  Then eastern Ukraine, which had briefly won independence when the Czarist government fell in 1917, was brought under brutal Russian Communist control in stages in the early 1920s.  When the Russian Communists implemented the collective farm programs and stole the farmland of the Kulaks, the richer farmers, Ukraine was hit harder than the rest of the USSR.  By about 1900, Ukraine had become known as the Breadbasket of Europe.  Many of its farmers were comparatively well off.  These hardworking people had their land stolen and the professional class of people in the many well-developed cities of Ukraine also lost their property.  Then in 1932 - 1933, the Russians took all the food the Ukrainians had grown and left millions of them to starve.  Once again, Ukrainians were discriminated against for government jobs and all jobs in the USSR were government jobs.  They were also discriminated against in education.  They were thought of by Russians as though they were hillbillies, the actual word a Russian Jewish scientist told me they were.

Putin was a KGB agent and a member of the Russian Mafia.  He climbed to power over the bodies of many Russians, let alone many Ukrainians.  Neither he nor the general Russian are someone any rational Ukrainian would want as a brother.  A brother does not steal the land of his brothers, yet Russians did this to Ukrainians.  A brother does not use brutal force to steal all the food grown by another brother and leave him to starve.  A brother does not prevent another brother from having a good job or a good education.  All around, the Putin claim that Ukrainians are Russian brothers is absurd.  He has managed to heighten that absurdity with his claim upon experiencing considerable Ukrainian resistance to his occupation of Ukraine by stating that he needed to set his nuclear forces at a high level of readiness because he cannot image in world without Russia.  Does he really think that Ukrainian resistance to invasion is a threat to the existence of Russia?  Well, perhaps it is a threat to his rule of Russia and he is a much a megalomaniac as Hitler, who could see no use in the continuation of the Third Reich without himself at its head.  Putin, as is the case with many long term dictators, has become mentally unstable and quite divorced from reality.

Ukraine is the second largest country in Europe, if you count Russia as a European country.  It is larger or about the size of France, and larger than Spain, Sweden, Germany, and Finland.  Kyiv, pronounced Kay-eve, contrary to what you hear on the news, is Europe's seventh largest city.  It is not an Appalachian hollow hamlet.  Lviv, of the western Ukraine and very near Poland, is known as the Cultural Center of Ukraine.  

Lviv is about 60 miles west of the small town from which my wife's family came.  Her older brother and sister were born in that town.  Her father, John Palka, was the village mayor and owned a wealthy enough farm of less than 40 acres, that he was a Kulak.  He also had a history of fighting the Communists, when as a 16 year-old he fought in the Ukrainian Army trying to resist the Communist takeover of Ukraine in the early 1920s.  When the Soviets took over the western Ukraine at the start of WWII upon the heinous partition of Poland between Germany and the USSR, he had to flee his home.  When the Germans attacked the USSR and soon took the western Ukraine, he returned and resumed his duties as mayor.  When the Soviets again returned in the closing period of WWII, Anna's family fled Ukraine and wound up in West Germany in the American sector at the end of the war.  They emigrated to the USA in late 1947 and arrived when Anna, my wife, was about 8 months old.  They settled in Cleveland, Ohio and became part of the large Ukrainian community of Cleveland.  The Palka family was active in the Ukrainian Catholic Church and Ukrainian Scouts.  Anna proudly became a U.S. citizen when she was a student at Case Western Reserve University.

I met Anna when I set up a dinner group to meet at the CWRU Hospital cafeteria of people interested in the works and philosophy of Ayn Rand.  I was working on my Ph.D. in Physics at Case Western Reserve University and Anna was working as a microbiologist at the Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital of CWRU.  We married in December 1973 and I became an adjunct member of her Ukrainian family, though with my deficient skills in learning languages, I never learned to speak Ukrainian.  This and my lack of dancing skills required some tolerance on their part.  Still worse, was my lack of belief in God and Catholicism.  Nonetheless, these good people were quite welcoming.

Some will dismiss my moral and  strategic analysis of the role of the Russian Federation as overly influenced by family bias now, but my family experience is also rich in the lessons of history, about which too few Americans have knowledge. 

The United States have contributed to Putin's ability to invade Ukraine by restraining its own oil, gas, and coal production since the start of the Biden administration.  This has caused the cost of oil and natural gas to rise and 40% of the Russian economy is due to its energy resources.  This was crucial to Russia since its total GDP is smaller than that of either Italy, Canada, or South Korea and barely larger than that of Brazil or Australia.  This is a direct result of the lack of freedom, property rights, and individual initiative in Russia.  Not only have we removed American oil, gas, and coal from the global economy, but we have taken to actually importing Russian oil!  We have been providing Russia with the money to pay its military, provide it with arms, and to assemble for the attack on Ukraine.  We aided Putin in building up a $600 billion war-chest so he can weather the relatively weak economic sanctions being applied to Russia.  We have crippled our own energy production at the urging of radical environmentalists who have received considerable Russian funding to achieve that purpose.  Both Russia and China have long promoted false claims of catastrophic man-made global warming in America to scare us into destroying our own great energy advantages to our economy and to global strategic policy.

Putin and the execrable Xi of Red China have entered into some sort of mutually supportive pact to aid their aggressions against their neighbors and to diminish the effects of any economic sanctions by moral indignant countries.  Just as Putin can cause many European nations great harm by cutting off the supply of natural gas and oil to them through a web of pipelines, so can Red China cause tremendous economic harm now that it was cornered so much of the world's manufacturing capacity.  With its cheap and often slave labor, its lack of concern for the environment, its currency manipulations, and its extensive use of coal-fired power plants, China has managed to become the world's largest manufacturer.  In 2018, the value of its manufacturing output was one and two-thirds that of the USA.  China is the dominant supplier of solar panels, rare earth metals for powerful magnets used in wind generators and other electric motors, chemicals for pharmaceutical production and for the Mexican drug cartels, and LEDs.  They are a huge beneficiary of the wrongheaded goal to establish solar and wind generation as the primary sources of electricity in the developed countries.  China's biggest trade partner is the European Union, closely followed by the USA.  The West is assiduously investing gigantic sums of capital in building manufacturing operations in China.  We are truly providing this evil country the rope to hang us with, just as the early Communists assured one another that the Capitalists would do.

Red China is a totalitarian country whose people outside of the annexed and suppressed Hong Kong have never known freedom.  People who have never or only long ago enjoyed freedom are not a moral people.  Morality only thrives among a free people.  Our Founders were fond of saying that a people could be and remain free only if they behaved morally.  The inverse is also true.  A nation which has long lacked freedom, lacks morality.  This applies to Russia as well as to Red China.

Biden has stated that Ukraine should not be admitted to NATO because corruption was widespread in Ukraine.  Rather than encouraging Ukraine to become less corrupt, the Biden family business actively took part in the corruption in Ukraine.  The Biden family business has also been extremely active in business operations in Red China which are controlled by the intelligence and military agencies of the Chinese Communist Party, including acquiring US company defense intellectual property.  It is not a wonder at all that Biden has worked hard to disassemble the American carbon-based fuel industries.  It is not a wonder that the Biden administration has proven such a weak ally to Ukraine.

Americans should become much more reluctant to purchase goods made in China.  They should encourage our government to allow the US carbon-based industries to greatly increase their production of these plenteous and reliable energy sources.  Americans should strongly condemn the ubiquitous violations of individual rights in the Russian Federation and in Red China.

The U.N. Security Council vote on a resolution to "deplore" the Russian invasion of Ukraine was approved by the USA, France, Britain, Albania, Brazil, Gabon, Ghana, Ireland, Kenya, Mexico, and Norway.  China, India, and the United Arab Emirates abstained on the vote, which the Russian Federation vetoed.  We should remember the immoral choices that China, India, and the United Arab Emirates made on this resolution.

The Educational Attainment of Americans Before 1850

It is widely assumed that few Americans prior to 1850 and the development of government-run school systems were capable of reading and that knowledge was sparsely distributed.  This is a myth which there is much evidence to refute.

Here is an excerpt from an article by Andrew Berstein which was published in The Objective Standard, Vol. 5, No. 4 (2010) under the title The Educational Bonanza in Privatizing Government Schools.

Prior to the mid-19th century, government schools did not exist in America. All schools were private, and education was widespread and outstanding. For example, in the Middle Atlantic colonies during the pre-Revolutionary period, professional educators established numerous schools to satisfy the demand for education.15 Philadelphia, for instance, boasted schools for every subject and interest. Between 1740 and 1776, 125 private schoolmasters advertised their services in Philadelphia newspapers—this in a city whose population was miniscule relative to today. Professional educators provided mentoring services in English, contemporary foreign languages, science, and a wide variety of other topics.16 Children who grew to be such brilliant scientists, writers, and statesmen as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington received their education at home or in private schools.

(As to higher education, by the late-18th century six private colleges operated in the colonies: Yale, the College of New Jersey [Princeton], the College of Philadelphia [Penn], Dartmouth, Queen’s [Rutgers], and Rhode Island College [Brown].)17

Predictably, the educational results of such a free educational market were superb. The literacy levels of Revolutionary America were remarkably high. For example, Thomas Paine’s book, Common Sense,written in plain style but enunciating sophisticated political principles, sold 120,000 copies during the colonial period to a free population of 2.4 million (akin to selling 10 million copies today).18 The essays of The Federalist, written by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay in support of a Constitution for the nascent republic, were largely newspaper editorials written for and read by the common man.

Sales of American books and educational materials in the early- and mid-19th century likewise indicate a high national literacy rate. Between 1818 and 1823, while the U.S. population was under 20 million, Walter Scott’s novels sold 5 million copies (the equivalent of selling 60 million [actually more than 77.5 million] copies today). Early in the 19th century, The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper likewise sold millions of copies.19 The McGuffey’s Readers, first published in 1836, routinely used such terms as “heath” and “benighted” in third-grade texts. They asked such questions as “What is this species of composition called?” and gave such assignments as “Relate the facts of this dialogue.” The fourth-grade reader included selections from Hawthorne, and the fifth-grade text, readings from Shakespeare. “These were not the textbooks of the elite but of the masses,” explains Thomas Sowell. “[F]rom 1836 to 1920, McGuffey’s Readers were so widely used that they sold more than 122 million copies.”20

Given the high quality of education in early America, it is no surprise that two renowned French visitors observed and reported on the phenomenon. In an 1800 book Vice President Thomas Jefferson commissioned, titled National Education in the United States of America, Pierre Du Pont de Nemours reported that Americans received an education far superior to that of other peoples. “Most young Americans,” he wrote, “can read, write, and cipher. Not more than four in a thousand are unable to write legibly.”21 Several decades later, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America that Americans were the most educated people of history.22

The bracketed text in red is my correction.  Footnote 17 explains that Harvard College, King's College in New York City (now Columbia University), and William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia, which are all private colleges now, were founded by governments.  Harvard was founded by the Massachusetts Bay Colony and King's and William and Mary Colleges were founded under Royal Charters in the colonial period.  It is clear that the 1800 book Vice President Thomas Jefferson commissioned, titled National Education in the United States of America, Pierre Du Pont de Nemours stating that "not more than four in a thousand are unable to write legibly" did not include slaves.

The idea that a private education system would leave many Americans less educated than the government-run education system of today is belied by this history and by the fact that the approximately 11% of schools today that are private out-perform the government schools readily.  Home-schooled children also greatly out-perform government-schooled children.

The government-run schools have little reason to teach children good reasoning skills, the knowledge they need to earn a living, and the habit of independent, critical thinking.  Without these attainments, it is a very uphill battle for individuals to achieve wisdom and the necessary skills to make their own value choices well.  Government-run schools have a tendency to propagate myths that support Big Government and diminish the exercise of individual rights.  Government-controlled education endangers children, future adults, and our constitutionally limited republican government of a few enumerated powers.  Government-educated students generally have no idea what purposes and achievements define a legitimate government, no sound understanding of individual rights, no thoughts about the intelligibility of laws and regulations, and no commitment to the Rule of Law.  Because the People are divided about ideas of morality, the government schools downplay moral principles.  They have little knowledge of history and the many lessons of how governments have deprived their citizens of their rights.  They have no understanding of basic economics and are taught to believe in policies that deny the basic Law of Supply and Demand and the importance of production itself.  They massively promote group identifications and victim-hood and victimizer status for these groups in a highly divisive manner.  They systematically undermine the much greater diversity and wealth of individual choices provided by the private sector in favor of the rigid, group oriented controls of the government sector.

The government-run education system wallows in a profound conflict-of-interest and because it is coercive and tax-funded, it has no reason to improve.  In fact, the schools are more commonly provided with more money the more they fail, providing them with no incentive to provide a decent education.  Government-run and controlled schools very commonly put the welfare of their under-performing employees well ahead of that of their under-performing students.

The state of education in America today is tragic and is much of the reason that the state of government in America today is increasingly harmful to the freedom, security, and general well-being of Americans.

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.

Senator Dick Durbin Says to Put Down Ayn Rand's Books

Senator Dick Durbin of the Democrat Socialist Party of the highly indebted state of Illinois, has told Senate Republicans to put down their Ayn Rand books and get to work on the socialist agenda, including perpetual unemployment insurance payouts.  He claims that if Republicans want to help the public, they should vote to take money by force from those who are working and give it to those who have largely stopped looking for work.  We know that many have stopped looking for work because Big Government has so degraded the economy with endless similar takings of income and wealth that private sector job creators have largely stopped creating jobs.  Labor force participation is the lowest it has been since that great failed Democrat Jimmy Carter was in the White House.  Durbin's solution is to take still more money by force from those who are working and give it to those who are not!

Durbin's solution is immoral, as Ayn Rand most ably made evident to rational thinkers who have read her books despite the vilification of collectivists.  Durbin's solution has been the modus operandi throughout this never-ending Great Socialist Recession, now starting its seventh year and likely to continue for at least one year after Obama has retired.  We can expect a 10-year recession due to such continuous nonsense as Durbin is backing.  So, any rational observer can clearly see that the Democrat Socialist Party solutions do not solve the problem, but instead are the problem.  It is always interesting to observe that extended attempts to ignore morality always end in disasters, such as this great American Lost Decade.  But then, as Ayn Rand said, one needs a moral code in order to assure one's survival and in order to flourish in life.  In other words, the practical man is a moral man and a moral man is a practical man.  Those who believe it is practical not to be moral are horribly mistaken.  So do read Ayn Rand.

Dick Durbin has never created more jobs than those of a small law practice in Springfield, Illinois, which he started after passing the bar in late 1969.  He mostly ran his private practice as a sideline while working for the Illinois legislature and running for offices in losing campaigns until he finally became a Representative in 1982.  One of his winning campaign issues was that he would solve unemployment problems.  He has yet to figure out how that is done.

It is a strange thing that so many people are now helpless to find work when most people were once capable of creating their own jobs in America.  Apparently for many Americans that enterprising spirit is dead.  Perhaps that is the main problem with employment today.

Does a loving Father tell his children that he does not care whether they learn to read and write or not?  Does he tell his children that they need not bother to learn to add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers?  Does he tell them they are not to have chores to do, so that they will be happier?  Does he say that he does not care what they will do with their lives because he will always take good care of them?  No, he pushes his children to learn the skills they will need to take good care of themselves.  Yet Dick Durbin is telling us that we should not care about the effort our children make, we should without reservation promise to always care for them.  Well, as any good parent knows, you have to make demands of your children.  You have to raise them so that they will understand the need for work and the pleasures that being a competent worker provide.  If you are a loving parent, you push your children to become competent in managing their own lives and in choosing their own values.  You teach them the morals and the many skills they will need to live well.  You teach them that pride and happiness are well-earned when they abide by their morality and manage their lives well.

If this is the path we follow with those whom we love best, then how is it that anyone can entertain Dick Durbin's claims that it is better to treat your fellow Americans the way a poor parent would raise a spoiled brat with no hope of ever becoming a real adult?  How can it be wise to take the advice of such a fool then to put down Ayn Rand's books?

So, visit the Atlas Society and read about Ayn Rand's ideas if you have not.  Then buy her books and read them carefully.  Think deeply about all you know about life and evaluate her ideas as objectively as you can.  It is the practical and moral thing to do!  It will also be a most appropriate reply to the self-destructive and wrongheaded advice of Senator Dick Durbin.

The Falsely Framed Moral Evaluation of Capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pearlstein characterizes their argument for capitalism as

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pearlstein claims that free market advocates say that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Immoral Estate Tax

The estate or death tax is simply immoral.  When an individual has spent a lifetime building wealth, he or she should be able to give that wealth in whole to whomever they wish.  It is particularly obnoxious that some people would stand between the dead and their own families or other loved ones.  The building of wealth is often motivated in good part by a desire to leave a significant estate to one's family in order to provide them with security.  Of course the Progressive Socialists Elitists do not want anyone to be provided with security unless they choose to have the government provide it to some select group among whom the family members may or may not be numbered.  The Elitist, who fancies himself god-like, thrives on making these choices and on having the chosen dependent upon his goodwill.

The Progressive Socialist Elitist commonly claims that the estate tax in not levied on the individual who died, but on the heirs.  Barney Frank just recently made such an often quoted claim:

Rich people should have a large chunk of their remaining estate confiscated by the government when they die because their heirs have done nothing to "earn" it themselves.

Strangely enough, the tax cut, to be 35% in 2011 and 2012, is made before and not after the money or property is put in the hands of the heirs.  The tax is made on the transfer of the estate, which really means before the transfer of the estate.  Thus it is more correct to say it is made on the dead than on the heirs.  Either way, this tax is made on those who generally did not choose to engage in an estate transfer, the dead usually not choosing to die and the heirs generally wishing their parent or other loved relation might have lived longer.

Unfortunately, the re-imposition of the death tax on 1 January 2011 for estates of $5 million or more has put dying people in the dilemma of choosing to die before then.  It is highly immoral that the federal government is forcing people to make such a choice.  Studies have shown that people do make the choice to die earlier in such cases.  Imagine yourself dying, but fighting to hang on to spend a last few days or weeks to say goodbye to those you love and allowing them to say goodbye to you and having to make this choice to cut off that incredibly important process.  You may have family members thousands of miles away who would wish to come to your side and spend a few last hours with you remembering the good times you have shared.  Imagine how important it is to hear one last time that you were a great father or mother and that your children will miss you greatly.  On the other hand, if you just stop fighting through the pain of dying, the business you spent a lifetime building may survive and your the employees you care about and trusted will continue to have jobs.  Maybe one or more to those who will continue to have jobs will be your children.  No one should ever be forced by a callous government run by Progressive Socialist Elitists to make such choices.

The Barney Frank claim begs several questions.  For one, it is simply assumed that the heirs did nothing to earn the estate.  Perhaps the children gave up many hours of time with their parent as the parent worked hard to accumulate the wealth.  Despite this, the children may have encouraged or given strength to the parent with their love to be so dedicated to his work and wealth-building.  In such cases, it is also often the case that the parent loved the work he or she did and the child understood that.  If, as is often the case, the wealth was accumulated from a business owned by the parent, the children may well have worked in the business as children and may still be working in the business as adults.  As adults working in the business, they may be the managerial succession plan of the business.

Yanking 35% of the business away from them at the difficult moment of transition may kill the business, causing much human grief as employees lose their jobs and as customers who have come to depend upon the business lose that relationship.  These are losses to which the power-grubbing likes of Barney Frank are blind and insensitive.  It may also be the case that the business owner had been retired for years and the business was in fact being run by his children for many years.  His children may already have greatly enhanced the value of the business.  One very important value enhancer is that a business gains value simply by having good managers it can count on for years to come, including tough recession years such as those of the Great Socialist Recession.  Family members are often just such valuable managers.  It cannot be correctly assumed that the children will not provide an even better manager and wealth creator than the family founder.  Or, the founder may have found the formula for success in a business after years of trial and error and passed it on to the children who will have much more time to use that formula, with such modifications as they will have to introduce themselves, to further build the business.  Destroy the business with taxation and the formula may also be destroyed.

Becoming an entrepreneur is a very difficult process.  The successful entrepreneur may have had, and probably did have, a long struggle to learn how to be successful.  One of the difficulties in becoming successful is the very fact that we already soak high income earners.  The top 1% of high income earners paid 38.02% of income taxes in 2008.  The top 5% of income earners paid 58.72% of all income taxes.  The successful entrepreneurial wealth-builder is just the person whose wealth will be again outrageously taxed at 35% on his death, with the frequent collapse of his business with all of his highly trained employees.  Such organizations are a wonder and should be highly valued in our society.  They represent incredible numbers of hours of hard prior work and difficult decisions, which are rarely appreciated at all by the all-knowing Progressive Socialist Elitist.  The founder or the heirs of the founder have built and maintained this organization.  In either case, its destruction or the act of harming it does harm to our society.  It has to be remembered that society generally is more benefited by the growth of the private sector than by the growth of government.  We must maintain rational priorities, despite Barney Frank's desire for us to irrationally further continue the transfer of private sector wealth to the government.

Of course there are cases we all know about in which the children are undeserving wastrels.  This is not really relevant, since it is the parent who built the wealth who has the right to decide where that wealth will go.  It is not our decision to make.  Neither is it the decision of government to make.  WE know the 35% cut the government will take will be spent foolishly and unconstitutionally for the most part.  In fact about 75% will be spent unconstitutionally, making the proper government spending out of the 35% tax a mere (1 - 0.75) (35%) = 8.75%.  This is a wastrel record which most wastrel children cannot match.  Their spending, while unwise, may easily be less unwise than that of the government.  Besides, the wasted part of the government spending very commonly goes to the undeserving poor or to the corrupt parasites of big business, labor unions, and other special interest groups, such as trial lawyers and public employees, who take advantage of the general taxpayer to live large.  In these days in which half the voters pay almost no taxes and the high income earners pay an outrageous fraction of all taxes, the wealth accumulator in many cases spent a lifetime supporting wastrels with his tax payments and upon dying is to once again forced to support those same wastrels with another 35% of his wealth.  You can hardly get more immoral than to demand that.

The Death Tax is highly immoral because it is a very discriminatory tax.  It strikes a very hard blow against businesses which are capital intensive.  Farming, for instance, is very capital intensive, since farmland has a very high value in the aggregate when enough acreage is held to make a farm profitable and a farmhouse and barn must be a part of the capital investment package as well.  A tractor and truck and many farm implements are other capital investments needed in our high-productivity farming environment.  The plight of farms due to the death tax has been often discussed and yet this important issue is of no concern to the Progressive Socialist Elitists such as Barney Frank.  There are many other American businesses which are also capital intensive.  In fact, for Americans to maintain their high standard of living in a global economy of intense competition, it is critical that many businesses achieve a very high labor productivity by being very well-equipped and by having other appropriate capital investment.  But, the death tax is a tax aimed at the destruction of exactly these competitive types of business with high capital investment because they also have high asset value upon the death of an owner.

Our all-knowing Progressive Socialist Elitists have long been dead-set on damaging the private sector, particularly our productive businesses, with completely stupid policies such as:

• The Death Tax to destroy businesses with high capital investment.
• The highest corporate tax in the world, designed to cause many U.S. corporations to build more facilities abroad and keep more of the profits of those facilities abroad, while decreasing their ability to compete in world markets from production in facilities in the U.S.
• High personal income taxes on those with relatively high incomes which hurt the accumulation of cash to be re-invested in many small businesses, thereby decreasing their growth rates and the numbers of employees they have.  Of course, high marginal tax rates at moderate to high incomes also decrease the incentive of productive people to work hard and produce as much wealth and as many jobs as they otherwise would.
• High company personal tax rates by counties and states which hurt capital intensive and therefore asset-intensive businesses.
• High power costs owing to wrongheaded supports for expensive ethanol fuel, electric wind generation and solar power subsidies and mandates, and restrictions on oil and natural gas production.  The electric power supply dependability has already been harmed and will suffer much more as these policies are expanded.
• Some pollution controls have exceeded rational cost benefit ratios.  Those on carbon dioxide are clearly such a case since carbon dioxide does not cause the global warming attributed to it by some all-knowing Progressive Socialist Elitists.  Despite this, great expense is already incurred in the name of CO2 reductions and the expenses are to ramped up drastically if the Obama EPA has its way in raping the U.S. economy.
• Many safety controls and regulations are expenses on business with little to no benefit.  Food inspection, drug regulations, FCC controls on broadcast and now Internet information and entertainment, anti-trust, railroad regulations, the first-class postage monopoly, and many more costs have been imposed on businesses and individuals more for government control and power and to protect big industries selectively while punishing other industries than makes rational sense.  All such schemes were advanced by Progressive Socialist Elitists.
• Tariffs and many irrational trade prohibitions still restrict international trade which is only carried out when two parties are benefited.  These restrictions are harmful.
• The minimum wage law creates higher unemployment and keeps many under-educated young people from receiving necessary on-the-job training and a start to their careers.
• Government favoritism toward unions makes labor too expensive in some industries, suppressing the competitiveness of those industries and pulling down other industries dependent upon those industries.
• Restrictions on the freedom of information exchange harm the economy, as does the introduction of government propaganda on economic issues critical of Capitalism through our government-run education system and by the Progressive Socialist Elitist media.
• Subsidies and mandates favoring some industries distort our economy and greatly harm the efficient utilization of capital and brainpower.
• Policies by the government favoring some races and women over men create an impediment to the efficient use of human brainpower.
• The huge transfer of wealth from the private sector to governments for unconstitutional purposes moves that wealth generally from production to non-productive uses.

The Unbearable Smugness of the Elitist Environmentalist/Socialist

My youngest daughter, Kate, has an interest in sustainable housing.  This has grown out of her extensive work with the Habitat Club at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), of which she was the president last year.  She continues to work with the club while working as a lab technician in medical research at the University of Rochester.  RIT also has a Sustainability Center and the engineering departments have worked up inexpensive ways to build homes that use less energy and they are building such a home with the Habitat Club.  So, Kate was watching a show on Green TV in which a woman had installed a large tub of water in her home as part of a low-energy use heating system.  Now, I saw too little of this show to know whether this was a good idea or one of those half-baked and not yet ready for prime time ideas, but the show host asked the home owner how long it would take her to recover her initial investment in lowered energy costs.  She thought it would be 10 years.  The host smiled and said that she would also enjoy the smugness factor.  She smiled in response and he smiled even broader, putting his thumb up.  She responded with a thumbs up and an even broader smile.

Yes, the smugness factor is critical in the religion of environmentalism.  Just as it used to be in religion and in some places still is today.  It is the preservation of this wonderfully easy to attain smugness factor that causes the elite environmentalist to flare into such vicious anger when a scientist such as myself questions any part of the following thesis:

• The Earth is warming at an unusually high rate.
• This warming is caused by the greenhouse effect of CO2 in the atmosphere.
• Man has been putting more and more CO2 into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Age in about 1850.  This CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for 50 to 200 years, causing virtually all of the  concentration increase measured since 1850.
  
• This increased atmospheric concentration has caused the greenhouse effect due to CO2 to increase greatly and caused the rapid temperature increases of the late 20th Century.
• There are further run-away effects which may well cause the CO2 greenhouse effect to heat the Earth catastrophically.
• We must use much less fossil fuel, indeed virtually none at all, if we are to avoid this catastrophe and we must stop using it very quickly.

Now, one might think that assessing these issues would be a matter for very rational scientific and economic thought.  I have many times in the past disputed other ideas held widely among the college educated socialist-leaning elite.  In the 1960s and early 1970s, I strongly opposed the urban bulldozing of the homes of the poor in the inner cities and I have long opposed the idea that government can be entrusted with the education of our children.  I was called callous toward the poor for these reasons.  I have opposed Affirmative Action as morally wrong and as an insult to those minorities who were said to be unable to compete without it.  I was sometimes called a racist.  But never have I been attacked with such vitriol has I have been for arguing against the tenets of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

Let's review some of the things said about me for claiming the catastrophic man-made global warming argument above was wrong.  Here are some examples in response to asking fellow alumni from Brown University and Case Western Reserve University on LinkedIn if they were aware of a faculty member at the university who was skeptical of catastrophic AGW and the ensuing discussion:

Ian Forrester said... "Solar induced cooling [my noting that water vapor and CO2 absorb solar insolation before it reaches the surface]? What evidence do you have of that nonsense. Please try and behave like a scientist if you are claiming to be one."  Then later said:  "You don't really have a Ph D do you? How anyone who has a real Ph D would refer to Plimer's book as "excellent" just shows what little knowledge of science you have."

Rick LeFauve said "Perhaps you need to check the NASCAR dept?

Michael Thomenius said "Dr. Anderson... you are currently engaging in a internet behavior known as trolling [apparently trolling my own posted question]. It is generally considered to be psychologically akin to flashing or putting shaving cream on someone's door knob." Later: "Perhaps your next post will use the phrase "the ethically questionable practice of abortion", "the controversial theory of evolution" or "the massive failings of the Bush White House"."  Then still later: "It's just rude."  Still later: "I am bent on making rants like your's unwelcome."

Lonnie Fogel: "And the world is flat!", using the common put-down of catastrophic AGW deniers as flat-earthers.

I was also called a racist for opposing Obama on his carbon cap and trade legislation, called a flat-earther on several other occasions, accused of believing that the Earth was only a few thousand years old, accused elsewhere of believing that women should not be allowed abortions, frequently accused of only listening to Fox News, and frequently informed that I was anti-science.  And, of course, I was told that I should submit to the overwhelming consensus of other scientists that catastrophic AGW was real innumerable times, laying my own independent judgment aside.

The last time such homogeneity of belief was required was in a communist country such as North Korea, Cuba, Red China, or the USSR, or in many of the Muslim countries.  In the Western European tradition, we have to go back to the times when small disagreements on elements of the Christian religion could subject men to death in earlier times and then still to complete ostracism in later times.  Why is belief in catastrophic AGW so important to so many today?

As has been often observed, many of today's environmentalists are really socialists on the inside wrapped in a green cover.  They are often described as watermelons.  This is largely true.  The failure of the USSR and the conversion of Red China into a strange mix of control and command economy with some encouragements to private enterprise, the failure of socialism to become thoroughly accepted by the American people, the phenomena of many Western European countries backing away from socialism to revive their economies, and the improvement of East European countries after they abandoned communism all left these socialists very dispirited.  Environmentalism gave them a more acceptable cause to rally around.

Now if socialism was supposed to improve the condition of the common man, it was apparent very long ago that it was a failure.  Those who continued to find socialism appealing in most cases had ulterior motives.  Very often they were educated people who claimed they had an obligation to help those who were poor, discriminated against, or disabled because those people could not help themselves.  These people were educated in government schools and government is always seeking to discover problems it can use to justify an expansion of government power, frequently in defiance of the constitutions which limit their power.  These schools are pervaded by extensive propaganda designed for this purpose.  The universities continue this program of propaganda because they are often funded mostly by government or their research programs are funded by government and their faculty chose a university environment often because they do not like private enterprise.  Power and income for such faculty comes with being very cozy with government.  Claiming that many people are downtrodden and in need of government help and hence the help of the educated elite furthers this goal, while allowing the educated elite to feel very superior and to gain a virtue easily earned by simply advocating many new government programs.

But, the clear failures of socialism put this program of moral smugness, power, and money self-aggrandizement for the educated elite in jeopardy.  In earlier times, the socialists had often been impressed by the philosophical viewpoint of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who pictured the ideal state of man as that of primitive men in close touch with nature.  The socialists mostly liked his opposition to the capitalist industrial age, while mostly opposing Rousseau in that they claimed they wanted the common man to have the benefit of many of the worldly goods then available to the middle class.

The modern frustrated socialists could hardly admit that the only way the common man was going to live like the middle class of old was for countries to turn whole-heartedly toward Capitalism.  First, this would be to admit they had been wrong.  Second, the Capitalist system inherently accepts the idea that most people are capable of managing their own lives in accordance with the values they have chosen for themselves.  What would be the exalted function of the educated elite in such a system?  My God, they would really have to work and actually become productive to be admired and to earn the comforts they felt entitled to by virtue of their many years of study.  This would not do.

So, the only other direction they could see to turn in was that of Rousseau who viewed modern man as a destroyer of nature.  This view they could adopt and claim that their knowledge and advice was essential to the government which would use its force to reign in the appetites of the people for more and more goods.  People now, even poor people, were living better than the kings of 200 years ago.  It would not be easy to get them to give up their newly acquired worldly goods in the name of protecting the environment and loving nature and Mother Earth.  The development of a religious fervor for nature would be necessary.  Man would have to be convinced that he was the destroyer of nature and with its destruction he, of course, was at risk.  This promise of catastrophe would cause the now unbelievably wealthy poor and middle class all to join with these frustrated college-educated elitists in the common goal of saving Mother Earth.

But, most men are not altogether comfortable viewing themselves as destroyers.  So, you logically enlist them as saviors of the Earth by getting them to recycle goods which are not economical to recycle and by convincing them that they are doing the Earth great good if they use less fossil fuel energy, even though there is no real scientific evidence that man's emissions of CO2 due to using fossil fuels are creating any catastrophic anthropogenic global warming at all.  But, such a claim gives people a mission and makes them part of the cause.

Meanwhile, the educated elite still can believe they are essential and in control and morally superior because they are the priests of this new religion.  They provide the scientific evidence that man is destroying the Earth, they get to rail against the Industrial Age of the Capitalists they have always hated, they get lots of money and prestige for developing the alternative energy, CO2 sequestration schemes, and sustainability advances in the universities, and they get to remain advisers to the governments on all the development of new government programs to address the overwhelmingly large issues due to man harming the environment.  At the same time, that hated private sector can be diminished.

Unfortunately for our college-educated elite of socialists turned environmentalists, most people kinda like their many worldly goods, services, and their property.  When, they do not have to give these up, or give up their jobs, or be much more heavily taxed, they are rather susceptible to the argument from authority provided by the league of college-educated elitist socialists/environmentalists.  But, when the level of pain they are expected to bear becomes greater, they start to pay attention and, it turns out, their minds are not so feeble as the elitists thought they were.  More and more begin to question the reality of such theses as catastrophic man-made global warming.  The polls in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States are all showing this awakening phenomena of the common man.

You see, it turns out that the Capitalist idea that most men are capable of managing their own lives is right.  They are not the dumb automatons the college-educated socialist elite often thinks they are.  But, of course, it does help if some college-educated scientists and economists do help them to acquire the data and the arguments that counter those of the college-educated socialist/environmentalist elite.  For one thing, the consensus they have so much argued exists begins to look a lot less monolithic.  It becomes more and more acceptable to question the orthodoxy of the new religion.  The college-educated dogma denier is now hated by the elite as a turncoat, a heretic, why even the devil himself.

So, the college-educated socialist/environmentalist elitist tries to shut up the dogma denier with assertions that since they mostly agree, he must be wrong.  Or, they pretend it is his duty to prove them wrong, while they claim any argument he makes against their thesis is wrong because they do not agree with him and that is clear in the peer-reviewed journals they control.  They say he is unscientific because he does not bow to the consensus of the many pro-catastrophic anthropogenic global warming articles in the college-dominated peer-reviewed literature.  They call him rude for discussing the matter.  They describe him as a mere internet personality.  They assume that since he is a turncoat from their viewpoint, then he must have all the attributes they believe the non-elite have.

So, what are these non-elite attributes?  Well, the non-elite love NASCAR.  The non-elite do not think a woman has a right to an abortion.  The non-elite believe the Earth is flat.  The non-elite do not believe in evolution.  The non-elite are racist.  The non-elite watch Fox News.

I do not pay attention to NASCAR, though I have analyzed hard coatings used in their engines and drive-trains and I have a brother who enjoys NASCAR.  I see nothing wrong with enjoying NASCAR.  I do believe a woman has a right to an abortion, but I also believe taxpayer money cannot morally be used for the purpose.  I know the earth to be round and I think the theory of evolution is well-founded.  I am not a racist.

I do watch Fox News, since it is the only television news which is not biased against Capitalism.  But I also read widely on the Internet, read The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, The Washington Examiner, Forbes, The Economist, many science and technology journals, and many books.  But, I am at fault for not reading the New York Times or the Washington Post, though two copies of the latter are delivered to our home daily.  Actually, I do read it, but mostly just the Sports section, showing my non-elitist true soul.  The two copies are for the wealth of coupons my wife clips from them.  She saves much more money a week than the cost of the two subscriptions and she likes to read about concerts and museum exhibits, as well as the news in them.

But, back to what this all shows us about the thinking of the college-educated socialist/environmentalist elitist.  You see, when they were mostly just socialists, it really did not bother them that there was good evidence, which many behind the Iron Curtain knew all too well, that the common man was not faring well in those socialist utopias compared to the poor souls in those nasty sort-of Capitalist countries of the West.  No, the western elitists were still enthusiastic socialists.  How could this be?  After all, they claimed they believed in socialism to help the poor and the common man.  Well, the reality was they really did not much care about the poor or the common man.  How could they?  They really thought those people were to be looked down upon.  How can you respect anyone you do not even think can manage their own lives?  So, when they saw these common people loving NASCAR, then NASCAR became something to be sneered at.  The claim of interest in the common man was disingenuous.  It was really a lust for power and money and influence and that wonderful feeling of easily acquired moral smugness.  They all agreed among themselves that they were wonderful, good, enlightened people.

The same is the case now that they have transformed into environmental/socialists.  The fact that the only evidence for global warming by CO2 was a combination of excluding rural measurement stations giving true temperature readings in favor of sites with urban heat island effects or stations too close to homes, grills, air-conditioner vents, or newly applied coatings to hold in the heat of day into the evening, and absolutely crazy raw temperature data manipulations does not really matter to these people.  This is no more important than the knowledge of decades of human suffering in the communist countries was.  The only thing important is to keep the common man from becoming aware of this.  Pure socialism only lost its public supportability when the common man saw its obvious failure with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the re-unification of Germany, and the rise of commerce and trade in China.

If it becomes known to the common people that the scientific theory the elitists backed so strongly that man was destroying the Earth by emitting CO2 from his use of fossil fuels is wrong, they do not know where to turn next for an easy route to smug moral superiority, to power, to wealth, influence, and respect.  It has become absolutely vital to shut down those scientists who say the science of catastrophic CO2-induced global warming is wrong.  I will not shut up.  It is absolutely vital that every American becomes aware of the truth that the warming of the late 20th Century was much milder than the alarmists claimed, that it was not caused in any significant measure by man's use of fossil fuels, and that the declaration by the EPA that CO2 is a pollutant is nonsense, as is the idea that carbon cap and trade will accomplish anything to keep the world from overheating.

Well, these college-educated socialist/environmentalist elitists are an inventive lot, so maybe they will come up with another reason we should all bow to them in the near future.  But they are running mighty scared right now and they are striking out like a wounded bear backed into a corner.  Note all the crazy things they are saying about how unimportant the document dump from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia is.  Note how they deny all chinks in the science of their crazy hypothesis of CO2-dominated warming.  The People are not going to sleep through this.  These socialist/environmentalist elitists are going to have pay for this fraud on the People.

Gov. Mark Sanford

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford is a curious mixture of libertarian and conservative political ideas. His concepts of family life as publicly espoused are based upon common moral viewpoints of the Christian religion. It has become a major news story that this man who has been recently in the news for rejecting bailout money and his libertarian/conservative fiscal viewpoint has violated the Christian moral idea of marriage. Indeed, he has. This does show him to be a hypocrite.

But, all Christians are sinners. Some sin worse than others. At least Mark Sanford was not one of the common breed of governors who believes in hugely expanded government with all the additional use of force that entails to select the people's values for them and to force them to live their lives in accordance with those selected values. So, he is a sinner as an adulterer in accordance with his own stated moral principles, but these are impractical principles from a religion which frankly says they are impractical. That religion does not say that a politician has to lust mightily for power and to thwart the free will of the people, yet most of our politicians do just that. Compared to them, Mark Sanford is just a little sinner.

Judged by a more rational moral code than that of Christianity, it is not clear that his loving an Argentinian woman was immoral at all. Perhaps she is worthy of his love. We do know that she had long been a friend and that this was unlikely to have been a casual love. This may be a very genuine and deserved love and Mark Sanford may love his wife also, for all I know.

I can say that he should not accept the conventional Christian morality as being moral, but many people have that fault. Pretty much every politician claims to accept it, at least for the most part. This is also a fault of the people who elect politicians to office. We are hardly likely to see anything better in a democracy.

Clearly, he did fail to perform a duty as Governor of the state of South Carolina by disappearing and not staying in touch with the state government apparatus. It is fair and appropriate to take note of this.

In the end, this is another illustration of why even very capable and thinking people cannot live in accordance with Christian morality, which is inappropriate for human beings living on this earth. We all have an obligation to ourselves, to those we love, and to those we wish to live with in a civilized nation, to discover a rational moral code for life appropriate to human beings in the real world. Mark Sanford may be a tragically damaged man due to his and many Americans holding a much less than rational moral code for life.

Tax Slavery

We should all be keenly aware that we not only pay taxes, but we also bear costs in the time it takes to keep records for tax purposes and to fill out tax forms. We should also be very aware of the costs in general of our time to abide with such government regulations as are irrational and excessive.

It is not really the tax money itself that we should be focused on. We should be focused on the cost in our time to taxes, regulations, and mandates. Viewed that way, it is much clearer that we are not the masters of that time. Our masters in Washington and in our state and local governments are taking those hours of our lives from us. To the degree that those governments exceed their proper role of serving as the protectors of our sovereign individual rights, they are enslaving us. In our time, government violations of this rule for good government are so prevalent that the great majority of the time represented by taxes, regulations, and mandates is that time we serve as Slaves.

Most Americans greatly underestimate the amount of taxes that they pay. We are taxed on our incomes for Social Security, Medicare, unemployment taxes (both state and federal), and Workman's Compensation Insurance. You may argue that the employer pays some of these taxes, but that is a pretense. They all really come out of your pocket. You are generally hit with sales taxes, utility taxes, luxury or bad habit taxes, tariffs, corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, license fees, car registrations, title fees on cars and homes, real estate taxes, higher food costs due to farm subsidies, fuel taxes, inflation, and death taxes. Very few people have any idea how much they are paying in taxes. Almost everyone thinks it is far less than it is. For instance, almost no one thinks they pay corporate taxes. But they do every time they buy something made by a corporation. And how many realize that the time their employer spends on accounting, on paying payroll taxes, on filing other taxes, and paying real estate and property taxes is all taking away other uses of money and time which could have been used to make the company stronger.

I am sure that many of you are still busy filing your taxes. I still have to do mine. But, when you can, you should pay more attention to the many costs of government that you are paying with your time and money. You should then carefully assess whether the services you get are really worth what is taken from you. You should also think about whether governments taking your time and money has a moral or an immoral justification.