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.

The US-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement and Compounded Growth

The Associated Press has distributed an article claiming that the International Trade Commission, an independent federal agency, says that Trump's new USMCA trade agreement will only yield an increase to the GDP of 0.35%.  To claim that this is a negligible effect is to be ignorant of compounded growth and the many other possibilities that government has for avoiding putting burdens on the private sector that impede economic growth.

If the US private sector economy grows by 2.9% a year or it grows by 3.25% instead, this can make a bigger difference than most people think it will.  The average American is going to live another 40 years, so let us project the effects of this difference in annual growth rate over a 40 year period.  An economy growing at a rate of 2.9% rate will be 3.138 times larger in 40 years than it was at the start.  An economy growing at a rate of 3.25% a year, or a 0.35% higher rate, will be 3.594 times larger.  This projected higher growth rate economy is 14.5% larger than the projected slower growth rate economy is.  That is a substantial difference.

Now some readers are going to say that the USMCA trade agreement will not increase the economy's growth rate by 0.35% every year over 40 years.  That is probably correct.  A really good agreement might be able to do that, but the Trump agreement probably will not do that.  However, there are a plethora of ways that the federal government can take actions year after year that will allow the economy to grow by an additional 0.35% that year than it would otherwise.  The government can roll back expensive regulations with little rational reason to exist.  It can desist from instituting new regulations that cost more than they are rationally worth.  A decrease in the number of expensive and irrational regulations would give American companies much assurance that investing money in increased production in the USA will be profitable.  It is immensely damaging when a President declares that he intends to wipe out an industry he does not like and in so doing hurt supporting companies and the jobs of tens of thousands of Americans, as Obama did to the coal industry and his party threatens to do to the oil and gas industries.  It could stop over-withholding income taxes so that money could be circulating in the private sector economy at a higher velocity.  It can and should reduce taxes.  It should release many government employees so they can do productive work in the private sector.  It should release millions of acres of land it holds so that land can be put to much more productive use in the private sector.  It could take steps to greatly reduce absurd burdens due to excessive legal actions against companies simply because they may have deep pockets.

There are so many ways the federal government and state and local governments could act to see that future private sector growth rates are 0.35% larger year after year.  In fact, when Obama was suppressing the growth rates to levels of about 2%, the 40 year result compared to a 3.25% growth rate result is even more dramatic.  After 40 years at a growth rate of 2%, the economy is 2.208 times larger, while at a rate of 3.25% growth it is 3.594 times larger.  The higher growth rate economy at 40 years is 1.628 times larger than the Obama normal growth rate economy.  Imagine how much of an impact that added growth then has on the every day lives of Americans.  That larger society will provide much better medical care, produce much more advanced technology, have a much greater understanding of reality, provide individuals with many more options in life, and will surely allow a massive increase in charitable giving.

It is very foolish to minimize even seemingly small improvements in the economic growth rate.  The growth of the private sector is the basis for improvements in the richness and security of our lives.  We have the option of allowing the economy to grow at compounded higher growth rates that will make huge differences in the quality of our lives in our lifetimes and in those of our children.

Labor Union Membership, Right to Work, and Education

Labor unions have been having a tough time competing in the private sector for a long time and now are even shrinking as a percentage of government workers.  In 2015, union workers were 11.1% of the work force.  This fell to 10.7% in 2016 with a loss of 240,000 union members.  Only 6.4% of private sector workers are now union members.  The mainstay of the unions is in the government sector with 29.6% of state government employees being union members and 40.3% of local government employees being members.  The local government union membership is much inflated by the many teachers who pretend to manage 25 or 30 people in the classroom, but are really blue-collar workers unable to negotiate their own work compensation as individuals.  The high percentage of government workers in unions has more recently been falling so that the percentages above are 15-year lows.

Within the last year, West Virginia and Kentucky have become Right to Work states, increasing the number of Right to Work states to 27.  There is a good chance that Missouri will soon become a Right to Work state.  In the 2016 election, a Republican who championed Right to Work hard won the governorship in Missouri despite the unions supplying the Democrat who opposed Right to Work with more than $10 million of campaign funds and other support.  Missouri voters returned every one of the state legislators to office who supported Right to Work.  Missouri, like other states with forced union dues collection, has been losing jobs to states with Right to Work laws.  The bordering states of Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky all have Right to Work laws.  Only the basket case state of Illinois still maintains forced unionization on its borders.

You would not know it based on the recent campaign rhetoric, but manufacturing jobs increased by 236,000 in 2016.  Despite that overall growth in manufacturing jobs, union membership decreased by 74,000.  The growth in manufacturing jobs has been in Right to Work states.  In 2016, union membership in the 25 states that were Right to Work states for the full year decreased by 290,000, falling from 7.1% to 6.5%.  Membership in forced unionization states increased by 50,000, making it clear how dependent labor unions are on forced unionization.  Union membership increased in only one-quarter of the states with Right to Work laws, while increasing in 60% of those with forced unionization.  The percentage of Michigan workers in labor unions has fallen by 2.2% since Michigan became a Right to Work state in 2013.  Government worker unions lost their privileged powers in Wisconsin in 2011 and since then union membership has fallen by 136,000 workers or by 40%!

The loss of union power over the school systems in Wisconsin since 2011 and the freeing of school systems to pay teachers on their individual merit, is improving education in those school systems that have moved to the individual merit evaluation and compensation of teachers.  A Stanford University researcher, Barbara Biasi, has found that the school systems that have chosen to stick with union-favored seniority compensation programs rather than individual merit programs are falling behind the individual merit school systems.  Governor Scott Walker's Act 10 collective bargaining reform has allowed the thinking school systems to improve.  Who would think that evaluating and rewarding individual teaching ability would improve education?  Clearly the Democrats who claimed this would undermine the government-run school system would not allow this possibility.  How surprising it is that there is a correlation between being a capable teacher and classroom manager and being capable of negotiating your own working conditions and compensation!

Only 8 Years Ago Alarmists Were Sure the U.S. Was Out of Gas

Many environmentalists and anti-business people in the U.S., most centered in the Democrat Socialist Party, were sure that the U.S. production of oil and gas was going to rapidly dwindle.  It was one of their many reasons for attacking U.S. oil companies as dinosaurs of the past.  It was time to make these dinosaurs extinct, at least with a government-controlled and accelerated culling and size-reduction plan.  Oil and gas when burned both produced the fatal gas carbon dioxide, which was claimed to be slowly or not so slowly killing the planet.  We were told that the only energy that made sense was the so-called renewable energy sources of windmills, photovoltaic devices, and all sorts of plants grown for fuel.  These people backed Obama for the presidency in 2008 and were rewarded as he allowed less and less production of oil and gas on the incredible acreage of federal lands and in the many off-shore areas controlled by the federal government.  Meanwhile, windmills and photovoltaic device arrays were offered subsidies and mandates with claims they would replace coal, oil, and gas in large part soon.

Because the renewable sources of energy proved, as I and many others said they would, to be expensive and unreliable, they have effectively proven to be non-renewable.  Investments in these energy sources have often failed and when they did not, it was only because of the subsidies and mandates that they managed a slow growth in energy output capability.  Let us compare the oil dinosaur in vigor:

The production information is from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.  The year at the bottom of the dip is 2008 when production was 1,829,985,000 barrels of oil, well down from the maximum production in 1970 of 3,517,450,000 barrels.  As the fracking revolution in oil production began, Obama was off-setting its initial gains by restricting oil production on federal lands.  In 2011, however, fracking oil production on private lands really took-off.  In 2015, oil production in U.S. fields was back to 3,436,515,000 barrels of oil.  Now, with the blessed end of the Obama Regime and the apparent desire of OPEC to give up its ruinous price war on oil, there is nothing to keep oil production in the U.S. from continuing to increase.  An end to the suppression of U.S. energy production heralded by the Trump administration and a Republican Congress as well, will be a great boon to the U.S. economy.

The story of shale oil production in the U.S. is shown below:

U.S. oil production already appeared certain to soon exceed that at its prior peak of 1970.  But at some point the Bakken and Eagle Ford and other known shale oil fields are likely to see lowered production.  Will other undiscovered oil fields take their place?  Yes!

In September, Apache Corp. announced that it Alpine High field in an area of the Permian Basin in West Texas holds 1.1 - 2.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil at current prices.  This area had been drilled many times by other companies with no finding of economically recoverable oil.

Then comes the blockbuster announcement by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) that the Wolfcamp Shale in the Midland Basin portion of the Permian Basin has 20 billion barrels of recoverable oil at current prices and 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.  Compare this to the largest oil producing field in North America, the Prudhoe Bay field of the north slope of Alaska with the 12 billion barrels of oil produced over 43 years.  The largest producing field in the Lower 48 is the East Texas oil field, which has produced 7 billion barrels of oil since the early 1930s.  The Wolfcamp Shale is now expected to produce nearly 3 times the oil of the Bakken - Three Forks capacity according to the USGS assessment in 2013.  The Wolfcamp Shale capacity is nearly 19 times that of the Eagle Ford field according to its 2012 assessment by the USGS.

Over time, the USGS estimates prove to be low due to increased knowledge about the oil field geology and to improvements in extraction technology.  How true this is, is clear from the fact that Midland, Texas is well within the Wolfcamp Shale area.  This huge discovery is entirely based on new technology, not on a failure of many an oil company to examine the area for its oil possibilities. Recall that George W. Bush spent his oil years in Midland, which had been an oil center prior to his arrival.

At current prices, the Wolfcamp Shale oil is worth about $900 billion.  Pioneer Natural Resources has drilling rights on 785,000 acres within the large field.  ConocoPhillips has Wolfcamp Shale holdings of 1.8 billion barrels.

I am sure that President Trump will be very happy to claim credit for all the new jobs that will be produced by the production of the Wolfcamp Shale!  Assuming he does not act as Obama has to try to suppress oil production, I suppose we will have to give him a portion of the credit, though in a healthier context we would give all of the credit to the oil field innovators and production experts of our wonderful private sector.

Progressivism Evolves from Soak the Rich to Soak the Poor

Progressivism used to pretend to soak the rich in order to provide welfare for the poor.  To some degree it did what it pretended to do, but it mostly hurt the middle class to provide welfare for the poor and a false and easy sense of morality to the rich.  Of course the rich looked down on the poor and claimed to make their supposedly miserable lives better even as they shut them off from joining the middle class.

The platform of the Hillary-run Democratic Party has now been proclaimed the most Progressive in terms of its environmental policies ever.  Tom Steyer, the single largest campaign donor of the 2014 elections with donations of about $74 million, has already spent $31.5 million on the 2016 campaign with most of his effort aimed at ensuring the Democratic Party has radical and destructive environmental and energy policies.  Once again, he is the biggest campaign donor so far in this election.  The Democrat pledge to end freedom of speech for corporations and for-profit companies is not intended to apply to this businessman's gigantic donations.  "Free speech for me, but none for you" is the motto of the Democrat Party.

Under the bought influence of Tom Steyer, the Democrat Party platform is the "most progressive environmental platform in the history of the Democratic platform or in the history of American politics", according to the buyer himself.  Steyer boasts that efforts to thwart climate change appear everywhere in the platform document.  “So it really isn’t a question of any one single silver bullet. It’s an attitude where we basically put it into every discussion we have, so when we’re talking about jobs, we’re also talking about clean energy, we’re also talking about fighting climate change.” 

Of course, the number of coal mining, oil and gas fracking, railroad, pipeline, and power plant jobs killed is de-emphasized and the number of so-called green energy jobs is hugely exaggerated.  The health benefits of using less and less fossil fuel are multiplied many times in their imaginative telling of the story.  The dangers of fossil fuels to the environment are blown to heroic proportions, while those of covering state-sized sunny areas with photovoltaics, boiling birds with directed and amplified sunlight, and blenderizing birds with spinning dicing blades are lost in silence.  Where any other structure made by man is an abomination to the beauty of nature, tall and broad wind generators are a problem only when they are in the backyard of wealthy "Progressive" aristocrats eager for the absolute power of the nobility of ages once thought behind us. The fact that the few unemployed coal miners so deep in despair that they commit suicide greatly exceed the numbers of those killed by air-borne pollutants downwind of coal-fired power plants, is never noted.  The fact that unemployed workers due to the war on fossil fuels who commit suicide can actually be counted, while there is no epidemiological evidence for those imagined downwind deaths due to the use of coal or natural gas in electric power generation plants, gives the aristocrats of power no qualms at all.

Not only does the War on Fossil Fuels cause unemployment and the destruction of huge prior capital investments, but it causes the cost of energy to go up greatly.  It also causes energy to be less reliably available.  Both increased cost and decreased reliability hurt the poor and the lower middle class the most.   They pay a larger fraction of their incomes for energy.  They are the most likely ones to lose their jobs, whether they work in an energy related field or for a company whose energy prices are going up because of the Democratic Party efforts to make them go up, or to skyrocket, as Obama once said was his purpose. Some companies are so dependent on reliable energy that as energy becomes unreliable, their costs go up due to lost time and production.  My own materials analysis laboratory is such an example of a company that pays a terrible price when the electricity goes down.  And while the rich can afford a stand-by generator at their home, less than rich Americans commonly cannot afford that luxury.

So, the Democratic Party "Progressive Environmental Agenda" is absolutely committed to harming the poor and generally the less than wealthy.  It offers rich scammers wondrous opportunities to turn modest campaign contributions into huge government loans and grants for their fake green energy companies, which fail left and right, err ... left and left and left.  The companies go bankrupt after paying the principals great salaries and the taxpayers lose the money they loaned the fraudulent companies and receive little in innovations for their grants.  The green companies last longer than they should because of additional mandates that their energy output be used to meet unrealistically high quotas.  The economic fallacy of a government-directed economy once-again has proven the principle that government direction is vastly inferior to private sector direction. 

It takes but a little unproductive kick to the head of the private sector to significantly reduce the growth of the per capita real private sector income.  The new big government real per-capita private sector income growth rate is about 1%.  This is the growth rate which the new Progressive Democrat program will actually try to decrease in the name of the environment. Most Americans can expect to live another 40 years.  So under the "Progressive" embraced 1% real per-capita private sector income growth rate, that essential measure of the health of the economy will be 1.489 times larger than it is today.  An easily achievable growth rate, with a modest decrease in the size of government and in regulations, of 2%, gives us a private  sector economy which is 2.208 times larger than what our economy is now.  A little more effort to reduce the relative size and scope of government could achieve a real per-capita growth rate of 3% a year.  At the end of 40 years, the private sector economy would be 3.262 times larger than it is now.

So, the economy desired by the Democrat Party in 40 years will be a pip-squeak economy compared to that of an economy with a real per-capita growth rate of 3%, such as a smaller government economy can readily achieve.  The smaller government private sector economy is 3.262 / 1.489 = 2.19 times larger.  Does big government really offer sufficient value to trade it for an economy that can readily be more than twice as big in 40 years?  The many more jobs and much better paying jobs of 40 years from now also will come with many more improved products, more scientific advancement, much better medical care, much more national security, improved retirement security, and even more ability to treat the environment with care than will the Democratic Party dream private sector economy dominated by big government.

This choice really is a no-brainer choice.  It requires one to shun the truly retrogressive Democratic Party platform and to embrace with confidence the productivity advantages of the private sector.  One has only to understand that the fear and the alarmism spread by the Democrats on the environment and against the private sector comes with horrible consequences for our future, that of our children, and especially that of our grandchildren. It appears that Democrats simply do not care about the future.  In fact, the near zero economic growth of the Middle Ages appears to be their favored growth model.  For some of them, the ravages of the plague with huge population and economic decreases are even better.  So of course, not caring about the future of human beings, they represent themselves as Progressives!  That lie and their refusal to recognize the existence of individuality in their embrace of collectivism are the most fundamental errors of their political worldview.  These are grievous, unnecessary errors indeed.

The Severe Limits of Social Justice

The idea that the government should force every individual of our society to provide Social Justice is a central belief of Progressive Elitists.  The implementation of their Social Justice agenda is a massive injustice.  Let us examine the reasons that make this the case.

Justice has meaning in the relationships of individuals and meaning as an aim of government.  In the relationships of individuals, justice exists when an individual correctly identifies the value of another individual based on his character and actions.  This evaluation is clearly dependent upon one's ethical code.  Consequently, an individual will not correctly identify the value of another individual when his moral code is not correct or when he holds himself to no moral principles.

Suppose an individual has a correct moral code and is highly capable in applying that code to the complex problem of evaluating the worth of another individual on the objective assessment of observations of his character as witnessed by his actions in life.  This highly competent judge of value in other individuals will nonetheless not be able to form a valid opinion of the worth of all the other people he encounters in his life simply because he will not know enough about many of them to form an objective opinion.  He will only be able to do justice to those he knows sufficiently well.

This objective moral evaluator will understand that when dealing with people who he does not know well enough, he should be careful not to do an injustice to them.  This is at least the case in the context of a society in which the initiated use of force by individuals is prohibited, as it is by legitimate governments.  A further requirement is that the government itself uses no more force than that needed to prevent the initiated use of force among individuals.  Once the use of force is minimized in a society, then an individual can afford to live by the principle that he should hold a benevolent assumption that others are not a threat to his life and he may assume that others are of significant value until they actually prove otherwise in actions he has had the opportunity to observe. Thus the rational individual in a free society acts on the principle that he should not do others the injustice of assuming them a threat to his life.  In voluntary associations with them, he can assume that they will trade values to their mutual benefit or they will be free not to have any association at all.

This benevolent assumption of value in others is conditional on a society in which our interactions with others are of a voluntary nature.  It assumes that when we trade values in our interactions, we are not being forced to do so.  A government which harms some individuals in order to provide favors to other individuals or groups, as our present government does on a major scale, is actively making some groups a threat to the lives of many individuals.  It undermines or even denies the basis under which one may make the benevolent assumption of value in others.  It can actually force individuals to do the injustice to others of having to assume that they are a threat to his life until and unless they prove that they are not a threat and actually are a value.  This is what has happened in many fascist and communistic societies.  Big Government or statist government is a basic threat to justice in this way.

Government can clearly be the means by which massive injustice comes to characterize a society. How can government be prevented from being the cause of injustice?  It is by forcing government to observe the rights of the individual.  The rights of the individual are determined by the nature of man and by a basic core morality.  As Ayn Rand said in her essay Man's Rights:

"Rights" are a moral concept -- the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual's actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others -- the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context -- the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics.  Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

A "right" is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context.  There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man's right to his own life.  Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action -- which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.)

The concept of a "right" pertains only to action -- specifically, to freedom of action.  It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.

Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive -- of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice.  As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligation except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights.

The freedom to act on your own judgment implies the need for freedom of conscience and the exercise of voluntary choices within a society requires the freedom of association.  Freedom of speech does not exist unless one is allowed to advocate wrong ideas from the perspective of others or even with respect to reality.  Similarly, freedom of conscience does not exist if one is not allowed to have ideas, including moral ideas, that are wrong.  Freedom of association does not exist unless one is allowed to unjustly err in assessing the value of others.

While rights are a means of securing morality in the actions of government, those moral principles that government must recognize are the most basic and most core moral beliefs.  The government must not dictate more than the most basic of moral requirements on the individuals of the society it serves.  Government protection of the exercise of individual rights requires it to allow individuals to choose their own values and to manage their own lives in accordance with their own values.  The bare minimum of morality that forms the foundation of rights is the recognition that the individual must take actions to secure his life and to maintain it in a healthy state.  He has the right to pursue his own happiness. To take such actions effective in their purpose, he must be free to think and to pursue the information and develop the knowledge necessary to that effective action. Both freedom of thought and action for such purposes are critical values and he must have property rights to values he produces by his thought and actions.  But, he does not have the right to initiate the use of force against others, as they do not have that right against him.  No one has the right to use the force of government to do harm to others either, unless those others have first initiated the use of force.

Rights reside in the individual.  The individual is the sovereign rights-holder.  Rights are not a grant or a privilege from government.  Rights arise from the nature of man, not from the nature of the state. The state either protects the rights of the individual or it does not.  It either performs its legitimate function or it does not.

Man, whether singly or in numbers, is not omniscient.  The development of knowledge and the understanding of nature are difficult.  In attempting to understand our reality we all make mistakes and no one achieves a complete knowledge.  This is a critical part of our understanding of man's nature and of the complexity of the reality in which man lives.  This being the case, it is not reasonable to expect that all men will agree on most moral issues and most value judgments.  So how can we live in a society together even when we are not in complete agreement, or maybe even in considerable agreement, about moral decisions?  The practical answer to this is to have a government that only enforces a minimum of moral requirements.  The answer is a government that simply prohibits the initiated use of force and protects our individual rights.  We are then left the freedom to make our own value choices and to associate with others of our choice voluntarily in the private sector to pursue our common values and to trade with one another to our mutual advantage.  In this private sector we can all aim to achieve every one of our values and to gain values we want in every association and cooperative endeavor we have with others.  This is not the case in the government sector, once government expands beyond its legitimate purpose as the protector of individual rights.

The Progressive Elitists say no to this concept of individual rights.  They claim that rights are really only privileges granted those favored by government.  Those privileges may be changed at the whim of government, at least if that government is controlled by a democratic vote, whether fraudulent or not.  They say the purpose of government is not to secure and protect the rights of the individual, but to ensure Social Justice.

An individual cannot form a just assessment of the character of everyone he encounters, so he cannot offer everyone justice.  But, he can adopt the principle that he will do no one an actual injustice and he will most certainly not initiate the use of force against others.  How can a government do more than this?  A government does not have a moral assessment of every one of the individuals within the country.  The government is still composed of a number of individuals and that number of individuals will never come close to having adequate objective knowledge of the character of most individuals in the country to form a valid assessment of their individual worth.  The government can no more provide justice to everyone than can an individual.

How does a government embarked on the endeavor of Social Justice respond to this inadequacy?  It must simplify the problem.  Its response to insufficient knowledge is a classification scheme that simplifies individual differences by assigning individuals to categories.  Individuals are complex, so a given individual will be thrown into many categories, with his particular combination of characteristics largely lost to the process.  The individual may be characterized by many pixels of information, but the whole of the individual is eradicated.  For instance, one individual may be a count in each of the following categories:

• Skin color or the area of the origin of his ancestors
• Male or female or transgender
• Age
• Married or unmarried
• Dependent children or not
• Child care users or not
• Home-owner or not
• Income level
• Wealth level
• Veteran or not
• Heterosexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other flavors of sexuality
• Employer or employee
• Employed, seeking employment, or not seeking employment
• Labor union member or not
• Supporter of bigger government or not a supporter
• Contributor to favored charities and non-profits or not
• Healthy or unhealthy
• Paid health insurance or not
• Citizen, legal resident, or illegal alien
• Supporter of green energy and catastrophic man-made global warming or not
• Borrower or lender
• Farmer or not
• Exporter or not
• Bank accounts abroad or not

On and on the classification counting goes, but Abigail Adams and Patrick Henry cannot be reconstructed from the many bits they have been parsed into.  The individual himself is totally eradicated.  But with this simplification, the government can now pretend to pursue Social Justice.

Now having partitioned the population into numerous categories, the government can indulge in legislation aimed at helping certain categories and hurting other categories.  When helping a category, the usual justification is a claim that Social Justice is being served.  If preferences in hiring to certain ancestral groups or to one gender are legislated, Social Justice is served.  If income or property is transferred from someone who has worked hard to become educated and worked hard in business to subsidize someone else who has spent endless hours watching TV sitcoms and horror movies and who partied and played instead of studying, then Social Justice is served.  If a person unhealthy due to tobacco smoking and overeating of junk food has difficulty affording health insurance, then force healthy and young people to pay much more for their insurance in order to subsidize unhealthy behaviors in the name of Social Justice.  If it is impolitic to make employees file their own payroll tax forms and send their own tax payments to the government, then in the name of Social Justice make the employer spend his time providing this unpaid service.  If the taxpayer wants to contribute to a non-profit organization supporting individual rights, do not allow that organization to become a tax-exempt organization or if it already is and he contributes $250 a year to it, take down his name as an enemy of Social Justice.  If an individual or organization notes that the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis is a proven failure, prosecute him as a racketeer under RICO in the name of Social Justice.

Social Justice can be used to justify every act of special interest favoritism.  It is used to justify every instance in which the government hurts some individuals or groupings of individuals to supposedly help another grouping.  Endless numbers of groups are pitted against one another for the favors of government or to at least avoid being the victim of government.  The result is a general breakdown of the voluntary interactions that make it possible for one individual to assume that another has value to his life prior to his actually having such an evaluation of the character of that other individual.  It becomes easy to determine if that individual is a threat to one's life in many cases.  If you are an employer, then employees are a threat, especially if they are members of a government-favored labor union.  If you are a so-called white male, than anyone who is not a white male is a threat due to government favoritism.  If you have a high income or are wealthy, then those with significantly lower incomes or wealth are a threat by virtue of their ability to provide larger numbers of votes for a politician.

Because of government favors rendered in the name of Social Justice and the battle to be designated a special interest, society is broken into numerous, nearly innumerable, groups at war with one another to control the use of government force for their advantage.  The separation of interests of each individual into many categories is a great aid to minimizing the opposition of individuals to the government taking control of many aspects of their lives.  Each enabling act of legislation or each bureaucratic regulation commonly helps a group under one category at the expense of a group in another category.  The group hurt is hurt in one aspect of their lives, but that group still has many reasons to be busy attending to the many other aspects of their lives.  They cannot afford to spend a great deal of time opposing the new act that is imposing upon their individual rights and depriving them of their values and freedom.  The government pursuing Social Justice counts on this to perpetrate its accumulation of more and more power over the life of every individual. 

The Social Justice pursuing government cannot allow anyone to disagree with its moral proclamations.  Disagreement implies a violation of justice within this framework.  It becomes policy for the government to become intolerant of different views of ethics and of different value judgments. If you disagree with affirmative action for the hiring of Black Americans, you are a racist and because you are wrong, you do not have the right to say that affirmative action is wrong.  But, note that if you do not have the right to be wrong, then you have no right to freedom of speech.  If you believe you have religious reasons for thinking gay marriage is wrong and will not produce a wedding cake for a gay marriage, you must be fined heavily enough to destroy your small bakery. You cannot be wrong about this moral issue, so you are not allowed freedom of conscience, freedom of association, or the freedom of free trade.  If government claims that some scientific theory implies that harm is being done to someone and you claim the science of that theory is wrong, you are proclaimed guilty of Social Injustice to those the theory claims will be harmed.  You do not then have the right of free inquiry, free speech, freedom of the press, and you do not have the right to develop scientific understanding because you are not serving Social Justice as determined by the government.

Governmental pursuit of Social Justice imposes much more highly elaborated moral theory on the people of a nation than does the legitimate government whose only purpose is to protect individual rights.  That theory will neither be consistent nor highly rational since the government is chosen by those who vote and they are notably not experts in ethical theory.  What is worse, because there is an enforced intolerance of differing moral beliefs, the People are denied the benefit of a free discussion of morality.  Moral ideas are never tested and improved in the free market for the development of knowledge.  

Even if the People were thoughtful about ethics, they might be wrong and the politicians they vote for might trade ethics for geld or power in their dealings with the myriad special interests vying for the great powers exerted by Social Justice-pursing government.  Such government must violate individual rights.  It must act largely in ignorance of the interests of many of the People.  It must act to hurt many people in the name of helping others.  It must use force much more often than will the individual rights protecting government.  It must minimize the voluntary and co-operative relationships found in the private sector and replace them with involuntary mandates and transfers of income and wealth, jobs, medical care, education, housing, and innumerable other values.  The harmony of the private sector must be replaced with the strife of the Big Government sector.  All of this is a necessary consequence of a government pursuing Social Justice as envisioned by the Progressive Elitists.  In reality, this is the ultimate Social Injustice.

The closest a society can come to maximizing Social Justice is to be a society that honors individuality and protects the rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.  The best a society can do is to protect these individual rights equally and to provide an environment in which the use of force is minimized by not allowing either individuals or the government to initiate the use of force.  The rational individual will understand his own life and his freedom to manage and secure his own life is his greatest value.  He understands that to do that he must be free to think and to act upon his thoughts, with only such limits as set by the requirement that he not deprive others of an equal right to think and to act upon their thoughts in the interest of their lives as well.

It is the private sector, not the force-wielding government sector, that provides us the opportunities of a good and healthy society for beneficial relationships with others to achieve our individual values in a manner consistent with a respect for individual lives and the individual minds that direct those lives. The role of a legitimate government is only to protect our individual rights. When government takes on the additional role of delivering goods and services to some at the expense of others, it is hurting some under the threat of force in a brutal manner that has no analog in the private sector.  It forces individuals into an unnecessary conflict of interest, whereas the private sector provides a wealth of individual choices for relationships, cooperation, trade of values, or the freedom to not pursue a relationship, cooperative endeavor, or a trade.  In comparison, the Big Government model, proclaiming itself to be pursuing Social Justice, is a shotgun wedding offering no possibility of divorce and a staid existence with ever-reduced choices.  Nothing more offends my sense of justice than this evermore totalitarian state.

Comments from Comments Following an Article Attacking Ayn Rand's Ideas

A very scurrilous article called This is what happens when you take Ayn Rand Seriously by Denise Cummings has elicited many comments.  The article itself sets up many a straw man interpretation of Ayn Rand's ideas and makes some incredibly obvious false statements about her ideas.  I have commented rather extensively in the comments following it.  Here is one of my comments in reply to other comments opposing Ayn Rand's ideas:

Blaming businessmen for their business practices is one of the frauds most commonly used to justify governments that micromanage our lives and prevent us from individually choosing our own values and pursuing them in a rich and robust private sector. The bogeyman businessman is all too often the false justification for forcing us to give up our individually optimal choices for the sake of one-size-fits-all laws and regulations which are not enforced on the friends of big government, but are often enforced on those who just want to get on with their lives.

Average Joe is always free to start his own business, except that governments make it hard for him to do so and will require him to spend huge blocks of time on paperwork and tax him at every turn. Big government institutes many of its regulations more for the purpose of preventing the formation of small businesses and for preventing them from competing with bigger businesses who find it much easier to comply with the 80,000 pages of new regulations each year. Of course, even some big businesses are not favored by Big Government, such as the fossil fuel businesses.

It is only when a business is allied with big government that it can get away with mistreating employees and customers. A really free market always offers alternatives, as people take advantage of their freedom of association and either start competing businesses or turn to existing competitors or make suitable substitutions. Of course government should prevent the actual use of force or fraud throughout our society. But, what we find is that government itself is the abuser and uses much too much force and defrauds the citizens on a routine basis.

To which one Paul Ruggiero, who often shows up whenever Ayn Rand is the subject, replied:

"Bogeyman businessman" - how about tobacco companies? Was it rational to sell products to people that the company knew were addictive and highly likely to kill them over time? Where was the "self regulation" or rational or moral nature of this?
Businesses can mistreat employees or their customers very easily without the help of government. You are making a lot of assumptions about free market capitalism in your argument without stating them. Many of your assumptions though are not true. State some, and I'm happy to knock them down.

Rand's ideas about companies are unfortunately not true. She assumes that without govt interference all businesses would be rational. This is crap.

To which this patient soul replied:

The left likes to picture the businessman as frequently a predator and government as a protection against these powerful and many predators. Yes, bad people can be found in the business world, but they are actually much less likely to be bad than the politicians and bureaucrats of the government which wields much more power than do businessmen.
Tobacco is addictive and I have never used it for that reason and for health and hygiene reasons. Everyone else also has had this choice, whereas when government runs up the cost of energy or denies me paying a high school summer intern less than the minimum wage, I have no choice. I am forced to comply. It is worse to be robbed of a choice and forced to comply than to be offered a product I should not choose to buy.

Let us also note that government, your tainted angel, long subsidized tobacco farming. It also delighted and still does in the taxes it collects on this dangerous product.

Rand absolutely does not assume that all businesses will be rational or that those that are usually fairly rational will always be so. She also does not assume that all purchases of goods and services will be rational. The trades of the free market and private sector generally are akin to freedom of speech. We do not assume that everything everyone says will be rational or true. We know it will not be. But, there will be a rich diversity of ideas and knowledge in that flow of speech in a free society. People are free to evaluate what others have to say and incorporate or reject viewpoints and ideas according to their own choice. The same is true of the many products and services offered in the private sector.

To the degree that the customer chooses badly, he will be hurt. But he is also free to choose wisely and to benefit greatly from good choices. It is stultifying to be so terrified of making bad choices that one refuses to allow oneself the opportunity to make good choices. I have confidence that most people make more good choices than bad ones and that they benefit greatly from the diversity of choices offered by the free market, just as we benefit greatly from the rich and diverse flow of ideas and information we are offered due to freedom of speech. Just as we tend to stop listening to people who always rattle off nonsensical viewpoints, so do most people refuse to buy goods and services from companies that do not meet their needs. Bad products and poor service tend to bring an end to the company that offers them.

Now, I understand that you think that most people are bad and will fleece everyone else at every opportunity. You also have no confidence in the people to be mostly rational consumers. I do not think so. Then you turn around and seem to believe that the same bad sellers and consumers are capable of choosing good representative politicians and good government policies to protect these basically incompetent people. Your inconsistency could not be more apparent.

To which a good man (Threnody) added:

Savin' this one.

Echoes of Bastiat

"When it is time to vote, apparently the voter is not to be asked for any guarantee of his wisdom. His will and capacity to choose wisely are taken for granted. Can the people be mistaken? Are we not living in an age of enlightenment? What! are the people always to be kept on leashes? Have they not won their rights by great effort and sacrifice? Have they not given ample proof of their intelligence and wisdom? Are they not adults? Are they not capable of judging for themselves? Do they not know what is best for themselves? Is there a class or a man who would be so bold as to set himself above the people, and judge and act for them? No, no, the people are and should be free. They desire to manage their own affairs, and they shall do so.

But when the legislator is finally elected — ah! then indeed does the tone of his speech undergo a radical change. The people are returned to passiveness, inertness, and unconsciousness; the legislator enters into omnipotence. Now it is for him to initiate, to direct, to propel, and to organize. Mankind has only to submit; the hour of despotism has struck. We now observe this fatal idea: The people who, during the election, were so wise, so moral, and so perfect, now have no tendencies whatever; or if they have any, they are tendencies that lead downward into degradation."

The comments following articles misrepresenting and misunderstanding Ayn Rand's ideas are often very interesting.  There really are huge numbers of people who either cannot understand her or who are endlessly eager to misrepresent her ideas.  Many people become so deeply rutted in their line of "thought" that they literally are unable to see any other viewpoint, especially when that viewpoint fundamentally differs with all of their own reference points.  The most blatant inconsistencies in their own viewpoint go totally unrecognized and unaddressed.  Even when you bring such a person to admit they have a problem through hours of discussions, by the next day almost everyone of them will have found some way to forget that they admitted a severe inconsistency the prior day.

Few people can change their worldview after they have held it for many years.  It is often claimed that Ayn Rand's ideas appeal only to the young and therefor to the immature.  It is not entirely true that only the young are greatly influenced by her ideas and it is certainly not the case that her ideas only attract interest from the immature.  But, there is a reason why so many individuals who do become interested in Ayn Rand's ideas do so when they are young.  It is because such a large fraction of those older are mired in deep ruts in the mud of ideas they have held a long time and which have so distorted their view of the world that they cannot see or will not see the truth anymore.

Congressman John Sarbanes Favors FCC Takeover of the Internet

In response to my e-mail in opposition to the FCC subjecting the Internet to its ancient and bureaucratic controls, the Democrat Congressman of my unbelievably gerrymandered district in Maryland replied today:

Mr. Anderson,

Thank you for contacting me to express your opposition to net neutrality. I always appreciate hearing from individuals who carefully follow the legislative proceedings of Congress.  On February 4, 2015, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Wheeler proposed a set of rules to safeguard net neutrality. These rules include reclassifying broadband service as a public utility under Title II to allow for greater oversight and consumer protection; prohibiting the blocking of lawful websites, the impairing of lawful Internet traffic, and the prioritization of certain traffic for a fee; requiring Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to protect customers' private information; and providing widespread access to Internet service. February 26, 2015, the FCC voted to approve the proposed rules.

 I strongly believe that technology-including broadband, digital communications and other information technology - is an important tool for the economic and social advancement of individuals and communities. Going forward, I also believe that we must put in place a regulatory framework that ensures the relationships between consumers and providers are fair and equitable. As a member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which has jurisdiction over telecommunications issues, I will be certain to keep your views in mind when the House of Representatives considers any relevant legislation.

Again, thank you for your input on this important issue. If I can be of further assistance to you, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Sincerely,

John P. Sarbanes
Member of Congress

To which I replied:

John,

Government does not make the affairs of man fair and equitable. It simply replaces voluntary acts of cooperation in the private sector with coercion to achieve political, rather than individual, purposes. With government so big that the People do not understand what it is doing, let alone the effects of its actions, those political purposes become the purposes of special interests. The takeover of the free Internet by the FCC only means that my individual choices will be replaced by the government's enforcement of special interests' will. All of the verbiage about protecting individuals is just the usual smokescreen behind which government once again wrests individual value choices out of our hands. It is a false front so that government can further expand its ignorant micromanagement of our individual lives.

You have to admit that you do not know me, so it is not plausible when you claim to be protecting my interests, about which you know nothing. What is more, it is highly pretentious of you to assume that you know better how to manage my life than I do. Because I know this, I much prefer making the voluntary associations with others in the private sector of my choice, compared to being the subject of government coercion in my associations.

Charles

Charles R. Anderson, Ph.D.

http://www.AndersonMaterials.com
http://AndersonMaterials.blogspot.com
http://ObjectivistIndividualist.blogspot.com/

Of course the Big Government proponents have a biased viewpoint that government is benevolent, while companies operating in the private sector are largely malevolent. It is assumed by many that the profit motive pushes companies to behave immorally and without regard to the interests of their customers. How odd it is that the profit motive which is exactly what mostly motivates companies to behave morally and with a great regard for the interests of their customers is assumed by so many to have the opposite effects. Meanwhile, governments which have the power motive are assumed to be benevolent!

To be sure, when governments are small and effectively managed by the People with the intelligent use of their votes, government has a substantial interest in the best interest of the People. But as I have so frequently argued, when government becomes big enough, the People are no longer able to effectively manage it. While with the occasional company that comes along and has little interest in its customer's welfare, it can usually be avoided by taking one's business elsewhere, except when government has given that company a monopoly. The action to deny a government coercive control over us is usually more drastic. It requires us to uproot ourselves, our families, and our businesses to move out of the jurisdiction of that government. This is a sufficiently drastic remedy that its avoidance is a powerful argument for highly limited government.

The Minimum Wage in Maryland

Maryland is a very progressive state with the Progressive Elitists dominating both legislative bodies.  It did just elect a Republican governor, after the last two Democrat governors with the help of the Democrat state legislature enacted 40 straight tax increases, including the tax on rain and one on high income citizens.  The last governor, Martin O'Folley, er.... O'Malley, claims to have done the people of Maryland a favor by mandating that employers will pay a higher minimum wage for their services, if employer's can find a reason to hire them any more at all.

From December 2007 to December 2014, Maryland had a 0.15% increase in the number of jobs in the state even before this state minimum wage was added to the problems of doing business in Maryland.  This wee increase in jobs vastly lagged the population growth.  This was in spite of Maryland doing better than most states in the early years of the Great Recession due to the huge, horrendous increase in federal spending.  Maryland received a much larger fraction of that windfall than did the median state.

Minimum Wage Rates for Employers
$7.25 Until 12/31/14
$8.00 Effective 1/1/15
$8.25 Effective 7/1/15
$8.75 Effective 7/1/16
$9.25 Effective 7/1/17
$10.10 Effective 7/1/18

One of the Ph.D. scientists who works in my laboratory just had jury duty.  He was paid $15 per day.  I am not sure he was in court for exactly 8 hours, but he absolutely could not be at the laboratory for 8 hours.  Effectively, the government paid him $1.875/hour for his services.

Sure, the government would say he was just expected to do his civic duty.  I might respect that argument if the government were acting legitimately to protect every citizen's equal and sovereign rights.  But the governments in Maryland are highly attuned to special interests and rob the majority of the citizens to provide advantages to many special interests and to buy the votes of many low-information and relatively unthinking citizens, the many non-citizens who vote in this state, and the many citizens that vote both in this state and in others.  I absolutely refuse to buy the argument that civic duty to this form of tyrannical government is morally superior to providing materials problem-solving services to companies that are trying to raise the American standard of living with superior goods and services in the private sector.

It is highly hypocritical for Maryland to require private sector businesses to pay a minimum wage of $8.00/hour when it is paying a minimum wage of $1.875/hour.  While my employee will receive his normal pay for those days he was on jury duty, a self-employed person might very well not be able to pay himself for the time he spent on jury duty.  For my laboratory, the loss of our scientist's billable work is a significant loss.  It would help if we could pay him the difference between his usual salary and the amount paid him by the government for that time, but since they paid him so little, making any such correction is more trouble than it is worth.

As usual, we see that Democrat government is a poser without substance at the business of justice.  It cares not the least about interfering with the individual right to earn a living, whether it be to deprive an employer or an employee of that freedom with a minimum wage law or by imposing a duty with far less than what it claims is subsistence pay when it talks to employers.

Minnesota is Misrepresenting the Effects of Higher Taxes and Minimum Wages

It is being claimed that higher taxes on high income persons and increases in the minimum wage are the key to jobs creation and a fast-growing economy.  The example of Minnesota since Democrat Gov. Dayton took over is being used to "prove" this.

Gov. Dayton certainly benefited relative to Gov. Pawlenty in that he became Gov. in the year that the recovery from the Great Recession began, however meekly. He did not create the 172,000 jobs either. But let us note that 172,000 jobs in two years is just barely a match for an anemic population growth.

The article notes that the Minnesota median income advantage relative to the national average actually fell by $2,000 from 2012-2013 to now. It was not noted that the cost of living in Minnesota relative to the national average is going up as well. The combination of a rising cost of living and a falling median income, both relative to the nation, is not good.

While the minimum wage is to go up to $9.50/hr. for large employers by 2018, it will go up to only $7.75/hr. for small employers who employ most people. There are special provisions for a 90-day training period for workers under 20 years old and for all workers under 18 with a minimum wage of $6.50/hr. There are many states with no such provisions.

Furthermore, the private sector job growth in Minnesota from Q1 of 2013 to Q1 of 2014 showed Minnesota to be dead last in the Midwest in private sector job creation. Its 0.8% increase in private sector jobs was behind the next worst state in the Midwest, Illinois at 1.2%.

Gov. Dayton is probably not claiming that he caused a relative decrease in the median income with an increase in the relative cost of living.  And now that businesses have had time to react to his higher taxes and mandated higher wage costs, he is surely not claiming credit for Minnesota being dead last in private sector jobs creation in the Midwest.

The Critical Factor in American Politics: Who Owns Your Body and Mind?

The critical question whose answer determines the balance of power in American politics today is: Who owns your body and mind?

There are three answers to this question which are given by significant numbers of Americans.  They are:

1) I own my own body and mind.

2) God owns my body and mind.

3) The collective, effectively the government, owns my body and mind.

The idea that an individual owned their own body and mind was essentially a cornerstone idea of the Enlightenment and one which played a critical role in the thinking of the minds of the Founders of the United States of America and the Framers of the Constitution.  The purpose of government was to protect the individual rights of  the people.  Only if an individual owned their own mind and body did such an idea make sense.  Only then could a person have a sovereign right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of his own happiness.

Yes, some of them thought that God also owned their minds and bodies, but that even then an individual had a right to acknowledge that or to deny that ownership.  The individual, in their minds, could either freely give themselves to God or they could sin.  They believed in free will.

Some who believed that God owned their minds and bodies believed the state must help God assert this ownership.  Many a nation had established a religion and was all too committed to using government power to force others to make value choices these people believed God wanted them to make.  In America, the early Pilgrims were such an example.  Later many Calvinists in New England had similar ideas.  The colony of Virginia had an established religion, The Church of England, which was funded by the colonial government.  In addition to establishing churches, the colonies frequently codified many of their religious beliefs into laws.  By the time of the American Revolution and in the decade that followed, many of the thinking Americans came to the conclusion that government should not play this role of trying to force people to act within the confines of religious beliefs.  The need for a broader freedom of conscience was becoming widely recognized by thinking Americans.

The idea that the collective owned one's mind and body has been around probably as long as people have associated in bands or tribes.  Medieval European city and nation states used this idea to build hierarchical societies in which the serf served the local aristocratic lord and that lord served the King.  The King pretended to serve God, built and protected the state, and pretended to be the caretaker for the poor, dumb serfs.  The serfs were to devote their lives to the nation, the King, and God. 

The socialists extended this ancient idea to the state alone with no particular pretense that they depended upon God's authority to take control of the masses of the people.  As socialists became more and more common, thanks largely to government controlled education, the demands of the state based on collectivist ownership increased.  The Prussian government began such an expansion of the state based on socialist ideas of collective ownership of the people's minds and bodies.  It provided schools, medical care, and retirement benefits to the people in exchange for fairly complete control of their lives.  The Marxists advanced their version of such claims, as did the fascists and the National Socialist German Workers Party.  The Progressives in America borrowed the idea of the socialist government-run state schools, heavy regulation of productive labor, control of medical care and retirement benefits, and have created their own socialist variant.

As I have noted many times, ObamaCare is based on the assertion that the collective owns every individual's body and mind.  There can be no other basis for a governmental demand that each American must care for the maintenance of his or her mind and body in accordance with rules established by the government.  The government is claiming the right to have its property maintained.  It is telling Americans what medical care they must pay for coverage on in their insurance whether any particular individual has any need for that coverage or not.  The government is doing this very explicitly on a collectivist basis.  Someone needs that coverage and therefore every individual will pay for it.  This requirement is so important to the government that ObamaCare will actually cause many millions of individuals to lose the insurance they have and were happy with.  After all, there is nothing so important to the socialist as the principle of collective ownership and its assertion.  This is not actually being done for the sake of the welfare of each American individual.  No, it is being done to create a strengthened mandate that every individual's mind and body belongs to the government.

Of course this idea was asserted already in many other laws.  For instance, Progressive governments have long asserted that almost any activity that earns income or salary comes under its powers of regulation, control, and taxation.  American governments also believe they have the right to dictate minimum wages, which means they assert that they have the right to prevent individuals from earning a living at all.  Progressive governments have long levied taxes on an individual's pay from their own labor.  These are very blatant claims that an individual's labor belongs to the government.  Now what is your labor but one of the most critical ways you use your mind and body to support and maintain your own life.  Yet, these same governments pretend they are not violating anyone's right to life.  Controlling and taxing your labor is effectively a claim of ownership of your mind and body.

The balance of power in America today is the result of a two-party system in which one party, the Democratic Party, is wholly of the belief that every individual's mind and body belongs to the collective, or effectively to the government.  The other party, the Republican party, is more disparate in its parts.  It is composed of three major factions, which either hold that:

1) An individual's body is only self-owned.

2) One nominally owns one's own body and mind, but ought to give them to God of one's free will.

3) God owns everyone's body and mind, but God is too weak or lazy to force everyone Himself to obey his will and acknowledge his ownership, so the government must perform this task of forcing obedience for Him.

As far as the use of government power through its monopoly on the use of force is concerned, there is little friction and little difference between Factions 1 and 2.  The consequences on the use of force by government of Faction 3, however, are profound.  The most critical and common issues affected are government policies with respect to sex and procreation.  The portions of our society most directly affected are women and those who are lesbians, gay, bisexual, or transgender.  Many American women and LGBTs find the use of force by Faction 3 of the Republican Party to be extremely threatening.  More often than not, these groups find this threat more frightening than the broader and more equally applied, by gender and sexuality at least, threats to self-ownership of the Democratic Party.

I am fully in agreement that the use of government by Faction 3 for its purposes is highly immoral and highly irrational.  It is threatening.  But, I see the claim of collective ownership by the Democrat Party as even worse.

First, the collectivist agenda of the Progressives, in full control of the Democratic Party, has been very successful in getting the government to control our daily lives in many ways.  It dictates what values we are free to pursue and it takes many hours of our time and effort from each of us by force.  The amount of our labor it commands has steadily increased, but for secondary fluctuations such as major wars.

Second, more and more Americans, especially younger Americans, find the claims of Faction 3 to be wrongheaded, even as many of them embrace the idea of collective ownership of our minds and bodies.  Faction 3 has poor prospects of controlling the government to do its will on a national level, because many Republicans oppose them, as do all of the Democrats.  Only a very few states are so dominated by Faction 3 that there is a practical likelihood of their enacting their program.  At the national level, even when the Republicans controlled the House, the Senate, and the presidency, this faction was never able to accomplish much of anything toward their agenda.

Third, the range of those aspects of human life claimed as the purview of government control by force is much larger on the part of the Progressive collectivist agenda of Democrat Party.  It applies to everyone and to almost anything we do.  It is without any real boundaries at all.

Most Americans say they want smaller government, yet the dominion of government keeps growing.  The Republican Party is clearly the party of at least less massive government, though it is not really the party of smaller government as it ought to be.  Yet most Americans favor the Democratic Party in Generic Congressional Polls.  The reason is primarily due to the fear of many women and almost all LGBTs of the agenda of Faction 3 of the Republican Party.  If this agenda were to be put into effect, that fear would be well-justified, but it has almost no chance of being put into effect.  Yet because so many women and LGBTs vote for the Democratic Party out of this exaggerated fear, the less massive Republican Party is unable to attain enough offices to prevent the Progressive collectivist attack upon our individual rights which has been very successful in many ways.

At this time, the biggest issue of government is the repeal of ObamaCare with its takeover of 16 to 18% of the US economy, its many harmful effects on medical care and its cost to individuals, and its blatant claim of government ownership of our bodies and minds.  Most Americans recognize that ObamaCare is a massively troublesome program, even if most underestimate its harms.  Yet, we have seen anti-ObamaCare candidates for the Senate defeated by Democrat collectivists who favored ObamaCare and the rest of the Progressive collectivist agenda because women, young people, and LGBTs found the ideas of Faction 3 Republicans abhorrent.  And even though Ken Cuccinelli, a Republican candidate for Governor in Virginia, has vowed that he will not try as Governor to implement his previous Faction 3 agenda as required by his support from the Tea Party, he is likely to lose that election to a highly corrupt collectivist, Terry McAuliffe.

There are many who believe that the Tea Party is a movement of Faction 3 Republican types.  It is not so.  It is primarily people more aligned with Factions 1 and 2.  There are also a few Faction 3 types who have agreed that the threat of the Progressive collectivist agenda has become so great in America that they will give up trying to codify their religious beliefs in the law at least until the collectivist threat is defeated.  Ken Cuccinelli is a man who has made this pledge.  He has fought ObamaCare with more determination and effect than almost any politician.  He is strong in his support that we each own our own labor and should be free to cooperate with others to our mutual benefit in the private sector.  He understands that government should be smaller.  It should be dictating fewer of our values to us and less involved in our lives.  He is a strong Tea Party promoter and candidate who has agreed to live by the rules of the Tea Party to leave his religious beliefs in the private sector and not use the force of government to promote them.

It is a serious mistake to allow the Progressive collectivist Terry McAuliffe to become governor of Virginia.  His strong support of ObamaCare and all things collectivist will do serious harm to the people of the state of Virginia.  If you value your rights and you are voting in this election, it is a serious mistake to vote for McAuliffe or even to vote for the Libertarian candidate.  The Democrat will bring nothing but evil accomplices into the state government, while Ken Cuccinelli will bring in many Faction 1 and Faction 2 Republicans instead.  This will be very good for the people of the state of Virginia.

A Comment on the Constitution and its Role

I just left this comment on the Constitution and its legitimate role in a discussion in another blog:

Obama said he did not like the Constitution in a Chicago radio interview when he was a state Senator in Springfield, IL.  The reason: It did not allow the redistribution of income that he favored.  So of course, he and the other Democrat Socialists such as Justice Ginsburg, simply ignore the Constitution.

The Declaration of Independence clearly states that the legitimate purpose of government is the protection of individual rights, broadly defined as to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The Preamble to the Constitution sets the terms of the contract the People have mandated that the government will observe, namely that the government will insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the General Welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity.  It then enumerates a very few powers of government designed to make its sphere of influence small and that of the individual in the private sector much, much larger.

This is consistent with a government just big enough to defend us, but not big enough to use a great deal of force, as is the essential nature of government, to control our lives and deprive us of our liberties.  Government was small so the use of force and the fight over the power that represents would not divide the People and cause the destruction of the domestic tranquility.  The General Welfare then was understood to mean that government was to function so that everyone's welfare was promoted, not just that of a majority, or that of the poor, or that of the middle class.  Everyone's interest, which was mostly in their liberties, was to be promoted.  That understanding of the General Welfare has been horribly corrupted.

Signing Up to be a Federal Government Contractor

Years ago, I signed my laboratory, Anderson Materials Evaluation, Inc., up as a federal contractor under the system the government was using at the time.  I was submitting an SBIR proposal which turned out to be in competition with about 60 other small businesses for a research and development grant.  About 6 weeks after these 60 small companies went to great expense to submit their proposals, the agency sent us a letter that said that because some other agency had requested a rather similar proposal a year earlier, they were not going to fund any grants under this request for proposals at all.  There was, of course, no apology for the agency's lack of homework in requesting the proposals and no expression of sorrow for the blow to the many small companies who never even had a chance to get a return on their investment.  Federal government bureaucrats simply are unable to imagine the harm they do.  I decided that applying for SBIRs was just too risky for my business and went years without applying for any contracts.

Recently, I performed two analyses for a federal agency which so impressed it that it decided it wanted five more such analyses.  These individual analyses were performed for three thousand dollars apiece and could be paid for with a credit card.  Over the years since my last bad SBIR experience, any work I had done for the federal government was performed at its request for credit card payment without the formality of being a registered government contractor.  As a result, my company did not need to be in the federal contractor system until this agency just requested that I respond to their RFQ for 5 more analyses on a contract.

So, I spent much of Thursday afternoon and evening and Friday afternoon setting my laboratory up in the new federal contractor system call SAM.  This system is integrated with Dun and Bradstreet, so I had to update my listing there and figure out how to get SAM to update obsolete information it had from an old set of data from years ago from Dun and Bradstreet.  Even before I could do that, I had to figure out how to get the system to authorize me to update the information it had imported from the old system in use years ago when I had put in a proposal for the ill-fated SBIR.  Then I had to wait until Friday to get that authorization.

Among the remaining tasks was the required reading of 45 FAR and DFARS requirements placed upon federal contractors on a host of issues.  One has to affirm that one is in compliance with each.  To understand these federal requirements, one is often referred to various laws.  In one case, one is told that the definition of an entity is to be found in a law and that it is different than the meaning the IRS gives to the same identifier in the Internal Revenue Code.  Apparently, small business owners have an infinite amount of time that bureaucrats and Congressmen can assume is readily dedicated to the finer points of their games.  No links are provided to the laws in question.

Once again, I am most impressed that the federal government has absolutely no sense of what expenses in time and effort it is appropriate to impose upon small businesses to do the work which the federal government is unable to do for itself.  For the government to have any ability at all to pose as competent, it has to turn to contractors to do its work.  Yet, when it does so, it does its darnedest to impose many of the inefficiencies and irrelevancies of the government bureaucracy on companies of the private sector.  It has no concern whatsoever for the value of the small business management's time.  None.

What the federal bureaucracy does care about is that it appears to have some concern for the issues of these FAR and DFARS.  If some contractor does violate one of them, it wants to be able to slam the responsible parties into prison or to heavily fine them.  Woe to the small business owner who rushes through these requirements without understanding them.  Woe to the small business owner who uses the time he could be using to earn a living to thoroughly understand these requirements.  This is a Catch-22 common to dealing with Big Government.

Many a small business simply cannot afford the assumed level of understanding and hence assumes a level of risk which the average citizen has no concern about, just as the bureaucrat and the Congress and the President have on concern.  Big government does not like small businesses.  It cannot comprehend a business which is less than very large.  Small businesses with resources that actually have to be earned the old-fashioned way with hard work simply live in a different world from governments.  Business owners are also a minority, so they count little at election time.  Indeed, most politicians think it makes nothing but sense to treat small business owners as villains while courting the votes of the worker bees.  Basically, government justifies its intrusiveness in everyone's life almost entirely upon the claim that business owners are villains and only Big Government can control them.  So, who cares how much time government forces these villains to waste?  It really is all very logical.

But, what would the private sector be without small businesses?  It is odd that few voters ever give much thought to the function of government, either what is does or what it should do.  It is even more odd that few voters think about the critical role of small businesses in the private sector that has to produce the wealth and perform the tasks so profligately squandered by Big Government.

Americans Have Become So Wealthy, the Middle Class is Disappearing

According to the constant theme of the Democrat Socialist Party, the American Middle Class is disappearing because more people are poor than ever.  Well, despite the best efforts of those who are constantly trampling upon our rights to earn a living, as I have pointed out before, the Middle Class is disappearing because many more Americans are rising up out of it.  A recent post at the AEI Ideas blog shows this very well:

This chart is based on Census Bureau income data which is given in constant 2009 dollars.  I would certainly question the idea that the lower bound of the Middle Income Group is $25,000 a year and would set that at least at $35,000, but that would not change the fact that the percentage of families in the Middle Incomes is dropping as those in the Upper Incomes rises.  There is a slight decrease in the number in the lower income group.  The data does not yet show the effects of the never-ending Great Socialist Recession as many families have been worn down over the last four years.

Actually, if we look at this data a bit more closely over the period from about 1998 through 2009, the fraction of families in each income group has been about constant.  I would maintain that the longer term trend for families to leave the Middle Income Group for the Upper Income Group has been successfully foiled by Big Government with its increasing impediments to economic freedoms over that period.  If we want to restore the trend for Middle Income families to increasingly become Upper Income families, we need much less government interference in the private sector than we have seen over the last 15 years.