Erecting a Ladder

Last Saturday, I helped a friend remove a large branch which had fallen on her roof in a storm earlier in the week. She had borrowed an extension ladder from a neighbor who had stored it in his yard. The rope for raising the extension had rotted away and the springs which would cause the latches to lock in place on each rung as they came into alignment with it had rusted away. We wanted to put the ladder against a particular edge of the roof over a room which made a right angle with the main part of the house from the deck. The deck was edged with a somewhat high rail and two sets of parallel wires ran outward perpendicular to the main part of the house. We needed to erect the ladder amidst all of these obstacles and then extend it to a safe height.

When we finally maneuvered the ladder into the upright position after a couple of false starts, she asked me how many Ph.D.s does it take to put a ladder up. I laughed. She has a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering. We then had to use a stool to raise and lock the ladder a couple of rungs higher than we could reach from the deck. This was still not a safe height, so we brought a 5-foot ladder up from her basement and raised the extension ladder another two rungs and locked it. We took note that most any tradesman in the roofing business or tree-trimming business would have been equipped with a proper ladder and would have gotten it erect more efficiently than we had. Most American workers are fairly competent at what they do for a living.

But, I also reflected on an issue I have often thought about over the years. While I sometimes, well maybe frequently, am frustrated that most Americans give little thought to what I believe is the most essential issue of our time, and probably of most any time, namely the ever on-going fight for the rights of the individual, this does not mean that I have a low opinion of most people's ability to manage their own lives. The socialist elitists who want the government to make almost all decisions for the people, believe this is necessary because they actually do hold most people in contempt. They really do believe most people are unable to intelligently manage their own lives. Yet, when you see how well most people do their jobs, which is something most do care about and do put some real effort into doing, shouldn't you be able to understand that most people are also capable of generally managing their own lives? Besides, they showed that they could historical in the American wilderness, which we now are inclined to forget.

Now it is interesting to examine who is most likely to be an elitist who believes that others cannot manage their own lives. One such group is college and university faculty. Another is the teachers of the public school systems. Another is politicians and government employees. Lawyers and accountants are special interest groups looking for a validation for expanded government mandating the extensive use of their services. Another yet is women.

College professors have often become professors because they have a low regard for people who enter the free market and are willing to trade their productive work products with others using money as a medium to facilitate these exchanges. Professors are quick to heap scorn on these "money grubbers", losing sight entirely of the fact that money is the means to making voluntary exchanges much easier to arrange. They believe they deal in the realm of ideas, while others are simply materialists. This is a terrible oversimplification. Yes, there are many people in business who are very motivated by a desire to acquire money. But, then there are many in academia who are very desirous of prestige and the power to influence government to use force to make all of the people live by the values dictated by the professors. This is not a superior motivation. Power has served as the motivation of many a brute going back in human history to times long before money was even invented as a facilitor of trade. Few of these professors live like monks either, since most are fairly well paid. These same professors who decry the materialism of the businessman, analyze every difference of worldly goods that exists among Americans and people generally in the world and claim that all variations from equality are clear signs of injustice. They ignore the choices the people involved have made, the differences in dedication to learning and to hard work, the differences in intelligence, those of place, those due to partitioning the use of their time differently, choices of occupations based on factors other than remuneration, and those due to better or worse governments. They protest against materialism, but then they use almost entirely materialistic equality as the measure of social justice.

The teachers of the public school systems are to a degree the guardians of the children who study under their direction. To some degree, the teachers extend this accustomed mode of thinking as guardians into their relationship with the rest of society. Disproportionate numbers of the public teacher ranks are also women, who will also have maternal instincts in many cases for the care of others. The children they deal with are not yet mature adults and are not generally ready to fully manage their lives. The way the public schools work, they are not particularly encouraged or helped toward taking on the responsibilities of a self-managed individual. They are not even much encouraged to view themselves as individuals. Then, as though this is not enough to understand why teachers have a strong tendency to favor governmental nanny states, they are public employees who do benefit from transfers of wealth from the private sector to the government sector. Teachers are also union members. Teachers see their interests almost uniformly then as being tied to ever-growing governments.

Politicians and government employees are constantly looking for reasons to justify their positions and to increase their powers and budgets. This is clearly done effectively whenever they can convince the voters that many of the people are dumb sheep and need them as sheepherders. The lawyers find massive employment and income from the huge number of overly complex government laws and regulations. They play a disproportionate role in drafting the legislation that produces this end result. They work especially hard as a special interest group in control of the actual levers of government. They also enjoy the court system, which they principally control. That system's many delays, strange trial logic, and by and large, the choice of judges is all determined by lawyers. Accountants are more and more massive beneficiaries of our overly complex government taxation and regulatory requirements. Companies and individuals are forced more and more to pay accountants for help in producing the mountains of government-required paperwork on income, expenditures, employment, and taxes.

Finally, there is the predominant role of women in the socialist Democrat Party. This is the party of feminism and anti-masculinity. This is the party of those elitists who view themselves as the caregivers for the many adult children who do exist and the many more who are imagined to exist. As women have long been particularly prone to the appeal of the traditional religions, so too are they prone to a religious approach and zeal for socialism, equality of material results, the politics of envy and class warfare, the politics of group identity, anti-man environmentalism, and anti-business attitudes. They have a tendency to feel uncomfortable unless they are enveloped within a group. Male individuality, analytical thinking, and self-confidence are often offensive to them. Women are less than comfortable in the analytical thought required to gain mastery over science, technology, and economics than are men. It is not difficult to understand why the Democrat platform appeals to many of them. There are, of course, many women who are exceptions to these statements, but they are definitely a minority of women. There are also many men who are also susceptible to the Democrat platform, but for several decades, they have generally been a minority group among men.

I continue to believe strongly that most American men are capable of running their own lives with minimal interference from government. Despite the way they vote and the uncertainties that women seem to feel about having such an ability, I also believe most women are capable of managing their own lives, especially with the help of a decent man.

Federal Regulations - Cure for Economic Ills?

In 1949, after 150 years of Federal government, we had about 20,000 pages of federal regulations. By the year 2000, we had about 120,000 pages of federal regulations. Now, in 2008, we have over 200,000 pages of federal regulations. In the first 150 years this is an average of 133 pages a year of added regulations. In the next 51 years, the federal regulatory burden of pages was increased at the much higher rate of 1961 pages per year. In the eight years since 2000, the number of added pages per year has averaged 10,000 pages/year. I suppose that this means that our Congress is composed of men who are now 10,000/133 times or 75 times smarter than the Congressmen who started our republic! Isn't it good to be ruled by such supremely intelligent people?

Now of course, all of my readers, being much brighter people than the average person, know all of these regulations and are fully capable of living their lives in accordance with them. We know this because it would clearly make no sense to expect people to obey laws that they do not know. Since our Congressmen have never read the laws they have voted for, we can assume that they do not know these laws. We also are aware of this because they are constantly being found to be violators of the laws. But the people are held responsible for knowing these laws. Since the federal agencies can only offer the citizen contradictory advice on what the laws mean, we cannot turn to them. In many cases we could turn to the federal courts which have made many rulings on these regulations, but this means that we have a lot more reading to do and then we still have to figure out what that means too. But, we ordinary citizens have copious free time to devote to this exercise. Unlike our Congress, whose full time job is the making of laws, we somehow have the time to read all of these laws, agency documents, and court decisions. We the people are clearly all geniuses! Isn't it wonderful that our Congress thinks so highly of us!

Now, being geniuses, of course it dawns on us that those who do not read the laws they pass and do not know the law have no business forcing the rest of us to live by their rules. This is like being put back in high school where most of us had teachers who were no better than average students in high school who nonetheless set the rules. How fun was that? How great to be treated like children by teachers who had returned to the only place they ever felt comfortable, namely the over-controlled environment of high school.

Our ever-dependable Mainstream Media constantly barrages us genius citizens with injunctions to have Congress create still more laws and regulations. What does that say for their intelligence?

Our university professorial class agitate for more laws and regulations by eliminating free speech from the universities and using their class lecterns to issue socialist propaganda which it takes many of our youth 10 years of being in the real world before they can see how false it is. But what does this call by professors for more and more laws say about their intelligence?

In particular, Congress, the MSM, and a host of professors are all calling for still more regulations to deal with the slowdown in our economy brought on by endlessly invasive and foolish laws already on the books. Of course, these disparate calls for more interference in our complex economy and with the complex lives of those citizens we have already established to be geniuses, is sowing much confusion and uncertainty. Even our genius citizens cannot figure out how to proceed in growing our economy and investing for the future under these conditions.

How did we invert the pyramid of ability in which the few imbeciles rule the many geniuses? Is this way of governing odd or what? Perhaps some one of you MSM, Congressional, or professor types can actually provide some kind of rational explanation for your fascination with ruling the lives of geniuses with myriad one-size-fits-all life-recipes? This writer naively believes that if you would use the force of government to rule the lives of others, especially your betters in intelligence, you have a severe requirement to prove the wisdom of your laws. You should also be aware of what they are.